The Little Ice Age

Once upon a time, Brian Fagan became curious about how history has been shaped by climate.  He did a remarkable amount of research, and then delivered a fascinating and very readable book, The Little Ice Age.  Mainstream history tends to focus on rulers, empires, wars, and technology, providing us with a pinhole perspective on ages past.  Fagan used a wide angle lens, and revealed how the miserable peasantry of Europe struggled to survive in a world of daffy rulers, steamroller epidemics, wildly erratic weather, and the ever-present threat of famine — a highly insecure existence in a world with no safety nets, and brief life expectancy.

Most of our detailed, regularly recorded weather data is less than 200 years old.  Older writings made note of climate conditions, times of prosperity, famines, plagues, and natural disasters.  More recently, we’ve discovered that tree rings and ice cores can provide climate information going back thousands of years.  The annual rings in tree trunks are thicker in ideal weather and thinner in lean years.  The annual layers of ice in glaciers are thicker in cold years, and thinner in warm ones.  In this way, climate leaves a fingerprint pattern that we can decode.  Ice also preserves ash residue, marking volcanic activity, which can have significant effects on weather.

While climate can vary from year to year, and day to day, modern climate science has discovered broader trends in weather patterns.  Fagan examined three trends: the Medieval Warm Period (900-1200), the Little Ice Age (1300-1850), and the warming trend of the fossil-fuelled industrial era. 

In northern Europe, the years between 800 and 1200 were the warmest period in the last 8,000 years.  There were vineyards in England.  Generous grain harvests fed a population explosion, which naturally triggered a rash of bloody conflicts.  Because of the warm weather, sea levels rose between 1000 and 1200, creating challenges for the lowlanders.  “At least 100,000 people died along the Dutch and German coasts in four fierce storm surges in about 1200, 1212-1219, 1287, and 1362.”

The kickoff for the Little Ice Age came in 1315, when it rained almost continuously from May to August.  Fields became lakes or knee-deep mud.  Floods erased entire villages.  Wars had to be cancelled.  The population, which had exploded between 1100 and 1300, now had to share a puny harvest, if any.

The survivors eagerly awaited a return to normal weather in 1316, but rains resumed in the spring.  Livestock diminished, crops failed, prices rose, and the roads were jammed with wandering beggars.  Many villages were abandoned.  People dined on pigeon dung, dogs, cats, and the corpses of diseased cattle (rumors of cannibalism).  By the spring of 1317, they had eaten their seeds, and had few oxen to plow with.  The rains returned.  There were seven years of bad harvests, creating steady employment for gravediggers.

For the next 550 years, the weather got colder, and there were more storms.  Frigid spells might last a season or a decade.  Cold weather was extreme from 1680 to 1700.  London trees froze and split open, and the Thames was covered with thick ice.  Chilly summers led to poor harvests from 1687 to 1692.  You could walk across the ice from Denmark to Sweden in the winter of 1708-09.  The All Saints Flood of November 1570 submerged the Dutch lowlands, drowning 100,000. 

This book is jammed with stories of weather-related problems — floods, droughts, crop failures, epidemics, famines, and food riots.  Most people struggled to survive via subsistence farming, using primitive technology.  Most didn’t have enough land for livestock, which meant little manure for fertilizer.  Under ideal conditions on prime land, planting a bushel of wheat would produce just four or five bushels at harvest time.  Because of this low productivity, feeding society required the labor of nine out of ten people.  Famine was common, and food relief was rare.  “Even in the best of times, rural life was unrelentingly harsh.”  “Farm laborers lived in extraordinary squalor….”

Fagan’s tales reinforced my dislike of agriculture.  It fuels overpopulation, converts healthy wild ecosystems into wreckage, enslaves plants and animals, and requires inequality and brutality.  It is proprietary — all the big juicy melons in that field belong to my group, and our field is strictly off-limits to any other creature.  This is the opposite of nature’s way, in which a big juicy melon is fair game for one and all, finders keepers.   

