PHOTO BY BRYAN WELCH

Most North American farms of the 21^st century are, comparatively speaking, biological wastelands. Plowed, fertilized and cultivated from property-line to property-line, much of the Great Plains has been stripped of its wildlife. Walk through a soybean field anywhere in the Midwest, then take the same sort of stroll through a native prairie in the same region (if you can find one). The contrast is shocking. The prairie, especially the dominant “tallgrass” prairie, is among the world’s most fecund environments. Dozens of species thrive in a thick carpet of plants growing unbelievably fast. In three months I have watched an acre of my undisturbed pasture grow six tons of grass. One acre, three months, six tons.

Ecologist David Tilman has been studying the productivity of the prairie at Minnesota’s Cedar Creek Natural History Area for more than a decade. He has compared the productivity of the land planted in a natural mixture of several species with the same land planted with only one highly useful species. In the December 2006 issue of Scientific American he reported that the diverse natural prairie produced 238 percent more “bioenergy” than the same land planted in one species. Furthermore, the diverse, natural prairie stores two-thirds of its productivity underground, making a native grassland naturally carbon-negative, no matter what the tops of the plants are used for. The soybean field produces a lot of food, but it produces comparatively little life, for what that’s worth.

 

PHOTO BY BRYAN WELCH

This is no chicken-little scenario. Agribusiness is not destroying the human habitat (although it probably could, given time). We need to give due credit to the architects of the first “green revolution.” The benefits of agricultural productivity are real. We have fed a lot more people than would have been possible without technology. But a lot of people believe that the world would be a better place if we re-focused agricultural priorities on local food, environmental preservation and healthy farmers.

Agriculture’s green revolution underlines in a powerful way this basic biological fact: We live at the expense of other creatures. Every living thing does. We can, through symbiotic relationships or good husbandry, cooperate with other creatures to increase biological productivity overall, but at the end of the day if we disappeared, other living things would take advantage of the resources we no longer consumed.

And because I am alive — because you are alive — a lot of other creatures never get the chance to live. 

PHOTO BY BRYAN WELCH

The first “green revolution” has not been an unqualified success. It’s had its downsides. Farmers have generally stopped raising their own food as production has shifted to “monocultural” crops with global market value. So, when economies decline and geopolitical structures teeter, farmers are in the same dire straits as everyone else. They have, largely, surrendered their ability to live off their land or to supply their own communities with a balanced diet. The visionary scientist Wes Jackson[1] describes modern agricultural economies as “brittle.” When an entire region depends on a single product — say corn — and an unusual weather pattern devastates the corn crop one year, the region’s economy is also devastated. Most modern farmers don’t even raise their own vegetable gardens.

Pesticides, herbicides and industrial fertilizers pollute water supplies and destroy wildlife. Even as the White House and the Ford Foundation were trumpeting industrial agriculture’s achievements, Rachel Carson was taking note of the sudden decline of wildlife around the world where pesticides were used. New health problems proliferated in farming communities around the world. According to the National Cancer Institute within the U.S. National Institutes of Health, farm workers face unusually high incidence of leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, multiple myeloma, soft tissue sarcomas, and cancers of the skin, lip, stomach, brain and prostate.[2]

The bare earth between the rows of corn or soybeans erodes in the absence of the root structures and decomposing plant matter that enrich undisturbed soils. Plant varieties are developed to maximize the nutrition derived from every square meter. As that nutrition is pulled from the soil and trucked away to feed human beings and livestock, the soil is depleted and the crops are increasingly dependent on artificial fertilizers. Those fertilizers are specifically designed to benefit the crops immediately, and have no lasting positive impact. The soil is, gradually, robbed of its natural assets.

Furthermore, there’s good evidence that, as we’ve increased the productivity of our farmland, we’ve also made our food less nutritious. Some studies suggest that up to 75 percent of the natural minerals we would expect to find in a piece of fruit or a bowl of spinach may be missing if our fruits and vegetables are grown with aggressive industrial agricultural practices. [3]

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BRYAN WELCH

I would describe myself as a committed environmentalist. It’s my passion and my work. I’ve covered our deepening environmental crisis as a journalist for 30 years and now I run magazines and Web sites dedicated to raising human awareness of environmental issues. My wife and I raise much of our own food on our little organic farm and we supply organic food to lots of other local families. Environmentalism is my passion, my career, my chief avocation.

I’ve watched the environmental “movement,” if you will, grow from a radical, tie-dyed clique into a mainstream global consensus. I don’t think we, as environmentalists, can take much credit for that however.

We have, for the last 30 years, been among society’s least effective leaders and least pleasurable companions. In his 2006 essay, “Beyond Hope,” Derrick Jensen claims that the most common words he hears spoken by environmentalists,everywhere,are “We’re fucked.”[1] He exaggerates, but he has a point.

Our attitudes reek of Puritanism. We are, often, dour, strict and humorless. We’re judgmental. Behind most of life’s simple pleasures we see unnecessary consumption, which we ridicule. Because humanity is responsible for environmental problems we are, ipso facto, all sinners and we find little joy in being human. We portray the giant global corporations as occult covens, and we burn their representatives in effigy in our own reenactments of the Salem witch trials. When our neighbors seem too moderate or abstract for our tastes — as the Quakers did to New England’s 17^th-century Puritans — we whip them out of the colony, at least figuratively, and we’re not above discussing executions. (The Puritan authorities hanged four Quakers for their religious beliefs in Boston between 1659 and 1661.)

To say the least, we’re no fun a lot of the time.

Maybe that explains why we’ve accomplished so little in the past 30 years. After all, we were right all along. Why has it taken popular opinion so long to catch up?

Well, for one thing, no one follows a pessimist. We’ve spent far too much time confessing our sins and assigning our scarlet letters. We’ve invested far too little time visualizing successful outcomes.

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[1] Jensen, Derrick. Beyond Hope. May/June 2006 issue of Orion magazine. Excerpted from Endgame, published in June 2006 by Seven Stories Press.

BRYAN WELCH

We in the developed world consume far more than we need. We are fat, we drive big cars, we throw away whole households of valuable goods because we’re spoiled and we can afford to buy something new rather than preserving or repairing what we have. Our bad habits damage our environment.

But conservation is not going to save our habitat. Global warming, deforestation, desertification and pollution are all products of overpopulation. The poorest people don’t have the option of leaving the nearby forest standing, or keeping their goats off of an overgrazed pasture. For the world’s poorest people, every scrap of land is part of a thin barrier between life and death. They must use every resource available to keep themselves and their families alive. That’s the grim reality at the heart of human population growth. At some point we all end up there, struggling to sustain our lives regardless of the consequences for our community or our habitat.