The soil beneath the stalks is plainly visible, all hint of weediness rounded up by chemical sprays. Nothing extraneous is allowed to grow here; everything has been stripped down to its least diverse form. Whatever is left of the biotic community is harnessed and tuned to the production of one star: the cash crop. Plumes of diesel smoke and soil billow behind their rigs, like live volcanoes spewing. The soil plumes bring me back to a conversation I had at the Ravalli County Fair with a stoop-backed rancher who had farmed in Kansas during the Dust Bowl.
He described windrows of soil so high that the cows used them like ramps to walk over the fences and out. Only then can I find the trail home. We saved a seed, planted it, and rejoiced when it grew up, spilling its harvest right into our hands.
We celebrated our release from the gamble of hunting and gathering, and brought bumper crops of grain and babies into the world.
The more babies we produced, the more land we had to put under production to feed our brood. In our quest for ever-increasing production, we removed their inborn defenses. We isolated them from mixed species groupings, narrowed their genetic diversity, and gutted the health of their soil.
Of these three, say historians of agriculture, eviscerating soil was our greatest misstep. Topsoil is essentially nonrenewable. Once eroded or poisoned, it can take thousands of years to rejuvenate itself. Rather than opt for a self-sufficient, perennial plant community that would batten down this black gold, we opted for the rip-roaring growth of annuals, which requires us to disturb the soil each year. Each time we plow, we simplify the soil, taking away some of its capacity to grow crops.
We break apart its intricate architecture and wreak havoc with the dream team of microfauna and microflora that glues it together into colloids, or clumps, of soil and organic matter. This clumping is vital; it leaves air channels like veins throughout the soil, giving water a way to sink down deep. Soils that are plowed too fine or packed too hard lose their colloids, and with them the art of retaining water.
Parched air sucks the ground dry, and when the winds blow, talcum-powder topsoil coats the hoods of cars in town. Instead it glances off and runs in sheets, rills, and rivulets, murky and bloodstained, to the sea. The blood is soil, the living plasma of the Earth, sloughed off at a rate of five to one hundred tons per acre per year—a massive heist.
Some Palouse Prairie wheat fields in Washington, on the shameful side of that equation, have the potential to lose one inch of topsoil every 1. In Iowa, up to six bushels of soil are washed out to sea for every bushel of corn produced. Behind the rest stop on Highway 7, I trespass a ways into a Kansas wheat field and bring up a handful of the bladed, pulverized, chemically amended soil. Such is what we have lost. The grand larceny of harvest removes even more organic matter from these fields.
Even in places where the stubble is plowed back in before planting, the nutrients are often wasted, pried away by hard rains before any plants are even visible. Exotic plants instead of indigenous ones, annuals instead of perennials, monocultures instead of polycultures. This disruption of a natural pattern, says Wes Jackson, is the definition of hubris. Rather than looking to the land and its native peoples for instructions what grows here naturally and why? Wheat, for instance, was leveraged to help us win the First World War.
The European continent was overoccupied with fighting, and in many places, crops were neither planted nor harvested.
To fill that void, we boarded battalions of newly motorized tractors and plowed our home soil right up to the Rockies, uprooting massive amounts of virgin prairie in what would later be called the Great Plow-up. It was considered backbreaking but heroic work, at least by white settlers. Having broken the prairie, we were ripe for the s disaster of deep drought and relentless winds called the Dust Bowl. It got so bad our topsoil started showing up on the decks of ships a hundred miles off the Atlantic coast.
One day in , as officials in Washington, D. A frightened Congress coughed, teared, and eventually created the Soil Conservation Service SCS , an agency that would cajole and even pay farmers to conserve their soil. SCS agents were evangelical, and farmers were ready to repent, and together they were successful in getting our most erodible lands replanted to perennial, soil-holding grasses.
We now had acres of new canvas on which to paint the next face of industrialized farming: the Green Revolution. In what was heralded as the answer to world starvation, breeders unveiled new hybrid strains of crops that promised phenomenal yields.
