Agriculture: villain or boon companion?

Well duh, not all strategies work in all places. But the difference is that some forms of horticulture can be sustainable in some places. Agriculture (monocropping) is not sustainable. Period.

Monocropping worked for the Egyptians. The Nile replenished the soil every year, and their plow and monocrop cultivation went on for 3000 years.

Hey All,

I like the point that you make Vera, about agriculture working well for the Egyptians. It plays into the discussion really well. They are a great example of how civilizations start. Also, it can show you how agriculture could be less destructive, if used in places like the Nile Delta, and if limited to not full-time agriculturalists. The problem with agriculture is more then just the soil depletion though. Population dynamics play a large role in agriculture’s destructiveness. Because agriculture creates an easy-to-store food source, and because it is very fragile, agriculturalists have insane amounts of food storage. I know lots of horticulturalists did this too. I’ve read the Iroquois had 7 years of food stored at any time for example. I think that food storage, like agriculture, is a slippery slope of population growth problems. Depending on your region, some cultures could not survive without food storage or caches. The problem with agriculture is that it promotes grain storage specifically. Also, grain calories increase fertility. Agriculture, or rather, full time agriculture creates an artificially inflated population. “artificially inflated” meaning, beyond sustainable carrying capacity. Its a short term population increase, followed by a collapse. So when a population, like the Babylonians for example, begin to crash, they take what is a less destructive to the land practice like river basin agriculture and move it outside of its origins to a place where it does not “work”. It’s like Asian civilizations doing the same thing with rice paddies. They build damns to flood areas to create more rice paddies. But it’s not a replenishing flood like a river flowing out of a mountain range, so it doesn’t replenish the soil. This is why we have to use Petroleum as fertilizer; this replicates what the river would have done.

Taking agriculture out of the river basin was inevitable in a way. When the population crashed, rather then recognizing that it doesn’t work full time, the exported the practice out of the river in an attempt to curb the population crash. This is why Stanley Diamond said, “Forests precede us, deserts dog our heels.” We’re recreating a flood plain or field or river delta, where there is none. This creates an exponential growth problem of population and deforestation.

Let’s talk about Horticulture. The Natives of the Northwest had ridiculously large populations for “hunter-gatherers”. Anthropologists says this is because there were so many salmon here and the population didn’t have to do much or move. So you had sedentary cultures of hunter-gatherer-fishermen. This isn’t exactly true. They lived here for 10,000 years or so. They relied heavily on Western Red Cedar for their daily survival. Cedar is not a food source. When we think of “increase in food production” or managing the land for “food production” we often do not hear about all the other forms of life that are not direct food, but are used in the production of food. For example, Cedar canoes were taken out for fishing. Cedar boxes stored food. Cedar bark was used to make baskets to collect food. Cedar wood was used to make all of their longhouses. Cedar is a late comer in terms of succession in the Northwest; a cedar forest is the climax of succession here. Old growth Cedars today pale in comparison to what the white people were clear-cutting 200 years ago. We’re talking about trees that were over 2000 years old. These trees were so large and so old that the natives here harvested wood out of them in a way that didn’t kill the trees. In a very real sense, they tended these forests and perhaps even created them with routine fire maintenance. If your objective is growing old growth forests of Cedar, you’re not going to destroy the soil from under yourself; you’re going to build it. “Forest gardening”, “Permaculture” or “Horiticulture” are example of subsistence strategies that are heavily engaged in land management in a way the builds soil and biomass. It might mean more people in dense areas, and that leads to more social problems, but not environmental ones.

I really recommend these three books:

Tending the Wild by M. Kat Anderson
The Earth’s Blanket by Nancy Turner
Keeping it Living (edited by Nancy Turner)

They basically cover how this is accomplished.

Hey Pete,

How about the role of birth control and family planning in that population thing? I’ve come more to thinking that the biggest influence agriculture has is cultural, in that it seems agricultural societies get rid of a lot of womens’ abilities to control their own fertility. I think it has something to do with the myth and mores, in that agricultural societies tend to objectify people around them (particularly non-human peoples). Civilization is based on slavery for a reason, mostly because it takes force to get people to practice some of these back-breaking tasks. When women and people in general become objects to be owned and controlled, it becomes in the interest of those that own to have more people and not let women control their own bodies.

Not to mention that monocropping is inefficient. The food per acre ratio is too low, and the nutrient density is even lower.

Something to muse over.

Related to what Peter said… Any time you monocrop you’re taking habitat directly away from other species. Then add the problem of food-surplus/population-growth, and the consequent spread of more agriculture, and you have ongoing, spreading destruction of habitat.

