More Scenes from the Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  April 3

  In its short, shameless history, big agriculture has had only one big idea: uniformity. The obvious example is corn. The Department of Agriculture predicts that American farmers—big farmers—will plant ninety-four million acres of corn this year. That’s the equivalent of planting corn on every inch of Montana. To do that you’d have to make sure that every inch of Montana fell within corn-growing parameters. That would mean leveling the high spots, irrigating the dry spots, draining the wet spots, fertilizing the infertile spots, and so on. Corn is usually grown where the terrain is less rigorous than it is in Montana. But even in Iowa that has meant leveling, irrigating, draining, fertilizing, and spraying.

  You can argue whether uniformity is the result of efficiency or vice versa. But let’s suppose that efficiency is merely the economic expression of uniformity. The point is this: when you see a Midwestern cornfield, you know you’re looking at nature with one idea superimposed upon it. This is far less confusing, less tangled in variation than the nature you find even in the roadside ditches beside a cornfield or in a last scrap of native prairie growing in a graveyard or along an abandoned railroad right-of-way. Nature is puzzling. Corn is stupefying.

  Humans have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the big idea behind nature is. It’s hard to tell, because we live at nature’s pace and within the orb of human abstraction. We barely notice the large-scale differences from year to year, much less the minute ones. But if we could speed up time a little and become a lot more perceptive, we would see that nature’s big idea is to try out life wherever and however it can be tried, which means everywhere and anyhow. The result—over time and at this instant—is diversity, complexity, particularity, and inventiveness to an extent our minds are almost unfitted to conceive.

  A reasonable agriculture would do its best to emulate nature. Rather than change the Earth to suit a crop—which is what we do with corn and soybeans and a handful of other agricultural commodities—it would diversify its crops to suit the Earth. This isn’t going to happen in big agriculture, because big agriculture is irrational. It’s where we expose—at unimaginable expense—our failure to grasp how nature works. It’s where uniformity is always defeated by diversity and where big agriculture’s ideas of diversity are revealed to be as uniform as ever.

  To a uniform crop like corn, farmers have been encouraged to apply a uniform herbicide to kill weeds. Modern corn is genetically engineered to not be killed by the herbicide in ubiquitous use. Mostly, that herbicide has been glyphosate, marketed under the Monsanto trade name Roundup. Farmers have sprayed and oversprayed billions of gallons of Roundup, thanks to an economic and moral premise: corn good, weeds bad. And yet you can’t help noticing that it’s done nothing to stop the endless inventiveness of nature.

  To broadleaf weeds and soil microorganisms, Roundup isn’t the apocalypse. It’s simply a modest, temporal challenge, which is why, fifteen years after genetically engineered, Roundup-tolerant crops were widely introduced, it’s no longer working against spontaneous new generations of Roundup-tolerant weeds, especially in cotton fields. This is because research, in nature’s laboratory, never stops. It explores every possibility. It never lacks funding. It’s never demoralized by failed experiments. It can’t be lobbied.

  To fix the problem of glyphosate-tolerant weeds, Dow Chemical is hoping to introduce crop varieties that will withstand being sprayed with an herbicide called 2,4-d. When it was first released to farmers in 1946, 2,4-d was a breakthrough—a herbicide that killed only certain kinds of plants instead of killing them all. It’s less safe than glyphosate, especially because it’s sometimes contaminated with dioxin. But it’s not an indiscriminate, lethal killer, despite the fact that it was one of the chemicals in Agent Orange, the notorious defoliant used during the Vietnam War. (The dioxin in Agent Orange came from another component chemical called 2,4,5-t.)

  Still, this is backward-engineering of a sort, like trying to breed birds that will tolerate ddt. And while the usda hasn’t decided whether to approve Dow’s 2,4-d-tolerant soybeans yet, it’s decided to speed up the process of reviewing genetically engineered crops, mainly to help deal with the spread of so-called superweeds caused by the nearly universal application of glyphosate for the last decade and a half. According to Dow’s numbers, superweeds affected some sixty million acres of crops last year. If things go right, bureaucratically, that’s just so much cash in Dow’s pocket.

  “Farmers needs technology right now to help them with issues such as weed resistance,” a Dow official said. Translation? Farmers need technology right now to help them with issues created by right-now technology introduced fifteen years ago. Instead of urging farmers away from uniformity and toward greater diversity, the usda is helping them do the same old wrong thing faster. When an idea goes bad, the usda seems to think, the way to fix it is to speed up the introduction of ideas that will go bad for exactly the same reason. And it’s always, somehow, the same bad idea: the uniform application of an antibiological agent, whether it’s a pesticide in crops or an antibiotic on factory farms. The result is always the same. Nature finds a way around it, and quickly.

  This is the irrationality of agriculture as it’s practiced in the United States and now all over the world. It has one big idea, and it will never give it up, because it has invested everything in that one big idea. Against uniformity and abstraction—embodied in millions of acres of genetically modified crops—nature will always win. Whether it can ever win against the uniformity and abstraction embodied in the human brain is very much in doubt.

