Agriculture and Natural Environments
, by William Schroeder, 2 min reading time
Preserving and managing the natural environment is a worthy goal for the landowner. We have been given the priviledge and repsonsiblity to manage land. What we do to our land is important to future human generations as as well as the birds, animals and plants that rely on it.
Growing up I knew that trees were important we planted and preserved trees, acres of them, as part of our small farm operation. My father appreciated what trees did for the environment much more then I realized at the time. He treasured the hedgerows that he left behind when he carved his farm out of the aspen. These hedgerows were filled with choke cherries, saskatoons, rose bushes wildflowers along with scores of birds and animals. I learned to appreciate what trees gave us.
When we sold the land in 2017 we realized with modern agriculture there could be some alteration of the farm landscape, with the changes in farming practice with the emphasis on efficiency we knew some changes in the farm landscape were likely. What we feared became reality and in 2021 the hedgerows my father provided for the trees, birds and flowers are gone, replaced with 5 acres of monoculture canola, wheat or barley. We anticipated this and during the land sale subdivided 20 acres of bush and wetland to retain a small amount of natural habitat in what has become an industrial farmscape where every acre needs to pay its way. I worry about that. How long can we continue to mine a resource without giving anything back?
We are seeing a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment due to a lack of experience and knowledge of its past condition. What many farmers now consider to be a healthy environment, my father would consider to be degraded, and what we consider degraded now the next generation will likely consider healthy or normal.
Soga and Gaston in their journal article ‘Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications’ argue that without memory, knowledge or experience of past environmental conditions, current generations cannot perceive how much their environment has changed because they are comparing their own normal baseline not to historical baselines.
Preserving and managing the natural environment is a worthy goal for the landowner. We have been given the priviledge and repsonsiblity to manage land. What we do to our land is important to future human generations as as well as the birds, animals and plants that rely on it.