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A
farmer inspects the soil ahead of planting at a maize field in
Wesselsbron, a small maize farming town in the Free State
province of South Africa
Thomson
Reuters
At the height of the slave trade in 1785, an English divinity
student, Thomas Clarkson, won a Latin essay contest considering
the question, “Is it lawful to enslave the un-consenting?”
Few read it. Fewer took it seriously. But Clarkson, along with a
small band of similarly inspired people, went to work, designing
and executing a set of coordinated tactics to reveal the
atrocities of legal slavery in the systems that brought sugar to
British tables.
Wherever he went, Clarkson carried a wooden box filled with the
slaver’s tools – iron handcuffs, shackles, thumb-screws, branding
irons, and instruments for forcing open slaves’ jaws. Clarkson’s
moment of grace changed his course. Clarkson’s box showed
consumers the intolerable violence in their sugar bowls.
The violence that we do to our planet’s soils, while by no means
a crime comparable to the brutality of chattel slavery, is
inseparably tied to our modern economic system, just as slavery
was. And the mounting evidence of the violence we are doing to
our soils is as obvious as the shackles in Thomas Clarkson’s box.
The extractive farming methods that have been used since World
War II to drive massive increases in agricultural yields and
human population have brought our species and planet to a set of
historic extremes – with unknown, but not unforeseeable, possibly
devastating consequences for our food supply.
In May 2012, I lifted off from the Des Moines airport in a
helicopter with a philanthropist and another scientist to take a
look at America’s soils. From above, the land looked tired, the
beginning of the worst drought in 25 years. That afternoon,
planters scuttled hopefully back and forth in the haze, plumes of
dust rising in the late afternoon sun, symptoms of the damage we
have inflicted on some of the richest soils on Earth.
Soil organic matter has dropped 30 percent to 50 percent since we
began cultivating this ground. Compounded by erosion and
agricultural practices that reduce soil life and damage soil
structure, the injury to American soils is stunning and ongoing.
During these 150 years, our national anthem in agriculture has
been “yield, yield, yield,” the uncontested route to prosperity
and abundance. But the harm we’ve done to our soils under this
spell was plainly clear from the cockpit that afternoon in the
rising trails of dust in the sky.
Despite millennia of traditional knowledge, and some major
successes inspired by the Dust Bowl, it is estimated that nearly
a third of the world’s arable land has been eroded, lost at a
rate of more than 20 million acres per year. The UN Convention to
Combat Desertification estimates that more than 50 percent of
land used for agriculture globally is “moderately or severely”
degraded.
Injured soils lose resilience to drought and reduce agricultural
productivity. When production fails, food systems more often go
awry. When food systems go awry, people get frightened and
desperate and angry. Chronic environmental stresses, somebody
else’s new dam, poor governance, and “sub-acute” events can and
recently have added up to suffering, rebellion, violence, war,
even the Syrian Crisis.
By 2050, scientists estimate we will need to feed 9 billion
people with enormous implications for the world’s resources.
Already, geologists have graduated us from the Holocene, the
comfy and stable geological period in which humankind evolved, to
a new era called the Anthropocene. In the Anthropocene,
humankind’s actions shape the way our planet works, and
agriculture is both our lifeline as a species and the dominant
mode by which we care for our planet.
Yet, as British housewives once did, we are still earnestly
ignoring the atrocities embedded in the food on our tables, and
denying ourselves the possibility of much better. Our 20th
century fragmented views, our inch-size glimpses of the elephant
in the living room do not reveal the dimensions of opportunities
for radical innovations to better meet our needs – or a full
understanding of the risks we face.
Further, our Whac-a-Mole responses to the range of symptoms we
now detect, from degrading agricultural resources to epidemic
obesity to mass species extinction, constrain our ability and our
will to innovate. Our narrow views shackle us to incremental,
stepwise change–and to the delusion that doing a little less bad
and a little more good will be enough.
Always, the most dangerous lies are the lies we tell ourselves.
For all of human history, farmers have known that their soil is
the living foundation of our species’ future. For more than a
century, scientists have formally confirmed these insights.
