Hugh Iltis                                                                             Conference, Land Institute
                                                                                              Salina, Kansas
                                                                                              Oct. 1989
                                                                                              Revised Jan 1991

                The Marriage of Agriculture and Ecology:
                      A Taxonomist's Perspective

The arguments of the agro-industrial sector, as presented by my good friend Don Duvick, are hard to dispute. Man may not live by bread alone, but he does need bread; and the farmers who raise grain will need all the help they can get. Yet, how much bread is enough? And how many people can a finite world feed without destroying the rest of the living world; a world on which we depend, totally and irrevocably, not only for food, but for flowers and butterflies, and the great biodiversity which makes it a joy to be alive ?
     I would like to read to you some thought-provoking sentiments (p. 11) from "REAPERS OF THE DUST, A Prairie Chronicle", by Lois Phillips Hudson, published (by Little, Brown and Co.) in 1965. She talks of the farmers of the Great Depression, her parents among them, who, sowing grain and seed, found themselves reaping dust and bankruptcy. She recalls, wondering what it all meant, when, as a terrified little girl, a terrible and unforgiving dust storm roared across their North Dakota farm for a day and a night. And then, by "The next morning the sky was very blue again, in the way it has of being especially blue just after storms. My father had gone looking for the stock. The dust, catching in the Russian thistles that were clinging to the fences, had packed so hard and piled so high in several sheltered areas that the cattle and horses had walked right up the dirt banks and over the fence."
    "Once in the memory of my own grandparents, that atomized earth had been nearly impossible to break with a plow. Enriched by the floods of vanished rivers, the droppings and bones of numberless generations of buffalo, the mulch of thousands of summers of grass, it waited now, ... to be carried farther and farther, scalding other fields in its passing, finally coming to its grave in the Mississippi Delta. There was no rain to hold it for us, no rain to nourish clutching roots before the next wind."
     "A prairie child, walking in the loneliness of great spaces, absorbs familiarity with eternity. In that enduring loneliness I might have existed through centuries of freedom and bounty, when the grass rose to the shoulders of the buffalo and the grass and the buffalo fed each other, and the land and the grass held each other against wind and drought. This eternity of abundance had spread a feast for the bread hungry world and for the soul of the farmer - but the farmer's soul had been too small to cherish this immense heritage."
     "Through the storm I was being informed that this eternity could not survive the ignorance of men."
       Although I surely approve of the  marriage of agriculture and ecology (while forced to agree with Major Goodman that the offspring from this shotgun union will be born in poverty), it has been trying for me to listen to the speakers at this conference, because many of the biggest issues of our time have not been addressed at all. Indeed, the major issue now, and for all eternity to come, for agriculture and industry, as well as systematic botany or ecology, is simply this: what kind of world are we going to leave our children ? And how can we derail this express train, reroute to sanity this pilotless spaceship of a technological civilization gone amuck, with which the world is insistent on committing eco-suicide? And so in a way, I have been uncomfortable this morning listening to all these interesting and biologically not unsound suggestions on how to modify our biologically or ecologically unsound agricultural practices without even one person touching on the root causes of the human dilemma, which include not only a polluting, unsustainable technology, but a human population explosion out of control.
     I have the unmistakable impression that much of the underlying thinking has been directed toward the issue of feeding ever more people ( a given, we assume? ) , when, in fact, the basic problem in the world today is not raising more food, but raising fewer people.
     Furthermore, one thing that has not been mentioned here in any way, among all the clever suggestions of making genetic and ecological gains within this new and sustainable agriculture of the future, is nature, the living environment and the prospects for its survival. The forest and the river valley in front of me here, the prairies on either side - what is going to happen to them, for example? Wes Jackson himself has repeatedly voiced his concern for the fate of nature. Nevertheless, what if his visionary methods should work and lead us to a New Agriculture based on perennial crops? What then, when those who care less about wild species are going to plant multiple perennial crops on every available acre, even the steepest slopes unsuitable to annual crops, or those very areas which, as of now, have never been plowed, unusable as they are with present methods? In fact, there has always been the grave danger that by implementing their own discoveries, even the most well-meaning scientists in agriculture or in conservation will help destroy the very thing they love.
