The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis (27 page)
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Authors: Ruth DeFries
Borlaug had no patience for these criticisms. “Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth,”
he once told a journalist, “but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elites back home were trying to
deny them these things.”
M. S. Swaminathan, the father of the Green Revolution in India, takes a different view. He coined the term “Evergreen Revolution.” It’s undeniable that yields need to improve in Asia, with more mouths to feed as populations continue to grow, and virtually no place to expand. But, he has argued, the experience of the Green Revolution shows that humanity needs a different path to avoid ecological damage. Swaminathan envisions, as the next revolution, poor farmers participating in decisions, new efficiencies in using fertilizer and water, and advanced technologies opened up by
biotechnology for the benefit of poor farmers.
Whether the future veers toward Swaminathan’s or Borlaug’s view, one message is clear: the Green Revolution was yet another experiment in feeding humanity. Like all the other experiments, there’s no endpoint. Nature finds a way to ensure that no solution is permanent.
The world’s wheat seemed safe from stem rust after Borlaug’s early efforts in Mexico to breed varieties resistant to the decimating fungal disease. But Borlaug’s mentor, Elvin Stakman, was right. The enemy proved to be shifty. In 1998, red blisters appeared on wheat in Uganda. It was stem rust, reemerging five decades after Borlaug’s victory over the disease. Wind-borne spores spread the disease to Kenya and Ethiopia and east to Iran. Then the fungus appeared in Yemen. Few scientists and farmers remembered the disastrous outbreaks of long ago.
Back in Mexico, in the international research center set up during the Green Revolution, researchers took up the cause once again to breed
rust-resistance into wheat. Borlaug had warned that the virulent pest could one day reappear. It did. The reemergence was a reminder that there’s no finish line when it comes to
manipulating genes to our liking. Like all else in nature, change is constant. Evolution never rests.
Over geologic time, plants and animals in the wild go extinct when conditions change and they can’t adapt fast enough. That’s not a very comforting outcome for humanity if that same process applies to the species we rely upon for food. It’s the human hand, not nature, that keeps domestic species resistant to pests or able to withstand dry years. The human hand fashions new varieties that people like to eat—such as the broccoflower, a cross between broccoli and cauliflower, or the plum-cot, a cross between plums and apricots. But the human hand needs the genetic ingredients. The wild relatives of our domesticated species hold a treasure trove of genes for breeders to manipulate. But they can only test them and use them to improve the
domestic stock if they still exist.
The tomato is a case in point. With the domesticated variety of long ago badly inbred, tomatoes are targets for disease, despite the many colors and shapes on display at the farmers market. Their puny wild relatives clinging to slopes in their native western Chile, Peru, and Ecuador have come to the rescue. Breeders have crossed genes from at least twenty wild relatives since the mid-twentieth century to keep tomatoes healthy. Researchers keep thousands of specimens of the tomato’s small and bitter relatives and share the seeds with plant breeders around the world. But relying on wild species to prop up the gene pool is no easy task. It’s an adventure in the Andes to find the wild relatives. And it’s a race to save them before they are trampled,
paved over, or plowed under.
One might think that saving the wild relatives of the plants and animals that feed humanity would take center stage in society’s priorities. But parks set aside for nature are more often for scenery, recreation, or to conserve a treasured animal, such as the tiger or the macaw. A
few parks have been set aside to house the relatives of species domesticated by the first farmers, such as wild emmer wheat in the Galilee region, wild onions in Washington state, and wild coffee in Mauritius. The whereabouts of many other wild relatives are not known. Perhaps they will not be able to withstand the changing climate, or will fall prey to the
ever-expanding human presence. Or perhaps they have already gone extinct.
One solution is portrayed on a Norwegian postage stamp. It depicts a snowy, drab landscape in a remote northern Arctic hillside. The top of a large underground vault protrudes through the snow. The treasure in the vault is more precious than any bank with money or jewels. Inside the vault are seeds from over a hundred seed banks around the world. The practice of sharing seeds goes back at least to Egyptian and Babylonian times, but only in the past century did governments and scientists assemble their collections. If a fire or some other calamity befell these collections scattered throughout the world, the genetic wealth would be lost. The so-called “doomsday vault” is the ultimate back-up. Millions of varieties of wheat, corn, and other plants that we depend on to feed civilization are frozen underground in the vault as fodder for future breeding to overcome some unknown disease or adapt to a changing climate. More varieties, growing wild or in farmers’ fields, are yet to be deposited in banks. The vault, built in 2008 halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole, houses the record of humanity’s past and quite
possibly ensures its future.
Human ingenuity shines when it comes to genetic twists of nature to feed our species. The first foragers started down the path of the dramatic transformation to a farming species. Plant and animal breeders for millennia improved on nature, at least in terms of the large seeds, docile temperaments, or other traits that people value. The hybrid corn
makers transformed the American landscape, and hybrid rice breeders transformed China’s. Dwarf varieties kept wheat and rice upright when chemical fertilizers and irrigation boosted the weight. The Green Revolution took genetic twists of nature to new heights, with skyrocketing yields in the developing world that even outstripped the explosive growth in population of the past century. The next pivot is playing out in contemporary times.
What Mendel’s experiments did for hybrids, the Nobel Prize–winning 1953 discovery of the double-helix DNA molecule by James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin, did for a new
frontier for manipulating genes. DNA holds the blueprint for all traits, the code for all life. Breeding plants not by how they look to the eye but by the composition of their DNA, and splicing genes from one species to another, is a far cry from the forager who picked a wild tomato. But the basic principle remains the same. Transform species to our liking. Sidestep natural selection.
