Episode Five: Environmental Episode CL: From Public Radio International, I'm Christopher Lydon…this is the Whole Wide World. Historian Jared Diamond has followed the interplay of guns, germs, steel and humanity over the last 13,000 years; he says the next 50 years look like a final countdown in our marriage with the natural planet. Ant biologist E.O. Wilson observes that we are threatening our biosphere at an explosive rate. This hour, simplify the question: was it something we ate? Is it something we're eating? In feeding 6 billion people the world has accomplished the impossible; but food production in the modern mode has become a leaching worry unto itself. After a meal of globalized, industrialized food – produced with heavy inputs of chemicals and delivered halfway around the world – the leftovers include pollution, water shortages and greenhouse gases. We're examining the mound of environmental dangers on our plate, next…on the Whole Wide World. [Music] CL: I'm Christopher Lydon and this is the Whole Wide World…puzzling this hour about how to serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner to six or seven billion people without exhausting the only habitat our species ever had. [Montage] M. Pollan: "…we forget that what we eat is our most important, most profound engagement with the natural world. We affect it most directly by our choices of what we eat…" V. Shiva: "…food is best produced when you take care of ecosystem limits, when food cultures evolve our of the biodiversity…" E.O. Wilson: "…we're in the early stages of dangerous revolutionary change in every aspect of the environment…" CL: The Whole Wide World is the radio conversation that decodes global-ism and its implications about power, prosperity, and identity in the world. We're trying to sort the trends in politics, culture, disease, trade, technology – some that are pulling the planet together, some pulling it apart, some both. No threat is more clearly global than the fouling of this whole planet's environment – the evidence of climate change, water shortages, a crash of species or collapse of the habitat. But these are threats and warnings – like the risk of nuclear annihilation – that we've learned to live with, threats we've got a strong impulse to deny, or pretend to ignore. So this hour we're testing the force of those dangers by imagining them in your face, down your gullet, on your plate, in the food that the world eats. What if we narrowed the environmental mission to feeding the human race now and for centuries to come? Has modern food production managed our way past a crisis of survival? Just what can you tell from your daily diet about how the old globe, and the new globalism, are doing? For me a lot of the urgency in the question came out of a conversation with the polymath historian Jared Diamond. "Guns, Germs and Steel" is his classic account of the last 13,000 years and how our ancestors out of Africa spread themselves and the fruits of the earth so unevenly among the continents. Jared Diamond has a peculiar eminence as a medical doctor who is also a UCLA professor of geography; he knows the hunter-gatherers of New Guinea and the evolution of birds from deep study. He seemed as good a guide as any to the very big picture of where we are now. JD: One way to express where we are would be in what could be the final countdown. What one can say for sure is that within the next 50 years, lots of important things are going to get settled in one way or another; settled either in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways, not of our choice, and one can tick off the list of such things; they're familiar: Loss of fresh water supplies, fossil fuels, biodiversity, forests, fisheries, accumulations of toxics, introduced pests, and all of these things are changing at a rate, such that we will either solve them ourselves within the next 50 years, or they will solve themselves for us. By that, I mean that there are a dozen things, all of which we have to solve, and if we fail to solve any one of them, we'll be done in. CL: Jared Diamond's line is: imagine the earth's balance as something like a marriage. What's the most important thing in a marriage? It's not to look for the most important thing in a marriage, he says, because a happy marriage requires getting about 37 things right. Problems with money, kids, sex, or religion might each be enough to bring it down. Similarly with our world, with climate change, killer viruses, and the diversity of species large and small. Avoid prioritizing, Jared Diamond says, but get real, and get to work. [Music] CL: The ant biologist at Harvard, E. O. Wilson, another of the magisterial voices in American science, gave us an alternative frame for this hour. We were looking at that famous NASA picture of the Blue Planet, the earth rising over the horizon of the moon. What it suggested to him, what Ed Wilson wanted us to imagine in that image, was the invisible film – much thinner than a razor's edge from the astronaut's perspective – that contains all life as we know it in the universe. Human beings and Ed Wilson's specialty, ants, are among the species in that amazing web of life on the land and sea of Planet Earth. Take away the 6 billion humans, Professor Wilson observed, and the fragile biosphere would be in balance for all time; but take away the million-billion ants, he said, and the whole edifice of living species would be doomed to collapse. EOW: I don't think that life, in it's, oh, more than three-billion-year history, has ever experienced an organism like humanity. We are a biological species in a biological world; we are not creatures poised halfway between those creatures and the angels above; we were not, we did not descend from aliens put on this planet. We