Animal Extinction - The Greatest Threat to Mankind
In the final stages of dehydration the body shrinks, robbing youth from the young as the skin puckers, eyes recede into orbits, and the tongue swells and cracks. Brain cells shrivel and muscles seize. The kidneys shut down. Blood volume drops, triggering hypovolemic shock, with its attendant respiratory and cardiac failures. These combined assaults disrupt the chemical and electrical pathways of the body until all systems cascade toward death. 
Such is also the path of a dying species. Beyond a critical point, the collective body of a unique kind of mammal or bird or amphibian or tree cannot be salvaged, no matter the first aid rendered. Too few individuals spread too far apart, or too genetically weakened, are susceptible to even small natural disasters: a passing thunderstorm; an unexpected freeze; drought. At fewer than 50 members, populations experience increasingly random fluctuations until a kind of fatal arrhythmia takes hold. Eventually, an entire genetic legacy, born in the beginnings of life on earth, is removed from the future.
Scientists recognise that species continually disappear at a background extinction rate estimated at about one species per million per year, with new species replacing the lost in a sustainable fashion. Occasional mass extinctions convulse this orderly norm, followed by excruciatingly slow recoveries as new species emerge from the remaining gene-pool, until the world is once again repopulated by a different catalogue of flora and fauna.
From what we understand so far, five great extinction events have reshaped earth in cataclysmic ways in the past 439 million years, each one wiping out between 50 and 95 per cent of the life of the day, including the dominant life forms; the most recent event killing off the non-avian dinosaurs. Speciations followed, but an analysis published in Nature showed that it takes 10 million years before biological diversity even begins to approach what existed before a die-off.
Today we’re living through the sixth great extinction, sometimes known as the Holocene extinction event. We carried its seeds with us 50,000 years ago as we migrated beyond Africa with Stone Age blades, darts, and harpoons, entering pristine Ice Age ecosystems and changing them forever by wiping out at least some of the unique megafauna of the times, including, perhaps, the sabre-toothed cats and woolly mammoths. When the ice retreated, we terminated the long and biologically rich epoch sometimes called the Edenic period with assaults from our newest weapons: hoes, scythes, cattle, goats, and pigs.
But, as harmful as our forebears may have been, nothing compares to what’s under way today. Throughout the 20th century the causes of extinction - habitat degradation, overexploitation, agricultural monocultures, human-borne invasive species, human-induced climate-change - increased exponentially, until now in the 21st century the rate is nothing short of explosive. The World Conservation Union’s Red List - a database measuring the global status of Earth’s 1.5 million scientifically named species - tells a haunting tale of unchecked, unaddressed, and accelerating biocide.
When we hear of extinction, most of us think of the plight of the rhino, tiger, panda or blue whale. But these sad sagas are only small pieces of the extinction puzzle. The overall numbers are terrifying. Of the 40,168 species that the 10,000 scientists in the World Conservation Union have assessed, one in four mammals, one in eight birds, one in three amphibians, one in three conifers and other gymnosperms are at risk of extinction. The peril faced by other classes of organisms is less thoroughly analysed, but fully 40 per cent of the examined species of planet earth are in danger, including perhaps 51 per cent of reptiles, 52 per cent of insects, and 73 per cent of flowering plants.
By the most conservative measure - based on the last century’s recorded extinctions - the current rate of extinction is 100 times the background rate. But the eminent Harvard biologist Edward O Wilson, and other scientists, estimate that the true rate is more like 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate. The actual annual sum is only an educated guess, because no scientist believes that the tally of life ends at the 1.5 million species already discovered; estimates range as high as 100 million species on earth, with 10 million as the median guess. Bracketed between best- and worst-case scenarios, then, somewhere between 2.7 and 270 species are erased from existence every day. Including today.
We now understand that the majority of life on Earth has never been - and will never be - known to us. In a staggering forecast, Wilson predicts that our present course will lead to the extinction of half of all plant and animal species by 2100.
