Not yet, on sustainability, it seems....

This post is triggered by the beginning of the biking season here.  Joy of joys!!  When the snow's gone and the temperature gets far enough above freezing for weaklings like me to venture out on my bike, I like to see what's changed along the many various paths that are here, since the previous autumn when I put my bike in the basement to wait out the long, icy winter.  My usual reaction is that an important message hasn't gotten through at all.

We live in a land-grant university town.  Penn State is in fact a very good university.  We have an ag school and they have some active conservation and sustainability groups.  But overall it is a money-first institution.  Each year as I venture out I see more former agricultural land being urbanized:  soil and the prior year's farmland is being paved over to make room for condos or suburban-style McMansions, or shrink-wrap or fast-food franchise outlets, or banks.  Oh, and more bars, of course.

A few years ago our President and trustees sold many, as I recall hundreds, of acres right near the edge of campus, upon which hundreds of condos are being built.  That land had been used by the ag school and its students.  Bye bye, or perhaps one would better say $ye $ye to that old-fashioned notion!

View of Circleville Farm, 2005; Penn State Daily Collegian

Circleville Farm now: US Framing

Even here it seems that the message hasn't gotten through that what's important here should be beyond the interests of the short-term 'developers' (that is, the realtors and destruction companies) and that there should instead be at least a modicum of consideration not just for the long-term future but also the quality of life.  Thousands more people come in, and what we get is more demand on water, more light, noise, and air pollution, more crime, more sewage and electricity demand, more litter.  And, of course, more business for the local banks, shrink-wrap, fast-food, and alcohol merchants.  Every new development seems to be named for what the developers destroyed to build it -- "Pheasant Glen", "Acacia Woods", "Pine Hollow".

Urban sprawl envy
It is difficult for me to grasp why, even here, the need for restrained growth and long-term sustainability, especially in regard to agriculture, is basically not felt at all.  I think that's the appropriate word for it.  Humans are humans, and we're a short-term thinking species.  We're very good at long-term awareness, but it's in the abstract.  What we feel is of the here-and-now, and in our society this means quantity more than quality of life.  Or, to be fair, quantity of life is seen as quality of life.  Until the threat looms palpably on the horizon, we will carry on with what we know and are used to.

Even here, even in a university town with an ag school, intellectual awareness of issues has little 'bite'.  It is depressing.  Even as we see stories in the news of droughts and soil loss and climate change issues, we do essentially nothing.  Without a wolf right at the door blowing hard, complacency yields to or generates deniers and other arguers-of-convenience, who reflect the general human pattern of short-term thinking.  We daily hear arguments about how to insure 'growth' in business and the economy.  Population growth is hardly on the agenda at all, either locally or globally.  Here the operative word is growth, and it's a mainstay of international development efforts as well as economics professors.  There was just an episode of the  BBC Radio4 program The Inquiry, that dealt with this problem--and asked if we've just all got tired of hearing about climate change. The same goes for population growth, and resources exhaustion.

I can ride my bike all over town, which is a very good thing.  But at night it's hard to see the stars. We may think our consumerist world is expanding, but light pollution keeps us from realizing how finite we really are.

If State College with a major university, that even has sustainability programs, can't do it, who can or will?  Maybe in the western US, where drought stares one in the face?  We shouldn't denigrate climate deniers if we act in a comparable manner.  It seems that there is only one word in our language:  "More!"  Instead, Nancy Reagan had it right: when it comes to 'development' what we need to learn is how to "Just say No!".

But if deniers want to keep their big vehicles and whatever else makes them feel righteous, climate change advocates have their own hypocrisies.  They and their publicity advocates overstate the various aspects of the science itself.  Sustainability advocates use efficient LED light bulbs and recycle their milk bottles, but they still live in big air conditioned houses and drive to work and to the store to get those milk bottles.  Climate scientists and relevant policy-makers in large numbers gambol around the world attending meetings (flying, nice hotels with fancy meals, ....) where they debate how people should cut back on greenhouse gases, rather than the boring alternative of using Skype or Google Hangout for their conferences.  This is do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do behavior and no matter how correct the climate and sustainability arguments are--and they seem essentially urgent--the threat is just not looming enough.

I, too, am a hypocrite and probably, no certainly, don't do enough to truly recognize the problem. Neither do I have any idea how, or even if, it would be possible for a people, even an educated people, to become enough aware of long-term issues to do something really major about it. I like my car (and driving to the store to get my bottles of milk)!  But I also know that as long as everyone carries on as usual, each year there will be more bike paths for me to ride, because they put them in and around all the new condo complexes, and that's great!  So, I think I'll close now, and head out....

"Save the planet": a meaningless slogan?

What is all this talk about sustainability and so on?  What does the term mean and do we have historical precedents to turn to for an answer?  These days, in relation to the concept of sustainability we also hear a debate about how to 'save the planet' in the face of climate change, global warming, CO2 emissions, fossil fuels, overpopulation, industrial agriculture and erosion, antibiotic overuse, loss of clean water, and so on.  We're on various email lists that almost every day send us stories bemoaning the course of things that are not 'sustainable'.

