Clearly, the definition of agriculturist merges insensibly into the definition of hunter-gatherer and it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins.
— Tim Flannery
Jared Diamond of Collapse fame wrote an essay on agriculture’s origins provocatively titled The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. For many people, this is a paradigm-altering read. Diamond claims that rather than improve the lives of our ancestors, agriculture made them worse. It brought malnutrition and disease, inequality, despotism, risk of starvation, population explosion, and unsanitary crowdedness. Free time shrank, hard labor increased, parasitic elites skimmed the surplus produced and went to war on neighbors snatching slaves and tribute. When I read the essay, I was stunned. You bet I double-checked his claims. In the old days, anthropologists used to ask what took humans so long to become farmers. Now they are asking, what forced our ancestors into this difficult way of life when life as foragers was generally plentiful enough, healthier, and full of leisure compared to the new lifestyle?
In a nutshell, the understanding of the so called agricultural revolution is in flux. That oldest theory of all, that agriculture is the superior way to live, was laid to rest in the 60s when forager research matured enough to see past the stereotypes. The main theories which followed proposed that humans were pushed into agriculture by hunger, climate downturns, and population growth. Though they linger, testimony of the ground has not supported them. There is a great deal of evidence that agriculture as we understand it emerged in areas of relative plenty, during periods of favorable climate and small forager populations, when there was the luxury to experiment. For example, the first known domesticate, rye, was cultivated in the Near East as early as 13,500 years ago, well before the climatic cold of the Younger Dryas – the last gasp of the Ice Age.
Perhaps the word “disarray” would describe the situation better than “flux.” As Bryan Hayden commented in his 1990 article Nimrods, piscators, pluckers and planters:
Few topics in prehistory have engendered as much discussion and resulted in so few satisfying answers as the attempt to explain why hunter/gatherers began to cultivate plants and raise animals. Climatic change, population pressure, sedentism, resource concentration from desertification, girls’ hormones, land ownership, geniuses, rituals, scheduling conflicts, random genetic kicks, natural selection, broad spectrum adaptation and multicausal retreats from explanation have all been proffered to explain domestication. All have major flaws … the data do not accord well with any one of these models.
The most colorful conjecture posits that it all started with human fondness for alcohol and other grain-produced endorphins. Then there is the encouragement of surplus production for competitive feasting, Hayden’s own contribution, but we know such feasts had gone on among foragers without leading to agriculture. Each hypothesis seems to have a bit of the truth, and none seems to satisfy the demands of a full-fledged, well-corroborated theory.
There is another prism through which to view this puzzle. After delving into far prehistory in great detail, it seemed to me passing strange to assume that our sapiens ancestors 100,000+ years ago did not notice that sticking a bit of a plant back in the soil produces more. We have erectus building rafts and navigating the ocean 800,000 years ago, we have neanderthalensis cooking up glue at high temperatures at 80,000+ years ago, but gosh darn, nobody noticed plants grow from seeds!? It makes no sense. I am assuming along with Colin Tudge’s Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers that by some 50,000 years ago, our ancestors were minding plants in ways that will never show in the archeology record, and had probably been doing it for eons before that time. As the Australian paleontologist Tim Flannery stresses in his book The Future Eaters:
Traditionally, the major crops of New Guinea have been root crops such as the taro, or suckering species such as the banana. In order to propagate these plants one simply needs to grub them up, cut off the tuber or sucker and stick the leafy top back into the ground. This simple act has probably been part of the human behavioral repertoire for 100,000 years or more. Clearly it does not qualify a person as an agriculturist. But what is to be said of the person who returns to the newly established plant and clears competing species away from it? And what if they plant 10 taro tops together…?
Surely, human intelligence would apply itself in trying to enhance the fecundity of a given environment… not in order to be able to cram more humans into it, but in order to have an easier, less toilsome life with a bit more buffer from natural downturns. After all, we humans follow the “law of least effort” whenever we can. I wager that we have experimented with plant and animal “magic” for a long time, trying for the best mix of strategies to fit in with a particular environment. ‘To tend’ means to listen, be attentive to; to watch over; and finally to cultivate. And taming (as in befriending) animals or helping plants spread and thrive will not necessarily leave a genetic footprint. In other words, cultivation is possible without domestication. The tribal record shows that we’ve gone back and forth, trying this and that, then returning to what was before if the new ways did not please. The precise mix of subsistence means varied in response to local opportunities and challenges. We sapiens emerged from the mists not as some pure and delimited hunter-gatherers, but as hunters-scavengers-fishers-gatherers-tenders and “firestick farmers.” This is who we were then. This is who we are now.
We lived in bands and small tribal groups, eking out a living from the land with some combination of foraging and tending, coming together periodically to gift and trade, feast and forge alliances. There was no progression to some “other” future, no march toward a “revolution.” Each culture adapted to its environs; in some areas, by further simplification (for example, Tasmanians gave up harpoons, boomerangs and clothes as nonessential), in most areas by only modest elaboration (in Australia and many parts of the early Americas and Asia a stone age toolkit with modest enhancements was enough to secure the provender of a tribe); a few others leaned toward tending in more complex ways (in New Guinea, Near East, northern China, Mesoamerica and the Andes – the earliest known centers of more intensive cultivation – animal and plant selection, elaboration of containers and other tools, terracing and irrigation played a role). I think of it as a mosaic of great many adaptations, each evolved to fit a particular people and land.
To be fair: what Diamond’s article really pillories is intensive grain agriculture. Grain agriculture, as it was generally practiced in ancient times and as it is still widely practiced today, not only contributes to the evils listed above by Diamond, but through the repeated baring and plowing the soil has also been a major cause of soil erosion and deterioration around the the world. It is said that in Australia (where soils are particularly vulnerable) it costs several kg of vanished soil to put 1 kg of bread on the table. There is no doubt that there exist any number of very poor ways to farm, and that the plow has done a tremendous amount of damage. But that should not obscure the fact that there are many very good ways to farm; there are places in the world where the ancient farmers actually left the land in better shape than they found it (e.g. the terra preta areas of the Amazon basin). Field-based, low-till, high-mulch vegeculture is another good way to farm; so is soil-sparing horticulture, silviculture, and their various permutations, as in permaculture. And similarly, there are good ways to tend animals. The Saami follow the reindeer and tame a small subsection of the herd. Certain tribes in New Guinea develop a relationship with a sow and help take care of her piglets, while she continues to live a life of the woods, a life a pig was meant to live, breeding with wild boars all along. The North American Indians opened up eastern forests through controlled fire, creating new habitats for bison. Agriculture is as old as humanity, and has been of great use to us as we spread widely and adapted to a wide range of environments.
It seems to me that the most successful human adaptation ever is the one that offers the greatest diversity of food sources. Foraging combined with basic tuber cultivation and the naturalization of new crops, as the north Australian Aborigines did with the wild yam. Anchovies plus orchards and veggies the Norte Chicans thrived on. Limited-till small-field agriculture backed up by foraging in nearby woods, or biointensive gardens surrounded by sequentially grazed pastures, hedges and prairies. Even larger scale plow-based grain agriculture may have its place in the self-renewing soils of a regularly flooding river like the Nile used to be, or within carefully looked after mixed-use fields (e.g. milpa), provided foraging habitats are preserved nearby.
And indeed, the anthropological record shows a great many cultures combining foraging with small-scale tending, which became a very successful, long term, stable way of life. The people enjoyed a varied diet not dependent on heavy starches, and when their agricultural efforts failed in any given year, foraging kept them well fed. And vice versa; when a severe El Niño chased fish shoals far away from the coast, inland fruits and vegetables tided the people over. Even in recent times, of those New World cultures that preferred to invest more than 10% of their effort in cultivation, the most popular combination was about 40% agriculture, and 60% foraging.
The chase after the origin of agriculture is a mirage. (Leaf-cutting ants invented farming 250 million years ago; we don’t get any firsts anyway!) Archeological evidence shows not the origin, but the intensification of agriculture to a point when it becomes visible to us today. The question we should be asking is this: what brought about surplus-oriented intensification that began to do away with the sensible and durable lifestyle of our forager/tender ancestors and led an escalating chain of evils up to the present time?
October 30, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Many thanks to Jay D for shepherding this post in the right direction. And to Ian for the nudge to get it done! 🙂
October 31, 2011 at 11:24 am
Great post, leavergirl. You’ve redrawn the parameters of a crucially important question in a most interesting way. If a simple accidental discovery of seed to food manipulation didn’t soon lead groups to sedentary farming, what else might have? What sort of groups living in the last 100,000 years or so would be most likely to benefit? Maybe they were groups that were having recurring problems of some sort. Their survival might have been threatened by any combination of local, even temporary, factors. So they may have had the insight to turn to something they’d noticed or learned earlier but had then had insufficient reason to pursue. They could’ve stumbled into circumstances where they were forced to be more sedentary to survive, so they adapted by scraping the ground, pushing seeds into the earth, and waiting. In any case, it seems to me that the overworked adage that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ would be a very useful one to posit in considering what, perhaps, ‘drove’ man towards the actual implementation of the early agricultural techniques.
