Postcard from Illinois
How does it feel to be a monocropped plant?
[The following is an excerpt from my 2019 book, Roadtripping at the End of the World, a collection of essays and interviews. Only six autographed hard copies remain, and I just marked them down from $16 to $12 each, postage included, because I will soon be re-editing and re-ordering the volume, and I want to move these along. It’s also available as a digital download for only $4. Thanks for supporting me by ordering one!]
I found myself on the I-65 in downstate Illinois, on my way to visit a friend in Urbana-Champaign. The land was some of the flattest I've ever seen. No hills as far as the eye could see. The horizon was a totally straight line.
Seemingly every acre of scenery was filled with crops, mostly corn and soy. Trees were few in number and tended to be clumped around farmhouses or along watercourses. At one time in the not-so-distant past, there were more trees, but as smaller family-owned parcels were absorbed into larger, corporate-run operations, they were razed for the “fence-to-fence” style of agriculture that now dominates.
And dominates it does in Illinois. People in cities tend to think of urban sprawl as a major environmental problem, but agricultural sprawl is far, far worse. For one thing, it's footprint is larger by orders of magnitude. For another, most of it is subjected to intense chemical treatments with substances that aren't even legal in cities.
I was amazed by the such vast areas of botanical conformity and pulled off at a random exit for a closer look.
As it happened, there was a cemetery with markers going back over a century. One stone said “Bushman” and I couldn't help but chuckle. “Bushmen” are exactly the kind of people wiped out by agriculture, so didn't it make sense to find a grave for them here?
Fake flowers decorated some of the plots. I remember when only real flowers were offered. How long do the fake ones stay out? The real ones had a distinct duration measured in days, and then a caretaker would clear them away. Plastic doesn't last forever either and eventually fades or starts disintegrating. At some point, someone has to make the call that they're trash and throw them away. Then what? They're buried in a dump, incinerated in a furnace of float out to sea. In other words, they pollute the land, the air or the water. Yet again, an “improvement” that is no such thing. A few plots were also marked by perennial plants. Those are from another time again, before my memory. It's probably against the rules now.
Beyond the cemetery, some distance away from me, stood a group of shiny metal grain silos, round with conical tops, squat in shape but rather tall; I would guess at least 40 feet high. Each one had a crane-like structure built beside it for filling it up. In rural areas like this, grain silos are the tallest things for miles and miles around. The skinnier ones can look like skyscrapers in the distance.
From time to time grain elevators explode. The dust is highly flammable and can be ignited by heat from machinery or even just static electricity. One spark can totally flatten one of these suckers. According to Purdue University1 there are an average of 8.4 grain dust explosions per year. 2018 saw a dozen, with a total of four injuries and one fatality. In the history of such events, 1977 was a particularly bad year, with the Westwego grain elevator explosion of Dec. 22 in Louisiana causing 36 deaths and the Galveston grain elevator explosion in Texas just five days later responsible for another 20.2 So here by this cemetery were placed these potential bombs. I'm not sure what kind of juxtaposition that is; the usual adjectives—poignant, ironic, etc.—don't quite fit, but it's... something disturbing, that’s for sure.
Across the interstate from the cemetery was another kind of threat: a field of Soybeans. The crop looked ready to harvest soon; the pods were mature and drying out, hanging off the stems like sausage links. Given that over 90% of the soybeans grown in the United States are genetically-modified organisms (GMO), that's most likely what I was looking at.