  July 12

  Like many people, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and mourning the cascading extinction of species caused by human activity. But only recently has it occurred to me to frame it this way: humans have lived past the peak of biological diversity on this planet. There may well be other, higher peaks of biodiversity after we’re gone, but the best I can imagine as long as we’re around is a slight decline in the calamitous rate of extinction.

  As it happens, we’ve also lived past the peak of linguistic diversity—the number of different human languages spoken on this planet. The loss would be more evident if each of this planet’s nearly seven thousand human languages was spoken by a separate species—one species per language. But losing language is as human as using language. After all, we live in a country where, for the past two and a half centuries, people have come to abandon their ancestral tongues in the second generation after arrival—a country where most of the aboriginal languages had long since been destroyed.

  According to a recent study, there’s a close correlation between biological diversity and linguistic diversity. A biological hot spot is likely to be a linguistic hot spot. Put simply, there are more human languages where there are more species. “Of the 6,900 languages currently spoken on Earth,” the authors write, “more than 4,800 occur in regions containing high biodiversity.” The corollary? Most of those languages are threatened. Nearly 60 percent of the languages in high biodiversity regions, like Amazonia, are spoken by fewer than ten thousand people. More than 1,200 of them are spoken by fewer than a thousand people. Every language is a species, but most languages are also habitats, linked closely to the physical habitats in which they occur.

  Human languages evolve far more quickly than the single species—Homo sapiens—that speaks them. And languages speciate for some of the same reasons that organisms do—topographic separation, for instance. A good example is New Guinea, which is as rich in linguistic species (972 endemic languages) as it is in biological species. Topographically speaking, New Guinea is famously difficult, a torturous landscape that isolates humans.

  It’s tempting to assume that the correlation between biological and linguistic diversity is functionally negative. In other words, high linguistic diversity occurs where the conditions of biological diversity—dense forests, harsh terrain, and other barriers, like disease—force small human s
ocieties to remain separate. But there’s another way to think of it. What if the correlation is functionally positive? Instead of merely forcing linguistic diversity, high biological diversity also affords linguistic diversity. The richness of one sustains the richness of the other.

  There’s something curious and unsettling in all of this. It seems odd to think that such a pure extension of human-ness as language itself (apart from mere vocabulary) is so niched, so profusely and divergently rooted in the natural world. A universally shared language seems like a universal good. But most languages spoken by small numbers of humans in regions of high biodiversity do not and will not survive extended contact with widely spoken languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. No matter how desirable it may seem, a universal language is a bulldozer with measles.

  I think we inevitably underestimate the bond between biological complexity and cultural complexity. So let me turn to a landscape I know far better than the jungles and mountain ridges of New Guinea: northwestern Iowa. Within my lifetime, the cultural and biological complexity of rural Iowa has declined precipitously. What underlies both kinds of loss is the decline in the number of farms. Modern farming is a way of spreading vacancy. The farms grow bigger and bigger—declining in number—and fewer and fewer people live on them. This has been accompanied, in Iowa, by a decline in the biological diversity of the farm itself. In most of the state, there are now only soybeans, corn, chickens, and hogs, a huge change from even fifty years ago.

  This much is easy to see. But so is the loss of cultural complexity. The way to measure that is to ask as many good questions about the components of social and cultural texture as you can. What kinds of questions would you ask to get at the diversity, the complexity of a small town? Some are fairly obvious. How many independent banks are there? How many independent grain elevators? How many independent slaughter houses? Creameries? Grocery stores? How many farm implement and auto dealerships? How many butchers and livestock breeders? How many farmers sold milk and eggs in town? How many entries were there in the county fairs?

  But these are really technical and economic questions. So let’s consider some others. What percentage of the children learned how to play a musical instrument? How many unconsolidated school districts were there? What about amateur theatrical societies and singing clubs—even small-town opera houses? How many softball teams? What about sewing circles and baling rings and card clubs? How many people in town had grown up on the farm or had friends on the farm or went out in the country to do part-time work? How much barter was there?

  All these questions point in one direction. With the decrease in biological complexity—the regression to corn and soybeans—came a decrease in social and cultural complexity. The farmscape emptied and the towns became ghosts of themselves. You might argue that the one didn’t directly and necessarily cause the other: in other words, if most of the 203,000 farms that existed in Iowa when I was born (1952) suddenly switched to growing only corn and soybeans, that wouldn’t necessarily have reduced the population and complexity of the countryside. But the fact is that Iowa did switch to corn and soybeans and when it was done, fewer than ninety thousand farms remained. Not many people live on ninety thousand farms.

  It may seem far-fetched to compare social and agricultural change in Iowa with linguistic and biological correlation in some of Earth’s biodiversity hot spots. But the underlying premise is the same. Biological diversity and cultural diversity go hand in hand. This is a hard idea to absorb for the simple reason that humans, in our pride, have always assumed that cultural diversity and complexity is the result of who we are, not what nature has made of us and we’ve made of nature. We still believe fiercely, against all the evidence, that we’re independent of most other species. And we still believe fiercely that the habitat that matters most is the one we create. We couldn’t be more mistaken.

