Chasing the Red Queen

A barley field in England. Photo by Neil Howard, used under Creative Commons licensing.

 

Reposted from the Chasing the Red Queen blog with permission. A common question for anyone promoting organic farming as the answer to our food issues is this: “That sounds great, but can organic farming feed 7 billion (or more) people?” The question is a challenge to the promoter of organic foods because of the well-established belief that modern commercial farming is the most efficient way to produce the vast quantities of food needed for feeding the world. The statistics are hard to argue against and organic farming seems to be a niche market that is incapable of scaling up to produce the quantities needed for the current population of the world. The argument is a false one, however, and it’s important to understand why. First, organic farming is “farming” and should not be called anything else, including “organic farming.” The modern activity that calls itself “farming” is a perversion of farming that has evolved over the past half century, slowly displacing true farming and insinuating itself in our minds as the only way food production can be done. This has happened in very large part because of the massive sales job by sectors of the agricultural industry as they attempted to justify everything they did in their own interests as being in the public’s interests too. By 1940, we had already established that farming meant turning the soil, repeatedly, deeply, whenever necessary to control weeds, and sometimes just because it made the fields look neat and tidy. This practice was rarely questioned even though it resulted in tremendous erosion, loss of nutrients, and the loss of living soil constituents. These losses were balanced with the addition of fertilizers, such as cow manure, and after World War II with the availability of inexpensive synthetic fertilizers. So, farming quickly became an activity that required external inputs to maintain soil fertility.

Harlequin beetle. Photo by TCDavis, used under Creative Commons licensing.

 

After World War II, synthetic pesticides began an incredibly rapid ascent in the public consciousness, largely because of the fantastic (albeit short-lived) success at controlling very damaging and problematic insect and weed pests. The revelation of pesticides was welcomed with open arms because it represented the triumph of science over nature, which was an ongoing success story playing out across all sectors of human cultures. So, farming soon became the activity that produced food with machines, fertilizers, and pesticides. The Green Revolution, and plant breeding in general, also burst onto our consciousness in the 1960s by producing new food cultivars that were going to end hunger around the world. Together with vaccines and antibiotics, modern technology was going to end human suffering for all people. Importantly, the ills of the world, including those in agriculture, were merely nuisances that fell by the wayside when the might of the human intellect was focused on them and technology was brought to bear. Farming became, by necessity, an activity that had to be done on a large monoculture scale and at the same time crop genetics had to become more uniform. Despite the growing numbers of problems that also accompanied this evolution of farming, such as environmental destruction, toxins, cancers, loss of wildlife, pesticide resistance, and ever-growing (not shrinking) numbers of agricultural pests, the public was being assured that this path toward food production and security was natural and safe, and existing problems would be solved. Those questioning the modern farming practices were vocal but weak in comparison to the lobbying power of the industries that had grown out of the march toward production and efficiency.

Bt corn. Photo by Snebtor, used under Creative Commons licensing.

 

Beginning in the 1980s, breakthroughs in biotechnology extended the reach of agro-industry into the very genomes of the plants and with that power came incredible claims of new capacity to generate miracle plants. Despite the short-comings of the over-use of fertilizers and pesticides and other ecosystem damaging practices, these biotech plants would solve all the problems that had troubled us; it was just a matter of human ingenuity. Farming continued to move toward larger and larger expanses of single crops with less and less genetic variation due to the new practice of patenting these biotechnological products. And thus, farming became a large, commercial, soil-destroying, fertilizer-dependent, pesticide-dependent, biotechnology-driven, expensive activity that could only be afforded by corporate entities that could afford the very expensive goods now required to produce the crops. More than 75% of our farm production is by very large commercial farming companies. If one stands back and looks at the activity of farming in 1940 and that of today, there is little the two have in common. Any attempt to recreate the farm of yesterday is met with a dismissive scoff because that kind of farming is an artifact of the past and cannot meet the needs of today. Farming without soon-to-be-useless pesticides, soil-damaging fertilizers, genetically weak cultivars, tremendously expensive short-lived biotech seeds, and bankruptcy-causing large machinery on soil and land that have been stripped of their capacity to assist the farmer…. is a patently ridiculous concept. Organic farming is a fairy tale. And yet, “organic farming” is what we used to call “farming” until very powerful and influential industries redefined what constituted farming. Most importantly, they got the government to buy into the redefinition of farming to the point that those farmers refusing to use modern commercial goods and processes often find themselves without a market. The consumers of today are the motivating force behind change and they want a return to healthy and nutritious food. One of the most important challenges for us is to reclaim the definition of farming. Organic farming is farming. Farming as it has been redefined over the past 65 years is the result of an evolutionary treadmill that is not sustainable in any long-term sense. It is an insidious corruption of true farming. The sooner we use the correct words to describe what we want and what we are doing, the better.

