What we’ll never be able to provide on our own is feedback from a natural world that’s not human. The authors of this article are right in asking the environmental movement to think of its main business now as managing the trade-offs in ecosystem services. The idea is rational, realistic, and human, and it accurately reflects where we’ve gotten to. But it’s not good enough. We love the hidden metaphor in domestication—the idea that we’re making the world more homelike for our species. But without alien feedback from the natural world, which enriches and outstrips our imagination, we’ll find ourselves less and less at home on this planet.
January 16
I won’t be eating cloned meat. The reason has nothing to do with my personal health or safety and everything to do with this question, “Who benefits from cloning?” You’ll surely hear some people say the consumer does, because we’ll get higher quality, more consistent foods from cloned animals. But the only person really arguing for consistency is a meat packer, and since there are only a few meatpacking companies left in this country, that person is a large-scale meat packer, the kind who’d like it best if chickens grew in the shape of McNuggets. Anyone who really cares about food is interested in difference, in diversity.
The same is true for anyone who cares about farmers and their animals. An agricultural system that favors cloned animals has no room for farmers who farm in different ways. Cloning, you’ll hear its advocates say, is just another way of making cows. But this isn’t entirely true. Every other way of making cows—even using embryo transplants and artificial insemination—allows nature to shuffle the genetic deck. A clone is identical to the animal it was derived from. A clone is produced by asexual reproduction. This doesn’t mean it was produced in a test tube. It means it was produced without the extraordinary variability that sexual reproduction fosters.
To me, modern agriculture looks like this. You begin with a wide array of breeds—a truly diverse gene pool. As time passes, you impose stricter and stricter economic constraints upon those breeds—and upon the men and women who raise them. One by one the breeds that don’t meet the prevailing economic model are weeded out. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, you’ve moved from the broad base of a genetic pyramid to its nearly vanishing peak. In other words, the genetic diversity present in the economically acceptable breeds of modern livestock is minuscule. Then comes cloning, and we leave behind any variation and enter the realm of identity.
Cloning itself isn’t unnatural. It’s natural for humans to experiment—to try anything and everything. Nor is cloning really that different from anything else we’ve seen in modern agriculture. It’s another way of shifting genetic ownership from farmers to corporations. It’s another way of creating still greater economic and genetic concentration in an industry that has already pushed concentration past the limits of ethical, environmental, and economic acceptability.
Diversity isn’t just good in itself. Genetic diversity is an essential bulwark against disease. And humans are only as rich as the diversity that surrounds them, whether we mean cultural or economic or genetic diversity. That measure of richness helps us understand just how badly we’ve been impoverished by modern agriculture. There’s less and less genetic diversity in the animals found on farms, and farmers themselves become less and less diverse because fewer and fewer of them actually own the animals they raise. They become contract laborers instead.
And one more point. It’s possible to preserve plant and crop diversity in seed banks. But there are no animal banks. Breeds of animals that aren’t raised die away, and the invaluable genetic archive they represent vanishes. To some, this looks like a basic test of economic efficiency. But it’s a colossal waste, of genes and of truly lovely, productive animals that are the result of years of human attention and effort. From one perspective, a cloned animal looks like a miracle of science. But from another, it looks like what it is: a dead end.
March 20
Today’s vocabulary word is aerosolization. As words go, it’s cumbersome and unattractive. But it neatly sums up what happens when a solid physical substance is turned into mist. In this case, the substance being aerosolized was pig brains in a giant slaughterhouse in Austin, Minnesota.
Here’s how aerosolization happens. A worker slides the tip of a compressed-air gun into the hole at the base of the skull where the spinal cord once entered a pig’s head. A few blasts of air, and the pig’s liquefied brains are forced out of the same hole that let in the compressed air. This happened nineteen thousand times a day. The workers were protected by plexiglass shields, by hard hats, safety glasses, and lab coats, but they wore no masks or face shields. They worked in a fine mist of brains. When workers at the “head table,” as it was called, developed an illness with a strange set of neurological symptoms, the slaughterhouse, to its credit, stopped using compressed air to extract pig brains.
The wonder isn’t that some workers suffered from fatigue and numbness. The wonder is that they were able to force themselves to go to work at all. I have just enough experience of pig killing to barely glimpse the psychological dislocation that their everyday jobs must have forced upon these workers. You could build mechanical pigs—nineteen thousand a day, if you like—using robots, who have no feelings in the matter. But you can’t disassemble nineteen thousand living, breathing pigs a day without using humans, who do have feelings—and feelings not only about being sprayed with aerosolized pig brains.
The trouble with this picture is that the conventional economic answers do nothing to explain away the trouble with this picture. Pigs can be killed in such huge numbers because the packing industry is overwhelmingly concentrated, and because global consumption of meat is rising. Packers can find workers to fill these jobs because for the immigrants who fill them, these are what pass for good jobs.