There may be an unresolved problem concerning the same food surplus issue with horticulture (EDIT: though the point Peter made about about grains softens it somewhat). Beyond some limit, that growth certainly can create ecological problems. But at least some horticultural approaches to do a much better job of preserving or even nurturing habitat.

To me, an unsettled question is how horticulturalists can know they are improving an ecosystem. I would think it might be too complex to know that. (But I have some reading to do, so…) And sometimes it seems too readily taken as a given. Still, it has to be a whole lot better to do things that, as far as we can tell, are improving ecosystems rather than things we know are obviously destroying them.

JohnF,

Maybe it’s hard for us to understand how horticulturalists and foragers could see/understand their effects because most of us don’t have cultures that have been living in place for a dozen or more generations (or since the “beginning of time”). Just a thought. Six Nations peoples talk about planning seven generations in advance. I’m willing to bet they have some clues to at least attempt to discern that.

Dan, Yes, actually I was thinking about how it’s more contemporary, civilization-based permaculturists who leave me questioning when they say, “We’re improving the land.” My sense it they do it without having as much to base it on. I’m definitely more open to such an assertion from someone from a culture with a long tradition of living in relationship with the land. I mean, I’m still a little questioning because, you know, time is mighty long. ??? But that said, yeah…

...you know, time is mighty long

Then again, that’s me stuck in that civilization-centric linear time thing, so… :o

JohnF: there is a great deal of hype in permaculture. Wise to be wary of the claims.

Any time you monocrop you're taking habitat directly away from other species.

Well, that is relative. Birds, rodents and grazers love to feed off a field. And until recently, even fields of grain were full of other species, I myself remember fields of wheat ablaze with wild red poppies. The chemically-nuked fields are a very recent phenomenon.

And when the Indians burned swaths of eastern forests, weren’t they taking habitat away from certain species, while favoring others?

Peter, thank you, I am thinking it through.

Any time you monocrop you're taking habitat directly away from other species.
Well, that is relative. Birds, rodents and grazers love to feed off a field. And until recently, even fields of grain were full of other species,

So you completely destroy an area of habitat, taking it completely away from all the interacting inhabitants that have come to depend on it, and sure, later some other species come into the now monocropped area. But that is completely altering what the area would be naturally, without this huge human intervention, not to mention the unnecessary taking of all those lives for human purposes in the first place. Biodiversity is almost surely reduced. Ecosystem health is severely damaged.

And when the Indians burned swaths of eastern forests, weren't they taking habitat away from certain species, while favoring others?

Of course. That’s one of those things I do question about some kinds of horticulture. (Remember, I’m pro-immediate-return. I not 100% convinced on anything else. ???) It’s probably considerably better, though, in the long run, for an ecosystem. The argument seems to be that it will lead to a basically healthy, though different ecosystem. I don’t think many people would contend that a monocropped field is a healthy ecosystem, despite some species favoring it. Take a look at Iowa. No way you could call it an example of healthy ecosystems. Very, very little biodiversity, everything kept at the initial level of succession… Sure, the chemical nuking makes it even worse, but by definition monocropping depends on reducing biodiversity.

Vera, I feel I’m losing the big picture in this focus on details of cultivation techniques and their effects. Let me back up. Aren’t you actually questioning the assertion that any particular kind of cultivation (that is, plowing/monocropping of grains) led to civilization. You’re speculating that something else may have been the real villain, right?

I do think it’s important to consider some of those other possibilities – like language etc. that Zerzan discusses. But would you not agree that agriculture (by which I think he means plowing/monocropping grains) made civilization possible? I mean, I think Zerzan sees it as “These other things probably led to agriculture, which in turn was the major factor enabling the rise of civilization.”

Am I understanding you? (I did read your blog post and this thread, but it’s easy to lose track. :slight_smile:

Thank you, John! Maybe I am losing track too… I wuz beginning to feel that arguing with you guys is like arguing God with the atheists… ;D

Ok… so here is the trail I am on. I noticed, a while back, that forager societies, some of them, already went astray. In other words, there were peoples like the Kwakiutl, who inhabited a rich foraging territory… and a while down the road, we see elites, slavery, high population, economic warfare (potlatches) and ostentatious destruction of wealth. Yikes! You don’t need ag to go astray…

Yet on the other you have Tolowa and coastal Yurok, same environment, same subsistence techniques, and yet… egalitarian sanity.

How does your model explain it?

So I reached past the ag explanation. Does that make any sense?