Nothing specific triggers this post other than musing about a set of issues that may be of critical importance to 'us'--whoever 'us' is.  These various terms and slogans make sense to many people and indeed even hearing them puts others' hair on fire, because they oppose what those who want to save the planet are assumed to be advocating.  But these terms are in themselves almost without clear meaning, if any meaning at all, and that can be a problem, given how polarized society is on the issues.

Generally speaking, those on the political left express urgent fear about the current problems that are being discussed, recognized, or claimed.  The left wants to save the planet by cutting back on the use of fossil fuels and big-scale agriculture, human overpopulation, the destruction of natural habitats, and so on.

In reaction, generally those on the political right say that if there really is a problem (they tend to doubt sensory reality and science as its formalizer), then industrial innovation and the capitalist seizing on opportunity will fix it, so not to worry.  Even more, they often argue that the crises are being over-stated or data being misunderstood (or fabricated) so that, in truth, the planet doesn't need 'saving' anyway.  Global warming is either being misinterpreted or it's just part of the normal cycling on Earth and the pendulum will swing back in time.  Industrial capitalism will feed and warm us all, if we but give it the time and enough rein to do its job. The planet, in a sense, will 'save' itself.

Earth; What exactly does one want to 'save'?  Source: Wikipedia

But if you think about it, none of this has much meaning at all, no matter that it sounds like it does.
To see this, we ask in particular what, exactly, save the planet means?

1.  Does it mean save our current way of life?  Do we want to cut back on fossil fuels enough to stop or reverse global warming and resource exhaustion, but not so much that even liberals would complain?  I don't hear them saying we need to outlaw18-wheelers, or trains, tractors, air conditioners, golf carts, power leaf-blowers, backyard pools, or personal cars.  'Cutting back' generally seems to mean to people that we can have a bit less, though not a whole lot less, and still keep our lifestyle and reverse climate change, loss of topsoil, and so on.  Of course, if we really wanted to 'save' the planet in these terms, perhaps we should be advocating global equity in resources and living conditions, but nobody is actually serious about that because if we evened out the income distribution we'd all be in the soup.  Indeed, of course, we're concerned that the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians et al. want to wait til they have cars and A/Cs before they start to save the planet.

I mean, if we polluted ourselves out of supermarkets and personal cars, we would still survive, though there would be a lot fewer of us, and perhaps no global transport and even, heaven forbid, no electronic entertainment.  Some would survive all the fracking anyone could possibly imagine.  So, here, 'saving' really means something akin to delaying the demise of our way of life.

2.  Save human life on Earth?  That is an understandable if selfish thing to advocate.  The Earth would not miss us were we to go extinct.  And we will eventually be gone, of course.  So as far as that goes, again what is being advocated is not save the planet, but delaying our specific species' demise.  Likewise, saving species from extinction is, as any ecologist or evolutionary biologist (or cosmologist) knows, quite illusory.  All species become extinct and only a fraction of lineages do that by evolving into new species.  In the long term, of course, the Earth will be swallowed up by the exploding dying Sun.  So 'saving' again means 'delaying' something we, personally, in our very short-sighted, egocentric lives value.

Even more than that, we want our own lives to have some sort of long-term meaning. That's of course also an illusion, unless perhaps you have expectations of an infinite afterlife.  It's just that when we are returned to ashes, some new future ashes will harbor similar thoughts (about their own lives).

3.  Save the 'planet' as a whole?  It means little to talk about 'saving' the planet.  First, evolution has always adapted life to our planet's conditions, and there is absolutely no reason to think it won't adapt to whatever humans do to the place, including nuclear holocaust.  But since Earth is doomed to destruction eventually, what, exactly, does 'saving the planet' mean?  I think it probably means some cuddly short-term view of things, rather than a carefully considered view, unless it means preserving for the moment things we happen to like, like pandas, our kids and grandchildren or fellow countrymen and the like.  There's of course absolutely nothing wrong with that, but one should be clear, because not saving 'the planet' doesn't mean there'd be nothing; it just means it'd be different.

Our planet is not in danger and doesn't need 'saving'.  The Earth is one huge biochemical reaction and its 'Gaia', its physico-chemical unity is based on its components, energy, and so on.  When or whether or for how long people, or any given lifestyle, or any lifestyle exists is part of that.  We may try to preserve what we like, or enough of what we like, in a state that for our limited lifespan and egocentric purposes seems permanent, if that's how we wish to define 'save'.