Might peoples who had already founded a lifestyle that had partially shifted from both foraging and hunting discover that their group life was less complicated if they were to deepen their already nascent sedentism. If a group had managed to control access to sources of obsidian, for instance, they might have found their energies divided between maintaining control over their nest egg and providing sustenance in the old time honored ways. Perhaps, turning to agriculture near to the areas where they obtained obsidian for trade was an easy and profitable adaptation. Once established, the process would be imitated, and most likely spread – though perhaps controversy about such a ‘devolution’ might even have been possible then.
October 31, 2011 at 12:08 pm
Great post! This is the kind of thoughtful closer look at the finer grain within the pattern of how we got here that is essential to us now. It’s what keeps a focus on looking to the past from becoming just a nostalgic reaction and instead allows this focus to deepen our understanding and broaden the potential for finding useful insight.
November 1, 2011 at 7:49 pm
Nice summary of a prickly situation. Much more comprehensive and academic than your typical post, leavergirl.
I just wonder if there are any other issues we have not noticed in this respect? Animal domestication, overgrazing, poisoning, dementia, pathological behavior. A trajectory to collapse? Who knows for sure?
kC
November 2, 2011 at 5:55 am
Hi Vera; at NBL I mentioned that I agree completely with what you are saying here. Have a look at this:
http://tamnaa2.blogspot.com/2011/09/indigenous-permaculture.html
It’s wonderful to find your blog. I’ve already read a few earlier posts and I will definitely continue.
Excellent work!
November 2, 2011 at 1:16 pm
Hi Vera,
I echo what everyone else said – great post (you might like Marvin Harris’ book Cannibals and Kings – it’s good, I recall, on the link between the ability to store food and the growth of political power (that is, domination)).
The same old question – this side of the inevitable collapse (be it fast or slow), What is To Be Done? How do you Occupy a 10,000 year old system?!
November 4, 2011 at 7:12 am
Wow… check out Ian’s erudite and fascinating post on humans caring for oaks and oaks caring for humans. Balanoculture.
November 4, 2011 at 7:48 pm
Hey Vera,
Glad to act as your ‘catalyst’ for this 🙂 I was expecting to come away unsettled, with ideological pillars wobbling. Mostly, though, I found it reassuring and strangely calming. A lot of clear, penetrating, truthful statements. I could sort of tell it had been ‘maturing’ over a decent length of time. Only one part clanged my bells a bit:
Would you consider substituting ‘agriculture’ here with ‘cultivation’? Although then you might have to point out that in a certain light cultivation is as old as speciation itself… Saying that agriculture has been universal among human beings seems to violate the etymology of the word. Godesky again:
I was happy with everything else though, you’ll be pleased to know 🙂 Especially agree with you on the importance of maintaining a ‘diversity of food sources’ and wish you the best of luck explaining the origins of ‘surplus-oriented intensification’. On the puzzle of why humans took so long to start growing plants from seed, I thought I’d provide just one more Tending the Wild quote before putting it back on the shelf (no, really this time):
Or, as the awesome bushman quote from the Jared Diamond piece goes, ‘Why should we [farm], when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?’
cheers,
Ian
Oh, and PS: ‘erudite’, ‘fascinating’? Stop it, you’re making me blush!
November 5, 2011 at 10:11 am
Chewy, thank you, glad you enjoyed. Sedentism is not a firm link to farming… mesoamerican foragers came up with squash they planted then left alone and came back to harvest at the end of the season… and continued doing it for thousands of years. And this was often a pattern with other foragers who would for example flood an area where they scattered seeds, then go on their nomadic way until the seeds ripened. I am not sure why exactly sedentism caught on on some areas… it is a sure fire way to control people, when they can’t just up and go their way…
It seems that Catal Huyuk indeed developed as a trading center in obsidian while remaining largely foragers. So many permutations!
Sandy, Antonio, welcome again!
You towering dwight, I don’t have all the answers! We gotta figure it out together, eh? 😉
I still haven’t read Cannibals and kings. One of these days. But it’s not storage per se that causes problems, it’s that some try to get a hold of those goodies for themselves and dole out to others in only small portions. Open Source, rah!
Ian, you are right on the money. I debated whether to use “cultivation.” But at the same time, I wanted to jolt people from their customary thinking ruts, so maybe I’ll leave it for now.
Yeah, Jason dwells a lot on the root of agriculture, but does not go deep enough. Ager meant a field in Latin, but comes from the root AK (or AJ in Sanscrit) which means ‘to drive, urge, conduct’. The etymological dictionary speculates that it may have meant a pasture or a hunting ground earlier. In other words, it is a land that was urged or driven to do something by humans. (?)
In any case, is a chicken keeper an agriculturist, or a bee keeper, or an orchardist? I say yes. Neither plows a field. What do you say? Jason wants to say that to plow a field is bad, damaging. But not necessarily – depends on a lot of factors. I just don’t find the tarring and feathering of agriculture useful.
And a thought regarding the proto-agricultural practices beings successful… could it be that it was so in most parts of the world, and another factor altogether pushed people on? The mystery deepens.
Here is a discussion spurred by my post on the rewilding forum:
http://www.rewildportland.com/Conversations/index.php?topic=1702.0
November 5, 2011 at 9:56 pm
Our own Indigene Community research estimates that Polyculture Orchards are in the order of 100 fold more (10,000%) productive than agriculture given all factors https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/design/food-materials-resouces Agriculture creates scarcity, scarcity creates human panic and panic creates a choice between wisdom and power. I like the analysis of wisdom over power and given similar ‘control theory’ perspectives by such as William Glasser. We know that people can become confused perverting conscious collaboration, enter extended periods of panic based aggression and limitless symbolism (confusion). A widely implemented Indigenous Circle of Life https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/home/indigenous-circle-of-life kept ‘Indigenous’ (Latin = ‘self-generating’) peoples of the world in balance through a constellation of checks and balances from all disciplines All this taken together provides an indigenous template for sustainable development today.
November 5, 2011 at 11:27 pm
I’ve never heard of anyone refer to the “Farm of Eden”
Its the “Garden of Eden” – something very different and ancient in our psyches about gardening (horticulture) vs. agriculture – not my quotes..
..this is from someone else – forget whom?? the main point is the attitude,
seems “agriculture” requires some level of exploitation and the “utilitarian value” view of the world vs. “intrinsic or sacred value” view
November 7, 2011 at 12:06 pm
Welcome, Douglas. I have been exploring your site and will have more to comment.
Welcome, John. I think it makes sense what you say about attitude. But agriculture does not necessarily require exploitation. Exploitation is a choice that can accompany ANY type of subsistence system. Keep in mind… Easter Islanders ruined their Garden of Eden with… gardening.
November 7, 2011 at 11:06 pm
I just got hold of a paper that compares Tikopia and Easter Island. The striking finding is this: they did some computer modeling and found out that converting Tikopia into, basically, a permaculture island where all the land is “designed” by humans, is not enough to keep things sustainable in the very long term. Without an area that remains wild, even if the humans keep the population within limits, the land will be depleted and the humans will die out. Or so the model showed.
They think that nature must be allowed to recover its natural “stocks” for long term sustainability to be possible. In other words, the Tikopians would have to lower human population to a level where a part of the island could remain wild.
No matter how clever the horticulture, it cannot do the job without giving Mother Nature her due (both in the sense of wild land remaining wild, but also humans remaining foragers to a significant degree).
Erickson and Gowdy, Resource use, institutions and sustainability: a tale of two Pacific Island cultures. Land Economics, Aug 2000.
November 8, 2011 at 6:15 pm
Hi Vera
That’s interesting about the deeper etymology. From your description it seems to go back into the thorny problem of domestication itself. An orchard, a bee colony, a batch of chickens, a land ‘driven, urged, conducted’ by humans to do what? Sounds like they’ve been enslaved to produce exclusively for the ‘agriculturist’. Does this arrangement cater for their needs (by which I mean their ontological need to live good lives as their evolved biology prepared them for, not merely the blunt ‘success’ of an expanded gene pool) as well, or do their primary natures have to be broken before they will submit to servitude? I see this pointing to another, possibly more basic distinction between voluntary relationships (co-evolution) involving two parties who both benefit mutually, and involuntary relationships where one party must coerce, manipulate or otherwise force the other to detrimentally abdicate their will. North American flora & fauna were healthier & more vigorous after the Indians were done ‘tending’ them – they got something out of the bargain too. Could the same be said for the weak, dependent and disease-prone European domesticates?
Yes – though buggered if I know what that might be 🙂 I’m not really satisfied with any of the explanations I’ve seen so far, although I’d like to check out Bainbridge’s contribution in full (I didn’t notice before, but in the small print on that first page he mentions the possibility of acorn use in your favourite Catal Huyuk – apparently Bohrer is the guy to check out). Looks to me like a paroxysm of insanity that went global over a few short millennia and will soon be over, one way or another. Of course, calling something ‘insane’ never explained anything…
Good luck with jolting people out of their ruts – usually a fairly thankless task in my experience. You’ve prompted me to reconsider a few things, for what it’s worth… Let me get it straight though: you put your post directly in the ‘humanure bucket’ on the rewild forums?? Girl: have more respect for yourself! Or were you spoiling for a fight? I was quite amused to see you calling Jensen and the DGR Wall St. communique ‘nuts’ in one of your first posts there. You like stirring things up, huh? 😉 I’ll be interested to follow the ongoing exchanges there. Might even butt in myself if you really step on my toes!
cheers,
Ian
November 8, 2011 at 9:02 pm
Tee-hee, Ian! That forum is way too slow. You bet I am stirring things up!
