Since then, I’ve been rubbed up hard against the worlds Hearne knew best of all, dog training and horse training. They’ve changed my life. Some extraordinary animals and some extraordinary trainers have given me a glimpse of the moral universe she was trying to portray. “Dog trainers and horse trainers,” she writes, “insist that training—teaching animals the language games of retrieving, say, or haute école in dressage—results in ennoblement, in the development of the animal’s character and in the development of both the animal's and the handler’s sense of responsibility and honesty.” Those are Hearne’s italics. They suggest how serious she was about the reciprocity good training entails.
Hearne was trying to unravel a subject of almost impossible subtlety. To do so she turned to the men and women who had thought most carefully about language, to poets and philosophers. They gave her the tools to express the vigilance she exercised as a trainer, a vigilance that depended not on a mechanistic or behaviorist view of dogs and horses but on a faith, proved by experience, in their moral depth. To her, there was no freedom for those animals apart from their engagement with humans, and no freedom for humans apart from their engagement with those animals.
But Hearne never called it freedom. She called the kinship that develops between trainers and animals a version of the heroic. She called not for mere tolerance or kindness between humans and animals but for a shared nobility. Hearne explained that certain dogs and horses can teach you “whether or not your relationships and your artistries, your grammars, are coherent, whether what you have is a free-floating and truncated bit of the debris of Romanticism or a discipline that can renew the resources of thought.” This will only sound hyperbolic if you’ve never witnessed or experienced the results of that discipline, which is a word we fear these days.
Hearne made large claims, but they were always tested by the animals she worked with day in, day out. No one has come close to her ability to articulate what one feels in a working relationship with animals. For her, that relationship—that work—was a human duty, nothing less. It’s not a lesson we bestow on animals but a learnable mystery that they impart to us. “Animals matter to us,” Hearne wrote, and the “way they matter to us is probably all we can know of how and why we matter.”
January 2
Beef cattle and dairy cattle are two very different creatures, but their fates are identical. Most Americans don’t realize that nearly every dairy cow eventually becomes hamburger when her profitability drops. Holsteins are frequently culled for slaughter when they’re between five and six years old. A Holstein first gives milk at about two years old, so that means a productive life of just about three years. In that brief lifespan, everything is done to maximize yield, including the regular use of antibiotics.
After poultry and pigs, the dairy industry has become one of the most concentrated forms of agriculture in America. The old mental picture of a herd of Holsteins standing hock-deep in pasture bears no relation to the way milk is produced in most of America. The herds at some dairies, especially in the West and Southwest, now number in the thousands. The animals spend their lives in barns on cement where they’re milked automatically, in some cases on huge rotating platforms that look like something out of science fiction.
Even Holsteins can put up with only a certain amount of this. By the time they mature, at around five years old, many begin to break down from leg and foot problems. Dairy organizations distribute locomotion charts to help workers assess lameness. Other cows begin to fail from the stress of carrying an udder that can weigh as much as a full-grown man. To prepare them for slaughter, the cows must be given time to get any residue—the word means traces of drugs—out of their system.
As always, the goals of industrial agriculture create a perverse logic. Instead of adapting the agricultural system to suit the animal, we try to adapt the animal to suit the system in order to eke out every last so-called efficiency. Take it for granted that dairy cows will eventually be slaughtered. But strange as it sounds, it makes greater financial, ethical, and social sense if we subscribe to the cows’ notions of efficiency, which don’t include living on concrete or eating anything but grass and grain. The animals would be healthier, their milk would be better, and we wouldn’t have to worry quite so much what’s in our food.
Some day Americans will learn to judge agriculture not by its intentions but by its unintended consequences. The intention in the dairy industry has always been to streamline, modernize, automate, all in the interest of greater profits. But the consequence has been to concentrate power and money in the hands of a few, drive down prices, and create a national surplus of milk that forces small dairy producers out of business. That, in turn, frees former dairy land for development, for suburban sprawl. The consequence has also been to breed an animal that can barely sustain the way she’s forced to live.
The river of milk in America brings with it a river of ground beef made from dairy cows, a river that’s impossible to inspect adequately in a deregulated industry. The problem isn’t just a concentration of meat. It’s a concentration of political power that hamstrings any calls for closer inspection. The industry has been quick to point out that far more people die from salmonella and E. coli than from mad cow disease. That’s not exactly a reason to stand up and cheer. And that’s luck rather than good planning. According to the philosophers at Cow-Calf Weekly, an online journal for the beef industry, “Perception is reality.” That’s the sort of thing you say when reality is unbearable to look at.
January 8
The dna proves that the Washington State Holstein diagnosed last December with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, came from a Canadian herd. You can almost hear the relieved sighs of the American cattle industry, joined by the sighs of grain farmers and exporters and meat packers and the usda itself. In the world of bureaucratic borders, this fact of origin makes a vital difference.
