Biomimicry Page 2

  The ideology that allowed us to expand beyond our limits was that the world was put here exclusively for our use. We were, after all, the apex of evolution, the pièce de résistance in the pyramid of life. Mark Twain was amused by this notion. In his marvelous Letters to the Earth, he says that claiming we are superior to the rest of creation is like saying that the Eiffel Tower was built so that the scrap of paint at the top would have somewhere to sit. It’s absurd, but it’s still the way we think.

  Where I live in the mountains of western Montana, a huge controversy is brewing about whether grizzly bears should be reintroduced to the wilderness area that sprawls outside our door. It’s an issue that makes people scoop up their kids and get out their guns. The anti-reintroduction folks say they don’t want to have to “take precautions” when they go hiking or horsepacking, meaning they don’t want to have to worry about becoming a meal for a grizzly. No longer top banana, they would have to accept being part of another animal’s food chain, a life-form on a planet that might itself be a life-form.

  The rub is, if we want to remain in Gaia’s good graces, that’s exactly how we have to think of ourselves, as one vote in a parliament of 30 million (maybe even 100 million), a species among species. Although we are different, and we have had a run of spectacular luck, we are not necessarily the best survivors over the long haul, nor are we immune to natural selection. As anthropologist Loren Eisley observed, all of the ancient city-states have fallen, and while “the workers in stone and gold are long departed,” the “bear alone stands upright, and leopards drink from the few puddles that remain.” The real survivors are the Earth inhabitants that have lived millions of years without consuming their ecological capital, the base from which all abundance flows.

  NOSTOS ERDA: RETURNING HOME TO EARTH

  I believe that we face our current dilemma not because the answers don’t exist, but because we simply haven’t been looking in the right places. Moi, upon leaving Washington, D.C., where he had seen hot showers, The Washington Post, and televised baseball for the first time, said merely, “There is not very much to learn in the city. It is time to walk in the forest again.”

  It is time for us as a culture to walk in the forest again. Once we see nature as a mentor, our relationship with the living world changes. Gratitude tempers greed, and, as plant biologist Wes Jackson says, “the notion of resources becomes obscene.” We realize that the only way to keep learning from nature is to safeguard naturalness, the wellspring of good ideas. At this point in history, as we contemplate the very real possibility of losing a quarter of all species in the next thirty years, biomimicry becomes more than just a new way of looking at nature. It becomes a race and a rescue.

  It’s nearly midnight, and the ball is dropping—a wrecking ball aimed at the Eiffel Tower of squirming, flapping, pirouetting life. But at heart this is a hopeful book. At the same time that ecological science is showing us the extent of our folly, it is also revealing the pattern of nature’s wisdom reflected in all life. With the leadership of the biomimics you will meet in the chapters that follow, I am hoping that we will have the brains, the humility, and the spirituality that are needed to hold back that ball and take our seat at the front of nature’s class.

  This time, we come not to learn about nature so that we might circumvent or control her, but to learn from nature, so that we might fit in, at last and for good, on the Earth from which we sprang. We have a million questions. How should we grow our food? How should we make our materials? How should we power ourselves, heal ourselves, store what we learn? How should we conduct business in a way that honors the Earth? As we discover what nature already knows, we will remember how it feels to roar like a jaguar—to be a part of, not apart from, the genius that surrounds us.

  Let the living lessons begin.

  CHAPTER 2

  HOW WILL WE FEED OURSELVES?

  FARMING TO FIT THE LAND: GROWING FOOD LIKE A PRAIRIE

  The native peoples who inhabited these lands long before us worshipped the Earth; they were educated by it. They didn’t require schools and churches—their whole world was one.

  —MICHAEL ABLEMAN, organic farmer, Goleta, California

  How do we act on the fact that we are more ignorant than knowledgeable? Embrace the arrangements that have shaken down in the long evolutionary process and try to mimic them, ever mindful that human cleverness must remain subordinate to nature’s wisdom.

  —WES JACKSON, director of The Land Institute

  I was at a friend’s family reunion in Pipestone, Minnesota, a farming community in the squared-off, smoothed-out-straight corner of the state. Neat rows of wheat marched up to the doors of the Kingdom Hall, veered around the Quonset hut and its covey of pickups, then folded back together and marched on for miles.

