[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

The Big Picture



The Big Picture, reviews by Bill Duesing
>From  The Natural Farmer, March, 1995, the newspaper of the Northeast Organic
Farming Association
C 1995, Bill Duesing, Solar Farm Education, Box 135, Stevenson, CT 06491

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, 1992. Bantam/Turner Books
How Much Land Can Ten Billion People Spare for Nature?   by Paul E. Waggoner,
February, 1994. CAST Task Force Report, No, 121. 
Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity  by Cary Fowler and
Pat Mooney, 1990. University of Arizona Press

Recently, these three publications dealing with agriculture, the earth and its
inhabitants came to my attention.  They are thought-provoking and provide a
broader context for our work.  

I rarely read novels, but after my son and my wife both recommended Ishmael, I
did.  It was a requirement for Dan's study of sustainable communities at the
Gaia Educational Outreach Institute in Temple, NH. In addition to these
recommendations, Ishmael won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship for "fiction that
produces creative and positive solutions to global problems."  It's easy to see
why.  Gentle and engaging, it changes the way we look at the world and deepens
our understanding of the human story.   

Near the beginning, the protagonist, with some reluctance and cynicism, answers
an ad which reads  "TEACHER seeks pupil.  Must have an earnest desire to save
the world.  Apply in person." The teacher, Ishmael, is a gorilla.  His
experiences in a zoo, in a travelling menagerie and with a tutor on a private
estate have given him an interesting perspective on the human species.  And, he
is able to communicate telepathically.

Most of the novel is a dialogue between teacher and pupil.  Ishmael's views on
agriculture, contemporary mythology, the Mother Culture and captivity raise as
many questions in our minds as they do in his student's.  Sometimes there's so
much to think about as Ishmael challenges our assumptions that it is hard to
read very much at one sitting.  Other times, it flows quickly and movingly and
the pages fly by.  

One of the book's most powerful images is Ishmael's description of "Taker"
society branching off from the long line of "Leaver" societies at the beginning
of agriculture 10,000 years ago. He says that the "Taker" society decided it
wasn't subject to the laws of nature.   He compares the mere 500 generations
of"Taker" society to an attempt at flying before the laws of aerodynamics are
known.  The erstwhile flying machine is launched from a high cliff and glides
for a long time.  At first everything looks great - "We're flying."  But, as
time goes on, the plane sinks lower and lower.  A few passengers begin to notice
that the plane is going down, but others say, "just pedal faster."  Eventually,
more and more people notice that the enterprise seems to be failing.
  
 (In his wonderful book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology
of New England, William Cronin offers a classic example of what Ishmael would
call a "Leaver"society when he describes the relationship of population size and
ecosystems among Northern New England Indians.)  

Ishmael is a refreshing antidote to the recently-published 64-page report How
Much Land Can Ten Billion People Spare for Nature?  This clever public relations
ploy, a perfect example of the "Taker" vision, is a task force report,
commissioned by Rockefeller University and published one year ago by CAST.
(CAST, the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology,  consists of  Weed,
Poultry, Dairy and other agri-science societies, companies and individuals.)
This report was widely distributed to Congress, government agencies and the
media.  CAST seems to assume that Americans are too jaded to worry about hungry
people in their midst, but they will worry about nature.  

Hubris is the word which springs to mind as we read the title of this report.
(These reports are the raison d'etre of CAST). The assumption that humans can
exist for long without being part of nature is downright arrogant.  (This is the
central issue in Ishmael.)  The author of the report, Dr. Paul Waggoner, "one of
the world's leading agricultural scientists," is the former director of the
Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven.  He is frequently
called upon to chair a commission which expresses the opinion of the "powerful."
He chaired a National Academy of Science Panel on Adaptation to Global Warming.
That panel's report assumed a "surprise-free scenario of mild, predictable
change" and therefore said that we shouldn't do much to prepare for global
warming.

In this report, Dr. Waggoner supports widespread adoption of all the most
advanced technology and biotechnology to grow more food on less land in order to
feed 10 billion people by the middle of the next century and still leave room
for nature.  However, Dr. Waggoner demonstrates the limitations of his linear
thinking when he writes about fertilizers, climate change, and flooding.  He
sees essentially no limit to the availability of chemical fertilizers to raise
yields to spare more land for nature.  Although he is a meteorologist, he
devotes only two paragraphs in the surprises chapter to climate change. He
claims that the midwestern floods in 1993 discredited or at least discounted the
predictions of a warming and drying climate made just five years earlier.  His
conclusion is "that farmers should diversify portfolios and await surprises."

However, there are a number of important connections that he doesn't make.  It
seems more likely, especially this winter, that any cooling was a temporary
effect of the Pinatubo volcano.  He also doesn't note that chemical fertilizers
are one of many tools that large-scale agriculture has used to destroy the
water-holding capacity of millions of acres of some of the earth's most fertile
soil. After nearly a hundred years of this destruction, it's no wonder there
were severe floods.   He also doesn't point out that fertilizers themselves
cause the release of methane (from the organic matter burned up by the high
nitrogen to carbon ratio synthetic nitrogen fertilizers create).  This methane
is a powerful greenhouse gas which may increase climate change.  It also seems
inexcusible to talk just about slow warming and not about the kinds of severe
and record-breaking weather events which are occuring  all over the globe.

