A Pre-History of CUES: Critical Urban-Environmental Research and Activism in the Social Sciences at UC Santa Cruz
By Will Parrish, James Sirigotis, and Hillary Angelo.
The University of California, Santa Cruz, has a rich history of critical urban and environmental scholarship and activism. In the Social Sciences, this legacy is most often associated with UCSC’s experimental farm and well-known Community Studies and Environmental Studies departments. At the core of this tradition was and is a commitment to radical praxis: the reflexive integration of critical theory, engaged pedagogy, and transformative institution-building. For half a century–and in many ways prefiguring current environmental concerns and scholarly approaches to them–UCSC faculty have argued for attention to the historically specific forms society-nature relations take, the deep intertwinement of social and environmental challenges, and the need for interdisciplinary responses that go beyond technical fixes to interrogate root causes and help foster deep systemic transformation.
Though an early orientation toward environmental issues is often part of the story of UCSC’s founding, no systematic intellectual history of what might be called a “Santa Cruz School” of political ecology yet exists. Given the importance of urban environmental critique today, amidst climate crisis and growing inequality, and UCSC’s continued strengths in these areas, it seems well past time to bring this history into focus. Moreover, while an environmental orientation is frequently seen as central to UCSC’s legacy, institutional reproductions of this history often forget its radical social and political ambitions. In what follows, we begin by describing UCSC’s intellectual and institutional formations, attending to the historical entanglement between environmental thought and transformative social praxis. In the process, we trace UCSC’s emergence as a unique and important site of critical environmental thought beginning in the 1970s, and trace the evolution of this work to the present.
It could be argued that critical environmental work, at UCSC and beyond, has come to be defined by three key features: 1) a critical orientation that is historically specific and challenges dominant framings and power structures; 2) a rejection of the society-nature binary in favor of a socio-environmental lens that understands the two as co-produced; and 3) attention to the spatial dimensions of environmental issues with an emphasis on grounded, multi-scalar analysis. At UCSC, these commitments have been clearly evident since the 1970s, and have directly and indirectly influenced on- and off-campus scholarship that followed. On campus, they were (and are still) evident in at least three distinct but related areas of scholarly work: the use of Marxian methods and categories to analyze nature-society relations; geographical analyses of food and agriculture systems that relate the local to the global and the urban to the rural; and engaged scholarship that is in dialogue with emergent social movements and oppositional institutions. In the following sections, we consider each of these in turn. While much of this work was rooted in and attentive to UCSC’s urban context—with, for instance, path-breaking approaches to urban environmental planning and environmental justice developed on campus—this did not become a focus of campus research until the 2000s. We explore this intersection in a final section.
Theoretical and sociological analyses of nature under capitalism
One obvious place to begin the history of UCSC’s critical urban and environmental scholarship and activism is with the work and legacy of James O’Connor, who arrived on campus in 1976. Already well-known for his Marxist scholarship on the state’s role in capitalist production, crisis, and transitions to socialism, O’Connor helped shape the intellectual and political direction of UCSC Sociology by emphasizing a political economic approach not just to individual industries, but to the broader social totality of capitalist societies. Of particular note, his seminal text The Fiscal Crisis of the State (1973) identified a central contradiction within capitalist states that contributes to their crisis tendencies: nation-states’ need to maintain conditions for capital accumulation and social stability beyond the factory itself.
This critical insight led O’Connor to a second consequential idea, that of the “second contradiction” of capital. First appearing in an article O’Connor authored in 1988 for the first issue of the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (CNS), the second contradiction thesis holds that, following its own logics, capitalism systematically undermines its own ecological and social “conditions of production.” This includes by degrading workers’ capacity to sell their labor power, dismantling public infrastructure, and depleting all non-human ecologies—all of which deepen the contradiction. As a result, capitalism tends to drive up costs and generate periodic crises of underproduction, in addition to the more familiar crises of overproduction. With these and other contributions, O’Connor soon helped make UCSC into a center of the now-burgeoning field of ecological Marxism.
