Dennis Avery’s UC Berkeley Commencement Address
May 21, 2000
Leading a 21st Century Global Triumph for the Environment
Commencement Address, University of California, Berkeley, College of Natural Resources,
May 21, 2000
” . . . farms obliterate empty places, ploughed fields vanquish forests, herds drive out wild beasts, sandy places are planted with crops, stones are fixed, swamps drained, and there are such great cities where formerly hardly a hut . . . everywhere there is a dwelling, everywhere a multitude, everywhere a government. . . . We are burdensome to the world. The resources are scarcely adequate to us; and our needs straiten us and complaints are everywhere while already nature does not sustain us. Truly, pestilence and hunger and war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations, like a pruning back of the human race becoming excessive in numbers.”
– Quintus Septimus Florence Tertillianus, Roman citizen, about 200 A.D., when the world population was about 200 million.
“. . .the Western World today is on the verge of the greatest ecological renewal that humankind has known; perhaps the greatest that the Earth has known. Environmentalists deserve the credit for this remarkable turn of events. Yet our political and cultural institutions continue to read from a script of instant doomsday. Environmentalists, who are surely on the right side of history, are increasingly on the wrong side of the present, risking their credibility by proclaiming emergencies that do not exist. . . . It’s time we began reading from a new script.”
– Greg Easterbrook, A Moment on Earth, 1995, p. xvi, with the world population 30 times as large and still increasing.
The students at this commencement must take up a critical responsibility–helping the societies of the world adopt true conservation strategies for the 21st century.
Population growth is no longer threatening the planet. Quintus Tertillianus could not have known that, when modern medicine cut death rates and lengthened life spans, humans would respond (for the first time in history) by lowering their birth rates.
During my working lifetime, births per woman in the poor countries of the Third World have dropped from more than six to less than three–and stability is 2.1. The Third World today is unquestionably headed toward a fertility rate of less than 2.0 per woman. Before 2050, world population will peak at less than 10 billion people followed by a slow population decline.
Thanks to technology, trade and democracy, the world of 2050 will have little of the poverty that much of the world still knows too well today. Democracy and free trade are spreading rapidly. Education and communications are improving worldwide. We are unraveling the secrets of the human genome, and proving that gene therapy can cure many human diseases. We are making exciting progress with such technologies as diesel-electric cars and fuel cells.
Virtually all environmental-quality measurements in the affluent countries are much higher than 20 years ago, and getting better year by year. Thanks to affluence, virtually all of human society will be able to invest in environmental preservation during the coming half-century.
However, there is still one critical threat to the world, its people, and its natural resources. It is a threat that could undermine the stability of our society in the next few decades and ultimately bring on the collapse of natural resources predicted by pessimists for the last 2000 years. It is a threat particularly relevant to this college, to this year’s graduates, and to the students who will pursue knowledge here throughout the coming years.
That threat is low-yield agriculture and forestry in a more populous and affluent world.
The question is whether we will meet urgent human needs through the use of the best technologies and systems that our societies can develop to produce high yields on a small amounts of land or destroy the forests for low-yield production of crops, livestock, and paper pulp.
There is a clamoring element of First World societies that measures current human progress by how closely we can return to the wilderness of prehistory. This is the element of society that demands organic or “natural” farming; which demands that we continue the lavish waste of natural resources involved in low-yield traditional agriculture. This is the element of society which would turn half of the world’s scarce cropland into a gene museum, not for millions of wild species, but for a relatively few human-bred landrace varieties of crop plants. In short, this is the element which wants fewer people in the world and wants those people to live less well than we do today.
In today’s mostly well-fed world, it is hard to remember that humanity’s greatest fear until the past 40 years was famine. For ten thousand years, farmers were heroes because food was scarce. It’s hard to remember today that the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 went to a plant breeder, Dr. Norman Borlaug, as a living symbol of the Green Revolution that had finally banished the specter of famine through new knowledge.
Just 30 years later, the best-educated and most sophisticated societies in the world are attempting to promote low-yield farming and forestry. The fashion today is to worship the “natural” almost as did the Druids of ancient Europe.
Tripling Output Per Acre by 2050
Such an irrational worship of the natural would be a desperate mistake for conservation. It would throw humanity back into direct conflict with Nature, a war Nature would lose. No matter how keenly the urban intellectuals of today revere wild things, humanity will never commit suicide to protect them–nor even permit its children to suffer malnutrition on their behalf.
