Staving Off Extinction
Biodiversity is more than a catchword, a liberal conceit, or a sentimental love of nature. It's a matter of life and death. Pulitzer Prize winning science editor Holcomb B. Noble reviews the new definitive work on the subject.
| More Food Faces Change in this issue |
| The Price Is Fright Is America's reliance on cheap food over? Looks that way, as an onrush of complex factors unloose a perfect storm of spiraling costs. Agriculture policy and World Bank veteran August Schumacher Jr., recipient of this month's Silver Spoon Award, scrutinizes the spinning weather vane with an eye to the future. |
| The Price of Purity Convinced that an ever greening public is willing to pay a little more, a young Argentine restaurateur is determined to take his organic concept national. |
| Seed Capital Heirloom tomatoes are much more than a menu item du jour or a glorious still life at the local farmers' market. They are part and parcel of preserving our agricultural heritage. Katy Keiffer reviews the definitive new book on the subject. |
| Awake at the Switch At a conference in Spain assessing the effects of global warming on wine production, Alan Tardi discovers that what's bad news for some is good news for others. |
| In for the Short Haul Careening fuel costs and demand for eco-friendly product are causing sharp swerves on the food distribution highway. Katy Keiffer spots some green lights at the end of long-distance tunnels. |
| Plowing Toward Utopia Christopher Styler reports on the efforts to transform the American farm into a model of environmental enlightenment, community good, impeccable ethics, and, yes, gainful employment. |
| Massing Links Judith Weinraub speaks with environmentalist and social activist Paul Hawken about offtrack food practices and policies and what can be done to reverse them. |
| Weather Watch Agriculture savant Frederick Kirschenmann assesses the potential effects of climate change on farming in the United States and ways to ensure adequate food supplies in the future. |
| Silver Spoon August Schumacher Jr. |
Bugs, it turns out, don't need people. But people desperately need bugs, bacteria, fungi, plants, and countless other organisms that make up the biodiversity of life on planet Earth. The bad news is that this biodiversity is now in deep trouble. During the past 50 years, a nanosecond in the scheme of time, people—and their increasing love of red meat and bread and cheese and cereal and bacon and eggs and condos in the Wild West or on land that used to be farms or orchards or lay idle but teemed with life beneath the surface and their love of fancy cars and gasoline and superhighways and their love of reproducing their own species—have used up one-fifth of the planet's arable land, almost 90 percent of its large marine fisheries, and one-third of its forests. To make the bad news worse, the world's population during the same brief period of time has almost tripled, from 2.5 billion people to 6.5 billion. All this has been so damaging to the other species, on which, again, our survival depends, that we are driving them to extinction.
That is the consensus of some 100 scientists, whose studies have been collected, added to, and edited by Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein in Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity. Chivian, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, is founder and director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School; Bernstein is a fellow researcher at the center. The book, the Silent Spring for frogs and fishes, lacks Rachel Carson's poetically driven narrative, but it's clear, readily understandable, and its message is compelling. And, let me say, general comprehensibility is not always the leading characteristic among some serious and well-meaning scientists for whom English is a second language. Sustaining Life is a clarion call for saving biodiversity, indeed, for preserving life on Earth. It reports one simple but disappointing effect of species extinction in a species of frog discovered in the 1980s in the rain forests of Australia. The gastric brooding frog is the only amphibian known, as with humans, to raise its young early on in the female's belly. She swallows her fertilized eggs. After the hatched tadpoles are allowed to develop sufficiently, she delivers them to the world through her mouth, and somewhere along the line tadpoles secreted substances that inhibit both acid and pepsin. This secretion might have led to better treatment of human peptic ulcers, which afflict some 20 million Americans. But the gastric brooding frog has become extinct.
The rates of species extinction may by recent calculations be as much as 1,000 times greater than they were before humans dominated the planet. It's projected that world population density will increase from 50 people per square kilometer to 70 people by 2050 and that population densities in land suitable for agriculture will rise by 10 times that rate. These statistics, combined with poverty, climate changes, and inevitable damage to biodiverse organisms, raise, among other questions: How are we going to provide for ourselves? How are we going to find enough to eat?
The good news is that we may soon be eating genetically modified food that's more nutritious than what we eat now and that it may be produced by genetically modified plants more resistant to the increasingly hostile environment. In one study reported in Sustaining Life, scientists inserted genes of a disease-causing bacterium into maize, potatoes, and cotton. They found that these Bt genes (derived from strains of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis) modified the genetic blueprint for the plants' construction and growth in ways that made them more resistant to insect pests and able to thrive despite exposure to certain herbicides. The authors cite two 2005 studies reported in Nature Biotechnology and in Pest Management Science. Rice has been similarly modified. Scientists inserted in rice plants the antioxidant compound beta-carotene, from carrots and other orange and yellow vegetables, that our bodies can convert into Vitamin A. Attempts to improve the traits of broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage are currently being made, something I for one as a child would have more than welcomed.
"Genetically modified foods hold great promise that they may provide one of the solutions to help feed the growing world populations," Chivian and Bernstein write. But the promise is not necessarily the reality. Great care must be taken to see that new solutions don't become the new problems, a point Chivian and Bernstein are quick to acknowledge. Modified organisms can also escape from greenhouses, fields, and aquatic cages into natural ecosystems and disrupt their biodiversity. Farmed salmon have escaped to threaten their wild salmon step-cousins in the Atlantic, and biologists and environmentalists are angry about current marine farming in Chile, where they say salmon pens are too crowded, too close together, and lack proper sanitary controls. Chivian and Bernstein say the decisions about the health and safety of the new methods must be made not on politics or vested interests, or on widely quoted but often inadequately studied assumptions, but on scientific grounds. "We must be sure that the science supporting these decisions has been carefully and objectively obtained and that it has been fully aired so that people have complete access to all the facts." This book goes a long way toward reaching those goals.
