The Rational Optimist (46 page)

p. 137 ‘Fuegian men, who could not swim, left their wives to anchor canoes in kelp beds and swim ashore in snow storms’. Bridges, E.L. 1951.
The Uttermost Part of the Earth
. Hodder & Stoughton.

p. 137 ‘One commentator writes’. Wood, J.W. et al. 1998. A theory of preindustrial population dynamics: demography, economy, and well-being in Malthusian systems.
Current Anthropology
39:99–135.

p. 137 ‘The archaeologist Steven LeBlanc says that the evidence of constant violence in the ancient past’. LeBlanc, S.A. and Register, K. 2003.
Constant Battles: Why We Fight
. St Martin’s Griffin.

p. 138 ‘In the Merzbach valley in Germany’. Shennan, S. 2002.
Genes, Memes and Human History
. Thames & Hudson.

p. 138 ‘At Talheim around 4900
BC
’. Bentley, R.A., Wahl, J., Price T.D. and Atkinson, T.C. 2008. Isotopic signatures and hereditary traits: snapshot of a Neolithic community in Germany.
Antiquity
82:290–304.

p. 138 ‘As Paul Seabright has written’. Seabright, P. 2008.
Warfare and the Multiple Adoption of Agriculture after the Last Ice Age
, IDEI Working Paper no. 522, April 2008.

p. 138 ‘When Samuel Champlain accompanied (and assisted with his arquebus) a successful Huron raid upon the Mohawks in 1609’. Brook, T. 2008.
Vermeer’s Hat
. Profile Books.

p. 139 ‘Robert Malthus’. Yes, Robert: to call Thomas Robert Malthus by his first name which he did not use, is like calling the first director of the FBI John Hoover.

p. 140 ‘the eminent British chemist Sir William Crookes gave a similar jeremiad’. Crookes, W. 1898.
The Wheat Problem
. Reissued by Ayers 1976.

p. 140 ‘Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch’. Smil, V. 2001.
Enriching the Earth
. MIT Press.

pp. 140–1 ‘As late as 1920, over three million acres of good agricultural land in the American Midwest lay uncultivated’. Clark, C. 1970.
Starvation or Plenty?
Secker and Warburg.

p. 142 ‘a scientist working in Mexico called Norman Borlaug’. Easterbrook, G. 1997. Forgotten benefactor of humanity.
The Atlantic Monthly
.

p. 143 ‘In 1968, after huge shipments of Mexican seed, the wheat harvest was extraordinary in both countries.’ Hesser, L. 2006.
The Man Who Fed the World
. Durban House. See Borlaug, N.E. 2000. Ending world hunger: the promise of biotechnology and the threat of antiscience zealotry.
Plant Physiology
124:487–90. Also author’s interview with N. Borlaug 2004.

p. 144 ‘Intensification has saved 44 per cent of this planet for wilderness.’ Goklany I. 2001. Agriculture and the environment: the pros and cons of modern farming.
PERC Reports
19:12–14.

p. 144 ‘Some argue that the human race already appropriates for itself an unsustainable fraction of the planet’s primary production’. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that humankind is already overdrawn in its use of earth’s resources, but it reaches this conclusion only by including a vast acreage of new forest planting needed to balance each person’s carbon emissions.

p. 144 ‘HANPP – the “human appropriation of net primary productivity”’. Haberl, H. et al. 2007. Quantifying and mapping the human appropriation of net primary production in earth’s terrestrial ecosystems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:12942–7.

p. 145 ‘These findings suggest that, on a global scale, there may be a considerable potential to raise agricultural output without necessarily increasing HANPP’. Haberl, H. et al. 2007. Quantifying and mapping the human appropriation of net primary production in earth’s terrestrial ecosystems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:12942–7.

p. 145 ‘Even the confinement of chickens, pigs and cattle to indoor barns and batteries’. Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute has written on this. See http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=3988.

p. 146 ‘Colin Clark calculated that human beings could in theory sustain themselves on just twenty-seven square metres of land each’. Clark, C. 1963. Agricultural productivity in relation to population. In
Man and His Future
, CIBA Foundation; also Clark, C. 1970.
Starvation or Plenty?
Secker and Warburg.

