Posted on 01/25/2002 6:53:02 AM PST by NorCoGOP
I have a somewhat different take on the demise of the family farm, having had a very small introduction to that lifestyle when I was younger. I even cut hay with a scythe (for two days, until my hands bled and my back siezed up.) But I was a dilletante in that I always had a lifeboat. I could "get a job in a factory" if things didn't work out. I was playing. Real farmers "bet the ranch" at all times, with no escape route if things don't work out. Who among us would bet their life and fortunes every year on the weather and the markets?
Consider this: Every day you have a choice when you fix those eggs and bacon for breakfast. You probably bought them at the supermarket, like I do these days. But the wife and I used to eat the eggs and bacon that we raised. It was a lot of work, and very expensive, too - more expensive than buying them at the store. We did it because we wanted to learn how.
Feed bills, fencing costs, electricity bills, vet bills, getting up in the middle of the night to fend off varmints or tend sick animals, plucking and gutting chickens, butchering hogs...we will never forget the "fun" we had learning how to do these things and teaching them to our kids. But damn, it sure is simpler and cheaper to to buy the eggs and bacon at the supermarket!
Family farmers did what they did because that was their best (and just about only) choice. Given the chance to make money in an easier and less stressful fashion, they took it. Who wouldn't? Who can blame them?
It's damned hard to "live off the land", and given any other choice, most people won't even presume to try it.
What corporations do well is take advantage of economies of scale to make one thing incredibly efficiently. What we need out of resource land management is more than one thing on a frighteningly detailed, site-specific basis.Who is best suited to do that work?
What we feel, in our loss of family farms and ranches when they go out of business, is the disappearance of all the implicit goods they provide. The tragic thing is that those are the very goods for which we never pay! The more intangibles we need from them, the more we regulate their lives, the more likely they are to go out of business when we punish them for not having satisfied our desires. The answer is not price supports or subsidies; the answer is to return to farmers all the assets that come of their land, and allow them to market the range of goods their land is best suited to provide.
Many ranchers out in Wyoming/Montana are now selling "hunting rights" for about $3,000 per week. A neighbor here used to travel there every year and the ranchers would let him hunt for free. Now the ranchers have banded together and hired some "management company" which arranges hunting trips for city folks.
(Doncha' hate these weekend posts that nobody ever sees?)
The king's deer,
The king's suckerfish,
The king's salmon,
The king's olde growth forest,
The king's geysers,
The king's viewshed,
The king's buffer zone,
The king's greenbelt,
The king's roads,
The king's park,
We have met the enemy and he is us
The king's a covetous idiot.
The King's watershed management service,
The King's pollution control and abatement service,
The King's septic system service,
The King's air rights of way,
The King's satellite photographic rights,
...
Of course, because the Democrats know that city life creates liberal thinking.
What's more, the Democrats know that to feed the entire Third-World population that is immigrating here, the U.S. needs more efficient living arrangement for its citizens, which means people should be made to live in urban population centers where they can be better managed, and farmlands should be more efficiently farmed by big business mass production farms.
Just remember the map that shows which parts of America voted for Gore and which parts voted for Bush.
That maps shows those in cities voted for Gore and those living in rural areas voted for Bush.
Family farms are no more sacrosanct than your city cousin's manufacturing job or your uncle's small business or your great grandfathers buggy shop.
The world is changing (for better or worse) and somethings just aren't cost effective in the "new world".
The beauty of Capitalism is that when everyone works in their own self-interest it is the most efficient use of resources and ultimately in the best interest of the whole.
Ponder this. If you live long enough you'll get to attend the funerals of everyone in your family and all your friends. My point being, sh*t happens. Any way you look at it. Embrace life and live it as best you can, with the resources God gave you.
Funny you should mention the Kings Forest. That's a perfect analogy of where America is headed, back to the time when trespassing on - or worse yet, poaching from - the Kings Forest was a crime punishable by death.
It's still nearly impossible to take pictures of the fuel load. It's just incomprehensibly dense.
To: be131;Grit;snopercod;brityank
May interest you. Remember that Los Alamos fire quite literally started by the federal government? Know why they started the fire? It was part of a long-term plan for developing "an Alpine meadow ecosystem." You might say that the environ-weenies "at university," were extremely successful.
