When I was a little girl, one of my favorite outings was a Sunday drive to the local orchard. Out of the blue my dad would say, “Let's go for a drive,” and we'd all scramble into the station wagon. When the destination turned out to be the orchard, we would rush to the juice machine and push our paper cups under the spout to get a cup of cold, fresh cider.
The autumn air would be filled with the scent of fallen leaves and wisps of wood smoke, and we would always come home with a wooden bushel basket full of apples, or sometimes even two if we were going to make applesauce. None of us wore seat belts and, in fact, I doubt the car even had them—it was the 1960s. We headed home feeling lucky to live in a place where apples right from the tree were so delicious, so fresh, and so close by.
These were our good times. My Eden. My family lived right next door to my grandparents on a working farm where chickens, pigs, cows, sheep, and organic vegetables and fruits were raised. The fields were planted with hay and corn. At that time we knew the only way to get organic food was to grow it ourselves and so we did. And it was good.
Years pass, and now I'm driving my own kids to the local fair. In the intervening years, my grandfather died, having achieved iconic status in the hippie culture (although he himself was not one). My father, too, died, killed in a freak car accident while trying to launch an organic gardening magazine in Moscow. As I drive, I notice that the orchard has been turned into a housing development, and only a few gnarled old apple trees remain at the edges of the manicured lawns. I have often joked that Pennsylvania's biggest farm crop is houses, so while I am saddened to see a housing development there, I am not surprised. Nor, unfortunately, am I surprised when I read in the local newspaper that every one of the 800 water wells in that development tested positive for lead and arsenic. The soil is also contaminated, with levels more than 50 times higher than is deemed safe by the Environmental Protection Agency. The families who bought houses on Macintosh or Dumpling Drive, thinking they were getting their slice of the American dream, now are living an American nightmare.1
It's impossible not to feel for those poor families. Their children have a much higher risk of suffering reduced intelligence, behavioral problems, and health issues. Consider the young couples who thought they would be starting families and now find themselves unable to conceive,2 and may even be facing cancer treatments instead of fertility treatments. Consider the hard working people who might never be able to sell their houses. Perhaps you know other families in similar situations.
Now consider this: We are all in the same situation to varying degrees. We are all being poisoned, contaminated, sterilized, and eventually exterminated by the synthetic chemicals we have used for the last 100 years to grow our food and maintain our lawns, to make our lives easier and “cleaner” and our food “cheaper.”
Most of us probably think our species’ biggest problems, aside from the global economic collapse, have to do with energy and energy independence. The debate over the climate crisis and environmental destruction has been almost completely focused on energy usage—how we drive our cars, heat our homes, and power our affluent and well-lit lifestyles. We haven't yet made the full connection between how we grow our food and the impact it can have on our climate crisis and our health crisis.
The global economic upheaval in 2008 and 2009 has afforded us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild and re-envision an economic model, a government, and a future that is based on what is right for people, the environment, and business. We can and must create a world that is more than sustainable, that is regenerative. Nature, under optimal circumstances (mainly, when we leave it alone) heals itself. Regeneration is necessary to heal the damage we have already done to ourselves and to our environment.
It is time to begin the process of healing.
Over the last century we've all been subjected to an un precedented chemical experiment. While there have been antivivisection movements around the world to protect animals from testing, I've never heard about a single protest to save our children from this vast experiment. Yet there is increasing and frightening evidence that agricultural and other industrial chemicals are causing significant and lasting health problems—problems that will be hard to solve and take time to correct even if we start making changes today. The evidence is starting to pile up.
Do you know what the number one reason is for kids missing school these days? It's not colds or the normal sicknesses that all children go through during their lives. It's asthma.3 Asthma's prevalence increased by 75 percent from 1980 to 19944 (the last time it was officially measured by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Thirty-four million Americans have been diagnosed with asthma, and worldwide the number has reached approximately 300 million. 5 You could say that it's getting harder and harder to breathe on this planet.
What does asthma have to do with carbon?
Let's think for a minute about the human body and its relationship with the planet. Breathing is fundamental to life. We can live a few weeks without food, a few days without water, forever without cars if we must. But take away our air or our capacity to breathe it in and we are dead in minutes.