You probably had no idea. Few do. A poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that seven in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming; and that the dangers of mass extinction are woefully underestimated by almost everyone outside science. In the 200 years since French naturalist Georges Cuvier first floated the concept of extinction, after examining fossil bones and concluding “the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some sort of catastrophe”, we have only slowly recognised and attempted to correct our own catastrophic behaviour.
Some nations move more slowly than others. In 1992, an international summit produced a treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity that was subsequently ratified by 190 nations - all except the unlikely coalition of the United States, Iraq, the Vatican, Somalia, Andorra and Brunei. The European Union later called on the world to arrest the decline of species and ecosystems by 2010. Last year, worried biodiversity experts called for the establishment of a scientific body akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to provide a united voice on the extinction crisis and urge governments to action.
Yet, despite these efforts, the Red List, updated every two years, continues to show metastatic growth. There are a few heartening examples of so-called Lazarus species lost and then found: the wollemi pine and the mahogany glider in Australia, the Jerdon’s courser in India, the takahe in New Zealand, and, maybe, the ivory-billed woodpecker in the United States. But for virtually all others, the Red List is a dry country with little hope of rain, as species ratchet down the listings from secure to vulnerable, to endangered, to critically endangered, to extinct.
All these disappearing species are part of a fragile membrane of organisms wrapped around the Earth so thinly, writes Wilson, that it “cannot be seen edgewise from a space shuttle, yet so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered”. We owe everything to this membrane of life. Literally everything. The air we breathe. The food we eat. The materials of our homes, clothes, books, computers, medicines. Goods and services that we can’t even imagine we’ll someday need will come from species we have yet to identify. The proverbial cure for cancer. The genetic fountain of youth. Immortality. Mortality. The living membrane we so recklessly destroy is existence itself.
Biodiversity is defined as the sum of an area’s genes (the building blocks of inheritance), species (organisms that can interbreed), and ecosystems (amalgamations of species in their geological and chemical landscapes). The richer an area’s biodiversity, the tougher its immune system, since biodiversity includes not only the number of species but also the number of individuals within that species, and all the inherent genetic variations - life’s only army against the diseases of oblivion.
Yet it’s a mistake to think that critical genetic pools exist only in the gaudy show of the coral reefs, or the cacophony of the rainforest. Although a hallmark of the desert is the sparseness of its garden, the orderly progression of plants and the understated camouflage of its animals, this is only an illusion. Turn the desert inside out and upside down and you’ll discover its true nature. Escaping drought and heat, life goes underground in a tangled overexuberance of roots and burrows reminiscent of a rainforest canopy, competing for moisture, not light. Animal trails criss-cross this subterranean realm in private burrows engineered, inhabited, stolen, shared and fought over by ants, beetles, wasps, cicadas, tarantulas, spiders, lizards, snakes, mice, squirrels, rats, foxes, tortoises, badgers and coyotes.
To survive the heat and drought, desert life pioneers ingenious solutions. Coyotes dig and maintain wells in arroyos, probing deep for water. White-winged doves use their bodies as canteens, drinking enough when the opportunity arises to increase their bodyweight by more than 15 per cent. Black-tailed jack rabbits tolerate internal temperatures of 111F. Western box turtles store water in their oversized bladders and urinate on themselves to stay cool. Mesquite grows taproots more than 160ft deep in search of moisture.
These life-forms and their life strategies compose what we might think of as the “body” of the desert, with some species the lungs and others the liver, the blood, the skin. The trend in scientific investigation in recent decades has been toward understanding the interconnectedness of the bodily components, i.e. the effect one species has on the others. The loss of even one species irrevocably changes the desert (or the tundra, rainforest, prairie, coastal estuary, coral reef, and so on) as we know it, just as the loss of each human being changes his or her family forever.