4.   Go back to swidden hand-hoed agriculture?
There are many arguments, apparently quite valid, that we are rapidly exhausting our soil in various ways having to do with large-scale industrialized commercially capitalized agriculture.  Does save the planet mean to find and implement ways, that apparently do exist, to grow enough to feed the human population without this being forced upon us when naturally developed soils are drained away?  This might be a good objective, but it is a political one, obviously, because from the 'planet's point of view, maybe its overall sustainability would be better off if we did exhaust the agricultural soil and starved ourselves out of existence or at least back to less resource-demanding numbers. But save the planet as a slogan probably isn't advocating this.  Does it just mean we don't like the way Kansas is being farmed, that Big Ag's like Monsanto are very rich, and that we (most of us who've never really seen a farm first-hand) are venting some nostalgia about things we don't really personally even know much about?

5.  Develop 'sustainability'?
This word is as vague and in a way naive as save the planet.  Nothing in human (much less evolutionary) history is eternally sustainable.  Change is part of Nature and its geological-historical processes.  Human agriculture has more or less from its beginning gone through periods of growth, resource over-use, and decline.  That ours will do the same should come as no surprise.  Is that bad? From the point of view of our own personal nostalgia and sentimentality, perhaps.  From the point of view of 'the planet', there is no reason to impose such a purely human judgment.

In a NY Times editorial on the Canadian tar sands XL pipeline debate, Andrew Nikiforuk concludes:

"The American social critic Lewis Mumford described mining as barbaric to land and soul. By any definition, Keystone XL grants license to an earth-destroying economy."

The editorial is in itself a good discussion of the tar sands and how they are extracted and what that will do to large tracts of forest.  But the final description is just naive, in the sense I am discussing.  No matter what the ramifications in the short term, mining won't actually destroy the earth.

Yet, of course, there is something here--but what is it?  Esthetics about primeval forest?  Global warming and forest destruction?  Dislike of greedy BigOil?  Failure of society to come to grips with the potential traumas whose seeds short-term convenience and greed will lead to?

Do as I say, not as I do?
A new book by Naomi Klein called This Changes Everything, is getting rave reviews these days.  She makes a case that current global capitalism is responsible for climate change that is soon to be disastrous (not good for saving the planet!).  We must cut back, way back, on our energy consumption in the developed world.  Citing conservation advocates' estimates, for global sustainability and to curb or reverse global warming, we must, if we are humanitarian, share the wealth, that is, share the per-capita Wattage expended.  We here in the developed world need to cut back by something like 80%, and let those in the developed world grow, for humanitarian reasons, a few-fold.

Sounds nice.  I haven't read the book, and I am writing based on reviews, including an excellent recent one (OA) by Elizabeth Kolbert in the December 4th issue of The New York Review of Books.  From the reviews, I probably will agree with the book's argument, but that's not the point here.  The review notes in passing that Klein has traveled the globe so much that she's an 'elite' frequent flyer club member, that she has been flying over the world to visit places where relevant activities to curb resource extraction are taking place, that she got ideas when dining in Geneva, and that she and her husband are making a film to go with her book.  The book is printed on paper and distributed around the world.  It's not freely downloadable.  Will the film involve air travel, or a lot of resource consumption, or be free on line?

It's an ethical dilemma and by no means new.  Authors and film-makers, like missionaries for causes back through history, must make a living.  The justification for high consumption on their part is a kind of executive privilege: it's a nasty job being holier than thou, but somebody's got to to it.  This is similar to what has always been heard from powerful, pious, or privileged as they squeeze the rest of the population, exhorting them to bite this or that bullet.

Yet, obviously, authors do have to make a living, just as preachers, earls and kings do, and maybe it's simply true that someone abusing the resource issue is needed if masses are to be informed so they won't abuse the resources.  Masses need leaders.  You can make your own assessment as to what's fair, whether there are other ways than experts and spokespersons to carry a banner, and so on.  There are no easy answers (and, certainly, yours truly drives, has a warm house, travels to Europe to lecture or visit family, eats fresh food in winter shipped from the tropics, and so on).  It's very hard not to be hypocritical.  The human track record isn't very good in this respect.  Indeed, even many of today's arguments were au courant only a few decades ago--if you're old enough, you'll remember 'the population bomb' and 'small is beautiful' and daisy-painted VW buses parked in drop-out, live- naturally communes.

Is change as we are experiencing it these days any more threatening than it has been to prior human generations, albeit each in its own particular way, with likely negative as well as positive consequences?  If we individually or collectively want to alter things to satisfy some goal, and want to rally others behind that view, is the simple, catchy save the planet banner the kind of rallying point that works?

OMG, this is what really matters!
While finishing this post, nibbling a chocolate covered hazelnut, we came across this horrifying story that in an incredibly timely way showed in stark relief just the very disastrous things we face, to make our entire point.

From http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/africa/141118/chocolate

A new story apparently reports iron-clad proof that what we are doing to the earth is going to make its most precious resource disappear completely: chocolate!  Horror of horrors, now here is some thing that really does threaten anybody and everybody in every way and that even the most rabid Republican capitalist can agree on!  This shows why we really do need to save the planet and it clearly shows that that slogan has unambiguous, and unquestionable meaning.

