on the cover / By Ryan Burns

With a Rural Yell

“When they saw the maps, that is what prompted them into action,” said Martinez last week. Another advantage to the CCRP maps: They can cross language and literacy barriers. In the weeks that followed, workers formed comités — community action committees — and set out to convince Tulare County authorities to enact and enforce quarter-mile buffer zones around schools and playgrounds. It worked: Aerial pesticide spraying has been banned in those areas.

As Steinberg told Humboldt Now, the university magazine, the CCRP’s research gave validity to citizens’ complaints. “We interviewed community members who had been dismissed in the past as uneducated farm workers when they reported autism, unusually high rates of twin births and people sickened with asthma or migraines,” she said. “We provided them with visual maps and technical assistance to trace pesticide applications. We gave voice to their concerns through our research.”

The comités continue to work. Next school year the groups hope to establish a flag system to warn parents when sprays are scheduled, and they’re trying to convince school officials to utilize an existing emergency call system for the same purpose. The CCRP’s report, compiled with the help of HSU undergrad and grad students, contains numerous recommendations directed at farm owners and legislators.

Sitting in her office on the top floor of the tallest building in Arcata, Steinberg says the CCRP has just begun to realize its potential. She envisions the center as a place where rural Californians can come not just for problem solving and analysis but for diagnosis. “You take a car in to a mechanic, right?” she says. “As the driver of the car it’s not your job to know what you need done. That’s the mechanic’s job. So we’re kind of like the mechanics of rural California.”

In addition to the grant-funded studies, Steinberg says the center does contract work, like a recent project in which they helped a Native American tribe (she didn’t want to say which one) prove to the state government that they’d been under-counted in the 2000 U.S. Census and were therefore entitled to more state funding. Steinberg and the other CCRP directors are hoping more groups will seek them out for this kind of work. They’ve also begun sponsoring workshops, like a UCLA-organized community training session called “Data and Democracy.” (Part two of that workshop takes place this Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Nelson Hall East, room 102.)

“CCRP is building confidence and capacity,” Stewart says. “The first couple years we were just doing the data collection for the studies.” The economic downturn likely means that things may get worse before they get better. But Stewart says that makes the CCRP’s job all the more important. “Resources will be even tighter, and we have to be even smarter with how we use them.”

Of course, vulnerability isn’t the true hallmark of rural folks. We pride ourselves on being hardworking. Resourceful. Self-reliant. We’re not gonna sit around waiting for a government bailout, dammit. Part of living behind the Redwood Curtain means learning how to take care of our own.

“I think when you live here you know that help isn’t always going to come from the outside,” says Steinberg. “We have to be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and help each other. And that ties in with the whole formation of [the] CCRP.” Steinberg may have grown up in cities and suburbs, but she’s got the defiant Humboldt attitude down pat. “Let’s not rely on the big schools to come in and study us as a rural community under the microscope,” she says. “Let us study ourselves. Let us decide how we want to be portrayed. Let us be the holder of the data. And then we have it to share with others in the community, and then we can empower ourselves — because knowledge is power, right?”

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