day, January 30, 1978
University Daily Kausan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unused editorial represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
Stand firm on ERA
Kansas Legislature this session will in the opportunity to take a giant leap for mankind. In a proposal by Sen. John Vermilion, it would be to require on its passage of the Equal Amendment to the Constitution.
mendment, which would guarantee quality for both sexes, has passed in legislatures. Three more states' bills are needed to give the amend- required three-fourths support by as by March 22, 1979.
ass, commendably, is among the 35 to support the measure. But the sent underfoot in a Senate committee of automatic rescission if three of the states fail to ratify by the dnr or Congress extends the deadline.
such a resolution would be aca-
bility Congress still is being disputed.
Attorney General Curt Schneider
has vowed to resist rests with Congress. But in the
past, Schneider says, Congress has refused to recognize states' attempted rescissions of previously ratified amendments.
Also, whether the conditions of Vermillion's proposal will become reality is undecided. Fifteen states have failed to ratify the ERA with the deadline a little more than a year away. And although the U.S. Justice Department has ruled that Congress may extend the deadline if it chooses, so far the initial deadline stands.
National politicking aside, Kansas' stand on the ERA should never be pressed to another vote in its own legislative houses.
Doesn't Kansas have enough courage in its convictions to stay on record in support of the ERA? Why the impetus to weasel out of a state like Kansas, for once, among the progressives?
r testimony on the proposal will be heard in the approaching days. Rather than waste time rehashing the issue, legislators should toss out the proposal with a resounding thud to signal that, indeed, Kansas has made its stand, once and for all.
Faculty Council, noted for its ease to make controversial decisions, gargantum leap forward last week came out in favor of research and
Knowledge ranks high
but the council didn't take its time on resting the resolution, which restated council's commitment to "ethical and the pursuit of knowledge." But council finally heeded the well-chosen Carl Leban, who wrote that the council pointed out that research is not "not only at this University but by."
ROY LAIRD, professor of political science and council member, said the resolution "would be valuable to the chancellor's communications with the Legislature and the Regents. Now he can say, 'Hey, my faculty is behind me.'"
Dykes, after all, struck a true note in his convocation speech last August when he defended research. He didn't deal directly with knowledge, but he probably doesn't need to do much reaction. The council otherwise might have devolved its time to truly pressing issues.
There will be those who oppose knowledge, those who would close the academic doors to enlightenment and plunge the University into the intellectual Dark Ages. Fortunately, the Faculty Council is valiantly resisting the tendency.
The Joad family of the 1930s would have marveled at some dreamer's audacious predictions that one day wetland parts of the Bowl House into a garden.
Ground water valuable resource
But the same irrigation techniques that have built western Kansas agriculture into a sophisticated business also have contributed to the value of water on the High Plains.
In some areas of western and central Kansas, water is being pumped out of the ground at a faster rate than it is being put back into the ground by natural recharge. The volume will continue indefinitely, the condition of future, although the rate varies.
EASTERN KANSANS appear to be insulated from the effects of water management in the western parts of the state. But because the state's economy depends on agriculture even eastern Kansas, who enjoy an average of about 34 inches of rain a year, ought to watch the role water resources play in Kansas
It's impossible to take all the water out of a ground water source. But in some parts of western Kansas, depletion of groundwater resources means that we must stock to lake stock of an area's water reserves. In shaping policies, the question is whether a region's water resources should be spent at least as soon as possible or be made to last as long as usual.
The third district, covering 5.72 million acres in southwest Kansas, has chosen to mine their groundwater supply for a short-term benefit. In small areas, particularly near Ulysses, in Grant County, declines of 100 feet in the water table have been reported between 1948 and 2001, like this more water is being taken out of the water-bearing formations that is being put back into the ground.
The creation of five state groundwater management districts by the Kansas Groundwater Exploration Act in 1972 was the first step in establishing the management phase of exploiting the groundwater resources. The policies of each district reflect the varying economic choices of an area's citizens.
the second and fifth districts, the Equs Beds and Big Bend districts in central Kansas, have opted for conservation, but they still supply their supplies last as long as possible.
THE FUTURE of agriculture in areas
such as southwest Kansas will doubtless include a change to dry-land farming.
Cheap energy, in the form of natural gas from the Hugeton gas fields in southwest Kansas, made cheap water a reality. Most irrigation pumps are powered by natural gas. But as prices for natural gas rise, a farmer will find that it may be more economical to use 18 inches of water, rather than 20 feet, to grow a crop.