As for the manure bucket, it was a strategic choice necessitated by the fact that the forum demands adherence to Jason’s 30 theses. If you follow the turn of the discussion lately, you will see. But to tell ya the truth, I liked it. Humanure is one of my favorite causes. 😀
More later…
November 9, 2011 at 9:55 pm
Good to see I can come upon a good discussion late here and it’s still going on.
As for the key question, in my understanding, as well as I think what is said in essence in these comments, it was all a “natural” consequence of growing the root crop of ego-driven greed, desire for more and more comfort and security… The “benefits” to such human egos are now obvious to see as the drivers of the hoarding, etc. that Quinn nails. So I’m with Dwight, in the “what can be done, given all this?” Dept.
November 9, 2011 at 10:09 pm
a “natural” consequence of growing the root crop of ego-driven greed
Where do we get this idea that ego-driven greed is the natural condition of humankind. It is an absurd, and culturally-biased assumption.
November 9, 2011 at 11:37 pm
Did I say that? Don’t think so. Keyword of yours “the”. More like “a”, don’tcha think? I sure do. Ya myth-interpreted me, “Critic”.
November 9, 2011 at 11:47 pm
JD – U can try all you want to reframe your story; but it still smells like shit to me!
November 9, 2011 at 11:51 pm
Just to remind you… u said that “ego-driven greed is the root crop”!
November 10, 2011 at 10:25 am
Wow, dude, i must say, how rude, Ain’t mad though, just sayin’… So, just to remind you, in reaction to my ‘too-brief-to-be-sure-of-its-meaning-especially-if-ya-dunno-the-writer’s-style’ sketch of something complex, you dismissed it by labeling it an absurd concept that smelled like excrement without even seeming to care what i actually meant. When someone tells you that you mis-interpreted such words, do you really believe such a response is somehow better than drawing the person out, clarifying each other’s positions, generally helping them feel welcome in the discussion? Instead, it seems more important to you to shoot down the mentioning of an alleged elephant in the room, rather than help find its appropriate place in the toxic mix we find ourselves trying to clamber out of. I, like the Leavergirl as i understand it, am just here to help with that process. Would you rather i just leave? Cuz that’s the effect such words have on many, even if not directed at them.
So here’s a challenge: If you ARE interested in what i actually meant, which i assure you is likely much closer to your position as stated so far (though you haven’t said enough for me to be sure enough of your meaning–get that?) than what you assumed i meant, please try a ‘constructive’, rather than ‘destructive’ approach to communication. If so, i’d be willing to explain how what i was trying to touch on ain’t what you were pre-disposed to hear..
November 10, 2011 at 10:34 am
Your cavalier response did not make me feel welcome; why should I extend a hand to you?
November 10, 2011 at 10:36 am
I am all ears, my dear friend. Please restate your position. How’s that for welcoming, JD?
November 10, 2011 at 10:38 am
Just do me a favor first. Go back and read your original reply to my first questioning of your statement. There was absolutely nothing in your response that made me feel warm and fuzzy inside!
November 10, 2011 at 11:36 am
To the Critic, i reply…um…how best to respone to treatment like this that would leave just about anyone feeling sad at best? Just with calm facts and compassion, not negative emotion, obviously. OK, first, my role as entering a (chat) room late is not to “welcome” nor attack the existing conversants, but to weigh in, which i did. When my view was attacked as absurdity that smells like shit no matter how i might try to clarify it, my role was not to make the attacker feel warm and fuzzy, but, in the spirit of respectful conversation, to tell him or her what i am the best qualified in the world to know: Whether or not s/he was interpreting me at all correctly. Since the answer was “not”, i so informed this Critic with light-hearted language under the circumstances, assuming i’d get some benefit of doubt. When i got the opposite, i attempted to call attention to process, not to argue with someone about my view when s/he seemed closed minded. When i was called “dear friend”, it felt disingenuous in context. When i re-read myself as requested, well, above is my reply. Favor done.
If my true view is actually desired for discussion in an open-minded non-hostile forum based in fairness, i would feel safe to respond. Seems we’ve got a ways to go, through no fault of our beloved host. And so i’m feeling sorry to have been co-catalyst for any civility setback here..Am wide open for how to remedy, present and future…But hey, this is the Stuff folks, this sort of loggerheading is holding up the Big Show, seems to me!,Again, i ask, “what to do to” to deal with the flipside of the fundament of human nature, the TWO-sided coin of the Dark and the Light (to put it admittedly metaphorically and simplistically) which evidently we ignore at our peril?
November 10, 2011 at 12:34 pm
You are right JD. This is virtual community, which itself is basically a charade provided to and by us for the benefit of distracting us from the trajectory of our culture. But, nevertheless, here we are… looking either for distraction, or find comraderie online because we can not seem to find it in the flesh.
One of the problems with online communication is its disembodied nature. So all one has to go on is the words and sentence structure themselves. When I read:
Did I say that? Don’t think so. Keyword of yours “the”. More like “a”, don’tcha think? I sure do. Ya myth-interpreted me, “Critic”.
I saw snarky sarcasm and dismissal. After all, I don’t know you from a computer chip. Perhaps you have been better served had you written in clear language to a disembodied stranger who doesn’t know you. And my original question to you, was not even framed as an attack on you personally:
Where do we get this idea that ego-driven greed is the natural condition of humankind. It is an absurd, and culturally-biased assumption.
So, my reaction to what I read as dismissal, was to dis you right back. Good old eye for an eye. If I misread your intention, mea culpa; but, perhaps you should pay closer attention to your virtual missives before you press that send button.
Having said that, I will now address your recurring use of the term “human nature. You say:
to deal with the flipside of the fundament of human nature
I have no idea what “nature” you are referring to. As I see it, the very concept of “human nature” is an artifice and artifact of the Western curriculum; it is another distraction, a red herring that further distances us from non-human nature, while acting as propaganda to justify the hierarchical institutions of the State and their mechanisms of control over the masses (and our evil within).
I hope you don’t take offense to anything I said in this post. All was said in honesty and with the intention of communicating with you. sandy
November 10, 2011 at 1:05 pm
I assure all who may read this, my alleged “dismissal” of the Critic’s dismissal of my words that he mis-interpreted was meant to keep things light, rather than just “react” as if i was personally offended. Sometimes “ya’ just can’t win” with words, and i accept that.
But it does seem that perhaps we don’t agree as much as i thought, yet still i didn’t mean to say, nor did i say, that the dark side of human nature, wherever that ego-structure comes from, is any more influential in the big picture than the essential” goodness”/fairness/whateverness which we all embody in our own ways also. The root crop of ego is counter-balanced by our deeper selves. My thing is that if we refuse to face what’s being learned on the psychological front, if we don’t factor in the “selfishness-at-others’-expense” part of the Big Picture, we have an elephant in the room, which at this point i see no need to argue, as it is a given if anything is.To me, the relevance to the original post’s main question is clear and important. And we gotta grok its dynamics or we just keep playing them out like unconscious pre-programmed computers who are in denial about it. Once we do, we can start to move on.
Moving on…
November 10, 2011 at 1:10 pm
P.S. Of course, then, the side of us that insists “we can and must do better” is like ‘the root crop of our better selves’, the fervent belief in which keeps me getting out of bed every day.
OK, i took a good shot at it…i can shut up for awhile now…
November 10, 2011 at 3:08 pm
So as to the what caused the intensification of agriculture, to pick up where my first comment left off, just a note to say that the concept of “coercion” used in other comment(s) is sort of the place to start, i think. Along with the know-how for cultivating “surplus” was the concomitant gradual rise in the ruling and commercial, etc., classes that benefitted at others’ expense. (Others meaning both humans and “nature” in general.) Greater comfort and security and ego-power, status, and other related, excessively illusion-based lures, gave rise to the big split that has now grown to its inevitable “limit” times, its karmuppance time. Way back when, it manifested into Industrial Civ. as we see, and of course ag was a key part of that.
We can learn from all this, so as to do things differently when we take this next crack at sustainable survival and all that we talk about and envision. So thanx to Leavergirl for focusing on this pivotal period, as long the “period” was in some ways, in order to get the lessons right.
And thank to the Critic for getting me to quickly, and at least somewhat i hope, clarify my comments. As for the process of how we go about this with the mutually acknowledged drawbacks and advantages of this medium, i’d say that to me it’s plain to see that there can be no more basic ground rule than to be careful to be respectful of each other. And one crucial way of doing that is to go a bit out of our way if necessary to give each other the benefit of the doubt, if there can be doubt, or mis-interpretation or being taken way out of context is claimed. especially, Then we’re on our way…to wherever we’re going…
By the way, where ARE we going, does anyone have a clue?!
November 10, 2011 at 5:47 pm
Starve, most of us, I’m afraid. Off topic-ish (sorry, Leavergirl, I won’t make a habit of it), but there’s a very good short story, set in the year 2040, by Helen Simpson,
It’s in a collection called “I’m with the Bears”, just published by Verso. Proceeds go to 350.org (for what that’s worth?!) The Simpson story is narrated by a woman born in the year 2010. Let’s say, life hasn’t turned out how people today might be hoping.
Also excellent – and set in California or thereabouts – is Paulo Bacigalupi’s effort, called The Tamarisk Hunter. Water is power….
