Fruits We'll Never Taste, Languages

We'll Never Hear: The Need for Needless

Complexity
Fennelly, Beth Ann

Imagine cupping an Ansault pear in your palm, polishing its golden-green belly on your
shirtsleeve. Imagine raising it to your lips and biting, the crisp snap as a wafer of buttery
flesh falls on your tongue. Imagine the juice shooting out—you bend at the waist and
scoot your feet back to prevent the drops from falling on your sneakers. . . .

Imagine it all you can, for it's all you can do. You'll never eat an Ansault pear. They are
extinct, and have been for decades: dead as dodo birds. How could this happen to a pear
variety which agriculturist U. P. Hetrick described, in a 1921 report called "The Pears of
New York," as "better than any other pear," with a "rich sweet flavor, and distinct but
delicate perfume"? The dismaying truth is that you can apply that question to thousands
of fruits and vegetables. In the last few decades we've lost varieties of almost every crop
species. Where American farmers once chose from among 7,000 apple varieties, they
now choose from 1,000. Beans, beets, millet, peanuts, peas, sweet potatoes, and rice all
have suffered a large reduction in varieties. In fact, over 90 percent of crops that were
grown in 1900 are gone.

Of course, next to "Save the Whales," a bumper sticker reading "Save the White
Wonder Cucumbers" sounds a bit silly. And as long as we haven't lost pears altogether,
the loss of a particular variety, no matter how good, isn't cataclysmic. We have a lot of
other worries. How many years of sunlight do we have left? Of clean air? Water? But
when we lose a variety of pear or cucumber, even one we're not likely to taste, or, in an
analogous situation, when we lose a language, even one we're not likely to hear, we're
losing a lot more than we think. We're losing millions of bits of genetic information that
could help us solve our big questions, like who we are and what we're doing here on
earth.

Farming has always been subject to the manipulations of human desires, but up until the
last several decades these manipulations increased crop diversity. Long before Mendel
came along, our farmer ancestors were practicing a kind of backyard Darwinism. Early
Peruvian farmers, for example, noticed mutations among the colors of their cotton
fibers, and by breeding the cotton selectively, they were able to grow different colors to
weave vibrant cloth. When farmers moved, they took their seeds with them, and various
growing conditions increased crop diversity even further as the varieties reacted to new
environments or evolved new defenses for pests or blights. And in this way farmers
farmed for about 10,000 years. Even at the beginning of this century, small farms were
varied; each grew many crops and sometimes several varieties of a particular crop. If a
blight attacked one species of a farmer's corn, it was likely that the farmer, or another
farmer nearby, would also have grown a variety of corn that turned out to be resistant.

But as the century wore on, agribusiness was born. Now, giant agricultural agencies
develop fruits and vegetables specifically for giant farms, which concentrate on a single
variety of a single crop sanctioned for high-yield growth. These new crops aren't self-
reliant—many hybrids can't even produce offspring, putting an end to the age-old
tradition of gathering seeds from the current harvest for next year's crop. They are
dependent upon intensive fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides. They are grown only if
they can withstand mechanical harvesting and the rigors of shipping to distant markets,
and these packing considerations shape our diet in startling ways, as anyone who's
followed the quest for the square tomato can tell you. Some biotech companies have
taken the human manipulations of crops to a profitable—if seemingly unnatural—
extreme. Biotech giant Monsanto, maker (and dumper) of hazardous chemicals like
PCB, filed for a patent in 1997 for a seed whose germination depends not on being
exposed to a rise in temperature or an inch of rainfall, but being exposed to a certain
chemical.

So now, according to the International Food Information Council, we have scientists

crossing two potatoes to make a new hybrid which will be higher in starch and need less
oil for frying, resulting in lower-fat fries. But genetic engineers don't stop with crossing
two kinds of potatoes. Genes from a potato could be crossed with a carrot, or a banana,
or a daschund, if genetic engineers thought such a crossing would improve the potato's
shelf-life. Recently, genetic engineers have crossed the strawberry with a gene from the
flounder to make a strawberry resistant to cold. In this way, millions of years of nature's
"decisions"—which crops should fail, which thrive, which qualities parents should pass
to their offspring—are reversed almost overnight. The Union of Concerned Scientists is
—well—concerned. Poet W. S. Merwin likens our position in history now to the start of
the nuclear age—we are rushing to embrace technology that will change us in
unalterable, unforeseeable ways.

