It was already too late for Darren Nicolet to reverse course last June when he heard that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had overturned E.P.A. approval of three products containing dicamba, a controversial but widely used weed killer. A farmer in Kansas, Nicolet had planned his season around the herbicide, planting his fields with soybeans that were genetically modified to survive being showered with the chemical. He was well aware of dicamba’s tendency to vaporize and drift from field to field, causing damage to crops and threatening nearby wildlife and trees, but he didn’t feel as if he had much of a choice: Dicamba was one of the last tools that provided some control over Palmer amaranth, an aggressive weed that would quickly go on to choke out his sorghum crop — and that threatened to overtake his soybeans too. “There was a little bit of a moment of panic there for a few hours,” Nicolet said; he was worried that a season without dicamba would mean devastation for his farm.
If there’s a plant perfectly suited to outcompete the farmers, researchers and chemical companies that collectively define industrial American agriculture, it’s Palmer amaranth. This pigweed (a catchall term that includes some plants in the amaranth family) can re-root itself after being yanked from the ground. It can grow three inches a day. And it has evolved resistance to many of the most common weed killers, continuing to reproduce in what ought to be the worst of circumstances: A three-day-old, herbicide-injured seedling, for example, can expend its last bit of energy to produce seeds before it withers up and dies. Unchecked, Palmer amaranth can suppress soybean yields by nearly 80 percent and corn yields by about 90 percent.
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Superweeds — that is, weeds that have evolved characteristics that make them more difficult to control as a result of repeatedly using the same management tactic — are rapidly overtaking American commodity farms, and Palmer amaranth is their king. Scientists have identified a population of Palmer amaranth that can tolerate being sprayed with six different herbicides (though not all at once), and they continue to discover new resistances. By now, it’s clear that weeds are evolving faster than companies are developing new weed killers: Just six years ago, in response to the onset of resistance to its marquee product, Roundup (active ingredient: glyphosate), Monsanto began selling a new generation of genetically modified seeds bred to resist both glyphosate and dicamba. By 2020, scientists had confirmed the existence of dicamba-resistant Palmer amaranth. The agribusiness giant took a decade to develop that product line. The weeds caught up in five years.
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When Monsanto introduced Roundup in the mid-1970s, it worked better than any other weed killer on the market, and it was dirt cheap as well. “It was so good,” Kumar says. “Wherever you put it, it was so effective.” “Top control at a rock-bottom price,” subsequent television ads would crow. “The herbicide that gets to the root of the problem.”
Two decades later, Roundup’s complement, an innovation that caused sales to surge even higher, arrived: Roundup Ready seeds. The genetically modified plants that sprouted from them could survive spray after spray of the herbicide. This enabled farmers to simply plant Roundup Ready seeds, wait until the weeds emerged, then spray the entire field with Roundup. Everything but the valuable crop quickly wilted and died. The development revolutionized weed control: Farmers no longer needed to buy a vast array of expensive herbicides each year or till their land every season.
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Whereas cash crops are virtually identical — farmers purchase new genetically engineered seeds containing the glyphosate-tolerance trait every year — Palmer amaranth benefits from incredible genetic diversity. It mates sexually (obligate outcrossing, in biology-speak), and female plants produce hundreds of thousands of seeds each year. The plants that sprouted with random mutations that inadvertently equipped them to survive showers of herbicide lived to reproduce with one another. Then, once applications of Roundup annihilated all the weeds in a field except the resistant Palmer amaranth, the pigweed could spread without competition. In one study, researchers planted a single Roundup-resistant Palmer amaranth plant in each of four fields of genetically modified cotton. In three years, the weeds choked out the cotton, and the crop failed.
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The trouble with these weapons is that they work only as long as their targets stay the same. If a weed killer is like a key and its target like a lock, a change of the locks can render the herbicide useless. Many species evolve resistance in this way: A single mutation or set of mutations can change the shape of the target site, leaving the would-be lethal substance with nowhere to bind. With glyphosate, Palmer amaranth doesn’t change the locks; it simply replicates them. The weed killer still disables the enzymes it reaches, but the plant produces extra enzymes. Imagine a door with a thousand locks — and glyphosate can bring only a hundred keys to open it.
Even more concerning, weeds are evolving resistance mechanisms that can defend against multiple different herbicides aimed at multiple different target sites — to belabor the metaphor, an entire key ring. Enzymes in a plant cell can act like a vigilant doorman, stopping different weed killers near the entrance and neutralizing them before they ever reach their destination. Scientists hypothesize that these doormen-enzymes are active to some extent even in the tiniest seedlings: A baby Palmer amaranth plant may be able to disable herbicides that were sprayed before it emerged from the soil.
