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TODAY Wednesday 30 July 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Atlanta and Salina

Peter Bahouth used to run Greenpeace and now runs the Turner Foundation from the tenth floor of the CNN building in Atlanta. Yesterday Wes Jackson and I were visiting Peter to see if he has ideas on how Wes could raise a ton of money to expand his work on ecological agriculture. Through Peter's window, off to the right, you can see the ruins of the Omni, erstwhile home of the Atlanta Hawks, a once-flashy 1970s amphitheater now being chewed up by giant metal-eating cranes. But most of the view is taken by a vast parking lot, one of the biggest I've ever seen, bordered by a scattering of glass office buildings. An interstate highway runs through it.

"Did you know," asks Peter, "that Metropolitan Atlanta has had the fastest outward growth of any settlement in human history?" Never before, he says, had so many square feet of development been required for every human added to a given population. Atlanta sprawl makes Los Angeles look dense.

Atlanta actually has a very nice train system, but there are only two lines on it, each less than twenty miles. Most people drive their cars to work and rely on their cars for shopping, childcare, and entertainment. Just like everywhere else, but more so. Wes and I walk about a mile down Auburn Avenue to the Ebenezar Baptist Church and the tomb of Martin Luther King. We encounter remarkably few fellow pedestrians. A New Yorker goes to Atlanta and he realizes that while it's absolutely a good idea to promote alternatives to the automobile, there is no evading the fact that one of the most crucial environmental challenges of these next years is to induce the production of new kinds of automobiles; the devil of private mobility deserves his due.

"You know what else?" says Peter. "You can't even buy a Georgia peach any more. The peaches come from California, Mexico, Florida. The Peach State, Peachtree Street -- forget it." Wes nodded ruefully. He has just come from a long weekend visit to Wendell Berry's place in Kentucky, and he and Wendell have been exchanging notes on the struggle to keep alive American agrarianism and the traditions of place that inform it. Wes isn't very optimistic, not for the short run, but he knows that his work will be of value someday to a world that can't afford a perpetual 1997.

Out in Salina, in central Kansas, Wes runs the Land Institute. For 25 years now, he and a small cadre of scientists have been trying to answer the following question: Can perennial plants, arrayed in polycultures that mimic prairie ecosystems, produce an abundance of edible seeds, control pests and pathogens, and sponsor their own nitrogen? In other words, can you produce food on the Great Plains without tilling the soil and without adding poisons or fertilizers? The answer is yes, says Wes. "We've had our Kitty Hawk," he says. "We may not be able to fly 300 people across the Atlantic yet, but we've demonstrated lift and drag." After a quarter century of investigation, it's all there in the refereed journals: perennial grasses can be bred and arranged so that conservation is a consequence of production. It looks like a breakthrough.

Now Wes is trying to shape the next 25 years, which he just may live through. He wants to set up a Center for Natural Systems Agriculture with about 20 Ph.D.-level scientists on staff and a battalion of graduate students and interns, and he wants it to demonstrate a practical, profitable alternative to conventional food production by 2023. "Hell," he says to Peter Bahouth, "why not think big here?"

At which point, a bustle in the outer office announces the arrival of the prototype big thinker, Ted Turner himself. He strides into Peter's room and within a minute he and Wes are going back and forth on soil erosion and desertification. Ted Turner knows a lot. Well, one says to oneself, sometimes this business can be a lot of fun.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

We've got two excellent agriculture resources for you in our High Fives section. Give a look at both Chuck Hassebrook (Center for Rural Affairs, Nebraska) and Hal Hamilton (Center for Sustainable Systems, Kentucky).

 

Recent "Today" columns:

7/29: Herons and Frogs
7/28: Golf
7/25: Climate Chess: Arkansan Opening
7/24: Top and Bottom
7/23: Smart Exxon
7/22: Climate Chess
7/21: Don't Know Much About Conservation
7/18: All Aboard
7/17: Downward and Outward Mobility
7/16: A Muggy Day on The Hill
7/15: Plug for Planet Ark
7/14: Follow Me

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