The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

by Rebecca Skloot

  But with a blue-sky tone, Kloppenburg said that the true objective had never been to create a license per se. Instead it had been to create a positive alternative to the intellectual-property regime. He was confident they could still do as much. The open-source idea had generated enthusiasm from all corners of the agricultural world. (Even the inventor of the Seminis red carrot, an old-school plant breeder caught in the tangle of the modern industry, had expressed his support.) This signaled to Kloppenburg that perhaps finally there was enough momentum to build an American seed movement big enough to have an impact.

  OSSI was one of many nuclei organizing around the larger topic of seeds. Over the previous two years the national seed-swapping nonprofit Seed Savers Exchange had grown its membership by 33 percent—to 13,000 gardeners. Later, in 2014, Vermont would pass the first law in the country requiring the labeling of all foods containing genetically modified ingredients, a goal anti-biotech activists had sought for years. But there was still no concerted, sustained effort around that most fundamental issue of control and ownership, as there was in other countries. Kloppenburg pointed to Canada, where the National Farmers Union had been waging war against increased intellectual-property protections, and to countries throughout the developing world, where seed issues were an integral part of the international struggle for peasant rights. Across the Atlantic there had been an uproar for more than a year over European Patent 1,597,965: “Broccoli type adapted for ease of harvest”—granted to Seminis in May 2013. As the title suggests, the claim is essentially identical to the company’s American patent on exserted-head broccoli. But while Jim Myers was about the only person upset about the U.S. version, a coalition of 25 organizations from Europe and India filed a formal opposition to the European patent within months of its approval. Along with the requisite paperwork requesting that it be revoked, they delivered 45,000 signatures from supporters.

  “Patents on naturally occurring biodiversity in plant breeding are an abuse of patent law,” the opposition statement read, “because instead of protecting inventions they become an instrument for the misappropriation of natural resources.”*

  Their argument centers around a single line in the European Patent Convention, Article 53b, which states that patents shall not be granted on “plant or animal varieties or essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals.” Recent objections to similar claims (one on a different broccoli, another on a tomato) led the European Patent Office’s board of appeals to clarify that a new variety created by simply crossing plants and selecting their offspring—exactly the work of Myers and the Seminis broccoli breeders alike—was considered essentially biological and so not patentable.

  The latest American ruling on the topic, in June 2013, established just the opposite. In the highly publicized case Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that DNA itself was “a product of nature and not patent eligible.” But in delivering the opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas made the distinction that new plant breeds developed by conventional plant breeding were patent eligible. He cited the American Inventor’s Protection Act of 1999 as well as court precedent—namely, the opinion in the landmark 2001 case, which he also authored.

  So while OSSI believes in the same basic principles as the European coalition—whose statement about the ethical implications of patents could have been written by Kloppenburg himself—the Americans’ fight is arguably much tougher. Its challenge is to amend patent law, which involves lobbying Congress against the powerful forces that are deeply invested in maintaining, if not strengthening, intellectual-property protections. Slow change, indeed.

  Kloppenburg hopes that OSSI, with its new approach, can at least help speed things up. Listening to him and Goldman describe their new vision, it’s almost as if they have replaced seeds as software with a new metaphor—one inspired by plant breeding itself. Instead of building a protective barrier, OSSI would reach out into the world as widely as possible. Each time open-source seed was shared, the message on the packet would germinate in new minds: it would prod the uninformed to question why seeds would not be freely exchanged—why this pledge was even necessary. It would inspire those who already knew the issues of intellectual property to care more and spread the word. As the seed multiplied, so would the message. With three simple sentences, OSSI would propagate participants in the new movement like seedlings. They would breed resistance.

  On April 17 the Open Source Seed Initiative announced itself to the public in a ceremony at the University of Wisconsin. The original plan was to rally on the steps of grand Bascom Hall, next to a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln—“an appropriate witness to our emancipation of seed,” Kloppenburg said. Instead the rally took place outside the less charismatic Microbial Sciences Building, beside a tree still bare in the young springtime. Unfazed, volunteers planted the dry lawn with dozens of short white flags reading free the seed!!!, which shivered in a brisk breeze. Clad in winter jackets, about 60 people gathered to hear Kloppenburg, Goldman, and others talk about food sovereignty and the importance of genetic diversity. Then organizers handed out packets printed with the OSSI pledge. Each contained seed from one of 36 open-source varieties, ranging from barley to zucchini. They included two carrots bred by Goldman, one of which he named Sovereign, in honor of the occasion.

  They also included a broccoli from Oregon whose history began in 1997, the same year as Tom Michaels’s epiphany about the future of plant breeding. That year Jim Myers began breeding a plant he now calls “The O.P.,” which stands for “open-pollinated.” Until then his broccoli were either hybrids or inbreds, created by a process of narrowing the genetics until one select mother is bred with one select father to create a single, most desirable combination of genes. The O.P., by contrast, is the result of a horticultural orgy. Myers began with 23 different broccoli hybrids and inbreds, including some of the lines behind the exserted-head trait. He let insects cross-pollinate them en masse, and the resulting plants were crossed at random again—and again, and again, four generations in a row. He then sent germplasm to farmers around the country, had them grow it in their fields and send back the seed they collected. Over the winter Myers bred it in another greenhouse orgy, then sent it back to farmers. For six years he repeated this process.

