Plaidoyer pour les haies
In France alone, during the 1980s and 1990s, half a million kilometers of hedge were cut down. Issues of biodiversity, water quality and run-off, soil erosion -- aspects of sustainable agriculture, were all sacrificed to the pursuit of productive agriculture.
If there's a bustle in your hedgerow... its a bird or a mouse or ... but first it takes a hedge, and a public policy that values agriculture that is first sustainable and then productive, rather than the reverse.
We didn't see hedges in Iowa, or Wisconsin, or Minnisota, or South Dakota, or ... in the Central Valley or along the Central Coast. What we did see was uninterrupted monoculture, punctuated by postage stamps of wetlands.
Comments
Don't forget the dying soil, the vast sprinkler systems jetting groundwater into the air and and the packed earth roads separating one giant patch from the other. Modern agriculture can feed the earth but only until the resources that enable it run out and run out they will as they are used up.
Posted by: Hawise | October 7, 2006 10:18 AM
haha! nice, sneakin' in an old Zep reference. man. you just zapped me back to like 11 years old or somethin'. wow.
Posted by: NLXJ | October 7, 2006 12:08 PM