North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Douglas Woodard <dwoodard@becon.org>]

Burgers and fries will keep you alive for a long time.

Selling a plant that's certain to die seems to me to be a kind of theft. 
The sales staff may be too ignorant to know. The management who make the 
decisions are culpable, but it's not that different from a lot of other 
things that go on in North American society.

Lots of people who want a fruit tree know almost nothing, don't 
appreciate their ignorance, and hardly know where to look for 
information. Many don't have the time and other resources to acquire 
much information. A few decades ago, I was there.

I'd say that our economy and society at present have certain defects, 
and plant acquisition shows them up especially clearly. The recent 
increases in postal rates and change in size regulations and charges in 
Canada have to a considerable extent replaced specialist mail-order 
nurseries with garden centres, which has had negative consequences.

It used to be that the farm and rural economy had a substantial 
subsistence component, the rural population was large, and politicians 
bent over backwards to appease the rural population. These conditions no 
longer hold. 25 years ago many economists, politicians and buraeucrats 
in Canada seemed ready to write off even commercial agriculture as an 
obsolete part of the economy, replaceable by imports from low-wage 
countries. They are no longer quite so confident about the march of 
industrial progress, but much of the mindset persists.

Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario



On 25/05/2011 12:08 PM, Naomi Counides wrote:
> Is it responsible for McDonalds to sell burgers and fries?  People want to
> buy these items.  It is not an illegal act to sell them.  If people were
> only offered what was good for them, what would work for them.. etc.. LOL we
> would be in a state of even greater economic distress.
>
> On a personal note.. Are there not people in this group (including myself)
> trying things that may not work?  We call it exploration.
> Naomi
>
> "I am a solipsistic conspiracy theorist.  I am sure I am up to something,
> and I will not stop until I find out what."
>
>
> http://xkcd.com/842/  Jan 3, 2011

[snip]