Somehow Devon knew that photographing these sights was opening up something in me. I’ve since heard her tell people, “For the first time, maybe in his life, I think Howie was pretty serious, and for a lot of the day, he was quiet. He wasn’t joking around telling stories or focused on other people, and the light and the colors and all these images from nature were resonating with him. People say they feel like they see Howie’s soul in his photography.”
Devon went to the Nebraska Furniture Mart and bought me my first nice camera. It was a Pentax 35-millimeter single-lens reflex. I was hooked. Photography eventually played a huge role in what I came to understand about hunger. I could not “look away.”
Early on, when traveling, I would photograph nature. But even when my mission was to get shots of gorillas or polar bears or cougars, I’d often turn and take pictures of the local people too. It was almost like a quiet muse nagging at my conscience. In so many endangered habitats, those people would be visibly poor and hungry.
I learned a lot I never could have if I was not in pursuit of a shot. You pay attention to factors such as light and air quality. In many villages in the developing world, there is a noxious, smoky haze low to the ground that people are exposed to, which damages their lungs over time. It might be from garbage burning, or it might be the residue of charcoal fires. Whatever the source, the smoke and fumes are unhealthy to inhale, particularly for young children, and unpleasant to smell. It is present because people are poor, and whatever is burning is somehow keeping them going.
Another element to taking people’s photographs that always fascinates me is that even if they are extremely poor, they often have some item they treasure, some element of their identity, that they want to show me. In refugee camps, I have had women bring me cooking pots with bullet holes in them or a dress stained with blood that they carry so they can have tangible evidence of something horrible that happened to them. Or children will want to show you a special little toy or doll, or a little car. They are proud when you photograph them with it. It validates them and what they care about.
Pursuing a shot can put you in harm’s way as well. Sometimes you get so intent on framing the picture you forget that. Photojournalists talk about how once they have their cameras in their hands, they have a sense of being on a mission, with their camera a truth gun of sorts. The problem is that despite the illusion of holding a weapon, the truth gun is not going to protect you from anything real. My search for a powerful photograph has landed me in some precarious situations: freezing cold at fourteen thousand feet in a Blackhawk helicopter above Afghanistan, for example; getting charged by a polar bear; even confronting angry men holding pickaxes around a diamond mine in Sierra Leone.
The boy from Senegal in chains embodies one of the many faces of hunger to me. What happens to a child raised in chains who must rely on a cruel teacher for food and shelter? Questions like these have haunted me over the last decade. At times, I am driven to the depths of despair by the tragedies I’ve seen and the human anguish hunger causes. When I am behind my lens, I tell myself how much it matters that I collect evidence, and that those images stand to someday turn hearts and minds in the right direction. That is my emotional coping mechanism in real time. But it weighs on a person.
A few years ago I had back surgery, and Devon was by my side as I came out of the fog of anesthesia, talking while still half-unconscious. She later told me she felt like she was hearing “a breaking heart.” I was moaning, “They are all going to die, the people in Sudan. The mothers can’t help their children. Nobody understands. People are dying all the time . . . I can’t help them . . . nobody cares . . . the man in Chad . . . They’re all going to die. I can’t save them fast enough. No matter what I do . . .” Devon was startled at what the medications had unleashed—we realized it was a part of me that had been hiding behind the lens.
I’ve come home from one-week trips with five thousand or more images—many which carry a unique meaning from my journey. I find in telling any story that the ability to share the image of a child in distress, or an aerial shot of a refugee camp or a deforested hillside, is a powerful part of trying to get others to understand what I have seen. Photographs have come to represent one dimension of how I try to maximize my forty chances.
Story 5
Because “Al Called”
Dwayne Andreas was a brilliant man but not a tall guy, so the day I looked up and saw him walking a little clumsily toward my office carrying a heavy stack of books and articles and reports about two feet high, I knew something unusual was going on. It was 1994. I was at my desk at Archer Daniels Midland Company, a multibillion-dollar corporation and the largest corn and soybean processor in the world. Dwayne was the CEO. He didn’t often play mail clerk. He plopped the whole stack on my desk. “Howie, Al called!” he barked. “We need to help him out on this. Get the ag guys turned around on this biodiversity thing—fast!”
I had been working for ADM for two years, and I was also on the board of directors. I’d had a number of different responsibilities, including scouting for new businesses in Central America, being the official company spokesman, and also consulting on public policy. I had an office next to Dwayne Andreas’s nephew Marty, who was a senior vice president. Dwayne told me he wanted me to read the material and then write an op-ed piece we should try to get printed in a major newspaper by the following week. Then he turned and left. I knew that Marty had overheard Dwayne speaking to me, so I went around the corner and asked him, “Al who?”
Marty smiled. “Al Gore. The vice president.”
