The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis (29 page)

And it is not just the quest for food that is making its mark on the landscape. Corn, oil palm, and sugarcane make industrially produced biofuels viable replacements for fossil fuels. It seemed like a good idea at the time: there should be fewer greenhouse gases with a decline in fossil-fuel use, and more freedom from the geopolitics of oil and gas. But as usual, there was a downside, and the trial had an error. The space to grow these biofuels brings another competitor for land into the mix and
pushes food prices higher.

The cracks started to show as the decade of the 2000s came to a close. Rioters in Cairo, Port-au-Prince, Dhaka, Mogadishu, and across West Africa protested the rising prices of foods, from rice to cooking oils. Floods, cyclones, and the diversion of land from food to biofuels in the United States and Europe merged into a perfect storm that year. Prices of staples soared. Households were
unable to put food on the table. Headlines screamed around the world: “
Food Security Rattled in 2008,” “
Riot Warning,” “
Egyptians Riot over Bread Prices,” “
Hungry Haitians Expand Food Riots,” “
Food Riots Will Spread.” It’s too early at this juncture to draw the trend line, but the era of cheap food may be
drawing to a close. The web of connections that carries food in ships, planes, and railroads around the world can tumble like a house of cards if just one link goes awry.

The plenty of the Big Ratchet is a paradox. The mantra was more, more, more, but more does not necessarily mean better. Some of the hatchets came clear in a matter of decades. The notion of Paul Müller’s Nobel Prize–winning discovery of DDT as a miracle pest-killer quickly crumbled as birds succumbed to the poison and resistant pests emerged. The pivot to safer pesticides followed. People took a few decades to realize the unhealthy downside to Paul Sabatier’s Nobel Prize–winning invention that made cheap vegetable shortening an alternative to butter and lard. The pivot is slowly turning toward healthier options
where people have the means.

The planetary hatchets from the Big Ratchet are poised to fall. New pivots enabling us to sidestep the
blow are far from assured. Countries do not readily agree on a set of common goals. Humans have a proclivity to favor diets that extract a large cost on the planet. These problems do not make for easy solutions. If the past is a guide to the future, we may be able to muddle through from ratchet to hatchet to pivot and back, propelled by our human ingenuity. But whether the massive changes wrought by the Big Ratchet will have a very different ending from the events of the past remains to be seen.

The verdict on whether the victories of the Big Ratchet were real, or only temporary fixes with too high a cost, will have to wait. What is clear is that the Big Ratchet is as transformative as any event our species has ever seen. From the vantage point of the far side of the Big Ratchet, we can see we are a fundamentally different species than we were before the pivots of the past century came into play. We are an urban species fed from a manipulated nature.

The Next Pivots

The long-lens story of humanity’s journey exemplifies our species’ trademark. Ingenuity to twist nature accumulates and builds on ideas
from many people in many places. The ways that humanity acquired its ability to so massively manipulate nature goes far back in time before the Big Ratchet started to turn. The list of events, people, and motives that contributed along the way is long and varied: spies who spread the secret of the Haber-Bosch process; the chemist who rescued DDT from obscurity; the expeditions to find new seeds and to unearth geologic oddities; the intellectual curiosity to painstakingly brush pollen on thousands of pea plants; competition for prestige; conquest; trade; good ideas spread from one person to another; pushes from those with political power; flukes like the locust extinction in North America; and, of course, the profit motive, which grew strong in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries once chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and high-yielding seeds could be controlled in the hands of the few. All of these contributed to the spread of humanity’s collective ability to experiment with nature.

No new way to manipulate nature, from ancient animal power to modern machinery, ever occurred without trial and error. Feeding urban species from modern agriculture is our most recent trial. So far, humanity has recuperated from the errors in our trial-and-error strategies. Whether modern agriculture turns out to be an error too big for humanity or the planet to bear is only possible to tell with a lens into the future, a lens that gives us only a fuzzy picture.

