#36
Beitrag
von Manfred » Mi 4. Mär 2015, 18:57
Joel heute auf Facebook:
"from Joel Salatin, March 3, 2015
I spent the last day flying home from two weeks in Australia, where I did seminars in Melbourne,
Sydney, Brisbane, Cairns, Byron Bay, Noosa, and Metreeba. As I came back through security in Los
Angeles, after having wound my way through immigration, two things happened that made me shake
my head about where we are as a culture.
The first was a lady ahead of me sending a well-protected fur-looking coat through the security
machine. The guy behind me commented about it and I touched the hem of it and asked her if it was
real. She quickly responded: "Of course it's not real; I would never wear something real." Isn't that an
amazing statement? When you see it in all its starkness and judgment, it's almost surreal, like something
out of a sci-fi movie.
We've become such an artificial culture that the mere thought of being real repulses us. What a
shame. I quickly told her that animals were what she should wear, and she began mumbling about animal
rights. Not willing to let her get off so easily, I challenged her about carrot rights and killing them. By that
time the conveyor was moving and that was about all the conversation we could have, but the idea that
wearing petroleum is superior to wearing animal furs not only disrespects the very bedrock of ecological
function (life-death-decompostion-regeneration) but extracts humans from a participatory role in the
ecosystem.
In our area of Augusta County, more than half of the foxes now have mange, a debilitating parasitic
disease that gradually wastes away foxes. Why? Because they aren't being harvested by humans. You
see, foxes don't have many predators in our area. Ditto for many fur-bearing wild animals. Old-timers in
our area who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s note that boys got spending money in those days by running
trap lines and selling the pelts for clothing. In those days, a good fox pelt would fetch $50. That was big
money for a teenager in those days, equivalent to a couple hundred dollars today. That created balance
in the ecology and reduced rabies and predation on farmers' chickens and other livestock. Too bad those
days are gone, with good pelts hardly even sellable now. Boys aren't learning how to become men, the
ecology is denied human participation, and pastured poultry farmers are inundated with predators. To be
fair, I'm sure a few gals ran trap lines too.
"The Greatest Estate" is a fairly new book in Australia about how the Aborigines created an Edenic
place over many centuries of careful land management. The book is akin to newer books in the U.S.
showing how Native Americans managed the land with hunting and fire to build the rich, deep soils we
are still raping today with corn, beans, and chemical fertilizers. Australia in 1820 averaged 20 percent
organic matter in its soils. Organic matter is primarily decomposing vegetation and a direct relative of
sequestered carbon, which according to many is the key to climate change.
The U.S., with herds of buffalo 50 miles long and 30 miles wide, averaged 8 percent organic matter.
Each pound of organic matter holds four pounds of water; clearly a reduction of 19 percent in Australia and
7 percent in the U.S. has reduced water retentive capacity at an exponential level; it's also accounted for the
lion's share of the release of carbon from the soil into the atmosphere. By far and away the most efficacious
way to address atmospheric carbon is to put it into the soil, which perennials, herding, and ancient management
actually did. Australian fossils show 10 foot tall wombats.
On my first trip to Australia 15 years ago, I touched a couple of wombats that a lady had tamed using
carrots as a treat. They're like hard-shelled meg-groundhogs. Herbivores, modern-day wombats weigh
about 30-50 pounds and make burrows that swallow pickup trucks. According to recent archaeological
findings, the Aborigines gradually hunted out these slow-moving herbivorous behemoths and then turned
to strategic fire as an alternative. That worked fairly well. They also cut (without chainsaws) trees and dropped
them into water courses to create terraces and deltas, elevating the rivers above the landscape. It was quite
remarkable, this landscape the British convicts landed on in the 1800s.
I talked with one fellow who was trying to buy a ranch. He had the ranch manager's notebook from the
late 1800s, and that ranch fed 28,000 cows. Today, it can feed only 7,000. That's a typical example of how
improper grazing management has reduced the fertility and productivity of this great land mass. This was my
eighth trip to Australia, and what I'm learning is that it's a canary for ecological function. Remember, this has
nothing to do with cows; it has everything to do with how the cows were managed.
For several reasons, Australia is on the leading edge of what industrial farming does to the ecology. It's
not pretty. Because it's a more fragile ecosystem, things that hurt here in more temperate North America hurt
even faster in Australia. This is why the most aggressive solutions are coming out of Australia: permaculture,
keyline water management, pasture cropping. These are commercial-scale answers to all the destruction, and
are templates now being adapted throughout the world by people of conscience.
The second incident was in the same airport security line. I was in the TSA precheck line. Adjacent to us
was another line with five TSA agents doing nothing. While those of us in our line inched forward and finally
got our place in the radiation machine, a man noted that it was pretty inefficient for one side to be stacked up
and the other to be nobody. I mean nobody. The whole 15 minutes we were inching our way through and I was
having my conversation with the faux fur lady, the adjacent line had nary a person and all the TSA folks just stood
around looking lost.
The guy pointing out the obvious said that was indicative of government waste. The lady next to him took
issue: "They aren't the government." That made me look up and pay attention. The fellow next to her who made
the statement hardly knew how to respond. What do you say to such a stupid statement? He diplomatically pointed
out that indeed, yes, they were the government. Nonplussed, the lady--undoubtedly a well-educated sophisticate
since she was in the TSA pre-check express line--retorted "The TSA governs itself."
Dear, dear folks, this lady votes. How do educated people say such things? It makes me shake my head. It
also makes me realize why our founders were paranoid of a democracy. They called it mob rule. They wanted us
to have a republic, which limited voting to people with a stake in the country. Early on, you had to be a land owner.
Of course, voting requirements were abused during Jim Crowe and other periods. But I think the spirit of limiting
the vote is good if it can flush out the people who have an inherent anti-liberty bias. Who would have such a prejudice
today? People who want to take from producers and give to non-producers.
People who know nothing. I think a simple test at the voting booth with 10 basic questions would be fine to weed
out folks who don't know enough about our country to make a decision. Or how about this: only taxpayers can vote.
Simple, direct. If you don't pay taxes, you don't vote. That would limit the vote to people who pull their weight. That
half of Americans don't pay taxes but all get to vote is one reason we're in such an anti-freedom situation. Anyway, if
I ever ran for office, I would champion, among other things, a republic and not a democracy, and an integrity vote instead
of a shyster vote. The very notion that someone would say the TSA is not the government--it's unspeakably anti-liberty.
Enough for one day. Now go participate in the environment by buying from organic matter-building farmers, and
go read the constitution--it's really an amazingly readable document, despite what academic focus groups say."