Nowhere is this better proven than in a 12-year study conducted in the Chihuahuan desert by James H Brown and Edward Heske of the University of New Mexico. When a kangaroo-rat guild composed of three closely related species was removed, shrublands quickly converted to grasslands, which supported fewer annual plants, which in turn supported fewer birds. Even humble players mediate stability. So when you and I hear of this year’s extinction of the Yangtze river dolphin, and think, “how sad”, we’re not calculating the deepest cost: that extinctions lead to co-extinctions because most living things on Earth support a few symbionts, while keystone species influence and support myriad plants and animals. Army ants, for example, are known to support 100 known species, from beetles to birds. A European study finds steep declines in honeybee diversity in the past 25 years but also significant attendant declines in plants that depend on bees for pollination - a job estimated to be worth £50bn worldwide. Meanwhile, beekeepers in 24 American states report that perhaps 70 per cent of their colonies have recently died off, threatening £7bn in US agriculture. And bees are only a small part of the pollinator crisis.
One of the most alarming developments is the rapid decline not just of species but of higher taxa, such as the class Amphibia, the 300-million-year-old group of frogs, salamanders, newts and toads hardy enough to have preceded and then outlived most dinosaurs. Biologists first noticed die-offs two decades ago, and, since then, have watched as seemingly robust amphibian species vanished in as little as six months. The causes cover the spectrum of human environmental assaults, including rising ultraviolet radiation from a thinning ozone layer, increases in pollutants and pesticides, habitat loss from agriculture and urbanisation, invasions of exotic species, the wildlife trade, light pollution, and fungal diseases. Sometimes stressors merge to form an unwholesome synergy; an African frog brought to the West in the 1950s for use in human pregnancy tests likely introduced a fungus deadly to native frogs. Meanwhile, a recent analysis in Nature estimated that, in the past 20 years, at least 70 species of South American frogs had gone extinct as a result of climate change.
In a 2004 analysis published in Science, Lian Pin Koh and his colleagues predict that an initially modest co-extinction rate will climb alarmingly as host extinctions rise in the near future. Graphed out, the forecast mirrors the rising curve of an infectious disease, with the human species acting all the parts: the pathogen, the vector, the Typhoid Mary who refuses culpability, and, ultimately, one of up to 100 million victims.
“Rewilding” is bigger, broader, and bolder than humans have thought before. Many conservation biologists believe it’s our best hope for arresting the sixth great extinction. Wilson calls it “mainstream conservation writ large for future generations”. This is because more of what we’ve done until now - protecting pretty landscapes, attempts at sustainable development, community-based conservation and ecosystem management - will not preserve biodiversity through the critical next century. By then, half of all species will be lost, by Wilson’s calculation.
To save Earth’s living membrane, we must put its shattered pieces back together. Only “megapreserves” modelled on a deep scientific understanding of continent-wide ecosystem needs hold that promise. “What I have been preparing to say is this,” wrote Thoreau more than 150 years ago. “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” This, science finally understands.
The Wildlands Project, the conservation group spearheading the drive to rewild North America - by reconnecting remaining wildernesses (parks, refuges, national forests, and local land trust holdings) through corridors - calls for reconnecting wild North America in four broad “megalinkages”: along the Rocky Mountain spine of the continent from Alaska to Mexico; across the arctic/boreal from Alaska to Labrador; along the Atlantic via the Appalachians; and along the Pacific via the Sierra Nevada into the Baja peninsula. Within each megalinkage, core protected areas would be connected by mosaics of public and private lands providing safe passage for wildlife to travel freely. Broad, vegetated overpasses would link wilderness areas split by roads. Private landowners would be enticed to either donate land or adopt policies of good stewardship along critical pathways.
