The Flaw is Fatal

Richard Manning

Richard Manning is a Journalist, Missoula, MT

Abstract

This article provides a summary comment of Man-

ning’s encounter with the anthropologists who read and

commented on his book. [Keywords: agriculture, climate

change, environment]

For a lifelong journalist, the experience of having

one’s work masticated by a circle of scholars is rare

privilege. We ink-stained wretches are not at all used

to civility and consideration, or with the habits of

mind that use criticism to expand, not contract a line

of thinking. More than any I know of, our topic here

deserves expansion. Do not be misled by the fact that

this discussion and resulting collection of papers ap-

pears at first as the usual exchange of ‘‘yeah buts’’

among well-meaning and refined intellects. This is

not an academic exercise. Our topic is bedrock and

pivotal.

In fairness, I need to state up front that I have great

advantage in this discussion in first having been per-

mitted to say all I had to say at book length. Then, as

Douglas Midgett explains in his introduction, there

was a conference and papers. It would be unsporting

now to use my privilege of having the last word to

simply gainsay these. Everything the scholars preced-

ing me say is, in fact, not only true, but useful in

wrestling with this issue, which is agriculture, not just

the roundly castigated excesses of modern industrial

agriculture, but all of agriculture, every row and seed,

by which we mean the very foundation of all of hu-

man civilization. Besides the last word, though, I have

the advantage of time, in that 3 years have passed

since they submitted their thoughts, and much has

happened in those subsequent years. This second ad-

vantage, I intend to exploit shamelessly.

Midgett handles much of the necessary update in

his introduction. Ethanol production has exploded be-

yond anyone’s imagination in that very short time of

3 years, short indeed when compared against the rel-

evant backdrop: 10,000 years of agriculture in general.

Yet our newfound obsession with ethanol is not at all

out of line or even any sort of significant departure

from the main focus of agriculture itself. What is un-

usual is the speed of change, and this is not at all

limited to ethanol.

Most of my journalistic travels of the past few de-

cades have been among agronomists, biologists,

agricultural economists, ecologists and even the odd

anthropologist. Most of them throughout that period

have been concerned with some very big numbers,

the macroaccounting of such as nitrogen use, water

supply, planetary yields, population growth, and, in-

creasingly, the human influence on the planet’s car-

bon cycle. Always, these numbers generated concern,

particularly when aggregated on graphs, which in-

variably described exponential curves.

I remember once hearing the legendary conserva-

tion biologist Paul Ehrlich say that he could solve the

world’s problems if he could only bring the public, or

failing that, the public’s leaders, to understand the

urgency of exponential curves, not just climbing (or in

cases such as total species extant, plummeting) but

increasing the rate of climb, compounded interest on

compounded interest. Exponential curves lie at the

heart of the phenomenon of biological crashes. They

produce tipping points.

Yet in the circles I traveled in, everyone under-

stood exponential curves, and the ones they drew did

indeed raise deep concern. They promised to produce

tipping points in the near future. Nonetheless, even

within these circles there was, or at least there was a

decade ago, some confidence that the situation was

merely chronic and manageable. In this past couple of

years, this bit of confidence has slipped. The rapid

increase in ethanol production that Midgett describes

is but a part of a sea of change roiling much more

rapidly than anyone imagined, even 2 years ago. Ex-

ploding global grain prices, oil prices, escalating

Culture & Agriculture Vol. 31, Issue 1 pp. 24–25, ISSN 1556-486X, eISSN 1556-486X. r 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. Allrights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1556-486X.2009.01015.x

violence, catastrophic weather, crop failures, all seem

poised on the edge of a mutually reinforcing tipping

point. ‘‘A perfect storm’’ is the metaphor frequently

used. At the root of this is the unsettling record of

global climate change, that our generation’s worth of

experience now weighed against generation-old mod-

els and even against almost-current models mostly

shows the level of change to be at least at the more

extreme and dire edge of forecasts.

What seems so very odd about the shock and awe

over these developments is that we ought to have seen

every bit of this coming now for 10,000 years. Every bit

of this is wound up in agriculture. The hand we are

playing out was dealt with the domestication of

wheat.

This business of agriculture is not a work in prog-

ress; the fundaments were laid down with domes-

tication and have not changed in 10,000 years, and the

root of today’s headline problems are in these literal

roots. This is not a matter of ‘‘yeah buts,’’ of refining,

of modifying, or of accepting the good on the one hand

and weeding out the destructive on the other. This

is not a matter of an ordinary flaw, but of fatal flaw.

Agricultural production through history has rested on

cultivation of annual grasses. Cultivation of annual

grasses in any way, shape, or form depletes soil re-

serves, stored organic matter, and nutrients, meaning

farmers either deplete land and move on, as farming

did, mostly, from its beginnings until about mid-20th

century, or farmers subsidize their activities by im-

porting and replacing those nutrients, now mostly

with hydrocarbon-based fertilizers. It is this latter ad-

aptation that brought hydrocarbon energy into the

equation on a grand scale, which is why farming today

is wholly hydrocarbon dependent, meaning oil prices

and food prices can appear in the same equation.

I happened to be considering all of this in the late

summer of 2008 on a trip through Iowa’s corn desert, a

comparison unfair to deserts in that the genuine article

has at least a couple of orders of magnitude more

biodiversity than an Iowa cornfield. Floods in the early

summer of 2008 had wrought billions of dollars in

damage to the cities of the region, havoc wholly at-

tributable to the reworking of the landscape to

accommodate corn, a crop now increasingly grown

for ethanol to burn to add carbon to the atmosphere to

generate more catastrophic weather. This is what sci-

entists call a positive feedback loop, and here

‘‘positive’’ is not used in the same spirit that gener-

ates a smiley face button.

I was in Iowa to visit a handful of beef farmers

who were converting cornfields to permanent pas-

ture and making money on the deal. For sake of ar-

gument, I say permanent pastures are not agriculture,

in that they are not cultivated. Because they are com-

posed of perennial plants, each year they build

rootstocks; each year they add biomass to the soil.

They do so in the course of raising not just profit, but

food, a deeply revolutionary activity. This is precisely

the reversal that must happen to undo 10,000 years of

catastrophe.

Forget the energy cycle for a moment, even forget

the money. Follow the carbon. A prairie, a forest, a

permanent pasture, in fact, any ecotype of nature’s

devising, pulls carbon from the atmosphere and se-

questers it in the soil. Every cultivated field, every

single one, does exactly the opposite. That’s what

we mean by depletion of the soil. Cultivation causes

organic matter to decay, and organic matter is based

on carbon; so decay inevitably releases stored carbon

dioxide. Inevitably.

On that trip, a farmer told me he had noticed

that discussions of global warming always featured

two exponential growth curves: the graph year-

by-year of total carbon in the atmosphere arrayed

against the graph of the combustion of hydrocarbon

fuels by industrial society. We know now that agricul-

ture as we practice it today contributes mightily to the

latter, but something far worse is at play. The two

curves are twins, of course, but there is another perfect

fit. Remove the combustion curve and in its place

substitute the one almost never seen in these discus-

sions, a simple plot of total acres under cultivation

over time. Every farmed field emits carbon just the

same as every smokestack. These two curves are twins

as well.

Culture & Agriculture 25 Vol. 31, No. 1 June 2009