Lynda and Stewart Resnick are among the many extra beneficiant patrons of the humanities scene in Los Angeles. They’ve made multimillion-dollar donations which have put their names on elements of the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork (LACMA) and the Hammer Museum, in addition to different establishments within the metropolis. You won’t be accustomed to the Resnicks or their enterprise, The Great Firm, however you seemingly know at the very least a number of of their manufacturers, which embody POM Great pomegranate juice, Fiji bottled water, and Great Pistachios. Lots of their agricultural merchandise are grown in California’s Central Valley, an enormous stretch of land that was turned from a floodplain into one in every of Earth’s most fertile farming areas via heavy hydroengineering within the mid-Twentieth century.
The valley can also be rife with poverty and is a hotspot of environmental contamination and well being points, because of the iron rule highly effective landowners just like the Resnicks exert over it. Of particular word is the extraordinary quantity of water diverted to those farms to develop these crops — notably pistachios, which require round a thousand gallons per pound produced. In a state with persistent drought points, prioritizing a nut appears doubtful, to say the least. What number of museum wings can the Resnicks fund to keep away from questions on their enterprise practices?
Yasha Levine, a contract journalist who has reported on the Central Valley in depth, teamed up with filmmaker Rowan Wernham to direct the documentary Pistachio Wars. The movie takes the Resnicks as an entry level to analyze elite management of the Central Valley. Forward of its launch on VOD, I met with Levine and Wernham by way of Zoom to debate how they related, the Resnicks’ historical past and artwashing ways, and the broader historical past of water management in California. This dialog has been edited for size and readability.
Yasha Levine in Victorville, California.
Hyperallergic: How did the 2 of you hyperlink as much as make this movie?
Rowan Wernham: I’ve been studying Yasha’s work for a very long time. I believed his article “A Journey Through Oligarch Valley” would make an excellent movie, and reached out to him via [writer] John Dolan.
Yasha Levine: I’d by no means thought-about making a documentary, however I instantly was struck by the probabilities. Visually, California is such a wealthy atmosphere; the state has all these contrasts, the wonder on one hand and the environmental devastation [caused by] its business on the opposite. So it didn’t take a lot for Rowan to persuade me.
RW: We really began out extra targeted on their lobbying for sanctions on Iran, then realized it could be onerous to show into a movie, as a result of the world of anti-Iran lobbying is so opaque. The article is concerning the land barons and previous farming cash that management California. The Resnicks are one in every of 4 or 5 oligarch farmers coated within the article. We realized there was additionally a Chinatown story, like a water heist with these good villains within the background. So we modified the main target to be extra concerning the water, with the Iran lobbying being like a twist.
Nut silos on the Great Firm plant.
H: How did the Resnicks emerge as the point of interest? Is it as a result of they’re notably public going through and aggressively sunny of their self-promotion?
RW: Once you’re an organization referred to as “The Wonderful Company,” which places this picture on the market in California, which is meant to be the environmental chief in America, after which it’s as unhealthy as we present it to be, I believe that makes an impression. However the Resnicks additionally simply have an excellent story.
YL: The Resnicks had been my entry into the world of California water politics as a result of, such as you mentioned, they’re very ahead going through, aggressive, and visual. They stand out among the many massive farming households that management big chunks of California as a result of the others are normally a lot older, going again to the Gold Rush. The Resnicks come from a very completely different world. They’re Jewish, they arrive from Hollywood, they usually obtained into farming accidentally. They wished to achieve success businesspeople, and farming was simply one of many ventures they tried.
As a result of they’re new and impressive, they’ve needed to be inventive in a manner that the older farming households that already management the market don’t. They lobbied to alter the foundations round how water is ruled and distributed. With their aggressive advertising and marketing campaigns, they basically created a whole marketplace for a crop they had been rising. That type of enlargement of farming hadn’t been seen in California for a number of generations. And since then, the Resnicks have been throwing round their cash quite a bit to, put crudely, whitewash their picture and purchase acceptance within the artwork world and liberal LA society.
Nut orchards.
H: I used to reside in Los Angeles, and for a very long time, that identify was one thing I used to be simply ambiently conscious of as a result of I had seen it in locations like LACMA. Yasha, you staged a protest on the Hammer a number of years in the past tied to the Resnicks’ donation to the museum.
