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TODAY Wednesday 19 November 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Wes Jackson's Problem with Agriculture

"Everybody wants to talk about the problems in agriculture," says Wes Jackson from his research institute in Salina, Kansas. "I want to talk about the problem OF agriculture." What he means is that we humans have not yet devised a food system that saves soil and contributes more biological life than it withdraws. Agriculture is ipso facto unsustainable, and modern agriculture -- which is indisputably productive over the short haul -- spreads and accelerates this basic dynamic of unsustainability.

When you think about it, Wes says, humans don't have much experience as farmers. Ninety-nine percent of our history as a species is pre-agriculture. We're hunter/gatherers from the savanna (with some vestigial hard wiring from our ancestors in the rainforests). We're new to this business of staying put and concentrating food production in relatively small places. No wonder we haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Wes' long view of things is brought to mind by the lead story in yesterday's science section of The New York Times: "New Clues Show Where People Made the Great Leap to Agriculture." The story, by John Noble Wilford, summarizes a report in the current issue of Science which purports to have pinpointed the region where seed-bearing grasses were first domesticated 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. (Southeast Turkey is the best bet, they say). As Wilford says, it's hard to overplay the significance of what went on: "Archeologists and historians agree that the rise of agriculture, along with the domestication of animals for food and labor, produced the most important transformation in human culture since the last ice age -- perhaps since the control of fire. Farming and herding led to the growth of large, settled human populations and increasing competition for productive lands, touching off organized warfare. Food surpluses freed people to specialize in crafts like textiles and supported a privileged elite in the first cities, growing numbers of bureaucrats and scribes, soldiers and kings."

There you have it. Most of the things that we were taught to think of as "history" are developments which flow from the creation of a food system based on annual, rather than perennial, plants and on domestic, rather than wild, animals.

What Wes wants to know is whether it's possible to take yet another step, where a food producing system combines the high calorie-production of the annual plants with the self-fertilizing, self-sustaining characteristics of natural ecosystems. Can humans feed themselves at the same time as they simulate the replenishing tendencies of the unplowed landscape? "140 years after Darwin," he says, "it's time we took him seriously."

In practical terms, that means that Wes and his fellow researchers at The Land Institute are investigating whether the Great Plains of central North America can be the scene of a new kind of agriculture that mimics the ecology of the native prairie. Can perennial plants, arrayed in polycultures, rival the food production of annual plants arrayed in monocultures? And, as a preliminary, can humans breed plants that will work well in such arrangements? The answer is in, Wes says: Yes. "We've had our Kitty Hawk," he says. "Natural-systems agriculture can fly. We're not ready to book passengers on a transatlantic 747 just yet, but we've mastered the basics." Variants of native grasses have been developed which, when planted near complementary neighbors, each year produce cereal seeds (food for humans) much more lavishly than their natural ancestors at the same time as they repel pests, sponsor their own fertility, and leave the soil unturned and immune to most erosive forces.

In retrospect, perhaps, the work of Wes Jackson and the scientists at The Land Institute will appear to our grandchildren as much more important than one would guess from the attention we give to it now. While most of us are constrained by limitations of talent and vision to work on incremental steps in the here-and-now (the enterprises we call "sustainable" are really closer to "more environmentally-friendly than the previous model"), it's comforting to know that a few brilliant, dedicated people still ask fundamental questions which provoke radical answers.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

On an unrelated, but always interesting, topic -- the health of the world's coral reefs -- we've just received a new and updated High Five from Mary Miller at San Francisco's famed Exploratorium. Follow Mary's advice and you'll embark on a fascinating tour of the best Web places to learn about the science and politics of saving the reefs.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

11/18: "Stay Home and Be Decent"
11/17: World Cups (Soccer; C02)
11/14: Amtrak, My Amtrak
11/13: Tim Wirth's Excellent Adventure
11/12: Monsters of Wellesley, Massachusetts
11/11: Armistice Day and the Next Great War
11/10: Mea Maxima Culpa
11/07: Inflexible Flyers
11/06: Meaningless Votes, Really
11/05: In Praise of SeaWeb

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