synthesis / regeneration 59 fall 2012 - green social...

Looters and Savers

Biodevastation

ifc Small Is Bountiful Henry Robertson forecasts that the future is in the hands of

small farmers interested in conserving their land.

2 The Americans Take What They Want from Haiti—Even Near-Extinct Lizards Dady Chery objects to those whose overarching interest is to publish scientific papers that move their careers along.

4 Med School Classes Cancelled in Havana Don Fitz describes a mobilization campaign to combat dengue

fever.

7 Why Fukushima Is a Greater Disaster than Chernobyl Robert Alvarez documents that several pools of radioactive

waste are completely open to the atmosphere and could collapse from another powerful earthquake.

9 An Agrarian Progressive: Henry A. Wallace Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero recounts an outstanding example of the

conflicting agendas behind the green revolution.

Less of What We Don’t Need

17 Eat, Sleep, Click: The Bicycle-Powered Internet Jane Anne Morris points out that if the Internet were a country,

it would be the fifth biggest power consumer.

19 The New Global Medicine Don Fitz explains that the Cuban project includes rethinking,

redesigning and recreating medicine in a way that meets the needs of the world’s poor.

27 Timor’s Oil: Blessing or Curse? Guteriano Neves shows how oil comes with disaster,

authoritarian regimes, environmental degradation, corruption, social inequality, and endemic poverty.

29 E-Waste Recycling Is Deceptive Paul Palmer wants to know what the hell happens to the stuff

that is recycled .

Thinking Politically

32 Ghosts of Gorz R. Burke reviews The Immaterial and

Ecologica, noting that in order to exploit knowledge, the capitalist enterprise has to privatize it

33 Chicago Spring: NATO and the 1% vs. the 99%

Kim Scipes observes that over $14 million was spent on NATO-related social events, yet the Mayor had closed down half of the City’s mental health facilities.

38 India and China Scramble for Africa

Jemima Pierre reports that cheap imports, from shoes to medicines, elbow rival African products aside.

39 Social Movements that Reimagined Argentina

Francesca Fiorentini explores the way they began to occupy buildings and organize themselves into work committees around press, culture, employment, services, health, political action, and community purchases.

43 “ObamaCare,” the Constitution, and Democracy: The Heart of the Matter

Jane Anne Morris worries that we are trying to plumb the depths of the true meaning of “commerce” instead of debating health care.

Synthesis / Regeneration 59

Fall 2012

A Magazine of Green Social Thought t

2 Synthesis/Regeneration 59: A Magazine of Green Social Thought, Fall 2012

Biodevastation The Americans Take What They Want from Haiti—

Even Near-Extinct Lizards by Dady Chery

More frog species live in Haiti than anywhere else in the Caribbean. This broad speciation partly re-sulted from the isolation of animal populations by the mountainous landscape. Many species of the small lizard anole also make Haiti their home. These animals have attracted the attention of well-meaning con-servationists—as well as soulless seekers of fame.

At the end of July, an expeditionary team withdrew over 100 animals from an isolated patch of virgin forest in the mountains of Haiti’s Tiburon peninsula. It was led by Pennsylvania State University biologist Blair Hedges, who brought along one of his graduate students, Philadelphia journalist Faye Flam, Dominican freelance photographer-naturalist Miguel Landestoy, a videographer, and a botanist with some knowledge of Haitian Creole. [1]

The group was flown by helicopter to a remote Haitian forest at an altitude of about 1800 meters, where they removed as many lizards and frogs as they could find from a chilly patch of woods that the animals had made their sanctuary.

The journalist reports that: Near the end of the trip, the team began search-

ing in a region that was lower and much hotter, and the blistering sun was threatening the whole collec-tion of rare frogs and lizards. With my own skin beginning to burn, I volunteered to take the more than 100 animals back by helicopter to the island of La Vache, off the south coast of Haiti, where there

was an air conditioned hotel room waiting for them. These high-altitude creatures are adapted to cool temperatures and can die if exposed to more than a minute or so of harsh daytime sun....

Though some will inevitably die, the goal was to get them through the trip and back to Pennsylvania alive, where they can be studied and catalogued. Every time I checked, the frogs and lizards were stirring. By luck, most got through the night, and are now in Port-au-Prince awaiting their first and only trip to the United States!

What sorts of scientists would show up for a project like this without a cooler, and then abandon their samples of rare and endangered animals to the heat, or to a journalist, casually expecting some of the animals to die?

From the footage at about nine minutes into the video, it is evident that at least one of the anole liz-ards was quite furious about being plucked away from the tree fern where he was sleeping on a moonless night. Justifiably so. This animal happened to be Anolis darlingtoni: the rarest lizard in Haiti and

the one in the most immediate danger of extinction. It is also given the common name “darlingtoni liz-ard,” though this animal surely has a Haitian name. In characteristic colonial style, it was renamed after US zoogeographer Philip Darlington, who cata-logued it in the 1930s.

Returning to our expedition: Suppose a group of Haitians were to decide to go, say, on a helicopter trip to the Ozark Mountains to collect endangered animals because the Ozarks were being destroyed by mountaintop removal. And let us suppose further that this group of Haitians bagged 100 animals or so—all rare, some never before reported, others

nearly extinct—and tried to fly them all to Haiti. What do you think would hap-pen?

It turns out that Blair Hedges, the scientist who headed the Penn State team, had removed the same species of lizard from another region of Haiti.

Anolis darlingtoni has not been seen there since. Here is how he got his previous quarry and what happened to it [3]:

...we collected on the slopes of the Massif de la Hotte south of Castillon. On the evenings of the 5th and 9th of November [1984], at an elevation of 1360 m, we found Anolis darlingtoni in a one-hectare patch of disturbed forest.... sleeping on vegetation about 1–4 m above the ground. Three juveniles (two were collected) were found sleeping vertically on the tips of dead tree fern branches (l–4 m high) while three adults were found sleeping horizontally on limbs of small trees low (1 m) to the ground.

Two of the three adults (all males) were depos-ited in the United States National Museum and the third (skeletonized) was deposited in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. The two juveniles were used in biochemical analyses and are in the frozen tissue collection of the junior author.

All the collected animals were killed, although before that expedition the animals were considered extinct.

Synthesis/Regeneration 59: A Magazine of Green Social Thought, Fall 2012 3

In other words, all the collected animals were killed, although before that expedition the animals were considered extinct and had not been seen for 50 years. [4]

About the current expedition, the journalist writes further:

Hedges estimates they’ve picked up about 33 unique species here—several of them never seen before—living proof that if deforestation doesn’t stop in Haiti, we will never know the full extent of the country’s loss.

Sounds kind of noble, doesn’t it? In addition to Anolis darlingtoni, rare animals

noted in the video include: • La haute glanded frog • Mozart’s frog • The Hispaniolan lesser racer, and • The Macaya dusky frog (exceptionally rare).

