None of this is inevitable. As pointed out early in this series, one of the reasons the prophets made predictions about the future was to change the behavior of their listening audiences so that what they were predicting would not take place. That is exactly the goal of this week's discussion; I want to give you an overview of actions Christian young people can take to help prevent any such future collapse of agriculture from taking place during your lifetimes or the lifetimes of your children and grandchildren.
To start off in this direction, consider the example of Joseph in the book of Genesis. The entire story of Joseph can be found in Genesis 37-50. In the middle of that story we find Joseph summoned from prison to interpret a deeply troubling dream of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Joseph told Pharoah that his dream was about the near future of Egypt. Seven years of abundant harvests were coming, to be followed immediately by seven years of poor harvests. Joseph then volunteered some advice: Save the extra produce from the seven good years and distribute it during the seven bad years. That will save Egypt from mass starvation. Pharoah was so impressed that he adopted Joseph's plan and enlisted Joseph to execute it. Joseph traveled throughout Egypt during the seven good years, setting up huge storage facilities in the cities of Egypt, organizing collection of excess grain and keeping track of the volumes put up for storage until the quantities grew so large that record-keeping became unmanageable. When the seven years of bad harvests began and the people of Egypt began to suffer, Pharaoh directed them to Joseph, who ordered the storehouses opened for sale of grain to the people.
This brief description raises tons of issues. The practical obstacles to accomplishing such a feat are so many it is hard to know where to begin. The story does not bother to address any of them because the purpose of the story is not to propose practical solutions for future agricultural catastrophes. Instead, the purpose of the story is to stimulate hope in times of looming catastrophe.
Here are reasons for hope:
1. Joseph's entire life up to the point of being summoned to interpret Pharaoh's dream had been a series of preparatory tests for just such a crisis. And he passed all the tests.
2. At the critical moment God provided Joseph with wisdom needed to prevent catastrophe.
3. At the critical moment, Pharaoh recognized the need for decisive action, recognized the wisdom of Joseph's proposed solution, and -- against many deep-seated Egyptian prejudices -- recognized Joseph's administrative talents and put the survival of the entire Egyptian kingdom in Joseph's hands.
4. Later, reflecting on his own rise to power in Egypt, Joseph put it this way: "God intended it for good, to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives." (Gen 50:20)
Several other worthwhile points should be noticed in this story:
- The story does not tell us how God gave Joseph the wisdom to interpret the dream or come up with practical steps to prevent catastrophe. One thing we can say for sure: Joseph did not get that wisdom from the Bible; none existed at the time. And given what we just said about the purpose of this story, we shouldn't be expecting to find in the Bible detailed proposals for the solutions to any other modern problems. If we become people with the same type of character as Joseph, we will be able to learn, grow, persevere, cooperate, offer our services to the unwilling and undeserving, and help discover and implement solutions to problems threatening ourselves, our neighbors and fellow humans generally. Thousands of other individuals, some Christians, some not, have already been joined in this task over many years, gathering wisdom painstakingly while trying to solve the problem of producing enough food. It would be foolish to ignore this collected wisdom. In short, we are talking about science and technology, collective efforts to understand how our world works and what we can do make it better.
- Joseph didn't rest satisfied with good intentions or vague pronouncements. He proposed a specific solution, and when offered the chance to execute, he took it and stuck with the responsibilities it required for at least 14 years. If your hopes for the near future are that angels and demons will finally reveal themselves and battle it out on planet earth while poor, helpless humanity cheers on the good guys from the sidelines, you won't get any comfort from Joseph's story. All you get there is lots of human sweat, fears, and exhiliration.
- Many modern Christians want to fill in the "blanks" in the Joseph story with things more like their own religious experience. For example, the Sights and Sounds Theater in Strasburg, PA put on a series of performances of the Joseph story this year. In their version Joseph evangelizes his future wife, leading to her conversion to Judaism. There are several scenes in which Joseph expresses his trust in God or otherwise uses pious language to explain his motives and desires. All of this is missing from the original story. This difference reveals the bankruptcy of some modern Christians' religious practice. Joseph story gets it right. When people ask "Show me the money," we need to produce deeds that benefit people, not confessions of our faith.
