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THE CALIFORNIA AGGIE

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VOLUME 146, ISSUE 29 | THURSDAY, JUNE 1, 2023

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Pride Festival comes to campus June 2

The second annual event will feature drag performances, student clubs and vendors BY SYDNEY AMESTOY

campus@theaggie.org ASUCD’s second annual Pride Festival is returning to the Memorial Union Quad on June 2 from 3-8 p.m. The event will feature numerous vendors selling crafts and food, along with a performance by the student pole dancing club and shows from local drag queens, according to fourth-year American studies and neurobiology, physiology and behavior double major Emma Bishoff. Bishoff, along with secondyear communication major Hallie Wong, are this year’s ASUCD Pride Festival co-chairs. The two have been working throughout the year to organize June’s event, which is new to UC Davis as of last year. Some of the tasks that went into organizing this year’s festival included gathering student volunteers to help table and run the event, as well as bringing in new vendors and entertainment not featured at the inaugural event. “This year, it’s bigger,” Bishoff said. “I would say [there are] aspects of the festival that are unique to the queer and trans community like drag performance. We’re also having tarot readers come, and we’re having a Henna artist. So we’re having a lot of activities.” Many of the vendors being brought in are local, according to Wong. “This event also provides a

KELLIE LU / AGGIE platform for local businesses and small businesses owned by queer and trans individuals,” Wong said. The Pride Festival was recently designated an ASUCD unit. Last year, it was organized by the ASUCD Gender and Sexuality Commission with a relatively small budget, but this year, it was granted a budget of $10,000. “[The budget] definitely alleviated

a lot of the stress, because last year, we didn’t have [much] funding, and nobody believed in the event because it had never happened,” Bishoff said. “[Now] it was like people had confidence in us, which was nice. We could take a little bit of a deep breath.” Pride Month at UC Davis is celebrated throughout the month of May, rather than the nationally recognized month

of June, because of the fact that many students aren’t in Davis over the summer. ASUCD and the LGBTQIA+ Resource Center have been putting on numerous events throughout the month so far. The LGBTQIA+ Resource Center’s events were themed around ‘Rage and Resilience,’ which Bishoff said was inspired by the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City.

The festival is not a part of the LGBTQIA+ Resource Center’s May Pride Month events, but according to Bishoff, it shares the same themes of resilience. “Right now, in our country, we’re at a very important moment,” Bishoff said. “The people who are standing up and saying we are proud of this community, and we are here to support it, I think that every chance we have to do that, we must. This event is not just to be fun and celebratory. It’s also a protest [to say], ‘We are we are here, we are we exist, we matter and we’re going to take up space.’” Both Wong and Bishoff emphasized what they see as the importance of an event like this, both for the LGBTQIA+ community on campus and individually. According to Wong, her attendance at last year’s Pride as a freshman was one of the main factors that encouraged her to take on the co-chair position. “Celebrating and uplifting the queer and trans community and just knowing that I can contribute or help contribute this year, I’m incredibly honored to be a part of this new tradition,” Bishoff said. “I’m super excited and proud of this event and I hope it carries on forever.”

New carbon farming Women’s Resources and Research Center presents 18th techniques can help mitigate climate change annual Feminist Film Festival City-owned farm Howat Ranch sets

The festival featured 24 short films centered around the theme of solidarity

precedent in Yolo County area for offsetting carbon emissions

BY KAYA DO-KHANH

campus@theaggie.org On May 18 and 19 from 6-10 p.m., a number of students and local community members gathered in the Student Community Center (SCC) multipurpose room to view a selection of 24 short films that were curated by eight undergraduate interns for the Davis Feminist Film Festival. Put on by the UC Davis Women’s Resources and Research Center (WRRC), the theme for the 18th annual festival was “solidarity,” with sub-themes of survival, resistance, motherhood and intergenerational struggles. The event was free to all, and attendees enjoyed short films from around the world with snacks and drinks provided. The event also featured a photo booth and raffle prizes including gift bags filled with film posters, a t-shirt designed by one of the interns, a gift card to the CoHo and other goodies from the WRRC. The annual grassroots event seeks to link art to social issues, as the festival screens independent films in the experimental, narrative and documentary genres that highlight perspectives that might be missing from more mainstream media. The festival accepts local, national and international submissions from professionals, students