Wouldn’t it be better to help stop Haiti’s loss instead of merely monitoring it? Had these scien-tists felt any motivation to stem this loss, the logical next step would have been to collect extensive videotape footage of the animals in their natural habitat, leave the animals alone, and use the videos to advocate for official protection of the mountain sanctuary on their behalf. But this is not what these scientists did.

Instead, they took the animals to a laboratory at Penn State to be ground up and studied. Here’s how they justified these actions:

Bringing specimens to the lab is critical for sev-eral reasons. DNA sequences are needed for correct identifications. Morphological analyses are needed to describe new species, and cryo-banked cells will keep species alive in case they go extinct in the wild.

In other words, Hedges is claiming that it is necessary to bring an animal to the lab to look at it carefully, to kill the animal and extract its DNA to identify it correctly, and to freeze its cells to “keep [the] species alive.” This is quite misleading, of course. A far superior way to preserve an animal’s genetic material is by treating him with respect and letting him live out his sexual life. In any case, the same species had already been frozen in 1984, and such deep-frozen specimens should last indefinitely. And so there was no conceivable scientific justifica-tion for removing the endangered lizard.

A bit later, the video notes, in the continuing calm tone of the readers of devastating side effects of drugs in US television advertisements, that the Macaya dusky frog was “later found to be geneti-cally distinct from the Macaya populations.” Mean-ing that the little frog that we saw being manhandled

in the video is quite dead now, and its DNA has been extracted and studied.

Hedges is not the only westerner who has chased after Haitian frogs and lizards. Other collec-tors of these animals have claimed that they were meant for captive-breeding programs, but I have yet to find such a program. In fact, some of these indi-viduals could be adventurers who trade in endan-gered animals or fools who try to keep the animals as pets.

Whatever the motives of this Penn State team, one thing we know for sure is that the animals col-lected on this expedition were endangered animals and possibly the last individuals of their kind.

Yes, deforestation is advancing in Haiti. I make no excuses for us Haitians in this regard, though I do feel obliged to note that the world loses 16 million acres of forest each year, and deforestation is a prob-lem for the entire globe, including the US. [5]

The Haitian frogs and lizards were hunted in their forest sanctuary: one requiring a tortuous jour-ney by helicopter and picked for its inaccessibility to humans. The animals were spirited away to a US laboratory to be ground up and exploited for their DNAs.

Such comportment by scientists is criminal and would be illegal in the United States. It brings to mind the Christian missionaries who kidnapped 33 Haitian children immediately after the earthquake. Like the missionaries, these US scientists feel that while in Haiti they are under no legal or ethical guidelines. In fact, they were so proud of their deeds that they publicized them in an article [1] and a video.

Obviously, their overarching interest is to pub-lish scientific papers that move their careers along. But DNA sequencing, which is what these scientists evidently do best, is actually quite boring and unde-manding. Scientific papers on DNA sequencing do not make careers, unless one sequences the DNA of the cholera that infected Haiti or something of the

sort. In other words, if the owner of the DNA is ex-citing, then one can instantly turn an otherwise bor-ing sequencing project into a “hot” career-building enterprise.

As it happens, lizards are a hot scientific topic right now. The first genome (all the DNA that makes up the genetic material) sequence for a reptile was published three months ago, and it was the se-quence of the green anole (Anolis carolinensis) ge-nome. [2] The justification offered by a team at Har-vard for this project was that there was a connection to human health because of “the anole split brain and the fact that female anoles alternate ovaries in pro-ducing eggs, just like one other group of verte-brates.”

The project resulted in a huge grant to the Har-vard group, which had searched Haiti’s Tiburon pen-

They took the animals to a laboratory at Penn State to be ground up and studied.

Their overarching interest is to publish scientific papers that move their careers along.


insula for Anolis darlingtoni in summer 2009 and failed to find it. And so this summer’s expedition to the peninsula by a rival Penn State team to redis-cover this elusive animal might have been motivated merely by a desire for one-upmanship.

Scientific research and competition are well and good, but the US scientific establishment ought to pay more attention to the way scientists are collect-ing their biological materials for genome sequencing projects these days.

Back in the late 19th century, the likes of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, and leagues of lesser-known scientists and adventurers, undertook long voyages, after which they returned from the new world with boatloads of animals preserved by pickling or taxidermy for stocking British natural history museums. The sale of rare beetles was so lucrative that many people made their living from it, and the stocks of the animals collected in those times were so vast that, even after more than 140 years, only a minor fraction have ever been exhibited. We, of more enlightened times, have of course, come to consider this mode of study as being no longer an acceptable way to treat animals.

In a sort of scientific neocolonialism, we find a 21st-century group from the US casually removing and destroying rare animals from places they con-sider to be their backyard.

The video’s concluding remark is: “Without protection, they will all disappear soon.”

Without protection from whom? Dady Chery grew up at the heart of an extended working-class family in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She emigrated to New York when she was 14 and since then has lived in Europe and several North American cities. She writes in English, French, and her native Creole. She is the editor of the blog Haiti Chery at <http://www.dadychery.org/> and can be contacted at [email protected]. References 1. Faye Flam, Planet of the Apes, “Penn State team finds a

long-lost lizard in Haiti,” July 29, 2011,_http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/evolution/A-Long-Lost-Lizard-is-Found-in-Haiti.html_

2. Jonathan Losos, Anole Annals, “How the green anole was selected to be the first reptile genome sequenced,” August 31, 2011,_http://anoleannals.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/how-the-green-anole-was-selected-to-be-the-first-reptile-genome-sequenced/

3. Caribbean Journal of Science, Vol. 27, No. 1–2, 90–93, 1991.

4. Dechronization, “A Day of Highs and Lows in Haiti,” August 27, 2009,_http://treethinkers.blogspot.com/2009/08/day-of-highs-and-lows-in-haiti.html_

5. “Global deforestation,” http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/deforest.html_

Winter Dengue

Med School Classes Cancelled in Havana by Don Fitz

“I’m on pesquizaje,” my daughter Rebecca told me. “All of the third, fourth and fifth year medical stu-dents at Allende have our classes suspended. We are going door-to-door looking for symptoms of den-gue fever and checking for standing water.” [1]

As a fourth year medical student at Cuba’s ELAM (Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina, Latin American School of Medicine in Havana), she is assigned to Salvador Allende Hospital in Havana. It handles most of the city’s dengue cases. Though she has done health canvassing before, this is the first time she has had classes cancelled to do it. It is very unusual for an outbreak of dengue, a mosquito-borne illness, to occur this late in the season. She remembers most outbreaks happening in the fall, be-ing over before December, and certainly not going into January–February.

Groups of medical students are assigned to a block with about 135 homes, most having 2–7 resi-dents. They try to check on every home daily, but don’t see many working families until the weekend.

