SubscribeFor every head of population —whether you are an American or an East Indian— if you are a grain eater, it now costs about 12 tons of soil per person per year for us to eat grain. All this loss is a result of tillage. As long as you are tilling, you are losing. At the rate at which we are losing soils, we don't see that we will have agricultural soils within a decade.
What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man. ... Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.In "The Oil We Eat," Manning comments on this passage:
Plato's lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country's soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By the fifth century, though, wheat's strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major "corrective" famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period.By 500 BCE, Greek coastal cities had become landlocked due to deforestation, leading to soil erosion, filling in bays and the mouths of rivers; Plato wrote, "All the richer and softer parts have fallen away and the mere skelton of the land remains." The Meander River became so silted that its course changed, weaving back and forth, giving us our word "meandering." Greece suffered from massive soil erosion that degraded agricultural quality over the few centuries of the city-states.
Citizens of the Roman Empire at its height, in the second century A.D., were born into the world with an average life expectancy of less than twenty-five years. Death fell savagely on the young. Those who survived childhood remained at risk. Only four out of every hundred men, and fewer women, lived beyond the age of fifty. It was a population "grazed thin by death." In such a situation, only the privileged or the eccentric few could enjoy the freedom to do what they pleased with their sexual drives. Unexacting in so many ways in sexual matters, the ancient city expected its citizens to expend a requisite proportion of their energy begetting and rearing legitimate children to replace the dead. Whether through conscious legislation, such as that of Emperor Augustus, which penalized bachelors and rewarded families for producing children, or simply through the unquestioned weight of habit, young men and women were discreetly mobilized to use their bodies for reproduction. The pressure on the young women was inexorable. For the population of the Roman Empire to remain even stationary, it appears that each woman would have had to have produced an average of five children. Young girls were recruited early for their task. The median age of Roman girls at marriage may have been as low as fourteen. In North Africa, nearly 95 percent of the women recorded on gravestones had been married, over half of those before the age of twenty-three.In the Middle Ages, the human toll of agriculture's ecological devastation was even more oppressively bleak. In his article for the Atlantic Monthly, "1491," (same title as his book) Charles C. Mann writes:
France—"by any standards a privileged country," according to its great historian, Fernand Braudel—experienced seven nationwide famines in the fifteenth century and thirteen in the sixteenth. Disease was hunger's constant companion. During epidemics in London the dead were heaped onto carts "like common dung" (the simile is Daniel Defoe's) and trundled through the streets. The infant death rate in London orphanages, according to one contemporary source, was 88 percent. Governments were harsh, the rule of law arbitrary. The gibbets poking up in the background of so many old paintings were, Braudel observed, "merely a realistic detail."With the colonization of the Americas, the sharp contrast of agriculture's toll could be seen in the comparative heights of Europeans vs. Americans, as a reflection of the soil. Richard Manning, again from "The Oil We Eat":
The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his hosts at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans present were a good head taller than all of the French. Indeed, colonists in all of the neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as well as a lower infant-mortality rate—all indicators of the better nutrition afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin soil.Such evidence makes it painfully clear how civilization has worked at destroying its own ecological foundations. That you think that the survival of a center like London, or even ancient Eboracum that became modern York (yes, I'm well aware of when—and how—London got its start), changes that, then that doesn't make me a "real live oddball," it simply means you suffer from a distinct lack of perspective. Even the full 10,000 year span of agriculture is an astonishingly short period of time for such a dramatic failure, and you're crowing about a mere two millennia? Bitch, please.
Discovery of the New World gave European man a markedly changed relationship to the resource base for civilized life. When Columbus set sail, there were roughly 24 acres of Europe per European. Life was a struggle to make the most of insufficient and unreliable resources. After Columbus stumbled upon the lands of an unsuspected hemisphere, and after monarchs and entrepreneurs began to make those lands available for European settlement and exploitation, a total of 120 acres of land per person was available in the expanded European habitat—five times the pre-Columbian figure!Changelessness had always been the premise of Old World social systems. This sudden and impressive surplus of carrying capacity shattered that premise. In a habitat that now seemed limitless, life could be lived abundantly. The new premise of limitlessness spawned new beliefs, new human relationships, and new behavior. Learning was advanced, and a growing fraction of the population became literate. There was a sufficient per capita increment of leisure to permit more exercise of ingenuity than ever before. Technology progressed, and technological advancement came to be the common meaning of the word "progress."But the aura of limitless opportunity had another effect: further acceleration of population growth. To go into some details not shown explicitly in Table 1, between 1650 and 1850, a mere two centuries, the world’s human population doubled. There had never before been such a huge increase in so short a time. It doubled again by 1930, in only eighty years. And the next doubling was to take only about forty-five years! As people and their resource-using implements became more numerous, the gap between carrying capacity and the resource-use load was inevitably closed, American land per American citizen shrank to a mere 11 acres—less than half the space available in Europe for each European just prior to Columbus’s revolutionizing voyage. Meanwhile, per capita resource appetites had grown tremendously. The Age of Exuberance was necessarily temporary; it undermined its own foundations.Most of the people who were fortunate enough to live in that age misconstrued their good fortune. Characteristics of their world and their lives, due to a “limitlessness” that had to be of limited duration, were imagined to be permanent. The people of the Age of Exuberance looked back on the dismal lives of their forebears and pitied them for their “unrealistic” notions about the world, themselves, and the way human beings were meant to live. Instead of recognizing that reality itself had actually changed—and would eventually change again—they congratulated themselves for outgrowing the "superstitions" of ancestors who had seen a different world so differently. While they rejected the old premise of changelessness, they failed to see that their own belief in the permanence of limitlessness was also an overbelief, a superstition.The advantages you're talking about came in several waves. First, the Renaissance, which followed to no small extent from the wealth of new, American colonies flowing into Europe. You already mentioned London, so I'm sure you know how it flourished, coming back from the brink of collapse, thanks to the influx of American trade. I'm sure you also, then, know how that changed the situation in London vis a vis the relative cost of humans vs. coal. With so many merchants in London, for the first time in history, human labor wasn't cheap. It used to be that the systemic overpopulation that agriculture created made it cheaper to simply use more slaves or serfs than to burn precious fuel, but with the combination of the booming trade in places like London, and the cheapness of Newcastle coal, you had a situation where fuel was cheap, and human life was costly. That's what created the Industrial Revolution, not some sudden burst of genius in the midst of centuries of ignorance. The Industrial Revolution happened, because the influx of American wealth into Europe made it profitable to invent things for the first time. That presented the second wave, as we began to subsidize our lifestyle with fossil fuels.
