This Changes Everything (71 page)

Gradually, I learned to identify a half dozen birds by sound, and the sea mammals by the ripples that appeared on the water’s surface. I even caught myself
appreciating beautiful moments without simultaneously mourning their loss. The golden card in my wallet attesting to my frequent flyer status expired for the first time in a decade, and I was glad.

I still traveled for research, though—and when I did, I often noticed
parallels between my new doctor’s theories about infertility and some of the ideas I was encountering about the changes humanity
must make if we are to avoid collapse. Her advice had pretty much boiled down to this: before you can take care of another human being you have to take care of yourself. In a sense she was saying that I had to give myself some fallow time, as opposed to the mechanistic “push harder” approach that dominates Western medicine.

I thought of this advice when I left my hideout and traveled to the Land
Institute in Salina, Kansas, one of the most exciting living laboratories for cutting-edge, agro-ecological farming methods. Wes Jackson, the founder and president of the center, says that he is trying to solve what he calls “the 10,000-year-old problem of agriculture.”
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That problem, in essence, is that ever since humans started planting seeds and tilling fields, they have been stripping the
soil of its fertility.

Without human interference, plants grow in different varieties next to one another and as perennials, reseeding themselves year after year, with their roots staying put and growing ever longer and deeper. This combination of diversity and perennialism keeps soil healthy, stable, and fertile: the roots hold the soil in place, the plants allow rain water to be more safely
slowly absorbed, and different plants provide different fertility functions (some, like legumes and clover, are better at fixing nitrogen, critical to forming the building blocks of plant life), while diversity controls pests and invasive weeds.

It’s a self-sustaining cycle, with decomposing plants serving as natural fertilizer for new plants and the life cycle being constantly renewed. Maintaining
this cycle, according to the farmer and philosopher Wendell Berry, must be the centerpiece of humanity’s relationship with nature. “The problem of sustainability is simple enough to state,” he says. “It requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay . . . should turn continuously in place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted.”
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Simple enough:
respect fertility, keep it going.

But when humans started planting single crops that needed to be replanted year after year, the problem of fertility loss began. The way industrial agriculture deals with this problem is well known: irrigate heavily to make up for the fact that annual plants do a poor job of retaining moisture (a
growing problem as fresh water becomes more scarce), and lay on
the chemicals, both to fertilize and ward off invasive pests and weeds.

This in turn creates a host of new environmental and health problems, including massive aquatic dead zones caused by agricultural runoff. In other words, rather than solving the fertility problem in the soil, we have simply moved it, transforming a land-based crisis into an ocean-based one. And the chain of infertility is
longer still because some of the chemicals used in industrial farming are endocrine disruptors such as the herb killer atrazine, which research shows causes sterility in amphibians, fish, reptiles, and rats—as well as triggering bizarre spontaneous sex changes in male frogs. And these same chemicals have been linked to increased incidence of birth defects and miscarriages in humans, though the manufacturer
of atrazine disputes all these links. Honeybees, meanwhile, our most critical natural pollinators, are under threat around the world—another victim, many experts say, of agriculture’s chemical dependency.
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Many traditional agricultural societies have developed methods to maintain soil fertility despite planting annual crops. The maize-growing cultures of Mesoamerica, for example, allowed fields
to lie fallow so they could regenerate and incorporated nitrogen-fixing legumes such as beans into mixtures of crops grown side by side. These methods, which mimic the way similar plants grow in the wild, have succeeded in keeping land fertile for thousands of years. Healthy soil also has the added bonus of sequestering carbon (helping to control emissions), and polycultures are less vulnerable
to being wiped out by extreme weather.
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Wes Jackson and his colleagues at the Land Institute are taking this approach one step further: they are trying to remake the way industrial societies produce grains by breeding perennial varieties of wheat, wheatgrass, sorghum, and sunflowers that do not need to be replanted every year—just like the original tall grasses that dominated the prairie landscape
before large-scale agriculture began. “Our goal is to fashion an agriculture as sustainable as the native ecosystems it displaced,” the institute’s literature explains, “to find a way of growing crops that rewards the farmer and the landscape more than the manufacturers of external inputs. We envision an agriculture that not only protects irreplaceable soil, but lessens our dependence on fossil
fuels and damaging synthetic chemicals.”
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And it is beginning to work: when I first visited the institute in 2010, the gift shop had started selling the first batch of flour made from perennial wheatgrass that Jackson and his team have domesticated and dubbed Kernza. When I returned a year later, the Southern Plains were in the grip of a devastating crop-destroying drought. Texas was having
its driest year on record, with wheat, corn, and sorghum down 50–60 percent and agricultural losses topping $7 billion;
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And yet the test sorghum field at the Land Institute was robust and healthy, the plants’ long roots able to hold onto even tiny amounts of water. It was the only patch of green for miles around.

