Editorial at The New York Times today keeps the corn-bonanza trend in the spotlight. A few prior posts here at the World's Fair have broached the issue of the dangers of gung ho ethanolism (one, two, three, four). In the face of massive energy production, consumption habits, and climate change debates, the burgeoning corn boom is worth sustained and critical attention, before, rather than after, it happens.
The brunt of the editorial is to put farmland conservation into the spotlight:
[The] corn boom puts pressure on land that has been set aside as part of the United States Department of Agriculture's Conservation Reserve Program. Since the mid-1980s, farmers have enrolled some 37 million acres of farmland in the program. This is land that has been returned to nature, and it is part of what Americans pay for through the farm bill. Much of it is unsuitable for crops -- too hilly, too wet, too valuable as wildlife habitat -- but when corn prices are this high, the idea of suitable changes swiftly.
The brunt of the next steps in the conversation should be about envisioning more holisitc (dare I say ecological, without intending to abuse the term?) views of the relationships between food, land, energy, and climate. Ah, platitudes. But, wow, that's not easy -- rather, it's that great idealism of the blog space at work. (Though, in a good way, it's also in keeping with the ethical dimensions of human-land relationship that Josh recently brought up in this post about Conservationism and Preservationism.)
So, where to?
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Another view:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070327113831.htm
Farmers will do whatever you them to with the land as long as you pay them. The world has grown fat on four cent a pound corn for far too long. Paying 8 cents a pound is no crisis.
Except for the people who cannot afford that.
People in the ethanol lobby (for example, 25x25) basically admit that farmers are going to encroach on these conservation lands - but that's just an effect of the free market, so whatever. They'll say there's no "silver bullet" to sustainability, then they talk a mighty talk about cellulosic ethanol and switchgrass and that kind of thing. It's just that no one has a handle on when that's going be a real solution.
There isn't going to be a solution using ethanol, no matter how it is produced. If you use scrubland and suchlike, all your going to do is encroach further onto plants and animals and insets that are already under pressure. For example, see the "Bee's are dying: who cares?" post on this very blog.
It looks to me as if cellulosic ethanol will be a reasonable use of bits of plant we don't use after harvesting, such as the straw or leaves or something, but if we actually want to preserve the natural environment, it is no answer.
right on guthrie. (woody or arlo?)
Guthrie, if ethanol (and corn) isn't an option at all, what direction would you suggest?
I wonder if it would be worthwhile (and perhaps this isn't the place or post to work through this question) to step back and ask what the basic environmental problem is, and what precise problem things like ethanol are supposed to solve. If you've managed to resist the obvious sarcastic response, then let me restate the question, and iterate that I am not being glib. What *is* the environmental problem?
Obscure philosophical reference alert: In Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard starts his essay off by talking about faith, and about how people keep talking about "getting beyond faith." And Kierkegaard takes umbrage at such presumptuousness, saying how can we get "beyond" faith? What does it even mean to have faith? Because that question is almost too hard in itself. And to prove my point, so says Kierkegaard, let me give you a book-length deconstruction of the story of Abraham and Isaac.
The tenor of these NatureLand blog posts seem to be of this ilk, without perhaps ever coming out and saying it. What is the environmental problem? Because that's a hard question, with shifting answers. The trouble with technophilic and scientistic answers is not the attempt, per se, but the extent to which they foreclose the future. That they presume a question. That they, through their world-making power, allow such a question to "become true", to borrow from Hannah Arendt.
And that seems to be my problem - I can't even pose the question with much certainty. Because it seems fraught with really difficult issues. Existential issues, like who are we, and what is really meaningful about short-term human existence? And these answers shift, and the questions eat themselves.
But isn't it time to ask them anyway, as a prelude to (or at the very least concurrent with) our stabs at environmental problems so (far) defined? And keep asking them, knowing that no answers are forever true?