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AP Language and Composition
Name: _______________________________________ Date: _________________ Period: ___________
UNIT 4: Our Environment and Ourselves
Ms. Bishopp
I can…
identify the SOAPSTone elements, the appeals, and argument of a text.
identify and analyze a writer’s use of syntax to achieve a purpose.
identify and analyze an author’s use of figurative language to achieve a purpose.
write with varied syntax.
write using figurative language.
seamlessly embed quotes within my argument.
control a wide range of the elements of effective writing.
utilize tone words effectively in my writing and every day speech.
Day 1
 Tone Words 1-5 review
 Writing with varied syntax practice
 “Why Bother”: read, annotate, SOAPSTone
 Track the argument = chunk text, summarize
sections, identify claims and evidence
HW: Read, annotate, SOAPSTone “What’s Eating
America.” RT cards 36-40; Be studying TW1-5
Day 2
 “What’s Eating America”: discuss annotations,
SOAPSTone
 Cause and effect essay: track his argument. How
is this kind of explanation different from the
explanation of how a car engine works or the
carbon cycle? What are his cause-and-effect
explanations for? How does he use them to make
his larger argument?
 From either Pollan article, choose a sentence or
passage, identify the element(s) of syntax, and
then write 2-4 sentences about the effect of
that element on his article (MLA format).
HW: TW 1-5 Review: vocab squares #1-6; Be
studying TW 1-5/RT 1-40!
Day 3
 Share and discuss sentence/passage, element, and
effect from Pollan articles.
 Writing about syntax: example, group practice
 Choose a passage from either Pollan article.
Then write an analysis paragraph in which you
discuss his use of syntax to help him achieve his
purpose. (MLA format)—EMBED QUOTES
 Revising analysis paragraphs
HW: TW1-5 Review: vocab squares #7-12; Study
RT 1-40
start of unit
end of unit
Day 4
 QUIZ: Rhetorical Terms 1-40
 AP Timed Write: Synthesis Essay (Locavores)
 Reading and scoring anchor papers
HW: BRING BOOK TO CLASS Read “Clan of the
One-Breasted Women” (LC 816-822). You will be
assigned 3 of the ‘Exploring the Text’ questions
(LC 822-823). Answers need to be typed, MLA
format. Utilize mature syntax; TW 1-5 Review:
Vocab squares #13-15; RT cards 41-45
Day 5
 Figurative language: Group Practice (1)
 Discuss “Clan of the One-Breasted Women” (be
sure to have your book in class!) Identify
figurative language.
 Revise intro and one paragraph of your timed
synthesis essay. MLA format. Embed Quotes
HW: TW Review 1-5: Vocab squares #16-24; Study
for quiz RT1-45 tomorrow
RHETORICAL ANALYSIS
WRITING WORKSHOP
 Date: Saturday, 16 January, 2016
 Time: 10:00am to noon
 Where: Ms. Bishopp's room 219 (the
upstairs door between the main bldg
and the annex will be unlocked)
 What: We will work through the
processes of writing a rhetorical
analysis from reading, annotating,
identifying and analyzing the rhetoric,
creating an outline, utilizing embedded
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AP Language and Composition
quotes, and writing a 4-5 paragraph
essay.
Day 6
 QUIZ: Rhetorical Terms 1-45
 Begin “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson
(LC798-799): Read “I. A Fable for Tomorrow”
 Answer Question for Discussion 1. Questions on
Rhetoric and Style 1, and part of 2.
 Rhetorical strategy graphic organizer (I.)
HW: Read, annotate “II. The Obligation to Endure.”
Finish question 2 in on rhetoric and style. Prepare
for Socratic seminar (packet). You may “steal” 3
questions from the book. The rest must be original.
Be studying TW 1-5; RT cards 46-50.
Day 7
 “Silent Spring” Socratic seminar
 Rhetorical strategy graphic organizer (II.)