As I write this book, it’s the twentieth anniversary of the Earth Summit, the first conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on the subject of climate change, development, and biodiversity. In 1992 then-senator Gore was in Rio promoting biodiversity and warning about climate change.1 Two years later, as vice president, he was still getting pushback from many sectors of big business and that had prompted his request for help from Dwayne. The US Senate had just recessed without agreeing to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity that 168 countries had signed during and after Rio.2 The livestock lobbies in particular were set against the United States signing on to this convention. Gore had called Dwayne, who had a talent for seeing right to the heart of complicated situations, and he figured out that ADM and all of agriculture should get behind the idea of protecting ecosystems. Dwayne was famous for having good friends in politics. He knew how to keep them.
I now look back on the experience that started with that stack of papers dropped on my desk as a pivotal moment. Farming is my hands-on, practical connection to the challenge of hunger. Photography is my emotional connection. But this project created for me an underlying intellectual framework for understanding and working on global food security. It was the beginning of my seeing the big picture of how conservation and agriculture related to each other in ways I had never imagined. Frankly, most people don’t realize these connections today.
THE ADM YEARS
Devon and I had moved from California back to Omaha in 1982, and I began making my living and supporting the family by farming and working at the Essex Corporation, a diversified construction company in Omaha. I loved farming, I enjoyed Essex, but I also got a little restless, and I felt a small tug from my grandfather’s legacy.
My grandfather, Howard H. Buffett, was a Nebraska congressman from 1943 to 1949 and again from 1951 to 1953. His family had been in the grocery business, although he started his own stock brokerage before he went into politics. He was a Republican to the core, devoted to the belief that freedom should be the paramount value that Americans treasured and protected. My dad, Warren, has surprised many people in his life by being both a successful capitalist and a Democrat. Neither my mom nor my dad began as a Democrat, but they switched to the Democratic Party during the civil rights movement. I’m fully aligned with my parents’ convictions about civil rights, but I’m also a throwback to my grandfather. I like smart, lean, compassionate government. The ide
a of leaving people alone for the most part appeals to me.
I’d always been interested in politics. One day in 1988 I read in the Omaha World-Herald that for the first time in decades two seats were open for election to the Douglas County Board of Commissioners—without an incumbent running. I called Devon and told her I wanted to run.
“Do you even know what the county board does?” she asked. I did not.
I called my mother and ran it by her. The county board seat represents a large constituency, not much smaller than the local congressional district. “You should run for school board first,” she advised. “You should work your way up to county board.”
Despite this logical input, I focused on the idea that with two vacant seats, I had a better chance of winning. That opportunity might not come again for a long time. So I went to my dad and said, “If someone runs for office and they lose, do you think people think less of them?”
“Absolutely not,” he said.
If he had said yes, I would not have done it. On two words from my father, I embarked on my political career.
I wasn’t sure how the campaign process would go. I went into it with a lot of apprehension, but I do like meeting and talking to people. I tend to be upbeat and straightforward, which seemed to appeal to voters as well. One night I was supposed to go to some kind of ice cream social event for candidates hosted by a group in an area of Omaha that was almost all registered Democrats. I asked my dad whether I should bother going. I’ll never forget him looking at me a little puzzled and saying, “Howie, just don’t be a jackass, and they’ll think you’re great.” Watching some of the antics that go on today at even the national level, I wish more candidates would follow his advice.
In any event, it was fun running for the board. I used to take the kids out on the campaign trail with me. Once I was standing in front of a church handing out leaflets with HWB when he was about five years old, and an elderly man walked up and said, “Howard! It’s so great to see you running again!” HWB was confused and started to ask me what he meant. I whispered I would explain later. I just smiled and thanked the gentleman for his support and later explained to HWB that the man had probably voted for my grandfather forty years earlier, and when he saw “Howard Buffett” on a sign again, the man confused me with him.
My dad was supportive of my efforts in the campaign. His involvement was a tricky situation. If he didn’t support me, that would look odd. If he gave me too much in campaign contributions, that would not look good either. He settled on matching $1 for every $10 I raised. When people asked him about my running for office, he joked that my signs should spell Buffett with a “small b because Howie’s the one with no capital.”
I had to campaign hard to win. It happened that while there were no incumbents involved, three of the four of us running were all sons of people with significant name recognition. In addition to me, there was US Senator J. James Exon’s son and also the son of the popular mayor of Omaha Bernard Simon, who had passed away while in office. Our only female opponent, Lynn Baber, came up with a clever campaign slogan: “I’m nobody’s son.”
Election night arrived. I was nervous. There was a funny story in the family about how my grandfather went to bed the night of his first congressional election before the votes were tallied. A reporter called first thing the next morning and asked for a quote. He replied, “I’m sure Chip [Charles F.] McLaughlin will do a good job for the people of Nebraska for the next two years.” The puzzled reporter replied, “But you won!” Those kinds of stories are a lot funnier when you’re not a candidate sitting around watching all the other races in your election year tilt in favor of the other party.
My dad and I stayed up watching the late returns. Around one in the morning, we gave up and went to bed. It was looking good for me, but I refused to declare victory until the votes were officially counted. The next morning, I learned I pulled it out. I enjoyed my time on the board and felt that we did some good work. Governor Kay Orr appointed me to the Nebraska Ethanol Board soon afterward, an experience I also found fascinating.
