Part of a run of my unsustainable, non-organically grown tomato plants
The words are fine, and some of the concepts they represent rather appealing, actually. It’s the usages to which they are put that bug me, usages that are by turns deceiving, dishonest, obfuscating, bogus, hokey, and euphemistic. There is a theme binding them all together, one concerning us humans’ exploitation of the wild world. The words pertain to how we use “resources,” which I define as the materials that make up the planet and its life as viewed through a bottomless stomach. These terms are unthinkable without our having domesticated ourselves and our surroundings: I cannot imagine our foraging ancestors in the Pleistocene having need of such words. Only a creature in a broken relationship with its planet needs a special terminology to salve its wound. Such words allow us to entertain feelings of wholesomeness while engaged in plunder.
1. Organic
Originally, pertaining to organisms. That’s the simple root. For a long time, matter associated with organisms was thought to be special because it was alive. Surely a vital force animated such material. Then a chemist name Friedrich Wöhler managed to produce urea — a component of urine — without having to pee in a bottle. He found it could be produced from ordinary, dead matter as well as through the processes of life. Thus began organic chemistry — the study of the properties of the carbon atom. At that moment, the word bifurcated, with continuing absurd consequences.
Among farmers, some pursued the synthetic way initiated by the likes of Wöhler (think Norman Borlaug and industrial agriculture), while others clung to vitalist notions, such as those promulgated by occultist Rudolph Steiner, whereby the products of living systems were privileged, “synthetics” be damned, bringing us the current linguistic mess. Organic food enthusiasts parted ways with the organic chemists around the beginning of the twentieth century, with “organic” gaining positive connotations and “chemical” negative ones.
Today the United States has the government-sanctioned term “organic” to describe a veritable Leviticus of “Allowed” and “Prohibited” substances and practices put into place to ensure that a farm is, well, organic. The term now conflicts with the scientific, chemical definition in just about every way. At least they wear their paradox on their sleeves:
1. Synthetic substances are prohibited unless specifically allowed on the National List. 2. Nonsynthetic (natural) substances are allowed unless specifically prohibited on the National List.*
In other words, synthetic stuff is not OK unless it is OK; and natural stuff is OK (more about that below) unless it is not OK.
For example, a chemically organic, naturally occurring pesticide produced by a flower grown in Kenya, pyrethrum, is declared “organic,” even though it decimates arthropods, including bees; but a likewise chemically organic pesticide native to North America, nicotine sulfate, is “non-organic” because it is derived from tobacco and thus prohibited in organic farming.
A synthetically produced, chemically organic fungicide, captan, is declared “non-organic,” but the synthetic version of the chemically inorganic fungicide, copper sulfate, is declared “organic.”
Go figure. A poison is a poison and regardless of its provenance should be used judiciously. Heed Paracelsus.*
No matter what adjective precedes it, farming — all farming — takes over land, draws down finite resources, converts these resources to wastes, and grows populations. That’s our “Holocene trap.” Without plastics, diesel fuel, and electricity, any modern farmer is lost. Even an organic one.
Nowadays, if someone asks if the food we grow on our little farm is “organic,” I just say, “Sure, it’s carbon-based.”
2. Natural
The adjectives in this list suffuse the nouns to which they are attached with a soothing glow, and none so much as “natural.” It is the all-purpose, go-to marketing term used to impart a halo of benignity and authenticity to any product or substance. It may be used in any and all situations . . . for what isn’t natural? If it’s a part of nature — basically, if it exists — it’s natural.
But what about synthetic chemicals?
They are all synthesized ultimately from natural compounds. They may be novel, but they still exist in the natural world. Once upon a time a few tens of millions of years ago, there was no pyrethrum in the universe, which is produced, as stated above, by a flowering plant. Then natural selection gave us Tanacetum cinerariifolium, a daisy which produces its own nerve poison to protect itself from insects; et voila, a pesticide is born. At the time, it was a novel substance but still natural. Likewise, anything humans produce — bad or good — must follow natural laws and are thus natural. We would not call beehives or beaver damns unnatural. The same goes for the excrescences of Homo sapiens. Extraterrestrial visitors studying our planet would be correct in identifying nuclear power stations as natural wonders. Novel, but natural.