So farmers around the world abandoned the time-honored and ecologically prudent tradition of seed saving and added a new expense to their ledgers: purchasing hybrid seeds.
The homogenization of fields spread rapidly. Varieties of crops that had once been used because they did well on a south-facing slope or were able to prosper in the Banana Belt or the Little Arctic regions of a state were forgotten.
In places like India, where there were once thirty thousand land- tailored varieties of rice, their replacement by one super variety swept away botanical knowledge and centuries of breeding in one fell swoop. Too late, farmers realized that touted yields were only promised, not guaranteed. In your part of the world, the fine print read, you may have to do a little goosing to get advertised yields—more water, more thorough tilling, more pest protection, more artificial fertilizer.
But once the farmer next door had taken the bait and started to grow high-yielding varieties, you had to as well, so as not to be left behind. Together, like a slow pour over a large falls, we switched to a system of farming that mimicked industry, not nature. Chasing economies of scale, experts advised farmers to get big or get out.
To hold the debt at bay, and to qualify for government subsidies, you have to farm volume. We quickly went from growing food to sustain ourselves to growing so much food it became a surplus—an export item and a political tool.
The farm became just another factory producing another product that would keep the United States in the global catbird seat. They propped up flagging soil fertility with artificial nitrogen fertilizer produced with natural gas. Weed competition was quelled with herbicides, another petroleum product, while oil-based chemicals were used as a prophylactic against pest outbreaks which by now were extreme, thanks to acres of identical plants with identical vulnerabilities.
Suddenly, for the first time in ten thousand years of agriculture, farmers were beholden to the protection ring of petroleum and chemical companies, and were said to be growing their crops not so much in soil as in oil. Once on that treadmill, the feedback loops began. Weeds and pests are wily by nature, and even if you spray them one year, not all of them will die. Those that manage to hack an immunity explode the next year, requiring even heavier doses of biocides. Since , pesticide use has risen 3, percent, but overall crop loss to pests has not gone down.
In fact, despite our pounding the United States with 2. In the meantime, more than five hundred pests have developed resistance to our most powerful chemicals. On top of that bad news, the last thing we want to hear is that our soils are also becoming less productive. Our answer has been to rocket-boost fertility with 20 million tons of anhydrous ammonium fertilizer a year—as many as pounds per person in this country alone.
Recently, the protection racket has jumped to a whole new level of menace. Because the plant has been specially bred to grow unscathed by that brand of herbicide and none other, the company is assured future sales. Evidently, this latest move has been in the offing for quite some time.
This is the kind of news that should worry all of us. At last count, leaching pesticide residues made agriculture the number-one polluting industry in this country. At stake is groundwater, which supplies half the U. Farm families already know about contamination. Recent studies have shown that people living in rural parts of Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois are likely to have pesticide residues in their wells, and to have higher than normal risks of developing leukemia, lymphoma, and other cancers.
Nitrate levels from fertilizer in the drinking water of many farm communities also exceed federal standards, which may be why miscarriage rates in farm families are unusually high. Nitrates are not the only thing draining from farmland.
Money is, too. Today, even though we produce more food, our genetically pauperized, oil- hungry crops cost more to grow.
Moreover, because of the crops and robbers feedback effect, we will continue to need more and more inputs. Already, Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel reckons that society spends ten kilocalories of hydrocarbons to produce one kilocalorie of food.
That means each of us eats the equivalent of thirteen barrels of oil a year. Author Richard Manning cuts through these statistics to ask the important question: When you have a system that is one part farmer and nine parts oil, who do you think will have the ultimate power? Not small farmers, and certainly not the landscape.
According to data collected by Iowa State University in , most farm families now rely on off-farm revenues for one half of their income. These megafarms are hardly what Thomas Jefferson envisioned when he saw a nation of yeoman farmers tending their acres, beholden to no one. Fertilizer, for instance, masks the real problem of soil erosion caused by a till agriculture of annuals. Pesticides mask a second real problem: the inherent brittleness of genetically identical monocultures.
