May, 2011
Last semester I had the good fortune to take a class in Environmental Sociology. The last few years of the 20th Century raised social awareness to a common problem in our society: one man’s gain should not come at the expense of another man’s loss. We see this too often in today’s society. It’s great to know others feel as I do about the world we share and speak up about issues that impact us all.
Education gives voice to reason. The terms and talking points used by former environmentalists to call attention to greed, misconduct or misanthropy. One of these terms is NIMBY, Not In My Back Yard. It is similar to LULU, Locally Unwanted Land Uses. These two terms have much in common.
When someone gets an idea about creating economic opportunity (jobs let’s say) in a socio-economic, disadvantaged area, they might look to areas less densely populated. These areas then bear the burdens of less desirable responsibilities. (Think prisons, ammunition plants, mining operations, slaughterhouses, manure lagoons and suchlike, you can reason many industries that wouldn’t make good neighbors.)
Garrett Hardin, for instance, stated in 1993, “There is no ‘away’ to throw to.” Fishing a favorite place recently, I couldn’t help but notice the nearby town faced away from the river where I stood. The backdoors of all the buildings faced the riverside, while the front doors faced the street-side, “open for business.” Sound familiar to you? This is how we used to deal with most things we didn’t want to address in public---out the backdoor, not on the front lawn. Do we still?
Today, we understand the “inter-connectedness of the elements of the landscape” (Carl Trall, 1939) and the outcry: “the same principles of justice that forbid disenfranchising one person for the social gain of another---would also forbid policies and practices that seriously contaminate the food, water, or air supply of one person for the social gain of another. (Brent Singer, 1988)
I’m confronted with these things when I see a field plowed down to the stream. The landowner rents out his field to be ‘cropped.” The renter hires someone to plow the field. The person hired to do the plowing thinks he’s paid to get every inch of the usable area prepared for planting. “Fencerow to fencerow” (said Earl Butts, Secretary of Agriculture, 1976, propagating the myth of ‘feeding the world’) and the person doing the plowing doesn’t provide a perimeter around the field or has ever heard of the ‘Wisconsin Buffer Initiative’ instituted in 2002 that allows for a 20ft setback along the riparian way to provide a place for wild, uncultivated growth to protect the stream from field run-off, and allow “outdoors-life” a place to flourish, too.
More than this---visit the central sands area of Adams County. Old farmhouses and outbuildings are disappearing, making way for the plow. The plow has access to the largess of the fertile outwash plain. The pump (only 800 now operating in Adams county) irrigates the ‘bio-mass’ crop for the Castle Rock Ethanol Plant or the crop rotation for the area’s corporate agriculture. Stand in a low-lying area; see how the plowed field slopes to the nearby river, stream, or ditch. Look at the sediment filling up the stream. Think about the materials being applied to encourage plant growth. Consider which watershed gets the by-product of this run-off. Know that one pound of phosphorus makes 500 pounds of algae.
Think about what it must be like to have a cottage on a nearby piece of water or somewhere in the River’s Watershed. Ask your legislator what’s wrong with this picture.
Others are thinking about this too. For more read this: http://johntorinus.com/general-blog/green-gold/gop-may-lose-green-republicans/?utm_source=Straight+Talk+From+the+Heartland&utm_campaign=bd3948710a-GOP_may_lose_green_Republicans_5%2F10%2F11&utm_medium=email
It's springtime in Wisconsin and we're open for business.
