Ecology Prophet Fights for Land

For centuries, Americans have treated our precious soil like dirt. A terrific cover story in the November Atlantic Monthly warns that we had better clean up our act fast.

Around the world, farmers and technologists and biologists are working to stop soil erosion and water pollution and to advance the science of sustainable agriculture--a way of farming that doesn’t deplete the Earth’s scandalously overused resources.

Wes Jackson, a geneticist who created the Land Institute in Kansas, is “the most radical of America’s agricultural prophets,” according to Atlantic writer Evan Eisenberg. In profiling Jackson, Eisenberg creates an intricate, intriguing portrait of the awkward--some say catastrophic--way American farming methods intersect the natural ecology.

The statistics on the damage inflicted on America’s topsoil by tilling and planting crops each year are staggering: “A third of our farmland topsoil, accumulated over millennia, is gone. For every bushel of corn that Iowa grows, it sheds at least two bushels of soil.”

Because the soil that hasn’t washed or blown away is of poorer quality, farmers have resorted to chemical fertilizers and pesticides to improve productivity.

But this use of fossil fuels is an inefficient use of energy and just plain ineffective.

“In 1948, at the dawn of the chemical age, American farmers used 15 million pounds of insecticides and lost 7% of their crops to insects,” the article states. “Today they use 125 million pounds and lose 13%.”

The prairie, on the other hand, with its naturally diverse mixture of plants and root systems can defend itself against predators and disease. It is superior in other ways, as well, which is why many modern agronomists believe that, “Wilderness is the standard against which agriculture should be judged.”

Jackson has a wild vision of how the two can be combined. As Eisenberg writes, “From the point of view of the ecologist, the prairie is doing everything right. From the point of view of the hungry ecologist, it has a serious flaw. What Jackson has in mind is a prairie that can feed the world.”

He and his students and colleagues at the land institute are working on what, technically, would be termed a herbaceous seed-bearing perennial polyculture. Jackson calls it “a domestic prairie.”

While Jackson considers genetic engineering to be the Great Satan, he is willing to make some compromises with biotechnology in his quest to achieve a more natural way of farming. But he wants to move slowly.

Along the way, in this ambling Chautauqua of an article, Eisenberg describes a lecture Jackson gave to a group, in which he carefully detailed nine categories of ecological trouble that biotechnology might unleash. At the end of the talk, Jackson said to the group: “Now look, you people worked very hard to follow me, but you couldn’t stay with me, could you?”

The answer was no. And that, Jackson told them, was his point precisely. This is tough stuff, but stuff that laymen as well as scientists need to understand fully. So far, they don’t, yet we proceed like a drunken farmer driving a tractor at full throttle. “This is a threat to democracy!” Jackson told his audience.

“Heroic cleverness” in the way we deal with the natural world has got us into many of our present environmental predicaments. Jackson says that it’s time for people to call for a moratorium on biotechnological brilliance, to pause and catch their breath. He knows that’s unthinkable in this culture. But still, he believes it’s imperative that we “Call time out and say, ‘Let’s think about it.’ ”

Other noteworthy articles in this issue include James Fallows’ discussion of what we have to learn from Asian nations and an interesting analysis of modern suburbia by Nicholas Lemann.

California Issues a Report Card for Judges

Judge not lest ye be judged, the saying goes. But if you pull down a paycheck as a professional judge, it only seems fair that you be held up to judgment yourself.

California magazine put this state’s judges before a jury of their justice-system peers--other judges, lawyers, commissioners and cops. Backed by evidence gathered from court records and the Commission on Judicial Performance, the magazine’s reporters found seven judges guilty of wrongs ranging from simple arrogance to incompetence and malice.

Catalogued in the November issue, the “insider’s brief on the state’s wackiest court jesters” includes Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Henry Patrick Nelson, who allegedly told whispering spectators he would have them shot; Bruce William Dodds, an apparently misogynic Santa Barbara County judge; and Ventura County Municipal Court Judge John J. Hunter, who sentenced a man to 930 days in jail for traffic violations without allowing him time to prove his assertion--a correct one, it turned out--that the tickets weren’t his.

In the same issue, California puts the state’s water on trial, and finds that in many places, including Los Angeles areas served by the Metropolitan Water District, traces of aluminum sulfate, put into water to remove particles, may be contributing to Alzheimer’s disease in the population. Meanwhile, there is no state requirement that bottled water be tested for this chemical.

Could Real Estate Be Nodding Off?

The sky may not be falling, but at least a few naysayers claim that California’s real estate may be on the verge of taking a dive, or at least a long nap.

The Oct. 30 Forbes magazine gives voice to contrarian analysts such as Timothy Hurckes, who speculates that by 1991, the market--especially at the high end, especially in certain areas--will be in for a bit of trouble.

And that may also mean trouble for developers and speculators and the institutions that gave them loans.

The idea of a price dip goes against the common wisdom of those who believe California’s diversified economy will continue to support rising real estate values.

But those who see a downturn have their reasons, too. Pollution and traffic are driving off a lot of folks, they say, and of those who stay, only 16% can afford homes at today’s prices.