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  • From: Harvey Ussery <harvey@themodernhomestead.us>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Crops, ponds destroyed in quest for food safety
  • Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:45:00 -0400

Elizabeth, thanks for posting this--I guess. I can't remember when I've found something I've read so utterly depressing. Truly we don't have a *chance*. Our utter bonehead *ignorance* of how to create an agriculture in harmony with nature simply has no bounds; and it is leading us to kill our world. Once again Wendell Berry: "How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used."

I kept thinking as I read the article of a couple of idiocies I've read about from totalitarian states where ideological fools made agricultural policy: In the former USSR, an agricultural committee in Moscow would dictate when to plant wheat--for a country that stretches through a dozen time zones. And Mao Zedong, another city fool dictating farming policy, decreed that farmers throughout China should kill all the sparrows because they would eat the rice. So people banged pots and pans every time the birds landed, driving them to exhaustion and death. The next growing season--the bugs ate all the rice. Duh.

I've told those stories to illustrate just how mucked-up anything to do with natural systems can get in a totalitarian system. But those idiocies have *nothing* on what we're doing here, as described in this article.

Madness this organized and this blind and on this scale can only end in Collapse. Maybe that won't be such a bad thing. . .

~Harvey



Posted by Elizabeth B. (07-13) 04:00 PDT Washington -- Dick Peixoto planted hedges of fennel and flowering cilantro around his organic vegetable fields in the Pajaro Valley near Watsonville to harbor beneficial insects, an alternative to pesticides.

He has since ripped out such plants in the name of food safety, because his big customers demand sterile buffers around his crops. No vegetation. No water. No wildlife of any kind.

"I was driving by a field where a squirrel fed off the end of the field, and so 30 feet in we had to destroy the crop," he said. "On one field where a deer walked through, didn't eat anything, just walked through and you could see the tracks, we had to take out 30 feet on each side of the tracks and annihilate the crop."

In the verdant farmland surrounding Monterey Bay, a national marine sanctuary and one of the world's biological jewels, scorched-earth strategies are being imposed on hundreds of thousands of acres in the quest for an antiseptic field of greens. And the scheme is about to go national. . . .

--
Harvey in northern Virginia
www.themodernhomestead.us

A society that permits the advantages of ecological abuse to go to individuals, while the costs are shared by the whole society, is effectively subsidizing the destruction of its environment. ~John Michael Greer





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