It was right around then that my son was conceived. For the first few months,
the hardest part of the pregnancy was believing that everything really was normal and healthy. No matter how many tests came back with reassuring results, I stayed braced for tragedy. What helped most was hiking, and during the final anxious weeks before the birth, I would calm my nerves by walking for as long as my sore hips would let me on a well-groomed trail along a pristine creek. The stream
begins near the top of a snowcapped mountain and the clear water rushes down a waterfall, gathers in dozens of pools, and flows through rapids until it finally empties into the Pacific.

On these hikes, I would keep my eyes open for silvery salmon smolts making their journey to the sea after months of incubation in shallow estuaries. And I would picture the cohos, pinks, and chums swimming with
all their might through the rapids and falls, determined to reach the spawning grounds where they were born. This was my son’s determination, I would tell myself. He was clearly a fighter, having managed to make his way to me despite the odds; he would find a way to be born safely too.

You can’t ask for a better symbol of the tenacity of life than the Pacific salmon. To reach their spawning grounds,
cohos will leap up massive waterfalls like deranged kayakers in reverse, dodging eagles and grizzly bears. At the end of their lives, salmon will expend their last life force to complete their mission. Salmon fry must go through a dramatic physical transformation (smolting) to prepare their bodies for the transition from freshwater to
the oceans, where they will live out their lives until it is
their turn to make the journey upstream.

But these triumphant feats of biology are only one part of the story of regeneration. Because as everyone who lives in salmon country knows, sometimes the autumn streams are eerily empty, filled with nothing but dead leaves, and perhaps one or two mottled fish. The salmon are indeed our Olympic athletes, their determination one of the planet’s most powerful
expressions of the drive to carry on the life cycle—but they are not invincible. Their strength can be defeated by overfishing, by fish farming operations that spread sea lice that kill young salmon in droves, by warming waters that scientists believe may threaten their food supply, by careless logging operations that leave spawning streams clogged with debris, by concrete dams that defy even
the most acrobatic cohos. And of course they can be stopped dead in their tracks by oil spills and other industrial accidents.

All of which is why salmon have disappeared from about 40 percent of their historical range in the Pacific Northwest and several populations of coho, chinook, and sockeye are under perpetual threat and at risk of extinction.
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To know where these kinds of numbers lead,
we need only look to New England and Continental Europe, where commercial runs of Atlantic salmon have disappeared from the rivers where they once were plentiful. Like humans, salmon can overcome an awful lot—but not everything.

Which is why the happy ending to my own story still makes me uneasy, and feels incomplete. I know that for some, my fertility saga seems to reinforce the idea that human
resilience will always conquer in the end, but that’s not what it feels like. I don’t know why this pregnancy succeeded any more than I know why my earlier pregnancies failed—and neither do my doctors, whether of the high-tech or low-tech varieties. Infertility is just one of the many areas in which we humans are confronted with our oceans of ignorance. So mostly I feel lucky—like I could just
as easily have failed, no matter how serene my life became, having pushed my system too far. And it’s also possible that I could have ended up with a cute baby picture on the wall of the frenetic fertility factory if I had been willing to keep upping the technological ante.

