[D66] The Scourge of Agriculture

[R.O.]

  The Scourge of Agriculture

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theatlantic.com
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/Against the Grain/ 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0865476225/theatlanticmonthA/ref=nosim> 

[Click the title
to buy this book] by Richard Manning
North Point Press

232 pages, $24.

The concept of the noble savage has existed in the nomenclature of 
Western civilization for some time. In popular culture, the phrase may 
conjure up images of American Indians from movies like /Dances with 
Wolves/, or aborigines from /The Gods Must Be Crazy/. A roughly clad 
native runs around the bush with a bow and arrow, living a simple life 
that is best described as "close to nature." But where exactly does our 
conception of tribal peoples as inherently "noble" come from? And is it 
accurate?

Richard Manning, who has written extensively about culture, agriculture, 
and the environment, believes that "noble savage" isn't a particularly 
satisfying way to describe tribal peoples. "It's more complicated than 
that," he says. However, in his new book, /Against the Grain: How 
Agriculture Hijacked Civilization/, he makes the case that 
tribes—particularly hunter-gatherer tribes—live in a way that is 
fundamentally sustainable, whereas the social system that developed with 
the advent of agriculture has spawned inequality and famine, and has had 
an immense environmental impact in a period of time (about 10,000 years) 
that pales in comparison to the history of human life on the planet 
(about 4 million years). While arguments against agriculture have gained 
steam in the past few decades, they have centered mostly on the debate 
over twentieth-century developments like the Green Revolution or 
genetically modified crops. Manning's scope is much broader than that, 
and extends to the very origin of agricultural societies. He argues that 
a major change took place among humans when we discovered 
agriculture—and began to move toward an ethos of dominance based on the 
practice of domestication.

"Domestication is a human-driven evolution," Manning writes, "a 
fundamental shift in which human selection exerts enough pressure on the 
wild plant that it is visibly and irreversibly changed, its genes 
altered." Paradoxically, Manning explains, domestication helped create a 
society that was even more affected by the vagaries of nature than 
hunter-gatherer societies. This is because the kind of agriculture we 
came to practice was tied to a catastrophic relationship with the earth: 
the clearing of large tracts of land to put a single crop under till. 
That practice began to destroy diversity—the fundamental strength of all 
natural systems.

In /Against the Grain/, Manning looks beyond the environmental effects 
of agriculture and civilization, which have already been well 
documented, and explores what these inventions have done to the quality 
of human life on the planet. Agriculture gave us surplus, surplus gave 
us wealth, and wealth gave us hierarchies that necessarily created an 
underclass. "If we are to seek ways in which humans differ from all 
other species, this dichotomy [between rich and poor] would head the 
list," Manning writes. "Evolution does not equip us to deal with 
abundance." The industrial agriculture showcased in twentieth-century 
America—fueled by government subsidy and the "dumping" of surplus grain 
in foreign markets and characterized by the shift toward processed 
food—has resulted in the obesity of the developed world and the 
malnutrition of the developing one. Readers may find Manning's proposed 
solutions to the problems caused by agriculture to be surprising. While 
one might expect him to encourage civilization to abandon agriculture in 
favor of something more "noble," in this interview he suggests that we 
should embrace it. In fact, the key to combating the problems we've 
created through agriculture lies in utilizing the very environmental 
manipulations we've relied on to domesticate our environment—but in 
different ways.


*I found your subtitle, "How agriculture hijacked civilization," to be a 
bit confusing, given that you seem to be saying that agriculture and 
civilization are basically synonymous. Can you explain what you meant? *

Actually, I agree with you. However, there's an interesting caveat to 
that: we always think that agriculture allowed sedentism, which gave 
people time to create civilization and art. But the evidence that's 
emerging from the archeological record suggests that sedentism came 
first, and /then/ agriculture. This occurred near river mouths, where 
people depended on seafood, especially salmon. These were probably 
enormously abundant cultures that had an enormous amount of leisure 
time—they just had to wait for the salmon runs to occur. There are some 
good records of those communities, and from the skeleton remains we can 
see that they got up to 95 percent of their nutrients from salmon and 
ocean-derived sources. Along the way, they developed highly refined 
art—something we always associate with agriculture.

