Article from Natchez "Naturalist Newsletter"

I received the following article from our Experiment Station  horticulturist. 
 Thought you all would find it interesting.
zem
zone 7
West TN
 
 
NEATNESS AS ABOMINATION
A fellow in the vicinity has been busy this week  bulldozing the trees and 
bushes from a ditch running across his large, flat,  grassy field. Someone 
remarked to me how wonderful it is that "things are  getting cleaned up around 
here, really looking neat now."

Let it be known  that when it comes to neatening up the landscape for 
neatness' sake, what I see  is habitat destruction, and there's nothing neat about it.

Above I use  the word "abomination" advisedly. I am aware of the word's 
religious  connotations, for many of us never see that word except in the Bible, 
where many  things are classed as "abominations before the Lord." I use the word 
not in a  religious context, but in a spiritual one, and in my opinion the 
destruction of  life-giving habitat purely for the sake of appealing to the 
local community's  concept of "neatness" is abomination before the spirit of the  
Creator.

For, when you look into the Universe and at the web of life on  our little 
Earth, you see plainly that the Creator blossoms diversity out of  nothingness, 
evolves sophistication out of awkwardness, and leaves strands of  
interdependency among all things. Whatever in
spirit goes against this grand  and beautiful theme of the Creator is 
"abomination."

The bushes and trees  along that little ditch across the field provided a 
tiny island of habitat for a  gorgeous diversity of living beings. A thriving 
local ecosystem of mutually  dependent living things existed in an ocean of 
ecologically unstable monoculture  grass. It was a polyphonic song sung in a 
desert. And its destruction for the  sake of neatening up the
landscape is an  abomination.

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