Toby Hemenway, in
Our Finite World
Jared Diamond calls it “the worst mistake in the history of the human
race.”(1) Bill Mollison says that it can “destroy whole landscapes.”(2)
Are they describing nuclear energy? Suburbia? Coal mining? No. They are
talking about agriculture. The problem is not simply that farming in
its current industrial manifestation is destroying topsoil and
biodiversity. Agriculture in any form is inherently unsustainable. At
its doorstep can also be laid the basis of our culture’s split between
humans and nature, much disease and poor health, and the origins of
dominator hierarchies and the police state. Those are big claims, so
let’s explore them.
Permaculture, although it encompasses many disciplines, orbits most
fundamentally around food. Anthropologists, too, agree that food defines
culture more than our two other physical needs of shelter and
reproduction. A single home-building stint provides a place to live for
decades. A brief sexual encounter can result in children. But food must
be gotten every day, usually several times a day. Until very recently,
all human beings spent much of their time obtaining food, and the
different ways of doing that drove cultures down very divergent paths.
Anthropologist Yehudi Cohen (3) and many subsequent scholars break
human cultures into five categories based on how they get food. These
five are foragers (or hunter-gatherers), horticulturists,
agriculturists, pastoralists, and industrial cultures. Knowing which
category a people falls into allows you to predict many attributes of
that group. For example, foragers tend to be animist/pantheist, living
in a world rich with spirit and in which all beings and many objects are
ascribed a status equal to their own in value and meaning. Foragers
live in small bands and tribes. Some foragers may be better than others
at certain skills, like tool making or medicine, but almost none have
exclusive specialties and everyone helps gather food. Though there may
be chiefs and shamans, hierarchies are nearly flat and all members have
access to the leaders. A skirmish causing two or three deaths is a major
war. Most of a forager’s calories come from meat or fish, supplemented
with fruit, nuts, and some wild grain and tubers.(4) It’s rare that a
forager will overexploit his environment, as the linkage is so tight
that destruction of a resource one season means starvation the next.
Populations tend to peak at low numbers and stabilize.
The First Growth Economy
Agriculturists, in contrast, worship gods whose message usually is
that humans are chosen beings holding dominion, or at least stewardship,
over creation. This human/nature divide makes ecological degradation
not only inevitable but a sign of progress.
While the forager mainstays of meat and wild food rot quickly,
domesticated grain, a hallmark innovation of agriculture, allows
storage, hoarding, and surplus. Food growing also evens out the seasonal
shortages that keep forager populations low.
Having fields to tend and surpluses to store encouraged early farming
peoples to stay in one place. Grain also needs processing, and as
equipment for threshing and winnowing grew complex and large, the trend
toward sedentism accelerated.(5)
Grains provide more calories, or energy, per weight than lean meat.
Meat protein is easily transformed into body structure—one reason why
foragers tend to be taller than farmers—but turning protein into energy
exacts a high metabolic cost and is inefficient.(6) Starches and sugars,
the main components of plants, are much more easily converted into
calories than protein, and calories are the main limiting factor in
reproduction. A shift from meat-based to carbohydrate-based calories
means that given equal amounts of protein, a group getting its calories
mostly from plants will reproduce much faster than one getting its
calories from meat. It’s one reason farming cultures have higher birth
rates than foragers.
Also, farming loosens the linkage between ecological damage and food
supply. If foragers decimate the local antelope herd, it means
starvation and a low birth rate for the hunters. If the hunters move or
die off, the antelope herd will rebound quickly. But when a forest is
cleared for crops, the loss of biodiversity translates into more food
for people. Soil begins to deplete immediately but that won’t be noticed
for many years. When the soil is finally ruined, which is the fate of
nearly all agricultural soils, it will stunt ecological recovery for
decades. But while the soil is steadily eroding, crops will support a
growing village.
All these factors—storable food, surplus, calories from
carbohydrates, and slow feedback from degrading ecosystems—lead
inevitably to rising populations in farming cultures. It’s no
coincidence, then, that farmers are also conquerors. A growing
population needs more land. Depleted farmland forces a population to
take over virgin soil. In comparison, forager cultures are usually very
site specific: they know the habits of particular species and have a
culture built around a certain place. They rarely conquer new lands, as
new terrain and its different species would alter the culture’s
knowledge, stories, and traditions. But expansion is built into
agricultural societies. Wheat and other grains can grow almost anywhere,
so farming, compared to foraging, requires less of a sense of place.
Even if we note these structural problems with agriculture, the shift
from foraging at first glance seems worth it because—so we are
taught—agriculture allows us the leisure to develop art, scholarship,
and all the other luxuries of a sophisticated culture. This myth still
persists even though for 40 years anthropologists have compiled clear
evidence to the contrary. A skilled gatherer can amass enough wild maize
in three and a half hours to feed herself for ten days. One hour of
labor can yield a kilogram of wild einkorn wheat.(7) Foragers have
plenty of leisure for non-survival pleasures. The art in the caves at
Altamira and Lascaux, and other early examples are proof that
agriculture is not necessary for a complex culture to develop. In fact,
forager cultures are far more diverse in their arts, religions, and
technologies than agrarian cultures, which tend to be fairly similar.(3)
And as we know, industrial society allows the least diversity of all,
not tolerating any but a single global culture.
(Continuar a ler
aqui)
