A Sebastian Hoffmann at the Sueedeutsche Zeitung
wrote that a folly is spreading throughout the
United States.

The folly, he says, comes from eco-freaks.

These people in the USA, he reports, want to return much of the land back to the buffalo, deer, antelope, prairie dogs, beaver and other wild animals, and then allow industrial hunting in place of herding or farming domestic animals and plants.

He says this is Quatsch. Folly.

I resent what he says.

I resent it because I came to such conclusions after decades of running and cycling throughout the Great Plains, and after several years of canoeing and living off the land in the north,
and my BODY said, yes, my body, that we should
let the buffalo, beaver and other wild animals
come back.

Some ancestors of mine came to Nebraska from Sweden around 1870 and tried to homestead on a tract in the Prairie. The attempt did not work.
It should not have worked. Instead, there should have been what the county name says: Buffalo.

The buffalo were being eliminated under US military orders so that the native Americans could not maintain their economy.

Nor, as we have seen in the century and a half since, a stable ecology.

A University of Minnesota study reports that with a buffalo-beaver-prairie dog and so-on economy,
in which most of the land is wild and only small tracts have crops, the North American continent could support ca. 450 million people. That is,
we could all live quite well with most of the land being managed for wildlife.

Sebastian Hoffmann says this is Quatsch from a position that is very unique in the world: MittelEuropa. In this place, there is water, temperate climate, plenty of greenery. Such conditions do not occur in most of the world.
They do not occur in most of the Americas, Asia or Africa, and certainly not in Australia.

A ground-breaking book on water supply in North America, by an MIT-trained engineer named Alice Outwater (sic), reports that in order for sufficient freshwater to remain in North America, there must be very large numbers of animals that create water-storage habitat. This means, she writes: 80 million buffalo, 250 million beaver, billions of prairie dogs, tens of millions of alligators. Right now, the freshwater supplies are being depleted. If she is right, then we in North America must allow many more wild animals to proliferate on the land. And if that happens, we must justify this great increase in number with industrial hunting.

Mr. Obama might think otherwise.

His great hero is Abraham Lincoln.

He maybe does not notice that Mr. Lincoln worked as a young man in the removal of native Americans from their home soil, and in the replacement of their wild-animal economies with Europe-sourced farming economies. Mr. Lincoln was not a nice man. Not for the native Americans. And not for the ecology of North America.

Sebastian Hoffmann is encouraged to not comment on how we Americans deal with our soil and water.

Tschuess,
meine Palin,

Peter