Grassland

I've arrived in Walla Walla and have renewed my Semester in the West pre-departure reading list efforts. I just started a book called Grassland by Richard Manning, which discusses the destruction of prairies and grasslands in the US. He starts out with an interesting take on the environmental movement in the United States, which I think is largely accurate. He posits that the conservation movement began as a reaction against industrialization and separated man from nature by designating places like Yosemite and Yellowstone to remain wild. He goes on to say that conservation efforts have largely focused on "charismatic megafauna"--the polar bears and wolves who look so good on posters for environmental organizations--at the expense of less glamorous organisms and ecosystems. Everyone can appreciate that a clearcut isn't beautiful (no one would hang a poster of a clearcut in their room), but people celebrate the beauty in rolling hills of wheat, although they represent deforestation of the grassland ecosystem in the exact same way.

I hope I can get through Grassland before we leave. It touches on a lot of issues which have defined Western land management--the impacts of ranching and monocrop agriculture, the evolution of a conservation ethic, the meaning of environmentalism. And I'm guessing it's going to raise the same questions that have been bothering me since I started thinking about how we should go about fixing the world we live in.

Books like this invariably lead me to conclude that our civilization is not sustainable in any sense of the word. Certainly the way we feed ourselves, beyond just the sheer distance our food travels, isn't sustainable. Wheat, soy, anything grown as a monocrop, depletes irreplaceable topsoil and requires chemical fertilizers and pesticides to grow. The question then becomes--in a world of seven billion people, what is the right course of action. Last year on an environmental studies excursion, we visited a wheat farmer who challenged us to confront our bias towards organic, "sustainable" food production.

"If we only produced organic food, there'd be some really healthy people and a lot of dead people," he said.

And he's unfortunately, absolutely right. We're severely overpopulated to the point where speaking of sustainability without speaking of population reduction seems meaningless. But where does that leave me as an environmentalist? Urging everyone to eat local, organic food ignores the poverty that billions of people live in. Saying that continuing to deplete finite resources to feed ourselves makes sense seems to condemn future generations to an ever larger population crash.

Bottom line: I don't know, I'm excited to learn what I can, and I like this book.