Money borrowed to pay for the fossil-fuel inputs masks a third real problem: the fact that industrial agriculture not only destroys the soil and water, it strangles rural communities. With our help, they are liquidating the ecological capital that took the prairie five thousand years to accumulate.
Every day, our soil, our crops, and our people grow a little more vulnerable. What I want to know is, how long can our denial hold? At core these researchers are farmers, and they think there is nothing more sacred than the pact between humans and the land that gives them their food. It comes from an insistence on decoupling ourselves from nature, from replacing natural systems with totally alien systems, and from waging war on, rather than allying ourselves with, natural processes.
Once wild creatures, our agricultural charges were shaped by an ecological context that bears little resemblance to our farming. Their natural ecosystems ran on sunlight, sponsored their own fertility, fought their own pest battles, and held down, even built, soil. But long ago, plants were removed from the original relationships they had with their ecosystems and pressed into our service.
He was amazed that no one planted or tended it, yet the grass came up year after year, drought or no drought, through snow and blistering sun. There were rattle- snakes coiled right in the middle of it, and burrowing owls standing sentry outside their holes. Another good rain fell while Jackson was working toward his Ph. When Jackson was thirty-seven, on the fast track to tenure after writing a successful text called Man and the Environment, he got uneasy.
To the astonishment of his colleagues, he and his wife, Dana, packed up their three kids and returned home to Kansas. They moved into a partially earth-sheltered house that they had built along the Smoky Hill River, and in , they began a school that focused on sustainable living practices. In Kansas, the wilderness was tallgrass prairie, the natural expression of the underlying layers of soil, the carnival of weather, the licking of fire, and the grazing of elk and bison.
Prairie is what Kansas land wants to be, but for the most part, is no more. With no warning, the bristle of wheat fields yields to a softer ensemble of wild-haired plants, stems akimbo, saturated with color and raucous with flowers and tasseled stalks. As I watch, wind enters like a dancer onto a crowded floor, parting the crowd, causing a bobbing and dodging of plants in its wake.
The whole thing sways crazily for a moment, then settles in a perfect hush, like a band ending a jam by feel. A sign by the road says that this is The Wauhob, a prairie miraculously spared a sodbusting, probably because it was up gradient, and hard to get plows to. An understanding intern spots me and interrupts his organic gardening chores to give me directions to the office. The Land Institute headquarters is a modern brick house that was once home to an older couple.
Ecologist Jon Piper greets me in the foyer and asks about my drive, all the while migrating toward the door, as eager as I am to get out into the prairie. Piper is in his late thirties, bespectacled and bearded, with a quiet forbearance for visitors like me. He knows that what I experience here, my dip in the prairie sea, will be as important as what we say to one another.
Though never planted by human hands, the prairie is choked with blossoms, grasses gently pouring over, seeds setting, new shoots growing, runners crisscrossing the earth in a web of decay, growth, and new life. There is no hint of hail damage or drought wilt, no such thing as weeds. Every plant— species in this patch alone—has a role and cooperates with linked arms with the plants nearby. Piper talks about the plants as if they are neighbors in a community—the nitrogen fixers, the deep-rooted ones that dig for water, the shallow-rooted ones that make the most of a gentle rain, the ones that grow quickly in the spring to shade out weeds, the ones that resist pests or harbor heroes such as beneficial insects.
He also points out the butterflies and bees, the pollinators with wagging tongues, spreading rumors from one plant to another. Beneath this unruly mob lies 70 percent of the living weight of the prairie —a thick weave of roots, rootlets, and runners that captures water and pumps nutrients up from the depths.
A single big bluestem will have twenty-five miles of this fibrous plumbing, eight miles of which will die and be reborn each year. These root remains, together with the leaves shed from above, will fall into the welcoming jaws of a miniature zoo—ants, springtails, centipedes, sowbugs, worms, bacteria, and molds. There are thousands of species in a single teaspoon, all tunneling, eating, and excreting, conditioning the soil crumb by crumb.
