CHANGING ENVIRONMENTS, LANDSCAPES, CONTROLS
Alvin W. Urquhart–University of Oregon
PERSPECTIVES OF THE LAND
I want to look at the land that is the Great Central Valley from three perspectives–environment, landscape and control. By environment I mean here “the physical and cultural surroundings of the valley’s inhabitants.” The scale of the environment of the valley’s people has truly exploded since the Europeans and Americans arrived.
By landscape I mean “the view of man-made spaces on the land.” Landscapes have developed from an unconscious experience of a living place into fleeting images of inanimate things.
By control of land I mean “the ways Valley folk have man-handled land into conformance with their world views.” The control over land has increased from a mere nudging of natural processes to an extensive employment of vast engineering works.
- ENVIRONMENT = the people’s surroundings.
–Changed from local to international scale —
- LANDSCAPE = views of the land.
–Changed from a participatory experience to a distant object–
- CONTROLS = the modifications of the land.
–Changed from an adjustment of ecologic niches to radical human engineering—
THE TIME and PLACE
The Great Central Valley has witnessed greatly changing values and attitudes toward environment, landscape, and controls. I like to think of these changes in five stages, which in Western America usually correspond with the last 150-200 years and look to the future. The first stage in the Valley may be characterized as the:
PRE EUROPEAN HOMELAND OF NATIVE CALIFORNIAN INDIANS
in which a component of the world view was:
–To live respectfully within a modified nature—
The local environments were for local use and were the communal responsibility of the tribelets. The creation of desirable ecologic niches increased their control over naturally occurring resources.
Spaniards, Mexicans, and adventurous Americans led the:
- TRANSITON TO the area‘s becoming the site of REMOTE EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN OUTPOSTS
where a dominant view was:
–To occupy an “empty” land—
Of course the emptiness was largely only by contrast to the more humid homelands from which the adventurers had come. The valley’s landscape was seen as hot, dry, and grass covered. It seemed to be simple and monotonous by comparison with more familiar homelands. The newcomers’ eyes were uneducated, unsocialized, and unused to much of the valley countryside. Instead the landscape was seen as a personal challenge, one in which individualism had high survival value. With only a few good men the land could be controlled by using vast herds of grazing animals and by hunting the wildlife to near extinction. The native Indians were seen merely as obstacles to controlling the land and to the unhindered availability of wildlife and grass.
The transition period was simply the forerunner of the:
- FRONTIER of the “manifest destiny” OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM which seemed destined
–To impose an abstract American model on an objectified land—
The environment of the American settlers depended upon railroads and towns, which were the link to the social, economic and political heartland of America. The railroads offered freedom from the local surroundings; the towns were the control points of the dominant U.S. environment. The immigrants to the Great Valley of California looked at land and resources in the conventional American way–as commodities, resources, or objects with potential use in the markets of the nation. The major attraction of the land was its cheapness and accessibility once the railroads were built. Cheap land and water, cheap labor, and cheap energy to support machines, technology, education, transportation and innovation all made the valley attractive to an expanding capitalistic society. Unencumbered by residual emotional, religious, social, or conflicting political ties, the valley was ripe for unfettered imposition of frontier capitalism. Specialized development of selected natural elements came to support and supplement the national economy. Because the models of agricultural development were not derived from the local area, the controls that were applied were highly artificial (or artful) having been largely filtered through a hierarchy of urban places.
Continuing into the 20th Century the valley experienced a complete:
EMBODIMENT WITHIN NATIONAL (INTERNATIONAL) CAPITALISM
in which the overpowering compulsion has been
–To create a physical reality to fit an abstract model—
Urban-based planners, regulators and movers of economy, government, and technology live in an abstract artificial environment largely ignorant of countryside and nature. Instead they have become experts in the dominant values and technology of our time. To them the landscape of the valley’s countryside is open (often boring) space, at best an agricultural scene filled with geometric patterns, huge machines, and occasionally people.
The farmers and farm workers–the insiders in the countryside–see a landscape of productive wealth obtained largely through the use of technological devices. To them the city–in which they are only partially outsiders–is the completely artificial place of control and restriction, but also the source of food, supplies, and services.
Both town- and country-dweller manipulate or respond to the physical world largely according to abstract models of an ideal economy, democracy, technology, and science. The land and the landscapes have been transformed into objects in which a richness of natural life has been exchanged for a place in what now seem to be compelling man-made systems.
That we are losing touch with the non-humanized environment, that we are assuming a more distant view of the landscape, and that we are arrogantly expecting to continue technological and economic control over the Great Central Valley should lead us to take heed
FROM THIS CONFERENCE FORWARD
that instead, we might start a search
–To experience the Great Central Valley as a unique place from many perspectives—
The Great Central Valley is indeed a unique natural world, which the humble models of ecology, habitat, and evolution have much to teach us. The Great Central Valley also has the potential of becoming a unique cultural world, where local art and creative acts are cultivated more actively than conformity and subservience to distant and diffuse sources of power.
THE DOMINANT MODEL
might be revised so that the current dominance of
GEOMETRY OVER GEOGRAPHY
may become geography supplemented by geometry, that is to say that the richness that is geography– the writing and description about that part of the Earth that is the Valley may encompass, rather than be reduced to, plane or solid geometry–the simplification of that same segment of the Earth into a spatial object or thing so that it can be measured and converted into property.
And the model might be changed so that the mystical power of
ECONOMY OVER ECOLOGY
may be transformed so that the richness of the Valley’s ecology–the doctrine, theory or science of the particular household that is the Great Valley–prevails over uncaring, dominate economy–the management of the national or international household which is so large and diffuse that the Valley is at best only one of its many closets.
THE PENTAGON OF POWER NOT THE NURTURE OF NATURE
And finally, Lewis Mumford’s Pentagon of Power, Profit, Property, Productivity, and Propaganda may be replaced in the valley by the nurture and experience of real humans within a vital nature.