The Food Explorer



Cue up the marching band, majorettes, flag-waving veterans, and cheering crowds.  The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone is a proud celebration of American greatness.  The hero of the story is David Fairchild (1869–1954), a botanist and agricultural explorer.  Working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, his group was responsible for sending home seeds and cuttings of thousands of plants from nations around the world.  The goal was to expand the variety of crops grown in America, and build the biggest, most profitable, industrial agriculture system in human history.

The devious villain in the story is Charles Marlatt, a childhood acquaintance of Fairchild who had grown up to be an entomologist.  He detested what Fairchild was doing, because the tons of samples sent home to Washington were not quarantined and thoroughly inspected.  So, plant diseases and pests were free to flee and discover America.  Imported insects included the codling moth, Hessian fly, asparagus beetle, hop-plant louse, cabbage worm, wheat-plant louse, pea weevil, Croton bug, boll weevil, San Jose scale, gypsy moth, brown-tail moth, Argentinian ant, alfalfa-leaf weevil, and so on. 

Marlatt understood that plant pests and pathogens were potentially as dangerous to society as a cholera epidemic.  They could spread rapidly and cause enormous damage.  Farms were getting thrashed, and Marlatt had stunning photos.  It was nearly impossible to control problems once they were released into the ecosystem.  It would have been far more intelligent to zap them before they left the starting gate.  Fairchild scoffed at Marlatt’s hysterical paranoia.  Economic benefits exceeded economic costs, he believed.  America could solve any problem.  Full speed ahead!

The spooky fanatical weirdo in this story is Fairchild’s all-star food explorer, Frank Meyer.  In deepest, darkest Asia, he often walked 20 miles (32 km) per day, through regions where locals intensely hated white folks.  He had frequent confrontations, beatings, and near death experiences.  He obsessively gathered and shipped thousands of plant seeds and cuttings.  Folks who comprehended the botanical risks of importing exotics gave him a nickname, Typhoid Mary (Google her). 

In his book Grassland, Richard Manning talked about the unintended consequences of introducing European cattle to the western plains, where the climate and natural forage were not ideal for them.  Efforts to introduce traditional European plants failed, so Meyer was assigned to send back plants from arid regions of Asia.  Crested wheatgrass was one of his discoveries. 

Following the Dust Bowl, and other agricultural wipeouts, the government aggressively planted crested wheatgrass for erosion control.  It thrived on the plains, aggressively replacing native vegetation with colonies that were nearly monocultures.  Unfortunately, in the winter months, this wonder grass retained little nutritional value, and the mule deer, elk, and antelope starved in endless fields of grass.  Manning lamented that “Meyer brought with him botanical bombs that explode even today.”

The plant importation fad introduced a number of bummers.  Spotted knapweed suppresses native grasses, and has now spread to 7 million acres (2.8 million ha).  Grazing animals avoid it.  Leafy spurge now inhabits 2.5 million acres, only some types of goats can eat it.  The result is biological deserts that are expanding, and extremely expensive to eliminate — essentially impossible, according to Manning.

Anyway, my curiosity about Meyer led me to discover Stone’s book.  It’s easy to read, and portrays the food explorers as heroes who devoted their lives to making America great.  If, like most Americans, school taught you little about environmental history, Stone’s story is warm and fuzzy, a pleasant tale of courage, progress, and wealth creation.  Fairchild became a celebrity, and hung out with the rich and famous.

One of the biggest eco-catastrophes caused by imported plants was the chestnut blight.  Fairchild, Marlatt, and Meyer were fully aware of it.  It was first noticed on American chestnut trees at the Bronx Zoo in 1904.  At that time, chestnuts were a canopy species in 8.8 million acres (3.5 million ha) of eastern forest.  The trees were called “the redwoods of the east.”  Some grew to 150 feet (46 m) high, having trunks up to 17 feet (5 m) in diameter, and a canopy 100 feet wide.

Every year, mature trees dropped an abundance of nuts, food for squirrels, wild turkeys, deer, bears, raccoons, and grouse.  The wood was rot resistant, easily split, did not warp or shrink, and was useful in many ways.  Both the Indians, and the hill people who followed them depended on these trees.  Hillbillies could raise free-range hogs in the forest commons at no cost, and fill their smokehouses with chestnut flavored pork.  Cartloads of nuts were hauled to town and sold for cash, “shoe money."

