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Essay on history of agriculture
Essay on history of agriculture
Essay on history of agriculture
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Agriculture, according to Jared Diamond, is an adaptation this country has made that is the “worst mistake in the history of the human race”. In his article he discusses how the disadvantages of becoming a country based solely around agriculture have become a country’s biggest downfall. Looking back in the past, the fear of survival ultimately led to the beginning of agriculture. It is safe to assume that agriculture took off based on fear which can be why Diamond thinks so negatively of it. Although some may argue that agriculture has allowed an individual more free time, it is something that created an unsolvable disaster. “It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors” The argument for agriculture was mostly based around the fact that it allowed more leisure time for the population. In fact, living life as a hunter-gatherer allowed an individual to have more spare time in a given day. This was for the simple fact that you only had to gather food for a certain amount of time versus working long hard …show more content…
Often times a person can relate to the feeling of dislike for tourist because they tend to change your constant, whether that is being on a perfectly organized schedule or even something as small as causing traffic. No matter what it may be tourists bring something to the table that natives will often dislike. Constantly being in one place, a person or this sense a native, can often get bored and get an urge to travel or get out of town. This is a natural human feeling, but on the context of Kincaid many natives often do not want to become the tourists that they so often despise. Even though there is a slight emotion of envy the sense of hatred toward tourists overpowers that envious
Wendell Berry writes in his book, “What are people for?” a thesis that modern culture is destroying the agricultural culture. He feels that technology is seen and used as the easy way to produce food faster and more efficiently. With this modern way of farming comes the idea that we need to work smarter not harder which is not always true. The goal is comfort and leisure and Berry feels that this is the reason for the down fall of the agricultural culture. He believes that hard work and pride in workmanship is more important than material goods and money. This was by no means a perfect society. The people had often been violent wand wasteful in the use of land of each other. Its present ills have already taken root in it. Even with these faults, this society appreciated the hard work of farming compared to the easy way of living today.
A lot of tourists would not think that they are offending the native residents when they travel. In the article, “The Ugly Tourist” excerpt from Jamaica Kincaid’s book, Small Place, she argues that when one is in a state of being a tourist, one does not know the depth of the place and only sees what one wants to see. Kincaid gives a strong idea of what she is arguing when she described a tourist as “an ugly human being.” She presents the emotional conflicts between tourist and the natives by evaluating their different lifestyles.
Agriculture plays an enormous part in having a functioning society. The farming fields in the
After reading McKibben and Hurst’s articles in the book Food Matters, both authors present arguments on “industrial farming”, and although Hurst provides a realistic sense on farming, McKibben’s suggestions should be what we think about.
Hunting and gathering is probably a preferable lifestyle compared to a farmer, but it seems a bit over the top to blame absolutely every problem in our society on agriculture. It’s a common argument, but Jared Diamond's theory does seem to be quite an over-simplification. For example, he argues that inequality between sexes could be caused by agricultural because women were made beasts of burden and given greater pressure to work on the fields. However, the root cause of that isn’t agriculture, it’s sexism and stereotyping, because without an outdated sexist mindset no one would treat women differently in the agricultural department, and it is an oversimplification to ignore this. Furthermore, because of farming and globalization people now are given even more opportunity for a diverse diet. Although early farmers had access to only one or a few crops versus hunter-gatherers who had an entire forest of varied food, people nowadays have many more options than both hunter-gatherers and early farmers combined. A grocery store has ten times as many diverse and varying food items as a forest does, providing food from all corners of the world not just a single location or country, allowing people to create a perfectly balanced diet if they so choose. In conclusion, I agree with Jared Diamond's thesis on certain grounds, but I mostly disagree that the introduction of agriculture was the “worst mistake in human
In the essay “Why Africa? Why Art?” by Kwame Anthony Appiah, he talks about basically how Africa is thought to be an uncivilized barren and that’s the stereotypical thing that comes to most people’s mind when thinking about this continent. African art has to look a certain way to be able to be called “African.” It has to be made by a tribe, not just one person which is why he says that most African pieces are signed with a tribe name, not just one name. Appiah gives an example of these Asante gold weights that his mother had a collection of. Their use value was to weigh gold dust, which used to be the method of currency. They were made as a utilitarian product, not for art, but many people started to recognize the aesthetic value. He says, “…in appreciating and collecting these weights as art, we are doing something new with them…” These days art is defined to be a certain way and look a certain way. It can’t just be anything, it has to have an aesthetic value to be considered art and to fall into the “guidelines”.
Our nation was founded on agriculture, and for hundreds of years we were able to migrate across the nation bringing our farming tools and techniques with us. Technology has driven populations away from rural areas towards industrialized cities. With money now being pumped into cities, rural farmers are suffering the most. Farmers are taking out large loans in order to sustain their farms, leading to debt and in some cases suicide. Patel spoke about a farmer in India whose husband took his life because he was unable to live with the amount of debt from his struggling farm. This man left his wife and chi...