A problem with miracles is that sometimes they don't last. A miracle yield hybrid's
defenses are often based on a single gene, an easy thing for continuously evolving pests
to overcome. And meanwhile, back at the ranch, there is no more ranch—the small
farms that grew the original parent varieties that crossed to make the super vegetable
have failed. The parents are extinct. Unless genetic raw material resistant to the pest can
be found in some other variety, the hybrid will be lost as well.
The first crop to be nearly wiped out due to lack of genetic diversity is the humble spud,
which the Europeans brought home with them after "discovering" the New World. King
Louis XVI of France saw the potato's potential for feeding the poor and was determined
to spread the crop. He knew that publicly endorsing the potato, however, would earn it
the commoner's enmity. So Louis grew a bumper crop and had the field guarded all day,
but he removed the guards at night so the locals could raid the field. Potatoes were soon
growing throughout France and beyond. In Ireland, the potato became the staple crop—
by the 1840s a third of the Irish were dependent on it for nourishment. But since all the
potatoes grown in Europe were the descendants of that original handful of potatoes
brought over from the Andes, the crop had a narrow gene pool. When Phytophtora
infestans struck in 1845, the potato lacked the resistance to combat it. The Freeman's
Journal reported on Sept. 11 of that year that a "cholera" had rotted the fields; one
farmer announced that he "had been digging potatoes—the finest he had ever seen" on
Monday, but when he returned Tuesday he found "the tubers all blasted, and unfit for
the use of man or beast." A five-year famine followed that slashed the population of
Ireland by 20 percent, killing between one to two million people and forcing one to two
million others to emigrate to the U.S. The potato was saved only when resistance to the
blight was found in more diversified varieties of the potato still growing in the Andes
and Mexico. Had it not been, it's unlikely the potato would be around today as a major
crop.
While the potato famine might seem like dusty history, the U.S. corn blight proves we're
not doing much to stop history from repeating itself. In Shattering: Food, Politics, and
the Loss of Genetic Diversity, environmentalists Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney describe
the 1970s hybrid corn plants as "sitting ducks." As a result of a cost-cutting measure,
each of the several hundred varieties of hybrid corn seed had the same type of
cytoplasm. That made the entire crop susceptible to any disease that could come along
and exploit that uniformity—and, of course, one did. Even today we have several
dangerously unstable crops including—gulp—coffee and chocolate. The dangers of
genetic uniformity are currently being cited in an altogether new arena—the Genome
Project. Now that scientists have engineered vegetable hybrids, what's stopping
scientists from creating human hybrids? Could cloning so narrow our gene pool that a
single epidemic could destroy us like the potato blight nearly destroyed the potato?

Imagine hiking high into the Sierra Nevadas and coming across the Northern Pomos.
Imagine being able to converse with them in their language. Imagine clicking your
tongue against the back of your teeth to say "sunset," aspirating in your throat to say
"waterfall." Imagine learning the idiomatic expression for "hungover" and using it to
great effect, comparing it with others you know—how the Japanese expression for
"hungover" translates as "suffer the two-day dizzies," how Italians say "I'm out of tune,"
how the Czechs say "there's a monkey swinging in my head," how Arabs don't have any
word at all for "hungover." Imagine trading recipes with an elderly Northern Pomo, then
walking with his wife through a stand of ponderosa pine, their trunks so thin, because of
the high atmosphere, that you could fit your hand around them. You tell her you need to
stop talking, for you've developed a sore throat. She questions you about it, then bends
down to a small plant and yanks it out of the ground. This yerba del manza will soothe
your throat, she tells you, and she gives hints on how to recognize the plant again
should your soreness return. Imagine going to bed that night, your throat calmed, your
mind blossoming with Northern Pomo words that will fill the cartoon bubbles of your
dreams. . . .

Imagine it all you want, but Northern Pomo, spoken for millennia in Northern
California, has perished like the Ansault pear; its last speaker, a woman in her eighties,
died a few years ago.

