I drove up from Kansas City to Omaha. Was satisfied to see the Missouri Mitigation effort in Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa. Despite farmers claim that the Corp. of Engineers orchestrated the Missouri River flood 4 years ago, (I think?), to force land prices in the flood plain down, and make it available for restoring the river flood plain, chutes, and backwater. Startling is the continued wholesale destruction outside these areas, to erase any ditch, tree, fencerow, or any grass covered " idle land" ( as the farmer says), to grow more crops. I have been thinking of a way to express this for sometime, like every trip in rural America! it occurs to me, we in the conservation minority, need categorize this in what could be considered "shocking terms". I have determined that " unintentional genocide", is shocking, because genocide is a term, which harkens back to the worse of human culture, Unintentional, because, like the human genocide we are all familiar with, a lot of people who might have had knowledge, but not involved with the systematic implementation, did not object, and maintained deniability during and after the fact. This since, has been a galvanizing attitude in the human population, hopefully, there will be outcry, to stop this in the future. So with our natural world being stripped from around us, perhaps the table conversation with dinner party guests, political meetings, the subject might be focused on unintentional genocide. Expressed with this though, I realize that the average farmer has no will to rid the world of pheasants, quail, rabbits, songbirds, might even feed these at the backyard bird feeder! This also includes the investor who has holding in Monsanto, is a charitable contributor to Universities which provides product and management to continue the unabated assault of the countryside. The theory is while there is not intentional destruction or actively killing the species, the fact is if you destroy the brush pile, corner swamp, fencerow, and force out the game birds, rabbits, song birds, et.al., we force them to migrate to "other" habitat, most of which is also gone, we have now exterminated the species, not country wide, probably not even county wise, but alarmingly enough any casual viewer would be conscious of it! Do we want to be the people who stood silently by and facilitated this? You can even expound this with governmental unintelligent and unintentional duplicity. After all the U.S. government used a term of "total war". On our own Indians! We used the food resources, buffalo, to force the submission of a people by starvation, and in ability to fight for their way of life. A co-incidence, the buffalo were nearly extinct. I doubt the harden buffalo hunter, the cattleman, the sportsman, or the people who came to find a farm, on the wilderness to make a life for them selves and their kids, ever under stood the real issue, and probably waxed nostalgically over the passing of the herds, not realizing the small part of their activities contributed to the solution. Lets not let this happen again. We are a culture of "shock therapy", we ignored Japan till Pearl Harbor, now we ignore the "dead zone" I call little Iowa, where half of top soil goes with it's contaminants), ground water either polluted, or depleted, lesser prairie chicken on endangered species list, bobwhite quail habitat shrinking uninhabitable, and last but not least, the pheasants pushed back to shrinking corners of habitat that the plow has spared! We have seen it coming, and as "pogo" in comic books said, "we have seen the enemy, and he is US!".
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