The Joads might have laughed if they had been told that land that was worthless during the years following the Great Depression would somebody be worth $50 an acre. And although the value of the land probably will remain unchanged in more efficient agricultural markets is a certainty for many areas of Kansas.
THE INTENSIVE development stage of state water policy has ended, most experts agree. The era of cheap energy is ending, although no one knows just how cheap energy is now because no one can answer what the next energy might be in the future.
One thing is sure. "It's just not profitable to pump a lot of water as you used to." Gibson said. Willeth wells throughout
"in some areas, certainly, we're going back to dry-land farming," Guy Gibson, chief engineer of the Water Resources Division, the Kansas Board of Division, said.
of the state are required to be located from one-quarter to one-half mile apart. The quantity of discharge from wells is monitored by state and local agencies. Gibson estimates that 80 percent of irrigators are trying to be more efficient."
THE SAME constraints of energy prices and water supply that are exerting their influence on the state's southwestern farm economy will have their effect on all Kansans. Choices, such as those being made by agribusinessmen farther west, will be made by urban Kansans in the future.
Increasing prices of energy and declining reserves of water are bringing about a change in Kansas agriculture and, in turn, changes in the state's economy. American agriculture, which has been investing more energy in production than it has been reaping, is adjusting to influxible pressures.
Difficult choices are grist for alarmists' mills. Although the good news is that America's clean water be that Americans will be drinking recycled waste water toward the turn of the century, the bad news may be that even recycled waste water may be
But we won't run out of water. Before that happens the water marketplace will exert its own price constraints.
Enter:
orts traffic strands residence ball students
realize that collegiate of universities like KU segmentes of the function and pride. We enjoy several athletic ourselves, but are sports, there actors and traffic.
w of traffic into and out
of designated parking areas at KU is chaotic. It is unfair to assume that all designated parking areas should have their
freedom to come and go
restricted Students living in Oliver and Nazism balls
them with activities unrelated to the games,
but during the games are not permitted to return to their own
Something must be done! The police should provide us
with a means with which to return to our residence halls. Last Saturday we were twice refused entrance at 19th and Naismith streets. No suggested entrance, nor trenny rude policewoman. Our makeshift route up Kentucky disrupted the traffic flow.
Why couldn't the officer
remove the barricade on northbound Naismith since everyone leaves the games southbound?
It is much more sensible to allow a four-lane street to remain open then to squeeze through a narrow crossway. We enjoy KU sports but we also would like the option to freely
travel to and from our residence halls during games.
Lee Reynolds, Overland Park sophomore
Paul Bichler, Overland Park freshman
Roger Syng, Overland Park freshman
freshman Howard Hirsch, Chicago freshman
trike isn't solution to farmer's plight
pattern is becoming familiar.
a group that began the protest has not found its support to continue in a burdensome burst of bravado, it is its stand and hopes it is its 'revised will draw more people, those are in vain.
a story is that of the farm te. The American culture Movement began a rhetoric the tractor or wagon, as it announces it, bringing it ee hail to spring planting if
wheat support prices were not raised. A cold month followed, for both the weather observers and the protestors. Farm demands were politely listened to, but they were made and the farmers were left with little more.
ON SATURDAY, Dec. 10,
more than 4,000 farmers went
to Topeka, some from as far
away as 300 miles, to rally for the strike. Their wants were simple: parity or cost of production. They estimated that it cost them $24 to wheat and $15 to wheat that bushel of wheat would sell for $2.40, leaving the farmers with a loss.
The farmers reasoned that it was up to the government to provide them with the aid they needed, and fortunately, no one, including the farmers and those in government, was sure who in government was supposed to be responsible for the defense. Gov. Robert Bennett
he supported the farmers' cause, but could wave no "magic wand" to help them. Sen. Robert Dole said he agreed with the farmers that he could not support their strike.
On the national level, even Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland told representatives in the country to give them parity. Everyone seemed ready to offer an encouraging word, but the outlook was cloudy on clouds on the ranks of the strikers.
THERE HAS NOT been much news recently about the
tarm strike. What news there has been is negative. The United States has a surplus of cotton and has 46% tops 6% tons from last year. Citizens continue to scoff at the strikes report, saying farmers needed only some oxygen to capy in their time between crops.
And finally the American Agriculture Movement announced Wednesday that it no longer was aiming at a complete work stoppage. Instead, group leaders said, they were hoping to see a 50 percent reduction in planting.
IT ISN'T WORKING, and chances are that it will not work. Farming is not a cohesive industry. It is a fragmented, individual enterprise when practiced on the striking farmers of the striking tasks: mobilizing, mobilizing, and enforcing a farm strike present a huge problem.
