The Forgiveness of Nature



I grew up in the battered remains of a once vast hardwood forest in Michigan.  I was lucky to spend my childhood wandering in a small surviving remnant.  My forest was a sacred place.  To me, the western plains felt dry, empty, bleak.  But my oldest ancestors evolved on the arid savannahs of Mother Africa — grassland with scattered brush and trees.  Grassland was where the big game hung out, and they were good to eat.  Recently, I studied horse history, and learned a lot about the vast steppe grasslands of Eurasia.  They were also home to big game and nomadic hunters.

I began to get curious about grass.  There are maybe 12,000 species of grass, and they inhabit climates between the arctic and equator.  More than half of the calories consumed by humankind come from three grasses: rice, wheat, and corn (maize).  Others include oats, barley, millet, sorghum, sugar cane, and bamboo.

Clive Ponting noted that in the last 300 years, the world’s grassland has increased 680 percent.  The forests of the U.S. Midwest were destroyed to grow corn, wheat, and livestock.  The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed to create cattle pasture.  So were the rainforests of Britain and Ireland.  The list is incredibly long.  I discovered that a British grass worshipper, Graham Harvey, had written a passionate book, The Forgiveness of Nature: The Story of Grass. 

Nature “forgives” humankind’s tireless vandalism — deserted roads, villages, and battlefields are eventually covered with a healthy carpet of greenery.  “Like the horse and hyena, Homo sapiens is first and foremost a creature of the grass,” wrote Harvey.  The Bible says “All flesh is grass,” because all flesh is mortal: green today, brown tomorrow; but God is eternal.  In 1872, John James Ingalls of Kansas offered a different interpretation.  “The primary form of food is grass.  Grass feeds the ox: the ox nourishes man: man dies and goes to grass again; and so the tide of life with everlasting repetition, in continuous circles, moves endlessly on and upward, and in more senses than one, all flesh is grass.”

Harvey described the heartbreaking story of the American prairies.  Farmers first arrived during an unusually rainy period.  They plowed under lots of turf, tapped the fantastic fertility of the rich black soil, and had fantastic harvests for a while, until drought returned, and the Dust Bowl blew away millions of tons of degraded soil.  Within 50 years, the party was over.  Farming continues today, with significant yields, but the heavily diminished soil is kept on life support by fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation, and fossil fuel.

Native Americans enjoyed the abundance of the prairie for free, hunting herds of 50 million bison.  Observers described one herd that was 50 miles (80 km) long and 25 miles (40 km) wide, maybe 480,000 animals.  American colonists now use the prairie to raise 45 million cattle, in a capital intensive, fossil fuel powered enterprise that degrades the grassland.  Bison evolved on the plains; they grazed and then moved on, allowing the grass to recover.  Cattle moved too little, and they were heavily overstocked.  Regions of the once-rich ancient turf were “grazed practically to dirt.”

Montana writer Richard Manning summed it up.  “Seventy per cent of the grain crop of American agriculture goes to the livestock that replaced the bison that ate no grain, and one wonders, what is agriculture for?”  Cattle don’t need grain, but farmers are subsidized to grow enormous surpluses.  Harvey lamented the rape of the prairie, “It was a biological powerhouse, rich in wildlife and with a productivity no modern farming system could match.  Yet Americans waged a ceaseless war on this priceless asset, and now it has all but disappeared, its life snatched by the quick cut of steel or slowly sapped by overgrazing.” 

Harvey carefully described the many ways in which evolution ingeniously created grasslands that could survive almost any challenge — except civilization.  They created soil-building humus, which retained moisture and accumulated nutrients.  Many plants have very deep roots, up to 32 feet (10 m), which bring up nutrients.  They can tolerate fire, drought, and grazing.  In fact, they need grazing, to nip off the first shoots of woody shrubs and trees that would compete for sunlight.

Back in the good old days, on the steppe and prairies, the bison and other grazers manicured the turf, and the wooly mammoths controlled the woody plants.  With the mammoths and mastodons gone, and elephants fading, humans in many regions around the world have adapted “firestick farming” to expand grassland area, control woody vegetation, improve the vitality of the forage, and attract game.  Burning off the dry grasses eliminates hiding places for game, and provides a banquet of roasted grasshoppers and other delicacies.

Grasslands are arid, receiving just 10 to 30 inches (25-76 cm) of rain per year.  In wetter prairies, grass can grow tall enough to hide a horse.  Lands getting less than 10 inches are desert.  More than 30 enables forest.  Britain is wet, not arid.  Its grasslands are manmade.  The land was once largely a rainforest.  Over the centuries, nomadic pastoralists gradually cleared trees to expand meadows for their cattle, sheep, and pigs.