It’s a radical vision, one the Wildlands Project expects will take 100 years or more to complete, and one that has won the project a special enmity from those who view environmentalists with suspicion. Yet the core brainchild of the Wildlands Project - that true conservation must happen on an ecosystem-wide scale - is now widely accepted. Many conservation organisations are already collaborating on the project, including international players such as Naturalia in Mexico, US national heavyweights like Defenders of Wildlife, and regional experts from the Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project to the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council. Kim Vacariu, the South-west director of the US’s Wildlands Project, reports that ranchers are coming round, one town meeting at a time, and that there is interest, if not yet support, from the insurance industry and others who “face the reality of car-wildlife collisions daily”.
At its heart, rewilding is based on living with the monster under the bed, since the big, scary animals that frightened us in childhood, and still do, are the fierce guardians of biodiversity. Without wolves, wolverines, grizzlies, black bears, mountain lions and jaguars, wild populations shift toward the herbivores, who proceed to eat plants into extinction, taking birds, bees, reptiles, amphibians and rodents with them. A tenet of ecology states that the world is green because carnivores eat herbivores. Yet the big carnivores continue to die out because we fear and hunt them and because they need more room than we preserve and connect. Male wolverines, for instance, can possess home ranges of 600 sq m. Translated, Greater London would have room for only one.
The first campaign out of the Wildlands Project’s starting gate is the “spine of the continent”, along the mountains from Alaska to Mexico, today fractured by roads, logging, oil and gas development, grazing, ski resorts, motorised back-country recreation and sprawl.
The spine already contains dozens of core wildlands, including wilderness areas, national parks, national monuments, wildlife refuges, and private holdings. On the map, these scattered fragments look like debris falls from meteorite strikes. Some are already partially buffered by surrounding protected areas such as national forests. But all need interconnecting linkages across public and private lands - farms, ranches, suburbia - to facilitate the travels of big carnivores and the net of biodiversity that they tow behind them.
The Wildlands Project has also identified the five most critically endangered wildlife linkages along the spine, each associated with a keystone species. Grizzlies already pinched at Crowsnest Pass on Highway Three, between Alberta and British Columbia, will be entirely cut off from the bigger gene pool to the north if a larger road is built. Greater sage grouse, Canada lynx, black bears and jaguars face their own lethal obstacles further south.
But by far the most endangered wildlife-linkage is the borderland between the US and Mexico. The Sky Islands straddle this boundary, and some of North America’s most threatened wildlife - jaguars, bison, Sonoran pronghorn, Mexican wolves - cross, or need to cross, here in the course of their life’s travels. Unfortunately for wildlife, Mexican workers cross here too. Men, women, and children, running at night, one-gallon water jugs in hand.
The problem for wildlife is not so much the intrusions of illegal Mexican workers but the 700-mile border fence proposed to keep them out. From an ecological perspective, it will sever the spine at the lumbar, paralysing the lower continent.
Here, in a nutshell, is all that’s wrong with our treatment of nature. Amid all the moral, practical, and legal issues with the border fence, the biological catastrophe has barely been noted. It’s as if extinction is not contagious and we won’t catch it.
If, as some indigenous people believe, the jaguar was sent to the world to test the will and integrity of human beings, then surely we need to reassess. Border fences have terrible consequences. One between India and Pakistan forces starving bears and leopards, which can no longer traverse their feeding territories, to attack villagers.
The truth is that wilderness is more dangerous to us caged than free - and has far more value to us wild than consumed. Wilson suggests the time has come to rename the “environmentalist view” the “real-world view”, and to replace the gross national product with the more comprehensive “genuine progress indicator”, which estimates the true environmental costs of farming, fishing, grazing, mining, smelting, driving, flying, building, paving, computing, medicating and so on. Until then, it’s like keeping a ledger recording income but not expenses. Like us, the Earth has a finite budget.
Reprinted with permission from Mother Jones magazine. © 2007, Foundation for National Progress. The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific by Julia Whitty is published by Houghton Mifflin on 7 May
Disappearing World
More than 16,000 species of the world’s mammals, birds, plants and other organisms are at present officially regarded as threatened with extinction to one degree or another, according to the Red List.
