Enjoyed Anthony Anella's Bean Counter bit in the New Mexico Independent explaining the need for a new accounting of environmental consequences - using soil as an elemental example of his larger point. It is a faulty accounting that does not count "dirt".
In a very real sense, we owe our wealth as a nation to the black dirt
of our heartland. And yet we treat that dirt as if there were no
tomorrow. In a few short generations we have converted the grassland of
the Great Plains into an 80-million-acre agribusiness machine. In the
process of plowing the soil, we have also exposed it to erosion. (...)
We need a new system of accounting that does not distort our understanding of our economic self-interest by emphasizing short-term profits while ignoring long-term environmental consequences. Such a system would help us to reconcile our short-term economic aspirations with the earth’s long-term environmental necessities.
Soil and soil loss is a fundamental challenge for humanity - closely related to issues of watershed management, agriculture and land use planning. Grading development sites for building pads and parking lots also exposes soil to erosion, of course.
As a regular practice, land is summarily (and somewhat cavalierly) stripped of flora, fauna and place-defining features . Worse than the resulting franchise architecture and big parking lots are the many many cases where these sites remain undeveloped, unused, unlandscaped, unloved and eroding. Even worse than that is where tax dollars get spent to service these now gaping vacant dumpsites on the sprawling edge of what the bean counters call progress.
Beans.
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