The first dengue sign they look for is fever. The medical students also check for joint pain, muscle pain, abdominal pain, headache behind the eye sock-ets, purple splotches, and bleeding from the gums.

What is unique about Cuban medical school is the way ELAM students are trained to make in-home evaluations that include potentially damaging life styles—such as having uncovered standing water where mosquitoes can breed.

Dengue is more common in the Cuban cities of Havana, Santiago, and Guantánamo than in rural areas. Irregular supply of water to the cities means that residents store it in cisterns. Cisterns with bro-ken or absent lids and puddles from leaky ones are prime breeding sites for the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the primary vector (carrier) of dengue. [2]

It is very unusual for an outbreak of dengue to occur this late in the season.


DF and DHF There is a significant difference be-

tween dengue fever (DF) and dengue hem-orrhagic fever (DHF). DF is a virus which usually lasts a week or more and is uncom-fortable but not deadly. [3] DF has four va-rieties (serotypes). If someone who has had one type of dengue contracts a different se-rotype of the disease, the person is at risk for DHF. Early DHF symptoms are similar to DF but the person can become irritable, restless, and sweaty, and go into a shock-like state and die. [4]

DF can be so mild that many people never know that they had it and that they are at risk for the far more serious DHF. This is why the Cuban public health model of reaching out to people is important in pre-venting a deadly epidemic. There are no known vaccines or cures for DF or DHF—the only treatment is treating the symptoms. With DHF, this includes dealing with dehy-dration and often blood transfusions in in-tensive care. [3, 4]

Each year, there are over 100 million cases of DF, largely in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Southwest Asia, and parts of Indonesia and Australia. [4] Be-tween 250,000 and 500,000 cases of DHF occur an-nually and 24,000 result in death. [5]

Dengue was not identified in Cuba until 1943. Epidemics hit the island in 1977–1978 (553,132 cases), 1981 (334,203 cases of DF with 10,312 cases of DHF), 1997 (17,114 DF cases with 205 DHF cases), and 2001–2002 in Havana (almost 12,000 DF cases). [2]

Climate, mosquitoes and health Climate change could make conditions more

comfortable for mosquitoes that are vectors for den-gue. During the last half a century, Cuban health officials have calculated a 30-fold increase of Aedes aegypti mosquito. [5] Since the 1950s, the average tem-perature in Cuba has increased between 0.4 and 0.6°C. Health officials are well aware that “increasing variability may have a greater impact on health than gradual changes in mean temperature...” [2]

The 1990s were a very hard time for Cuba. Known as the “special period,” this was when col-lapse of the Soviet Union caused oil to dry up, the nation’s production (including food) to plummet, and illnesses to increase. [6] It was also a time when there was a climb “in extreme weather events, such as droughts, and…stronger hurricane seasons.” [2] Increases in climate variability meant winters have become warmer and rainier.

Conner Gorry, Senior Editor of MEDICC Re-view in Havana, reports that “My friends and neighbors tell me they can't remember ever having

to fumigate or think about dengue in the winter.” [1] Another consequence of more ups and downs in the climate is “insults to the upper respiratory tract, in-creasing viral transmission, particularly among in-fants and children.” [2]

Mobilization Medical students in Havana come from 100

countries about the globe. [7] No matter what accent they have when speaking Spanish, they don’t have trouble getting into homes. In Havana, there is noth-ing unusual about a foreigner in a bata (white medi-cal jacket) walking through homes, poking into yards and peering on roofs to see if there is standing water.

Always in need of extra cash, an enormous number of Cubans have some sort of less than totally legal activity go-ing on in their homes (such as a nail parlor in the living room). But it does not occur to

either the resident or the medical student that the inspection would be for anything other than public health reasons. Cuba has experienced more than half a century of mobilization campaigns like current efforts to control dengue. Soon after the 1959 revo-lution Cuba mobilized the literacy campaign which sent teachers and students to every corner of the is-land to teach citizens to read and write. Every hurri-cane season, the neighborhood Committees for De-fense of the Revolution (CDRs) are prepared to move the elderly, sick and mentally ill to higher ground if an evacuation is necessary. Campaigns against diseases like polio and dengue have made

Cuban medical students are trained to make in-home evaluations …


Cubans used to the government bringing public health efforts into their homes. [6]

Beginning in the 1960s, the CDRs worked with thousands of trainers, who in turn trained 50,000

more Cubans to teach the importance of polio vacci-nations. As a result, Cuba has not had a polio death since 1974. CDRs actively encourage pregnant women to regularly visit their neighborhood doctor’s office and patrol the community to enforce the ban on growing succulents that attract mosquitoes. [6]

Cuba investigates Cuba places a very high value on researching

preventive medicine. MEDICC Review (Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba) is a peer-reviewed open access journal which works to en-hance cooperation among “global health communi-ties aimed at better health outcomes.” [8]

Cuban researchers have played a key role in developing the widely accepted model that DHF is determined by “the interaction between the host, the virus and the vector in an epidemiological and eco-system setting.” [9] In Cuba, this translates to (a) the most important risk factor for getting DHF is having a second infection of DF which is a different strain; (b) being infected a second time in a specific order of DF strains places children at a higher risk for DHF than adults; (c) white Cubans are at a higher risk for DHF than Afro-Cubans; but, (d) those who already have sickle cell anemia, bronchial asthma, or diabetes are at higher risk.

Cuban researchers openly discuss weaknesses in their health care system. One study indicated that there could be a “marked undercounting” of dengue due to missing a large number of cases. This finding occurred even though the study examined data dur-ing a time of “maximum alert,” suggesting that un-dercounting could be very widespread. [10]

A typical finding is that the community must feel that the dengue control program belongs to them if it is to be successful and sustainable. [11] Some of the best work I’ve seen on the role of public health takes an honest look at effects of “the absence of active involvement of the community” in dengue control. The authors felt that Cuba’s outdoor spray-ing of adult mosquitoes “is of questionable effi-cacy.” Instead, they focused on “the bad conditions or absence of covers on water storage containers” in the city of Guantánamo. [5]

The study had a control group of 16 neighbor-hoods which carried out the usual practices of home inspections, measuring the degree of mosquito infes-tation, and larviciding (applying chemicals to kill mosquitoes during the larval stage of growth). In contrast, their intervention group did everything that the control group did, but added intense involvement by local activists. “Formal and informal leaders” of

the community worked with health professionals “to mobilize the population and change behavior,” such as covering water containers correctly, repairing broken water pipelines, and not removing larvicide.

Measuring the number of mosquitoes in the two groups revealed dramatic results. The authors con-cluded that “Community based environmental man-agement integrated in a routine dengue prevention and control program can reduce level of Aedes infes-tation by 50–75%.” [5]

Imagine Rebecca told me that when medical students in-

spect the homes of Havana residents, they find that the overwhelming majority comply with pubic health policy. But some do not. A few cannot af-ford the proper lid for cisterns. Some have mental problems that limit their ability to cooperate. And a very few just don’t give a damn, even if they could be raising mosquitoes that infect their neighbors. Cuban-style public health research is critical in iden-tifying barriers that communities need to overcome if they are to protect themselves from disease.

