Author: R. Ross

Fragilecologies Archive
1 January 1996

Today we seem to have a love affair going on with dinosaurs.
Godzilla and Jurassic Park, among other movies, have whetted an
interest in life on earth millions of years ago. Reflecting that
interest is the fact that American businesses are making lots of money using dinosaurs as the theme for their products, from toys to computer
games to clothing for kids.

Researchers are spending considerable time, energy, and even
computing power on trying to identify what it was that brought
about the extinction of the dinosaurs. Scientists have suggested that
a comet hit the earth 65 million years ago, sending up large quantities
of dust into the atmosphere, thereby cooling down temperatures sharply
and quickly. An inability to adjust to such rapid and drastic
environmental changes, they say, brought about the demise of the
dinosaurs.

Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson put forth his view on what happened to dinosaurs: He suggested they disappeared because they had taken up smoking cigarettes.

Today, there are many species that are similar to the dinosaur:
the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the manatee,
dolphins, sharks, iguanas, lizards, armadillos, kangaroos, and so
forth. They are being hunted to extinction. They have been hunted for
their tusks, skins, teeth, and for hunting entertainment.

This suggests a paradox to me. On the one hand we “worship” the
ancient dinosaurs and animals, while on the other hand we are in
the process of exterminating animals (not to mention plant species) in
our own time.

If dinosaurs lived

How would we have treated dinosaurs, had they survived until now?
Would they be on the endangered species list? Would poachers be
as active in hunting down dinosaurs as they are today with other
animals? To what extent would society at large really care about the
fate of the dinosaurs? Would it be left to “bleeding heart”
environmentalists to lead the fight to preserve them — even if only in
Jurassic-like theme parks?

I have the feeling that, had dinosaurs survived until the twentieth century, we would have hunted them to extinction by the 1990s, had they not already been killed off tens of millions of years ago by a comet-related climate change. The same debates going on now between those who seek to preserve various animals, species, or natural areas and those who want to hunt them would likely have gone on over how to deal with dinosaurs, if indeed there were any left to save.

Zoo and videos

Civilization seems to find it totally acceptable to replace animals in the wild with representatives of their species in zoos. And, with the advent of video cameras and VCRs, it may come to pass that it will suffice for most people to see the animals that are presently under the threat of extinction on video film and not in zoo parks or in nature reserves. Even better, perhaps before the extinction of animals that appear to be survivors of the dinosaur era, like the rhino and the alligator, some inventor will develop a way to put the smells of the natural environment onto videos (sort of a video version of “scratch and sniff”) so that we can get the full, simulated effect of having visited a zoo without leaving our living room couches.

Today, lots of animals and plants are threatened with extinction and, as with the dinosaurs, we know that “extinction is forever.”
We’ve come to love many of these animals, and honor them as, for
example, in the stuffed animals we buy for our kids, or in movies such
as “The Lion King.” Why can’t we show the same level of interest in — and compassion for — the real thing, while they still roam the earth?
It’s not too late for many species.

Fragilecologies Archive
23 October 1995

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry has gone to three researchers (Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina, and Sherwood Rowland) who have had a long association with scientific research on the possible impacts of manufactured chemicals on stratospheric ozone.

Their studies go back to the early 1970s, when they hypothesized that even small amounts of chlorofluorocarbons, popularly known as CFCs and as Freons (a trade name), could destroy large amounts of stratospheric ozone. In fact, chlorine molecules in the stratosphere earned the dubious honor of being labeled as “ozone-eaters.”

By now, most Americans, as well as many others around the globe, have come to realize that certain industrial chemicals can have negative effects on the ozone layer. They may know it from the numerous articles that have appeared in newspapers and magazines or from news clips on television. A thinning of the ozone layer will increase the amount of ultraviolet rays from the sun that reach the earth’s surface. This thinning puts humans and most other living organisms at increased risk to various types of skin cancer.

Not surprisingly, a few scientists continue to challenge the large amount of scientific evidence of ozone depletion, and they have denounced the Nobel Prize Committee’s selection of these atmospheric chemists as nothing more than a political act.

All this hoopla, pro and con, about the selection of these researchers notwithstanding, there is yet another aspect of this particular award that needs to be brought to light. In my mind, this award rings loud and clear as a Nobel prize FOR the environment.