     Of this paradox (which needs a name: the conservationist's dilemma ?), I give you two examples. We, at the University of Wisconsin Herbarium, ere involved in the discovery of a perennial teosinte (a wild maize) which is genetically compatible with maize. It has some remarkable agricultural immunities available nowhere else. It was a discovery that electrified the agricultural communities, here and overseas. And yet, I've often thought, I don't want to be a party to increasing food production in the world: the more food, the more people: the more people, the more destruction of nature, of the wild fauna and flora that I study, a self-sustaining spiral that goes faster and faster, and now, with time, has gone out of control like the famous Sorcerer's Apprentice and his water bucket, to which he gave orders that he did not know how to rescind. Agriculture has come to this too: it is out of control, and we don't know how to rein it in.
     Now, I am glad that we not only found this new species, which led to an understanding of maize taxonomy, but that our work with teosinte eventually led to the establishment of the large Sierra de Manantlan Biosphere Reserve in SW Mexico. We were very lucky. And, of course, when you are successful at discovering so fascinating a species, you brag about it. But in the process of such bragging you run the danger of convincing people that this marvelous discovery will solve your problems, whatever they may be. When in 1979 we first announced this discovery (in Science and, by Walter Sullivan, on the front page of The New York Times), all hell broke loose, with many hundreds of requests  for seeds and including a long distance phone call to "Please ship immediately sic hundred pounds of seeds of your diploperinnis teosinte for planting in Africa. We'll pay you of course. (We had only a handful of seeds, of which I sent only fifty to Don Duvick at Pioneer Hi-bred Inc., because that's all we could spare at the moment.)
     Another example of the conservationist's dilemma can be found in GATHERING THE DESERT, a wonderful book by Gary Nabham (reviewed by truly in Natural History, Vol. 95: 74-79, March 1986), which is in your library here at the Land Institute. For 290 pages, this gifted writer sings praises to the desert, its pristine beauty, its refreshing loneliness, describes how wonderfully adapted the plants are, how the Indians have learned to harvest them with the greatest gentleness and foresightedness, and how the desert needs to be protected from development and pesticides. Then, in the very last chapter, he talks about a desert cucurbit, the buffalo gourd, Cucurbita foetidissima, with a root, weighing as much as 100 pounds, that could be harvested for starch (53%) and protein, and its seeds for a high-grade polyunsaturated oil; and , that, in fact, it could be cultivated in most of the arid and semi-arid areas of the world, from Mexico to Australia, making even the coastal deserts bloom with a grand new agricultural industry.
     What is going on here? Nabham is a thoughtful preservationist, yet is tempted onto the slippery "development-at-all-cost" slope. Surely, he must know that, with wild ecosystems, whether tropical forests or Kansas prairies, or Arizona or California deserts, you cannot have it both ways: you cannot preserve ecosystems and develop them at the same time! ( Not withstanding sustainable development, a crashing oxymoron if there ever was one.)
     Who shall speak for wild nature? And its preservation? Who is here to defend the 10 to 15 million species of animals, the 400,000 species of plants? The talks we heard today were mostly upbeat, optimistic. But by the definition of the famous German playwright Bertold Brecht, who gave you the Three Penny Opera with Mac the Knife, and the play Mother Courage, "An optimist is a person who has not yet heard the bad news." (An American optimist is someone who doesn't want to hear the bad news.) And the bad news is the mass extermination of life on earth, now in full swing.
    Let me tell you a little story. In late June of 1948, a group of us botanists got lost north of the Sand Hills in western Nebraska, near Ansley, a small town with a grocery store and six houses. We camped out that night under the wide open sky, high up on a treeless hillside, a vastness of waving shortgrass prairie around us, not a house, nor a light nor a telephone pole in sight, There swept over us a feeling of glory, an empowerment that the earliest explorers and settlers must have felt, induced perhaps by what may well be a genetically programmed rush of hormones, the glorious reward for finding a habitat unpreoccupied by people, by conspecifics, by competitors. It was the same kind of a feeling that you hear when listening to the triumphal final movement of some symphonic masterpieces, be it Tchaikovsky's Fifth or Brahm's First, with their majestic, victorious heartbeat rhythms. And you can see that same ecologically comprehensible feeling beautifully represented in the "pioneer" movies, such as in The Immigrants, where at the very end of this four-hour-long film, the Scandinavian settlers finally reached the promised land of Minnesota, and, standing there on top of a hill next to their wagons, the Old Man and his companions look out on this immense plain west of Minneapolis - and there's nothing on that grassy plain except groves of oaks and herds of wild animals - some deer, but no humans, no competitors! That is perhaps why people like to climb mountains - to place themselves above it all, and to see below (or so it seems) an "open" habitat, available land where they can go, breathe free, and reproduce. All animals surely must have evolved to be like this, not to live in places densely populated, already occupied, where it is hard to be successful.