Spores of the blight fungus were transported by birds, mammals, insects, and breezes.  As the contagion got rolling, it could spread as far as 50 miles (80 km) per year.  The blight damaged the inner bark, blocking the flow of water and nutrients to the tree above ground.  Within 40 years, the American chestnut was a threatened species.  Four billion trees died.  The wildlife disappeared, and many hill people had to abandon their subsistence way of life.*  One reported, “Man, I had the awfulest feeling about that as a child, to look back yonder and see those trees dying; I thought the whole world was going to die.”

In 1904, nobody knew if the fungus was native or imported.  Meyer identified the source of the fungus when he found infected chestnut trees in China in 1913, and Japan in 1915.  He noted that these trees rarely died from the blight, and some were very resistant.  The food explorer lads did send back some chestnut seeds and cuttings over the years, but they weren’t the first.  In her essay on the introduction of the blight, Sandra L. Anagnostakis** noted that nurseries were importing Japanese chestnuts as early as 1876.  Many seedlings were sold by mail order long before 1904.

Marlatt argued that the blight could have been prevented if the federal government had wisely quarantined and inspected all imported plants.  Fairchild though this was a ridiculous idea, impeding the speed of progress for no good reason.  Marlatt eventually won.  Congress passed the Plant Quarantine Act in 1912, and inspections were the domain of the Federal Agricultural Board, which Marlatt controlled.

Stone devoted about four sentences to the chestnut blight catastrophe.  In Stone’s account, Fairchild dismissed the blight as a triumph of progress — an existing vulnerability had been eliminated by importing the superior blight resistant chestnuts from Asia.  Hooray!  Fairchild wrote a different version of this story in his 1938 book, The World Was My Garden.  When he eventually comprehended the incredible devastation, he was stunned.  He wrote, “I regretted any feelings of impatience I may have had towards their quarantines and inspections.”

As we chaotically plunge into the twenty-first century, with seven-point-something billion humans furiously beating the stuffing out of the planet’s ecosystems, all the red idiot lights on the dashboard are flashing.  At the same time, the vast majority of consumers seem to believe that perpetual growth is both possible and desirable, life as we know it won’t get blindsided by the end of the fossil fuel era, and wizards will find a way to feed eleven billion.  I’m beginning to wonder if it might be wise to devote a little time to sniffing reality’s butt.

It took thousands of years for Old World cultures to develop the skills and technology needed to obliterate their wild ecosystems.  By the time these folks washed up on the shores of America, they were fire-breathing masters of the art of destruction.  Uninvited immigrants colonized a vast continent and threw open the floodgates to legions of biological nightmares.  Environmental history is loaded with horror stories caused by primate travelers — potato blight, anthrax, Dutch elm disease, white-nose fungus, bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, influenza, HIV, and countless others.

The tallgrass prairie and much forest land has now been stripped of indigenous life, plowed, and planted with sprawling monocultures of genetic clones — absolutely perfect paradises for pests and pathogens.  Here comes the sprayers.  Here comes the tumors.  There goes the topsoil.  The parade marches on.  Hooray!

Stone, Daniel, The Food Explorer, Dutton, New York, 2018.

* Historical Significance of American Chestnut by Donald E. Davis.

** Chestnuts and the Introduction of Chestnut Blight by Sandra L. Anagnostakis.

The Dying of the Trees

Long, long ago, before the 1970s, thousands of people would make a springtime pilgrimage to the Catoctin woods of Maryland to enjoy the flowering dogwood trees.  Today, the tourists no longer come, because 79 percent of the dogwoods are dead, and the rest are dying.  A mystery fungus created a rapidly spreading blight, which penetrated the bark and blocked the flow of water and nutrients.  It killed new dogwood seedlings.  The experts were puzzled.  Could the trees have been weakened by acid rain, smog, increased UV radiation, or a changing climate?

The dogwood die-off captured the attention of Maryland resident Charles Little, a conservationist and writer.  It inspired him to spend three years visiting 13 states, observe dying trees, interview experts, and read papers and reports.  Then he wrote The Dying of the Trees.  It was a heartbreaking project, because everything he learned was grim, and worsening.

On one trip, he visited Hub Vogelmann, in the Green Mountains of Vermont, a region downwind from the industrial Midwest.  Three-quarters of the spruce trees were dead, and there was no evidence of insects or disease.  In tree ring studies, vanadium, arsenic, and barium began appearing in the wood around 1920.  Following World War II, the wood also contained copper, lead, zinc, and cadmium.  Aluminum is commonly found in forest soils, but acid rain breaks down aluminum silicates, enabling the metal to be absorbed by plants.  It kills the roots.  Vogelmann was sharply criticized for suggesting that the problem was related to acid rain, an emerging issue by 1979.