Oh and to your question, did plowing/monocropping grains make this civ possible? Sure. But there were other civs. Norte Chico (Caral) was based on fish-orchards-veggies. No grains. They did have irrigated fields… and did not ruin the land.

See? There is no pat answer to either the question of how to get food out of the ground sustainably, or what exactly was the root of the nastiness we have inherited.

I am sniffing past ag… into surplus-based intensification, and beyond.

Kwakiutl intensified. Yurok did not. Why?

Sorry. Trying for clarity and missing pieces.

Aren't you actually questioning the assertion that any particular kind of cultivation (that is, plowing/monocropping of grains) led to civilization.

I am questioning the assertion that any particular kind of subsistence is immune from the pull toward the evils for which we know this civilization.

Peter, I think I will have to take your advice and read the books you recommend. There is much we can learn from those who tweaked the landbase in different and sometimes saner ways than we.

"Forest gardening", "Permaculture" or "Horticulture" are example of subsistence strategies that are heavily engaged in land management in a way the builds soil and biomass. It might mean more people in dense areas, and that leads to more social problems, but not environmental ones.

None of these ways are proof against negative environmental impacts. And too many people adds up to an environmental problem in the long run, no?

You have pointed out one thing to look out for that I think is really important. Not cultivating (or I would add foraging) full time. But does that not point back to intensification as the culprit? (Cultivation of any kind is not, per se, a backbreaking task… unless, of course, you do it from dawn to dusk.)

I am questioning the assertion that any particular kind of subsistence is immune from the pull toward the evils for which we know this civilization.

Ah okay, so the evils, not necessarily civ itself, eh? The hierarchy, slavery, war-making, treating women like crap, and such. Well, that is a very interesting question! From what I’ve seen, the best bet would probably be immediate return hunter-gatherers.

But I believe there are exceptions. The Hiwi (in the region of Colombia and Venezuela) are said to be nomadic hunter-gatherers, but fairly violent. But I’m always a little leery of descriptions like that because it frequently turns out there are factors involved that aren’t mentioned in the basic assertions. (e.g., their culture has been heavily impacted by civilization, or encroaching agriculturalists, or, in this case, they seem closely related to folks who are agriculturalists and I don’t know how that might have tied in historically, or whatever) Another Godesky essay you may have seen is pretty good at sorting through some of that:

http://rewild.info/anthropik/2008/01/noble-or-savage-both-part-1/index.html

I guess to the extent that no subsistence method can completely immunize against inhumane behaviors (and I’m not sure just what that extent is), you’d have to build in cultural norms. I would think that would be easiest if you don’t have elites controlling the food and all the developing hierarchy that seems more typical of more complex, sedentary societies, especially civilizations. (I’ve seen it said that horticultural societies are general a lot more egalitarian than civ. But the “art of nothing” hunter-gatherers seem to have the best reputation of all in that regard.) But of course nothing will be perfect.

Yup, very true, the immediate return folks are really the only ones who are proofed against the evils… mostly, IMO, because elites are an expense they can’t afford… :slight_smile:

Trouble is, though, that immediate return societies are easy prey to those who intensify and go through the whole “more food, more people, more weapons” crap. You know, the whole Parable of the Tribes dilemma. (A horrible real life example were the Moriori, off New Zealand.)

If subsistence were our only problem to solve, then immediate return people would lead the way. But we also gotta deal with the problem of power.

Yeah, the evils. Civ… I think of it as the final culmination of all those evils.

I am reading Jason’s essay #10, very interesting, I had not seen it before. I think a lot of what I have been fishing for is right there. He also goes into intensification, btw.

Well, Toby Hemenway has claimed that hortis are more egalitarian, but frankly, all of Oceania was settled by hortis and they were not really egalitarian at all. People make all sorts of claims, and then you look into it, and it does not pan out.

Trouble is, though, that immediate return societies are easy prey to those who intensify and go through the whole "more food, more people, more weapons" crap.

Very true. It’s something future rewilders will have to be aware of. As you probably know, there’s good archeological evidence that agriculture spread not through foragers deciding to make the switch, but through the population growth and spread and domination of agriculturalists. The post-civ future could be mighty interesting.

Vera,

I am questioning the assertion that any particular kind of subsistence is immune from the pull toward the evils for which we know this civilization.

