Letter
by Donna Ramsay to Prospective Dairy Owner
9
July 2004
Dear Mr. and Mrs.
_________:
I am a resident
of Argo Township, Brookings County, South Dakota. Our farm
is located approximately one mile southwesterly from a site
where you apparently plan to establish an industrial-scale
dairy operation. I understand that on 4 May 2004 you applied
for a Conditional Use Permit in Brookings County, as relates
to the Brookings County Zoning Ordinance governing Concentrated
Animal Feeding Operations. I understand you are using the
services of Hammink Dairy Consulting, Bruce, SD as your local
representative.
I am opposed to
the establishment of any CAFO at the site selected, or at
any other location in the region, due in part to the irreversible
adverse impact these industries are known to have on every
environmental system. A long, well-documented record of this
adverse impact is being constantly compiled from data obtained
in virtually every state in our nation, as well as from records
maintained in other locations throughout the world. Holland,
along with The Benelux nations, Canada, Great Britain, and
other European countries have dealt with the concerns and
problems associated with these industries for a long time.
I assume that you, as business owners, are well aware of
these long-standing situations in the area of the world that
you call “Home”.
So I believe it
is important and fair, as someone who considers Argo Township
and South Dakota my “Home”, to reach out to you
strangers to explain my objection to your plan. I want you
to try to understand why I object to your purposeful intent
to wreak permanent environmental damage on this land that
has never suffered such disaster. I hope that you would come
to realize, and then respect, the fact that our culture,
way of life, and historic environment is precious to us--beloved
and protected in much the same way that I know the people
of Holland treasure your own homeland.
My family has had
a home on our property since 1886, but has resided in Argo
Township since 1883. My roots are very deep in this land.
My cultural heritage is inextricably linked to the people
and value systems of this rural community. Many of my neighbors,
like me, are direct descendants of immigrants who fled the
poverty and feudal systems of Europe to seek freedom and
a better way of life in America.
I have known first-hand
people who left everything they loved and cherished—their
families, their communities, their landscape and their way
of life—to start over in an unknown environment, with
unknown consequences. Perhaps you and your family felt the
same way when you left your birth country.
When my great-grandfather
and his 4 brothers arrived in Argo Township, they left behind
parents, siblings, and other family—never to be seen
again. What these men found in Argo was a vast, endless,
open treeless prairie of 2-meter tall grass. Almost devoid
of communities or towns, they found few other settlers—and
those spoke dialects and languages they had never heard.
The climate and conditions were so brutally harsh that men—who
thought themselves young, strong and durable—commonly
succumbed to the elements and terrors in insanity or death.
Decades of backbreaking
labor brought a level of civilization to this land. With
grateful hearts and undying faith in God, my family founded
a tiny church. Soon after, they created a school for their
children. St. Paul’s Cemetery, located on my farm,
still cradles those who either died too soon, lacking the
medical care already known and available in the Old Country,
or died old, after working tirelessly to establish homes
and communities for their families. The ancestors of my current
neighbors lie next to my own forebears. We all know and remember
their names and where they lived their lives—and how
essential was their shared, cooperative life in creating
and building the Argo Township community as we now know it.
Please understand,
Mr. ______, that ours were families of common people, peasants
fleeing a decayed and warring Europe. They never yearned
to live lives of grand accomplishment or wealth. They hardly
dared to hope for lives of usefulness and the most modest
success—all impossible, had they remained in their
ancestral homeland.
Abandoning the “known” to
seek the “unknown”, was a dangerous and irrevocable
decision they believed they had to make. And the only resource
they could rely on to support themselves was their own physical
labor. They believed they could do it. And they did.
Today, we enjoy
and treasure the fruits of their labor: the pristine air,
the productive and beautiful agricultural landscape, the
neat, modest homes and farms of ordinary American families.
We still maintain the institutions they founded: the churches,
schools, and commerce of small towns, and the vitality of
clean, safe cities. We seek to safeguard the very environment
our parents taught us to respect. We remember the stories
and experiences of our forebears, who, enduring the almost
unbearable, created a community where tolerance, trust, kindness,
and harmony—among all animals, plants, and other humans—were
qualities essential to surviving Nature’s unimaginable
challenges.
Yet also today,
our citizens face new, once ‘unimaginable’ challenges:
those destructive practices and entities, such as the industrial
dairy you want to build, that impose irreversible damage
to the very elements of land, air, water, and living organisms
that have made Argo Township, and the region in which it
is located, what is still is.
Today we are challenged
by the unfamiliar value systems of immigrants such as yourself,
whose essential frame of business reference—that of
industrial scale animal exploitation, with it’s alluring
promise of great riches and accumulation of material wealth—is
so utterly foreign to the cultural and environmental context
of our homeland.
