Micah Saul: This project is built on a hypoth­e­sis. There are moments in his­to­ry when the sta­tus quo fails. Political sys­tems prove insuf­fi­cient, reli­gious ideas unsat­is­fac­to­ry, social struc­tures intol­er­a­ble. These are moments of crisis. 

Aengus Anderson: During some of these moments, great minds have entered into con­ver­sa­tion and torn apart inher­it­ed ideas, dethron­ing truths, com­bin­ing old thoughts, and cre­at­ing new ideas. They’ve shaped the norms of future generations.

Saul: Every era has its issues, but do ours war­rant The Conversation? If they do, is it happening?

Anderson: We’ll be explor­ing these sorts of ques­tions through con­ver­sa­tions with a cross-section of American thinkers, peo­ple who are cri­tiquing some aspect of nor­mal­i­ty and offer­ing an alter­na­tive vision of the future. People who might be hav­ing The Conversation.

Saul: Like a real con­ver­sa­tion, this project is going to be sub­jec­tive. It will fre­quent­ly change direc­tions, con­nect unex­pect­ed ideas, and wan­der between the tan­gi­ble and the abstract. It will leave us with far more ques­tions than answers because after all, nobody has a monop­oly on dream­ing about the future.

Anderson: I’m Aengus Anderson.

Saul: And I’m Micah Saul. And you’re lis­ten­ing to The Conversation.

Aengus Anderson: So here we are at the begin­ning of episode 22, which is my con­ver­sa­tion with Wes Jackson in Salina, Kansas. 

Micah Saul: He’s the founder of the Land Institute, and I think prob­a­bly for con­text, we should talk a bit about what the Land Institute does and what his project is, because we don’t real­ly get into it much in the con­ver­sa­tion itself but I think it’s good to know what he’s work­ing on.

Anderson: What Wes Jackson and the folks of the Land Institute are doing is they’re rethink­ing the prob­lem of agri­cul­ture. And they stat­ed that way very delib­er­ate­ly. They’re try­ing to rethink ten thou­sand years of agri­cul­tur­al prac­tice, and they’re try­ing to cre­ate a new type of agri­cul­ture in which sus­tain­abil­i­ty is actu­al­ly the result of the agri­cul­ture. So, they’re emu­lat­ing nat­ur­al mod­els and they’re try­ing to cre­ate agri­cul­tur­al crops that work in ways that are very much like nat­ur­al systems.

Saul: Right. So you’ll hear it in the con­ver­sa­tion, but he talks about a niche in agri­cul­ture that just has nev­er been filled in all of human his­to­ry. So, they’re actu­al­ly work­ing, and have been for quite some­time on a peren­ni­al form of wheat. This is a wheat that sur­vives year after year, but pro­duces enough seed that it’s use­ful to har­vest. And they’ve actu­al­ly got one. All they have to do right now (“All they have to do.” I said make it sound so triv­ial.) is improve its abil­i­ty to live in the hot plains environment. 

Anderson: So that’s sort of the prac­ti­cal back­ground to what’s hap­pen­ing at The Land Institute. But our con­ver­sa­tion real­ly does go on a lot of direc­tions, and it con­nects to pret­ty much every­thing else in this project. It’s a huge, sprawl­ing, multi-dimensional con­ver­sa­tion, and edit­ing it was absolute­ly painful because there is so much fas­ci­nat­ing mate­r­i­al. But if I was to tell you one per­son in the series thus far who you should keep front and cen­ter in your mind, it would actu­al­ly be Timothy Morton. And he does­n’t come up in here. There are a lot of peo­ple who do who are much more direct­ly relat­ed to what Wes is say­ing, But Timothy Morton’s ideas have a real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing res­o­nance with Wes Jackson’s ideas, and I think with both of them, and also with David Korten as well, we have some enor­mous sys­tems thinkers who are char­ac­ter­iz­ing the world we live in, the world we are embed­ded in, in a real­ly inter­est­ing way. And you’ll see com­mon­al­i­ties in terms of think­ing about the…I hes­i­tate to use the word ​“nat­ur­al,” but the nat­ur­al world as encom­pass­ing a lot more than we think of when we think ​“the nat­ur­al world.”

Saul: We will stop our blath­er­ing now, and give you Wes Jackson.

Wes Jackson: In 1977, the General Accounting Office put out a report. It looked to me like soil ero­sion was bad it the 70s as it was in the 1930s, and I thought you know, how can this be? We’ve had soil con­ser­va­tion ser­vice going back to 1935 devot­ed to the com­mon task of sav­ing our soils. And I start­ed look­ing at the his­to­ry of earth abuse through agri­cul­ture. Well, you can go back to the Greeks. Plato had lament­ed the demise of the moun­tains of Attica that were once pros­per­ous but now only fit for bees, as he said. And also about the same time tak­ing my stu­dents on a field trip to the Konza Prairie. Now the Konza Prairie is one of twenty-six long-term eco­log­i­cal research sites, and the Konza Prairie is just six­ty, sev­en­ty miles from here. 

