Reflections on rural and urban California and Sonoma Valley
A recent two-week trip into rural California revealed a few things about Sonoma Valley. One, the Valley is very pleasant and nice. It has an overall placid feel; there are no tail-gating logging trucks, Trump stickers, no blatant religious billboards, or fiery publicly posted screeds about liberals or the negative role of government regulations in land use. Sonoma Valley is on the surface, a first world habitation, even though areas of the Valley like the Springs manifest the same levels of poverty as rural California.
At one time Sonoma was rural California. At some point between the 1950s nuclear scares and the late 1970s, the town started to shift demographically, and a lot of outsiders came in, this as the North Coast economy consciously changed branding, with an explicit economic strategy, a shift from the Redwood Empire to Wine Country.
Demography of working class poor
Like rural California, Sonoma Valley has working class poverty, inequality, lack of health care, and lower education services for the poor, but the difference is in the population who bears the costs. In the Valley, the working class is segregated, and it is mostly Latinos who are poor. They are not as in your face and scary as rural white poor. Latinos don’t drive Darth Vader coal burner giant trucks with American flags flying and Confederate stickers on them. Latinos are not openly hostile to the liberal culture of the Bay Area, even though they end up with the short end of the economic and government services stick just like rural white guys.
Sonoma Valley spatial demographics
The valley has a certain spatial demographic that is born out in voting patterns, land use, residence, and property values. The true rural areas are red and ag-based. The urban core areas are blue. The Springs area has segregated poverty. Sonoma itself is divided into east and west sides, with the greatest wealthy and gentrification on the east side. Foothills areas bridge the city and county up and down the valley, and are generally very well off. The west side of Sonoma and parts of the Springs are shades of middle class. Glen Ellen and Kenwood are middle to upper class.
Contrast Latinos with poor rural whites
Differences between white and Latino labor, and demographics are a big topic; these are just a few generalities and observations.
Latino labor
There are some significant cultural differences between Latino labor and rural white labor.
Latinos have immigrated, initially, as agricultural, service, and construction labor, to escape terrible systemic poverty in Latin America.
Latino immigrants, in general, work hard, work for less, are family-oriented, have conservative religious values, play along with the system, and are a desirable pool of labor that Sonoma Valley and California has come to count on. They are in demand. This immigrant labor group is hungry and willing to work hard. Latinos have a cultural fabric that provides social stability, with intact values to fall back on.
The value of genuine culture
Once a culture is broken, for example with Native Americans or the descendants of black slaves, or with modern, adrift individuals, then the human design is not being realized; people are not as resilient, and tend during hard times to revert to a culture of poverty. Poverty gets to be about survival, and engenders fewer of the higher levels of self-actualization people are capable of.
Western hemisphere demographics
Being poor in the US is nothing compared to being poor in Mexico. Historically, Latin American structural poverty has been aided and abetted by US foreign policy and interventionism. The US bears some responsibility for this poverty, and for creating the pressures to emigrate. Nativism is an easy answer that avoids awareness of this history.
Rural white labor
In rural California, it is mostly white locals who make up the labor force. They are poor now because natural resource extractive industries in rural areas have run out of juice. Mining, logging, grazing, fishing, were all the backbone of rural economies. These industries were run in the past as if there was no end, no limits, and many damages were done to ecosystems, some irreparable, for example, to salmon runs. These damages have been addressed by government agencies like the EPA, and by urban public pressure for conservation land management.
Agricultural practices in the southern Central Valley have recapped the above extractive excesses, and tremendous overdraft of groundwater has led to the creation of California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.
Efforts are now underway federally, to reverse environmental protections, which amounts to Trump satisfying his base supporters many of whom are rural white labor, satisfying Republican anti-government ideology, and hewing to a particular religious view that earth was created by God solely for man to use.
For rural white labor, lack of rural extractive industry work has led to pockets of poverty, loss of culture, alcoholism, drug addiction, and meaninglessness. Due to large, complex economic and cultural forces, a once stable life has now fallen apart in many rural areas. Structural poverty has arisen, and traditional mainstays of family and religion have broken down. No one came to the rescue or made this rural decline an issue. Rural whites were hung out to dry like the rest of the poor. Rural California naturally looks for someone to blame, but lacks perspective, and has been co-opted by rightist ideology, that may feel good, but doesn’t bring home any bacon.
