California’s Central Valley, protecting shut to twenty,000 sq. miles, produces roughly 40 p.c of the US’ fruits, greens, and nuts. That abundance is the end result not solely of large-scale irrigation, but in addition of the widespread use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, which then seep again into the valley’s aquifers.
The ensuing air pollution is a significant purpose why greater than 1 million Californians don’t have entry to protected ingesting water. A lot of them are Latino farmworkers who stay in small communities reliant not on municipal water methods however on underground aquifers tainted by nitrates, arsenic, hexavalent chromium, and different pollution which have quite a few ailing well being results.
In her video “The Nice Divide” — the third-place winner within the 2020 Yale Surroundings 360 Video Contest — filmmaker Casey Beck takes a have a look at a type of small communities — Tooleville, an unincorporated group of 80 houses positioned within the San Joaquin Valley on the southern finish of the Central Valley. Beck tells the story of Pedro Hernandez, an organizer with the nonprofit Management Council for Justice and Accountability, as he works to have Tooleville consolidated into a bigger neighboring city that has a correct municipal water system.
“It’s very, very, very laborious,” Tooleville resident Yolanda Cuevas mentioned of her worries about her kids and grandchildren being uncovered to the contaminated water. “Solely by strolling in another person’s footwear are you able to perceive how one other individual lives. In the event that they noticed every part that we now have to cope with, they might notice how troublesome it’s to stay with an issue like this.”
In regards to the Filmmaker: Casey Beck has been directing and producing impartial documentary movies for the previous decade, highlighting in any other case untold tales. She has produced movies for FRONTLINE, MTV, FoodMattersTV, and The Documentary Channel (Pivot). Her tasks have screened at a number of movie festivals, together with the Mill Valley Movie Pageant and Cinequest, and been broadcast on nationwide TV, Hulu, and iTunes. Beck additionally teaches documentary manufacturing at California State College East Bay.
In regards to the Contest: The Yale Surroundings 360 Video Contest honors the 12 months’s finest environmental movies, with the intention of recognizing work that has not beforehand been extensively seen. Entries for 2020 have been acquired from six continents, with a prize of $2,000 going to the first-place winner.