To his credit, he does discuss the effects of diet on the amount of food
consumed, although he fails to note that the modern food system encourages the
most energy- and resource-intensive diets.  It is direct contact with the food
>from  our gardens and farms which is most useful in encouraging a less intensive
diet, I believe.

This report is full of charts, graphs and formulas.   At one point Dr. Waggoner
reduces the whole question of the price of food in the future to a simple
equation involving technological change, income elasticity of demand, demand and
supply elasticity of price, and population. His conclusion: "so by harvesting
more per plot, farmers can help ten billion spare some land that unchanging
yields would require to feed them.  Glimmers can be seen even of changing diets,
never-ending research, encouraging incentives, and smart farmers feeding ten
billion at affordable prices while sparing some of today's cropland for Nature."

The month after How Much Land... was published, the Hudson Institute, founded by
Herman Kahn, published a Briefing Paper by Dennis T. Avery. Avery was one of
three reviewers of How Much Land...  and defended biotechnology at the 1993 NOFA
Conference.  This paper, titled "The Organic Farming Threat to People and
Wildlife" probably evolved from Dr. Waggoner's work. Avery's thesis seems to be
based on very limited, skewed data, and the linear/mechanical model.  Sadly,
neither of these gentlemen has any role for the vast majority of people to play
in food production.

Ishmael's comments are relevant here. "Given an expanding food supply, any
population will expand.  This is true of any species including the human.  The
Takers have been proving this here for ten thousand years.  For ten thousand
years they've been steadily increasing food production to feed an increased
population, and every time they've done this, the population has increased still
more."
  
Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity had been on our
book shelf for several years, unread, until it was assigned as the textbook for
a graduate course "Food Policies and Environmental Issues" that Suzanne just
started as part of her graduate work in Environmental Education.  I had assumed
Shattering was just about biotechnology, which I figured I knew enough about to
reject.   Once I delved into it, however, I discovered that it is about much
more than just biotechnology.  It is very readable, has a broad scope and is
very informative.  It provides a non-fiction balance to the CAST report.

The authors point out, for instance, that in precisely the areas where the green
revolution increased food production, hunger and malnutrition also increased
most rapidly.  "The green revolution answered the problem of hunger and rural
unrest with increased production, not with land reform or employment projects;
essentially it offered a technological solution to a social and political
problem." 

Ishmael is a lot about how the stories we tell influence our thinking.  How much
land... and Shattering both tell of the Irish Potato Famine, its causes and
effects, but the differences in their stories are revealing. (My own impression
before reading these accounts was that the famine was a lesson about the dangers
of relying too heavily on one source of food. ) Dr. Waggoner writes about the
effects of the potato on the Irish population.  Because it provided a
satisfactory diet from a smaller area than wheat, and was easy to grow, its
widespread cultivation allowed the Irish population to increase greatly from the
late 18th to the middle of the 19th centuries.  He then uses comparisons of
yields of wheat and potatoes in different times and places to conclude that
"changing human diets and crop species to match the era and the place can
increase the number of people sustained on a given area of land, saving more for
Nature."  Later, he talks about the blight which appeared suddenly and decimated
the potato crops for five years, and the Southern corn leaf blight in 1970-71,
as examples of unexpected pests.  But, he doesn't mention the narrow genetic
base which was responsible for the devastation these blights caused.  It wasn't
until I read Shattering  that I began to understand the causes of the Irish
famine.  

The book's authors, Fowler and Mooney, (whose ancestors emigrated to this
country because of the potato famine), fill in the picture.  By 1840, Irish
peasants were eating between nine and fourteen pounds of potatoes a day. All of
the potatoes grown in Europe at that time were descended from just two
introductions from the "New World," late in the 16th century.  

After the blight, resistance was located in potatoes in the Andes and Mexico,
and is responsible for the success of potatoes today.  The authors state that
"the Irish potato famine stands both as the most dramatic warning of the dangers
of genetic uniformity and the clearest example of the value of preserving
diversity."   

However, there's another part of the story that I hadn't heard before.  In 1840,
there were eight to nine million people in Ireland, but 80 percent of the land
was owned by just 4000 people, many of whom were foreigners.  Throughout the
famine, Ireland exported large quantities of grain to England, and 80 percent of
the countryside was grazed, not cultivated.  The military thwarted mobs which
tried to prevent grain from being exported, and eventually Irish relief
societies imported Irish grain from England at high prices for distribution to
the poor.  The famine was a social problem, not an agricultural problem.  The
Irish say " God sent the blight; the English brought the famine.  This story has
echos in present-day Chiapas, Mexico, in India and even closer to home in
Bridgeport, Connecticut. 

 The CAST report would have us put our food supply in the hands of a few
agricultural scientists and technologically-advanced farmers who use an
industrial model and lots of inputs, synthetic hormones and genetically
engineered seeds.  And this should be done for the sake of ten billion people. 

Ishmael and Shattering remind us that there are other paths for us to consider.