  The broccoli evolved in two ways simultaneously. The back-and-forth of the breeding scrambled the plants’ genetics, making the germplasm wildly diverse. It also let the environment whittle away at individual genes. For instance, plants without pest resistance produced less seed or simply died, reducing their presence in the gene pool. When it was hot, plants that could tolerate heat produced more seed, increasing their presence. Survival of the fittest.

  In the seventh year Myers sent most of the seed back to the farmers—just gave it to them, without licenses, royalties, or restrictions. The idea was that each farmer would adapt that dynamic gene pool to his or her farm’s particular climate and conditions, selecting the best plants every year to refine the population. In other words, they could breed it themselves. In time each would end up with his or her own perfect broccoli.

  The beauty of the O.P. is that rather than challenge the intellectual-property system, it inherently rejects the concept of ownership. It contains many of the desirable genetics of Myers’s commercial broccoli lines, but in a package that is designed to be shared, not owned. Because it is open-pollinated, not a hybrid, its seeds can be saved by any farmer. And because it is genetically diverse, it would be difficult to pin down with a patent. Even if someone did claim to own it, because each new seedling is a little different, that claim would be all but impossible to enforce. In this case, the plant’s natural instinct to mate, multiply, change—to evolve—isn’t an impediment at all. Rather, it is a central reason why people would want to grow it in the first place.

  One of the farmers who received seed from Myers was Jonathan Spero, who grows and breeds vegetables on his farm in southwest Oregon. After a decade of wor
king with the O.P., he released his own variety, a sweet, purplish broccoli that sends out numerous side shoots after the main head is harvested. Spero named it Solstice because it produces earlier than most—if planted by mid-April, it will yield florets by the first day of summer. Some people also refer to it as Oregon Long Neck, because it has an exserted head. On April 17, in front of the Microbial Sciences Building at the University of Wisconsin, it gained another title of sorts: the world’s first open-source broccoli.

  That day, as the last act in the ceremonial birth of OSSI, the audience turned over their crisp little packets of seed and recited the pledge on the back. What they held in their hands was no silver bullet. It wouldn’t keep Seminis from getting its broccoli patent application approved, much less rewrite the laws of intellectual property in favor of free exchange and genetic diversity. But still, as Kloppenburg and Goldman read those precious words in unison with the small crowd gathered in the cold before them, there was a new power to their voices. The seed wasn’t even in the ground yet, but already open source was taking root.

  ROWAN JACOBSEN

  Down by the River

  FROM Orion

  ALTHOUGH YOU WOULDN’T have known it as recently as 10 years ago, the Sonoran Desert city of Yuma, Arizona, is a river town. Located near the junction of California, Arizona, and Mexico, this kiln-dry city of 90,000 people and 3 billion heads of lettuce has always owed its existence to the Colorado River. It was here in 1849 that thousands of Gold Rushers arrived at Yuma Crossing, where two granite ledges funneled the powerful Colorado River through a deep narrows that made for the easiest ferry crossing in the Southwest. The native Quechan enjoyed a brief monopoly ferrying settlers across the Colorado until the U.S. Army established Fort Yuma in 1850, ostensibly to protect the river crossing. Regular skirmishes between the Quechan and the newcomers followed. Soon enough, more than a few Quechan were dead and the river crossing was firmly in the hands of the United States. The Quechan were relegated to the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation on the west bank, while the city of Yuma grew up on the east bank, welcoming riverboats that steamed up from the Gulf of California laden with settlers and supplies.

  To picture the Colorado River back then, one needs plenty of imagination, because the current river in no way resembles the historical one. Before the coming of the dams, the Colorado was an unruly god of creation and destruction. Fed by Rocky Mountain snowmelt, it would swell to 40 times its size each spring, inundating the floodplain and forming one of the world’s largest deltas, which ran from Yuma to the Gulf of California, 100 miles south. The floods were the lifeblood of this bone-dry corner of the country. Verdant gallery forests of willow and cottonwood etched the riverbanks, and thick mesquite groves filled the floodplains. The trees evolved to survive on one big dose of water per year by drilling their roots deep to reach the groundwater. Cattails and bulrushes thrived in the meanders and back channels, making the region the unlikeliest of ecological jewels. Nearly 400 species of birds used the desert wetlands. Beaver, deer, and pumas slipped through the cool green pools.

  As did the Quechan. They fished and hunted year-round, made their houses from willow withes, cooked mesquite-flour tortillas over mesquite fires, and waited until the floods receded each spring to plant their crops in the still-damp earth.

  That way of life didn’t work for the sedentary settlers, who in 1936 were only too happy to see Hoover Dam shackle the beast that had eaten their homes and farms one time too many. More dams and canals followed, and the Southwest’s great boom was on. By the time the Lake Powell Reservoir, about 700 miles upriver on the Arizona-Colorado border, filled in 1980, 90 percent of the river’s water was being diverted to farms, as well as cities as far away as Denver and Los Angeles, before it reached Yuma. The mighty river had become an obedient stream that never left its banks, let alone overflowed into what had been desert wetlands. Deprived of their annual dose of river water, the willow, cottonwood, and mesquite trees died. The marshes withered. And the birds disappeared. The Pacific Flyway, which stretches from British Columbia to South America, became a shadow of its former self. The Quechan found themselves on a barren reservation.