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Realizing resistance would spread, Monsanto in the mid-2000s began developing a new generation of Roundup Ready seeds that could tolerate the application of a second herbicide, dicamba. Like glyphosate, dicamba was not a new chemical: It was first approved for use in the United States in the 1960s.
Dicamba fell out of favor in some regions soon after its introduction because of the damage it tended to cause when it drifted onto neighboring farms. The telltale sign of dicamba damage is called “cupping.” In soybeans, leaves curl up, the veins run parallel and their tips turn brown or cream-colored. Monsanto began developing a new formulation that was supposed to reduce dicamba vaporization after its application.
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While dicamba continues to damage non-G.M.O. crops and trees, its effectiveness at killing weeds has already begun to decline. Dicamba-resistant Palmer amaranth was confirmed in Tennessee in 2020.
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While dicamba continues to damage non-G.M.O. crops and trees, its effectiveness at killing weeds has already begun to decline. Dicamba-resistant Palmer amaranth was confirmed in Tennessee in 2020.
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For years, weed scientists have been urging farmers to practice integrated weed management, combining herbicides with other strategies — rotating crops, hand-pulling weeds, scouting for weeds to catch them early — in hopes of eking out a few more effective years for the remaining weed killers. But many of these practices, some of which are already common among organic growers and very small farms, would require major changes to the current way of doing things. Van Wychen says the No. 1 reason organic food is so expensive is the time and energy spent on weed management. “It’s a tough message to sell,” he says, “because it’s still very easy to go out and spray something, and when it does work, it’s the most economical means out there. But that has to change.”
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Nature is under siege. In the last 10,000 y the human population has grown from 1 million to 7.8 billion. Much of Earth’s arable lands are already in agriculture (1), millions of acres of tropical forest are cleared each year (2, 3), atmospheric CO2 levels are at their highest concentrations in more than 3 million y (4), and climates are erratically and steadily changing from pole to pole, triggering unprecedented droughts, fires, and floods across continents. Indeed, most biologists agree that the world has entered its sixth mass extinction event, the first since the end of the Cretaceous Period 66 million y ago, when more than 80% of all species, including the nonavian dinosaurs, perished.
Ongoing losses have been clearly demonstrated for better-studied groups of organisms. Terrestrial vertebrate population sizes and ranges have contracted by one-third, and many mammals have experienced range declines of at least 80% over the last century (5). A 2019 assessment suggests that half of all amphibians are imperiled (2.5% of which have recently gone extinct) (6). Bird numbers across North America have fallen by 2.9 billion since 1970 (7). Prospects for the world’s coral reefs, beyond the middle of this century, could scarcely be more dire (8). A 2020 United Nations report estimated that more than a million species are in danger of extinction over the next few decades (9), but also see the more bridled assessments in refs. 10 and 11.
Although a flurry of reports has drawn attention to declines in insect abundance, biomass, species richness, and range sizes (e.g., refs. 12⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓–18; for reviews see refs. 19 and 20), whether the rates of declines for insects are on par with or exceed those for other groups remains unknown. There are still too little data to know how the steep insect declines reported for western Europe and California’s Central Valley—areas of high human density and activity—compare to population trends in sparsely populated regions and wildlands. Long-term species-level demographic data are meager from the tropics, where considerably more than half of the world’s insect species occur (21, 22). To consider the state of knowledge about the global status of insects, the Entomological Society of America hosted a symposium at their Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, in November 2019. The Society was motivated to do so by the many inquiries about the validity of claims of rapid insect decline that had been received in the months preceding the annual meeting and by the many discussions taking place among members. The entomological community was in need of a thorough review and the annual meeting provided a timely opportunity for sharing information.
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Many of the butterfly declines in Europe appear to be directly linked to changes in agricultural practices, with the rate of losses accelerating after World War II, when family farms began to amalgamate into larger commercial operations, modern tractors and mechanized equipment were employed to accelerate industrialization of agriculture, insecticides became widely available, and synthetic fertilizers could be manufactured and applied in prodigious volume (1, 16, 23, 42). Since the 1990s, the computerization of farming has dramatically changed the nature of agriculture (e.g., software-driven machinery can yield numerous efficiencies in planting, chemical applications, and harvest), further disadvantaging small-scale operations and practices. Much modern agriculture has become incompatible with nature, with its effects in the tropics especially worrisome. There deforestation, principally for agricultural expansion, is progressing at alarming rates, with its effects on insects and other arthropods essentially unmeasured (1).
