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Green Pastures Because I was raised knee-deep in cow manure on a dairy farm in Idaho, I know a mess when I see one. At Pt. Reyes on the coast of northern California they transformed the estuary at the head of the shallow trough called Tomales Bay into cow pastures where hundreds of cows graze producing milk, methane, and manure. ( I don’t know what the relative amounts are, not being one of those smart people who can figure out such things, but it doesn’t sound like a pleasant job, trailing along behind a Holstein, weighing and measuring whatever comes out of it.) All that manure flushing into the bay doesn’t do the fish or plants or anything that lives there much good. In fact it’s killing them and Lord knows what’s happening to the whales that swim past the mouth of the bay on their regular migration, although if it comes down to a struggle for survival between the cows and whales, my money’s on the whales who don’t stand around all day eating grass and farting methane and waiting for somebody to milk them. The environmentalists are trying to get the farmers to give up the cows, but what’s a dairy farm without cows? And once you get used to milking cows twice a day, it’s hard to break the habit although the use of machines has taken most of the pleasure out of it for everybody involved. 92 Tomales Bay is a long narrow fissure marking the path of the San Andreas Fault beneath it. Maybe when the big quake comes the whole controversy will be quickly resolved: cows, drainage, and even the bay itself, but it will be a dreadful mess with liquid cow manure flying around and the magnificent homes of the rich along the bay sliding down into it. 93 ...

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