Well, take a breath (if you can!).  Should we be clearer and more precise about what, exactly, that might be, and why, that a consensus could agree on?  Can we be clearer?  Maybe nostalgia is enough, but otherwise, save the planet is more an advertising slogan for a vague, essentially ideological point of view than a clear statement of some objective goal.  There are serious issues for us, or at least our living descendants. Is it possible to have agreement an agenda or are people just too different in what they think about themselves and the world, whether you want to call that selfishness or whatever?

The Dirt on Ancient Civilization: Lost Soils and Lessons Lost

     Recently, the Mermaid’s Tale hosted a lively discussion about the impact of agriculture on society, from its Neolithic beginnings until the present day. I personally see the move from hunting and gathering to farming not unlike a visit to the dentist: painful but necessary. Painful because, too often, its come at environmental cost, but necessary because the hallmarks of society (art, modern medicine, the Yankees) could never have been realized without the social organization that farming demands. Still, there was consensus that not all farming is the same, that certain agricultural practices are more sustainable than others, and that the repeat offender, human shortsightedness, is not inherent to agriculture, but to people (and here we can agree with the prophet of Ecclesiastes who said there is nothing new under the sun). But that doesn't discount agriculture's unique expression of this all too human flaw. Perhaps today's greatest threat in this regard, provoked under current agricultural regimes, is topsoil degradation and loss. The problem, exacerbated by global markets and soaring demographics, has blown by any measure of sustainability, with annual rates of worldwide topsoil loss at 24 billion tons. With business remaining as usual, the planet will be stripped of all topsoil within a century's time. If you value humanity, you should be outraged.
      As a student of archaeology, I thought a deep-time perspective on soil loss might help. After all, both farmers and archaeologists value dirt, the one for what lies above it, the other for what lies below; and besides, soil and civilization have long shared an intimate relationship, each dependent on the other for health and survival. Healthy soils are home to billions and billions of microbes. When stripped of plant cover and sapped of life, the remaining dirt can no longer support crops. In order for meaningful soil conservation to take effect, an individual's sense of responsibility has to extend beyond physical space (be it local or global, though that's an important part, too) into historical space, as well. Only then can we regard agriculture for what it was, is, and must remain: a social institution to be valuated beyond dollars and cents.
     Moreover, a recent article in Science, "Dust Unto Dust," made the oft repeated distortion that ancient farmers had little regard for environmental stewardship. This simply isn't true. My six mentally stimulating but fiscally foolish years spent stooped over Greek and Latin texts in fusty libraries with fools in old style hats and coats will prove it. The Greeks and Romans, just like the early settlers of America, saw the harm in their practices, but for various and sundry reasons failed to change course, at times resulting in social catastrophe (for the U.S., this was epitomized in the North American "dust bowl" of the 1930s; for the Greeks and Romans, the abandonment of numerous cities and towns, such as Timgad in present day Algeria). The age-old struggle with soil preservation does not represent nature's inherent inability to accommodate civilization, but civilization's inability to accommodate nature.

http://www.travels.tl/travel-in-time-among-the-roman-ruins-of-timgad-algeria/
The Roman colonial town of Timgad, once famous for its fertile hinterland, had even in antiquity been reduced to desert 

    Topsoil is quite literally the foundation of every society - footings and stomachs depend on it. Perhaps it's not coincidence that the name Adam, related to the noun adamah in Hebrew, means "soil" or "earth" (from the Semitic root "ADM"), while the name Eve, Adam's female counterpart, is related to the noun havvah (the Semitic root "HYW"), meaning "life-source," with the result that the biblical creation narrative links soil to life (and vice versa) from the beginnings of time. In the Babylonian creation myth of Atrahasis, man is fashioned from the alluvial clays of southern Iraq. In fact, the Latin word for man, homo, is a derivation of the word humus, meaning "soil" and "earth." Fun etymologies aside, when topsoil is exhausted for short-term gain, decay and loss unleash a cascade of direct and indirect consequences for farmlands, forests, wetlands and watersheds, many of long-lasting effect.

   

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Henry_David_Thoreau.jpg

     Henry David Thoreau once said that

The civilized nations — Greece, Rome, England — have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! Little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers.

Unfortunately, the automaticity of our everyday experience lacks the immediacy of Thoreau's words. Even at today's rate, soil loss occurs slow enough to go unnoticed by the average viewer. It doesn't help that less than 1% of the U.S. population, for instance, feeds the other 99%, meaning that our eyes are not only metaphorically but also physically averted. In his excellent novel, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, David R. Montgomery points out that soil is an undervalued resource in the modern world. In fact, he goes so far as to say that within dirt (or more specifically, its geological narrative of misuse) can be found the graveyard of successive civilizations.