p. 146 ‘the world grew about two billion tonnes of rice, wheat and maize on about half a billion hectares of land’. Statistics taken from the FAO: www.faostat.fao.org.

p. 147 ‘would mean an extra seven billion cattle grazing an extra thirty billion acres of pasture’. Smil, V. 2001.
Enriching the Earth
. MIT Press. See also http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/22792/Greenpeace_Farming_Plan_Would_Reap_Environmental_Havoc_around_the_World.html: Dennis Avery asked Vaclav Smil to make this calculation.

p. 147 ‘Lester Brown points out that India depends heavily on a rapidly depleting aquifer and a slowly drying Ganges’. Brown, L. 2008.
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilisation
. Earth Policy Institute.

p. 148 ‘Once it is properly priced by markets, water is not only used more frugally’. Morriss, A.P. 2006. Real people, real resources and real choices: the case for market valuation of water.
Texas Tech Law Review
38.

p. 149 ‘as a professor and a chef have both suggested on my radio recently’. The professor and the chef I refer to are Tim Lang and Gordon Ramsey. ‘Why are we buying food from other people which should be feeding developing countries?’ asked Tim Lang, member of the Sustainable Development Commission, on the BBC
Today
programme, 4 March 2008. ‘I don’t want to see asparagus on menus in the middle of December. I don’t want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home grown,’ said Gordon Ramsey on 9 May 2008. (See ‘Ramsey orders seasonal-only menu’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7390959.stm.) Apart from the increased emissions, imagine the terrible monotony of the British diet under these proposals. There would be no coffee or tea, no bananas or mangoes, no rice or curry powder, there would be strawberries only in June and July and no lettuce in winter. You would eat an awful lot of potatoes. The rich would heat their greenhouses and plant orange trees in them, or travel to foreign parts and smuggle papayas in their luggage. Meat would become a luxury only available to the professor and his fellow rich folk – for to grow a lamb chop requires ten times as much land as to grow a piece of bread of equivalent calories. There are no combine harvester factories in Britain, so unless the prof wants us hypocritically to import combines but not flour, we would all have to take our turn in the fields with sickles in August. These are no doubt mere inconveniences that the professor would sort out with some laws and some food police. The real problem lies elsewhere, conveniently out of sight in the developing world. The growers of coffee, tea, bananas, mangoes, rice and turmeric would all suffer. They would have to stop growing cash crops and start being more self-sufficient. Sounds charming, but self-sufficiency is the very definition of poverty. Unable to sell their cash crops, they would have to eat what they grow. As we in the north munched our potatoes and bread, so they in the tropics would be growing heartily sick of an endless diet of mangoes and turmeric. The cash economy enables me to eat mangoes and them to eat bread, thank goodness.

p. 149 ‘again the acreage under the plough will have to balloon’. Or, to put the point in academic-ese: ‘The additional harvest of 4–7 Pg C/yr needed to achieve this level of bioenergy use would almost double the present biomass harvest and generate substantial additional pressure on ecosystems.’ Haberl, H. et al. 2007. Quantifying and mapping the human appropriation of net primary production in earth’s terrestrial ecosystems.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
104:12942–7.

p. 149 ‘each needs little more than a thousand square metres, a tenth of a hectare’. Smil, V. 2000.
Feeding the World
. MIT Press.

p. 150 ‘Organic farming is low-yield, whether you like it or not’. Avery, A. 2006.
The Truth about Organic Foods
. Henderson Communications. See also Goulding, K.W.T. and Trewavas, A.J. 2009. Can organic feed the world? AgBioview Special Paper 23 June 2009. http://www.agbioworld.org/newsletter_wm/index.php?caseid=archive&newsid=2894.

p. 150 ‘With such help a particular organic plot can match non-organic yields, but only by using extra land elsewhere to grow the legumes and feed the cattle’. A recent study claimed that organic yields can be higher than those of conventional farming (http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=5936), but only by an extremely selective and biased misuse of the statistics (see http://www.cgfi.org/2007/09/06/organic-abundance-report-fatally-flawed/).

