what makes us so smart?
July 1, 2020
Welcome to our blog! We couldn’t be more excited to have you here with us.
For the moment, let go of the distance and the electronic medium, and imagine this space as we would make it in a universe of our choosing.
See yourself walking toward of a stone and wood farmhouse with a wrap-around porch at the end of narrow dirt road. The lane is lined with cottonwoods, sycamores, and laurel trees, scented with the fragrance of wildflowers in the lower story of the gallery forest.
Take a breath and imagine pale swallowtail butterflies gathering near a seep on the side of the road dance in your path as you walk up the drive through shadow and late spring sunshine. You step carefully through their gathering, keeping an eye on the ground so as not to step on any of the dancing Papilionidae.
Tranquility brings with it happy noise. Borrowing words from the great poet Mary Oliver, the din of a living planet announces your place in the family of things. A breeze rattles the canopy of the trees on the path. Bees are gathering pollen in the elderberry blooms and in the sage blossoms. A mockingbird in an elm tree nearby is cycling through its broad repertoire. In one moment, mockingbird is a house finch, then a bluebird, then a titmouse, then a lizard. Is mockingbird showing off, or is this just what mockingbird does to feel most alive? You hear the sound of a cow in a pasture beyond the cottonwoods and sycamores ambling through pasture grass—a multigreen mix of clover and borage, blue wildrye, brome, nettle, and deergrass. Then, behind you at the bottom of the lane, near a farm pond, an insistent quacking enters the day’s songscape. It’s a mother duck signaling the way for her fifteen ducklings as they cross the lane from grass to cool water.
You’ve walked up the lane, you’re on the porch now. There’s no need to knock. Come on in. We’ve been waiting for you. Estás en tu casa. You are in your home. If at this moment the place we summon in words here stands in contrast to the place you are now, let it be a shared destination of the mind. Let it be a stopping place for considering the work than can and must be done in the world’s cities and countrysides, its forests and estuaries, its grasslands and deserts, its rivers and bays, its islands and coastal marshes, its open oceans.
Consider this your blog, your sounding board for ideas and commentary on food and agriculture. We mean to think expansively about an approach to food and agriculture that is not just about eating, buying, growing and harvesting, or even about the moral and social questions of who may eat, who may buy, and who may grow or harvest. This blog is also meant to be a lively stopping-place for talking about books, film, art, scholarship, activism, home pilot projects, networks of like-minded people pursuing alternative food system projects small and large, and for notes on public interest litigation and lawmaking that deal with the urgent and maybe impossible task of preserving food-bearing natural infrastructures for human beings and their co-resident life-forms on Earth.
Agriculture and food are inseparable from planet’s physical systems of atmosphere, water, land, oceans, the Earth’s tectonic and magma. But food itself is a matter of carbon-based life—and as such, is part of what makes this planet unique in the universe as we have observed it up until now. As Stephen Pyne wrote in the introduction his classic book, World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth, “We are uniquely fire creatures on a uniquely fire planet. Other planetary bodies in the solar system have elements of combustion—Jupiter has an ignition source in lightning; Mars, traces of free oxygen; Titan, a methane-based fuel. Only Earth, however, has all the essential elements and the means by which to combine them—only Earth has life. Marine life pumped the atmosphere with oxygen, and terrestrial life stocked the continents with carbon fuels.”
Much has been made of the question of whether we carbon-based life forms are alone in the universe. Surely not, say astronomers who calculate that the universe contains some two trillion galaxies, each with somewhere around 100 billion stars. The odds are that the physical building blocks of life have combined on other planets with similar Goldilocks conditions, and simple microbes or even complex ecosystems have emerged through some combination of serendipity and inevitability of the eons and great numbers of planets thrown into the orbit of innumerable stars.
At the same time, the gossamer-like nature of our universe, so abundant in stars but so vast as to be mostly empty space, simply teases us with the possibilities of all the things we cannot see. It is a vast and intriguing field of the possible, combined with the improbability of physical or even real-time encounter through radio-encoded broadcast.
But we here on Earth, are we alone? And are we, homo sapiens, the intelligent life here on the planet? And if so, are we looking for complex life marked by consciousness and memory in the right places, out there in the cosmos? Might there also be universes to discover? Are worlds we cannot see and have not yet begun to know? Underneath our feet in the soil biome where somewhere between 10 and 100 billion bacteria of up to 50,000 species reside every gram of soil pursue collective and rival destinies. In our forests and groves, trees communicate with one another through fungal filagrees in systems some compare to the internet. The deep seabed may be a natural Library of Alexandria, yet undestroyed, that could tell us about the origins of life on Earth through its living microbial archive of bacteria and archaea whose DNA have remained isolated and intact in the abyssal sediments.
The human brain, seemingly distinct among Earth’s species in its hard-wired capacity for symbol-making and language, has enabled us (along with our prehensile thumbs) to manipulate our environment. A moment ago in Earth’s history, around 2.6 million years ago, bipedal ancestors of Homo sapiens used the first tools in China, Africa, India, and Europe. Somewhere around one million years ago, hominids made fire, and, by 200,000 years ago, had become so adept at it that they had the power to burn and chop down the forests from which they came.
Modern humans some 30,000 years ago began selecting plants and seeds that served their needs. Although the process of making settled agriculture has often been seen as a process of human domination of nature, Michael Pollan argued provocatively in his classic book, The Botany of Desire, that it may have certain plants who seduced us. For the lucky organisms who managed to attract the desire of our ancestors— wild variants of tomatoes, potatoes, wheat, rice, coffee, citrus or maize— competition with other plants become a matter of waiting for human farmers to plant their seeds in fertile soil, uproot their rivals with sticks and hoes, water their habitat soil when the rains were scarce, and herd their domesticated animals through fields to nourish the soil with their manure.
But these plants, if they won temporarily, may have made a devil’s bargain when human economies sought prosperity through uniformity, yield, and scale. With our machines, powered by the remnant carbon of ancient life, we have captured the world’s rivers and turned them into batteries for more machines, into highways for our ships that ferry grain and mined minerals from field to silo and back into machines, and finally into sprinkler systems for our desert plantations, manured with mined carbon and minerals. We combined elements and split atoms, created new molecules, and even learned to mix and match the amino acid inside cells so that radically different life forms might be made to exchange properties in a way that seemed to useful to us. Now even the plants who seduced us are having trouble surviving our crush on them. Some 93 percent of the biodiversity of all the cultivated seeds humans selected and bred and harvested and replanted has disappeared in the last century.
We, the clever fire-makers, have grabbed carbon from the ground and put carbon in the atmosphere at concentrations that likely cannot be put back in the ground and the oceans by the cleverest of our machines. We, the clever chemists have grabbed gigatons of nitrogen from the atmosphere and put it on the ground and in our rivers and oceans at concentrations that similarly, will not return easily and harmlessly to the air from which it was summoned.
Our greatest intelligence, our last best idea, lies not in our ability manipulate our environment to our present convenience, but to observe and document the assemblages of life from which we came, of which we are a part, and which, in the form of our bodily biome, makes us each who we are.
We are not alone in this universe. We are not alone together on this planet. We’re superorganisms ourselves, treading with every step on universes we have barely begun to explore. Our salvation is in our curiosity, in our love for the dark matter of Planet Earth.