conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a title for a book about Earth</a, Ideas, Kemmis</a>'s with the genre: Science & Math, Earth Sciences
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Becoming Native to This Place'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Becoming Native to This Place
  In my very small hotel room at the Tokyo Prince the night of my arrival, after registration, I open the Conference Program and circle the times and rooms where the Soviet papers will be given. I suspect that part of my motivation to attend some of the sessions by these creatures from behind the Iron Curtain is less interest in what they have to say than curiosity about this strange and relatively isolated breed of men. If my memory is correct, more than half the papers by the Soviets were canceled. We learned that, at the last minute, they had been detained, many of them at the airport. Moreover, when one did see the Soviet scientists who were on hand, they were always in a group. I never once saw one alone or talking alone with another scientist. To call it eerie does not adequately describe my feeling.
  Professor Dobzhansky was born in Russia. He had left the Soviet Union before the great purge and had come to America as a young scientist for further training. For three decades while living in New York he heard of the awful and sad events in his home country. Many of those who presumably died in the labor camps were his friends.
  Back to the Tokyo Prince Hotel. It was early in the week, the meetings were getting under way, and I was standing in the lobby waiting for an elevator. A small group of Soviet scientists were also standing and waiting. They were all older men. Not one would, I guessed, be under fifty-five or sixty. Some looked to be seventy or older. I managed to catch the eye of a few of them. They nodded to me but quickly turned away, and we all stood in silence, looking up to see where the elevator was on its trip down. It finally arrived. The bell rang. The doors opened and ready to step off was Professor Dobzhansky, face to face and not five feet away from his former country-men. They stared. He searched their faces. I suspect some of them he had never known, but some he had known were now thirty-five (or more) years older than when, as an aspiring young Soviet scientist himself, he had last seen them. It was a moment when time seemed to stop. Within seconds a wave of emotion swept over the small gathering as one elderly Soviet scientist after another embraced their old colleague. I know nothing of what was said; it was all in Russian, of course. But I do remember, after the bear hugs ended, seeing Professor Dobzhansky put his hand to his right eye, and the flick of his thumb there.
  Not wanting to be caught staring, I got on the next elevator going up, aware that I had seen an important moment in the history of genetics. The Soviets had returned and had been welcomed back into the fold of genetics after thirty-five years of self-imposed exile. What led them into that exile has a complex history relevant to our current efforts to develop a sustainable agriculture. It is a history that carries a message I am afraid will be ignored, partly because of human nature and partly because many modern scientists have not taken the time to study some of the subtle implications of the history of science. This is no academic fine point of which I speak. It is far more than that. It has to do with the future of scientific inquiry in agriculture and how that inquiry relates to our future food supply, especially in the developed world. It also has to do with the future of science itself in a world of secular materialism. Eventually, I want to describe what amounts to a complex message from this period of history.
  To know for sure where the story begins is hard. We can start with the 1918 Revolution in that part of the world. We can cite some of the political theorists of that time and place. I start with an important Soviet figure, T.D. Lysenko, a man who had a bizarre career. For thirty years, from 1935 until 1965, this fanatical agronomist not only achieved dictatorial power over Soviet genetics, he also wielded power over plant science and agronomy. He used the term "agrobiology" to describe what has been called in the West a "pseudoscientific creation." A man from peasant stock with little formal education, Lysenko had great powers of persuasion. So forceful was he that he persuaded Soviet officials that enormous increases in crop yield could be achieved at little or no cost. Long before his influence came to an end, countless scientists lost their jobs, biological education was almost completely gutted, and classical genetics stopped. According to most historians, his impact on Soviet agriculture was also great and destructive.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: But there are other obstacles. For starters, what about the factory moving to a poorer neighborhood or a poorer part of the country or a poorer part of the world? We've already seen that happen, though Ellig and Coase would say in all likelihood that the moves came about because governments were the regulators. They believe that the role of government should be to "make sure that property rights to use land, air and water are clearly defined, then eliminate or reduce the transaction costs that prevent polluters and communities from striking deals. In this way, the decisions of the citizens most affected by pollution, rather then distant government officials, determine how much, if any, pollution will be allowed."
