The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis (2 page)

As heartbreaking as the scene in the southeastern Amazon was to witness, we knew it was just a modern take on an age-old process. People had long ago demolished forests across North America, Europe, and Asia, replacing them with more useful plants to eat or sell. But this was nothing like the image of the struggling settler setting up a homestead. Chainsaws were buzzing, bulldozers were clearing debris, tractors were spreading seeds, planes were spraying pesticides, and trucks were carrying the product from the farms. The scene was more like the current-day industrial, fossil-fuel-powered farming of the American Midwest, with huge fields, towering silos, and few people.

Not far from where we sat on the log bemoaning the vanishing rainforest, a completely different scene was playing out. The Kayapó, who live on a nearby reserve of land that the Brazilian government set aside in the early 1960s for indigenous peoples, guard their still-forested land against intrusion by the modern-day farmers. The Kayapó live largely in their traditional ways, hunting birds and game in the forest; catching fish in the river; gathering roots, fruits, and nuts; and growing
sweet potatoes and manioc. They have only the energy of their own labor and fire. There is no option to buy tractors or sell their products half a world away.

On one side of the reserve’s boundary, farmers sit behind fossil-fuel-powered bulldozers to clear land and grow soy to feed livestock
around the world. On the other, the Kayapó hunt animals and gather seeds and fruits as humans have done for the vast majority of our history. What a strange species we have become. What an odd juxtaposition of ways that people use nature to fill their stomachs.

Confronted with these contrasting scenes, it’s easy to get trapped in a romantic view of the Kayapó living off the land in harmony with nature. But that naïve view serves little purpose. The notion of a static, unchanging harmony is a fiction better suited for the armchair environmentalist than for people struggling for a better life for their children. It’s tragic to see the majestic forest cleared for short-term profits, but it’s also impractical to expect that most of humanity can live like the Kayapó. From the other side of the boundary, it’s equally possible to get trapped in a fictitious view that the bulldozers necessarily represent progress and fulfill promises of a better life.

Questions swimming through my mind as I sat on the log: Is one way of life better than the other? Do the vanishing forests mean that our species is doomed? Conversely, should we be grateful to our ancestors who figured out how to grow so much food that we can buy our sustenance in stores and spend our time in creative pursuits? Then a more answerable but no less fascinating question popped up. Just how did humanity get to this point? We started out like any ordinary mammal, as dependent on our immediate surroundings as any other species. Now we are clearing forests with bulldozers; feeding soy to cows, pigs, and chickens; and shipping food around the world. We are no ordinary mammal.

This book is an attempt to reconstruct how we became extraordinary, how human civilization evolved to manipulate nature so much that most people live in cities. Our journey began by living off the plants and animals that nature made available. Now we are the only species with most of its members subsisting on food produced in some distant location. In telling this story, I do not presuppose that our journey represents either the supremacy of our species or our hubris in abusing
nature. If a reader is looking to justify the Kayapó’s way of life as being better than Maggi’s, or to prove civilization’s imminent demise, this is not the book to find those arguments. Neither does this book argue that the bulldozers represent an endpoint in our progression toward a healthier, happier, or more prosperous way of life for our species. Instead, this book’s purpose is to look back on humanity’s journey, and to tease apart the pathways that show how we got to where we are now. Perhaps we can learn about our future on this planet by looking at the past.

1: A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW

S
OCRATES, SPEAKING TO HIS DISCIPLES
in his final hours, imagined the view if he could “take the wings of a bird and fly upward” and peer down upon the Earth. “I believe that the earth is very vast,” he surmised, with little more than water, patches of earth, and “an
endless slough of mud.” Humanity’s significance wanes against the vastness of the world below in this long-ago view.

More than a hundred generations later, the view from above tells a story that Socrates could scarcely have imagined. Whether from airplane windows or images beamed down from space, the picture is clear. Roads crisscross the landscape. Fields where people sow wheat, rice, potatoes, and a multitude of other crops pockmark the countryside. Pastures where grazing cows are raised to supply meat and milk for their owners expand to the horizon. Bright lights beam to the sky from buildings in towns and cities. Socrates’s view from above diminished our significance in the world. Today, that same view signifies our powerful role. Signs of human presence
are nearly everywhere.

Our species, one among millions that inhabit the planet, has transformed the Earth. The imprint on the planet is visible from far-off space.
And much of the change—from the fertile prairies of North America to the verdant rice paddies of the Mekong Delta—has occurred for one reason: our species has commandeered nature to fill our stomachs.

Humanity’s unmistakable imprint on the planet typically evokes one of two antagonistic reactions. In one, the Earth’s dramatic transformation is proof that human ingenuity can trump any
barriers nature presents. Every problem has a technological solution. Run out of food or energy? No need to worry, someone will devise a clever technology and find a way out. According to Julian Simon, the classic protagonist of this view, human ingenuity not only stretches natural resources, but can make them infinite. The ultimate resource is not coal, water, or copper, but human ingenuity. Nature poses no limits. The
future is secure.

The counterargument views our enormous imprint as the height of folly and proof that humanity is headed toward disaster. Monopoly by a single species, the reasoning goes, is bound to lead to catastrophe, starvation, and collapse. Resources, by definition, are finite, and humanity’s expansion will inevitably butt up against the limit or create side-effects so severe that civilization will not survive. A long list of scholars follows this line of thinking, most famously the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, with his predictions of famine. More recent thinkers have used suggestive titles for their writings to reflect this view, such as Donella Meadows, with
Limits to Growth
, and Johan Rockström, with
Planetary Boundaries
. Nature will have the last say, they claim. Humanity is slurping up resources and spewing wastes with
catastrophic consequences. Humans are a destructive force.

