It’s taken way too long, but given the blindingly obvious, the mainstream media is now reporting (fairly often) on climate change and the destruction of our planet through land management…or the lack of. Plastic litter, changing of natural water courses, the constant stripping of the rain forests, drilling in vulnerable areas and the list goes on…
When I was a wee boy growing up in Angus, Scotland, we were told at school that the farmers were the keepers of the countryside. Years later as an adult having a taste of the world through military deployments, I could understand that the farmers weren’t alone with that responsibility. They required the backing of Government and the land owners.
As I got older (and wiser) again, I learnt that Governments and land owners could be “bought” by big business.
Sadly, this has happened way too often. Not just in the far off lands of the jungles and swamps, deserts and grass lands…but also here at home in places like the USA and my own dear UK.
Again as a youngster I remember tattie picking during the school holidays for some pocket money. I’d look at the fields around me with the different crops, shooting past the bus window as I travelled to the farm from Dundee. But every now and then there would be an empty ploughed field with nothing growing. I asked an adult about it. She told me that farmers leave the field fallow to help the soil regenerate for the following year’s crop. Rotating the fields and leaving one fallow each year is not just good for land, but it’s good for what grows, and it’s good for the wildlife too…everyone’s a winner.
Well, pretty much all over the world, there’s extremely little of that great land management now.
With an over populated planet where the people have more than doubled in just the last 50 years, 7.5 billion are demanding a Western standard of living. Just to start with they all have a cell phone. Wars over rare earth materials and lands stripped bare. Let alone the rest of the needs.
Global consumerism has led to intensive farming all pressured by big business.
Intensive farming…I never heard that as a kid!
Poisonous sprays pushing all living things that pray on the fields towards extinction. Worn out soil with no break in between. Being fed with chemicals that seep down into the ground and find the easy route into our precious waterways.
The crazy speed at which our planet’s lungs, the rain forests are being stripped away, is causing carbon to be released into the atmosphere at an alarming rate. Two thirds of all carbon is under the earth trapped by the likes of the jungle and the ice fields of the north and south.
Release that carbon, and the planet warms up. The warmer the planet, the heavier the rainstorms…washing off the depleted soil leading to flash floods and drought.
It’s happening…right here…right now.
Shame on big business. Shame on Governments around the world. Shame on landowners. Shame on farmers that capitulate.
No longer keepers of the countryside!
Bob Shepherd 
As usual a lot of sense. However using politician and responsibility in the same sentence is an oxymoron, and as long as they are allowed to take freebies in whatever form —why change? Leave it for the next lot who take over the reins. (our kids)