What I mean to say is, the word natural is virtually meaningless. The best we can do is use it to distinguish between that which is human-made and that which precedes the human. And yet humans are natural. There’s just no sense in trying to take a cleaver and sever the human from the rest of the natural world. It may be that our habits, both rapacious and restorative, are perfectly natural, a novel iteration of the principle of ecological succession.
The effects of a 100% all-natural, organic phototoxin from the gas plant, Dictamnus albus, on my legs
Besides, Mother Nature is a rather bad parent. She doesn’t always provide us with the protection we need to thrive. In fact, She regularly supplies pestilence, disease, shitty weather, infection, and entropy. If you’re an orchardist, the fungi are your mortal enemy and you have to spray fungicides or your orchard is doomed. So please just be careful with that perfectly natural copper sulfate, which can accumulate in the soil and can cause organ damage if ingested.
3. Sustainable
Keeps on going. Indefinitely. Preferably without harm. This is one adjective that upon being prefixed to any noun immediately produces an oxymoron: “Growth,” “development,” “farming,” “mining,” “CO2 emissions,” “drinking straw manufacture,” you name it. Putting the adjective “sustainable” in front of it produces a howler.
Of course, this depends on the temporal lens through which you view the word, which for most people is usually something like “until the next quarter.” The word “sustain” is used in music to indicate a note that lasts. Until it fades out, that is. “Sustain” is actually not “sustainable.” That’s why music has the related concept, “decay.” Modern usage of “sustainability” is akin to stepping on the sustain pedal of a piano; it seems sustainable while people are paying attention, which is usually not very long.
As soon as your perspective approaches anything like the geological — or even just the historical — you have to greet “sustainability” with
ROTFLMAO
a posture that is itself not sustainable, as the joke gets very old very soon and you have to stop laughing.
But as with “natural” and “organic,” “sustainable” is continually trotted out and hitched to the Feel-Good wagon, allowing us to continue our plunder, waste, and destruction of the planet with a clean conscience.
The renowned Professor of Physics, Albert A. Bartlett, saw through sustainability bullshit like no other. His great rallying cry was, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Because of the compounding nature of growth,
[. . . ] sustainability of life as we know it may not be an option. [. . .] Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.*
Admit that there is anything like a long future, and all pretense of sustaining our current growth-based industrial civilization evaporates like beads of sweat on hot asphalt. The mere fact of a continuing rise in human-caused CO2 emissions puts a fatal dent in notions of sustainability. But that is irrelevant. Everyone knows the American way of life is not negotiable. We do not have to confirm our sustainability; we just have to die before it matters.
4. Renewable
Able to replace itself. Advocates of renewable energy intend to power automobile manufacturing plants, world-wide rock concert tours, and the military-industrial complex with wind, water, and sunlight. These forms of energy “renew” themselves, meaning something like: “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”*
It’s a lovely idea. And as false as water.
These very, very dispersed “sources” of energy — water flows, air flows, photon flows — are ultimately solar, which is lovely; but they require very sophisticated gadgets, devices, machines, apparatuses, and systems to gather up all this energy and work; and all of these contraptions are hopelessly mired in a fossil fuel-based mining, refining, manufacturing, transport, assembly, and maintenance economy. I’d even call them baubles brought to you by fossil fuels.
Furthermore, these machines don’t renew in any sense; wind turbines, hydroelectric dams, and solar panels are rebuilt, not renewed. But first you have to build them.
Simon P. Michaux, Associate Professor of Metallurgy at Geological Survey Finland, has undertaken the daunting — and horrifying — task of calculating what it would take to “phase out fossil fuels” with so-called renewable energy systems. It would take “a much larger system than the existing system.” Well over a billion internal combustion vehicles need to be replaced with electric vehicles and their batteries. All long-distance trucking, rail, and maritime shipping need to be replaced with hydrogen fuel cell-powered fleets. And generating the power to do all this would require building over 220 thousand new non-fossil fuel power stations! * There are currently just 46,ooo such power stations. Then there are all the storage batteries, contemplating which might make your head explode . . .