Photo taken by the author in Oxford, UK

     Agricultural harm to the environment has a long and complicated history. It wasn't until the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. in northern Europe that plows began to employ a vertical knife, horizontal share and moldboard to cut furrows, directly scarring the earth's surface. Prior to this, enough indirect damage was caused, through violation of fallow, disregard for overgrazing and/or lack of crop diversity, that eventually, divested of nutrients and biota, soil was no longer fertile soil, but simply sterile dirt. For the Mediterranean environment especially, a healthy topsoil required forests to preserve soil structure, preventing erosion and flooding. Unfortunately for the Greeks and Romans, deforestation became widespread, the result of resource extraction and clearance for agriculture.
     Forests supplied the very fabric of life in the Classical world: materials for construction and fuel, as well as medicinals and dyes. Wood and charcoal fired ceramics to be found in every house; drew pitch from pinewood; smelted the metals in foundries; and leached fertilizer from limestone. For most private houses and public buildings, timber was the material of choice. Navies depended on lumber for the construction of their vessels, while armies used wood to build siege engines, weapons, and armor. It's no wonder that the Greek word for wood, "hyle", became synonymous with "matter" and "substance." The word "materia" in Latin represented all three.
     While populations were relatively small, daily existence depended on wood and its by-products, laying whole landscapes bare. Presumably, many could sympathize with Vergil (70 - 19 B.C.) when he said,

My hearth is piled with branches of pitch-pine;

Free burns my faithful fire, and every hour

My walls are black with smoke (Ecologues 7.49-50).

Moreover, cleared forests weren't given time to regenerate, but were replaced with agricultural land. Ancient writers were aware of the environmental consequences. Vitruvius (first century B.C.), Roman author and engineer, knew well the role of forests in supporting the flow of water for natural springs:

Water ... is to be most sought in mountains and northern regions, because in these parts it is found of sweeter quality, more wholesome and abundant. For such places are turned away from the sun's course, and in these especially are many forest trees; ... nor do the sun's rays reach the earth directly and cause the moisture to evaporate. Valleys between mountains are subject to much rain, and because of the dense forests, snow stands there much longer under the shadow of the trees and the hills. Then it melts and percolates through the interstices of the earth and so reaches the lowest spurs of the mountains, from which the product of the spring flows and bursts forth (De Architectura 8.1.6-7).

And Plato (427-347 B.C.) lamented the state of the denuded landscape following torrential rains:

What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left (Critias 111B).

Over time, intensive farming and deforestation led to soil loss in upland valleys, with resulting sedimentation and siltation in lowlands and coastal plains. The consequences were often complex, including reduced water retention for underground aquifers, the formation of new disease vectors (such as malarial swamps and marshes), increased aridity and wind damage, as well as the marginalization of agriculturally (farm) and socially (urban) productive land, creating dependencies of distance that only heightened ecological burdens.
     In Greece and Rome, geo-archaeology has shown that meaningful erosion only followed settlement and farming. After certain environmental thresholds were crossed, great periods of seeming stability gave way to outright destabilization. Archaeological investigations near Rome have shown that erosional rates spiked during the second century B.C., a time of the Gracchan reforms that extended land clearance. Before agricultural reform, erosion rates averaged from 2-3 centimeters per every thousand years; following reform, the rate climbed to 20-40 centimeters. Similar phenomena have been seen in the archaeological record of Greece. Thermopylae (the "hot gates" of Frank Miller's 300 movie), famous for the battle that took place there in 480 B.C., saw a vastly outnumbered Greek force successfully repel an advancing Persian army, precisely because the narrow coastal strip, hemmed in by cliffs and sea, provided a tactical advantage. Today, years of accumulating river silt have left the shoreline some 5 miles from the site of the ancient confrontation. Unfortunately for Xerxes, he was two millennia too early.

http://a5.mzstatic.com/us/r30/Video/cd/78/71/mzl.ltdunkrj.jpg

Again, the textual sources show a keen awareness of topsoil degradation, even though that awareness often failed to bring about systematic change. Columella (4 - 70 A.D.), for instance, noted in his De Re Rustica that, following the clearance of forest for agricultural land, crop production waned in successive years, not because the cleared lands were "young," but because the soil, now deprived of the roots and foliage of woodland plants, was malnourished (2.1.5-6).