Maintained by the Swiss-based World Conservation Union (usually known by the initials IUCN), the Red List is one of the gloomiest books in the world, and is set to get even gloomier.
Since 1963 it has attempted to set out the conservation status of the planet’s wildlife, in a series of categories which now range from Extinct (naturally), through Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable and Near-Threatened, and finishing with Least Concern. The numbers in the “threatened” categories are steadily rising.
Taxonomists at the IUCN regularly attempt to update the list, but that is a massive job to undertake - there are about 5,000 mammal species in the world and about 10,000 birds, but more than 300,000 types of plant, and undoubtedly well over a million insect species, and perhaps many more. Some species, such as beetles living in the rainforest canopy, could become extinct before they are even known to science.
The last Red List update, released in May last year, looked at 40,168 species and considered 16,118 to be threatened - including 7,725 animals of all types (mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, insects etc) and 8,390 plants.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
Sad.
It is plant extinction we should be most worried about. Sad as it is to contemplate, humans can do a lot better without other “higher” animals than we can do without plants. Insects (in addition to bees) and other invertebrates, fungi, algae and bacteria are also worthy of attention.
There are many flowers currently blooming in the yard of the Portland, Oregon house where I live. I have gone out on three sunny days recently and made a bee count. The count is now a total of two bees.
Here in central NY we have no bees any more; did see a bee last year, a lonely little thing, and perhaps I’ll see another this year. But none this spring so far. Also, no butterflies, and no land birds making nests, which they should be doing now. As for frogs, forget it - haven’t seen one in years. But there is some blight that killed our birch tree last year -so there is still some wild life around. Such as it is.
It presents a grim future. Is anyone listening? Does anyone care? This is a collective problem. It has to be solved collectively. In the face of those odds, I don’t have much hope for the future.
A good article, but it misses or avoids one key factor. It says:
The causes cover the spectrum of human environmental assaults, including rising ultraviolet radiation from a thinning ozone layer, increases in pollutants and pesticides, habitat loss from agriculture and urbanisation, invasions of exotic species, the wildlife trade, light pollution, and fungal diseases.
What about population growth, arguably the single biggest cause, as E.O. Wilson, among others, makes clear? Mentioning habitat loss from agriculture and urbanization hints at it, but we need to say it plainly.
I’ve wondered whether the “sixth extinction” could be the topic to really wake people up to our ecological crisis. There’s an excellent, brief video on it in an article I posted not long ago.
http://growthmadness.org/
one of the great sins of the “liberal” (in the classical econ sense) intellectual movement was its reductionism: the model of the individual as a lone actor in a competitive marketplace, the model of living beings as mere mechanisms (thanks a lot, M’sieur Descartes), of dissection and separation as the only methodology for “understanding how things work” — i.e. we understand how they work only when they are dead and taken irrevocably out of context. the model of the quantitative as inherently truer and more useful than the qualitative, of conflict and competition as inherently more natural and more real than symbiosis and cooperation. it is an adolescent fantasy more than a philosophy, the dream world of a little boy with his little tent in the back yard pretending that he is wholly divorced from and superior to the family in the house.
the reality is that symbiosis is our middle name — also our first and last names; without symbiotic cultures of bacteria co-operating inside our bodies around the clock, we would stop working entirely (i.e. die). symbiosis and co-evolution are the web that holds that thin skin of life together and we cannot pull one brick out of the wall, then another, then another (even with the best FEA) and expect that wall to stay up. even more so because the brick analogy is still reductionist — bricks being a standardised commodity item with structural effects computable by finite models. the interactions of life with life, the anti-entropic business of living, is infinitely more complex and subtle. pulling one brick out of the beyond-crystalline complexity of living systems has repercussions literally incalculable, especially in light of our profound ignorance of much of the biomass around us.
