Nabhan, Gary Paul. Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989.
This collection of essays from one of the foremost ethnobotanists in the United States intriguingly documents a field of conservation generally ignored by the environmental mainstream: the preservation of gene pools from ancient domesticated and semi-domesticated plants.
Many of the edible plant varieties that Americans, and now the world generally, depend on for our daily bread have native origins. But when speaking strictly of the territory north of the Rio Grande, Nabhan asserts that “(i)f American consumers were asked to live on food from crops native to the [contiguous] United States, they would probably be shocked that their diet was limited to sunflower seeds, cranberries, blueberries, pecans, and not much else ... Tobacco would be available, but they would have no cotton ... [The] resources that support our domestic food and fiber production today are imported.” Mesoamerica, however (meaning here the territory of the extreme southwestern United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras, as well as the ancient Incan lands of the Andes) was the original home for such staples as tomatoes, potatoes, and many varieties of maize and melons, squashes and beans. All of these crops have since been exported to the Old World via the commercial and cultural interaction now known as the Columbian Exchange, a transatlantic intercourse dating to 1492 that provided the new Spanish colonies with manioc, rice and okra (and slaves) in exchange for crops long tilled by American Indians being sent to Europe and Africa.
Today American, Canadian, and Latin American agribusinesses are increasingly sowing monocultural crops of New and Old World species that are swollen in size or multiplied in number through extensive inbreeding and genetic engineering. These essentially artificial plants are entirely dependent upon comprehensive applications of pesticides, fungicides, rodenticides and herbicides to protect their frail beings from being utilized by nonhuman consumers. Furthermore, the new crops of the Green Revolution demand thoroughgoing fertilization to reach their full potential; heavy fertilizer runoff continues to play a major role in the declining health of places like Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
Aside from the disastrous ecological ramifications of chemotherapeutic growing practices, Nabhan reports on the dangers modern industrial agriculture poses to the global food supply. By steadily decreasing the gene pool for a given species, such as the popular Silver Queen sweet corn, in an attempt to bring out the characteristics we desire (sugary, juicy kernels and large ears) and to limit those we don’t want (thick husks, broad, energy-consuming leaves), the genetics and chemical industries are weakening the resistance of these strains to bacterial and fungal disease, as well as to insect parasites and weed competition. To counter these trends, we are told to increase the levels of the chemical surrogates we employ to replace lost natural resistance; at the same time we strive to keep one step ahead of rapidly mutating bacterial and viral plagues with newer and newer stocks of genetically-altered plants.
As we have seen with the HIV and Ebola viruses, however, the capacity of these pathogens to adapt their mode of attack vastly outstrips science’s attempts to contain them. By jettisoning or ignoring the reserves of gene potential as stored in the multitudinous strains of Mesoamerican and Eurasian Neolithic crops, we throw out accumulated banks of genetic data that may prove invaluable in a future of chemically dependent, defenseless monocultural crops facing new breeds of pests. “The attitude of seed conservation has really been one of reaction,” says Nabhan. “If we need rare seeds to breed a stronger variety of grain in the event of an epidemic, we go out and collect them. We have felt that we can always go to the country of origin and get the seeds we want.”
Another threat to the viability of plant diversity is the terrific rate of global deforestation and general destruction of the world’s vegetation, an accelerating, downward spiral that shows no sign of abatement. Our planet is being gradually covered with a dead scabrous layer of cement, asphalt, plastic, domestic animal manure and barren, compacted earth, while the net acreage of living plant matter continues to plummet. Invaluable genetic stocks and local knowledge of their use and availability disappear before the entwined blast furnaces of overpopulation, clearcutting, cultural amalgamation and species extinction. “And because traditional farming and gathering peoples of the Neotropics are being acculturated with the same speed that their forests are being cut,” ethnobotanist Michael Black predicts that “there is time enough for only one more generation of scientific research about the rarer tropical plants now used by these peoples before the plants and the folk knowledge about them are both gone.”
The reliance we in modern society have built upon industrial science to gloss over our insupportable lifestyles is evident in the hopeless road we are taking as regards agriculture: while becoming more and more dependent on food stocks whose health and viability are stretched to the breaking point, we allow the continued decimation of the rain and cloud forests between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, easily the region of Earth’s highest plant diversity. Indeed, “(i)f tropical forests in the New World were reduced to those currently protected as parks and refuges, by the end of the century about 66% of all plant species and 14% of [plant] families would disappear … The imminent catastrophe in tropical forests is commensurate with all the great mass extinctions except at the end of the Permian period.”
