What the farmer said

This morning I took the ferry over to the mainland and got a ride up the city with a farmer that I got to talking to on the boat. On our 45 minute car ride, we talked about agribusiness, economies of scale, consumer demand, and road construction. The highway between the port where the ferry docks and Stockholm is, for the first 25 minutes of the ride, a two-lane road through woods and farmland. Once every couple of years there is a nasty accident on the road that can hold up traffic for hours. Normally, though, the loudest complaints come from tourists who get caught in traffic jams to and from Gotland and Poland ferries.  A few years ago they started widening the road, cutting down the woods and encroaching on the fields. I’ve always thought of it as just ugly but this farmer sees it differently.

He said that you often find very productive farmland along roads. When you make roads wider to save people an average of 3 minutes on a 45 minute ride, you have to use up a disproportionate amount of productive arable land.  The construction of bypass roads around cities is not just an environmental problem in that encourages people to use their cars more because transportation becomes faster and encroaches on animal habitats, it reduces the world’s potential food supply. Given that there are increasing numbers of people to feed in this world, he sees unabashed road construction (N.B. a traditional sign of infrastructure health and wealth) as a waste of good, necessary farmland. Food for thought.

Healthy roots, physical, social, and/or spiritual, are as necessary for peace as they are for good crops and forests (this is me talking now). You don’t run around looking for trouble if you know who you are and what your place is in the world.

Today’s knitted object, you guessed it, more socks. These are knitted in Sisu, which might be the most durable sock yarn that I’ve used.

I’m off to visit relatives for a few days, so unless I can borrow their computer, no blogging for me until Monday.