O’Connor’s argument concerning the second contradiction was a major intervention in ecological Marxist intellectual debates, furthering work by critical geographers Neil Smith (1984) and David Harvey (1982) who had just begun writing about the production of nature as part of the way capitalist societies produce space. Amidst a crisis in the socialist project and the rapid growth of environmental movements, the work showed pervasive ecological destruction to be an objective, systemic, and deeply structural outcome of capitalist political economy, one that ultimately undermines capitalism’s conditions of production and thus the functioning of capitalist society itself. Moreover, as capitalism extends the cash nexus into key domains of socioecological reproduction, O’Connor argued, it not only threatens the well-being of humans and more-than-human nature, but also establishes new possibilities for anti-capitalist politics. The struggle to end exploitation of human beings by other human beings may also become a struggle to end the degradation and destruction of the earth, and vice versa. These insights anticipated more recent discussions of how the historically-specific nature-society relations constituted in and through capitalism have precipitated global ecological crisis, while also giving rise to new linked-up forms of radical “red” and “green” politics.
UCSC became home to one of the country’s first interdisciplinary Environmental Studies departments in 1970. As the department grew to include a Ph.D. program in 1994, Marxist geography continued to find a home there–it was at around this time that geographers and political economists David Goodman and Margaret Fitzsimmons were recruited to join the department faculty. As part of a broader post-structuralist turn in political ecology at the time, Goodman and Fitzsimmons understood agency to encompass human as well as nonhuman actors, and their work on agrifood systems, ecosystem processes, and political ecology emphasized the collective, rather than individual, character of natural-social agency. They analyzed the role of both natural processes and spatially uneven development in restricting the conditions for profitable production in agriculture, thus contributing to a new understanding of the forces that produce agricultural regions. Fitzsimmons’ prescient 1989 article, “The Matter of Nature,” engaged critical scholarship on the social production of nature, including ongoing work by Smith, Harvey, and others. She acknowledged the importance of industrial urbanization in producing particular conceptions of “Nature,” while arguing that longer histories of capitalism and the Enlightenment should remain the fundamental frameworks through which “disguising abstractions” such as urban and rural society, as well as nature, are produced (118).
UCSC scholars were also early to expand notions of environmental issues themselves, and to highlight their connections to human inequalities, in ways that have since become core tenets of critical environmental scholarship. When the environmental sociologist Andrew Szasz arrived on campus in 1985, he was producing work that extended Marxist class analysis to the environment and health. He situated regulatory struggles within broader political-economic contexts to illuminate the complex interplay between economic interests, public consciousness, and policy change–such as the ways grassroots opposition and national regulatory politics increased the cost of hazard disposal, drawing surplus away from expanded commodity production. Szasz’s focus on the health and safety dimensions of labor was also critical in articulating how environmental issues, such as workplace health, were neither discrete nor marginal but always-already of central importance to sociology (1986). His book EcoPopulism (1994) argued that the American environmental movement represented a new form of radical environmental populism that linked class, race, and gender to environmental issues.
UCSC’s intellectual and political atmosphere played a role in shaping each of these scholars’ interdisciplinary, praxis-oriented trajectories, and their work was always tied to local, national, and international struggles. In a sense, the entire project of CNS and ecological Marxism was born from a commitment to political struggle at a time when orthodox Marxism had become predominantly positivist and economistic. Sociologist Andrew Szasz’s work was deeply tied to environmental justice and anti-toxicity movements. O’Connor, Fitzsimmons, and the others were engaged not merely in theoretical innovation, but, to a large extent, pursued such lines of thinking for their potential to broaden the concerns of political economy beyond class struggle to articulate with other social movements at the time, such as the environmental justice, feminist, and black power movements.
UCSC produced a number of leading interdisciplinary scholars in this era who are still building on and refining these fundamental ideas of ecological Marxism, while continuing to engage with other, emergent concerns. This was certainly true of the Sociology PhD program. Alan Rudy drew inspiration from Donna Haraway’s feminist techno-science to combine political economy, science studies, agrifood systems, hybrid environmental social theory, and regional agricultural studies (2005, 2017). Michael Goldman would go on to examine the socio-environmental implications of World Bank structural adjustment programs and other global development institutions (2005). Danny Faber (1988) took inspiration from O’Connor and Szasz in examining ecological democracy in Central America, showing how production-caused environmental crisis necessitated a restructuring of the region’s productive forces and social relations that led reformist and revolutionary movements to form. Jason Moore, who received an MA in history at UCSC, drew on the insights of O’Connor and Marxist feminists to highlight the socio-ecological bonds that are at the root of any mode of production and the unpaid (re)productive labor of women, indigenous peoples, and slaves (2011, 2015).