Gary Nabhan states that the co-evolution of early “domestic” plants (actually semi-domestic plants when compared to the total reliance today’s monocultural crops have on human nurture) with Neolithic agriculturists and Archaic Indian horticulturists led to an emphasis on diversity that bred an incredible amount of not only plant but animal life as well. Tolerance for wildlife to balance out the ratio between agricultural pests and predation leads to net benefits for the small farmer, claims Nabhan, such as self-reliance from biocides and increased protein intake from rabbits, quail, and other species that live alongside the farmed acreage. Traditionally sustainable agriculture is still practiced today by certain Amerindian peoples and by “primitive” Eurasian farmers and pastoralists such as the Kurds. (The author argues that “the mixed subsistence farming cultures—those who, like many of the Eastern Woodland Indian tribes, hunt, gather, and tend small fields—have a richer knowledge of wild flora and fauna than do cultures dominated by any other form of livelihood.”)
One hope cited by Nabhan for the simultaneous preservation of native plant species and traditional botanic knowledge is the biosphere reserve, “a kind of protected area in which traditional uses of plants and animals by indigenous peoples persist without interference from outside pressures.” These programs will be essential in the tropical zones of the Americas where booming population growth and the associated clearing for livestock and agriculture have brought enormous pressures on the regional ecosystems. The concept is straightforward: traditional peoples are dependent on and thereby knowledgeable of their local plant life; domestic strains of crops have co-evolved with aboriginal cultures; the surrounding jungles of wild vegetation interact with the gene pools of the hardy local crops, assuring genetic diversity and health; ideally, Westerners will be able to interact with the tribal elders, recording folklore dealing with the medicinal and nutritional uses of native plants.
The biosphere reserve, already in place in several areas of the Latin American tropics, will be necessary to protect the equally priceless heritages, floral and cultural, that have grown together over the last twenty thousand years. In Enduring Seeds, Gary Paul Nabhan allows us to understand that “what were once considered separate issues—cultural survival, agricultural stability and diversity, and wildlands preservation—now seem to be tightly intertwined.”
This collection of essays from one of the foremost ethnobotanists in the United States intriguingly documents a field of conservation generally ignored by the environmental mainstream: the preservation of gene pools from ancient domesticated and semi-domesticated plants.
Many of the edible plant varieties that Americans, and now the world generally, depend on for our daily bread have native origins. But when speaking strictly of the territory north of the Rio Grande, Nabhan asserts that “(i)f American consumers were asked to live on food from crops native to the [contiguous] United States, they would probably be shocked that their diet was limited to sunflower seeds, cranberries, blueberries, pecans, and not much else ... Tobacco would be available, but they would have no cotton ... [The] resources that support our domestic food and fiber production today are imported.” Mesoamerica, however (meaning here the territory of the extreme southwestern United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras, as well as the ancient Incan lands of the Andes) was the original home for such staples as tomatoes, potatoes, and many varieties of maize and melons, squashes and beans. All of these crops have since been exported to the Old World via the commercial and cultural interaction now known as the Columbian Exchange, a transatlantic intercourse dating to 1492 that provided the new Spanish colonies with manioc, rice and okra (and slaves) in exchange for crops long tilled by American Indians being sent to Europe and Africa.
Today American, Canadian, and Latin American agribusinesses are increasingly sowing monocultural crops of New and Old World species that are swollen in size or multiplied in number through extensive inbreeding and genetic engineering. These essentially artificial plants are entirely dependent upon comprehensive applications of pesticides, fungicides, rodenticides and herbicides to protect their frail beings from being utilized by nonhuman consumers. Furthermore, the new crops of the Green Revolution demand thoroughgoing fertilization to reach their full potential; heavy fertilizer runoff continues to play a major role in the declining health of places like Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
Aside from the disastrous ecological ramifications of chemotherapeutic growing practices, Nabhan reports on the dangers modern industrial agriculture poses to the global food supply. By steadily decreasing the gene pool for a given species, such as the popular Silver Queen sweet corn, in an attempt to bring out the characteristics we desire (sugary, juicy kernels and large ears) and to limit those we don’t want (thick husks, broad, energy-consuming leaves), the genetics and chemical industries are weakening the resistance of these strains to bacterial and fungal disease, as well as to insect parasites and weed competition. To counter these trends, we are told to increase the levels of the chemical surrogates we employ to replace lost natural resistance; at the same time we strive to keep one step ahead of rapidly mutating bacterial and viral plagues with newer and newer stocks of genetically-altered plants.
