The Oil We Eat
Following the food chain back to
Iraq
Posted on Friday, July 23, 2004. Originally from Harper's Magazine, February 2004.
By Richard Manning.
The secret of
great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because
it was done neatly.—Balzac
The journalist’s rule says:
follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative,
in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of
tracking energy. We’ll follow the energy.
We learn as children that there
is no free lunch, that you don’t get something from nothing, that what goes up
must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only
slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth
century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat,
from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be
less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is
the first law of thermodynamics.
Special as we humans are, we get
no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat
plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants
to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic
fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this
fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative
to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as
cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.
Scientists have a name for the
total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget
for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity.” There have been two
efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at
Energy cannot be created or
canceled, but it can be concentrated. This is the larger and profoundly
explanatory context of a national-security memo George Kennan
wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning committee, ostensibly
about Asian policy but really about how the
If you follow the energy,
eventually you will end up in a field somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying
array of artifice and industry. Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity’s
cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in
turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since
humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished, most
likely because they are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense,
transportable bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a
barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from
hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of true wealth—sun energy—to
be found on the planet.
As Kennan
recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often
requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of
human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s
offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of
agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the
skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly
nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer
contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best
points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early
agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts—the presence not
just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses
significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those
granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the
accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in
charge ever since.
Domestication was also a radical
change in the distribution of wealth within the plant world. Plants can spend
their solar income in several ways. The dominant and prudent strategy is to
allocate most of it to building roots, stem, bark—a conservative portfolio of
investments that allows the plant to better gather energy and survive the
downturn years. Further, by living in diverse stands (a given chunk of native
prairie contains maybe 200 species of plants), these
perennials provide services for one another, such as retaining water,
protecting one another from wind, and fixing free nitrogen from the air to use
as fertilizer. Diversity allows a system to “sponsor its own fertility,” to use
visionary agronomist Wes Jackson’s phrase. This is the plant world’s norm.
There is a very narrow group of
annuals, however, that grow in patches of a single
species and store almost all of their income as seed, a tight bundle of
carbohydrates easily exploited by seed eaters such as ourselves. Under normal
circumstances, this eggs-in-one-basket strategy is a dumb idea for a plant. But
not during catastrophes such as floods, fires, and volcanic eruptions. Such
catastrophes strip established plant communities and create opportunities for
wind-scattered entrepreneurial seed bearers. It is no accident that no matter
where agriculture sprouted on the globe, it always happened near rivers. You
might assume, as many have, that this is because the
plants needed the water or nutrients. Mostly this is not true. They needed the
power of flooding, which scoured landscapes and stripped out competitors. Nor
is it an accident, I think, that agriculture arose independently and
simultaneously around the globe just as the last ice age ended, a time of
enormous upheaval when glacial melt let loose sea-size lakes to create tidal
waves of erosion. It was a time of catastrophe.
Corn, rice, and wheat are
especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of
things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil,
that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession
would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would
stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide
cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of
ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial
catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per
acre for a modern American farm.
When we say the soil is rich, it
is not a metaphor. It is as rich in energy as an oil well. A prairie converts
that energy to flowers and roots and stems, which in turn pass back into the
ground as dead organic matter. The layers of topsoil build up into a rich
repository of energy, a bank. A farm field appropriates that energy, puts it
into seeds we can eat. Much of the energy moves from the earth to the rings of
fat around our necks and waists. And much of the energy is simply wasted, a
trail of dollars billowing from the burglar’s satchel.
I’ve already mentioned that we
humans take 40 percent of the globe’s primary productivity every year. You
might have assumed we and our livestock eat our way through that volume, but
this is not the case. Part of that total—almost a third of it—is the potential
plant mass lost when forests are cleared for farming or when tropical rain
forests are cut for grazing or when plows destroy the deep mat of prairie roots
that held the whole business together, triggering erosion. The Dust Bowl was no
accident of nature. A functioning grassland prairie produces more biomass each
year than does even the most technologically advanced wheat field. The problem
is, it’s mostly a form of grass and grass roots that
humans can’t eat. So we replace the prairie with our own preferred grass,
wheat. Never mind that we feed most of our grain to livestock, and that
livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. And never mind that there
likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming
than all of beef farming raises in the same area today. Our ancestors found it
preferable to pluck the energy from the ground and when it ran out move on.