Through their magic, dissolved nutrients are released to thirsty roots or stored in humus—the tilth that transforms the prairie into a living sponge. The character of this belowground world is an expression of the bedrock, organic matter, rainfall, temperature, light conditions, and most important, the plant and animal community above.
Pluck or plant something new and you change the microecology slightly. Plow, spray, and harvest every year, and you change it plenty. Some of the organisms you lose might be those that sponsor fertility, or help stave off insect and disease attacks, or produce hormones that tell a flower to unfurl or a root to push its snout deeper into the soil.
It takes years to tune such an orchestra of microhelpers, but just moments to silence it. The secret of the prairie is its ability to maintain both above-ground and belowground assemblies in a dynamic steady state. A prairie keeps pest populations in check, rebounds gracefully from disturbance, and resists becoming what it is not—a forest or a weed garden.
To illustrate, he heads downslope from The Wauhob to stand in the zone between the prairie and wheat field I saw earlier. There exists a sweet spot between chaos and order, gas and crystal, wild and tame.
Is there a rule of thumb about which categories of plants consistently show up on a prairie roster, and what ratios they are in? Does it matter where they grow in relation to one another? In search of answers, Piper read everything he could about prairie ecology, and then spent seven glorious summers up to his eyebrows in wild pastures.
He and his interns actually took scissors and clipped and bagged all the vegetation in certain plots. They identified each and every plant, separated them out into piles, and then dried and weighed them to find out what grew there. Through wet years and dry years, in rich soil and poor, Piper found that prairies do have a pattern that repeats itself, an order in the seeming chaos. They cover the ground throughout the year, holding the soil against wind and breaking the force of raindrops.
Hard rain hits this canopy of plants and it either runs gently down the stems or it turns into a mist. By contrast, when rain hits row crops, it strikes exposed soil, packs it, then runs off, taking precious topsoil with it.
Thirty percent of their roots die and decay each year, adding organic matter to the soil. The remaining two thirds of the roots overwinter, allowing perennials to pop open their umbrella of vegetation first thing in the spring, long before weeds can struggle up from seed.
Not just one nitrogen-fixing legume, but twenty or thirty. That means that there will always be some species or some variety of a species that can do well in our highly variable Great Plains climate. Other years, after plenty of rain, you and I could stand three feet apart and not be able to see each other through the big bluestem. The species composition remains the same, but different species excel in different years.
Disease spores may blow onto the wrong plant, or insect young may crawl into the wrong bud. With a diverse offering, attacks die down before they become epidemics. Cool-season grasses come up early, set seed, and then bow out of the way, allowing warm- season grasses such as big bluestem to rule the rest of the season. Composites, such as goldenrod, asters, and compass plants, can flower anytime throughout the season.
We knew we needed perennial grains grown in a polyculture, with the four suits of the prairie represented. The only question was how many different species in each group will we have to plant? Our intuition told us that we would probably have to plant many more species than we need and let the assemblage shake down over a few years to the handful that would provide human food.
That was encouraging to us. Today, most of the food eaten around the world comes from only about twenty species, and none of them are perennials! Some began as perennials, but over the ten- thousand-year odyssey of plant breeding, we systematically removed their hardy perennial traits, marching right by the sweet spot between wild and tame, and domesticating them until they were annual by nature.
A story is told about the moment Wes Jackson realized the full extent of this unhappy extreme in agriculture. Shortly after starting his school, Jackson took his students on a field trip to the eight-thousand-acre Konsa Prairie near Manhattan, Kansas.
It was a revelation in black-and-white. They were disturbed to find that no one, save some folks looking at animal forage, had studied seed- yielding perennial grasses or legumes or composites. The reason? The first question The Land Institute assigned itself was the one everyone else had skipped: Can a perennial produce as much seed as an annual crop?
