the development of ecology revealed a
deeply connected world we all inhabit
one big biosphere one big house we share
one hydrosphere one atmosphere you get
the idea but the flipside of finding
this connection was learning about
various kinds of environmental collapse
already in motion
we share one fragile house we've said
here that science is generally moved
from understanding natural phenomena to
controlling them today we'll examine
scientific efforts to control the whole
world that is to say capital in nature
some have saved lives but there are
downsides frequently devastating
[Music]
during the Cold War attempts to control
nature by technological means involved
both Soviet and American plans for
weather control in part because each
side worried that the other would figure
it out first
spoiler alert neither did the u.s.
conducted one secret rain making project
Operation Popeye during the Vietnam War
they ineffectively tried to make them on
soon season lasts longer in Southeast
Asia hampering the North Vietnamese
Army's movements by deteriorating roads
and bridges through flooding that's some
James Bond villain stuff the u.s. also
carried out an operation at home called
project Stormfury from 1962 to 1983
seeding dangerous tropical storms with
silver iodide in order to freeze some of
the water in them and slow them down
making them less dangerous this didn't
work well in practice but the
experimental flights were valuable to
meteorology other grand scale
engineering projects focused on power
and agriculture these included many
irrigation canals and gigantic dams like
the Aswan High Dam in Egypt built
between 1960 and 1970 these projects
allowed people in dry regions or one
subject to seasonal flooding to have
more control over when they planted and
to grow more harvests per year in the
United States the reclamation service
later the Bureau of Reclamation worked
starting in 1902 to irrigate the western
plains today that Bureau is the largest
wholesaler of water in the u.s. overall
across industrial societies agriculture
changed a lot as engineers developed
machines like tractors chemists created
new fertilizers and pesticides and plant
geneticists bred hybrid seeds plants
need the nutrient nitrogen to grow but
plants can't fix their own nitrogen from
the air so they need bacteria or
human-made fertilizers like ammonia to
do it for them and in the early 1900's
German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl
Bosch developed a way to take nitrogen
right out of the air this seemed like a
big win any industrial society could use
the haber-bosch process for synthetic
nitrogen fixation to make millions of
tons of fertilizer and grow more crops
in synthetic ammonia from this process
was also used to make nitric
acid which was necessary to make
explosives so again
war and professional science were
tightly linked but the bigger problems
long-term were environmental the
haber-bosch process requires fossil
fuels like oil or natural gas to work
which seemed fine industrialists didn't
know that burning these fuels would
disrupt Earth's climate cycles the more
obvious problem is runoff to make plants
take up lots of nitrogen industrial
farming treats them with more fertilizer
than they need rain washes the leftover
fertilizer into waterways leading to
eutrophication or too many nutrients in
the water this leads to a buildup of
algae which use up all of the oxygen in
the water making it deadly for fish
another seemingly big win with
unintended consequences was an
improvement in staple crops in the 1930s
after decades of research agricultural
scientists in the u.s. rolled out hybrid
crop varieties these crosses of pure
strains produced much higher yields but
farmers started using only these seeds
commercial fields became monoculture or
one plant this means that fewer plants
are commercially available today and
pests can more easily wipe out any one
plant this is the opposite of growing
many plants together or polyculture
which can help restore nutrients to soil
without synthetic chemicals so in the
one hand synthetic fertilizers and
hybrid crops seemed like easy wins on
the other hand there were negative
long-term consequences and also on the
third hand even these advancements
didn't prevent environmental problems
and growing fears that agricultural
innovation just couldn't keep up with
rapid population growth for example part
of the u.s. experienced severe droughts
in the 1930s and was farmed in
unsustainable ways this led to massive
dust storms collectively called the Dust
Bowl which forced many farmers to
abandon their farms during the Great
Depression and this was the United
States most of the world's farmers
remained small holders they worked plots
of land smaller than 10 hectares largely
without industrial machines populations
were growing but storms and Wars
threatened to lead to famines so many
scientists taking a note from that
crotch
preacher who inspired Darwin Thomas
Malthus wrote pessimistically about
humanity's future probably the most
famous of these neo Malthusian thinkers
was American biologist Paul Ehrlich
whose 1968 bestseller the Population
Bomb predicted that famines would soon
kill millions of people especially in
India which didn't happen arguably the
biggest example of humans controlling
our environment was the Green Revolution
in the 1950s and 60s when crop yields
went up for farmers in less
industrialized countries way up in one
sense it's a simple story of science
applied scientists from rich countries
offered new techniques built on hybrid
seeds in another sense it's science in
the service of politics this revolution
was organized by International
Agricultural Research Center's or IAR
Seas which were funded by federal grants
from developed and developing countries
and by private foundations like
Rockefeller and for the IAR seas
believed that the best way to improve
yields was through smart breeding they
wanted to focus on breeding plants
resistant to pests in specific areas and
simultaneously to make these plants to
take up more nitrogen and grow more
edible material lots of people were
involved in this work particularly in
the US Mexico and India but people loved
