You mean Southerners like me in Virginia who are actually doing that “fighting” and it’s making absolutely no difference whatsoever
is that who you’re talking about?
I’m literally 10 toes down on the ground trying to do exactly the thing that everybody says should be happening which is democratizing community development and nobody gives a fucking fuck
they will show up when you give them resources but never step up to lead after
I’ve started so many goddamn community things but the second I pull back from them to let others lead nobody picks up the slack
I’m excruciatingly done with over and over and over trying to help people take care of themselves
no, they are saying that by discarding mississippi, you are ignoring like 45%+ of the state that didn't vote for whatever politician you hate. and also you are ignoring the centuries of disenfranchisement that prevents more people from voting against whatever politician you hate. it's not a monolith. mississsippi is the blackest state in the union yet coastal liberals who are supposedly anti-racist are quick to throw out the state.
Having actually lived in Mississippi, I’ve seen the disenfranchisement first hand. But what can we do? We can’t fix Mississippi, they will have to want to fix themselves, so why not let them explore more fully the consequences of their own actions? Mississippi thinks California is keeping them down, then without California they would have to start blaming themselves more.
You know, we can blame China (another country I've lived in) all we want for our problems, and China definitely blames the US for a lot of its problems...but at the end of the day, the Chinese and the USA don't really have to care what the others think about them.
i'm from there and there are so many people trying to fix it. somehow you lived there so long and didn't realize this fact, bless your heart. (this is helping prove my point btw)
who in mississippi is blaming california for their problems, other than state politicians who think that is effective political rhetoric? all of the voters i know can read past that BS even if we have different political ideology.
idk this is just my experience growing up there and then later studying the south as an academic. we are used to being condescended to.
How is it condescending to say that Mississippi should just do its own thing and we don't have to bother ourselves with their choices? I feel like we are in a damned if we do, damned if we don't situation. Whatever we say, or even if we say nothing, will be seen in Mississippi as being condescended to. Just us existing is seen as condescended. This is why we should just give up, we do our thing and they do their thing, if Mississippi is still offended by our existence, we can just ignore them.
So? How's that any different than everyone in Buffalo just having to bend over and take it because NYC and Albany want to do spreadsheets and services instead of factories?
I mean it'd be less divided insofar as the minority would be more thoroughly subjugated by the state. No pesky federal government getting in the way. Though that's probably not a good thing.
Extremely wrong how? There's a great an well sourced section in Vaclav Smil's How to Feed the World about this very topic. I also cited a specific erosion figure. But I guess that doesn't matter.
looking forward to reading it! definitely skeptical about your erosion rates, will have to go do my own research later (quick look, USDA estimates for the Corn Belt (~5 tons/acre/year on average)). if your info is coming from one book then i'm doubly skeptical, though i would bet that a soil scientist would probably agree with me and i'm def wondering if you might've misread the book?
i'm not a farmer, but i do manage woodlands, have a huge garden, volunteered on farms over the years, worked in a sustainable ag non-profit, and have even tried distributing sweet potatoes, etc, so i have an avid interest in agriculture and our food system.
aside from the fact that the soil is one of the three most important components for growing food, therefore it's extremely important to take care of it if we want our species to live into future centuries... there is a lot of evidence that shows that industrial ag creates erosion problems (one easy example: all of the national forests in my area was degraded farm land that they converted to woodlands in the 30s, because they learned this fact that hard way then). believing that hunger is a solved problem because of 20th century style agriculture is a fallacy. the dust bowl is one historical example that shows how this system can fail spectacularly, and it's all based in how we manage the topsoil, a natural resource just like oil or water.
we lost the moment we tried to overcome natural systems with chemicals (we've had a good run but i believe it's gonna be an anomaly in history). you can use science + natural systems in your favor to grow food. taking care of the topsoil is objective number one. food is a byproduct of good soil. the soil is a living system and chemicals kill that ecosystem to our detriment.
technology is definitely not the answer here. you are welcome to go try to grow food on mars without soil. good luck!
I initially copied the wrong number, the correct number is 1mm per year, coming from a Unas Amherst study not Smil’s book. It’s high vs pre industrial rates, but not catastrophic and as Smil points out there are plenty of places where land being farmed industrially is gaining soil.
glad we're working from the same figure now. 1mm per year is not insignificant, and soil is not a renewable resource... probably a fine amount of soil loss for a farmer's lifetime, but a land manager needs to think over centuries and not in profit cycles.
> and as Smil points out there are plenty of places where land being farmed industrially is gaining soil.
i would bet at least $100 this happens where they do cover crops and actually manage the soil as a resource to be preserved
Thats 1mm in the upper Midwest around the Great Lakes, wind is doubtless a factor. You can’t generalize to all industrial ag from a dozen sites in 3 geographically similar states.
Right, but tillage is not a set in stone practice. The Nebraska Corn Board is now advocating no-til corn planting[1]. Apparently it's already dominant in Western Canada and more than half of Montana cropland is managed without tilling.
Herbicide is a whole different discussion and probably too deep a rabbit hole so far down thread.
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