Beautiful Valleys - A Cautionary Tale

I was born in a place so beautiful and so naturally bountiful that it was called “The Valley of the Heart’s Delight”.  That lovely name stuck for 100 years – roughly 1850-1950 – and it was well deserved. 

This was a lush and temperate coastal valley in California.  Each spring, it was transformed into a huge, multi-coloured bowlful of flowers.  This was excellent agricultural land, primarily planted with fruit and nut trees.  Until the 1960s, the Santa Clara Valley was the largest fruit production and packing region in the world, with 39 canneries.  Many old fruit box labels and postcards from the 1920s and ‘30s boast of its former beauty.  Images like this forever cemented California’s reputation as a land of milk and honey in people’s imaginations.

By the time I was born, though, the Santa Clara Valley’s fate was sealed.  This was California in the 1950s.  A huge migration was coming in, primarily from the eastern United States.  The newcomers all wanted to live in nice places – like those lovely ones they’d seen in all the picture postcards.  This was many decades ago – the bad old days, environmentally – back when there were few protections for agricultural land, and few efforts being made toward conservation.  Places like my valley were ripe for plunder. 

 

My early childhood was spent watching the Valley of the Heart’s Delight rapidly decline into something far less delightful, once the developers really got going.  By the time I entered kindergarten, I had witnessed acre upon acre of flowering trees bulldozed, all over the valley.  The valley's fertile soil was paved over, or planted with suburban lawns. 

               
                           

I found it horrifying then, and the memory still horrifies now.  New neighbourhood street names – “Valley Vista,” “Prune Ridge” - “Orchard Park” and the like – replaced the very things they described.  These new streets were filled with cramped rows of depressing, cookie-cutter subdivisions.  This was described as “progress” at the time by its local boosters, but – let’s be honest – greed played a huge role in all of this.  Greed is a juggernaut, once it’s allowed to really get going, and it mows down opposition like dandelions.  When greed is empowered, watch out.

The local boosters in the 1950s and ‘60s made scads of money.  Many then moved on to do the same things to other pretty places.  Unfortunately, pretty places often attract ugly people. 

You already know “The Valley of the Heart’s Delight,” by the way – oh, maybe not by its actual geographic name, the Santa Clara Valley, but by the one that took hold in the 1970s and persists to this day: Silicon Valley.  This valley full of blossoms became the land of the microchip, where billions of dollars have been made. 

As the name “Silicon” might suggest, there is scant natural beauty left here any more. 

Silicon Valley may be a delight to those who love money above all else, but everyone else lost out.  Asphalt, subdivisions, strip malls, freeways and smog cover the Santa Clara Valley now; it’s a mini-Los Angeles. 

Nature lost, big time.  Agriculture in California was transformed as it was relentlessly evicted from the temperate zones.  This paved the way for big agribusiness concerns to prevail over smaller family farms.  Agriculture was moved into the much more arid inner valleys and deserts, where enormous quantities of water have to be piped in from afar.  This creates an artificial ecosystem in order to enable crop life where none could naturally occur, and it has altered weather patterns over time.    

California agricultural land - Spring 2015

You know the current California drought and water crisis?  The eviction of nature from the Santa Clara Valley and other temperate coastal areas has helped exacerbate this problem.  Nature was upended, and mankind’s thoughtless greed has prevailed.          

                     

Over time, during the years I spent in California, I lived or worked in several other ruined valleys.    One was the sunny San Fernando Valley, just northwest of L.A.  This was formerly home to vast orange and lemon groves.  Many picturesque old orange crate labels feature images of the former San Fernando Valley: 

 

 

                                       
The San Fernando Valley was over-developed during the postwar building boom, at roughly the same time the Santa Clara Valley was. 

Where Spanish settlers’ haciendas and former movie stars’ ranches and once stood, there are now rundown old ‘50s suburbs and strip malls baking in the smoggy sun.  Clark Gable’s old ranch was carved up long ago; in classic tacky suburban memorial style, its subdivision’s streets are all named after characters and places from “Gone With the Wind”.  Gone with the wind, indeed. 

The San Fernando Valley already looked cluttered and tawdry by 1960.  Please note that this is a postcard view of Van Nuys – this is as pretty as they could make it look.  This picture was taken on a clear day.  In normal (hot, smoggy) conditions in the San Fernando Valley, you would not be able to see those hills in the distance - just brown sky.  Believe me; 50+ years haven’t made these streetscapes any more attractive, and the traffic is now much, much heavier.