  Inside, we had hardly touched the Jell-O salad when news of the approaching weather snaked its way up and down the long banquet hall. Heads turned toward the southern doors and long-legged men began stepping over the benches that lined the tables. They bent down to whisper in the ears of other men, who excused themselves and swung their legs over and out. Through the doorframe, we could see a sky the color of carbon, a sky that would come off on your hands if you touched it.

  I made my way out to the parking lot where men in their church clothes leaned against trucks dusted the same flat color as the soil. In silence they watched the weather come. A few lit cigarettes and winced as the clouds roiled, like smoke barreling before a runaway fire. “It’s hail,” said one of them finally. The others were already crushing butts and climbing into their Dodges and Chevys, peeling out to join the caravan. Wordlessly, the kids at my table collected silverware while their moms stacked plates and whisked tablecloths away. The festive air had turned funereal, and I had the feeling it wasn’t the first time.

  That storm turned into one of the hardest hails to hit southwestern Minnesota in a decade. What I realized then, viscerally, I knew already. Farmers are responsible for protecting their crops from things they cannot control. Today’s farmer in southwestern Minnesota has a huge spread, and because the fields are planted in one species, one variety, and one growth stage, the losses, when they come, are catastrophic. Having put their eggs in one basket, they are at nature’s mercy, caught in the crosshairs of drought, floods, pests, hail, and eroding soils. If anyone knows about being booted from the Garden of Eden, it’s farmers.

  What’s amazing to observe is a natural grassland—a prairie—under the same kind of assault. Some of the grasses suffer, but most survive quite well, thanks to a perennial root system that ensures next year’s resurrection. There’s a hardiness about the plants in a wild setting. When you look at a prairie, you don’t see complete losses from anything—you don’t see net soil erosion or devastating pest epidemics. You don’t see the need for fertilizers or pesticides. You see a system that runs on sun and rain, year after year, with no one to cultivate the soil or plant the seeds. It drinks in no excess inputs and excretes no damaging wastes. It recycles all its nutrients, it conserves water, it produces abundantly, and because it’s chockfull of genetic information and local know-how, it adapts.

  What if we were to remake agriculture using crops that had that same kind of self-sufficiency, that ability to live amiably with their fieldmates, stay in sync with their surroundings, build soil beneath them, and handle pests with aplomb? What would agriculture look like?

  Well, that depends on where you live. Wes Jackson thinks it would look like a prairie. Jack Ewel thinks it would look like a tropical forest. Gary Paul Nabhan thinks it would look like a floodwashed desert. J. Russell Smith, were he alive today, would vote for a New England hardwood forest. The common theme is that the agriculture in an area would take its cue from the vegetation that grew there before settlement. Using human foods planted in the patterns of natural plant communities, agriculture would imitate as closely as possible the structure and function of a mature natural ecosystem. Threading our needle with the roots of such a stable system
, we would sew up one of the deepest wounds on the planet—the gash made by till agriculture.

  In many ways, this “farming in nature’s image” movement is the most radical in this book, and perhaps the most important. As any economist would tell you, you can’t eat widgets. Food is what is called a complementary; it’s a given need that will always be with us, and despite what science fiction says about pill meals, there is no substitute.

  Years after the hailstorm, I am once again in farm country, this time in Kansas, on my way to the country’s premier enclave of agricultural researchers seeking to mimic nature’s patterns. As I drive, a crew cut of wheat fields surrounds the car in all directions, as far as the eye can see. From the air it must look cut from a tool and die machine—straight rows of alternating green and brown, edged with an angularity foreign to living things. 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. The fields have a factory-floor efficiency about them, and every now and then I see the floor managers, two stories up in Big Bud, Model 747 tractors, checking their six television monitors to see what’s happening on the ground. 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. “It was on account of plowing where we had no business plowing,” he told me, “and what got lost on that wind, we never got back.”