Each of these scholar-activists examined and addressed crises of nature and society under late capitalism. Their work, like Harvey and Smith’s theories of uneven development and of the production of nature, began to articulate the manifold relations between nature and capitalism in ways that have remained central to urban-environmental theory and research, as their students (and many others) have continued to take up these intellectual and political questions. In these ways, their work continues to animate contemporary critical environmental thought and praxis.
Applying Spatial Thinking to Political Ecology, Agrifood Systems, and Reconfigurations of the Urban and Rural
In the 1990s and into the 2000s, many UCSC social sciences faculty continued to focus on issues of nature under capitalism, while bringing a distinct spatial focus to these questions. As noted above, scholars such as Goodman and Fitzsimmons were part of broader intellectual efforts to break critical social theory’s long silence on the active material presence of nature in social life and social reproduction. Along with other UCSC faculty, such as Community Studies Professor Julie Guthman, they particularly helped reinvigorate human geography by theorizing the social production of nature alongside the social production of space. During the same period, UCSC scholars also brought geographical modes of analysis to topical debates surrounding neoliberal globalization, analyzing transformations of ecologies and societies on multiple spatial scales, from the local to global. Further, UCSC Environmental Studies, Sociology, Community Studies, and Anthropology faculty produced a number of significant critical works on agro-food systems, which gave the campus a reputation as a major international center for scholarship in this realm. Among other things, UCSC social scientists distinguished themselves through influential studies of farm economies’ links to the broader rural society and with processes of urbanization, and their consistent attention to the struggles of agricultural laborers and to questions of social and environmental justice.
In significant respects, the person who laid the groundwork for subsequent UCSC scholarship on agrifood systems and rural sociology was the late Bill Friedland, hired in 1969 as Professor of Sociology. A significant international figure in the sociology of food and agriculture, Friedland used industrial and rural sociology to analyze agriculture as a complex network of production and commodity systems involving, among other things, the corporatization of agribusiness; the mechanization of growing, harvesting, and processing; the impacts of political and economic changes on both agricultural workers and growers; and the organized labor struggles of farmworkers. Friedland was perhaps best known for developing a “commodity systems analysis” that describes the stages through which commodities are transformed and acquire value — a method that emerged through his analysis of several California commodities, including tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, and wine. One of Friedland’s most significant impacts, in combination with other rural sociologists in the ‘80s and ‘90s, was to convince most sociologists to move away from the rural homestead/community as their locus of analysis and regard US agriculture as an increasingly industrial system of production (Friedland et al. 1991). Like O’Connor’s insights about the second contradiction and role of nature in capitalism, this view may appear commonsensical from the standpoint of the present, but this can be taken as, in part, a measure of his influence. At the time, this perspective was still controversial and counterintuitive in many academic quarters.
UCSC’s development into a global hub of agro-food systems research kicked into a higher gear in the mid-1990s. At the time, agro-food studies were at the confluence of numerous critical currents in social and cultural theory, political economy, and heterodox economics and sociology. Fitzsimmons, Goodman, Friedland, and others also contributed significantly to the development of knowledge about why and how globalization and the ascendancy of neoliberal ideas transformed agro-food systems in different regions around the world. In various publications in the 1990s, for example, Goodman argued for an approach to studying agrarian restructuring and reconfigurations of rural space that gives more attention to the distinctiveness of various locally-specific processes of capital accumulation and cultural transformation, rather than prematurely collapsing variegated regions and processes under a one-size-fits-all analytic that sees agribusiness as increasingly identical to industrial manufacturing (Goodman and Watts 1997; a view that contrasted somewhat with that of Friedland).
The 2000s and early 2010s marked what Julie Guthman calls “a very serendipitous convergence of people doing critical food studies work,” with UCSC becoming internationally renowned as a center for such work. This interdisciplinary cluster of scholars included Guthman and Mary Beth Pudup (Community Studies); Goodman, Fitzsimmons, Gliessman, and Patricia Allen (Environmental Studies); Friedland and Melanie DuPuis (Sociology); Melissa Caldwell (Anthropology); and a number of graduate and undergraduate students whose contributions are too many to list here. While the group’s work was multi-faceted and sometimes divergent, it had significant elements in common. Most notably, it maintained a critical orientation toward the alternative food movements and networks that were proliferating at the time, through institutions such as farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture subscription programs, voluntary labeling schemes, and Fair Trade goods. Several of UCSC’s food systems scholars offered critical (if often relatively friendly) appraisals of these movements, on various grounds: the limits of market-based and individual entrepreneurship as modes of social change; the broad tendency of these movements to occlude class, race, gender, and other axes of domination and oppression in their perspectives; and the vulnerability of these locally-scaled and consumer-oriented projects to corporate cooptation (Guthman 2008; Pudup 2008).