  So now we have light! There is the air, a common good of nature; appropriate it, assign ownership to it, move it into the market economy. The assumption, of course, is that we all have total knowledge, that we will act on the basis of our knowledge to meet not only our present needs but also those of generations to come. But the real knowledge of everyone who has thought about the problem of pollution or has had practical experience wrestling with it is that generally the factory can control the data better than the receivers of the pollutants can uncover the data.
  Ronald Coase's assumption has to be based on the idea that when we run an experiment our knowledge is adequate—that is, that if there is any remote possibility of harm to the environment, our knowledge will be sufficiently complete that we can make every necessary correction.
  Before economists or anyone else becomes too excited about the recommendations of Nobel Laureate Coase, how about just one master's or doctor's thesis simply compiling a list of the major factories that have gone out of existence in the last five years? I say major factories because of the sort of financial commitment that must have gone into them and therefore the amount of information that must have been brought to bear before the financial commitment was made. Or how about an analysis of why we lack the ability to make a sound decision on matters surrounding nuclear power?
  After Pope, Berry points out, this theme of a practical harmony between man and nature departs from English poetry. Later poets see nature and humanity radically divided. A practical harmony between land and people was not on their agenda. The romantic poets made so central the human mind that nature became less a reality to be dealt with in a practical way and more what Wendell Berry refers to as a "reservoir of symbols."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: On the negative side, much of the time in our Paleolithic past we could likely take from the world with little thought for the morrow. Nature provided. And in most of the past, any technological device we developed must have increased our adaptive value. We did not have to be psychologically predisposed to put the brakes on technology. If we were as repulsed by technological proliferation as we are by spoiled meat crawling with maggots in a hot sun, it would be a very different world. Because we have "stolen fire" or because we are "fallen," we are stuck with creating the cultural language to develop the resistance.
  On the positive side, much of what we do unconsciously in community that had an adaptive value in tribal life is beautiful and adaptive still. Think of the members of a community who respond to a neighbor's fire or flood or other physical disaster or attend to the retarded or the sick.
  In the time span since Coronado ordered the first murder of a true native on what is now Kansas soil, we of Western civilization have moved from the church, to the nation-state, to economics as the primary organizing structure for our lives. We have been through the hypocrisy of the church, the atrocity of the nation-state that peaked with Hitler, and now we are devotees of economics, the encoded language of human behavior that directs us toward ecological bankruptcy. It is time to move more aggressively on to the fourth phase, already under way, ecology.
  The skeptical have reason to doubt the validity and power of an ecological view still poorly developed in its implications, in its reach. In all segments of society, perhaps we are about as far along as we are in our efforts at The Land Institute to build an agriculture for grain production based on the principles of a natural ecosystem such as a prairie We are at about the same stage as the Wright brothers were at Kitty Hawk. That first flight was only a few feet high and long. The skeptical and impatient mind can sometimes be a terrible combination. Imagine such a mind watching those efforts at Kitty Hawk, trying to anticipate such a craft as a future carrier of as many people as then rode a train. That first plane showed little promise. But what was being tested was not an airplane but a principle, a principle that would one day lead to the likes of the 747 and the SST. (I happen to think that the airplane is a bad idea and that we are really not meant to fly, considering the horrendous resource cost.) Because the ecological paradigm for agriculture is at about the stage of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, we need more experiments, more time in the wind tunnel. But given patience and time, surely we can develop an agriculture that will be here long after anything like the airplanes of today have grounded. But it cannot happen in isolation.
  The penetration of the ecological paradigm—using nature as the measure—into all of society will have to inform our economics, our health, our communities. Specialists everywhere, from the artist to the scientist, will have to operate in the spirit in which the late Wallace Stegner wrote. Wendell Berry in a tribute said this of him: "There must have been a moment when he decided that he would not be the kind of writer who would look on his native country as 'raw material' for his art, and leave it otherwise to take care of itself or to be cared for by other people, but that he would be a kind of writer who would be devoted to his country for its own sake, and do what he could to protect it." We have to become that sort of patriot.