Every one of these elements—the scale of concentration, the fact that packers, not farmers, own so many of the animals being slaughtered, the pattern of immigration that fills the jobs, even the fact that reporters aren’t allowed into the plants—can be read directly back into the shape of the industrial landscape of what passes for rural America. This is just the way things are, the status quo, and as most of us know, the status quo has a logic all its own. The best explanation of that shady logic comes from George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, which was published in 1937.
Orwell describes the brutal conditions in the coal mines in the north of England, conditions that he says were once much worse. “There are still living,” Orwell writes, “a very few old women who in their youth have worked underground, with a harness around their waists and a chain that passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging it to and fro, I fancy [Orwell means “imagine” or “suspect”] we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of coal. But most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they were doing it.”
Health problems associated with harnessing pregnant women to drag tubs of coal along a railway a mile underground would surely cause a medical examiner to wonder, “What’s wrong with this picture?” But in the search for the symptomatic picture—the immediate cause of the suffering—it’s easy to lose sight of the systemic picture, which is presumed to justify itself. We need coal—or pig brains—and we’d just as soon forget how we get it and what its costs really are.
The mystery in Minnesota isn’t the sickness of a few workers. The mystery is the structure of the entire system, the truckloads of hogs arriving at one entrance, the lines of workers arriving at another. It was a good idea to stop using compressed air to blow the brains out of a pig’s skull. But at some point it must have seemed like a good idea to give it a try. There will be other good ideas too, most of them equally bad.
September 17
For the past dozen years, I’ve been writi
ng editorials opposing the introduction of genetically modified crops. When I began, genetically modified corn and soybeans were just getting a foothold in American fields. Now, hundreds of millions of acres here and abroad have been planted with these new varieties, which are usually engineered to withstand the application of pesticides—pesticides made by the same companies that engineer the seeds. Even wheat and rice producers, latecomers to the genetically modified table, are feeling the pressure to convert.
There’s been a frenzy in the grain markets in the past couple of years—a new volatility in futures and in prices on the ground—that seems to favor genetically modified crops. It makes sense. The cost of conventionally grown grain goes up and up because there’s less and less of it. This leaves the world open to the nearly unchecked proliferation of genetically modified varieties.
I still oppose genetically modified crops. This may sound like truculence on my part—a Luddite reluctance to accept the future. It’s certainly dispiriting. Like many people, I feel, as I did a decade ago, that genetically modified crops were introduced with bland assurances of safety based on studies from small test plots, a far different thing from the uncontrolled global experiment we now find ourselves in the midst of.
Scientists are still discovering the extent to which genetic fragments from these new crops can drift into other organisms. There’s no evidence yet of catastrophic drift, where a genetic shard from a new crop cripples other organisms. But there’s plenty of evidence to show that genetically modified fragments are turning up in places they’re not wanted. The worry isn’t just how widespread the altered versions of familiar crops, like corn and soybeans, are becoming. It’s also that many more conventional crops are being modified and that many more landscapes and ecosystems, yet untouched, will be planted with genetically modified varieties.
These crops close the circle on the farmer’s knowledge, finally eliminating, after ten thousand years, the farmer’s role in the genetics of agriculture. Genetically modified crops are rigorously licensed forms of intellectual property. Every seed is a binding contract with stiff penalties attached. This represents the final transfer of the collective farming wisdom of the human race into corporate hands. Only the minutest fraction of the dna in a genetically modified crop has been modified. The rest of the dna is the result of infinite elaboration by working farmers choosing their own seeds, season after season, over all these thousands of years.
The trouble with genetically modified crops isn’t merely the fact that they’re genetically modified. It’s that they embody so completely the troubling logic of modern agriculture. They demonstrate the tendency of commercial seeds to drive out traditional, locally adapted varieties, a pattern that’s been intensifying since the introduction of hybrid corn in the 1930s. They exemplify the bias toward expensive high-tech solutions, when, in much of the world, simple low-tech solutions make much better and much more affordable sense. They foster the spread of commodity crops, grown for cash, in place of subsistence crops.
Genetically modified crops create the illusion of more and better choices when, in fact, they represent a narrowing of genetic ownership and a model of genetic diversity that’s unattainable outside the laboratory. Because of that, they may well turn out to decrease food security, especially as new nonfood varieties—crops genetically modified to produce pharmaceuticals, for instance—go into production. The risk is enhanced by licensing restrictions on genetically modified seeds that prevent independent research on their environmental impact. In effect, the gm seed industry is able to stifle research, even by agricultural scientists who are sympathetic to the technology.