But in the world of global meat the dna doesn’t make a bit of difference. Moving cattle and meat and meat by-products across borders is one of the things our agricultural system does extremely well. That becomes obvious only when the system stops, and it stops only when a disease looms, whether it’s a slow plague like mad cow disease, which takes several years to incubate, or a fast plague like hoof and mouth disease, which ravaged British farming just as it was beginning to recover from the effects of mad cow disease. Industrial agriculture is indeed industrial. It’s designed to move parts along a conveyer belt no matter where the parts come from. And if one of the parts proves to be fatally defective—a dairy cow with the staggers, for instance—then shutting down the conveyer nearly always comes far too late.
What’s needed to avert a major crisis is real change, from the bottom up. The global meat system is broken, as a machine and as a philosophy. In America meatpacking has gone from being a widely distributed, widely owned web of local, independent businesses into a tightly controlled, savagely concentrated industry whose assumptions are completely industrial. Meatpacking plants are enormous automated factories, as void of humans as possible. The machinery is very expensive. Profitability requires an uninterrupted flow of carcasses. To packers, that means that they, not independent farmers, should own the cattle, hogs, and poultry moving through the line. The federal government agrees. Every effort to outlaw packer-ownership of livestock has failed.
The result is a system in which the average drives out the excellent and the international drives out the local. The structure of global meat creates a forced acquiescence. I know a large-scale rancher in north-central Wyoming who does everything he can to raise beef cattle of the highest quality. That means good genetics, good grass, and as few chemical and pharmaceutical inputs as he can possibly manage. But then the cattle are loaded onto trucks, shipped to feedlots, and hauled to slaughter, where they merge with the great river of American meat, indistinguishable from all the rest. There’s no real alternative to the highly concentrated meatpackin
g and distribution system in this country. Any alternative—grass-fed, organic beef, separately slaughtered, separately marketed—is merely a niche so far.
In science-fiction movies, there’s often a moment when space colonists talk about “terra-forming” a suitable planet—giving it a breathable atmosphere and a terrestrial flora and fauna. We’re going through a different process on the one planet we have. We are agri-forming it. We’ve given over vast tracts of rain forest to cattle production. Every distinctive food culture, every island of genetic difference in farm animals, every traditional relationship between humans and the soil is threatened by global meat and its partner, global grain.
The consequences are more far-reaching than we like to think. Last week a usda spokesman said that a herd of cattle in Washington State was going to be “depopulated” as a preventive measure. Apart from the coarseness of the euphemism, the word is a perfect summary of the effect of agri-forming. Take Iowa, where I was raised. As farms have gotten larger and larger, the number of farmers has plummeted. As a result, the towns have dwindled, and there aren’t enough workers for the industrial meatpacking plants in the state, which officially encourages factory farming. A few years ago, the governor launched a program to invite one hundred thousand immigrants to Iowa to fill those empty meatpacking jobs. A depopulated countryside is, in effect, a de-democratized countryside, no matter what the Iowa caucuses may suggest. But so is a town filled with captive workers in a captive industry. We like to pretend that the problem with global meat stops at the borders. But it reaches right down into the heart of our own lives and institutions.
August 22
Last month a team of paleontologists announced that it had found several fossilized dinosaur embryos that were 190 million years old—some 90 million years older than any dinosaur embryos found so far. Those kinds of numbers—190 million, even 90 million years —are always daunting. Ever since I was a boy in Iowa, I’ve been learning to face the eons and eons embedded in the universe around us. I know the numbers as they stand at present, and I know what they mean, in a roughly comparative way. The universe is perhaps 14 billion years old. Earth is some 4.6 billion years old. The oldest hominid fossils are between 6 and 7 million years old. The oldest distinctly human fossils are about 160,000 years old.
The truth of these numbers is like watching the night sky in the high desert. It fills me with a sense of nonspecific immensity. I don’t think I’m alone in this. One of the most powerful limits to the human imagination is our inability to grasp intuitively the depths of terrestrial and cosmological time. That’s hardly surprising, since our own lives are so short in comparison. It’s hard enough to come to terms with the brief scale of human history. But the difficulty of comprehending time on an evolutionary scale is one of the major impediments to understanding evolution itself.
It’s been approximately 3.5 billion years since life first originated on this planet. That’s not an unimaginable number in itself, if you’re thinking of simple, discrete units like dollars or grains of sand. But 3.5 billion years of biological history is different. That’s not an abstract lump of time, not a mathematical set or a kind of scientific shorthand. All those years have really passed, moment by moment, one by one. They encompass an actual, already-lived reality, the sum of all the lives of all the organisms that have come and gone in that time. That expanse of time defines the realm of biological possibility in which life in its extraordinary diversity has historically evolved. Time has allowed the making of us.
