The Binary Circumstance

The San Francisco Chronicle reviews a book called Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization by Richard Manning, an enviromental journalist.

In Manning’s view, we’ve retained the physical senses of our hunter- gatherer forbearers, but we’ve forgotten how to use them: “Our kind,” writes Manning “has spent at least 290,000 years as hunter-gatherers, only 10,000 years as agricultural people, making the latter way of living a relatively brief and novel experiment.

[…]

Agriculture, asserts Manning, was the prime mover behind colonization. It created a climate for overpopulation, which can only be solved by geographic expansion or by killing off the excess population. Thus, periodic famines are an essential part of agricultural society.

[…]

The “Green Revolution” of the past few decades has led to huge increases in agricultural yields but at a heavy, heavy cost, asserts Manning. Nitrogen-based chemical fertilizers, used all over the world, have killed the environment, especially rivers and other bodies of water. The Green Revolution has resulted in “[l]oss of biodiversity, pesticide pollution, nitrogen pollution, soil depletion, erosion” and other major environmental disasters.

I haven’t read this book but it sounds interesting, especially in light of some of my recent comments regarding overpopulation, government and evolution. According to the review the author also goes into the relationship between agriculture and slavery and also how the government’s support of corporate farming has destroyed small farms.

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