A Natural History of the Future by Rob Dunn

Author:Rob Dunn [Dunn, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2021-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Embracing Diversity to Balance Risk

THE GREAT AGRICULTURAL ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE LAST CENTURY has been a matter not of sustainability or flavor or nutrition, but of quantity. Crop scientists set out to increase the number of calories produced per acre for human consumption. They succeeded. An acre of corn now produces more corn kernels, an acre of wheat more wheat grains, and an acre of soy more soybeans than would have been imaginable forty years ago, much less a hundred years ago. These increases in yields have kept many of the world’s most important staples cheap and available and have led to decreases in hunger during the last decades.

These successes have been achieved through control. Through breeding and engineering, we have altered the genes of crops in ways that make those crops grow faster, especially when watered and fertilized. We have waded, as Annie Dillard has written, into the “wet nucleus of the cell” and inserted new genes that produce pesticides.1 We have even inserted new genes that make plants resistant to herbicides (and then sprayed the fields with herbicide to kill back the nonresistant weeds with which they might otherwise compete). The defining feature of these manipulations has been that we have made our crops ever more part of our system of industrialization. Like components of an assembly line, they are controlled, and in light of that control they thrive. Many features of this system can be critiqued, though while bearing in mind that a far smaller proportion of the world’s population is hungry today than a hundred years ago. Yet as we look toward the future, we see that this system faces a major challenge. We have built a food system that thrives when variability is minimized. But, as noted in Chapter 6, we have also altered Earth’s climate in such a way as to make it much more variable and unpredictable. Herein lies a problem.

The industrial, technological approach to agriculture is well suited to helping solve some of the challenges of the future—for example, how to eke a few more calories per acre out of farms or how to produce more drought-tolerant crops. But it is not well suited to deal with variability, especially variability outside the scope of its control. The future’s conditions will be a more rapidly moving target, particularly with regard to climate. The ideal crop for conditions this year is unlikely to be the ideal crop for conditions next year. What one hopes for in such situations is what ecologists call ecological stability. A stable natural ecosystem is one in which primary productivity, the amount of green life that grows in a particular area over a particular time period, does not vary much from one year to the next, even when climatic conditions do vary. A stable agricultural system is one in which year-to-year variation in yield is modest, even when climate is very variable. One approach to achieving such stability is to use technology to buffer environmental variation, to in essence keep conditions invariant.

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