The well-educated 9 billion people we can expect on the planet in 2035 will understand good nutrition. They will have the affluence to pursue it, for their children and for their pets. (America today has 113 million companion cats and dogs. A reasonable projection for China in 2050 is at least 500 million house pets, and woe to any politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food.)
Despite the publicity about vegetarian diets, there is no vegetarian trend in the world. There has never been a voluntarily vegetarian society in all history. Humanity seems to have an urgent hunger for the high-quality protein found in livestock products, and the world is currently in the greatest surge of meat and milk consumption ever seen. These high-quality calories take two-to-three times as many farm resources as cereal calories.
This means that the world will demand nearly three times as much farm output in the year 2050 as we harvest today. And we are already farming about 37 percent of the world’s land area. The Green Revolution allowed the world to save at least 15 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed for low-yield food production. Think of it in these terms: high-yield farming has saved wildlands equal to the total land area of the United States, Europe, and South America combined. Without continued advances in knowledge and farm yields, all the wildlands saved will be lost to the plow.
The Fabulous Conservation Success of Knowledge
Plant breeding, chemical nitrogen fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticides have been critical to this massive high-yield conservation triumph. Therefore, it is reassuring to know that during the past half-century of manipulating genes (often with chemicals and radioactivity) and spraying pesticides widely in the atmosphere, we continued to lengthen the average human lifespan. The average lifespan in Roman times was 25 or 30 years. That was still the average lifespan in 18th-century London, even though they were eating only “natural” foods. Since 1900, America has added 30 years to the average lifespan–eight of them since we began the pesticide spraying and genetic manipulation of the Green Revolution. First World babies being born today can expect to live into their 80s, and Third World lifespans are rapidly catching up to that fast-moving First-World target.
Yet an important element of modern society says we should rein in plant breeding, reject nitrogen fertilizer, blow up irrigation dams, and ban pesticides.
They say modern farming is not sustainable. Soil erosion has been the underlying sustainability threat to human society throughout history. We could only farm if we could control the weeds; and our only weed control came through “bare earth” farming systems such as plowing and fallow. Last year, a sediment expert from UCLA finished a “soil archeology” project in the Coon River watershed of Wisconsin. He found that the modern farmers working there today are suffering only 6 percent as much soil erosion as did farmers during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, thanks largely to conservation tillage, which was introduced after 1970. Yet conservation tillage demands chemical weed killers, and the urban intellectuals are telling us to abandon the use of herbicides.
High yields are critical to saving wildlands and the yields on organic farms are little more than half as high as the yields on mainstream farms. This is primarily because organic farmers reject the chemical nitrogen that we take from the air through an industrial process. Even America, the most agriculturally blessed country in the world, has only about one-third of the organic nitrogen to support today’s farm output, let lone tripling output for the future.
In India, the crop residues must be fed to their draft animals while the animal dung is burnt as fuel, so there is no organic N to replenish the soil. China already uses every bit of organic N–including nightsoil–and also far more chemical fertilizer than any other agriculture.
I calculate that, with an organic farming mandate, the world would immediately have to clear at least 10 million square miles of wildlands for green manure crops like clover and rye. Yet, urban intellectuals tell us that organic farming is better for Nature.
We are also told, by urbanites, who don’t raise livestock or poultry, that confinement feeding is cruel for the birds and animals, and bad for the environment. Yet the birds and animals are more comfortable in confinement, grow faster on less feed while their wastes are handled under “zero discharge” management as organic fertilizer for feed crops.
If the world goes from its current 1 billion breeding hogs to 3 billion, and the animals must be raised outdoors, it will take another million square miles of land from Nature to house them and raise the extra feed. Meanwhile, the wastes from outdoor hog and poultry producers wash into streams with every storm event.
There is a furor now over biotechnology in farming. Europe, which has more food than it needs, is trying to block the use of biotechnology for Africa and Asia, which have less food than they need. We are told that biotechnology in food is “playing God.” (The same critics seem to believe that the use of biotechnology to cure genetic diseases for First World children is just fine.)
Yet biotechnology has already produced virus-free sweet potatoes and bananas that will produce higher yields to enhance the diets of Third World families. Genetically engineered “golden rice” can prevent the Vitamin A deficiency that causes blindness and even death for millions of small children in low-income rice cultures. As a bonus, “golden rice” will also prevent the iron deficiency that puts millions of women and their babies at risk of birth complications.
