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 Destruction of California

Raymond Dasmann (1919–2002) was a professor of conservation biology, and the author of many books.  The poor fellow suffered from a devastating mental disturbance known as rationality, a condition that affects dozens of people in the civilized world.  He frequently experienced painful attacks of foresight and common sense.  Living in California, he was on the front line of the world war against the planet, an ecological blitzkrieg.  “When this war is finally won, the consequences will be as severe and irreversible as though we had fought a nuclear war,” he said.

Dasmann was born in San Francisco, in an era when there were few cars, the neighborhoods were pleasant, and men, women, and children felt perfectly safe, day or night, almost everywhere.  He was cursed to be born whilst the fossil energy blip was skyrocketing toward its climax, creating a bewildering whirlwind of immense change.  Young folks perceived the whirlwind to be normal, while older folks remembered better times, and were sickened by the senseless destruction, and the profound decay of society.

He wrote The Destruction of California when he was 45.  During his lifetime, the state’s population had grown six fold, spurred by a tsunami of immigration.  This was not good.  In the book, he described the various crises that were propelling the state toward disaster.  He wanted people to better understand the consequences of perpetual growth.  The book was published in 1965, 50 years ago.

Before colonization, California had been a cool scene for thousands of years.  Over time, the native hunter-gatherers learned how to live in a careful and respectful manner, and the ecosystem enjoyed jubilant health.  Their children were lucky to receive superb educations, which inspired them to live mindfully, in balance with the land.  The lasting marks that tribes left on the land were mostly mounds of discarded shells.

Later, the Spanish arrived, built missions, enslaved the Indians, introduced contagious diseases, and forced the natives to accept a foreign religion obsessed with world domination.  With the invaders came livestock and shipments of hay, which included the seeds of Spanish weeds.  The weeds were mostly annuals, and they were well adapted to thriving in a Mediterranean climate similar to California.  The grasses indigenous to California were primarily robust perennials that provided an excellent source of nutrition.

During drought times, there was less vegetation for the Spanish livestock to eat, leading to overgrazing.  The weed seeds sat patiently in the dust, waiting for a year when the rains returned.  Sadly, the weeds won.  The indigenous grasses are nearly extinct now.  Decade by decade, the quality of rangeland declined.  “In some places all that was left was worthless tarweed, star thistle, or cheat grass.”  Today, few people cruising through ranch country are capable of perceiving this glaring ecological train wreck.

Eighty years after the Spanish settled, a swarm of Americans rumbled into California, and they were out of their minds with Gold Fever.  They didn’t enslave Indians; they shot them.  Indians had been known to trade gold for glass beads, because gold was not super-big juju in their culture.  But gold made white folks crazy.  They would kill for it.  Gold was a magical rock that gave crazy people enormous illusions of grandeur.  With hydraulic mining, they channeled flowing streams through high-pressure nozzles and washed away entire mountains to extract the shiny rocks.

Early visitors to California were overwhelmed by the incredible abundance of wildlife.  Portions of the Central Valley looked like the Serengeti — herds of tule elk, pronghorn antelope, and black-tailed deer.  There were many wetlands.  “Here were birds in the tens of millions that darkened the sky when migrations sent them winging northward.”  In 1852, a man in Humboldt sat on a hill and observed 40 grizzly bears below.  The swarm of gold digging crazy people inspired other crazy people to get into the meat business via full-scale industrial hunting.  By 1910, the wildlife was in tatters.

Crazy people also became giddy with greed at the sight of 4,000 year old redwoods, 27 feet (8m) in diameter.  They sharpened their axes and went wacko.  Profits were invested in technology that enabled them to cut more and more.  There was no plan to leave anything for future generations.  The plan was to make as much money as possible, as fast as possible.  Floods washed away highways, bridges, and entire communities.  Fish perished in the silt-choked streams.  When Dasmann was writing, it looked like the old growth would be gone in 16 years.  At the same time, the community of Arcata was fiercely resisting the proposed creation of Redwood National Park.

Hordes of well-educated elites, who did not suffer from rationality, were delighted to get rich quick promoting the rapid growth of ghastly megacities in arid regions having minimal freshwater resources.  As the consumer mobs swelled in size, more streams were dammed, new aqueducts were built, rivers were pumped over mountains, and ancient water was removed from aquifers.  Nobody questioned this.  “Since growth is by definition progress, and progress is by definition good, this is deemed to be answer enough for any but a fool.”

Dasmann was driven out of his wits by this highly contagious pandemic of Get Rich Quick Fever.  Yet he was not an eco-revolutionary who recommended turning the clock back 400 years.  He didn’t preach the gospel of ecological sustainability.  His dream was quite modest; stop making things worse — think!  He worried about environmental destruction, the growing populations of people and automobiles, and the ongoing threat of water shortages.  Today, we can add to this list climate change, economic collapse, and growing limits on energy and other resources.  It’s 50 years later, and the crazy growth has not stopped.

The Indians lived in the same land for thousands of years without destroying it.  This is called “primitive.”  If whites had never arrived, the land would still be incredibly healthy.  But the blitzkrieg arrived in 1769, and the destruction has been accelerating at an exponential rate.  This is called “progress.”  The root problem here is not genes, but culture.  During the pilgrimage from womb to grave, every human floats in the currents of culture, like fish swim in water.

Indian children received superb educations because they lived in rational cultures that were mindful about not rocking the ecological boat.  Today’s kids are taught to work hard, shop like there’s no tomorrow, and leave the bill for their descendants.  Those who rock the boat the hardest earn the highest social status.  This screwy ritual is reinforced by teachers, preachers, peers, parents, the media — everywhere, all the time.  To break out of this toxic trance, a cultural meltdown is required.  Maybe we’ll be rescued by a beneficial calamity.

It’s difficult to question the madness.  We have a hard time comprehending how destructive and irrational our society is.  It’s nearly impossible to wrap our heads around the notion that the Indians enjoyed a way of life that had a long future.  It’s very hard for us to understand ecological intelligence, and desire it.  Thinking outside the box requires us to summon our inner power and leap into the unknown.  We have nothing to lose.

Dasmann, Raymond F., The Destruction of California, The MacMillan Company, New York, 1965.