This morning's New York Times carries two stories about farming that convey pretty much contradictory messages. They both appear on the front of the Metro section. The first runs under the headline "Wave of 'Eco-Terrorism' Appears to Hit Experimental Cornfield." The article uses terms like "sabotage" and "vandalism" to describe attempts by environmental activists to prevent the development of more productive agriculture. The second article runs under the headline "Paying to Keep Farmers Down on the Farm" and uses terms like "intriguing" and "an effective model" to describe attempts by environmental activists to prevent the development of more productive agriculture.
Part of the distinction, of course, is tactics -- the environmentalists in the first article are using guerilla raids to prevent new-fashioned farming, while the environmental activists in the second article are using financial subsidies to preserve old-fashioned farming. But the voice of the Times in the second article, which describes an effort by two conservation groups to pay to preserve farmland in Kinderhook, N.Y., seems to share some of the same assumptions of what the voice of the first article would describe as eco-terrorists -- the main assumption being that change is bad.
The second article ruefully reports, for instance, that "American farmland continues to be eroded by two potent forces: the bulldozers of developers and the less familiar tendency of rich suburbanites to annex prime growing fields to their rural retreats and take them out of production forever." Well, it's true that farmland is eroding -- from 1.17 billion acres in 1960 to 931 million acres in 1997, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But that's a pretty slow decline over a long period of time. And, as Bill McKibben wrote in his 1995 book "Hope, Human and Wild," much of that farmland, particularly in the Northeastern United States, has been replaced by forest, which is what was there before the farming started. Moreover, improvements in farming technology -- mechanized tractors, advanced pesticides and fertilizers -- have made it possible to grow more food on less land. No one is going hungry in America as a result of the erosion in the amount of farmland.
If the conservation groups in Kinderhook want to spend their money on keeping farms going that wouldn't otherwise be economically viable, that's their right. It's their money. But rather than glorifying the effort as "intriguing," the Times could have at least found someone to suggest that the groups may be engaged in an effort of Luddite nostalgia that's just a slight variation on the "eco-terrorism" of those who are uprooting experimental cornfields. Or maybe the Times could have found someone to suggest that the groups in Kinderhook may be doing more environmental damage by keeping a farm going that they would by letting the land revert to forest.
South Brooklyn: A short story on page B8 of the metro section of this morning's Times reports on a protest by parents, teachers and students who want the renewal of the contract of "a popular district superintendent in south Brooklyn." We learn a bit later in the story that the district "encompasses Coney Island, Seagate and Brighton Beach, and parts of Gravesend, Bensonhurst and Sheepshead Bay."
But wait a minute. While those neighborhoods may be in the southern part of Brooklyn if you look at a map, no one who knows much about Brooklyn would refer to them as "south Brooklyn." As the 1995 book "Brooklyn the Way It Was" makes clear, South Brooklyn is a neighborhood in Brooklyn that includes Smith Street and the area around the Gowanus Canal. That's miles away from the neighborhoods the Times is talking about when it uses the term "south Brooklyn."