A Geographer Looks at the San Joaquin Valley

A lavishness of scale and an extraordinary diversity of crops, orchards, and vineyards characterize intensively developed, irrigated agriculture of San Joaquin Valley. The complexity of its patterns and environmental problems, its diverse ethnic groups, and adaptations and human decisions from which it is always evolving make valley a place of excitement, subtle beauty, and grandeur with crucial importance for society and economy of California. A venerable tradition of cultural geography is scholarly attention devoted to ordinary landscapes and regions. No theory, however, explains magnificent heterogeneity of elements that compose a place. When cultural geographers distill and evaluate their cumulative observations of a landscape, value judgments are involved at every turn. Selectivity is necessary to avoid being completely mired in particulars. Emotion, aesthetics, and intellectual content inevitably overlap. In a manner similar to probing of character of an individual or a group, cultural geographers seek to know personality of a geographical space by examining its physical form, its inhabitants, and their relationship with both land they occupy and world beyond, most profitably in historical perspective. The San Joaquin Valley is region selected to demonstrate application of this analytical approach. For me few places are more exciting than California's San Joaquin Valley, especially on a blistering hot afternoon in late summer. It has been called the world's richest agricultural valley, a technological miracle of productivity where dog-eat-dog competition is at its keenest. Yet even Californians tend to take this big, flat world for granted. My focus is southern part of Central Valley of California, that alluvium-filled structural trough between Coast Ranges and Sierra that stretches for more than 400 miles from Redding to Tehachapis. The northern third of Central Valley, drained by Sacramento River, is smaller and better watered, more Anglo-Saxon, and much less populous than San Joaquin portion. It lacks landscapes of cotton fields, vineyards, orange groves, and oil fields that are so symbolic of latter. The San Joaquin Valley, wider and much more intensively developed, includes six substantial cities, from Stockton to Bakersfield, with Fresno regional capital. It is easy to forget that only northern half of San Joaquin is drained by river of that name. The Kings, Kaweah, and Tule * This article originated as Carl 0. Sauer memorial lecture, presented by Mr. Parsons on 30 April 1986 at Berkeley. * DR. PARSONS is an emeritus professor of geography at University of California, Berkeley, California 94720. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.237 on Thu, 07 Jul 2016 04:23:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms