**The Next Thousand Years of the San Joaquin Valley:**

**Learning to Cook Together -- Or Being Cooked!**

**The thoughtful development of the San Joaquin Valley represents an
opportunity to rebalance the unsupportable weight of California's
inequitable human drama, egregious environmental excesses, deleterious
land use expediencies, and juggernaut economy. The Valley has a unique
spatial position, key human and natural resources, and just enough time
to explore its potential to become an exemplar for sustainable
development on the planet for the next thousand years. Or not! At
current densities and rates of development the San Joaquin Valley will
be built out and nearly paved over with urban and suburban uses in the
next 50-75 years, and resemble the San Fernando and Santa Clara Valleys
with little or no meaningful supportive agricultural production and
other local natural resources to sustain life.**

The San Joaquin Valley can be hot, smoggy, and intolerant, and sometimes
very cold and foggy. But after a hard, early spring rain, the scale of
its natural beauty and unique greatness are wonderfully apparent for all
to see. It is a magnificent and expansive geo-physical formation,
bounded by the Sierra-Nevada foothills on the east, the Diablo and
Coastal Ranges on the west, the Tehachapi Mountains on the south, and
the lower Sacramento Valley on the north. Its shape and position make it
one of earth's most prominent features in photographs taken from
satellites and space orbiters. This wide part of the Central Valley of
California that connects the sprawling metropolises of the L.A. Basin
with those of the Bay Area in the north, is the true heartland of our
most populous, dynamic, and diverse state.

The San Joaquin Valley is by all accounts the best endowed and highest
producing garden on the planet. While initially neglected as a backwater
and purveyor of rural goods and services, it is now intentionally mined
and exploited by wealthy and powerful coastal forces and those living
and doing business in the Valley who have yet to see and believe its
ultimate promise, as the default location for overflow workforce housing
and attendant commercial development, warehousing and distribution
centers, and other land uses that can no longer be economically
accommodated in and are needed to serve the state's high priced urban
centers. They also like to drink our Valley's water and eat our Valley's
food. To those of us that see the Valley's possibilities, we know and
believe it can be the critical and much needed counterpoint to an
inexorably disparate destiny for our great state and perhaps for the
world. Fact is, the San Joaquin Valley contains the land and the water
(If Southern California hasn't bought all the underlying agricultural
water rights yet?) necessary to both feed and house a significant
portion of the future growth of the most productive state in the nation
and the world's seventh largest economy for some time to come - an
opportunity that is worth our highest consideration and attention before
it is lost.

The eight counties of the San Joaquin Valley (San Joaquin, Stanislaus,
Merced, Madera, Fresno, Tulare, Kings, and Kern) contain 27,277 square
miles of still mostly agricultural land representing nearly 18% of the
total California land area and about 10% of its estimated 2003
population of 35,484.453. The Valley produces roughly half of all the
fruits, vegetables and fiber consumed in the United States, and is a
major exporting region of U.S. agricultural products to the globe. In
contrast, the nine most urban counties of Northern and Southern
California (San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara. San
Mateo, Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange and San Diego) contain 14,140
squares miles or 9% of the California land area and house more than 63%
of California's total population. These highly populated areas produce
only a very small fraction of the water and food they consume, and have
become estranged from the symbiosis and freedom implicit in communities
closely connected to the natural resources they need to survive.

The San Joaquin Valley, alternatively, still represents the unique
opportunity to continue to grow significant and abundant amounts
nutritious foods and to nurture the development and growth of healthy
people, side-by-side, in the same spatial context. This is an important
combination now long lost in California's major population centers along
the coasts. Enough land is still available in the Valley to plan and
implement sustainable agriculture surrounding, integrated with, and
complementary of innovative, thriving metropolitan urban centers. There
is still time, though not much, to dream and experiment with bold ideas
for preserving the proximate relationship between growing food and
growing people in respectful, synergistic, and healthy urban/rural
environments, with densities and mass transportation that are the basis
for smart and inclusive growth and economically prosperous cities. The
San Joaquin Valley need not perpetuate humanity's 'Faustian Bargain' to
dominate and consume our planet's natural treasures as fast as we can,
paving over life giving soils, poisoning air and water, while competing
for transitory benefits. This bargain will soon give way to the
realities of terrestrial limitation anyway. We who live in and love the
San Joaquin Valley do not have to assume our Valley must duplicate the
same sprawl patterns of our urban partners to the north and south,
patterns that literally and laterally grow endlessly, and force the
importation of the bulk of the water, food and other necessities
required to sustain such inefficient growth.

The people of the San Joaquin Valley have options and resources. We can
wake up and seize the moment, build meaningful and powerful
relationships, create shared vision, and develop and assert the
leadership we need. We have the opportunity to make critical decisions
together that will make a difference to the future we want to share and
perpetuate for our children. We have the power together, if we want to
use it, to define our collective roles and responsibilities for
implementing and sustaining positive change, and for overcoming false
jurisdictional and other boundaries that impede recognition and action
to develop and preserve a more natural balance of our intertwined lives
and futures. We are quite capable of demonstrating stewardship for
healthy and sustainable human and physical development for the Valley,
for California, and for the world. We can think for ourselves. We can
plan and act smarter, bigger, and longer-term, challenging the current
wisdom of competition among interdependent cities and counties to
produce short-term results that deplete our capacities to produce clean
air, healthy food and people, thriving cities, and sustainable economy
for all.

Or, we can remain asleep and let the inevitable evolve. We can let the
rest of California think for us, act upon us, and allow outside
interests and the complicit among us, to exploit us and diminish the
potential of our future. We can forego the hard work of thinking and
acting together on collective possibilities -- by simply adopting the
current thinking of Northern and Southern Californians that see the San
Joaquin Valley as fodder for their growth and prosperity. We can
squander our opportunities to lead, until opportunities for shared
self-determination no longer exist, and we have been cooked, like the
proverbial frog in the pot, unwittingly.