If you are successfully receiving our holocom, you should be able to hear my voice and see the 3-D holographic images we are holcoming. In case you are simply reading a transcript of our holog, you will have to imagine what I am describing of the landscape along the shores of Lake Champlain in New Vermont.
Notice the grassy slopes that remain between the industrial quarries and their landscape-disrupting chutes and conveyor belts. There you can see a bucolic vision of a much earlier time: dozens of herds of goats, llamas, alpacas, and sheep, lazily grazing despite the mechanical noises surrounding them, tended by shepherds and dogs, apparently equally oblivious to the racket. These domesticated animals and those raised in the small interior valleys provide literally all the wool needed to clothe the entire citizenry of New Vermont and to provide our small nation with its second largest export, after granite and crushed stone: raw and woven wool.
Now, let’s look at the farmland in the middle of the landscape. Notice the tremendous variety of crops being grown, literally thousands of species, many of them super-hybrids developed at the University of Vermont’s (UVM) world famous College of Agriculture. There, at the turn of the century, agri-biologists and foresighted policy-makers joined forces to plan for and eventually enable the former state of Vermont to become food self-sufficient.
Most of the agricultural land you can see is divided into rectangular fenced plots that are exactly equal in area: ten by forty meters. If you look carefully, you may be able to make out the almost transparent netting wrapped around the horizontal fence pieces. This is thermo-netting, developed at UVM’s Cold Climate Agricultural Laboratory, and is used to extend Vermont’s naturally short growing season well into the autumn and to allow planting of most crops to begin in early May, when there is still lots of snow on the ground and killing-frosts occur almost every night.
In the first half of the century, of course, global warming had significantly expanded Vermont’s growing season so that it ran from March until November, but with the enormous decline in the use of fossil fuels over the past fifty years, some of the more obvious (and occasionally beneficial) effects of global warming have vanished. In fact, the northern hemisphere is currently experiencing a Little Ice Age with average annual temperatures ten degrees below what they had been in the twentieth century and the shortest growing seasons worldwide since the end of the last Little Ice Age in the mid-eighteenth century.
Despite a very short growing season, advances in cold-climate organic agriculture and the guiding neo-Socialist philosophy of New Vermont’s Constitution, which we call “Community Responsibility,” have made it possible for New Vermont to support a geographically concentrated population that has grown slowly, but steadily over the past one hundred years from 400,000 to just over four million.
New Vermont is very proud of its progressive food policies, which is why you can see that there is far less feed corn being grown in its fields than in low-population density countries like Quebec or Scandanavia where red meat is apparently still an important part of the diet. New Vermont’s non-red meat dietary policy was the result of agri-scientists recognizing in the late twentieth century that corn (needed for raising beef) was the ultimate unsustainable and habitat-destroying crop, due to its reliance on:
(1) petroleum-based chemical fertilizers, which put further pressure on diminishing supplies of fossil-fuels; in addition, runoff from fertilized fields polluted streams and rivers, killing off useful wildlife
(2) irrigation, which siphons off water needed for drinking and, in some areas, for food fish, like Salmon, to spawn.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment