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<h1 class="css-twhgrd">The Scourge of Agriculture</h1>
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<a
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href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0865476225/theatlanticmonthA/ref=nosim"><i>Against
the Grain</i></a> <br>
[Click the title <br>
to buy this book] by Richard
Manning <br>
North Point Press <br>
<p> 232 pages, $24.</p>
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<p>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 <i>Dances
with Wolves</i>, or aborigines
from <i>The Gods Must Be Crazy</i>.
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?</p>
<p>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, <i>Against
the Grain: How Agriculture
Hijacked Civilization</i>, 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. </p>
</section>
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<section>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>In <i>Against the Grain</i>,
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.</p>
<br>
<p><b>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? </b></p>
<p>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 <i>then</i>
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. </p>
</section>
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<p><b>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? </b></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><b> 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?</b></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
</section>
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<p>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.</p>
<p><b>What about religious control? If
agriculture creates surplus, which
creates social hierarchies, then
how has religion affected that?</b></p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><b>That's interesting. Do you think
vegetarianism isn't as socially
responsible as it's cracked up to
be?</b></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><b>If agriculture and civilization
have caused so many problems, what
about hunter-gatherers? Does their
way of life work better?</b></p>
<p>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. </p>
</section>
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<section>
<p><b>But even that practice was a
result of their contact with
civilization.</b></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><b>So is there something that
civilization can learn from the
tribal way of life?</b></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><b>Seems like a tough sell.</b></p>
<p>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."</p>
<p><b>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?</b></p>
<p>People always say, "Well, if
there's some terrible catastrophe, <i>then</i>
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. </p>
<p><b>But not in America.</b></p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p><b>In what ways will the First
World "feel the rub" of the
problems that stem from industrial
agriculture?</b></p>
<p>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. </p>
</section>
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<section>
<p><b>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?</b></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><b>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?</b></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><b>Like how?</b></p>
<p>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.</p>
</section>
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<section>
<p><b>At the same cost to the
consumer?</b></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><b> 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.</b></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><b>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? </b></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
</section>
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<p><b>But isn't improving yield just
creating more food, which in turn
creates more people? </b></p>
<p>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.</p>
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