Scientist Fights a 2nd Dust Bowl
According to legend, the 16th-Century Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado stood on a grassy butte 10 miles south of here and scanned the horizon in disappointment. The rumored city of gold that he was seeking was nowhere in sight, just mile after grassy mile of prairie.
Wes Jackson, an explorer of another kind, also scans the horizon here with a hard heart. What he wants to see is real prairie--firm sod of big bluestem and Indian grasses and a dozen other deep-rooted plants that brace the soil against wind and rain and man.
Instead, what Jackson sees in the Kansas midlands is a patchwork of cultivation, land tilled and laced with chemicals to maximize production. He sees ecological ruin under way in the form of erosion, contaminated ground water and tainted food. A child of Depression-era Kansas, Jackson has fashioned his own response to an agriculture that he believes will prove to be as ruinous as the Dust Bowl.
Thirteen years ago, he founded the Land Institute, a think tank on the prairie, classrooms for students and experimental plots for researchers. His idea is to turn Kansas farmland back to prairie, harvest the seeds of wild rye and other wild grasses, let nature’s wisdom prevail.
It is at once “a deep probe into the future and a deep probe into the past,” Jackson likes to say.
On a recent weekend, a tweedy clutch of academics, environmental activists and researchers convened at the Land Institute, attracted by Jackson’s radical but enduring experiment at his 100-acre prairie laboratory.
Jackson, who has a doctorate in plant genetics, convened the group to consider an issue that recently has come to permeate the public policy debate on agriculture-the environmental impact of farming practices. The symposium was dubbed “The Marriage of Ecology and Agriculture.”
The meeting on a rise above the Smoky Hill River outside Salina crackled with current flowing between two poles--the prairie stoicism of Jackson and the dark anger of a Kentucky agrarian poet named Wendell Berry.
Jackson presided over the event more with his presence than his words. In interviews, he invoked the Pre-Industrial past as a guide to the future, but he acknowledged readily that his prairie experiment may falter and indeed that mankind “may not pull through.”
“The human experiment may fail,” he said blandly.
Berry, a tall and spindly man who resembles Jimmy Stewart in the role of a fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher, cut through the drone of the symposium’s academic discussion like a knife.
“For a long time now,” he said, “we have understood ourselves as traveling toward some sort of industrial paradise, some new Eden conceived and constructed entirely by human ingenuity. . . . Now we face overwhelming evidence that we are not smart enough to recover Eden by assault and that nature does not tolerate or excuse our abuses. If, in spite of the evidence against us, we are finding it hard to relinquish our old ambition, we are also seeing more clearly every day how that ambition has reduced and enslaved us.”
Later, with Jackson looking on from the wings like a mortician at a funeral, Cornell University entomologist David Pimentel enumerated the grim trends of modern agriculture. Erosion, he said, is proceeding at 20 times the rate of replenishment; in 150 years, Iowa has lost one-half of its topsoil.
Meanwhile, he said, American agriculture is responsible for 81% of the nation’s water use and is soaking up aquifers at an alarming rate, especially in Kansas. Pesticides, Pimentel said, are being dumped on the land at a rate of 1 billion pounds a year, yet pests are destroying larger and larger portions of the crop.
The paradoxical result, he and others assert, is pest proliferation on farms where large-scale methods are in use.
Jackson’s vision of prairie agriculture does not provide a complete fix for all of these troubling trends. The grasses he hopes to cultivate in a “domestic prairie” promise a lower-yielding form of agriculture, one designed to complement a small-is-beautiful kind of local economy. Such an economy presupposes a radical revision of American life.
That theme of revision was woven through the three-day symposium, as speaker after speaker proposed modifications to the status quo. Ironically, the only participant to offer an unequivocal celebration of the American landscape was Eugene Ryabov, a visiting Soviet soil-conservation specialist.
At the close of a dinner program, Ryabov recited favorite verses in thickly accented English, minus the music:
Home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play.
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.
