Earth

*Laudato ingentia rura, exiguum colito. (2261) (Latin – Praise a great estate, but cultivate a small one.) (Virgil)

*The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land. (2035) (Abe Lincoln)

*Most folks can be firewood self-sufficient with a woodlot of just one acre. Mother Earth News (1854) (“Hybrid poplars” July/August 1980, pg.43)

http://www.motherearthnews.com/

*We hold nature to be the measure of consummate beauty, and we consider its destruction to be sacrilege. (2738) (Ohiyesa) (A hundred years ago, Ohiyesa took a group of Plains Indian chiefs to the Corcoran Art Gallery. After their tour an old Sioux chief said, “Such is the strange philosophy of the white man! He hews down the forest that has stood for centuries in its pride and grandeur, tears up the bosom of Mother Earth, and causes the silvery watercourses to waste and vanish away. He ruthlessly disfigures God’s own pictures and monument and then daubs a flat surface with many colors, and praises his work as a masterpiece.”)

*“Harvesting” implies something you’ve nurtured and cared for, and you cut it and it grows back. This [clear-cutting of old growth forest] is mining. You mine a[n old growth] forest and it never comes back. (1843)

This quote is from an unidentified conservationist in the video Ancient Forests, by “NOVA.” He was describing what happens when old-growth forests are clear-cut. Lumber companies do re-plant the forests they cut down, but does anyone really believe a lumber company will wait 800 years before they “harvest” the trees they’ve planted?

A forest is also a bio-diverse ecosystem and was created to be able to survive whatever nature threw at it, such as pests, blight, fire, and drought. Square miles of clear-cut forests that have been re-planted with single-specie trees are a disaster waiting to happen. They can easily be wiped out by a pest or blight, and leave square miles of dead forest waiting to catch fire.

Clear-cutting is a way to make lots of money quickly, but until the area is replanted, and the trees have developed, the extensive soil erosion is not only polluting, but wasteful.

America does need lumber, but God did not give us this planet to ravage. Trees are a renewable resource. If there is ever a shortage of lumber, it will be because of ignorance, greed and wastefulness – not because we didn’t cut down the last of the big trees.

To other Americans who love old-growth forests, but live east of “out west,” take heart! Dendrochronologists (people who find old trees) have been finding old-growth forests near you. Fifty miles from Times Square, 500 year-old pitch pines have been discovered in the Shawangunk area. Three to four hundred year-old chestnut oaks have been discovered in the Delaware Water Gap. White cedars over 1,000 years old are living in the Niagara escarpment. Bald cypress along the Black River in North Carolina have been discovered to be 1,700 years old! They started growing well before the end of the Roman Empire. And in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, many hundreds of square miles of post oak, blackjack oak, and red cedar have been discovered to be over 500 years old.

Read more about this in the January 13, ‘03 edition of U. S. News and World Report, pg. 51.

Those of us on the west coast may have 3,000 year-old sequoias that are well over 300’ tall, and 4,700 year-old bristlecone pines, but we don’t have a monopoly on old-growth forests, so enjoy!

*The object of gardening is not production – it is happiness in God’s creation. AlanChadwick (1857)

*Of all occupations from which gain is secured, there is none better than agriculture, nothing more productive, sweeter, nothing more worthy of a man. (2317) ( Cicero)

*A quarter-acre of aeroponically grown tomato plants will produce over one hundred tons of tomatoes. (2399) (Marion Kwartler – Farmstead magazine 1982/Garden, pg 12)

*The ultimate goal of Natural Farming is not in the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings. Fukuoka (2088) (Masanobu Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution With his “do-nothing” farming method, he doesn’t plow, irrigate, prune, weed, use pesticides or fertilizers, yet his land is as productive as the most intensely and expensively farmed land in Japan.)

*Man – despite his many accomplishments – owes his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil, and the fact that it rains. (1856)

*We’re losing forty tons [of topsoil] an acre on some farms to erosion [each year]. Davis (2402) (Pete Davis, U. S. Soil Conservation Service – National Geographic MagazineSept./1984, pg. 379)

*The life expectancy of eight inches of topsoil with straight line plowing is thirty-six years. With drilling seed into untilled, mulched, and contoured terraces, it’s 2,224 years. (1763) (National Geographic Magazine July/1976, pg. 45)

*MULCH! (2503) (Mulching helps hold moisture in the soil much longer than exposed soil. It helps prevent heavy rains and wind from causing soil erosion. It helps keep weeds under control. It modulates soil temperature by adding a layer of insulation between the weather and the soil. It improves the soil by adding organic material and nutrients. It uses up organic material that might have been thrown away. It’s the best thing since sliced bread!)

*100 pounds of dry soil with 4 to 5 percent humus will hold 200 pounds of water. With 1½ to 2 percent humus it will hold 35 to 45 pounds of water. (2429) (Humus is the organic matter in soil and is made from protein. Anhydrous ammonium nitrate destroys protein but is used by farmers as fertilizer. In WW2 this stuff was sprayed on land to form a cement-like surface to land huge planes on. No wonder there’s so much run-off and flooding from farmland.)

*Who needs summer? We’ve got winter! (1687) (The northwest has extremely mild winters during an El Nino.)

*SAVE OUR DAMS. (2507)

The enviro-nazis want to breach the dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers to “save the salmon.” They don’t see any other solutions to the dam/salmon problem. And they never mention the other reasons salmon runs are less than they used to be, or that the sludge built up behind the dams would wipe out fish runs for years if it were suddenly loosed into the rivers.

They also don’t mention that the dams were built for flood control, water storage and irrigation, electricity production, barge and pleasure boat traffic, recreation, etc. After the last bad inundation of ‘48, dams and dikes were built to save our cities, and all 150,000 of us have been dry ever since.

I’ve listened to some foolish fishermen who support the breaching because they think it will make for better fishing for them. Rather selfish priorities, I’d say. But do they really think that if the government would destroy all the benefits from the dams (which would gut the economies of much of Washington, Oregon, and a chuck of Idaho), to save some fish that the government will let them catch, and kill, and eat those fish?

Part of the salmon “problem” is the wild salmon verses hatchery salmon controversy. Hatchery salmon have a notch cut out of a fin to identify them. If you catch a salmon that doesn’t have a notch (a wild one), you have to put it back. Some folks say that we must do everything (including breaching our dams and forcibly keeping people off their own private property) to protect wild salmon because they are dwindling in numbers. These folks say that wild salmon are genetically different from the hatchery salmon. Where do these folks think our hatcheries got the salmon eggs in the first place? From wild salmon! They were certainly not from pet salmon brought over from the old country.

The people who run the dams have become enlightened over the years. They build fish ladders for the fish traveling upstream to get over the dams and have devised many fish-saving gadgets for the fish traveling downstream to protect them from the turbines. One way to get 100% of the fish safely downstream past the dams would be to barge them to just below Bonneville Dam and then let them go.

Oh, one more thing – the salmon run of 2002 was the largest since they started keeping records seventy years ago. A friend of mine went up to Alaska to work on the salmon boats, but the run was so record-breaking that the price of salmon dropped to three cents a pound. Most of the fishermen just packed up their boats and went home.

*Thousands of nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that “going too the mountains” is going home; that wilderness is a necessity…. (2316) (John Muir)

*I have a garden of my own, shining with flowers of every hue. I loved it dearly while alone, but I shall love it more with you. (2412) (Thomas Moore)