Tree, Why Do You Wait?Some people walk in their sleep, but the author of this book seems to be sleepwriting. The author has sandwiched interesting and well-written accounts of two midwestern Mid·west or Middle West A region of the north-central United States around the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi Valley. It is generally considered to include Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and towns between two long, gloomy gloom·y adj. gloom·i·er, gloom·i·est 1. Partially or totally dark, especially dismal and dreary: a damp, gloomy day. 2. chapters about the demise Death. A conveyance of property, usually of an interest in land. Originally meant a posthumous grant but has come to be applied commonly to a conveyance that is made for a definitive term, such as an estate for a term of years. of America's rural values. Critchfield's main argument is simple and simplistic sim·plism n. The tendency to oversimplify an issue or a problem by ignoring complexities or complications. [French simplisme, from simple, simple, from Old French; see simple : The "kind of urban culture we have in America America [for Amerigo Vespucci], the lands of the Western Hemisphere—North America, Central (or Middle) America, and South America. The world map published in 1507 by Martin Waldseemüller is the first known cartographic use of the name. is going to depend on how many Americans farm." He attempts to prove his thesis by selecting the people from a present farming community and a former farming community to speak for themselves. Their words give the book the authentic sound of the grain belt, but Critchfield refuses to let the real story come through. We've always known that every solution brings new problems. But Critchfield can take no comfort in the fact that since World War II crops grown by two farmers can feed 50 people instead of a pre-war three, that people live longer and healthier, and that the death toll in wars is the lowest it's been since the Renaissance. Today's farming, Critchfield says, extracts a big environmental price. It can "compact the soil, reduce organic matter, and endanger en·dan·ger tr.v. en·dan·gered, en·dan·ger·ing, en·dan·gers 1. To expose to harm or danger; imperil. 2. To threaten with extinction. wildlife when plowing." All true, but also true yesterday. Anyone who has walked in the southern forests has climbed in and out of old erosion gullies five to 10 feet deep where farmers between 1800 and 1950 inflicted environmental damage that makes today's farmers look like saints. Critchfield cannot shut out hope entirely. Many of the people he interviewed believe much more strongly than he does in the power of American imagination and our science and technology. It could save us, Critchfield allows, but "such hopes lie in the distant future." That is true only because people who have swallowed Critchfield's bitter pill have slumbered through America's economic restructuring restructuring - The transformation from one representation form to another at the same relative abstraction level, while preserving the subject system's external behaviour (functionality and semantics). of the 1980s and will continue to sleep through the present revolution in managing natural resources. |
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