Food: Tackling the oldest environmental problem: Agriculture and its impact on soil (Energy Bulletin)

by Wes Jackson

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EXCERPT:

I want to talk about the 10,000-year-old problem of agriculture and how it is both necessary and possible to solve it. Were it necessary but not possible this idea would be grandiose, and were it possible but not necessary it would be grandiose. But it has passed the test of grandiosity.

Figure 10.1 illustrates what most people think about when they talk about sustainable agriculture. This is part of an ad for a sustainable-agriculture conference in Chicago. Look at the diversity and think hard about how much that informs the sustainable-agriculture movement. There is not a single grain there. And what’s wrong with that? The foods shown there represent fewer than 25 percent of the calories that humans eat, and I have a $100 bet that 70 percent of the calories eaten by the people in the most economically important agricultural state, California, come over the Sierra Nevada and up from Mexico in the form of grains.

In the background of all of us organisms on Earth is what I call the 3.45-billion-year imperative. We are a carbon-based planet. The carbon that enters so importantly into our bodies, we all now know, was cooked in the remote past of a dying star. But humans, with the big brain, have been around for only 150,000 to 200,000 years, and only some 11,000 to 13,000 years before the present we got to the first pool of energy-rich carbon, the young pulverized coal of the soil. And we mostly wasted it. With the opening of the North American continent, some soil scientists estimate the United States went from around 6 percent carbon to around 3 percent. I think that’s when global warming began, with agriculture 10,000 years ago.

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