YL: That protest was simply my spouse and I. Calling it a protest is overkill, actually. We simply wished to get consideration on this subject. So I used to be shocked by how fragile the Resnicks are. It didn’t take a lot for them to activate their complete PR equipment. Lynda Resnick went to Misplaced Hills to personally give this [Times] reporter a tour about how nice their little firm city is. It’s usually unimaginable to get near them with any questions. The truth that she flew on the market to placed on this little present for the Instances, to me that confirmed how simple it’s to puncture their picture. The truth of what they do outweighs the meager cowl they’ll present by placing their names on museums. By now, everybody is aware of rich individuals give to those establishments to cowl their asses. I ponder if there are diminishing returns to those sorts of donations, and what they suppose they’re going to get via them.
Porterville resident with no working water.
Featured right here: Juana Garcia and Donna Johnson.
H: We did see one thing of a reckoning for the Sackler household and their makes an attempt at artwashing, however that got here after a few years and plenty of factors of strain.
RW: Not too long ago, The Great Firm has drawn plenty of huge ire round their water use, because of the fires this yr. Folks made that connection: They see how a lot hassle that they had placing the fires out, then considered how the Resnicks use a lot water. That’s the closest we’ve seen to mass public outrage towards them. With the Sacklers, you might have an organized group of people who find themselves households of [opioid] overdose victims. They will say their brother, son, or husband died, whereas with the Resnicks, it’s a part of an even bigger change in California’s panorama.
H: It’s additionally more durable to make the connection as a result of every thing they’re doing is happening within the Central Valley, which, for many Californians who don’t reside there, is out of sight, out of thoughts.
YL: That’s precisely the purpose we’re making within the movie. And I do know that with issue-based documentaries, lots of people anticipate to listen to options, however we don’t supply an answer, as a result of whereas the Resnicks are a major a part of the system, it’s nonetheless a systemic subject, and one we’re all implicated in. There’s no fast repair the place you’ll be able to simply use much less water or change to some inexperienced various, after which it’ll all be good. It’s an issue larger than agriculture, even; it’s a part of the capitalist system.
Great Firm Headquarters in LA.
H: Thematically, this movie jogged my memory plenty of the work of Mike Davis, who wrote a lot on California politics and historical past. Was he or some other work a notable affect?
RW: Yasha gave me Davis’s Metropolis of Quartz to learn early on. It’s an excellent e book on the background of California politics. I believe Davis’s thesis might be much like ours, about overdevelopment pushed by hypothesis and senseless capitalism. There’s additionally an older PBS documentary collection about water, Cadillac Desert, primarily based on the e book by Marc Reisner.
YL: That’s the extra normie one. It’s extra of a sweeping historical past of the American West and the function water infrastructure performed in it. One of many enduring myths of America is that the cowboys conquered the land — this excellent of rugged individualism. However as Reisner’s nice e book exhibits you, the West sits on these huge infrastructure initiatives, these dams and canals. The New Deal propped up this excellent of Western rugged individualism and allowed the creation of this civilization in California and the Southwest.
Visiting the positioning of the “secret dam” in Porterville, California.
RW: We’re tackling that tech utopian thought of Fifties California, the place it was thought-about progress to transform rivers into concrete canals and computerize the distribution of water, and nobody actually questioned this. The panorama actually is a hell. Coming from New Zealand, and simply in my travels, I’ve seen agricultural areas produce meals fairly successfully, and I haven’t ever seen something as stark because the Central Valley. It’s this computerized effectivity, a flat desert with a managed irrigation system, computer-planted timber, and ideally nothing else is allowed to reside there — weeds, different crops, birds, bugs. You simply have the crop with the minimal of water to maintain it alive, or a feedlot. It’s peak neoliberal effectivity, however clearly viscerally incorrect.
That drove the type of the movie. I really feel just like the format of a daily documentary with information and consultants has been weaponized, since all people can do it and make their very own model of actuality. So I wished to seize extra of the expertise of driving via California, of seeing it.
Great Halos signal for orchard subsequent to grease subject from Pistachio Wars
Pistachio Wars is obtainable on VOD beginning November 7.