Over the decades, work explicitly situated at the intersection of urban and environmental studies was less prominent than geographic studies of the rural and agricultural. When it did take place, it was frequently oriented towards environmental justice and sustainability struggles in Santa Cruz and the region. In 1969, an activist core of Community Studies students led by Bill Friedland conducted a survey of citizen attitudes toward plans to construct a four-lane freeway through the heart of Santa Cruz. The survey revealed that the vast majority of local residents were in opposition, and became a significant factor in the state Highway Commission’s decision to abandon the project (Gendron and Domhoff 2009). A 1987 study by sociology PhD student Robert Moratto and Friedland concerning Santa Cruz “street people” found that economic distress was the main cause of the early-mid-’80s increase in the houseless population, a finding that contributed to new social welfare experiments in the city. Jim Pepper, an early member of the ENVS faculty and specialist in land-use planning, helped plan the recovery of Santa Cruz following the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. Business interests, however, fended off Pepper’s proposal to develop downtown mainly as a social gathering place, rather than as a commercial hub (Gendron and Domhoff 2009). Pepper also created and led an environmentally oriented urban and regional planning track within ENVS, training many who went on to planning careers in the region. They argue this program was one of the earliest attempts to institutionalize burgeoning ideas about urban sustainability planning. And beyond applied progrms, Professor Emeritus G. William Domhoff, best known for his 1967 bestseller Who Rules America? (2006), teamed with former PhD student Richard Gendron to publish The Leftmost City: Power and Progressive Politics in Santa Cruz, based on Gendron’s dissertation and decades of participant observation. The book used growth coalition theory to analyze Santa Cruz’s unique left-leaning political history, with a focus on the period beginning in 1980 when the city’s main elected leadership consisted of an often adversarial assemblage of environmentalists, socialist-feminists, and neighborhood organizers (Domhoff and Gendron 2009) Nonetheless, such urban and urban environmental research was intermittent.
An explicit engagement with urban and urban-environmental issues and research began to consolidate in the 2000s, with the arrival of Sociology Professor Miriam Greenberg in 2006, and a number of other spatially oriented scholars soon thereafter—including Hillary Angelo, Lindsey Dillon, and Alison Alkon. In 2008 Greenberg founded the Urban Studies Research Cluster, together with Eric Porter (History), with an interest was in creating a “Santa Cruz approach to urban studies” linked to campus strengths in cultural studies, environmental studies, and social justice engagement, as well as using UCSC’s geographic and historic context as laboratory and inspiration. Early activities included a reading group on the then-emerging field of urban political ecology and water with sociologist Ben Crow, followed by a series of annual symposia: “Representing New Orleans: Challenges and Responsibilities,” honoring the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina through jazz, photography, and critical race and urban studies; “Coastal Cities: Urbanization, Water & Environmental Justice,” exploring socio-environmental shaping coastal cities like Santa Cruz, Seattle and New Orleans; and, with UCSC’s Center for Labor Studies, “Whose City? Labor and the Right to the City Movements,” on the challenges and necessity of urban-labor coalitions.
As concerns about climate change and interest in urban sustainability grew in the 2000s, along with awareness of the centrality of Silicon Valley to these problems and possible solutions, Greenberg organized the Critical Sustainabilities project. This UC multi-campus working group analyzed competing and contradictory discourses of urban sustainability in California. The group also brought together urbanists and agrarian and food scholars, including Dillon, Alkon, Guthman, and Pudup, and aimed to advance the broader field of critical sustainability studies (2013). In 2013, Greenberg and Angelo collaborated with colleagues in the Urban Democracy Lab at NYU to organize and host the conference “Democratizing the Green City,” focused on the politics of urban sustainability planning, at UCSC. These efforts reflected an emergent Santa Cruz approach to critical urban and environmental studies, focused at the time on the environmental dimensions of the affordable housing crisis in Santa Cruz and critique of the absence of affordability and housing issues in California sustainability policy and planning more generally (Greenberg 2021; Angelo et. al. 2024).