Here was a prairie that’s been there prob­a­bly since the retreat of the Kansan ice sheet, and there was no soil ero­sion there beyond replace­ment lev­els. There was species diver­si­ty, and of course with species diver­si­ty you have chem­i­cal diver­si­ty, which means it takes a tremen­dous enzyme sys­tem on the part of an insect or pathogen to give you the epi­dem­ic. And spon­sor­ing its own nitro­gen fer­til­i­ty. What it amounts to is that the prairie, like essen­tial­ly all of nature’s land-based ecosys­tems, fea­tures peren­ni­als grown in mixtures.

Agriculture reversed that by fea­tur­ing annu­als grown in mono­cul­tures. That’s sort of what set me off. You know, I start­ed look­ing at the var­i­ous kinds of arrange­ments that humans take advan­tage of for food or fiber. And there are four dichotomies. There are woody plants that we use. There are herba­ceous plants. We har­vest poly­cul­tures and mono­cul­tures. We har­vest peren­ni­als. And we har­vest annu­als. There are twelve com­bi­na­tions, and eleven of those total com­bi­na­tions are filled, except herba­ceous peren­ni­al seed-producing polycultures. 

Aengus Anderson: So, for peo­ple who don’t know some of those words, what is that thing that we’re look­ing at there?

Jackson: Alright. A herba­ceous peren­ni­al would be like a prairie grass. Of course they pro­duce seeds, but as far as the human is con­cerned for food, we don’t har­vest­ed the seed of any peren­ni­al grass or legume. And a poly­cul­ture means a mix­ture. So herba­ceous peren­ni­al seed-producing poly­cul­tures, that is a blank. That’s been our work now, is to build an agri­cul­ture that is some­thing of a mim­ic of a prairie or a grassland.

Anderson: With every­one I talk to, there’s an idea that there’s some­thing that they’re con­cerned about that obvi­ous­ly moti­vates them to rethink things. What is wrong with our cur­rent sys­tem of agri­cul­ture that got you think­ing about this?

Jackson: Well, let’s com­pare a wheat field, which is an annu­al mono­cul­ture, with a prairie, which is a peren­ni­al poly­cul­ture. That wheat field, you plant the seeds in September and you har­vest your wheat in, well this year late May but usu­al­ly in June and July. And then the rest of the time, there’s noth­ing there unless you double-crop or some­thing. So it’s sub­ject to the forces of nature, wind, and rain. Whereas that prairie is there year-round.

So, if you look at say the 1930s, the Dust Bowl years, the wheat plants died. The prairies come back. You have more ele­gant micro­man­age­ment of nutri­ents and water with that peren­ni­al root sys­tem. 80% of the agri­cul­tur­al land­scape of the United States is devot­ed to the annual. 

Anderson: And what hap­pens to us in a long-term sense if we main­tain the system?

Jackson: Well, you lose a lot of the stuff we’re made of. If you take a peri­od­ic chart of the ele­ments (remem­ber­ing your chem­istry class­room or lab), and the upper third of that chart of the ele­ments that go into life. Carbon, hydro­gen, oxy­gen, nitro­gen, are in the atmos­pher­ic com­mons. The oth­er twenty-some are in the soil. It’s the stuff of which we’re made. The greater num­ber of nutri­ents, the total weight, though, most of that weight comes out of the atmosphere.

Anderson: If we con­tin­ue using these annu­al systems… 

Jackson: We’ll go just like what hap­pened in the Middle East, with the soil ero­sion. And what hap­pened in Greece. What hap­pened in Rome. What hap­pened around Carthage.

Anderson: Can you paint a pic­ture of that for me?

Jackson: Well, you have a des­e­crat­ed land­scape. I mean, you have soil ero­sion and then it’s aban­doned. And right now, I think it’s United Nations says that we’re los­ing about thir­ty mil­lion acres a year world­wide. From 1700 to 2000, that three hundred-year peri­od, we lost due to land degra­da­tion, on a glob­al scale, we’ve lost three times the US total acreage. That’s huge.

Anderson: Can we get that back?

Jackson: Some of it, but it’ll take a long time. You’re deal­ing with timescales that are beyond humans’ inter­est. I mean, it’s sor­ta like glob­al warm­ing. The heat that we have now built up, that car­bon was burned thir­ty years ago. It’s going to take a while for the cor­rec­tion process. So, if you have the ele­ments of the phos­pho­rus, the potas­si­um, the man­ganese, and so on, it can be built back pret­ty fast. But a short­hand way of putting it is that soil is as much of a non-renewable resource as oil. And, more impor­tant than oil. I mean, we’re talk­ing about stuff we’re made of. So that’s why I’ve said that the plow­share has destroyed more options for future gen­er­a­tions than the sword.

Anderson: That’s a great quote. Very dis­turb­ing quote.

Jackson: Yeah, well take a swipe at Isaiah, you know.

Anderson: Yeah, why not.

Jackson: Well, think about it. I mean, I don’t want to min­i­mize the impor­tance of human anguish, but when say, for instance Native Americans would be in some bat­tle, they’d kill one anoth­er but the poten­tial would­n’t be lost on the land­scape because the repro­duc­tive pres­sure of humans is such that replace­ment would hap­pen. But when that plow­share went through that prairie and, as one Native American put it back in the 1880 when he saw where it’d been plowed and he said, ​“Wrong side up,” that’s when the ero­sion is now pos­si­ble in a big way.

Anderson: So, I’m going to con­nect the dots real quick. We have top­soil, a carbon-rich lay­er which is basi­cal­ly the engine for plant growth.