and here we are, trapped in a religious system called neoliberalism or capitalism or industrial communism or progressivism, all variant sects of the one basic C20 cult of Rationalism (not to be confused with reasonableness) which insists, childishly, that the world has to be a lot simpler than it really is and that we have the right, nay duty, to control it. it’s far too complex for us to micromanage and control — our ignorance is too great and its nonlinear living responses too creative and subtle — but armed with the sledgehammers of industrial tech we are doing a dandy job of vandalising it into dysfunction.
to stop this process means undermining and contradicting some foundational myths of the culture: the infinite growth myth, the Panglossian linear progress myth, the compound interest myth, the “tech always better than bio” myth, the “Enclosure and Efficiency” myth, the cult of biophobia, the glamour of simplification and monoculture replication, the “externality” myth — and above all the mesmerising, flattering, utterly insane myth of the “free agent”, the individual whose monadic, rational acts on a level playing field involve no harm or benefit to any others not involved in his contractual negotiations.
you can never do just one thing.
there is no such thing as an externality.
you can’t eat money.
every petri dish has a rim.
One problem is that we’ve given power to businessmen who have a very narrow view of the world: sucess is money and power. Since they can’t envision another possible world, they’re deprived of freedom to choose another way. Since Truth is money and power, their choice is between money and more money, power and more power, Versace and Guicci. In other words, they many not have the psychological make-up to do anything other than continue taking us down the same self-destructive path. There’s madness in their MBA rationality.
It is frustrating, especially being in the business of Earth repair. Nature actually responds very slowly to damage from human beings. But when human beings work in harmony with nature, nature responds immediately and rewards us with abundance. For instance, salinated soils can quickly be repaired, water tables can be locally rejuvenated via sensible earthworks, topsoil can not only be preserved but created. The only problem I face is lack of interest.
We will envy the poor Chinese and Cubans with their sustainable agriculture when oil peaks and promises of nuclear power to replace it prove as empty as conservative’s heads.
So it’s the overpopulation of man, and his livestock, that drives the sixth great extinction. In the lower 48 US states, there’s 1.9 billion acres. 1/4 of this area is livestock range land and another 1/4 is for livestock feed. Only 0.1% grows our vegetables.
One person eating only plant food can live on 1/6 of an acre. Our developed land is about 140 million acres, so we could free up all of our farm/range land and then use 35% of our current developed land, i.e. residential lawns, to grow our food.
Can you imagine - freeing up one billion acres? That would let the deer and the antelope play and the buffalo too, on 1.7 billion acres, or 89% of the total. And let’s see - what are the side benefits - oh yeah, a huge carbon dioxide reduction, and huge health gains.
Then we can grow walnuts, pecans, avocados and jojoba on 2% of the land for biodiesel, and put solar thermal-electric systems on most roofs, and put wind and solar thermal-electric farms over another 1% of land area.
So then we’re using only 13% of total land area, eliminating our consumption of all fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas. That should be a great relief to all the species. They can diversify into every imaginable shape and color. This is responsible resource allocation. Now who is going to enforce it? Each and every one of us - by selective trade.
I live in the Sonoran Desert just south of the Saguaro National Park West and have watched, with growing alarm and sadness, the disintegration of an ecosystem. It’s not just the rapid increase in human population, pollution, and temperature that is taking place. Something else, something more ubiquitous and deadly, is taking place. Something in the air and the light itself is changing and this change is at once subtle and exponential. If you have seen and felt this happening, please share your experiences and insights before it’s too late.
They sprayed last year. As soon as they sprayed there were no birds or bugs everything just disapeared.
I don’t know what the lynch pin will be? I’ve seen entire villages where the homes, crops, and people are literally covered in industrial waste. The people eat the crops and life goes on. People and the environment can endure tremendous ecological stress….
