H. F. Raup

Piedmont Plain Agriculture in Southern California

THIS PAPER is a protest against a current geographical practice which, if continued, will eventually blight the subject and the point of view of those who call themselves geographers. I refer to a rut into which many students are pushed when they are assigned problems dealing with land use, land planning, occupance, or a region. In the last decade the geographic literature has been stuffed with dozens of studies of varying: degrees of quality, in which a problem in land utilization has been presented with the aid of detailed maps. Most of the studies to which I refer follow a rigid pattern which is monotonous in the extreme and sometimes ill-suited to the problem. A more serious deficiency becomes apparent when the authors ignore the historical setting of their problem, treating their subject, as it were, as though they were taking a snapshot instead of a time ex-