We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide in an ongoing cycle. Researchers have determined that global warming or climate change is caused primarily by too much carbon dioxide being produced by cars, manufacturing, and other uses of fossil fuels. Our collective exhaling is exceeding the earth's capacity to process it back into air for us to breathe in.
Carbon, the building block of life,6 is one of the most abundant naturally occurring elements on earth—it's in coal and inside our bodies, it's in limestone and in every living thing (which is how scientists are able to use carbon dating to determine the age of artifacts and fossils), it's in oil and it's in the air, it's in wood and it's also in soil. In its densest form, carbon is a diamond. The very same element in a less compact form is charcoal or graphite.
Carbon molecules move all the time—and react readily with other elements, especially oxygen. When one carbon atom reacts with one oxygen atom, the result is carbon monoxide, which is both highly toxic and at the same time useful (it's the blue flame burning on your gas stove, for instance). The carbon monoxide reaction occurs most often when carbon is burned in an oxygen-starved environment, like a woodstove. We have all heard stories about people who went to sleep on a cold winter night but never awoke the next morning because their faulty heating systems—oxygen-deprived, carbon-burning combustion—killed them with carbon monoxide.
When one carbon atom merges with two oxygen atoms, the result is carbon dioxide (CO2). Carbon dioxide is produced naturally by things like volcanoes and hot springs, but it also occurs when you burn carbon. Like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide is toxic in high concentrations and can cause dizziness, headaches, rapid breathing, confusion, palpitations, and at very high concentrations death.7
Oxygen is released into the air by plants through photosynthesis. Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, a fundamental reason that plants of all kinds are essential to our survival. Plants generate oxygen we need to survive. The earth doesn't have enough plants to breathe in and store all the carbon dioxide our activities have been producing and recycle it as fresh oxygen. So we either have to stop spewing out so much carbon dioxide or find ways to “sequester” it—hold it someplace. This is the conundrum we now face. This is the essence of our climate crisis.
There is no shortage of schemes and dreams to solve this problem—including making “biochar,”8 cap-and-trade programs,9 creating vast underground tanks to hold the carbon, or shooting it out of our atmosphere and into space.
But what if we are missing a major piece of the equation? Most discussion on global warming has focused on the energy issue, both because it's the most visible cause of carbon dioxide emissions and, more important, because it's where all the money and political power are concentrated. Oil, gasoline, “clean” coal, solar, wind, biofuel, and all that goes with those things (wars, power grids, automobile companies, bailouts, deals, lobbying, government appointments) have been hogging our attention. And so in our daily confusion, we just take for granted that we will always have food, comfortable lifestyles, cars, and climate-controlled homes.
We take it all for granted—just like breathing.
Now imagine for a minute that someone, maybe Bill Gates, has developed a nanotechnology for sequestering carbon (that is, taking the excess carbon dioxide that causes global warming from the air and holding it in a stable, safe form somewhere where it cannot do any damage to the atmosphere). Perhaps it is a technology that you put in the soil that will suck up all the carbon we have expelled into the air. Bill will set up a new business called Mycrosoft that is backed by venture capitalists and has an IPO scheduled for Year 2. People would be all over this like girls at a Jonas Brothers concert. Headlines in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal would herald this new technology as the savior of our environment. Warren Buffett would buy a piece of the business, for sure. Bill Gates would win a Nobel Prize. All the lucky investors would make a fortune.
The irony is that this cutting-edge, breakthrough technology already exists. It's just that nobody has figured out how to own it yet.
(Actually, it's just a matter of time until Monsanto figures out a way to make money from it. Monsanto has been hosting meetings of the Agricultural Carbon Sequestration Standard Committee, along with the USDA, to develop standards for “validating carbon offsets resulting from soil carbon sequestration of greenhouse gas emission reductions at the soil interface.” In other words, it is trying to figure out how to make a business out of carbon sequestration in the soil. This process is facilitated by a company called Novecta, a joint venture of the Iowa and Illinois Corn Growers Associations that provides guidance on crop protection, “value enhanced crops,” and help farmers understand their role in “producing product that is desired by the food, fuel, and industrial markets.”10
These are smart people who are on to carbon sequestration and trying to get ahead of the market, the government, and the organic community in order to control it and make money from it. And they have billions of dollars at stake in doing so.)