   The expansion of agriculture was a prime contributor to erosion. Lucretius said that entrepreneurial farmers "made the woods climb higher up the mountains, yielding the lowlands to be tilled and tended (De Rerum Natura 5.1370-71)." Over time, this forced both farmers and loggers into hillier land that, when exploited, posed an ever greater risk to topsoil runoff and flooding. In the Mediterranean basin, timing and intensity of rainfall mattered far more than annual totals.  Following deforestation, the mountainous landscape was especially vulnerable to sudden, violent rains. Unprotected first by the previous forest cover and then destabilized without the natural root system, soil didn't have a fighting chance. Pliny wrote, "often indeed devastating torrents unite when from hills has been cut away the wood that used to hold the rains and absorb them (HN 31.30 (53)." 
     In addition to land clearance for farming, animals that wandered the land posed an even greater danger. Varro (116-27 B.C.) wrote, "Grazing cattle do not produce what grows on the land, but tear it off with their teeth (De Re Rustica 2.2.8, 11-12)." Foraging animals (particularly goats on hill slopes) functioned as a sort of secondary threat, making whatever degradation came before, permanent, ensuring that ecological niches were never given adequate time to regenerate. Ultimately, soil loss required the complicity of entire ancient societies: merchants, farmers, and pastoralists.
    For some, it's interesting in its own right to know that the Greeks and Romans knew how to use natural fertilizer, to practice crop rotation, and to construct terraces, that is, knew how to treat the environment responsibly. But it's perhaps universally important to know that, despite that knowledge, they often failed to do so, with topsoil loss leading to famine, disease, and fragile social structures. Today, we as a global community are facing a similar crisis, together with a similar knowledge base. But we have the unique advantage of historical perspective. My current area of study, Mesopotamia, experienced social collapse because of over salinization from the maximizing strategies of short-sighted agriculture, millennia before men wore togas. Mesopotamian tyrants, like modern politicians, were consciously aware of their short shelf-life, with the result that policies affecting a future beyond their own terms in office were little more than afterthoughts. Today, if we fail to adapt, to ask ourselves and our politicians for long-term solutions, we can expect the same outcome. To think otherwise is fatal hubris, the prime mover of historical change seen in the works of men like Herodotus, Thucydides and Polybius.
     Topsoil loss is inevitable in both the agricultural and natural world, but that doesn't mean we can't treat it sustainably. In past and present, local production for global consumption has had devastating effect. Whether it was Rome's monopolization of North Africa for cash crop industries, or America's impetuous push west to sustain tobacco exports, formerly fertile lands were impoverished in the name of capital. When this happened, a type of economic colonialism occurred, dividing formerly sustainable lands into decadent cores and imbalanced peripheries. The difference now, however, is that societies in the plural is now society in the singular, and the loss of mankind's ability to produce food will be of global consequence.
    In the modern regimes of soaring populations and unpredictable climate, crop rotation and diversification are critical, as well as the move to lower-input, no-till farming. In addition, governments should stop subsidizing harmful agricultural practices, and consumers have to adapt to appropriate-scale markets. Only then will soil increase in biodiversity and organic content, bringing with it the much needed benefit of carbon sequestration. Most importantly, individuals need a lived sense (past, present and future) of social responsibility. And we would be wise to keep in mind Faulkner's famous line: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Indeed, I would say it's right under our feet.

Here be Dragons: climate change and a lesson from the past

          Recently, Richard Alley, a Nobel Prize winner for his work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State, told the Anthropology Department here a tired tale of human-driven global warming and how it will be our end (or our children’s children’s end, and then only if they live in the tropics). I’m a graduate student in Archaeology in the Department, working on land use and sustainability issues, and so I was particularly interested in what he had to say. 

          Alley provided good evidence that carbon dioxide is intimately linked to rising temperatures, as it has always been. Throughout different periods of history, changes in earth’s orbit caused heat spikes, in turn ramping up atmospheric levels of CO2. This resulted in a feedback effect, where increasing carbon dioxide spun the temperature dial in the direction of HOT. Of late, humans have opportunistically contributed to atmospheric CO2 through the burning of fossil fuels, causing uncharacteristic warming in our interglacial period and, undoubtedly, unnecessary extremes in weather. This has become a fairly well known and accepted argument across the board, and the data are only getting stronger.
          But the noteworthy bit, to me, was Alley’s generous display of humility. One of the world’s leading scientists on abrupt climate change, he began his talk with the moralizing concession that science can only know so much. In other words, he acknowledged that the story of climate change is and will remain, to some degree, unknowable. And that might be the scariest part. To bring the point home, he produced a slide of the Hunt-Lenox Globe. Dating to the early 16th century, the Hunt-Lenox is a beautiful, copper sphere, one of two historical maps with the Latin phrase HIC SVNT DRACONES, or “here be dragons.” He then posed a simple but earnest question: if people prepared for dragons in the past, if only out of fear, then why don’t we, here and now, prepare for ours, especially when we are, in terms of global warming, on firmer (though, dare I say, soon-to-be-submerged) ground?

Hunt-Lenox Globe
http://www.swiftek.net/?page=dragons

          These weren't scare tactics; Alley was being realistic. Based upon their theoretical constructs, scientists have long observed anthropogenic climate change. He pointed out that even Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, US Chief of Pacific Forces, was recently quoted in the Boston Globe as stating that melting polar ice is leading to rapid rises in sea level, posing a top threat to national security. When it comes to climate, the question is no longer if, but when and to what extent.