After two more years of library safaris and actual planting experience, The Land Institute staff was convinced that perennials could be bred to yield plentiful seeds without losing their perennial traits. Illinois bundleflower and wild senna, for example, were two wild perennials that, with absolutely no breeding, already approached the benchmark yield the floor range for wheat in Kansas: eight hundred pounds per acre. Considering that the wild relatives of some of our crops have undergone four-, five-, even twentyfold seed-yield increases at the hands of talented breeders, the chances of upping yields for these new crops were good.
The trick this time around would be to increase seed yield without stripping the plant of its wild hardiness. In short, the trade-offs were not as strict as everyone imagined, and it seemed that the chimera The Land Institute wanted to create was well within the realm of the possible. In , the staff embarked on the painstaking process of breeding crops for the domestic prairie. The precedent for this work completely disappears when you consider that Jackson and crew were shooting for crops that were dependable, but not dependent on us.
There were two ways they could wind up with a perennial grain—one, they could start with a wild perennial and boost its seed yield and crop character, or two, they could start with an annual that already had good crop character and cross it with a perennial wild relative to refresh its memory about how to survive the winter.
Now all they needed were candidates. Those that survived well in Kansas weather and had a whiff of a hope for high seed yield became candidates in their breeding program. They planted the seeds and waited anxiously, as farmers do, to see how the plants matured. The four most promising candidates for perennial domestication turned out to be eastern gamagrass Tripsacum dactyloides , a sprawling warm- season grass that is a relative of corn; Illinois bundleflower Desmanthus ittinoensis , a legume that grows tall and produces a baby rattle of seed pods; mammoth wildrye Leymus racemosus , a stout cool-season relative of wheat that the Mongols used to feast on when drought claimed their annuals; and Maximilian sunflower Helianthus maximilianii , a composite that yields oil- rich seeds, which could be pressed to create vegetable oil diesel fuel for tractors.
The second approach—starting with an annual and hybridizing it with a perennial—led to the mix of milo grain sorghum, which is already used as a crop, and perennial Johnsongrass. Now that The Land has its lineup, the breeding has begun in earnest. The very best individuals from each species are grown together in one plot so that they can cross-pollinate. The seeds from each trial are planted out in various kinds of soil to make sure the differences are truly genetic, or inheritable, and not just environmental , and the best individuals are selected to cross-pollinate once again.
This process is repeated until the improvements due to crossing show signs of diminishing returns. He walks me among the monoculture and polyculture plots where the best of the best are showing their stuff. Some collections of eastern gamagrass are bravely resisting various leaf diseases, and certain collections of bundleflower and gamagrass are yielding well despite some drought.
The most vigorous crosses between Johnsongrass and grain sorghum are showing both high seed yield and good rhizome production. In terms of seed yield, there are already some superstars. Even though its food value has yet to be explored, says Piper, Illinois bundleflower is yielding seed quantities that approximate the typical yield of nonirrigated soybeans in Kansas.
For eastern gamagrass, which can be ground into a cornmeal and baked into a palatable bread, the potential to improve seed yields is great, thanks to a variety that was discovered along a Kansas roadside. The collector noticed that instead of the normal flower stalk, which is composed of about one inch of female flowers topped by four inches of male flowers, this sport had all female parts which turn into seeds except at the very tip. If all yielded, the sport could produce up to four times the normal amount of seeds.
As Piper shows me one of the stalks, I notice that the female organs are green. Most of our crops are exotics, brought over in our traveling bundles from Mexico and Europe. The only native plants that we have ever domesticated in this country are sunflowers, cranberries, blueberries, pecans, Concord grapes, and Jerusalem artichokes.
The Land Institute is trying to lengthen this short list, knowing that natives are tuned through evolution to sing in harmony with the melody of local conditions. While coaxing agronomic manners from these plants will be a Pygmalion task, growing them in monocultures at least gives breeders a chance to compare apples with apples. The real Holy Grail is to grow them in polyculture—mixed species plots—since, as nature has shown us, only poly cultures are able to pay their own bills.