Jackson: Uh huh.

Anderson: And we have an agri­cul­tur­al sys­tem that is deplet­ing top­soil at a rapid rate.

Jackson: Yeah.

Anderson: And it can’t be replen­ished quickly.

Jackson: That’s right.

Anderson: Well, that rais­es a kind of big ques­tion about food secu­ri­ty, does­n’t it.

Jackson: That’s right.

Anderson: So, what does this look like if we keep going on like this? Do we have a cri­sis down the road?

Jackson: Of course we got one on the road. We’ve got star­va­tion fac­ing you. The only rea­son it’s not as bad as it is now is because of the most impor­tant inven­tion of the 20^th cen­tu­ry. 1909, two Germans, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch learned how to take atmos­pher­ic nitro­gen and turn it into ammo­nia. In our time, we use nat­ur­al gas as the feed­stock to run the Haber-Bosch process. Vaclav Smil, the schol­ar in Winnipeg who stud­ied ener­gy as well nitro­gen, Vaclav Smil says that with­out Haber-Bosch, 40% of human­i­ty would­n’t be here. Without nat­ur­al gas for that feed­stock so, you know…most peo­ple don’t think of that as the most impor­tant inven­tion of the 20^th cen­tu­ry. I’ve asked a lot of col­lege audi­ences, even in land-grant schools, And my gol­ly it’s every­thing from indoor plumb­ing to usu­al­ly the auto­mo­bile, or whatever.

Anderson: It’s the things you see. And this seems like some­thing that’s very invis­i­ble. I would­n’t have been famil­iar about this if it was­n’t for actu­al­ly a Radiolab episode. So we’re think­ing about some real­ly big sys­tems here. If we’re talk­ing about a future cri­sis, and that’s an idea that’s come up in a lot of con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had, a lot of thinkers see this as a very cru­cial moment because they see us as head­ing towards a cri­sis. And then there’s anoth­er entire half of my inter­vie­wees who feel that sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy are mak­ing the world pro­gres­sive­ly bet­ter, and a cri­sis is absolute­ly the last thing we need to wor­ry about. Because of the work you’re doing, clear­ly you see a need for that work. What’s kind of the worst-case sce­nario, if we don’t address the sort of food security…

Jackson: First of all, I think we’re now expe­ri­enc­ing the worst form of fun­da­men­tal­ism to ever arise on the plan­et. Far worse than any form of reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ism. It’s tech­no­log­i­cal fun­da­men­tal­ism. The belief that we’re going to solve all of our prob­lems through tech­nol­o­gy. To me that’s no dif­fer­ent than peo­ple say­ing, ​“God is good. God is good. God will take care of us. Trust in God. God’ll do it.” I mean, that’s in my view mind­less litany.

So, the tech­no­log­i­cal fun­da­men­tal­ist to me is in some respects worse. Here you have a world in which, I think it start­ed ten thou­sand years ago, the idea that nature’s to be sub­dued or ignored. And that came with the plow and the hoe. And we’ve had pay­offs. But they’ve been for short-run kin­da con­sid­er­a­tions. Empires have risen on their soils, soils have been deplet­ed, down they go. It is inter­est­ing to me that Hannibal, and over on the south side there of the Mediterranean… I mean, that was a gra­nary for the Roman Empire. You go there today, and if you want to pho­to­graph those soils you bet­ter be ready to go underwater.

But the tech­no­log­i­cal fun­da­men­tal­ist says, ​“We’ll think of some­thing. We’ll think of some­thing. We’ll think of some­thing.” Well, all of that think­ing of some­thing has hap­pened dur­ing… I call it the peri­od of the five pools of energy-rich car­bon. The first pool of car­bon was the young pul­ver­ized coal of the soil, and that made civ­i­liza­tion pos­si­ble. The sec­ond pool is about five thou­sand years ago, where we start­ed using the forests to smelt the ore for the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. And then the next pool is coal, 1750, the Industry Revolution in England. Then a lit­tle over a hun­dred years lat­er is Drake’s oil well in Western Pennsylvania. The year I was born, 1936, you know, of all the oil burned to date, only one per­cent of the oil had ever been burned. And then the next pool is nat­ur­al gas. Now, we’d been using it for light­ing, but the start of using it for pow­er came after oil. 

So, here we have what I call the 3.45 bil­lion year-old imper­a­tive. That is all life forms are carbon-based; they go after car­bon. So if you have a Petri dish with sug­ar on it, you put bac­te­ria on it, the bac­te­ria will con­sume the sug­ar and just divide toward the edge of the Petri dish and deplete it. We’ve devel­oped an eco­nom­ic sys­tem that is just Petri dish eco­nom­ics. It’s called cap­i­tal­ism. Its growth. It’s the whole growth idea. That’s a fun­da­men­tal­ism. So, all of these solu­tions that we’ve had for deal­ing with dis­ease, going to the moon, a lot of social prob­lems, we’ve his­tor­i­cal­ly solved prob­lems by expan­sion of land, like us appro­pri­at­ing this con­ti­nent. Or, find­ing ener­gy sources. 