As my four-year term neared an end in 1992, there were new wheels in motion, and they weren’t attached to my tractors or combines.
THE BIG BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE
I had joined the ADM board in 1991, in part because of my experience and understanding of ethanol, which the company produced. The odd turn of events that landed me at ADM was Dwayne Andreas’s trying to recruit me to run for governor of Nebraska. It was tempting, but I realized that I preferred my smart, lean government to be run by other people; I did not want to give up time with my family, or farming, or my other interests to embrace a full-time political career at that level.
Less than a week after I turned down the suggestion, however, ADM came back with an attractive offer: the chance to learn big agribusiness from the inside as a company executive. I had to move to Decatur, Illinois, where ADM was located. At first I considered that a nonstarter. But the company kept recruiting me, and I realized there was plenty of land to farm around Decatur. Devon and I decided that it could be an exciting adventure, and we could afford a larger house with more room for the kids on the bigger salary ADM was prepared to pay me. So in 1992 we moved to Illinois.
Those three and a half years at ADM would turn out to be important in our lives in large and small ways. I loved Omaha, but in Decatur, the family enjoyed operating below the radar. Also, Marty Andreas was a passionate amateur photographer, and we encouraged each other’s interest in photography. We used to talk about lenses and techniques and bring our cameras whenever we traveled on business. I became very involved in buying businesses in Central America, and I made lifelong friends in Mexico. Also, because I was always meeting outsiders who wanted to influence ADM to support them on policy or other nonbusiness initiatives, I became much more aware of the complexity of politics and markets and regulations, both domestically and internationally.
My education about biodiversity was one of the most important of my life. Today many more people are familiar with the importance of biodiversity; most were not then. And arguments about biodiversity in the media at the time tended to be explained through the lens of pharmaceuticals, as a large portion of medicine’s array of drugs originally came from plants from around the world. The idea that the next plant to go extinct could be the one that cures some form of cancer is a compelling one, but I began to realize that biodiversity plays a much bigger role in everyday life.
When an important crop develops an infestation or becomes vulnerable to a new virus, agricultural scientists often combat the problem by interbreeding the existing crop or replacing it with another variety from the same species to resist the threat. In the nineteenth century, for example, grape growers in France were plagued by a root louse called phylloxera. Their solution was to import a so-called rootstock from America that was resistant to the louse and graft grape varieties such as chardonnay or cabernet onto that rootstock.3 In the 1970s, the availability of diverse varieties of corn helped stave off disaster in the United States when existing strains fell victim to southern leaf blight fungus.4
But the element of biological diversity that became of paramount concern to me involved land use. As a farmer, I know that you can’t just grow anything anywhere. The connection I had never thought about before I dug into this subject was that not maximizing production in fertile or well-irrigated areas of the world such as the United States threatened the ecosystems in more fragile areas.
Established rain forests and other ecosystems are home to millions of species that play a critical role in the overall health of the air, water, and soil. They work together to provide the diversity that ensures survival at many levels. Rain forests sequester a lot of carbon. Grazing lands in the African savanna are arid for much of the year and, therefore, not well suited to agriculture, but they allow migration and perpetuate important species’ survival. At the time I began investigating what was happening to forests globally, I had an awakening. While nearly
50 million acres of prime farmland lay idle in the United States in 1993, I discovered that Indonesia cleared 1.5 million acres of tropical forest to grow soybeans. Ecuador was in the process of expanding cropland and depleting forest at the rate of 2 percent per year. Large areas of the Amazon rain forest had been torched to make room for cattle grazing.5
One of the misconceptions about tropical rain forests is that they grow out of rich soil. Rather, these regions have evolved in a complex web that often results in roots of living trees growing up out of the ground and into dead trunks and other vegetation because the underlying soil lacks nutrients. The nutrients are in the plant matter, and it’s best for the health of the region and the planet if we leave them there. Instead, too often slash-and-burn agriculture creates a brief few years of production from these soils, and then the soil is so depleted that little will grow. What’s more, without the trees and other vegetation, the remaining soil is subject to erosion at a much higher rate, leading to mudslides, sedimentation, and contaminated water.
As we flew over the rivers of El Salvador, the water looked like chocolate milk due to soil erosion. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
I was in El Salvador in 2012, and we flew along the west coast on our way to visit an agricultural project. This country was once covered in lush rain forest, but by some estimates, 85 percent of it has been lost to farming and other uses since the 1960s.6 In some areas, farmers have cultivated every inch of the soil on steep slopes: they tie ropes around their waists and anchor themselves to trees so they can plant and harvest without falling down the face of the hillside. Unfortunately, they have not used cover crops to keep the soil in place, and the frequent rains wash so much soil down the slopes that the rivers look like chocolate milk. As we passed overhead, there were huge mushroom-shaped dark areas where the rivers emptied into the Pacific Ocean. Productivity for these farmers is declining. Every day, the ocean claims tons of topsoil that will not be regenerated in their lifetimes.
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