Tamed

by Alice Roberts

  The biggest problem with this new technology, perhaps, is the food sovereignty one. Farming isn’t just about food production, it’s about power and profit – which are concentrated in the rich North. There’s a danger that new GM varieties – however efficient, robust and disease resistant they are – could just cement the inequalities that already exist in the global food system, leaving poor smallholders disenfranchised once again. The first generation of GM crops, like Roundup Ready soy, was largely irrelevant to poor countries – but the second generation could, if not managed well, end up snatching away power and decision-making from poor farmers around the world.

  Traditionally – or at least, in the traditions of the last hundred years or so – farmers have been treated as end-users of knowledge – rather than creators of it. This is very different to the way that the Neolithic started – and actually, it’s quite distinct from the reality out there, on the ground, in the fields, from the rice terraces of Longsheng to the orchards and pastures of England. Farmers are always innovating, testing possibilities in real-world experiments; they know their land better than anyone else. Research projects which involve farmers right from the beginning reap dividends, and farmers, in turn, are much more likely to adopt innovations that they’ve helped to develop. Development experts suggest that the whole system needs to be turned on its head: initiatives need to be driven from the grassroots, with national and international support – rather than by the current top-down system of policies, trade agreements and regulation.

  It’s a tangled, twisted, entwined problem. We need to come up with ways of producing enough food, in the right places, while adapting to climate change and trying not to make it any worse, as well as conserving ecosystems and improving the livelihoods of poor farmers. Whatever the solutions are, they need to be worked out in a connected way. What’s really required is an integrated, holistic strategy – but one that looks very carefully at the gains and costs at the local level, as well as the global. If we’re to make sensible decisions, for us, for the welfare of our domesticated animals, and for wild species, we need to break away from dichotomies and dogma. It can’t be a simple question of industrial, intensive agriculture OR wildlife-friendly small-scale production; the use of agrochemicals OR organic agriculture; a focus on existing varieties OR the creation of new, genetically modified strains. And the solutions will vary from place to place.

  So there’s global food production, food security, sorted. Apart from – it isn’t. Too many people are still starving. We need solutions quickly. And if that wasn’t a big enough challenge – what about the rest of life on the planet? What about all the species we haven’t domesticated – what about the wilderness? The real legacy of the Neolithic, as far as the planet is concerned, is not how well humans manage to survive and thrive, but how other species around us – the ones we haven’t domesticated – have been affected by this revolutionary change.

  The wild

  I remember flying over Malaysia some ten years ago and feeling heart-wrenching dismay at the extent of the deforestation. Hills and valleys had been scoured clean of their natural vestment of ancient rainforest and bulldozer tracks formed strange, ridged patterns like pink thumbprints on the land. Where green was returning, it was all in orderly rows – of palm-oil seedlings. The monoculture palm-oil plantations covered vast areas, in regular patterns and standard green. A Malaysian man that I was filming with had links with the palm-oil industry, and I gently expressed my concerns. ‘But you deforested your island thousands of years ago,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be preaching to us.’

  We’re currently pushing at the limits of the biosphere to support humans. Some 40 per cent of terrestrial land is farmed – as our population and demand for food grows further, how much more will be pressed into service, under the plough or as pasture for our domesticated herds? Is it at all possible to balance the need to produce our food with the challenge of preserving biodiversity and real wilderness?

  Our domesticated livestock – especially large mammals such as cattle, sheep and buffalo – represent a huge burden for the planet. There are over 7 billion of us, and around 20 billion of them. We currently feed a third of the plants we grow to these animals. An increasing volume of the cereals that we grow is being diverted to feed livestock – a topsy-turvy trend that just makes food production even more energy-hungry. We could stop eating meat. At the very least, we could stop eating grain-fed beef and opt for pasture-fed beef instead, or shift from beef to less energy-intensive poultry. We could make our existing food systems much more efficient by making changes like these – without more intensification, without pouring in more energy and agrochemicals. But perhaps we need to consider whether keeping livestock at all can actually be justified any longer. Should we – as a report from the UN’s Environment Programme has suggested – be looking at going vegetarian, globally?