Private property turns humans and societies into obnoxious two-year olds — “that’s MY melon!”  Possessions become objects of wealth, power, and status.  If I steal your horse, then its power becomes mine.  In the insatiable pursuit of wealth, people will lie to your face, snatch your purse, cut your throat, bomb cities into ashtrays, and destroy entire planets.  You can’t farm without warriors to protect the real estate, livestock, and granaries, and you can’t control warriors without hard-fisted leaders.

The legions of hungry dirty peasants who produced the wealth were expendable, and lived in a manner that none of us would tolerate — while the lords gaily feasted.  “Excavations of medieval cemeteries paint a horrifying picture of health problems resulting from brutal work regimes.  Spinal deformations from the hard labor of plowing, hefting heavy grain bags, and scything the harvest are commonplace.  Arthritis affected nearly all adults.  Most adult fisherfolk suffered agonizing osteoarthritis of the spine from years of heavy boatwork and hard work ashore.”

 Today, our lives are unnaturally soft and cozy.  We exist in a “luxurious” unhealthy cocoon created by a temporary bubble of abundant energy.  The shelves at the store are always full, a wonderland of easy calories.  We have no memories of the hellish life of muscle-powered organic agriculture.  We have forgotten how recently our ancestors died from famines and pestilence.  As the cost and scarcity of energy increases, our bubble will surely pop.

Fagan gives us an eye-opening preview of what life is likely to look like when the fossil fuel bubble becomes the subject of scary old fairy tales (The Big Bad Consumer).  As our miraculous machines run out of fuel, we will have no choice but to slip and slide into a muscle-powered future, which will be anything but unnaturally soft and cozy. 

He also warns us that climate change is often not smooth and gentle.  History is full of sudden catastrophic shifts.  Despite our whiz-bang technology, and hordes of scientists, climate shifts remain beyond our control.  We will experience whatever nature decides to serve us — even if we exercised our famous big brains, and permanently stopped every machine today.  Climate was a persistent threat to agriculture-based societies long before coal mining was invented, because agriculture had far more defects than benefits.

This book provides vital information for those struggling to envision a sustainable future based on organic agriculture.  Ideally, enlightened humans will deliberately keep the transition to muscle-powered organic agriculture as brief as possible, whilst devoting immense wisdom to the essential goals of full-speed population reduction and rewilding.  There is nothing finer than a sustainable way of life.  All other paths lead to oblivion.

Fagan,Brian, The Little Ice Age — How Climate Made History 1300-1850, Basic Books, New York, 2000.

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations

Professor David Montgomery’s book Dirt provides a fascinating discussion about an extremely precious substance that we can’t live without, but treat like dirt.  He begins with an intimate explanation of what dirt is, how it’s formed, and how it’s destroyed — in plain, simple English. 

Then, he proceeds to lead us on an around-the-world tour, spanning many centuries, to examine the various methods that societies have devised for mining their soils, and diminishing their future via agriculture.

The book is impressively thorough, and it’s likely to blow more than a few minds, but the voice is a bit soft.  A neutral tone is mandatory for textbooks, and this may encourage casual readers to be less concerned about the future than they should be.  Connect the dots.

From a human perspective, soil is a non-renewable resource, because new soil is created very slowly, a process often measured on a geological timeframe.  For example, the soils of the Mediterranean basin were largely destroyed by 2,000 years ago, and they remain wrecked today.  They are quite likely to remain wrecked for many, many thousands of years.  Much of the region that once fed millions is a desert today.

If smoking a single pack of cigarettes reliably caused a painful death by cancer within weeks, nobody would smoke, because it’s clearly not smart.  But cancer normally takes decades to become apparent, and by the time you learn about the tumor, it’s too late to make smart decisions.  Life does not have an undo button.

It’s a similar story with societies that take up the dirty habit of agriculture, which is almost always fatal.  Once you get started, it’s nearly impossible to quit, because it’s unbelievably addictive.  Yet we continue to act like it’s a cool thing to do, because it’s a clever way to acquire trade trinkets and status, and all the other cool societies are doing it, too.  The disease often advances so slowly, over the course of generations, that nobody realizes the mistake.  But once the soil is ruined, it’s too late to become smart.  There is no wonder cure.  Game over.

Eventually, Montgomery’s world tour brings us to the United States, where the white invaders imported their dirty habit.  In Europe, many farmers were quite careful to do what they could to slow erosion, and improve fertility, using time-proven techniques, because starvation was the alternative.  American settlers promptly threw these prudent practices overboard, because they were time-consuming, and because there was an unbelievable supply of fertile soil that was readily available.  In the New World, dirt was a disposable commodity.

Settlers could get rich quick by raising tobacco and cotton.  A field of rich virgin soil could support three or four crops of tobacco, and then it would be abandoned.  It was cheaper to pack up, move on, and clear new fields than it was to manure the fields they had already cleared.  This careless attitude fueled an explosion of erosion and deforestation.  One gully near Macon, Georgia was 50 feet deep, 200 feet across, and 300 yards long.  Soil exhaustion was a primary driving force behind the westward expansion of the colonists.  Rape and run agriculture seems to have set the mold for the emerging American mindset.

In the twentieth century, when farmers bought millions of big, powerful machines, the 10,000 year war on soils mutated into a new and horrifying form.  Erosion rates skyrocketed to levels never before believed to be possible, leading to catastrophes like the Dust Bowl.  Montgomery says it like this: “Continued for generations, till-based agriculture will strip soil right off the land as it did in ancient Europe and the Middle East.  With current agricultural technology though, we can do it a lot faster.”

Here’s a line that made me jump: “Everything else — culture, art, and science — depends upon adequate agricultural production.”  Like air and water, food is essential for our survival.  Without food, our entire techno-wonderland turns into fairy dust and blows away.  We can’t live without it, but at the same time we are rapidly destroying what makes food possible — because profits today are more important than existence tomorrow.  Sorry kids!

On a bright note, Montgomery gives us a quick tour of Tikopia, a society on a tiny island that is one of the few exceptions to the rule.  They seem to have devised a sustainable form of agriculture that majors in agroforestry (food-producing trees).  They combined this with a draconian method for maintaining a sustainable population, which was far less painful and destabilizing than the effects of over breeding. 

Looking toward the future, Montgomery foresees a large number of serious problems.  Explosive population growth continues.  We are moving beyond the era of cheap and abundant energy, and this will continuously drive the price of everything upward.  Climate change is likely to deliver unwanted surprises.  Widespread destruction of soils continues, and simply converting to organic farming will not fix this.  Nor will no-till technology, which will eventually be forced into extinction by rising energy costs, or herbicide-resistant weeds.  We are running out of tricks for increasing productivity.  The end of the chemical fertilizer game is inevitable, and it will largely be replaced with recycled sewage — a priceless treasure that we are now throwing away via expensive, energy-guzzling treatment plants.

Our current system is simply not up to the task of feeding the world in the coming decades, because it’s a design that self-destructs.  We try to force the ecosystem to adapt to our food production technology, and this doesn’t work.  Instead, we need to make farming adapt to the needs of the ecosystem.  In short, we need a serious revolution in the way we do agriculture — a new philosophy that gives top priority to the health of the land, not to maximizing income by any means necessary.  How likely is this?  Don’t hold your breath.

The subject of this book centers on soil erosion.  In the good old days of muscle-powered organic agriculture, soil destruction took a thousand years to ruin a civilization, on average.  Industrial agriculture is much quicker.  It now keeps seven billion people alive by using soil to convert fossil energy into food.  But the clock is running out on cheap energy, and industrial agriculture has an expiration date.  This will give birth to a new agricultural revolution — the return to muscle-powered farming, on severely depleted soils, fertilized once again by nutrient-rich sewage.  Farm productivity will plummet.  We are close to peak food production now.