So here we are, and some are say­ing, ​“Well, we’ll go to new nukes,” because they’re not carbon-based. Well, if you’re going to go to nukes, then it’s going to require a lot of fos­sil fuel in order to make that tran­si­tion, which effec­tive­ly they’ll be can­ni­bal­iz­ing the fos­sil fuels to get there. But we keep talk­ing about our progress as a species. Yeah, there’s that spi­ral upward. But what about when the avail­abil­i­ty of that ener­gy begins to go down? Now let’s see how good out tech­nol­o­gy can be.

And there’ll be some things. But my feel­ing is that until we acknowl­edge the real­i­ty of lim­its, we’re gonna keep destroy­ing, well, until nature impos­es the con­se­quences of not hav­ing the stuff. And we’re all in addi­tion to that fill­ing up the sinks. I mean, the atmos­pher­ic sink being filled with CO₂ So we’ve got a source prob­lem, in ener­gy and soil and water, and we’ve got a sink prob­lem, which is more than landfills.

Anderson: It’s amaz­ing to hear you say that. I’m think­ing of some of the the con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had recent­ly, espe­cial­ly the one I had right before this in Denver, which is with a pro­po­nent of Mars col­o­niza­tion. He runs The Mars Society, but he also spends a lot of time talk­ing and think­ing about the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment on Earth. And when I asked him about growth and progress, he said there are no resource lim­its. There are no resource lim­its on Earth because tech­nol­o­gy can always find new and cre­ative ways to use resources. And even if there are lim­its here, it’s our mis­sion to go into space and to grow. For him, that is his ulti­mate idea of good.

And I think that maybe the biggest divide in this project is peo­ple who feel that it is our des­tiny (And I use that word delib­er­ate­ly. It’s an ara­tional feel­ing, when you boil it down to it.) to just grow. And there’s a very anthro­pocen­tric sense that the uni­verse is essentially…only has val­ue accord­ing to us. And then there are peo­ple who think maybe the uni­verse has val­ue in and of itself. Where do you come down on ques­tions like that?

Anderson: Well, you know Blake said, ​“Man must and will have some reli­gion.” That’s reli­gious talk. Creativity, real cre­ativ­i­ty, in my view is the result of the acknowl­edge­ment of lim­its. To aban­don your­self to no limits…I mean, it’s absurd. I used to be a track coach. And I think track records will con­tin­ue to be bro­ken. But they’re not gonna get bro­ken by dou­bling. So we’re real­ly talk­ing about the rate in which the change will come about, and I think we’ll always have tech­nol­o­gy. But that tech­nol­o­gy will slow down, espe­cial­ly if you don’t have the energy.

We’re going to lose some things. I mean, I think we’ll be using draft ani­mals by the end of the cen­tu­ry, because we will want to be get­ting sun-powered ener­gy and we don’t want to send our bio­mass off to some fac­to­ry to get turned into a bio­fu­el and have the embod­ied ener­gy of that machine that’s going to eat it. Even though you can turn the machine off. You don’t have to pay it to stand around and be a machine. But you know, you won’t come out some morn­ing and find a lit­tle baby tractor.

I’m amazed at the human mind and what poten­tial it has. But I don’t like call­ing the Earth a plan­et. This is an Earth. Planets do not have any­thing close to the beau­ty that has been put here over mil­lions of years of evo­lu­tion. Why would we want to risk the demise of this plan­et through more tech­nol­o­gy? Because when we look out, what we see is it’s ener­gy use that’s been destroy­ing rain forests. It’s ener­gy use that’s giv­en us glob­al warming. 

In oth­er words, we’ve lived through a peri­od in which there’ve been essen­tial­ly no lim­its in mate­ri­als and ener­gy, and look what we’ve done. Our job has got to be now, espe­cial­ly over the next cen­tu­ry, the rest of this entry of sure, is that our job has to be devot­ed to acknowl­edg­ing lim­its, and then allow a kind of flow­er­ing of cre­ativ­i­ty, and the sci­ence, and the arts, that is not pred­i­cat­ed upon exploitation.

Anderson: You’ve carved a line here between a lot of dif­fer­ent peo­ple I’ve spo­ken to. Creativity as a top­ic has come up in terms of gen­er­al­ly the technophile inter­vie­wees. And they’re usu­al­ly the ones who feel that cre­ativ­i­ty and no lim­its go togeth­er. The peo­ple I’ve spo­ken to about lim­its have maybe not engaged with the idea of cre­ativ­i­ty as much. And it seems inter­est­ing in that we’re talk­ing about sus­tain­able sys­tems, but we’re still talk­ing about cre­ativ­i­ty, and we’re still talk­ing about technology.

Jackson: I think the only cre­ative force comes from the ecos­phere. And that the cre­ativ­i­ty of the sci­en­tists in the lab, or the artist at the easel, is real­ly pip­squeak cre­ativ­i­ty. The Earth’s ecos­phere is real­ly a supraorgan­ism. Not super, supra. And it has pri­or­i­ty in scale, pri­or­i­ty in time. Anyway you look at it it is supe­ri­or, and it will claim us. I mean, we are embed­ded with­in it. This is one rea­son we ought to get rid of the word ​“envi­ron­ment.” Environment implies some­thing out there instead of acknowl­edg­ing that we are embed­ded with­in, and that we are a prod­uct of the cre­ative process. But the ecos­phere has giv­en rise to life, it’s giv­en rise to dif­fer­ent kinds of life­forms through evo­lu­tion and nat­ur­al selection.

