Elon Musk, he of the electric car, and Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, are both talking about a move away from Earth as it deteriorates and life becomes increasingly problematic. Musk wants to colonize and reshape Mars, Bezos talks of life pods wandering space, each with its own life support system, whatever is all meant by that. This is astonishing. Consider this:
• They are libertarians. That means this will operate on private wealth. It also means that you and I are expressly not invited.
• They propose running away-by a few wealthy-as a solution to a problem.
• Having both benefited from and in their turn being a major driving force in the destruction of Earth’s gifts, they propose to do better by moving into space.
Any reasonably mature and self respecting culture would take the microphone away from these two and laugh them off the stage. We, of course, are not that culture. The fact that the public stage is being given over to them and others like them demonstrates the devolution of our lives and culture into so much reality television. This fantastical journey is really only imaginable by ignoring who and what we are. The result, if it ever in any real sense happens, will be a smear of garbage, pollution and ruined lives across the cosmos. What makes us think we can live there when we have so obviously not yet learned to live here?
And not only do we not know how to live here, we appear to have forgotten most of what we formerly learned about it. This is glaringly obvious looking at farming and agriculture in the context of the climate. Take as an example the current turmoil in dairy. The move, fostered by the benign “oversight” of those in charge of antitrust enforcement is toward non-land based dairy factories closely linked with huge processing industries. So while the cows congregate 10,000 at a time under huge roofs, other, much smaller dairies, many of whom are thrust off the milk truck by the consolidation call it quits. The result of this across dairy country in southeast Minnesota and Wisconsin is that the pastures and especially hayfields on these smaller dairy farms are now in corn and beans and terribly exposed to the increasingly torrential rainfalls happening due to climate change. Just driving through these areas in June will reveal cuts and ravines in the hillsides and large deltas of soil at the bottoms of hills where the runoff slowed down. It is impossible to see this and sleep peacefully at night if you are a farmer. Even on the “non highly erodible” and relatively flat soils here in Chippewa county of western Minnesota, the marks of serious erosion are there to see for anyone who will look.
The government — both the regulators and the extension services — should have been thinking ahead. After all Exxon Mobil did, when they saw where the climate was headed in the 1960s and went to work obscuring oil’s role in its deterioration so as to preserve their bottom line. Agriculture has a role in it as well, having to do with the steady centuries-long burning off of organic matter which is about 58% carbon, putting carbon that belongs in the soil into the air instead. This burning off effect is the result of tillage made necessary by annual crops.
There is no good reason why the smaller dairy farms, the ones quitting by the hundreds every month due to the flood of corporate milk, should not have been grazing their cows on swards of perennial plants. Some perhaps were, most were simply smaller but land-based versions of the 10,000-cow dairy factories. There is, in fact, no reason at all that I, in my 70s and farming all my life, should not have been subjected to a steady drumbeat of information out of the extension service all that time urging conversion toward more perennial systems in milk and meat production. And there is no reason that our universities should not have been studying in detail the role of tillage and cropping rotation on carbon loss. Instead of developing grain producing perennial plants, they have wasted time developing annual crop plants resistant to certain herbicides.
Much can be done to mitigate some of the damage of annual crops. Cover crops and mixes of cover crops targeted at improving the soil may be interseeded or seeded as a followup. This keeps roots in the soil more of the year. But perennial plants, properly managed, will begin to install carbon from the atmosphere back into the soil, where it is very much needed to help boost soil life and improve the water holding capacity of soil. What might this change do to mitigate some of our torrential rains? Farming could begin to move from its current role as carbon source to become instead a carbon sink. Agriculture could begin to be thought of as “lungs of the earth” in the same way the tropical rain forest is.
So this is the situation. A huge company both recognizes oncoming climate change and acts over more than a half century to protect its profits from that reality. A farming culture neither admits the reality of changes in the climate nor acts to deal with it. The public universities do little to focus on the situation or to communicate that focus to the public. The company is protecting its profits. The farming culture and its information services is inactive in the face of a developing situation which will adversely impact its grandchildren. And that culture and public is not merely practicing status quo ante but rather actively pushing to make agriculture more destructive of our common home than it already is. This cannot continue.
The difficulty is that, like so much of the entire economy, agriculture has most of the good ideas on one side and nearly all the money on the other. The conventions and conferences of alternative agriculture, including grass agriculture are full of eager young people wanting more than anything a chance at a little land to try out some of their ideas.
Meanwhile, the Congress is responding to the commodity groups and the corporations that have the money to be heard. So to address the problem will require radical change, that is, change at the root of the system. Anyone who is politically aware in a rural area sees this. The representatives serve the wealthiest farmers while being pretty much unwilling to listen to anything that would benefit the rural people as a whole, from health care for all to widely distributed opportunity on the land. Standard electoral politics will evidently not change this. After all, some of us have been trying for a very long time.
Nature, wounded as she is, has powers to effect change, much of which we will not like. We humans cannot see ahead very well. Increasingly anger, resentment and hatred drive our politics, making it useless. Yet we know that changes in our individual lives are by themselves insufficient. Some of the necessary change is not possible on an individualist basis, needing at least a supporting farming community. The sense of foreboding grows.
Jim Van Der Pol farms near Kerkhoven, Minn. A collection of his columns, “Conversations with the Land,” was published by No Bull Press (nobullpressonline.com).
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2019
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