First_Salute, I remembered you saying that. I thought this might interest you (from http://www.prfamerica.org/UpdatesIndex.html ) :
November 2001: Bush Administration signs a Memorandum of Understanding with The Nature Conservancy to jointly manage the nation's National Forests....
The U. S. Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy announced a watershed memorandum of understanding (MOU) on November 16 to share the management of the entire National Forest system. The agreement includes inventorying, monitoring, protection and restoration of forest, grassland and aquatic habitat for fish, wildlife and plant resources. According to the official press release, the underlying goals of the memorandum of understanding include preservation of biodiversity and ecosystem management, rather than production of raw materials to feed the nation's economy. Two key MOU directives are to utilize prescribed burns and to combat invasive species. The MOU can be expected to reinforce the previous administration's road closure policy.
More here: http://www.prfamerica.org/TNC-USDA-JoinForces.html
"TNC (The Nature Conservancy) is the largest environmental organization in the United States, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, with 1994 assets of just over one billion dollars. In 1994, TNC received $237,779,000 from sales of land to government, while expending $76,046,000 for this purpose." http://www.prfamerica.org/NYsNaturalHeritageProgram.html
THE WILDLANDS PROJECT.....By Henry Lamb
Editor's note: The following is a series of four articles published in 1994, from more than 300 newspaper columns in our Members' Section. In 1995, the U.N. identified The Wildlands Project - by name - as the ideal land management scheme for the implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity. It is sobering to see how effectively the plan has been implemented.
"Our vision is simple:" says Dave Foreman, convicted eco-terrorist,
"we live for the day when Grizzlies in Chihuahua have an unbroken connection to Grizzlies in Alaska; when Gray Wolf populations are continuous from New Mexico to Greenland; when vast unbroken forests and flowing plains again thrive and support pre-Columbian populations of plants and animals...."
Foreman has been babbling about his ecotopian dream of converting North America to wilderness since before he founded Earth First! His dream is no longer eco-babble; it is a well-funded, nationally organized campaign called the North American Wilderness Recovery Project, and described in detail in a special edition of Wild Earth, the journal of Foreman's newest organization, the Cenozoic Society.
Editor, John Davis, says:
"Wild Earth exists in part to remind conservationists that in the long run all lands and waters should be left to the whims of Nature, not to the selfish desires of one species which chose for itself the misnomer homo sapiens. Does the foregoing [the plan] mean that Wild Earth and the Wildlands Project advocate the end of industrial civilization? Most assuredly. Everything civilized must go...humanizing of landscapes must stop now and be reversed."
The centerpiece of the special edition is a strategy developed by Dr. Reed F. Noss, a research scientist for Idaho's College of Forestry, and Stanford University. According to Noss, the plan was prepared '...on contract with the National Audubon Society and The Nature Conservancy,' two of the richest and most respected environmental organizations in the world......" A MUST READ BY HENRY LAMB: WILDLANDS PROJECT http://www.eco.freedom.org/el/20020102/wildlands.shtml
"Humanity must drastically scale down its industrial activities on Earth, change its consumption lifestyles, stabilize and then reduce the size of the human population by humane means, and protect and restore wild ecosystems and the remaining wildlife on the planet." http://www.wildlandsprojectrevealed.org. "Humanity must drastically scale down its industrial activities on Earth, change its consumption lifestyles, stabilize and then reduce the size of the human population by humane means, and protect and restore wild ecosystems and the remaining wildlife on the planet." (slide show, page 3).
THE UNCONSTITUTIONAL ORIGINS OF THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT http://www.discerningtoday.org/unconstitutional_origins_of_ESA.htm
".....Under S. 990, the government can grab private land for nearly any reason. In the bill, the term "acquisition" appears several times, including, to quote directly from Section 102, "acquisition of an area of land or water that is suitable or capable of being made suitable for feeding, resting, or breeding wildlife." Section 102 goes on to say, "conservation includes any activity associated with scientific resources management, such as acquisition, improvement, and management of habitat."