          Good science on climate change favors words like risk over certainty, because science deals in probability, not truth. Unfortunately, the public doesn’t like the former. This might seem odd, given that we equip our automobiles with seat-belts and airbags, our airplanes with flotation devices, and our dress shirts with that extra little button on the inside, just in case, all in the name of risk. Why, then, shouldn’t we prepare for the increased risk that attends a warming planet? The answer, I tend to believe, is that people are waiting to see direct correlations for the nearing of another Permian Extinction, where warming will be the de facto source of death and destruction. But that’s not how this works, not this time, at least. What will happen instead, and what we’re already beginning to see, is a correlation between rising temperatures and lower crop yields (at a time when one out of every eight people are suffering from chronic undernutrition), increased water usage (at a time when water scarcity effects one out of every five people), mounting violence (hello, Arab Spring), and rising seas (goodbye, Florida). There’s another problem, as well: the age-old belief that technology and innovation will be our savior. Here, archaeology presents a cautionary tale.
          Just as earth’s climate is dynamic by nature, people are naturally shortsighted in their maximization of resources, and understandably so. We prepare for what we know. Indeed, humans switched from hunting and gathering to farming some 12,000 years ago, in large part to optimize production, as agriculture provided a more consistent food supply. Famine and drought were ever-present possibilities, as they remain today, and so early farmers developed technologies, slowly over time, to increase and store their yields. Early agriculture’s shortsighted innovations had, from time to time, localized consequences, to be sure, but they remained just that: local. And that’s a fundamental difference from today.
          It was not until populations grew large enough, and technologies effective enough, that people had long-term impacts—through shortsighted decision-making—on the surrounding landscape. Maximization and stability are opposing strategies, but this becomes obvious only after certain thresholds are crossed. Particularly with the rise of state economies, individual or community interests became absorbed into fewer and fewer maximizing strategies. As humans invested ever more in their environments, and as economies of scale developed around the extraction of particular resources, institutions developed and the very fabric of a community became locked-in, part of a path-dependent, adaptational response. While this was economically and socially advantageous in the short-term, it meant decreased resilience over the long-term. With the introduction of a crisis, large, interdependent societies were faced with few options but to innovate. Often, they failed to do so, and this is why the rise and fall of empires is the stuff of legend.
          In some ways, it’s useful to think of history as a cycle of challenge and response. This is not to suggest that certain societies at certain times faltered because of a lack of creativity – to the contrary, in fact. But in terms of innovation and the environment, every technological response trades knowns for unknowns. Moreover, technological innovation is directed toward common challenges, meaning that a group’s technological advancements are designed to face common threats, meanwhile disregarding and therefore becoming more vulnerable to unsuspected but (potentially major) dilemmas. As societies and their technologies build in complexity, complex unknowns also build, inviting far-reaching and often unforeseeable consequences.
          Global warming is as much an environmental challenge as it is a social challenge. It would be an extreme myopia to believe that technological advances will save us in the future. When looked at from the perspective of the past, a people’s ability to successfully innovate is never guaranteed. A brief review of the archaeological record shows that, time and again, technological advances failed to outpace advancing interdependency and the coalescence of maximizing strategies. We now live in an era of globalization and unprecedented vulnerability, subsumed, willingly or not, under a stratagem of cheap oil maximization. The ineluctable switch to natural gas and methane hydrate, instead of the necessary and unconditional move to renewables, is further proof that technology is touted over reality, over science.
          Environmental catastrophes have never been wholly avoidable. But in the past, they were limited in extent, largely because societies were more decentralized, comprised of fewer people, and significantly, the sole reapers of what they sowed (pun intended). With the introduction of fossil fuels and the global market, we've exchanged local resilience and stability for worldwide maximization and fragility, as well as the universal responsibility of, as Richard Alley made clear, an unpredictable climate. And all with an Ozymandian arrogance. This is not to suggest that innovation is inherently evil, but to say that technology, in the modern sense, might not be able to slay the dragon.

Learning the lessons of the Land: part III

This is the third and final post on a recent article in The Land Institute's Land Report, describing advances and methods to identify and isolate desirable genetic variation in plant species, with the goal of sustainable agriculture by scientific, but efficient, methods.

This is pure modern genetics, combined with traditional Mendelian-based empirical breeding as has been practiced  empirically over many thousands of years and formally since the mid-19th century.

The discussion is  relevant to the nature and effects of natural selection, which, unlike breeding choice, is not molecularly specific and is generally weak.   That's why it's difficult to find desirable individual plants in the sea of natural variation, and why intentional breeding is so relatively effective: with a trait in mind, we can pick the few individual plants that we happen to like, and then isolate them for many generations, under controlled circumstances, from members of their species without that trait.

By contrast, natural selection seems usually to act very slowly.  Among other things, if selection were too harsh, then perhaps a few lucky genotypes would do well, but the population would be so reduced as to be vulnerable to extinction.  Strong selection can also reduce variation unrelated to the selected trait, and make the organisms less responsive to other challenges of life.  If environments usually change slowly, selection can act weakly and achieve adaptations (though some argue that selection has its main, more dramatic effects very locally).

With slow selection, even if consistent over many generations, variation arises at many different genes that can affect a trait in the favored direction.  Over time, much of the genome may come to have variants that are helpful. But they may do this silently: even if variation at each of them still exists, there can be so many different 'good' alleles that most individuals inherit enough of them to do well enough to survive. But the individual alleles' effects may be too small to detect in any practical way.

