Abstract
Building from ethnographic and archival research, this article describes the role of desire, relationship building, and creativity in Kern County's environmental justice organizing. Located in California's Central Valley, Kern County is dominated by oil extraction and large-scale agriculture, which impact the region's air and water quality and create environmental injustice for the predominantly Latinx communities who live near agricultural and oil fields. We situate environmental injustice within racial capitalist and colonial histories of land use, labor exploitation, and dispossession. We further build from feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous scholarship to describe the labor of care, relationship building, and everyday creative practice that undergirds environmental justice organizing in Kern County. Understanding environmental and climate injustice through racial capitalism and colonialism underscores the fact that connection despite dehumanization and isolation is deeply political work in itself. We believe this literature has much to add to discussions of resilience in contemporary environmental justice literature.
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