November 10, 2011 at 7:43 pm
JD – I think you are correct, we may in fact disagree on this issue of the essentially human. I don not hold to the theory that there is either goodness or evil in our nature, our genes, if you will. I see the concept of ‘human nature’ as a piece of the fable constructed to help manage us. There is no concept among pre-literate, pre-civilized cultures, as far as I understand the literature. We are simply a part of nature, our flesh, the flesh of the world. Culture is what which creates the person, for good or bad. I would offer a recommendation, if interested: Marshall Sahlins, The Western Illusion Of Human Nature.
November 11, 2011 at 10:04 am
Good to see your weigh-in on the general human future, Dwight. Sigh… Can’t argue… wish i knew how to read such stories and books without having to paying for ’em all…circulate books through this network via snailmail? Wow, something to create more community? What a concept!
Leavergirl, let me know if you don’t like this teasing out of terminology yesterday and below as commentary on your important post. Definitely not precisely on topic, though it’s about clarifying what i meant by my simple summary of the situation you bring up in the post, and trying to come up with some shared terms that don’t keep bogging things down. Maybe we should move it to another post or something? Feel free, oc. Not saying i’ll be clogging things up 😉 with a lot more long posts, probably not able to stay around too long this time, but would very much like/need to understand: How do people think we can get away with ignoring the importance of dealing effectively with the shadow side of life? If there actually IS a way that’s not fraught with denial, i’d LOVE to embrace it! But if it’s in denial about the staggering influence of denial, naturally it ain’t so useful.
Kulturcritic, well maybe we DON’T disagree QUITE as much as it seemed, as i too am uncomfortable with conceptual formulations which are too easily seized upon as “black and white”, uselessly dualistic, simplistic, etc. Please keep in mind that i am well aware in using them that they are crude word tools and metaphorical, as in the “two-sided coin” and the two “root crops” we cultivate both within us and within culture. Simplistic, and i hate simplistic, but we need handles on things that matter to talk about, so…i am open for a better way to look at this which fewer would object to as too Christian-like, etc. (NOT where i’m coming from!)
I would like to see what Sahlins means by his title, but again, i doubt the library has it. Could you summarize what we might say instead to describe the basis of greed, etc. in practical terms? Surely it’s not all the culture’s fault? Agreed it’s the most influential thing in “creating the person”(ality) as it manifestss itself in the world. Though it’s turning out there is a much more biological basis for personality than even recently thought. (There’s a recent book titled “Quirk” about that which is very readable and important i think; i find the new insights immensely helpful in dealing with other people and myself). Hmmm, well, do you agree there is actually a spectrum of human traits, some considered good, some bad, some neither, depending? Granted these terms are woefully inadequate, but acknowledging we need a common language, what do we call this stuff? Without that, well, what are you saying, that we’d be better off discarding, say, depth psychology altogether…in favor of what?
November 11, 2011 at 10:37 am
Ian, I think the distinction between befriending and co-evolving with critters (incl. plants) and treating them like slaves is one way to distinguish good and bad ag… (subsumed under my “stench of misery” characteristic I wrote about earlier). Indeed…
On the rewilding forum, someone said something related… “Do we see it as us, humans, “growing” food – thus implying that we are the only beings taking action (that the plants, soil, etc are just objects that we act on), and also implying that the food “we grow” is “ours” (that we are entitled to exclusive use of it, if we wish)? Or do we see it as us participating in the cycle of life (which would happen with or without us, just maybe in a different way), along with many other beings in a wider community of life? That we are helping the plants to do what they are already doing?”
Sandy and Jay D, interesting you all should get into the whole “human nature” thang. I have a post brewing on that… I tend to think along with Jay D that common human behaviors exhibit both the light and the dark side… I certainly have behaved in greedy ways during my life, and other times, in generous ways.
As for intensification and why, go ahead and dig into it, that is the next puzzle. It does not by itself explain the bad turning… what pushed/pulled people to intensify?
Dwight, starvation (food and water) is the most likely die-off. Easiest to pull off by those who wish for it, and it certainly is nature’s way also beyond a certain point. Nevertheless, the future depends on what we do today…. maybe those are right who say we have somehow lost the ability to imagine a positive future.
November 11, 2011 at 8:38 pm
Sahlin’s take, via a review:
“In this latest in a series of contentious . . . pamphlets, really, distinguished anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (who is also executive publisher of this series) opposes the Western idea of human nature (at least its Hobbesian branch) as avaricious, pugnacious and destructive, unless severely governed.”
Well, that kind of a POV I too disagree with. But let’s keep in mind that’s just the Hobbesian branch! 🙂
November 11, 2011 at 11:09 pm
Here is a link to my latest post… some thoughts on this issue of human nature.
best, sandy
November 14, 2011 at 8:25 pm
Vera, this was a very thought provoking essay. Having discussed it with you on the rewilding forum, I’d like to share a couple of additional thoughts privately. If you’re so inclined, please contact me through my site. Thanks!
November 15, 2011 at 10:50 am
I got tossed out of the Rewilding Forum. I guess the manure pile was too good for this heretic; nothing but silencing would do.
So I am musing here, this morning, that it is not so much their subsistence methods that draw me to the tribal way. They had much that worked and is worthy of emulation, and some that did not & did a lot of damage. What particularly draws me is their, on the whole, sensible social patterns, so admired even by civ folks like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. That is where the real treasure is.
November 23, 2011 at 9:52 am
[…] and their various merits and drawbacks, see this thread on the rejuvenated rewild forums and this Leaving Babylon post which spurred it. GA_googleAddAttr("AdOpt", "1"); GA_googleAddAttr("Origin", "other"); […]
January 5, 2012 at 7:45 am
Hi Vera, writing to say a big thank you for your recent posts, all of which I’ve enjoyed; and particularly, belatedly, for this one. I love the way that you hold the received wisdoms from various sources at arm’s length for a moment and step back to draw simply on common sense (such an undervalued resource!). Your suggestion that we’ve been using ‘plant magic’ of some form for many tens of thousands of years seems self-evident, once made, and I agree that the important distinction would seem to be between small scale cultivation and intensive agriculture.
I’ve also learned a lot from the discussion that ensued (thank you commenters, if you’re still here). Particularly like Ian’s contribution on proto-agriculturists, which reinforces the case here. And grateful for the link back to Ian’s balanophagy piece, which really *is* erudite and fascinating.
A few months ago I read ‘Pandora’s Seed, The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization’ by geneticist Spencer Wells. Although I struggled to identify with the concluding chapters there is much to be gained from his detailed analysis of the archeological evidence for our transformation from semi-nomadic peoples to settled horticulturists. He puts the first agricultural event at around 10,000 years ago (but perhaps would benefit from a correction to ‘first significant-enough-to-be-identified agricultural event’!) The circumstances of this time, in which semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers who had become used to (and settled around) plentiful wild grain supplies in a warm, wet period (leading to population growth) suffered a supply crisis during the Younger Dryas ice age, created a double whammy in the form of an already large population burden and geographic constraints. Deploying (or intensifying) agriculture as a solution led to yet more population growth within a culture now used to being settled and bounded. This eventually resulted in settlements so densely populated that some form of government was required. Power hierarchies, with surplus food the primary lever of power, followed.
This looks to me like the beginning of just the sort of dangerous positive feedback loop that can’t help but lead to relentless intensification of food production. I wonder if some deeper exploration of the early intertwining of food and power (which came about because of unprecedented population densities in settlements where people had lost a sense of their ability to uproot and fend for themselves) might be of use in addressing your final question … blending the question of what made us take up this intensive ag thing with one along the lines of ‘when and how did we become captive?’.
Realise this discussion is likely done though – mainly just wanting to say thanks 🙂
January 6, 2012 at 2:04 pm
Hey Vanessa, thank you for your kind words and for continuing the conversation! Such a fascinating topic. I am sure we’ll keep hearing more on it as time goes by. I need to check out Wells.
From what you say, Wells repeats conventional wisdom. The oldest domesticate — rye — dates back to 13,500 years ago, well before the Younger Dryas, when humans were still nomadic. There is more and more evidence that intensification began in the plentiful areas inhabited by foragers. Really way back in the Paleolithic, but became more more common after 15,000 years ago. (There is intriguing but sparse evidence of tame horses and reindeer earlier than that.)
Younger Dryas put the kibosh on ag. If was only after it ended that things got going. Like Quinn says, you can’t knit a parachute after you fall out of an airplane. Similarly, there is no evidence that humans knitted the parachute of intensified food getting under crisis. More likely, they ranged wider, made sure every scrap of food was shared scrupulously — and had fewer children! The dry cold would have made cultivation difficult anyway.
As for what pushed intensification, I have a hypothesis that awaits its unleashing upon the world. 🙂 Still working on it. There just isn’t the kind of data out there that it was population explosion that pushed humans into it. The evidence points to population explosion *resulting from* intensified food production… As Quinn says, more food, more people. Not the other way around. (I do agree that once more food produced more people, that was one of the reasons for continuing to escalate ag. But why intensification in the first place?)
Many many thanks for stopping by. The discussion here on the blog is never finished… and I will ping you when I do another post continuing the topic. Hugs!
(I just deleted some babble I posted yesterday. I am just not all that clear how the population falls into this… more data needed!)