*The discovery of agriculture, you write, led to a shift in the way we 
interacted with our environment, toward an ethos of "dominance." It's 
hard not to envision agriculture as something that reflects an inherent 
drive within man to defeat, or at least tame, nature. But you also argue 
that the development of agriculture was just "opportunism." Does 
agriculture come from a desire to dominate, or was it just one big 
coincidence? *

We can approach that from about fifty different angles and not come up 
with a satisfactory answer. But I think it's really illuminating to 
think in these terms. One view is to say that all the damage we see on 
the planet is the result of our numbers, and of human nature—and that 
agriculture is the worst symptom of the human condition, because it has 
the greatest impact on the planet. In this analysis, we don't blame 
agriculture—we blame humans.

But I don't think that's the full explanation. This gets a lot richer 
when you look at co-evolution: it's not just human genes at work here. 
It's wheat genes and corn genes—and how they have an influence on us. 
They took advantage of our ability to travel, our inventiveness, our 
ability to use tools, to live in a broad number of environments, and our 
huge need for carbohydrates. Because of our brains' ability, we were 
able to spread not only our genes, but wheat's genes as well. That's why 
I make the argument that you have to look at this in terms of wheat 
domesticating us, too. That co-evolutionary process between humans and 
our primary food crops is what created the agriculture we see today.

*The biggest problem with agriculture—and civilization—seems to be the 
surplus it creates. You make the point in the book that humans have not 
developed a way of dealing with surplus yet. Do you think we ever will?*

Since civilization began, surplus has been with us. A kind of "blind 
need for excess" has been driving our culture in exactly the wrong 
direction. It creates stratified societies. The CEO of a corporation 
makes a thousand times more than one of his workers. That kind of 
disparity doesn't exist in any other type of species. And that would 
suggest that we haven't gotten any better at handling surplus—in fact 
we've gotten worse at it.

Dealing with surplus is a difficult task. The problem begins with the 
fact that, just like the sex drive, the food drive got ramped up in 
evolution. If you have a deep, yearning need for food, you're going to 
get along better than your neighbor, and over the years that gene is 
going to be passed on. So you get this creature that got fine-tuned to 
really need food, especially carbohydrates. Which brings us to the more 
fundamental question: can we ever deal with sugar? By making more 
concentrated forms of carbohydrates, we're playing into something that's 
quite addictive and powerful. It's why we're so blasted obese. We have 
access to all this sugar, and we simply cannot control our need for 
it—that's genetic.

Now, can we gain the ability to overcome that? I'm not sure. You have to 
add to this the fact that there's a lot of money to be made by people 
who know how to concentrate sugar. They have a real interest in seeing 
that we don't overcome these kinds of addictions. In fact, that's how 
you control societies—you exploit that basic drive for food. That's how 
we train dogs—if you want to make a dog behave properly, you deprive him 
or give him food. Humans aren't that much different. We just like to 
think we are. So as an element of political control, food and food 
imagery are enormously important.

*What about religious control? If agriculture creates surplus, which 
creates social hierarchies, then how has religion affected that?*

The control of an enormous supply of food was woven heavily into 
religious observance. In the early going of agriculture, it was the 
priest who decided when the planting would occur, and all the religious 
observances were geared to seasonal changes. It's all woven into a very 
rich story—it's even in our prayers: "Give us this day our daily bread."

But religion also gets into display behavior. Part of that is the 
self-denial that goes with religious observance. People fast because 
it's the opposite of what normal people would do, so it's a display of 
fealty. And though I don't mean to disparage vegetarians, we've all seen 
that kind of display behavior there, too: the vegetarian who orders very 
loudly in a restaurant so that everyone knows he is morally superior in 
some way.

*That's interesting. Do you think vegetarianism isn't as socially 
responsible as it's cracked up to be?*

It depends on how it's done. In the U.S., we use highly processed foods 
as replacements. You know, rice cream and soy burgers and all that 
stuff. Once you're into that kind of process, then the energy gains from 
vegetarianism are almost immediately removed. But beyond that, you have 
to look at the way we do agriculture in the U.S. We wipe out enormous 
areas of habitat. Iowa has something less than 1 percent of its native 
habitat left. Well, that habitat supported wild animals. So you have a 
hard time arguing for vegetarianism as some kind of "kindness to 
animals" when you're wiping out their entire habitat that way.