We must abandon the widespread, and perpetuated, myth that humans are somehow separate and exalted above all other species. It is lunacy, and it is exploited for power and commercial purposes. There is a subtle acceptance of human ingenuity, as if the fact that we have opposable thumbs makes anything that we can engineer OK, makes us ‘better’. What it does do is give us added responsibility for assuring the survival of our animal and plant co-travellers on this planet. Humans, by and large, still pat themselves on the back for being human, as if being a human is an exemption from the laws of nature.
Biodiversity is richness, and is directly proportional to the health of the living system. We must come to realize as a species that it is the most serious crime to knowingly cause the extinction of another species, only slightly less to knowingly allow it and not strive to prevent it.
Our survival as a species, at the expense of other species, is a dead end. Us or them is not an option. When we design our artifacts and systems so that they are for the benefit of all at the expense of none, then we will be on the right track. This is a design challenge. Bucky Fuller had it right.
It’s too late to try to save individual species.
Isolate habitat and let it heal. Don’t pollute the Ocean.
Most important: Earth’s natural resources need to be an “ASSET” in the big accounting equation.
David Suzuki has often written that the maximum sustainable human population on the Earth is 25 million. Yes, 25 million people.
What to do with the other 3 billion? The Earth needs a highly virulent ebola virus.
“So it’s the overpopulation of man, and his livestock, that drives the sixth great extinction. In the lower 48 US states, there’s 1.9 billion acres. 1/4 of this area is livestock range land and another 1/4 is for livestock feed. Only 0.1% grows our vegetables.”
not all the undeveloped land is suitable for growing veg; much of it is arid. we’ve paved over much of the prime agricultural land — and more each day. s huge chunk of the acreage currently under cultivation is productive only via unsustainable drawdown of fossil water reserves (i.e. the Oglalla aquifer and smaller reserves) and rivers. only by moving a lot of water over long distances — using fossil fuel to power pumps and support huge earthworks and canals — do we get yields from the expanded acreage of “modern” industrial ag. (I put the word ‘modern’ in scare quotes here because the industrial worldview is so hopelessly 19th century, still congratulating itself on surpassing the ox cart in “efficiency”).
OTOH, the good news is that modern industrial ag is actually insanely *inefficient*. it is ag as practised by loan sharks and finance capitalists, concerned only with minimising *labour* per bushel or per hectare and maximising off-farm inputs so as to keep farmers in debt and paying usurious interest on loans. maximising bushels per acre or calories per acre, or minimising water and fuel inputs, are not even in the picture. the idea is not to produce food but to produce profit — money profit unbounded by any physical realities (thanks to the fantastical concept of compound interest), not the modest fixed rate of return offered by life’s antientropic generosity and an annually averaged input of solar energy.
in other words, we are producing far less food per acre than we could be. some studies of intensive polyculture suggest that yields (calories and/or tonnes) per acre vould be as much as 20x higher if we move away from industrial monoculture and towards expert intensive polyculture. this puts a different spin on land use and population: we’re doing agriculture very stupidly and assbackwards, there’s enormous room for improvement.
however, the entrenched food oligopoly will resist this to the (other people’s) death. the entire corporate food system is run for the benefit of processors and transporters and retailers, not for farmers or eaters. food is reduced to lowest-common-denominator commodity inputs — the feedstock for high tech industrial “value added” processing; what this means is that profit is realised by the “value adder” and not by the grower.
Farmer John grows standardised monoculture maize from patented seeds, a starchy inedible commodity substance that is worth diddlysquat per pound; and our friends (not) at ADM and Cargill turn it into “food” of a sort by cracking and recombining its elements in a process more similar to the petroleum or industrial chem sector than anything recognisable as cooking. you can’t eat — or wouldn’t want to — most of what is growing on millions of hectares of US farmland. it isn’t food. it’s feedstock. and of your food dollar, only a few pennies go to Farmer John for his inedible crap corn. most of the dollar goes to the processing plant and the packagers (and the oil and chem companies who make all the inputs “needed” to turn nonfood into pseudofood). crop losses per acre are higher now, in huge monocrop plantations, than they were before the ubiquitous overuse of synthetic pesticides; the profits are accruing in the pockets of the chem company CEOs and their army of chemists, and incidentally in the pockets of big pharma and the med mafia as they rake in the dough for treating the many chronic diseases resulting from bad nutrition and low-dosage exposure to neurotoxins and endocrine disruptors.