Today we have the impression that there's a rough 1:1 correlation between countries and
languages; each nation is monolingual. But this has never been the case. In the sixteenth
century, for instance, five major languages were spoken in the English King's domain.
Our country was especially language rich because each Native American tribe clung
fiercely to its tongue as a signifier of cultural difference; Edward G. Gray in New World
Babel estimates that, when European contact occurred, there were between 1,000 and
2,000 distinct tongues in the Americas, nearly half of which are now extinct. A graphic
way to understand this is to peruse the maps in The Atlas of World Languages edited by
C. Moseley and R. E. Asher. The maps showing pockets of language before the
colonizers arrived in America are many-colored, many-patterned quilts; each
subsequent map is increasingly bleached, increasingly pattern-free.
Languages don't die because they are in any way inferior or deficient, as has been
sometimes supposed in the past. They die because of pressures on minority
communities to speak the majority language. Sometimes this pressure is economic, as
seen, for example, with the Waimiri-Atroari of Brazil, a tribe of 500 people in the
Brazilian Amazon, whose tongue is listed in the UNESCO Red Book of Endangered
Languages. The Waimiri-Atroari are mostly monolingual, but they have experienced
increasing contact with the Portuguese-speaking majority. The tribe is growing in
bilingual members because learning Portuguese widens the Waimiri-Atroari's potential
market from 500 members to 160 million. As the proportion of bilingual members of
the tribe rises, members of the tribe might begin using Portuguese when speaking to
each other; it follows that the motivation for children to learn their native tongue will
erode. The language's death will surely follow.
Sometimes the pressure for a minority community to speak the majority language is not
economic but political, as has been the case with Native American languages in the U.S.
since European settlement began. Early U.S. settlers had a romantic notion of language
difference as a cause of personality difference. Since some Native American languages
were found to lack abstract concepts like salvation, Lord, and redemption, the settlers
presumed the speakers of these languages to be unable to grasp these higher concepts. It
seemed to follow that Native Americans' salvation could only be achieved by
"liberating" them from their restrictive native tongues. "In the present state of affairs,"
Albert Gallatin wrote of Native Americans in Archaeologia Americana in 1836, "no
greater demand need be made on their intellectual faculties, than to teach them the
English language; but this so thoroughly, that they may forget their own." In his report
on Indian affairs, Reverend Jedediah Morse recommended the suppression of any texts
in Native American tongues. There were supporters of America's original languages—
Thomas Jefferson, for one, compiled vocabulary lists of Native American words
throughout his lifetime. But even today we haven't a national policy of language
preservation. In fact, between 1981 and 1990, fifteen states enacted "Official English"
laws to guarantee English as the language of the U.S. government. As Alexis de
Tocqueville observed in his 1839 Democracy in America, "the majority lays down the
law about language as about all else."
Languages are termed "moribund" if they are spoken only by a small group of older
people and not being learned by children. These languages stand in contrast to "safe"
languages, as defined by criteria set out in Robins and Uhlenbeck's Endangered
Languages. A safe language has, at a minimum, "a community of 100,000 speakers"
and the "official support of a nation-state." These numbers don't necessarily represent a
swelling, robust population—Gaelic, for example, is among the safe languages—but 80
percent of the languages spoken in North America fail to meet even those standards. In
Australia, 90 percent of the languages are moribund. As I write this, sixty-seven
languages in Africa are being spoken for what may be the last time. The more fortunate
of them are being documented by linguists, who spend much of their professional lives
rushing to record a language before it dies. When it does, they find themselves in the
rather lonely position of linguist Bill Shipley, the last human being on earth who can
speak Maidu.
In my girlhood I thought that languages were codes that corresponded; each word in
English had its exact equivalent in every other language, and language study was the
memorization of these codes. Later when I studied my first languages I learned that
such codes do not exist; each language is a unique repository of the accumulated
thoughts and experiences of a community. What do we learn about a culture by
examining its language? The Inuit people live in the northernmost regions of the world,
in small, roadless communities on the ice, and lack our modern electronic conveniences.
They have no word for boredom. Poet Anne Carson writes of the Yamana of Argentina,
a tribe extinct by the beginning of the twentieth century, who had fifteen names for
clouds, fifty for different kinds of kin. Among the Yamana variations of the verb "to
bite" was one that meant "to come surprisingly on a hard substance when eating
something soft, e.g., a pearl in a mussel." The Zuni speak reverently of "penaµ
taµshana," a "long talk prayer" so potent it can only be recited once every four years.
The Delaware Indians have a term of affection, "wulamalessohalian," or "thou who
makest me happy." The Papago of the Sonoran Desert say "S-banow" as the superlative
of "one whose breath stinks like a coyote."