- Some of these same Christians will tell you that the proper response for Christians to the tragedies and sorrows of life in this world is to preach the gospel. But what they mean by preaching the gospel is just this: "tell people to believe in Jesus for the forgiveness of sins so they will go to heaven" -- after they starve to death or get butchered. IOW, concentrate on communicating the verbal message of eternal life, and don't get bogged down trying to fix problems in this life. The problem with this kind of Christianity is that it is not Christian. Christians don't get to choose between helping people in this world or the next. We are supposed to do both. Here again the Joseph story gets it right. When Joseph says God intended to save "many lives," he isn't talking about eternal life; he is talking about life in this world. Now, if the story is to be taken seriously in the context of modern Christians' beliefs about the afterlife, we have a serious conundrum. On the one hand, God intends to "save many lives." But there are no attempts on the part of Joseph or any of ther other Jewish participants in the story to convince any Egyptians that Yahweh is the one true God and that they ought to commit themselves to following him. And yet, many Christians will tell you that these Egyptian idolaters were all headed to hell. And God didn't tell Joseph or any of his family to share their faith with the Egyptians? Or they all disobeyed? Or the author of the story decided to leave that part out? Or, maybe God only intended to save their lives on earth and then have them all lost in hell forever? Or maybe he was really only interested in saving the lives of Joseph's family and the salvation of the Egyptians was a side-effect? These explanations can be combined in various ways as well, but personally I think they are all less likely alone or in combination than this explanation: The author of the story did not believe in an afterlife, or at least not in afterlife whose conditions depended on our behavior here. Therefore, the important thing, the thing that mattered for Joseph, his family, and all of Egypt, is that God would save their lives in the here and now. "Life here and now" mattered then; it matters now.
- Although the story focuses on Joseph's actions, it doesn't require much thought to realize that the task he was undertaking would be impossible without the support of Pharaoh and the cooperation of Egyptian society as a whole. This is a collective effort, not the heroism a "Superman." That Joseph obtained this cooperation from people who were taught not to trust or respect people of Joseph's background should give us hope.
Second, unlike the Joseph story, we do not live in a society essentially run by one person. Joseph persuaded Pharaoh, and that was enough. If it was good enough for Pharaoh, it was good enough for Egypt. While I may be overstating the case, ancient Egypt was still a much more top-down society than ours. In our society the opinions of the 300 some-odd million average Joes and Janes really matter, because they can vote and they can and do raise holy hell if they don't like their elected leaders' actions. That means that one Joseph won't cut it on our society; we need thousands of them, enough to generate a consensus about the urgency of the problem and the steps we should take to solve it.
Third, unlike the Joseph story, we do not live in a society that values tradition above novelty. You will notice that if Joseph actually proposed any startling new technologies, nothing is said about it. This is routine for that culture. People didn't like "new" ways. Modern Americans like to joke about yokels who dismiss new ideas with "We never did it that way before." In the ancient world this was no joke; it was standard operating procedure. People who introduced genuinely new technologies often had to hide the fact that they were new. If the Joseph story had explained all the new methods Joseph used to save Egypt, the ancient readers would have been so upset over the implied insults to their accepted way of life that they would have gotten bogged down arguing against Joseph's new ideas. The author of the story writes as if all the technologies and techniques already known and practiced by the Egyptians were more than sufficient to prepare them for the coming disaster. According to the story, Joseph provided leadership and one good, but not new, idea. The story's failure to offer any basic challenge to the traditional ancient Near Eastern way of doing things would have comforted the fears of its original readers: "See, the old ways really do work for us. We can fall back on our ancient wisdom in times of trouble and, with God's help, survive."
