Modeling Sustainability

So you can see that unless you think not only in whole sys­tems but also in the long term, there is no hope of con­tin­u­ing to do this indef­i­nitely. I’m not talk­ing about the next 10–15–20 years; I’m talk­ing about the next 50–100–200 years, when things are really going to go bad if we con­tinue to be more part of the prob­lem than part of
the solu­tion.”

It is this inte­grated approach that is being taken by Dr. Herren and the Millennium Institute. Through com­puter mod­els, they are able to demon­strate to gov­ern­ments the pre­cise effects that will be cre­ated with the over­all imple­men­ta­tion of sus­tain­able practices.

“The model inte­grates the envi­ron­ment, which holds basi­cally everything—land, water, pol­lu­tion issues, peo­ple, edu­ca­tion, health­care, gov­ern­ment; every­thing is con­nected to every­thing else via equa­tions,” Herren said. “We are train­ing peo­ple within gov­ern­ments, within key min­istries such as finance or plan­ning, to use sys­tem mod­els to help them in play­ing out sce­nar­ios. Every coun­try has set a num­ber of goals, but the ques­tion is how do they get there? So they’re using these com­puter mod­els, which we built with them, so it actu­ally becomes
their model.”

Herren is no stranger to sus­tain­abil­ity, and he has spent his exten­sive career find­ing meth­ods to broadly bring it about. Prior to join­ing Millennium Institute, he was director-general of the International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi, where he devel­oped and imple­mented pro­grams in the areas of human, ani­mal, plant and envi­ron­men­tal health as they relate to insect issues. Prior to that, he served as direc­tor of the Biological Control Center for Africa of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, where he con­ceived and imple­mented a suc­cess­ful bio­log­i­cal con­trol pro­gram that saved the African cas­sava crop and averted Africa’s worst-ever food crisis.

But for Hans Herren, the quest began dur­ing
his teenage years in the mid-sixties. “I grew up on a farm in the French part of Switzerland near Lake Geneva,” he said. “We were orig­i­nally rais­ing tobacco, pota­toes and wheat in a very organic way. With the advent of all these chem­i­cals, we moved into spray­ing for every­thing we could think of. I expe­ri­enced see­ing us go from doing the right thing to doing the wrong thing, with no end in sight because it’s a tread­mill. Then when I stud­ied agron­omy, I learned the nat­ural ways and means to man­age your fields and land­scapes so that you don’t have those prob­lems to begin with. But this started from day one when I saw it on our own farm—it became obvi­ous that’s not the way
to go.”

Herren has also seen, from their incep­tion, how GMOs are not a solu­tion to the prob­lem. “GMOs are not an answer, because the prob­lems we have can­not be solved by GMOs,” he said. “We don’t have a prob­lem of not enough food; we grow twice as much as we need today, world­wide. We don’t need to pro­duce more—we need to pro­duce dif­fer­ently.

“When we are talk­ing about pro­duc­ing diverse and healthy food, we have to start with healthy soil, as in organic farm­ing, which does it that way, or sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture pro­duc­tion systems—agroecology. We make sure that the soil is fer­tile, that the soils are full of life and organic mat­ter. Then you have a healthy crop.”

Under Dr. Herren’s lead­er­ship, the Millennium Institute is expand­ing. Currently it is run­ning eight dif­fer­ent projects in Africa, two in China, two in Bangladesh, two in Europe, three in the Latin America/Caribbean region, and seven in North America. The projects are uti­liz­ing mod­el­ing to sus­tain­ably resolve issues related
to agri­cul­ture, cli­mate change, water
resources, energy, dis­ease, eco­nomic devel­op­ment, ecol­ogy, infra­struc­ture, and many other subjects.

While the Millennium Institute con­tin­ues work­ing with gov­ern­ments in an effort to show them the light, Herren believes the final tip­ping point will come about because of con­sumer demand. “I think we will finally get past this only if we have a mass movement—all farm­ers and the gen­eral pub­lic who say, ‘Look, we don’t want to be told what is on our plate. It’s the pub­lic, the con­sumers,” he con­cluded. “So we need to edu­cate con­sumers much more

For fur­ther infor­ma­tion about the Millennium Institute and their many pro­grams, please visit www.millennium-institute.org.