Do you remember Katrina and the number of New Orleans residents who languished while the state and national governments did nothing mean-ingful? Do you remember the photos of 1000 Cuban doctors in batas ready and waiting to come to New Orleans just like they went to Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and dozens of other countries hit by disasters? Do you remember the government that would increase the suffering of its own people rather than accept help from Cuba?

It may be difficult, but imagine that, at the height of the Katrina disaster, the US closed medical schools in Gulf coast states and coordinated the work of attending to medical and public health needs of the poorest in New Orleans. It may contradict your lifetime of experiences, but imagine that medi-cal schools across the US sent their students to sur-vey living conditions of poor black, brown, red, yel-

low, and white Americans to determine what causes elevated mortality rates and then announced that no one would return to medical school until they were part of a national plan to resolve health care needs.

It may bend your mind to the border of halluci-nation, but imagine that health care professionals throughout the world demanded that people of the Global South be spared the mosquito infestations, rising waters, droughts, floods, species extinctions, and all other manifestations of climate change brought on by the gluttonous overproduction of the 1% in the Global North. Imagine new medical care based on help going to those who need help the most rather than obscene wealth going to those who invest in the sickness industry.

Imagine citizens welcoming health profession-als to walk through their homes because they do not

Cuba has experienced more than half a century of mobilization campaigns.

Cuban researchers openly discuss weaknesses in their health care system.


fear being reported to the police and because they have seen mobilization after mobilization improve their lives rather than ensnare them in empty prom-ises. Imagine a new society. Don Fitz ([email protected]) is editor of Synthe-sis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought. He is Co-Coordinator of the Green Party of St. Louis and produces Green Time in conjunction with KNLC-TV.

Notes 1. My Spanish-English dictionary does not include “pes-

quizaje;” but Conner Gorry, Senior Editor of MEDICC Review says that Cuban health professionals use “pesquizaje active” to mean “active screening” when they go door-to-door. Email message from Conner Gorry January 24, 2012.

2. Lázaro, P., Pérez, Antonio, Rivero, A., León, N., Díaz, M. & Pérez, Alina (Spring, 2008). Assessment of hu-man health vulnerability to climate variability and change in Cuba. MEDICC Review, 10 (2), 1–9.

3. Dengue fever, A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia. Pub-Med Health. Retrieved on February 6, 2012 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002350/

4. Dengue hemorrhagic fever, A.D.A.M. Medical Ency-clopedia. PubMed Health. Retrieved on February 6,

2012 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002349/

5. Vanlerberghe, V., Toledo, M.E., Rodriguez, M., Gómez, D., Baly, A., Benitez, J.R., & Van der Stuyft, P. (Winter 2010). Community involvement in dengue vector control: Cluster randomized trial. MEDICC Re-view, 12 (1), 41–47.

6. Whiteford, L.M., & Branch, L.G. (2008). Primary Health Care in Cuba: The Other Revolution. Lanham:

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 7. Fitz, D. (March 2011). The Latin American School of Medicine today: ELAM,” Monthly Re-view, 62 (10) 50–62. 8. Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba. Retrieved February 6, 2012 from http://www.medicc.org/ns/index.php?s=3&p=3. 9. Guzmán, M.G. & Kouri, G. (2008). Dengue

haemorrhagic fever integral hypothesis: Confirming observations, 1987–2007. Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. 102, 522–523.

10. Peláez, O., Sánchez, L, Más, P., Pérez, S., Kouri, G. & Guzmán, M. (April 2011). Prevalence of febrile syndromes in dengue surveillance, Havana City, 2007. MEDICC Review, 13 (2),47–51.

11. Díaz, C., Torres, Y., de la Cruz, A., Álvarez, A., Piquero, M., Valero, A. & Fuentes, O. (2009). Estrategía intersectoral y participativa con enfoque de ecosalud para la prevención de la transmisión de dengue en el nivel local. Cadernos Saúde Pública, 25 (Supl. 1), S59S70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0102-311x2009001300006

Why Fukushima Is a Greater Disaster than Chernobyl

by Robert Alvarez

With the world’s worst nuclear power disaster well over a year in the past, the news media is just begin-ning to grasp that the dangers to Japan and the rest of the world posed by the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site are far from over. After repeated warnings by former senior Japanese officials, nuclear experts, and now a US Senator, it is sinking in that the irradiated nuclear fuel stored in spent fuel pools amidst the reactor ruins may have far greater potential offsite consequences than the molten cores.

After visiting the site recently, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote to Japan’s ambassador to the US stating that, “loss of containment in any of these pools could result in an even greater release than the initial accident.”

This is why: • Each pool contains irradiated fuel from several

years of operation, making for an extremely large radioactive inventory without a strong contain-ment structure that encloses the reactor cores;

• Several pools are now completely open to the atmosphere because the reactor buildings were demolished by explosions; they are about 100 feet above ground and could possibly topple or collapse from structural damage coupled with another powerful earthquake;

• The loss of water exposing the spent fuel would result in overheating and cause melting, igniting the fuel’s zirconium metal cladding — resulting in a fire that could deposit large amounts of ra-dioactive materials over hundreds of miles.

Irradiated nuclear fuel, also called “spent fuel,” is extraordinarily radioactive. In a matter of seconds, an unprotected human one foot away from a single freshly removed spent fuel assembly would receive a lethal dose of radiation. As one of the most danger-ous materials in the world, spent reactor fuel poses significant long-term risks and requires isolation in a

… imagine that medical schools across the US sent their students to survey living conditions…


geological disposal site that can protect the human environment for tens of thousands of years.

Fukushima and Chernobyl It’s 26 years since the Chernobyl reactor ex-

ploded and caught fire, releasing enormous amounts of radioactive debris. That accident revealed the folly of not having an extra barrier of thick concrete and steel surrounding the reactor core, something required for modern plants in the US, Japan and

elsewhere. The Fukushima Dai-Ichi accident re-vealed the folly of storing huge amounts of highly radioactive spent fuel in vulnerable pools, high above the ground.

What both accidents have in common is wide-spread environmental contamination from cesium-137. With a half-life of 30 years, Cs-137 gives off penetrating radiation as it decays. Once in the envi-ronment, it mimics potassium, accumulating in biota and the human food chain for many decades. When it enters the human body, about 75% lodges in mus-cle tissue, with perhaps the most important muscle being the heart. Studies of chronic exposure to Cs-137 among the people living near Chernobyl show an alarming rate of heart problems, particularly among children.

As more information is made available, we now know that the Fukushima Dai-Ichi site is stor-ing 10,833 spent fuel assemblies (SNF) containing roughly 327 million curies of long-lived radioactiv-ity. About 132 million curies is in cesium-137—nearly 85 times the amount estimated to have been released at Chernobyl.

