Kase Wheatley is an Environmental and Climate Justice Scholar at the UC Davis Institute of the Environment and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Geography Graduate Group. Wheatley’s project examines how regional and statewide land-use transition efforts can center environmental justice through ecological and social accountability to historically dispossessed and underserved communities. 

What are the short and long term goals you hope to achieve with your research?

Kase Wheatley: My hope for this research is that it supports the longer project and intervention at universities, which is thinking about the role and responsibility of agricultural research. I'm thinking broadly about socially and ecologically accountable change, in the landscape and in local and regional food systems. Land grant universities like UC Davis are actively shaping the landscape and people's lives, economically and socially. In terms of who the university supports and who it doesn't. Who gets research done for them, and which farmers are receiving support in developing new machines and new tools.

There's the famous example from the 1980s of the lawsuit against UC Davis because of its role in the creation of the UC-Blackwelder Tomato Harvester. The tomato harvester was a collaboration between a plant breeder and an agricultural engineer which eliminated 32,000 farm labor jobs, and consolidated the tomato industry down from 5000 growers to just over 500.

My research is broadly trying to think about how we bring justice into food system transitions, and as an institution how do we support historically marginalized and dispossessed land stewards. Thinking about communities that are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color as well as Tribal nations. Some of my research is focused on ecological transitions. How do we shift to more bio-regionally adapted cropping systems, organic, regenerative, and even agroecological. Each of these terms means slightly different things, but in general, it means eliminating pesticides and synthetic fertilizer, lowering greenhouse gas emissions, as well as promoting practices that have been practiced since time immemorial by Indigenous and peasant peoples like agroforestry, intercropping, and integrating crops with livestock. Also, how do we think beyond supporting farmers to transition to organic or beyond to those other cropping systems, and about the role of the institution, and agricultural researchers? How do we think about our work as political, as something that impacts people's lives? Not in this kind of imagined, bubble of apolitical, unbiased research that's goal is simply feeding the world without any social, ecological, or emotional side effects or externalities.

I think of my research as continuing these conversations and sparking dialogue, especially in the current political terrain. With the removal of programs focused on bringing justice to these areas, I think we either give in to that, or we say values are important. We have to articulate our values beyond acronyms and heuristics, and instead, articulate them clearly so that we can plan together for the coming decades, when climate change and inequality will become even more impactful. We need to adapt and become resilient, to lessen the gulf around land between those who have and those who don't.

We live in a country where 98% of farmland is owned by people of white, European descent, and there are historical reasons for that. So how do we shift the food system and the agricultural landscape in California, where private equity, millionaires, and billionaires own huge amounts of land and grow almonds and pistachios in chemical-intensive plantations for export? How do we change that? How do we shift our food and water systems to support local food systems, local communities, general well-being, and the common good? How do we promote food systems that see salmon rehabilitation as a priority based on justice, and also prioritize and promote Indigenous food systems?

What led you to want to study and research environmental solutions?

Kase Wheatley: I grew up in suburban, Southern California with very few connections to where my food came from, in kind of the black box that is agriculture and food systems in a globalized, capitalist world, where people are generally alienated from land and what they produce. Don’t look behind the curtain! As a child, the beginning and end of the question of where my food came from was the grocery store. The food and agriculture system is one of the most monopolistic sectors of our economy. If you look at the major commodity crops, corn, soy, and also, animals, meats, pork, beef, chicken, etc, The market share is owned by such a few number of companies. The people benefiting are few, and the people paying the toll with their health, the health of the landscape, and economic deprivation are expansive. These are things I didn't think about when I was younger, the things that are intentionally hidden from view.

I came to UC Davis as an undergraduate studying the new Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems major that launched in 2011. It opened my eyes to the ways that our food system works. It prioritizes profit over people and land degradation over thriving rural economies and multi-species communities. And it’s part of a longer trajectory or structure of settler colonial accumulation at the expense of Black, Indigenous, and communities of color. California is one of the major sites of Japanese internment during World War II. We don't talk about that in agriculture classes here. It's not part of the plant sciences curriculum even though it's an ecological, issue in agriculture, and a social justice issue.  For me, coming to UC Davis as an undergrad and then returning as a PhD student has been an opportunity to dig deeper into the history of this land, into understanding and thinking about the historical ecologies, the indigenous ecologies of this landscape.

