Most articles that I write are to the tune of the benefits of local organic agriculture, but has agriculture done our species and our planet any good?
Meatless Monday is no doubt something that my generation and those before us have heard of recently to reduce the damage that modern agriculture has done to our little blue biosphere known as Earth.
While agriculture and the storage of the products of agriculture has led to a longer life and an explosion of the human species' population, it may have been the worst experiment we have embarked on.
This idea first gained attention from the University of California professor Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel.
Jay Stock, an evolutionary anthropologist, has conducted a study of 9,000 skeletal remains that span in time from the early Neolithic hunter gatherers to 1500 BC.
The researcher found evidence of malnutrition through the teeth of the human remains once agriculture had arisen. Human teeth reflect human health just as rings of a tree indicate seasons in the tree's growth.
What Stock and his assistant found out was that 40 per cent of hunter gatherers 13,000 years ago had linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH), a defect in the layers of tooth enamel which indicates malnutrition through illness or lack of food.
The skeletal remains of those who lived during what is considered the agricultural revolution saw a dramatic climb in the percentage of the population who had LEH, as high as 70 per cent.
In Stocks' study, after 8,000 years (the re-emergence) of agriculture we did begin to show better health and nutrition. A study by Dr. Weston Price suggests that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in comparison to today's processed agricultural diet is far superior in producing healthy people with strong immunity to infectious disease.
A recent discovery of proto-weeds and cereal grains in an archeological site that is on the shores of the Sea of Galilee suggests that our species has actually been experimenting with agriculture for over 23,000 years. This is prior to the last ice age!
This discovery blows the old theory of the start of agriculture starting around 11,000 years ago in the cradle of civilization out of the water.
This poses the question of, "Did the last ice age make our experiment start again from scratch?" If so, then we obviously know that our early experimenters did not live to pass the knowledge down to eager farmers. This again forms another question, "Is our species prone to agricultural experimentation and why?"
Marshall Sahlin's book Man the Hunter in 1972 suggests that hunter gatherer societies are not the primitive "cave men" that cinema would suggest.
Sahlin suggests that hunter gatherers are the original affluent societies. They were affluent because they desired little and met those desires and needs by what is around them. This type of affluence would no doubt do our species and our environment some good.
The hunter gatherer lifestyle appears to be the proverbial "Garden of Eden" in which the human species merely lived within its niche, but we just had to go and think we could do better than what 4.3 billion years of evolution has systematically put in place by placing a few seeds in the ground and enslaving a few species of animals.
There is no doubt that the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer would be met with harsh conditions of survival and high infant death rates, which would limit population growth to that of the carrying capacity of the environment, but would that be such a bad thing?
The late 18th century philosopher Thomas Malthus wrote, "The power of population is so superior to the power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race."
It's too late to turn away from agriculture now that the population has risen to its current level without massive die off, but will the great population caused by agriculture be our undoing?
I couldn't tell you, but I do believe that preservation of early agriculture is an essential skill that may help our species survive in an ever changing world... for now.
Just to be safe though, I'll keep learning First Nations use of native plants as that seems to be a good survival strategy from the last 13,000 years in North America.