Before we keep going, I’d like to ask you to not use the terms “good/evil” or “good/bad”. Those terms are belief-based concepts, not real world action/reaction observations. It becomes hard to talk about shared observations of reality when they become obscured by ethics. If you think destruction of the environment is “bad” then please refer to it as “destructive” rather than “bad”. If you say “destructive” I see the action/reaction of something happening in the real world. If you say “evil” it comes across as a religious statement, which is not based on actions, but personal beliefs. We are building a common language with which to discuss shared observations of reality, and beliefs and concepts like good/bad/evil just get in the way. I don’t think civilization is “evil” or “bad” or “wrong”. They are destructive forces of nature that cause mass extinctions. Asteroids do that too. :slight_smile:

None of these ways are proof against negative environmental impacts. And too many people adds up to an environmental problem in the long run, no?

The proof is in the pudding. There is little to no evidence of horticulturalists or hunter-gatherers that devastated their environments. Most of the classic examples like the Pleistocene die-off have been debunked. I can’t claim that this never happens, but we have little to no proof that they did. We do have proof that these cultures had population complexities and higher rates of conflict. No one has ever claimed that there is a perfect way for humans to live; there are just ways we understand had better impacts on the environment and our own communities.

Horticulture can mean “more people” but it doesn’t necessarily mean “too many people”. I think we have a hard time understanding horticulture and hunter-gatherer land management because we are so used to seeing that as a way of controlling the food supply only for humans. However, this is not true. Horticulturalists do not build fences. They do not take away the ability of others to reap the benefits of encouraging more growth. An increase is “food production” for horticulturalists also means an increase in food for all other mammals that eat in a similar fashion as we do. Horticulture is not necessarily labor intensive either. The point is letting nature do the work for you. Starting a fire and watching it burn is very different from chopping down all the trees in a region and then tilling the soil and irrigating it.

Horticulture either creates more biomass or more biodiversity while not destroying the soil, which all life is dependent. Horticulturalists can create more biomass, such as the 2000 year old cedar trees and runs of salmon so thick you could walk across the top of a river on them. More fish means more bears for example. This is not an increase in food production, it’s an increase in particular forms of biomass. Horticulture mostly uses fire to return nutrients to the land faster than if they were to break down without it. It’s not destructive, it’s an increase of the speed in which nutrients become bioavailable. Burning a field is similar to the flooding of a river in that regard. Horticulture is multi-habitat management. This means you’ve got fields, savannahs, woodlands, forests and climax forests. The most biodiverse places are where two or more habitats meet. Biodiversity requires these edges. Horticulture maintains these edges and encourages them.

The term intensification, meaning an “increase in food production/efficiency”, is a construct of a civilizational paradigm in which humans are thought to be the sole land managers of a landscape. This mentality is carried over into permaculture, which is why it is not worth the hype it gets. Horticulture is not about controlling the food supply for humans only. It’s about increasing the abundance for everyone; humans and other-than-humans.

This is not to say that horticulturalists haven’t or could not completely fuck up their environment. It’s just not very likely. This is not true of agriculturalists. With agriculture, it’s a given. Again, the proof is in the pudding. Agriculturalists (full-time agriculture) has proven to be destructive every time. A great book that expands on Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse” is called “Dirt: the erosion’s of civilization”.

But honestly, I think I know what you’re getting at. You’re talking about Empire and Daniel Quinns the “One Right Way” meme as the inspiration that took over agriculturalists into this unsustainable wreck. It took a ruling class to convince their slaves that agriculture was the one way that everyone should live. Is this what you are wanting to articulate? If so, I think we would all agree. I don’t think it was agriculture alone. And we certainly didn’t get to where we are with plain old agriculture. None of the other civilizations bounced back the way ours did. A great example of a horticultural society post-civilization is Martin Prechtel’s books about the Mayans. They didn’t “disappear” to a higher vibration of existence as the racist books of the Celestine Prophecy want us to believe. They just stopped full-time farming. Lol. And their spiritual concepts become such that building civilization’s were not possible. So there is something clearly different about our culture than other civilizations that came and went. However, full-time agriculture always leads to increase in population and always to a hierarchy. This doesn’t necessarily lead to the “One Right Way” mentality that our civilization has. In that regard, agriculture is not an inherent cause for the One Right Way meme. But while all other civilizations did not create a global mass extinction, they sure as hell created a localized one.