Please don’t
misunderstand: we are not ignorant people who just dislike
those who have been bred and born in other regions of the
planet, merely because they dare to investigate life in other
worlds. And don’t heed or believe those who, for their
own political purposes and agendas, accuse us of xenophobia
and intolerance.
Indeed, many of
us have traveled extensively and even lived in other lands.
Still others from Argo Township, including both my mother
and father, my husband and son, and now my son-in-law, have
risked their lives in military service to liberate and protect
the people of other countries and cultures--such as even
your own homeland--from cruel tyrants and oppressive regimes.
Speaking for my own family, we, in fact, delight in meeting
people from other places, and are honored to have made friends
and acquaintances in many parts of the world. We treasure
the cross-cultural experiences we have enjoyed, and look
forward to many more.
My deep concern, though, is about the irresponsible and contemptuous
manner in which my homeland is being sold to “investors”,
such as yourselves, who have a seemingly unquenchable thirst
for “more”: more money, more cows, more so-called ‘success’.
Of course, with
that thirst for ‘more’, comes more incredibly
high levels of debt and risk for you and your family, more
necessary exploitation of poverty-stricken, desperate Third-World
citizen-slaves (mainly Hispanic migrants) imported to do
the endless, healthless work of maintaining more cows producing
more waste and pollutants, while you endure more anxiety
about the almost certain inevitable environmental accident
that will cause you more personal sorrow, more shame, more
failure, and more legal liability.
My family and I,
and our neighbors, have worked our entire lives to protect
and care for our way of life. We are not “rich” in
your terms, perhaps, but we are contented people—wealthy
beyond even your wildest imaginations. “Enough” is
a hallmark characteristic of the people of this region.
We endeavor to
live by the classic “Golden Rule”: Do Unto Others
As You Would Have Them Do Unto You. We sincerely avoid creating
situations that would harm our neighbors, as much as ourselves.
We try to be considerate of the whole community, believing “…there,
but for the Grace of God go I…”. We willingly
help our neighbor today, because we may need their help tomorrow.
In this place, in this environment, we know we cannot survive
alone.
And Mr. _______,
while we may not have or even desire what you and your family
think you want or need—and will be able to buy, with
the great wealth you hope to gain from the industry you want
to impose on our neighborhood, please understand this: Next
to our families, nothing—absolutely NOTHING—is
more valuable to us than the right to live peaceably in this
quiet, clean, healthy, loving community.
So, should you
proceed with your intentions to destroy the sweetness of
our summer breeze--fragrant with the aroma of crops and animals
nurtured by my neighbors in the pursuit of their traditional,
family-scale farm enterprise--with the unbreatheable stench
of toxic clouds and winds generated from millions of gallons
of animal urine and feces contained in your man-made ‘lakes
of filth’, I intend to remind you constantly of the
unwelcome intrusion of your business.
Further, should
the pollutants your property creates ever impact the natural
environment beyond the precise borders of the land on which
your industry is located, I intend to alert any and all protective
agencies and authority, ceaselessly prevailing upon my constitutional
rights as an American to seek redress of this destructive
and illegal situation.
Thus, I urge you
now, while you still have time, to re-think the potential
for disaster that the site in question poses--comparing it,
as I have, with the design proposal you submitted for your
Permit Application. Try to imagine the impact that your industrial
facility will have on that site. I suggest that you then
come stay here for a few years—perhaps living in a
tiny cabin, as my forefathers did—to learn first-hand
how the climate and the environment itself will never yield
to man—and how it has the power and opportunity to
wreak almost unbelievable damage to even the sturdiest of
man-made objects in a moment’s notice.
Surely you must
have some appreciation of my concerns: no one can be born
and live in Holland without believing the power of the climate
and the sea: Nature reigns supreme.
Perhaps you feel you are already legally bound to the promises
of vast riches. We know well the siren song of land developers,
and others, such as the suppliers to your industries, who croon
lovely tunes to the unwise and the inexperienced. In the past,
we have seen land sold, like now, for exorbitant sums, with always
the granting of generous loans for incredible amounts of money.
They have always failed-- proven to be short-term, get-rich-quick, “low
risk”, yet popular schemes.
You and your family
are not bound to continue on a path of failure and destruction.
You can change course now—today! You may choose a different
plan.
Mr. _________,
the land here is populated not by an extravagantly wealthy
and status-seeking bourgeoisie, such as befits a multi-million-dollar
industrial development scheme, but rather by comfortable,
contented, hospitably honorable people who consider the long-term
protection of a clean, adequate water supply, the freshness
of unpolluted air, and the safety of all natural populations
to be the greatest wealth a people can hope to enjoy in a
lifetime.
Without your industrial
dairy, you and your family would be as welcome in Argo as
the trill of the meadowlark, as happy as a child playing
with a kitten, and as comfortable as I am when having coffee
with my neighbor.
Give it some thought.
Your life is short, too. You are, indeed, free to choose….
Yours truly,
Donna H. Ramsay
And family
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