Michael Pollan - the convergence of sustainability issues

In an article in the New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan (author of The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Delight ) raises the question of how sustainability can be defined and what the signs will be of the failure of our current non-sustainable agricultural system. He discusses in detail two issues that have arisen in the past year (and have been discussed in this blog here and here, for example) that may be the signs that we need to be able to recognize it: MRSA and CCD (that's Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus and Colony Collapse Disorder for the acronymically impaired).

It seems that a new strain of MRSA has now crossed from a major concentration in pigs in the Netherlands into the human food chain, and is now responsible for more than 20% of the MRSA cases in Europe. Pollan speculates that it's probably present in the US also; we just haven't looked yet. Looking would be a threat because fixing the problem will probably require major changes to our current system of agriculture.

The other issue Pollan discusses is CCD. In particular he talks about the almond pollination frenzy in California, where over half the hives in the US (as well as hives from Australia and probably other parts of the world) are transported to the California almond growing area to pollinate the trees which produce most of the world's Almond crop. Research published a few months ago suggested that the cause of CCD may be a virus from Australia, but the USDA has denied that to be the case on the grounds that the virus has been known in the US since 2002, but CCD has only shown up in 2006. Pollan understates the case, merely pointing out that all those bees are flying around together during that week.  I guess that leaves it to people like me to wonder out loud if this doesn't provide an ideal situation for transmission of the virus throughout the country and present the opportunity for disaster.

Pollan closes:

. . . the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.

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