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Imagine that you own a small, 20-acre farm in Californias Central Valley. You and your family have cultivated this land for decades, but drought, increasing costs, and decreasing water availability are making each year more difficult. Now imagine that a solar-electricity developer approaches you and presents three options: You can lease the developer 10 acres of otherwise productive cropland, on which the developer will build an array of solar panels and sell electricity to the local power company. You can select 1 or 2 acres of your land on which to build and operate your own solar array, using some electricity for your farm and selling the rest to the utility. Or you can keep going as you have been, hoping your farm can somehow survive. Thousands of farmers across the country, including in Californias Central Valley, are choosing one of the first two options. A 2022 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that roughly 117,000 U.S. farm operations have some type of solar device. Our own work has identified more than 6,500 solar arrays currently located on U.S. farmland. Our study of nearly 1,000 solar arrays built on 10,000 acres of the Central Valley over the past two decades found that solar power and farming are complementing each other in farmers business operations. As a result, farmers are making and saving more money while using less waterhelping them keep their land and livelihood. A hotter, drier, and more built-up future Perhaps nowhere in the U.S. is farmland more valuable or more productive than Californias Central Valley. The region grows a vast array of crops, including nearly all of the nations production of almonds, olives, and sweet rice. Using less than 1% of all farmland in the country, the Central Valley supplies a quarter of the nations food, including 40% of its fruits, nuts, and other fresh foods. The food, fuel, and fiber that these farms produce are a bedrock of the nations economy, food system, and way of life. But decades of intense cultivation, urban development, and climate change are squeezing farmers. Water is limited, and getting more so: A state law passed in 2014 requires farmers to further reduce their water usage by the mid-2040s. The trade-offs of installing solar on agricultural land When the solar arrays we studied were installed, California state solar energy policy and incentives gave farm landowners new ways to diversify their income by either leasing their land for solar arrays or building their own. There was an obvious trade-off: Turning land used for crops to land used for solar usually means losing agricultural production. We estimated that over the 25-year life of the solar arrays, this land would have produced enough food to feed 86,000 people a year, assuming they eat 2,000 calories a day. There was an obvious benefit, too, of clean energy: These arrays produced enough renewable electricity to power 470,000 U.S. households every year. But the result we were hoping to identify and measure was the economic effect of shifting that land from agricultural farming to solar farming. We found that farmers who installed solar were dramatically better off than those who did not. They were better off in two ways, the first being financially. All the farmers, whether they owned their own arrays or leased their land to others, saved money on seeds, fertilizer, and other costs associated with growing and harvesting crops. They also earned money from leasing the land, offsetting farm energy bills, and selling their excess electricity. Farmers who owned their own arrays had to pay for the panels, equipment and installation, and maintenance. But even after covering those costs, their savings and earnings added up to $50,000 per acre of profits every year, 25 times the amount they would have earned by planting that acre. Farmers who leased their land made much less money but still avoided costs for irrigation water and operations on that part of their farm, gaining $1,100 per acre per yearwith no up-front costs. The farmers also conserved water, which in turn supported compliance with the states Sustainable Groundwater Management Act water use reduction requirements. Most of the solar arrays were installed on land that had previously been irrigated. We calculated that turning off irrigation on this land saved enough water every year to supply about 27 million people with drinking water or irrigate 7,500 acres of orchards. Following solar array installation, some farmers also followed surrounding land, perhaps enabled by the new stable income stream, which further reduced water use. Changes to food and energy production Farmers in the Central Valley and elsewhere are now cultivating both food and energy. This shift can offer long-term security for farmland owners, particularly for those who install and run their own arrays. Recent estimates suggest that converting between 1.1% and 2.4% of the countrys farmland to solar arrays would, along with other clean energy sources, generate enough electricity to eliminate the nations need for fossil fuel power plants. Though many crops are part of a global market that can adjust to changes in supply, losing this farmland could affect the availability of some crops. Fortunately, farmers and landowners are finding new ways to protect farmland and food security while supporting clean energy. One such approach is agrivoltaics, where farmers install solar designed for grazing livestock or growing crops beneath the panels. Solar can also be sited on less-productive farmland or on farmland that is used for biofuels rather than food production. Even in these areas, arrays can be designed and managed to benefit local agriculture and natural ecosystems. With thoughtful design, siting, and management, solar can give back to the land and the ecosystems it touches. Farms are much more than the land they occupy and the goods they produce. Farms are run by people with families, whose well-being depends on essential and variable resources such as water, fertilizer, fuel, electricity, and crop sales. Farmers often borrow money during the planting season in hopes of making enough at harvest time to pay off the debt and keep a little profit. Installing solar on their land can give farmers a diversified income, help them save water, and reduce the risk of bad years. That can make solar an asset to farming, not a threat to the food supply. Jacob Stid is a PhD student in hydrogeology at Michigan State University. Annick Anctil is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan State University. Anthony Kendall is a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Michigan State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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In 2001, social theorist