  Livestock are – rightly – blamed for a litany of ecological problems, but they aren’t always detrimental to ecosystems. Sometimes rearing animals can be a way of extracting resources from a landscape which is otherwise difficult to farm – so they’re not taking up room that could be used for growing crops. On the other hand, grazing can be disastrous. Writer and environmental activist George Monbiot rather devastatingly called the grazed landscapes of Britain ‘sheepwrecked’. But it’s not always an unmitigated disaster – carefully managed grazing can help to keep environments like grasslands open, for instance. Having lost so many species of Pleistocene megafauna at the end of the Ice Age, our domestic megafauna can step into that role, by grazing and trampling – helping to sustain communities of plants and animals that thrive in more open environments. Livestock in mixed farming systems can also help to recycle nutrients back into the soil, adding their own natural fertiliser in the form of manure. And very importantly, livestock represent a source of protein and other nutrients that may be difficult to obtain from plants alone, especially in developing countries. Secondary products like leather and wool are important as well, and animals are still used for traction and transport in places where farming is less mechanised. There’s also the bond of that ‘ancient contract’ between people and their domestic animals: a cultural value that is difficult to measure, but that emerges so eloquently in our stories and myths, and which we feel so strongly.

  We need to look carefully at how domesticated animals fit into farms of the future. This is a crucial question for society as a whole, and requires careful thought about the values we place on a host of different factors – limiting carbon dioxide emissions versus improving soil quality or conserving an open landscape, for instance. Industrialised systems can be very efficient, but they also rack up some impressive ‘food miles’ for animal feed, and raise questions about animal welfare. Canadian soil scientist and biologist Henry Janzen suggests that we need to look at each locality, weighing up all the pros and cons, and asking, ‘How best do livestock fit here?’ Sometimes the answer will be: they don’t. But sometimes, it will make a whole lot of sense to be keeping sheep, goats or cattle – these ancient allies of ours – on the land, and we can work to minimise the environmental stresses while embracing the benefits that our cloven-hoofed companions continue to offer us. Keeping livestock on the very land they depend on may be more beneficial to both the animals and the ecosystems they interact with.

  But just how much room do we allow our farms to take up? This question really centres on whether we choose to make our agricultural land as productive as humanly possible – or aim for more wildlife-friendly farming. Adopting an intensive, ‘land-sparing’ approach means accepting the loss of wildlife in our fields but, by focusing on agricultural productivity, should allow us to keep more of the wider landscape truly wild. On the face of it, this seems like a sensible option: if we ring-fence our agricultural land and concentrate on making it maximally productive, we can leave plenty of room for wildlife elsewhere. But ecologists have argued that this just doesn’t work in the real world. Wild species can’t be supp
orted in isolated pockets of habitat. Wildlife – whether it’s bees, birds or bears – tends to do better in networks of protected wilderness, semi-natural habitat and managed landscapes. In the UK, natural biodiversity has been profoundly impacted by the intensification of agriculture since the 1960s. Environmentally friendly farms are essential as both refuges and links, with the hedgerows of traditional farmland forming crucial connecting corridors for wildlife. Organic farming, currently accounting for only 1 per cent of agriculture worldwide, supports wild biodiversity, and can be almost as productive as conventional farming, whilst being more profitable. It looks like the most sustainable option, but achieving both food and ecosystem security will involve a range of different approaches, in different places. The ‘land-sharing’ versus ‘land-sparing’ debate continues. Treating the choice as a global dichotomy is unhelpful – ecosystems are much more complex than that. Once again, it’s a question which needs to start with a local focus, looking carefully at the communities of plants and animals, the opportunities and pressures, in each place.

