Short Black 11 No Fixed Address by Robyn Davidson

Author:Robyn Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.

CONCLUSION

The agricultural revolution transformed the earth and changed the fate of humanity. It produced an entirely new mode of subsistence, which remains the foundation of the global economy to this day.

There is no going back. Without human labour hacking at the weeds, or redirecting water, domesticated grains would die out, and without that grain, so would we. The economy which gave us more cheap food, and an increasing population dependent on that food, provided no exit other than famine.

When Homo sapiens sapiens inherited the earth, we numbered perhaps a third of a million. Around ten thousand years ago, we had increased to perhaps three million, and by the time farming had given rise to civilisation five thousand years ago, there might have been up to twenty million of us in the world. We are now six billion and rising.

By requiring us to become sedentary, agriculture changed the way we conceive of our place in nature, and it changed the way we distributed goods. In pre-agricultural societies social structures were more or less egalitarian and food was shared. Population was limited. Injustice and subjugation did not begin with settlement (one only need look at Jane Goodall’s work with chimps to know that murderousness is a primate inheritance), but they found a rich habitat there in which to flourish.

The process of agricultural take-over of hunter-gatherer economies has almost reached its conclusion. In 10,000 BC all human beings were hunters and gatherers; by 1500 AD this had reduced to about 1 per cent. And by the mid-twentieth century, it was down to 0.001 per cent.

What damage do we cause ourselves when the earliest extant efforts of the human mind to find its place in the universe have gone, never to be recovered?

And now the more recent forms of nomadism – pastoralism and artisanship – are also being brought to a halt. They do not fit well with modernising drives. Such nomads are difficult to control and tax, independent-minded, skeptical, and they tend to value knowledge above accumulated wealth.

Agriculture set us on a path to the urban and industrial revolutions, and finally to the wild consumerism of late capitalism. Like those previous chapters of the agricultural story, post-industrial globalisation is achieving material wealth, longer life, greater choice. But it cannot distribute those benefits. The rate at which the gap between over-and under-privileged is widening depends on which statistics you read, but no one seriously doubts that it is widening, both within and between countries. Evidence from its own institutions indicates that a couple of billion people suffer from chronic malnutrition and live in poverty.

Most importantly, the generation of that wealth requires an increasing pillage of the environment. Global warming alone should be terrifying enough to galvanise us into changing habits of consumption. It does not appear to be doing so. Four billion years of life on earth. Millions of those years reigned over by the dinosaurs. Us lot a mere 200,000-year blip and according to several commentators, including Lord Rees, the UK Astronomer Royal, we are not looking good to get through the next hundred years, let alone compete with the dinosaurs.

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