Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change By Seamus McGraw (review)

It is unfortunate that Seamus McGraw’s compelling new book has such an inscrutable title, not only because it suggests that the book primarily concerns farming (it does not) but also because the title makes little sense outside the context in which it appears. The title refers to Illinois farmer Ethan Cox’s intuition that a drought would follow an especially mild winter and his resulting decision to “bet the farm” on an early planting. It turns out Cox was right and was able to harvest his crops early, according to McGraw, while “most of his neighbors, like farmers across the Midwest, saw their crops wither in the fields” during the dry summer of 2012 (111). McGraw never directly addresses the symbolism of this phrase, which is characteristic of the book as a whole. Instead, he offers down-to-earth profiles of working-class heroes, truth-telling scientists, and determined policy makers, all of whom are struggling to come to terms with climate change as an everyday reality.

Betting the Farm on a Drought resembles Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006) in both style and purpose, but McGraw is more uncertain than Kolbert about the future, which in a sense makes his book a more searching account. Whereas Kolbert shares a sense of apocalyptic environmentalism with Rachel Carson, McGraw’s pragmatic approach allows for a dose of cautious optimism. As with The End of Country: Dispatches from the Frack Zone (2011), his no-nonsense exploration of hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale, McGraw grounds his stories in the day-to-day experience of himself and his subjects.

Although the book begins somewhat un-steadily with a chapter addressing the potential of hydrofracking to help reduce greenhouse emissions, McGraw quickly finds his feet in voicing his frustration with “how long-existing cultural fractures are being exploited by the most extreme voices on the right and left” (24). Seeking a responsible middle ground, McGraw visits the climate scientists Katharine Hayhoe, Klaus Keller, Michael Mann, and Richard Alley; the sportsman and climate activist Todd Tanner; former South Carolina representative Bob Ingliss; fishermen like Roy Diehl; and farmers like Ethan Cox, David Ford, and Joe Leathers. Speaking of the latter, McGraw’s point could apply to them all: “We need to listen to them, even if it’s sometimes hard to hear them over the shrieks of protest from partisans on both sides of the climate debate who demand strict adherence to their almost religious orthodoxy” (124).