Our culture values innovations and richly rewards those who invent them. For us, the author's failure to give us details as to how Joseph pulled it off is disappointing, not comforting. We hope the characters learned something new about how to survive agricultural catastrophes. In fact, we would prefer the story gave us some good survival tips. This important difference does not mean we are better; in fact, we may be at a disability. Perhaps the most promising solutions to the coming food crisis involve doing a lot of things our more distant ancestors did rather than leaning ever more heavily on the latest and greatest new technologies. Maybe, maybe not. But I am sure of one huge advantage we have: Ours is a scientific culture, the ancient Near East was not. The difference is HUGE. It is by the standards of scientific investigation that we will be able to settle the question of what mix of new technologies and ancient practices will give us the best chance of preventing the coming food crisis. The ancients would have resorted to their traditions, their priests, or in desperate straits, blind luck.
Here I would like to introduce the first of many books I am going to recommend for your long-term benefit: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. This book argues the case for science as an indispensible tool for resolving disputes about how our world works and what we should do to make life in this world better. The book is written for ordinary people, not scientists or philosophers. A high-schooler can read the book and understand it. Odds are, you will learn more about how science is -- and should be -- practiced than you will/have from any 2 of the science courses you take in high school. You will also learn a good deal about the foolish habits of thinking human beings tend to fall into. He gives plenty of examples from all walks of life. Putting those two lessons together, Sagan hopes you will agree with him that unless we use scientific methods we human beings will almost certainly kill ourselves trying to solve our most important problems.
Some people may be put off that I am recommending to you a book by Carl Sagan, because it is well-known that he was an atheist and critical of conservative Christians. These are serious issues, but you need to understand that this book was written to promote science, not atheism. And it does a better -- and less offensive -- job than any other book I have read. It is fitting to recommend this book not only because it is excellent, but also because Sagan, unbeknownst to him I would expect, was a type of modern incarnation of Joseph. First, Sagan's family background was Jewish. Second, Sagan was an eminently positive individual, who proposed practical solutions to daunting technical problems and advised multiple presidents and congressional leaders about governmental policy. Third, Sagan was genuinely interested in the public welfare.
Keep Sagan's advice about the necessity of science in mind as we examine proposed solutions to the world's coming food crisis. For convenience sake, I'm going to divide up the proposed solutions into 2 groups:
Group 1:
"Make societies the rest of the world act more like modern American and western European societies. If we can accomplish that, the food problem will take care of itself."
The idea is that American and western European societies have figured out how to encourage people to find new solutions to the difficult problem of providing food for large populations of people who live in cities. Our whole culture, its values, the way we run our governments and economies, leads to our food prosperity. Sure, it helps to live in temperate zones with good soils, but our societies can produce abundant food even in places where the environment is not so favorable. In particular our society is willing to provide money for scientific research and to allow investors to start companies that develop and sell useful products derived from this research. The main reasons societies in other parts of the world fail to grow enough food for themselves are that bad governments and belief-systems discourage people from trying new ways to solve difficult problems and then punish them for trying to profit from making and selling products that use the new ideas.
Advocates of this group of solutions will point to new technologies, such as genetically-modified foods, as examples of solutions to problems that are a direct result of our society's reliance on science, technology, and free enterprise. As long as we continue to do this, our society will always have a surplus of new technologies available to deal with food problems.
The more other societies attempt to imitate us, the more brain power will be freed to find solutions to food problems specific to their environments and the more resources will become available to put the solutions to work. The solutions they come up with plus the solutions we have already discovered or will discover are enough to solve global food problems. Another way to put it is that all the losses I mentioned the last class, loss of minerals, loss of water, loss of good soil, loss of inexpensive fertilizer, loss of favorable climate, are not the real problems. All of these problems could be solved if the societies who are experiencing them acted more like us.
One well-known advocate of this approach was the late Julian Simon, who taught economics at a number of American universities. He wrote two books presenting his case: The Ultimate Resource and The Ultimate Resource II. In these books he argued that human ingenuity is the crucial resource -- the more humans, the better we will be able to solve our problems. Letting human population grow until food becomes scarce is good, because it forces people to exercise their creativity and come up with new ways to feed themselves. This is especially true in modern western societies, because we value science, technology, and free enterprise.
OK, so if we follow the "pro-technology, pro-free-enterprise" approach, what should we do? Here are some ideas:
- train yourself to become one of the following: Agriculture depends on all these sciences.
- a molecular biologist or biochemist - develops drugs and pesticides
- a genomics researcher - helps develop genetically-modified plants and animals that can thrive in difficult environments, use food better, resist diseases and pests
- an organic chemist - develops fertilizers
- an agricultural botanist - researches crops to find out what kinds of environments they grow best in
- a livestock veterinarian - helps farmers solve animal health problems
- a robotics engineer - develops "smart" agricultural equipment that can save money and time harvesting crops
- raise a large family and lavish your children with time, attention, discipline, and a good education.
- educate yourself on the benefits of modern technology as applied to agriculture, so that you can disprove the whacky solutions proposed by the people in Group 2
- become an advocate for science education in your community. Raise the issue of educational standards and attention to excellence in teaching with your school board, at every school board meeting if necessary, and publicly tell retired folks who complain in those same school board meetings about rising property taxes to stop trying to steal the country's future so they can spend a couple extra weeks in Florida.
- vote for candidates who will support funding of basic scientific research
- vote for candidates who are pro-business and anti-government regulation
- vote for candidates who are ready to reform insane US agricultural policies.
1. Simon says that whenever humans have faced a food crisis due to overpopulation they have always invented their way out of it, and there is every reason to believe we will continue to do into the indefinite future. Therefore, we shouldn't worry about it. The problem is, his premiss is false. Humans have NOT always invented their way out of food crises brought on by overpopulation. Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fall or Succeed, shows how past societies facing food problems fared. Some succeeded, others failed, leading to mass starvation. Simon is right that many of the societies that succeeded did so because they employed science, technology and free-enterprise. But there is no guarantee people will do that. Haiti is one prime modern example of a society that has NOT been doing that. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that science, technology, and free-enterprise will end up supporting the types of solutions that Simon favored. His theory about how human populations will never outgrow their food sources is not a biological theory, it is an economics theory. Biologists view people as a type of animal. It is a well-known biological fact that other species of animals go through cycles of population growth and shrinkage, and that one of the ways animal populations shrink is through starvation. Biologists are scientists, they have been employing the tool Simon says will lead to our deliverance from a food crisis. OK, so biologists have been using the tool, and their conclusion is that we can save ourselves by limiting our population. They prove his point about science by disproving his theory of population growth. Game, set, match.
2. Simon has plenty of fans who are not nearly as smart as he was. Some of his arguments were already shaky, and he took steps to qualify them. For example, he believed that we do need things like the Environmental Protection Agency. His followers, lacking his sophistication, want to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, take all our environmental laws off the books, and let American corporations police themselves. Unfortunately, Simon encouraged that kind of overreaction because he couldn't maintain balance in his own writings. Instead of being encouraged to deep thinking and more research, fans of his books have gotten intellectually lazy and irresponsible.
OK, time to move to Group 2.
Group 2: "Make preventive human population controls universal and change our food production systems so that they depend less on the technologies used in the last 70 years."
What unites this second group is two fundamental ideas:
1. There is a definite limit to the human population the earth can support over the long run. This limit can be partly increased by better technology, but only so far. It also depends on the individual impact of each living human being. That impact depends on how much of existing natural resources a human being consumes. It is a pretty good rule that the more technology a human employs, the more natural resources she consumes. That means, the more technologically advanced we become the fewer of us the earth can support in the long run. This is exactly the opposite of Julian Simon's belief. It also seems counter-intuitive, because as our technology has advanced so has human population. But there is no real problem here. The reason population has been able to increase is that we have been "mining," that is, using up, natural resources that took thousands or millions of years to accumulate in a matter of a few hundred years or less. We are busy stealing our grandchildren's and great-grandchildren's futures to support our own lifestyles. At some point there will be nothing left to steal. If that happens, the game is up and our technological society will collapse. Group 2 solutions all include some method of limiting or shrinking the human population of the world.