The chronic effects of nitrification, mostly from the combustion of fossils fuels and the manufacture of more than 200 million tons of reactive nitrogen (mostly for fertilizer) annually, is now widely recognized as a major global stressor of insect and plant diversity (34, 42⇓–44). Similarly, there is mounting evidence that light pollution is driving local declines in suburban and urban locations (45, 46). Although not an emphasis of the 11 articles, urbanization is increasingly recognized as an important stressor (47, 48).
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Even without much-needed monitoring and demographic data, enough is already known, based on first principles and records for amphibians, birds, flowering plants, mammals, reptiles, insects, and other taxa, to understand that a biodiversity crisis is accelerating as the planet’s human population grows, increasingly exacerbated by unprecedented recent climate changes and other anthropogenic stressors. Time is not on our side, and urgent action is needed on behalf of nature. Actions taken as individuals, groups, nations, and members of a global community are needed to address issues relating to insect diversity across multiple fronts (14, 85). Individuals can adopt behaviors that mitigate drivers of insect and biodiversity declines (28), vote for nature-friendly legislators and legislation, and promote local and global environmental policies. Immediately and across all nations, people must find solutions to slow climate change (1, 41) and lessen the impacts of global agriculture, especially by slowing its expansion in the tropics (1, 29). Shared goals should be to change societal attitudes about insects, dispel misperceptions, and convey to others that insects are crucial components of functioning ecosystems that also provide a diversity of cultural services, including aesthetic (Fig. 5), recreational, and health benefits. Scientists must educate a wider population about the ecological, economic, and scientific value of arthropods and find ways to integrate insects and other arthropods into the fabric of daily human life (27, 28).
“By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity over a considerable area, for an extended time.” — Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)
People who criticize billionaires for foolishly building underground bunkers believe they can survive the impending doom of climate change by hunkering down on a homestead.
Both groups are attempting to escape the realities of collapse. It’s a race that most humans will likely lose. It’s now a question of whether the species can survive extinction.
On one hand the survivalists (rightfully) poo-poo plans for colonizing Mars as too difficult on a “dead planet” while simultaneously clinging to the belief that for all their beans and bullets, gardens and wells —the hoarded supplies of a prepper will see them through the sixth mass extinction on a dying Earth. It’s the poor-man’s version of an Elysium space station.
The cognitive dissonance must physically hurt.
And let’s admit what no one is saying out loud. The carefully made plans for some sort of Neo-Thoreau lifestyle is more about surviving the collapse of civilization in relative safety and comfort than reducing a carbon footprint — the same attitude that put us in this predicament in the first place.
Here are just a few of the reasons this fantasy won’t work.
Collapse will be everywhere but not all at once
The central idea of catabolic collapse is that human societies pretty consistently tend to produce more stuff than they can afford to maintain. . . .Sooner or later you run into the limits of growth; at that point the costs of keeping wealth flowing in from your empire or your oil fields begin a ragged but unstoppable increase, while the return on that investment begins an equally ragged and equally unstoppable decline; the gap between your maintenance needs and available resources spins out of control, until your society no longer has enough resources on hand even to provide for its own survival, and it goes under. That’s catabolic collapse. — John Michael Greer, originally published by The Archdruid Report
Planet Earth is a closed economic system. Sure, some places might fare better than others, and only for awhile, but there will be no Garden of Eden on 40 acres in Missouri. Moving to New Zealand won’t save you. No place will remain untouched because it not just about climate, weather events, social systems, or politics.
It’s everything.
We are a global network of systems — made up of individuals — all interconnected and fragile because humans may be resilient, but they are not immortal. This means a problem on the other side of the planet will eventually reach you. and it carries with it the seeds of your potential decline. Wildfires on another continent produce choking smoke. A novel virus stops all air travel. Terrorism in one region spills over to another. It’s coming for you.
So losing factories in China to fire (up 150% this year) means a massive disruption in the supply chain. That results in supply shortages of semiconductor chips, plastics, cardboard (up 638%) which affects numerous products. The same chip shortage which drives up the costs of cars and trucks, also affects things like heating systems, cell phones, and a total of 169 different industries.