Montgomery, David R., Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007.

NOTE: If you find this subject interesting, the first edition of Topsoil and Civilization (1955) is available for free online as a PDF download.  It follows a parallel course, but provides a different banquet of information, while coming to similar conclusions:

http://www.soilandhealth.org/copyform.aspx?bookcode=010113

New Roots for Agriculture

Wes Jackson was born in Kansas farm country, in a place where his grandfather homesteaded.  The land of his birth was being destroyed by agriculture, and this drove him crazy.  Wes and his wife Dana created The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.  Their mission was to create sustainable agriculture, a noble 100-year project that he describes in New Roots for Agriculture.  This book is a great primer on farming — short, smart, and easy to read.

Our education system excels at graduating scholars who are blissfully ignorant about the food they eat.  Opponents of our truly horrid system for the mass production of meat, milk, and eggs often fail to recognize that our system for producing tofu, bean sprouts, and spinach is seriously defective as well.  Almost everything we eat has ecological costs far in excess of the price we are charged, and blissful ignorance keeps us marching down the wrong path.

Jackson has profound admiration for the Amish and Mennonites — America’s finest farmers — because they are religious about farming with exceptional care.  But their soil is not safe from normal hard rains, it washes away, too.  It’s heartbreaking.  No matter how hard you try, it fails.  It’s impossible to win when your primary tool is a plow (and no-till has its own serious drawbacks).

Jackson doesn’t restrict his scorn to modern stuff — agribusiness, pesticides, GM crops, the Green Revolution.  He condemns agriculture in its entirety.  It was a disaster 10,000 years ago, and it’s far, far worse today.  He has referred to it as an “accident,” but one that can be repaired.  We would be in far better shape today if we had continued dining on healthy wild foods, instead of shifting to growing crops on tilled fields.  He sees till agriculture as “a global disease” that is especially severe in the US, and “unless this disease is checked, the human race will wilt like any crop.”

Agriculture is a huge monster with a thousand heads, but it’s most terrible offense may be soil destruction, because it is largely irreparable.  Terrestrial life requires soil, and agriculture is tirelessly sending our finest soils to the bottom of the ocean.  It’s bad, and every farmer knows this.  Unfortunately, the system is designed to reward productivity, not ecosystem health.  Soil worshippers quickly go bankrupt.  Jackson is telling us nothing new, but he is shining a bright light on things that everyone should be thinking about at every mealtime.

There are a few exceptions to the rule.  In Japan and portions of northern Europe, agriculture has been relatively benign, because of unusual combinations of soil types, topography, and climate patterns — not superior farming techniques.  But almost everywhere else, it is a destructive process.  Note that neither of the two exceptions comes close to feeding their own populations.

Looking out his office window, Jackson can observe both heaven and hell — prairie and wheat field.  The prairie is beautifully adapted to the ecosystem, and suffers no erosion problems.  It actually builds healthy new soil.  The wheat field produces more calories per acre, but it is a soil mining operation, an extractive enterprise with no long term future.  Jackson’s core principle is that “no interest or value should be put above the health of the land.”  Let’s make that our planetary motto.

He believes that truly sustainable agriculture is possible.  Annual plants, like corn, wheat, and soy, need to be started from seed each year, which requires annual tilling, and results in significant soil erosion.  Perennial plants survive for a number of years.  Jackson recommends that we switch to perennials for grain production, because this would more closely resemble a prairie, and cause less erosion. 

In his plan, fields would contain a blend of different species of seed-bearing plants, not a monoculture of genetically identical plants.  The system would improve soil quality, maintain its own fertility, conserve water, have few problems with pests and diseases, require lower energy inputs, be more drought tolerant, and produce as much grain as conventional agriculture.  Because yields are highest in the first year, and then taper off, the prairie would have to be plowed and replanted periodically.  He estimates a five to ten year replant cycle.