Despite claims to the contrary, neither Soybeans nor any other GMO crops have been engineered explicitly to produce higher yields. Soy has been genetically modified to be “Round-up Ready,” which is to say, resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Round-up. Both GMO soybeans and glyphosate are manufactured and sold by the notorious Monsanto Corporation. As more Round-up Ready crops have been planted, more Round-up has been applied. Why? Because weeds have been modifying themselves and developing their own natural resistance to glyphosate. This has necessitated higher applications of Round-Up and the reintroduction of other pesticides like 2,4-D.3 2,4-D is a nasty one; it's been implicated in birth defects, cancers, and thyroid issues in humans and is toxic to water-dwelling creatures.4
Monsanto has long denied that glyphosate is harmful to humans but in 2018, the tide started to turn against them. They lost a case in California in which a jury found that Round-up was responsible for a man's cancer and the company was ordered to pay millions in damages. Other such cases have followed. Additionally, Monsanto continues to be exposed for their interference in the science, their misrepresentation of facts and their meddling in the regulatory process to stay off the hook for culpability.
Regardless of what glyphosate does to humans, its environmental effects are beyond dispute. No one denies that it kills plants. That's what it's for, after all. But when you kill plants, you affect animals. Birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, and spiders are among the creatures who lose habitat and food sources when vegetation is destroyed. Herbicides also don't distinguish between native and non-native plants (nor indeed do many animals, who come to depend on exotic species when the indigenous ones decline).
Populations of the iconic Monarch butterfly have shrunk dramatically since the turn of the millennium in part because their primary food source, Milkweed (genus Asclepias), is being wiped out by the increased use of glyphosate.
The toxicity of glyphosate is compounded in water. Fish, amphibians and insects exposed to the chemical in riparian areas are harmed in a variety of ways, including genetic damage and immune system disruption. As these species suffer, so do others in the food-web, such as the birds and mammals who eat them.
Monsanto is scamming us and killing the planet for the sake of their own profit. Given the scale of the damage, we are justified to ask: Should any means be left off the table when it comes to stopping them?
Gazing out over a monocropped field, GMO or not, is surreal. The plants are not exactly identical, but close enough. So your field of vision is taken up by the same object repeated thousands—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands—of times, for miles, maybe to the horizon. In wild settings, plants don't grow like that. Monocrops don't exist in nature. It's not a healthy way for plants to grow, so they don't.
What is it like to be one of these plants, packed in such close quarters with so many of your siblings? (“Brothers and sisters” is perhaps not accurate since the flowers on every Soybean plant contain both male and female sex organs—an arrangement described by botanists, by the way, as “perfect”—so every plant is neither/both.)
What is it like when no one but your own kind is present? And when the other plants who try to grow are poisoned to death? Are you grateful that the “competition” is gone or would you prefer some company, perhaps some cooperation? Maybe your senses aren't as acute as those of your ancestors due to your modification, and so these are all moot questions. Is life in a monocropped field a lonely, numbing daze all day long? Or is the pain of injury and disconnection sharper?
Last but not least, what does it do to humans when we eat food produced this way? Or to the confined animals who have nothing else and who are in turn consumed by humans? What we have here is a closed system of domestication, with genetic modification and chemicals severing some of the last ties between living creatures and their environment. For some crops, the very soil is sterilized so that not even microorganisms are part of the picture anymore.
But there's one element that humans cannot control, much as we might like to, and that's the elements. You can't poison away a flood or a heatwave or a changing climate. As I write this (mid-June of 2019), floodwaters have still not completely receded in the Midwest and a large percentage of this year's crops have not been planted and soon it will be too late. At what point does this massive system break down far enough that people don't have enough to eat? Famines have been regular occurrences all over the world, throughout the entire history of agriculture, and the amount of time we've gone without one here in the US is quite remarkable, and even unprecedented. That is to say, we're due. Are we ready for that probability yet? I’m afraid not.
I shared this post on something called deep adaptation forum. I learned something new but it wasn’t pleasant. You are a good writer and a good storyteller and thank you very much.
Another wonderful essay. If you’d like a historic precedent for the dangers of mono cropping, the Irish potato famine of 1845-1851 in which at least 1 million people died is a salutary lesson. Ireland today, alone of all European countries has less people than it had in 1845 (pop 9 million then approx 7 million today).
We don’t seem to learn...