  One of the few plants that flourished in the arid and saline soils of the unwatered Lower Colorado floodplain was Tamarix ramosissima, the tamarisk or saltcedar, which looks like a ratty pine tree and forms tangled stands a few yards high. The tamarisk—described in both the Bible and the Koran and a native of the deserts of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean—was planted by the millions during the Dust Bowl to fight soil erosion. With little competition from native plants, it soon swarmed across the West, and now infests more than 3 million acres, including almost the entire Colorado River corridor.

  Few areas were hit harder than Yuma, and the calamity went beyond the tremendous loss of biodiversity. In 1999 community developer Charlie Flynn took the helm of the Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area, which is part of the National Park Service’s program to foster community-driven stewardship of important natural or cultural landscapes. His task was to bring the riverfront back to life, but he found the area so overgrown with invasive tamarisk thickets that no one could get near the water, and in the few places where people could, they didn’t dare because of drug smugglers who used the abandoned waterway as a thoroughfare. “Once all the nonnative vegetation grew up, it was the perfect breeding ground for drug traffic, meth labs, hobo camps, trash dumps,” Flynn explained to me. “You name it, it was down there. It was a no-man’s land. People just didn’t go to the river. They were afraid to. Even the police hated going down there. You couldn’t see two feet ahead of you.”

  Along with the riverfront, the historic downtown had withered. And with the two sides of the river in a cold war of sorts, the only direct connection between downtown Yuma and the Quechan reservation—the Ocean-to-Ocean Bridge—had been allowed to fall into ruin. The 1915 masterpiece was declared structurally deficient in 1988, and there had been no attempts to repair it. Yuma soon forgot about its river and its history and became a sprawling land of industrial lettuce farms fueled by migrant labor.

  A practitioner of Eastern medicine might have diagnosed a chi blockage. The energy of the river was what had always held the system together. The tamarisk and the drug trade were the diseases that had taken hold in the resulting imbalance; the severing of community and the loss of identity were some of the symptoms. But with every drop of the Colorado River already claimed, and the Southwest projected to have 20 million additional people and even hotter temperatures in the coming decades, the river was unlikely to ever again have a surplus of water. Faced with these realities, the city shrugged and turned its back on its benefactor.

  Charlie Flynn saw the upside of a restored waterfront, but he thought the odds of success were slim. “I wondered if it was really possible,” he admitted to me. “The physical and stakeholder challenges were so great.” The land-ownership issues were even more tangled than the tamarisk: 16 different entities owned land along the river, including the Quechan, the city of Yuma, local farmers, and the states of California and Arizona. And they would all have to work with the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages infrastructure on the Colorado River. “The Quechan didn’t trust us. The farmers didn’t trust us. You couldn’t ask for a mix more hostile to the federal government.”

  Although the city and the tribe were not on speaking terms, Flynn knew nothing could proceed without the cooperation of the Quechan, so he took it upon himself to start attending the monthly tribal council meetings. “I thought, okay, is this going to be a transaction or a relationship? What most people don’t understand is that if you start off trying to do a transaction with a Native American tribe, you’re dead. You’d better establish a relationship, establish trust, and then go forward.” At the first meeting he attended, he received a litany of injustices visited upon the tribe. “It was a monologue, going all the way back.” But the monologue slowly turned into dialogue, and eventually Flynn and the tribe found two things t
hey both wanted to fix: the riverfront and the Ocean-to-Ocean Bridge. “We agreed that the bridge was more tangible and doable. It was a rallying cry. And it was also a physical and symbolic connection between the Quechan and the city.” After long negotiations, they agreed to split the costs evenly.

  On February 28, 2002, the Ocean-to-Ocean Bridge reopened in a spirited celebration. About 800 people turned out to watch the mayor and the Quechan tribal president drive across the bridge in antique cars, and the Quechan hosted the ceremony on their side of the river. “The bridge was the turning point,” Quechan economic development director Brian Golding told me. “Because of that collaboration, the two entities came together.”

  Two weeks after the bridge ceremony, another chasm was crossed when the Quechan tribal president called Charlie Flynn and proposed that they get to work on the riverfront. Flynn learned of a young landscape architect who had been living in Parker, Arizona, and restoring wetlands on the Colorado River Indian Reservation. So he drove about 100 miles north of Yuma to visit.

  The Colorado River Indian Reservation is a dusty moonscape of cactus and red rock. No trees, no grass. In summer it cooks along at 110 degrees, and you can almost hear the crackle of creosote bush leaves frying in their oil. When Flynn arrived, a baby-faced man with a long ponytail introduced himself as Fred Phillips. Flynn found him to be practical and passionate about his work. “Although he had deep respect for Native Americans, he did not romanticize them,” Flynn said. “He was willing to engage with tribal leaders, which can be both difficult and meaningful.”