evolved here, as a species, over millions of years, and our bodies and our minds are exquisitely well adapted to this particular physical environment that we inherited. This is our cradle; it's where we grew up, and as we start perturbing any of that atmosphere – quality of water, the composition of the plants and animals around us – we are doing it at our peril, because we are moving away from what we were adapted to. [Music]s CL: So those are the baselines from two authorities we respect. And the challenge. Can we confront the serious disrepair of our home planet? Can we see the human hand in its predicament? Even if it might take a lifetime or more to show some improvement? This hour, see the planetary problem close-up and bite-size. Have a look at the food on your table. Michael Pollan writes about food from the inside: the growing of apples, potatoes, and steer beef, and about what industrial agriculture does to the outside. So he's an expert on the meal before us that we've been wanting to ask about. [CL to MP]: I'm looking at a Big Mac and fries here. "Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame-seed bun," with fries, and thinking: here it is, industrialized food for a global age. It's a franchise – McDonald's, oddly enough – that is supposed to keep the peace. Tom Friedman of the New York Times said there'd never been a war between two countries that had McDonald's franchises. That was before the Balkans came apart. But we've got some sort of a symbol here, just in terms of what you can eat. What's the evidence of globalization of our food in this burger and does it scare you, or rather comfort you? MP: McDonald's stands for many things. And one of the things it stands for is, yes, cheap industrialized food. But it also stands for American power. Um, and you know we're…we're constantly surprised and amazed that people both love this food and hate. There's something very seductive about industrialized food. The…the fact that no matter where I am all over the world, I can…I can get a french fry, and it tastes exactly the same and conforms to a universal image of the perfect golden french fry. This is an amazing thing, but it comes at an enormous ecological and perhaps spiritual cost, because in order to have a universal, you know, platonic ideal of a french fry, you need a monoculture of potatoes. CL: Explain what that means. MP: Well a monoculture is basically a single species and, indeed, very often a single variety of a species, grown in incredible profusion over vast fields of the same thing…because, to get, you see, to get that perfect McDonald's french fry, which is unusually long, and they like them long and golden so that they're long enough to come up out of that red box like a bouquet... CL: Right... MP: ...um, you know, that's what we like, that sense of that overstuffed, that cornucopia, really. Only the Russet Burbank gives you that really long potato. So you end up planting only Russet Burbanks, all over the world. This is an inc...from an ecological point of view, it's an incredibly dangerous and stupid idea. The reason for that is, all monocultures are exquisitely vulnerable to pests, to diseases, to insects, which like nothing better than a giant field of the same thing. I mean, the Irish potato famine was a result of exactly this approach. The Irish, for whatever reason, were planting more or less one kind of potato through the whole country. It was called the Lumper. One day, a disease – a blight, a kind of fungal disease – blew in, and overnight, all the potatoes in Ireland, and most of Europe, died. They turned black. The vines turned black, and the potatoes underground turned to mush…and that was because there was a monoculture. Monocultures are very vulnerable. You need vast amounts of pesticide to support the monoculture, to keep it healthy. So that you end up with this precarious system, this perfect french fry requiring all these Russet Burbanks, which in turn require all these pesticides. To give you a specific example, when McDonald's is buying potatoes, the one thing they can't stand is, you know, when you slice up a potato, sometimes you see a couple brown spots... CL: Right... MP: ...inside. Well, they mean nothing. It's a…it's a cosmetic defect; it's called "net necrosis." And it's caused by an aphid that passes around this… (I'm not sure if it's a virus or a bacteria), and that infects the potato, and it has no real effect on the health of the plant…on the health of the eater, but it unaesthetic. And if you're selling, if you're in the business of selling the platonic ideal of french fries, you have no tolerance for this. The only way that we know to prevent net necrosis in Russet Burbanks is to spray them with very powerful insecticides, which we do. And those insecticides are so strong that, in fact farmers, won't go into their fields for five days after you've sprayed them, even if the irrigation pivot is broken down... CL: Wow! MP:...because they know that this pesticide will basically mess with their neurology; they're neurotoxins. So we're doing that; we're endangering farm workers strictly for the aesthetic ideal. And if you ask an organic farmer: well, how do you deal with net necrosis? And he'll say…and in fact I asked one…he'll say: Oh, I don't, I don't have that problem. And I said: Why not? And he said: Well, I don't grow Russet Burbanks. CL: Michael Pollan doesn't grow Russet Burbanks either. He did however, as an experiment, grow genetically modified New Leaf potatoes with their built-in pesticide. When it came time to eat them, Michael Pollan said "no thanks." MP: ...and so my point is, if we weren't growing potatoes in vast monocultures, we probably wouldn't need potatoes that had been genetically modified to kill bugs. Nor would we need