Institutional and Political Engagements
Critical urban and environmental scholarship at UCSC has always been dynamically related to the university’s changing institutional configurations—and frequently, to scholars’ political work both on- and off-campus. UCSC’s social scientists have themselves played key roles in fostering the university’s unique legacy of social experimentation through programmatic and institutional innovations.
During UCSC’s formative years, the university was famously a site of radical experimentation that included various attempts to get away from both the discipline-dominated model and the alienating mass-instruction model that had come to characterize mainstream undergraduate education. Amid the general social ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, faculty at UCSC (as at other universities) also sought to develop classroom content and research programs that responded to students’ desire for experience directly relevant to the counter-hegemonic political, social, and cultural currents of the time. The university’s longest-running interdisciplinary program—Community Studies—is exemplary in these regards. Prior to joining the UCSC faculty, Bill Friedland (himself a former long-time union organizer affiliated with the CIO) developed an innovative program at Cornell University in which a cadre of undergraduates conducted field studies as agricultural workers and researchers in migrant labor camps, followed by a seminar in which they analyzed their experiences in academic terms. This program, the Cornell Migrant Labor Project, was to become the model for Community Studies, which Friedland founded upon his arrival in 1969. The program was built around a required six-month full-time field study in which students work with a social justice organization and then return to campus to reflect critically upon the experience, guided by history and theory. Mike Rotkin, a long-time Community Studies faculty member with a long and influential history as a Santa Cruz city politician and labor organizer, played a crucial role in shaping the field study program’s intellectual content and activist orientation, as the program’s founding coordinator.
UCSC’s flagship Environmental Studies program is another example of a truly interdisciplinary academic program that has persisted since the campus’s early days. As ENVS faculty member Jim Pepper put it, an explicit goal of the program has always been not to “get stuck in any particular academic paradigm, any one single academic and intellectual tradition.” ENVS at UCSC is one of the few environmental studies departments in the U.S. with full-time, tenured faculty appointments. It has also remained a deeply interdisciplinary program, with faculty from a variety of disciplines, a large proportion of whom have a background in the social (rather than natural) sciences.
The University Farm is another paradigmatic example of a counter-hegemonic institution at UCSC. Even if its relationship to critical urban and environmental work is less direct (the same is true of the much smaller, but still legendary, Alan Chadwick Garden at Merrill College), it nonetheless played a key role in establishing UCSC’s international reputation as a center of critical research on food and agriculture. Both were founded by the world-famous biodynamic farmer Alan Chadwick, a flamboyant innovator of organic farming techniques and an influential instructor of biodynamic/French intensive gardening, and the farm continues to offer apprenticeships in organic horticulture and agriculture today. Whereas the research agendas of the University of California’s dominant ag-science network have remained largely responsive to the economic and political concerns of conventional agribusiness enterprises, the UCSC Farm ultimately found a niche as a world-renowned center for practical and applied research on ecologically-sensitive and more socially-just agricultural practices.
Founded in 1971, the 25-acre facility was initially managed by Chadwick, but social scientists had a surprisingly significant hand in shaping its subsequent trajectory. Friedland and Pepper played key administrative roles in charting out the Farm’s alternative paradigm, including the decision to hire Steve Gliessman as farm director in the early 1980s. As founding director of the now-named Center for Agroecology, Gliessman has long been one of the intellectual progenitors of agroecology: a science, a set of practices, and a social movement that applies ecological and social justice principles to the design and management of food systems. As with the scholarship we have chronicled above, the Farm’s work to establish alternative agricultural paradigms in many ways prefigured approaches and agendas that have gained in importance and popularity, from organic farming to various forms of food entrepreneurship (community-supported agriculture, direct food purchasing, etc.).
These programs have all been unqualified successes on their own terms. Moreover, each has, in turn, shaped the kinds of questions that UCSC’s urban and environmental scholars have pursued in their scholarly work – if not the very meaning of that work itself. UCSC scholars’ interest in alternative food movements, described in the previous section, grew to a considerable degree out of the campus’s proximity to the powerful organic farming and farm localization movement on the California Central Coast – itself in some measure a legacy of the UCSC Farm’s prowess at training agroecology and sustainable farming exponents. Applied UCSC research on just and ecologically balanced agro-food systems practices prefigured increased interest in food sustainability in mainstream U.S. culture, such that the Farm remains a significant hub for food systems scholars and activists. Community Studies faculty members such as Friedland and Julie Guthman have often drawn on their students’ experiences in, and attitudes toward, their community field internships as sources of intellectual inspiration and as data. Environmental Studies’ abiding interdisciplinarity and the strength of its social science research cluster made it a natural home for scholars such as Goodman and Fitzsimmons, who in turn cultivated the research agenda that became the UCSC Food Systems Study Group.
