On p. 37, Pollan notes that there's very little genuine Darwinian competition between F-1 hybrids -- they're all identical copies of one another, so there are no genetic traits to compete with one another. I wonder what the potential consequences of flattening competition like that might be? One obvious answer is, if these plants can't compete with one another, then they can't develop on their own traits that would help out in case of a change in environmental pressures. They produce decreasing yields with each generation, so they basically only have a few generations in which to mutate new adaptations -- if they can produce future generations at all.
Another possible consequence is, if there did happen to be a rogue individual, whatever genetic difference it had from other plants in the crop might give it a huge advantage. I'm thinking here of the hawk and dove scenarios Dawkins used in the middle chapters of "The Selfish Gene". Just as a for instance, if only one plant in a crop could reproduce more without human intervention...
Moving on, I don't know that there's anyway around the long-term consequences of our reliance on fossil fuels for soil nitration. The way Pollan presents it, we were on the way to catastrophic food shortages when the Haber-Bosch process was invented. The Haber-Bosch process may have made it possible to sustain millions of lives, but because of it, there are now almost 5 billion
more lives to sustain (source:
Wikipedia. So what happens when the fossil fuels run out?
And on p. 51, Pollan recounts the events that paved the way for the steady revoking of New Deal policies: "In the fall of 1972 Russia, having suffered a series of disastrous harvests, purchased 30 milliion tons of American grain. [Earl]Butz had helped arrange the sale, in the hopes of giving a boost to crop prices in order to bring restive farmers tempted to vote for George McGovern into the Republican fold." The plan worked, Nixon was re-elected, and the bottom was quickly knocked out of the New Deal. So my question is, how can we in a democratic society guard against scenarios like this, where one political move reassures us about the very administration most likely to subvert our interests?
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Edited by: 
at: 10/2/06 12:04 am
