More Green Nonsense
I read a little AP article entitled "Wet area studied for wine" in today's Washington Times. I like wine. I'm greatly pleased at the strides made in wine production in the United States. Heck, about 20 years ago some friends and I had a party to try wines produced in the Great Commonwealth of Virginia. They weren't very good. In fact a couple were actually pretty bad. Now, however, I could serve you a Virginia wine that would belong on any table in the world.
I say all this to establish my bona fides as to why I read the article and to provide cover for myself before I launch into the idiocy.
The background on this is that in Washington state, the "vast majority" of grape production is in the "hot, dry eastern" part of the state. However: "Now, Olympic Cellars owner Kathy Charlton has commissioned a study aimed at refuting the notion that good wine grapes can't be grown on the wet side of the Cascade Range and finding a valuable crop to preserve farmland under increasing development pressure."
Oh GMAFB! I don't find that there's any shortage of grape growing land in the drier eastern regions but some damnable effete vineyard owner pays good money to "prove that wine grapes" can be grown in less than the best available conditions and secondarily ot "preserve farmland." Bullflop. Most crops can be grown in less than ideal conditions. I could not be more certain that it's the "preservation" of farmland that drives this study. This is one of the great greenie chimeras of modern times. If farmland were the best economic use of the land, the land would be farmed. "Development pressure" is demonized as "sprawl" when it's actually an expression of the desire of people to live in homes of their own choice. The same debate is raging in my home county of Loudoun (which I call with great affection "LoCo") and the same bullcrap arguments are being made.
I sometimes think that if the "environmentalists" have their way, people will herded into ultramega dense housing (with all the concommitant problems) so that the annointed can enjoy the "open," "unspoiled" land that is owned by someone else and which has had its value stripped from it by governmental fiat. If you want to "protect" land, buy it. At least the Nature Conservancy got that much right.