Envisioning a 50-Year Future

WE LURCH FROM ecological crisis to crisis, all of them real: So far this year we’ve seen the sickening collapse of much of the Pacific’s coral in a 10-month blitz of hot ocean water; we’ve watched a city of 90,000 evacuated ahead of a forest fire so big it was creating its own weather; and we’ve witnessed the earliest onset of widespread Arctic melting ever recorded. And so on.

All of these need urgent responses—the fire company has to report for duty. So it’s been sweet to see activists doing civil disobedience on an unprecedented scale around the world and increasingly putting the fossil fuel industry on the defensive. We’ve got to turn the tide soon.

But “soon” and “urgent” and “emergency” are words that can blind us as well—keep us from seeing the deep roots of problems and solutions. So it is a very good thing that we have some folks who don’t scare easily. I’m thinking in particular of Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, who keep patiently pushing the most deeply (and literally) rooted piece of legislation I know of, the 50-year Farm Bill.

The Kansas geneticist and farmer, and the Kentucky writer and farmer, begin with the premise that roots are important. Our industrial agriculture has plowed up the perennial crops that once covered the continent (and the planet) and replaced them with high-yielding annuals. All that wheat and corn feed us cheaply—and lead to dead, eroding soils that, among other things, can’t soak up much in the way of carbon. So Jackson, at his Land Institute, has spent the last decades crossing annual and perennial crops. The goal is nothing less than grains you don’t need to replant every year—grains that will grow deep, tangled roots into the prairie soil, feeding us and restoring a desperately needed balance.

THIS ISN’T EASY work. Because engineers have done their jobs so well, we could replace the world’s fossil fuels with sun, wind, and other renewables by 2030 (if we could get the dead hand of the fossil fuel industry out of the way). But far fewer agronomists have been working on perennialization, which is why the legislation Jackson and Berry propose would ask the U.S. Department of Agriculture to fund and monitor such work in the years to come. If all goes well, by mid-century the sunflower, say, will be where the solar panel is now: fully perennialized and busily producing oil on a heartening scale.

One of the most beautiful features of the 50-year Farm Bill is precisely that it envisions a future for us—a future hard to imagine some days, as one grapples with the latest scientific reports from the front. Both Berry and Jackson are of an age that guarantees they won’t see the end of the effort that they’ve launched, which is also beautiful. It implies the continuing, connected care for the one planet we’ve got—our best chance at salvation if we can only muster it. Relatively fast.