When you are working in a polyculture, you take all the difficulties that you encounter in monoculture breeding and multiply them. The Land Institute staff was essentially faced with designing an agricultural dinner party, deciding who should be seated next to whom to maximize the beneficial interactions and minimize the detrimental ones.
Nature arranges these kinds of matchups all the time through the slow culling of natural selection. Could The Land somehow mimic and speed up this process? Just as Piper and his colleagues started questioning this reductionist approach, they began to read about recent developments in the field of community assembly.
James Drake and Stuart Pimm of the University of Tennessee study what it takes to arrive at an assembly of species that remain in equilibrium, a condition farmers would obvously want for their domestic prairie. Unlike The Land staff, they do their experiments with ecosystems in a computer artificial life and with aquatic organisms in glass tanks real life.
They begin by adding species in various combinations and then letting them work out who will survive and in what ratio. Eventually, without intervention, the community shakes down into something that is both complex and persistent— order for free. A prairie restorationist must give the prairie a successional history, that is, actually grow the prairie over a trajectory of years.
Some plants will blow in and others will drop out, but as those facilitating species change the soil and the fauna and flora around them, they make it possible for the final assembly to be there. What we want to do is build complex, persistent systems that shake down within a very few years. In some plots they sowed only four species, in others eight, twelve, and sixteen. There are four replicates of each treatment. After two years, any species in the replacement plots that have dropped out or failed to germinate will be replaced.
All the while they will be tracking changes in the communities and looking for rules and patterns about how stable communities assemble.
Within a few growing seasons, they want their target perennial grains to be well represented, and to yield abundantly year after year without weeding or seeding. If a few other noncrop species are present in the mix, so be it. Then you sit back and watch the trajectory unfold. The trajectory might take five years, say, but you would be rewarded with a complex, persistent system.
The resultant recipe might include a recommendation to burn in year two, mow in year three, or graze livestock in year four. Your best hedge against disaster is going to be variety, just as the prairie teaches—lots of paints in your palette so that no matter what the conditions, some species will still flourish.
It has to compete reasonably well with what farmers are now growing. The final three questions that occupy Piper and company have to do with the polyculture performance from that pragmatic point of view.
Can the polyculture yields stay even with or actually overyield those of monocultures? Nor are they competing for the same plane of sunshine. As a result, the members of a diverse community are actually capturing more resources and yielding more than they would under constant same-species competition.
The literature is replete with examples of overyielding when complementary annuals such as maize, beans, and squash are planted together. When compared with their performances in monoculture, plants in mixtures have consistently overyielded.
It makes sense if you think about it. An insect that finds itself in a field of nothing but its target plant is like a burglar with the key to every house in the neighborhood. In a polyculture, where all the locks are different, finding food is more of a chore. A mixed neighborhood is equally frustrating for diseases that specialize in one plant.
A fungus may fester on an individual, but when it releases its spores, the leaves of invulnerable plants act as a flypaper, bringing the fungal rampage to a halt. Invasions are contained.
Just as with overyielding, most of the experimental evidence for resistance comes from studies on annual plants in polycultures. In , Cornell biologists Steve Risch, Dave Andow, and Miguel Altieri reviewed such studies and found that 53 percent of the insect pest species were less abundant in annual polycultures than in annual monocultures.
Similarly, Australian ecologist Jeremy Burdon summarized studies of two- component mixtures and found that there were always fewer diseased plants in the polyculture. So far, the same seems to hold true for the perennial polycultures planted at The Land. But only in the monocultures. The bundleflower that was grown with gamagrass was fine.
Polycultures also seem to reduce or delay the onset of maize dwarf mosaic virus, which can be a problem on eastern gamagrass. With the thought of pesticides gone, Piper and his colleagues began fantasizing about eliminating another petroleum-based crutch: nitrogen fertilizer. Can the polyculture sponsor its own nitrogen fertility?
