The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins

Author:Peter Tompkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

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Part IV

Children of the Soil

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Chapter 14

Soil: The Staff of Life

Despite Carver’s prescient observations on how to bring life back to the cotton-debased soils of Alabama by rotating crops and fertilizing the soil with natural humus, the farmers of that state—and those in every other state of the Union—have since Carver’s death been lured by the promise of large profits to deal with the land, not in a natural, but in an artificial way in order to force from it every ounce of productivity. Instead of exerting patient and tender efforts to keep their soils in natural balance they have been seeking to subjugate nature rather than cooperate with her. Everywhere there are indications that in the process of being raped rather than loved, nature is protesting. If the process goes on, the victim may die of bitterness and indignation, and with her all that she nurtures.

An example—one among thousands—is Decatur, Illinois, a farming community in the heart of the United States cornbelt. As the summer of 1966 was drawing to a close, steamingly hot and sultry, the corn stood in the fields as high as an elephant’s eye, promising a bumper crop in every direction, perhaps eighty to a hundred bushels to the acre. In the twenty years since World War II the farmers had almost doubled the land’s yield in corn by the use of nitrate fertilizers, unaware of the deadly danger they were courting.

The following spring one of Decatur’s seventy-eight thousand townsmen—whose living depended indirectly on the success of the corn harvest—noticed that a cup of drinking water from his kitchen faucet tasted funny. As the water was supplied directly from Lake Decatur, an impoundment of the Sangamon River, he took a sample to the Decatur Health Department for testing. Dr. Leo Michl, a Decatur health official, was alarmed to find that concentrations of nitrate in the waters of Lake Decatur and the Sangamon River itself were not only excessive but potentially lethal.

Nitrate, in itself innocuous to the human physical constitution, can become deadly when converted by intestinal bacteria; these combine nitrate with the blood’s hemoglobin into methemoglobin, which prevents the natural transport of oxygen in the bloodstream. This can cause a disease known as methemoglobinemia, which kills by asphyxiation; infants are particularly susceptible to it. Many cases of the mysterious epidemics of “crib death” are now attributed to it.

When a Decatur newspaper ran a feature suggesting that the city’s water supply had become polluted with excessive nitrate and that fertilizers being poured on the surrounding cornfields might be the source of the trouble, the story exploded like a bombshell in the cornbelt communities. At the time of the water analysis, farmers were resorting almost exclusively to nitrogen fertilizer as the cheapest, and indeed the only, means to produce over eighty bushels of corn to the acre, an amount dictated by the economics of corn production as necessary to realize a profit. Corn, or maize as it is known in the English-speaking world outside

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