The overall problem we face is that nearly all of the spent fuel at the Dai-Ichi site is in vulnerable

pools in a high risk/consequence earth-quake zone. The urgency of the situation is underscored by the ongoing seismic activity around northeast Japan. Thirteen earth-quakes of magnitude 4.0–5.7 occurred off the coast of Honshu between April 14 and 17. This has been the norm since the first quake and tsunami hit the site on March 11 of 2011. Larger quakes are expected, closer to the power plant.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) recently revealed plans to remove 2,274 spent fuel assemblies from the dam-aged reactors. That will probably take at least a decade to accomplish. The first pri-ority will be removal of the contents in Pool No. 4. This pool is structurally damaged and contains about 10 times more Cs-137 than was released at Chernobyl. Removal of spent fuel from the No. 4 reactor is opti-mistically expected to begin at the end of 2013. A significant amount of construction

to remove debris and reinforce the structurally-damaged reactor buildings, especially the fuel-handling areas, will be required.

Furthermore, it is not safe to keep 1,882 spent fuel assemblies containing ~57 million curies of long-lived radioactivity, including nearly 15 times more Cs-137 than released at Chernobyl, in the ele-vated pools at reactors 5, 6, and 7 (which did not experience melt-downs and explosions).

The cycle’s still open The main reason why there is so much spent

fuel at the Da-Ichi site is that the fuel was supposed to be sent to the Rokkasho reprocessing plant, which has experienced 18 lengthy delays throughout its construction history. Plutonium and uranium were to be extracted from the spent fuel there, with the plutonium to be used as fuel at the Monju fast breeder reactor. That would, it is said, “close” the nuclear fuel cycle.

After several decades and billions of dollars, the United States effectively abandoned the “closed” fuel cycle 30 years ago for reasons of cost and nu-clear non-proliferation. Over the past 60 years, the history of fast reactors using plutonium is littered with failures, the most recent being the Monju pro-ject in Japan. Monju was cancelled in November of last year, dealing a fatal blow to the dream of a “closed” nuclear fuel cycle in Japan.

The stark reality, if TEPCO's plan is realized, is that nearly all of the spent fuel at the Da-Ichi site, containing some of the largest concentrations of ra-dioactivity on the planet, will remain indefinitely in vulnerable pools. TEPCO wants to store the spent fuel from the damaged reactors in the common pool,

Several pools are now completely open to the atmosphere and could collapse from another powerful earthquake.

Studies of chronic exposure to Cs-137 show an alarming rate of heart problems…


and only to resort to dry-cask storage when the common pool’s capacity is exceeded. At this time, the common pool is at 80% storage capacity and will require removal of fuel to make room. TEPCO’s plan is to minimize dry cask storage as much as pos-sible and to rely indefinitely on vulnerable pool stor-age. Senator Wyden finds that TEPCO’s plan for remediation carries extraordinary and continuing risk. He sensibly recommends that retrieval of spent fuel in existing on-site spent fuel pools to safer stor-age in dry casks should be a priority.

Given these circumstances, a key goal for the stabilization of the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site is to place all of its spent reactor fuel into dry, hardened

storage casks. This will require about 244 additional casks at a cost of about $1 million per cask. To ac-complish this goal, an international effort is required – something that Wyden has called for. As we have learned, despite the enormous destruction from the earthquake and tsunami at the Dai-Ichi Site, the nine dry casks and their contents were unscathed. This is an important lesson we should not ignore. Robert Alvarez is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Pol-icy Studies in Washington DC specializing in energy, environment and national security issues. Between 1993 and 1999, Mr. Alvarez served as Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Energy.

An Agrarian Progressive: Henry A. Wallace by Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero

In November 1940 an American drove from Washington DC to Mexico City. His road trip would turn out to be of great historical importance for the development of agriculture worldwide. In the course of this grand tour, he established the foundations and fundamentals of the green revolution, an agricultural revolution that in the following decades would transform food and agriculture all over the world. The green revolution was one of the single largest non-military undertakings of the twentieth century. Whether this global agricultural transformation was for better or for worse remains a matter of contro-versy.

The driver of that car in the Mexico countryside was Henry Wallace, former US secretary of agriculture and at that moment, the country’s vice president elect. The life of Henry A. Wallace, one of the most important forefathers of modern industrial agriculture, is an outstanding example of the idealism, contradictions and conflicting agendas behind the green revolution. Born in 1888 to a family of Irish immigrants, Wallace was the scion of a powerful Iowa agribusiness dynasty. His father, Henry C. Wallace, was agriculture secretary under presidents Harding and Coolidge.

As a child, Henry A. became friends with the great African American scientist George Washing-ton Carver, whose trailblazing research into soils and crop rotation, and development of value-added products from peanuts, soy and sweet potato, earned him great esteem and honor in the United States and abroad.

George Washington Carver was a major influence in the life of Young Henry. He met Carver when he was six years old. Carver was a student and col-league of Henry’s father at Iowa State College. His father invited the young Carver to the family home. Carver provided a scientific direction to Wallace’s interest and love of plants. Carver would take the young boy on walks collecting specimens in fields around Ames. He helped the boy identify species of

plants and plant parts. In the greenhouse, he taught young Henry about plant breeding. They would ex-periment with sick plants and crop breeding. [1]

Hybrid seed and the transformation of agri-culture

While studying at Iowa State in the first decade of the 20th century, Henry A. became fascinated with the new science of genetics, and in order to give it practical use in crop science, he taught him-self statistics. During the 1920′s he became one of the first private sector entrepreneurs to see the poten-

tial in hybrid corn seed. Hybrid corn was a formidable scientific achievement of the public sector, an undertaking sometimes referred to as the Manhattan Project of agri-culture because of its massive scope.

Wallace developed his own variety of hybrid corn, Copper Cross, and in 1926 founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company, which specialized in the sale of hybrid seed. This corporation, which in 1936 changed its name to Pioneer Hi-Bred, would go on to become one of the world’s premiere seed compa-nies and an undisputed world leader in corn breeding and genetics. In 1999, the gigantic Dupont Corpora-tion bought Pioneer through what was then the larg-est initial public offering of shares in history. With this purchase, Dupont became the world’s largest seed company until it was surpassed by Monsanto in 2005. Both Monsanto and Dupont belong to a small handful of companies that today control much of the world’s seed business.

Wallace promoted hybrid seed with evangelical zeal, and so helped transform the country’s corn

Wallace…is an outstanding example of the conflicting agendas behind the green revolution.


production. In 1933, around 1% of Iowa’s corn came from hybrid seed, by 1943 the figure was almost 100%. By 1965, over 95% of the country’s corn was from hybrid seed, to Pioneer’s great profit.

