Return of the Dust Bowl Days
Aug 28th, 2006 at 11:05 pm by Susie
Tomorrow’s Times is running a piece about the severe drought conditions in the northern Great Plains.
My friend MB (of Draft Gore 2008 PAC fame) has been telling me about this for weeks now. But I assured her there’s no such thing as global warming, so she feels a lot better now.
This might be a good week to catch “The Corporation,” which is playing on cable. Maybe Americans will start to pay attention to our energy-inefficient way of farming when they have to shell out $10 for a head of lettuce, and we’re going to war over water instead of oil:
Ranchers are turning to desperate expedients. Withered sunflower plants, normally raised for seeds and oil, are being fed to livestock. Cattle are being hauled hundreds of miles to healthier feedlots, despite soaring fuel costs. Water is being poured in to refill natural watering holes that have gone dry. The governor of South Dakota even issued a proclamation declaring a week to pray for rain.
Despite these efforts, many ranchers are being forced to sell their herds and get out of the business. At one livestock market, 37,000 cattle were sold this summer, compared with 7000 last year.
The hardest-hit states, Nebraska and the Dakotas, have been hit by several dry years, a winter with little snow, and now record heat. Recent rains in some areas have been described as merely “a drip in a bucket.”
Even the Corn Palace of Mitchell, South Dakota, a tourist attraction normally wrapped in hundreds of thousands of ears of corn, had to announce that it would not redecorate this year due to a lack of corn.
Switchgrass.. I’m serious. Everyone on the Great Plains should be foaming at the mouth over switchgrass. I think I might even have Eric convinced to cash it all in and become freakin’ switchgrass farmers.
BTW, Susie, the correct link for my work on Great Plains drought is http://draftgore2008.org/node/261. Just thought you might want to know ;-).
The Dust Bowl happened before global warming got going. The Great Plains has always had some severe weather swings from time to time. Farmers seem to get into a pattern of ignoring expert advice and trying to push their yields, which works until the weather changes a bit.
Since the Dust Bowl the government has tried to convince farmers to plant a row of trees between fields to hold down the topsoil, but many of them would rather put in that extra row of corn instead.
It’s not so much that global warming causes extreme weather to happen, but that it causes extreme weather, which has always happened, to happen more often.
So looking at native plants and animals that have evolved to live in these extreme conditions seems very sensible. Switchgrass sounds interesting. They might also consider raising bison instead of cattle.
We eat more bison than we do beef. It’s better for you, because there’s less fat. My wife grew up eating at Tatanka Take-Out.
For further scary news about the Great Plains, do a search on the “Oglala aquifer”.
Gee, it’s a shame the jury is still out regarding global warming. We might be able to start working on the problem, otherwise.
*sigh* I want adults back in charge.
Meat production uses about 100 times more water than vegetable production, depending on the kind of animal, their location, and their diet. I’ve been personally conserving about 400,000 gallons of water each year by not eating meat. Taking my wife and kids into consideration, we conserve over 1 million gallons of water per year compared to if we were to eat meat.
This is why I became a vegetarian. Why don’t you?
What more do I need to say about it?
I only eat meat two or three times a week. It’s probably easier to cut back than to do it completely.
Cutting back is good to the degree one cuts; I have to acknowledge that. Every bit (or is that byte?) helps.
Personally, I just quit altogether when I first understood the situation, and meat quickly stopped seeming like something I wanted to touch, much less eat. It also made me very sensitive to the suffering of animals, which I think accounts for the tendency of vegetarians to be a little critical of those who aren’t. I’m sorry if I sometimes come across that way.