Rural-urban tensions
These general trends have created tensions between rural and urban Californians. Urbans outnumber the rurals by far, and set state laws and policy by majority rule. California urbans are educated and mostly liberal. What really happened is that the frontier era of unlimited resource extraction necessarily came to an end. No society can harvest with no limits, or they will face collapse.
Rural white labor then, has at once suffered from a structural limiting of resource extraction jobs, and has degenerated in its capacity to perform and adapt. No one in government took care of them; they were left to twist slowly in the wind. They have become alienated, and much blame is cast against immigrants for taking work that these whites, in fact, are unwilling to do. Lack of education and perspective added in, makes for a tendency to find easy answers to complex problems.
Rural California is similar to Sonoma in that the economy now is dependent on wealthy tourists to come and spend money, but the locals don’t really respect the tourists as people who share their values. And, if locals are working for wages, they are likely not benefitting much from any tourism. This is all a tangible feeling on a trip to rural California.
Why such struggles?
And so, calls by urban liberals to limit unsustainable land management practices have become part of an overall culture war, wherein the new Trump administration is seeking to bring back the good old days, and dismantle as many regulations as possible. This will presumably allow rural residents to resume extractive industries regardless of the environmental costs. In the case of Scott Pruitt, new director of the EPA, these actions are taking place in secret, outside of public oversight. Foxes are at work in the henhouse.
It is a surety that the benefits of these fox’s work will accrue only to those at the top.
These demographic and economic patterns are one big ball of wax that analysts are making much hay out of now, trying to explain why California and the US is in such a conflicted mess, and why people can’t get along and work for a common good. My comments here are just scratching the surface, pointing at a few patterns.
Machiavelli
Perhaps the easiest way is to explain the underpinnings of the various struggles of ideology, environmentalism, labor, and culture, is to frame it all as a Machiavellian struggle for control of resources. Powerful interests of all kinds are always trying to exploit and keep an inordinate share of the pie, and the lower-downs are always exploited, and trying to get what they have coming for their efforts. Whichever higher-ups win, the locals are forced to suck up the order that is established.
What is actually happening regarding the economy, or immigration, or with public benefits gets submerged into simplistic one-liner rhetoric that people then cling to like glue. Battle lines get drawn, and then people fight on that basis, just for the inertia of it. People are innately good at fighting. What’s really happening is that the US was created with seeds of contradiction built in: are all men created equal or is slavery and exploitation just? This unresolved internal contradiction continues to play out 100s of years later.
Currently a long-term battle has re-awakened, between the Union and the Confederacy, between the 1950s and the 1960s, complete with racial overtones, with nativism and immigrants as a flashpoint.
Many explanations are put forth, some scientific, some educated, some emotional, and some manipulative, and the whole political and cultural landscape gets to be a confused mess that is hard to see clearly. The best way to make sense of it is to follow the money and interests, and analyze how rationales back up the self-interest. Interest can be for common good, or for selfish purposes, or for ideology. What are the interests and why? Are interests inclusive or exclusive?
Paradoxes
At the bottom of the pile, all the peons fight among themselves for the crumbs left by the same 1% that has existed since the beginning of civilization, and for crumbs left by a government sacked and disabled by conservatives. Even though the peons have common cause, they blame and attack each other, fueled by higher-ups who manipulate their lack of culture, perspective, and education.
Unfortunately for the urban liberals, they too have become complacent and lost cultural fabric. The era of individuality has progressively left all people without common touchstones. Liberals have lost touch with the poverty and cultural struggles of their rural white brethren. Urban liberals are encased in self-satisfied bubbles; they a mile wide and an inch deep; they decry discrimination even while exploiting Latino labor and while gentrifying the working class straight out of town, happy to get a Prius and trickle a few crumbs back through charity and then call it good.
Back to Sonoma Valley
These are some of the socio-economic-cultural tensions and that come to mind as meditations on a trip to rural California. In rural CA, the tension is perceived as against liberals and government, who appear as a malevolent combine trying to constrict access to dwindling resources, and levels of extractive land use. This while the educated (liberals) see their work as a noble pursuit of sustainability. Sonoma has all these same dynamics, all within one valley.
Sonoma is microcosm of California and the US
“Wine country” Sonoma Valley and its luxury tourism-based affluence has not replaced the rural demographic completely. There remain natives who were and are part of a still existing rural economy and cultural fabric. Voter overlay maps show that in the last presidential election, the farther from Valley urban cores, the redder it gets. Basically, Sonoma Valley recaps the demography, policy tensions, and values differences of the whole state. These values issues, and different views regarding resource extraction, can be expected to come out in the deliberations of the new Sonoma Groundwater Sustainability Agency. Herein limits will be framed either as a public benefit, or as a taking, with a negative connotation of regulation.