January 7, 2012 at 4:23 pm
Picking up on Vanessa’s idea of a feed-back loop; I think there is another way to look at how intensive farming may have developed.
First, dominators consume what others produce. The warrior bullies don’t provide much food so the common folk must somehow get a surplus to feed the appetites of their oppressors.
Second, when tribes come into conflict, more of the group’s resources must be allocated to fighting; making weapons, fortifications, etc. Fewer people must somehow produce more food to support all this.
Third, inter-tribal conflict makes higher population advantageous (power in numbers), thus requiring greater food production from a given territory.
I’m suggesting that there are much easier ways of obtaining sustenance than clearing land and cultivating fields. People began to do it only when, under threat of violence, they were forced to feed the non-producers in their tribe as well as themselves.
Field agriculture was a successful adaptation to conditions of inter-tribal conflict. It is an outcome of domination, the labor being performed by commoners, serfs or slaves for the benefit of warrior lords. In the same way that peaceful societies might be forced to adapt warlike ways to survive, foraging, and horticulture would give way to intensive agriculture under the pressure of conflict.
I probably haven’t made it clear enough how this is a feedback loop, but perhaps it can be imagined how it could have started in a small way and forced a response which “upped the ante” so to speak, and the whole pattern has continually escalated from there.
January 8, 2012 at 5:21 am
Thanks Vera and Tamnaa for continuing this conversation.
Your suggestions seem very plausible Tamnaa – and I do see how they would lead to a positive feedback loop if those tendencies are not constrained (looking forward to reading the latest post of Vera’s here on how they are constrained in healthy societies).
And Vera – it’s my pleasure and long overdue!
I take your point that Wells appears to be following the path of conventional wisdom. I have read some Quinn and am conversant with the argument that raised food production leads to population growth rather than the other way round (although I admit I don’t see why it can’t be both!). But I haven’t researched anything like to the extent that you have and it’s very interesting to learn of evidence that rye was domesticated 13,500 years ago – and surprising that Wells hasn’t picked up on this.
Just for the record: he does acknowledge evidence of flour-making near the Sea of Galilee 23,000 years ago! But he says (referring to research by Dani Nadel) that in this case the grain was gathered from abundant wild harvests rather than cultivated.
This also, he suggests, applies to the period between the last ice age and the Younger Dryas, when, he says, “life became easier … food … became more plentiful. This allowed people to finally settle down in an area with large quantities of the easily-gathered grain. Gathering wild wheat yields more calories of food for each calorie of energy invested than did early forms of agriculture…”.
This is quite an interesting observation, if true, not least because maximising the ratio of energy gain to energy invested is always a driver of behaviour – for all life, as far as I understand. Perhaps a version of settled life was (at least in some areas) made possible and desirable by abundant wild grain (which, incidentally, was also amenable to storage over long periods of time), and then the life and culture that resulted became embedded over generations, which made it very hard to return to a nomadic way of life. In other words: what if, in some parts, the culture of agriculture came before the practice of agriculture?!
I’m deliberately just throwing things up in the air for fun here. Truth is, I haven’t researched properly (and I can see you have!) so realise you’ll be able to spot the errors in my thinking. Also I suspect different things happened in different parts of the world. Either way, it really does seem that Wells has some gaps in his literature review 😉 .
Thanks again for sparking off such a fascinating discussion.
Hugs to you too 🙂
January 8, 2012 at 11:36 am
Tamnaa, you just cut the Gordian knot! Yes, indeed, it does seem that domination was the impetus toward intensified ag. (Duh! ;)) And this is a theory that is spreading in the anthropological community, though it remains controversial, and not yet widely adopted. The “greater population forced intensified ag” people are still holding on.
Vanessa, you say: “am conversant with the argument that raised food production leads to population growth rather than the other way round (although I admit I don’t see why it can’t be both!).”
I very much recommend that you read the appendix to the Story of B by Quinn, where he goes into the food issue in depth. IMO, this is a crucial thing to understand for us all in this world that cranks out enough food for 12 billion and is then surprised that in no time at all, the world population has doubled.
Quinn says: “The phrase ‘you are what you eat’ is highly accurate. People are not made of moonbeams or pixie dust or unicorn breath. They are made of food, and nothing but food. The population will not increase in the absence of food – it can ONLY increase in the presence of food. More food this year than last. Flesh, bone, sinew and blood cannot be made from anything other than food, so if there are more people, there must be more food!”
That is why it only works one way.
But maybe you meant it this way? I think that one could argue that the rich areas available to the foragers at the end of the ice age spurred population growth, which then (still before Dryas) was an impetus for intensified ag. The questions there, and I will look into this, are: is the evidence for this in the record? Or were the semi-nomads still largely limited in their growth by their high-protein, modest calorie diet and the “contraceptive on the hip”?
Then, does it really explain why cultivation rapidly intensified after the end of Dryas cold? After all, the populations would have been reined it during that time, even if they had increased rapidly before.
You make an excellent point regarding energy flows. Will keep it in mind as I delve into this further.
I will also keep an eye out on whether there is evidence of settled life prior to Dryas. I have read that the evidence points to domestication and intensification long prior to any significant settledness (allowing that humans were semi-nomadic and did not move camp all the time).
Cool beans. Spread the word, we need more input to this discussion!
P.S. Your astute suggestion that culture changes came before practice changes resonates with what I have seen in the literature.
January 9, 2012 at 7:52 am
Thank you Vera – will follow up the Quinn reference. But I do understand that we are made of food and that more food=>more humans, honest ;-). And yes I was trying (not very well) to articulate something along the lines of your alternative interpretation of my points – that “the rich areas available to the foragers at the end of the ice age spurred population growth, which then (still before Dryas) was an impetus for intensified ag.”
However, not quite. (Bear in mind this is not my thesis, but from the book.) Wells supports the idea that intensified ag tends to result from supply-side stresses combined with an already-grown population. So his suggestion is that the agricultural activity that followed the post-ice-age surplus came about as a result of constraints on food supply during climatic changes leading up to and through the Younger Dryas, which hit extra hard because of the extra population burden and the (likely) settled habits of the society. I don’t think he gave a reference here, but admit I am reluctant to get the book off the shelf again right now as I need to move on to other things, not least including your latest!
You know, I think it could be an oversight to rule out resource constraints as a possible contributor to the early drivers of innovation in production *in some cases* – given that the whole ‘more food=>more people=>more food=>more people’ thing is a cyclical process. While the time-integrated picture flattens out to more food=>more people, there are snapshot points on each turn of the cycle where the other half of the process applies: additional babies born into a community (because of previous-stage increase in food supply) are an additional draw on the existing food supplies. In the absence of a culture that insists communities split and live apart when this happens, trying to get more food out of the available landbase would seem to be a plausible response (albeit not a very wise one).
I too appreciated Tamnaa’s outline of the food and domination links. It is where I was trying to go with the phrase “Power hierarchies, with surplus food the primary lever of power, followed”. I wonder if all these threads could be combined into something that adds up? Let’s say there is abundant food for a time (e.g. post ice-age). Groups settle (perhaps!). Regardless of the extent of cultivation, food surpluses build up. The dominator bullies take control of these and use them to further their influence and power. Something changes. (The climate.) The surpluses dwindle, and the lever of power looks shaky. The dominators get nervous and use what remaining power they have to deploy all those at their command to build the surpluses back up again. Hence: intensification. It’s easy to turn this into a feedback loop and bring it right up to the present moment.
However: I take your points, Vera, that (a) there’s no evidence of settled life before Dryas (which would blow the detail on the early stages of the above out the window) and (b) it’s possible that the cold snap would have curtailed population levels enough to reduce the impetus for intensification (which would throw doubt on the external constraint part of it). Will be keeping an open mind on these though.
This is far too interesting! Thanks again. Grateful for anything else you come up with on your mental and literary travels.
January 9, 2012 at 5:23 pm
Too interesting indeed! And so many divergent points of view. I ran to the library to get Pandora’s Seed, and find that he does not document his very vague conjecture that someone in the Natufian culture invented domestication of grains. I have been running around the web and looking at stuff, and boy, even the dates are divergent… sometimes you wonder if people know what they are talking about. I did find something that could be worth reading, unfortunately they want money.
—
Archaeology (2010)
The Tangled Roots of Agriculture
Michael Balter
Summary
About 13,000 years ago, a sharp, 1300-year-long cold and dry spell called the Younger Dryas reversed the warming that had followed the last ice age. According to a once-popular hypothesis, the Younger Dryas created an environmental crisis that forced the Natufians, hunter-gatherers who roamed the largely treeless steppes of the eastern Mediterranean region, to begin domesticating plants and animals to ensure that they had enough to eat, thus spurring the world’s first experiments with agriculture. Back in 1989, when archaeologists convened the world’s leading Natufian experts for a meeting, the Younger Dryas model was well on its way to becoming a leading paradigm for agricultural origins. But when the Natufian mavens got back together for a meeting in Paris last fall, opinions had shifted. In talks and recent journal articles, many researchers rejected the idea that the Younger Dryas forced Near Eastern hunter-gatherers to become farmers—or that the Natufians themselves were precocious farmers, as some had suggested.
