Not the most compelling earthy-crunchy argument.
The Trust for Public Land, a conservation group that I was previously unaware of, sent me a pretend survey today in the mail (it asked about 10 questions about land use, including a couple that are "and how much money will you give us now that we've sent you this pretend survey?") with a typical fundraising "TheSkyIsFalling! YouMustGiveUsMoneyNow!" cover letter.
The coverletter wasn't particularly exceptional, except for a couple of passages. On the one hand...
Pristine forests, farms, and meadows you once took for granted are now lost forever. Developed for housing, bulldozed for shopping malls, paved over for parking lots.
... and ...
Because once land is bulldozed, paved over and built on, it is gone forever.
But on the other hand...
A citizens group will ask us to work with a developer to help turn an abandoned asphalt lot into a kids' playground.
So. Lost forever vs. not lost forever. Which is it? And, for that matter, just how pristine is a farm anyway? I grew up in Wisconsin, which is a heavily forested state with plenty of farms and meadows. The vast majority of those farms were cut out of the woods (Lake Pepin, of Little House in the Big Woods fame, is about 75(?) miles north of where I grew up. The replica little house is now situated in a little park surrounded by a field, and when the original little house finally collapsed into a pile, it was surrounded by fields in the same way that many farmers houses were. When the Ingalls family lived there, it was surrounded by an old-growth forest, all of which is now gone except possibly one or two surviving trees tucked into ravines and other places where it wasn't worth it for the farmers and loggers to cut them down and drag them out.
Sure, I can see the point of preserving untouched old-growth forest and pre-columbian ecosystems; if someone set aside a few hundred thousand acres to restore to a pre-columbian state, it would take several hundred years to get to that point and, barring some cure for mortality coming out of the medical labs in the far east, nobody living today will get to see the 300 year old trees that would grow up in the precolumbian-to-go preserve. But to preserve farms because they are some sort of unrecoverable utopian paradise? That's just delusional; if you want to preserve farms, get the American Imperium to stop subsidizing factory farms; once those factory "farmers" can't sit back and pick up millions of dollars from Uncle Sugar, there will be more little family farms than you could shake a stick at, because people like to eat even if they have to suffer through knowing that the money they pay won't go to a GOP super team leader deluxe.
But I digress. The cover letter here is first saying that if land is developed, well, that's it, it's gone forever. And then it turns around and says that one of the things they do is work with developers to reclaim developed land. One of these statements does not match with a couple of the other statements (and, for that matter, reality; there are plenty of cases of developed land that have reverted back to forest and meadow, with nothing left to show for the development except the rusted carcass of a steam locomotive or automobile, or even two vast and trunkless legs of stone), and I'm not likely to pay much attention to a begathon letter that tells me "OhG-dTheSkyIsFalling!" and then, as an aside, says "we repair fallen skies. Inquire within for rates."
And they didn't put return postage on their envelope, so I couldn't even drop them a note complaining about the incoherence of their whinathon letter.