<p>There have been intermittent demands during the past ten years or so for the creation of a special Nobel award for the environment, along with those already given for peace, medicine, chemistry, physics, and economics. But to date, such calls have not been taken seriously.

It is time to renew our demands for a special Nobel Prize for the Environment.  We have learned a lot about the workings of the earth’s environment during the past century, and that body of knowledge is still growing. As part of that learning, we have come to realize just how fragile the Earth is. We have seen how easy it is to destroy forests, create deserts, pollute bodies of water, and even make large bodies of water disappear. We have also seen how costly it has been to do so &#8212; costly in terms of both human suffering and environmental destruction.

In addition to recognizing the environment as the focus of many of the world’s most pressing problems, it would be a great gesture to the generations who will manage the planet in the 21st century to honor those whose efforts are related directly to improving the environment, such as individual scientists, activists, governmental, and nongovernmental groups. It would also be a great gesture to make on behalf of Alfred Nobel.

Let’s see if we can convince the Nobel committee to create an environmental prize by 1999! You can contact them at the following address: Nobel Foundation, Sturegatan 14, Postfack 5232, S-102 45 Stockholm, Sweden.

Fragilecologies Archive
9 October 1995

A few decades ago, the leaders of the Soviet Union set into motion the planning process for the possible diversion of northward-flowing Siberian rivers to the arid southern part of their country. The diversions would water the desert sands of the Kyzylkum desert in Central Asia. It was proposed in the days when Soviet leaders were out to dominate nature. In fact, Khrushchev once said that his country could not wait for nature to provide its fruits to society and that his society was ready to take those fruits … using its national technological prowess.

There was considerable debate over the wisdom of such diversions. Many Soviet geographers, soil scientists, and writers, among others, opposed the diversions, citing the adverse environmental impacts that would ensue. Some even suggested that diverting large amounts of fresh river water from flowing naturally into the Arctic Ocean could ultimately lead to the melting of Arctic Sea ice and a change in global climate.

When Gorbachev came to power in the mid-1980s, he implemented a policy of glasnost, or openness. Thus, debates that had taken place only in journals or in closed meetings were exposed to the public, in both the Soviet Union and in countries around the globe. Environmentalists rallied to the side of those opposed to the diversions. Gorbachev cancelled plans to undertake the diversion of the Siberian rivers.

Gorbachev’s decision upset leaders of the Soviet Central Asia Republics, especially Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan who, in essence, were trying to cope with the environmental impacts of regional river diversions and wanted retribution. Their land surrounds the Aral Sea, which, as we now know, is drying up at an unnatural rate of speed because increasing amounts of water from the rivers that feed the Aral Sea had been diverted since 1960 to grow irrigated cotton and rice in the desert sands. With no water flowing into the Sea, evaporation took its toll on the remaining sea water. The Central Asian leaders expected that Siberian water would eventually make up for their sacrifice of the Aral Sea. At least, that is what they believed that the leaders in Moscow owed them for sacrificing their land to grow cotton to feed the textile mills in the Russian part of the Soviet Union.

Today, the Sea lays dying. The Siberian river diversion project is dead. End of Story. Or is it? Like a poltergeist, the river diversion project is back — to the surprise of everyone.

An Uzbek Government poster display showing the declining levels of the Aral Sea over the last several decades. Photo by M.H. Glantz, taken in Nukus, Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan in September 1995.

At a regional heads-of-state meeting on the Aral Sea crisis, organized by the United Nations Development Programme in mid-September 1995 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the Russian Minister for the Environment told the presidents of the Central Asian Republics that Russia was now prepared to provide them with water, either from the Volga River or from other Russian rivers in Siberia. This was interpreted as a renewal of the old, grandiose scheme to move large amounts of water to solve Central Asia’s water problems. The Russians, however, were talking about selling water for drinking purposes and only in relatively limited amounts. They had also gone to the World Bank with this proposal last July, seeking Bank funding for the building of the pipeline. The Bank turned down the proposal. But now, leaders in
Central Asia have been brought into the act, calling once again for water from Siberia or the Volga, water that they believe is owed to them by the Russian government that succeeded that of the former Soviet Union.

At a press conference, President Karimov of Uzbekistan applauded the
Russian offer, as did President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan. Everyone else
in the audience was shocked by the offer. Was it loose talk? Was it authorized by Yeltsin? No one yet knows. But, despite the radical political shifts of the past decade, it seems that the desire to dominate nature at almost all costs is still viewed as an option in Moscow as well as in Central Asian capitals. Apparently, plans to divert water from somewhere in Russia to Central Asia may still be alive and well in the minds of political leaders who are in a position to make it happen.

Fragilecologies Archives
5 June 1995

There is a transition afoot that we are missing. It is subtle. It is creeping. It is happening. Money that had been going to economic development activities in recent decades is increasingly going to relief operations. In fact, a recent article in the British magazine, The Economist, noted that “disasters are a growth industry. More and more aid is being diverted from development to emergency relief.”

In this day and age, when even the rich industrialized countries are
claiming to be poor, there seems to be a retreat from investing in economic development activities. In part, this may be a result of the collapse of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Before the end of the Cold War, each ideological position was backed up by foreign assistance in order to foster capitalism or communism of different stripes. For example, Cuba received considerable direct and indirect support from the Soviet Union, its strongest ally in the midst of the American sphere of influence. In the hope of containing or “rolling back” communism, the US gave assistance to those leaders who supported our policies abroad, if not our type of political system.

In part it may also be a result of donor fatigue — that is, countries and international organizations that were providing economic development assistance to developing countries, having seen little progress toward any semblance of economic self-sufficiency, have become more reluctant to “invest” their resources. Wars and corruption, among other chronic problems, have also served to turn constituents in donor countries away from putting additional funds into situations that may appear hopeless.

Paralleling this shift away from development assistance is the shift
toward disaster assistance. There seems to be an increasing number of disasters around the globe that demand the attention of donor nations. These disasters, unlike demands for economic development assistance, play on the humanitarian heartstrings of potential donors. Often the disasters affect the poorest in a society, those least likely to be able to take care of themselves. They need help if they are to survive.

Many of these disasters are of human origin, or at the least have a
human contributing factor. Often, poor land-use practices have led to a
decline in soil fertility and an associated decline in agricultural production. Under normal conditions, people are able to live on the margin, producing barely enough food to feed their families. However, with the onset of a drought, these people cannot feed themselves, although they continue to try. The end result is an accelerated degradation of the land, a failure to sustain themselves, the abandonment of the land and homestead, and a search for help.

Wars and other armed conflicts often have the same effect when, for
example, large tracts of farmlands are put off limits because of the indiscriminate planting of land mines. In case of either drought or war, the end result is often similar.

People often flock to feeding centers that have been set up by humanitarian organizations, usually non-governmental ones such as the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, Oxfam, or Feed the Children. In essence, they become wards of the international donor community, awaiting handouts and largesse from relatively rich countries — if and when they decide to dole it out.

With monies being in scarce supply during the post-Cold War period, and with the increase in the number of conflicts around the globe, the
pool of funds available for the attainment of long-term economic development objectives is being increasingly shunted to ad hoc, stop-gap humanitarian efforts to get the poorest of the poor through the life-threatening crisis at hand, usually a famine sparked by conflict or drought or exposure to the elements of refugees from conflict.

It is difficult to say what the situation will be like in, say, twenty or forty years, but the signs that are appearing at the end of the 20th century are sending me an ominous message. The international community will eventually be, for the most part, focused on responding to the disasters of the day, regardless of cause.

Making a bad situation even worse is the tendency of impoverished governments to abandon their welfare responsibilities to their own citizens. This puts an additional burden on humanitarian relief organizations to take care of those unfortunates — such as the elderly, children, infirm, and handicapped — for indefinite periods into the future.

A Chinese proverb (paraphrased) suggests that “if you give a person
a fish she will eat today. If you teach her how to fish, she will feed
herself forever.” It seems that a combination of post-Cold War factors
— an increase in conflicts, increasing population pressures, deteriorating environments and (possibly) global warming and climate change — have pushed us back to the equivalent of “giving a person a fish” and away from the more long-term policy of teaching people how to fish. The latter is likely to be a less costly and more humanitarian strategic policy in the long run.

Fragilecologies Archives
10 April 1995

We’ve been hearing a lot more these days about free riders. The notion of a free rider is used in economics to describe someone who does not contribute to payments for services that have been provided, even if he or she benefits from those services. According to economists, they pose a dilemma to those who favor the free market as well as to Marxists.