These facts explain, without any magic or mystical arguments about causation, why there is so much variation affecting many traits of interest and why their genetic basis is elusive to mapping approaches such as GWAS (genomewide association studies).  

Of course, even highly sophisticated breeding doesn't automatically address variable climate, diet, etc. conditions which can be relevant--indeed, critical, to a strain's qualities.  Molecular breeding is much faster than traditional breeding, but still takes many generations.  Think about this:  even if only 10 generations, in humans that would mean it would take250 years (the age of the USA as a country) to achieve a result for a given set of conditions.  So how could this kind of knowledge be used in humans....other than by molecular based eugenics (selective abortion or genotype-based marriage bans)--days we surely don't want to  return?

Breeders might eventually fix hundreds of alleles with modern, rapid molecularly informed methods.  But we can't do that in humans, nor as a rule identify the individual alleles, because our replicate samples come not from winnowing down over generations in a closed, or controlled, breeding population, but from new sampling of extant variation each generation, in a natural population.  

The data and molecular approaches seem similar in human biomedical and evolutionary genetics, but the problem is different.  As currently advocated, both pharma and 'personalized genomic medicine' essentially aim at  predictions in individuals, based on genotype, or treatment that targets a specific gene (pharma will wise up about this where it doesn't work, of course, but lifetime predictions in humans could take decades to be shown to be unreliable).

It's hard enough to evaluate 'fitness' in the present, much  less the past, or to predict biomedical risk from phenotype data alone, though such data are the net result of the whole genome's contributions and should be of predictive value.  So how to achieve such prediction based on specific genotypes in uncontrolled, non-experimental conditions, if that is a reasonable goal, is not an easy question.

In ag species, if a set of even weak signals can be detected reliably in Strain B, they can be introduced into a stock A strain by selective breeding.  It need not matter that the signals that only explain a fraction of the desired effect in strain B aren't detected by the mapping effort because repeated iteration of the process can achieve desired ends.  With humans, risk can be predicted to some extent, from GWAS and similar approaches. But so far most of the genetic contribution detected has been elusive, weakening the power of prediction.

In humans, the equivalent question is perhaps how and when molecular-assisted prediction will work well enough in the  biomedical context, or in the context of attempting to project phenogenetic correlations back into the deep evolutionary past accurately enough to be believable.  Perhaps we need to think of other approaches.  Aggregate approaches under experimental conditions is great for wheat. But humans are not wheat.

Growing pains cropping up?

There is a good story in the NY Times about the use of genetically modified crops, that reflects some of the politics, and much of the genuine complexity of the life sciences and their application to human problems. The headline, Study Says Overuse Threatens Gains from Modified Crops.

Pesticide or insecticide resistant crops have been engineered so that crops either have natural insect resistance (the produce a toxic substance called BT), or they are resistant to an herbicide called Roundup. These crops yield about the same amount as formerly, but require less tillage to turn over weeds, or less insecticide spraying. By not requiring tillage every year, they help retain ground water and reduce soil erosion. This seems all to the good.

Any evolutionary biologist would predict that sooner or later the target species of insects or weeds would evolve resistance to the GM crops' engineered distance. The Times story refers to growing Roundup resistant weeds, and we can expect insects to 'learn' to eat these BT plants.

The social side of this has to do with agribusiness--forcing farmers to pay for GM seed because the plants can't be fertilized and proliferated by the farmers, raising the cost of the crop because of the seed costs, domination of the market by monocropping of the same type of plant, which can encourage a more rapid evolution of resistance, and the escape of the engineered plants to contaminate wild strains hence reducing biodiversity and future, different breeding stocks.

And of course there are those who either don't trust the safety of the genetically different plants for human consumption, or who don't like the corporate monopoly and greed, or who think the engineered plants will spread too widely, or will kill off necessary insects (like pollinators). And those who just don't like big business and yearn for small family farms and their communities.

In fact, all of these sides to the story have some merit, and what the long-term impact on society--if any--will be is of course unknowable. The issue involves not just the science, but the social sides, because protagonists seize on any fact that supports their side.

So far, it does not seem that most of the worries about food safety are valid. It seems that soil erosion and reduced spraying are good, and can help stall some of the erosion and other problems with mass-scale monocropping. Yes, small farmers are being replaced by capitalists in Omaha and New York, but different jobs are being created as well. How you rate the good and the bad will depend as much on your politics as the science.

The bigger questions are whether genetic engineering technology can stay one step ahead of evolutionary ecology. Or whether all this exotica will become moot or even life-way threatening, if society goes into a serious slump, such as an oil crisis depriving supplies of fertilizer or pesticides, or the human population grows too large or paves over too much land.

So if someone asks whether GM crops are good or bad, perhaps the best answer is 'yes'. Or simply the evolutionary response: 'wait and see.'

On the other hand, tomorrow we'll post about a program that is trying to balance all of the above objectives--and it's not pie in the sky, either.