Hairspray, GMOs and the Road to Perdition -- a Philosophical Gardening Primer

“Ecology is a dirty seven-letter word to many people. They are like heavy sleepers refusing to be aroused. ‘Leave me alone! It's not time to get up yet!’”

--Frank Herbert

The most egregious failures of humanity to deal with our unhealthy relationship to the world around us take place under our very noses.  We remember encountering stories in 1970s about the effect of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer, and overnight the use of aerosol spray cans (most notably for hair spray) became taboo items… yet to get that ever desirable feathered hair look every guy and gal in the 70s and 80s (no longer able to slather aerosol-fueled-hairspray in a guilt-free manner) instead used liberal amounts of pump-spray hair products, and never thought once (let alone twice) about the idea that just because the aerosol problem was solved did not mean there were no other petrochemical evils invoked by our vanity.

And, of course, no one wears their hair that way any more anyway, so what did we really gain by this behavior?  Not much, other than a few more baby steps toward ecological perdition.  We avoided adding pollutants to the stratosphere by cutting back on one kind of chemical, but we kept right on truckin’ with adding petrochemicals to our water supply, not to mention all the environmental harm caused in the manufacturing process for both hairspray and the plastic containers it came in.

We are not going to spend much time beating this particular dead horse, however.  Overuse of manufactured goods and services (particularly the petrochemical variety) has become obvious to all but the most obtuse observers – we know we use too much, we know we need to kick the oil habit, yes, yes, Myrtle, we hear you, you’ve been standing in that particular bully pulpit, squawking into the same old bullhorn, for long enough.

Instead, we would like to suggest today that there are other stories to which we do not pay much attention, but which have every bit as much environmental significance as our abuse of the natural world in the form of pollution and neglect.  And we’re not talking about an ad hoc, line-item review of human behavior; we are talking about a review of how we think about what we do.  Essentially, by ignoring the nature of Nature, by not realizing that it is an interconnected system, or, rather, a series of interconnected systems, we have allowed unimaginable degrees of vulnerability to develop all around us.  Our basic philosophy of how we fit into the world, and how we relate to it, is, to be blunt, messed up.

We were reminded of this idea recently by seeing a story oft repeated in the Facebook feeds of many of our friends in the skeptic community – a story on the science behind the health effects of GMO (genetically modified organism) crops.  The science, these stories report (and many of our skeptic friends believe as a consequence) suggests that there are no deleterious health effects to consuming GMO crops.

This is, on its face, a ludicrous idea, but not for the reason most folk who discuss GMOs (either as advocates or as antagonists) would think.

Eating a GMO crop is not particularly unhealthy, in general.  As a generic concept, a GMO crop is not especially different from a crop whose genetic makeup has been altered via the cultivation process.  When it comes right down to it, all corn (maize to our non-U.S. readers) is “genetically modified” – there is no “natural” maize.  Proto-Mayan farmers in the dawn of time tended and teased a grassy grain in Central America until it became corn.  It would not exist without human intervention.  And outside of an extreme allergic reaction, we cannot imagine any reason why eating it would be any more dangerous than eating any other cereal crop.  It would be possible through genetic manipulation in a lab, one would suppose, to create a poisonous variety of corn… but then, a patient farmer with time on his hands for this dubious enterprise could undoubtedly do the same thing through selective breeding.

So, eating an ear of corn with a modified genetic makeup is not, in and of itself, unhealthy.  However, the act of eating is not an isolated event.  It happens as part of a system.  And it is here that GMO crops are not only unhealthy, they are downright perverse and deadly.

The point behind the vast majority of genetic modifications to crops is seldom to increase the nutritional value of the plant or animal being modified.  No, most GMOs are so-modified because the engineers involved are attempting to increase productive yield – in the case of GMO corn or vegetables, by decreasing the amount of crop loss from insects and drought, or by changing the natural timeline for fruit set (making tomatoes which require less sunlight, or changing the temperature requirements for either fruit set or for ripening, for example).

