I have "weeds" growing on the side of my house.
The normal course of action here would be to first grumble about this fact,
then decide to do something about it, spend a great deal of time
procrastinating and then either
1): liberally douse the afflicted areas in pesticide
-or-
Naturally, I did none of these things. I purchased Sonoran Desert Life: Extensive Coverage of
the Anza-Borrego and Colorado Deserts, Second Edition by Gerald A.
Rosenthal, and was nearly immediately able to identify this particular “weed”
as Palmer’s Amaranth. Amaranthus Palmeri is a dioecious, erect annual herb that
can reach heights of 6.5’, is commonly found in disturbed sites and sandy
washes, and flowers from late summer thru autumn. Its leaves are lanceolate to
ovate with conspicuous venation, and the plant produces single-celled utricles.[2]
Palmer's Amaranth owes its name to an Edward Palmer
(1829-1911), a British-born botanist employed by the United States Department
of Agriculture from the late 19th century onwards. His collections
still exist today and number over 100,000 pressed and dried specimens. He is
also notable as the “father of ethnobotany”. Essentially, Palmer was one of the
first individuals to methodically catalogue, name, and collect hundreds of
thousands of samples from the Southwestern United States and into Mexico, while
also being one of the first botanists to note the niches and roles of many of
these plants occupied in native and local culture and tradition. His collections
are still kept by the Smithsonian, and there are something like 200 species of
plants named after him.
One of these plants is Palmer’s Amaranth. Nearly every
Native American population in the Southwest cultivated and ate Palmer’s
Amaranth. The leaves were baked, boiled, or dried, the seeds were ground into a
meal, dried, chewed, cooked, &c. As a juvenile plant the leaves are still
tender enough to be eaten and taste good, and as it matures, one can use the
seeds as a grain. The juvenile stage does not last long though. The plant is
very well adapted to growing in poor desert soils. It can grow several inches a
day, especially if it is growing in a nitrogen-rich soil. But more on that
later.
In its historical usefulness, cultivation, and ubiquity,
Palmer's Amaranth is nearly analogous to, say, corn. But I have corn planted in
my garden boxes, and Amaranth growing wild as a "weed" in the gulch next
to the boxes. Why is this? Well, I'm not an ethnobotanist, by any stretch of
the imagination, but, it seems to me, by the time that amaranth became known to
"Americans"[3] in the late 1800’s, a
number of successful agricultural practices were being used. Corn, squash,
beans, and potatoes, to name a few, had already been "learned" from
Native agricultural practices, and were feeding millions. Even if amaranth were
a better grain[4],
an incentive to adopt a new idea, a new crop, a change, was not present.
Essentially, there was no reason to adopt amaranth[5].
As White Americans aggressively expanded further West,
taking with them their agricultural practices[6], Amaranth faded into obscurity.
There are, again, a number of underlying cultural attitudes that have led to
this, most of which will be touched on in the second part of this bipartite
post.
An important
botanical factor, though, is Amaranth’s efficacy at extracting nitrogen from
soil. Contemporary (and historical) American Agricultural practice is to
heavily fertilize the land on which the farming is to take place to ensure a
nutrient-rich soil for plants to grow better, so the reasoning goes. Amaranth,
however, becomes so nitrogen rich when grown on fertilized soil that it becomes
toxic to livestock, and possibly even humans. It seems simple enough, then, to
just not grow it. However, the issue here is not with the Amaranth but with us.
Amaranth grows very well in poor soil. The issue is our insistence that it
should be grown in “better” soil. Additionally, monocrop farming has been
widely adopted by our agriculture practices. To be sustainable on a longer time
scale, a nitrogen-fixing crop (such as bush beans) should be grown in
conjunction with the Amaranth. All of these factors contribute to our decision
to not grow amaranth on a large scale. Again, the attitudes underlying these
choices are toxic, but will be touched upon more thoroughly in the next entry.