Let’s consider a single component in Michaux’s analysis of what is needed to pull off this gargantuan feat — not copper, not nickel, not lithium, but graphite, which forms the negative electrode of lithium-ion batteries. Current production of graphite is well over a million tons per year. To create the system above, it would take . . . 13.2 billion tons of graphite. I thought I had misread that. I hadn’t. That’s over 12,000 years of mining at current rates. Try extracting all that graphite without the application of at least a little diesel fuel. Then there’s the copper, and the nickel, and the silver, and the cobalt, and, well, all the rest of the minerals and metals in the Earth’s crust.
Michaux concludes, drily:
At this point it might occur to you all that this is not a good plan and we should make a better one.*
5. Green
Green is great when describing broccoli plants, algal mats, rain forests, katydids, and, to a lesser extent, naïveté. Not so much for vast photovoltaic arrays, hydroelectric dams, and wind turbine “farms.” Now, if chloroplasts were involved, that would be a different story, but they are not involved. Not in the goddamned least. Instead of chloroplasts, these “green” technologies are built, fed, and propped up by coke and coal and diesel, which, I might remind you, are decidedly non-green.
Dare I sneer it? Green is the new black.
You may now roll your eyes and remind me, “Green” is used metaphorically in these cases, Dummkopf. But the fossil energy used to prop up these industries ain’t metaphorical. It’s quite literal.
Ecologist William Rees and Systems Analyst Megan Seibert point out that a single wind turbine can weigh up to 1200 tons, most of which consists of steel and concrete, which do not reproduce themselves.* They are composed of minerals out of the ground, to which is added coal, lots of coal.
Steel production is dependent on coal. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon, the latter contributed by metallurgical, or coking, coal. The production of coke from metallurgical coal requires temperatures around 1800 ◦F (1000 ◦C). Combining coke and iron to make steel then requires blast furnaces at temperatures of 3100 ◦F (1700 ◦C). On average, 1.85 tons of CO2 are emitted for every ton of steel produced.
Simultaneously depleting the Earth’s crust of minerals and deforesting the planet, but with taste. My battery-powered (“green”) chainsaw
The same goes for the cement in concrete and the silicon in solar panels: They’re coal hogs because they require such high temperatures to make. Funnily enough, coal is in a sense green: It represents dead trees buried in the Earth’s crust then pressure-cooked for hundreds of millions of years. But, unlike trees, coal is non-renewable; it must be destroyed to be of any use. Once destroyed, it leaves us with a scalded atmosphere. Now partly in the service of a “green” economy, used to run business as usual.
Coda
We need to cut the happy talk and admit the truth: We have obliterated the world we inherited from the Holocene and are cobbling together something entirely new in its stead, something we don’t yet comprehend.
Since I was a toddler loading up diapers with the bounty of industrial agriculture, wild animal populations worldwide have plummeted by about three-quarters.* The mass of us humans and our livestock now outweigh wild animal mass by a huge margin. For the estimated 60 million total tons of wild animals, there exists a total of 1.2 billion tons of us humans and our livestock. That means just 3 kg of wild animal biomass per person on the planet, about the size of one jackrabbit. By killing seven porcupines this summer, I’ve exterminated at least 50 kg of wild biomass, well beyond my personal allotment, to say nothing of the voles, snakes, and frogs I have crushed beneath tractor wheels while mowing the fields surrounding our farm. Ecologically, that makes big game hunting the equivalent of genocide.
Atmospheric CO2 content has blown past 420 parts per million. The average surface temperature has exceeded the 1.5° Celsius increase that we were warned should not be breached. Twenty-five percent of CO2 emissions just come from growing and processing our damn food. Let’s grow food in such a way as to ruin the planet so that we cannot grow food anymore. Brilliant.
The individual can do exactly nothing about this. We are constantly reminded — through traffic jams, supermarket queues, and slow internet connections — that each of us is just one of over 8 billion, meaning that our particular effect doesn’t amount to a flyspeck. Any one of us suddenly dropping dead would have zero impact on the overall human pressure on the planet. Efforts to reduce our “footprints” — buying electric vehicles, choosing paper over plastic, drinking through paper straws, ordering hemp t-shirts online, importing organic teas — are decidedly paradoxical: they require energy and materials to produce, and that just make things worse.
The honeybee is born to the hive and must serve the hive, no matter how much she detests it.
***
For the “organic” discussion, I have cannibalized part of my essay “Why I Am Through With Organic Farming”, originally published on Fourat Janabi’s website Random Rationality, which no longer exists.
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Images
Photographs by the author
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