California’s rice farmers pride themselves on environmental stewardship, saying their flooded fields provide habitat for millions of ducks and geese in an era when traditional marshlands have largely disappeared.
Source: Rice-growing experiment will cut water use but subtract from habitat
Why do you think that the average person believes that flooding one of the most pesticide laden areas we’ve got will generate a beneficial habitat for birds that :
1 At best eat the very thing the pesticides kill? And thus have nothing to eat.
2 or worse, eat contaminated material and are poisoned by the pesticides in these areas?
3 or nest in, and expose their chicks to these pesticide laden areas?
So tell me again why flooding agricultural fields is providing habitat.
So I sent the above to the author of the article and he responded:
Ask the environmentalists. They seem very supportive of flooding fields for waterfowl habitat.
Oh what a great answer! Boy that’s really doing your research. And thinking outside the box. He must work for a newspaper that gets a lot of money from advertising housing and the like up in Sacramento. Wow I may be cynical but could the all the “environmentalists” just be duck hunters that want to raise ducks. And aren’t really worried about providing h a b i t a t for all the other Wetland birds and animals.
If we gave away thousands of acres of Old-growth Redwood forest to a developer that then clear cut it, planted a few twigs and seedlings in the ground somewhere else, and said “oh it’s exactly the same thing” we would be justifiably outraged. And yet our city planners giveaway our old growth wetlands to developers regularly.
Flooding a toxic Rice Field to create habitat is the same thing as sticking a couple of Redwood seedlings in the middle of a cornfield heavily sprayed with Roundup and saying “oh it replaces the Redwood Grove that we just clear cut.”
The reason that we accept this with old-growth marsh habitat is that we can’t _see_ what makes an old-growth Marsh.
And contrary to what the news media would like to have you swallow, an old stable marsh removes billions of mosquitoes from the environment. And without poisoning your kids. Think about where all those dragonfly and damselfly and their larvae live. Have you ever sat and watched a dragonfly larvae or a damselfly larvae just pig out on mosquito larvae? It is fascinating and highly amusing. It’s our backyards that produce mosquitoes because we poison all the predators in our yards with pesticides and in addition, provide no real aquatic habitat for them either.