Eating Our Seed Corn

In Atlanta this past week, I had a quick conversation with a man in the elevator where we both remarked on the weather. A cold front had moved through that afternoon, dropping the temperature to an unseasonable low. He said, “This must be left over from that typhoon they’re talking about.” I replied that it was a cold front. And he allowed that that made sense.

The high school kid down the road was relating to me why she loved her favorite class, English literature. The students there were currently enjoying The Scarlet Letter. I was pleased she liked to read, so I asked her if she read ahead of the class and had finished the book. She looked puzzled. “No,” she replied, “the teacher only plays one chapter at a time.” No reading, just listening to a book on tape.

For me, the phrase “eating our seed corn” comes to mind. One of my favorites, it perfectly encapsulates the trajectory of the human race on this planet. Whether we’re talking about climate change, peak oil, destruction of agricultural land, depletion of fresh water, population overshoot or any of the other things that keep us awake at night, the phrase seems apt.

We are eating our seed corn, cannibalizing the future for a convenient present. No resource is too precious to warrant saving–not the intelligence and education of our children, not the arable land where they built a new Walmart; not the diminishing aquifer pumped out to frack a limited supply of shale oil or gas; not the soil under the clearcut forest on our neighbor’s property, where reseeding did not enter into the financial equation; not our planet when it is at odds with continued growth.

Someday, and I fear rather soon, we will go to the collective storehouse and find that our seed corn for next year’s crop was last night’s cornbread.