The idea of such quantities of time, such factual eons, is extremely new. Humans began to understand the true scale of geological time in the early nineteenth century. The probable depth of cosmological time, as well as the historical extent of the human species, has come to light only within our own lifetimes. That’s a lot to absorb, and not surprisingly many people refuse to absorb it. Nearly every attack on evolution—whether it’s called “intelligent design” or plain “creationism”—radically foreshortens cosmological, geological, and biological time.
Humans feel much more content imagining a world of human proportions, with a shorter time-scale and a simple narrative sense of cause and effect. But what we prefer to believe makes no difference to the facts. We’ve arrived at a point where it’s possible for humans to have beliefs only because the eons have been steadily ticking away, working out the trial and error of natural selection. Evolution is a robust theory that has been tested and confirmed again and again. Intelligent design isn’t a theory at all, as scientists understand the word, but a well-funded political and religious campaign to muddy science. Its basic proposition—the intervention of a divine designer—can’t be tested. It has no evidence to offer, and its assumptions—that humans were divinely created—are the same as its conclusions. Its objections to evolution are nonserious. They’re based on syllogistic reasoning and a highly selective consideration of the physical evidence.
Accepting the fact of evolution doesn’t necessarily mean discarding a personal faith in God. But accepting intelligent design means discarding science. Much has been made of a 2004 poll showing that some 45 percent of Americans believe the earth—and humans with it—was created as described in the book of Genesis, and within the past ten thousand years. This isn’t a triumph of faith. It’s a failure of education. The purpose of the campaign for intelligent design is to deepen that failure. To present the arguments of “intelligent design” as part of a “debate” over evolution is nonsense. From the scientific perspective, there is no debate. But even the illusion of a debate is a sorry victory for antievolutionists, a public relations victory based on ignorance and obfuscation.
Intelligent design keeps God in the history of life on earth in the simplest way possible—by distorting that history. The essential but often well-disguised purpose of intelligent design is to preserve the myth of a separate, divine creation for humans, in the belief that only that can explain who we are. There’s a fearful arrogance in that myth. It sets us apart from nature, except to dominate it. It grasps at divinity as the only guarantee of morality. But it misses both the grace and the moral depth of life itself—knowing that humans have only the same stake, the same right, in the earth as every other creature that has ever lived here. There’s a righteousness and a responsibility in the deep, ancestral origins we share with all of life.
August 9
Recently Science magazine published an article called “Domesticated Nature,” which noted in passing that by 1995 “only seventeen percent of the world’s land area had escaped direct influence by humans.” The article was accompanied by one map showing the “human footprint” on Earth and another showing the interlacing of road networks and shipping lanes across the globe. That 17 percent figure is now smaller, and the weave of that interlacing of transport networks gets tighter every day. The article assumes what is obviously true: “There really is no such thing as nature untainted by people.” This was a radical thought in 1989, when Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature first appeared. Now it’s axiomatic.
What does it mean to go from a humanly ancient world in which, say, only 17 percent of nature had been “tainted”—to use the authors’ word—to a world in which only 17 percent remains untainted? It’s also tempting to wonder where that remaining 17 percent is and how to protect it. It can’t be far away—just off a sea lane or a two-track road running into the distance—which makes it all the harder to protect. The authors of this article take the domestication of nature as inevitable—a “natural” part of human behavior—and wonder what the “trade-offs among ecosystem services” might be. You may want to ponder this too the next time you go for a long walk among the ecosystem services.
What I find most worrying here isn’t merely the premise of so much loss. It’s the emergence of a world in which “nature” means little more than the consequences of human decisions. That world has been emerging for a long time. Humans first arose in a densely articulated natural world, on
a globe that had been unaffected by human activity—because there was none—for several billion years. We are who we are, as a species, in part because of the natural intricacy in which we emerged. In a way, we originated in an alien world, alien in the sense that almost nothing we saw around us had been made or shaped or influenced by us. It may sound like folly to talk about the wisdom of nature. But its wisdom is that it will not simply show us ourselves. Wisdom is always a kind of otherness.
I’m oversimplifying. But consider where we are now. The authors of the Science article are certainly right when they stress the importance of stewarding “nature in perpetuity for people, as opposed to simply trying to protect nature from people.” But they have more faith in people than I do—both in our ability to steward nature and to decide what stewarding it “for people” really means. It’s possible to make wiser and wiser choices, but what if the world we make our choices in steadily becomes, in natural terms, poorer and less diverse? More and more, we find ourselves choosing only among the consequences of regrettable choices we made before.
Humans are competent to do many things. But we’re not competent to run a global ecosystem. Something has been irretrievably lost by the time we begin to believe that we can manage nature in perpetuity for people. My lack of faith in humans as global managers isn’t just a philosophical conclusion. It’s based on the sorry, sorry evidence. We’ve begun to run the global ecosystem already and we’re doing a terrible job of it. Our minds are rich, but our purposes are simple, and though our purposes complicate the world around us, socially and culturally, they also simplify the natural environment around us—simplify it to the point of tragedy.
More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 11