JULY 16, SUNDAY

GREEN REVOLUTION

When I was a boy growing up in India my father was Principal of the Allahabad Agricultural Institute that had an extension program to help Indian village farmers to adopt new agricultural methods, the green revolution, to improve their farm production. I was aware of this but didn‘t think about it. And I guess I had heard that my grandfather, Martin Luther Mosher was friends with Henry Wallace who later became FDR’s vice-president, and both were pioneers in the development and popularizing of hybrid seed corn which greatly increased agricultural production in the American mid West in the 20th century.

My father wrote a book titled, “Getting Agriculture Moving”, translated into fifteen languages, and for the rest of his life was involved in the spread of the green revolution, which was what the book was about. The green revolution was a pretty simple idea. In order to greatly increase production you had to combine five things. You needed to plant hybrid sees that with Indian wheat would produce bigger heads with shorter, thicker stalks to hold the heads up but these new strains of wheat grew much better with fertilizer and required more water. Up until this point crops only grew in North India after the summer monsoon rains with maybe a second crop after the short winter rains. Large dams soon provided irrigation but it was also discovered that North India had a huge aquifer beneath it and that tube wells would provide water so that wheat could grow year around. The wheat grew better if the soil was turned over with a deep plow which led to requiring tractors which until now were not produced in India. In addition the green revolution required a banking system that villagers could use to buy seeds on credit as well as a transportation and storage system to get the wheat bounty to market. And farmers had to buy into this new system and be trained to do it. All of this had to happen at the same time and did. India went from being a land of famine to a land of bountiful wheat harvests and this led to a shift from rural life to industrial life for many Indians which further grew India’s economy.

But, with seemingly as with every revolution that does well, the green revolution led to complications. And as I am reading Entangled Life these problems become clearer and clearer to me. Entangled Life reveals that life on earth developed as a symbiotic process with a mycelium network of fungi working in cooperation with the roots of trees in forests as well as on prairies. The green revolution completely ignored this natural symbiotic connection of fungal mycelium, plant life and animal life with the clearing of land and replacing of the old natural life cycle with planted hybrid seeds, petroleum based agriculture, the pumping dry of huge aquifers and the necessity to transport food huge distances with huge energy costs. Also the natural ways that plants protected themselves were lost and the new strains had to be protected by pesticides which flowed with fertilizers into rivers and disturbed marine life.

This week I read that a major reason the earth has tilted 31 inches off kilter with far reaching effects is in part because of the water pumped out of the North Indian aquifer as well as out of the western American aquifer, and that this shift is unbalancing the earth and changing weather patterns. And the carbon dioxide causing global warming is being pumped into the air. This is increased by the fossil energy used for farming and transportation while the production of fertilizer is warming the climate which will lead to the sources of Indian water needed for agriculture stored in big dams from the melting snows of the Himalayas to be dried up while at the same time as the aquifer is being depleted.

So the green revolution which led to so many good things is now part of the problem of global warming and global pollution.

Entangled Life also makes clear that the rise of plants on barren land led to plants storing great amounts of carbon dioxide which was buried underground in the form of coal and petroleum which allowed Earth both to become a much more temperate place but also gave us oxygen to breath. But now we are digging up the carbon sequestered deep in the earth in the production of coal and petroleum and are pumping it back into the atmosphere.

What Entangled Life makes clear is that the natural symbiotic ecosystem of which fungi had played such an important led to the temperate world humans have lived in. And now humans are dislocating the natural order, with the green revolution a part of this dislocation. What my father dedicated his life to, feeding earth’s growing human population, now turns out to be one cause of global warming.