Harold has been dismantling his feedlot.
He built it over 40 years ago and eventually achieved a 30,000 head
capacity. You can imagine the accumulation of steel, rubber, railroad
ties, nails, car bodies, pipe, chains, wire, horseshoes and baler twine.
He has completed most of the hauling off and is ripping the ground that
has been packed like road bed. He’s planted it to millet. He is
returning the land to its natural state.
Harold’s
reason for razing the feedlot is, of course, urban encroachment. The
land is too ‘valuable’ upon which to raise livestock. In the next few
years Harold’s feedlot will become part of the city. Crisscrossed with
tile, cable, wire, iron and asphalt. It will be drilled, scraped, paved,
disemboweled, pounded and polluted. Millions of tons of concrete,
brick, timber, glass and iron will rest in or on old feed alleys and
sick pens. Oceans of sewage, mountains of refuse and purgatories of
poison will work their way into the soil upon which the city is built.
It will become the receptacle for the waste of human herds.
Ancient
civilizations as mighty as ours have disappeared. All that remains of
them are the ruins of the cities, the Aztec and Egyptian pyramids, the
great walls, the foundations of majestic coliseums and castles. But it
is hard to find the ugly footprints of olden agriculture, a hog wallow, a
horse corral, the trail to water, the milking shed, an irrigation
canal, an overgrazed pasture, the chopped down woods. They seem to have
vanished.
I think that is because, though agricultural production changes wide expanses of land, the changes are not deep.
If
you want to look at long lasting destruction of the environment you
need go no further than any major city. If people were to abandon
Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Chicago, Denver or San Francisco, how long
would it take the earth to heal the scars left by man? How many years
after abandonment would we still see pieces of the Golden Gate Bridge,
Denver International Airport or the Empire State building? Hundreds?
Thousands? Compare that to the time it would take a cleared pasture, a
clear-cut forest or a highly fertilized irrigated desert to return to
its natural state?
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