p. 150 ‘a pound of organic lettuce, grown without synthetic fertilisers or pesticides in California, and containing eighty calories, requires 4,600 fossil-fuel calories to get it to a customer’s plate’. Pollan, M. 2006
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: the Search for the Perfect Meal in a Fast Food World.
Bloomsbury.

p. 150 ‘when a technology came along that promised to make organic farming both competitive and efficient, the organic movement promptly rejected it’. Ronald, P. and Adamchak, R.W. 2008.
Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food
. Oxford University Press.

p. 152 ‘a near-doubling of yield and a halving of insecticide use’. ISAAA 2009.
The Dawn of a New Era: Biotech Crops in India
. ISAAA Brief 39, 2009: http://www.isaaa.org/resources/publications/downloads/The-Dawn-of-a-New-Era.pdf.

p. 152 ‘the use of insecticides is down by as much as 80 per cent’. Marvier M., McCreedy, C., Regetz, J. and Kareiva, P. 2007. A meta-analysis of effects of Bt cotton and maize on nontarget invertebrates.
Science
316:1475–7; also Wu, K.-M. et al. 2008. Suppression of cotton bollworm in multiple crops in China in areas with Bt Toxin-containing cotton.
Science
321:1676–8 (doi: 10.1126/science.1160550).

p. 152 ‘the leaders of the organic movement locked themselves out of a new technology’. Ronald, P.C. and Adamchak, R.W. 2008.
Tomorrow’s Table: Genetics, and the Future of Food
. Oxford University Press.

p. 152 ‘the amount of pesticide
not
used because of genetic modification at over 200 million kilograms of active ingredients’. Miller, J.K. and Bradford, K.J. 2009. The pipeline of transgenic traits in specialty crops. Unpublished paper, Kent Bradford.

p. 152 ‘writes the Missouri farmer Blake Hurst’. Hurst, B. 2009. The omnivore’s delusion: against the agri-intellectuals.
The American
, journal of the American Enterprise Institute. 30 July 2009. http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals.

p. 152 ‘
Silent Spring
’. Carson, R. 1962.
Silent Spring
. Houghton Mifflin.

p. 153 ‘These mutations were selected, albeit inadvertently’. Doebley, J. 2006. Unfallen grains: how ancient farmers turned weeds into crops.
Science
312:1318–19.

p. 153 ‘DNA sequences borrowed from mosses and algae’. Richardson, A.O. and Palmer, J.D. 2006. Horizontal gene transfer in plants.
Journal of Experimental Botany
58:1–9.

p. 153 ‘DNA has even been caught jumping naturally from snakes to gerbils with the help of a virus.’ Piskurek, O. and Okada, N. 2007. Poxviruses as possible vectors for horizontal transfer of retroposons from reptiles to mammals.
PNAS
29:12046–51.

p. 154 ‘Only in parts of Europe and Africa were these crops denied to farmers and consumers’. Brookes, G. and Barfoot, P. 2007. Global impact of GM crops: socio-economic and environmental effects in the first ten years of commercial use.
AgBioForum
9:139–51.

p. 154 ‘what Stewart Brand calls their “customary indifference to starvation”’. Brand, S. 2009.
Whole Earth Discipline
. Penguin.

p. 154 ‘Robert Paarlberg writes’. Paarlberg, R. 2008.
Starved for Science
. Harvard University Press.

p. 154 ‘Ingo Potrykus thinks’. Potrykus, I. 2006.
Economic Times of India
, 26 December 2005. Reprinted at http://www.fighting diseases.org/main/articles.php?articles_id=568.

p. 154 ‘Or as the Kenyan scientist Florence Wambugu puts it’. Quoted in Brand, S. 2009.
Whole Earth Discipline
. Penguin.

pp. 154–5 ‘Per capita food production in Africa has fallen 20 per cent in thirty-five years’. Collier, P. 2008. The politics of hunger: how illusion and greed fan the food crisis.
Foreign Affairs
November/December 2008.