HW: Figurative language: Individual practice (2);
TW Review 1-5: Vocab squares #25-36; Study
TW1-5, RT1-50; Find an example of visual
rhetoric that has to do with the environment or
health. This can be an advertisement, a
cartoon/comic, a poster, or something similar. Print it
out and bring it to class 8.
AP MULTIPLE CHOICE WORKSHOP
 Date: Saturday, 23 January, 2016
 Time: 10:00am to noon
 Where: Ms. Bishopp's room 219 (the
upstairs door between the main bldg and
the annex will be unlocked)
 What: We will work through AP multiple
choice sections together
SEMESTER FINAL (25-28 Jan) will cover a
random selection of rhetorical terms (1-50), tone
words (1-5), an AP multiple choice section, and a
rhetorical analysis timed write.
Friday, 29 January: No school (teacher work day)
Day 8
 Review figurative language HW
 Tone Words 6: Definitions
 Read rhetorical analysis anchor papers
 Score essays
 Revise your intro and ONE body paragraph
from your Silent Spring rhetorical analysis
HW: Figurative language: Using figurative lang (3);
RT cards 51-55; TW 6 Synonyms and Antonyms
Day 9
 Review figurative language (3) HW
 TW 6: Connotation sort
 Analyzing visual rhetoric: DDT and smoking ads.
Analyzing student samples.
 Writing a rhetorical analysis paragraph on a
visual argument
HW: Complete the writing assignments that we
began in class (see above), Typed, MLA format;
Schoology TW 6 Practice Quiz; Study RT1-55
Day 10
 Figurative language: group practice (4)
 An intro to “Nature”
 “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
 Read in class, aloud Part 1. Be sure to have book.
Rhetorical strategies graphic organizer
HW: Answer Questions for Discussion #1-2;
Answer Questions on Rhetoric and Style #1-2.
Must be typed, MLA format, mature syntax.
Figurative language: independent practice (5); Study
RT 1-55
Day 11
 QUIZ: RT 1-55
 Review figurative language (5) HW
 Read “Nature” Part 2 in small groups.
 Answer Questions for Discussion #4-5,
Questions of Rhetoric and Style #3.
 Figurative language: group practice (6)
HW: Complete the work started in class.
Read/annotate “Nature” Part 3. Prepare for Socratic
Seminar (packet).
Day 12
 QUIZ: Tone Words 6
 Review figurative language (6)
 “Nature” Socratic Seminar
HW: Figurative language: individual practice (7)
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AP Language and Composition
Day 13
 Review Figurative lang (7) HW
 AP multiple choice: “Nature”
 Figurative Language Assessment
HW: None
 AP Timed Write: Synthesis (Green Living)
 Read and score anchor papers
 Revise our synthesis essay
HW: Print Unit 5 guide
Day 14
Assignments for this unit
Readings for this unit will be articles located in the unit guide or texts found in the
Language of Composition (LC) textbook. Be sure to bring book to class daily!
Group Work: Students will work in various cooperative settings to discuss work, write paragraphs, and
create brief presentations.
Questions on Rhetoric and Style: Students will answer questions on rhetoric and style of the texts.
Students are expected to type these in MLA format. Answers should utilize various syntactical structures
and patterns being used in class, along with vocabulary from the Tone Words lists or the readings.
Spelling and grammar are important, and serious errors will result in grade markdowns.
Rhetorical Analysis Timed Write: Students will engage in a College Board released rhetorical
analysis timed write. This essay will be scored according to the College Board rubric. Students will
engage in reading and scoring anchor papers, and then revising a section of their own essay for grading.
Synthesis Timed Write: Students will engage in TWO College Board released synthesis essay timed
writes. These essays will be scored according to the College Board rubric. Students will engage in reading
and scoring anchor papers.
Vocabulary Composition Book: Students will be recording Tone Words into their composition books.
We will engage in various other activities, but primarily students are expected to begin utilizing these
words (owning them) in every day conversation and then journaling about it. Vocabulary Composition
Books will be checked at random for grades.