Supporters of industrial agriculture point to hy-brid seed as an indisputably good development. Yields certainly increased; between 1950 and 1980, US corn exports were multiplied times twenty. To-day, the US produces 44% of the world’s corn, more than China, the European Union, Brazil and Mexico combined, according to the US Grains Council. Iowa produces 1/6 of US corn, more than all of the European Union. But, is scientific pro-gress a linear process with inevitable outcomes? Or could the saga of corn have taken a different route that did not lead to hybridization? Jack R. Kloppenburg, rural sociology professor at the Uni-versity of Wisconsin, and Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin, wager that indeed there could have been a different outcome, and argue that if similar support had been given to the improvement of open-pollinated varieties, the results would not have been any less good.

According to Lewontin, Since the 1930s, immense effort has been put into getting better and better hybrids. Virtually no one has tried to improve the open-pollinated varieties, although scientific evidence shows that if the same effort had been put into such varieties, they would be as good or better than hybrids by now. [2]

“Does it matter which breeding method one chooses if ultimately one obtains the same yields?” asks Kloppenburg in his book First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology (2004 revised edition).

Certainly any economist would be interested in the relative efficiency of the procedures and in the op-portunity costs of selecting one breeding strategy over another…hybridization galvanized radical changes in the political economy of plant breeding and seed production. There is a crucial difference between open-pollinated and hybrid corn varieties:

seed from a crop of the latter, when saved and re-planted, exhibits a considerable reduction in yield. [3]

Hybrid corn provides great yields, but if grains from its harvest are saved and used as seed for the next planting season, the resulting plants will have poor yields. Therefore, the farmer eventually has to go to the market to buy seed every year. This does not happen with open-pollinated varieties, and there-fore can be planted season after season. In the words of Lewontin and French agronomist and economist Jean-Pierre Berlan, “Hybrids opened up enormous profit opportunities for private enterprises and for

this reason all efforts were shifted to the new tech-nique,” (Quoted in Kloppenburg, p. 94).

Henry A. Wallace played a prominent role in the selection of the hybrid road as the principal avenue of corn improvement”, says Kloppenburg. “Hybrid corn would have been developed without Wallace, though certainly somewhat later. But he was in the right place at the right time, a personification of lib-

eral business inter-ests that had initiated the historical trend to commodification and the rationalization of agriculture. [4]

Among the most celebrated attributes of hybrid corn is the ease with which it can be harvested by machine. So homogeneous are hybrid plants that a combine can harvest them with no major difficulty, which is not the case with open pollinated varieties. From 1935 to 1945 the percentage of Iowa corn har-vested by machine rose from 15% to 70%, and be-tween 1930 and 1950 the number of combines in-creased ninefold. Mechanization turned farming into an activity that uses motor vehicles and consumes large amounts of petroleum, to the great benefit of machinery manufacturers such as John Deere and oil companies like Exxon.

Mechanization also cleared the way to an agri-culture without farmers because of all the jobs that it eliminated. Agriculture stopped being a job creator and went on to become a sector that continually shed employees. Today it is estimated that no more than 1% or 2% of Americans are farmers. It is often said that the United States nowadays has fewer farmers than convicts.

The combination of hybridization and mechani-zation exacerbated the trend toward monoculture, with resulting problems, including the erosion of soils, reduction of biodiversity, and an increase in pests. With the increasing use of hybrids, countless traditional and heirloom varieties fell into disuse and eventual extinction. By 1969, 71% of all corn grown in the US came from seven hybrid varieties. This

genetic uniformity created a dream situation for pests—disaster was around the corner. The following year the Southern corn leaf blight claimed 15% of the American harvest, causing losses estimated at $2 billion and rais-ing prices by 20%.

In its 1972 report, “Genetic Vulnerability of Major Crops,” the US National Academy of Sci-ences (NAS) stated that “The corn crop fell victim to the epidemic because of a quirk in the technology that had redesigned the corn plants of America until, in one sense, they had become as alike as identical twins. Whatever made one plant susceptible made them all susceptible.” Apart from corn, the NAS re-port also warned that most other American crops were “impressively uniform genetically and impres-sively vulnerable.” [5]

Wallace promoted hybrid seed with evangelical zeal.

Among the most celebrated attributes of hybrid corn is the ease with which it can be harvested by machine.


In 1976, the US Department of Agriculture re-leased its own report titled, “An Evaluation of Spe-cial Grant Research on Southern Corn Leaf Blight,” which asserted that genetic uniformity was indeed one of the main factors that led to the disastrous 1970 blight. “In the [1960s], it became clear that relatively few corn breeding parents were being used to produce the bulk of American hybrid corn varie-ties,” stated the report. “This narrowness of germ-plasm set the stage for potential vulnerability to dis-eases, insects and other stresses.”

Wallace did not live to see the blight of 1970 or the numerous problems and failings of the agricul-ture that he promoted. But current advocates of this mode of agricultural production do not have such an excuse; they cannot claim ignorance. In fact, they would do well to follow Wallace’s example. As we’ll see, late in his life he advocated for the preservation of crop varieties and warned against the hazards of relying too much on genetics as a factor in farm productivity.

Wallace, the agrarian progressive As agriculture secretary, Wallace was much

more than just a member of President Roosevelt’s cabinet. None other than John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the two or three most influential economists of the 20th century, said Wallace was the number two man in Roosevelt’s New Deal. [6]

In the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger, “Wallace was a great sec-retary of agriculture. In 1933, a quarter of the American people still lived on farms, and agricultural policy was a matter of high political and economic significance. For the urban poor, he provided food stamps and school lunches. He instituted programs for land-use planning, soil conservation and erosion control. And always he promoted research to combat plant and animal diseases, to locate drought-resistant crops and to develop hybrid seeds in order to increase productiv-ity.” [7]

Quoting historian David Wool-ner:

Wallace championed a whole host of New Deal programs, such as the Ag-ricultural Adjustment Administra-tion, the Rural Electrification Ad-ministration, the Soil Conservation Service, the Farm Credit Administra-tion, the food stamp and school lunch programs, and many others. In the process, he also transformed the De-partment of Agriculture into one of the largest and most powerful entities in Washington. Wallace also greatly expanded the Department of Agricul-

ture’s scientific programs, rendering the depart-ment’s research center at Beltsville, Maryland the largest and most varied scientific agricultural sta-tion in the world. [8]

Today the agricultural research center at Belts-ville is named after Henry A. Wallace.

Wallace quit politics after an unsuccessful presidential campaign as candidate of the left-of-center Progressive Party in 1948, and returned to his old pursuits.

