Preface to "The Environment Game"

If men were intended to work the soil they would have longer arms. In truth, we evolved as hunters and we remain the most efficient, predatory animals of all, shrewd of brain, infinitely adaptable of body, and with hands to make and wield weapons. Yet since the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, most men have been obliged to bend their straight backs to cultivate the land. We have grown mightily in numbers and have constructed remarkable civilizations on the basis of agriculture. But we have made it a distinctively boring world for most people; only in sport and in war can we recapture something of the excitement of the chase, which was everyday occupation of the first of our species.

It is a good moment to reconsider how we should live. In the first place, we have recently acquired some astonishing powers. We can get energy from its ultimate source, the annihilation of matter in nuclear reactions. We can modify the heredity of plants and animals. In the computer we have a machine more revolutionary even than the steam engine. In short, we have a torrent of knowledge and skills at our disposal, to shape our civilization along quite novel lines. Yet, there is little sense of direction or purpose; instead of guiding the torrent we are being wept along by it to some unknown destination. Unless we start picking and choosing between the technological courses open to us, we shall shortly finish up with an ugly, noisy, overcrowded, hungry, chaotic world. The present trends point to affluence and boredom for the richer countries, a tightening grip of poverty and righteous envy on the part of the less fortunate, with intensifying nationalistic policies reinforced by the technological competition and a spread of nuclear weapons. Yet we have the means at our disposal to make it quite otherwise.

A second compelling reason for looking with a flesh mind at the roots of our civilization is that agriculture is simply failing us. Only by the very greatest efforts can it provide adequate foods for the growing population in the under-developed countries, and after twenty years of talking about the "problem" there is still no sign that such efforts will be made. The obstacles are human rather than technical; so it is appropriate to look for alternative methods of producing food that may encounter fewer social obstacles. Such methods exist, or can be invented.

Thirdly, there is the ever present risk of annihilation. Men, the hunters-manques, have put such intellectual and physical resources into hunting their fellow-men that we can now conceivably achieve what all our natural enemies have failed in our own total extinction. Short of that (which is technically a little awkward) we can wreak unimaginable suffering on our own kind, and devastate our own works. We know it perfectly well, yet we do not shrink from the preparations, because warfare continues to fascinate us. In nations, as in individuals, readiness to fight is still regarded as a mainstay of honour. Only if we give due weight and outlet to the manly aggressive instincts of the hunter in each of us can we hope to avoid a disaster. A policy so based in entirely feasible.

These three apparently diverse considerations converge on a single technical question: whether the widespread cultivation of the soil remains the most appropriate source of our first physical requirement - our food. And it is around the negative answer to this question that this book revolves.

In arguing for the replacement of most of agriculture by artificial methods of food production, I am conscious that it will seem so profound a change to many people that it could easily acquire the status of a dogma, a heresy, or a panacea. I hope that it will not be taken in any of those glib senses. It is neither an original proposal nor is it essential in the sense that no other course is conceivable. The choice is not between 100 per cent agriculture or 100 per cent synthetic food; rather it is a matter of deciding, in something which is more than a prediction but less than a policy, what the balance between the two sources should be. Certainly I should regret it bitterly if the proposition about synthetic food should be seized upon by people incapable of distinguishing between the short-term and the long-term, as a distraction from the immediate task of developing agricultural food production as rapidly as possible.

Because I believe strongly that too many discussions of future possibilities are narrowly and therefore falsely based on one or two "bright ideas", this book broadens out from a discussion of agriculture and its replacement for a conspectus of other, simultaneous trends that have to be harmonized in that world of our children and grandchildren. Despite these disclaimers, I am out to persuade. Synthetic food production deserves a massive programme of research, development, and application, here and now. And although others have casually or earnestly discussed the possibilities, as far as I know this is the first attempt to consider them against the broad panorama of our skills and needs. In making the attempt it has become apparent to me that the liberation of large areas of the planet's surface could enable us, in the nick of time, to reconstruct our way of life.