In the s and s anthropologists, such as Richard Lee and Yehudi Cohen, noticed the strong correlation between how societies produce their food and how they are structured socio-politically. Years of accumulated anthropological research showed that those who live by hunting and gathering show a very strong tendency to live in egalitarian, consensus-based societies.
Hunter-gatherers depend on each other for food, and so co-operation and mutualism are institutionalised by necessity. A single hunter might only have a one in four chance of making a successful kill, but four hunters who agree to share whatever they catch have a much more reliable food supply. Moving around the landscape, from areas depleted in food to areas where the land is richer, hunter-gatherers allow nature to do the hard work for them and reap the bounty when it is ready. This mode of production means the Kung and the Hadza, who live in the most marginal habitats of southern Africa, spend a mere three to five hours looking after their daily food needs.
Even in a harsh desert environment such as this, the Hobbesian conception of the life of pre-civilised humanity as being nasty and brutish could hardly be further from the truth.
When a nomadic society ends up settling somewhere, the first possibilities for coercion come into being. A group of nomads, finding itself unable to agree on an issue of importance, can always split into two or more groups, each of which can go its own way and implement the decision they believe to be the best.
Farmers, however, are stuck where they are, and the best kind of democracy that a settled community can produce is the tyranny of the majority. Once a settlement produces a surplus, things get even worse; certain people stop being food producers and begin to specialise in other trades. This specialisation creates the beginnings of significant material inequality — some skills are simply more valued than others, and attract more wealth as a result.
Among nomads, property becomes a burden if it accumulates. A society of equals, which places little value on what material wealth it does possess, is not fertile ground for property crime. The material inequality of agriculture-based societies, however, does result in crime, and while some might specialise in metalwork, pottery or public relations, others come to specialise in violence, under the guise of crime prevention. These specialists in violence really spend their time maintaining the differentials in wealth that are appearing, and ensuring the security of another group of specialists — the nascent elite.
Archaeological digs at Neolithic sites neatly demonstrate the architecture of early hierarchy; the largest houses are always positioned next to the buildings used for storing grain. When the elite finds itself able to control the surplus in such a way as to have a monopoly on violence, for instance by paying off and arming the strongest and best fighters in a community, the transition is complete and a minority is able to hold power.
Thus, when an elite is able to exercise violence with impunity within the geographical bounds of the society, tyranny ensues. When the same is done outside these bounds, war and empire ensue, since a food surplus also allows the fielding of a dedicated army, which can then be used to seize land and assets from neighbouring populations.
Without a surplus of food, sustained military campaigns are simply not possible. A food surplus also leads to higher, more concentrated populations. This causes increased incidence of disease. While in small populations a disease can die out once it has run its course, in a larger population there are enough people around for the disease to mutate into something new, and re-infect the population over and over again.
Witness the common cold, measles, chickenpox and influenza — these diseases simply do not exist in non-agricultural populations. Lifespan looks about the same looking across hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists.
Biomedical and fitness indicators are much much higher for hunter-gatherers. This is an open question in philosophy, but Diamond appears to think that it is a closed one. And Diamond ignores the important consideration that only the density of population that comes with agriculture can generate enough human brains thinking to allow us to—quite possibly—transcend our Malthusian limits and create a truly human world in the long run.
As to inequality … violence … domination … In my view it is difficult to say on net. Certainly the agricultural epoch has many many more people reaping where they did not sow and gathering where they did not scatter. Nevertheless, taking all three together, I cannot judge whether there was either a positive or a negative change across the boundary of the Neolithic Revolution. More inequality and domination, certainly. But you also have many more interactions between humans that are not one-shot interactions: people have fixed addresses, after all.
If we know anything about humans, it is that human males have a tendency to resort to violence—perhaps not as great a tendency as chimps or gorillas, but a tendency, and we make more deadly weapons. It is not at all clear to me that the hunter-gatherer epoch had less murder, rape, kidnapping and enslavement of women, and so forth than did the agricultural epoch.
The hunter-gatherer age was not a kumbaya-singing age. Where, after all, are the Neanderthals today? With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence…. For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10, years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals.
Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture? Bare, compacted land can bring about soil erosion and destruction of topsoil quality due to the runoff of nutrients.