We have already mentioned one of the problems with this approach in a previous posting about the effects of neonicotinoid poisons which some GMOs have allowed plants to create on their own – essentially, some GMO crops kill any insects who encounter them, including not only the grasshoppers, aphids, etc. who have been the bane of farmers since farming began in roughly 10-15,000 B.C.E., but also beneficial insects like bees, without whom all of agriculture (and, by extension, all civilization) would pretty much come to a halt.

Even without singling out one particular GMO, though, the entire approach can be called to task for a fundamental philosophical failing.  Increasing production sounds like a good idea, but… it is actually a catastrophe waiting to happen.  Growth for the sake of growth is the ethic of the cancer cell, and that is more or less what agriculture has become – an ecological cancer. 

Large scale agribusiness has created huge swaths of land which are monocropped, and we have seen time and again that uncontrollable large scale destruction is the inevitable result.  One would think that the devastation wrought by the Dust Bowl years would have given us pause to think about the entire approach we were taking to the question of how to feed ourselves… but the lesson we learned from that specific

catastrophe was that specific conditions could be controlled.  Farmers did not stop planting acre after acre of the same kind of crop (which was the real problem); instead, they changed tillage methods, which only solved a symptom.

And GMOs are much the same:  the problem is that large scale agriculture creates systemic failures, as it replaces natural ecosystems with unnatural ecosystems of limited biodiversity and tremendous vulnerability to the slightest entropic change.  Instead of treating this disease (ecological cancer), GMOs treat symptoms.  Just like chemical fertilizers do.  Just like overpumping slow-charging aquifers… just like building dams on low-flow river systems… just like applying indiscriminate pesticides… just like hundreds and thousands of other engineered adaptations to ecological failures, GMOs are not bad because they are in and of themselves bad, they are bad because they are part of a cancerous philosophy.

Like teenagers trying to imitate the hair styles of Farrah Fawcett or a young John Travolta (because, let’s get real, even John Travolta doesn’t want to be like old John Travolta), corporate farmers pay attention to form and not to substance.  The overapplication of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and excessively pumped

water are all problems of which agribusiness is well aware… and to their credit, much like fashion-conscious teenagers of yesteryear, they are doing what they can to throw out those things which have been proven to be bad.  Unfortunately, just like teenagers who switched from one bad cosmetic to another, agribusiness is merely shifting from one kind of bad behavior to another.

The real problem is vanity.  We are, as a species, mired in the same self-absorption we so easily see on every teenager’s bathroom counter.  We think of increased production as “the end result”, without realizing that there is no “end” result.  There is no “end” – we are part of a series of cycles, part of an endless flow of systems, everything we do, everything we are, everything we take, everything we discard, comes from someplace and goes someplace.  And, on a closed planet with a strong gravitational pull, all those someplaces are connected with each other.

Instead of thinking about problems in production as “problems” or even as “in production”, we should think about what is happening in the context of how natural systems are attempting to balance themselves.  A useful way to visualize this is with a reexamination of the concept of entropy.  The 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics essentially posits that systems move from any state lacking thermodynamic equilibrium to a state in which there is equilibrium. This is often mischaracterized as moving from “less chaos to more chaos” or “less randomness to more randomness” – which is often true, but it really misses the point.  The point is, any system moves from a state in which small changes in one variable cause big changes in all the other variables to a state in which  even small changes to any variable are not likely.

Put still another way, things tend to change a lot until they naturally progress towards a state in which they don’t change much.  Every time humans try to control nature, we have to relearn this lesson – as children, we try damming rivulets of rainwater runoff coming out of a puddle, only to discover that our little dams made of mud are vulnerable to erosion, and eventually wash away.  As grownups we discover that the gutters we put on our roofs to direct rainwater runoff get clogged by leaves and other debris, and if we do not constantly intervene, the natural state of the universe slowly but inexorably adds “roof damage” to the list of reasons our houses – which we foolishly think of as “permanent” structures – will be reduced by the sands of time to rubble.

I am Ozymandias, King of Kings

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

 This way of thinking sounds pessimistic to some; those people are probably no fun at parties, is our guess.  There is nothing dour about recognizing how things work.  In fact, it’s quite the reverse.  To give an agricultural example… when there is an infestation of insects on your tomatoes, the cynical approach of the last century has been to think of some way to poison the bugs without poisoning ourselves – sometimes unsuccessfully, but… as we have suggested all along, maybe even the “successes” should be viewed as “failures” because, let’s be honest, they are.

So… just let the bugs eat my tomatoes?  Myrtle, you’re nuts!

Au contraire.  The problem isn’t the bugs.  The problem is that the system is out of balance.  Putting it back in balance means taking the tomatoes out of isolation, where they are vulnerable to the implicit dynamic inequilibrium of monocropping.  In plain English, plant some flowers, you fool.  Nasturtiums, sunflowers, marigolds, a few herbs like basil, catnip, mint… create a more vibrant, biodiverse ecosystem in your garden and… Presto!  Your heirloom tomatoes are every bit as healthy as your neighbors’ GMO tomatoes are, and they are prettier, to boot.  And you will be much more prepared to deal with the next scenario of inequilibrium, whatever it may happen to be, because you have treated the cause not the symptom.

Trust us, it’s much more fun to be smug than depressed.  Ozymandias was a schmuck.  So is John Travolta, when it comes down to it.

Happy farming!

Be Sensible, Not Common

“Common sense is that which tells us the world is flat.”

-Stuart Chase

Any time a politician tells you something is “just common sense” it’s time to lock up your daughters and hide the chickens, because the drivel that is about to follow will invariably place your personal safety at risk in a multiplicity of ways, from your economic welfare to your very physical wellbeing.

What part of this is "Common Sense" and what part requires someone
 to have made an observation not readily seen from the road?

The world is a complex place, home to myriad interlocking processes about which our five senses (six, if you foolishly include the “common” one) provide almost no direct information.  We seek simplicity, “straight talking” and “unmuddled answers” but the truth is that any simple answers are based on fable, and “straight talking” hardly ever has any evidentiary basis.  As for “unmuddled answers” the reality is this – honest answers to most questions seldom accomplish anything more concrete and settled than yet more questions.

E.M. Forster once quipped “beware of muddle” and, while he is one of our favorite authors, the fact remains that his advice is worthless outside the context of personal relationships, and even then relates only to the question of personal commitment.  In terms of certainty of knowledge?  Embrace muddle – it is the only refuge of truth.  Yes, we should rather betray our country than our friends… but we cannot say that we know with certainty anything for which there is not a verifiable testing framework, a way to validate the hypothesis.  When those hypotheses have been tested, however, for God’s sake, don’t ignore the results.

We are wading into these philosophical waters for a particular reason, naturally, and that is to attempt to bridge the gap between “common sensers” (climate change denialists, lawn care specialists, monocropping agriculturalists, etc.) and cold hard truth.

Merely presenting evidence frequently makes no impact upon the opinion of those who cling to the notion that truth should be “plain and simple”; the claims, for example, that global warming is a hoax (!) fly square in the face of overwhelming mounds of not only theoretical reasoning, but actual verifiable empirical measurements of air and (more significantly) ocean temperatures which are virtually incontrovertible evidence of the idea that global temperatures are not only rising, but rising at a rate never before seen at any point in the paleometeorological record.  Essentially, if you are politically conservative, you are statistically highly likely to ignore this evidence, regardless of your education level, and truth be damned.

Another excellent example of proponents of “common sense” ignoring the myriad complex processes around them involves anoxic waters, the so-called “Dead Zones” in our lakes, streams and oceans where a lack of oxygen causes nothing at all to live.  First reported by shrimp fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the phenomenon has grown dramatically over the years, such that in places like Lake Erie, there are only tiny slivers of water in which any fish at all live.

The phenomenon of an algal bloom, of course, can occur naturally due to dramatic changes in wind and ocean currents, floods or droughts upstream at the origin of freshwater streams which discharge into saltwater bodies, and a host of other variables.  However, these natural sources of eutrophication (the rapid increase in the nutrients on which algae thrive, which in turn depletes the water of oxygen) do not account for the massive increases in dead zones throughout the world, nor do they explain why the Gulf of Mexico has seen the occasional hypoxic area transform from a some-time and highly localized event to a permanent description of a vast area ranging from the Texas coast just south of the Brazos River discharge eastward to Mississippi and Alabama.

Vast sums of research dollars, hundreds and thousands of experiments, and a wide ranging array of analysts have been applied to the problem over the last fifty years, and the causes of the problem are now more than obvious.  There are numerous factors contributing to the creation of  dead zones throughout the world, but far and away the most noxious is fertilizer runoff.  The Mississippi River is the drainage zone for a little over 40% of the continental United States; much of that area is the so-called “corn belt” – and corn production is dependent almost entirely upon the presence of nitrogen in high concentrations in soil, a state which cannot exist in monocropped agriculture without constant yearly application of high quantities of industrial fertilizer, the very sort which is most likely to wash away disproportionately.

Corn production in the central U.S. has been increasing dramatically since the 1950s; nearly all the forested regions in the Missouri Valley, for example, have been stripped of trees and converted to corn fields, and thanks to the ill-conceived “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007” still more will be converted to corn production for the purposes of ethanol production.  Even before this stupidity was foist upon us, 1.7 million tons of potassium and nitrogen were being delivered to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River every year.  The size of the Gulf dead zone has essentially doubled since the late 1980s; it is not likely to shrink any time soon, absent permanent and devastating drought conditions throughout the Midwest.

This is not a thermal picture; it is a picture of areas where no fish
or shellfish or coral reefs, etc. can live -- red means dead.

Meanwhile, there is ample empirical evidence suggesting how dead zones may be reversed.  The collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of centrally planned economies in the former communist states of Eastern Europe caused fertilizer use in the nations bordering the Black Sea to drop to virtually zero.  The Black Sea dead zone had, prior to the 1990s, been the biggest in the world.  It shrank to practically nothing between 1991 and 2001.  Fishing – which had completely disappeared from the Black Sea in the latter half of the 20^th century (you can’t catch fish who don’t exist) is once again becoming a way of life in the region.  Likewise, the North Sea dead zone has decreased by about a third since nitrogen and other industrial emissions along the Rhine River have been cut.

Similar progress is not likely in the United States any time soon, however, for the simple reason that any attempt to salvage our ecology is met with incredulity and vitriol about how environmentalists are “out to destroy the economy”.  It is hard to see how it is “common sense” to argue that the economy of a dead region is much of an economy, but so it goes.  The Scots aphorism is perhaps apropos here:  “’tis an ill bird wha’ fouls its ain nest.”

In any event, the fishing economy of the Gulf of Mexico is on the order of at least $10 billion dollars.  Absent appropriate management of environmental policy (meaning banning fertilizer) all $10 billion of those dollars (and by all means, feel free to adjust for inflation) will simply disappear in coming decades.  Not trying to be hyperbolic here – just extrapolating from the data.  Science passes no judgments, it merely provides the tools for analysis, and very few of those studying the data have come to any other conclusion than this:  we ignore natural processes at our own peril.

The scope and scale of our impact on the world around us has always exceeded our ability to visualize and conceptualize, and that reality is becoming increasingly apparent any time we step back and attempt to understand any particular phenomenon.  There is a simple reason people used to believe that the world was flat – when you look from horizon to horizon, it seems flat.  Indeed, without the evidence provided by mathematical analysis of a series of observations and experiments, one would have to be a buffoon to believe anything other than that the world was a vast disk, immense perhaps, but certainly not round.

The truth was, is, and ever shall be much greater than what we can take in first hand.

Because of that “simple” reality, we have an obligation to toss common sense on the dung heap of no-longer-respectable notions, and take a long hard look at the impact we are having on the world around us.  What we eat, how and where we live, what we wear, it all matters. 

We at Myrtle’s place have railed against lawns for a while now, because they are bad for us all (killing bees, destroying soil tilth, causing nitrogen runoff, generally looking icky) but that’s really just a jumping-off point.  We are well aware that the vast majority of Americans think lawns are not only “okay” but that they are essential.  The same holds true for all sorts of other things that most folk take for granted, and giving up those harmful things will not at all seem like “common sense” to most people.  But it’s the only kind of sense that matters, if we want to continue living lives worth living.

And on that happy note…

Happy farming!