  There’s also an important economic imperative to protect wilderness and wildlife – the future of farming depends on it. The process of domestication has, each time, involved sampling the genetic diversity that existed amongst the wild ancestors of domesticates. The DNA of our tamed species often shows clear signs of ‘bottlenecks’, sometimes associated with original domestication, but also with the narrowing focus of selective breeding over the last couple of centuries, producing the varieties that we grow and rear today. The Green Revolution led to another contraction of diversity, with a concentration on an even narrower portfolio of more productive cultivars. What seems like a neat solution actually presents a significant threat to all our food-production systems. The ‘future-proofing’ of any ecosystem, any species, lies in the diversity and variation contained within it. We see that in the history of species, of life on earth. If we try to constrain species too much, we seriously limit their potential to adapt to changes in the future – to unusual pathogens as well as to changes in physical environments. The Irish Potato Famine showed just how devastating the effects can be. The wild relatives of our domestic species represent an immense store of genetic and phenotypic variation. Understanding how domestication happened, and tracking down the wild relatives of our tamed species, isn’t just interesting from a historical and theoretical perspective. That knowledge and those wild species are important to our modern breeding programmes, to the future of our domesticated plants and animals. If only for very selfish reasons, we need continuing access to that wild library. What’s good for the wild species is good for us, too. We’re in the same game: evolution, survival. Our own fate is inextricably tied up with the fates of other species.

  Wild species are threatened by the presence of our domesticates – at a genetic level. The distinction between domesticated and wild, the human landscape and the natural one, has become increasingly blurred. Genes from domesticated species have already – have always – escaped from our gardens into the wilderness. We’re not sure what this introgression of genes from domesticates means for wild species. Natural selection could end up weeding out the ‘domestic’ genes – it may have already done that; or those genes could be advantageous – and retained. Recent studies have revealed the presence of DNA from many popular domesticated varieties in crabapple genomes. That could significantly affect the future evolution of wild apples – as well as, possibly, diminishing their usefulness for future crop improvement. And even the tightest regulation can’t rule out the escape of DNA from genetically modified organisms into wild species.

  The genetic connectedness of our domestic species with their wild relatives reminds us what a complex network of relationships we’re part of. Our domesticated species have not somehow ‘left nature’ – they are still part of it. That goes for us, too. We might have a spectacularly profound and far-reaching impact on the rest of the planet, but we’re still a biological phenomenon. If anything, the acceptance that we’re part of nature should encourage us to be more thoughtful about our influence and the way that our existence impacts on other species. We can never stand apart from all those other lives, but we can perhaps push those interactions in a more positive direction. Keeping an eye on the future of farming shouldn’t be our only reason for protecting wildlife. We understand the threat that we, as a species, represent to biodiversity. There’s a moral obligation to try to balance the basic need to feed and clothe the human population with the need to sustain our fellow species – not just the domesticated ones, but the wild ones too.

  We have become a powerful evolutionary force on the planet, shaping landscapes, changing the climate, forming co-evolutionary relationships with other species, and instigating global diasporas of those favoured plants and animals. Through those movements – as much as through any human-mediated natural selection – the genomes of those domesticated species were altered, as they interbred with wild species. Apples still retain the memory of their origin in those wild orchards on the flanks of the Tian Shan mountains, but they’re more wild, European crabapple in their genetic make-up. The same goes for domestic pigs, which originated in Anatolia but bred with wild boars as they spread across Europe – until all their mitochondrial DNA signatures were replaced by those of local, wild boars. Horses interbred with their wild counterparts as they galloped away from the steppe. Commercial chickens today have yellow legs – a trait they picked up when ancestral chickens interbred with grey junglefowl in south Asia. This pattern of origin, spread and interbreeding has created such a tangled genetic tapestry in each domesticated species that it’s been hard to pick apart the threads. The injection of genes from wild relatives in different places has often led to suggestions of multiple sites of domestication. But as genetics moved on from looking at mitochondrial DNA to exploring whole genomes, and with extraction of ancient DNA from archaeological remains, the real, complicated picture has begun to emerge. It turns out that Vavilov and Darwin were both right. As Vavilov predicted, most domesticated species do appear to have a single, discrete geographic centre of origin. But Darwin was also right about the likelihood of multiple ancestors – not through multiple, separate centres of domestication, but through the hybridisation that happens as the species spreads. Even cattle, purported to have a second centre of domestication, producing zebu cattle, are more likely to have had a single, original centre of domestication in the Near East. Dogs, too, long thought to have originated from two widely separated centres of domestication in Eurasia are – on the basis of the latest analyses – most likely to have emerged from a single origin. Pigs, however, may be a true exception to the rule, with evidence pointing to separate centres of domestication in west and east Eurasia.

