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From extractive to renewable agriculture.

Article Excerpt
[Editor's note: This is a transcription of the author's June 28, 2008 presentation at the Surviving Climate Change roundtable.]

I played hooky this afternoon. I wanted to see the Mississippi River, at the highest it's been since 1993. As I looked, my mind went to 1803 at the time of the Louisiana Purchase and wondered, if Thomas Jefferson had been standing where I was standing, in his time, what the light reflecting off the rushing turbulent river would be. Would it be as dark as it is now due to soil? The river may have been as high, but because the Mississippi was draining native prairie and forestland, nutrients headed toward the Gulf in 1803 would soon be replaced by nosing roots of the prairie and the forest. Recharge of the ecological capital from the rocks and the subsoil to sponsor growth would be more or less complete. Not so today.

We live on the most fortunate of all continents. Pleistocene ice from the Canadian shield scraped and ground and pulverized rocks to give us much of Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska. We have the richest soils in the world and the most favorable moisture regimes.

But, our good land has suffered for our ignorance. Wendell Berry once said that as we came across the continent, cutting the forests and plowing the prairies, we've never known what we were doing because we have never known what we were undoing. It has suffered from institutional causes, as well.

Dan Luten, professor at UC-Berkeley, acknowledged the role of our institutions as derivatives of our early settlement when he noted that we came as a poor people to a seemingly empty land that was rich in resources. We built our institutions for that perception of reality: poor people, empty land, rich. Our educational institutions, our political institutions, our economic institutions, even our religious institutions, are largely predicated on that idea. Well, now we've become rich people in an increasingly poor land that is filling up. The institutions don't hold. We patch them up here and there and as Professor Luten would have said, "give them a lick and a promise. But they...

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