—
I’ll try to get it via the library, and will report more. Btw, I have done a great deal of research on Catal Huyuk, which Wells mentions, and even there, these peoples were foragers, though there was much expectation that they were farmers. I stand corrected about the Natufians, though, they were partly sedentary, at least from spring to fall, sources say. Basically, there seems to be an agreement that sedentariness and ag are not correlated in the early stages.
The story about rye is weird. Small quantities of what are thought domesticated rye seeds, then nothing in the record until Bronze Age. So some archeologists are naturally disputing that they really were domesticated.
Btw, for folks still following us, 🙂 the dates for Younger Dryas (aka the Big Freeze) are 12,800 – 11,500 before present. (Unless they change their mind tomorrow!)
January 9, 2012 at 8:34 pm
“sedentariness and ag are not correlated in the early stages.”
Right, there are lots of examples of cultures where rich conditions for hunting and gathering allow villages to be established in fixed locations without any agriculture going on, e.g. Pacific Northwest tribes.
Also some tropical people who do slash and burn horticulture go off on their nomadic way and return later for harvest.
I suspect that the richest habitats for hunting and gathering (probably along the lower river basins) encouraged sedentary ways and expanding populations. Casual tending of useful plants would allow these areas to support even greater pop.
In sparser habitats a band that gets too large would have to split up into separate bands to forage in different areas but when there is enough food for a large group to remain together, social division starts to happen within the group. Hierarchy and competition for rank and power ensue. All this would go on long before organized warfare, building of fortifications, etc. would necessitate intensive field agriculture.
Maybe there is a critical number (Dunbar’s#?) for the size of a group, beyond which it becomes more and more difficult to maintain close trusting relationships, true sharing and cooperation, genuine equality.
The Pacific Northwest tribes, such as the Haida, Nisgaa, etc. lived in fairly large sedentary groups. they were very hierarchical and often aggressive but they still had not reached the point of needing to bother with agriculture.
It seems to me the early steps toward civilization happened very slowly.
January 10, 2012 at 11:56 am
Just to say I appreciate these additional points (from Vera and Tamnaa both) – and your determination to identify a sensible explanation. It does seem that some of the “experts” would do well to develop a bit more rigour. Perhaps we should point Prof Wells at this thread 😉
Will continue to follow developments (here and elsewhere) with interest.
January 10, 2012 at 9:21 pm
We continue to objectify the pre-civilized past in order to understand our present and who we are… the true mark of self-estrangement and cultural bankruptcy. Great analyses; keep up the good work.
January 11, 2012 at 6:23 am
kulturecritic; I probably don’t understand your comment but it prompts me to say this:
I freely admit a personal agenda in my views. I’m trying to figure out how the human species can possibly continue forward, living here on this planet. When the orthodox doctrine that agriculture inevitably leads to overpopulation, conflict and industrial civilization is taken to mean that humans must never cultivate useful plants but must adopt a nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life… I have to take issue. There is a huge gap in this thinking. Cultivation of plants is not the problem. Failure to dis-empower aggressive tendencies is a major problem. Failure to stabilize population is a major problem.
In my opinion, modern people can never shift to foraging in the wild anyway, so the idea that nothing else is viable only promotes hopeless inertia.
The only way forward for humanity, I believe, is to explore ways of living in small, de-centralized egalitarian, agrarian communities committed to peace, non-expansion (population, territory, power, etc.) and happiness.
Vera; I looked a Cattal Huyuk a year or so ago but without the questions in my mind that I have now.
Taking another quick look today, it’s really very puzzling. Not only how; i.e. what enabled several thousand people able to cluster together so closely, but why did they choose to do so? What I’ve been able to find on the internet so far has been inconsistent and unsatisfying. Were so many people really able to get a livelihood from foraging in the local territory? Wouldn’t they have de-forested the area and run out of fuel eventually? Was their society really egalitarian? Was there a defensive reason for such a high population density?
Anyway, the evidence that such a large group of people could have lived together without hierarchy seems to blow a big hole in my “small community” theories. 🙂
January 11, 2012 at 6:46 am
Perhaps, Tamnaa, what I am suggesting is that theories are just that… why let them interfere with your visceral sense… just do it and get the F… out of your own way. With lots of love, sandy
January 11, 2012 at 3:45 pm
Sandy, good suggestion. I’d say my wife and I have been doing our best to make our theories a reality. It has been a lifetime journey, of course, but during the last four years we’ve managed to create an agrarian community of two and we are well on our way to independence from the money system now.
How about you? Different theories, different direction I suppose?
January 11, 2012 at 8:14 pm
Me? I moved to Western Siberia with my Russian wife. We live in the city of Barnaul at the foot of the Altai Mountains, but our (her) family has a dacha (country cottage) with a wood burning stove, propane, wood heated banya (Russian steam room), outhouse, great deep water aquafir, Ob river at our door and a forest surrounding us, with a large vegetable and berry garden. It is a start.
January 12, 2012 at 8:06 am
Great to see this discussion continuing and bearing much fruit. Some of the explanations offered by T, V & V are among the most plausible I’ve seen for the origins of ag, and it’s nice to see people listening to one another and re-adjusting their positions based on information provided by other parties (man, I wish that would happen more often!)
I would only caution against the temptation of simple ‘one size fits all’ narratives based on scant evidence which is never going to fill in all the aspects of the story, which must have taken centuries or millennia to play out. Maybe one tribe tried it and crashed; maybe another tried it and was taught a lesson by its neighbours after getting too big for its boots; maybe yet another tried it for a while before counterrevolutionaries staged a coup and reinstated the old ways. Who knows? How could anybody know ten thousand years later?
Also, ‘largely treeless steppes of the eastern Mediterranean region’ doesn’t gel with my understanding of the Natufian environment. This paper, which I dug up during my acorn research, refers several times to expanding woodland areas during the late-Pleistocene:
Just more grist to the mill – I don’t know if things changed going into the Younger Dryas, for example…
Oh, and Dave Pollard put the Quinn appendix up on his site here, for anybody interested. Mmm, population, the next big topic…
cheers,
Ian
January 13, 2012 at 11:55 am
Thank you, everyone, for extending our discussion!
A lurker very kindly forwarded to me that Balzer article noted earlier, so I thought I’d summarize it here. (Anyone want a copy, let me know.)
During the ice age maximum, the area was steppes. Roaming small human bands. Then, with the warming, forests of pistachios, almonds, oaks and olives spread, and the Natufian culture began to flourish, and more permanent shelters built, with up to several hundred people, and elaborate burials. 90% of plant remnants in the settlement analyzed were from almond and pistachio trees. They ate wheat also. The rye, well, there are only 9 plump rye seeds found — not enough to argue for domestication.
Then, when the cold Dryas hit, the Natufians simplified again and got more nomadic. They seem to have done well doing the cold, no evidence of a population crash. The forests did shrink.
The view presented (which some continue to argue against) is that agriculture was not driven by climate change and the Natufians were not on a trajectory to ag. Their increased mobility probably postponed ag. Ag only intensified after the return of warm, most conditions. Pre-domestication cultivation may have gone on [it’s good to see that this idea is finally catching].
February 16, 2012 at 7:26 pm
Hello Leavergirl
Thank you for a very interesting set of articles. They are helping me to explore questions I have also been grappling with for several years. I think it is important to consider human impacts in a holistic manor and, I would like to contribute to this discussion by introducing the work of Allan Savory. This is someone who has spent a lifetime looking into the cause of desertification and how to reverse it.
This is a link to a 60-minute presentation http://vimeo.com/8239427 . I recommend you view the last 10 minutes first, and then please take some time to go through the body of the presentation. This is a man with a lot of wisdom and experience, and I feel he is controlling his anger at our stupidity.
When I first saw this presentation, I began to imagine what it must have felt like to be listening to Galileo describing how the Earth moved around the sun. It is a “Copernicus moment” to be told – desertification is not caused by too many grazing animals, but by too few. More precisely, a lack of large herds of herbivores kept tightly packed and on the move by predators.
I hope this gives you another lens with which to look at hunter-gathers and their impact on the landscape in “non-humid” environments. See also an interview with Allan Savory, http://chelseagreen.com/blogs/jtellerelsberg/2010/02/25/following-up-with-allan-savory-on-using-cattle-to-revsere-desertification-and-global-warming/
Thank you again for your work
Stephen Simpson
February 17, 2012 at 9:43 am
Welcome Stephen and thank you. This is a wonderful resource that I will pass on. I am still to watch the vid, but here are a few sentences from the interview that really hit it home:
“Fundamentally, land is not manageable.”
“Many people, influenced by economists, do not understand that land and economy are inseparable. But they are, because the only wealth that can truly sustain any community or nation, or sustain the global economy, comes from the photosynthetic process — ultimately relying on healthy soil.”
February 18, 2012 at 2:26 pm
Hello Vera,
“Ultimately relying on healthy soil”
Building new top soil and hence (by definition) building biodiversity is the ONLY way to create true wealth. You cannot leave Babylon without knowing this. Have a look at this paper on building new top soil by Christine Jones http://www.renewablesoil.com/pdf/JONES-BuildingNewTopsoil.pdf.
Here are two sentences that struck me on the head like a lump of two by four.