During this century, eighty-seven languages spoken in the Amazon basin have become
extinct because their native speakers were scattered or killed. Some of these forest
dwellers were both nonviolent (their languages lacked vocabulary words for war and
bloodshed) and democratic (they included terms for collective decision making). When
these languages died, they took with them not only the specialized knowledge that the
tribes had gained from thousands of years of natural healing and conservation, but ways
of living we might have done well to study. In the absence of these examples, as John
Adams wrote, "we are left to grope in the dark and puzzle ourselves to explain a
thousand things which would have appeared very simple if we had . . . the pure light of
antiquity."

But even beyond this rather romantic notion of the need for language preservation, there
are concrete and empirical losses to science when languages become extinct. There's a
wealth of information that can be extracted from languages by the use of statistical
techniques, and this information can be used not only by linguists, but by
anthropologists, cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, geneticists, and population
biologists, among others. Hypotheses about human migration patterns can be tested by
seeing whether words have been assimilated into a language from the languages of
nearby populations. Hypotheses about neural structures and processes can be tested by
analyzing the phonology and syntax of a language. Hypotheses about the hardware of
our brains capable of generating sentences can be tested against the different sentences.
What must all infant brains have in common that any child can acquire any language?
The more data we have, the closer we can come to answering questions such as this.
Furthermore, recent studies indicate that language learning causes cognitive and neural
changes in an individual. At a recent conference at the Center for Theories of Language
and Learning, Dr. Mark Pagel argued that when a child acquires a disposition to
categorize objects through word-learning, some neural connections in the brain are
strengthened, while others are weakened or eliminated. Previous learning affects a
system's way of categorizing new stimuli, and so Pagel concluded that, although it may
be true that all humans "think in the same way," one's native language influences one's
perceptions. When we lose linguistic diversity we suffer a consequent loss in the range
of ways of experiencing the world.

Yet we needn't constrain ourselves to discussions of hard science, for the issues
involved in diversity are more far-reaching. If the language ability, as many theorists
hold, is what separates us from animals, it is the central event of human evolution. Each
language that dies takes with it everything it might have taught us about this unique
aspect of our constitution. If language is a well-engineered biological instinct, as Steven
Pinker argues in The Language Instinct, each language that dies takes from us another
clue to the mystery of what keeps the spider spinning her web or the hen warming the
eggs in her nest. The cognitive organization which shapes our language facilities also
shapes other mental activities related to language, such as music and mathematics. Each
language that dies not only weakens linguistics but all of these related fields—all fields,
in fact, that seek to understand the human brain. Each language that dies takes from us a
few crucial parts of nature's tale, so much of which (even how and when the universe
was created) still eludes us. In fact, each language that dies weakens our most vital
challenge—to engage the world in all its complexity and to find meaning there. This is
the definition of both art and religion. To lessen the complexity of the world is to lessen
our moral struggle.

I've written "personal essays" before, and this isn't one of them. I haven't told you very
much about myself. I haven't told you if I'm a scientist (I'm not) or a linguist (I'm not).
I'm a poet. So the argument could be made (perhaps some of you are making it right
now) that I'm not qualified to write this essay. But I'm qualified to make metaphors, and
that's what I've tried to do. I read books on crops and languages and I begin to hear them
speaking to each other, and soon the desire is born in me to speak of them to you.

