| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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reviews Making a HomeBecoming Native to This Place, by Wes Jackson. Counterpoint Press, Washington, D.C., 1996, 118 pp., $12.50 paper. Mattfield Green, Kansas, population 36, is an appropriate place for Wes Jackson to set up his podium and deliver a series of riveting addresses on the shortcomings of the industrial economy. At the edge of the Flint Hills, surrounded by virgin tall-grass prairie, this once thriving farm community has been mostly abandoned, its houses, stores, and schools left vacant as their inhabitants fled, no longer able to eke out a living from agriculture. Jackson has returned to Mattfield Green to sift through the history and culture of this town, to sweep inches of top soil blown to the rafters during the Dust Bowl, and to sketch out a road map for ecological and community-based living and farming that won't exact such a heavy toll on the landscape. Becoming Native to This Place is Wes Jackson's fourth book, and he has honed an eloquent and convincing argument to make us sit up and pay attention to what all too often has become bitter medicine. Time-traveling through the history of the American conquest and expansion, traversing centuries of scientific and social thought, and investigating nuances of plant genetics and ecosystem dynamics, he traces how our modern economic systems have destroyed communities and left eco-catastrophe in their wake. We follow the first conquistadors marching across Kansas looking for gold. We hear the cognitive wheels of Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo spinning us into a scientific paradigm of reductionism, where nature is continually broken into smaller and more convenient parts for economic ends. We see the Europeans arriving on American soil with their eyes open, but capable of seeing only the land of their ancestors. And we learn what motivated us to make factory chickens of jungle fowl, feedlot beef cows of savanna grazers, and antibiotic pincushions of forest boars. Jackson's questions are as compelling as his analyses. Can we grow grain on a perennial basis, the way prairie grass thrives? And could such an ecologically designed agriculture also be high-yield? Can scientists achieve a balance between data obsession and nature-based intuition? Rather than forcing homogeneous solutions across our landscapes, can we develop the patience and discipline to find elegant solutions based on the requirements of place? Jackson's research and his often humorous rants make the book a great read, but his efforts to put his ideas into place in the field also lend powerful credibility. In the 1970s he founded the Land Institute, an alternative research organization whose primary focus has been the development of perennial polyculture. To simplify this complex endeavor, Jackson is crossing native prairie grasses with edible grains, in order to model food production after the prairie ecosystem where he lives. Jackson was awarded a 1992 MacArthur Fellowship in honor of the two decades of work he and his colleagues have performed at the Land Institute. His most recent project integrates both community development and sustainable agriculture, and is located in Mattfield Green. Jackson has purchased and restored a number of buildings in the ghost town, including the house where he wrote the book. The old hardware store has been converted into a headquarters for the Land Institute as well as a community center. The old high school, complete with a gymnasium and stage, has been re-roofed and is now suitable for classes. Jackson's fifth essay, from which the title of the book derives, describes his experience in Mattfield Green. It is my favorite. We journey through the attics of the abandoned houses, reading excerpts of programs from the New Century Club, (a women's organization), printed between 1920 and 1964. This was the time when community life (however unsophisticated) was vital, until steamrolled by the approach of large scale industrial agriculture and global economies. And while Mattfield Green provides a micro view, Jackson digs farther into the tragic loss of bison and native peoples, with passages from Wallace Stegner and discussions of tribesmen in New Guinea. Ultimately he sketches a new kind of Renaissance communitarian: part scientist, part artist, part ecological accountant, part farmer. This is a short book, but don't look to it for easy answers. It is full of challenges, questions, and compass points, imbued with a refreshing thoughtfulness. It might just inspire you to find a Mattfield Green of your own to dig into and "go" native.
