Interesting topic. I live in the country (in Tennessee - so this is a Southern story), so I don't have neighbors to fight with on this issue, but I do know a little about trees and the health of forrests. On my own property, I am preparing for some selctive logging and thinning of the forrest. This is necessary because the old growth in some spots has gotten to the point of causing a DECLINE in bio-diversity. When you get trees that are 100+ feet in height, they can shade out just about anything else underneath. So shade-tolerant species are the only ones that can grow under the canopy, and they eventually create somewhat of a monoculture in the forrest. When the large canopy trees do die - as they all will - what's left are the shade-tolerant trees, and they prevent the next generation of hardwoods from growing. So eventually you loose the majestic Oaks, Hickories, etc. and are left with little more than Beech, Ironwood and Maple. These trees are not as good for the ecology, and don't provide much food for wildlife. Oaks and Hickories are the back-bone of the forrest, providing the lion's share of the food crops. An Oak tree also processes twice as much CO2 as a comparably sized Maple. But their seedlings are shade-intolerant. The Oaks will not grow back if the forrest is shady. So, if we never thin the forrest, and insist on preserving all the mature trees, the richness of our ecology declines. The forrest supports fewer species, and weedy species gradually become dominant. We have eliminated much of the natural "turnover" that occurred in the forrest, especially wildfires. We put them out with a vengence! Yet these acts of nature are crucial to clearning areas where Oaks and Hickories can sprout and thrive in the sun. The Forrestry service did a survey of my land for me and recommended selective thinning to allow a greater diversity of species to grow here. I'm negotiating with loggers who use low-impact logging techniques, such as the use of mules to haul out the logs, so as to minimize the impact on the land. No one loves trees more than I do, but we all need to realize we have a responsibility to manage the forrest, just as we would any garden. It IS a garden - just a garden of giant plants! Diversity and renewal are an essential part of any healthy ecology. I think those principles extend to urban neighborhoods and back yards too. :-) K4

Great discussion all around. Appreciate everyone's viewpoints & contributions. Kinda busy, but a couple of quick thoughts: As others say, I don't think we are going to significantly de-industrialize any time soon - hopefully we can move quickly towards doing it smarter. I'm not totally opposed to industry or economy of scale ...but we've got to learn to do it with more closed-loops, better designs that turn our problem 'wastes' into resources, etc. We have the know-how of how to meet our basic needs and restore ecological health. We know how to regreen the desert (Geoff Lawton) or restore degraded pasture land while grazing MORE animals (Allan Savory) - As Olpea pointed out, the political will isn't there. So much inertia built up in this approaching-train-wreck of an economic system. How much crappier do things have to get before the growth-at-all-costs nonsense gets tossed? While the rest of the world is figuring that out that growth at all costs, I work on facing up to my own consumption, which is humbling. I am doing my best to withdraw from 'feeding the beast', growing what I can at home, saving and sharing seed & seedlings. Buying what I can't grow from local & organic producers. Most of all, my wife and I just refuse to live a consumerist lifestyle. I laugh every time I take out the garbage because there really is so little of it. We could easily go a couple months without taking out the trash, the next step is cutting down on the recyclables. No-till: Fukuoka did it to good effect with rice, equalling yields of his counterparts using 'green revolution' approaches. There are pockets of Japanese farmers here and there quietly using Fukuoka's method. Hopefully, I'll have the chance to visit one of these farms next time I visit Japan. In the west, I have heard of a lot of people experimenting with no-till or perennial grains, interesting glimpses, but no stunning successes. After a few thousand years of breeding annual grains for till systems, it's not surprising that progress might take a few generations. John Jeavon's biointensive offers small-scale grain production which builds biomass every year, but that is backyard scale - beds double dug by hand. There are many different growing systems out there that will bring high yields without undermining future ability to produce. I don't think there are any one-size-fits-all solutions, but different for each situation. Lastly, I have to emphasize that, despite occasional differences of opinion, I think horticulturalists and farmers, conventional or organic, are some of the best people on earth.