Today we do the same, only now
when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of
oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual primary productivity stored as
hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. On
average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year’s worth of
lost fertility to an acre of eroded land—in 1997 we burned through more than
400 years’ worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace
else. Even as the earth beneath
Six thousand years before
sodbusters broke up
Two other types of catastrophic
agriculture evolved at roughly the same time, one centered on rice in what is now
The wheat-beef people swept
across the western European plains in less than 300 years, a conquest some
archaeologists refer to as a “blitzkrieg.” A different race of humans, the
Cro-Magnons—hunter-gatherers, not farmers—lived on those plains at the time. Their
cave art at places such as
Hunter-gatherer archaeological sites
of the period contain spear points that originally belonged to the farmers, and
we can guess they weren’t trade goods. One group of anthropologists concludes,
“The evidence from the western extension of the LBK leaves little room for any
other conclusion but that LBK-Mesolithic interactions were at best chilly and
at worst hostile.” The world’s surviving Blackfeet, Assiniboine Sioux, Inca, and Maori probably have the best
idea of the nature of these interactions.
Wheat is temperate and prefers
plowed-up grasslands. The globe has a limited stock of temperate grasslands,
just as it has a limited stock of all other biomes. On average, about 10
percent of all other biomes remain in something like their native state today.
Only 1 percent of temperate grasslands remains
undestroyed. Wheat takes what it needs.
The supply of temperate
grasslands lies in what are today the
Plato wrote of his country’s
farmlands:
What now remains
of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man. . . . Formerly,
many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are
now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant
pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was
enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from
the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the
water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and
running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly
there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.
Plato’s lament is rooted in wheat
agriculture, which depleted his country’s soil and subsequently caused the
series of declines that pushed centers of civilization to
The new lands had an even greater
effect on the colonists themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture
on the rustic nature by his hosts at a dinner party in
The precolonial
famines of
The accepted term for this
strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more
properly labeled the amber revolution, because it applied exclusively to
grain—wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of
these three grains so that they could be hypercharged
with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This
innovation meshed nicely with the increased “efficiency” of the industrialized
factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat,
the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.
For openers, it disrupted
long-standing patterns of rural life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed
people off the land and into the world’s most severe poverty. The experience in
population control in the developing world is by now clear: It is not that
people make more people so much as it is that they make more poor people. In
the forty-year period beginning about 1960, the world’s population doubled,
adding virtually the entire increase of 3 billion to the world’s poorest
classes, the most fecund classes. The way in which the green revolution raised
that grain contributed hugely to the population boom, and it is the weight of
the population that leaves humanity in its present untenable position.
Discussion of these, the most
poor, however, is largely irrelevant to the American situation. We say we have
poor people here, but almost no one in this country lives on less than one
dollar a day, the global benchmark for poverty. It marks off a class of about
1.3 billion people, the hard core of the larger group of 2 billion chronically
malnourished people—that is, one third of humanity. We may forget about them,
as most Americans do.
More relevant here are the
methods of the green revolution, which added orders of magnitude to the
devastation. By mining the iron for tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them
and to make nitrogen fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers
had meant for other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion,
to lands that were not farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries
across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets.
The common assumption these days
is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There’s a little joke in
this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie
we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the
average farm in the
David Pimentel,
an expert on food and energy at
Fertilizer makes a pretty fine
bomb right off the shelf, a chemistry lesson Timothy McVeigh
taught at Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building in 1995—not a small matter, in that the green revolution has made
nitrogen fertilizers ubiquitous in some of the more violent and desperate
corners of the world. Still, there is more to contemplate in nitrogen’s less
sensational chemistry.