a lot of pesticide. So you see how the monoculture in culture, the monoculture of taste, the idea that we should have, you know, the…the McDonald's ideal – one world, one taste – has ecological ramifications – very, very powerful ones. So, there's a connection between biodiversity on the plate and biodiversity in the field. And biodiversity in nature, we understand, is the key to health. Nature never puts all her eggs in one basket. She would never have one variety of potato or anything else growing over, you know, millions of miles of farmland. CL: That's the fries on my plate. Michael Pollan is saying that the pollution from all those industrial chemicals – fertilizers, hormones, pesticides – is one of the hidden prices of what we're eating. Another uncounted cost is the use of petroleum products to fertilize the corn that feeds the steers that make the burger. [CL to MP]: Let's talk about the beef in this Big Mac. You write that a steer, who may tip in eventually at fifteen hundred pounds, will eat food that has absorbed 284 gallons of petroleum as fertilizer. I'm thinking, at 25 miles a gallon, I could drive coast to coast in the United States on the gasoline that will go into that cow's beef. Um, is this not a problem? MP: [Laughs] Well, it's not all gasoline. It's…it's gasoline equivalent. I mean, it's fossil fuel. CL: Okay... MP: Oddly enough, the way we grow a hamburger in this country does involve a lot of fossil fuel. Now how should this be? I was kind of amazed to find that we have this animal that's brilliantly designed by nature to digest grass, that is a terrific kind of solar system. You know the sun feeds the grass, and the grass feeds the cow, and the cow feeds the human. So this system works pretty well, and it's very sustainable. But, it doesn't work fast enough for the capitalist system, which is always trying to make a cow reach its slaughter weight as fast as possible. If you keep a cow on grass, it takes maybe two years to get it up there. But that's not quick enough. So what do you do? Well, to get it down to fourteen months, which is what we have it down to, to bring a cow to slaughter…if you feed them on corn, they will grow a lot more quickly, because it's a more high-energy food; corn is really cheap. Now why is corn so cheap? Well, partly 'cause it's subsidized, partly because we grow it with fertilizer that is made from, mostly from natural gas. It can also be made from fuel, from diesel or anything else, and that's where you get all that fossil fuel going into the cow. It's first fed to the corn. And so we've taken this system that is essentially…was a solar-driven, grass-based system of producing a hamburger, or any other piece of meat, and we've turned it into another gas guzzler, because it's faster to give all that cheap fuel, natural gas, to create the fertilizer to feed the corn, then use the corn to feed the cows, and they grow fast. Um…it makes sense economically because time is money, and corn is…sells for half the price it costs to grow it, thanks to subsidy. Does it make sense ecologically? No, absolutely not. It doesn't make sense from a population point of view either because we're growing, you know…more than half the grain grown in this country is grown to feed animals; it could be feeding people. CL: That subsidized corn is the lynchpin of a system that, as Michael Pollan describes it, delivers cheap fast food for the masses but makes a habit of hiding what it really costs. MP: The expression "cheap food" is…is really a myth. You know, how is it that we can have a ninety-nine cent hamburger? But behind that cheapness is an incredible trail of expenses having to do with the war in the Persian Gulf, to defend our oil supply; having to do with the cost of antibiotic resistance, because in order to get the cows to tolerate all this corn, which disagrees with their digestion, we have to give them antibiotics or they would get sick… hormones to make them grow even more quickly, and whatever that is doing to the, you know, the disruption of… endocrine systems of humans and frogs, and all sorts of other animals. The pollution from feedlots…to feed animals corn you take them out of the grass, and you concentrate them in these cities, you know, these metropolises of meat…where manure, which is a great boon on an organic farm, becomes a pollutant, because there's too much of it in one place. So you have these vast waste lagoons, and you pollute the local water system. So these are all the costs of cheap…cheap food. Um…and the motto of our food system should be, you know, something like "cheap at any cost." CL: He's talking about costs that, of course, you never see on your plate. MP: The hidden price is really, I think, the most…the one that worries me the most is…to the natural systems. You know…we forget that what we eat is our most important, most profound engagement with the natural world. We affect it most directly by our choices of what we eat. And when we choose to eat an industrialized hamburger and potatoes and french fries, we are exacting a tremendous price from the environment, because there is the issue of moving that food around the world, which is very wasteful of energy. And there is the issue of the vast agricultural monocultures required to grow it, which in turn requires us to use all sorts of pesticides. All these things are linked. CL: Here's one link: that cheap subsidized corn behind the cheap burger and Chicken McNuggets brings a kind of foreign policy with it. MP: And the other implication of this: we can sell corn more cheaply than people in Africa can grow it. So you are, essentially, impoverishing already impoverished farmers with our subsidies. The ramifications of those subsidies are reaching to farms in Nigeria, where farmers find that