Virtual ecology: a brief environmental history of Silicon Valley.

• Author: Sachs, Aaron
• Position: Cover Story

This place in sunny California, so famous for its high technology, high salaries, and campus-like office parks, is not what it seems.

"Dutch" Hamann, City Manager of San Jose, California, from 1950 to 1970, liked to say that he put Silicon Valley on the map. Despite Hamann's success at spurring economic growth, though, the oil-executive-turned-civic-planner drew much criticism for his expansionist boosterism, for having allowed industrial parks and housing tracts to sprawl perhaps too far, blotting out Santa Clara County's former beauty. His retirement, which came just as the county's high-tech nickname started to enter the national lexicon, was celebrated not only by environmentalists but by economists as well. In September, 1970, Business Week ran an article about the challenge of "Correcting San Jose's Boomtime Mistake." But Hamann himself never doubted his legacy, insisting until his death in 1977 that the benefits of intense development would far outweigh any costs. "They say San Jose is going to become another Los Angeles," he noted in a 1965 interview, seeming to acknowledge his critics. "Believe me, I'm going to do everything in my power to make that come true."

Twenty years after Hamann's death, his vision has been realized. San Jose is booming again, and Silicon Valley is often lauded as the engine of America's economy: high tech now has just as high a profile as Hollywood. In 1997, Silicon Valley firms created some 53,000 jobs, and profits among the region's top 150 high-tech companies grew by 15 percent to $15.4 billion. City officials from around the world have been visiting the area, desperate for the secret of San Josh's success. And, in fact, intense cooperation between municipal governments and high-tech firms has resulted in several attempts to copy the Silicon Valley model, from Silicon Desert in Phoenix, Arizona, to Silicon Glen in Livingston, Scotland, to Silicon Plateau in Bangalore, India.

Of course, critics and skeptics have argued that the Valley's economic upsurge can't last forever, that bust always follows boom. Even the newly minted millionaires of Silicon Valley (there are two more every week) are beginning to acknowledge that they, too, may be held hostage by the cycles of history. An eventual economic downturn, however, is perhaps the least of this region's problems. Evidence is mounting that the boom-bust cycle may be quite dangerous even in good years, that economic growth as we know it may create about as many problems as it solves. While money is certainly flowing freely in Silicon Valley (the average salary of $46,000 is more than 50 percent higher than the national average), most of it is going to a relatively small social and economic elite. As a result, much of the region is becoming unaffordable for the local working-class people, many of whom are immigrants or ethnic minorities. Latinos, for example, make up 24 percent of Santa Clara County's population, but 50 percent of the county's working poor. In addition, housing is in short supply (jobs are being created about 15 times faster than housing units), and the region suffers from stultifying traffic snarls (freeway delays more than doubled between 1994 and 1996). And beneath all this burgeoning development, the soil and water are so battered by the chemicals used in high-tech manufacturing that the region now has 29 Superfund sites, giving it the densest concentration of highly hazardous waste dumps in the country.

San Jose is similar to Los Angeles, then, not only in terms of its internationally significant industries and economic success, but also in terms of its deep class and ethnic tensions, and the many other frustrations that accompany rapid growth - which tend to be exacerbated by the region's seemingly endless sprawl of strip malls, highways, cookie-cutter housing developments, and office parks. This troubling physical reality is one of the best-kept secrets in America: everyone has heard of Silicon Valley, but few people know what it looks like. Many East Coasters don't even know where in California it's located, as I discovered in 1996 when I told my friends and colleagues in Washington, DC, that I was moving to San Jose (which is right at the southern tip of the San Francisco Bay). Moreover, the images we have of high-tech companies in Silicon Valley - those offices full of bright, young engineers - rarely reflect the fact that high tech is just as much an industry as a profession, that the Valley is actually packed with manufacturing plants. But, then, transcending physical realities is an important theme in the high-tech world, especially for people promoting the Internet, which represents the industry's best bet for future economic growth. When your Web browser asks you where you want to go today, the implication is that the space you actually inhabit is irrelevant.

Nowhere is that philosophy more obvious than in Silicon Valley, especially given what Santa Clara County used to look like. Perhaps the most significant difference between Los Angeles and San Jose is that L.A. used to be a desert, whereas San Jose used to be home to some of the most fertile soil in the world, which just five decades ago produced close to 50 percent of the world's prunes, apricots, and cherries. People used to come to this area, known in the first half of this century as the Valley of Heart's Delight, not to see Research and Development facilities but to visit the orchards and go on "blossom tours." The recent history of San Jose represents an almost unparalleled ecological transformation, which begs a fundamental question confronting society at the end of the twentieth century: how long can we sustain economic growth without considering the relevance of our physical surroundings?

The high-tech version of the American Dream is a compelling one: young software engineers flock to Silicon Valley in the same way that young actors and actresses flock to Hollywood, and here the "failures" still make six figures. But in Santa Clara County this new model for success came at the expense of an older version of the American Dream. The Valley of Heart's Delight had fostered a community of thriving agriculturists - one that lasted well into the 1950s. The climate and soil were perfect, and land was so widely available that many cash-poor independent farmers were able to start successful orchards, whether on a subsistence level or as profit-making enterprises.

At the peak of agricultural activity, in the early 1940s, there were about 6,000 farms in the Valley. Almost all of them were small family-run operations covering less than 50 acres each, which together made up 80 percent of the county. About half of the planted area comprised the largest near-continuous orchard the world had ever seen: some 8 million flowering trees spread over 132,000 acres. As paintings, photographs, and old-timers attest, it was an amazing sight. "For 60 miles the beautiful Santa Clara Valley unrolls south, verdant with orchards, vineyards, and groves," wrote N.D. Ford, author of America's 50 Best Cities, in 1956. And the fruits of the farmers' labor were like nothing you can get today at your local supermarket. "That asphalt there is covering some of the best land in the world," says Charlie Olson of Olson's Cherries, one of the last remaining fruit stands in the Valley. "What hurts mc is that people don't even know how good it used to taste. They don't even know what they're missing." When I recently showed some vintage footage of the Valley's orchards to an environmental studies class I was teaching at a community, college in San Jose, my students expressed disbelief. Most of them had never seen an orchard.

You can build an electronics plant almost anywhere, but there are truly few places on earth that could match the fertility of Santa Clara Valley in the early twentieth century. The U.S. Department of Agriculture evaluated all the land in the county and designated 32 percent of it - 400 square kilometers - as Class I, the top ranking for the cultivation of fruits and...