“Topsoil formation is a separate process to rock weathering and can occur quite rapidly under appropriate conditions. In fact, soil building occurs naturally in most terrestrial habitats unless reversed by inappropriate human activities, or prevented by lack of disturbance.” (Emphasis mine)
“Fundamentally, land is not manageable”
This observation ties in with your comment (No.9 above) to Ian on the meaning of agriculture. “In other words, it is a land that was urged or driven to do something by humans. (?)” The land is constantly changing. If we adjust our lens and focus in on the life in the soil food web, we see a process of succession building (or destroying) complexity and diversity. These processes are not manageable – only urge able. http://www.soilfoodweb.com/sfi_approach1.html#Top
Adjust the lens again and zoom out to a planetary scale, and we see change over geological time from ice age to warming and back again. Are the two great kingdoms of life on Earth (plants and animals) playing a game of tug of war with our planets carbon? Is this a disputed point of view for the introduction to chapter 4, Ice age and global warmings? See: http://managingwholes.com/grass-carbon.htm
February 22, 2012 at 11:02 am
Stephen, your very provoking links deserve a long response. I am abuzz with the ideas they impart. More soon. This is great stuff! I am also intrigued to follow up on Savory’s planning process which seems to be an amalgam of very helpful insights along with militaristic “march to the goal” prescriptions. Do you know much about his methods?
February 23, 2012 at 6:45 pm
Vera, the military know that any plan becomes useless upon contact with the enemy. I wish I knew more about Savory’s holistic management. I think he “marches towards the goal” by testing (thinking through) each decision to see if it helps towards achieving the goal. Actions taken are then monitored to see how things are going – which informs further decisions. Perhaps it is a structured form of un-planning? (Rather like the building of medieval cathedrals in your post, Tyranny of the (inner) planner) Alternatively, the go, no go, decision-making process used to great effect to save the Apollo 13 astronauts. I believe the key is to have a holistic goal that encompasses the ecosystem(s), people and economy/livelihoods.
Saving redwoods is not a holistic goal, although I fully support such actions to stop “the takers” from clear cutting. A holistic goal might be something like – Harvesting the forest in a way that is sustainable; promotes maximum biodiversity; is in line with what people value and hold dear and supports the economy – both short term and long term. So now, all decisions are tested against this holistic goal. Such an approach might result in cutting no trees at all. Alternatively, it may lead to the felling of a limited number of trees to give room for the strong ones to grow to maturity or new trees to establish.
Biologist Willie Smits wanted to save orang-utans in Indonesia. To achieve his goal he had to grow a rainforest and develop livelihoods for the local people. I think this TED talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vfuCPFb8wk shows what can happen when you start working towards a holistic goal. I found this uplifting. I do not know to what extent Smits uses Savory’s methods.
February 28, 2012 at 1:44 am
I have a lot of faith in Albert Howard’s insights about soil… that it should be viewed as a living organism and that the health of soil biota is vital in supporting the health of plants and animals, including ourselves. This morning I built a compost pile of leaves and grass cuttings, buffalo poop and a little wood ash. We keep a barrel of water with a beneficial micro-organism culture to which we feed fruit scraps from time to time. I inoculated the compost with these little “breaker-downers” and it will soon be cooking nicely and changing to rich dark humus.
It’s fascinating to realize how organic methods of cultivation are based on mutually beneficial relationships between species. Our work helps the soil biota, the plants, the pollinating insects and they all help each other and give us a good return on our investment of energy.
Whether a happy, healthy, peaceful livelihood doing as little harm as possible to life around us is truly a holistic goal… I’m not sure. It does seem to us that it’s a positive (rather than destructive) role for humans to take in the natural world. The key would be stability; voluntarily placing checks on growth.
March 4, 2012 at 5:47 pm
Hello Tamnaa
I also have a lot of faith in Howard’s Agricultural Testament. I do not know if you are aware of an earlier pioneer Dr. Julius Hensel – making the same connection between healthy soil and healthy plants and animals. See: http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010173.hensel.pdf Hensel came at the subject as an agricultural chemist and looked at soil remineralisation using rock dust in the 1890s (I found it a difficult read but worth it). The following summarizes his findings:
“The use of various pulverized rocks will lead to permanent restoration of even poor soils to the balanced mineral content of the best virgin soils; and the rock dust thus applied will remain year after year and not be washed away by rains or irrigation water, as is the case with highly soluble chemical fertilizers. Also, since foods thus mineralized are healthy and immune to plant diseases and insect pests, there is no need for the expense and dangers of spraying.”
Modern day research highlights the role of mycorrhiza fungi – transporting sugars from plant roots to feed bacteria breaking down minerals to make them available to the plant. Thus making the connection between Hensel’s rock dust and Howard’s compost heaps (so to speak). It is truly amazing how degraded land can be restored when all the pieces of the organic jigsaw puzzle are brought together.
“The key would be stability; ….” Assuming people have contraception and are working towards your holistic goal/positive role, I wonder if it is enough just to keep the dominators in check? Are they the root cause of competition and the need for growth? I am just thinking out loud asking myself these questions.
March 4, 2012 at 9:47 pm
Stephen; While trace mineral balance is definitely essential for healthy soil, it’s hard to imagine how Hensel’s rock dust fertilization could amount to anything beyond a last-resort measure. It seems to me that quarrying, grinding and transporting rock dust fertilizer is an industrial process that requires heavy petroleum use, isn’t it? If at all possible, remediation on-site using human energy and biological processes would be preferable. Deep-rooted trees, for example, penetrate lower strata to bring up minerals that may be missing at the surface. Compost made from these leaves can help to restore mineral balance in the topsoil. If all else fails, though, rockdust it is I guess.
(by the way, there’s a misprint in the intro. Hensel believed plants get their nitrogen from the air through the leaves. That partly explains his dislike of animal manures. He was right about trace minerals and the NPK fallacy but wrong about other things, I’d say)
About stability; I’ve been giving this a lot of thought and I’m still finding it hard to articulate. We are at a point in our evolution at which we must intentionally place checks on our own expansion… population, territorial control, power and domination. Although we all have these tendencies within the overall mix of our personalities, we also have tendencies for co-operation, nurturing and harmony. The main problem is that the majority of us, rather than thinking independently, find it easier to “conform, comply, consume” as our survival strategy, thus handing power over to those very individuals who are most destructively hooked on domination and expansion. Clearly, they do far more damage with the power we passively give them than ordinary people would do on their own.
I think a general improvement in consciousness would, over time, bring about self-organizing holistically-minded communities without much conflict. With our current level of consciousness, though, I’m not optimistic that any real change can be achieved. Our poor over-stressed planet needs a profound shift in human values. Hierarchical models of organization (leaders and followers) are fundamentally inadequate for the job of creating such a transformation.
March 5, 2012 at 5:39 pm
Tamnaa, your comments put the “jigsaw-piece” of rock dust & remineralisation into its proper place. It is a petroleum powered industrial process giving a last chance opportunity (when coupled with appropriate organic methods for nutrient cycling) to restore severely degraded lands relatively quickly. Viewed as a one off investment to help restore ecosystems it would be a wise use of petroleum compared to our current destructive practises. On the down side however, the industrial process is a hierarchical process, and thus wide open to corruption and domination. Given our current level of consciousness (as you put it) perhaps it is better we promote organic nutrient cycling, and let the Earth sort its self-out through river sediments, glaciations and volcanism.
March 14, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Stephen, I have not forgotten our discussion. I read and reread the Building new topsoil paper by Jones, and it blew me away.
She claims new soil forms readily if we idiots but get out of the way! Gah, who knew?
So… I developed some questions. And wrote to her. Because, I mean, folks, haven’t we been told for decades how disturbing the soil is a bad idea, Ruth Stout and all that jazz, dig once and don’t dig again, special forks to not disturb the capillaries and soil crumb…. and now she and Savory say you gotta trample it! Yowza.
She says that on a good garden soil, well fed earth worms will do disturbance enough. She brings them food from her walks.
On pastures, besides running livestock there in rotation, she recommends pasture cropping, drilling seeds into the pasture with modest disturbance. Then I discovered strip tilling, a fabulous technique where you plow narrow, widely spaced furrows and leave the inbetween perennials intact. Preferably along contours so that the furrows catch water. You can plant whatever will add nutrients to the livestock and the pasture.
And finally, she talks about “liquid carbon.” By that she means the humates that form when carbon is passed down from plant roots to mycorrhizal fungi which stabilize it for years to come. This is the real McCoy of soil carbon sequestration! I am totally psyched.
Here’s a bunch of articles she recommends:
http://www.amazingcarbon.com
And her latest paper, Carbon that counts:
Click to access JONES-Carbon-that-counts-20Mar11.pdf
March 15, 2012 at 12:50 pm
Vera thanks for the links. The more I look into this, the more I see the need to learn how to let life get on with living. Maybe Hansel’s results with rock dust fertilization (my comment # 61) was the result of providing trace elements AND, NOT POISONNING the soil with artificial fertilizer or too much nitrogen from dung heaps?
I would like to draw your attention to two sentences from the Jones article, “Liquid carbon pathway unrecognised” (Australian Farm Journal I July 08, page 16)
“It is well-known that mycorrhizal fungi access and transport nutrients such as phosphorus and zinc in exchange for carbon from their living host. They also have the capacity to connect individual plants and can facilitate the transfer of carbon and nitrogen between species.”
