Agriculture: Evolution or Devolution?

Agriculture: Evolution or Devolution?

Considering that the alarming excess and continuing growth of the current world population (of humans) is directly tied to food production and availability, the question of how and why we even developed the technology of agriculture in the first place is becoming more and more relevant to human survival as we collectively continue to destroy the environment in which we live due in part to these very agricultural techniques and strategies that we are continuing to employ today. Current estimations show that at around the same time that agriculture was beginning to develop and thrive, the population of our ancestors started to double at a rate that was far higher than what it had been previously for the more than 2 million years of prior human existence. What does this then mean, and what does it say about humans and their attitude towards the environment? This hinges largely on the viewpoints to which we allow ourselves to be open.

The most common view taken is that most (if not all) technologies we create mark an "advance" for humankind. Perhaps because they are prized so much either for their practical or symbolic value, it has become difficult to regard the technologies without a bias towards their immediate effects on human society as opposed to the overall compatibility with the rest of the natural world. Within this mindset, it is very hard to put aside the very "advanced" tools that seem to form the foundation of what a complicated, sophisticated, intelligent human is supposed to be. In this light, a complex process like agriculture cannot be anything but an advance, and any lifestyle that dates prior to the agricultural advent must, by subtle implication, be inferior. This infe...

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...e technologies we created, from market economy and weapons of mass destruction to the simpler-scale household appliances. This suggests that many do not really see the frictions such technologies impose on our surroundings as problems, but rather according to their perception of the way things are, the tools they use are only doing exactly what they were supposed to and it cannot be helped. And moreover, this is so ingrained in most modern human cultures that the constituents of said cultures do not even see a problem with that.

Sources

Ehrlich, Paul R. "Human Natures: Genes Cultures, and the Human Prospect". Island Press, 2000.

Cipolla, Carlo M. "The Economic History of World Population". The Harvester Press, 1978

Ponting, Clive. "A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations". St. Martin's Press, New York, 1991.