The pivots leading to the Big Ratchet were geared toward increasing the supply of food. Now the paradox of success is unfolding. We live in a time when the problems created by post–World War II solutions are unfolding. Unhealthy fat- and sugar-laden diets, as obesity spreads across the world to nearly all countries and strata of society, constitute perhaps the
most obvious and immediate problem. Planetary backlashes are less obvious, but no less severe. Some resources that once seemed limitless—water in some places, and perhaps phosphate rock for fertilizer—are bumping up against the inevitable hatchet of too much
demand and not enough ready supply. Others—nitrogen and fossil energy—have backlashes so detrimental that business-as-usual is not an option. The third legacy of the Big Ratchet, after the problems of obesity and planetary decline, is the tragedy of families with too little amid a world of too much. These three vestiges were not likely so much on the minds of those working to produce more while the Big Ratchet was swinging upward.

From the far side of the Big Ratchet, the focus changes to solutions for the problems that these prior solutions have brought. No doubt, new solutions will create new, unforeseen problems of their own. This is the unending conundrum of settled life. At this point, the pivots rest at least partially on what we decide to eat and how society manipulates nature to produce food.

The pivots are starting to turn. As the urban arm reaches into the countryside to feed the city-dwellers, the next pivots need to focus not just on more, but also on better, on quality and not just quantity. People in cities are planting gardens on rooftops and slivers of land between buildings to grow a few vegetables. Some cities and communities are closing the loops to recover nutrients from human waste rather than washing them into the waste stream, as the ancient Chinese had
learned to do long ago. Farmers are learning to use water and fertilizer more efficiently than in the bonanza times of the Big Ratchet.

Reducing the heaps of food that go waste in developed and developing countries alike is another way to lessen the Big Ratchet’s downsides. In the developed world, wasted food takes the form of spoiled fruits, vegetables, and meats in the fridge and the pantry, as well as in
restaurants and grocery stores. In the developing world, up to four of every ten tons of food rot because of the lack of refrigeration, or is pilfered by pests before
people can buy it in the store. Less wasteful habits in the developed world, and better storage in the developing world, would mean less water, energy, and fertilizer used as food makes its journey from field to fork.

Urbanites are learning that the implicit bargain with modern civilization does not mean they are disconnected from where their food comes from and how it is produced. Incipient movements toward diets that are healthier for people and the planet are signs that the pivots may be starting to turn. While much of the world is upping its consumption of meat and other animal products, some people are moving toward more plant-based diets. The shift not only benefits their health but gives them a way to help recapture the disproportionate amounts of energy and water that animal-based diets consume. Plant-based diets lessen the spewing of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in the form of methane from cows and other ruminants, nitrous oxide from the synthetic fertilizers used to produce feed grains, and carbon dioxide spewed as
forests are cleared for grazing.

Not every pivot turns out to hit the mark. Take the well-meaning movement to buy groceries on the basis of “food miles.” Surprisingly, driving a long distance to purchase locally produced food can be less energy efficient than having distant, commercially produced food
delivered to your doorstep. The “food mile” calculation also ignores the benefits to poor farmers’ livelihoods when they get access to premium-paying
customers in faraway markets. But the modern pivot to eating locally produced food does have its benefits: it can make for fresher, less processed, and healthier meals and more tightly knit communities. The willingness of purchasers to spend extra for food certified to be sustainably produced, such as certified shade-grown coffee or organic chocolate, is yet another trend that marks a possible transition to a different future than
current trajectories suggest.

All of these trends are only small steps. They are taking place in developed parts of the world with only a trifling impact
on worldwide trends. But they move the collective consciousness toward the pivots that society needs to recover from the backlashes of the Big Ratchet.

We are relearning that eating is our most fundamental connection with nature. Before the Big Ratchet, the irrefutable fact that nature binds
our food choices was impossible to avoid. Nature imposed constraints. People had no choice but to live within them. After the Big Ratchet, it became all too easy to forget those constraints. Now the notion that urban lives are connected with nature is seeping into the public consciousness against strong headwinds driven by the push to consume more.

