their bounding and their internal ordering of
processes creating space, for a time’ (1996: 261).
The two key points here are, first, that a perma-
nence is constructed out of extensive connections.
That is, scale is important because processes
operating at a variety of scales are what structure
the permanence. But second, it is the permanence
that internalizes these extensive connections,
gives them shape and form, and turns them into a
(relatively) stable thing, a thing that resides in the
world and becomes an actor in ongoing social
relations. These extensive connections include
struggles over meaning as much as they include
physical struggles over the conditions under
which, for example, migratory farmworkers live.
Part of what the landscape internalizes is what
people make it mean. Intellectual labor as much
as physical labor is made dead in and by the land-
scape. And crucially, asdead labor, as the physi-
calembodiment of reified social relations, the
landscape is a fetish. Or more accurately, the
landscape necessarily, as part of its very being,
fetishizes the labored over social relations that
make it.
Epistemologically, then, the key to under-
standing (and therefore transforming) the landscape
revolves around first understanding how – and
especially where, by whom, and under what con-
ditions – it is made. Second, the key question for
landscape is not, therefore, so much why and
how it is always changing (though this is cru-
cial), but why and how it has remained. Just what
is ‘permanent’ about it? What are the effects of
that permanence? How is it maintained in the
face of all those working to transform it? What is
fetishized in the landscape and why? These are
the questions we need always to ask of the land-
scape. But – and this is the genius of landscape as
a way of seeing – they are the ones we hardly
ever do ask.
A decade after that spring Sunday morning in
California, I now live in upstate New York, and
I am writing these words on a day, in its gentle
warmth, not unlike that earlier one. Strawberries
were selling this week at a nearby market for
99 cents a pint, a ridiculously cheap price. Accord-
ing to the crate at the store, the berries were
picked on the Central Coast, and they are beauti-
ful. My parents have since moved to the moun-
tains of Virginia, and from the profit they made
in selling their Moraga home (and a little perk in
the tax code for the upper classes that allows
capital gains taxes to be avoided on gifts to family
members), my wife and I were able to purchase
first a small condominium in Boulder, Colorado,
and then a much larger old house in Syracuse,
New York, where we now live. Instead of pear
and eucalyptus, our yard is shaded by a big oldblack walnut. The flowers are not California
poppies, but the peonies so well suited to this
wetter, colder climate. Down the road from our
house, closer than the strawberry fields were to
my parents’ old place, is an incredibly produc-
tive, and incredibly beautiful, apple growing
region. Every fall armies of migrant laborers
come to the area to pick the ripe fruit. I know
nothing about them. I know nothing about who
they are, where they come from, how much they
are paid, where they live both during and after
the season. The apples we eat tell us nothing
about these things, and the views from the roads
and highways yield few clues either. The fruit
pickers’ lives might as well be a world away
from my own. The landscape of my back garden,
where the irises are in spectacular bloom, and a
crew of landscapers have just built us a new,
raised vegetable garden, is placid, quiet, bucolic.
But so too was my parents’ garden in Moraga.NOTES1 Action no. 31891, Municipal Court of California,
County of Monterey, Salinas Judicial District, State of
California, 16 December 1985, 7, quoted in Wells
(1996: 211–12).
2 My account of strawberry production practices, labor
relations, and the Salinas–Monterey landscape in this
section draws heavily on Miriam Wells’ impressive
ethnography, Strawberry Fields(1996).
3 ‘Anglo’ is the local term used for Americans of
western and northern European origin.
4 That such is the case is a shame. Better that Anglo-
American geography would have looked to the related
old Dutch Landskabwhich denoted a form of region-
ally based social justice that stood against the hierar-
chical juridical forms of European feudalism (Olwig,
1996). Landschaft’s more restricted meaning – as a
morphological area stripped of its normative implica-
tions – helped promote and institutionalize a remark-
ably depoliticized landscape geography, the ‘old’
cultural geography concerned with fenceposts and
barn types that is so much the object of caricature by
‘new’ cultural geographers.
5 Sauer (1963) admitted, toward the end of his long
essay, that aspects of the landscape were ‘subjective’,
and that these aspects were important. But he also
argued, in the very title of the section in which he
makes this admission, that such subjectivity was
‘beyond science’.
6 This passage, which goes on to note the differences
between instinctive animal labor and conscious human
labor, is usefully deconstructed in Harvey (2000).
7 The Mann–Dickinson thesis explains why seemingly
‘archaic’ labor practices, like peasant and family farm-
ing or sharecropping, remain important – and often
expand – within capitalist agricultural production. The
history of other industries would lead one to expect a246 LANDSCAPE3029-ch11.qxd 03-10-02 10:51 AM Page 246