While reviewing my science news feeds a few days ago, I came across an interesting article about how the nature of corn plant has changed over the centuries:

Corn didn’t start out as the powerhouse crop it is today. No, for most of the thousands of years it was undergoing domestication and improvement, corn grew humbly within the limits of what the environment and smallholder farmers could provide.

For its fertilizer needs, early corn made friends with nitrogen-fixing soil microbes by leaking an enticing sugary cocktail from its roots. The genetic recipe for this cocktail was handed down from parent to offspring to ensure just the right microbes came out to play.

But then the Green Revolution changed everything. Breeding tools improved dramatically, leading to faster-growing, higher-yielding hybrids than the world had ever seen. And synthetic fertilizer application became de rigueur.

That’s the moment corn left its old microbe friends behind, according to new research from the University of Illinois. And it hasn’t gone back.

“Increasing selection for aboveground traits, in a soil setting where we removed all reliance on microbial functions, degraded microbial sustainability traits. In other words, over the course of half a century, corn breeding altered its microbiome in unsustainable ways,” says Angela Kent, professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois and co-author of a new study in the International Society of Microbial Ecology Journal.

Or, to put it a different way, human interference to increase yields, productivity and efficiency (i.e., to increase the economic benefit of the plant), ended up making it less sustainable and, along the way, created the problem of the oxygen-starved dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. So, what's the solution according to the scientists who discovered all this? Well, more human interference for our own benefit, of course! They propose to "rewild" the corn microbiome by using genetic manipulation. I'm sure that will work out great. We shouldn't expect any sort of unexpected effects from that idea.

In the end, it boils down to this: we have an enormous amount of power that we have gained in the past few decades thanks to science, but we barely know what we are doing with it. We've heard many times that human knowledge has grown far more than human wisdom and, while that may be true, I'd argue that human power has also grown more than human knowledge, especially in the 20th century. I'm not a religious person, but it seems clear to me that the death of God predicted by Nietzsche also washed away the natural brakes that were in place to protect humanity from its own ambitions. Now, I'm not proposing to return to the old ways. I'm fully aware that this is not possible. Neither it is advisable, since it'd also bring with it the old dogmatism that the Enlightenment and science helped us break from. And yet, it seems clear to me that, if we want to avoid an awful destiny, we'd better come up with a new approach that doesn't put us (and our insatiable appetites) at the center of it all. {enlace a esta entrada}