In Harvey’s mind, this was the golden age, an era of wonderful freedom and easy living — before the arrival of farming, drudgery, serfdom, and oppressive nobility.  It doesn’t occur to him that wild Britain was even freer, when the ancient forest thrived, home to red deer, wild boar, wolves, and aurochs, and the Thames was loaded with salmon.  Tragically, agriculture displaced the nomadic herders, “setting Britain on its momentous path to ownership and exclusion, enclosure and dispossession, industrialization and urban living, to factory farming and genetically modified foods.”  Harvey screams “Why?” 

Sheep sped the Brits down the road to ruin, a sheepwreck.  The climate was ideal for producing wool of exceptional quality, which became a major industry, and made many people very rich.  This led to the enclosure movement, during which peasant farmers were evicted from the land, so their fields could be converted into valuable sheep pasture.  The wool gold rush generated much of the capital needed to launch the industrial revolution. 

Many of the evicted farmers migrated into rapidly growing urban slums that were crowded, filthy, and disease ridden.  They were joined by hordes of desperate refugees from the Irish Famine.  This generated widespread discontent that could not by soothed in gin palaces.  The fat cats got nervous, fearing unrest and revolution.  Grass came to the rescue.  Liverpool, New York, and other cities began building parks, providing islands of green sanity amidst the industrial nightmare world.

Delirious from perpetual growth fever, Brits joined the Americans in racing down the dead-end road of industrial agriculture — synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, big machines, fossil fuel, monocultures, feedlots, mega-farms.  Maximum yields were the goal, <bleep> the topsoil, the ecosystem, the grandchildren.  This explosion of pure idiocy drove poor Harvey bonkers.  He goes to great lengths to enthusiastically educate readers on the magnificence of healthy topsoil, and the many ways that spectacularly stupid people foolishly destroy it.

His grand vision is a wise transition to organic mixed farming, a three-year rotation of winter grain, spring grain, and a fallow of grasses and red clover — combined with regular application of all available manure.  While this is better than the current norm, there are some important drawbacks.  Every trainload of wheat shipped away to London includes essential nonrenewable nutrients that will never be returned to the farm.  The soil nutrients sent to London stay in London, where they are mixed into toxic sludge.  Anything less than 100 percent nutrient recycling is an enterprise with an expiration date.

Britain usually has gentle rains, so less soil is washed away than in the U.S., where torrential downpours are common, and soil erosion is a huge problem.  Harvey asserts that mixed farming can heal the wrecked soil, rebuild the humus, and restore the millions of tiny creatures that thrive in healthy soil.  If people did this everywhere, enough carbon could be sequestered in the soil to snuff climate change.  Listen to this: “A return to sound husbandry in agriculture would end global warming without the need for motoring cuts.”  Oy!

 When my Norwegian ancestors settled in Iowa in 1879, folks were astonished by the coal black topsoil that could be up to 12 feet (3.6 m) deep.  This super-fertile soil was created by thousands of years of healthy tall grass prairie.  Today, this treasure is nearly gone.  Plows are turning up yellow patches of subsoil.  A wise elder once concluded that the plow has caused more harm to future generations than the sword.

Harvey explores many other subjects.  His book is easy to read, and out of print.  It will inspire you to psychoanalyze the suburbanites who spend thousands of dollars obsessively maintaining spooky freakshow lawns that look as natural as Astroturf.  They must spend their nights having sweet dreams of chasing antelopes across the endless prairies.

Harvey, Graham, The Forgiveness of Nature: The Story of Grass, Random House, London, 2001.

The Population Bomb

In 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich achieved infamy by publishing The Population Bomb, one of the most controversial eco-books ever printed.  Ehrlich has been condemned to spend eternity with Thomas Malthus, in a dungeon reserved for doom perverts.  To this day, professors still use the two lads as great reasons to never take seriously anyone who asserts that there are limits to growth.  We all know, of course, that humankind has no limits.  We have technology!

Actually, Malthus never predicted catastrophic famine.  He simply stated the obvious — when population reaches overshoot, the death rate will automatically rise to restore balance, one way or another (starvation, disease, conflict).  A thousand people cannot prosper if forced to share ten cheeseburgers a day.  The overshoot ceiling rises when food is abundant, and falls when food is scarce.  Malthus was not a doomer.  His cardinal sin was declaring the obvious — that there are limits to growth.

Ehrlich, on the other hand, actually did predict catastrophic famine, and soon.  The first lines in his book are, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.  In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”  Millions indeed starved, but not hundreds of millions.  Everyone agrees that this prediction was inaccurate or premature.

When Ehrlich was writing, India was sliding toward catastrophic famine.  Only ten nations produced more food than they consumed in 1966.  In America, the postwar baby boom led to a freakish population spike of 55 million in 20 years.  The streets of 1968 were jammed with scruffy rebels protesting the Vietnam War, and our totally unhip way of life.  It was hip to be loud, brash, and vigorously opposed to the status quo.

