Perhaps in the end, it will not be a change in technology that will bring us to the biomimetic future, but a change of heart, a humbling that allows us to be attentive to nature's lessons. As author Bill McKibben has pointed out, our tools are always deployed in the service of some philosophy or ideology.
If we are to use our tools in the service of fitting in on Earth, our basic relationship to nature—even the story we tell ourselves about who we are in the universe—has to change.#2864•
The ideology that allowed us to expand beyond our limits was that the world was put here exclusively for our use. We were, after all, the apex of evolution, the pièce de résistance in the pyramid of life. Mark Twain was amused by this notion. In his marvelous Letters to the Earth, he says that claiming we are superior to the rest of creation is like saying that the Eiffel Tower was built so that the scrap of paint at the top would have somewhere to sit.
It's absurd, but it's still the way we think.#2859•
Chapter 2
We quickly went from growing food to sustain ourselves to growing so much food it became a surplus—an export item and a political tool. The farm became just another factory producing another product that would keep the United States in the global catbird seat.#2860•
Once on that treadmill, the feedback loops began. Weeds and pests are wily by nature, and even if you spray them one year, not all of them will die. Those that manage to hack an immunity explode the next year, requiring even heavier doses of biocides. In the escalating war of "crops and robbers," the more you spray, the more you have to spray.#2875•
What's most dangerous about this dependency—the crops on us and us on petroleum—is that it keeps us too busy to think what the real problems might be. Fertilizer, for instance, masks the real problem of soil erosion caused by a till agriculture of annuals. Pesticides mask a second real problem: the inherent brittleness of genetically identical monocultures.
Money borrowed to pay for the fossil-fuel inputs masks a third real problem: the fact that industrial agriculture not only destroys the soil and water, it strangles rural communities.#2853•
The problem of agriculture is an old and pervasive one, explains Wes Jackson in a series of books including New Roots for Agriculture, Altars of Unhewn Stone, and Meeting the Expectations of the Land. It comes from an insistence on decoupling ourselves from nature, from replacing natural systems with totally alien systems, and from waging war on, rather than allying ourselves with, natural processes.#2866•
It's a concept that I'd read about in chaos and complexity literature. There exists a sweet spot between chaos and order, gas and crystal, wild and tame. In that spot lies the powerfully creative force of self-organization, which complexity researcher Stuart Kaufmann calls "order for free." Tropical agroecologist Jack Ewel also alludes to this free ordering when he says, "Imitate the vegetative structure of an ecosystem, and you will be granted function."#2876•
Diversity is also the cheapest and best form of pest control. "Many pests tend to specialize on one host plant species, so when there's a diverse mix, pests have a harder time finding their target plant. Even if they manage to touch down somewhere in the field, the attack troops don't get very far. Disease spores may blow onto the wrong plant, or insect young may crawl into the wrong bud.
With a diverse offering, attacks die down before they become epidemics."#2877•
"Right now, for instance, we're seeing a flush of annual weeds the first and second year. The fields look awful at first, like a total failure, but the perennial seeds are in there and by the second or third year, they just go whoosh and come into their own. Somehow, the environment filters out what works from what doesn't work, so you are left with the most stable combination.
We're studying how this happens, and what steps we might take to help it to happen."#2865•
Studies at The Land are showing that when plants are grown in bicultures and tricultures, they're better able to fight off insects and diseases than when they're grown in monocultures. It makes sense if you think about it. Plants defend themselves against insects with chemical "locks," and at most, an insect carries only one or two "keys" to the plants it is adapted to eat.
An insect that finds itself in a field of nothing but its target plant is like a burglar with the key to every house in the neighborhood.#2854•
In a polyculture, where all the locks are different, finding food is more of a chore. A mixed neighborhood is equally frustrating for diseases that specialize in one plant. A fungus may fester on an individual, but when it releases its spores, the leaves of invulnerable plants act as a flypaper, bringing the fungal rampage to a halt.
That's why, although pests exist in prairie polycultures, you don't see the runaway decimation that you see in monocultures.
Invasions are contained.#2869•
Over the years, Fukuoka would turn this secret into a system he calls "do nothing" farming because it requires almost no labor on his part, and yet his yields are among the highest in Japan.#2856•
"It took me thirty years to develop such simplicity," says Fukuoka. Instead of working harder, he whittled away unnecessary agricultural practices one by one, asking what he could stop doing rather than what he could do. Forsaking reliance on human cleverness, he joined in alliance with nature's wisdom#2868•
Designing with nature's wisdom is at the core of this farming philosophy, which is called permaculture, for permanent agriculture. In permaculture, you ask not what you can wring from the land, but what the land has to offer. You roll with the weaknesses and the strengths of your acreage, and in this spirit of cooperation, says Mollison, the land yields generously without depletion and without inordinate amounts of body work from you#2873•
Ultimately, the strongest persuader is likely to be changing economic conditions. When the way farmers (or anyone else, for that matter) have been doing things becomes economically uncomfortable, they will be eager to try something new. This may happen when fossil fuels begin to run out, making farm inputs such as gasoline, fertilizer, and pesticide prohibitively expensive.
When that time comes, we'll do what any species does under the pressure of change.
We'll start shopping around for alternatives and adopt the most creative one, jumping to the next evolutionary level.#2863•
The point is that the sanctity of seeking higher yields—the agronomic equivalent of the search for gold—makes it virtual heresy to drop down to more realistic yields, to what the land will support over time. The Land realized that in order to defend the yields of perennial polyculture against those of conventional monocultures, it would have to somehow level the playing field.#2871•
One hundred and fifty years of farming the American plains has also resulted in an accumulation of local knowledge. People have learned how to time plantings, how to read the weather, and what to expect from soils, insects, diseases, and each other.
The problem is that with the rapid depopulation of the countryside, this knowledge has been disappearing. At this point, only 1 percent of the U.S. population is growing our food, and that figure is falling.#2862•
Chapter 3
The rest is history. We now know that photosynthesis, which means "putting together with light," is the process by which green plants and certain algae and bacteria take carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight and transform them into oxygen and energy-rich sugars. In the meantime, animals like us take that oxygen and those sugars and transform them back into carbon dioxide, water, and energy.
Thanks to the sun, mint and mice and men all thrive.#2888•