  We understand domestication much better today than we did just a decade ago. The boundaries we’d drawn between the tamed and the wild back then were too robust and rigid. As we’ve been unravelling the stories of our allies, we’ve also illuminated the evolutionary history of our own species. Like them, we’re hybrids. Moving around the world, colonising new landscapes, we interbred with our ‘wild’ relatives, just as horses, cattle, chickens, apples, wheat and rice did too.

  Now we’re everywhere – and our domesticated species are global phenomena alongside us. It’s obvious that the evolutionary success of our domesticates depends a great deal on us, but the success of other species which have not been sown, grafted, bred and bridled by us also depends on their ability to survive in a world profoundly influenced by our existence – and that of our domesticated allies. We don’t just need to tend the species that have teamed up with us. We need to nurture the untamed wildness – now, more than ever. We can’t plough on with the idea that we can separate ourselves from the rest of nature; we need to learn how to live with it. It feels like the challenge of this century is learning how to accept those interrelationships, to thrive with the wildness, not always to fight it.

  As I finish writing this book, my apple trees are comin
g into leaf. I pruned them heavily this year, shaping them to encourage more fruit, but also to please the eye. I stand back from each tree as I’m pruning it – as I would with a painting – testing the balance of the composition, before reaching in again to trim a branch. The blossoms have all gone, and in their place are the small, round, hard beginnings of new apples. They will swell over the coming months until they’re ready to be eaten, when the warmth of summer is waning. Underneath the trees, cowslips – carefully mown around – are still nodding their lemon-yellow heads. Solitary bees are buzzing. Some of the black bullocks in the field beyond the garden crane their heads over the wall to eat the ivy. A great spotted woodpecker shimmies up one of the apple trees, investigating the bark for insect delicacies. There are divisions here, between the wild and the domesticated, the untamed and the tamed. But in the end, it’s all one: a tangled bank, beautifully intertwined.

  Acknowledgements

  Well, what can I say – I am eternally, massively grateful to many kind colleagues and friends who have freely shared their expertise, reading the draft of Tamed and offering me their insights, suggestions and amendments. Thank you: Adam Balic, Helen Sang and Mike McGrew at the Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh (for all your help with chickens and genetics); Ivana Camilleri (for a brief Spanish lesson, including enlightening me on the meaning of sweet Zorrita!); Colin Groves, Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University (for endless evolutionary biological wisdom); Laurence Hurst at the University of Bath (for genetic gems and such careful reading; horse Parmesan, anyone?); Nick and Miranda Krestovnikoff (for their wonderful wassailing parties); Greger Larson at the University of Oxford (guru of domestication!); Aoife McLysaght at Trinity College Dublin (for spotting mutations); Mark Pallen at the University of East Anglia and Robin Allaby at the University of Warwick (for sedimentary support); Adam Rutherford (for troubleshooting, early warnings and the occasional jibe, of course); Chris Stringer and Ian Barnes at the Natural History Museum (for much brain-picking at Cheltenham Festival of Science); Bryan Turner at the University of Birmingham (for such attention to detail, down to the molecules of the story); and Catherine Walker (for hot-off-the-press references!). Any mistakes or oversights are of course mine, and mine alone.