by Robert M. Traxler
To take a walk down memory lane, some 30 years ago, the cause celeb was saving the Amazon Rain Forest. It was said that the plants or animals that would save the world were there, even the cure for cancer was to be found in the rain forest.
A movie “Medicine Man”, staring the late Sean Connery, was made in 1992, highlighting the possibilities of medical advancements lost because of slashing and burning the rain forests along the Amazon River. The destruction of the Amazon, an act we were promised would end the world because of ecological imbalance, fell out of favor and has been forgotten as a cause celeb for the eco warriors.
Fast forward to today and an article in the “Michigan Farm News,” a real ink and newsprint paper in publication since 1923, the Farm News highlighting the role Brazil is playing in the world of agriculture. It appears that Brazil is rapidly expanding its farm land, clear cutting rain forest, and has surpassed the United States in the production of soybeans by 20%.
A good question to ask is why is Brazil out-producing American farmers? Well as we have outsourced our pollution to China, India and now Africa for manufacturing, we are also outsourcing our production of agriculture to other nations — beef, chickens, soy products to name a few. American farmers are going the way of American manufacturing workers. Regulations allow other nations to pollute Mother Earth at an accelerated rate, and the progressive movement is deaf and dumb, paid off by the corporations who import the food items grown cheaper with limited environmental controls.
How we can go from the end of the world due to slashing and burning of the rain forests with the smoke, ash, air and water pollution, and lack of life saving vegetation to passively condoning it, even encouraging it, it is an example of the prostitution found in the new progressive movement. Pay me and we will love you no matter how much you pollute elsewhere. Killing poor folks in China, India and other nations and is acceptable if you tithe to our environmental corporations in the United States.
American farmers are the most productive in the world, but they are being strangled by government regulations; American farmers need to be lawyers, chemists, tax attorneys and mathematicians to exist. The family farm is moving to extinction at light speed due to government regulations, mostly environmental regulations not found in most of the world, allowing manufacturing in China and agriculture in nations like Brazil to produce cheaper products.
We are educating our population to believe it is noble to save the planet from our sea to shining sea, and not give a damn that Americans can produce products with less pollution than most other nations. NIMBY, not in my backyard is the rule, polluting in any other nation is fine.
Has the progressive movement given a passing thought to the pollution involved in shipping, trucking or flying products to our nation from China, Brazil, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Chile, or other nations? Political correctness is deaf and blind if enough money is paid to their corporations and their shell game of outsourcing pollution is lucrative enough.
The slashing and burning of the old growth trees in the Amazon rain forest is a classic example of the evolution of the American environmental movement, from liberal to progressive. 30 years ago, there would have been hell to pay for what is now passively acceptable in clearcutting the rain forest, polluting the river, land and the air, destroying the natural habitat of endangered species in the Amazon. Today it’s fine as long as it is not in our nation and enough money changes hands. Traditional liberals, 30 years ago, would have been up in arms about the destruction of the rain forest. The progressive leaders today turn a blind eye, the money is just too good.
We are helping to kill 2,734 (per the World Health Organization) poor nonwhites daily, yes daily, just in China from outdoor pollution, and double that if you add indoor air pollution. To my progressive friends: Wake up and look at the worldwide pollution, not just pollution in our back yard. It is better for the Earth’s environment to let American farmers farm, and American industrial workers work. My opinion.