Pivots can be slow in coming, and few and far between, and all of us need to do much more to keep the hatchets that are following the Big Ratchet from falling too severely. But glimpses of change are emerging. The pivots are starting to turn. The move toward a sustainable future—an overused and under-defined term, but nonetheless a term that represents a powerful notion, the notion that our species can apply its ingenuity to prosper in the future on a healthy planet—is the next step in our species’ remarkable journey from ordinary mammal to urbanite.

Into the Cacophony

Not long after a new, gleaming metro system opened in the city of Delhi in India, I was traveling from the university where I was working at the time into town to meet a friend. The metro displayed all the signs of India’s growing, vibrant economy—well-dressed people busily going to and from offices, film posters, advertisements for technical schools and test preparation, and snack vendors selling packaged biscuits and greasy potato chips. All kinds of people piled into the metro car, from jeans-sporting teenagers to elderly, sari-clad women. As I took a seat, a family entered the car.

The family’s weather-beaten hands and faces, the rubber thongs on their feet, and the cloth bundles on their laps made it easy to tell that they were new arrivals from one of the hundreds of thousands of villages in the country. They were clearly uneasy, not quite sure how to hold on as the car swayed or what to make of the crowd. As the train slowed toward their stop, the oldest girl of the family hoisted the youngest baby on her hip as the parents gathered up their belongings. We got
out at the same station. The family hesitated at the escalator and held hands nervously as they navigated the moving stairs. I followed them out of the metro. Then the family disappeared into the honking horns, swerving traffic, and cacophony of the city.

Perhaps they left their village because they could not grow enough food on a small plot of land. Perhaps they were looking for a shot at a decent job and a chance to join the growing middle class. Whatever the reason, they were one of millions of families streaming into the burgeoning cities. They were joining the multitudes whose lifestyles are quickly transforming from rural to urban. They will buy their rice and lentils rather than wait for the rains to plant their seeds. Maybe they will buy some vegetables. Their city-reared children will probably have no more than two or three children of their own. If luck and hard work are on their side, these children might be able to go to school, hold a well-paying job, and share in the implicit bargain of modern civilization. If they are among the fortunate to escape poverty, they will be able to drink milk every day and add chicken or goat meat to their dishes. They might drink too much sugary soda and eat too much fatty, fried food. Perhaps they will succumb to the urban afflictions of diabetes and heart disease. For better or for worse, they will become part of the massive transformation of our species to urban-dwellers.

By the time the century reaches its midpoint, it is likely that nearly eight out of ten people in the
world will live in cities. The world’s fast-growing cities—Lagos, Dhaka, Shenzhen, Karachi, Delhi, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Manila, and Mumbai, among others—will continue to grow. People will continue to flock into millions of smaller
towns and cities throughout the developing world. These city-dwellers will all buy their food from grocers. Many will order meals from restaurants. But they will be no less tied to nature than the Inuit or the Kayapó. Urbanites will still depend on the planet’s amazing machinery to convert the sun’s energy into the food on their plates. Microbes will
still recycle wastes. The vast conveyor belt deep below the ground will still move continents, and volcanoes will still spew gases into the atmosphere. The city’s breakfasts, lunches, and dinners will still come from the food-producing landscapes of the bird’s-eye view. Humanity’s cumulative knowledge will continue to build, and more ingenious ways to twist—or perhaps untwist—nature will come to the fore.

Twelve thousand years have passed since we began to transform from forager to settled farmer. It took several thousand years of learning and culture before the transition was nearly complete. The twists of nature that human ingenuity devised have ratcheted up, step by step, our dominance as farmers on the planet. Now we are transforming from farmers to urbanites. Our newest experiment—to feed massive numbers of people from the work of a few—is just beginning. The outcome is yet to be seen. There will surely be more hatchets and pivots in the never-ending cycle of our species’ manipulations of the planet’s endowments. Humanity is still, and will always be, learning to live with the massive transformations our ingenuity has wrought.