More excerpts from J. Russell Smith's brilliant article "The Agriculture of the Garden of Eden..."
The lesson in brief is that crop-yielding trees may serve fundamental needs of great importance and make easier our hold upon life. We are newcomers to this continent. As Man's history goes, we came here but yesterday, and we are still strangers to the land and its best uses. We have found a land of trees which we have destroyed in order to apply and produce the crops we brought rather than those that were best suited to the land and to our present needs...
The trouble is that we have not taken tree crops seriously. In the autumn we go forth with our children and gather a few nuts as a kind of an outing, but it is little more important in our eyes that the collecting of pretty pebbles, and it has no appreciable influence on the family budget or the family's nutrition.
Next time... Eden in the oasis, and bringing the oasis to North America!
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