Ilustration courtesy of the California Digital Library.

One of the tragedies of California has been the loss of millions of acres of citrus. Vast areas of the state stretching from the San Fernando Valley eastward to Palm Springs were devoted to the cultivation of oranges, lemons and limes. Trains shipped these fruits to cold cities back east. The perishables were packed in beautiful color boxes decorated with illustrations of sno-capped mountains and verdant fields of yellow and orange. This was an industry that defined the Golden State. It also was a religious message, preaching the gospel of California, that brought so many millions of pilgrims to this state and helped to destroy the very beauty that they sought out.

Imagine what it was before Pearl Harbor…….What was it like to descend, for example, the Sepulveda Pass on a Sunday morning in 1940 and enter the San Fernando Valley when thousands of acres of orange trees were in full bloom? A time before smog, freeways, acid rock and acid rain? You rode in your convertible through a beautiful mountain roadway, and entered a green leafed kingdom that tantalized your five senses of taste, touch, smell, sight and sound. How fleeting that moment in time was……

After World War Two, thousands of acres of orange groves were bulldozed to make way for ranch houses, shopping centers and industrial parks. People started to eat “mandarin” orange slices packed in tin cans.The entire county of Orange was similiarly destroyed and replaced with clone like housing fit for a totalitarian state. A new Disneyland [also called the “Magic Kingdom”] murdered a much more magical kingdom of nature.

Is it possible to regain some of the citrus lands we have lost? Perhaps those acres of now rusting factories in the northeast San Fernando Valley and east of downtwon Los Angeles can be transformed into citrus farms. Mayor Villaraigosa should hire some of the many Israelis in town and establish kibbutzim around the city. All of those homeless men and women sleeping on the streets might work and live on these farms and earn free health care and housing in return.

Productive agriculture is part of what keeps a society healthy. The Swiss government lavishly subsidizes its farms up to 80%. Why can’t Los Angeles, one of the most imaginative and flexible places on the planet, create new pockets of citrus to replace those hellish miles of gangland, grafitti, freeways, urban squalor and ugliness which we now call our city?