Photo by Melissa Wiese, used under Creative Commons licensing.

 

Reposted from the Changing the Red Queen blog with permission. Editor's note: Andy Dyer will be on the Diane Rehm Show tomorrow, February 3rd, at 11 a.m. ET to talk about agriculture and resistance. Tune in to learn more! Can we win against crop pests? In a word, no. The reasons for that are many and rather inter-twined, but suffice it to say: our efforts to beat back the enemies of our crops only makes them stronger and the harder we try, the more quickly they win at the game. On the other hand, if we quit trying, they win easily. The rules of evolutionary biology dictate the outcome. OK, is it possible for us to predict the emergence of resistant pests or the mutations that provide that resistance? Well, yes and no. First, if we persist in the use of chemical pesticides as our primary weapon against the multitudes of creatures that want to share our crops with us, there will be resistant pests and that means the mutations are present and are being favored. If that’s a form of “predicting”, then yes, we can predict the emergence of resistance. Can we know when and where the mutations for resistance will emerge? No. Are they going to emerge? Yes. Let’s use the lottery as an analogy. The probability of any one person winning PowerBall is 1 in 175,000,000. In other words, my odds of winning are 0.000000006 which is the same as saying that if I bought 1,000,000,000 tickets, 6 of them would have the winning numbers. (The MegaMillions lottery is worse at about 4 chances in a billion.) So, my odds of winning are zero. How is it the odds of winning are zero, but someone always wins? Because as more and more tickets are sold, the odds of one of them having the winning numbers goes up. The odds of it being you or me are zero, but the chances of SOMEONE winning is quite good, if many millions of tickets are sold. This is also why the games tend to roll over several times before someone wins. Unfortunately, if the draw is truly random, there is no possibility of predicting in advance who the winner will be. Now, in a field of insects eating lettuce and being assaulted by the latest pesticide, the odds of an individual possessing a random mutation conferring resistance to that pesticide are extremely small. But all individuals possess random mutations and in a field of millions of insects, the odds of one of those millions of mutations being just the right one for resistance to or tolerance of the pesticide is actually quite good. So, the odds of any insect possessing a favorable mutation (i.e., a winning lottery ticket) are essentially zero, but the odds of a favorable mutation existing are high. Indeed, if a pesticide is not particularly specific and kills a large number of different species, the odds of a mutation for resistance go up dramatically. That’s because we would be allowing a larger number of players in the game. So what is the solution to the pest resistance problem? There is no solution- there are pests and there will always be pests because we have the defined the term “pest” as “those organisms eating plants we don’t want them to eat.” They aren’t inherently pests; they are extremely well-adapted organisms. For tens of thousands of generations, nature has selected the traits that allow these organisms to persist and thrive on certain plants. Every “pest” species out there is an example of nature shaping and molding a species to survive and reproduce regardless of the obstacles. To try to eliminate them is like trying to deny LIFE itself. In every possible way, nature has designed organisms to succeed in the face of adversity. Evolutionary biology is the study of how nature has sculpted organisms to withstand environmental stresses and every species in existence has survived every stress it has ever faced. They are supremely well adapted to dealing with anything we can throw at them. Pesticide resistance isn’t a problem for nature, pesticide resistance is evidence of nature finding a solution to a problem. Fundamentally, pesticide resistance isn’t a failure of humans, it’s a success of nature. Our attempts to control the species found in nature are a direct challenge to the evolutionary system. Our failures verify and validate the system, the rules of evolutionary biology, and nature’s ability to create organisms that can rise to meet any challenge. That makes our attempts to “control” the agents of nature just one more obstacle in the path. And our attempts at control using chemicals are blunt and crude in comparison to predators and pathogens that co-evolve as their prey species are pursued.

