Our World and Everything in It

I don’t know about anyone else but I hate to see unnecessary urban sprawl. People want to move to the country, As soon as they are in the country they want shopping nearby. Strip malls and drugstores pop up, gas stations, and pretty soon they’re not in the country anymore and want to move on. Remember Canton? It was farmland not all that long ago. It is a concrete jungle of huge, treeless subdivisions now. It wouldn’t be so bad if the contractors building subdivisions would forfeit some profit and the buyers agree to a little higher price to keep some original trees and landscape around. Driving past new neighborhoods on 90-degree days makes me think of frying eggs on pavement. The sun just beats down on those homes and they pay the price with huge A/C bills. It’s not at all inviting, at least to me. Everyone may be different but there is no one who wouldn’t like to lower his or her energy bills, especially with houses that are so large. Wouldn’t large shade trees lining the lanes be nice?

 
Due to energy costs and conservation the big house trend might not be around for a while. I never understood it to begin with. Ladies you have to clean that big house! And there is maintenance for the guys. The same with yards. The idea of a housekeeper and lawn service goes out the window when the job is so much bigger. Watching redesigns on TV for bathrooms the size of half my house is the most ludicrous. The worst room in the house to clean, and we want it bigger? Until we make use of solar and wind power it is just not economical. This may be a good thing for America.

 
According to American Farmland Trust, “America loses over one million acres of fertile farmland every year to sprawling cities and endless suburbs. This is irreplaceable food-growing land.” They went on to say if this continues in 25 years the amount of fertile cropland lost would be equal to the size of New England. We’re not using constructive farming techniques and the government’s practices need to change. Nearly two billion tons of fertile topsoil is lost to erosion each year. It ends up in tributaries along with fertilizers and pesticides, which end up in the ocean. The Gulf of Mexico has a dead zone that has grown from feet to over a mile wide. The water is black and there is no life all the way to the bottom. Fishermen say they can simply tell when they enter it. The water is deplete of oxygen and can’t sustain life. Do you like shrimp? Then this is important. Notice all the farm raised fish these days? There are reasons for all of it and it starts with us. We need to act responsibly. We create a lot of garbage because we are a nation that does not like to recycle and that extends to houses. The urban sprawl over the past 10 years is ridiculous. Houses are all about with for sale signs, yet new subdivisions with no trees, and now no economy to support them, popped up everywhere.

 
We’re using up the space that produces our food. Do we really want to eat foreign produce? Add industrialized farms or CAFO’s squeezing the life out of local farmers and we’re headed for disaster. I personally love my local farm market. The produce is usually from somewhere in America and many times from Michigan. They will not exist if we keep using our land needlessly. I know there are plenty of you out there that agree. I have a dirt road near me that was like Eden at one time. It had creeks and ponds with weeping willow trees, only a handful of houses along the way. I could hear a pin drop if I stopped the car. The birds and wildlife were everywhere. It is now the back way out of a subdivision that never really did sell all of these new homes, and has more for sale now. I’m sorry; I don’t think those homes were worth forfeiting that road.

 
Organizations like American Farmland Trust have a good agenda. They are campaigning for a new initiative to reinvent the U.S. farm policy through Farm Bill legislation. Instead of crop subsidy farmers will get “green” subsidy for making sure their land is maintained properly and available only for farming in the future. Like our need to keep energy costs down, we need to do all we can to keep our food costs down. It will happen through conservation. We need our farms. This is the land of “amber waves of grain and fruited plains” and we’re ruining it. Does anyone agree they hate to see it happen? And if we’re talking ethanol as one of the possible alternative energy sources, we really need to act by urging our congress to enact new farm policy and supporting our farmers and organization like American Farmland Trust. With the latest scare from tainted foods, CAFO’s creating needless pollution and pushing the small farmer out, horrible fires ravaging land, and floods, a return to the farmsas we once knew them would be a comforting process. To know our nation can support it’s own as far as food is of utmost importance to most Americans I would think. Besides that, where are we going to grow the grains for ethanol production? Even if we figure out a way to use weeds for fuel, there will be a shortage of those in the future if we keep sprawling. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.