Acid rain was killing forests in Germany and Eastern Europe.  It was killing the sugar maples in New England, Ontario, and Quebec.  In the Appalachian region of Quebec, 91 percent of the maples were in decline by 1988.  The rain was ten times more acidic than normal.  It was leaching the phosphorus, potassium, and magnesium out of the soil — essential nutrients.  In some places, the livers and kidneys of moose and deer contained so much cadmium that the Canadian government issued health warnings.  In glaring defiance of the evidence, the U.S. Forest Service reported that the maples were healthy and improving.

Little visited Rock Creek, near Beckley, West Virginia.  It was home to a remnant of the mesophytic forest, bits of which are spread across several states.  This ecosystem may be 100 million years old.  It was never submerged by rising seas, or erased by glaciers.  It was the mother forest for the trees now living in eastern North America. 

Sadly, mature trees at Rock Creek, in full foliage, were falling over, their trunks hollowed out by rot.  Fungi, supercharged by excess nitrogen, were now able to penetrate the bark.  Trees were producing up to 80 percent fewer seeds.  John Flynn was among the pioneers in reporting the acid rain story to the national media.  He was harshly criticized by both industry and the U.S. Forest Service.

Once, on a visit to England, Little met an elderly sailor who had visited Oregon as a young man.  The immense virgin forests had amazed him.  Little did not tell the old fellow that those ancient forests were mostly gone now, and that industry was eager to destroy the ten percent that remained.  It took the Brits a thousand years to exterminate their ancient forest.  Americans largely did it in one generation, thanks to better technology and mass hysteria.

The vast white pine forests that once stretched from Maine to Minnesota never recovered.  Deciduous trees took their place.  Ancient forests are not renewable resources.  “In clear-cutting such forests, then, we not only kill the trees that are cut, but we annihilate the possibility of such trees for all time.”  Forests are incredibly complex ecosystems, and logging disrupts a state of balance that took eons to develop.  Many wildlife species cannot survive on cutover lands.  A monoculture tree plantation is not a forest, and is more vulnerable to cold, drought, pests, and diseases.

Little visited Colorado, where many forests were brown and dead.  The original forest was exterminated about 100 years ago.  The second growth that replaced it was a different mix of species, mostly shade-tolerant, which were more vulnerable to spruce budworms.  These trees were densely packed together, thanks to a strategy of fire suppression — promptly extinguishing every wildfire.  The dense growth was attractive to budworms, which weakened the trees.  Then the bark beetles were able to finish them off.  Dead forests loaded with fuel invite fire.

Native Americans controlled fuel buildup with periodic low-level burns, but this is impossible today, because of the massive accumulations of fuel.  There is no undo button for a century of mistakes.  The government cannot afford to thin overgrown forests and remove the excess fuel from many millions of acres, so the stage is set for catastrophic fires.  There will come a day when the cost and availability of oil makes modern high-tech firefighting impossible.

Forests often die in slow motion.  A speedy decline might take 25 years, and be invisible to casual observers.  Forest death increased in the twentieth century, following the extermination of ancient forests.  It worsened after World War II, as pollution levels increased.  Climate change is likely to cause additional harm.

A vital lesson in this book is to never automatically believe anything.  Master the art of critical thinking, and always question authority.  Our culture is out of its mind, and many of its deeply held beliefs are bull excrement.  Each generation innocently passes this load of excrement to the next, because it’s all they know.

Here’s my favorite passage: “A hand will be raised at the back of the room.  ‘But what can we do?’ the petitioner will ask.  Do?  What can we do?  What a question that is when we scarcely understand what we have already done!”

In a series of stories, Little’s book informs readers that industrial civilization and healthy forests do not mix.  But it barely scratches the surface of the harms caused by the logging industry, or the many other industries.  When I proudly received my golden meal ticket from the university, I was dumber than a box of rocks.  I was well trained to spend the rest of my days striving for respect and status by shopping the planet to pieces.

Today, as the clock is running out on industrial civilization, it’s essential to better understand what we have already done.  We won’t discover every fatal defect, because our way of life is overloaded with them, but the ones that we can see are more likely to be addressed.  We are on a dead end path.  We would be wise to outgrow our habits and illusions, and remember how to live.

Little recommends the obvious — sharply reverse population growth, end the extermination of forests, plant billions of trees, and stop industrial pollution.  He cautions readers that we’re well beyond the point where the damage can be repaired.  Our task today is damage control — learning, growing, teaching, and mindfully reducing the harm we cause each day.  The book does not conclude with the traditional slop bucket of magical thinking.  His straight talk is refreshing.

Little, Charles E., The Dying of the Trees, Viking, New York, 1995.