News & Articles

The National Union of Friendly Americans (NUFA) has taken in tens of thousands of well intended folks during our Spring Re-information Drive For The Observation Of Land Ethics. Yes, it’s that time of year, a time of renewal, when well intended folks start to think about their old biases and habits and open themselves up to ideas of practicality and sustenance, of our place in a natural world.
Humankind has spent much of its existence removing itself from the natural world as soon as is possible in the misguided belief that things are easier if we all hide indoors, watch TV and pretend that what we do as a species is separate from the workings of the planet.

The nice thing about 2015 is that NUFA has oodles of examples, a plethora of fallacies, to observe as we prove the point that there is a better way to share this space with all other living matter than by paving it over, filling it up, tilling it up and thinking that such practices are sustainable.

So much of the wrongheadedness of our existence is caused by money, of course, and the need for jobs on an industrial scale and with an industrial model. Henry Ford did make automobiles that way but even the old anti-semitic knew you couldn’t push Mother Nature around like factory workers or there would be dire consequences.

So we’re now in a time, a turning point, where we have to call a spade a spade and understand that our collective practices on the face of the earth come with dire consequences. Over time we have happily convinced ourselves that we can dig massive holes in the ground and rearrange waterways and cut the trees and grow crops we don’t actually eat and called it progress.

Economically, such overt short-sighted actions have created temporary jobs but have displaced far more workers in the long run. As we adopted an industrial scale agricultural model we have, over time, emptied the countryside of family farms and decimated communities. We have ignored the natural world and now many farmers live by slogans such as “growing the food, protecting the land” when the reality is in order to keep productivity and earnings they are poisoning the landscape with chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. In reality they are, we are, killing the land, not protecting it.

It is a system doomed to failure in the long run. There isn’t enough life left in the soil to grow anything without artificial means, without killing the cycle of fertility in the soil. That begins to happen with the first application of the industrial model.

In SW Minnesota, nearly all waterways are polluted to the point that fish and kids can’t swim in them. The cause is agricultural runoff. In this legislative session there are hopes to begin to slow the cycle of lifelessness by creating mandatory 50-foot buffers along every ditch, creek, and waterway. Of course everyone agrees we should have clean water, even the farmers say so, but the largest creators of the problem, farmers, are opposed to the notion. The modern farming method is so surrounded by money and myopia it won’t change even if it got kicked in the head by a mule. The model has broken the balance of growth and decay, the means for creating soil in the first place.

That same notion applies to so much of what our economy desires. We have trees, we cut them. We like to pretend that we are simply mimicking natural forest rotation by growing pulp, which is what we have in much of Minnesota. Our forests are primarily one massive pulp farm. A young forest. Over time we have shifted our boreal forests to a 65 percent deciduous base rather than the 65 percent conifer base that was here pre-settlement. That shift in species takes a toll on the landscape, removing water storage and native mosses and allowing grasses and shrubs and other invasive species to move in lock stock and barrel.

It’s a land of little sticks out there across much of our wild north country, sticks and brush and ticks.

It takes work to manage a healthy forest but we have essentially budgeted management of a healthy forest out and simply have come to wait and see what grows in its place after we’ve harvested.  

The wood industry is wonderful at adapting to available wood, from the cutting of black spruce bogs to balsam and spruce, to aspen, birch and finally maple. Give them credit, they finally figured out that if you wait a year or so the bark of cut birch will loosen and allow for making wood products. For years birch just wasn’t valued that much. Not now.
And maple? Lordy, we can pulp that too so maple stands are going just as fast. What pulp species will follow after the removal of the maple?    

Over the past century the reality is that we’ve changed the makeup of the boreal forest to reflect our economic needs rather than reflect the natural systems that might grow one species better than another in order to sustain a biotic community. And in all that harvesting is the reality that waterways have been ignored. Granted there are minimal stream and lake buffers but over time we have greatly reduced the capacity of the land to hold water and along places like the North Shore it means vastly impaired streams. Streams that are hanging on to dear life, streams scoured by flood waters.   

And now folks are arguing against clean water standards when they’re actually arguing for mining jobs, especially copper-nickel mining jobs. Again, all the naysayers are saying that “we all want clean water but…” But what. There is no but. If you give the go ahead for copper-nickel mining you’re essentially giving the go ahead for pollution. You can’t mine without polluting. Impossible. Water will be impaired and air will be fouled. Wetlands will be drained, forests cleared, roads and tracks laid.
All those copper-nickel mining folks say the same thing, “Protecting what we all treasure, our woods, water, wildlife.”

Impossible.
A landscape impaired.
It’s spring, the time of renewal. NUFA still has openings for our Spring Re-information Drive For The Observation of Land Ethics.