heroes the Green Revolution stories
often focus on American agronomist and
plant geneticist Norman Borlaug who was
to be fair an awesome scientist
thought-bubble
introduce us Borlaug joined the
Rockefeller Foundation's group in Mexico
in 1944 he had never worked on wheat
maize or beans before and he didn't
speak Spanish but he eventually learned
it and stayed in Mexico for 16 years
working mostly in Sonora
he developed a hybrid wheat that
withstands a common fungus called rust
blight how well lots of painstaking
research into plant genetics courtesy of
other geneticists and lots of field
trials Borlaug took Noren 10 a wheat
bread by Japanese scientists Gong Jiro
inuzuka that was short but produced lots
of food if given lots of nitrogen and
defended with chemical pesticides and
bred a semi dwarf wheat specifically for
Mexican climates starting
19:50 Mexican agriculture shifted toward
high yielding varieties of wheat
synthetic nitrogen and pesticides in
this revolution in farming soon spread
to Colombia Chile and India the Ford
Foundation pushed the Indian government
to adopt the same changes so Indian
scientists worked with Mexican
scientists and hybrid semi-dwarf Mexican
wheat seeds were shipped to India in
time for the 1963 planting season this
led to astounding growths in yield also
in the 1960s an international team of
scientists and farmers worked to develop
a new variety of high yielding
semi-dwarf rice called ir8 sometimes
called miracle rice in 1971 the
Rockefeller and Ford Foundation's
created the consultative group on
International Agricultural Research to
further extend the IAR see research
Borlaug won the Nobel in 1970 but no
Mexican Indian or Japanese scientists
shared the prize thanks thought-bubble
meanwhile with minimal support from the
Soviet Union the Maoist Chinese state
fostered its own scientific farming
including a system of experimental
agricultural stations and hybrid sorghum
and hybrid rice varieties agriculturally
the Green Revolution was an immediate
success thousands of tons of seeds moved
from Mexico to India food prices dropped
India became a rice exporter and
currently over produces wheat but in the
longer term the Green Revolution meant
that way more farmers started practicing
monoculture essentially betting their
chips on a small number of hybrid crops
thousands of traditional varieties are
no longer cultivated only for crops
wheat maize rice and soy provide more
than half of our food today
socially industrial farming requires
investing in expensive equipment and
hybrid seeds which aren't produced by
the previous year's harvest this changed
the business cycles of farmers zooming
out the Green Revolution changed what
defines a modern society it now meant
using synthetic nitrogen pesticides and
tractors on large monoculture farms the
idea of the revolution had been to end
hunger and it probably prevented
millions from starving but famine has
always been linked to distribution or
the political economic process
of moving food around not just to how
much food is produced and the Green
Revolution was also always about the
United States flexing its scientific
muscle around the world buying allies
with bread including India the world's
largest democracy this is soft power
meanwhile also in the 1950s and 60s
synthetic pesticides were used to
control bugs that spread human illnesses
the most famous was
dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane which
probably have heard of as DDT so that
you don't have to save you that whole
thing that was sprayed on fields and
urban green spaces right on the little
kids just everywhere it had seemingly
miraculously dropped mosquito
populations during World War two helping
fight the spread of malaria and typhus
only it turned out the DDT while not
immediately toxic to humans was toxic to
lots of other living things like birds
and fish and it wasn't good for humans
in the long run either after years of
careful research all of which angered
scientists working for the chemical
industry American biologist and
pioneering environmentalist Rachel
Carson wrote a series of articles that
became the book Silent Spring in 1962
she explained in simple beautiful
language how some kinds of synthetic
pesticides work and why they are often a
terrible idea
with this book along with her other
books numerous op-eds and appearances
carson helped spark the modern
environmentalism movement in the united
states in addition to long-term effects
pesticides have also been involved in
acute disasters in 1984 a Union Carbide
India chemical plant in the city of
Bhopal had a serious accident this plant
produced the insecticide seven using a
highly toxic chemical called methyl
isocyanate gas the accident released 32
tons of methyl isocyanate half a million
people were exposed four thousand people
died immediately 2,500 died that year
Bhopal is widely considered as the worst
industrial disaster in history only two
years later in 1986 the Chernobyl
reactor melted down in Ukraine clouds of
radioactive material billowed across
Europe and then the world conflicting
politically inflected epidemiological
studies put the long-term casualties
from cancer due to Chernobyl at anywhere
between ten thousand and hundreds of
thousand
so controlling nature hasn't been a
total slam-dunk for humankind and most
of humankind has had no say in these
projects the effects good or bad just
happened to them and this is still the
case in fact the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change warns that global food
supplies are in danger because staple
crops like rice wheat and corn are now
facing a slowdown in the rate at which
their yields go up meaning back to
Malthus we might soon have more hungry
mouths than food
even if agronomists keep making
incremental gains so some serious
scientists are returning to the idea of
controlling the climate in 2006
nobel-winning atmospheric scientists
Paul Crutzen called for humanity to use
geoengineering the modification of the
climate to keep our world habitable next
time we'll look at control over living
things in a different scale it's the
characterization of DNA and the birth of
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