The proposal to bring DDT out of the retired arsenal of chemical weaponry to control mosquito vectors carrying the Zika virus is a Pandora’s Box of problems.  And these are not hypothetical problems.  The mosquitoes and the virus are biological threats that have emerged because of disruptions to the broader environment, all of which are connected to human population growth and simplification of the ecosystems humans live in.  While the Zika virus is a very real threat to human health, the answer to this threat is not DDT.  DDT is a technological solution to a biological problem; it will not only fail rather quickly, but its widespread use will create additional biological problems for hich DDT is not a solution.  The long-term damage to the broader ecosystem will certainly far outweigh any temporary benefit. 

DDT does kill mosquitoes, but it’s a broad-spectrum insecticide that kills most insects plus many organisms closely related to them, many of which are species that help control mosquitoes naturally.  Once those species are reduced or gone, we will have fewer options for biocontrol and will rely instead on the continued use of technological solutions, which are short-lived and inevitably fail when applied to biological problems.  Mosquitoes are part of the human and natural ecosystems; to control them with DDT, we would literally be poisoning our own homes and environment.  Using chemical solutions to pest species, we continue to simplify our environment and continue to lose valuable assets for addressing future challenges. 

Photo Credit: jetsandzeppelins at Flickr.com

When biological problems emerge, we should examine the environmental context in our search for solutions.  In an intact ecosystem, the checks and balances that exist among predators and prey prevent any one species from dominating or damaging the system for very long.  In the human ecosystem, we should ask what has changed, what natural controls might be missing, and what in our environment is favoring the spread of the problem.  The human environment has been simplified, many biological parts of a healthy ecosystem are missing, and our interactions with the environment are typically technological. 

Our entire history of synthetic chemicals (technological solutions) to control agricultural pests has revealed some very profound truths that govern our interactions with nature: biological problems will adapt to technological solutions, technological solutions will inevitably fail, the rate of failure increases with the intensity of the technology, and the damage wrought by technology makes the future use of biological solutions even more difficult. In stark contrast, the most successful solutions to human pathogens have been to manipulate the human immune system (a biological solution) through the use of vaccines.

We must protect human health from the Zika virus, but turning to DDT is not a viable solution.  Aside from the well-known ecotoxicology issues associated with DDT, we have proven a thousand times since 1950 that insecticides do not eradicate pests, that control is illusory, and that such technology can reduce our ability manage future problems.  Mosquito abundance is symptomatic of a deeper environmental imbalance and one that will not be solved with DDT, but one that can be solved by understanding the biology behind it. 

With Chasing the Red Queen, Andy Dyer offers the first book to apply the Red Queen Hypothesis to agriculture. He illustrates that when selection pressure increases, species evolve in response, creating a never-ending, perpetually-escalating competition between predator (us) and prey (bugs and weeds). The result is farmers are caught in a vicious cycle of chemical dependence, stuck using increasingly dangerous and expensive toxics to beat back progressively resistant pests.

To break the cycle, we must learn the science behind it. Dyer examines this pressing problem as a biological case study. He presents key concepts, from Darwin’s principles of natural selection to genetic variation and adaptive phenotypes. Understanding the fundamentals of ecology and biology is the first step to “playing the Red Queen,” and escaping her unwinnable race.

Read Chapter 1 from the book below, and for further reading on pests and poisons, check out Andy's blog post on the proposed use of DDT to control the Zika virus.

Cavendish bananas are in crisis. Around the world, a soil fungus known as Tropical Race 4 is killing Cavendish bananas and threatening the global banana trade. We asked Andy Dyer, author of Chasing the Red Queen: The Evolutionary Race Between Agricultural Pests and Poisons, to tell us more about the monoculture of these iconic yellow bananas. 

The Cavendish banana was truly fortunate to have been discovered by humans. Without our adoption, this sweet and attractive—but seedless—banana would have disappeared into the jungle long ago because, as a genetic mistake, it was doomed to be an asexual and probably short-lived anomaly. Instead, like winning the big lottery, the Cavendish became the most famous of all bananas, despite having no evolutionary future whatsoever. However, the time has come, the course has been run, and the Cavendish is now likely to disappear, but only to be replaced in the grocery display by another genetic anomaly, another as-yet-unknown seedless banana.

Although humans in love with the long yellow Cavendish banana may mourn its passing, that single banana genotype only exists because we fostered it (by the millions and millions) and because it was unable to reproduce itself by seed. Although all wild bananas naturally make seeds, those seeds make them undesirable as far as humans are concerned. But occasionally the banana plant produces a mutant, a genetic mistake containing three copies of all chromosomes, which renders the new plant unable to produce viable seeds. Humans love these seedless triploids and we have discovered ways to make more of them, as we have done with the seedless watermelon. Sweet and juicy, the triploid fruits have none of those nuisance seeds scattered across their delicious interiors.