There are endless examples where we should oppose free riders; for instance, people who slack off at work expect to have much of their work done by fellow workers, even though they will receive the same salary; those who sneak across subway turnstiles avoid paying the fare, although someone else will have to; some do not pay for dams to be constructed, although they will benefit from them by getting flood protection, and so on.

Today, it seems that all organizations are moving in the direction of the pay-as-you-go concept. Pay you must, if you are to be provided a service. Yet not everyone has the ability to pay, although they have a need for that service … for food, for energy, for a place to live. What then? What happens to these people?

My question is this: What’s wrong with free riders? If I can pay for
a service from which I receive benefits and if the service is fully supported, why not allow free riders also to have that service? The challenge is to separate the free riders from the freeloaders.

There are people in our society (not just the poor, the elderly, or
the unemployed) who may not have the ability to pay. With little impact
on others who pay, some free-riding can be permitted. A Buddhist saying goes as follows: “One candle can light many others without diminishing
itself.” In the same way, free riders can be allowed. The problem is how to decide how many free riders can be allowed without degrading or bankrupting the service. Another problem relates to deciding who is
to be an accepted free rider.

What I think concerns most people, however, is the notion of freeloading; that is, setting out to be a free rider to “beat the system.” This has nothing to do with the ability of the freeloader to pay.

There is a big difference in reality, if not in economics theory, between free riders and freeloaders. Let’s look at the global warming issue as an example.

It seems that the industrialized countries want all countries in the
world, rich and poor alike, to make sacrifices in order to reduce their
emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In fact, Australian
representatives at the Berlin Climate Change Conference, meeting now, called on developing countries to make sacrifices to reduce their emissions of such gases. Reductions in these emissions will reduce the rate at which human activities may heat up the earth’s atmosphere.

Combining the fact that industrialized countries have to date produced the lion’s share of greenhouses gases with the fact that they have the scientific, technological, and financial capabilities to attack the global warming problem, shouldn’t they be the ones to take the first and biggest steps toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Instead, they want other countries to carry their “fair” share of the burden of greenhouse gas reduction. Although poor countries may be free riders, they are not freeloaders.

Should we expect Rwanda, for example, or Bosnia, or Bangladesh, to lower their present-day quality of life in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Should African countries, on their own initiative, using their own scarce resources, try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the expense of trying to provide their citizens with, at the least, a subsistence-level ability to feed, house, and clothe themselves?

As an industrialized society, we ought to be more concerned about freeloaders than about free riders. In the long run, free riders can enrich the humanitarian aspects of our society.

Fragilecologies Archives
10 November 1994

When Vice President Gore was a Senator, he wrote a book called “Earth in the Balance.” In it he focused on the fate of the Aral Sea, in the Central Asian part of the former Soviet Union. That sea’s level has declined about 50 feet since 1960.

The reason for the decline relates to the large amount of water diverted from the rivers that feed the sea. The water is used to irrigate a few key cash crops such as cotton. At the same time in a nearby sea, something else was happening.

The Caspian Sea level has quietly increased about 8 feet since the late 1970s. To local inhabitants along the sea’s coast, the rising level has been anything but quiet. Coastal villages have been inundated at the same time that inland villages have become coastal ones.

Although its impacts have been locally devastating, it has received
little attention in the media. The sea is the size of France and is getting larger each day.

The Caspian Sea is sandwiched between exotic Central Asia and the southernmost part of European Russia. The world-renowned Volga River has its delta in the northern part of the Caspian Sea, where it terminates its thousand-mile journey through Russia.

By the mid-1970s, the Caspian Sea had reached its lowest level in recent times. As the sea declined, human activities, such as farming, were shifted onto the newly exposed seabed.

The Soviet government responded with engineering solutions, developing plans to bring water to the sea from wetter parts of the Soviet Union. By the late 1970s, the level of the Caspian Sea unexpectedly began to increase and has continued to do so at a rate of about 6 inches per year.

Some Russian scientists have suggested that the level of the Caspian
will continue to rise for at least a century, while others think that it will stabilize by the end of this century.

The author of a 1994 book on the Caspian Sea (“Global and Regional
Climate Interaction: The Caspian Sea Experience”), Dr. Sergei Rodionov,
a research associate at the University of Colorado, points out that assessments of the historical record of Caspian Sea level suggest that, with a warmer global climate, the Caspian Sea would decline in level. Yet it is going the other way, and scientists are somewhat baffled by its cause. Several research projects are under way to identify the causes of the changes in sea level.

The Caspian Sea used to be the focus of concern of only two countries: the Soviet Union and Iran. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, however, new countries now border the sea: Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. Parts of Russia (Kalmykia and Dagestan) are also adversely affected. Managing the resources of the Sea has thus become politically much more complicated. Presently, the main concern of the newly formed governments is how to maximize oil production. The Caspian seabed is considered to be oil-rich, perhaps even rivaling the Persian Gulf.

Environmental problems are mounting: coastal inundation because of sea-level rise, water pollution by raw sewage and oil production, pollution and fishing pressure, and impacts on fish populations (especially sturgeon, the main source of high-value caviar). But, whose sea is it now? Which country has responsibility for stabilizing the sea level, or reducing water pollution, or protecting fish?

The countries in the region are faced with a multifaceted environmental situation that involves both natural and human causes. Because no one country, acting alone, has the resources to adequately address — let alone resolve — the situation, there is an urgent need for cooperation among the circum-Caspian countries in using science, politics, and economics to deal with regional creeping environmental problems and their societal consequences.

Meanwhile, not too far eastward from the rising Caspian Sea, the Aral Sea lays dying.

Photo: M.Glantz, former Karakalpak fishing village

Fragilecologies Archives
10 March 1994

Grandiose military strategies are designed by nations as much to deter aggression as to undertake it. In the post-World War II Cold War era, foreign policy strategists designed a policy of Containment — contain communist regimes within their borders so that the ideology of communism could not be spread.

This policy was followed in 1954 by one of “Massive Retaliation.”
The idea here was to avoid having the free world nibbled to death by creeping communist-inspired wars, such as the Korean War in the early 1950s. If you cross some unspecified threshold, you would be met not with an equal and opposite force but with a massive strike — all or nothing.

Following that, with the election of a new president (each president
seems to want to define his/her own unique military doctrine), then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara proposed counterforce as an anticommunist strategy. The basic idea is that military might would focus on the military might of the enemy and not on its citizens. Thus, cities were not to be attacked directly but were more or less to be held hostage (a trump card, so-to-speak) if all else failed to deter the enemy.

To strike at people was called a countervalue strategy; i.e., terrorizing a population in order to convince an enemy government to avoid initiating a conflict altogether or letting them know that, if counterforce failed, countervalue would be implemented. Countervalue is a totally different but not uncommon approach to winning a military conflict. It resorts to terrorizing the populace. Perhaps the best example of this today is the Serbian siege of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

What is the military objective of mortar attacks on marketplaces and sniping at people seeking food and water on the streets and in the alleyways? Clearly, this siege is designed to break the will of the Bosnian Muslims, not to defeat them militarily on the battlefield. War stinks. But war on innocent people stinks even more so. Such attacks are not crimes against an enemy; they are crimes against humanity.

With the end of the Cold War and the retreat by former superpowers
from resorting to proxy wars (using other countries as stand-ins, such
as North and South Vietnam, North and South Korea, East and West Germany, etc.), a new strategy seems to have emerged — counterEarth. This strategy involves wanton attacks on the Earth, allegedly in the name of some sort of military objective or financial gain. The use of drift nets trapping anything that crosses their paths or the indiscriminant use of mercury in the search for gold in the Amazon rainforests are examples of counterEarth activities.

One of the most recent examples would be the Kuwait fires, when retreating Iraqi troops torched about 700 oil wells. This was a counterEarth strategy which had nothing to do with the Iraqi war effort. It was an attack on the Earth, pure and simple.

Photograph of a watercolor drawn by a Kuwaiti child of the 1991 Kuwait oil fires, exhibited at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 1992.

Another example is the present-day indiscriminant use of land mines.
There are now estimated to be about 100 million of them in the ground worldwide, and the number is growing. They continue to function long after conflicts have ended. They make unsuspecting people working the land their victims, and they render large expanses of territory useless for human activity. While they cost only a few dollars to buy, the cost of removing them is on the order of a thousand dollars each. Even if one could afford to have them removed, there are not enough experts in the world to do so. It would take centuries to dig up those that have already been “planted.”

