It's interesting that our society seems to be waking up to the problem of grain. This Village Voice book review of Richard Manning's newest book, Against The Grain, indicates that there is recognition of the problem even in the belly of the beast.

We participants in an industrial economy end up with abundant goods but rarely know the histories of our household objects or our meals. Manning's dirt: The U.S. food supply arises from an ecological catastrophe. Across the country, food processors have gouged out the landscape, sterilized soil, and parched estuaries and gulfs. As much as William Burroughs ever did, Manning wants to freeze your fork in the air so you can see naked the food perched at the end of it...

Evolutionary physiologist Jared Diamond tagged guns, germs, and steel as the forces that carved our unbalanced world. Manning, an environmental reporter living in Montana, suggests that the soft-sounding trio of wheat, corn, and rice has been even more powerful—and brutal. The three grains wormed their way into human hearts by flashing easily detached, dense clusters of carbohydrates. Weary hunter-gatherers fell for their convenience. In staying put to farm, humans could have more of what we were obsessed with, food and sex. Plus, grains were storable, unlike dead mammals. This allowed trading, hoarding, the provision of armies, eating at one's desk, and other innovations leading to sorrow.

The affection for these corrupting crops now verges on mania. In developed countries like ours, people get about 31 percent of their calories directly from rice, corn, and wheat. Of 10,000 items in a typical grocery store, at least 2,500 use corn in some form. The environmental damage arises because these starchy species thrive only in catastrophic ecological conditions. Catering to their needs, we humans plow up the soil, destroying other plants rich with sun energy. Then we drain barrels of oil restoring fertility to exhausted land. Put this on the label: Every calorie of processed foods has already demanded a calorie of oil—more like 10.

Manning has written on this subject before. This Audobon review of his 1995 book Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie speaks of his earlier work.

Richard Manning's Grassland is an attempt to remedy our neglect of the grasslands. It is a plea to change our attitudes toward what was North America's largest biome. Now it is the most altered and degraded. Manning writes, "Our culture's disrespect for its grasslands has produced an environmental catastrophe. It will be the best measure of the maturing of the American environmental movement when it begins to understand and combat this destruction." But our lack of understanding is also resulting in an economic and social catastrophe. This is a rich and brilliantly written book that ranges over the history, literature, biology, politics, economics, sociology and the future of our grasslands.

Homo sapiens evolved in the grasslands of Africa but the dominant American attitude toward the land is a product of the tree culture of northern Europe. Manning believes that we have never understood the prairie and other grasslands of North America. "Just as a forest is not only trees, a grassland is not only grass. It is hundreds, literally hundreds, of species of plants woven together in a complex fabric of interdependencies." We have destroyed this complex fabric. Manning argues that the large mammals which prefer the grassy plains, grizzlies, wolves, bison and elk, have been driven back into mountainous forests. He also believes that the decline of many migratory songbirds is partly related to agricultural practices on the North American plains.

Manning contends that the plowing of the prairie has both environmental and economic consequences. Converting grasslands to wheat fields increases erosion and reduces the biodiversity of the high plains from 250 species of plants to one. It also has produced an unsustainable economy in the Great Plains. The dust bowl era was the first warning but we have forgotten its lessons. In the plains, land under the plow has increased since the dust bowl era. "Farmers began pumping water from the Oglala aquifer onto their fields to insulate themselves from the dust bowl drought. . . Hydrologists suggest that it will be depleted within thirty years," says Manning. We have merely postponed the inevitable by mining the Oglala aquifer to irrigate the plains.

Manning's naturalism - unreflective acceptance of the pre-Columbian state of the American prairie as an ideal - appeals to the mood and style of paleo-conservation organizations and fellow travelers. This is a popular stance, good for selling books and raising public consciousness about grain hegemony, but isn't sufficiently practical to be useful or alter current behavior. Consider this view:

Manning believes that second only to the destruction caused by the plow is overgrazing by domestic cattle. Grasslands were adapted to fire and grazing by free-ranging bison. Now, however, cattle are concentrated on relatively small areas, resulting in water pollution, soil erosion and the invasion of exotic alien plants. Bison are adapted to these dry grasslands; cattle are not. In the middle of the 19th century, the Great Plains supported about 50 million bison. A "century's worth of work, warfare, and technology replaced 50 million bison with 45.5 million cattle," Manning says.

Why would 45.5 million cattle be destructive when 50 million bison were not? Manning's only stated reason is that cattle are not adapted to dry grasslands. That's like saying that dogs are not adapted to cold weather because Chihuahuas clearly are not. Cattle, like dogs, have been domesticated. Different breeds of cattle, like different breeds of dogs, are adapted to a wide variety of environments. There are many breeds of cattle that are well adapted to dry grasslands and ranchers continuously improve the genetics of their herds to match prevailing conditions.

Overgrazing isn't a result of too many cattle or the wrong species of ruminant, it is a result of bad management. Cattle, like bison, are herd animals that move as a group from place to place seeking fresh pasture. But fences, roads and cities prevent them from doing so. Confining animals to small areas prevents them from moving to fresh pasture and allowing rest and regrowth. This weakens the root system of pastures and slows their regeneration, reducing total production.

It isn't that ranchers don't know how to manage well, it's that it isn't economically viable to do so. Subsidized grains and forages are cheaper to buy and feed to cattle than grass though they are more expensive in absolute terms. Subsidies skew management practices. Eliminate the market distortions and ranchers will breed their animals for better grass efficiency and alter their grazing practices for sward health and productivity. The genetics exist now in other countries that don't have a glut of grain and the management practices are well documented and widely used where appropriate. We can have the benefits of a prairie ecosystem as well as the practical advantages of using domestic livestock.

Manning's work is valuable. We are still a long way as a society from understanding the ecological issues of grasslands. You don't see advertisements for prairies the way you do maize fields. His work might even have less useful impact if it did speak to practical issues since the public is so deeply deluded about agriculture that it is common to hear the claim that vegetarianism is an ecologically sound behavior. I wish Manning well in his efforts. I buy his books. It may also be useful to know that there are practical methods to achieve the substance of Manning's objectives. We don't have to revert to a pre-Columbian state to have healthy prairies. We can have our beef and eat it too.