Triploid bananas have no real future in the wild. They can only reproduce by cloning, that is, by growing new shoots at the base of the parent plant and those new shoots take over once the parent plant has flowered and produced a stalk of bananas. But the mutant seedless plants are anchored to the spot, in a genetic sense, unlike seed-producing bananas that can disperse their offspring and move across the landscape with each passing generation. Thus, humans have provided the transportation assistance the Cavendish banana needed and we have spread the strange mutant seedless genotype across the globe, making it possibly the most successful dead-end genotype in history.

Unfortunately for the Cavendish banana, an alliance with humans is both the reason for its success and the reason for its downfall. The human propensity for using monocultures for producing food also creates the conditions that will eventually wipe out this most unusual of all things—an organism with only one genotype. For such a creature, success can be sustained only as long as the world around it doesn’t change. But life with humans is life with change, often rapid and unpredictable change, and such change is never favorable for asexual species. Without the recombination of chromosomes through sex, a clonal species cannot produce new genotypes that may be better able to tolerate new stresses in the environment. And unfortunately for humans, there are no natural methods we can use to assist the Cavendish banana to be more sexually active.

The seedless Cavendish banana exists in the very trap that human agriculture now finds itself. In fact, asexual reproduction and genetic uniformity of bananas is the very reason it has fit into the human world so perfectly. Our agricultural system has slowly and intentionally adopted a worldview wherein huge monocultures of genetically identical plants are not just the norm, but a desirable condition. The Gros Michel and now the Cavendish bananas were and are represented around the world by single genotypes. If bananas were corporations, they would be McDonalds and Starbucks; meeting the exact expectations of consumers around the world for uniformity of quality, taste and experience. As long as consumers only want a single flavor, this is a winning business plan. But there are flaws in this worldview and given the right conditions, these flaws will become gaping holes, and it begins with the monoculture.

A monoculture is much like a vacuum and it cannot be tolerated in nature. A monoculture is a vast and uniform resource awaiting exploitation on a first-come-first-served basis, and there are a multitude of herbivores attempting to be first. When any plant-eating organism infiltrates the defenses of human agriculture, it is faced with a seemingly limitless food supply. Under such artificial conditions we always see explosive population growth of the very organisms we try assiduously to keep under control. It is an evolutionary truism: vast expanses of genetically uniform crop monocultures guarantee the emergence of pest species.

Under natural conditions plants are extraordinarily adept at producing defensive chemicals for discouraging herbivory; plants have been fending off herbivores for millennia.  Every smell and flavor in plant leaves, flowers, and seeds are important for attracting or dissuading other species. And every natural population of plants has genetic variation for every different trait, particularly for those defensive compounds. Oh, but the banana. The seedless banana has eschewed genetic variation. And the Cavendish banana is being grown in vast genetically uniform monocultures by humans who incessantly propagate only a single genotype rather than embracing genetic variation as a method for preventing the disaster that awaits.

This defiance of nature, both by the banana and by human agricultural practices, is getting harder and harder to sustain. The enemies are gathering at the gates, searching for any weakness in the defenses and we are literally inviting them to find the weak spot. A typical Cavendish banana plantation is now spraying pesticides 25-50 times a year to fend off nature’s would-be consumers of this incredibly unnatural crop. The result is inevitable and predictable. An enemy is a product of evolution and emerges by beating the defense systems that humans have created to defend the defenseless. Whether it is our chemical arsenal selecting for pesticide resistance in an insect or the emergence of a highly chemical-resistant strain of fungi, the result is inevitable. These outcomes are a consequence of the rules of the evolutionary game played by all natural organisms and the rules we refuse to acknowledge in our pursuit of modern agricultural production practices.

Is there a solution? Can the Cavendish banana be saved? Yes, there is, and no, probably not, at least not as the preferred banana genotype worldwide. With 1,000 species of genetically variable bananas to choose from and dozens of seedless varieties already being grown, we will have no particular difficulty finding a replacement for the Cavendish. The nemesis of the Cavendish banana has already been unleashed and, like Frankenstein’s monster, it cannot be recalled.

