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[ 34 ] “You could grow a really good crop of rutabagas here,” David Whitmer, the Napa County agricultural commissioner, joked in 2004, “but nobody would come and watch you harvest them.”1 Instead, the Napa Valley hitched its fame and fortune to wine and the tourism that has accompanied it. Napans have engaged in commercial viticulture (grape growing) and enology (wine making) for almost 150 years. However, they had not yet achieved the current level of international renown in the 1960s when the urban sprawl that engulfed much of the San Francisco Bay region threatened their vineyards. In response to that trend, Napa County created an agricultural preserve to protect the vineyards, a measure that was both conservative and progressive. While environmental historians have tended to focus on developments in federal law in the post–World War II era, the agricultural preserve and subsequent Napa County ordinances (expanding the preserve, defining wineries , and limiting hillside vineyards) reaffirm the centrality of local law in defining land-use controls—controls that dramatically, directly, and immediately affected human interactions with the physical world while balancing competing economic and cultural interests. In this case, and despite the imperfections of their solutions, a county government and its committed populace have used local laws, when federal and state laws proved less effective, to preserve both agriculture and open space in one of the most densely populated regions in the United States. Napa County lies to the north of San Pablo Bay, the northernmost extension of San Francisco Bay, and east of the Pacific Ocean and Sonoma County. For most outsiders, the heart of the county is the Napa Valley. Carved prehistorically by the Napa River and blessed with a Mediterranean climate of generous summer sunshine and cooling nighttime breezes, the valley has long been a center of Crabgrass or Grapes Urban Sprawl, Agricultural Persistence, and the Fight for Napa Valley K a T h l e e n a . B r o s n a n [ 35 ] Th e fiG h T for Th e n a pa Va lleY agriculture. Nestled between the Mayacamas Mountains on its northern and western sides and the Vaca Mountains on the east, Napa Valley opens into the marshy deltas of the San Pablo Bay to the south. The valley, which begins at the foot of Mount St. Helena, the second highest peak in the Bay Area, is but one mile across at its northern end, travels only thirty miles in length, and reaches just five miles across at its widest. With the exception of a few smaller valleys, the remainder of Napa County mostly involves mountains or steep hills.2 As of the year 2000, some two-thirds of the county’s population of 125,000 lived in the Lower Valley in the City of Napa and the recently incorporated community of American Canyon. Another 11 percent called the Upper Valley communities of Calistoga, St. Helena, and Yountville home. With a land area of 754 square miles, Napa had the lowest population density (165 people/mile) in the nine-county Bay Area. Sonoma County, Napa’s neighbor to the west and perhaps the nation’s secondbest -known wine region, had the next lowest population density in the Bay Area, but it was 75 percent greater than Napa’s. By contrast, the counties south of San Francisco Bay have experienced substantially greater growth. For example, Santa Clara County was once called “Valley of Paradise” and enjoyed a thriving agricultural economy. Santa Clara officials in the 1950s and early 1960s had hoped to alternate urban and agricultural zones, but the cities soon overwhelmed the farms. The area now bears the moniker “Silicon Valley” and has a population density of 1,303 people per square mile, almost eight times greater than Napa County. James Hickey, who was regional planning director for the Association of Bay Area Governments in the 1960s and director of the Napa County Conservation, Development, and Planning Commission in the 1970s and 1980s, wistfully observes,“There was some of the best agricultural soil in the world under the city of San Jose and they’ve pumped so much water out of it, they have about a foot or more of subsidence in some areas.”3 Numerous scholars have discussed the emergence of the United States as a suburban nation following World War II, attributing growth on the urban fringe to revolutionary construction techniques that provided relatively inexpensive housing; federal programs that provided building loans and supported highway construction ; and a...

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