Politicizing the Environmental Debate, 2000–2017 265
“We also are looking at soil microbes to alle-
viate plant stress, weather-related nutritional
problems, and new ways to protect seeds from
fungal diseases and insects. We want farmers to
have the tools to mitigate changes in weather
and environment.”Source: Gil Gullickson, “@#$*% Weather! No, it’s
@#$*% climate change!” Successful Farming, Oct. 2014,
pp. 35-36.develop models, and to talk to other scientists
about what we needed to do for the future,” says
Robb Fraley, Monsanto’s executive vice presi-
dent and chief technology officer.
“They found even small 1°F. to 2°F. changes on a
microclimate level can prompt an insect to hatch
or a disease to infest a field,” he says.
“So, we put more effort into breeding for dis-
ease and breeding for insect traits,” says Fraley.
Document 178: John R. Gillis on the Sand Crisis (2014)
The world is running out of the beach-quality sand we need to build our cities. An essential ingredient in
concrete, glass, and silicon, this sand is almost as crucial for modern life as clean water and plentiful energy. In
parts of Asia and Africa widespread illegal sand-mining supplies a huge black market.
John Gillis, the author of The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History, notes that some of this precious beach-
quality sand is being used to restore our shorelines—an oft-times questionable and wasteful use of a precious
commodity.To those of us who visit beaches only in sum-
mer, they seem as permanent a part of our nat-
ural heritage as the Rocky Mountains and the
Great Lakes. But shore dwellers know differ-
ently. Beaches are the most transitory of land-
scapes, and sand beaches the most vulnerable of
all. During big storms, especially in winter, they
can simply vanish, only to magically reappear in
time for the summer season.
It could once be said that “a beach is a place
where sand stops to rest for a moment before
resuming its journey to somewhere else,” as the
naturalist D. W. Bennett wrote in the book “Liv-
ing With the New Jersey Shore.” Sand moved
along the shore and from beach to sea bottom
and back again, forming shorelines and barrier
islands that until recently were able to repair
themselves on a regular basis, producing the illu-
sion of permanence.
Today, however, 75 to 90 percent of the
world’s natural sand beaches are disappear-
ing, due partly to rising sea levels and increased
storm action, but also to massive erosion caused
by the human development of shores. Many
low-lying barrier islands are already submerged.
Yet the extent of this global crisis is obscured
because so-called beach nourishment projects
attempt to hold sand in place and repair the
damage by the time summer people return, cre-
ating the illusion of an eternal shore.
Before next summer, endless lines of dump
trucks will have filled in bare spots and restored
dunes. Virginia Beach alone has been restored
more than 50 times. In recent decades, East
Coast barrier islands have used 23 million loads
of sand, much of it mined inland and the rest
dredged from coastal waters — a practice that
disturbs the sea bottom, creating turbidity that
kills coral beds and damages spawning grounds,
which hurts inshore fisheries.
The sand and gravel business is now growing
faster than the economy as a whole. In the United
States, the market for mined sand has become
a billion-dollar annual business, growing at 10
percent a year since 2008. Interior mining opera-
tions use huge machines working in open pits to
dig down under the earth’s surface to get sand
left behind by ancient glaciers. But as demand
has risen — and the damming of rivers has
held back the flow of sand from mountainous