A few years after World War Two a farmer in the Cotswolds was persuaded to buy a load of what we then called ‘artificial’, the new chemical fertiliser that farmers were under pressure to use in order to push up yields, to solve an obsolete wartime food-supply problem. The farmer noted how it stung his hands, decided not to use it, and his farm went on to become a noted supplier of organic produce. I was shown the stack of dilapidated fertiliser bags, still in the shed, and bought the most delicious meat I have ever tasted, or will now ever taste, since I am now a vegan. He was out on his own then, and essentially still is. It is the farming orthodoxy now that it is necessary to use chemical fertilisers, insecticides, fungicides and herbicides in order to farm successfully, and I have spent much time trying to convince people that we should not be poisoning the planet with these chemicals. If we had had any understanding of ecology after the war we might not be where we are today; chemical farming might not have become the dominant orthodoxy, nor farming the major destructive force affecting the biosphere and the climate.
The English countryside had already been damaged by hundreds of years of a senseless war on ‘vermin’, but nature is very resilient and many insects, mammals, reptiles and birds still found food and shelter in this impoverished countryside. After the war the rivers and ponds were still full of life, and there were curlews and lapwings, cuckoos and turtle doves, all now vanishingly rare. Farms used their own farm manure and recycled the nutrients on the farm, so that their farming was relatively sustainable before that use of the word was invented. But although the ecology of the countryside was in good health, at least compared with today, the word ecology was scarcely known. Our understanding of the complexity of the relationships and interdependencies of all the organisms in the biosphere was negligible, and so the natural world was defenceless when industrial farming began.
The end of World War Two led to a concerted drive by government to increase food production. They were trying, after the event, to prevent wartime shortages occurring. The end of the war had left explosives factories, and researchers into nerve-gas and chemical-warfare agents, with a shrinking market for their services. Luckily explosives factories can easily be turned over to making fertilisers, and chemical warfare can be redirected by calling it crop protection and repurposing, in quite a few cases, the very same chemicals, re-labelling them as pesticides.
Government departments and government scientists worked with chemical companies to put farmers under serious pressure to make their farming dependent on the use of these chemicals, and their agricultural advisory service promoted the products of the companies. Even the Archers was, or maybe were, co-opted by the government to denigrate ‘old-fashioned’ farmers as being out of date and inefficient, and wildflower-rich hay meadows were now called unimproved grassland. There was no environmental movement to protest at the poisoning of the countryside. If there had been one its arguments would have sounded weak when facing government scientists and big business, mainly because our understanding of ecology was primitive. We had no idea that putting fertiliser on the fields would damage rivers and seas and even the soil it was supposedly fertilising, much less that it would emit greenhouse gases that threatened the survival of life on earth. And we thought that killing pesky insects was a simple business. They were pests; you killed them and gave no thought to the effect on birds or flowers of a lack of insects, or the effect of persistent poisons on ecosystems that were not yet even thought of as ecosystems.
This ignorance may excuse some of the excesses of chemical farming, and it may explain why this style of farming became a powerful global orthodoxy before we began to challenge it. And when we started to ask questions we were faced with industrial corporations that were becoming very sophisticated in their use of the black arts of public relations. The tobacco industry had pretended to be very interested when the link between smoking and cancer was discovered, and they set up a Tobacco Research Council that purported to be supporting research, funding scientists who were sceptical about tobacco being a cause of cancer. Fossil fuel companies are still using similar distraction techniques to deny global warming. So when suddenly in 1962 Rachel’ Carson’s book ‘Silent Spring’ raised awareness of the effects of pesticides, it did so in a world that had largely accepted that farm chemicals were necessary, and where the lobbying of the chemical companies was powerful and sophisticated. It took ten years of research and campaigning by environmentalists to achieve a partial ban.
This campaigning singled out DDT as the cause of the ‘silent spring’, and resulted in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in the USA and eventually - ten years later- led to a ban on the use of DDT in agriculture in the USA. Not until 2004 was DDT banned – with some exceptions - in the rest of the world.
DDT was found to be causing the decline of iconic species such as the American bald eagle, which made a welcomed comeback after the ban. But the focus on the problems caused by DDT seems to have obscured the more general problems caused by farm chemicals. We had a good story about falcon eggs being thinned by DDT, causing the eggs not to hatch, and the ban on DDT, fought for tooth and nail by conservationists, obscured the fact that we still had an agriculture that polluted the biosphere with other toxic chemicals as a matter of routine.