Where we are today: Critical urban-environmental studies for the 21st century
This essay has argued that UCSC has a distinctive tradition of critical urban-environmental research and activism that emerged and has evolved in relation to various political and economic conjunctures and the campus’ shifting institutional configurations. In the interest of establishing an intellectual history, we have carved relatively coherent and discrete intellectual communities, fields, and disciplines, often intertwined with political movements on and beyond the campus, out of a set of networks in motion. While these scholars have generated a meaningful institutional footprint and intellectual impact, which we wish to help extend into the future, it is critical to acknowledge that this work is by no means complete nor has it been sufficient unto itself. For instance, the initial waves of what might be called a “Santa Cruz School” of political ecology described in this essay largely failed to develop strong analytical engagements with enduring structures of settler-colonialism and anti-Black racism, and related conceptions of race, racialization, and indigeneity–in part due to individual personalities and in part due to deep intellectual disagreements and divisions. The thinkers and fields we have described have frequently been marked by conflicts from within and without concerning, for instance, the centrality of class as an analytical category vis-à-vis race, gender, nationality, and ethnicity, among others. Similarly, early campus moves towards environmental justice theorizing, such as by Rudy and di Chiro, then a PhD student in History of Consciousness, in the 1990s, were strenuously opposed by ENVS faculty who sought to defend environmental studies as a science and/or policy-based field, as opposed to one aligned with critical theory or social justice frameworks.
Such a history could also be told differently. UCSC has also been a site of significant political economic and urban scholarship and associated political organizing that is neither reducible to nor necessarily legible within the specific tradition we have described. One compelling example of such work is that of founding Sociology faculty member Herman Blake, perhaps best remembered as a co-author of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton’s best-selling 1973 autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide (Newton and Blake 1973). On campus, Blake is often remembered as the founder and first provost of Oakes College, and for his collaboration with Black undergraduate students in an organized effort to have it christened Malcolm X College. It is less well remembered that Blake was trained as an urban sociologist, and that he produced scholarly articles on the political economy of urban life in Mexico City and on Black urban experience in the United States. Blake’s vision for Oakes—one never fully realized—was for it to serve as both a pedagogical home and intellectual center for urban studies and urban experience (Blake 1966; Blake and Vanderscoff 2014).
This path not taken is particularly interesting because it is in such close alignment with the orientation of current campus (and national and international) scholarship and activism. The first wave of critical urban and ecological scholarship did not result in a scholarly dialogue between the concerns of traditional Marxist political economy and other radical traditions concerned with categories and historical experiences of race and racialization, colonialism and imperialism, and Indigeneity. Blake represents these impulses, and was also oriented toward institutionalizing his intellectual and political commitments in novel ways at UCSC, yet his vibrant legacy and intellectual orientation are not reflected in the scholarly frameworks we described in previous sections, nor (as far as we can tell) was he an active member of those institutional spaces. Rather than continuing to operate in separate intellectual spheres, as many previous UCSC faculty did, or simply retrospectively assimilate Blake into a history from which he was largely separate, we follow numerous contemporary scholars who are now aiming to achieve new confluences of these critical traditions. This is not—and must not be—a homogenizing intellectual unity, but rather an interdependence and cooperation of many standpoints, each drawing on their specific regional and social-historical origins. Against this backdrop, the legacy of scholars like Herman Blake—including his unrealized vision for Oakes College—gains further significance.
Today, at least as embodied by the faculty affiliated with CUES, critical environmental work at UCSC continues to exemplify the criticality, spatiality, and political engagement of its predecessors, while moving into new directions and engaging with a broader set of contemporary concerns.