The chemophobia
of modern times excludes fear of the simple elements of chemistry’s periodic
table. We circulate petitions, hold hearings, launch websites, and buy and sell
legislators in regard to polysyllabic organic compounds—polychlorinated
biphenyls, polyvinyls, DDT, 2-4d, that sort of
thing—not simple carbon or nitrogen. Not that agriculture’s use of the more
ornate chemistry is benign—an infant born in a rural, wheat-producing county in
the
Those who model our planet as an
organism do so on the basis that the earth appears to breathe—it thrives by
converting a short list of basic elements from one compound into the next, just
as our own bodies cycle oxygen into carbon dioxide and plants cycle carbon
dioxide into oxygen. In fact, two of the planet’s most fundamental humors are
oxygen and carbon dioxide. Another is nitrogen.
Nitrogen can be released from its
“fixed” state as a solid in the soil by natural processes that allow it to
circulate freely in the atmosphere. This also can be done artificially. Indeed,
humans now contribute more nitrogen to the nitrogen cycle than the planet
itself does. That is, humans have doubled the amount of nitrogen in play.
This has led to an imbalance. It
is easier to create nitrogen fertilizer than it is to apply it evenly to
fields. When farmers dump nitrogen on a crop, much is wasted. It runs into the
water and soil, where it either reacts chemically with its surroundings to form
new compounds or flows off to fertilize something else, somewhere else.
That chemical reaction, called
acidification, is noxious and contributes significantly to acid rain. One of
the compounds produced by acidification is nitrous oxide, which aggravates the
greenhouse effect. Green growing things normally offset global warming by
sucking up carbon dioxide, but nitrogen on farm fields plus methane from
decomposing vegetation make every farmed acre, like every acre of Los Angeles
freeway, a net contributor to global warming. Fertilization is equally
worrisome. Rainfall and irrigation water inevitably washes the nitrogen from
fields to creeks and streams, which flows into rivers, which floods into the
ocean. This explains why the Mississippi River, which drains the nation’s
About two thirds of
It began with the
industrialization of Victorian England. The empire was then flush with sugar
from plantations in the colonies. Meantime the cities were flush with factory
workers. There was no good way to feed them. And thus was born the afternoon
tea break, the tea consisting primarily of warm water and sugar. If the workers
were well off, they could also afford bread with heavily sugared
jam—sugar-powered industrialization. There was a 500 percent increase in per
capita sugar consumption in
There is another energy matter to
consider here, though. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a
breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of
food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy
of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing
industry in the
That number does not include the
fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, or the
fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores
on the edge of town, where the land is cheap. It appears, however, that the
corn cycle is about to come full circle. If a bipartisan coalition of
farm-state lawmakers has their way—and it appears they will—we will soon buy
gasoline containing twice as much fuel alcohol as it does now. Fuel alcohol
already ranks second as a use for processed corn in the
Green eaters, especially
vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food chain, a simple matter of energy
flow. Eating a carrot gives the diner all that carrot’s energy, but feeding
carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces
the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as
feathers, bones, and other inedibles, and uses most
of it just to live long enough to be eaten. As a rough rule of thumb, that
factor of ten applies to each level up the food chain, which is why some fish,
such as tuna, can be a horror in all of this. Tuna is a secondary predator,
meaning it not only doesn’t eat plants but eats other fish that themselves eat
other fish, adding a zero to the multiplier each notch up, easily a hundred
times, more like a thousand times less efficient than eating a plant.
This is fine as far as it goes,
but the vegetarian’s case can break down on some details. On the moral issues,
vegetarians claim their habits are kinder to animals, though it is difficult to
see how wiping out 99 percent of wildlife’s habitat, as farming has done in
Animal rights aside, vegetarians
can lose the edge in the energy argument by eating processed food, with its ten
calories of fossil energy for every calorie of food energy produced. The
question, then, is: Does eating processed food such as soy burger or soy milk
cancel the energy benefits of vegetarianism, which is to say, can I eat my lamb
chops in peace? Maybe. If I’ve done my due diligence,
I will have found out that the particular lamb I am eating was both local and
grass-fed, two factors that of course greatly reduce the embedded energy in a
meal. I know of ranches here in
Chances are, though, any meat
eater will come out on the short end of this argument, especially in the
Still, these livestock do
something we can’t. They convert grain’s carbohydrates to high-quality protein.
