Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
far better than in the bush. Nowadays, the rural peasant almost everywhere can
see on TV that his urban cousin is enjoying a much higher quality of life, and
the ruralite often abandons the farm (even if his situation there is viable) to head
for the city.
One illustration of this situation is experience in East Java in Indonesia on
a World Bank irrigation project in the 1980s
152
, namely, a Sunday tour to talk
to typical farmers. It was found that while most farmers worked essentially to
grow rice, a few had invested in chicken raising to produce eggs to sell to the
provincial capital market at Surabaya and thus realize some cash income all
year round. Only a few had the investment resources to do this. One of these
explained, when asked if he/his family ever ate any of the eggs, that the eggs
were much too expensive for them to consume, but his two younger brothers,
who had been forced off the farm to become urbanites (typical family of three
sons, but only enough land for one), and who had become taxi drivers, yes, they
often ate eggs.
Another final illustration of the rural to urban scenario is a TV cartoon movie,
which features a young coyote (“YC”) who lives in the uninhabited open bush
areas of eastern Riverside Country in Southern California (one drives through this
region in going from Los Angeles to Las Vegas). He's happy there, including
working at hunting 10 to 12 hours per day (mostly chasing rabbits) to get enough
to eat. It's all he knows. One day, while chasing a rabbit in the northern part
of his hunting territory, which borders on the highway, it happened that a big
truck/van stopped there, and the driver opened the back to take out a package
for delivery to a local gas station, leaving the door open. The rabbit ran in, the
YC after him, and the driver returned, closed the door, and took off. When the
truck stopped and the door was opened, the YC got out and found himself in the
foothills residential area of Hollywood/Beverly Hills (populated mainly by very
wealthy people). He promptly ran up into the mountainous hills that overlook the
L.A. basin, where he soon found a pack of coyotes who took him in. These guys
were living in the lap of luxury. They spent less than an hour per day having a
banquet, in the early morning, by feeding on a deluxe variety of delicious foods
contained in the house garbage cans that they overturned. Instead of eating only
rabbits all the time, and not very much of that, he enjoyed choices of beef, pork,
veal, whatnot, even rabbit, plus all sorts of desserts. Our YC soon became sleek
(no longer skinny) and with his ample time soon found a girlfriend and had
endless recreational fun with her, howling together especially in the evenings.
It was too good to be true, for long. The women organizations of Los Angeles
County, who believed that the “Hollywood Way of Life” was not good for the
coyotes and that they should be caught and returned to wilderness areas, forced
the county to set up a governmental unit to do this. Yes, our YC got caught, and
it happened he was returned to the very place where he had come from. At first,
he was very glad to be “home,” to see his friends again; however, after a few
weeks of all work and no recreation, the story ends when the YC stations himself
near the highway, waiting for another truck to stop and leave the rear open. It
happens; the YC runs in, the driver returns, closes the door, and drives off.