I suppose a part of me is still in that oiled Louisiana marsh, floating in
a sea of poisoned larvae and embryos, with my
own ill-fated embryo inside me. It’s not self-pity that keeps me returning to that sad place. It’s the conviction that there is something valuable in the body-memory of slamming up against a biological limit—of running out of second, third, and fourth chances—something that we all need to learn. Hitting the wall didn’t dispel my belief in healing and recovery. It just taught me that these gifts require
a special kind of nurturing, and a constant vigilance about the limits beyond which life cannot be pushed.

Because the truth is that humans
are
marvelously resilient, capable of adapting to all manner of setbacks. We are built to survive, gifted with adrenaline and embedded with multiple biological redundancies that allow us the luxury of second, third, and fourth chances. So are our oceans.
So is the atmosphere. But surviving is not the same as thriving, not the same as living well. And as we have seen, for a great many species it’s not the same as being able to nurture and produce new life. Just because biology is full of generosity does not mean its forgiveness is limitless. With proper care, we stretch and bend amazingly well. But we break too—our individual bodies, as well as the
communities and ecosystems that support us.

In early 2013, I came across a speech by Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer and educator Leanne Simpson, in which she describes her people’s teachings and governance structures like this: “Our systems are designed to promote more life.”
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The statement stopped me in my tracks. It struck me that this guiding purpose was the very antithesis
of extractivism, which is based on the premise that life can be drained indefinitely, and which, far from promoting future life, specializes in turning living systems into garbage, whether it’s the piles of “overburden” lining the roads in the Alberta tar sands, or the armies of discarded people roving the world looking for temporary work, or the particulates and gases that choke the atmosphere
that were once healthy parts of ecosystems. Or, indeed, the cities and towns turned to rubble after being hit by storms made more powerful by the heat those gases are trapping.

After listening to the speech, I wrote to Simpson and asked whether she would be willing to tell me more about what lay behind that statement. When we met at a Toronto cafe, I could tell that Simpson, in a black rocker
T-shirt and motorcycle boots, was wary of having her own mind mined by yet another white researcher, having devoted a great deal of her life to collecting, translating, and artistically interpreting her people’s oral histories and stories.

We ended up having a long, wide-ranging conversation about the difference between an extractivist mind-set (which Simpson describes bluntly as “stealing” and
taking things “out of relationship”) and a regenerative one. She described Anishinaabe systems as “a way of living designed to generate life, not just human life but the life of all living things.” This is a concept of balance, or harmony, common to many Indigenous cultures and is often translated to mean “the good life.” But Simpson told me that she preferred the translation “continuous rebirth,”
which she first heard from fellow Anishinaabe writer and activist Winona LaDuke.
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It’s understandable that we associate these ideas today with an Indigenous worldview: it is primarily such cultures that have kept this alternate way of seeing the world alive in the face of the bulldozers of colonialism and corporate globalization. Like seed savers safeguarding the biodiversity of the global seed
stock, other ways of relating to the natural world and one another have been safeguarded by many Indigenous cultures, based partly on a belief that a time will come when these intellectual seeds will be needed and the ground for them will become fertile once again.

One of the most important developments in the emergence of what I have been referring to as Blockadia is that, as this movement has
taken shape, and as Indigenous people have taken on leadership roles within it, these long protected ways of seeing are spreading in a way that has not occurred for centuries. What is emerging, in fact, is a new kind of reproductive rights movement, one fighting not only for the reproductive rights of women, but for the reproductive rights of the planet as a whole—for the decapitated mountains,
the drowned valleys, the clear-cut forests, the fracked water tables, the strip-mined hillsides, the poisoned rivers, the “cancer villages.” All of life has the right to renew, regenerate, and heal itself.