These years of Cold War paranoia saw Wallace re-turn to his original passions: farming and science. He recognized that wild strains of plants were the

raw material for engineered hy-brids, and was an early voice urg-ing the preservation of native spe-cies. Moreover, Wallace was ahead of most American geneti-cists in his recognition of the im-portance of environmental condi-

tions. Having developed a line of Leghorn chicken that produced more eggs and had a lower body weight, Wallace concluded “that care and feeding, especially feeding, of the inbreds…has a great deal to do with the outcome… My belief is that we have been inclined a little too much to slide along in the belief that the various inbreds are fixed entities.” But Wallace took this idea beyond chickens and corn and applied it to human beings, developing the concept of “genetic democracy,” which, anticipat-

…genetic uniformity created a dream situation for pests…


ing the work of Stephen Jay Gould and R. C. Le-wontin, argued that genetic differences between groups of human beings were relatively minor, and environment was still the overriding determinant in human success. [9]

Wallace in Mexico Now, what was the importance of Wallace’s

1940 road trip to Mexico? He was on his way to at-tend the inauguration of Mexican president Manuel Avila-Camacho, in hopes of starting a new era in US-Mexico relations. His immediate predecessor, Lazaro Cardenas, was a left-leaning populist who carried out a sweeping land reform that favored small farmers and the poor, and he also nationalized industries and expropriated foreign investors, includ-

ing the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil Company. The ruling classes and business elites in both countries anxiously hoped the new president would swing the ideological pendulum in the opposite direction.

But apart from politics, the vice president elect had other business in mind. Being a farmer and a plant scientist, Wallace made numerous stops along his route to meet Mexican farmers, campesinos as well as agribusinessmen, in order to learn all he could about Mexico’s agriculture and its problems.

Wallace drove his own Plymouth around Mexico. The Mexican people loved it. Wallace was the first official US representative to attend a Mexican inau-guration, yet he insisted on traveling among the or-dinary people. Soon, thousands of people were waiting in villages to see him. He visited both sub-sistence and industrial farms, agricultural experi-ment stations and government officials. He was re-lentless in his questions. [10] Wallace’s ability to speak Span-ish and his respect for the Mexi-can people helped to cement the friendship between the two na-tions, which was particularly im-portant in the face of the coming war. After Camacho’s inaugura-tion, Wallace spent a month traveling around Mex-ico with Secretary of Agriculture-elect Marte Go-mes. [11]

Wallace was appalled by what he saw as the backwardness of Mexican peasants:

He found that it took a typical Mexican farmer at least 200 hours of backbreaking labor to produce each bushel of corn; in his home state of Iowa, it took the typical farmer 10 hours for every bushel of corn. Wallace came back convinced that modern agricultural technology could help Mexico out of poverty and hunger.

In his view, it was not land reform and small scale family farming that Mexico’s peasantry needed in order to fight hunger and poverty, but the indus-trialization of agricultural production. “Wallace un-abashedly saw gringo know-how as the salvation of Mexico’s rural poor,” according to journalist Bill Weinberg in his book Homage to Chiapas (Verso Books, 2000). “It was Henry A. Wallace, more than any other man, who opened Mexico to the agribusi-ness model.”

In other words, Wallace’s views on Mexico’s agriculture and rural poverty were completely oppo-site to those of Cardenas’ and completely in sync with Avila-Camacho’s conservative politics.

Once installed as vice president in early 1941, Wallace met with Rockefeller Foundation president Raymond Fosdick. “If the Rockefeller Foundation would undertake to help the Mexican people in-crease the yield per acre of corn and beans,” he told Fosdick, “it would mean more to the future of Mex-ico than anything else that government or philan-thropy could devise.” Thus the Mexican Agricul-tural Program (MAP) was born.

This program, a joint venture of the Rockefel-ler Foundation, the US government and the Mexi-

can ministry of agriculture, introduced the Iowa model to the Mexican countryside: hybrid seeds, monocultures, agrochemical inputs, and mechaniza-tion. The changes—both technological and social–that this mode of farming effected on Mexico’s agri-culture were truly revolutionary.

The MAP was the spearhead of Avila-Camacho’s move against Cardenas’ land reform. The Cardenista zeal for justice was replaced by the belief that rural hunger and poverty could be tackled and eradicated in an apolitical manner by applying American expertise and scientific technique, without any need for social critique or political activism, and especially without distributing lands to the poor.

The Cardenista agrarian policy was not followed up on. The ejidos (communally owned lands) lost pri-ority and benefits flowed to landowners who re-ceived lands with irrigation systems, canals, dams,

etc; the extension of lands consid-ered inalienable property was in-creased, therefore the agrarian redis-tribution was suspended… campesi-nos were stripped of their lands. [12]

In the 1960′s the MAP was transformed into the International Center for Im-provement of Maize and Wheat (known as CIM-MYT, after its Spanish language acronym), which went on to set up field operations and facilities in South America, Africa and Asia. The CIMMYT was the first of over a dozen international agricultural research centers set up all over the globe with the express purpose of transforming agriculture in poor countries, a process referred to by many as the green revolution. All these centers based their research and development on the CIMMYT model.

The green revolution started with CIMMYT, which was an outgrowth of the Mexican Agricultural Program, and the MAP owed its existence, more

…the Mexican Agricultural Program introduced hybrid seeds, monocultures,

agrochemical inputs, and mechanization.

The ejidos (communally owned lands) lost priority.


than anything else, to that road trip taken by a re-markable American over 70 years ago. Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero is a Puerto Rican author, journal-ist, environmental educator and essayist. He is a senior fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program, a fel-low of the Oakland Institute, a research associate of the Institute for Social Ecology, and director of the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety. Notes 1. “Henry A. Wallace – Agricultural Pioneer, Visionary

and Leader” http://www.iptv.org/iowapathways/mypath.cfm?ounid=ob_000061

2–4. Jack R. Kloppenburg. First The Seed. University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

5. “Blight in the corn belt” http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/sex/cornbl.htm

6. David Woolner. “Second only to Roosevelt: Henry A. Wallace and the New Deal” http://newdeal.feri.org/wallace/essay.htm

7. Arthur Schlesinger J. “Who Was Henry A. Wallace? The Story of a Perplexing and Indomitably Naive Pub-lic Servant” (Originally published in the Los Angeles Times on March 12 2000) http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/schlesinger_wallace_bio.html

8. Woolner, David. “The Life of Henry A. Wallace” http://www.winrock.org/wallace/wallacecenter/wallace/bio.asp

9.http://www.winrock.org/wallace/wallacecenter/wallace/bio.asp

10. “The Mexican Agricultural Program” http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe50s/crops_14.html

11. “The Life of Henry A. Wallace” http://www.winrock.org/wallace/wallacecenter/wallace/bio.asp#anchor4

12. http://www.buenastareas.com/ensayos/Analisis-Economico-De-Mexico-1940-1952/294253.html

Small Is Bountiful (cont. from inside front cover) are nitrogen-fixing legumes); allow cattle and sheep to graze and replenish the soil with manure. But the incentive to maximize production has always com-peted with good husbandry.

