"A Conversation With Wes Jackson"
23 March 2011
Even when he's lecturing you over the phone about the effect of the hydrological cycle on soybean yields in Brazil's Amazon Basin, Wes Jackson sounds like a cowboy storyteller with a slight drawl. His campfire tales, however, are historically minded and deeply academic: he can take you from Brazil back to his native Kansas with the deft phrase, "Let's go back to the Bronze Age for a minute."
Jackson talks a lot about "the 10,000-year-old problem," the problem of how we grow our food. The solution may exist at the Land Institute, where Jackson leads research into new agricultural practices that combine earth-conscious farming practices with whiz-bang new plant breeds and genetic technologies. Here, he talks about perennials, the end of fossil fuels, and the very worst kind of fundamentalism.
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