Susan Rigdway Garry
Anti-Corridor/Rail Expansion (ACRE)
The September issue of National Geographic has an interesting article, “Our Good Earth,” on the soils of the world and the dangers to them.If you have access to this issue, please see the map on page 92 and notice how TTC-35 and the NAFTA Superhighway will create a path of destruction all along our nation’s most valuable farm land.
Even though National Geographic ranked this soil as one of the “most highly fertile soils in the world,” the article did not mention the imminent threat to it posed by TTC-35, even though it covered threats to some other soils.
The article is online at nationalgeographic.com in the September issue. I can’t find the map online. It is on page 92 in the print edition. [See the scanned image below]
I have sent the letter below to the magazine. Perhaps if more of us write, National Geographic will recognize the importance of this topic.
Blackland Prairie: DARK GREEN
Trans-Texas Corridor Priority corridors: ORANGE
To the Editor of National Geographic:
Regarding “Our Good Earth” in the September 2008 issue, one imminent danger not covered in your article is the Trans-Texas Corridor, which is underway in Texas and forms the first stage of the NAFTA Superhighway. Your map on page 92 illustrates that one of the largest areas of the most highly fertile soils in the world begins at the Texas-Mexico border and runs north to the northern Midwest.
Much of this Blackland Prairie in Texas, from the Mexican border to the Oklahoma border, is slated to be paved over by the Trans-Texas Corridor route called TTC-35—an almost quarter-mile wide swath of 10 vehicular lanes, 6 rail lines, and pipeline and utility zones. It is proposed to proceed north from Texas as the NAFTA Superhighway, covering hundreds of thousands of acres of the world’s best farmland, right through the middle of “the world’s breadbasket.”
Texas farmers, ranchers, and other rural residents have been fighting the Corridor for years, and we would like to alert the rest of the country, indeed the world, that one of the largest areas of “Good Earth” in existence is in extreme danger from an unnecessary project that benefits only those who will profit monetarily from its construction, while permanently depriving the world’s population of this invaluable resource.
It is very easy to send a letter to the editor of National Geographic through ngsforum@nationalgeographic.com
© 2008, ACRE: acretexas.blogspot.com
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