bell hooks warned about the dangers of a loveless zeitgeist. In All About Love: New Visions, she lamented the lack of an ongoing public discussion . . . about the practice of love in our culture and in our lives. Back then, the internet was at a crossroads. The dot-com crash had bankrupted many early internet companies, and people wondered if the technology was long for this world. The doubts were unfounded. In only a few decades, the internet has merged with our bodies as smartphones and mined our personalities via algorithms that know us more intimately than some of our closest friends. It has even constructed a secondary social world. Yet as the internet has become more integrated in our daily lives, few would describe it as a place of love, compassion, and cooperation. Study after study describe how social media platforms promote alienation and disconnectionin part because many algorithms reward behaviors like trolling, cyberbullying, and outrage. Is the internets place in human history cemented as a harbinger of despair? Or is there still hope for an internet that supports collective flourishing? Algorithms and alienation I explore these questions in my new book, Attention and Alienation. In it, I explain how social media companies profits depend on users investing their time, creativity, and emotions. Whether its spending hours filming content for TikTok or a few minutes crafting a thoughtful Reddit comment, participating on these platforms takes work. And it can be exhausting. Even passive engagement, like scrolling through feeds and lurking in forums, consumes time. It might feel like free entertainmentuntil people recognize they are the product, with their data being harvested and their emotions being manipulated. Blogger, journalist, and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe how experiences on online platforms gradually deteriorate as companies increasingly exploit users data and tweak their algorithms to maximize profits. For these reasons, much of peoples time spent online involves dealing with toxic interactions or mindlessly doomscrolling, immersed in dopamine-driven feedback loops. This cycle is neither an accident nor a novel insight. Hate and mental illness fester in this culture because love and healing seem to be incompatible with profits. Care hiding in plain sight In his 2009 book Envisioning Real Utopias, the late sociologist Erik Olin Wright discusses places in the world that prioritize cooperation, care and egalitarianism. Wright mainly focused on offline systems like worker-owned cooperatives. But one of his examples lived on the internet: Wikipedia. He argued that Wikipedia demonstrates the ethos from each according to ability, to each according to needa utopian ideal popularized by Karl Marx. Wikipedia still thrives as a nonprofit, volunteer-run bureaucracy. The website is a form of media that is deeply social, in the literal sense: People voluntarily curate and share knowledge, collectively and democratically, for free. Unlike social media, the rewards are only collective. There are no visible likes, comments, or rage emojis for participants to hoard and chase. Nobody loses and everyone wins, including the vast majority of people who use Wikipedia without contributing work or money to keep it operational. Building a new digital world Wikipedia is evidence of care, cooperation, and love hiding in plain sight. In recent years, there have been more efforts to create nonprofit apps and websites that are committed to protecting user data. Popular examples include Signal, a free and open source instant messaging service, and Proton Mail, an encrypted email service. These are all laudable developments. But how can the internet actively promote collective flourishing? In Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, sociologist Ruha Benjamin points to a way forward. She tells the story of Black TikTok creators who led a successful cultural labor strike in 2021. Many viral TikTok dances had originally been created by Black artists, whose accounts, they claimed, were suppressed by a biased algorithm that favored white influencers. TikTok responded to the viral #BlackTikTokStrike movement by formally apologizing and making commitments to better represent and compensate the work of Black creators. These creators demonstrated how social media engagement is workand that workers have the power to demand equitable conditions and fair pay. This landmark strike showed how anyone who uses social media companies that profit off the work, emotions, and personal data of their userswhether its TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, or Redditcan become organized. Meanwhile, there are organizations devoted to designing an internet that promotes collective flourishing. Sociologist Firuzeh Shokooh Valle provides examples of worker-owned technology cooperatives in her 2023 book, In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure: Feminist Technopolitics in the Global South. She highlights the Sulá Batsú co-op in Costa Rica, which promotes policies that seek to break the stranglehold that negativity and exploitation have over internet culture. Digital spaces are increasingly powered by hate and discrimination, the group writes, adding that it hopes to create an online world where women and people of diverse sexualities and genders are able to access and enjoy a free and open internet to exercise agency and autonomy, build collective power, strengthen movements, and transform power relations. In Los Angeles, theres Chani Inc., a technology company that describes itself as proudly not funded by venture capitalists. The Chani app blends mindfulness practices and astrology with the goal of simply helping people. The app is not designed for compulsive user engagement, the company never sells user data, and there are no comments sections. No comments What would social media look like if Wikipedia were the norm instead of an exception? To me, a big problem in internet culture is the way peoples humanity is obscured. People are free to speak their minds in text-based public discussion forums, but the words arent always attached to someones identity. Real people hide behind the anonymity of user names. It isnt true human interaction. In Attention and Alienation, I argue that the ability to meet and interact with others online as fully realized, three-dimensional human beings would go a long way toward creating a more empathetic, cooperative internet. When I was 8 years old, my parents lived abroad for work. Sometimes we talked on the phone. Often I would cry late into the night, praying for the ability to see them through the phone. It felt like a miraculous possibilitylike magic. I told this story to my students in a moment of shared vulnerability. This was in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, so