HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY!

For as long as I have known it, Mission Valley where I live has been a collection of freeways, hotels, shopping centers, condominium communities, and a golf course. A narrow strip of green splits the valley in half where the San Diego River meanders out to the sea. When I ride east on Friar’s Road past the dismal, scarred-earth rock crushing operation that will soon become another large residential community, I often think about the 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley. It’s the story of a family and a region in Wales radically changed by a mining operation that strips away freshness from hard-working, honest people and green from a valley that was once productive farmland. Mission Valley has been strip mined for years to provide building materials for San Diego County. The photographs posted on the BLOG today tell a story of a final phase of urbanization that has been transforming the valley into an extension of the city. Soon even the scarred earth will be covered with houses and apartments. In the branch library at Fenton Marketplace you can see old black and white pictures of the valley when it was green.


Many years before I arrived in San Diego in 1987, Mission Valley had been mostly dairy farms. The first settlement of Europeans (from Spanish Mexico) build a presidio and a small town (Old Town San Diego) far enough away from the river to be above flood plane. Kumeyaay aboriginal tribal people had lived in the green valley for at least ten to twelve thousand years before they were eliminated or pushed out by Spanish and Mexican settlers. How long will it be before there are no people left who can remember how green was our valley.