As we have seen with the HIV and Ebola viruses, however, the capacity of these pathogens to adapt their mode of attack vastly outstrips science’s attempts to contain them. By jettisoning or ignoring the reserves of gene potential as stored in the multitudinous strains of Mesoamerican and Eurasian Neolithic crops, we throw out accumulated banks of genetic data that may prove invaluable in a future of chemically dependent, defenseless monocultural crops facing new breeds of pests. “The attitude of seed conservation has really been one of reaction,” says Nabhan. “If we need rare seeds to breed a stronger variety of grain in the event of an epidemic, we go out and collect them. We have felt that we can always go to the country of origin and get the seeds we want.”
Another threat to the viability of plant diversity is the terrific rate of global deforestation and general destruction of the world’s vegetation, an accelerating, downward spiral that shows no sign of abatement. Our planet is being gradually covered with a dead scabrous layer of cement, asphalt, plastic, domestic animal manure and barren, compacted earth, while the net acreage of living plant matter continues to plummet. Invaluable genetic stocks and local knowledge of their use and availability disappear before the entwined blast furnaces of overpopulation, clearcutting, cultural amalgamation and species extinction. “And because traditional farming and gathering peoples of the Neotropics are being acculturated with the same speed that their forests are being cut,” ethnobotanist Michael Black predicts that “there is time enough for only one more generation of scientific research about the rarer tropical plants now used by these peoples before the plants and the folk knowledge about them are both gone.”
The reliance we in modern society have built upon industrial science to gloss over our insupportable lifestyles is evident in the hopeless road we are taking as regards agriculture: while becoming more and more dependent on food stocks whose health and viability are stretched to the breaking point, we allow the continued decimation of the rain and cloud forests between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, easily the region of Earth’s highest plant diversity. Indeed, “(i)f tropical forests in the New World were reduced to those currently protected as parks and refuges, by the end of the century about 66% of all plant species and 14% of [plant] families would disappear … The imminent catastrophe in tropical forests is commensurate with all the great mass extinctions except at the end of the Permian period.”
Gary Nabhan states that the co-evolution of early “domestic” plants (actually semi-domestic plants when compared to the total reliance today’s monocultural crops have on human nurture) with Neolithic agriculturists and Archaic Indian horticulturists led to an emphasis on diversity that bred an incredible amount of not only plant but animal life as well. Tolerance for wildlife to balance out the ratio between agricultural pests and predation leads to net benefits for the small farmer, claims Nabhan, such as self-reliance from biocides and increased protein intake from rabbits, quail, and other species that live alongside the farmed acreage. Traditionally sustainable agriculture is still practiced today by certain Amerindian peoples and by “primitive” Eurasian farmers and pastoralists such as the Kurds. (The author argues that “the mixed subsistence farming cultures—those who, like many of the Eastern Woodland Indian tribes, hunt, gather, and tend small fields—have a richer knowledge of wild flora and fauna than do cultures dominated by any other form of livelihood.”)
One hope cited by Nabhan for the simultaneous preservation of native plant species and traditional botanic knowledge is the biosphere reserve, “a kind of protected area in which traditional uses of plants and animals by indigenous peoples persist without interference from outside pressures.” These programs will be essential in the tropical zones of the Americas where booming population growth and the associated clearing for livestock and agriculture have brought enormous pressures on the regional ecosystems. The concept is straightforward: traditional peoples are dependent on and thereby knowledgeable of their local plant life; domestic strains of crops have co-evolved with aboriginal cultures; the surrounding jungles of wild vegetation interact with the gene pools of the hardy local crops, assuring genetic diversity and health; ideally, Westerners will be able to interact with the tribal elders, recording folklore dealing with the medicinal and nutritional uses of native plants.
The biosphere reserve, already in place in several areas of the Latin American tropics, will be necessary to protect the equally priceless heritages, floral and cultural, that have grown together over the last twenty thousand years. In Enduring Seeds, Gary Paul Nabhan allows us to understand that “what were once considered separate issues—cultural survival, agricultural stability and diversity, and wildlands preservation—now seem to be tightly intertwined.”