So, this cre­ativ­i­ty that we talk about in humans, we ought to least rec­og­nize we do as a con­se­quence of the larg­er cre­ative force. To use our tech­nol­o­gy to com­pro­mise that cre­ative ten­den­cy of the ecos­phere is hubris.

Anderson: That is a great way of putting it. The idea char­ac­ter­iz­ing the greater sys­tem as an enti­ty seems like an inter­est­ing way to give it more moral weight. When you say it’s nature, when you say its the envi­ron­ment you can say, ​“Well, it is not of me,” and not give it moral weight.

Jackson: Well, let’s think about the hier­ar­chy of struc­ture. Let’s start at the atoms. And atoms are embed­ded with­in mol­e­cules, con­sist of them. And then there are cells. And then there are tis­sues. And then there are organs. And then there are organ­isms. And a man by the name of Feibelman wrote a paper in the ear­ly 50s on the laws of inte­gra­tive lev­els. And he came to organ­isms, and biol­o­gists were say­ing, ​“What comes next?” And some said species. Some said populations. 

But an ecol­o­gist in Canada, J. ​“Stan” Rowe, said, ​“Well, what do the oth­ers have in com­mon?” He said they have con­tigu­ous vol­ume. Species don’t have con­tigu­ous vol­ume. Populations don’t have con­tigu­ous vol­ume. Ecosystems do. Once ecosys­tems was there, those twelve laws of Feibelman fit.

So here’s the hier­ar­chy: atoms, mol­e­cules, cells, tis­sues, organs, organ­isms, ecosys­tems, and ecos­phere. I think we ought to get rid of the word ​“bios­phere” and call it ecosphere, because bios­phere shows the bio-bias. And then as Stan Rowe says, Ignoring the phys­i­cal you then play fast and loose with it. And now look at the atmos­phere with the CO_2.

So, as we go through this hier­ar­chy, one thing we notice is that let’s say we’re at the cel­lu­lar lev­el. Above the cell is tis­sue, and that’s the ecol­o­gy. Below the cell is phys­i­ol­o­gy, its work­ings. You move up to the tis­sue lev­el, and above the tis­sue is organ. That’s the ecol­o­gy. And below is the phys­i­ol­o­gy. Purpose lies above and mech­a­nism below. 

Anderson: Which gets us to a real­ly inter­est­ing— I mean, when you extrap­o­late that, Purpose, for ecos­phere, being then unknow­able to us because we’re embed­ded in it?

Jackson: Probably.

Anderson: Does it then have an intrin­sic source of value?

Jackson: Well, it has an intrin­sic force of val­ue because with­out it, we’re dead.

Anderson: If we drop the idea of nature, the envi­ron­ment is some­thing else. Say we can com­plete­ly change the envi­ron­ment in a way that has huge reper­cus­sions for all these oth­er things, but maybe we engi­neer it in some way where we sur­vive. Is that ulti­mate­ly nei­ther bet­ter nor worse?

Jackson: I think it’s impossible.

Anderson: Ah.

Jackson: We did a sun­shine farm. Marty Bender was in charge of it. It was two hun­dred and ten acres. Fifty acres of crops, a hun­dred six­ty acres of pas­ture for cat­tle. We had pho­to­volta­ic pan­els. We had chick­ens for meat and eggs. We had draft hors­es. We had a biodiesel trac­tor. We grew fuel. And the pur­pose is to cause that farm to pay all of the ener­gy bills, and then to look to see how much could be export­ed through the farm gate. 

Marty went all the way back to min­ing the ore in the Minnesota iron range to build the trac­tor. To pro­cess­ing in Gary, Indiana. To man­u­fac­ture and the num­ber of com­mute days per work­er, to the com­mute miles, and so on. You go down through try­ing to deter­mine what that total cost is in terms of ener­gy and mate­ri­als. Can’t do it. You can go through about three lay­ers, because the scaf­fold­ing of civ­i­liza­tion itself is behind it.

Anderson: We’re get­ting into real­ly big sys­tems think­ing here. I find it fas­ci­nat­ing. I also find it a lit­tle alarm­ing some­times, because when I try to start grap­pling with the idea of how big the sys­tems are, espe­cial­ly when I’m think­ing about social ener­gy, they’re all inter­con­nect­ed so it’s hard to even parse them. Embarking on sys­tems think­ing as a form of think­ing, as a men­tal struc­ture, is extreme­ly dif­fi­cult for me, and it seems like it’s dif­fi­cult for a lot of peo­ple. Because these things are…they’re huge, right. And we can see lit­tle man­i­fes­ta­tions of them. But it’s hard to con­cep­tu­al­ize them as this total whole. And it’s fun­ny that as we talk about this, and we talk about sci­ence as a reli­gion as well, these ideas are sort of com­ing togeth­er for me. And I’m think­ing that maybe one of the things that’s been inter­est­ing in some of the more tech­nol­o­gist con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had? is that there’s an assump­tion that we can know how all the sys­tems work. Is that part of the ultimate—

Jackson: And the more those sys­tems are the prod­uct of our mak­ing, the more they’re depen­dent upon us. In oth­er words, a bac­teri­um that is anaer­o­bic (which means it had its ori­gin before there was oxy­gen) will form a spore around it, attach itself to the root of a plant, which stim­u­lates the root of the plant to grow around it. And as it’s grow­ing around it, the spore opens. But the growth has tak­en the oxy­gen so that now, using twenty-one enzymes, at ambi­ent tem­per­a­ture, that bacterium-plant inter­ac­tion can cap­ture atmos­pher­ic nitrogen. 