The question of how much nitrogen fertilizer a domestic prairie would need has not been definitively answered as of this writing. So far, though, signs are pointing to little or none. Tiny balls on the roots of a legume such as Illinois bundleflower are home to bacteria that have the ability to turn atmospheric nitrogen into plant food. As a result, legumes find a niche in nitrogen-poor soils, thriving where other plants falter. Plants growing near the self-sufficient legumes may also benefit from stored nitrates that return to the soil when the legume sheds a leaf, turns over a portion of its roots, or lays down its last.
In initial investigations of polycultures that include Illinois bundleflower, Piper found that, as predicted, bundleflower can grow beautifully and yield well even in poor soil, leaving the soil character actually improved.
Which is why, of course, no prairie would be without them. If the eroding Breadbasket is to be transformed by the work at The Land Institute, it will have sweeping repercussions. In the droughty plains, you want water hoarders. As the following stories will show, the investigation is already under way. As he strolled along a rural road, he spotted a rice plant in a ditch, a volunteer growing not from a clean slate of soil but from a tangle of fallen rice stalks.
He took it to be the whisper of a secret revealed to him. In early October, Fukuoka hand-sows clover seeds into his standing rice crop. Shortly after that, he sows seeds of rye and barley into the rice.
When the rice is ready for harvest, he cuts it, threshes it, and then throws the straw back over the field.
By this time, clover is already well established, helping to smother weeds and fix nitrogen in the soil. Through the tangle of clover and straw, rye and barley burst up and begin their climb toward the sun.
On and on the cycle goes, self-fertilizing and self-cultivating. In this way rice and winter grains can be grown in the same field for many years without diminishing soil fertility. The neighboring farmers are curious. Whereas they spend their days cultivating, weeding, and fertilizing, Fukuoka lets the straw and clover do the work.
Instead of flooding his fields throughout the season, Fukuoka uses only a brief dousing of water to head off weed germination. After that he drains the fields and then worries about nothing, except an occasional mowing of the paths between fields.
On a quarter acre, he will reap twenty-two bushels of rice and twenty-two bushels of winter grains. Natural farming has spread throughout Japan and is being used on about 1 million acres in China. The allure of this system is that the same piece of ground can be used without being used up, and yields can be consistently good. Instead of working harder, he whittled away unnecessary agricultural practices one by one, asking what he could stop doing rather than what he could do.
It throws scientific and traditional farming know-how right out the window. With this kind of farming, which uses no machines, no prepared fertilizer, and no chemicals, it is possible to attain a harvest equal to or greater than that of the average Japanese farm. The proof is ripening right before your eyes. In permaculture, you ask not what you can wring from the land, but what the land has to offer.
You roll with the weaknesses and the strengths of your acreage, and in this spirit of cooperation, says Mollison, the land yields generously without depletion and without inordinate amounts of body work from you. The most laborious part of permaculture is designing the system to be self-supporting.
The idea is to lay out crops so that those you visit most frequently are close by your dwelling Mollison calls it edible landscaping and those that require less vigilance are set out in concentric circles farther from the house.
Everywhere, there are plants in two-or three-canopy schemes, that is, shrubs shaded by small trees, which are shaded by larger trees. Animals graze beneath all three canopies.
Dips and furrows in the land are used to cache rainwater and to irrigate automatically. Wherever possible, permaculturists invite external forces such as wind or flooding to actually help do the work. They build windmills, for instance, or plant crops on floodplains, where they can enjoy a yearly pulse of alluvial sediment. To maximize these beneficial unions, the permaculturist creates a lot of edge—transition zones between two habitats that are notoriously full of life and interaction. Mollison is also fond of using interactions between animals in place of high-energy inputs or machinery.
They add to the heat with their own bodies, helping the plants survive the frosty dawns. In the morning, when the greenhouse becomes too hot, the chickens move into the forest for grazing. As they search for nuts and acorns shed by the planted trees, they comb the ground like rakes, aerating and manuring the soil while snatching up tree pests.
