Glut and Abundance II: Apocalypse Edition
Grain domestication, empire, famine, and food as a weapon
The following is an addendum to last week’s entry in the almanac, so be sure to read that one first, for some context.
The building blocks of empire are formed of surplus, glut, and abundance. Why does our culture champion this concept of abundance in all places, from prosperity gospel motivational seminar brotherhoods on down to the seemingly innocuous and well-meaning jargon of permaculturists, and new age salespersons of essential snake oil? Because abundance is power, and power is attractive.
Let’s go back a little bit to pre-agriculture homo sapiens, when hunting and gathering was the only way for humans to get fed. Don’t worry, this won’t take too long, maybe 200,000 years. We can somewhat ascertain that hunter gatherer cultures were classless, egalitarian even, and fairly sustainable, at least for a good long while. This was disrupted by changes in ecology and technology, specifically climate change, extinction of megafauna, and the development of plant domestication. I for one think these disruptions have some interesting parallels in today’s world, but I’ll hold my horses on that for a minute.
Seed domestication may have occurred innocently enough, as the result of human curiosity. Clans, tribes, and communities would have had middens, containing both foraging debris and feces, and inevitably, the seeds found in these piles of excreta would beget more useful and edible plants. Over the course of a pretty long damned time (but a relative flash in the pan of homo sapiens history), human communities learned to harvest, plant, and select seeds from the best plants, and wild grasses would become wheat, millet, barley, and more. The scapula bones of slain prey were joined to handles to become hoes, and along with advent of metallurgy and domesticated livestock to perform burdensome labor, vast areas could be plowed and planted with grain, providing far more calories per acre than foraging and hunting ever could. While the human labor required in early agriculture was much greater than in hunter-gatherer groups, it could be that the evolutionary drive of species propagation steered humans towards sustenance activities that could support a growing population. Communities therefore became sedentary and large, energy dense grains could be stored to keep humans fed year round, increasing population density. These lifestyle changes led to the establishment of scaled human developments like cities. Land became commodified, inextricably connected to resources, and concepts of class, power and capital formed. Yippee.
Conflict is natural among primates. Did a few pre-agriculture folks step outside of the social order and get bashed with a rock or branch? Certainly. But grain, horded in guarded silos would beget states, militaries, slavery, war, empire, vast resource extraction, and environmental degradation. We have not gone back, and with about 8.1 billion folks on Earth as of today, I don’t suppose we could, without consequences only the most demented would consider. And so this is where the abundance mindset has brought us: a place where the choice between mass starvation of the least resourced and fleeing the planet altogether are considered valid human viewpoints.
But what if we could do agriculture without the class system? Without the resource competition, or degradation? What if the focus of food production shifted from abundance to equity? Well, as it turns out, it isn’t the farmer who decides who gets fed.