the issue is one of power and money. industrialists have forced farmers out of the food market, stepping in between farmer and eater like a parasitical organism sucking up most of the money flowing through that market. to remedy this means forcing that parasite out of the frame, or off to the margins, and reconnecting farmer with eater and eater with real food. higher productivity per hectare would be a beneficial side effect of (re)adopting polyculture farming, enabling more truly efficient use of land.
recommended popular reading: M Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma; J Pretty, Agri-Culture; R Manning, Against the Grain; just about anything by Mollison and his colleagues from the permaculture movement; V Shiva, Stolen Harvest; E Schlosser, Fast Food Nation; A Kimbrell, Fatal Harvest; J Lieber, Rats in the Grain; and of course J Diamond, Collapse… and to cheer you up after all that, try H Flores, Food Not Lawns, and S Katz, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved. also google for: urban farming, intensive polyculture, no-till agriculture, lasagna gardening, companion planting, permaculture, microfarming, polytunnel, Salatin, grass farming, chicken tractor, french intensive gardening, Alan Chadwick, Enclosure, CAFO, glyphosate and fusarium, Percy Schmeiser, Alice Waters…
As DeAnander suggests, there are solutions to the ecocide we’re witnessing. Some simple actions, like supporting authors like Michael Pollan - whose bestselling books create all sorts of ripples of greater awareness and action. Subscribing to environmental journals like “E” and “Plenty” helps get a green message out. Letters to editors, calling into talk radio (including the right-wing shows that bash what they call “ecowackos”), supporting radio hosts like Betsy Rosenberg of “EcoTalk.”
We need to transcend our learned helplessness.
Subscribing to environmental journals like “E” and “Plenty” helps get a green message out. Letters to editors, calling into talk radio (including the right-wing shows that bash what they call “ecowackos”), supporting radio hosts like Betsy Rosenberg of “EcoTalk.”
Yep, or do what I did; start a blog on it. Wordpress.com (these comments are running on Wordpress) is free and simple, even fun, and allows you to get word on the issue out to the world.
DeAnander,
GREAT post!
I’m thinking… how will we ever get agriculture back into people’s back yards? Grow local make it hard for pests to locate favorite crop! I need to study up again on this subject-Thanks
I’m the author of this article. The longer, original article, called “gone,” is viewable at motherjones.com. Just wanted to address John F on the population issue. Couldn’t agree more that it’s the biggie–and I’m currently at work on a piece about it. As for me, my biggest gift to the future (to paraphrase Harvard sociobiologist, E.O. Wilson) may be my choice not to have children. Another way to keep my personal footprint on the planet as small as possible.
Or–sorry for the disjointed post — you can read “gone” in its entirety on my website:
julia.whitty.googlepages.com/home
Hi Julia,
Couldn’t agree more that it’s the biggie–and I’m currently at work on a piece about it.
That’s great to hear! So many writers today refuse to touch the population topic, but I think that may be starting to change, and am delighted you’re a part of it.
I’ve accumulated a fair number of sources and links on the topic. Feel free to email me through the contact page on my blog if I can be of any help at all.
http://growthmadness.org/
2008 is the year we draw a line in the sand, no more animal extinction. If we are not able to save the animals we will never save ourselves. We are not able to take care of all the needs on the planet at the present time. There are too many people and it will only get worse. Too much of anything is never a good thing. Many people say the animals are not important. If this is true, God would never of saved the animals during the flood. Some places are never meant for people.