*If agriculture and civilization have caused so many problems, what 
about hunter-gatherers? Does their way of life work better?*

Let's consider what happened in America. When European settlers came 
here, it became a very active policy of the government to try to make 
Indians start farming. Thomas Jefferson was explicit in that, and he 
wasn't alone. But the Indians simply fled—and not only did they leave 
white agriculture, but they left their own agriculture. Once they had 
horses, they had the option to hunt a lot more effectively. They put 
down their hoes, got on their horses, went into the western plains, and 
became nomadic in places that hadn't seen anyone for years. They became 
hunters. Did they "figure something out," or did they cut a deal with 
nature that was somehow sustainable? No, it's more complicated than 
that, because as soon as market hunting came into the area and allowed 
them to sell bison robes to the whites, they actually participated in 
the extinction of the bison—even before white hunters were on the scene.

*But even that practice was a result of their contact with civilization.*

And ability. So once given the technology, the market, and the ability 
to exploit that resource in a different way, they simply took advantage 
of it.

*So is there something that civilization can learn from the tribal way 
of life?*

Yes, I think there is something really important that hunter-gatherer 
cultures learned that we could benefit from. It's the fundamental idea 
of insecurity. We trade an enormous amount of freedom in our society for 
security. That's always the trade-off. It is our inability to deal with 
our lack of control over how and when we die that is fundamentally 
responsible for all of this. So we give up a lot of freedom for the 
false assurances that we won't die in this way or that way. I think we 
can learn from the hunter-gatherers that that's really an illusion. That 
kind of security is not obtainable in a natural system—and we are in a 
natural system and always will be. Therefore, we need to accept a good 
deal of that instability and threat and danger in our lives.

*Seems like a tough sell.*

Yes, it is. It's absolutely a tough sell. I mean, you look at how people 
sell cars today, it's, "This car won't kill you"—they don't care about 
anything else. Forget the gas mileage. And look what we're willing to 
give up in this country in terms of civil liberties, for instance, just 
because of the threat of terrorism. You cannot change the reality that 
the world is a dangerous place. So it is an illusion to think that we 
can be secure. We would be much better off if we'd simply give up that 
illusion and say, "I am going to die, I could die at any moment—now I'm 
going to get on with enjoying life."

*I wonder what it might take to return to that worldview? In nature, 
when a species adopts an unsustainable practice, nature eventually bites 
back with a catastrophe, like a population crash. Is that what it will 
take for humans to change the way we produce food?*

People always say, "Well, if there's some terrible catastrophe, /then/ 
we'll learn." But the catastrophe is already here. Africa is a 
catastrophe. Asia, Latin America… The poorest places in the world are 
constantly experiencing these very things that we envision as being 
disastrous.

*But not in America.*

No, not in America. So far, we're comfortably able to keep it out of 
sight. That's why we don't read international news in this country, 
that's why it doesn't show up on our TV sets—because we are able to 
maintain some sort of denial about the fact that one third of humanity 
lives on less than a dollar a day. We've separated ourselves. It's all 
around us—we just simply ignore it.

*In what ways will the First World "feel the rub" of the problems that 
stem from industrial agriculture?*

I think the effects of global warming are going to ramp up in the next 
fifteen to twenty years. There's going to be widespread crop failure 
because of global warming, that's pretty clear. And there are going to 
be huge weather changes and increased wildfires.

*Some might claim that free-market capitalism is the best way to create 
more egalitarian civilizations. It's tempting to view the free-market as 
the closest societal reflection of nature's "survival of the fittest." 
What do you think?*

Capitalism is a very linear process—we build factories with it. It 
doesn't think in terms of complexity, and it certainly doesn't accept 
insecurity. This gets us back to the fundamentals of agriculture. It's a 
factory system, a linear system. We think of inputs, outputs, and a 
single crop.

Nature doesn't work that way. The promise of nature is something called 
"over-yielding," the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. 
That's why I value natural systems so greatly. They work in combination 
with a lot of different things, and when those things are together and 
finely tuned, they tend to produce more than whatever we could replace 
them with. For example, prairies provide their own fertilizer.

Co-evolution comes up with solutions to problems that are much better 
than what we could come up with. So in that way it's unlike how we've 
conceived of capitalism.

*You write that solutions to industrial agriculture's problems aren't 
going to come from the government, since the very idea of government 
sprouted from agricultural civilizations. Are there ways we can apply 
our understanding of nature to current society?*

Well, there are some hopeful things out there. We're already beginning 
to accommodate our understanding of nature into information technology. 
When we start playing around with things like artificial intelligence, 
for instance, we know that we have to deal with complexity and that we 
have to design these organic systems that look like nature.

But the big steps come from understanding the genome. That gives us an 
incredible appreciation of nature, and also the ability to harness the 
productivity of nature in unique ways.