Above all, genetically modified crops give the illusion of revolutionizing farming without actually changing much of anything. Farmers who plant them do spend less time and less fuel in the field. But trying to pack a revolution into a seed won’t do when the entire system needs revolutionizing. Industrial agriculture is antithetical to diversity of every kind—biological, social, cultural, political. To understand its real effects on diversity you have only to look at Brazilian soybeans, a commodity crop, growing where there was once Amazonian forest.
There’s no disputing the enormous productivity of industrial agriculture, as long as you measure productivity solely in terms of the relationship between yield and labor and pay no attention to the health of the land or the well-being of the people who live there. But by pursuing the unrelenting logic of industrial agriculture we’ve left a world of alternatives unexplored.
The human species is still running ahead of the Malthusian prediction that we’ll outgrow our ability to feed ourselves. But this is a deeply troubling time for agriculture, as even a quick scan of the headlines reveals. Soaring food prices in the poorest parts of the world, soaring profits in the richest, wholly unnecessary subsidies, growing competition between food and nonfood crops, the list goes on and on.
To Americans, the continued resistance to genetically modified crops in other parts of the world may look quixotic, a refusal to accept a done deal. But it’s more than resistance to a type of seed. It’s resistance to a model of agriculture whose failings are all too plain.
October 21
At present there are 6.8 billion people on this planet, more than a billion of whom are hungry. By 2050, there will be an additional 2.3 billion people, most of them living in parts of the world that are already undernourished. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, feeding humanity in 2050 will require a 70 percent increase in global food production, partly because of population growth but also because of rising incomes. There are hopes that this increase can be brought about mostly by increasing productivity on current agricultural acreage and by greening parts of the world that aren’t, at present, arable.
The fao says it’s “cautiously optimistic” about the chances of reaching this goal. It estimates that there’s enough land and probably enough water to do so, even though climate change and scarcity will make the distribution of water uncertain.
It’s worth looking at this projection in light of another United Nations goal. In 2003, 123 nations committed themselves to “a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss” by 2010. But the 2010 target won’t be met. Biodiversity loss keeps accelerating. Extinctions are occurring at a rate that’s 100 times what it was before humans dominated the earth. One by one, species are going out like candles in the dark. They’re the candles, and we’re the dark.
Under the UN’s “cautiously optimistic” scenario, humanity will somehow progress in a more or less orderly fashion toward more and more food production, and in doing so, we’ll honor the value of other species, the importance of protecting habitat. We certainly must try. But there’s little in the history of the past century that suggests we’ll stop degrading and destroying habitat.
It’s not a zero-sum game. A 70 percent increase in food production doesn’t necessarily mean a 70 percent reduction in habitat—and resulting species loss. But the fao estimates that agricultural acreage will have to increase by some 297 million acres, a little less than three times the size of California. This is to say nothing about the ongoing rate of habitat destruction—including deforestation—or the growing production of biofuels or other disturbances to natural habitat.
There may be cautious optimism about feeding humans. But there’s a profound conflict between what our species will need to survive by 2050 and the needs of nearly every other species on this planet. By default, we seem to be running an experiment to find out just how little biodiversity humans need to exist. We seem to be hoping the answer is almost none. What we’re going to find out is whether we can transcend the self-interest natural to every species and act on the principle that our interest includes that of every other species on the planet. There’s only one acceptable answer.
The coming 2.3 billion people aren’t, in some sense, “extra.” They’re already in the demographic pipeline—
on their way, so to speak. They’re a real projection of our near-term reproductive future. And that helps illustrate a point. As things are going now—at current rates of extinction and habitat destruction—the most important difference between humans and almost every other species on this planet is this: we have a reproductive future and they don’t. It’s really that simple.
The question isn’t whether we can feed 9.1 billion people in 2050 or find the energy they’ll need. The question is whether we can find a way to make food and energy production sustainable in the broadest possible sense. The only way to do that is to think about habitat—the habitat of all other species—as the frame, the boundary, of our activities. Unless habitat is always a part of the equation, equivalent in weight and importance to our own pressing concerns, we’re not talking seriously about the character—much less the future—of our planet.
Our biggest obstacle in doing this isn’t our numbers or our needs. It’s our imagination. To us, habitat is a loose concept, a metaphor. Because we’re able to live all over the planet, in all sorts of physical circumstances, we have trouble understanding the detail and specificity of habitat as it applies to other species. As humans are now—at our current state of technology—we have no meaningful habitat more specific than the entire globe.
But for the tens of millions of other life forms on the planet, habitat isn’t a concept or a metaphor. It’s ironclad necessity—the individual and defining set of conditions for nearly every species but our own. It is existence itself. Perhaps we’ll discover that the real human habitat was the one created by the presence of all other species in their habitats. But we need to act on that principle now. After all, there are no “extra” species, any more than there are “extra” humans.
More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 12