If you read part-1 of “Following the Trail from Sustainability to Tyranny“, you would have seen a list of “What If?” questions. The third question reads: “What If you could not grow a vegetable garden without a permit?“. Some people might say these are pie-in-the-sky questions, or conspiracy notions, simply because they are not necessarily happening today. Well, you’ve been warned!
Someone in New Hampshire recently picked up on the Utah Garden Challenge website, from the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food (UDAF). The “Garden Challenge” is an attempt to get people in Utah to register their gardens. Now, we’re not talking about professional farmers or people who run decent-sized, licensed family farm stands; Utah is asking everyone, “whether you grow a tomato in a pot, a row in a community garden, have backyard gardens, a CSA or working fruit and vegetable farm, we want to hear from you because you are an important resource as a food producer.”
Key phrase: “resource as a food producer” (video)
Not surprising, one of the sponsors of the “challenge” is a university coop extension (Utah State). Here in New Hampshire, UNH (Carsey Institute) has their busy little (State subsidized) hands all over the “sustainability” and “social policy” movements, providing funding and academic support to the Regional Planning Commissions (RPC) and the “Granite State Future” program (kick-off report, PDF).
If you go to the UDAF main website, you see that they are working hard to achieve a goal of registering 10,000 gardens, by appealing to emotion and pride, declaring that “Utahns are self-sufficient and we take pride in our communities“, and that they want to “celebrate your space” and “display our agricultural heritage“. They are also offering random prizes for people who register.
Another subtle notion used, as a scare tactic and to gin up a non-existent problem (that needs to be “managed”): “Where’s the cost of our food headed?” They provide plenty of USDA data about food cost history and projection, but no mention of middle-class-killing inflation, at the hands of the currency-debasing Federal Reserve; a recurring method is to use an existing, manifested problem to justify a newly-created one.
This is not about vegetables – this is about creeping state management of all aspects of our lives. Are we just going to let it happen?
This, folks, is an inventory exercise, quite typical and standard protocol of the environmental/sustainable occult in our states. An important tool of the “sustainability” movement is information. There is strong emphasis on mapping the lands (GIS), identifying water, terrain, and other features, and to carve out zones with it. Another is to inventory people, automobiles, swimming pools, wells, gardens, lifestyles, and other habits. Once they have this information, they will use it to declare certain behaviors as dangerous to the environment, and to isolate behavior that needs to be managed, taxed, modified, or eliminated.
At least it’s voluntary…for now.
Hopefully, the people of Utah, and in states across the country, will realize that the behavior of the environmentalists is what needs to be modified, not ours.
Update: Jane, at the NH Tea Party coalition, also posted up a story about this program.