*Like how?*

For example, when you go to your local health-food store, you see two 
kinds of beets—golden and striped. This happened because some people 
were looking at some wild relatives and natural mutations in beets, and 
they found that there were two genes that created the red color in 
beets, and if they switched one off (not using genetic engineering, but 
a simple "knock-out"), it became striped. It turns out that this 
variation codes for a chemical called betalin, which is a 
cancer-fighting agent. So by understanding the manipulation of this 
gene, and by putting more betalin in the beet, they ramped up that 
cancer-fighting ability. If we look more into "forgotten" crops, and 
also wild relatives of crops, there are all these pigments that are 
coded for in genes. And these genes have many disease-fighting 
capabilities that we have bred out of our plants. We can bring those 
back into our crops quite easily and rapidly with the technology we have.

*At the same cost to the consumer?*

Yes, absolutely the same. The breeder I know who did this in Wisconsin 
says it's so easy that he doesn't have to deal with seed companies. In 
the "old world" you had to work with seed companies, and the seed 
company had to recover its investment—therefore things were expensive. 
But he can do it very quickly, release it to organic farmers, and then 
go on growing the thing—and it's a free seed.

*That's interesting. I think my first reaction whenever I hear about 
manipulations of nature is a negative one. In your book, though, you 
point out that even something as basic as using fire—something tribal 
societies did and still do—is a manipulation of nature. And here you 
seem to be lobbying for more manipulation.*

They're just wiser manipulations. One of the fundamental principles here 
is that these manipulations are not guided so much by our imaginations 
as by what existed before—that collective wisdom of nature. So we're 
going back and looking at the broader, more complex genes that we 
ignored before and saying, "What's in here that we didn't know?" The 
principle here is humility. We are not able to imagine the ultimate 
solutions—we have to see what nature has already imagined and mimic that.

*The solutions you speak of seem to have an awful lot to do with organic 
and alternative farming. That's fine for the hipster in Manhattan who 
can afford the whole foods store, or the farmer in Minnesota who can 
grow organic corn in fertile soil, but what about those who live in 
poverty? In your book, you chronicle the oppression of the poor by 
agricultural civilizations. What hope is there for them now? *

I know of a project in India which is an interesting case because India, 
like most other poor countries, is so heavily dependent on rice. But in 
India, it turns out that the poorest of the poor are dependent on 
dry-land rice. Ît's kind of a weird concept; it's not irrigated. 
Something like 40 percent of the land area given over to rice in the 
world is dry-land rice. The poor depend on it for a reason: they can't 
afford the best land, they can't afford irrigation, so they get by on 
the very marginal stuff, and have for thousands of years.

Of course, science for the last thirty or forty years has been looking 
intensively at irrigated rice, because such rice offers the most bang 
for the buck. But there are a couple of researchers in Bangalore, India, 
who've been collecting the local varieties of dry-land rice that people 
grow in those poor communities. They then compared them against the very 
best "improved" varieties from the very best of science, and they found 
out that the local varieties were better. They always yielded—no matter 
how bad the conditions were—and they had certain nutritional values that 
the other varieties didn't have.

So they're cataloguing the genomes of all these wild varieties, and 
breeding those varieties with the best characteristics into a variety of 
rice that, while very close to their local ones, also has some of the 
disease-resistant and insect-resistant capabilities of the improved 
varieties. In other words, they're making a "super local" variety. And 
then they're turning it back over to these poor people for free. It's an 
interesting case where people are thinking of ways to use technology to 
intervene for the poor.

*But isn't improving yield just creating more food, which in turn 
creates more people? *

That's a fascinating question—if you look at population growth in the 
world, it occurs not only in the most agricultural places on the globe, 
but also in the poorest places. Population growth is going crazy in 
places like India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. You have to find ways to 
ramp up the income of the poorest just slightly, because the record is 
very clear that if we can improve their income, their birthrate goes 
down dramatically. I've seen it. I was in a village in Mexico where one 
farmer was making something like 15 percent more than his neighbor, and 
he had two kids while his neighbor had thirteen. That's a very common 
thing in the developing world. Birth rate is most closely related to the 
income of the family—and that's true worldwide. The better your income, 
the fewer kids you tend to have. Education is also important, especially 
amongst women. If you can educate women, then birth control comes into 
play a lot more easily, and they have options to exercise. Good 
agriculture is hugely important in getting this to happen—but not 
industrial agriculture, which just makes it worse. If we're able to 
intervene, we have to understand that if we do agriculture well, we'll 
make lives better. But if we do it badly, we're going to make them worse.


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