It’s a radical idea that is much easier said than done.  To enable mechanical harvesting, the mix of species would have to ripen at the same time.  The mix would have to be fine-tuned for every microclimate and soil scenario.  The Land Institute is decades away from having a finished product, and there are no guarantees that it will ever reliably work as intended.  The Soviets had a similar idea back in the 1920’s.  They did decades of research, and then abandoned the project.  They claimed tremendous successes, but refused to show them to outsiders.

Jackson has some concerns about his vision.  The accident of agriculture began when we believed that we could cleverly control and manipulate nature.  And now, he’s attempting to correct the problem by using the same approach — controlling and manipulating nature.  That bothers him.  Sustainable agriculture must live in peace with the ecosystem, not replace the natural ecosystem with a chemical-soaked, soil-mining food factory.

This book was written over 30 years ago, when gas was 30 cents a gallon, and people thinking about Peak Oil numbered in the dozens.  In that era of innocence, you could still dream about plowing up the whole farm every five to ten years, and harvesting prairie-like grain fields with gas guzzling farm equipment.  Because Jackson’s plan requires the use of industrial machinery, it isn’t genuinely sustainable.  It can’t be harmlessly performed for the next 2,000 years, because it is dependent upon the existence of industrial civilization.

If you’re going to dream huge, magnificent, revolutionary dreams for a 100 year project, why not throw in radical population reduction, too?  An unsustainable population is, of course, completely unsustainable.  A much smaller herd would cause much less harm, and nothing is impossible when you’re dreaming. 

And why not dream of a cuisine where grains are not the foundation of the diet?  In another book, Jackson wrote that grains are core to the human evolutionary heritage.  Are they?  Many cultures throughout human history have done just fine with no grain foods at all.  Indeed, cultures that major in domesticated grains have a strong tendency to be over-crowded, belligerent, and suicidal.  Please help yourself to the nuts, berries, and grasshoppers. 

As I was reading, I kept thinking about Richard Manning’s vision of returning corn country to tall grass prairie, ripping out the fences, moving in the buffalos, elk, and wolves, and turning our bakeries into steak houses.  God was in fine form when she created prairie ecosystems, they were an absolutely brilliant design.  Ripping these perfect ecosystems to pieces with moldboard plows, planting grain fields, and exterminating the thriving community of wildness was the opposite of intelligent.

In his 1987 book, Altars of Unhewn Stone, Jackson described a 6,400 acre prairie ranch in the Flint Hills of Kansas that had never been plowed.  It supported 1,700 cattle during the grazing season, and it was mostly managed by a single cowboy.  Fertilizer was never used.  The use of fossil fuel was tiny.  Overgrazing was carefully avoided, and soil erosion was at normal levels for a healthy prairie.  If we replaced the cattle with buffalo, and gave them free range, would this be better for the land than perennial grains?  Could buffalo hunting be harmlessly performed for the next 2,000 years?

Jackson, Wes, New Roots for Agriculture, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1985. 

Against the Grain

Agriculture is one of humankind’s most troublesome experiments, and it is now hopelessly in debt.  It has borrowed soil, water, and energy that it can never repay, and never intended to repay — burning up tomorrow to feed today.  We know it, we keep doing it, and we have dark hallucinations about feeding billions more.  Agriculture has become civilization’s tar baby. 

Richard Manning is among my favorite writers.  He slings snappy lines like: “There is no such thing as sustainable agriculture.  It does not exist.”  Or, “The domestication of wheat was humankind’s greatest mistake.”  And he’s the opposite of a raving nutjob.  In his book, Against the Grain, he hoses off the thick crust of mythical balderdash and twaddle, and presents us with a clear-eyed history of agriculture, warts and all (especially the warts).  Everyone everywhere should read it, and more than once.