Now, moving right along, a full grown amaranth plant
produces a huge amount of seeds. As a dioecious plant (containing both male and
female flowers on one plant) it can self-pollinate, and produces about 500,000
seeds per fully grown adult plant. If were to cultivate Amaranth, this would be
a great advantage; the stuff grows like wildfire. As it stands, it makes
Amaranth a “weed”. In fact, it is so very good at spreading itself it has moved
from the Southwest, where it originated, and it now present is about 30 states.[7]
Let's take a tangent here. About 85% of soy grown in the US
is genetically modified. The company that sells the vast majority of GMO soy
globally is Monsanto. Monsanto also sells glyphosate as a broad spectrum
pesticide and herbicide, under the brand name RoundUp. Monsanto specifically
sells "RoundUp Ready" soy, that is, soy that has been genetically
engineered to be resistant to glyphosate, so that farmers can slather their
crop with RoundUp and kill only the weeds and bugs and annoying nature-y
things. Soy is a very large and very valuable crop in the United States, and
comprises a good portion of the arable land being farmed currently. Thanks to
the spread of Amaranth, the overlap between places where Palmer’s Amaranth
grows and places where soy is grown is growing larger. For a while, spraying
the Amaranth with glyphosate was very effective at killing it. But with 500,000
chances for mutation on each plant, it was only a matter of time before one of
them manifested as a glyphosate resistance.
Many populations of Palmer’s Amaranth are now glyphosate-resistant.
Since it evolved in semi-arid unfertilized soil, and had recently found itself
in well-irrigated nutrient-stuffed soil, and is now immune to the toxic slurry
that has become the industry standard to kill weeds,[8] Palmer's Amaranth has literally
choked out soy fields, overrun them to the point that farmers have given up on
the crop. It now threatens millions of acres of soy crop. It is a "super
weed". Recall here, that evolution is much more complex than it has come to be commonly portrayed. The
Palmer’s Amaranth in my yard is very likely not resistant to glyphosate, because it has never been exposed to it. The
populations that have been exposed, however, are. One adaptation does not instantly become present in every population. In fact, on a long enough timescale, the glyphosate-resistant and non-glyphosate-resistant populations will evolve into distinct species. It felt necessary to point that out.
So, as it stands, my adorable little green friends in my
yard are causing a multi-million dollar headache for big-agriculture, and I love
that.
It is at this point, after having written the bulk of the
essay above, that I returned home to discover that the landscapers for the plot
of land on which the apartment I am renting (and about 15 others) is situated,
had cut down and pulled out all of the Amaranth. I was very upset by this. My adorable little green friends, whom I had spent a few days
researching and learning about, and had come to love, had been clear cut for no
real reason.
The second half of this essay will attempt to catalogue the
underlying fallacies in Western thought that lead to our unsustainable and
horrific agricultural practices, why we are killing the world and ourselves,
and why permaculture is a word that everybody needs to become familiar with.
For now, I will leave you on a note of deep, simmering resentment and anger
while I grumble about plants and assemble an array of sources and citations
that will form the backbone of the next essay. The “climate change” problem has
been harped on so much, on such a shallow level, that many in the American
Public have grown tired of it, and so I will be sure to both make bold claims
that will hopefully incite some sort of action while providing enough citations
from reputable sources to verify that things are, indeed, very dire.
Long Live the Amaranth.
[5]Had the pilgrims, by
some freak non-Euclidean sailing accident, landed in California instead of
Massachusetts, perhaps we would have amaranth salad and antelope instead of
corn on the cob and turkey for thanksgiving. Or maybe the Apache would have
told us to fuck right off and this continent is settled, thank you very much. I
think the second is more likely
[8] That is to say, RoundUp Ready soy
is the only sort of GMO pesticide resistance that has been coded, because
Monsanto are the ones selling RoundUp. If any non-glyphosate pesticide were sprayed
on the soy, it would die. Farmers have been forced into using one pesticide
that is now completely useless against Amaranth, and any other pesticide would
kill the soy.
