Where the Earth Abides : THE GREAT CENTRAL VALLEY: California’s Heartland, <i> By Stephen Johnson, Gerald Haslam and Robert Dawson (University of California Press: $50 cloth, $30 paper; 253 pp.)</i>

At once vast and intimate, California’s central valley is more than the state’s heartland, it is its heart. For those of us who grew up on its farms and in its towns and cities, it was also a place where dreams began in the heat of summer or on the foggy winter mornings so perfectly depicted by Stephen Johnson’s and Robert Dawson’s photographs. “The Great Central Valley” documents in words and, above all, in pictures what we stand to lose if the longtime threats to this great valley--from nativist attitudes to environmental destruction--continue continue unabated.

The work of valley writers as diverse as Joan Didion and Richard Rodriguez is pervaded by a particular yearning when they describe the valley; Didion calls it “the Valley sadness.” It has something to do with how big and flat the place is. Beneath the enormous sky the land rolls on until the two meet in a blue blur that seemed to me, as a child, the end of the earth. It is hard not to feel one’s insignificance in such a place and, when confronted by the agricultural cycle of generation and death, one’s mortality as well.

In Johnson’s photograph, “White Rock Road, Mariposa County,” we see a ribbon of empty gray road curving in yellow fields beneath a milky sky. A single oak tree and a battered fence are the only landmarks, communicating the sense of isolation one feels driving the back roads between the small valley towns. Another photograph, “Sacramento from the Yolo Bypass,” shows a flat expanse of field under great fists of clouds rolling across the sky; the city is visible as little more than a collection of small silvery buildings in the distance.

As significant as the earth in the cosmology of the valley is water. The native tribes told creation tales that began, “Once there was a time when there was nothing in the world but water....” My hometown of Sacramento, like many other places in the valley, was a river town, founded at the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers and kept dry by a system of earthen levees. One of these levees curved behind my neighborhood, Gardenland, and I spent many hours sitting on the banks of its slough watching spores of cottonwood trees glance the turgid, green water. Johnson’s photograph, “Oaks and Lupins, Merced River,” captures that peculiar pea green of so much of the valley’s water. In the forefront are low-lying oaks, like green clouds, and a field of purple lupine, a pastoral scene now threatened by the ceaseless development of the land and the exploitation of the water.

“Delta Island” provides another evocative depiction of a valley waterway. A triangle of land juts out into a brown, unmoving river, the island’s trees vividly red and orange. These valley waters are not wild, swift-moving streams but slow and intractable, like the river that T.S. Eliot imagines “is a strong brown god.”

For those of us raised in the valley, perhaps our most abiding image is of fog, the so-called “tule” fog. Valley fog is more than dampness and mist in the air, it is practically an element unto itself. In the mornings, one would wake and look out the window to a ghostly world. “Stanislaus River, Caswell State Park” brilliantly captures the luminous, clinging whiteness of the fog. The white shore almost fades into the white water while the air is a dense shade of pearl. The only movement is a current where the water has snagged on some debris. Otherwise the world is suspended in white, like a metaphor for memory. The fog was sometimes inconvenient, but it was also innocent. The same cannot be said about the man-made effluvia that now hangs in the air whenever I return home to Sacramento where the dramatic rise in population had created a mini-Los Angeles with major problems of pollution.

The photographs, along with Gerald Haslam’s fine text, show how the valley’s prevailing philosophy of “bigger is better” has led to the growing salinization of the delta, increased pollution caused by the massive and evidently indiscriminate use of pesticides and other farm chemicals and the gradual extinction of native fish and wildlife. Agribusiness alone is not responsible for these depredations; more and more the fertile land is being paved over to accommodate a population that is growing at two times the rate of the rest of California.

Even more disheartening is the valley’s apartheid society of white landowners and colored land workers, which, as early as 1875, the San Francisco Chronicle deplored as “worse than old-fashioned slavery.” A particular sense among Anglos farmers of entitlement to the land, combined with their dependency on immigrant labor, produced a plantation mentality out of which arose some of the most outrageous violations of civil rights to take place outside of the Deep South. For example, the authors document the virtual “pogroms”--their word--conducted against Chinese laborers at the end of the 19th Century, the same period during which the legislature enacted laws that denied Chinese the right to own land.

When my mother was a child she was denied admission to a public pool because she was Mexican; in my own childhood I went to de facto segregated schools until I was 11 years old. Hand in hand with this blatant discrimination came a psychology of difference. In Gardenland, “they,” the Anglos, were “paddies,” whether they were Irish or not. Or they were “Americans,” even though some of us were were ourselves second-generation. They taught at our schools, policed our streets, owned the farms and the canneries where we worked, ran the local businesses where we shopped and occupied themselves mysteriously in the downtown office buildings. No one questioned their primacy; we were, my immigrant grandmother used to say, their “guests.”

Even those not interested in the valley’s stormy social and environmental history, however, cannot help but be moved by Johnson’s and Dawson’s photographs of the land and the people of the valley. They take us to the heart and soul of a place that Joan Didion, another Sacramento native, calls “the real California.” Notwithstanding Gerald Haslam’s eloquent, informative and urgent text, it is the photographs, finally that show why such a unique resource as the central valley must be preserved. There are few places on earth as fertile and productive as the valley--with each valley farmer feeding 82 people, it produces 25% of all the table food grown in this country. And there are fewer still as beautiful.

The valley’s beauty is of a particular kind, not the dramatic vistas of ocean and mountain that have come to define California even to most Californians. The valley is a place of fields and rivers, orchards and vineyards, small cities and smaller towns. What is moving about it, and what the photographs catch, is how elemental it remains. It illustrates to us world-weary urbanites what the Bible means when it says that the earth abides, and it brings to mind, as well, that other Biblical admonition: All flesh is grass. When you drive through the valley you are reminded that the earth has been given to our care, not our dominion; that we are its creatures, not its masters, and that it has been given not to one race, but to all. It’s a humbling experience, if you take it seriously. Thanks to “The Great Central Valley,” more of us will.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “The Great Central Valley: California’s Heartland,” see Opinion, Page 3.