Controlling Nature 2 3propagation. Prairie grass depends on fire in order to rejuvenate and
come back stronger.
Countless such phenomena are well known, and yet, more often
than not, wisdom about the planet seems to be limited to hindsight.
From Mesopotamia, the Dust Bowl, glyphosate, antibiotics, dicamba,
DDT, the Amazon, and more, one overarching lesson never changes—
attempting to control the environment and its inevitable response
eventually fails.
A decade ago, while traveling the dry, open plains of Burkina Faso
in Africa, I watched gusts of wind blow plastic bags across the road as
though they were tumbleweeds. The Burkinabé professor hosting me
commented that plastic had become a threat to ruminant animals like
cattle, sheep, and goats. The bags were gumming up their digestion,
causing a host of problems including bloating, weight loss, and reduced
milk production. Similarly, plastic in soil was preventing water from
percolating and seeds from sprouting.
From plastic bags, the conversation turned to the more general
problem of refuse piling up in countries around the world. In one
such country, though it could have been many, I recounted climbing
a riverbank covered in garbage to reach a small city originally built to
overlook the river. The seeming acceptance of trash with its insidious
environmental consequence and diminished quality of life perplexed
me. To my question about why this was being tolerated, my colleague
responded: “If one chooses not to see the problem, is it still a problem?”
Nowhere is his question more illuminating than with global warming,
the most existential problem facing the Earth’s inhabitants—starting
with ourselves, the human race. How carbon dioxide can retain heat in
the atmosphere was known more than 5 years ago. In the early s,
scientists were already concerned with gases and other residues from
burned fossil energy trapped in the atmosphere and possibly altering
the Earth’s climate. In the 6 s, President Johnson brought the matter
before Congress. Only when crop failures, drought, and famine drew
attention to changes in climate in the s did the threat of a warming
planet even appear on the global radar.
Scientists have provided volumes of peer-reviewed analyses on ris-
ing temperatures and sea levels, glacial melting, thermal expansion, and
elevated levels of carbon dioxide in our oceans and atmosphere. Among