However, our efforts at this point should be to find many replacements for the Cavendish banana, not just one, and to propagate them in diverse mixtures with no real dependency on any single genotype as in the past. This approach would protect us from the loss of any one or two genotypes to future threats. We should move away from monoculture-style production, such that multiple species of plants are grown on plantations. These changes to banana production would also reduce our reliance on environmentally damaging chemicals and would allow for some protection from naturally-occurring beneficial organisms.  In the long run, having experienced two disastrous challenges from nature to our love of bananas, perhaps it is time to follow the rules of the evolutionary game to ensure a safer future for our genetically deficient and nearly defenseless adoptees.

The push for organic food to supplant conventionally produced food (i.e., produced with pesticides, supplements and artificial fertilizers) has always been hampered by the claim that the organic production style couldn’t provide the volume of food needed to supply the US population. That claim was not really based in reality so much as a number of predictions about production costs, food costs, and backlash from invested corporations. With 100 million acres of prime US farmland being used to produce field corn, a crop that is diverted almost entirely to animal feed and ethanol production, space is certainly not the reason why we couldn’t begin to ramp up organic agriculture for actual food.  Of greater concern is the problem with converting conventional farms to organic farms and the necessary wait of several years before certification of “organic” can be obtained.

Sales of organic food in the retail grocery chains are growing at a phenomenal rate and food giants in the US have become active proponents of organic food—so much so, that they are literally investing their own money into supporting organic food companies in order to guarantee their supply lines. While this would seem to be a dream come true for environmentalists and healthy food choice advocates, the scaling up of organic food production is likely to carry with it a number of negative consequences. Admittedly, if organics move out of the niche market and into the mainstream, prices will decrease, options will diversify, and organic foods will become more attractive to consumers. On the other hand, that food has to be produced, and it’s the scale of production that should be of concern. Although “organically grown” has always implied “environmentally friendly,” there is certainly reason to worry that the scaling up of organic farming will have a rather conventional-farming effect on our environment.

Growing food on a large scale necessitates changes to the landscape. The over-riding question needs to be whether it is possible to scale up production without losing the entire point behind growing organic food. That is, can we be good stewards of the soil, protect and enhance biodiversity, maintain genetic integrity of crops, and avoid unsustainable depletion of resources while producing huge quantities of food for humans? Certainly, this ideal is in opposition to conventional and commercial farming, with its near total reliance on technological solutions in the form of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers being applied to vast acreages of a single crop. Can we produce food by working within the parameters of a biological system? 

Organic farming is a return, in many ways, to traditional farming; it’s generally small-scale, multi-crop farming that relies on human labor, beneficial insects from the surrounding environment, and careful attention to soil quality and ecology. In recent years, as organic farming has shifted into a higher gear, techniques have emerged to help organic producers scale up using very modern methodologies, including specialized equipment, hothouses and aquaponics. While these approaches will help produce and market larger quantities of organic foods, the food will become less of a product of the farm ecosystem and more of a product of technology.

In addition to the environmental consequences of large-scale farming, there is certainly another important reason to be cautious. One major attraction of organically produced food is the taste. Consider the fruit we call a tomato. Most of us will readily agree that nothing quite compares to a garden-fresh tomato—and certainly nothing currently available at the grocery store comes close. The reasons for the complete lack of character of the hothouse tomatoes adorning the shelves of the produce section of the grocery store are several, but they should serve as a warning to the major food chains attempting to too-rapidly scale up their organic farming sales. 

Making a tomato requires time. A tomato is the interaction between a plant and the environment and that interaction has been fine-tuned for millennia. The garden-fresh tomato is a creation not just of the plant, but also of the environment interacting with the plant. The environment stimulates the plant both positively and negatively and the plant responds to the environment in both genetic and physiological ways. The tomato is part of the genetic response, but the flavors of the tomato are a complex combination of many different responses to many different stimuli. 

A high-quality tomato, one that elicits such intense pleasure when eaten, is the product of a high-quality environment. Such a tomato cannot be produced in a system that attempts to maximize and speed production for the sake of quantity, one that diminishes the importance of the surrounding environment, or one that does not allow for the complete expression of the tomato genome. Otherwise, the result is what we now encounter in all conventional produce departments—bland, pink, texture-less pretenders that do not contain the same beneficial nutrients and qualities of the real thing, and that can never generate the rapturous response typical of their garden-fresh cousins.

So, can organic food production match the scale of conventional food production without losing its philosophical foundation?  It’s very possible and highly desirable, but moving in that direction at a high rate of speed will not be conducive to achieving that outcome.