She started her book with tourism and ended it with it too. The tourists were the most important things that happen to their island. There were tourists in the island from the start. They had a big effect on the people of the island and their country. A lot of money came from them and a lot of places belonged to them. The tone of the author when she talked about tourists was filled with hates. She hated them and didn’t want them in their island. She hated them because it was her home, but she was the one that feels like a slave and unwelcome. Those people weren’t just tourists, some of them became the residents. People who stayed there and turned it to their home and acted like the island belong to them and not the original residents. They built their own buildings and then didn’t let the Antiguans to enter. They treated them unwelcome. “We Antiguans thought that the people in the Mill Reef Club had such bad manners, like pigs: they were behaving in a bad way. Like pigs. There they were, strangers in someone else’s home, and they refused to talk to their hosts or have anything human, anything intimate, to do with them” (Kincaid 27). They welcomed the tourists. They gave them a place to live and a food to eat, but they didn’t pay them back with kindness and that’s another reason that she hated
The biggest aspect of Kincaid's argument that makes it flawed is her anger. That is not to say that there aren't times where anger is justified. At the same time, the harsh language that Kincaid uses to discuss tourists is only based on her perspective. In other words, when Kincaid calls the tourists “ugly” because of how they treat a vacation, it makes Kincaid seem like she is placing blame on the tourists for not being proactive in making sure that the workers in the tourism sector are not better appreciated. Another quote that indicates a lack of consideration for the tourists was “they (the natives) envy your (the tourists) ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself” (pg 18-19). The words “banality” and “boredom” indicate that Kincaid believes that the tourists’ lives are based on the rare time that they can go to another place to escape the monotony of their lives. Kincaid’s belief is flawed because it does not consider the fact that people are going on vacation in Antigua, because they heard that it is a tremendous place to go on vacation. More to the point, the language that Kincaid uses shows an unjustified anger at people w...
In part fictional and part autobiographical novel “A Small Place” published in 1988, Jamaica Kincaid offers a commentary on how the tenets of white superiority and ignorance seem to emerge naturally from white tourists. She establishes this by using the nameless “you” depicted in the story to elucidate the thoughts they have when visiting such formerly colonized islands. This inner mentality of the white tourists reveals how tourism is still a form of oppression for the natives of such formerly colonized tourists as it continues to exploit them. I will be focusing primarily on page 10 of the text to illustrate this.
Agriculture is the science and practice of producing crops and livestock. The primary aim of agriculture is to use the land to produce more abundantly to feed and clothe the world at the same time protecting it from deterioration or misuse. Humans had to improve agriculture as they became more dependent on food, creating a solitary evolutionary connection between plants and animals (Campbell and Reece, 2001). In this day and age, so many people have forgotten the authentic premises of survival. It is easy for some to believe that the grocery stores produce food and clothing is produced by shopping centers. These inaccurate presumptions are being made due to the lack of knowledge of how agriculture truly works. There are also significant differences in the levels of understanding between rural and urban communities.
So overall, Agriculture is playing a very important role in changing the lifestyle of different people. Agriculture might have made everything easy for us but it still has its cons. We see the effects of agriculture and how it affects the lives of other species and the environment.
Africa My Africa by David Diop is an excellent example of a post-colonialism piece of work. After researching the author of the poem, I thoroughly understood and enjoyed the text more than just reading it over, without knowing his personal biographical information. David Diop is an African poet, who was born in France. His parents are of the West African descent (Poets.org). Diop emphasizes the problems of Africa that were brought about by colonialism, and shares a message to Africans to bring about change and freedom through his poem, Africa My Africa. Colonialism is the political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power.
Farming has been an occupation since 8,500 B.C. On that year in the Fertile Crescent farming first began when people grew plants instead of picking them in the wild. Then nearly 5,000 years later oxen, horses, pigs, and dogs were domesticated. During the middle ages, the nobles divide their land into three fields. The reasoning for this was to plant two and leave one to recover. This was the start of crop rotation which is a big part of farming today. Burning down forest and then moving to another area is a farming technique used by the Mayans called Slash and burn. Mayan farmers also were able to drain swampy areas to farm them buy building canals. In 1701 Jethro Tull invented the seed drill and a horse drawn how that tilled the land. In Denmark they would plant turnips in the previously unplanted field. The turnips help restore the nutrients in the ground thus crop rotation is born. In England people began moving there fields closer to each other for a more efficient way of planting. Later in the 18th century selective breeding was introduce which made bigger, stronger, and more milk producing livestock. In the mid 1800’s a steam plough was invented. By the 1950 tractors, milking machines, and combines were used by almost farmers. The latest f...
Over one billion people are living in poverty, lacking safe water, housing, food, and the ability to read. There is a high concentration of communities in poverty in Africa; particularly Central Africa. States that are considered in Central Africa are the following: Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central Republic of Africa, Chad, Equatorial Guinea and the Congo. The majority of these Central African states’ economies are dependent on agriculture. As a result of this dependency, natural disasters, droughts and wars can displace subsistence farmer from their land resulting in poverty becoming even more prevalent and harder to come back from. Also with a history of dependency on farming there tends to be the trend of education not being a primary focus for the youth which is another factor into the stagnant poverty trend in Central Africa.