The Haber-Bosch process that’s a result of our clev­er­ness, requires three hun­dred and fifty atmos­pheres. Not ⁴⁄₅ of one atmos­phere, as the plant, but three hun­dred and fifty atmos­pheres at 400 degrees C. Millions of years of evo­lu­tion have devel­oped this abi­ot­ic inter­ac­tion. It’s an information-rich sys­tem. In fact, I wrote an essay enti­tled ​“The Information Implosion,” that is as we destroy ecosys­tems, we’re destroy­ing infor­ma­tion. And the amount of infor­ma­tion we destroy is far greater than the amount of infor­ma­tion we’ve acquired.

Anderson: So, the infor­ma­tion here is genet­ic infor­ma­tion? It’s how all of these sys­tems operate?

Jackson: Yeah, it’s real.

Anderson: It’s a very dif­fer­ent way think­ing about infor­ma­tion, I think, for most peo­ple. That’s a chal­leng­ing assump­tion. I’m going back here to our moment when we were talk­ing about sci­ence as the sil­ver bul­let to get us out of cri­sis sit­u­a­tions. And tying in our con­ver­sa­tion right now about infor­ma­tion. Is it fair to say the rea­son you think sci­ence can’t be the sil­ver bul­let to get us out of these sit­u­a­tions, can’t cre­ate a new nat­ur­al order, essen­tial­ly, is that the exist­ing one is so com­pli­cat­ed there’s no pos­si­ble way we can mod­el it and sort of antic­i­pate every prob­lem that we would have with a man-created system?

Jackson: That’s right. And what we’ll be doing is destroy­ing more in the inter­est of some short-term gain. See, why is it we don’t want to live with­in our means and think about a whole dif­fer­ent social order?

Anderson: What are our fun­da­men­tal assump­tions that we have now that are let­ting us not think about that?

Jackson: The idea that growth is the way we solve prob­lems. I mean, not a sin­gle politi­cian is will­ing to say, ​“Gang, the prob­lem is growth.”

Anderson: So, what is progress if not growth?

Jackson: Progress is to cease [reduc­ing] options for future generations.

Anderson: So, progress is about cre­at­ing choic­es, in a way?

Jackson: Well, progress is about the denial of any­thing that chis­els away at the ecos­phere’s capac­i­ty to nur­ture us. We live in a world in which the num­ber of wounds that are now wound­ing us is on the increase. Just look at say, what corn syrup has done to obe­si­ty because we don’t want to restrict the use of sug­ar. It’s com­ing back. We’re going to have more peo­ple on dial­y­sis. It’s the refusal to prac­tice restraint. So, I see no way out of rationing. 

Anderson: I think a lot of the peo­ple who are afraid of ideas like rationing, or the idea of any kind restraint, is that it’s socially-imposed. And they say, ​“Look at oth­er sys­tems where peo­ple have gone after the idea of col­lec­tive well-being. Those sys­tems have been dra­con­ian and they’ve lim­it­ed peo­ple’s indi­vid­ual freedom.”

Jackson: I grew up dur­ing World War II. I remem­ber going to town in the car. Gasoline was rationed. Sugar was rationed. And we were all in it togeth­er. And that was imposed as a result of mutu­al coer­cion mutu­al­ly agreed upon through a col­lec­tive, the peo­ple we vot­ed in.

Anderson: And you don’t think it’s nec­es­sar­i­ly draconian?

Jackson: I don’t think it’s dra­con­ian. Mutual coer­cion, mutu­al­ly agreed upon. We still have a democ­ra­cy. It’s a mat­ter of a per­cep­tion of neces­si­ty. Is it dra­con­ian to have a stop light and to get a tick­et for run­ning a stop light? I don’t con­sid­er that dra­con­ian. I con­sid­er it a prac­ti­cal neces­si­ty. I mean, peo­ple that say dra­con­ian, it like­ly comes from a child­ish impulse. Don’t want to be told no. 

The prob­lem of acknowl­edg­ing lim­its, to me, is right at the core of where the debate has to go. We need a kind of anoth­er myth. The Hebrews, they had to devel­op a code for get­ting along, the Ten Commandments. As Aldo Leopold said, only the most naive stu­dent of his­to­ry actu­al­ly believes that Moses wrote the Decalogue. What he did is sum­ma­rize an already-existing eth­ic for a sem­i­nar. Well, we’ve not begun the writ­ing of the man­i­festo. And it’s your gen­er­a­tion that’s going to have to do that.

Anderson: When I was talk­ing to David Korten, he was talk­ing about chang­ing the story.

Jackson: Yeah. Well look, we’re on our way to chang­ing that sto­ry. I mean, the Hubble Telescope has helped, actually.

Anderson: In terms of perspective?

Jackson: Perspective. I mean, no longer does Heaven have the kind of alti­tude that it for­mer­ly had. And car­bon, which enters so impor­tant­ly was cooked in the remote past of a dying star, and that we’ve been cycled through a super­no­va I guess at least twice. The ancient seas set the pat­tern of ions in our blood. That’s a dif­fer­ent story.