Earlier this month, media announced the first Zika-related death in the United States, meanwhile Congress recently adjourned for a seven-week recess without passing additional funding to fight the virus. Check out what Chasing the Red Queen  author Andy Dyer  had to say about this political inaction below.

The Zika virus is a very real public health threat to the United States and to the world.  Unlike the Ebola virus, Zika has escaped confinement and is moving rapidly and cannot be contained. Rather than stopping it, the best we will be able to do is develop medical interventions to treat at-risk populations both before and after infections have been detected. And once Zika becomes a permanent part of our medical landscape, we will never be fully rid of it. This is unavoidable because Zika is both contagious and has a common and abundant vector: the mosquito, which provides a place to hide from humans and which cannot be eradicated. Thus, we are faced with another emerging health crisis. To confront the reality of Zika, our Congress needs to get serious about funding additional research and preparations for an epidemic.  As rational and intelligent beings, we have the ability to anticipate future events and to take preventive action, but we cannot afford to have a political system that mimics the behavior of frogs and canaries.

Although the belief is false that a frog will refuse to leave pot of water that is slowly heating up to the boiling point, frogs are helpless to do anything about slow toxic changes to their environment. As amphibians, frogs can live on land, but must return to the water to reproduce. When they deposit their eggs in water, the eggs are exposed to anything in the water, including all manner of pollutants, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals. From egg to tadpole, the frog’s entire development takes place in this chemical cocktail, and the immature frog can do nothing to avoid toxic insults from the human environment. As a result, development is often impaired, and physical abnormalities and high mortality rates are common. 

In contrast to frogs, humans are able to recognize changes in the environment, and we are able to manipulate our environment in response to those changes. However, it also seems to be true that we are loath to make changes to our accustomed way of life. That apocryphal frog in the pot is a symbol of human behavior and represents a typical political response to looming environmental problems, particularly those of our own making. We see it, but we refuse to recognize it, especially if by doing so we have to change the status quo. This unwillingness to reconsider our path is embedded in and maybe even defines human politics. 

On the other hand, canaries were used throughout history as a warning sign to indicate rapid lethal changes to the human environment.  For coal miners, a dead canary was a warning that an environmental disaster was immanent and to leave the mine immediately. That warning was heeded without question because in a coal mine there is nowhere to escape except out.  To survive, miners had to act and act fast.  The Earth, our world, is very similar to a coal mine; we really have no escape options.  In a finite and confined world, the first warning may be the only warning. 

Our current political path seems to be to observe and lament deformed frogs and dead canaries as if their fate is somehow not intertwined with our own fate.  We believe we can endure the environment we have created and attempt to live with the consequences. We must recognize that those consequences will include increasing medical issues in babies and children, earlier onset of age-related diseases, more frequent loss of function from disease, and shorter lifespans.  The costs of these consequences will be prohibitive, disastrous, and tragic. A continuation of this mindset, I predict, will be the return of the era of high mortality from infectious diseases, which we thought we had conquered more than 60 years ago.  This would be a monumental failure and one that our descendants would find difficult to forgive.

Or we can accept the rules of the evolutionary game. To do so we must recognize and overcome the obstacles created by basic human nature.  We live a different world today than in 1950, we must act faster, as soon as we recognize a problem, and not wait until we have an uncontrollable crisis. This means that medical research must have the money to develop vaccines now, when we recognize a threat, not later when the threat has escalated to a crisis. This means that environmental and health issues cannot be used as political footballs with one political party attempting to score points at the expense of the other party. Today, we know for a fact that when a disease is spreading in a faraway place, that disease is only weeks, days or even hours away from us. Air travel has reduced the size of the planet to a single, very large, very dispersed city, and no one is safe from any epidemic.

When we recognize an environmental threat, we cannot wait until it knocks on our door. We can’t wait until the residents of Miami are a foot deep in sea water, until mercury is in every fish in every stream, until ground water is 500 feet down and salt water intrusion destroys our coastal water supplies, or until hundreds of babies are born with reduced brain size. When the facts tell us we must act, we should not argue with the facts because it is politically inconvenient. In the long run, facts will win every argument and losing some of those arguments will cause irreversible damage to our world. Zika is just one more canary and, while one political party blames the other for inaction, that canary is dying.

This Valentine’s Day, we thought it would be fun for Island Press authors to share the love. We asked a few authors to choose their favorite Island Press book—other than their own, of course—and explain what makes it so special. Check out their responses below, and use code 4MAGICAL for 25% off and free shipping all of the books below, as well as books from participating authors.