they can't…they can't match the price that the market is willing to pay. And they've already been enticed out of growing for themselves and been told, you know, in the global economy you've gotta…you have to grow for global trade, not for subsistence. I think it's very important that everybody, at least to some basic extent, be able to grow their own food. It's too dangerous to mess around with. We have been, you know, playing with policies in Africa, where we're basically weaning people off of local agriculture and the ability to feed themselves. [Music] CL: So there's a start on the global implications of the all-American burger: the mono-cropping of potatoes, the accelerated factory production of beef, and the hiding of costs, especially in subsidies of petroleum and corn. When we come back we're going to hear how the World Bank helped design and finance the global food system and how differently the global food fight sounds on the other side of the world. VS: "…for me globalization in food and farming means pushing peoples and societies, who have the capacity to feed themselves, into hunger and starvation…" CL: This is the Whole Wide World produced in association with WGBH Radio Boston from PRI, Public Radio International. [Music] CL: I'm Christopher Lydon…this is the Whole Wide World…looking this hour at the ecological burden of putting three squares a day on a few billion tables around the world. Any kind of food shopping these days puts you into a world market, not only for exotic plantains or mangoes, but also for what we used to think of as local produce. Half [of] the table grapes we Americans eat were grown abroad; sixty percent of the asparagus; one third of our fresh tomatoes. This gloriously tasty abundance and diversity of our food markets didn't happen by accident. Over the last half century, a concerted strategy in food technology and trade has eased the world past what was said to be an unsustainable population explosion. There are still hungry people, but there's more food than ever, thanks to a web of innovations in irrigation, in hybrid seeds, in specialization and fertilization known collectively as "the Green Revolution." The alternative to that revolution was mass starvation, as most of us understand our history. So it's not surprising that there's a huge institutional momentum for sticking to that strategic path. Kevin Cleaver is the top farm and food specialist at the World Bank in Washington. The big trend line in his career has been that rising curve of food production. Globalization of farming methods and markets has been overwhelmingly good news, he'd tell you, not just for shoppers and eaters, but for enterprising farmers the world over. Kevin Cleaver has watched and celebrated the example of Kenyan farmers in East Africa. KC: The market is here. We are already globalized. I lived in Kenya working on agriculture there, and the Kenyans both imported and exported, and they liked it just like that. What did they export? They exported tea and coffee, a little bit of cotton, cut flowers, vegetables to Europe and, in fact, what did they make a lot of money on? They made a lot of money on flowers, which they could produce in the European winter. So they would put 'em on an airplane and send them to Hamburg. And the farmers that were producing those things generated so much income, they were able to buy so much more food than they would have had they just produced their own, their own food crop. So globalization actually helps most farmers. CL: [There's] nothing wrong with globalization, Kevin Cleaver would argue, that couldn't be fixed by further globalization in the form of lower tariffs on food imports to markets like the United States, and wider, heavier traffic in trade. KC: Our own civilization is based on trade. We…you know, Adam Smith told us about this before... I trade with you. If you do something better than I, and I do something better than you, we exchange the product of that trade. And this is exactly what the Kenyans discovered: they could make a lot more money by producing these cut flowers and vegetables and exporting it to Europe, many, many, many times more money than just scratching the soil for just enough corn and succomaywhikey (sp?) to keep them alive. The world itself has a food surplus. There's more production per capita in the world than there ever was before, even with a bigger population. The world food prices on world markets are declined, so those Kenyans can go right to the market and buy it. Absolutely no problem. Why should we, you know…you and I don't produce everything that we consume. You and I don't produce the cars, the computer chips. We can't. We look for specialists to do that. So what is wrong with African farmers doing the same thing? Producing those things that generate the highest income, which they trade for those things that they need, the foodstuffs that they need on the world market that are relatively cheap? That's what they're doing. And the question, therefore, is to find those activities that would generate them the most income. This gets to the biggest problem of the global agricultural market, which is that most farmers do not have the access to markets that those lucky Kenyan farmers do, because they happen to produce a niche product that the Europeans and the Americans can't produce, which is flowers in the wintertime. Do we want to condemn African farmers to subsistence, to producing just enough to feed themselves? Do they not have the right to generate a surplus to purchase clothes and shoes and schools and health facilities? You know, what is conceivably wrong with this? CL: Kevin Cleaver meet Vandana Shiva. VS: I personally feel outraged as a scientist at the lies told in the name of feeding the hungry. CL: Author, activist, and physicist Vandana Shiva is in the thick of the global food fight, leading third world peasant farmers against the industrial food system in its many forms: the farm chemicals, the subsidized exports, the monocultures in the field and on the plate. Vandana Shiva is at war with the myth, as she calls it, of progress in food production. Her anti-global banner is: local varieties, local values, local taste. [CL to VS]: Vandana Shiva, I would take it very small, to the level of, you know, the Indian village farmer. How has globalization changed, and (you would say) impoverished, his world and his work? VS: Over the last decade, as the impacts of globalization have unfolded in India, I have traveled to villages in Punjab, which was one of the most prosperous farming areas, where village after village is like a perm…in a permanent mourning, because farmers, who could not just make a living, but did it well, are today in such deep debt that they can't pay back, and they are committing suicide. Down in Andar Pradesh (sp?), another area which has had an epidemic of farm suicides, our calculation is more than twenty, thirty thousand farmers have consumed the same pesticides that got them into debt. The cycle for that small farmer, for example, in a very semi-arid village in the Deccan plateau of India…the transition under globalization has meant giving up growing the fifteen to twenty crops he or she grew in order to feed themselves and sell something on the marketplace. It would involve millets, it would involve legumes, it would involve chilies, or some vegetables, eighty percent of which would be consumed by the family, none of which required irrigation; it was rain-fed farming, dry-land farming, and…you had, even in dry areas, food self-sufficiency. And then in the eighties, using the so-called "freedom of globalization," companies like Monsanto started to move in very, very rapidly with new hybrid cotton seeds, promising farmers they were going to become millionaires, using every one of our gods and goddesses to be their marketing agents, bringing videos that made it look like every American farmer who's driving a car has become rich because they bought "white gold" or some...some global seed. The costs of production shot up to more than a hundred thousand rupees an acre…what they're earning by selling their cotton, or their groundnut, or their Soya bean is going down. CL: That's a pretty grim overview. I wonder, is there any good news here, as you see it, in globalization? VS: In the area of food, unfortunately, the news is all bad... CL: Wow! VS: ...because food is best produced when you take care of ecosystem limits, when food cultures evolve out of the biodiversity of the region. And that is why, in a country like India, every region has a different cuisine. You go to the south, and they cook their food in coconut oil because that's the oil seed of that region. You come to the north: we cook our food in mustard oil, because that's the oil seed of our region. And since 1998, both the coconut oil economy and the groundnut oil economy and the sesame nut economy and the mustard oil economy have been destroyed by the forced dumping of genetically engineered Soya oil on Indian markets, wiping out our local consumption. Food is the kind of thing in which a few things should be globally traded, but they should be produced under the sensibilities of local limits. CL: Have we not all accepted that, under the old ecosystem limits, we couldn't feed a billion Indians or six and a half billion people on the earth? VS: In fact, it is only under ecosystem limits that you can actually feed people. For example, the Green Revolution, which is the name given to industrial agriculture when it was imposed on Third World countries – and in my view it was neither green nor very revolutionary – it led to five to ten times more water use to produce the same amount of nutrition. Per unit land, we produced less nutrition; we produced higher monocultures and used more chemicals, but overall, the food basket did not increase. CL: Let's be simpleminded here. Is there not less starvation and hunger today than there was thirty, forty years ago? VS: That's not at all true. CL: Okay. VS: The case of India is a case that is my life, it is my history, it is me... CL: Let's talk about it. VS: 1942 was the last big famine that hit India. And it was the result of free trade policies of that time, in which the British were extracting all the food produced, using it to feed the armies, for that big war that…the last big war we had, while the producers of food were not being left with enough to eat. The two million people who were pushed to starvation died in spite of enough food being available. Hunger and starvation disappeared from India after our independence in 1947. The Green Revolution only came in 1966. No one died of hunger in India in between, before the technological intervention of pushing chemicals and what I call "weapons of mass destruction," as a basis of food production. That's when the Green Revolution was imposed on us. It did not increase the overall food basket. It did start shifting the bias towards what I have called "monocultures of the mind." CL: That phrase, "monocultures of the mind," echoes Michael Pollan's monocultures of taste and that risky monoculture of potatoes. But notice also that Vandana Shiva refers to the Green Revolution not as a gift but [as] an imposition. We heard Kevin Cleaver of the World Bank promoting specialty crops for export. His example was Kenyan flowers for Europe. Vandana Shiva's counter-example is hybrid cotton in India. These are ventures where Vandana Shiva says India goes deep into debt to pay for its poison. VS: The large dam irrigation systems, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, new