San Joaquin Valley

I have already read James Parson’s piece on the San Joaquin Valley and let me tell you every time I read this article it still gets better every time I read it. I love how Parsons tells a story of the history of this valley. I almost feel like he is telling me a story and not just reporting an article, and I think this is one reason why this piece is so good. Parsons tells the history and even adds some of J.B Jackson methods on viewing a landscape, and then he goes into the patterns of agriculture, development with the land, the many ethnic groups like Chinese or the Dust Bowl immigration who took influence on the San Joaquin Valley. Then he talks about the land and how in this general over view how humans have changed it over time to being of a ranching area to now an petroleum area for the oil industry. Parson also goes into discussion about how urbanization has pressure the Valley to become less land for the farmers that are still left. This article talks about these different aspects that have affected the land over a time period to now in such rich detail. One of my favorite lines is at the end of the article and he talking about the how San Joaquin Valley is just a small piece of land but in reality it has affected us greatly. He states, “The San Joaquin Valley is only one small piece of the gigantic tapestry that is the American land, but it is lavishly rich in scale and promise for exploration and discovery, for landscape and for the study of changing human imprints on the earth as a form of culture history”(Parsons, 389). That is a great line.