Tag: GM Crops

Aug 07 2008

The Green Desert: Field Trip to New York City

This is a continuation of The Green Desert and The Green Paradox.  The quick update is:  more flowers; still many bees; growing number of moths and butterflies.  Still no bees on flowering plants around the Roundup Ready corn and soybean fields.  

This story starts about a week ago with a phone accounting of all this to a friend in NYC, who I had called to tell we were coming to the city for a few days.

Specifically, I told him not only about the bees, but the complexities of mass production and paying the bills on a family farm, ala how my father works alone the amount of ground that would have been 3 families’ work just 50 years ago, and grew much more than they did then as well-all while using (at minimum) poisons that (at minimum) bees don’t like and seem obviously to be out of balance with nature.

So my friend said, “Well, what’s wrong is the feeling that you have to grow that much.”  Which got me to thinking.

Jul 24 2008

The Green Paradox

I’ve sat down to write a followup of “The Green Desert” many times now.  My apologies that my schedule has prevented me from devoting the proper time needed to organize my thoughts.  

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But a good thing has happened as a result of this delay – time has passed and our overgrown lawn is even more beautiful and/or unruly, depending on your point of view.  Many many more flowers (and weeds) have bloomed.  And most germane to the discussion, many many more honeybees have arrived.

Jul 09 2008

The Green Desert

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While looking out my window in the middle of farmland in SE Indiana, I see woods at various distances from approximately a quarter to three-quarters of a mile away.  In between me and those woods are soybean and corn fields, scattered houses, their lawns, a few roads and lanes, the margins of those fields and roads, and (closest to me) our yard, that we decided not to mow this year.  It is mid-July, and in all of this very green, rural scene, the only substantial group of flowers of any kind is our yard.  A little island of “proper” flowers, and flowering “weeds”.  And it is full of bugs, namely BEES.

Across countless acres, I see nothing but fields and lawns.