They were honest enough to mention that not enough farmers were complying with the original plan to make it sound better, sound noble, warning that they gone with their complete idleness plan, "producers could break the national economy, resulting in serious hardship," the authors could have summed up their entire reasoning in three words: It isn't working.
Cooperative farm organizations already in existence, such as the Kansas Farmers Association and the Capper-Volstead Act—from restraining trade or enhancing prices. They are therefore unable to expand their business, it falls to tiny groups, such as the
American Agriculture Movement, to try to get momentum going. The team not worked that wonder vet.
Farmers have no union, no strike fund, no strike enforcement. Faced with a situation where nothing and receiving nothing and planting as usual and receiving substandard prices, the urge for self-preservation on to supersee principle.
Even if the strike were carried out by those aggrieved by low prices, how long could they survive it? Corporate farms, not farming the budget pinch as much as many, will keep crops growing. A drought could doom the smaller independents to a long siege of the market. Such a campaign may well stretch farmers' thin budgets too far. A local farm observed, "If youve observed your farm, it won't do you a hail of good."
THE CONCLUSION IS a hard one to have to come to. Farmers have not achieved full parity on their crops, it is estimated, since 1914. Our professional, industrial and academic lives are made possible through their large range of products that are warned and has reached the absurd situation of a Kansas farmer becoming eligible for federal food stamps.
we nave not yet found a solution to the farmers' plight. All that we can see now is that a farm strike is not that solution. If ever priority was given to a national and regional health network for the sake of all of us who know very well where our next meal—ultimately—is coming from.
Agriculture vital to entire culture
By WENDELL BERRY
N.Y. Times Feature
The concentration of farmland into larger and larger holdings and fewer and fewer hands—with the consequence that a lack of debt and dependence on machines—is a matter of complex significance, and its agricultural significance is derived from its cultural significance.
It forces a profound revolution in the farmer's mind: Once his investment in land and machines is large enough, he values of husbandry and assume those of finance and technology. Then his thinking is not determined by agricultural knowledge or accountability, and the capacities of his machines.
FOR SOME time now ecologists have been documenting the principle that ecology is what means that in a natural system whatever affects one thing ultimately affects another, and related to everything else and dependent on everything else.
Where his money comes from becomes less important to him than where it is going. He is caught up in the economy away from the land. Production begins to override maintenance. The economy of money has infiltrated and subverted the economies of other countries, and spirits. The man himself has become a consumptive machine.
A good agricultural system, which is to say a durable one, is similarly unified. In the 1940s, the great British agricultural historian Sir Robert Argued against the influence in agriculture of "the laboratory hermit" who had substituted official organization "for the soul-shaking principle of that system," needed by the seeker after truth."
HOWARD HIMSELF began as a laboratory hermit. But he saw the significance of the "wide chameau between his books and the practice in the field." He devoted his life to charm the aim that he finally realized in his books was to prepare the way for health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject."
He saw the necessary unity of the concerns of agriculture and the convergence of these concerns with concerns of other kinds—biological, historical, medical, moral and so on.
It remains only to say what has often been said before—that the best human cultures also have this unity. Their concerns and enterprises are not fragmented, scattered out, at airing their contents with another. The people and their work and their country are members of each other and of the culture.
IF A CULTURE is to hope for any considerable longevity, then the relationships within it must, in recognition of their interdependence, be predominantly cooperative rather than competitive. We live long at each other's expense or at the expense of their cultural birthright, just as an agriculture cannot live long at the expense of its soil or its work force. Despite the competition among species must be limited if all are to survive.
In any of these systems, cultural, agricultural or natural, when a species or group exceeds the principle of usufruct—literally, the "use of things that puts in danger," it has broken out of the system of nurture and has become exploitative; it is destroying what gave it life and what it depends on to live. In all of these systems a fundamental principle must be the protection of biodiversity from food species, the soil, the breeding stock, the old and the wise, the keepers of memories, the records.
AND JUST as competition must be stricty curbed within these systems, it must be stricty curbed among them. An agriculture cannot survive long at the expense of the natural systems that support it and that provide it with models. A culture cannot survive long at the expense of either its agricultural or its natural resources. To live at the source of the life is obviously suicidal.
Although we have no choice but to live at the expense of other life, it is necessary to recognize that you are involved: Past a certain point in a unified system, "other life" is our own.
Wendell Berry is a poet-novelist essayist who lives and farms in Port Royal, Ky. This article is excerpted from his Unsetting of America: Culture and Agriculture."
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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