The Big Squeeze. Where do we go from here?

Part of success -- with sustainability like everything else -- is staying engaged even when there seems to be no answer. When things get really hard, its easy to let your mind step back from the problem and kind of give up. It's very frustrating to have no answer while the problem stares you in the face. It feels like something has to give -- its just not going to be the unsolved problem.

It's times like these that people disengage -- and it's times like these we can't disengage, or we lose. This is the lesson we learn when we see real life heroes doing the mundane heroic work of raising their children, of getting the job done, of continuing the conversation even when every cell in the body wants to scream, holler and leave.

Here are two sides of one of those frustrating impasses: farms and farming vs. the growth and development of Frederick County.



This article by Ike Wilson in the Frederick News Post captures some of the issues that might be best summed up by the opening line, "A merger of city dwellers with rural living continues to impose problems for agriculture..."

Development has put the squeeze on our farmland, and Wilson touches on several of the conflict points. I suggest you read it and understand that this conflict won't go away until it's solved. Sit with the tension.

Here are a few points I don't think get made well enough in our stilted public dialogue:

--- Our population is growing and everytime we put in a new toilet or sink we are adding burden to our over-burdened wastewater system, which in turn burdens the Chesapake Bay with death. Maryland and the U.S. EPA are very industrious when it comes to regulating farms, but they are not so industrious when it comes to asking all those builders and flushers to carry their fair burden.

-- Economies of scale are forcing farmers to expand into what are known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation -- CAFOs. With regard to pollution, CAFOs are like farms on steroids. But to a farmer trying to run a business, scaling up is one of few options.

-- Many people from urban backgrounds want to live in the country and many from rural areas want to live nearer to work. This should be a strength for Frederick County! People want to live here and whether they know it or not they want to preserve the natural and agricultural aesthetic of our land. (Slipping into a mini-rant: I just wish these suburbanites who fancy themselves nature lovers would preserve our natural aesthetic, instead of living in ugly developments that seem to sprout like cancerous weeds on our hills and dales. I also want them to understand that living in the semi-rural comes with the earthy reality of living next to farms. Oh, and one more thing -- what are these folks going to do when their ugly development is surrounded by 50 other ugly developments? Move to Pennsylvania or West Virgina and muck them up, I guess.)

We need farms. We need land on which people can live. Neither of these facts are going to change. Stay engaged. Don't give up.

A Sustainable Global Population?

In his April 5, 2009 New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof talks about the increasing need for more effective family planning activities in developing nations -- his example is a woman from Haiti. I'm posting the link because we should remember that an ever growing global population is as dire a challenge as any we have ever faced.

I also think this issue serves as a great model for understanding sustainability. A great deal of the column addresses the promise and challenge of effective contraception and counseling; it isn't until the end that we learn that the sustainable solution is economic stability and growth, or as Kristof put it "There’s abundant evidence that when parents are confident that their children will live, they will have fewer and invest more in each of them."

"...are confident that their children will live..." How's that for a little cold water in the face.

Effective contraception can put a little pause in population growth for a bit, but it will take the forming of a solid economy for a real change in trends. Similarly, there are lots of things we can do to minimize the damage we cause now, like recycling or driving a more fuel efficient car and driving much less, but it will take a new economy to start resembling sustainability.