Does the bird’s-eye view reveal hubris or success, folly or triumph? Perhaps this is not even the right question. Within a narrow perspective, both views might seem correct at different points in history or in different places around the world. But both prove incapable of describing the world from a long-term and broader perspective. Simon’s view of technological fixes fails to foresee the problems that these fixes can create.
Rockström’s view of future catastrophes underestimates the ability of human societies to adapt and change. Both fail to consider the reality of humanity’s long and complex relationship with nature. Neither offers guidance for addressing humanity’s current conundrums.

A broader and longer-term perspective reveals a species that, like any other, manipulates its surroundings to expand its territory and grow in numbers. The difference is the extraordinary ability of our species to twist food from nature. To comprehend how our species—which for tens of thousands of years hunted prey and gathered wild plants like any other animal—became such a dominant force demands that we leave behind narrow-minded moralizing about conquest or destruction. A broader perspective views human civilization as neither right nor wrong, neither good nor bad, but as part of the evolution of life on this planet.

This book traces humanity’s remarkable journey from an ordinary mammal to a world-dominating, urban-dwelling species. Striking patterns emerge from this long-term view. One is that we have always lived off of the food that we have managed to squeeze from our surroundings, just like any other species, from the smallest microbe to the largest carnivore. Another is that civilization’s attempts to extract food from nature are experiments. Through trial and error, we have found new ways to extract more food with less work. Our capacity to build knowledge across generations, a hallmark of our species, has allowed one experiment to build on the last in a never-ending progression. If one experiment fails, we lurch, stumble, and try some other path. Even today’s massive manipulation of nature to feed billions is simply one more experiment in a long chain.

The process goes something like this. It starts with a hungry person in search of the easiest and quickest way to get a meal. At some point, a way to manipulate nature emerges, perhaps when someone tames an edible plant or devises a way to spread scarce nutrients so crops can grow. Maybe the twist of nature is intentional, or perhaps someone stumbles
upon some random good fortune. With more food to go around, the success ratchets up the number of our species, and people expand into new places. Inevitably, any innovation reaches its limit, creating demands it cannot satisfy, generating too much pollution, or creating some other unforeseen obstacle. Once again, specters of not enough food to go around appear, and prospects look grim. The hatchet falls. Then a new pivot, a new way to use nature’s endowments, emerges. The ratchet turns again, providing more and more people with food, committing civilization to keeping the growing number of people fed. At some point there’s an even bigger hurdle, perhaps from the sheer number of people or from disease, drought, or some other calamity. Ratchet, hatchet, pivot; ratchet, hatchet, pivot. In every cycle, the stakes get higher, as our species expands in numbers and in the extent of its reach across the world. In every cycle, new obstacles emerge. And in every cycle, millennium after millennium, humanity as a whole has muddled through.

Those cycles continue today, but in a different guise. For most of human history the hatchets were famine and shortage. As we will see in later chapters, our current problems are more about abundance than about lack of food. Our species has never before had to grapple with such surplus. What once seemed like a dream has led to new crises: exploding numbers of overweight people, others still without enough despite the plenty, and an excess that leaks pollutants into the air and water. The pattern of unintended and unforeseen consequences continues, but the hatchets are new.

Within the lifetimes of most of the people reading these pages, humanity has devised ways to extract food from nature on a scale like never before. We have lived through the Big Ratchet—the extraordinary second half of the twentieth century—when our twists of nature sped up so fast that the trajectory of human civilization changed course. Before the Big Ratchet, our species was already exceptional. We were the
only mammal that farmed, though not the only other farming species in the animal kingdom. But now, at the Big Ratchet’s crest, most of us live in cities and consume food that is produced far away by a minority of the human population. This change makes us unique.

Our species passed this milestone in May 2007. After that fateful date, more than half of us have lived in cities. We stepped over the threshold from mostly farmers to mostly urban-dwellers. And our evolution to an urban species reaches into the fundamentals of our lives—our diets, our health, the size of our families, where we live and work, our perceived links with nature, and the future of the planet itself. The shift is as fundamental as our transition from forager to farmer more than 10,000 years ago.

During the Big Ratchet, a year’s production of corn and rice nearly tripled worldwide, and wheat more than doubled. With the abundance of corn to feed cows, pigs, and chickens, the amount of meat
more than tripled. Food became cheaper than ever before. The share of a family’s income devoted to food is now lower than at
any other time in modern history. Many people, though by no means all, can spend more on education, cars, houses, and food than they would have been able to afford just half a century ago. They can live in cities and get their groceries from a corner shop, rather than laboring in the fields, or from a large supermarket that holds a cornucopia that our ancestors could not have imagined. At the same time, millions of families around the world are reaping the benefits of sanitation from flush toilets, vaccinations against big killers such as smallpox, antibiotics to cure infections, cleaner drinking water, pesticides to control diseases like malaria, and other health-care advances. For nearly all of human history, the average life span at birth was about thirty years. That statistic rose by about two decades during the second half of the twentieth century, though a person’s lifetime in a poor country was still many years shorter than that of someone living in one of the
richer parts of the world.