From: jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy)
Subject: Re: Topsoil as a commodity
Reply-To: jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Date: 21 Nov 92 11:20:54

In article <-1363575837snx@Gilsys.DIALix.oz.au> gil@Gilsys.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick) writes:
   In article <JMC.92Nov16000246@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU writes:

    > Some time ago, in the newsgroup sci.environment, I suggested that
    > farmers would be more motivated to take good care of their topsoil
    > if it were a commodity.  Thus a farmer with deep topsoil could sell
    > some to a farmer with inadequate topsoil.  Land with very deep
    > topsoil, e.g. in river valleys, would become more valuable than it
    > is today.  Land with barely adequate topsoil would become somewhat
    > less valuable than it is today.  Land with no or inadequate topsoil
    > would become more valuable, because it could be restored.  Of course,
    > quality of topsoil is not the only component of the price of agricultural
    > land.  Thus where rainfall is suboptimal, water rights may be even
    > more important.

   Well, I guess when finally confronted with such stubbornness based on
   patently false assumptions about what soil is and what it contributes
   to the growing of crops (that is, about the the basis on which farm
   land is already valued) as exhibited by our learned resident computer
   programmer, in the end a political counter-revolution will usually
   erupt to prevent such absurd ideas being put into effect.

   Perhaps McCarthy, by the tone and content of his various submissions
   to this International forum, might have felt at home employed by Stalin
   to assist in instituting a system of agriculture based on as ridiculous
   a strategy as is exhibited here. If you want to US to end up within 50
   years suffering the chronic mass hunger of its cities the now ex-Soviet
   cities suffer still today, please do proceed with trucking soil all over
   your country instead of investing the time and energy improving cropping
   capacity and growing food by more efficient methods.

   In the meantime, if you really do want to encourage farmers to take better
   care of your topsoil, I suggest that you might simply make fewer demands
   on both them and it.

   --
   Gil Hardwick                                      gil@Gilsys.DIALix.oz.au
   Independent Consulting Ethnologist                            3:690/660.6
   PERTH, Western Australia                                 (+61 9) 399 2401
      * * Sustainable Community Development & Environmental Education * *

I am properly humbled.  Gil Hardwick has properly thrown out all this
irrelevant stuff about land prices, amount of topsoil per acre and
trucking costs.  He has properly ignored J. L. Hurst's observation about
deep loess in close proximity to land good only for pasture.

He has gotten to the essence of a discussion appropriate to an
"International forum" - who is a good guy and who is a bad guy.

He calls me a computer programmer.  Programmers laugh when they hear
that.  I'm a professor of ... .

Ah, but this is also not the way to proceed in an "International forum".
Defense is irrelevant!  Attack is what counts!

What is an "independent consulting ethnologist"?  What does one do?  I
can see Gil Hardwick shouting through his megaphone, "Ah, what I could
tell you blokes about those abos over there if there weren't children
on the bus."

Not only a tour guide but a statist tour guide.  When I say topsoil
should be considered a commodity and give computations about the
profitability of buying and selling it, he thinks I'm talking about a
Government program.  He just wants a different Government program.

--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

Newsgroups: sci.environment