What’s your favorite Island Press book? Share your answer in the comments.

My favorite IP book—not that I’ve read them all—is Mike Lydon’s Tactical Urbanism. This book shows how ad hoc interventions can improve the public realm, especially if they’re later made permanent. I discussed the concept on the latest Spokesmen podcast with architect Jason Fertig and illustrator Bekka “Bikeyface” Wright, both of Boston. 

—Carlton Reid, Bike Boom and Roads Were Not Built for Cars

Last year I wrote a cover story for SIERRA magazine about how Donald Trump's proposed wall along the US-Mexico border would all but eliminate any chance for recovering jaguar species in the Southwest. In the course of my research I came across Alan Rabinowitz's An Indomitable Beast. It's a great read, blending Rabinowitz's own experiences as a big cat biologist with cutting-edge findings on this amazing species. As a writer, this book and its amazing details helped me bring the jaguar to life for readers. 

—Jason Mark, Satellites in the High Country

This day is a time for reaching beyond data and logic to think about deeper ways of knowing. Love, specifically, but I would add to that faith, tradition and ethics. That's why I love Aaron Wolf's new book, The Spirit of Dialogue: Lessons from Faith Traditions in Transforming Conflict. Going beyond the  mechanical "rationality" of the typical public meeting is necessary if we are to address the big issues of global sustainability and the smaller issues of how we sustain our local communities. Aaron Wolf provides the experience, tools and promise of a better, deeper approach.

—Larry Nielsen, Nature's Allies

Like many others, I am indebted to to Island Press for not one but three books that profoundly influenced my thinking. Panarchy (2001, edited by Lance Gunderson and C.S. Holling) introduced me to the concept of socio-ecological systems resilience. Resilience Thinking (2006, by Brian Walker and David Salt) taught me what systems resilience really means. And the follow-up book Resilience Practice (2012) helped me start to understand how systems resilience actually works. The latter remains the most-consulted book on my shelf—by Island Press or any other publisher—and I was thrilled and frankly humbled when Brian and David agreed to write a chapter for our own contribution to the field, The Community Resilience Reader (2017).

—Daniel Lerch, The Community Resilience Reader

"A large percentage of my urbanism bookshelf is comprised of Island Press books, so it's very difficult to share my love for just one! So, I won't because the books we pull of the shelf most often these days are the NACTO Design Guides. Finally, a near complete set of highly usable and mutually supportive design standards that help us advocate for and build better streets, better places." 

—Mike Lydon, Tactical Urbanism

Nicols Fox's Against the Machine is a book that’s becomes more relevant each year as technology impinges ever further on our daily lives. It’s a fascinating, deeply researched look at how and why people have resisted being treated as extensions of machines.

—Phil Langdon, Within Walking Distance

Lake Effect by Nancy Nichols. I read this book several years ago. It is so important to hear the voices of those whose lives are impacted by industrial age pollutants, lest we slide into complacency. In this case, the story of the chemicals of Lake Michigan. It is a short, beautifully written, disturbing read.
—Emily Monosson, Natural Defense and Unnatural Selection

Peter Gleick’s series, The World’s Water, is one of the most useful surveys of the cutting edge of global waters there is. Each edition brings in-depth coverage of the issues of the day, always eminently readable and backed up by the crack research team that he puts together for each topic. I use it in my classes, always confident that students (and I) will be kept abreast of the best of The World’s Water.
—Aaron Wolf, The Spirit of Dialogue

Mark Jerome Walters' important book, Seven Modern Plagues, places great emphasis on linking emerging diseases with habitat destruction and other forms of modification natural processes. This book is a call for us to recognize that each new disease reflects an environmental warning.
—Andy Dyer, Chasing the Red Queen

My favorite Island Press book is The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life, edited by Eric T. Freyfogle. Perhaps it remains my favorite IP text because it is the first IP text I remember reading front to back, twice! I first encountered the book as a graduate student and was struck my its scope and tone. The book is thought provoking. But it's also a joy to read, which isn't surprising in hindsight given the award-winning contributors.   
—Michael Carolan, No One Eats Alone

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Gene banks and seed vaults are saving and protecting crop seeds and the genetic diversity within crops, crop races, and some closely related species. There are some 1,700 gene and seed banks in the world with perhaps the most well-known being the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (Norway), but others include the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (Syria), Kew Millenium Seed Bank (UK), Global Crop Diversity Trust (Germany), and National Seed Storage Laboratory (USA). They are capable of storing and protecting many millions of species and crop cultivars.