Recommended Reading From the Editors' Desks Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens our Future, by Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich. Island Press/Shearwater Books, Washington, D.C., 1996, 334 pp., $24.95 cloth. More than 20 years ago Anne and Paul Ehrlich put the world population explosion on the map as a major environmental issue. Since then they have added other, related causes to their alarming resumes: the loss of biological diversity, global warming, limits to the world food supply, natural resource depletion, and proliferation of toxic substances. The Ehrlichs argue that ours will be a decisive generation when it comes to protecting the future of the natural world (including humans) and the systems that sustain it. With Betrayal of Science and Reason, they attack what they call the "brownlash" (backlash against green politics), a near-conspiracy of industrial interests and journalists who wish--for a variety of reasons, some subtle and others not subtle at all--to think positively when it comes to environmental degradation. The authors relentlessly critique the science behind claims by Dixy Lee Ray, Julian Simon, Stephen Budiansky, and Gregg Easterbrook that global warming, ozone depletion, and dangers posed by water and air pollution, for instance, are fictions. With an abundance of documentation, and the help of many of the highest scientific authorities, they will not let us ignore the probable consequences of being lulled into environmental complacency. Complete scientific unanimity on topics such as global warming will never be reached, the Ehrlichs say, and waiting for unanimity could well spell disaster. But scientific consensus has already been reached. And, the Ehrlichs argue, "while scientific research is not properly carried out by consensus, science policy should be."
The Mojave: A Portrait of the Definitive American Desert, by David Darlington. Henry Holt, New York, 1996, 352 pp., $25.00 cloth. Although nearly all of it lies within three miles of a road and one of its showcase parks is only two hours away from 12 million people, the Mojave Desert retains a mysterious and elusive nature. For author Darlington, "The Mojave is an unceasing contradiction, a continual koan, a riddle designed to confound preconceptions." In other words, a subject that won't sit patiently for its portrait. Undaunted, Darlington leads readers on a meandering field trip and introduces several crusty, colorful characters who call the Mojave home (a few of the UFO seekers it attracts may call other planets home, but they seem drawn to the desert as much as miners and the military). Darlington leaves a trail of ecological tidbits--for example, at least 25 bird species nest in the trunks of Joshua trees--but the desert's long and fascinating human history and the competing claims to its land and resources take center stage. For instance, Darlington provides a comprehensive account of the battle involving the Bureau of Land Management, environmentalists, and dirt bikers over the annual Barstow to Las Vegas motorcycle race and how the desert tortoise was used to curtail the event. Other topics are treated with less depth, though Darlington should be applauded for attempting to characterize such a vast and complex region--and one that must be reckoned with in a state that is one-quarter desert. Biodiversity II: Understanding and Protecting Our Biological Resources, edited by Marjorie L. Reaka-Kudla, Don E. Wilson, and Edward O. Wilson. Joseph Henry Press, Washington D.C., 525 pp., $34.95 cloth. "Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got till it's gone." So Joni Mitchell sang about nature as a whole, and it's certainly true of biodiversity. While in 1992, biodiversity was a major topic at the Rio Summit on the environment, five years earlier the word hardly existed. Among the major forces which put biodiversity center stage so quickly were the experts that came together under E.O. Wilson to hold the National Forum on Biodiversity in 1986, and to produce the subsequent volume Biodiversity II. The current volume is the second in the series and is an outgrowth of the recently established Consortium for Systematics and Biodiversity, an alliance of organizations dedicated to "enhancing the conceptual understanding and documentation of biodiversity of organisms." In addition to the editors, the book's distinguished authors include Thomas Lovejoy, Norman Myers, David Steadman, and many others. Topics range from the general (Why is biodiversity important?) to the particular (Molecular phylogeny in the eukaryotic microbial world). Some contributions are accessible to the informed non-scientist, others less so. But together they cover the frontier of the field in a way that both expert and amateur can appreciate. As the editors point out in their summing up, since the compilation of the Book of Genesis and the writings of Aristotle and probably well before, one species, Homo sapiens, has always been particularly interested in the others. As we are learning, despite the occasional tone of this volume, that interest is anything but academic. |
Winter 1997
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