Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
promise, in which minimum levels of material welfare
and food safety were acquired with the least expenditure
of physical labor.
This predilection is confirmed by the persistence of
shifting agriculture and by the reluctance to expand per-
manently farmed lands and adopt more intensive cultiva-
tion. As already mentioned (see section 6.1), shifting
cultivation, with its absence of tillage, fertilization, and
animals, requires relatively low and largely nonspecialized
energy inputs, and it has been a preferred way of food
production in all thinly populated forest regions. There
it included even those populations that had long contacts
with settled farmers, whether in Southeast Asia or Latin
America or even in Europe, where the last recorded
instances of the practice in Scandinavia and northern
Russia date to the early decades of twentieth century.
Permanent farming held little appeal until higher popula-
tion densities forced more intensive use of smaller areas
in order to maintain the accustomed nutritional levels.
Increased energy expenditures were also needed to clear
new lands for permanent arable land or to create new
fields by terracing or to dig new irrigation canals. Again,
these steps were taken reluctantly.
The villages of Carolingian Europe were overpopu-
lated, and their grain supplies were constantly insuffi-
cient, but except in parts of Germany and Flanders few
efforts were made to create new fields beyond the most
easily cultivable soils (Duby 1968). Later European his-
tory is replete with waves of German migrations from
densely populated western regions opening up farmlands
in areas considered inferior by local peasants (Bohemia,
Poland, Russia) and setting the stage for violent na-
tionalist conflicts for centuries to come. A similar reluc-
tance can be seen in Asia. In China the colonization
of the fertile but cold northeast did not start until the
eighteenth century, and only post-1960 government-
organized resettlement started the colonization of those
Indonesian islands whose densities were extremely low
compared to Java. Even in relatively densely populated
regions of Asia and Europe, it took millennia to advance
from extensive
fallowing to annual
cropping and
multicropping.
The other important strategy for reducing labor inputs
was to spread them as much as possible. Women, the
low-status adults in all peasant societies, did a dispropor-
tionately large share of heavy work, and having a large
family was the easiest way for parents to minimize their
future labor exertions (Caldwell 1976). The energy cost
of having an additional child is negligible (even preg-
nancy may have essentially no energy cost; see section
5.2) compared to the child's labor contributions, which
start as early as four to five years of age and assure much
less heavy work for parents in their old age. Seavoy
(1986, 20) sums this up well: ''Having many children
(an average of four to six) and transferring labor to them
at the earliest possible age is highly rational behavior in
peasant societies, where the good life is equated with
minimal labor expenditures, not with the possession of
abundant material goods.''
The process of very slow intensification of food pro-
duction is best illustrated by focusing on three traditional
agricultures of outstanding importance, in Egypt, China,
and Europe (fig. 6.7). In Egyptian agriculture the limited
cultivable area and the annual flood combined to pro-
duce an early shift toward intensification that, millennia
later, resulted in some of the highest outputs achievable
in solar farming. Predynastic agriculture coexisted with
hunting (antelopes, pigs, crocodiles, elephants), fowling,
fishing, and gathering. Emmer wheat and two-row bar-
ley were the first cereals, sheep the first domesticated
