The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

by Hope Jahren

The sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. —Thomas Edison to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone (1931)

How many generations must you trace back in order to encounter a farmer?

If you have to look back more than eight generations to find a farmer, or a rancher, or a trapper, then you and your lineage are extremely rare and conspicuously urbane. In 1817, only 3 percent of the global population lived in any kind of a city.

While the Heartland makes up only 15 percent of the land area of the United States, it is home to more than half of its farm fields.

How did we come to be growing three times more food on only 10 percent more land? The answer has to do with gigantic increases in yield—the amount of grain produced per footprint of soil.

This amazing agricultural feat was actually the result of three separate but related accomplishments: we feed plants better now than we did then, we protect them better, and we have improved the plants themselves.

If you are a farmer who wants to grow these wunderkind varieties of soybean or corn in order to keep up with your neighbors, you will inevitably find yourself doing business with Monsanto and DuPont, knee-deep in a near-monopoly.

Every year, more and more GMO crops are being adopted around the world. Is it prudent that the literal seeds of global food production should rest in the hands of fewer than five American companies, to sell or withhold as they see fit?

Iowa has always done the heavy lifting for agricultural America. There were years during my childhood in the 1970s when Iowa came close to producing one-quarter of the country’s number one crop. The state of Iowa always has been, and probably always will be, the most productive farm field in the world.

At present, there are just under ninety thousand “agricultural principal operators” (that is, farmers) in all of Iowa. That amounts to 3 percent of the state population responsible for nearly 10 percent of the state’s economy. Heavy lifting indeed.

We eat processed corn not only as cornmeal but also in forms as varied as gum, acid, wax, and MSG (monosodium glutamate), as well as the more recognizable starches, sugars, and oil. Nevertheless, human consumption of corn uses up only 10 percent of the U.S. annual harvest.

Half of the remainder (that is, 45 percent of the corn that will be planted, fertilized, and harvested this year) will never be eaten by any living creature. Out of the other half, more than one billion bushels—enough to feed one hundred million people for an entire year—will be converted directly into manure.

A full 30 percent of the fresh water used by humans on planet Earth is spent in the production, maintenance, and slaughter of meat animals.

Sooner or later we will have to reconsider the fact that every year, we actively waste 90 percent of the grain we feed to animals, in exchange for a little meat and a lot of manure.

There are distinct advantages to traditional fishing, namely: the fish breed themselves, feed themselves, and succeed or fail as adults based upon their own efforts. When you raise salmon in a pen, you must hatch them, feed them, bathe them, vaccinate them, medicate them, deworm and delouse them, and anesthetize them so that you can examine them, tag them, and move them from place to place without injuring them.

To get one pound of salmon, you need three pounds of fish meal. To get a pound of fish meal, you need to grind up five pounds of fish. Thus, each pound of cage-raised salmon “costs” fifteen pounds of fish from the ocean.

More small fish diverted into aquaculture to feed us means less food left in the ocean to feed them.

as with meat, every bite of fish that we do not take could free up many bites of food for someone else.

The development of high-fructose corn syrup will have no significant impact on either world sweetener consumption or on world trade in sugar. —Journal of Agricultural Economics (1978)

What happens to all this sugar—and the meat, and vegetables, and grain, and eggs and cheese that we put on our plates? Where does it end up? Forty percent of it, at least, goes straight into the garbage.

Americans are the world’s heaviest energy users, consuming a full 15 percent of the world’s energy production and almost 20 percent of the world’s electricity, despite making up only 4 percent of the world’s population.

How much of the working, learning, playing, and being together that you do every day could be done in the absence of electricity?

What we saw in chapter 6 with food, we now see with energy: all of the want and suffering in the world—all of it—arises not from the earth’s inability to produce but from our inability to share.

Use Less and Share More. As we’ll see in chapter 13, there is no magical technology coming to save us from ourselves. Curbing consumption will be the ultimate trial of the twenty-first century. Using less and sharing more is the biggest challenge our generation will ever face.

in 2017, the car population increased 50 percent more than the American population.

only 5 percent of Americans use any kind of public transportation on a daily basis. The rest drive almost everywhere they go.

Let’s pretend I’ve convinced you, that your eyes have been opened to the fact that cars are a murderous joy-sucking plague on the human species. Given where you live, could you give yours up, even if you wanted to? Could you secure the basics—food, education, medical care, a paycheck—on foot, by bicycle, by public transportation? For the majority of America’s households, it wouldn’t just be burdensome or impractical—it would be logistically impossible.