These efforts are an insurance policy for protecting our future ability to produce food in case of catastrophic changes in climates that reduce or even prevent food production from the current crop lines and in our current agricultural regions. Without this global effort to save seeds of millions of species, including as many crops as possible from every place on the planet, we would be facing a future with literally no hope of recovering from climate-change driven loss of food production.

However, equally important is the growing recognition that protecting the progenitors of our crops, which are the wild species that still exist and are the source of critically important genetic material for strengthening their domesticated cousins. The wild species are often well known, but much less effort has been expended to save those species and varieties although this effort is gaining momentum. The reason for protecting the wild species is basic and incredibly important, but is rooted in the direction modern agriculture has taken for the past century and especially since WWII. That direction is the intentional reduction of genetic diversity in crop cultivars, which carries with it the highly consequential result of eliminating any ability of those crops to adapt, or even adjust, to changing environmental conditions.

If you were to walk into a corn field in Iowa, you would be in the midst of, essentially, a single plant. That is, every plant you see would be genetically identical to every other plant in that field. This process of genetic simplification through inbreeding and hybridization has been a normal practice in crop improvement research for many decades. In recent years, this simplification has been intensified because genetically modified strains of corn are patented genotypes belonging to the companies that produce them.

A modern strain of corn grows at a uniform rate, to a specific height, produces ears of a particular size and quality that ripen at exactly the same time, and can be harvested with a single attempt. This uniformity saves time and energy, reduces losses, and ensures buyers of the quality of the product. However, these genetically uniform crops have absolutely no ability to withstand change; that ability has been bred out of them. For the purposes of crop production in a uniform growing environment, any and all traits of a crop that divert energy from the maximum production of seeds or fruit are frowned upon.

Thus, corn, wheat, cotton, soy, and many other commodity crops produced at very large scales have been stripped down genetically and are now no more than biological production machines. They are like albino lab rats; if they were released into the wild, they would probably not last the night. And in the case of genetically weakened crop plants, a changing climate could spell disaster.

Fortunately for crop scientists and farmers, closely related wild species of our crops contain genetic material that is very highly adapted to the home environments of those species. And this genetic variation to many diverse environmental conditions can be used to rescue our crops (and us) from impending climatic changes that could dramatically affect our ability to produce food.

Plant scientists have for years searched for genes to strengthen corn and wheat and other crops that have been weakened as a consequence of the previously mentioned genetic simplification from inbreeding and hybridization. For corn, testing Mexican land races and even the original corn plant (teosinte) for useful genes is a regular practice. Without these genes for improving and maintaining the strength and vitality of modern corn cultivars, our genetically simplified and highly inbred strains would be unable to produce viable seed within a few years.

Protection of wild plant species is the same as protecting our future ability to feed ourselves. We should be growing a genetically diverse food base as a rule, as a matter of national importance, perhaps even pride. Although there are 4,000 types of potato, the large majority of US production is from a small number of cultivars of russet potatoes and 41% of all US production is the Burbank Russet. There are thousands of varieties of apples, adapted to all regions of the US, but the marketplace is dominated by only five varieties. Over the past 100 years, we have lost in one way or another the majority of our crop varieties by focusing commercial production on only a few. This does not bode well for a quick response to a changing climate and the doubt it creates concerning future farm production.

The protection of existing genetic variation is equivalent to the protection of adaptations to the natural world. An adaptation in a wild species is an evolutionary response (and solution) to stress. Stress reduces growth, vitality, production, and survival, and increases the chances of losses to predators and pathogens. Adaptations reduce stress and therefore reduce losses in productivity. Thus, protecting biodiversity in the natural world should underlie our efforts to protect our future food supply.

The enemy of agriculture is probably not so much the change in climate, but what can be triggered by a change in climate. That is, a warmer world may be somewhat more stressful to a crop plant, yes, but the movement of new insects and diseases is also very likely to happen with a changing climate and that could lead to catastrophic problems that we cannot anticipate. Our multitude of experiences with invasive plant and animal species and pathogens provide plenty of evidence for the dangers. However, we also need to recognize that our history of relying on technology to save us from every new peril is also the process of responding to danger rather than anticipating it. While saving the source of food in seed vaults is a critically important insurance policy, our food investment portfolio would be better protected against those things we cannot predict if it is diversified by including wild species and natural habitats as well.