Free lunch
“Marketplace” — which airs on Maine Public Radio twice each weekday morning — is a delight. Fast paced, a little irreverent, and full of good information about what’s happening in business and in the broader economy.
Last Wednesday (August 27) Marketplace aired an interview with Hugh Grant, chairman and CEO of Monsanto. Among other topics, Kai Ryssdal, Marketplace host, asked Mr. Grant about the potential conflict between food and fuel. If we are using corn to make ethanol, doesn’t that drive up the cost of food?
Mr. Grant’s reply was:
Bio-fuel’s in its infancy. So if you’re in Europe you’re making diesel out of canola. If you’re in Brazil you’re making ethanol out of sugar cane. So far in the U.S. the industry’s been making ethanol out of corn.
My guess is we meet here in five to ten years time, we’ll be looking at the waste streams in these products. So the leafs and stems and turning them into ethanol, but you have to make a start.
At Acadia Partners we are working to help kids become better at thinking about whole systems — about natural systems. We are not in the business of debating ethanol policy–but I would very much like to provide students with the training to enable them to hear an interview like this one and to immediately conclude that Mr. Grant is trying to convince us that there really is a free lunch someplace in our future.
I hope we can get kids to think twice when anybody uses a term like “waste stream.” Deciding that something is “waste” is always a judgment call — a value statement — not a statement of fact. When we work with teachers to help them make students aware of cycles — the carbon cycle, the water cycle, the mercury cycle — I am hoping that one outcome is that students think it’s strange when someone says that something is just a waste stream — to be appropriated at no cost to the rest of the system.
Mr. Grant is taking the position that agriculture is just another form of extraction. The corn is a resource to be used. Plowing stalks and leaves back into the soil is a waste. Extracting it is a way to get something for nothing.
The point I would like to make for students is not that ethanol is necessarily a bad idea. I just want them to have the training and experience with living systems to understand that using the whole corn plant involves costs as well as the benefits that Mr. Grant is focused on.
As Aldo Leopold said in 1921 in his talk titled “Erosion and Prosperity:”
… destruction of soil is the most fundamental kind of economic loss which the human race can suffer. With enough time and money, a neglected farm can be put back on its feet–if the soil is still there. With enough patience and scientific knowledge, an overgrazed range can be restored–if the soil is there. By expensive replanting and with a generation or two of waiting, a ruined forest can again be made productive–if the soil is still there. With infinitely expensive works, a ruined watershed may again fill our ditches or turn our mills–if the soil is there. But if the soil is gone, the loss is absolute and irrevocable.”
Teaching students to think about systems and cycles–about how if you remove something from a system by extracting it and turning it into fuel for another use, then the system is changed–teaching all of that is, of course, also a way to get students thinking about stewardship.
But–for the moment–I will settle for creating providing students with an education that enables them to listen to Mr. Grant’s plans for using the “waste stream” from corn and to say, “Hey, wait a minute …” rather than “Cool. No problem” or, worse, “Whatever …”