The Last Prairie Meets King Corn
Guess who loses? The Independent - not a media source I generally link to - has an article that looks at the impact of the ethanol craze on the last of the native prairie in the United States. It is a bleak picture, indeed.
And now almost unnoticed by urban America, one of the great ecological disasters of modern times is unfolding as an ethanol-fuelled gold rush engulfs the Great Plains and risks destroying what is left of North America's most endangered ecosystem, the native prairie. The last 35 million acres of prairie, deliberately left alone to preserve a precious ecology, is being ploughed up to produce ethanol from corn.
The tiny Beaumont hotel is famous (among aviators at least) for having three different guest registers: one each for pilots, motorcyclists and other guests. Pete the rancher came striding in, wearing jeans and cowboy shirt and sat down in the small café overhung by aircraft memorabilia to tell his and Beaumont's story.
For over 100 years his family has been fattening cattle on rich Kansas Bluestem prairie grass, among the last remaining stands of original prairie. Most of the tallgrass that once covered millions of acres of the Great Plains has been ploughed under. Only isolated pockets remain, some preserved by conservation grants.
Now, even in the Flint Hills, what is left of the prairie is under threat as farmers race to cash in on a bonanza created by planting corn for ethanol production in order to ease America's worries about future fuel supplies. The corn economy is nothing short of a disaster for the environment, for the farm economy and potentially for the Flint Hills, in Mr Ferrell's view.
The prairie is some of the most fertile and productive land on the planet. Nowadays it has become the corn-and-soybean belt, with only remnants of the short-grass prairie providing grazing for livestock. A typical section of prairie grass shelters nearly 800 types of birds, mammals and reptiles. It also thrives on being heavily grazed and then left fallow. Prairie grasses hide nearly two-thirds of their buds and mass beneath the ground and when Native Americans set fire to it to burn off brush, the fresh growth lured back the buffalo they depended on……..
………Driving across the plains of Kansas to its geographical centre, I watched its farmers bring in their biggest corn harvest since World War II. Corn now completely dominates the landscape. Bruce Babbitt, like Al Gore, is a nearly man of US presidential politics. Like Al Gore he is an environmentalist who ran for the White House and failed. Babbitt fell at the first hurdle, in Iowa, in the heart of America's Corn Belt although later became US Secretary of the Interior in charge of its national parks and is now chairman of the WWF(US).
"Riding across the Iowa landscape at dawn is a beautiful experience," Mr Babbitt said. "You can almost hear the corn growing." It is only when you stop to think that the beauty starts to fade, there is just one crop, no wildlife, the skies are empty and the creeks run muddy. It is an industrial landscape stripped of its diversity, an American tragedy.'
As I have said many times: it has never been easier to rape the planet. Just say you're fighting global warming and any ecological depravity you want to indulge in is perfectly ok with the Al Gore crowd. Ethanol has an energy overhead that approaches unity: it uses close to one unit of energy to produce one unit of ethanol energy. It is using critical water resources, it is driving up - rapidly - the cost of food. It is dramatically lessening the amount of food aid available to the rest of the world.
And now it is killing what little is left of the prairie.
Energy, Environment, Insanity | Gaius Friday, 19 October , 2007
By Sissy Willis, Friday, 19 October , 2007 @ 2:20 pm
Cascades of unforeseen consequences. And please don’t confuse Al Gore & Company with the facts. They have seen the light.
Your new look is quite thrilling, by the way. Manifest destiny?
By Gaius, Friday, 19 October , 2007 @ 2:22 pm
Heh
By feeblemind, Friday, 19 October , 2007 @ 5:06 pm
Grass is being torn up in my area and replaced with crops as well. Not a lot yet, but much more will be torn out if prices stay high. Most of the pasture being converted to crop ground is highly erodible. It will not produce top yields. We have been down this road before on the Great Plains.
By mark sullivan, Saturday, 20 October , 2007 @ 12:40 am
Why farmers fall for this every-time, I’ll never understand. Crops have to be planted at the same time, and harvested pretty much at the same time. There’s no being first to market, in any serious way in farming. Everybody is going to harvest around the same time. So all that happens is that tons of over production gets dumped on the market, and the price crashes, sooner or later. But now you’ve ruined more cropland, or intact prairie. And your still broke, and in debt. If everybody would just be disciplined for once, the prices would stabilize at some reasonable amount. Some of the last tallgrass prairie still exists here in the Ozarks, because this is not row crop farmland. It’s hilly, and wooded, best used for livestock grazing. I get depressed every-time I visit the corn growing states. The lack of wildlife, muddy rivers, few forests, and sameness to the landscape is sad. Industrial farming is a disaster to the land and it’s people.
By syn, Saturday, 20 October , 2007 @ 6:16 am
And to think, the ethanol con is perpetuated by silly celebrities who fly to Africa in order to know what it’s like to poo in the woods.
Environmentalists are so far removed from respecting nature they must destroy it to give them cause for concern.