     What an incredible evening that was, there on that hill near Ansley. The stars were out, the air clear as a bell, the wind blowing over from Colorado, this marvelous clean air, and nothing in front of us but rolling hills of grass and prairie flowers as far as the eye could see.
     Twenty years later, we went back there to Ansley to relive that moment on the prairie, but search as we might, not as much as a square foot of prairie sod was left. Nothing! Not even on the fence rows! Lacking foresight, Nebraska and its farmers could not save even an acre. As in southern Wisconsin, where I live, it all had to be plowed up, to raise more food for a hungry world. In fact, in all of the Great Plains, there still is not a single prairie preserve, no national park, large enough to preserve the intact prairie ecosystem (Iltis, 1969). How contradictory now, that we, who are so ready to point fingers at the tropics, at Brazil, and give these often poor people moral advice on preserving their tropical forests, we, who are so rich, are not willing to preserve even one Prairie National Park of our own! ( Iltis, 1969).
     Let me give you still another scenario, from the tropical forests of Centinela Ridge, above Santo Domingos de los Colorados, on the Pacific slope of Ecuador at ca 500 m elevation. I was there in July 1977: at the end of a dirt road, a one room brick schoolhouse; beyond that, an opening in the forest and a little cabin, wherein lived a couple with there six children, and an acre or so of corn, manioc, bananas and papaya to feed their family. Beyond that clearing, a vast expense of virgin moist rain forest, a botanical paradise. Here, Calloway Dodson and Alwyn Gentry (both botanists at the Missouri Botanical Garden) collected over the next few years some 100 undescribed species of plants, including 26 species of forest trees, some as much as six feet in diameter and 150 feet high, magnificent giants that had never before been seen by any botanist: unnamed, undescribed, unstudied. One of the richest forest habitats on earth, Centinela Ridge was, as the clearing expanded during the next 10 years, totally wiped out, in this case, not by large cattle ranchers greedy for profits, as happens so often in Amazonian Brazil, or by some lumber company owned by foreign capital, but by land-hungry people each farming only a few acres. So the demise of tropical ecosystems has many causes, not just big business, or greed, as some would have us believe, but also the ever increasing millions, I'd say billions, of hungry stomachs, with machetes in hand, who go forth into the forest, savannas and deserts, and destroy the natural environment to grow food and harvest firewood. But who can blame them? Once born, you have to eat!
     The upshot of all of this eradication of nature is that, eventually, we are going to be left with nothing if what is happening now is allowed to continue. There will be no way out of this irrevocable assault on wild ecosystems unless you, among others, rethink some of your most sacred but misguided premises, several of which I have heard here this afternoon expressed by very well-meaning people. But being well-meaning is not enough, for the road to ecological hell is paved with good humanitarian intentions.
     The world has gained over 1600 million (1,600,000,000) people since the first Earth Day in 1970, and is predicted to add another billion in the next 11 years. This cannot, this must not be allowed to continue. In 1950, a very much concerned Paul Sears worried about the world population then gaining 25 million people a year. But by 1960, only ten years later, it increased by 45 million a year; and by 1970, only another ten years later, by 65 million a year; by 1980, 79 million a year; and now, in the 1990's, over 90 million additional people will be added to the world population each year.
     The population explosion, like a tremendous express train crashing through nature, is heading for a brick wall of inexorable limits that is going to destroy us all. We, as ecologists, agriculturalists, yes, especially as humanists and sociologists, must make the world aware of what is going on. If you are not going to do it, who is? If you are not going to do it now, then when?