In Sociology, CUES co-founders Miriam Greenberg and Hillary Angelo have continued, like O’Connor, to work on socionatural crises, with a specific focus on capitalist urbanization and an analytic lens oriented toward intersections of political economy and culture, on multi-spatial (i.e., relational across country and city) analysis, and on issues of lived experience and representation–each of which plays a central role in local political struggles and in how environmental challenges such as climate change are addressed (Angelo 2021; see Greenberg et al. 2024; Angelo and Greenberg 2023). Camilla Hawthorne and Lindsey Dillon, both trained as critical human geographers, bring environmental justice, post- and de-colonial geographies, and the Black Radical tradition to analyses of the racial politics of migration and citizenship (Hawthorne 2022) and histories of toxic waste, struggles for remediation, and threats of gentrification in San Francisco’s Bay-View and Hunter’s Point (Dillon 2024). Their work is representative of contemporary approaches in Black Geographies and ecologies that insist on an epistemological and geographic reorientation from traditional (Western, White, European) approaches (Hawthorne and Lewis 2023). The ongoing CUES workshop continues to engage graduate students and faculty from across departments and divisions in discussions of climate crisis, urban-agrarian transformation, and issues of social and environmental justice at various scales.
In Environmental Studies, Madeleine Fairbairn’s research on farmland financialization and agri-tech continues to draw from and contribute to political ecology and economy, to use the Central Coast as a research site, and, with Julie Guthman and others, to maintain UCSC as a site of critical food studies (Fairbairn 2021; Fairbairn et al. 2022). Her focus on the contemporary operations of global finance in agriculture can be read as updating work by Faber and Goodman who, earlier, wrote about the impacts of neocolonialism and dynamics of underdevelopment in Latin America. Mijin Cha’s (2024) work on “just transitions” addresses false divisions between labor and environmental movements that continue to impede the type of coalition-building Szasz wrote about in the 1990s. Flora Lu and Emily Murai have continued the institution-building impulses of earlier critical environmental scholars, helping to broaden and shift the epistemic frameworks through which environmental topics are taught (e.g., in classes and curricula), and by helping found and sustain student groups such as the People of Color Sustainability Collective (PoCSC) (see Lu and Murai 2023).
UCSC Sociology has also become increasingly well-known for community-engaged research of various kinds, which has also dovetailed with, and supported, campus and community issues. Miriam Greenberg, with Sociology Professors Steve McKay and Rebecca London, developed an approach to “community-initiated student-engaged research” (CISER) that has involved hundreds of students in community issues (Greenberg et al. 2020). In 2018, Greenberg and McKay published a study of Santa Cruz County’s housing crisis, “No Place Like Home,” based on months of surveying by undergraduates. The survey revealed (among other things) that 70 percent of local residents live under “rent burden” (defined as spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities). By that point, speculative pressures in the real estate market, compounded by increased number of renters, had combined to make Santa Cruz County one of the United States’ least affordable metro area for renters. In 2019-20, graduate student workers at UCSC drew liberally on the study’s findings in their wildcat strike for a cost-of-living adjustment, which not only spread to several additional UC campuses in February 2020, but also set the tone for an even larger UC grad worker strike that in 2022 that culminated in significant wage increases. Greenberg’s current work on the relationship between Santa Cruz’s affordable housing crisis and the growth of the Wildland-Urban Interface has involved student surveying and interviews across a four-county region. Meanwhile Community Studies, now housed within Sociology, continues to build intellectual and practical links between environmental and social justice, and between researchers and community-based food movements, in central and northern California. This is in large part thanks to Associate Professor Alison Alkon, whose own scholarly work focuses on radical food geographies and environmental justice (2011, 2024).
In these ways and through these and other figures, we see—retrospectively and prospectively—a strong tradition of critical urban-environmental research and activism at UCSC that we hope will continue into the future. As UCSC scholars have long argued, the complexity of socionatural relations, many of which–from contemporary affordable housing crisis; to increasing threats of wildfire, drought, and extinction; to the extensification of Silicon Valley and capitalist agriculture; to the enduring legacies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism–are endemic to our region, requires critical, interdisciplinary analysis informed by students and workers, activists and organizers, community and social movements.
The authors wish to thank the many people whose contributions have made this essay possible. Special thanks to Bill Domhoff, Michelle Glowa, Miriam Greenberg, Julie Guthman, Barbara Laurence, Stacy Philpott, Giovanna Di Chiro, and Andrew Szasz for generously sharing their time, insights, and reflections with us. We also thank the generations of UCSC professors, instructors, researchers, graduate, and undergraduate students, workers, activists, and organizers (including those named and unnamed in this essay) whose lives, labor, and histories have made possible the critical urban and environmental scholarship described herein.
Works Cited
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Angelo, Hillary, Key MacFarlane, James Sirigotis, and Adam Millard-Ball. 2024. Missing the housing for the trees: Equity in urban climate planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research 44(3): 1415-1430.
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