Roughly 10,000 years ago, agriculture came into existence in several different locations, independently.  These were lands having an abundant supply of wild foods.  The residents had no need to roam for their chow, so they settled down and built permanent homes and villages.  Over time, with the growing number of mouths, the food supply became strained, and this inspired a habit of seed planting.  As usual, nobody foresaw the unintended consequences of a brilliant new trick, and an innocent mistake ended up going viral and ravaging the entire planet.  Whoops!

Grains are potent foods, because they are rich in calories, and they can be stored for extended periods of time.  Herds of domesticated animals and granaries packed with hoarded seeds came to be perceived as private property, which led to the concept of wealth, and its dark shadow, poverty.  Wealth had a habit of snowballing, leading to elites having access to far more resources than the hordes of lowly grunts.

Countless legions of peasants and slaves spent their lives building colossal pyramids, temples, castles, cathedrals, and other monuments to the rich and powerful.  “What we are today — civilized, city-bound, overpopulated, literate, organized, wealthy, poor, diseased, conquered, and conquerors — is all rooted in the domestication of plants and animals.  The advent of farming re-formed humanity.”

Like mold on an orange, agriculture had a tendency to spread all over.  It tended not to “diffuse” from culture to culture, like cell phone technology.  More often it spread by “displacement” — swiping the lands of the indigenous people.  Evidence suggests that Indo-European farming tribes spread across Europe in a 300-year blitzkrieg, eliminating the salmon-eating wild folks.

Paleontologists study old artifacts.  Examining hunter-gatherer skeletons is brutally boring, because these people tended to be remarkably healthy.  The bones of farming people are far more interesting.  Grain eaters commonly suffered from tooth decay, bone deformities, malnutrition, osteomyelitis, periostitis, intestinal parasites, malaria, yaws, syphilis, leprosy, tuberculosis, anemia, rickets in children, osteomalacia in adults, retarded childhood growth, and short stature among adults. 

Hunter-gatherers consumed a wide variety of foods, consequently they were well nourished.  In farming villages, poverty was common, and the common diet majored in grain, the cheapest source of calories.  The poor in England often lived on bread and water, period.  They almost never tasted meat, and milk and cheese were rare luxuries.  The Irish poor lived on oat porridge.  Later, the poor of England and Ireland switched to potatoes, an even cheaper food.

In twentieth century America, government farm policies drove most small subsistence farms into extinction.  Big farmers, with big farms and big machines, got big subsidy checks for growing commodity crops, like corn.  We now produce vast quantities of extremely cheap grain.  Some of the surplus is exported to other nations, some is made into livestock feed, some is converted into processed foods.  The inspiration for writing his book came suddenly, when Manning returned from a trip abroad, and was astonished to observe vast herds of obese Americans.  Oh my God!  Why? 

Through the wonders of food science technology, we are now able to extract the complex carbs in corn, and convert them into simple carbs — sugar.  Sugar is the calorie from hell, because it is rapidly metabolized by the body, like spraying gasoline on a fire.  Mother Nature includes generous amounts of fiber in fruits and berries, and this slows the rate at which sugar is released to the body.  But there is zero fiber in a cheap 40 ounce soda fountain soft drink, and an immense dose of corn sugar.  It seems like most processed foods now contain added sugar.

Michael Pollan’s fabulous books encourage readers to have serious doubts about industrial agriculture and processed foods.  Manning probes deeper.  He leaves us perceiving the entire history of agriculture in a new and vividly unflattering manner.  It’s an extremely important issue, and one that’s long overdue for thorough critical analysis.

At this point in the game, we can’t painlessly abandon agriculture, and return to sustainability, so we’ve placed most of our bets on impossible techno miracles (God forbid!).  This century is going to provide many powerful lessons on the foolishness of living like stylish Madoffs on stolen resources.  As the end of cheap energy deflates the global economy, the shrinking herd will eventually reach a point where we actually can abandon agriculture painlessly.  It would be very satisfying to finally break out of our ancient habit of repeating the same old mistakes over and over.  Will we kick the habit and joyfully celebrate the extinction of tilling?  Hey, this is what big brains are for — learning.