research stations that deployed it all, making us forget ten thousand years of good farming knowledge – all this was made possible by the loans that the World Bank literally imposed on us. Interestingly, in the first round, the World Bank and IMF give you what they call "soft loans", so it looks to Third World countries [like] – oh, this is not going to cost us too much. And then when they've got you hooked onto a non-sustainable path, and got you hooked into what, in agriculture, has amounted to getting farms, farmers, and countries addicted to what has been called "ecological narcotics," – where the more you use pesticides the more you need them, the more you use chemical fertilizers the more you have to apply them, the more you use water the more you need it – all of this creates an addiction of an ecological kind. All of this is wonderful for the World Bank, which then moves its loans to the high-interest bracket, as the result of which, by 1991, one third of India's debts (at that time of ninety billion dollars), was really loans, unnecessary loans taken for poisons for farming and destroying our farmlands and forests and biodiversity and uprooting our indigenous communities to build large water, large irrigation systems… CL: Genetically modified and patented seeds are yet another intrusion that Vandana Shiva fights tooth and nail. Americans generally don't know what to make of this picture: of poor countries batting away the helping hand of science and food relief. VS: I can, at best, give you the example of India... CL: Okay. VS: ...to tell you what it means. In 1998, when our Indian edible oil economy was shattered because of globalization, and our mustard oil particularly, the most popular cooking oil of north India, was banned, and free imports of Soya were allowed – on the same day the two things happened. The women of the slums of Delhi called me to say, "We need our mustard oil." And the women said, "We are going to dump the Soya; we are going to come out and have an action; will you join us?" I said, "Of course I'll join you." I then did the studies on... CL: But what're they…what're they fighting, here? VS: They're fight…basically the women said, "Our children are not going to sleep, because the taste of Soya they can't stand. They love the taste of mustard." Food, we must not forget, food is us; food makes us. The aromas, the tastes, the cultures, the cultural quality of food is so intimately a part of what we are as our biological beings, the human body, for you to just change food overnight and say, "Stop eating mustard, mustard oil; eat Soya oil!" can be traumatic. The poorest of women, the poorest of children, were the ones making a choice and saying, "We will boycott Soya; we want our mustard back!" And they did that, and we had to have huge pressure, but mustard was allowed to come back to the marketplace after a year of direct action by the women's groups. [Music] CL: The chance to grow flowers in Kenya for winter markets in northern Europe makes globalism sound irresistible. On the other hand, the loss of sovereignty over seeds and the very savor of traditional food can be causes worth fighting for. When we come back: water, global warming and other weak links in the environmental food chain. This is the Whole Wide World from PRI, Public Radio International. [Music] I'm Christopher Lydon…this is the Whole Wide World…and it should be dessert time. We've been talking this hour about what we eat as a story about the fate of the biosphere. We began with a cautionary observation from the celebrated ant scientist E. O. Wilson that the human species, like none other, is a geophysical force, single-handedly and catastrophically affecting the web of life all around us. I asked Ed Wilson to put his stethoscope on the planet. EW: We're in the early stages of dangerous, revolutionary change in every aspect of the environment. Global warming, for example, if it continued…and now there's not any, much reasonable question that it is ongoing, and that it could have major effects within the next fifty years. We're in the early stages of it. If we pushed, kept pushing it, allowing it to proceed, then it could become truly catastrophic. We're in a very early stage of wiping out the rest of the world's biodiversity. It's gone farther than many people realize. For example, in some parts of the world…for example, of the 125 species known of birds that were native and unique to the Hawaiian islands when the first Polynesian put shore (I believe around 400 A.D.), including a native eagle and a flightless ibis, and a giant gooselike...remarkable, you know, the dodo of Hawaii and so on…of those 125 species, about twenty-five are left, and of those, most are endangered, some critically so. But in other parts of the world, we still have…intact rainforest, sufficient, and some grasslands and…and ancient deserts, which if protected would allow us, I think, to save most of the species. But not if we continue with conversion, logging, agricultural conversion, and pollution at the rate that we are inflicting on the planet now, inflicting it at an accelerating rate. I don't think any one of the major oceanic fisheries today is at a sustainable level. That is to say, all of them now have been skimmed off, are being skimmed off… CL: You're talking about the global warming, a crash of species, exhaustion of the fisheries...continue the list. EW: Well, one that's going to bite us, sooner than most people realize, is the shortage of fresh water, potable water, water adequately clean for irrigation. CL: There is a food crisis implied there, but what E.O. Wilson worries about is not sufficient calories to feed six, or even ten, billion humans with the lands under cultivation. EW: What alarms