I've argued for empirical reasons we need diversity on our table and in our ears. But I
think one of the most important reasons we need diversity isn't based on grubby need,
isn't based on a what-can-nature-do-for-me mentality. I don't want the argument to rest
solely on that because plenty of people will think they have all that they need. And in a
way they're right. After all, we live in an era of hysterical data. It's exhausting. Let's
have enough faith in our own self-interest, if in nothing else, to assume we will never
lose the pear or the potato. Let's have enough faith in our own torpidity, if in nothing
else, to assume we will never have a unilingual world. So okay, we lose a few varieties
of Ethiopian sorghum—varieties once so beloved they were named "Why Bother with
Wheat?" and "Milk in my Cheeks." Do we really need forty kinds? Isn't four enough?
It's not like only having four friends, or even four varieties of dogs. A seed company
streamlining its offerings isn't like a museum streamlining its Van Gogh collection. And
if we lose a few obscure languages, maybe that's the price one pays for having fewer
translators and English as a "universal business language," saving time, frustration, and
money. Why should we be overly concerned if what's lost wasn't useful to us in the first
place?

Of course, there's an old rejoinder but a good one—our responsibility to the future. In
poem No. 1748, Emily Dickinson writes, "If nature will not tell the tale / Jehovah told to
her / Can human nature not survive / without a listener?" But nature ceaselessly tries to
tell her tale to the patient and attentive, and her tale is still unfolding. Each seemingly
interchangeable variety of sorghum contains a distinct link of DNA that reveals part of
nature's story. Similarly, each language is a biological phenomenon that reveals millions
of bits of genetic information and contains within itself clues that help us understand
how our brains are organized. What clues our progeny will need is beyond our power to
know. We can't imagine what will be useful, necessary, what will provide a link, prove
or disprove a hypothesis. Losing plants, losing languages: it's like losing pieces to a
puzzle we'll have to put together in a thousand years, but by then puzzles may look
entirely different. We might put them together in the dark, with our toes.

Yet beyond the idea of what will be useful to future generations, we, right here, right
now, have a need for needless diversity. A world with fewer fruits and vegetables isn't
only a world with an endangered food supply. It's also a world with less flavor, less
aroma, less color. We suffer a diminution of choice. As Gregory McNamee writes in
"Wendell Berry and the Politics of Agriculture," we're experiencing "an
impoverishment of forms, a loss of the necessary complexity that informs an art rightly
practiced."[1] And a world with fewer languages isn't only a world with more limited
means of communication. It's also a world with fewer stories and folk tales, fewer
hagiographies, fewer poems, myths, and recipes, fewer remedies, fewer memories. We
possess the accumulated vision and wisdom of fewer cultures. We become like hybrid
corn: less diverse, with less accumulated defenses, susceptible to dangers that our
"parents" might have battled and overcome, dangers they could have helped us with,
were they not in their graves.
What I want to say is this: for twenty-eight years I've been carrying on a love affair with
words and the world and I've come to believe that the sheer magnitude of creation
blesses us. The gross numbers, the uncountability of it; as if the world were a grand,
grand room full of books and though we might read all we can we will never, ever
outstrip its riches. A thought both unsettling and comforting. If we are stewards of the
world, we are stewards of a charge beyond our comprehension; even now science can
tell us less about the number of species we have on earth than about the number of stars
in our galaxy. There is something important in the idea of this fecundity, this
abundance, this escape hatch for our imaginations. I have read Robert Frost's poem
"Design," and I have read Gordon Grice's essay on how the black widow spider kills her
prey with ten times the amount of poison she needs, and I'm not one for making
teleological arguments, but I can tell you that somehow, despite our savagery, we have
been over-provided for, and I believe it is a sign of love.

Poet Wendell Berry urges us to care for "the unseeable animal," even if it means we
never see it. So, I would argue, must we care for the untastable vegetable, the
unhearable language, which add their link, as we add ours, to nature's still-unfolding
tale. They deepen nature's mystery even as they provide clues to help us comprehend
that mystery. They enrich us not only because they can serve us, not only because they
are useful, but because theyare. Their existence contributes to the complexity of the
world in which we are, a world we still strive—thankfully, nobly—to understand.
NOTES
1. See Wendell Berry, ed. Paul Merchant (Lewiston, ID: Confluence Press, 1991), 90-
102