Green Nightmare

The ‘ocean of green’ one marvels at in the countryside makes most ecologists deeply uneasy. In Farmageddon, Philip Lymbery wrote of the devastation caused by industrial farming. In Dead Zone, he challenges the cry of agribusiness and the proponents of GM crops that we must produce more food, by any means, no matter how destructive to our environment. Not so, says Lymbery; there’s enough food and more, and much of it is wasted.

Each chapter, headed with a name of a key species, is a case study of the environmental consequences of monoculture and uncontrolled livestock rearing. He begins with the palm plantations of Sumatra, where shrinking forests have brought elephants into human settlements, often violently. In his chapters on English and North American ecosystems, he charts the consolidation of farms, the loss of hedgerows and other habitats, and the resulting assault on insects, birds, small mammals and so on up the food chain. The chapter on battery hens will make you gag next time you so much as see an egg. Even the oceans are not safe. In the dead zone four miles off the coast of Louisiana, one of many on our planet, no animalcan breathe.

All over the world, the fertiliser industry and its government handmaids enforce a cycle of subsidies, overproduction, diseases, antibiotics and excess nitrates in soil and water. Worse, even when governments observe and report these consequences, they decline to act. Contract farmers must obey corporate and government diktats on what to grow, when to sell, and how to fertilise, but even that doesn’t save them from crashing prices.

Lymbery gives us reason to hope for better in his accounts of farmers who have let the land go back to the wild before resuming truly sustainable cultivation. It is a hard battle fought by individuals and trusts, but its benefits, as he puts it, speak for themselves.