2. Modern agriculture, based on the industrial model, is unustainable. In order to produce large quantities of a few select crops cheaply and quickly, it consumes more energy than it produces, exhausts soil, encourages misuse of water and fertilizers, and creates conditions favorable to crop diseases and pests. You can't grow food like you build automobiles. Instead, we should learn more about the natural systems already operating in the areas in which we grow food and adapt our agricultural techniques to the local environment better. If we do this, we will reduce our need for fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, or genetically-modified organisms. Instead, we will make better use of things nature provides us "for free." Furthermore, we could save a great deal of energy and food if we didn't insist on transporting so much food half-way around the world. If people lived closer to the sources of their food, it would be better both for farmers and for consumers.
If you want to follow the Group2 approach, here are some suggested things to do:
- Consider becoming a farmer. See Joel Salatin's book You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise
- Everything listed for Group1, except for the part about educating yourself to disprove arguments from people in Group2. Group2 people believe just as firmly in science, technology and free-enterprise. They also happen to believe that these 3 cultural institutions point them away from the solutions favored by Julian Simon and his followers.
- Educate yourself on food production and the environment. You won't get very far into that effort before you discover that people following Simon's way of thinking are woefully ignorant of where our food comes from and what it costs us to get it. Start with Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. For further study, consider Lester Brown's World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse and Joel Salatin's Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front.
- Consider simplifying your lifestyle. The Amish and Mennonite communities are Christian examples of voluntary simplicity. You don't have to go as far the Amish either. A good place to start is to read and apply things from the book Living More with Less.
- If you decide to have children, consider a relatively small family, 2 or 3 children.
- If you don't have children of your own, consider a career as an educator or mentor of other people's children. You can do this as an avocation too (coaching, becoming a leader in a youth organiztion, etc.)
- Quiz your local grocery store manager regularly about 1.) how much food they are throwing out and where it is going (Read American Wasteland by Jonathan Bloom for real eye-opener on how much food our industrial-style agricultural system wastes) ; 2.) where they buy their vegetables, fruits and meats and dairy products from, and what they are doing to get more of these from local farmers.
- Alternatively, make farmers markets a regular part of your food shopping, or one better, start or join a local food coop that buys food directly from local farmers, and even better yet, start growing your own food via gardens and small-scale animal husbandry and sell/donate your excess harvests to the food coop.
- Embark on a study of Christian hospitality. Look into doing things like being a foster parent, adopting orphans from war-torn or famine-ravaged countries, opening your home as a short-term shelter for battered women, inviting older relatives to live with you when they become sickly or widowed. If you are really adventurous, you could become part of the sanctuary movement (underground railroad of the 20-21st centuries), housing illegal immigrants who have fled dangerous situations in their homelands but are denied refugee status by the US government. Yes, this is usually illegal, but may be the right thing to do in some cases. However radical you may get with these efforts, it will be nothing compared to the hospitality needs Americans will be facing if a flood of refugees escaping famine swarms into our country.
- become an advocate for science education in your community. Raise the issue of educational standards and attention to excellence in math and science teaching with your school board, at every school board meeting if necessary, and publicly tell retired folks who complain in those same school board meetings about rising property taxes to stop trying to steal the country's future so they can spend a couple extra weeks in Florida. (Yes, this is the same advice you'd get from somebody in Group 1.)
- Vote for candidates who support universal family planning, including cheap or free contraceptives, to everyone who wants it worldwide.
- Vote for candidates who support sustainable development of our economy, including conservation of natural resources.
- Join with members of Group1 in voting for candidates who are ready to reform insane US agricultural policies (Yes, supporters of Group 1 agree on this issue.)
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