At the same time, the Green Revolution was just getting rolling, and no one could foresee how well it would succeed at temporarily boosting grain production.  Norman Borlaug was the wizard of the Green Revolution, and his holy mission was to reduce world hunger.  He hoped that the new technology would give us 10 or 20 years to resolve our population issues.  We didn’t even try.  Those who recommend strict population control measures are called callous.  But the leaders who irresponsibly blew off an amazing opportunity were also callous.

Naturally, much more food led to many more people.  In 1968, there were 3.5 billion people, by late this morning there were 7.2 billion.  World hunger sharply increased, and many other problems worsened.  The Green Revolution had wonderful intentions, but its unintended consequences far exceeded its benefits, because we refused to seize the opportunity to confront and subdue the 800-pound gorilla.

The bottom line here is that Ehrlich’s predictions of catastrophe within a specific timeframe were wrong, but he succeeded in bringing a lot of attention to real and growing problems — population, pollution, and environmental destruction.  At the same time, he succeeded at pissing off almost everyone. 

Liberals hated him because he wanted to set population goals for poor nations, and withhold food aid for those who did not meet their goals.  He contemplated the notion of withholding food aid to nations that had zero chance of becoming self-sufficient.  He did not endorse the “right” of families to breed as they pleased — a right that was not handcuffed to responsibilities.

Religious people hated him because he believed that contraception and abortion should be legal everywhere, and that all children should receive rigorous training in sex education and family planning.  They hated him because he believed that fetuses were nothing more than potential humans.

Environmentalists hated him, because he was a lightning rod for criticism.  They believe that his fondness for bold statements made it hard for folks to trust anything that greens said.  He was a popular scapegoat to blame their failures on.  If Ehrlich had never been born, would we be living in a sustainable utopia today?

Conservatives hated him because he wanted to regulate pollution and pesticide use.  He advocated compulsory population control, because voluntary family planning has never been successful at stabilizing or reducing population.  Ehrlich detested their insane obsession with perpetual economic growth, which thrived on population growth, and disregarded ecocide.  But they loved him for being so loud and so bizarre.  He made it easy for them to label all greens as hysterical nutjobs.

Modern society is suffocating in information.  Everyone in a hunter-gatherer clan knew the entire collection of their cultural information.  Today, we don’t know a millionth of our cultural information, because knowing it all is impossible.  So, climatologists are freaked out about rising temperatures, while the masses are blissfully ignorant.  Petroleum geologists are freaked out about the looming specter of Peak Energy, while the masses are not.

Within the realm of his specialty, Ehrlich could perceive enormous threats that society was unaware of, and this freaked him out.  He was compelled to rattle cages.  If he had written a dry, mature, scholarly discourse on population, with 300 footnotes, it would not have reached a general audience and provoked lively and widespread discussion.  In modern society, suffocating in information, you get attention by flaming and screaming, like the election ads for candidates.  Whether or not it is honorable, it works.  In my opinion, Ehrlich’s opinions were sincere, and a bit inflamed, but not devious fabrications.

Ehrlich’s book was read by many, and it drew needed attention to a crucial issue.  A taboo subject was let out of the closet, for a while.  Others were inspired to write books.  Green organizations boldly called for action, but many checkbook activists promptly revolted by putting away their checkbooks.  So, the issue of overpopulation was handed over to Big Mama Nature to resolve, and she will.

While his ideas continue to outrage many, they do have a basis in cold, hard reason.  We could reward couples who don’t marry until 25, and those who space their children at least five years apart.  Childfree people could be eligible to win lottery prizes.  “There has been little effective criticism of the medical profession or the government for their preoccupation with death control… death control in the absence of birth control is self-defeating.”

It would have been cool if humans were purely rational, realized their mistake, and took bold action to divert disaster.  Ehrlich sighed.  “By now you are probably fed up with this discussion.  Americans will do none of these things, you say.  Well, I’m inclined to agree.”  He wrote because there was a wee chance for success.

Don’t read this book to learn about overpopulation and its side effects.  Hundreds of newer books are far more up to date.  Read this book to contemplate morals, ethics, taboos, ideologies, and communication.  Contemplate his critics, and why they are so determined to banish discussion on an issue that is a major threat to humankind and the planet (see the reader comments on Amazon.com).  The anger and pain that continues to swirl around this book provides a fascinating study in human nature — long-term survival vs. a mentally unstable culture. 

Ehrlich is an intelligent and charismatic fellow.  In 2008, on the fortieth anniversary of The Population Bomb, he reread his book and blushed a bit.  He had learned a few new things in the preceding forty years, but his overall impression was that in 1968 he had been far too optimistic.  He presented his current perspective in a lecture at Stanford, From the Population Bomb to the Dominant Animal (54 min.).

Ehrlich, Paul R., The Population Bomb, Ballantine, New York, 1968.

Other reviews on population-related books:  The Ostrich Factor, The Coming Famine, The Rapid Growth of Human Populations 1750-2000, Living Within Limits, Old Fashioned Family Planning.