What is this magical, superpowered natural nanotechnology?
Mycorrhizal fungi.
“Myco” means fungus, and “rrhizal” means roots. So Mycorrhizal fungi are literally fungi that grow on the roots of plants.
For more than two decades the Farming Systems Trial (FST) at the Rodale Institute has been studying what happens over time to plants and soil in both organic and synthetic-chemical farming systems. The most surprising finding of all has been that organically farmed soil stores carbon. A lot of carbon. So much, in fact, that if all the cultivated land in the world were farmed organically it would immediately reduce our climate crisis significantly. “These fungi actually build our soil and its health and contribute to taking greenhouse gases out of the air—counteracting global warming to boot,” says Paul Hepperly, PhD, a Fulbright scholar and former senior scientist at the Rodale Institute.
Conversely, soil farmed using synthetic-chemical or “conventional” methods has very little ability to keep or build vital supplies of carbon in the soil. This is not surprising, since farmers often apply fungicides as well as chemical fertilizers and pesticides. These chemicals are meant to kill. As a result of using these chemicals, a farmer is left with debilitated soil that has weakened microbial life, a compromised structure, and a significantly impaired ability to withstand the stresses of drought and flood.
The fact that we haven't noticed these little helpful creatures before shouldn't surprise us. We prefer our nature in the macro—the postcard vistas and views. When it comes to the micro, we'd rather not look or know. We know more about outer space than we do about the ground we live on, about the soil that sustains us. In general we don't care to think too much about soil. Frankly, it's not sexy. In its verb form, it's a synonym for something that's dirty or ruined. Our most regular contact with soil probably occurs when it gets tracked into the house on muddy shoes. Then we get out the bucket and mop and fill it with fresh meadow-scented antibacterial cleaners to purify our homes and protect our families.
In the 1950s, a promotional brochure for DuPont Farm Chemicals trumpeted “Man against the soil: The story of man in his rise from savagery to civilization is the story of his struggle to wrest his food from the soil.” Soil is our enemy?
Television commercials for cleaning products show magnified images of little bacterial villains who are out to get us, making us paranoid and afraid. And yet, according to Lynn Bry, MD, PhD, clinical fellow of pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital at Harvard Medical School, if all the germs and bacteria in our bodies (and all around us) were eliminated, we would be dead within 2 weeks.11 Why, then, are we so intent on wiping them out?
Suspend your fear of dirt and all those things we can't see with our own eyes for a minute.
What we call “soil” is a living thing. Just one tablespoon of soil can contain up to 10 billion microbes—that's one and a half times the total human population. We are learning more each day about what goes on in that soil. The discoveries are surprising—and incredibly important.
Right now, soil scientists understand less than 1 percent of all the living things in the soil. But soil is more like us than like plants because the microbes in it breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Healthy, organic soil also stores massive quantities of carbon and holds it tightly, just like a tree holds on to and stores carbon in its trunk and limbs (which is why all of our forests, including the rain forests, are so important to our survival).
Think about this for a minute.
It's about more than our climate crisis. It's about more than whether or not we can feed all of the people on the planet. When we destroy the normal functioning of our soil and spew more carbon dioxide into the air than we can sequester, we are suffocating ourselves. We interrupt the essential balance between people and the planet, people and nature, and soil and plants. It's much, much graver than melting icebergs and rising ocean levels. It's graver than food riots and graver than dead zones the size of Texas in the Gulf of Mexico. All that excess carbon dioxide is like a giant pillow being pressed down slowly but surely over our faces, and just as surely the earth is losing the ability to fight back on our behalf.