My dad grew up there during the 1920s and remembered the adults around him being skeptical of the idea that cars could ever replace horses as a means of daily transportation. All that money for a vehicle, and impossible to know if you were getting a good one? They shook their heads, unable to imagine paying hundreds of dollars for a hunk of metal that you couldn’t prod the haunches for muscle, or check the manure for worms, or even inquire as to the sire and dam. No, it would never catch on, they assured one another, plus where were you going to get all that petrol from? They’d have to sell it up and down the streets or bring it around in a milk wagon, and Main Street already managed to burn itself down once every five years without the benefit of gasoline running through the gutters. A century later, there is one passenger car for every two people of driving age in the United States, and gasoline is indeed sold up and down the streets of America.

The road not taken was also a Story of Enough, but when given the choice, we recommitted ourselves to the Story of More: America thoroughly offset any oil independence it could have gained from the miracle of renewed fuel efficiency during the 1970s and 1980s by doubling down, making more automobiles, and proceeding to use them harder.

Fossil fuels are also known as “nonrenewable” fuels because the amount of time required to transform living tissue into coal, oil, or natural gas is tens of millions of years at a minimum. When we pull oil, coal, and natural gas from the earth and then burn it inside our vehicles, power plants, and factories, it is not being replaced. Because it is easy to envision a world with a growing population translating into a growing use of fossil fuels, we are left wondering: How much fossil fuel is still out there?

Almost 10 percent of the plastic that we throw away eventually finds its way out to sea, where it has congregated into massive floating rafts of trash that perpetually swirl atop the oceanic gyres.

Most of the Americans I meet don’t realize that their iPhone runs off of fossil fuel. When you charge your laptop or phone, you pull electrical current out of the wall, and that current was more than likely generated by a coal-burning power plant located on the outskirts of town. Your refrigerator, toaster, and television, and all the electric lights in your house, work this same way, and it’s most often the case that they all go back to the burning of fossil fuels, as does the electricity that lights your school, hospital, and workplace and also powers the machines within them. This is true as well for the electric car that you sometimes think about buying. Tethered to fossil fuels through an umbilical cord made of lead, nickel, cadmium, or lithium, an electric vehicle emits its smog on the other side of town, allowing us to imagine it as clean and green.

In the last few decades entire new categories of waste have come to plague and menace the American scene. These are the technological wastes—the by-products of growth, industry, agriculture, and science. —President Lyndon B. Johnson (1965)

In short, the carbon dioxide molecule has a unique shape that intercepts and then absorbs heat. Add just a little carbon dioxide to a chamber of air, then let the sun shine through it, and the whole thing will heat up much more than a chamber without the extra carbon dioxide. This simple fact has been in our chemistry textbooks for more than one hundred years,

Scientists have also been trying to get politicians to act on this information for more than one hundred years. As early as 1896, Svante Arrhenius warned that fossil fuel burning would cause global warming.

Because the sun is the primary source of the energy that drives weather, and because of the carbon dioxide molecule’s well-understood ability to absorb sunlight, the sensible notion that Earth will get warmer as carbon dioxide levels rise has been dubbed “the greenhouse effect,” calling to mind the feeling of being in an unusually and artificially warm place.

At present, one-quarter of the earth’s population lives less than sixty miles from the coastal ocean. Even with the best protection that engineering can provide—a dike system similar to that undertaken in the Netherlands, perhaps—sea-level rise will likely displace thousands of people during the next hundred years and make drinking the local water and farming the adjacent fields impossible for many thousands more. These effects will hit worst in areas where the land is low or sinking and where people are too poor to undertake construction measures.

For most scientists, identifying a new species is a career-changing, once-in-a-lifetime event; these South American biologists were discovering a new species, on average, once every four days.

“A lot of what we do here is about looking a fish in the face at least one time before it goes extinct.”

About 13 percent of Earth’s land area is currently under some degree of legal protection,

The “father of biodiversity,” E. O. Wilson, is now promoting the ideal of the “half earth”—a full 50 percent of the earth’s land to be designated a human-free natural reserve.

six factors that form the social foundations of the cross-cultural concept of happiness: social support, freedom to make life choices, generosity, absence of corruption in government, healthy life expectancy, and per capita income. It goes without saying that most of these factors can be maintained, or even improved, while reducing fossil fuel use.

a wider and wiser humanity.

If we can refrain from overestimating our likelihood of failure, then neither must we underestimate our capacity for success.

You may be able to find out what kind of power plant serves your neighborhood via the EIA’s comprehensive site listing power plant schedules (www.eia.gov/​electricity/​data/​eia923).

Geobiologist Hope Jahren has spent her life studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil.