War on Evolution

Those folks at Monsanto, always making with the funny:

MonsantoCo @ethicurean Unfortch some are resistant. We work with academics to figure out how to effectively combat resistance. http://bit.ly/10zPHs

F*ing hilarious.

Look, resistance is an evolutionary process, not a fixed f*ing trait. You can't end the development of resistance in short-lived, ubiquitous species like herbaceous perennials and crop pest insects unless you put a complete end to every single individual/mating pair of the species that's capable of reproduction. Can't be done.

And if it could be done, if we managed to make whole inconvenient species extinct, that would probably end up being an ecological disaster. You might be thinking, 'But Natasha, humans cause species to go extinct all the time. What do you mean it can't be done.' Here goes.

Large, waddling, flightless birds: extinctable.

Predators that depend on big, tasty, easy to spot herbivores: extinctable.

Enormous, slow-growing trees: extinctable.

Chemically sensitive amphibians: extinctable.

Cute, tiny mint plants that only live at the edges of seasonal, rain-filled ponds in a small part of California: extinctable.

Mosquitoes: like the poor, they will always be with us.

Mice: when we finally have space colonies, they will have mice.

Crabgrass: at the end of the world, when the sun is about to die and burn the inner planets to a crisp, there will be crabgrass.

Cockroaches: after the end of the world, when the sun has burned the inner planets to a crisp, a last few cockroaches may still be hanging around, licking at the crabgrass cinders.

Am I getting a pattern across? Pest organisms are likely to be exactly the most change-tolerant, widespread and prolific of species. Some of them will survive, and they will adapt to the herbicide, and then you will eventually have to go and find a new one.

In the meantime, that herbicide which can kill most of the most resilient species has meant Götterdämmerung and good night for the cute little rare mint and the delicate salamander. Which means less competition for the crabgrass and cockroaches, which might not have been able to move into so many areas had more specialized species survived the human onslaught.

Yet how, how does Monsanto propose to deal with these problems? From a page on the site they linked to:

Monsanto and university weed scientists have also identified specific common factors that are often present in areas where glyphosate resistance has developed. These factors are:

• Limited or no crop rotation
• Limited or no tillage practices
• A high dependency on glyphosate alone or a limited use of other herbicides, and
• Reduced rates of glyphosate

Limited rotation, with you on that one. Insufficient tillage ... erm, isn't chemical no-till the thing your puppet in the House of Representatives, Rep. Collin Peterson, something you're lobbying to get subsidy money to producers for? And, frak me, a limited use of other herbicides? Isn't the selling point of this junk supposed to be that it reduces herbicide use?

Oh, wait, no. You have got to be f*ing kidding me. Reduced glyphosate use causes weed resistance? How bloody well convenient. And profitable.

Farmers in the Asian tropics, a very long time ago, developed methods of farming that were both highly productive and resilient to pests. If you've ever been in the tropics, you know that there's no escaping the bugs and the plants aren't less pushy, just slower. Their methods, which involved building soil organic matter and using the biodiverse cultivation patterns that can be observed in nature, eventually became what we here know as organic farming.

With the kind of coordinated breeding and cultivation technique research we can do now, as well as our ready access to such a diverse plant genome and extremely clever methods of farming that provided an abundance of pre-industrial food, it's possible to create agricultural ecosystems that work with the process of evolution. Ones that can feed the whole world now, without destroying our ability to feed the whole world in the future.

You can work with evolution, or evolution will work you. But it stops for no one.

(Photo credit: Neil T on Flickr.)