Manning Critique Sample
1062 words
Richard Manning’s “The Oil We Eat,” published in the February, 2004, Harpers, is an extended polemic against agriculture, inboth its traditional and modern forms. Manning argues that agriculture, especially industrial agriculture, is both wasteful and destructive, and that a solution is urgently needed. He outlines the important issues in traditional and contemporary farming, and suggests some possible solutions.
Although his evidence of waste and destruction is sufficient, relevant and representative, his reasoning about solutions is flawed. Ultimately, Manning’scase is not convincing.
Manning begins with a review of energy’s path from the sun, through plants, to animals and ultimately to human beings. Humans consume 40% of the overall plant energy produced each year. This is his first in a long chain of facts condemning human wastefulness.
Manning reminds us that energy can be concentrated, and suggests that violence usually accompanies this concentration. Farming, which concentrates energy in grain, seems to have been associated at the outset with social inequality, which he implies is maintained by violence. In the plant world, grain’s concentrated energy is made possible by the violence of catastrophe—flood, fire, volcano—that clears the ground of competitors. This violence is reproduced annually in farming. These twin forms of violence account for much of the destruction that he says farming causes.
Much of the article details this destruction. Farming extracts the energy stored in soil and converts it to grains. This energy is often wasted in the form of fat, or before it even reaches us, through erosion, destruction of native plants, and so on. Manning claims further that this process of extracting energy from the soil forced farmers to move to new, untapped lands, slaughtering the original inhabitants. He also cites the regularity of famine in medieval Europe, at a time when Europeans could not move to new lands. He implies that famine arose because the energy had been depleted from the soil, reinforcing the idea of agriculture’s destructiveness.
Manning then turns to modern farming and its use of fertilizers derived from oil. Using these fertilizers means using up fossilized energy faster than it is stored, leading to eventual depletion. Furthermore, the fertilizers themselves cause damage by producing more food than we need and by running into waterways, resulting in algae blooms and die-offs in the ocean, acid rain and global warming. More oil is wastedto process and transport our food. More still is devoted to feeding livestock which could live on naturally occurring plants, and which convert much of it to unusable form (bones, fur, feathers, etc.).
Manning concludes that we must eat low on the food chain and must eat local, unprocessed, efficiently produced food to avoid all this waste.
By and large Manning’s evidence is sufficient. He provides ample evidence of the environmental damage caused by farming, from a passage from Plato to the Dust Bowl to studies by contemporary scientists. Virtually all of his evidence is relevant as well, as it provides direct testimony of either waste or destruction, the two pillars of his thesis.
Some of his evidence is representative, but not all. We can be confident that methods in Iowa, a frequent example,are not too different fromthe rest of our agricultural regions. The Mississippi is a good example of fertilizer runoff, since it drains a large portion of our farming states. On the other hand, his choice of the “wheat-beef people” to illustrate the allegedly imperialistic drive of wheat is less representative. How do we know that these prehistoric conquering farmers were more typical than, say, the Hopi, who farmed corn in what is now the southwestern United States for centuries without, as far as I know, ever waging wars of conquest? Here Manning seems to read history selectively for examples that will support his point.
It is in his reasoning, though, that Manning’s argument is most flawed. Two assumptions stand out. First, Manning tells us that we are wasting energy, but the whole second half of his article describes what happened when we discovered a new source of energy. He seems to assume that this will never happen again. He may be right, and it would certainly be foolish to assume that it will happen, but his own evidence shows that it is possible, and it’s not unreasonable to think we might do it again. Much of his alarm would be unnecessary if we did. This meansnot only discovering new storehouses of energy, like oil, but also new ways to exploit known energy, whether in sewage or sunlight. Such possibilities are only that—possibilities—but they suggest that the problem of wastemay not be as drastic as he implies.
A bigger problem is the contradiction between his evidence and his conclusion. He makes a devastating case that farming has always been both wasteful and destructive. However, all but one of his solutions basically recommend that we go back to traditional farming. He wants us to eat low on the food chain, which will be less wasteful than eating meat, but where are we to get the carrots and potatoes he wants us to eat, if not from farms that have all the intrinsic problems of the wheat-beef people’s farms? Our farms may be local, but the wheat-beef people weren’t shipping their food from Argentina either. We might eat unprocessed foods, but the wheat-beef people weren’t eating Doritos or Snickers. All these apparent solutions simply take us back before the Green Revolution, which—Manning himself argues—is no solution at all.
The only “solution” not vulnerable to these criticisms is the one implied in his final paragraph, where he tells of killing an elk in his backyard. Here Manning seems to advocatea return to hunting and gathering.Thisinvolves an even bigger problem: the world’s population itself. There are just not enough elk to go around. Hunting and gathering requires a much lower population density to be sustainable. Manning seems to assume either that there are a lot more elk than there really are out there, or that a whole lot of people will have to disappear to make his solution work. Neither assumption is true or even reasonable.
So while Manning has an impressive body of evidence to support his thesis, he rests his argument on a number of assumptions that are simply not tenable. The article is ultimately unpersuasive.