more opinions about children

I need to share with you all that I am terribly surprised about something.  Let me start by saying… admitting.. that I have a preconceived notion of all things religious.  

I think we are so bombarded by extremes about religion that my opinions are justified. You hear much more about the religious fanatics starting a cult in Montana, Texas, or San Diego. So much so, that I might guarantee that this image evokes an emotion in you that might be negative.  However, it must be argued that the news rarely mentions the good news or the reasonable opinions of different sects.  

So, my admission is this… the Christian Science Monitor is a great periodical and has become a constant source of information for me.  Go to the wikipedia reference information, here, and you will see it was formed specifically to not evangelize and is not a religious themed newspaper.

There is no point in sharing this except I felt it was an elephant in the room that I had to address before continuing to link you all to articles I find useful.

So, now that that is out of the way… let’s discuss an article I happened upon.  It’s about overpopulation.

The author discusses the current articles being published about over-population and criticizes what has been said.  For one, he didn’t like this article, citing for example, that:

And if we’re to blame for the emissions of all of our progeny forever and ever, doesn’t blame equally fall upon our progenitors, going all the way back to a clump of self-replicating molecules some four billion years ago?

He also briefly mentions this article where there is a simple conclusion to over population: educating women.  And, if any of you have ever seen Idiocracy, the following argument sure rings true:

And is it really a wise strategy to deploy environmental stewardship to urge people to voluntarily stop having kids? Even if such a strategy worked (a big if), the only people to heed this advice be those who care about the environment, while those who don’t care about the environment would continue breeding as usual. Given that children generally tend to share the social beliefs of their parents, this starts to looks like a recipe for eliminating environmentalism from the gene pool.

And, so, like many of us he concludes that it is not so much over-population but what kind of people we consist of:

But in the end, it’s not really population itself that is inherently the problem. While there are no doubt physical limits to how many people can occupy the planet at one time, the real issue here is waste. If we continue with our current methods of production and consumption – extracting finite resources, rearranging their chemistry, and then dumping them into the sky, the sea, and the soil – then its almost inevitable that we will make the weather go all weird, poison our oceans, and consign our descendants to picking through our landfills.

another reason to care about farms

So, this is a statistic I was not expecting: half of all farms in Iowa are owned by WOMEN. Twenty percent of that are owned by single women, according the Christian Science Monitor.  

Most often these women have inherited the farms either from their parents or their husbands and keep them for sentimental reasons.

Those “sentimental reasons” often translate into conservation concerns – with animal habitat, environment, and water quality high on the list. Women land owners care more about land preservation than about maximizing crop yield – with potentially large implications for farming practices, the findings show.

Among more than 800 Iowa farm women who recorded their views on farmland ownership in 2006, most listed conservation as a high priority, according to the “Women, Land and Legacy” report conducted by Iowa State and US Department of Agriculture researchers.

Women show a “clear and strong consciousness about land-health issues and respect nature intrinsically – not for its productive value, but because it sustains life,” the report found. Women also support conservation to ensure the land will be productive for future generations and because the land provides “physical and mental health and healing benefits.”

However, there is a problem.  It seems that not only are the men they hire to maintain their farms not treating them in the manner the women want, but then ignore the women when they ask them to change their behavior.  

Many theorize that part of the disparity is that the women approach the farms as an eco-system, providing food and water to humans and animals, where the men look at the farms as a commodity.  (To add insult to injury, the women’s point of view is counter to the federal and state programs.)  There are also language issues, where the woman might not know the correct terminology to ask what they want done.  And, lastly, there is lack of respect on the part of the men towards the women. Simply enough… it is just pure sexism.

I do not have enough time to go over all the ways I find this so, SO fascinating.  The one thing I think is worth mentioning is that what the owners want to do with their land is in direct conflict with how the government sees there land.  Many feel the problem with our food culture, and I have talked about this frequently, is that there has been a switch to commodity agriculture.

This group of women, seemingly, would like to bring farms back to a sustainable system, but are being met with resistance either from our government or the men who run their property.  Don’t you think it would be sad if the fate of our food is a simple matter of workplace equality?