The world of the 21st century will not only demand more food, but also far more paper and forest products than today. Some analysts predict that forest harvests must increase as much as ten-fold. America’s wild forests produce only about 1.4 cubic meters of industrial wood products per hectare, per year. With such low yields, it is important to know that post-harvest technology–computerized saws, fiberboard, laminated lumber–have increased the utility of the trees cut by perhaps eightfold since World War II. It is also comforting to know that plantation-grown Georgia yellow pines can produce 15 cubic meters per hectare per year. And that cloned and tissue-cultured Georgia yellow pine planted under optimum conditions in Brazil can produce up to 50 cubic meters of industrial wood products per hectare per year.
Just 5 percent of the wild forest area planted to high-yield trees might protect the other 95 percent from even being logged, let alone clear-cut. To achieve such high-yield conservation, however, we must be willing to accept a substantial acreage of “unnatural” forests (which would be, in themselves, pretty good wildlife habitat).
The Enemy of Conservation Is Ignorance
Ignorance on the world’s farms and in its forests was the enemy of Nature in past centuries. Without higher yields, more people meant more and more land had to be taken from wildlands to provide even meager human subsistence. Gaining higher yields meant searching the world for higher-yielding species such as potatoes and corn from the New World, and the turnip, discovered in Asia.
Then agriculture moved on to such advances as hybrid seeds, herbicides and precision farming.
Traditional logging cleared huge tracts of forest to make charcoal for low-efficiency cooking fires, or even to smelt iron. Today, we use more intensive carbon sources as fuel, and replant harvested forestlands with fast-growing species.
Today, the ignorance that threatens nature is not on the farms or in the forests, but in the cities that have lost their understanding of good resource use. Since the massive urban migration of the 1940s and 1950s, First World city folk have lost touch with how their food and forest products are produced. All they have heard about the farms is that there’s a “farm surplus;” they have no understanding that the farm surpluses are local, not global, or that they result from farm trade barriers, not overproduction.
City folks do not understand that we can save tropical forests most effectively by raising farm and forest yields on the good-quality temperate soils of America and Europe, and exporting food and timber to Asia. They do not understand that three square kilometers of tropical forest contain more wild species than the entire continent of North America.
The city folks are attempting to save Nature by retreating to farming and forestry systems that proved inadequate and unsustainable when the planet’s population was one-sixth as high. They are refusing to support new farm and forest research, and they are attempting to eliminate new knowledge from the farms and forests through narrowly focused government regulation. Thus we see the demands for an end to logging in America, for a regulated reduction in American farm inputs, and for a European-inspired attempt to prevent biotech farming anywhere in the world.
Along with the other knowledge-based institutions in the modern world, the College of Natural Resources at Berkeley must continue to pursue better ways to produce farm and forest products, and to more effectively protect the wild resources of the planet. The school has done a marvelous job of that in the past.
In addition, the school and its graduates must do something they have never attempted in the past: they must find ways to communicate effectively with an urban public that does not know much about modern farming and forestry and has been told that both are bad for the planet. We must weigh in to support high-yield conservation with people who don’t understand it and may feel hostile toward it.
This challenge of communicating true conservation to urban audiences may be even more difficult–and more important–than finding appropriate high-yield technologies and fully sustainable production systems.
All the recycling and car-pooling in the cities will do little to preserve wildlands or wild species. As Aldo Leopold told us more than 60 years ago, wildlands conservation can only be done by the farmers and foresters who manage most of our land surface. City people can only provide the research and incentives. Lately, they have done too little of either.
Caring is not enough. Even caring intensely about the environment is not enough. Our Roman writer, Quintus Tertillianus, cared deeply about the environmental degradation of the Mediterranean Basin–but he lacked the knowledge to stop it. Only in the last 150 years, as we have combined caring with science, have we gotten past the awful choice between caring for our children and protecting nature. Only with caring and knowledge can we do both. Only with caring and knowledge can we move forward in rewarding compatability with the wildlands.
This must happen within your working lifetimes, or it can never happen at all.
Good luck, and Godspeed.
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Dennis T. Avery is Director of Global Food Issues for the Hudson Institute, a non-profit public policy “think-tank” headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was raised on a dairy farm in Michigan and studied agricultural economics at Michigan State and Wisconsin. He has done agricultural policy analysis for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and served on President Johnson’s national Advisory Commission on Food and Fiber. He also served for nearly a decade as the senior agricultural analyst for the U.S. State Department, where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement in 1983.
He is the author of Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming. The Center’s web site can be visited at www.cgfi.org
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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