the class was taking place over videoconferencing. In these online classes, one person talked at a time. Others listened. It wasnt perfect, but I think a better internet would promote this form of discussion: people getting together from across the world to share the fullness of their humanity. Efforts like Clubhouse have tapped into this vision by creating voice-based discussion forums. The company, however, has been criticized for predatory data privacy policies. What if the next iteration of public social media platforms could build on Clubhouse? What if they brought people together and showcased not just their voices, but also live video feeds of their faces without harvesting their data or promoting conflict and outrage? Raised eyebrows. Grins. Frowns. Theyre what make humans distinct from increasingly sophisticated large language models and artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT. After all, is anything you cant say while looking at another human being in the eye worth saying in the first place? Aarushi Bhandari is an assistant professor of sociology at Davidson College. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Mom guilt is such a familiar phrase that we rarely stop to ask what it really meansor why its so persistent. It describes that quiet, gnawing feeling that many mothers carry: that were not doing enough, not present enough, not loving, patient, or creative enough. That were falling short, even when were doing our best. But what if that guilt isnt just about personal choices? What if its not a private emotional shortcoming, but a reflection of something much largercultural messages, historical expectations, and systemic gaps that shape how mothers live and feel today? This essay offers a different way to think about mom guilt: not as a flaw in individual women, but as a symptom of a society that demands too much, offers too little, and then asks mothers to feel bad about the gap. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/acupofambition_logo.jpg","headline":"A Cup of Ambition","description":"A biweekly newsletter for high-achieving moms who value having a meaningful career and being an involved parent, by Jessica Wilen. To learn more visit acupofambition.substack.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} A guilt with no off switch Psychologically, guilt is often defined as a moral emotiona response to doing something wrong and wanting to make it right. But mom guilt rarely stems from a specific mistake. Instead, it often shows up as a vague, persistent sense of inadequacy. It lingers, shapeless but heavy. Because its so diffuse and constant, mom guilt may be less a personal emotion and more a shared emotional patterna kind of cultural atmosphere. Cultural theorist Raymond Williams called this a structure of feeling: not a formal rule, but a common way of feeling shaped by a particular time and place. In this view, mom guilt isnt just something mothers feelits something weve been taught to feel. Where did these expectations come from? To understand how this emotional pattern developed, we need to look at the historical construction of the good mother in American culture. After World War II, the ideal mother was cast as a full-time homemaker: white, middle-class, married to a breadwinner, and entirely devoted to her children. Her work was invisible but essential, and her worth came from self-sacrifice. By the 1990s and early 2000s, that ideal had morphed into what sociologist Sharon Hays called intensive mothering: mothers were now expected to be constantly emotionally attuned, manage every detail of their childs development, follow expert advice, and sacrifice their own needs to do it all. And even as more women entered the workforce, this new model still assumed unlimited time, energy, and emotional bandwidth. The result? Many mothers felt stretched thin, torn between competing demands: be selfless but successful, always available but independent. Mom guilt wasnt a sign of failureit was a natural outcome of being asked to do the impossible. The role of systemsand their silence These expectations dont exist in a vacuum. Theyre intensified by how little structural support American families receive. Unlike many wealthy countries, the U.S. offers no guaranteed paid parental leave. Childcare is expensive and hard to access. Most workplaces still operate as if someone else is handling everything at home. When mothers feel exhausted or overwhelmed, the message they receive is: Try harder. Be more grateful. Find balance. This reflects a deeper cultural logicone that blames individuals for structural problems. In this model, the solution to burnout is self-help, not social change. Mom guilt thrives in this space. It turns systemic failure into personal shame. It keeps women striving, quiet, and inwardly focusedwondering if theyre doing enough, instead of asking whether society is. Guilt is gendered Its also important to say this clearly: mom guilt is not evenly distributed. Fathers, especially in heterosexual partnerships, are rarely expected to feel guilty for long work hours or needing rest. When they show up for parenting, theyre often praised for helping. Mothers, by contrast, are expected to organize their livesand emotionsaround their childrens needs. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild called this emotional labor: the often invisible work of managing others feelings. In families, mothers are expected to carry the emotional weight. When they fall short, they feel guiltnot just about actions, but about presence, patience, and even joy. So what do we do with it? Rather than telling mothers to get over their guilt, we might ask: what is this guilt doing? Who benefits from it? Mom guilt isnt just a feelingits a social mechanism. It keeps women pushing toward unattainable ideals, keeps them quiet about their needs, and keeps attention focused inward instead of outward. It makes it harder to question the systems that are, in fact, failing us. Theres no quick fix. But theres power in naming it. When guilt creeps in, we can pause and ask: Where did this should come from? Whose expectations am I trying to meet? What would I needpersonally and structurallyto feel less torn? These questions wont erase guilt, but they can loosen its grip. They shift the storyfrom one of individual failure to one of cultural clarity and collective care. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/acupofambition_logo.jpg","headline":"A Cup of Ambition","description":"A biweekly newsletter for high-achieving moms who value having a meaningful career and being an involved parent, by Jessica Wilen. To learn more visit acupofambition.substack.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}}
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