Large plantations have never been good for the soil. Absentee landowners, hired overseers and in-voluntary labor disregard the health of the land in the push to grow cash crops. The Roman farming estates called latifundia, together with the practice of plowing up and down slopes instead of across (con-tour plowing), ruined Italian soils. Rome turned to North Africa until the soil there was degraded too. Egypt became the granary of the empire. The Nile valley had the longest run of agricultural productivity on record until the Aswan High Dam opened in 1965. The dam withholds silt that should replenish the soil down-stream, while six feet of wa-ter evaporate each year from the reservoir in the de-sert sun. Now the Nile delta is eroding and suffering salinization.

After the Roman empire collapsed, a system of common fields with crop rotation and pasture evolved in Europe as a way to cope with depleted soils. Productivity remained low, due apparently to the ever-present pressure to maximize yields.

According to Montgomery, the enclosure of common lands that began in the late Middle Ages was a good thing up to a point. It allowed a farmer to keep enough land in pasture to ensure an adequate supply of manure. In the early modern period, how-ever, landowners used enclosure to create large es-tates, arguing that they would increase productivity.

Simply letting the family cow poop on the com-mons would not do. The need for manure imposed an inherent scale to productive farms. Too small a farm was a recipe for degrading soil fertility through continuous cropping. Although very large farms turned out to mine the soil itself, this was not yet apparent—and Roman experience in this regard was long forgotten. [5]

The advance of agricultural science did not sal-vage the situation. “Crop yields at the start of the eighteenth century were not all that much greater than medieval levels, implying that increased agri-cultural production came largely from expanding the area cultivated rather than improved agricultural methods.” [6] Meanwhile, enclosure forced landless peasants onto the dole or into the industrializing cit-ies. The European diet deteriorated.

Colonization, the biggest land grab in history, rescued Europe. Plantation agriculture for export back to Europe was favored. Colonists in the Ameri-cas, gazing at a horizon of seemingly endless fresh land, paid scant attention to soil fertility. The situa-tion was worst in the American South, where slave plantations grew soil-exhausting tobacco and cotton. By the Civil War, the seaboard southern states were breeding slaves, not crops, for export westward, where planters were clearing their way through Ala-bama and Mississippi and into Texas to continue the same unsustainable practices.

In the late nineteenth century the westward push in the US continued, encouraged by a false gospel that intensive dryland farming was feasible west of the hundredth meridian. The eventual result was the Dust Bowl. [7]

In the era of limits We are up against planetary limits imposed by

climate change and the overexploitation of fossil fuels, fresh water and soil. If the US is going to feed itself without fossil fuels, we cannot have vast indus-trial farms employing less than 2% of the popula-

tion. The solution to the unemployment problem is farming—small farming. Ag-ribusiness companies are cash-croppers like no Roman senator or southern slave master before them. They grow com-modities, not food. Their corn and soy-

beans make ethanol, biodiesel and processed food-like substances.

There is another limit to agriculture—nitrogen fixation. Plants need nitrogen. The atmosphere is full

Large plantations have never been good for the soil.


of nitrogen but in the inert form of N2. The bond between those two atoms must be broken to make nitrogen available for use in the biosphere, but na-ture has only two ways to do that—lightning and the action of rhizobial bacteria on the roots of legumi-nous plants, which is why those plants had to be grown in rotation with other crops. As long as this was the sole means of getting nitrogen into the soil, the only way to feed a growing population was to expand the area under cultivation.

The artificial solution to this limiting factor is the Haber-Bosch process invented in Germany just before World War I. It breaks the N2 bond and com-bines nitrogen with hydrogen to form ammonia, from which fertilizer can be manufactured. This made industrial monocropping and twentieth-century yields possible. Instead of being in short supply, re-active nitrogen is suddenly everywhere, with grave consequences—further erosion, oceanic dead zones from fertilizer runoff, ground-level ozone (a precur-sor to smog), loss of biodiversity, and N2O, a green-house gas 300 times as potent as CO2. [8]

Haber-Bosch is also an energy-intensive proc-ess. It consumes 5% of the world’s natural gas pro-duction. Natural gas is a finite resource. It’s our pri-mary heating fuel, an industrial fuel, and now—with new supplies and lower prices thanks to the destruc-tive practice of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” which releases gas trapped in shale rock forma-tions—the favored fuel for electricity.

Vaclav Smil, a renowned energy expert at the University of Manitoba, calculated that without Haber-Bosch we could not feed more than half the world’s population on present agricultural land. If he’s right, organic farming won’t save us because it relies on natural nitro-gen fixation.

There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, however, and Smil has admitted that he didn’t give leguminous crops their full due. [9] But it will take time to re-store damaged soils, and Haber-Bosch fertilizers will be needed for as long as this takes. This is a re-minder that we shouldn’t burn fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow. Like any valuable, nonrenew-able resource, natural gas should be conserved. It shouldn’t be burned in vast quantities for electricity when there are clean alternatives, or for unnecessary heating, or to manufacture junk to feed the insatiable maw of a growth economy that declares wasteful consumption a virtue.

Our species is on the knife’s edge. The future is in the hands of small farmers interested in conserv-ing their land, and in the kind of plant breeding be-ing done at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, to create perennial grain crops. Perennial prairie grasses have thick, deep roots that hold soil and moisture. Perennial cereals could halt the erosion that conventional agriculture accelerates.

The first task in feeding the world sustainably is to rebuild the soil. In the US this means reclaiming the land from industrial agribusiness and rebuilding agrarian communities. Henry Robertson is an environmental lawyer and activist in St. Louis. Notes 1. Cover story and accompanying articles, Guardian

Weekly, Nov. 28, 2008; John Vidal, Food land grab “puts world’s poor at risk,” Guardian Weekly, Oct. 7, 2009; Claire Provost and agencies, Africa’s “water grab” threatens local communities, Guardian Weekly, Dec. 2, 2011.

2. Gilding, Paul, The Great Disruption, Bloomsbury Press, 2011, p. 83.

3. Montgomery, David R., Dirt: The Erosion of Civiliza-tions, University of California Press, 2007.

4. Morton, Oliver, Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet, Harper Perennial, 2009, p. 350.

5. Montgomery, pp. 96–8. 6. Id., p. 99. 7. See Timothy Egan, The Worst

Hard Time, Houghton Mifflin, 2005; Jonathan Raban, Bad Land, Pantheon Books, 1996.

8. For more on this subject, see Oliver Morton’s excel-lent book on photosynthesis (and climate change), Eating the Sun, pp. 351–4; and Mark Lynas, The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans, Na-tional Geographic Books, 2011, Boundary 3. This is not the place to excoriate Lynas for his strident insis-tence that all our ecological problems can be solved by technology alone.

9. Halwell, Brian, Can Organic Farming Feed Us All? World Watch Magazine 19:3, May/June 2006, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4060

Today our species cultivates barely half an acre per person.

The future is in the hands of small farmers interested in conserving their land.

synthesis / regeneration 59 fall 2012 - green social...

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