Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 8
Crossing the Internal Frontiers
A Fundamental Redesign
Human connectedness to nature has deep roots. For 5 million to 7 million
years we walked this earth as hunters and gatherers, entirely dependent
upon our knowledge of wild resources, and on our collective capacity to
gather plants and catch animals. About 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, we
began to domesticate plants and animals. For most of the time since then,
the culture of food production was intimately bound up in some form
of collective action, and in an intimate knowledge of nature. Where city-
states emerged, as in Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, China, Maya and
mediaeval Europe, the number of people no longer needing this intimate
connection for their livelihoods grew. But it was not until the advent of
the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions, just 200 hundred years ago,
that food production in some countries began its drift away from the
majority of the population. It is barely two generations since agriculture
became industrial, and modernist agriculture came to dominate, producing
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