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.
1 comment:
On further reflection, quarantine and inspection were not enough. Many, if not all, huge ecological mistakes were discovered after the fact. Any time you move a foreign organism into an ecosystem, it’s impossible to accurately foretell how the ecosystem will respond. Marlatt had better foresight than Fairchild, but not enough.
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