The stock markets closed lower today, Wednesday, December 6
Edges are where the social and biological action is; they’re the first places shaped by change. On the edges of seacoasts, forests, riverbanks, and -- real-estate bubbles – gulls scream, chipmunks gambol, poison ivy grows, dreamers gamble, and predators wait. Edges are where most of the feeding happens.
Many people live where housing is pushing into forest, creating ecological edge environments. Deer are pushing back at night, stealing vegetables from gardens, eating exotic shrubbery, and totaling cars on the highway.
A Wikipedia entry on edge environments says, “When an edge is created in any natural ecosystem, and the area outside the boundary is a disturbed or unnatural system, the natural ecosystem is seriously affected for some distance in from the edge.”
It appears this description is also valid for the edge of two unnatural environments.
In California, in an odd parallel, or reverse simile, or… fractal… suburbia is pressing against farmland, and natural predators are stealing agricultural produce at nighttime. But it’s not deer – it’s humans – and they aren’t checking the wind before entering the orchard, they’re checking commodity prices.
The sudden, endemic wave of thefts include:
- 616,000 lbs. of almonds worth almost $2 million
- 5 tons of avocados in one night, 25 tons in a year
- 22 - 200 lb. live dairy calves, four of which were found in the back seat of a Ford Taurus
- Large-scale heists of artichokes, zucchini, pomegranates, tractors, plows, fertilizer, diesel fuel, irrigation pipe and copper wire
- Anhydrous ammonia, a fertilizer that can be used to make methamphetamine
- Pine trees in Alabama
- Produce in Florida, Nevada and New Mexico.
- Ginseng in Michigan
- Japanese radishes in Hawaii
- Irrigation valves in Washington State.
- Fertilizers and herbicides in springtime, when crops are scant
Farms are wide-open targets after dark, but tour-bus tourists help themselves to tangerines, oranges, grapefruit, lemons and limes in broad daylight.
A California senator says the thefts are "putting our food supply under attack." Research shows farmers report only 10% of the crimes, and estimates are that California will lose $100 million, and the U.S. will lose $1 billion to agricultural crime this year.
Transgressions yield regulations. In Hawaii, where thieves steal papayas, bananas, coffee and honeybees, a new law requires a paper trail of receipts for all commodity purchases. In California, drivers carrying more than 25 lbs. of crops must have documentation proving the ownership and destination of the food.
This crime wave has more than a little similarity to other natural interactions in edge environments. The many forms of conflict at boundaries appear similar, and occur at vastly different scales. They seem to wax and wane like the seasons – or like a growth pattern.
We have a word for the result of human influence on nature: “anthropogenic.” But, true to our character of seeing ourselves as above and apart from nature, we have no antonym for anthropogenic.
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