21
" One day the Buddha was sistting with some of his monks in the woods. They had just come back from an almsround and were ready to share a mindful lunch together. A farmer passed by, looking distraught.He asked the Buddha, " Monks, have you seen some cows going by here?" " What cows?" the Buddha responded." Well," the man said, " I have four cows and I don't know why, but this morning they all ran aay. I also have two acres of sesame. This year the insects ate the entire crop. I have lost everything: my harvest and my cows. I feel like killing myself." The Buddha said, " Dear friend, we have been sitting here almost an hour and we have not seen any cows passing by. Maybe you should go and lookin the other direction." When the farmer was gone, the Buddha looked at his friends and smiled knowingly. " Dear friends, you are very lucky," he said. " You don't have any cows to lose. "
25
" Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle,” Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside.
This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don’t. And every year it burns, there’s more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve.
Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year.
The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What’s left of them...
“When you think about it from a native plant perspective,” Oyster says, “Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist.”
Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox. "
― Chuck Palahniuk , Lullaby
29
" What’s in an Orange?
Cuba has encouraged foreign investments in agriculture. The Cuban citrus industry was started during the 1960’s to supply the former Soviet Union, as well as other socialist countries in Eastern Europe, with oranges and grapefruit. After the economic crash and the restructuring of the Soviet Union, the demand for citrus crops fell off by about half. In 1994, the National Citrus Corporation was founded in Cuba, and is now known as the “Fruit Trees Enterprise Group.” It consists of 13 nationally owned citrus enterprises, a commercial company and 4 processing plants. Cítricos Caribe S.A. has three cold storage facilities and exports to contracted foreign vendors. A Chilean venture and a Greek-British consortium, both affected by the decline of demand, halted their operations in 2014. However an Israel company has successfully developed huge citrus and tropical fruit plantations on the island, with most of their crops being sold in Europe. Israeli orange groves stretch for miles in the Matanzas Province, east of Havana. The province known chiefly for its white sandy beaches and resorts also has the massive BM Corporation, based in Tel Aviv, operating huge citrus groves and one of its packinghouses there. Its modern processing factory is located in the middle of 115,000 acres of groves. It is known as the world’s largest citrus operation.
Read the award winning bock that is at all the US Military Academies, "
― Hank Bracker
31
" Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing — singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, noone, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time — which it is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere — poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That's what it feels like: getting shed of a routine. Even though one had rebelled terribly against it, even then, one feels uncomfortable when jounced out of the repetitive rut. And so with me. What to do? Where to turn? What ties, what roots? as I hang suspended in the strange thin air of back-home? "
― Sylvia Plath , The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