Not surprisingly, at the end of this book, Manning does not provide a cheap, quick, simple solution.  He does not foresee a smooth, managed transition to a sustainable future — it’s going to be a mess.  He recommends shifting toward foods from perennial plants, like fruits, nuts, and berries — and replacing grain-fed meat with grass-fed.  And, of course, nothing close to seven billion people can fit into a happy sustainable future.  The healing process will be a vast undertaking: “Not back to the garden, back to the wild.”

Manning, Richard, Against the Grain — How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization, North Point Press, New York, 2004.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3436277221231822913#

Richard Manning on agriculture.  This is a 60 minute video of a Manning lecture at the University of Montana in 2008. 

Farmers of Forty Centuries

In 1909, F. H. King visited farm country in China, Japan, and Korea.  He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and the Chief of Soil Management at the U. S. Department of Agriculture.  The purpose of his visit was to learn how the farmers of Asia produced so much food per acre, and the techniques that allowed some regions to be farmed continuously for 4,000 years.  He published Farmers of Forty Centuries in 1911, which documented his findings.

The book provides a fascinating glimpse into a world of low-tech organic farming that was performed with maximum efficiency.  Almost all of the work was performed by human muscle power, and all of the fertilizer came from nutrient recycling — no guano or mineral fertilizers were used.  King observed long daily caravans of peasants pulling handcarts from town to farms, each loaded with 60 gallons of fresh sewage.  Manure and crop residues were carefully gathered and composted.  Weeds and bugs were picked by hand.

Because food production was extremely labor-intensive, most of the population was rural.  The labor was back-breaking, seven days a week.  Following many generations of population growth, the farms were postage stamp sized.  It was not uncommon for ten people and a few animals to be fed from a two or three acre farm.  In lucky times, everyone had something to eat.  In bad years, people starved.  There were no safety nets.  Everyone lived on the razor’s edge.  The surrounding region was stripped clean of everything wild.  The land was under the total domination of agriculture, and every year its health declined.

King, the agriculture wonk, was fascinated by how hard the people worked, and how much grain per acre they produced.  He was not an advocate of workers’ rights.  He reported that the farm folks seemed to be happy and content.  He was eager to bring this system home to America, to provide a significant boost to farm productivity.

King was not an ecologist.  He did not mourn the loss of what these lands had once been — the forests, the grasslands, the wetlands, the fish, the birds, the deer.  He was observing a system that was completely maxed out, approaching the brink of collapse.  Long-lived farming systems have a pattern.  They practice an unsustainable mode of farming until chronic problems emerge, or a new technology becomes available, and then change their ways — to another unsustainable mode of farming, and then another, and then another, until the land is permanently ruined.

Today, the land is worked with machinery and chemotherapy: herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, chemical fertilizers.  Many of the rural folks have moved to town to make cell phones and running shoes.  Much of the former cropland in China has been abandoned, because of serious erosion problems and urban sprawl.  And now, the end of the era of cheap and abundant energy is approaching, and it’s time to start building shit wagons again.

The way of life that King observed is very likely similar to how we will be living in the coming decades, and the rest of the world, too.  He presents us with a time-proven model of how to live when fossil fuels, farm chemicals, and traction animals are not available.  This is not a model of sustainable agriculture.  Yes, it’s absolutely organic, but organic agriculture is almost never sustainable, in the genuine sense of that term.  On the plus side, it’s far less wasteful, polluting, and destructive than organic agriculture practiced on an industrial scale.

King, Franklin Hiram, Farmers of Forty Centuries — Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan, Jonathan Cape Limited, London, 1911.  The full contents of this book can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg.