ecospirit

Being able to fix atmospheric nitrogen has enabled us to feed 7 billion people, along with new seed strains from the steady, Herculean labors of Borlaug and his research associates. But nitrogen fertilizer is very costly in terms of CO2 use, and its regular overuse by farmers has created another transgressed boundary, the Nitrogen Cycle. Now, with the prospect of 9-10 billion by the end of this century, GM seeds put us on the threshold of making the next leap in yields, keeping within the Land Use limits that have us crowding the other species in the Cenozoic Ark. This is because GM seeds enable twice the grain yields of organic farming. This is the most important claim in the book. And if, as Lynas suggests, biotech researchers can find a way to induce grainseeds to fix their own nitrogen, that next leap would be assured.

Most of the planetary boundaries are involved with food production, which is not surprising, since feeding our species is the biggest single operation with which we task our host. Climate Change (CO2 emissions, but also methane); nitrogen cycle, land use, freshwater use, toxins, and of course biodiversity loss, which the Planetary Boundaries group ranks as number one, just ahead of climate change. Lynas argues that industrial ag, with the help of GMO's and intelligent use of market capitalism, is far more likely to feed the mass of humanity than traditional agriculture. In addition to huge conservation of land, he points to savings in freshwater usage, though two other boundaries don't fare as well, the nitrogen cycle and toxins. In these cases, though, he feels that new GM crops can help reduce both fertilizer and insecticide/herbicide applications. And he thinks many of the approaches of organic farming, including intercropping and biological pest control, can help in concert with GMO's.

Lynas accepts the importance of thinking ecologically, and grants the fact that this is now a matter of regular policy, business, and political concern - a huge victory for the environmental movement. But as activists, Greens tend not just to educate, but to prescribe, and this is where Lynas believes they once again go wrong in terms of agriculture. Since he was once one of the key anti-GM voices in the UK, he understands the dynamics well. As the journalistic voice of the 29 scientists in the Planetary Boundaries group, he extends the frame of ecological thinking, giving us a more complex and factually accurate basis for judging what are the appropriate tools and methods. For me, this means I must cooly take into account all the boundaries, not just accept the bundle of received opinions intertwined with deeply-held values and gut passions which have guided me heretofore.

I am a longtime organic advocate and organic gardener. And definitely anti-GMO. More than three decades ago, reading Jacques Ellul, I was struck by the gravity of the genetic encoding issue. If we started messing with that, I felt, we were crossing a line, eating not only from the Forbidden Tree, but creating an entirely new tree from which we would eat still more. Monstrous hubris, no?. Now we are routinely playing god, modifying the gene sequences to fit our needs, in agriculture as well as medicine. Monsanto, the biggest player in agricultural seedstock and chemical weed management, has recently won the World Food Prize (mistakenly called the “Nobel Prize for Agriculture”). Yet Monsanto is Greens' most hated agriculture corporation, the model for all that is wrong in industrial agriculture. If Lynas is right, I must be willing to rethink the once-sacred boundary of plants' genetic codes.

Beyond the issue of organic purity, what about the huge human population all these agricultural breakthroughs has afforded? Have we not already transgressed the number of human beings that the biosphere can sustainably support? Lynas insists that there is no numerical boundary for our population. Rather, we can reproduce as much as we would like as long as the nine boundaries are respected. But this is the man who cheerily says we have “only” broken three of the boundaries. Borlaug, on the other hand, lived under the Malthusian shadow. He felt his discoveries would provide a “temporary success in mankind's war against hunger and deprivation,” a breathing space in which to deal with the “Population Monster.”

My own boundary for human population, a gut number after reading many accounts from anthropological and green farming perspectives (while dismissing futurists and demographers, whose numbers I simply could not abide) is around 2 billion people – where we were at the dawn of modern agriculture. My guiding assumptions as I came up with this figure were principally using organic farming, leaving enough habitat for a significant portion of our Cenozoic cousins to survive, and enough fresh water for our species' activities, within reasonable limits that would preserve water for the other 8-10 million species. No matter that Donella Meadows, lead author of Limits to Growth, figured we could feed 10-12 billion. Bless her heart, she was sharp, but died an incurable optimist. That was not the kind of world I wanted to live in.