I have been reading Guns, Germs and Steel this week. It’s an interesting walk through human history and has clarified or just covered things I hadn’t thought much about.
The parts about domesticating plants, how it works, reminded me of The Botany of Desire: where Diamond talks about early people’s domesticated plants, Pollan makes a convincing case that they domesticated each other. Not that Pollan contradicts or disputes Diamond: I find they complemented each other on this point.
So far, one of Diamond’s central arguments is that the switch from subsistence hunting and gathering to agriculture is how civilizations got their start: the regions of the world with wild grasses that could be harvested and later planted systematically were able to support non-farm specialist classes (bureaucrats and politicos, to make a short list). The grasses he mentions were plentiful in the Fertile Crescent (the SW Asian highlands or modern Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, et al), less so in Europe and almost non-existent in other climatically similar areas. And to narrow the odds still further, the process of domestication stems from mutations: where true-breeding wild grains might drop seeds when ripe, making them inaccessible by hunter/gatherers, certain mutants would keep their seeds, allowing our ancient forebears to collect them and either thresh and grind them now or save them for later planting.
That, and his argument that the demise of certain large mammals on each continent is extricably tied to the arrival of early humans as they spread out from Africa and Asia, got me to thinking about how that maps onto modern society. As the modern world runs on energy, electricity specifically, but oil more generally as the chief means of generating it, are we hunter/gatherers or farmers? Do we harvest energy as our forebears harvested crops? Or do we slash and burn our way through, always expecting we’ll find more over the next ridge? The complex societies we know all stem from the ability or discovery of surpluses and the resulting freedom from subsistence food production/gathering.
I’ll be thinking more about this as I work through the book, but it seemed there was something resonating from the headlines. Diamond makes the point that not all cultures went into agriculture, even when their neighbors did, even if they traded with agricultural societies: that also resonates, since not all nations produce energy but they all use it, at increasing rates.
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