Unfortunately, it's not just the soil and air that have been affected by our chemical contamination. Currently, 60 percent of the fresh water in the United States is used for agricultural purposes.12 And when it's used for chemical agriculture, which is by far the majority, all those chemicals leach through the soil and into the waterways and wells to poison our drinking water, our rivers and streams, our bays and oceans, and, ultimately, all of us. Agricultural chemicals currently account for approximately two-thirds of all water pollution. According to an article in the journal Science, marine “dead zones”—areas in which fish, plankton, crustaceans, and other ocean life cannot survive—have been doubling in size every 10 years since 1960. Sea life in these dead zones experiences hypoxia literally suffocating because the water is starved of oxygen.13
Water is the ultimate recycled product. It rains, the plants drink the water, the soil cleans the water, people dig wells and drink the water, and it rains again. The water we drink every day (even if it purports to come from Fiji or the Evian Mountains in France) has followed this cycle through the earth, humans and animals, and plants an infinite number of times. We rely on natural processes to clean the water. But neither nature nor our high-tech water filters can remove all the toxic chemicals from water. They build up and linger for a long, long time. And they have the potential to poison us. It has been estimated that it would take an immediate 45 percent reduction in the amount of agricultural chemicals applied to our soils to have any impact at all on slowing the growth of the dead zones in our coastal waters.14 Without major global governmental involvement and an outright ban on chemicals however, a 45 percent reduction is unlikely.
An increasing source of concern regarding water is the drugs we use (and often overuse), many of which are made by the same companies that make agricultural chemicals. We are trapped in a cycle I call the “chemical death spiral.” The majority of research funding is being spent on the quest for miracle cures rather than preventing disease. Yet in many cases the same people who are benefiting from selling those “cures” are also contributing to causing those diseases in the first place. Add to that the human impulse to pay for a cure rather than change our unhealthy behaviors and you have a recipe for capitalist success and built-in market share growth that will expand until it all collapses in on itself and stops working.
Arsenic is a prime example. It is still used extensively in farming as a pesticide. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set the safe limit in drinking water wells at 10 parts per billion (ppb), but in many areas around the United States, levels range from 50 to 90 ppb. In some Asian countries, the levels exceed 3,000 ppb. In one recent study published in Environmental Health Perspectives, mice given water containing 100 ppb of arsenic had much more serious upper respiratory symptoms when exposed to the swine flu virus than those mice who had clean drinking water. The same study linked chronic low-level exposure to arsenic to cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and reproductive and developmental defects.15 It was also the poison of choice for murderers in the days before forensic science became available to the police.
Going back to asthma, there is no cause widely accepted by the medical community. Asthma killed 3,613 people in 2006.16 Many studies show a link between urban living, chemicals, pollution, and other environmental factors. The Agricultural Health Study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, has been studying agriculatural workers’ health issues in Iowa and North Carolina since 1994. A 2008 newsletter to participants points out a need for more in-depth study on lung health of farmers because “research shows that farmers and their families may be more likely than the general population to have asthma and other respiratory problems.” The article notes, interestingly, that in general, women who grow up on farms are less likely to have asthma than women who don't grow up on farms. However, “if they applied chemicals, they report more allergic asthma than others in the group.”17
Meanwhile asthma rates increase as the synthetic-chemical agriculture that destroys the soil's ability to function proliferates globally. And it gets harder and harder to breathe.
For thousands of years we've had the luxury of farming, grazing, deforesting, and degrading the land until it was exhausted and turned into desert, and then moving on to new land.
We no longer have that luxury.
Millions of acres around the globe have been destroyed by deforestation, desertification, and destructive farming practices, and if we continue on our current path, there is no end in sight to the devastation.
Now we need to learn how to stay. We need to figure out how to grow our food in ways that regenerate the land, rather than destroy it. We need to find ways to express our natural desires for growth, wealth, and creation without ruining the very sources of our strength and power.
The desire to stay is real. We love our homes, our land, and our countries. We connect with our communities and our shared histories. We love our families and want them to survive. And yet our behaviors often undermine our desires.
Our lands seemed limitless, but now we know we have reached the end of land and most of it is already contaminated and destroyed. A subprime farming crisis is looming on the horizon, yet the majority of Americans still believe that the only way we can feed the world is with synthetic chemistry, biotechnology, and other artificial means.
There's just one problem. The chemical system of agriculture is killing us.