     We have to speak out, if we really care about our sustainable agriculture, and confront the sex education and abortion questions, for example. Nobody is in favor of abortion. Nut we are morally obligated, if there are two evils, to choose the lesser of the two. I would dare say that the tremendous social brutality especially towards women and children in the slums of the United States, or the tremendous ecological brutality to its citizens in overpopulated nations such as Mexico or El Salvador, is 100 times worse than is abortion, which after all prevents the birth of children wanted neither by their mother nor by society.
     In an English play, The Chalk Garden, a woman, starving for love, says of her garden (but meaning her husband), "The earth can't give what it hasn't got." Indeed, the earth is not a rubber balloon that will grow bigger as our demands become greater. When I was born there were "only" 1,700,000,000 of us on earth. Now we have 5,260,000,000! What will be left of nature, when 10 billion humans fill up every niche?
     And what should we be doing here in Kansas about the prairies still left unplowed? It is to Wes Jackson's credit that the Land Institute preserved a prairie of 100 acres. Yet, where, oh where, are our prairie national parks where humans in the far-distant future may see the buffaloes roam, the way they were meant to roam by evolution. And what will biologists have left to study, and amateurs left to love, when it will all be gone? This is not only one earth, it is our only earth, with a nature irreplaceable, and indispensable for our welfare. Every animal species has been shaped by natural selection to protect its offspring; hence, there is not a species on the face of the earth that has ever deliberately destroyed the habitat that its offspring require - with one grand and horrible exception, the human species. We must search for the ecological truths and rethink our premises. This is the only time we can do it. An ecological agriculture is wonderful and great; the potential of it at least, is promising in many ways. But this addresses only one aspect of the problem. The population explosion, the extinction of species and ecosystems are even more important. We must work to preserve wild nature for all its diversity, because if we don't do it now, we will never be able to do it again. It is this loss, as E. O. Wilson so well put it, for which future generations will never forgive us.
    "The complexity of life on earth is far greater than anything thus far conceived in the nonliving portion of the solar system; we have scarcely begun to explore it. Life around us is the ultimate refuge of the human spirit. To continue to destroy a large fraction of the species, as we are now doing carelessly in the pursuit of physiological-time genetic fitness [of the present generation] is the surest way to injure future generations and earn their deepest contempt. You care only to the extent that you know, and they will know". (E.O. Wilson, Comparative Social Theory, pp. 49-73 in S.M. McMurring (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Univ. of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1980.)

Questions and Discussion Following Duvick & Iltis

Q:  (Mr. Robinson) I wanted to ask Dr. Iltis two questions. One point of information: when was is that Dr. Sears said that there were 25 million a year added to the world population ?
R: In 1950.
Q: ... and now the yearly increase is 90 million?
R: 89 last year and 90 million this year. Net increase!
Q: Now, what I want to ask you is: how do you stop this unstoppable express train? Have you any ideas?
R: It will not be easy, but yes, I have lots of ideas. The first thing you have to do is to make clear to the world what Donella Meadows and her MIT team wrote about 17 years ago, that there are absolute limits to growth.  This is not really a new concept. Good heavens, Malthus said as much a long time ago , that much maligned man, and Darwin used it in various ways. The world is finite. There's nothing new in this except for the popular opinion that there are so many resources in the world that we don't have to worry. But The Limits to Growth showed 17 years ago it just isn't so, that all unchecked growth, no matter what, eventually leads to disaster. Nevertheless,  while I agree for the most part with what has been said here today, many corporations are not interested in these, or any other limits. They want limits to be swept away because they want to continue business as usual, to make money. By ignoring reality, and mining non-renewable resources (such as the old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, or the Ogalala aquifer), they represent an enormous danger to the world today.
