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The Post Carbon Reader Series: Food
Tackling the Oldest Environmental Problem:Agriculture and Its Impact on Soil
By Wes Jackson
 
About the Author
 Wes Jackson is one of the foremost figures in the inter-national sustainable-agriculture movement. Founderand president of theLand Institutein Salina, Kansas,he has pioneered research in natural-systems agricul-ture for more than thirty years. He was a professor of biology at Kansas Wesleyan and later established theenvironmental studies program at California StateUniversity, Sacramento. He is the author of severalbooks including 
 Becoming Native to This Place
(1994),
 Altars of Unhewn Stone
(1987), and
 New Roots for  Agriculture
(1980). Jackson is a Fellow of Post CarbonInstitute.Post Carbon Institute© 2010613 4th Street, Suite 208Santa Rosa, California 95404 USAThis publication is an excerpted chapter from
The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’sSustainability Crises
, Richard Heinberg and DanielLerch, eds. (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010).For other book excerpts, permission to reprint, and purchasing visithttp://www.postcarbonreader.com.
 
TACI TE OEST EIROETA PROBE: ARICTRE A ITS IPACT O SOI1 TE POST CARBO REAER SERIES
is chapter is adapted om a presentation by Wes Jacksonto the Cal Alumni Association at International House,University of California, Berkeley on January 25, 2010.
I want to talk about the 10,000-year-old problem of agriculture and how it is both necessary and possibleto solve it. Were it necessary but not possible this idea would be grandiose, and were it possible but not neces-sary it would be grandiose. But it has passed the test of grandiosity.Figure 10.1 illustrates what most people think about when they talk about sustainable agriculture. This is part of an ad for a sustainable-agriculture conferencein Chicago. Look at the diversity and think hard abouthow much that informs the sustainable-agriculturemovement. There is not a single grain there
.
And what’s wrong with that? The foods shown there repre-sent fewer than 25 percent of the calories that humanseat, and I have a $100 bet that 70 percent of the calorieseaten by the people in the most economically importantagricultural state, California, come over the SierraNevada and up from Mexico in the form of grains.In the background of all of us organisms on Earth is what I call the 3.45-billion-year imperative. We are acarbon-based planet. The carbon that enters so impor-tantly into our bodies, we all now know, was cookedin the remote past of a dying star. But humans, withthe big brain, have been around for only 150,000 to200,000 years, and only some 11,000 to 13,000 yearsbefore the present we got to the first pool of energy-rich carbon, the young pulverized coal of the soil. And we mostly wasted it. With the opening of the NorthAmerican continent, some soil scientists estimate theUnited States went from around 6 percent carbon toaround 3 percent. I think that’s when global warming began, with agriculture 10,000 years ago.About 5,000 years ago, the second pool of energy-richcarbon, the forests, made it possible to smelt ore andbrought on the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Thethird pool, 250 years ago, was coal, which brought on
Figure 10.1
Typical illustration depicting sustainable agriculture.
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