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Course: Big History Project > Unit 9
Lesson 3: The Anthropocene | 9.2- WATCH: The Anthropocene and the Near Future
- READ: The Anthropocene
- READ: Anthropocene Africa — Out of Every Crisis, an Opportunity
- WATCH: Solving the Maize
- ACTIVITY: Graphing Population Growth
- READ: Gallery — The Modern World
- Quiz: The Anthropocene
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WATCH: Solving the Maize
Big History teaches us that the more complex something is, the more fragile it becomes. The COVID-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine have revealed just how complex—and fragile—our global food systems are. This complexity is the product of a long history of how humans learned to feed themselves. To understand that history, and to search for answers to the challenges we face today and will encounter tomorrow, we’ll examine the Big History of a single grain. Maize was an agent of complexity in the Americas, and when colonizers spread it to new places, it launched global transformations. Today, we use it for everything, and it has become a cornerstone of our global food systems. Maize could also help us with the challenges we might face in the future, as we strive to combat the impacts of climate change. Like what you see? This video is part of a comprehensive social studies curriculum from OER Project, a family of free, online social studies courses. OER Project aims to empower teachers by offering free and fully supported social studies courses for middle- and high-school students. Your account is the key to accessing our standards-aligned courses that are designed with built-in supports like leveled readings, audio recordings of texts, video transcripts, and more. Register today at oerproject.com!
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Want to join the conversation?
- Strange that I am the first one to comment...
But anyway, my question is:
What does corn have to do with climate change? If the climate is changing, as it has been for as long as there has been an Earth, why would maize have an especially important part of that change?(2 votes)- The narrator's comments at9:07"In addition, the production and processing of maize, especially into high ethanol gasoline, emits a lot of carbon into our atmosphere, which increases the effects of climate change."(2 votes)
Video transcript
A thousand years ago, a conflict in Eastern
Europe would not have affected the family living in the Arabian Peninsula. Today, a war
in Ukraine means tens of thousands of people in Yemen face starvation. How did we get here? How
did our global systems of food production become so complex and intertwined that one war in one
place threatens the entire global food system? For starters, Ukraine and Russia together produce
12 percent of global calories. Ukraine alone produces 16 percent of global maize exports and 14 percent of our wheat.
According to Arif Husain, the chief economist for the United Nations' World Food Program, Ukraine
is a country of 40 million people, but they produce food for 400 million. As sanctions fall on Russia
and Russian tanks roll across Ukraine, shortages of other crops and fertilizers from the two
countries threatens farming and livestock in places as far away as Brazil and Texas.
Feeding ourselves has never been so complex. Thanks to globalization, the food we eat often
comes from, or is dependent on, far away places. The webs of finance and shipping that connect
our global food system are incredibly complex. Unfortunately, the more complex the system gets, the
more fragile it becomes. All this complexity might seem very recent, but it's the product of a long
history of how humans learn to feed themselves. To understand that history, and to search for
answers to the challenges we face today and will encounter tomorrow, let's explore the big history
of one of the world's most important grains: maize. For over 10,000 years, maize has been a key
factor in our population growth. Everywhere it spread, it brought new levels of complexity to
human societies. This odd looking grass is called teosinte, also known as the Mother of Corn. About
10,000 years ago, people living in Southern Mexico gradually began developing this crop, artificially
selecting certain properties that would eventually lead to the cultivation of maize as we know it
today. As these Mesoamerican communities moved and interacted with others, they formed networks
of exchange that slowly spread domesticated maize across South and North America. Over the course of
thousands of years, Indigenous societies adapted the plant to suit their environments, selecting
varieties that could grow in wetter or drier conditions or at higher altitudes. In every
society it touched, maize transformed the ways that people lived and the food they ate, sparking
agricultural revolutions from Argentina to Canada. As people stored, distributed, and traded goods,
they transformed into more complex societies with huge cities, complex belief systems,
monumental architecture, and new social complexity. But that complexity meant that, in some
ways, societies grew more fragile, as well. A climate shift or drought could cause
large agricultural societies to collapse, sending thousands into crisis and famine. Foraging
societies, however, could more easily relocate and continue to feed their much smaller populations.