These and other impacts can destabilize a variety of fragile ecosystems and wildlife habitats. Chemical Fertilizer Synthetic fertilizers containing nitrogen and phosphorus have been at the heart of the intensified farming from World War II to the present day.
They are particularly effective in the growing of corn, wheat, and rice, and are largely responsible for the explosive growth of cereal cultivation in recent decades. While these chemicals have helped double the rate of food production, they have also helped bring about a gigantic increase, perhaps as high as percent, of reactive nitrogen levels throughout the environment. The excess levels of nitrogen and phosphorus have caused the once-beneficial nutrients to become pollutants.
Roughly half the nitrogen in synthetic fertilizers escapes from the fields where it is applied, finding its way into the soil, air, water, and rainfall. After soil bacteria convert fertilizer nitrogen into nitrates, rainstorms or irrigation systems carry these toxins into groundwater and river systems.
Accumulated nitrogen and phosphorus harm terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems by loading them with too many nutrients, a process known as eutrophication. Nutrient pollution is a causal factor in toxic algae blooms affecting lakes in China, the United States, and elsewhere.
Parts of the Gulf of Mexico are regularly afflicted in this manner. Nitrogen accumulation in water and on land threatens biodiversity and the health of native plant species and natural habitats. In addition, fertilizer application in soil leads to the formation and release of nitrous oxide, one of the most harmful greenhouse gases.
With the global population continuing to skyrocket, the tension will continue to grow between continued agricultural growth and the ecological health of the land upon which humans depend. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited. Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society.
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Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are among the gravest health threats we face today. And public health officials warn that the crisis will only get worse if we continue misusing and overusing these drugs.
Industrial agriculture permits us to overproduce grains, fruits, and vegetables year-round. Unfortunately, this productivity comes with a price. Nitrogen-based fertilizer has been a major factor driving the industrialization of agriculture in the past century, allowing high yields even on overtaxed land. But fertilizer has serious downsides for our water supplies and climate. Nitrogen is a primary building block for plants, and healthy soil uses nitrogen efficiently.
But under mono-cropping, soil becomes depleted of nutrients, requiring farmers to try to regenerate the soil through practices like planting cover crops or to move on to more arable land. The invention of synthetic nitrogen in the 20th century and then, quickly, its skyrocketing use removed this limiting factor and allowed for a boom in chemical-intensive, industrial farming practices.
A big boom, indeed: In U. By , American farmers were dropping 5. Synthetic forms of nitrogen are different in some key ways from the nitrogen occurring naturally in our atmosphere.
Naturally occurring nitrogen, known as N2, is more difficult for plants to use, requiring specific bacteria to help make it bioavailable. But synthetic fertilizer is made up of a nitrogen- and hydrogen-based ammonia NH3 that can be used by plants directly. Transforming N2 into NH3 through chemical processes is resource intensive, and this form of nitrogen is also more prone to reacting with other things in the environment, not just plants.
In addition, when excess nitrogen makes its way into the atmosphere as it often does when fertilizer is applied at high volumes , it can become nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas , or nitrogen oxide, which contributes to ground-level smog. The climate impacts alone are enough of a reason to wean ourselves off synthetic fertilizers, but these chemicals have another major environmental downside: nutrient runoff. Runoff occurs when nutrient-rich material like fertilizer or manure, chock-full of nitrogen and phosphorous, makes its way into nearby rivers, oceans, and lakes, wreaking havoc on our freshwater and marine ecosystems.
Heavy rains can trigger runoff, as can soil erosion. As algae then die off, aerobic bacteria decompose them, consuming oxygen in the process and starving other marine life.
Algae overgrowth can also block sunlight, disrupting the ecosystem below that relies on the sun for energy. And in recent years, persistent algal blooms, like red tides that produce toxins, have devastated coastal communities in Florida , staying long past their typical seasons and killing marine life en masse.
Pollution via runoff known as agricultural nonpoint source pollution is the leading source of harm to water quality for surveyed rivers and streams, the third-largest for lakes, and the second-largest for wetlands. But stemming it is in our control. Farmers can reduce nutrient runoff significantly through improved soil health practices like planting cover crops, water quality practices like planting streamside buffer crops, and by following fertilizer best practices.
Farmers routinely use pesticid es —herbicides, insecticides, rodenticides, and fungicides—to keep away any unwanted weeds, insects, rodents, and fungi.
But these toxic chemicals have serious side-effects.
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