Notebook check
You’ll need to the following for our notebook check. Be ready any time.
LA Handouts:
Unit 3 Guide on top.
Unit 2 guide
Syntax Overview
Essay Graphic Organizer for Rhetorical Analysis
Unit 1 guide
Tone Words 1-5
Rhetorical Terms Glossary
SOAPSTone handout (unit guide 1)
How do I format my paper? (unit 1)
AP Course overview
Initialed class rules
Any handouts/worksheets on rhetorical terms, syntax figurative language, etc.
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AP Language and Composition
LA Classwork:
Notes for lectures, presentations, mini-lessons. You should be taking notes every period. I should not
have to tell you to be taking notes.
Vocabulary Composition Journal
Tone Words lists 1-5
Various vocabulary words from readings
Why Bother?
By MICHAEL POLLAN
April 20, 2008
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate
change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in
“An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing
case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark
moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got
really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and
the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.
But the drop-in-the-bucket issue is not the only problem lurking behind the “why bother” question. Let’s say I
do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the
thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line
across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could
theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there
lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his
first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I
forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So
what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?
A sense of personal virtue, you might suggest, somewhat sheepishly. But what good is that when virtue itself is
quickly becoming a term of derision? And not just on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal or on the
lips of the vice president, who famously dismissed energy conservation as a “sign of personal virtue.” No, even
in the pages of The New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet “virtuous,” when applied to an
act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass
that virtue — a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue — became a mark of
liberal soft-headedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment — buying the hybrid,
eating like a locavore — should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.
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And even if in the face of this derision I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of
getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint? According to
one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result,
walking might actually emit more carbon than driving. A handful of studies have recently suggested that in
certain cases under certain conditions, produce from places as far away as New Zealand might account for less
carbon than comparable domestic products. True, at least one of these studies was co-written by a
representative of agribusiness interests in (surprise!) New Zealand, but even so, they make you wonder. If
determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I’ve got to consider not only “food
miles” but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then
maybe on second thought I’ll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their
footprints sorted out.
There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that,
whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well
ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly
optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly
terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue
water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active,
causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate
scientist recently? They look really scared.
So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?
I do.
Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly
inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon
footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also
take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do
enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change
crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less
than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending
represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires
and preferences.
For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re
not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until
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AP Language and Composition
we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our
predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on
specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of
thinking could now get us out of it.
Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this
mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we
would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to
be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to
environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives — the 1970s
equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to
change until we healed the “split between what we think and what we do.” For Berry, the “why bother”
question came down to a moral imperative: “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear,
then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can,
or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”
For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is “specialization,”
which he regards as the “disease of the modern character.” Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: we’re
producers (of one thing) at work, consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then once a
year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or
another — our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media,
care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.
As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of
civilization. Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same
division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their
real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my
screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams
running crimson with heavy metals as a result.
Of course, what made this sort of specialization possible in the first place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel
allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems,
with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the
things you suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out — up to and including entertaining
yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors — your community — to suddenly
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loom so much larger in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell
our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.
Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes
dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer
imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us
to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like,
say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to
cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to
power the same old cars and houses and lives.
The “cheap-energy mind,” as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is
helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the
cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based
solutions — carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes,
the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels.
The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for.
But while some such grand scheme may well be necessary, it’s doubtful that it will be sufficient or that it will
be politically sustainable before we’ve demonstrated to ourselves that change is possible. Merely to give, to
spend, even to vote, is not to do, and there is so much that needs to be done — without further delay. In the
judgment of James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who began sounding the alarm on global warming 20
years ago, we have only 10 years left to start cutting — not just slowing — the amount of carbon we’re
emitting or face a “different planet.” Hansen said this more than two years ago, however; two years have gone
by, and nothing of consequence has been done. So: eight years left to go and a great deal left to do.