All well and good, except that per capita protein production in the
This explains why the energy
expert David Pimentel is so worried that the rest of
the world will adopt
I live among elk and have learned
to respect them. One moonlit night during the dead of last winter, I looked out
my bedroom window to see about twenty of them grazing a plot of grass the size
of a living room. Just that small patch among acres of other
species of native prairie grass. Why that species and only that species
of grass that night in the worst of winter when the threat to their survival
was the greatest? What magic nutrient did this species alone contain? What does
a wild animal know that we don’t? I think we need this knowledge.
Food is politics. That being the
case, I voted twice in 2002. The day after Election Day, in a truly dismal
mood, I climbed the mountain behind my house and found a small herd of elk
grazing native grasses in the morning sunlight. My respect for these creatures
over the years has become great enough that on that morning I did not hesitate
but went straight to my job, which was to rack a shell and drop one cow elk, my
household’s annual protein supply. I voted with my weapon of choice—an act not
all that uncommon in this world, largely, I think, as a result of the way we
grow food. I can see why it is catching on. Such a vote has a certain
satisfying heft and finality about it. My particular bit of violence, though,
is more satisfying, I think, than the rest of the globe’s ordinary political
mayhem. I used a rifle to opt out of an insane system. I killed, but then so
did you when you bought that package of burger, even when you bought that
package of tofu burger. I killed, then the rest of those elk went on, as did
the grasses, the birds, the trees, the coyotes, mountain lions, and bugs, the
fundamental productivity of an intact natural system, all of it went on.
About the Author
Richard Manning is the author of Against
the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, published by North
Point Press.
This is The
Oil We Eat, a feature, originally from February
2004, published Friday, July 23, 2004. It is part of Features,
which is part of Harpers.org.
__________________________________________________________________
Correspondence between Nathan Lee and Richard Manning, fellow sustainable ag person.
|
From: |
"Richard
Manning" <manning@montana.com> |
|
Subject: |
Re: The Oil We
Eat, Harper's 2004 |
|
Date: |
Mon, 27 Jun
2005 10:27:09 -0600 |
|
To: |
"Nathan
Lee" <grassman7bar2003@yahoo.com> |
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Nathan,
Thanks for your kind note, and sorry it
has taken me so long to reply.
Sure. Go ahead
and post a link to my piece. I assume it's still on the Harper's site.
I know Alan. I
spent a week with him one time floating the Salmon River in
Good luck with
your project,
dick
On Jun 20, 2005,
at 9:29 PM, Nathan Lee wrote:
> Hello
Richard,
> ?
> My name is
Nathan Lee.?? I feel like we have a lot in common,
although
> we have never met.?? I am a cattle rancher from south-central
> Kansas.??
Ever since boyhood I have been a questioner of the status
> quo.? I have watched my local ag community decline, environmentally
> and economically, since my college days almost 20 years
ago.? A
> neighbor and mentor of mine introduced me to some concepts
in grazing
> management which originated with Voisin
and are promoted by Alan
> Savory.
>
> About a year
ago I decided to start writing essays under a website
> named
"solardollars.org", after Savory's legacy.??
It is still under
> construction.?? I had hoped to build a
intellectual database of
> sustainability methods and ideas pertaining to modern
agriculture.??
>
"Modern" should be qualified as "tomorrows methods of
re-discovering
>
yesterday."??? The Plains Indians thrived on the prairies using no
> borrowed energy.???
>
> Two days ago
I happened upon a website by ASPO (Association for Study
> of Peak Oil).?? There I discovered your article in Harper's.?? I am
> relieved that someone else has noticed this insanity, but
also
jealous > that I
couldn't be the first whistle-blower!
>
> Congrats on
a terrific essay.?? I would like to someday include a
link > to it in my
website with your permission.?? Keep up the good work.???
> Our World is
depending on you.
>>
> Nathan Lee
>
> Coats, KS
67028
> Home?? #????
620 248 FEED (3333)?
> Cell?????
#???? 620 672 8069?
> Ranch? #????
620?248 3329
> Email address ::? grassman7bar2003@yahoo.com
> Web
Page?????? :?? www.solardollars.com