Another example of counterEarth is Iraq’s pursuit of a strategy of
draining swamps in the southern part of its country. The purpose is to
destroy the ecosystem that supports the culture and provides the livelihood for the so-called swamp Arabs, who have opposed the rule of Saddam Hussein.

Yet another example is the declining level of the Aral Sea. In this
non-conflict situation, political leaders in the old Soviet Union and,
today, in the newly independent Central Asian Republics, seem not to care at all about saving the Aral Sea, once the fourth largest inland sea in the world (now, it is seventh). While formal statements to save the sea are plentiful, political behavior suggests other motives will win out. As one small reason why, they see the sea water as providing no benefits to their economies, whereas the river water that flows into the sea can be diverted to grow cash crops such as cotton and rice.

Whereas counterforce and countervalue strategies are solely military
doctrines, counterEarth is a strategy that has been resorted to in both
war and in peacetime. It is something to watch for in future years, as
the number of small wars around the globe tends to increase and as the
pressures on governments to achieve higher levels of economic development mount.

Fragilecologies Archives
27 January 1994

It seems that societies, in an attempt to drive their populations to greater achievements, have often resorted to the use of such notions as frontiers and breadbaskets.

The mention of frontiers tends to spark those with adventurous spirits to go to those frontiers and push them beyond their present limits. It’s partly a conquest thing. Frontiers afford new opportunities to develop, exploit, hide, start anew, and so forth. The American historian Frederick Jackson Turner developed a hypothesis about frontiers. Throughout the history of North America, there have been several frontiers to conquer — or to explore and then conquer. Many frontiers have been identified — on earth, the oceans; in medicine, the human body; in space, other galaxies. It seems that whenever we as individuals, bureaucracies, or nations become bored or confined, we search for new frontiers toward which to turn our attention.

The truth of the matter is that new frontiers are almost limitless. They are identified and pursued, if not in the name of resources to exploit or ideologies or people to dominate, then in the name of knowledge. Deserts may become a “new” frontier to those who see the earth’s population numbers as being beyond the land’s physical carrying capacity. As a result, scientists, among others, turn their attention toward ecosystems that are neglected after having achieved frontier status in earlier times, to see if there may be new ways to eke out some benefit from further exploitation of that environment. Where can we put the surplus populations (beyond carrying capacity)? Let’s try the deserts (where, by the way, civilizations began).

In a similar fashion, the notion of the breadbasket also provides a stimulus to societies to improve certain aspects of their quality of life, most notably food production. Today, America is seen as the breadbasket of the world. It produces surplus amounts of food which it then shares (sells) to others (those who can afford to pay for it and, to a much lesser extent, to those who are in need).

Breadbaskets have been identified in other parts of the globe as well. For example, the southern Sudan’s Gezira scheme was identified as one; Ethiopia’s Awash Valley as another. The latter two were identified as potential breadbaskets by donor countries seeking to invest in the Third World. In the former Soviet Union, the Ukraine was considered a breadbasket for the USSR, as was the region of the Virgin Lands scheme in western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan.

The truth of the matter is that there are few areas that can be viewed as real breadbaskets. While there may be all kinds of hopes and desires placed on finding such bioregions, they are seldom realized. Either the technology could not deliver what had been promised, or the soils were not as robust as scientists, development specialists, or politicians thought. A variety of factors mitigated against converting that perceived potential into a highly productive region.

So the notion of “breadbasket” has been used to push a different kind of frontier forward, to prompt people to produce more from lands that, in most cases, cannot sustain higher levels of production, or to find ways to bioengineer new kinds of edible products.

In addition, to keep some of these breadbaskets productive (not necessarily fertile), considerable amounts of inputs are often required in the form of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, irrigation facilities, and technologies imported from different regions. Thus, the cost of keeping alive a sustainable breadbasket may far outweigh the cost of seeking other ways and places in which to eke out increased agricultural production from the land.

So, frontiers and breadbaskets are really a state of mind. Anything that is a challenge can be considered a “new” frontier. Each generation determines what its frontiers (or challenges) will be. They can be found inside a white blood cell, in the Milky Way, in cleaning up our waste, in the history of the Middle Ages, or in our minds. Each frontier (such as bioengineering new foods) attracts different people whose interest in challenges are piqued by them. They are not in short supply. And as long as some of us think about challenges, they will be there to conquer.