     There's a new buzz word, "Sustainable Development." This year, at the University of Wisconsin, the administration would not let us put in a new course in Conservation Biology unless we agreed with some dean (a dean, by definition, is a mouse learning to be a rat) to tack on to the title Conservation Biology the words for Sustainable Development. (The two words, Sustainable Development, are, in fact, contradictions in terms, mutually incompatible, if the development is meant to be synonymous with economic growth, which it is in the naive and flawed if famous Brundtland Commission 1987 report, "Our Common Future". Cf. Donald Mann, Summer 1989 Newsletter of Negative Population Growth, Inc. ) These days we are deluged with speakers and reports from that well-meaning Norwegian ex-Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland and her World Commission on Environment and Development. Incredibly enough (according to the chairlady herself, in The Scientific American Sept. 1989, p.190), this commission "...found no absolute limits to [economic] growth," only limits "imposed by the impact of present technologies and social organization on the biosphere, but we have the ingenuity to change. And change we must: her commission, she writes, "... called for a new era of economic growth - growth that enhances the resource base rather than degrades it..." (whatever that contradictory concept means), and "...concluded...[that] sustained (sic!) economic growth... [is the principal] precondition for the elimination of mass poverty..."
Furthermore, in a related symposium volume, Global Change and our Common Future (National Academy Press, Washington, 1989) the editors R.S. Fries and T.F. Malone suggest with a glib and Olympian self confidence that "... to accommodate the doubling of the world's population [i.e. to 11 billion] at an acceptable standard of living, a 5- to 10-fold increase in the world's agriculture and industry will be required. This is sustainable through scientific and technological progress..."
     Now, it seems perfectly clear to me what this commission, apparently initiated by funding from Japan and the United States, is recommending: Not limits to growth, but more and unconstrained growth to indirectly bolster up the very countries that need it the least. What a bitter misconception! In fact, it is not only rampant population growth, but every other kind of growth, industrial and agricultural, that is causing the environmental destruction not only in the developed nations, but in the less-developed countries as well, the very ones for which that commission claims to speak. What enormous acceleration such a 10-fold (!) increase would bring in soil erosion, desertification, enhancement of the greenhouse effect, pollution, and above all in the enormous destruction of biological diversity, a biotic "wipe-out" of unforeseeable consequence, can only be proposed by the naivite of people totally blind to ecological realities, and thoroughly committed to ideological fallacies of hope. Thus, but with friends of the Earth's environment like that commission, who needs any enemies?
     What could we do, what premises are we to defend?
1)That our own standard of living is far too high can hardly be disputed, and a decrease in utilization of resources and a decrease in our standard of living would not only help many of the less developed countries, but would surely increase our own quality of life.
2)There are 100 people in this room, and if all of you would go out and really explain what the issues are, it would surely help. In the United States there are somewhere around 1.7 million abortions a year, and world-wide, about 50 million a year. If you add the current increase of 90 million to this potential increase of 50 million, you would add a total of 140 million people to the world population each year, surely an untenable situation. I'm not going to pass judgement whether abortion is a "good" method of birth control or not. It is effective! Without it we would be in an even worse shape than we are now. Let's face it, these are realities! You can't change them.
3)Therefore, make abortion and birth control aids freely available the world over. Paid for, if need be, by the United States. We'll pay for the drugs, we'll pay for the education and for the training of 100,000 doctors.
4)What else is there to do ? We need much greater stress on evolution and ecology in our schools. It would help as well to accept children as the little monkeys they are, as any of you who have raised them well know. That they need trees to climb on and flowers to smell, mud to splash in and wild country to explore is a given. Surely, one of the reasons we have such tremendous social problems in Milwaukee, or in Chicago or New York, or Los Angeles or New Jersey, is that children and adolescents have no place to go to be children in, except windowless houses that are half-torn down, full of rotten old clothes, broken bottles, rats, and piles of shit. And one of the net results of all this is that they smoke pot, and then later crack, to pass the time. What do you expect them to do in these de-natured environments? Children have not been genetically adapted by evolution to broken down slum houses. They are genetically adapted to trees and flowers, to clean air and uncrowded landscapes. We're going to have to leave your children a little more of a decent environment if we wish to have them grow up into decent citizens.
R (Don) : ... People who are in busisness, large or small , are etc.
                     equal fellow human beings, and will respond in that way.
R (Hugh) ; We need education in ecological principles, which does not skirt some of these controversial issues (sex education, teaching of evolution, abortion, the "free" enterprise system and its effect on the environment, etc. ) Students have to understand what this world, ecologically, is really about, and what the choices are: a miserable world in one sense, a sensible one on the other. This is really the crux of the problem.