me, as a biologist is this: the natural environments in which most of the plants and animals of the world hang on – the reservoirs, the parks, the remaining tropical forest wildernesses, and so on – are shrinking rapidly because the expanding populations are simply taking them over to produce more food and reach more water. We're in a bottleneck of overpopulation [and] rising per capita consumption all around the world. And the idea is to get through that bottleneck, but carrying as much of the rest of life with us as possible – not just human life, but all of life – through the bottleneck. If we find ourselves in a biologically impoverished world, where everything is human chains and with far fewer kinds of plants and animals and natural environments that can take care of themselves, around the world, I think that we – our descendants, humanity generally – will deeply regret that something wasn't done to avoid that fate. [Music] CL: On E. O. Wilson's list, and many others', the fresh water supply is high among the life-and- death emergencies facing the planet. Water, since it's mostly used to irrigate crops, is another name for food. Grain shipped from wet countries to dry countries is sometimes called "virtual water." In clouds overhead and in aquifers under ground, water is an absolutely vital resource that overflows national borders [and] international custody. Sandra Postel runs the Global Water Policy Project from Amherst, Massachusetts. I asked her what part of the food problem is a water problem, and what part of the water problem is a food problem. SP: Water and food issues are very, very connected. Seventy percent of all the water that we take out of rivers, lakes, [and] underground aquifers is for irrigation; it's to grow crops…70 percent. So, agriculture accounts for the lion's share of the water that we're extracting from the natural environment. Flipping that over, if you look at the food side, about 40 percent of the world's food comes from irrigated land, and so, on the food picture, we're very, very dependent on the availability of water to secure the food supply. And what we're beginning to see now around the world is that, when you look at the most important irrigation zones in the world – particularly China, India, Pakistan, and the western United States (which are the four top irrigators of the world) – you see very serious signs of unsustainable water use in just about all of those important irrigated areas. In addition, we see major rivers running dry in the important… CL: Like which ones? SP: We're seeing the Indus running dry, which is a very important source of water for Pakistan, and Pakistan relies on irrigation for 80 percent of its food production. The Yellow River in China has been running dry on and off since 1972, and it's been running dry for longer stretches of the year throughout the 1990s and into this decade now. The Ganges River in south Asia….these are major rivers that are over-tapped, even today… CL: You're talking about unsustainable water use in major breadbaskets of the world. What happens next? I mean, when does the crunch come and how? SP: Well, that's a very good question. In addition to the rivers being over-tapped and ground water being over-pumped, we have salinization of the soil, which historically is one of the biggest unsustainable uses of irrigation water. The fact that, as you use more and more irrigation water, salts build up in the soil, particularly in very dry climates. Something like twenty percent of our current irrigation base is suffering from the buildup of salts in the soil. So, we have these three major things happening in much of this irrigated base around the world. The United States can get by because we have a rich agricultural base in other parts of country, but many countries cannot. China, India, Pakistan, much of Asia is very, very heavily dependent on irrigation for their food supply. And this is where I think the major crunch will come. Asia has sixty percent of the world's people but only thirty-six percent of its fresh water. And so, it will be in the countries of Asia, I think, where we see this unsustainable use of water. The increased pressures on water really come to bear on food supply. CL: Water is a measure of that great threat to the biosphere: the climate change that's already underway, the global warming of which Professor Wilson says there is little doubt [and] the meltdown and flooding that Jared Diamond was worrying about at the start of the hour. The journalist Bill McKibben was one of the first to write about the scientific study of global warming and to put it in everyman's language. BM'K: So far, the temperature's gone up about one degree Fahrenheit on this planet due to human intervention; that's been enough to what…thin ice in the Arctic by forty percent. It's been enough to make winter at my latitude on average about three weeks shorter. Just to give you some example: you're sitting in Boston right now. The new computer modeling indicates that by the end of this century, middle to end of this century, the climate of Boston is likely to resemble the climate of current-day Atlanta, Georgia. If that's all that happened, that would be fine; people can survive in Atlanta, Georgia, but all that extra energy expressing itself in a million different ways around this system – you know, higher wind speeds, more melt of precipitation, more melt of ice, more precipitation – you know, every possible variable on the face of the earth, except tectonic and volcanic forces, will be thrown into some kind of disequilibrium simultaneously. CL: Global warming and food production, it goes almost without saying, are just a link or two apart. BM'K: Civilization and agriculture have evolved simultaneously over the last 10,000 