You know, two years ago, it was impactful when Lake Tulare re-emerged. It radically reshaped my understanding of the Central Valley - what it was, and what it could be like. Lake Tulare was massive, the largest lake west of the Mississippi by area. It was so large it affected weather patterns and created a breeze and better air quality. It's almost a science fiction landscape that's hard to imagine as the San Joaquin Valley today is so dry, with some of the worst air quality in the nature, full of monoculture plantations and difficult for local  people to meet their basic needs as groundwater over-drafting dried up wells and drinking water from local communities, including the very farmworker families who harvest the crops.

What are your most significant research accomplishments? 

Kase Wheatley: When I put forward my application for the Institute of the Environment's Environmental Climate Justice fellowship, I was in a moment of uncertainty about what kind of future I could have at UC Davis, and in my relationship with PhD program, earning the fellowship was impactful to be like. It was validation to hear my research was deemed compelling. That was in October 2024. In December, we received word that a multi-campus research project proposal  that we submitted was funded, for $2.7 million. This project, the California Organic, Agroecological, & Regenerative (COAR) Transitions project was funded to expand this work of supporting socially and ecologically accountable land-use transitions across multiple campuses, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, UC Merced, UC Riverside, and across the state through UC ANR. The research promotes just, sustainable food systems and agricultural transitions in different regions around the state. This initiative, COAR Transitions, that I'm co-coordinating overlaps significantly with the fellowship through the Institute of the Environment, and is very much about collaborating and coordinating across the state to promote these transitions. 

How do you think communities and collaboration could be improved in institutional and academic systems? 

Kase Wheatley: I think what is most compelling right now is thinking about working together as teams of researchers, scientists, staff members, and students. There's a fledgling field of team science or convergence research, which explores how we work together in these institutions which otherwise isolate and silo us into whatever department, building, or institute that we're part of. I'm at the beginning of understanding what team science is. It sounds basic - just people working together - but it's difficult. How do you do that, especially when, across the university, we're discussing different ideas of truth and knowledge. Some of whom include social context and some that do their best to eliminate it completely. This is important.

The people in the biophysical sciences use their different measuring devices to make observations, they have data which they systematically analyze, and that's a type of truth and knowledge. But we're also engaging with people who are talking about their socially constructed reality– their perceptions, their values, their visions for the future– which you can't measure as simply with a tool. You have to talk to people and understand their background, and then you have to understand who you are as a researcher, and how that impacts the biases you carry based on your own positionality and life experiences. How does that impact trust? I think it's in the process of  collaboration of how we bring together different ways of understanding knowledge and truth in a way that's going to have a positive impact, hopefully changing people's lives and the landscape for the better. I feel like I'm a fledgling at team science, or maybe what the Zapatistas called ConCiencias, and for me, it feels more necessary and compelling than any one field of research. My PhD program and the fellowship through the Institute of the Environment have pushed me to do practical things. How do we work with communities? How do we change things for the better? We're in a context of the State of California, where it seems possible to make change that's socially and ecologically beneficial for the masses. There's still a lot of moneyed interests that are actively preventing change from happening in the ways we want to see it. But compared to the federal context, or other states in which I've lived we're in a moment where there is a way we can dig down both locally, and do this team science or convergence research in a way that has an impact in the short term, creating policy recommendations for the state in the mid-term, and in the longer term re-thinking and re-imagining these institutions to serve communities in a participatory and engaged manner, and one that is based in trust and accountability.

How do you stay motivated with the recent rollbacks in environmental research?

Kase Wheatley: It's difficult, especially with so many friends, colleagues, advisors, faculty, and mentors, who are losing their research funds. The projects have to be scaled back or abandoned completely. Friends who had funding for multiple years through a graduate student research position now no longer have any of that funding and are forced to leave the institution or find TA positions if they can. I'm in a moment of trying to listen and understand where friends and colleagues are at. While it hasn't impacted my research directly, inevitably, some of it still rolls over into my reality because I'm collaborating with people. 

I see this larger work as something I need to continue doing to better my life and hopefully support more coordination and collaboration across the University of California that can lead to better opportunities, better policy, and a political landscape shift.

We don't know when the political or social winds will shift. The most we can do or do is, hoist our sails, get in position, and hope that when the wind does blow, we're able to catch it. It's a sobering time for so many reasons, whether it's financial cuts or friends and colleagues terrified over their Visa status. I think every day is a sobering moment, and I continue because it's all I can do to push through. Agricultural research is not separate from the world - it's part of it. We can either see it as solely focused on yield and simply producing more calories, or how we can step back and question what is the larger role of agriculture and think about bettering people's lives, promoting rural livelihoods, dignity, and accountability not just short term profit for a select few.