Q (Maureen): Don, long before corporate reponsiblity became a etc.
R: No, Corporate responsibility is tremendously important. And etc.
      attempt it properly and do it well. For the benefit of mankind.
Q (Dennnis) : What would you say the odds are , I know this is a etc.
R: Oh, Nirvana is never achieved. But as I said earlier, I etc. as it ought to go. I'm that much of a pessimist.
R (Hugh): I fully agree with what Don just said. There were huge movements set afoot in the last  twenty years. The first Earth Day, you know, was a tremendous revolution, really, literally. But, I think, because it represented danger to  many of America's "establishments", it was effectively undercut within a year or two. But the embers continued to smolder, here and there. Since then, a lot of significant research has been done in conservation, in preservation of biodiversity, in agriculture, in many, many fields. The new discipline of Conservation Biology, for example, has a bearing on the planning of national parks, on the preservation of endangered species. Dr. Ehrenfield is editor of Conservation Biology - a pioneering journal established only three years ago. Before that, there was nothing like it, really, in the scientific approach to try to understand what to do, and how to do it, to preserve biodiversity.
     Many things are happening. The difficulty is you have to fight an avalanche of misinformation that lulls the public into simply accepting things as they are, a public that says, "Oh leave me alone with all this ecology crap. I mean, everything's fine. I'm alive, what else matters?" (As young Michael says in the TV series Bob Newhart, "The world is a much nicer place if you don't know what's going on.") Just one example of this attitude is the current issue of Life magazine: " The 1980's." There is no mention in its 200 pages of any major environmental subject, as if nothing had happened during the last ten years. Not one word! There are four pictures of Princess Dianne wiggling her rear end at a party. Who cares about Princess Dianne? There's nothing about ecology, endangered species, oil spills, the rape of the National Forests, or the torching of Amazonia. There's not one word about the population explosion, which alone during the 1980's added 860 million people. Life magazine reflects one of the major problems of our American civilization, a civilization being lulled to sleep by trivia. And, I hate to say this in front of Don, big business is largely responsible for this, certain types of businesses that control advertisements, so that magazines simply don't want to touch anything environmentally controversial or difficult which might cut off their profits. But things are happening, will continue to happen, if not by free will, then by force of circumstance.
Q (David Ehrenfield): Isn't it so that business success for the farmer is not necessarily coupled with business success for some of the larger agribusiness corporations and that we might well see some of these corporations go out of business or change their business and still have farmers prosper?
R(Don): Sure. That was the line that I tossed by when I said that change always hurts somebody, if you want to put it that way.
Q ( David) : Then a quick question for Hugh (which isn't a quick question because it's for Hugh) ...
How does [ the French abortion pill] RU486 fit into this calculation? Isn't it a bit of a bright spot?
R (Hugh) : Science provides many such bright spots. But the so-called "pro-life" lobby, backed by the fundamentalists and the Catholic hierarchy, is trying to keep RU486 out of the United States. But, fortunately, it is going to be impossible for them to succeed. There is also the new birth control pill that
can be implanted and lasts for five years.

David :     Some people think that this has put the whole abortion issue on the back burner.
R (Hugh) : Yes, it would, provided that these pills, safe as they are, are going to be made freely available.
     Let me end now this interesting and hopeful discussion by quoting the title of a famous paper by Theodosius Dobzhansky, the great evolutionist, which states that "Nothing in biology makes any sense except in the light of evolution." This declaration should be posted in every schoolroom, from grade school on up to graduate school and in every church. If all people would understand the meaning of evolution, we could start dealing aggressive with ecological problems, whether by a truly sustainable ecological agriculture, of which I highly approve, or by species and ecosystem preservation, or the imposition of limits to both consumption and reproduction.
[There was no sense before Darwin?]
There was a lot of sense before Darwin, much common sense that dictated many good things that since then have been swept under the rug, because now they are not expedient or profitable anymore, such as the raising of children by parents, or the preservation of the family farm, or a genuine, if romantic appreciation of the beauties of nature. The marriage of agriculture to ecology, under the leadership of imaginative and well informed scientists such as our Wes Jackson will go a long ways to create a world future generations can enjoy.