Humans eat the eggs and eventually the flesh of these chickens, but in the meantime, they enjoy their services as cultivators, pest controllers, greenhouse heaters, and self-fed fertilizers. Mollison learned this ballet of efficiency firsthand when he worked in the forests of Australia in the late sixties.
As a researcher, he was trained to describe the biological world and leave it at that. Today in Australia many farms are now working according to the permaculture principles he has popularized, and an international permaculture institute, with branches throughout the world, is training people to disseminate the technique. Harpers Monthly Vol 84 Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Publication date Usage Public Domain Mark 1. There are no reviews yet.
Be the first one to write a review. Initially, these images might do less to invoke nostalgia than the more recognizable images of Pafko and Thomson. However, the surrounding context that situates the photographs, combined with the visual unity of the crowd at the game, invites viewers to partake in that union, even as the story dismantles it. In this novel, language is a democratic experiment. Once again, these narratives are made up of small details overlooked by the larger narratives of history.
Critics have generally noted two of these little stories that counter the mythic narrative of unity surrounding this baseball game. He sees Hoover as the exception because he is not willing to engage in the communal atmosphere. Cotter, an African American boy, skips school and sneaks into the stadium where he meets Bill, a middle-aged white man. A man takes his kid to a game and thirty years later this is what they talk about.
In the DeLillo text, however, the relationship is fraught with racial tension. The tension erupts when Cotter and Bill fight over the home-run ball. Bill chases Cotter and pleads with the boy to hand over the souvenir. While race relations and the Cold War are obvious challenges to the mythical unity of the baseball crowd, there are other, more subtle challenges. On one hand, the crowd acts in unison, thinking, longing, and vocalizing together. Somebody makes a nice play, they look at Frank to see how he reacts.
Disunity also appears in other parts of the stadium. Finally, in the radio booth, the technicians make racist jokes and ignore the game. The talking disturbs Russ Hodges, the radio announcer whose famous call of the game has been replayed on numerous sports highlight shows.
Those aspects of the game and its historical context are blocked and cropped out. The text uses these little stories of disharmony to counter the mythic narrative of unity surrounding the game that supports Cold-War nostalgia. They are asking whether those who set the tone of American life remember what makes life worth living. They long for leaders who can offer their children something to live for—the real meaning of hope.
Markusen, Coontz, and Lasch all call for action. While they challenge a dominant narrative, they all offer a replacement nar- rative that they hope will become dominant. Instead, the meaning of the game is left fragmented, a compilation of contra- dictory narratives which do not fit together, just as the members of the crowd do not form a cohesive whole.
In fact, many were contributing editors, including Wallace. Nonetheless, an initial survey indicates that most of the pieces are not coun- ternarratives. They are often long travel narratives with a slight political slant, or longer, quirky stories. Despite the clear reservations of the protagonist, who goes by the alias Paul Anderson, the mission goes ahead.
Several partici- pants declare that it has been a success, but the results are somewhat unclear. The rest of the novel reveals that the events of the mission were covered up to avoid a scandal.
The framing of the Folio section in the two different issues reflects this difference. The Folio is only one of the sections promoted on the cover. In the version of the Folio, the illustrations are buried at the bottom of the page, and help set the mood of the piece rather than highlight a contrast.
As a result, the presentation within the magazine becomes muted and ineffectual. This is, perhaps, the biggest differ- ence between the two Folios. While all of the articles use initials to separate different sections of articles, the Folio is the only one that uses drop caps.
John R. Giroux, et al. London: Routlege, , 2. Wallace adds that the novel critiques the way that nostalgia surrounding the game, and the fifties in general, celebrates the unifying function of commodities against the communism of the Soviet Union and the discord of racial difference. The June issue also contained a Folio in which editor Lewis Lapham presented a retrospective of the magazine.
In there were only two Folios, in January and April.
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