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Show 368, "tilled like a garden" not an adequate compensation for the wild garden lost, yet he also found such a future inescapable, even as he became a planter of tame Tokays and Bartlett pears. As a result he could only condemn in explicit terms the waste occasioned by hasty profit-motivated development. If people would make homes and learn to dwell in the Central Valley, he would have to make peace with the losses of wild Nature. It was too late to save the Central Valley. More than even Muir knew, its wild bloom was long gone. He had never seen the perennial glory which the Spanish shepherds had destroyed. He mourned only the passing of its annual glory. He was led in his search for bee pastures, out of the valley, and into a survey of the bee-resources of the whole State. He worried that "before long the wild honey-bloom of the mountains will vanish as completely as that of the fertile lowlands." He had in mind a pastoral buffer zone of bee-culture, between the heavy farming of the valleys, and the forest wildernesses above. Since "the plow has not invaded the forest region to any appreciable extent," he proposed that "thousands of bee ranches might be established" in the foothills. Further, the more arid regions, normally regarded as desert, might be utilized as they were, rather than being reclaimed through impossible schemes. If men saw no use for these Places, "Very little of it, however, is desert in the eyes of a bee." Such a program, taken seriously, would require that hees be protected from droughts like the one of 1877. The "small winged cattle" would need supplementary feeding, |