  Year

  SIX

  January 1

  Sooner or later the pickup will be packed and the dogs loaded. We’ll roll down the driveway and around the corner and onto the highway. With any luck it will still be early in the morning. The horses will be standing over a bale of hay, and the chickens and geese and ducks will be wondering why they weren’t let out of the poultry yard. The dogs, too, will have some questions, especially as the day of driving grows longer and longer and we don’t seem to be getting to the vet or the dog sitter’s house. By next week this time, we’ll be well down the road to Southern California again, angling across country however winter lets us.

  I don’t know how it came to seem so natural to load up and set out. My parents certainly had the habit. My dad has always liked the thought of being packed and ready to go—and then going at first light. In the early nineties, Lindy and I hauled the dogs and horses west every summer, and when we got there we found ourselves among people who made a living hauling horses all across the country, people for whom five days in any one spot was a good long time.

  I try to imagine what it would have been like driving across country about the time I was born, but I can’t. Once, when I was seven or eight, I rode a hundred miles home from my grandparents’ house in their car with my grandfather behind the wheel. His top speed was thirty-five miles an hour. It nearly killed me. I wanted to be anywhere but the backseat of that old Dodge plodding down the highway. Now I’d love to see all over again what I must have seen on that trip, the hogs in the fields, the creek-bottom pastures, the windmills and farmhouses. Iowa wasn’t yet a tyranny of soybeans and corn.

  I’m struck this time by the change in how I imagine the trip across country. It’s become so easy to look down the road. The last time we made this trip I spent weeks staring at the road atlas, pondering the mysteries of the American highway system. Now, instead of the road atlas, I contemplate the National Weather Service website—the page displaying a map, updated every five minutes, of all the weather warnings, watches, alerts, and advisories across the country. Right now, the only good weather slot for crossing west is somewhere near El Paso.

  This morning I ran through the whole trip on the GPS, mile by mile, turn by turn. I plotted out some driving distances on Google Maps, wondering how long we’ll want to drive each day. I scouted a couple of websites that list dog-friendly lodgings along the way. I’ve already downloaded the audio books we’ll listen to. We’re driving west this time in a cloud of information—the exact opposite, I suppose, of that trip with my grandparents, when all the information worth gleaning would have come in conversation with the two old people in the front seat and with the world that lay beyond the highway ditches.

  January 16

  It was a fitting end to the trip—a fifteen-mile traffic jam snaking over Cajon Pass and down into the refrigerated depths of Southern California, where avocadoes were freezing on the bough and sprinkler-soaked lawns iced over by morning. The day before we left it was seventy degrees at home. The route across country was snowless nearly till Santa Fe. But we drove through flurries in the Mojave Desert, and more snow fell on the San Bernardino side of the pass than we’d seen at home in all of November and December. The jam was a place to put impatience aside, to never mind the twenty nine thousand miles we’d driven and hope that somewhere in the last thirty miles the traffic would break up, like pack ice in a turbulent sea.

  In 2005, it felt as though the trip we were making was continuous with all the long-distance drives my family took when I was a kid. Those trips embodied the modesty of our expectations. We were camping then, not staying in motels, and we were driving, not flying or taking the train. Driving across the country wasn’t only normal. It was a sign of frugality. But this time I felt the excess in the trip. It was like traveling along the edge of one’s historical epoch and knowing the judgment that would be made upon it in the future. The scale of the road system—the volume and velocity of its traffic—seemed grievous. And so did the painful, nagging awareness that there’s nothing sustainable in this way of l
ife. As easy as the drive was, it felt wholly untenable.

  If you get up morning after morning and drive all day you eventually get to California. That still surprises me. The miles came and went, the soybean fields of Illinois, where water stood in place of snowdrifts, the hills of Missouri, the broad sweep of Oklahoma shoaling off into Texas. We headed out of Tulsa an hour before any sign of dawn, its refineries glistening in the dark. No matter where we stopped, it seemed hard to believe that we were really there, because the only there was the pickup cab and the two sleepy dogs in the backseat and the sound of our audiobook.

  “Last spring, 1846, was a busy season in the City of St. Louis.” So begins Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, which recounts his adventures along the Platte and Arkansas Rivers in what are now Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado in the summer of 1846. Nothing defines the moment you travel in like listening to the moment of someone else’s travels. We began the book as we crossed the Mississippi into St. Louis, and whenever Parkman mentioned the trail to Santa Fe I felt a kind of historical serendipity, as if we had more in common with him than the fact that we were pointed west.

  From a distance of 160 years, it’s easy to see the boundaries of Parkman’s historical epoch, except where it overlaps with ours. Every buffalo he comes across is “stupid,” and of the bulls he writes, “Thousands of them might be slaughtered without causing any detriment to the species, for their numbers greatly exceed those of the cows.” He feels a profound ambivalence toward the emigrants who are just beginning to crowd the trails west. He can praise the Indians he meets only by comparing their bodies to the works of ancient Greek sculptors. Otherwise, “So alien to himself do they appear that…he begins to look upon them as a troublesome and dangerous species of wild beast.”