Anderson: At the same time, sci­ence exists in this very phys­i­cal­ist world, which is a world of stuff. And these old sys­tems of moral­i­ty and behav­ior and belief are sort of based in a world of spir­it. And I won­der if the very devel­op­ments that allow us to sort of have our per­spec­tive in the uni­verse also make us have some kind of cri­sis in terms of, are we just stuff? You can say we’re just stuff and it’s amaz­ing that we’re made of the same mate­r­i­al as these stars. But where do you get val­ue there?

Jackson: We’re not just stuff. We’re the only species that’s mat­ter and ener­gy’s way of hav­ing gained self-recognition. We’re the only species that knows about the speed of light. That knows about plate tec­ton­ics. That knows about Darwin’s idea. That we’ve answered two of the old reli­gious ques­tions: Where do we come from, and what kind of a thing are we? The third reli­gious ques­tion is hang­ing in the bal­ance: What is to become of us? We aren’t just stuff.

Anderson: It seems like in our con­ver­sa­tion we’ve cer­tain­ly got­ten to a sense that this is a his­tor­i­cal moment that mat­ters. There is stuff in the balance.

Jackson: I think it’s the most impor­tant moment, includ­ing our walk out of Africa.

Anderson: Really. That much hangs in the balance?

Jackson: That much hangs in the balance.

Anderson: Because of soil, energy…

Jackson: Soil…the stuff that is nec­es­sary to sus­tain us, and the fact that it has to end. See, as hunters and gath­er­ers we did­n’t have to wor­ry about prac­tic­ing restraint. So, it’s been a tra­jec­to­ry of exploita­tion, start­ing with agri­cul­ture. That’s why I think that if we don’t get sus­tain­abil­i­ty in agri­cul­ture first, it’s not gonna happen.

The restraint from the past is what para­dox­i­cal­ly has allowed civ­i­liza­tion, and the exploita­tion of all those resources is what’s giv­en us the knowl­edge. Now, the big ques­tion is can we start liv­ing with­in our means and retain the knowl­edge as TS Eliot put it, ​“and in the end know our place for the first time.” 

Aengus Anderson: Well, if TS Eliot isn’t a classy end­ing I don’t know what is.

Micah Saul: Totally. We talked about it in the intro, but I’m still just amazed at how well Wes Jackson con­nects to almost every­body else in the project. In terms of those con­nec­tions, I think one of the first ones I think we should talk about, because it was the last con­ver­sa­tion, his response to Robert Zubrin. Jackson is very inter­est­ed in the idea of con­straints and lim­its, which is some­thing that…well that Zubrin finds just absolute­ly abhorrent.

Anderson: Yeah. I mean, these are two guys that I can’t even imag­ine what it would be like if they spoke face to face. I don’t think you could have thinkers who would be more polar oppo­sites. And yet, and yet, for both of them there’s this incred­i­bly strong desire to have a good qual­i­ty of life and long-term health for the species.

Saul: Right. Both Zubrin and Jackson talked about cre­ativ­i­ty. Zubrin says that the cre­ativ­i­ty of the human mind is lim­it­less and there­fore there are no lim­its. And Jackson responds and says, but there are lim­its, and it’s those lim­its that spark the cre­ativ­i­ty of the human mind. But then he goes on to say that cre­ativ­i­ty isn’t infi­nite. In fact, to think that human­i­ty’s cre­ativ­i­ty could even remote­ly com­pare to the cre­ativ­i­ty of the ecos­phere or the uni­verse is just hubris. It’s an inter­est­ing way of refram­ing creativity.

Anderson: It absolute­ly is. Thinking of evo­lu­tion, think­ing of what is hap­pen­ing in the cos­mos as a cre­ative process, Jackson real­ly push­es us to think about much larg­er things and our place in them. And in them is actu­al­ly exact­ly it. We are embed­ded with­in them, and as such we can­not ful­ly know and con­trol them. He has an issue with the very premise of a lot of…well, he would call them tech­no­log­i­cal fundamentalists.

Saul: Right. The idea that we could ever ful­ly under­stand the sys­tems in which we are embed­ded, he just does­n’t believe that it’s pos­si­ble. As we said in the intro it, made me think a lot about Timothy Morton. And it made me think about his idea that the cri­sis right now is that we’re sud­den­ly awak­en­ing to the fact that we are a part of this thing that is so large we can nev­er under­stand it. 

Anderson: And sort of that strange para­dox of, you cre­ate these immense­ly com­pli­cat­ed social and tech­ni­cal sys­tems and they start chang­ing your habi­tat in a way that may make you go extinct. And yet those very sys­tems give you the tools to step back and see them.

Saul: I loved Jackson’s com­ment about Hubble and how Hubble allows us to get a bet­ter sense of our…of who we are, and how we fit into all of this. As he put it, where did we come from and what kind of a thing are we?

Anderson: So do you think he has exces­sive faith in the abil­i­ty of sci­ence to help us real­ize that we are part of larg­er sys­tems? I mean, it seems like the type of sys­tems thought we’re get­ting from peo­ple like Jackson and Korten and Morton is real­ly big, and it’s real­ly hard to get your head around.