Intensified and diversified crop and livestock rotations, “cover”
crops, healthy microbial soil flora, no-till planting, and
grazed, cropped systems are taking hold across America. These
soil-care practices can slow the damage, even heal and regenerate
soils while they boost and buffer agricultural productivity.
Farmers
dig ditches to lead water from a white polluted stream into farm
fields, in Dongchuan district of Kunming
Thomson Reuters
Innovations in the food and beverage sectors are also taking hold
in the United States, which allow farmers’ to accelerate their
commitments to improving soil health. Sustainability scorecards,
wired-up farming systems, market differentiation, labeling
innovations, and distributed sourcing are all schemes that allow
farmers and their supply chains to fulfill their commitments to
best care for our soils. As these innovations take hold, we often
find win-win-wins…including improved profitability and resilience
to extreme conditions.
But the question remains: Are we moving in the
right directions fast enough? Are we reducing the annual rate of
soil loss and degradation? Can we objectively show we are
actually starting to heal our soils? Is what we are doing enough
to secure the agricultural future for our nation and our
children?
The best science we have today signals the answer to these
questions is no.
Thomas Clarkston started his lifelong journey toward abolition
with a simple now famous observation: “if the contents of the
essay are true, it is time some person should see these
calamities to their end.”
Today, a new science enables us to better see – and grasp – our
challenges and opportunities. “Complexity
science” investigates how relationships between parts give
rise to the behaviors of a whole, how systems move, interact,
form and re-form.
Just as Clarkson’s box and my view from the helicopter make
obvious large-scale features of systems that we are unable or
unwilling to see from the ground, complexity science can better
illuminate the relationships between our individual and
collective choices and their consequences. Cut free from
disciplinary boundaries, complexity science systematically
defines and reveals the elements of a system, how those elements
may change or be changed, and how systems evolve.
These new views are like a “macroscope,” bringing into sharp
focus new ways of seeing what’s already there. Complexity
Science, thus, can reveal strategies for systems change, the
value of risk avoided, and open new paths forward. It can even
reveal the power in a moment of grace – a phase change in the
system sparked by an idea pushed into the system with forays of
coordinated actions – with the potential for vast and amplifying
benefits for humanity.
Women
work in a cabbage field at the expropriated Fundo Aracal in the
state of Yaracuy, about 332 km (200 miles) west of Caracas August
27, 2007
Reuters
Advanced analytical approaches enable us to see how boundaries
move, how feedback cycles work, how human and biophysical
conditions interact. With new sight from billions of networked
devices, and new science of the Earth system, human understanding
of the violence, the tolerated-intolerables in our food systems
is starting to change before our eyes.
The view from the helicopter cockpit that May afternoon was
clear. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, the idea that
American agriculture can be profitable AND that our practices on
the land must heal, even regenerate, our soils is still generally
considered to be as preposterous as Clarkson’s strong opinions
about human bondage.
Last week, I flew into my home airport in Madison, Wisconsin.
Looking down, I could see most of the harvested cornfields in my
state famous for its progressive agriculture are “no-till” fields
– fields where crop residues are left on the soil to “feed” the
next crop and protect the soil from erosion. Other fields showed
the dewy green of the winter wheat crop and cover crops that can
hold the soil against the off-season winds and rains.
Almost nowhere did I see the old-fashioned naked fields we used
to leave open for erosion and exposure through the winter. Wavy
“contours” of alfalfa, a perennial crop that restores fertility
to the soil, and grassy waterways to limit erosion weave their
way through the corn fields of western Wisconsin. Change is
evident on the landscape.
But we know we can do better, and we are expecting a big crowd
around the 21st century table. The science says we have to
do better. I say we must do better.
Armed with new scientific approaches to “see” our challenges,
opportunities, and the benefits of the actions we take, armed
with a wide range of social and technical innovations, bands of
farmers, scientists, and many other partners in new cross-sector
alliances are becoming empowered with new tools, broader views,
and new inspiration to “see these calamities to their end.”
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