Paradoxes for local Sonoma ag
Given this analysis of Sonoma Valley demographics, it would be reasonable to suppose that the existing natives, the erstwhile rurals, those still here, those who still own land, who have businesses, and who have not sold out to corporate ag, must resent the hell out of the urban core liberals who are active in policy making.
Local political struggles bubble to the surface here as to how the frame the demographics, who is the majority, whose values are primary etc. Who the jerks are. Local liberals advocate for land use policies of conservation and limits, and for social and economic equity for the working class and immigrants. In contrast, local conservatives don’t really represent a working class white base. Local conservatives represent a financial, business class of people who advocate an amorphous economic vitality, that ends up disenfranchising poor natives, working class and Latinos alike. Local conservatives talk about economic vitality and benefits, but a recent study by the Sonoma Valley Fund shows that benefits are not shared, and the valley poor are getting poorer.
It is ironic that local, rural-minded grape farmers have their cart hitched to the horse of high-end liberal consumption of their products. The very people who support them with the whole wine craze, are the same ones whose values appear to run counter to theirs. Wealthy Bay Area elites come in waves of siren-called tourism, to hyper-inject the economy with more and more consumption, all the while this activity threatens to eat up more farmland, and progressively destroys rural values and culture, and will seek to limit resource extraction as well. The more that wealthy second home owners arrive, the less locals, and the rural fabric will survive. This is that pesky goose and golden egg metaphor.
A few other ironies: Economic elites are displacing everyone in Sonoma Valley urbans and rurals alike; corporations are buying up all the vineyards, and making fancy event centers based on scarce groundwater, and yet rurals still persist to blame government and regulation for all their problems.
Rurals are Trump supporters who buy into Nativism and love Trump’s immigration executive orders, yet if they need labor, Latino immigrants are the only game in town.
Common cause with rurals and urbans?
Rural folks and Sonoma urban liberals may have more common cause then they think. They both value the character of the unique setting here, and don’t want uncaring outsiders to come and make an ugly mess of the valley. Could conservative locals would take sides with the liberals? This would make sense in a lot of ways.
The Valley does have a sense of comity and open communication, from people serving together on various public bodies. The overall level of education makes for a more civil discourse. Actors share tables, and are able to frankly express themselves in ways that maybe make discussion of issues central. If the issues get framed in a rational way, maybe more common ground will open up.
More paradoxes
Coming elections in the city and county will certainly be a referendum on levels of tourism and land management, as well as justice and equity issues for various labor groups in the valley. Business, development, and free market types will attempt to ally with rural ag interests, to try and elect Right-wing candidates. The paradox here is that these candidates will then proceed to stoke an economy that fundamentally destroys the values of rural ag people’s lifestyle. Why? Because the valley will then continue as a tourist mecca, with authentic, rural culture progressively hollowed out until Sonoma is nothing but a corporate fantasy façade of what it once was.
The façade, comedy and irony will be complete if a right-wing valley hegemony comes into place, because all the money they make will be spent by rich liberals.
Some current local issues
Some of Sonoma Valley’s current issues have to do with social justice, how to house and pay the working class in a just manner. How to provide an equal opportunity education. How to not let the private sector ruin the socio-economic-environmental commons and dominate the economy with a monoculture of wine-hospitality tourism that runs the working class out of the whole region. How to protect the immigrant population from nativist executive orders. How to dial back energy consumption, particularly with transportation, to make a meaningful regional contribution to climate protections. How to manage the basin’s groundwater in a sustainable manner. How to handle and manage pressure from the super wealthy to turn Sonoma into a vision of the few rather than the many. How to preserve the great rural character, open space, and sense of place. How to bridge cultural and values gaps so there might be a positive collective effort rather than one big, endless fight.
A way forward
Many of these issues and challenges open up the same type of conflicts seen state-wide between rural and urban areas. Sonoma Valley contains within itself, many of these tensions and contradictions to work out. I feel that only by honestly attempting to lay the issues on the table, in values and interests-explicit ways, can we get past simple fighting and reflexive conflict, and begin to substantially address the serious management, and cultural issues we have on our plate.
Society, economy, environment, it is ours to manage and create. We are the actors in stage now, and it is up to us to work it out so that our visions and values are satisfied.
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