Saul: I mean, I would argue that they would sug­gest you can’t get your head around them. Because we are inside them, a part of us can’t con­tain their totality. 

Anderson: And Korten says you cre­ate a new myth, and Jackson touch­es on that idea, but it seems like for him the new mythol­o­gy is actu­al­ly less impor­tant than actu­al­ly just hav­ing a vol­ume of sci­en­tif­ic infor­ma­tion to say, ​“Look, this is how mas­sive­ly com­plex the uni­verse is.” And that should be in a way a sort of epiphany to make you real­ize that you’re fac­ing some­thing that is ulti­mate­ly unmap­pable and uncon­trol­lable in a way that say, an extreme tech­nol­o­gist would want to map and control.

Saul: Well, and is that maybe the new mythol­o­gy? Is the new idea here that com­plex sys­tems are too large for us? There is a lim­it to what we can know. 

Anderson: In which case I think actu­al­ly the term ​“mythol­o­gy” is almost dan­ger­ous here. Like, sci­ence can actu­al­ly get you to this point, and you can actu­al­ly real­ize with­out any sort of myth or val­ue sys­tem these things are too big to be under­stood, and they are in fact so big that even if the most extreme tran­shu­man­ist fan­ta­sy came true and you were able to become some­thing far more intel­li­gent and com­pli­cat­ed than what you are now, you would nev­er be com­pli­cat­ed or intel­li­gent enough to under­stand how all of your actions feed back to you. 

Saul: It’s a real­ly unset­tling thought, isn’t it? So, we’ve got­ten all sorts of new ways of think­ing about things or they’re improv­ing our ways of think­ing about things. Something we did­n’t get to was a notion of the good, or where val­ues come from. Which is actu­al­ly a lit­tle sur­pris­ing to me because it is some­thing that we talk about so much in The Conversation. I did­n’t even real­ize until a lit­tle bit ago that we don’t hear that here.

Anderson: No, we real­ly don’t. There’s an assump­tion, obvi­ous­ly, that sur­vival is good. But every­body’s work­ing toward survival.

Saul: Right.

Anderson: What we real­ly talked about is what Wes con­sid­ers a much more effec­tive way of sur­vival, and why. But that does­n’t real­ly get you into how to live, nec­es­sar­i­ly. It does­n’t real­ly get you into hap­pi­ness or a sat­is­fy­ing life. And it also does­n’t get you away from the ques­tion of, are you just stuff?

Saul: Right. He had an answer to that. 

Anderson: He did. And I was­n’t con­vinced by it.

Saul: I was struck by a sim­i­lar­i­ty to Zubrin in his answer to why we are more than just stuff. 

Anderson: Oh, you found a similarity.

Saul: Yes. So—

Anderson: I think you’re on to something.

Saul: So, Jackson says that we are mat­ter and ener­gy’s way of becom­ing self-aware. Which sounds a lot like, ​“We are the bios­phere’s way of spread­ing itself across the universe.”

Anderson: And maybe in this case it’s not spread­ing, but there’s def­i­nite­ly a sense of higher-order con­scious­ness. Or that con­scious­ness is good. And that some­how we are that, and that takes us out of the realm of stuff. Or maybe it leaves us in the realm of stuff but it makes us more mean­ing­ful? One of the hard­est parts of the sort of pic­tur­ing peo­ple as a com­po­nent in this real­ly big sys­tem is then for us to find some sort of sense of good, or sense of meaning.

I mean, you can know that you’re part of this big sys­tem, but I think Zubrin real­ly taps into some­thing that’s very appeal­ing to us. It’s like we are part of this big sys­tem, but the big sys­tem does­n’t care about us. We are inter­est­ed in our sto­ry. We can only know things from our per­spec­tive. The mean­ing is self-generated. And I think with both Jackson and Zubrin, there’s an inter­est­ing sort of sec­u­lar qual­i­ty and like, where do you get mean­ing? Because both of them seem very scientifically-minded. Both of them seem very phys­i­cal­ist. And yet both of them also seem to have a real­ly strong ara­tional sense of some kind of good. Both of them feel like they have a reli­gious or spir­i­tu­al sense. And I don’t see that as being a good or a bad thing. you know. It’s just a thing. I mean, if you boil any­one’s beliefs down, they’re going to be arational.

Saul: Right. That’s one of the big take­aways from this project I think for me.

Anderson: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s some­thing that John Fife and Max More back at square one would agree on.

Saul: Yup.

Anderson: So how do we move forward?

Saul: Well, actu­al­ly the per­son you’re gonna talk to next gives us some idea of, if not how to move for­ward, at least how do exist with­in these sys­tems we’re talk­ing about, to work with­in them in a way that isn’t just com­plete­ly daunting. 

Anderson: And that per­son is Carolyn Raffensperger, and she’s the head of SEHN, The Science and Environmental Health Network. And she’s real­ly inter­est­ed in the idea of insti­tut­ing rights for future generations.

That was Dr. Wes Jackson of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas record­ed July 18, 2012.

Saul: This is The Conversation. You can find us on Twitter at @aengusanderson and on the web at find​the​con​ver​sa​tion​.com

Anderson: So thanks for lis­ten­ing. I’m Aengus Anderson.

Saul: And I’m Micah Saul.