Detritus ecosystems are not uncommon. When nutrients from decaying autumn leaves on land are carried by runoff from melting snows into a pond, their consumption by algae in the pond may be checked until springtime by the low winter temperatures that keep the algae from growing. When warm weather arrives, the inflow of nutrients may already be largely complete for the year. The algal population, unable to plan ahead, explodes in the halcyon days of spring in an irruption or bloom that soon exhausts the finite legacy of sustenance materials. This algal Age of Exuberance lasts only a few weeks. Long before the seasonal cycle can bring in more detritus, there is a massive die-off of these innocently incautious and exuberant organisms. Their "age of overpopulation" is very brief, and its sequel is swift and inescapable.Fossil fuels are practically the definition of a detritus ecosystem, and our response has followed the classic overshoot curve of any other organism. The boom of the modern city in the age of cheap energy does not speak to its sustainability, but rather, to how closely it has followed the boom cycle of ecological overshoot. But the second part of that sequence is die-off, once the detritus ecosystem is finally consumed.
Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 PM we adopted agriculture.Or, take Joseph Tainter, author of the most-cited work on social collapse, The Collapse of Complex Societies, where he writes:
Complex societies, it must be emphasized again, are recent in human history. Collapse then is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity.If you define "the entire history of modern man" so tautologically, then I'm sure you'll get the answer you're looking for, but since archaeologists have already used the term "anatomically modern humans," as well as "behaviorally modern humans," and both exist in spans of time that dwarf the past 10,000 years to 25% or less of even those spans, it seems that it's not my perspective that's lacking, but yours—oddball.
The same group of anthropologists concluded that this culture’s [Linearbanderkeramik or LBK] sweep through Europe took no more than three hundred years, a blitzkrieg by the standards of the day. And it is appropriate to employ the war metaphor here, in that the record suggests, contrary to conventional ideas about rational and peaceful cultural diffusion, that there was almost no intermixing among the wheat farmers and the salmon-eating, cave-painting Cro-Magnon already resident.Genetically, the demic diffusion model has gained ground, reinforcing the archaeological evidence (see "Tracing the Origin and Spread of Agriculture in Europe" by Pinhasi, Fort and Ammerman, "Genetic evidence for the spread of agriculture in Europe by demic diffusion" by Sokal, Oden and Wilson, "Y genetic data support the Neolithic demic diffusion model," by Chikhi, Nichols, Barbujani and Beaumont, and/or "Clines of nuclear DNA markers suggest a largely Neolithic ancestry of the European gene pool" by Chikhi, Destro-Bisol, Bertorelle, Pascali and Barbujani).
The curious part of this is that there was probably not an inherent ecological reason for conflict. That is, the LBK people didn’t blanket the region, at least not at first, but tended to cluster in villages where loess soils were concentrated, leaving the river-valley bottoms and mountains untouched. That would have left a viable niche for hunter-gatherers. A coexistence with mutually beneficial trade could have developed between the two cultures, but the record says it didn’t. There is almost no record of Cro-Magnon artifacts in LBK villages and vice versa. Cro-Magnon sites seem to cease being occupied at about the time of LBK arrival. In fact, the record seems to show that the Cro-Magnons maintained a sort of buffer zone between themselves and the newcomers, leaving even in advance of the advancing farmers.
The exception to the absence of artifacts from one culture in settlements of the other is evidence that the two sides swapped spear points, probably not as trade goods. “All these artifacts are weapons,” note Price, Gebauer, and Keeley, “and there is no reason to believe that they were exchanged in a nonviolent manner. … The evidence from the western extension of the LBK leaves little room for any other conclusion but that the LBK-Mesolithic interactions were at best chilly and at worst hostile.”
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posted by jonmc at 5:08 PM on September 1, 2007