Page 17 - Winter2010

It’s important for us to understand where meat and ate the algae. Truth be told, you have
they’re coming from in a mutually respectful to eat ten pounds of golden rice in order to get
way. I admit that from my perspective as a Chris- the same amount of carotenes that you would get
tian libertarian environmentalist capitalist luna- out of one serving of a vibrant green bokchoy or
tic, it’s actually hard for me to understand how arugula.
these people can go down to the Presbyterian or So non-toxic, small-scale agriculture can’t
the Lutheran church, sit in the pew and take the feed the world? Let me paint a picture for you.
sacraments all the while dumping toxic chemi- In the early 1800s, a famous Austrian chemist
cals on God’s earth. How can they sit there and named Justus von Liebig began doing vacuum
not wrestle with the moral question of whether tube isolations to find out what things are made
it matters that we encourage the pigness of the of. In 1837 he introduced his findings to the world
pig? The great questions of life, they don’t even when he declared that everything in life—people,
wrestle with. How did this happen? plants, animals, everything—is just a rearrange-
And so in my years of going to hearings ment of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous.
and rubbing shoulders with people, including N-P-K—that’s all we’re made of. That notion
my own neighbors, who think I’m a bio terrorist, gradually developed into what we know today
I’ve come to appreciate the essence of what they as chemical agriculture.
think. Now fast forward to about 1900 and we have
I’ve made a list of twelve assumptions that a great panic in the world because Laura Ingalls
we need to understand if we are going to ap- Wilder finished going West, and there was no
preciate how they think and if we are going to more West. Australia and the United States had
formulate an appropriate response—because it’s both run out of virgin prairie for Europeans to
important for us in our daily life with friends, at exploit, and so there was a worldwide panic about
the Little League game, at the elders’ meeting, how we are going to feed the world. With the
at public gatherings, to be able to stand toe to toe Dust Bowl and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of
and articulate our position in the politics of food. Wrath, everyone was asking how we were going
to maintain soil fertility. This question absolutely
ONE: YOUR SYSTEM occupied the world’s mind between the years of
CAN’T FEED THE WORLD 1900 and 1930. This coincided with the height
This is the number one assumption from the of the industrial revolution, so it was easy to
greater culture out there: your system can’t feed embrace an industrial solution to the problem of
the world. If our system can’t feed the world, then declining soil fertility—just apply N-P-K fertil-
we’re all just living in a pipe dream. How can izer, that’s all we had to do.
we take a moral road advocating a system that In contrast to Justus von Liebig’s mechanical
can’t feed the world? People tell me that because view of life, others proposed the radical idea that
I advocate a non-toxic agricultural system, I must food, farming and biology are fundamentally
want people to starve. non-mechanical systems. If the wheel bearing
One day I sat down at a banquet in Wash- goes bad in your car, you can’t just leave the car
ington state, and the guy next to me sits down parked on the side of the road, let it rest and come People tell
and just looks at me and says: “Why do you want back ten years later to find that the bearings have me that
half a million Orientals to be blind?” Turns out healed. The difference with, and the beauty of,
he was a great advocate of genetically engineered biological systems is that they are dynamic, they because I
“golden rice” to provide vitamin A to Asians, be- can heal, and aren’t we glad for that? A number advocate a
cause otherwise they would go blind. Of course of thinkers at the time, such as Aldo Leopold, non-toxic
the reason lots of Asians are short of vitamin A is John Muir, and John James Audubon, recognized
because they are using chemicals from the West a biological mystique embedded in the physical agricultural
that have nuked all the bokchoy and arugula and world. They noted that we differentiate between system, I must
Chinese cabbage that were native around the rice mechanisms and biology. And so we have these want people
paddies, along with the tilapia that ate the snails two radically different schools of thought, each
and along with the ducks that laid eggs and made pursuing a separate line of research. to starve.

WINTER 2010 Wise Traditions 17

74240_text.indd 17 12/13/2010 2:13:56 AM