'The Oil We Eat'
Following the Food Chain back to Iraq
by Richard Manning

"The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten
crime, forgotten because it was done neatly."
-Balzac

The journalist's rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is
not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice
president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We'll
follow the energy.

We learn as children that there's no free lunch, that you don't get
something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on.
The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more
complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth
century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion
to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and
there will never be less of it. THe convervation of energy is not an
option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All
animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food
chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn
sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic
fuel of all animals. SOlar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to
make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as
there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our
plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they
are as sure.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by
Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. THey call it the
planet's "preimay productivity." THere have been two efforts to
figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at
Stanford Univeresity, the other an indenpendent accounting by the
biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single
species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth's primary
productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may
explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which
existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have
simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.

Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated.
This is the larger and profoundly explanatoroy context of a national-
security memoGeorge Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State
Deperatment planning committee, ostensibly about Asian policy but
really about how the United States was to deal with its newfound
role as the dominant force on Earth. "We have about 50 percent of
the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population," Kennan
wrote. "In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy
and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a
pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this
position of disparity without positive detriment to our national
security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality
and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated
everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive
ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-
benefaction."

"The day is not far off," Kennan concluded, "when we are going to
have to deal in straight power concepts."

[... SNIP ... entire GREAT article follows in Harper's Magazine,
Feb. 2004 ... ]

Richard Manning is the author of 'Against the Grain: How Agriculture
Has Hijacked Civilization', to be published this month by North
Point Press.

-- Scott Meredith
[AlasBabylon list owner]
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