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for a glor (this will be long) A couple of years ago, friends who live over in Digby County were practically driven crazy by clear-cutting on lands bordering their property. Apparently, this industrial type harvesting goes on day and night and makes a horrendous racket and a huge amount of light. I can't recall them specifically mentioning Sundays, but I believe, based on their description of the relentlessness of the cutting, it was probably seven days a week. If it was disruptive to humans, I'm sure it was even more disruptive to all of the creatures living in or near the forests being taken down - especially those being displaced as their tree homes came down. Anyhow, my friends were appalled by the way the work was carried out. Unfortunately, this seems to be the way of modern industrial type production. My late husband and I owned a farm outside Ottawa for over thirty years. In that time, we saw the lands all around us go from being mostly family dairy farms to being nursery sod operations. At first, it wasn't too terrible, apart from the fact that sod farming eventually strips topsoil away until the land (in that area) is nothing but tilth-less sand. Also, there is a tremendous amount of herbicide spraying. However, over the years, the three companies that operated on lands around us, went from working Monday to Friday, to working seven days a week (in keeping with a more *modern* work ethic, one supposes). Nursery sod requires much mowing, heavy herbicide spraying and, depending on the weather, irrigation from a huge lagoon using a mammoth-sized tractor left running 24 hours a day, roaring loudly while pumping water out to monstrou-sized water cannon type irrigation units that slowly inch across the fields. Their reach is so far that water was often blasted into our front yard. During a harvest cycle, workers cut sod during the middle of the night. They use huge lighting units that light up the fields like an outdoor sports playing field and that are so powerful that all the rooms on the side of the house facing the fields were lit like daytime. Tractors are running all night, people are shouting over ridiculously loud radios to communicate, and large diesel flatbed trucks are left idling all night while being loaded. At around 5 a.m., everyone finally prepares to depart for the day. My guess is that being antwhere near clearcutting of forests as done the way my friends describe it, would be somewhat the same, only 24 hours a day rather than all night. The only thing they would be missing out on is the incessant herbicide spraying that we were subjected to by being surrounded by hundreds of acres of nursery sod lands - which I will forever wonder if played a part in my never-smoker husband developing and dying from NSCLC lung cancer. Many of our neighbours died of cancer during those years as well. Just a few years before me selling the farm, one of the sod companies decided to accept the "free" fertilizer being given away by the City of Ottawa - actually just Class B sewage sludge promoted to farmers under the farcical moniker of "biosolids". They were going to spread it all over the fields around our and our neighbours' houses, without consideration of the extremely high water table of our area and what that might do to all our wells during a very wet spring when even a small shovel divet in the lawn would leach water immediately. Collectively, a bunch of us managed to fight them off, but that episode gave all of us a very good lesson in how little our supposedly good farming neighbours cared about the welfare of their neighbours when there are dollars at stake. In any case, lest there be any doubt, I now have nothing but utter contempt for the way that industrial type agriculture is often carried out. Yes, I know the arguments about how we need it to feed the planet, blah, blah, blah. Sorry, I don't buy that argument. My husband's family were all dairy farmers for decades and apart from milking their cattle, they never worked the land 7 days a week. They didn't terrorize their neighbours with racket for days on end and they never spread sewage sludge all around their houses. They were always careful not to spread cattle manure before or on a weekend when their neighbours might want to spend time outdoors having a bbq, etc, or in hot weather when people had their windows open. Don't think I am anti-farmer, as that is not so. For years, I was involved with promoting agriculture in eastern Ontario, working on agriculture awareness programs, was a director for the livestock division of one of the largest fairs, and wrote teaching materials for Ontario 4-H and Junior Farmers. In other words, I know a hawk from a handsaw. It seems to me that clearcutting practices differ very little from the more obnoxious forms of factory or industrial farming, and that is not even beginning to address the issue of the state of the land itself. Is this intensity of harves activity really necessary. I think not. Bev Wigney Round Hill, NS Sent from my iPad On 2015-02-19, at 7:16 AM, Fred Schueler <bckcdb@istar.ca> wrote: > Quoting David Patriquin <davidgpatriquin@yahoo.ca>: > >> It could be constructive to carry on a similar discussion about forest management policies in Nova Scotia, as academic discussion and debate of this topic seem to be totally lacking. > > * well, we can start with the premise that given the character of the Acadian Forest, proper forest management calls for no clear-cutting, anywhere in Nova Scotia, ever. > > QED? > > fred. > ------------------------------------------------------------ > Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad > Mudpuppy Night - http://pinicola.ca/mudpup1.htm > Vulnerable Watersheds - http://vulnerablewaters.blogspot.ca/ > study our books - http://pinicola.ca/books/index.htm > RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0 > on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W > (613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/ > "[The] two fundamental steps of scientific thought - the conjecture and refutation of Popper - have little place in the usual conception of intelligence. If something is to be dismissed as inadequate, it is surely not Darwin [, whose] works manifest the activity of a mind seeking for wisdom, a value which conventional philosophy has largely abandoned." Ghiselen, 1969. Triumph of the Darwinian Method, p 237. > ------------------------------------------------------------ > >
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