When Europeans arrived in the Americas in the late 15th century, they encountered advanced
empires and extensive trade networks, mostly thanks to maize. These societies and
networks were devastated by the arrival of the conquerors and the diseases they carried.
Tens of millions of Indigenous Americans died over the next century. Many communities lost
up to 95 percent of their people in this tragedy, yet maize remained, and soon it left the
Americas and transformed the world yet again. In a global process known as the Colombian
Exchange, Europeans transported maize across oceans where new societies adopted and
adapted the crop to suit their needs. One of the keys to its spread was
maize's incredible adaptability. It thrived in the warmer climates of Southern
Europe, Western Africa, and Southern Asia. In the 16th century, maize became a staple crop
in the rain forests of Africa's interior. This new source of food sparked a population
boom just as the Transatlantic Slave Trade decimated many African communities by enslaving 12
million Africans to work on American plantations. The environmental historian, Alfred Crosby,
suggested that the cultivation of maize in West and Central Africa is what allowed the
Slave Trade to continue as long as it did. That's a big claim. If it's true, then the whole of
the American plantation system, which fueled the Industrial Revolution and European colonial
expansion, depended on maize grown in Africa. Maize also grows in dry and mountainous regions
such as Western and North and China, where wheat and rice could not. The introduction of maize to
China transformed the region: China's population quadrupled between the 17th and 19th centuries
thanks to maize. In the province of Sichuan alone, the population rose from 9 million to 24 million
as maize increased the available farmland by 60 percent. As maize spread to new places, millions of
people began to rely on it, which generated complex, new relationships. However, the new connections
in larger systems meant that a change in one place, like poor harvest due to a drought,
could affect millions living in other places. Maize is a key ingredient of complexity in the
human past, but it continues to add complexity to our world today. We grow more maize than any
other grain and we grow it everywhere. Of the top 30 corn producing nations in the world, only
six are in the Americas and 11 are in Africa. In 2021, humanity grew 1.2 billion tons of maize
globally. That number is expected to increase. Why? Because there's corn in everything.
Of course we use it for food, but in the world's largest maize grower, the United States,
we only use about 10 percent of the corn we grow for food. About 45 percent we feed the livestock and
corn is also used in biofuels and ethanol fuel, it's used to make batteries, bourbon, diapers, cough
syrup, matches, textiles, adhesives and all sorts of plastics. As the inclusion of maize and varied
products has increased in complexity, so has its fragility. Therefore, if there is a disruption
in the supply of maize, dozens of industries in hundreds of countries would falter, for example:
while maize is an adaptable crop that grows in different environments, fertilizers are a necessary
ingredient that help maize to grow and thrive. Sanctions on Russia and its neighbor, Belarus,
two of the main exporters of fertilizers, due to the invasion of Ukraine, are making farmers
around the world very nervous, especially as the planting season looms closer. Fertilizer prices
were already at record highs before the war, but now those prices are expected to grow
even higher and last for many more months. Maize has inserted itself into every facet of our
lives. Any vision of the human future will involve maize. As we seek to build more resilient systems,
maize offers many solutions and challenges: it can grow in many environments, it is nearly unrivaled
in the amount of calories it can produce per acre. As our populations grow and our climates change,
maize will continue to be a key ingredient in feeding our species. Scientists have genetically
modified corn varieties to be more drought tolerant, so as droughts become more prevalent
in some regions of the world, maize might prevent climate change-induced famine. On the other hand,
corn is not immune from a variety of diseases and pests that can affect the crop at various
stages of the planting and growing process. As climate change results in more stress on the
environment, corn could be negatively impacted. In addition, the production and processing of maize,
especially into high ethanol gasoline, emits a lot of carbon into our atmosphere, which
increases the effects of climate change. Our food systems today are incredibly complex
and fragile, and corn is a big part of the long history that brought us here. The decisions
we make today about how we grow and use corn will be crucial to our future as a species as
we strive to feed ourselves and save our world from crises of war, disease, and climate change. Few
plants have shaped human history as maize has. In the words of anthropologist Michael Blake, "By being
genetically flexible, maize has persuaded humans to move its seed around the globe faster and farther
than any other plant in history... our global human economy depends on it just as it depends on
us. Humans grow maize, and maize grows humans."