I don't know why you pull out garlic musterd. Sounds tasty..:-) It is simple why it is the same as victimising newcomers in culture. It is an emotional response and when things turn for the worse, the newcomers are to blame for everything we feel has gone wrong. Because things change when there are enough of them to make a difference (fear of what is new) and the loss of what we had (sadness, it was so nice...). I understand these emotions, I am into climatology. Do you think I like the thought of an icebear drowning because he now has to swim 500 km with no ice instead of 100 km and finally drowns? Don't you think I find it a horrible perspective?? Don't you think most climatologists do the same and have some strong thoughts about that?? But they do so in private. And they rarely use valueladen words, even then... Scientists are not the ones who should start to use valueladen words about those who are the main cause of this. They should prove this first and foremost and than let us decide. You won't read anything about this in the climate scientific literature. No: scientists are not there to use these valueladen words and to victimise people, plants or animals. Scientists can never tell us what belongs somewhere and what does not. What should live and what should die. They are there simply to come up with proof and tell people, policymakers etc what the data means. Not what they should think about it, not what they should do about it. Nothing. That is up to us, the people. Yes, I know some climatologists personally who had to testify for the Dutch gouvernment. You simple tell what is correct and what is incorrect (thanks to climate deniers sometimes). But you do not tell that it is awfull, that they have to act now, that they should attack factories that put out Co2 or that should stop emitting CO2 ASAP. Or attack the US because it is the main poluter per capita. etcetc...No such thing. Ecologists however think they have this special position in which a moral view is quintessential. That somehow they are in a special positon to decide for us and what we shoud think and do. I have read the books, the scientific papers, their arguments also on this topic and these words. I know what I am saying. They throw in their moralistic views, how we should think of these immigrants and what we should do. In this way, it has become an ideology and a religion that tells us what our morals should be and how we should behave. When it is okey to let somehting live, what should be highly valued and what should be eradicated, killed etc. Another point is of course credibility: do I believe someone who researches something but is clearly not impartial? How credible am I if I want to research somehting and constantly name it in clearly negative ways. "Let research these dangerous, unreliable, aggressive foreigners and see how they behave in society.." Right... No, I don't think tearing out Garlic musted is any different than tearing out any other plant. But tearing out because it is bad and does not belong here is of the same kind as what some people want to do with immigrants in the cultural sense: based on prejudice and your personal problem with a changing region or may be a changing world. The negative bias you have heard time and time again about foreigners is the main cause for actions. That is waht I think. I think it is no different than the dislike of human immigrants and culture and the prejudice they encounter. In that case it are not sociologists, not historians, not antropologists who say they are bad. It are rather opportunistic and many times populist politicians that support this or even actively promote these views. In nature it are not politicians, but sadly scientist who actively promote this view and eradication programms.

That is an excellent piece of the puzzle KT. It fits with the likely consequences of shifts in vegetation patterns due to warming at the end of the Pleistocene period and inability to adapt to shrinking habitat. Researchers in Australia recently revisited Darling Downs. This is what they found: "By systematically analysing a 10 metre deep section of creek bed, the team uncovered 44 species, ranging from land snails, frogs, lizards and small mammals to giant wombats and kangaroos including many species previously unknown to have occurred in the Darling Downs fossil record. The results suggest that the extinction of Darling Downs megafauna was caused by a massive shift in climate rather than by the arrival of humans who over hunted animals or destroyed habitats by burning the landscape. The findings, which were unearthed with the help of amateur fossil hunter, Ian Sobbe, are of particular significance because the Darling Downs fossil deposits are among the youngest Australian megafauna deposits - laid down on the cusp of the extinction event. [snip] The Darling Downs contain some of the most extensive and significant Pleistocene megafauna deposits in Australia but because it's been excavated since the 1840s it was assumed that the palaeoenvironment record was well established. Closer examination revealed a bias in sample collection in favour of larger animals and there had been few attempts to document ecological and sediment data." See link for full text. The N.A. overkill hypothesis doesn't account for the birds lost at the same percentage of the megafauna. Who knows what else that may have been overlooked. Even more suspect is the fact that Martin's theory is based on the land bridge hypothesis which isn't supported by any evidence, yet has become gospel. Here is a link that might be useful: alert