This pattern has been repeated several times. The dangers to bees posed by neonicotinoids helped to power another campaign because bees, like bald eagles, had become an iconic species. As with DDT, the process is slow and confusing; neonicotinoids are now banned in Europe, with certain exceptions; the UK government reserves the right to allow them in certain circumstances, and they are still widely used worldwide. Another battle zone concerns the world-dominating toxic weedkiller glyphosate, a cancer-causing agent that is found in 80% of American urine samples. These campaigns create the impression that there are farm chemicals that are OK, and a few which aren’t, which after prolonged campaigning we manage to ban in our part of the world, and less often in the third world, which is a useful market for chemicals that are banned in Europe or the USA.
While battles are being fought over the use of particular pesticides, you can be sure that the companies are busy developing new chemicals. In general they provide the safety data on their new products, which is routinely accepted at face value by regulatory agencies, and the pesticide roundabout starts all over again with a new pesticide, yet to be discredited, replacing the old one.
Meanwhile our understanding of the complexity of the natural world increases. We know that the soil is a complex matrix of fungi and micro-organisms that is as complex and diverse as any ecosystem on earth. Indeed we know that all is so interconnected that the soil is part of the larger ecosystem, and to call soil an ecosystem is to simplify the interconnectedness of all things. We know that the soil organisms facilitate the supply of gases and moisture and nutrients to and between plants, and that the use of nitrate fertilisers, for example, disrupts these natural processes while emitting huge quantities of greenhouse gases at all stages from manufacture and transport to application, as well as creating dead zones in our rivers and seas.
We also know that herbicides and insecticides and fungicides are blunt instruments. They may be marketed as herbicides, for example, but that does not mean that they don’t damage animals. The weedkiller Glyphosate causes cancer, for example, and jaw deformities in deer. And none of these products is precisely targeted. Neonicotinoids were used to kill insect pests of oilseed rape, but they kill plenty of other insects too. The dose was adjusted so that they stopped just short of actually killing bees in the rape fields, though they were shown to damage developing bee larvae in hives miles away, and aquatic life in streams and rivers. There are similar arguments to be made about all farm chemicals. There is nothing that just kills the target fungus or the target insect.
But if it were possible to kill just the target pest, would even that be acceptable? Ecosystems are interlinked, and damage to a part damages the whole. For example, if snails are destroyed by the use of slug pellets in horticulture, that makes it hard for bluetits to breed. There is not enough calcium in the entire bluetit skeleton to make their eggshells; they have to eat snail shells before their oviducts can coat each egg with shell. Bluetits are as important a part of our ecosystems as any other part, a major predator on certain caterpillars, and their loss would have serious knock-on effects. And so ad infinitum.
If agriculture had not become dependent on chemicals, and it was suddenly suggested that, with our current state of knowledge about ecosystems, we should start to use such chemicals on farmland and forests all over the surface of the planet, we should have to conclude that it should not be done. We know a lot about the ill effects, but we also know that there is much we do not know. Natural systems have not evolved to cope with these chemicals and they are damaging by definition. We would not be using them if we did not know that they damage the biosphere – we have merely decided to tolerate that damage for short-term gain, by calling biosphere damage merely pest control. If we had known the damage that these chemicals cause we should not have started to use them, and now that we know the harm they do to the planet we should stop using them. To argue that we will continue to use them for a while and make some more profit at the expense of the planet and the future of our children is not justifiable. With current knowledge we should not have allowed their use, and so to continue to use them cannot be justified.
This will create issues. Soils need time to recover. Beneficial insects, killed by the sprays, need time to recover. Farmers who have relied on chemicals are remarkably unsophisticated and may need time to develop new techniques and new crop mixes. The industry has been too slow to develop alternatives such as resistant strains, or has diverted its energies in producing GM crops designed to tolerate ever-larger doses of glyphosate. There are issues around yields and food security. But in this argument the health of the biosphere trumps all the other arguments, because restoring the biosphere on which all life – and food supply – depends, cannot be postponed. A farming revolution that takes care of the biosphere on which our lives depend will have its challenges, but none so great as those cause by biosphere collapse if we continue current agribusiness.