  When I get lost in my wanderings around the wilderness areas of Montana, I usually don’t realize it for a while. When I do, I have to rein in a skittery panic and try to think of how I got there, which landmarks I remember. Only then can I find the trail home. In agriculture, after being lost for the longest time, it’s time to sit down and think.

  HOW WE WOUND UP IN THE BOX CANYON OF INDUSTRIAL FARMING

  It was ten thousand years ago that we split open the rich, ripe-smelling soil for the very first time. 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. We began to work the land harder and harder, moving up slopes and into other places we had “no business” farming. Although we improved our odds of a dependable larder, we had unwittingly stepped onto what plant breeder Wes Jackson calls a “treadmill of vigilance.” The more we tamed and sheltered our crops, the more they depended on us for their survival.

  By now, our crops are so far from the adaptive chutzpah of their wild ancestors that they can’t do without us and our petrochemical transfusions of fertilizer and pesticides. 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.

  When rain strikes the hard pack, it can’t shimmy down to the miles of thirsty roots as it should. 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 1.6 years. In Iowa, up to six bushels of soil are washed out to sea for every bushel of corn produced.

  What’s left behind is a little deader as well as a little thinner. 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. It’s not chocolate-pudding black like the soil under the first plowed prairies must have been. It’s beige and it doesn’t smell as dank or fecund as it should—it doesn’t smell like death and life commingled. The fungi that once wrapped their threads around rootlets to extend their reach, the brotherhoods of beneficial soil organisms, the bacteria that spun airborne nitrogen into food—they’re all down to a skeleton crew, a shadow of their former selves. With the links among them severed, there is less “bootstrapping,” less of the power that comes from several species working in biotic conspiracy to lift up the whole community.

  The wildly fertile “postage stamp” prairies still scattered throughout the Great Plains give fragmentary testament to what we once had. In his eloquent book The Grassland, Richard Manning describes these vestiges as “pedestals carved by the plow.” From the crown of some of these pedestals, once level with the land, you now have to drop down three feet to reach plowed soil. Such is what we have lost.

  In other places, the scalp of the Earth is so thin that our plows are already mixing it with subsoil, which doesn’t have the organic history that topsoil has. 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. Over the years, these heists and the mistimed feedings add up to decreased fertility, a slow sterilization of our nation’s real goose with the golden eggs. “Over a mere century of tilling the prairie soils of North America,” says ecologist Jon Piper in his book Farming in Nature’s Image, “we have lost one third of their topsoil, and up to 50 percent of their original fertility.”

  Part of our loss can be traced to our fetish for production, our eagerness to turn an organic, nature-based endeavor into a factory: the farm as machine. Author and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry says Europeans came to this continent with vision but not with sight—we couldn’t see the value of what was right before us. We set to work removing the land’s native dress and imposing a pattern of our own making. 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?), we issued arbitrary orders, expecting our farmland to fulfill many agendas, some of which had nothing to do with feeding people. 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.

  This was the finale of a movement that had begun with the first sodbusters and their steel-laminated moldboard plows, the only tools strong enough to break the tangle of prairie roots, some as stout as a homesteader’s arm. I
t was considered backbreaking but heroic work, at least by white settlers. A Sioux Indian watching a sodbuster turn prairie roots skyward was reported to have shaken his head and said, “Wrong side up.” Mistaking wisdom for backwardness, the settlers laughed as they retold the story, ignoring the warning shots that fired with each popping root.

  Having broken the prairie, we were ripe for the 1930s 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 1935, as officials in Washington, D.C., were hemming and hawing about what to do, a cloud of Great Plains soil fortuitously blew into town. 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.

  The institutional memory proved short, however, and when another world war had come and gone, we looked around and wondered why we weren’t “using” every inch of the breadbasket. Earl Butz, the secretary of agriculture under Richard Nixon, reflected the nation’s hubris by admonishing farmers to plow “fencerow to fencerow.” Forgetting the lessons of the Dust Bowl, farmers filled in draws and bulldozed windbreaks, spending millions of federal dollars to obliterate what the SCS had spent millions of dollars planting.

  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. Because of their hybrid nature, however, these new plants couldn’t pass their genetic traits on to the next generation. 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.