Which brings us back to the “why bother” question and how we might better answer it. The reasons not to
bother are many and compelling, at least to the cheap-energy mind. But let me offer a few admittedly tentative
reasons that we might put on the other side of the scale:
If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing
yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative
technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised,
perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V.
or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be
regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And
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those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from
others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.
All of this could, theoretically, happen. What I’m describing (imagining would probably be more accurate) is a
process of viral social change, and change of this kind, which is nonlinear, is never something anyone can plan
or predict or count on. Who knows, maybe the virus will reach all the way to Chongqing and infect my
Chinese evil twin. Or not. Maybe going green will prove a passing fad and will lose steam after a few years,
just as it did in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the
White House.
Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the
odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when
you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and
Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply
conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that,
in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.
So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the case of the environmental crisis?
Havel himself has suggested that people begin to “conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth
forever and be answerable for its condition one day.” Fair enough, but let me propose a slightly less abstract
and daunting wager. The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involve spending or voting,
that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what
may, will offer its own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce your carbon
footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this: determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week,
abstain completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.
But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if
you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into
getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty
benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon
footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheapenergy mind.
A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate
change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar
technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that
more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides,
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AP Language and Composition
with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel
energy to produce. It’s estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts
for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.
Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully
organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not
too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch — CO2-free and dollar-free.
This is the most-local food you can possibly eat (not to mention the freshest, tastiest and most nutritious), with
a carbon footprint so faint that even the New Zealand lamb council dares not challenge it. And while we’re
counting carbon, consider too your compost pile, which shrinks the heap of garbage your household needs
trucked away even as it feeds your vegetables and sequesters carbon in your soil. What else? Well, you will
probably notice that you’re getting a pretty good workout there in your garden, burning calories without
having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that,
having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our
unemployed bodies in shape.) Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time (and
energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment.
You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago,
one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or
nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still
more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that
you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something
and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out,
these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could
gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce
Americans ate.
But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life,
you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as
consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you
will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the
cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that
it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from
seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and
multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden
teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and
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people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves
without diminishing the world.
Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food:
An Eater’s Manifesto.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
What's Eating America
Corn is one of the plant kingdom's biggest successes. That's not necessarily good for the United States.
By Michael Pollan
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | JULY 2006
Descendants of the Maya living in Mexico still sometimes refer to themselves as "the corn people." The phrase
is not intended as metaphor. Rather, it's meant to acknowledge their abiding dependence on this miraculous
grass, the staple of their diet for almost 9,000 years.
For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain, yet one that is also rooted in corn,
not to think of himself as a corn person suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.
Or perhaps a little of both. For the great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket rests on
a remarkably narrow biological foundation: corn. It's not merely the feed that the steers and the chickens and
the pigs and the turkeys ate; it's not just the source of the flour and the oil and the leavenings, the glycerides
and coloring in the processed foods; it's not just sweetening the soft drinks or lending a shine to the magazine
cover over by the checkout. The supermarket itself—the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and
fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built—is in no small measure a manifestation
of corn.
There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket, and more than a quarter of them contain
corn. At the same time, the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the 45,000 different items
or SKUs (stock keeping units) represent genuine variety rather than the clever rearrangements of molecules
extracted from the same plant.
How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old World before 1492, came to
colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of the plant world's greatest success stories. I say the plant
world's success story because it is no longer clear that corn's triumph is such a boon to the rest of the world.
At its most basic, the story of life on earth is the competition among species to capture and store as much
energy as possible—either directly from the sun, in the case of plants, or, in the case of animals, by eating
plants and plant eaters. The energy is stored in the form of carbon molecules and measured in calories: the
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calories we eat, whether in an ear of corn or a steak, represent packets of energy once captured by a plant. Few
plants can manufacture quite as much organic matter (and calories) from the same quantities of sunlight and
water and basic elements as corn.
The great turning point in the modern history of corn, which in turn marks a key turning point in the
industrialization of our food, can be dated with some precision to the day in 1947 when the huge munitions
plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched over from making explosives to making chemical fertilizer. After
World War II, the government had found itself with a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principal
ingredient in the making of explosives. Ammonium nitrate also happens to be an excellent source of nitrogen
for plants. Serious thought was given to spraying America's forests with the surplus chemical, to help the
timber industry. But agronomists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: spread the ammonium
nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based
on the poison gases developed for war) is the product of the government's effort to convert its war machine to
peacetime purposes. As the Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in her speeches, "We're still eating the
leftovers of World War II."
F1 hybrid corn is the greediest of plants, consuming more fertilizer than any other crop. Though F1 hybrids
were introduced in the 1930s, it wasn't until they made the acquaintance of chemical fertilizers in the 1950s
that corn yields exploded. The discovery of synthetic nitrogen changed everything—not just for the corn plant
and the farm, not just for the food system, but also for the way life on earth is conducted.
All life depends on nitrogen; it is the building block from which nature assembles amino acids, proteins and
nucleic acid; the genetic information that orders and perpetuates life is written in nitrogen ink. But the supply
of usable nitrogen on earth is limited. Although earth's atmosphere is about 80 percent nitrogen, all those
atoms are tightly paired, nonreactive and therefore useless; the 19th-century chemist Justus von Liebig spoke
of atmospheric nitrogen's "indifference to all other substances." To be of any value to plants and animals, these
self-involved nitrogen atoms must be split and then joined to atoms of hydrogen.
Chemists call this process of taking atoms from the atmosphere and combining them into molecules useful to
living things "fixing" that element. Until a German Jewish chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to turn
this trick in 1909, all the usable nitrogen on earth had at one time been fixed by soil bacteria living on the roots
of leguminous plants (such as peas or alfalfa or locust trees) or, less commonly, by the shock of electrical
lightning, which can break nitrogen bonds in the air, releasing a light rain of fertility.
In his book Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production,
Vaclav Smil pointed out that "there is no way to grow crops and human bodies without nitrogen." Before
Haber's invention, the sheer amount of life earth could support—the size of crops and therefore the number of
human bodies—was limited by the amount of nitrogen that bacteria and lightning could fix. By 1900,
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European scientists had recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen,
the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt. The same recognition by Chinese
scientists a few decades later is probably what compelled China's opening to the West: after Nixon's 1972 trip,
the first major order the Chinese government placed was for 13 massive fertilizer factories. Without them,
China would have starved.
This is why it may not be hyperbole to claim, as Smil does, that the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen
(Bosch gets the credit for commercializing Haber's idea) is the most important invention of the 20th century.
He estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention.
We can easily imagine a world without computers or electricity, Smil points out, but without synthetic
fertilizer billions of people would never have been born. Though, as these numbers suggest, humans may have
struck a Faustian bargain with nature when Fritz Haber gave us the power to fix nitrogen.
Fritz Haber? No, I'd never heard of him either, even though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918 for
"improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind." But the reason for his obscurity has
less to do with the importance of his work than an ugly twist of his biography, which recalls the dubious links
between modern warfare and industrial agriculture: during World War I, Haber threw himself into the German
war effort, and his chemistry kept alive Germany's hopes for victory, by allowing it to make bombs from
synthetic nitrate. Later, Haber put his genius for chemistry to work developing poison gases—ammonia, then
chlorine. (He subsequently developed Zyklon B, the gas used in Hitler's concentration camps.) His wife, a
chemist sickened by her husband's contribution to the war effort, used his army pistol to kill herself; Haber
died, broken and in flight from Nazi Germany, in a Basel hotel room in 1934.
His story has been all but written out of the 20th century. But it embodies the paradoxes of science, the double
edge to our manipulations of nature, the good and evil that can flow not only from the same man but from the
same knowledge. Even Haber's agricultural benefaction has proved to be a decidedly mixed blessing.
