Government Caught Leaving Millions of Dollars Along Roadsides
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Loading ...Before you think this is a trick headline, written just to get clicks, please read on just a bit more.
We seem to have a serious but totally ignored problem here in the New York/New Jersey area. I’d be surprised if its not just about the same everywhere else in the US. Our State Highway Departments are foolishly wasting barrel after barrel of diesel, gasoline, oil and man hours too, mindlessly clipping the tips off of just sprouted spring grass along miles of highway medians and shoulders.
I’m not talking about a lone mower (excuse the pun). We have convoys of single and gang mowers, followed by mostly idling trucks waiting to move them elsewhere along the highway and refill the gas tanks.
I haven’t even brought up the pollution this is causing. I’m not a green freak, but I do drive a small car, I carpool and telecommute occasionally. I’m not trying to save the planet in a single blog post, but maybe we can get together and bring this to the attention of our elected officials, who in New Jersey today, are debating raising tolls by ten to twenty cents. Guess where the money is going?
Let’s suggest alternatives, such as growing ground covers, wildflowers, leaving much of it fallow? Or lets get progressive and use the wasted miles for public windmill or solar installations. Let the workers who are mowing, care for the utilities instead?
Here’s a link to the New York’s Congressional districts from the NY Public Library.
For NJ and other states, here’s a link to U.S. Congress Members by State
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May 1 2008
In outback Australia during times of drought like we’ve had recently, farmers whose grass has all died and are who are out of hay and can no longer afford to buy feed will drive their cattle or sheep along “the long paddock”, i.e. the grass that survives along the side of the road, camping with their flock for weeks at a time.
You don’t need a drought to take advantage of the Long Paddock, and you can get the grass without paying a penny for fuel, and without polluting the air with toxic petrochemical exhausts. Consider also the benefit to the land from free fertiliser which is spread out with minimaal or no human effort, to decompose naturally instead of putrify in concentrated feedlot cess-pools at factory farms. Add to these benefits that if you walk animals to their natural food, grass, you don’t have to devote acres and acres to growing grain as feed (which causes health problems for ruminants anyway).
Traffic of course has to slow down, warned by movable road-signs placed at either end of the herd/flock. However, this is a small price to pay for living less wastefully and more harmoniously with nature - something modern oil-powered society has largely forgotten about, and which may one day be forced by necessity to re-learn.
August 2 2008
Oh, you were speaking allegorically. I guess I can put my rake back in the garage.