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UC Davis Women’s Resources and Research Center presents 2023 Davis Feminist Film Festival. (Jersain Medina / Aggie) and community members, with the goal of creating a public space for filmmakers with marginalized racial and gender identities to showcase their art on the topic of social inequalities. Third-year international relations major and Film Curation and Lineup Co-Chair Erika Au said that there were around 700 film submissions this year, which were narrowed down to a select 24 films by the interns. Interns screened films in pairs and each pair watched about three hours of films a week for months leading up to the festival to narrow down the selections. “We didn’t think it was a good idea to ignore stories that were difficult to talk about, so we included those, but we also wanted some that brought light and hope into their stories,” third-year Asian American studies and cognitive science double major and Technology and Logistics Chair Mia Chi said. “We talked a lot about what feminism is when we were planning this festival […] thinking about all of those things and how [feminism] looks in different ways and in different places and circumstances.” At the end of the festival, audiences voted on their favorite films for each day of the event. The audience’s award selection for day one of the festival was a film from Germany called “Matapacos” by directors Karla Riebartsch and Lion Durst. “Matapacos” is based on the famous Chilean “riot dog” Negro Matapacos, a stray dog who gets to know Maria, a young protester. The audience’s favorite from day two of the festival was “ElHalabiyeh” by Palestinian director Rana Abushkhaidem. “El Halabiyeh” is a film personal to Abushkhaidem, as it is a story about her grandmother set the night before her heart surgery. It is all about opening the doors to the memories of her life in Aleppo, Jaffa and Hebron.

“I worked on this film with all my heart,” Abushkhaidem said via email. “When I started submitting it to film festivals, I was somehow picky [with] where to send it. I always tried to find something warm and familiar in each film festival I sent my film to. When I read about Davis Feminist Film Festival, I felt it.” She said that having her film screened around the globe is a pleasure and that when she got the news that her film was chosen as one of the audience favorites, she was proud and happy. She said that she immediately called her grandmother to tell her the news. “El-Halabiyeh fits into the theme of the feminist film festival because it tells the story of a woman who struggled and fought for her and her thirteen daughters’ lives in a complicated community and cruel political situation,” Abushkhaidem said. On the first day of the festival, some people stumbled upon the festival while walking by the SCC and ended up joining the event at the last minute. On the second day of the festival, several organizations, such as individuals associated with the WRRC and Students for Reproductive Justice, also tabled at the event. “I hope that audiences learn that there are so many different types of ways that feminism can be viewed in different cultural contexts,” third-year sociology major and Audience Engagement Chair Sara Tareen said. “Watching the films that I screened and then watching them again at the festival, I learned so much about so many different cultures and so many different types of people. When screening the films, that’s what I had in mind, I wanted the audience to be able to learn from these films [...] It’s so important to learn other stories and other perspectives, and I feel like we did a really good job of doing that this year.”

In collaboration with Yolo County Resource Conservation District, the city of Davis’s Community Development and Sustainability department is working to implement carbon farming techniques that will enhance the local habitat while also drawing as much carbon from the air. Chris Gardner, the city’s open space lands manager, and Tracie Reynolds, the manager of the leases and the open space program, are heading the project for the city. This is all happening on one specific farm: Howat Ranch, a 760-acre cityowned agricultural property that is the first of its kind in Davis. In 2019, the city of Davis began to use carbon farming techniques on Howat Ranch after they were approached by the Carbon Cycle Institute, a group that uses and promotes farming practices that create increased carbon capture in hopes of combating climate change. Pelayo Alvarez worked for the Carbon Cycle Institute for over seven years and said that his team initially brought the idea of carbon farming to the city of Davis. The Carbon Cycle Institute partners with resource conservation districts, such as the Yolo County RCD, as well as landowners, farmers and forest owners to implement conservation practices using certain funding programs. “Most of the funding is from federal programs, like Natural Resources Conservation Service, EQIP Program or Conservation Stewardship Program,” Alvarez said. “We help the landowners find the funding and then help them with technical assistance. We’re trying to promote carbon farming across the state.” On Howat Ranch, the city is using a

two-prong approach to mitigate climate change by reducing tillage and planting hedgerows in farming practices. One of these habitat-enhancing techniques is called “hedgerows,” which are strips of densely planted trees or shrubs that provide wind breaks on the farm. This creates better conditions for healthy soil and provides biodiversity on the farm. Reynolds and Gardner’s team has already planted 200 trees and shrubs on Howat Ranch and plan to plant more. The city is also working on a plan to turn 200 acres of Howat’s farmland into a wetland. To increase carbon capture, the farmers who rent Howat Ranch also uses crop rotation, which means over the span of four or five years, he plants different crops to keep the soul healthy. The crops in the rotation are alfalfa, winter wheat and either sunflowers or safflower. He has also converted all his farm equipment to Tier 4 engines, which are the cleanest in terms of emissions, and practices reduced tilling. This means that “He tries to pass over the land once and he only goes down about six inches,” according to Reynolds. All of these practices help to keep the carbon that’s already in the ground there while improving soil composition and health. Together, these actions limit the amount of carbon emitted from producing crops. “The city just recently approved the climate action and adaptation plan called the CAP update,” Reynolds said. “One of the many action items is to do carbon farm plans for the other city agricultural properties. So we’ll be looking into doing a couple more in the next year or so, but right now, this is the only one that we have.”

Howat Ranch. (Chris Garderner / Courtesy)

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