As a related aside:
The Northwest Coast horticulturalists had a hierarchy, but their potlatches and “slave” rank were not the way you described, or even Jason described. Nancy Turner covers a little bit about this in the “Earth’s Blanket”. The NW coast did not have a class system, but a ranking system. “Slavery” in a ranking system is not like the slavery we are aware of in the context of our own culture and in fact, “Slavery” is not an accurate term to describe the rank for which it stands. But that’s a complex discussion for another thread. The potlatches were actually a way of removing excess wealth. It was “Indian Christmas” where wealth was distributed to the people who needed it, and the rest was destroyed. This changed dramatically and turned violent with the encroachment of settlers. Think about it this way: Most of what we know anthropologically about the NW came in the form of Lewis and Clark’s minimal journals. 90% of indigenous people here died in 1833. Franz Boas, the father of NW Coast anthropology came here in the late 1890’s. 70 years after their apocalypse. Potlatches and Slavery at that time were heavily influenced by civilization and the collapse of the culture here. What most people know about those practices come from an apocalyptic native culture. We can’t really re-construct what things were like before, but there is evidence that alludes to things being very, very different than Franz Boas and others described. Also the so called “Big Man” or “Chiefs” had no say in any kind of military actions what-so-ever. This is directly opposed to our class system where the wealthy absorb it all and simultaneously control the military.

As another related aside:
Anthropologists are quick to say that NW Coast Indians had the concept of land ownership. This again, is a projection of our own cultural memes. They had families of “land stewards” who had more say than anyone else on who, how many people and in what quantity they could harvest from a particular piece of land. They didn’t “own” the land; they tended it. If the head of a family who “owned” a piece of land let too many people harvest and fucked it up in any way, if was considered a crime punishable by death. Contrast this with our culture, where you can completely obliterate a piece of land and make a million dollars in the process.

There are a zillion kinds of subsistence strategies and they can look very different and work differently in many places. What we can notice though, are tendencies in the subsistence strategies. Agriculture tends to destroy soil. Doesn’t mean it always does. Horticulture tends to encourage climax forests and build soil. Doesn’t mean it always does. I don’t think anything is as Black and White as our culture wants to think it is. The irony is that more and more these “immediate-return hunter-gatherers” are being relabeled as “hunter-gatherer-horticulturalists” when more closely examined. The lines are all very blurred.

I also think that rewilding is not about running away and trying to live as an immediate-return hunter-gatherer, but rather going backwards from where we are now. Planting forest gardens, burning instead of tilling. Raising cattle, free ranging them and rewilding all the things that we domesticated along the way. This means low-intensity agriculture as well (without a plow or irrigation).

Oh and to your question, did plowing/monocropping grains make this civ possible? Sure. But there were other civs. Norte Chico (Caral) was based on fish-orchards-veggies. No grains. They did have irrigated fields... and did not ruin the land.

Many people claim that the NW Coast culture was a civilization. But again, this obscures a lot more about what we mean when we say civilization. These cultures had large populations and lived from fishing site to fishing site. They were still somewhat nomadic even in their sedentarianism. We reserve the term civilization specifically for agrarian-based cities. Villages are not cities. This I think shows us that we could have something similar to civilization in terms of large villages but not cities. I think it’s important to keep the definition of civilization to agrarian-based cultures for our purposes. In that regard, a fishing/orchards/veggies based horticultural society would not fall under our definition of “civilization”.

Thank you for focusing this discussion, Peter. I felt like it was starting to get muddled up with the discussion of cultures “going astray” (the good/bad thing), and I prefer to keep this one focused on the real-world impacts of agriculture & horticulture. I am interested in the discussion of the origins of civilization, of which I feel agriculture plays only a part (although a vital part), but I feel that would be better discussed in its own thread.

I also really really appreciate your clarifications about the indigenous cultures of the NW coast. This is a really clear example of how we can easily view other (non-civilized) cultures through a civilized lens, assuming that their system of “slavery” = civilized slavery, their status-ranking system = civilized hierarchy, etc. It’s like placing all other cultures within the civilized box, by assuming that that box is the whole of reality, rather than understanding that we need to look outside the box in order to see these other cultures clearly.

What you said about the anthropological view of American Indians being based on white people observing them in a post-apocalyptic situation holds true for all American cultures. Smallpox swept the continent well in advance of most white exploration, after being introduced by the first explorers in the 1600’s, and that combined with the subsequent genocidal expansion of white settlers completely disrupted the indigenous cultures in pretty much every way. Also, the white anthropologists viewed these cultures through a racist, civilized lens - with the result that most of modern anthropological opinions of native peoples are totally racist and inaccurate (or at least severely distorted).

While we shouldn’t idealize indigenous cultures as “noble savages”, when I express my skepticism of mainstream (white) views of native peoples I constantly am told (always by white people) that I am “idealizing” them. This really irritates me because the (unintended) consequence is that of reinforcing the racism that predominates mainstream anthropology (and modern society in general). But I suppose this is also a topic for another thread.