Bt
corn and cotton with genes from a potent soil bacterium are examples of the power of the new technology. So are Roundup Ready soybeans, where the same technology is employed, but with the opposite effect of
Bt
crops. The crop is engineered to resist the effect of pesticides, making it possible for the farmer to spray pesticides that kill weeds without harming the crop. Another manipulation is Golden Rice, with genetically enriched vitamin A and iron from the genes of daffodils and bacteria. The rice could boost the nutrition from one of the world’s staple foods, but at the time of this writing its dissemination is stalled, mired in ideologically laden debates about the
dangers of genetic engineering. The young technology may yet find ways to make crops withstand drought or resist new diseases with the aid of the
genetic treasure of wild species.
Biotechnology has entered agriculture’s toolbox, with high expectations from some and
much trepidation from others. Some contend
that this leapfrog of nature gives humanity too much control, especially in the hands of the private sector, with CEOs who do not necessarily share the twentieth-century plant breeders’ zeal for feeding the hungry. Borlaug and others, to the contrary, saw biotechnology as the next great promise, predicting it would take breeders beyond the temporary solutions of the Green Revolution technologies. Borlaug fought against the opposition from what he called “
anti-science zealotry.” Regardless of one’s viewpoint, one has to admit that the feat to rapidly morph species to our liking is one of the marvels of our ingenuity. The trial and error of the first farmers took millennia; it took our ancestors many plant generations to coax wheat, corn, and other domesticated species to their liking. In conventional plant breeding, it can take decades to produce a new variety. With biotechnology, the time shrinks to the blink of an eye. It’s the next unexplored territory in humanity’s never-ending experiments to manipulate the marvels of nature. How far human ingenuity has come in such a short time.
This was the Big Ratchet: In the second half of the twentieth century, all the twists of nature—nourishing the soil, extracting energy from the ancient sun, warding off unwanted pests and manipulating genes—built on each other. Just as the pivot to chemical fertilizers would not have been possible without coal for factories and oil for machinery, the genetic twists to breed dwarf plants and vigorous hybrid seeds would not have been possible without chemical fertilizers and irrigated fields. Without the genetic twists, in turn, yields would not have soared around the world.
The Big Ratchet’s abundance of rice, wheat, and corn—the staples of modern civilization—helped set the stage for the remarkable times in which we now live. In the long arc of the history of human civilization, our times rival the Earth-changing transition from forager to farmer. This time, the pivotal transition is from farmer to urbanite.
B
INS OF RED APPLES
, green pears, rust-colored yams, and brown-skinned potatoes. Piles of peaches and varieties of vegetables from artichokes to zucchini. Loaves of breads stacked high on shelves. Boxes upon boxes of cereal. Packages of cut-up chicken and steaks wrapped in plastic. Bottles of milk and cartons of eggs. Frozen ready-made entrées. Spices from around the world.
As massive, concrete dams were Jawaharlal Nehru’s temples of modernity, grocery stores are modern shrines to humanity’s control over nature. They embody our long, winding journey from an ordinary mammal to a world-dominating, urban species. The journey began with the payoffs from a cosmic lottery, the endowments from our amazing Earth: plate tectonics, recycling machinery, and a profusion of plants, animals, and microbes. Later, our ancestors, having parted ways with our chimpanzee relatives, evolved with the capacity for cultures that could rapidly accumulate knowledge and transmit it from one generation to the next. Many millennia later, early domesticators nudged humanity from an existence in which we foraged for our food to one in which we
were mostly settled farmers. With towns, trade, new fertilizers, and many other innovations, the constraints of nature fell one by one.
The culmination in the twentieth century of all of these victories—what I call the Big Ratchet—produced more than just an abundance of food. In the Big Ratchet’s wake, with enough surplus food from the countryside, people could—and did—swarm to cities to take part in the implicit bargain of modern civilization. In this bargain, an ever-shrinking minority provides food to the rest of us in return for work in a factory, office, or shop, or through some other contribution to the modern economy. Our moment marks the beginning of an era in which far more people can take part in the implicit bargain than at any other time in history. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were fewer than 2 billion people on the planet, and fewer than fifteen of every hundred lived in cities and took part in the bargain. By the end of the century, our numbers exceeded 6 billion. Not quite half of these people lived in cities, although within a few years—by May 2007—
more than half of us did. By then, nearly thirty-five of every hundred acres of the planet’s land surface were devoted to producing food for our
single, urbanizing species. The Big Ratchet has revolutionized our planet and our species. It hasn’t just allowed us to produce more food, but has made possible more energy-intensive diets. And as diets change, new hatchets are falling from our success. The times call for our collective human ingenuity to turn next to a new set of pivots.
Who doesn’t enjoy a summertime scoop of rich, velvety ice cream? It lingers on the tongue, sumptuous and satisfying. Cones, sundaes, fried, on-a-stick, on top of a piece of pie, chocolate, strawberry, plain or French vanilla, or any of a rainbow of exotic fruit flavors. It makes sense that ice cream is a sought-after treat. After all, ice cream has
two esteemed elements that our taste buds cherish: fat and sugar. With hefty punches per ounce in caloric terms, these are the perfect foods for a species that evolved when times were tough, food was scarce, and the next meal almost always uncertain. It’s not surprising that the preference for fat and sugar seems to be innate. It is shared across cultures around the world, just
like cooing at babies.