Who would have thought plants of different species could “hold hands” while growing together in cooperation. I know there are also competitive and parasitic relationships, but it does seems too simplistic to think of evolution as “survival of the fittest”. Every living thing is part of a greater whole or ecosystem, and cannot therefore evolve in isolation, it must co evolve surely? Maybe the term evolution is outdated and needs replacing with co evolution (to put it in context). Survival of the fittest is not the only game in town, survival of the cooperatively adapted offers an alternative evolutionary path.
Your blog and comments of Tamnaa, JayD, Vanessa, and the others, too many to mention, have given me fresh insight. I am beginning to think any type of food production (be it organic agriculture, permaculture, or horticulture) when applied with a “blinkered mindset” of mimicking nature becomes a form of rape, a deceitful con trick; eventually nature turns in surprised horror and disgust to say, “You used me!” Can agriculture learn to become co operatively adapted with nature, accepting limits and the inevitable degree of chaos and wilderness (a non-totalitarian agriculture). Such agriculture may look the same as the bio mimicry boys and girls (with compost heaps, mulches, cover crops, strip tillage or alley cropping); but the difference is in the intent of balancing competition and live and let live. I think I may have found my magnetic north.
February 25, 2013 at 7:14 pm
[…] Agriculture: villain or boon companion, I argued that we sapiens have been cultivators since time immemorial, that a combination of […]
November 11, 2014 at 5:22 am
Great thread, you might want to have a look at this:
“In my last post I talked about Oaks and how useful they were and are to people. The last thing that I said in my last post is that acorns had been eaten by humans since at least late Paleolithic times right up to modern times, and that I would write about acorns and acorn eaters in my next few posts. In this post I will write about archaeological evidence we have for human consumption of acorns during the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Copper age, Bronze age and Iron age. I hope you find the data presented in this post as eye opening as I did find it, and that you will start seeing acorns in a completely different light from now on.”
You can read more here:
http://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.ie/2014/11/acorns-in-archaeology.html
February 17, 2016 at 12:37 pm
[…] lavish and impressive, the economic treadmill speeded up. People were propelled to get inventive. Foragers had tended wild plants since time immemorial; now they began to cultivate more. Not to feed themselves day-to-day, you understand: for that, […]
November 1, 2016 at 2:20 pm
What most people ignore, is that it is far from being an issue that philosophy ignored. Actually, the most important philosophers of the western world did talk about this, very explicitly.
Marx and Engels, drawing from the heritage of the Presocratics (who should really be called the Antesocratics, because they happened before Socrates and were in no way his “ideological predecessors”). These philosophers (esp. Marx of course), being the most well known, also became the most misknown. Nobody actually read Marx or Engels, and everybody think of them as oriented political writers, who they never were. They accomplished the Hegellian historical dialectic, they drew the whole picture of the historical process of Men, and it’s a movement which can be summed up as follows: « Man is Nature becoming conscious of itself. » (quote from Élisée Reclus)
The vision of history they drew is being taken back, more than one century later, by some notably well-known French writers, like Francis Cousin, in some of the darkest political spheres of the French internet. To explain the situation quickly, in France we have a big “shadow web” which consists of more or less radically anti-Establishment sites and authors, who never ever appears in the mainstream media and all gather under the banner of “The Dissidence”.
The most popular political site “Égalité et Réconciliation” (equality and reconciliation) is the crossing roads of all these various tendencies. These authors have forever changed the way of thinking of a whole generation of young people and young adults, who now see the forthcoming economical, ecological, social, (in one word:) human disaster civilization is driving us towards. Unified by a common extremely well-develop critic of the modern world (a few authors: Alain Soral (by far the most well-known, a central figure of this shadow movement whose last book “Comprendre l’Empire” [Understand the Empire] is a best-seller), Michel Drac, Alain de Benoist, Emmanuel Ratier, Pierre Hilard, …), then emerged different points of view regarding the causes. And that’s where Marx and Engels’ Hegellian vision takes all its meaning.
The writings are clear enough, and history has countless times already stated that, just like Heidegger realized in the start of his academic life, “everything has already been written”. Dialectic is both a conservation and a “going beyond”. Historical dialectic thus is the coming from local communism, to global capitalism towards global communism. History, just like every modern social artefacts, emerged after or during the Neolithic Revolution: writing, religion, the state, art, etc. Culture, in all the depth of its meaning, succeeded to Nature. We can only affirm this because of the countless testimonies which remind us who we forgot we were and still are: Amerindian communities, Dayak people, Inuits, Bushmen, etc. you name it: one century ago, there still existed thousands of these little ethnic group which knew not how to write, no God, no state and no social alienation in the enjoyment of the constant radiance of their cosmic being: in one word like in a hundred, they were Nature itself, and they were this direct relationship towards the cosmos. What the Neolithic brought wasn’t a new historic fact, or a massive change of organization: it was the birth of a new social relationship between beings, which took its root in the object of the commodity, which is the objectification of cosmos by its valorization; in other words, Value created the agricultural life, and the modern life, but it only emerged because it didn’t and couldn’t exist inside the community. Indeed, these ancestral communities (who probably more or less all died out by now, expect for one community in the Indian ocean, on the island of North Sentinel) were only local, so when a Pawnee met a Sioux, they fought quite mercilessly — and what happened next was only the prolongation of this evolved behaviour.
Value gradually reified the world for the sake of exchange, which needs work, which in turns can only come from human. Thus human exploitation (by work) is the logical result of this evolution, which ultimately towards the “upside-down” world so many, including Marx, talk about: the Nature is objectified, and the objects are naturalized. The Neolithic emerged for exchange, changing the purpose of things from their actual usability (utility value) to their value (exchange value). People become facebook profiles, sex becomes objectification of inert (non-)beings, nature becomes an economic resource, tastes become your identity, your work is your life, you sell yourself like an object to the market, etc. This ultimately leads to the world of indistinction we today now: everything being potentially tradable (including humans), quality no longer exist anymore, and we live in the thriving infinite market of quantity, a borderless, limitless, empty world of commodities. We have become commodities against each other, and we made the world just a bunch of commodity. Nothing is sacred anymore, and the Capital is, in the 21st century, the integrity of our lives. We went from being to having, and that is perfectly materialized when you compared an old Sioux community to people living in a modern city.
This is described in clear words throughout all of Marx and Engels’ work, and was prolonged by many radical groups nobody heard about, “Socialisme et Barbarie”, revolutionary groups in Hungary, Spain, France, Germany, etc. notable french author Guy Debord (which described the “Society of Spectacle”: “in societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”) and today Francis Cousin, among others. Understanding the logic behind it can be summed up to the subtitle of the Capital: “Critique of Political Economy”; indeed, Marx didn’t wish another politics or another economy, he pointed out the essence of the historical process is that of the political economy (for the politics always serve the economy) by describing its fuel, its beginning and, in the third book, its destination. And the conclusion of this historical process is both its end and its end: its termination and its objective, its conservation and its “going beyond”, from local community through global capitalism to global community.
Marx wrote the necrology of the Capital and how the fuel which drives it will in the end inevitably kill it; that’s when the “social revolution” happens, and that’s what we’re beginning to see today, throughout the entire world: it’s not just a want for regime change, it’s a deep, human desire for another world (while it’s mostly expressed through imperfect means, it is certainly there).
Today, especially in the USA (for historical reasons), Marx has become the perfect tool of the counter-revolution there, for nobody read him and everybody made him say things and he never uttered: Marx was never a feminist, nor pro-EU, nor pro-immigration, nor did he established any dogma of any sort. He only showed us why these social categories would emerge and what they mean in regards to class struggle; he tells us, for example, that immigration is the need to create a “reserve army” to drive down wages, put pressure on workers and cut production costs. All the people who read Marx’s gigantic work (which takes years) *in order and in its whole* are unanimous. A revolution, as Marx and Engels state it in the communist manifesto, is always an economic recomposition by the capitalists, whereas the social Revolution of tomorrow will be the conclusion of the historical movement, which also happens to accomplish the true meaning of the word itself: it will be a return to the origins, a “meeting back” with our profound beings; in the same way science is discovering again what we always knew but never needed to intellectualized, it is a return to the self: Man, meeting Man, meeting Nature, again.
I hope I haven’t been too long or obscure. It is indeed quite impossible to talk of a part without evoking the whole, for it is a paradigm-shift, a coherent, self-actualizing whole. Pardon my grammar mistakes if I made some.
If you want further references, feel free to ask.
S.
November 8, 2016 at 11:28 am
Welcome, Responsys. I never thought I would draw a Marxist polemic to my blog! 🙂 For folks interested in French politics, or in the difficulty of using the right/left divide anymore, see Wiki explanation of the Equality and Reconciliation group. Of course, the Wiki calls them far right, even though it’s quite obvious that Marxism and some very “hard left” positions are part and parcel of the group.
Thank you for the addition to the ag discussion. Changing values (and changing perceptions of value) certainly played a role in the shift to intensive agriculture. I tend to think that a “devil’s bargain” is at the root of it, where people acquiesced to growing inequalities for the sake of greater wealth and power of their tribe — the drive for wealth and power being promoted by the elites. Ultimately, it’s hard to separate the chicken and egg dilemma… what came first? And for a long time, the elites were very careful to veil any conflict of interest.
In a way, one can view the history of what began in mid to late neolithic as the progressive uncoupling of the elites from any responsibility to the larger society, be it a tribe or a commonwealth. Today, they don’t even veil it any more.