The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 468
Bill, I'd also like to point out to you and the Organic Consumers Association that
there are a wide number of reasons why prairie is being lost. In Indiana, for
example, they lose about 200,000 acres of farmland per year to urban growth.
If you're not a fan of shopping centers and new housing communities I guess
you could call it a "barren landscape," but the only way you could blame that on
corn is to complain about the popcorn they sell at the new movie theaters. However, for they or you, or anyone serious about this subject I would recommend
you read "Vanishing Open Spaces" by Leon Kolankiewicz, Roy Beck and Anne
Manetas. Their study provides a rather excellent break down of the loss of open
space and the problem of urban sprawl and population growth, and they don't
seem to have an oil industry sponsored agenda to blame it on corn. In fact, in
the entire study, which covers about 100 pages of text, charts, and tables, they
only mention the word "corn" one time.
The title of your article refers to an "ethanol mandate," and you imply that there
is also a mandate to make the ethanol from corn. However, there is no ethanol
mandate; there is a renewable fuel mandate. It so happens that ethanol is the
best and most affordable renewable fuel to use, therefore ethanol is used.
There is also no mandate that corn be used to make the ethanol. It just so happens that in America the best crop to use to make ethanol is currently corn.
For many decades, the oil industry has argued that there isn't enough land in
the United States to grow a sufficient amount of crops needed for ethanol to
become the primary engine fuel, or for it to become even the primary anti-knock
gasoline additive for America. William Kovarik documents this extensively in his
1993 dissertation, "THE ETHYL CONTROVERSY" which details the times and
