Majora: Hi, I'm Majora Carter, here with a special podcast from The Promised Land. Today you'll meet a true visionary who has devoted his life to the natural world, Wes Jackson. Wes is a plant geneticist who has proposed nothing short of a complete overhaul of American agriculture to solve some of our most serious environmental problems.
Wes: Let’s think of it this way, we’ve all read probably about the story of the blind kittens – apparently, kittens when they're born…if you put a blindfold on them and leave it there for six weeks, they never learn to see. In other words, the neurological development is dependent on their experience of this world. So, in a certain sense, we’re all blind kittens. But we have not acknowledged how our cultural and regional history has created various blind spots in us.
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Majora: Wes Jackson is a pioneer in the sustainable agriculture movement. At at the age of 75, he says he's "just hitting his stride."
Majora: You have one quote that, I swear, kind of left me a little cold, “farming is humanities original sin.” What do you mean by that?
Wes: Well, let’s think what those ecosystems were like 10,000 years ago. Almost everywhere nature features perennials grown in mixtures – whether we're talking about a tropical rainforest, desert scrub or alpine meadow. In order to grow the annual grain, you have to have a seedbed in which seed can germinate. That means that you have to essentially destroy the vegetative structure of what was there. And that introduces the idea that nature is to be subdued or ignored. That’s also the beginning of soil erosion. And so soil erosion on a global scale is not at all trivial. And I also said another place, that “the plow share has destroyed more options for future generations than the sword…”
Majora: Wes Jackson explains that the way farming is done in most parts of the world - can't work forever. Grains like wheat and corn are planted each year. When the fields are plowed, they lose soil. What's left is gradually losing nutrients that sustain our crops. Jackson came to this revelation at the age of 41 - while he was a tenured professor at California State University in Sacramento - and he was called to return to his native Kansas.
Wes: Many years ago, in 1977, I had read the General Accounting Office study – in which it appeared that soil erosion was as bad in '70s as in when Soil Conservation Service was formed back in the 1930s. I thought , "How can this be?" Shortly after that, I took my students on field trip to visit a prairie – this tall grass prairie– here was a system featuring perennials grown in mixtures, and it didn’t have soil erosion. It was running on contemporary sunlight – it featured continual recycling, it didn’t have the epidemic that would mow everything down because with species diversity you have chemical diversity. And so that’s what set me off to think about the possibility of breeding perennial grains that would be grown in mixtures and we would then be able to bring the processes of the wild to the farm.
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Majora: In the late '70s, Wes Jackson was ahead of his time - but, he says "behind the need." Wes Jackson moved back to Kansas to start The Land Institute, a plant breeding hub and alternative school based on developing a perennial polyculture - with more than one plant in a field, just like nature.
Majora: Tell us about the work of The Land Institute.
Wes: We’re mostly plant breeder types. So we have some 630 acres and 160 of those acres with bison on prairie. That’s our standerd, that's the original relationship. That's the tree of life. We have experimental plots, and we call that the tree of knowledge. We’re trying to get this reconciliation with nature – instead of nature being subdued or ignored – we're trying to be able to farm like a prairie or farm like a forest.
Majora: Jackson says we need to imitate nature - not dominate it or disrespect it.
Majora: Wes Jackson is now trying to raise more than a billion dollars to fund a 30-year research initiative to rain 110 PhD level scientists to build an agriculture as sustainable as the nature we have destroyed.
Majora: What is your hope for next generation of leaders and hopefully they're thinking about they work they need to do in their lifetime - that may not get done?
Wes: We need to feature questions that go beyond the available answers, drive knowledge out of categories and in so doing create a yeastiness of thought that we've not had before. So as long as we're asking questions that have available answers, then we’re going to stay stuck on this road to continued destruction. But I think there are more people are asking questions – like if we have no growth, how are we going to have social justice and see to it that everyone is taken care of? Well, that's a question that doesn’t have an answer – must be daring enough and live with the questions long enough. Right now it's the knowledge imbedded in the categories, that's a serious problem that has to be overcome.
Majora: Here's one of my favorite quotes from Wes Jackson - "If your life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough."
Wes: If we can get through this long journey, this long tunnel and keep ourselves fed – and break into the daylight with a whole different way of thinking about the world. I think agriculture can teach us that. Let’s imagine young folk, if they had places to go – and what the influence would be on various places here and there – start with idea that the planet is ecological music, and then take the lines of Alexander Pope, his poem, the Epistle to Arbuthnot – consult the genius of the place of the in all – genius of the place in Kansas is, say, prairie , genius of place in rainforest is the rainforest. So, consult the genius of the place but still using the same ecological principles here and there, noting that all adaptation is local. That would be a fundamentally different way. Right now, as it stands, we're planting soybeans where rainforest once stood, and we're planting soybeans where the prairie once stood. That is not acknowledging consult of the genius of the place.
Majora: Wes Jackson - President of The Land Institute - and a genius himself. he's a 1992 MacArthur Fellow, and he's just one of the many great people leading all of us to The Promised Land. I'm Majora Carter. Thanks for listening. This podcast was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with production support from APM, American Public Media. Please visit our website to listen to our other podcasts and public radio programs about visionaries creating change at thepromisedland.org.
