I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
Ca
rl Sandburg
One of the first things that impresses you about driving through Southern California is that nearly the whole of Los Angeles seems to have swallowed up all of the smaller communities that once surrounded it. Like the oversized amoeba it is, complete with the same intellect, taste, culture, and foresight, Los Angeles has sprawled over the communities which once fed it, becoming a living demonstration of parasitism.
As I drive through some of the smaller towns which once made up the LA basin, including Ontario, Colton, Chino, Covina, and the like, I occasionally find myself in the midst of what had once been someone’s downtown. Roll down Euclid Avenue in Ontario, and you’re reminded by the buildings on either side that at one point, this had been Downtown, that there had been banks, theaters, clothing stores, grocers, nearly all that the town needed for its own identity and use, right there at their fingertips. Malls which dominated vast tracts of acreage, all in the name of “convenience,” were unheard of, and probably would have provoked more horror than glee from the local residents. Passing what had once been hardware stores and lumberyards, I’m curious to know if the previous owners of these businesses knew that as they were feeding their housing boom that they were fueling the destruction of their own businesses, and possibly contributing to the erosion and failure of their own towns.
Ontario isn’t so much a municipality anymore. It’s just one more blip on the map that has become Los Angeles, another forgettable corner of homogenized sprawl across the landscape, another smear of gray when you see it from the sky.
I’ve learned to hate this kind of thing. I would rather spend my time rolling past the farmscapes of California’s Central Valley, and find I’d rather fill my lungs with the smells of the dairy farms I pass than the odor of the traffic that surrounds me on the Interstates. I can cope with the former, at least, if I ignore the reality that “agribusiness” has become the watchword for what I’m seeing, that factory-type production has taken over and driven family farmers off their lands. The ideals of Better, Faster, Cheaper, have now dominated to the point that you’d have to be a fool to want to farm in this nation.
Well, call me a major damned fool.
It was heartening to see small farms set up in vacant lots in and around Chino and Ontario. Still, their output was small, more a hobby than a commitment to an agrarian life. It was something these farmers did to fill out a paycheck, rather than to make a living.
The EcoNazis have all but driven out a number of family farms, and it doesn’t help when you see the Seattle Post Intelligencer with a Page One story, above the fold, about how a major pickle manufacturer is now buying its cucumbers from India rather than local farmers around Bellingham and the surrounding area. Growing up at times in the Imperial Valley, with my Dad in various stages of deployment with the U.S. Army, I grew accustomed to seeing farms and the communities that grew up among them, and respecting what it was they represented.
I miss seeing farms in this country, and it’s nothing short of disturbing seeing many of them going under and becoming industrial parks and housing tracts. I’d like to be part of the resistance to this, but with my income level, not to mention how state and local governments have jacked up tax rates, I’m not exactly grinning about my prospects.
LA has become an exemplar of what the rest of the nation is heading towards. As I well remember seeing in Visalia, CA, in parts of Colorado, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon, farms are being bulldozed for more urban development. The goal is to line someone’s pockets, ignoring the greater long term consequences for land use, for our environment. In the end, as the old Indian saying goes, we’ll wind up learning that we can’t eat money.
Maybe with the meltdown we’re experiencing in our economy, there’s a good chance we’ll be able to reverse a lot of this. We can hope. Maybe with the end of Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush Greed is Good politics, we have a chance of turning back the tide. As I said, I’m not overly enthusiastic that it will happen.
But, we’ve got a shot.
Sites to See:
Information from Ohio State University on saving family farms.
More information on sustainable agricultural communities.
And now for something competely different: Scotty the Blue Bunny.
