Fighting Mother Nature with Biotechnology - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 435

population dashes the illusion. Farming, even as practiced by our ancestors
10,000 years ago, is not natural. Our human ancestors tilled—that is, plowed—the
soil, disturbing the land in a manner disruptive to the species living there in order
to plant seeds of a single or few species to serve the needs and wishes of the humans
alone and without regard for the other species thus displaced. Tillage also results in
loss of a nonrenewable resource, topsoil, by exposing the valuable sand, silt, and clay
particles to erosion by wind and water.
Some naïve Europeans may talk with a straight face about the “natural agricul-
tural environment,” but I consider that expression an oxymoron. Certainly, Europe
encourages farmers to serve two masters—one being agricultural production and
the other preservation of biodiversity and, by implication, “Nature.” But the biodi-
versity being nurtured on European farms is a far cry from the plant, animal, and
microbial species occupying the same land prior to early European humans tilling
the soil. Human stewardship of the environment, even for sublime goals, does not
accurately reflect Mother Nature's plan. Our human biases ensure certain species
would get preferential treatment, usually by interfering with a natural dynamic that
would favor a different set of species, ones less interesting (or more threatening)
to humans.
All kinds of “natural” farming destroys biodiversity; whenever soil is tilled, the rich
native biodiversity is disrupted and replaced with a small number of species, especially,
in recent history, non-native plants grown as crops. Where is Mother Nature's “balance
and harmony” respecting the multitude of species previously resident in that soil? In
actuality, because of the massive loss of biodiversity and erosion of soil, tillage remains
the cause of the greatest environmental degradation the planet and biosphere has ever
suffered (Sparrow 1984). And it's 100 percent the fault of human activity engaged in “tra-
ditional” farming.
The concept described as the Red Queen hypothesis assures that a technologically
unchanging regime, as under the traditional or natural lifestyle, will deteriorate to even-
tual extinction of the population refusing to adapt. The Red Queen, Lewis Carroll's char-
acter in Alice in Wonderland , was constantly running but found herself going nowhere.
The analogy is that one must continue moving just to stay in place, relative to others,
because the others are moving. In biological terms, stability means, paradoxically, con-
stant evolution. For example, in the dance of host and disease, the host is constantly
changing, trying new genes and gene combinations to thwart the pathogen, while the
pathogen, in turn, is constantly modifying its own genes in trying to overcome the host's
new defenses, like a biological version of our arms race. After a period of many genera-
tions, both host and pathogen remain locked in the dance but both are genetically dif-
ferent from their respective ancestors. After all these generations and genetic changes,
the net result, relative to one another, is stasis (to appreciate the added titillation of sex
appeal to the Red Queen, see Ridley 1993).
Applying the Red Queen hypothesis to farming and human sustenance, farmers
and farming must similarly continue to improve just to maintain relative produc-
tivity. We know, for example, that farmers can control certain weeds using certain