You can’t escape it. And unless you are so self-sufficient that you never need to replace equipment, buy a new phone, visit a doctor, take prescription medication — and the countless other necessities of modern life, you will be affected. Yes, even on a homestead.
If you manage to wrest yourself from modern civilization (however doubtful), and things look promising for now, it probably won’t be in ten years when climate collapse comes for everyone.
You’re stuck here and this is a global problem. You can’t escape it.
You can't prepare for something unknown
Traditional prepping focuses on the most common disasters for any given region.
If you live in the South, you prepare for hurricanes. In the Midwest, you dig a root cellar to escape tornadoes. If you live in the Southwest, you build homes with flat white roofs to reflect sunlight.
The problem with climate change is that “change” part. That means we may have tornadoes in the South, flooding in the Southwest, or heat domes in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe your area cycles through disasters. Likely, these new events will be novel for the region. And no one can predict how it will play out other than the loss of plants and wildlife not acclimated to such weather extremes.
While models can estimate sea level rise, researchers can’t forecast how catastrophic weather will manifest. Canada may swelter under a heat dome, or become freezing cold. Wildfires could spread smoke and ash. Any number of life-threatening scenarios might play out, but preppers believe they can cover all potential threats from the safety of their personal haven.
And this is a problem as homesteading doesn’t allow much room for error. Nature doesn’t care if you starve to death.
Desert dwellers are not going to be skilled at surviving in the cold. Gardening in a temperate zone is going to be different than growing food in a hot house. You won’t have the skills or necessary equipment.
You’re betting on the hope that global climate change won’t be visited on your homestead.
Most preppers assume the weather in their locale will be the same albeit more severe.
Environmental scientists can model global warming but not specific events for a given region — so they don’t publish the likely extremes. And because of this, most preppers believe that this translates into any location doing well today will hold true tomorrow because no one is talking about all the potential scenarios they could face.
The perceived advantages that make your homestead desirable may disappear
Preppers who choose a colder climate for their homestead may experience collapse sooner than those in cities and suburbs.
If survival depends on a wood stove for heating, what happens when all the trees are gone? Siberia fires are now bigger than all the worlds other blazes combined. Once lost, those trees aren’t coming back because things like drought and climate change create conditions which make the area unsuitable for the once dominant species.
If you plan to supplement your meager garden with hunting because game is plentiful, you should be aware that according to the Living Planet Index, two-thirds of vertebrates are gone — and continue to decline.
You can’t prepare for every outcome when the changes are unknown. And you can’t move a homestead if the region becomes uninhabitable.
Decisions made by leaders are likely going to serve those in populated areas, diverting critical resources like water or fire suppression away from you.
You may be forced to flee.
A number of scenarios may force you to flee — wildfires, relentless drought, extreme flooding, or civil unrest. After investing all your resources in a homestead, will you be able to leave?
Events such as flooding may require you to temporarily abandon your homestead and relocate to more suitable area. This is far more likely a scenario as climate change renders certain regions uninhabitable. While scientists can guess what areas those might be, remember no one predicted wildfires in Siberia.
The world is already facing unpredictable events.
You've simply ignored what the report actually says and replied with your usual glib defense of the status quo. The use of pesticides results in weeds developing resistance to those pesticides.
article describes a very real problem which is occurring now because we engineered food crops to be resistant to herbicide.
This is comical.
We are back to the Mad Max dreams of the apocalyptic collapse of society. (Again, there are zero reputable scientific organizations that predict climate change will be serious enough to collapse civilization.)
These hysterical end of the world fantasies are nonsense.
That being said, if I did believe these prophecies of doom, stocking up on firearms and ammunition (in addition to antibiotics and water purification tools) seems like a logical step.
The weeds aren't being engineered to resist herbicide, they are evolving naturally.
The article describes a very real problem which is occurring now because we engineered food crops to be resistant to herbicide.
So if we could engineer plants that would require a lower amount of pesticide... that would be a good thing. Because that is what we are doing.
These hysterical end of the world fantasies are nonsense.
That being said, if I did believe these prophecies of doom, stocking up on firearms and ammunition (in addition to antibiotics and water purification tools) seems like a logical step.
Let me ask you here: Just how many "reputable scientific organizations that predict climate change will be serious enough to collapse civilization" before you acknowledged that MUCH more has to be done to mitigate the damage to the environment being done by humans?
Go ahead and explain this to Hightor.
Farmerman, you are jumping up to help your teammate... I get it.