Senator Smith claims that money in S. 990 cannot be used to benefit anti-hunting, animal rights organizations. That claim is false because the Senator put in a loophole which allows fully $250 million out of the bill's $600 million to be available as grant money for animal rights groups to use to oppose hunting. http://www.eco.freedom.org/el/20020201/deweese.shtml
President Bush, Sr., utterly dismissed the decade-long environmental study, National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP), so that he could make deals with the Democrats by swapping environmental tits for other-issue tats.
The late Detroit News columnist, Warren Brookes, wrote excellent work detailing the creeping vines of insidious, "junk science" environmentalism, which the Bushes have not had much care to tip, trim, nor cut. (A search through the newspaper's archives would be helpful, here, but I wasn't able to search at the Detroit News website, for Mr. Brookes's NAPAP writings.)
However, because of the technical details of "studies," the Bushes are aware that the public is not aware enough, of same --- and so what is not well understood is thus easily taken from conservatives, and others, by people who we would like to trust --- Republicans --- as you have stated.
By the way, writer, Michael Fumento, is working at filling the environmental gaps created by the liberals' "junk science," with contrasting information which blunts the environmentalistas. His collection of work can be found at:
Environmentalists, Activists, Doomsayers and Other Alarmists
A detailed writeup on how former President Bush and Congressional Republicans chose to ignore the results of NAPAP, can be found by looking up online, William Anderson article, published in Reason magazine in January 1992 (the first appears to be the entire article; I did not find it at i online):
Acid Test (www.sepp.org)Acid Test (www.objectivists.org)
Acid Test (www.gaiabooks.co.uk/environment)
A synopsis, entitled,
Acid Rain: The Scientific Questions
based on William Anderson's January 1992 article in Reason, is available (today) via the www.google.com cache (that is the link), which synopsis is apparently the work of a department at www.liberty.edu (which link is not working):
The applied subject of this chapter is the news coverage of the acid rain controversy of the 1980s. The coverage period begins in 1980 and continues until 1993, three years after the passage of the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act, which included provisions to reduce acid rain in the United States. The chapter examines how journalists from the prestige press covered this subject.Robert Angus Smith, an English chemist, discovered that rainfall in London and other industrial cities had become very acidic by 1852, linking what he called "acid rain" to the burning of raw coal to power the factories and electric generators of industrial England (LaBastille, 1981; Boyle and Boyle, 1983). However, the rainfall, which had a pH factor which was considerably lower than the 5.5 pH of "normal" rain, was not seen to be an environmental crisis until the 1970s. At that time, scientists in the United States, Canada and Scandinavia found that surface waters of northern could no longer support aquatic life because of increasing acidity.
Lakes in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York seemed particularly vulnerable, and it was pointed out that many of the lakes which were "dead" by the early 1970s had supported trout fishing at the turn of the century, drawing well-known sportsmen like Theodore Roosevelt. Likens and Bormann (1974) blamed the coal-burning electric utilities of the industrial Midwest and predicted widespread environmental disaster if the problem continued.
Part of this newly-perceived problem, ironically, had its roots in the 1970 Clean Air Act, which sought to lessen local pollution by requiring coal-fired electric utilities to use tall (about 1,000 feet high) stacks. While the measure accomplished its immediate purpose, it also ensured the sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrous oxide (N2O) particulates escaping from the tall stacks would be caught by prevailing winds. They were then blown to other regions of the country, and across the Canadian border where they fell back to earth with the rainfall (LaBastille, 1981).
Congress attempted to rectify some of the problems with the 1977 Amendments to the Clean Air Act. The law required coal-burning utilities to install stack gas scrubbers, but the lakes in the Northeast and Canada remained acidic, even though SO2 particulates steadily declined during the 1970s. By 1980, the issue had hit the popular press and public discussion became more heated.
Paulos (1995) writes that popular press coverage often precedes detailed scientific analysis, and acid rain was no exception. The National Academy of Sciences predicted a hundred-fold increase in acid lakes by 1990 if SO2 emissions were not severely curtailed (National Research Council, 1981). However, only a relatively small number of scientific studies had investigated acid rain and its effects, so in 1980 President Jimmy Carter commissioned the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP) to examine the damage being caused by acid rain and recommend solutions.
Ironically, the earliest scientific studies of acid rain were not alarmist. Johansson (1959) wrote that so-called acid rain actually was beneficial in that it led to improvement of crop yields and crop protein content. Krug (1991) noted that in the 1950s acid rain was considered to be a "poor man's fertilizer."
This benign view of acid rain changed in 1972, however, according to Abdullah (1989), with the Norwegian national acid rain program. The founders, according to Rosenqvist (1990), pursued a specific agenda, that being "to provide material for negotiations in order to limit the emission of SO2 in Europe." The Norwegian program ended in 1980, and the NAPAP program was created to further acid rain research.
The early researchers held to a "mineral titration" theory in which it was believed acidic soils could not buffer acid rain, which then directly ran into lakes and streams and acidified them. Only alkaline soils could provide adequate protection, researchers held (Anderson, 1992). Therefore, the experiments performed by early scientists concentrated upon the effects of lake acidification and not its causes (Krug and Frink, 1983).
President Ronald Reagan expanded the NAPAP program in 1982 from a $10 million to $100 million annual budget, and within a year, evidence emerged that questioned the "mineral titration" theory. (Krug and Frink, 1983) challenged the popular perspective. The two NAPAP-funded scientists disputed the connection between lake acidity and acid precipitation, claiming that the composition of soil in the watersheds of lakes and streams had a greater impact upon surface water acidification than did rainfall.
Krug later wrote (1990, 1991) that core samples taken from acidic Adirondack lakes showed they had been so even before the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, other NAPAP studies found that the region with the highest concentration of acidic lakes was not upstate New York but rather Florida, where acid rain did not fall (NAPAP, 1988). This finding was especially important because the news that many of Florida's lakes were acidic originally was reported as example of the peril of acid rain. Furthermore, researchers found numerous lakes in the mountains of Australia and New Zealand to be acidic despite the fact that rainfall in that region had a normal pH (Anderson, 1992).
When combined with the studies by Rosenqvist (1978, 1979) who studied lakes in Norway and Sweden, a scientific consensus began to emerge. It found land-use patterns and soil composition to be the statistically significant factors in determination of whether or not a lake or stream would be acidic. This became even more apparent when scientists discovered the history of the Adirondacks.
During the Nineteenth Century, lumbermen using "slash and burn" techniques heavily logged the region. The logging practices led to huge fires that left the once acidic-soil alkaline (Krug, 1990). In an ironic twist, however, the changed soil conditions allowed once-dead lakes to support fish, making the Adirondacks a popular destination for anglers.
The New York Legislature at the turn of the century passed "Forever Wild" laws that prohibited logging and other commercial development in the Adirondacks. While the laws protected the landscape, they also doomed many fishing lakes, as the watersheds reverted to their pre-industrial state, according to the land-use acidification theory. By the middle of the century, fish again began to disappear from many lakes.
People familiar with the area should not have been surprised, Krug wrote (1990). "Adirondack," in the Iroquois language, means "bark eater." Indians sparsely settled the region because acidic lakes could not support much fish (Krug, 1990).
NAPAP scientists (1989) also failed to turn up evidence that acid rain was destroying U.S. forests, including sugar maples. Researchers did document acid precipitation damage to approximately one-tenth of one percent of the high-altitude eastern red spruce forests, but found no other evidence of harm to trees and crops from acid rain (NAPAP, 1989).
Much of this news was included in the 1987 Interim Report that NAPAP presented to Congress. While one might suppose that Congress would have been pleased to find that an acid-rain environmental disaster was not in the making, that is not what happened.
The reception from Congress was hostile. Representative James Scheuer (D-NY), then chairman of the House Subcommittee on Natural Resources, Agriculture Research, and the Environment, attacked the report and the NAPAP director J. Laurence Kulp, who resigned a week later. Environmental groups declared the Interim Report as "political propaganda" from the Reagan Administration.
NAPAP scientists were not unanimous about the findings, even though Roberts (1987) wrote, "The quality of NAPAP's research effort is generally considered to be quite good, perhaps first rate, and there is little quarrel with the individual facts." The disagreement among scientists, she adds, involved "the way the facts are presented - which tends to minimize the extent of the problem . . . ."
The major disagreement among some scientists on the report involved the standard of lake acidity used by the NAPAP team. According to Roberts, the researchers used a pH of 5.0 as the threshold for acidity; dissidents held that the less-acidic 5.5 should have the standard. The arguments aired in the Science article did not encompass the watershed theory of lake acidity, and whether or not soil composition was the dominant cause of acidic lakes.
