So many things about the wildlife management, agriculture, etc. in this country make me feel like the joker.
Yeah the state has to breed fish in captivity and stock them into lakes for game fishing and food web maintence because the ecosystem is so fucked from a combination of overfishing, invasive species, pollution etc. that lakes don’t teem with fish naturally anymore. If you catch and eat fish you gotta make sure to check the gov website guidelines for that lake’s pollution levels. Male sure you don’t eat more than 3 in a month so you don’t give yourself mercury poisoning!
There’s too many deer overgrazing young plants and spreading disease because we expirated wolves so we gotta try to keep their numbers in check through hunting permits. There’s only a few remote lakes and rivers that the DNR say are so far from human settlements that the water is safe to drink straight from it. But don’t worry you can buy bottled water or a filter because you probably shouldn’t drink the tap water. There’s far less frogs and predatory insects around that normally keep disease spreading insects like mosquitoes in check.
Yeah there’s edible wild plants virtually everywhere but you probably shouldn’t pick and eat them unless you live in the middle of nowhere because of contamination from everything from pesticides to car exhaust to heavy metals. If you have a rain barrel the gov says you can use the water for your lawn or garden but not for a vegetable garden because of the chemicals leeched into it from your roof.
You gotta have a lawn so you can imitate the landed gentry who had large estates of land not used for farming so they could show off their wealth. So much money you don’t even need to grow your own food you can just have this completely devoid of life lawn that you have to mow every week (or twice a week sometimes) because you don’t have enough money to pay people to maintain it for you like the wealthy do. It also needs weed killer and fertilizer and seed and water every year too. But hey at least there’s also far less native plants for pollinators and therefore far less pollinators. All for a stupid fucking lawn.
Where I live it’s actually illegal to replace more than 50% of your lawn with a flower garden or a vegetable garden. Half of it just be grass or the city will fine you. And where do you get your vegetables? From the supermarket. Why grow your own food when you could rely on some company to feed you. Most of our country’s farmland is actually corn for ethanol and animal feed, not sweet corn, and then after corn it’s soybeans so we can use soy as a filler ingredient. You can’t grow bananas or avocados in our climate but don’t worry. You can get them in January because we have them shipped in from Guatemala and Mexico.
Despite what republican aesthetics would like you believe, most farms in this country are not salt of earth family farms, they’re huge factory farms staffed by visa workers who are paid terribly, work in unsafe conditions, can’t speak out against violations, and some of whom are even just straight up human trafficked here. But don’t worry why bananas somehow only costs 29¢ each. Don’t grow your own food. Buy it from a store, grown and shipped to you from 2,000 mi away. Because that’s how efficient the free market is baby. Because that makes more sense than every neighborhood designed having a community garden and chicken coop at the center.
I feel crazy. Through most of human history you didn’t have to worry about this kind of stuff, but we’ve built a society where you need the state to monitor air pollution levels so they can warn people not to go outside.