years, and they done it in a period of relative climatic stability. One of the things you've been able to count on in that 10,000 year period is that if you could grow potatoes, or wheat, or something in a particular field, your great-granddaughter would be able to do the same. That's now a complete sucker's bet. By radically changing climate, we introduce an element of instability into this system that's truly unprecedented. Take rice: it's grown in great many cases in low-lying parts of Asia, in parts of Asia that are close to the sea. I was in Bangladesh the year before last – one of great rice-growing cultures of the world because it's on this magnificent river delta, where the Ganges and Bramaputra pour down out of the Himalayas into the Bay of Bengal – and each year there's this nice gentle flood, and it leaves behind this layer of silt, and everything's incredibly fertile, and the rice, just, you know, three times a year…they're able to triple crop rice, and it explodes out of the paddies. Here's the problem. One of the things that happens when you raise the temperature of the planet, is you raise the level of the ocean. Well, if you raise the level of the Bay of Bengal a couple of feet, that water pouring down out of the Himalayas sort of runs into a plug when it reaches the ocean, and instead of a gentle flood, you get dire, devastating floods. They had one like that in 1998, in the warmest year on record in this planet. Something like two thirds of Bangladesh was under thigh-deep water or better for the better part of three months. Now, you know, on the one hand, they coped with it a lot better than we would cope with it. People moved up on the roofs of huts; they fished. There was much less whining than you encounter in Boston from the average snowstorm. On the other hand, they didn't get their fall rice crop in that year; they weren't food self-sufficient like they usually are. By many estimates, by many estimates, the number of environmental refugees in this century – primarily people who can no longer grow the food they need to grow on their land – will exceed the number of political refugees in the bloody century we've just come through. CL: So what is the chance that this is the way the world ends – not with a bang or a whimper, but as it almost did in Noah's day, with a flood? BM'K: Global warming is more a condition almost than a particular problem. You know, very few people are going to die from global warming. But, as you warm the planet, you make all the…you set the ground for all these other problems. For instance, who likes a warmer, wetter world? Well, the clear answer is: mosquitoes. So, you know, the World Health Organization has said that dengue is going to be the breakout disease of this century. I, in my usual avant-garde way, managed to contract it while I was in Bangladesh a couple of years ago and can testify that, if this is the vanguard disease of the century, it's not going to be much fun. There were a lot of people in Bangladesh who were dying while I was there, and dying, you know, in some measure because we can't get our own, you know, consumption under control. All those sort of things – from food shortages to violent weather episodes – all of those things are underwritten by this most basic change in the conditions of the earth. Here's the way to think about it: into this narrow envelope of atmosphere we are adding a lot, lot, lot more energy; many watts per square meter of the earth's surface. That energy will express itself in an enormous number of ways. The violence of the earth, the physical ferocity of the earth as we encounter it, will amp up in enormous measure. A world that we have managed to thrive on, that we've managed to grow to six or seven billion people on, a world that has been – in essence, taken as whole – benign, gentle, and hospitable to us, is vanishing, to be replaced by a world that we know very little about but that, by every indication we have, will be a far less pleasant place for us to hang our hat. [Music] CL: What sticks to my ribs at the end of this hour, this mixed meal of environmental reflections, is E.O. Wilson's optimism and E.O. Wilson's anxiety. When all else fails, he says, quoting Abba Eban, men turn to reason. The other saying goes: we are what we eat. Ed Wilson's worry is that we'll get more and more like what we're eating, especially those farm-fed salmon who never swim the oceans, or the pent-up steers fattening in their sprawling slums of beef. Ed Wilson's pretty sure that we humans can save species, but if we do it at the expense of other life around us, our offspring could be living on life-supports, like Frank Perdue's warehouse chickens, and they'll be cursing their free-range ancestors who heedlessly killed so much of the old habitat. Every meal henceforth can be a moment to remember our engagement with living nature. As Julia Child says, bon appetit! [Music] Please visit our global community online at www.thewholewideworld.net. The Whole Wide World is a collaboration of Lydon and McGrath Productions and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, in association with WGBH Radio Boston. We had help from producers Ben Walker and Katherine Bidwell, from engineer Tom Tiger, and Jake Shapiro of the Public Radio Exchange. Jay Allison of transom.org, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is our radio visionary. Thanks also to Keith Kiya Wilson, Justin Grotelueschen, Kezia Parsons, Josh Ward, the Christian Science Publishing Society, and public radio stations WCAI and WNAN on Cape Cod. Support for this program is made possible in part by the PRI Program Fund, whose contributors include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Mary McGrath is our executive producer. I'm Christopher Lydon.