The Innate Nature of Economics - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 39

widest distribution of wealth, and on limiting the inequalities within the
economic system. 3
Sharing was the core value of social interaction among hunter-gatherers,
with a strong emphasis on the importance of generalized reciprocity—the
unconditional giving of something without any expectation of immedi-
ate return. The combination of generalized reciprocity and an absence of
private ownership of land has led many anthropologists to consider the
hunter-gatherer way of life as a “primitive communism,” in the true sense
of “communism.”
Hunter-gatherer peoples lived with few material possessions for hundreds
of thousands of years and enjoyed lives that were in many ways richer, freer,
and more fulfilling than ours. These peoples so structured their lives that
they wanted little, needed little, and found what they required at their dis-
posal in their immediate surroundings. They were comfortable precisely
because they achieved a balance between necessities and wants, by being
satisfied with little. There are, after all, two ways to wealth—working harder
or wanting less.
The !Kung Bushmen of southern Africa, for example, spent only 12 to 19
hours a week getting food because their work was social and cooperative,
which means they obtained their particular food items with the least pos-
sible expenditure of energy. Thus, they had abundant time for eating, drink-
ing, playing, and general socializing. In addition, young people were not
expected to work until well into their 20s, and no one was expected to work
after age 40 or so.
Hunter-gatherers also had much personal freedom. Among the !Kung
Bushmen and the Hadza of Tanzania, there were either no leaders or only
temporary leaders with severely limited authority. These societies had per-
sonal equality in that everyone belonged to the same social class and had
gender equality. Their technologies and social systems, including their
economies of having enough or a sense of “enoughness,” allowed them to
live sustainably for tens of thousands of years. One of the reasons they were
sustainable is that they made no connection between what an individual
produced and their economic security, so acquisition of things to ensure per-
sonal survival and material comfort was not an issue. 4
With the advent of herding, agriculture, and progressive settlement, how-
ever, humanity created the concept of “wilderness,” and so the distinctions
between “tame” (meaning controlled ) and “wild” (meaning uncontrolled )
plants and animals began to emerge in the human psyche. Along with the
notion of tame and wild plants and animals came the perceived need to not
only control space but also to own it through boundaries in the form of land-
scape markers, pastures, fields, and villages. In this way, the uncontrolled
land or wilderness of the hunter-gatherers came to be viewed in the minds
of settled folk either as free for the taking or as a threat to their existence.
So it was that the dawn of agriculture, which arose in the Fertile Crescent
of the Middle East, ushered in a new era of controlling land through