I lived in the Conejo Valley – another temperate coastal valley, just inland from the Santa Monica Mountains – for several years.  This was once rolling ranch land, owned primarily by movie star Joel McCrea. 

         
     

      

Joel McCrea was always much more interested in ranching than he was in acting.  Fellow film star and rancher Will Rogers – a man with a keen eye for excellent ranch land – first recommended the Conejo Valley to young McCrea.  Film stardom provided McCrea with the means to buy vast acreage in the Conejo Valley.  The land he kept for his huge family ranch is now preserved as a park.  It includes a 75-acre area, the McCrea Wildlife Refuge, where public access to essential wildlife habitat areas is limited.  Many thanks to Joel McCrea, his wife Frances Dee and their children for their generosity; it was the right thing to do.

Alas, the rest of the Conejo Valley did not fare so well.
 

                      

“Conejo” is Spanish for the little brown rabbits that once abounded there (pronounced “cone-ay-ho” – in Spanish, the “J” is pronounced like an “H”).  In all my years there, I never saw one conejo; they were all gone.

For many years, the Conejo Valley’s greatest (actually, only) tourist draw was “Jungleland,” a  run-down amusement park featuring exotic trained animals, some of whom had also performed in movies.  No particular attention was paid to any of the local wildlife; indigenous animals were seen as having no value.
 

                                
                                     

I watched as the city of Thousand Oaks became a city of Hundreds of Oaks, when scores of “inconvenient” heritage trees were removed throughout the valley.  For all I know, the place may be down to “Dozen Oaks” by now.

Does the scene above – Thousand Oaks in bygone days – remind you of old cowboy movies?  Hundreds, if not thousands, of westerns and other movies and TV shows were once filmed in the picturesque settings of Thousand Oaks.  Now, you could film suburban sprawl, pavement and swimming pools there – much as you could anywhere else in greater L.A.  The natural beauty that made the place special is mostly gone.  It did not leave by itself; it was pushed.       

I doubt any of those beautiful big old trees have miraculously re-appeared.  Like the small brown conejos, they were squeezed out, all over the Conejo Valley.  But Thousand Oaks and the Conejo Valley are still named after those trees and rabbits, in classic suburban-honour style.

 

 The Conejo Valley was still being rapidly developed in the 1970s, when I knew it.  There was “progress” (and lots of money) to be made, requiring lots of land, so the oaks had to go – just as I’d previously seen the orchards removed from the Valley of the Heart’s Delight.

      

                                      

 

I last saw the Conejo Valley in 1994, and found it even more depressing than I remembered.  I will not return.

So – I know about valleys, and I have witnessed their destruction.  Why, then, did I take a chance on living in the Dundas Valley?  Well, you see, the Dundas Valley came with all these lofty, admirable promises of protection from the Niagara Escarpment Commission.  Over fifty years have passed since I witnessed environmental idiocy in California, and – as a species – we have supposedly learned from such greedy fiascos.  We now take pains to designate areas as protected, and to offer wildlife a refuge from over-civilization. We have rules in place, now, to prevent such destruction.  Yet, here in Dundas, these essential protections are being wilfully ignored, by the very agencies entrusted with environmental protection.

I’ve seen valleys destroyed before, and I never wanted to witness such carnage again.  But this situation in the still-beautiful Dundas Valley is actually the worst I’ve ever witnessed.   With so many cautionary tales like California’s environmental destruction to draw upon, we now know better than this.  There used to be very few laws to protect the environment, or wildlife, and nature was obliterated.  Those small conejos were gone by the time I laid eyes on the Conejo Valley, because no pains were taken to protect them.  But the deer and other wildlife are still here in Dundas, and they are supposed to be living in a protected environment.  Yet, from every window of my house, I now see displaced, stressed-out wildlife, attempting to survive in a valley where their habitats are rapidly – and illegally – being destroyed.  Rules are being blithely regarded as nothing more than inconvenient suggestions, and those in power seem fine with this.

 

Not only wildlife seek refuge here in the Dundas Valley; so do those of us who would like to live cooperatively with nature.  We have all been betrayed, here – honest people of good will who play by the rules as well as the natural world. 

All my life, I wanted to live in the forest – and now the “protected” forest behind my home is dead and gone.  I can scarcely believe I’ve had to witness the mass destruction of trees again, in any area – let alone in one designated “protected”.  This is absolutely shameful.

The Dundas Valley was my own personal “Valley of the Heart’s Delight”.  And my heart has been broken by what I’ve witnessed here.