Also important is who disagreed most loudly. Roberts extensively quotes Gene Likens, director of the Institute of Ecosystem Studies of the New York Botanical Garden, and one of the scientists who was a major source of the original concern about acid rain. (Likens is the main scientific source for Anne LaBastille's 1981 "How Menacing is Acid Rain?" story in National Geographic.) Another dissident source is David Schindler, who was an official with Environment Canada, the Canadian equivalent to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
However, it is clear from a thorough reading of Roberts' story that even the dissidents did not have a strong alternative hypothesis to what was written by NAPAP scientists. For example, on the question of whether or not acid rain was "destroying forests," there was this:
Art Johnson of the University of Pennsylvania agrees that there is no strong evidence of a direct effect on the health of forests from acid rain. But in his view, the key question to address is the interaction between natural stresses, which are very acute, and air pollution stresses, which represent a sort of "background stress." Air pollution may be "an added burden on already-stressed trees."
The problem with Johnson's argument, however, is that the NAPAP study did note that certain kinds of air pollution, mainly tropospheric ozone, "may play a major role" in damaging forests and crops. However, the study also points out that acid rain was not part of the tropospheric ozone problem, and their own studies demonstrated that overall deterioration of forests was not due to acid rain, itself. Johnson ignored the problem, which had been shown to be significant in harming vegetation, and blamed something else for which neither he nor other scientists had shown to be significant.
Johnson's declaration also unwittingly challenged what scientists had originally concluded what would happen if acid rain continued. The initial assumption was that acid rain directly affected forests and crops, both by striking plants and trees directly with low pH water and by dissolving the nutrients from the soils (Labastille, 1981). However, NAPAP (1989) declared that "Other than for high elevation red spruce, there is no apparent evidence of forest damage in North America related to the direct effects of acidic deposition."
Although scientists generally respected the NAPAP study, Congressional leaders sided with environmentalists and their allies. When President George Bush pursued stringent new rules for SO2 reduction (50 percent), he and William Reilly, Bush's appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency never publicly acknowledged any of the NAPAP findings. In the fall of 1990, Congress passed the new rules, which required a 10-ton reduction from daily point sources in SO2 emissions, and a two-ton reduction in N2O from 1980 levels, along with a 8.9 ton cap on SO2 by the year 2000. The EPA permitted the NAPAP report to be released only after he bill became law...
From the original, Acid Test, by William Anderson:
The report ignited a firestorm of protest. Rep. James Scheuer (D-NY), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Natural Resources, Agriculture Research, and the Environment, said the assessment was "intellectually dishonest" and badgered NAPAP witnesses before his committee. Environmentalists belittled the document because it came from the Reagan administration. They were especially angry at J. Lawrence Kulp, whom Reagan had appointed NAPAP director.Scientists, however, generally endorsed the study. Documents from the International Conference on Acid Precipitation in 1988 show participants agreed with most of NAPAP's conclusions almost unanimously. In fact, the scientists from Canada agreed with Krug on the important watershed acidification theory, which was partly at odds with the Interim Assessment. In other words, NAPAP's conclusions were scientifically correct, if not politically correct.
When James Mahoney became NAPAP director in 1988, he assured Scheuer's subcommittee that he "would not subscribe...at this time" to the view that acid rain would not harm any more Northeastern lakes. Three years later, he would subscribe to that position on 60 Minutes.
NAPAP was ready to release a final findings document in 1989. Under congressional mandate, the document was supposed to guide priorities for the Clean Air Act. But the EPA, now led by Bush appointee and zealous environmentalist William Reilly, refused to approve it. After much revision, the EPA finally allowed the document to be released on July 27, 1990--long after Bush, who in his 1988 presidential campaign had promised to be the "environmental president," signed the new law.
The Findings Document differed little from the Interim Assessment. An exhaustive, worldwide scientific search said acid rain was an environmental nuisance, not a crisis. The much-feared "silent spring" had not arrived.
After authorizing nearly $600 million for the NAPAP study, Congress refused to hear the good news. One committee met to examine the results, but only Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) appeared at the public hearing.
Making a few links, is all.
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