When humankind acquired the power to fix nitrogen, the basis of soil fertility shifted from a total reliance on
the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel. That's because the Haber-Bosch process works by
combining nitrogen and hydrogen gases under immense heat and pressure in the presence of a catalyst. The
heat and pressure are supplied by prodigious amounts of electricity, and the hydrogen is supplied by oil, coal
or, most commonly today, natural gas. True, these fossil fuels were created by the sun, billions of years ago,
but they are not renewable in the same way that the fertility created by a legume nourished by sunlight is. (That
nitrogen is fixed by a bacterium living on the roots of the legume, which trades a tiny drip of sugar for the
nitrogen the plant needs.)
Liberated from the old biological constraints, the farm could now be managed on industrial principles, as a
factory transforming inputs of raw material—chemical fertilizer—into outputs of corn. And corn adapted
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brilliantly to the new industrial regime, consuming prodigious quantities of fossil fuel energy and turning out
ever more prodigious quantities of food energy. Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always
been a process of capturing sunlight to turn it into food, has in no small measure become a process of
converting fossil fuels into food. More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn.
From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it's too bad we can't simply drink petroleum directly, because
there's a lot less energy in a bushel of corn (measured in calories) than there is in the half-gallon of oil required
to produce it. Ecologically, this is a fabulously expensive way to produce food—but "ecologically" is no
longer the operative standard. In the factory, time is money, and yield is everything.
One problem with factories, as opposed to biological systems, is that they tend to pollute. Hungry for fossil
fuel as hybrid corn is, farmers still feed it far more than it can possibly eat, wasting most of the fertilizer they
buy. And what happens to that synthetic nitrogen the plants don't take up? Some of it evaporates into the air,
where it acidifies the rain and contributes to global warming. Some seeps down to the water table, whence it
may come out of the tap. The nitrates in water bind to hemoglobin, compromising the blood's ability to carry
oxygen to the brain. (I guess I was wrong to suggest we don't sip fossil fuels directly; sometimes we do.)
It has been less than a century since Fritz Haber's invention, yet already it has changed earth's ecology. More
than half of the world's supply of usable nitrogen is now man-made. (Unless you grew up on organic food,
most of the kilo or so of nitrogen in your body was fixed by the Haber-Bosch process.) "We have perturbed the
global nitrogen cycle," Smil wrote, "more than any other, even carbon." The effects may be harder to predict
than the effects of the global warming caused by our disturbance of the carbon cycle, but they are no less
momentous.
The flood of synthetic nitrogen has fertilized not just the farm fields but the forests and oceans, too, to the
benefit of some species (corn and algae being two of the biggest beneficiaries) and to the detriment of
countless others. The ultimate fate of the nitrates spread in Iowa or Indiana is to flow down the Mississippi into
the Gulf of Mexico, where their deadly fertility poisons the marine ecosystem. The nitrogen tide stimulates the
wild growth of algae, and the algae smother the fish, creating a "hypoxic," or dead, zone as big as New
Jersey—and still growing. By fertilizing the world, we alter the planet's composition of species and shrink its
biodiversity.
And yet, as organic farmers (who don't use synthetic fertilizer) prove every day, the sun still shines, plants and
their bacterial associates still fix nitrogen, and farm animals still produce vast quantities of nitrogen in their
"waste," so-called. It may take more work, but it's entirely possible to nourish the soil, and ourselves, without
dumping so much nitrogen into the environment. The key to reducing our dependence on synthetic nitrogen is
to build a more diversified agriculture—rotating crops and using animals to recycle nutrients on farms—and
give up our vast, nitrogen-guzzling monocultures of corn. Especially as the price of fossil fuels climbs, even
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the world's most industrialized farmers will need to take a second look at how nature, and those who imitate
her, go about creating fertility without diminishing our world.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/whats-eating-america-121229356/?all