Peru
Two major cultures arose in Peru: the Nazca (circa 100–300 BP) and the Inca (1200–1500 BP). Both lived in regions of the world that were, to say the least, parched environments: In some parts of the Peruvian Alticama, it hasn’t rained even once in over two thousand years. Both responded by creating innovative irrigation systems, some of which are still in use today. Agriculture was more than a challenge, since the soils were poor due to the lack of regular precipitation events. Nonetheless, both areas had robust cultures and complex cuisines. The Nazca were famous for their incredibly large, accurate, naturalistic, and abstract figures they “drew” in the desert by arranging stones to depict the images. Discovered in the 1920s, for many years the purpose(s) of the Nazca figures remained a total mystery to even the most persevering teams of archeologists. That is, until recently, when it became apparent after extensive computer simulations that they were not used as astronomical aids, as originally hypothesized. Instead, the most logical explanation seems to fit their geographic orientation: Most of the figures have at least one feature that points to a source of underground water. The Nazca were so dependent upon knowing where to get their water for irrigation that they conceived, then executed, these remarkable figures. Having a reliable source of food forced early humans to use every fiber of their thinking process, or else they perished. It is that simple.
The Inca evolved an equally complex society to that of the Nazca, and, prior to the arrival of the Spanish, lived in splendid semi-isolation in the mountainous regions to the east of the center for the Nazca civilization. There they cultivated a wide variety of edible plants, including tubers such as potatoes, which they could store by first drying them and then grinding them into a powder. They used the potato powder to make breadlike food items. Of course, they also grew maize, which they acquired by trading with cultures from the north. In addition, several kinds of tomatoes and peppers, avocados, fruit (strawberries and pineapple), nuts, and even chocolate were staples of the Incan diet. To grow them, they constructed elaborate high-altitude irrigation canals that brought water from great distances to places as remote as Machu Picchu. Many of these early irrigation projects were so well constructed, they remain in use today.
Intended Consequences
Coincident with the advent of agriculture was the development of texturally rich written languages. The origins of spoken language arose early in our history, perhaps two hundred thousand years earlier than writing. It was writing, however, that enabled us to leave a record of what to do and what to avoid doing. Planting schedules, what to plant, how to plant, where to plant, when to harvest, how to store grain, and so forth all had to be written down. Equally important was knowing what time of the year it was. In response to this critical need, many versions of the calendar were invented. The Anasazi created the Sun Dagger spiral, and the Aztecs created an even more complex calendar known as the Sun Stone. The druids of the British Isles conceived of and erected monolithic structures such as Stonehenge and Newgrange that allowed for the determination of the summer solstice.
One of the most remarkable of the ancient devices for predicting the seasons was based on tracking the movement of celestial bodies such as the moon and the visible planets across the night sky. It was an elegantly conceived and highly advanced instrument constructed around 2200 BP in Greece, made of solid brass and named the Antikythera Mechanism. This remarkable invention, and undoubtedly many more of which we are unaware, were practical instruments, allowing cultures that had adopted some form of permanent agriculture to predict the seasons. Ritual practices evolved from these important landmark seasonal events (planting, harvesting), and most certainly gave rise to many organized religions.
As agriculture became the accepted way of acquiring food, settled populations grew larger, establishing stable urban communities that, in turn, led to a brilliant series of cultures. Europe, Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and South and Central America all spawned dominant civilizations that rallied around naturalistic religious concepts revering and celebrating the production of food. As mentioned, the Egyptians worshiped the scarab beetle (Khepri) and the sun (Ra), since they had intuitive knowledge that these two objects plus water were directly responsible for the production of plant life, and thus for all the rest of life, too. The Aztecs and many Asian cultures (e.g., Japan) also revered the sun, presumably for the same reason. They all got it right. We have inherited the legacy of those ancient civilizations and have refined and redefined the ways in which food is provided, as well as reinterpreted the religious tenets upon which those practices were founded.
Go Forth and Multiply
During the centuries that followed, farming in many different forms spread to nearly all regions of the world, giving countless numbers of people the advantages of a predictable food supply. With the establishment of cities, trade, and oceanic shipping, the cultivation of plants far removed from their origins became the norm. Invading new soils, crops of wheat, corn, rice, barley, potatoes, and hundreds of others were adopted by burgeoning populations of urban dwellers as their main cuisine items, even though they had no idea where their food was coming from. The only thing that seemed to matter to them was that it was available each year after the harvest. The lack of a good means of preserving fresh produce gave way to prepared foods with long shelf lives. Grain was milled into flour, corn into meal, and rice could be stored as is. Rye seed and other cereals gave rise to storage problems, though, especially in northern Europe. A fungus (Claviceps purpurea) routinely infected the stored seed, and when ingested caused an illness, often fatal, that came to be known as Saint Anthony’s Fire. Ergot poisoning is what we know it as today. The fact that some harvested crops turned sour did not stop the surge of agricultural initiatives. Nonetheless, many died from food poisoning, mostly caused by bacteria: Salmonella and shigella were as common then as they are today. Fertilizing crops with human feces unwittingly encouraged the spread of these infections, as the germ theory of disease and good sanitary practice did not take hold in Europe until late in the 1800s. Those cultures situated in moderate climates were more fortunate in some ways, enjoying year-round availability of fresh fruits and a variety of vegetables. Storage of these food items was more difficult, however; much of what was harvested had to be eaten that day or the next, or it rotted. Another advantage of warm climates was having multiple harvests in a year of the same crop. In Southeast Asia, for example, three crops of rice were possible.
How ’Bout Dem Apples
In the meantime, the newly introduced plant species were “morphing” into new kinds of plants we now refer to as cultivars, as farmers selected them for qualities related to taste and overall appearance, rather than for resistance to plant diseases, for instance. Many of these emigrant crops adapted well to shifts in annual temperature profiles and precipitation regimes by growing in ways that differed in surprising ways from the parent plant. A good example is what happened to the apple. Originally from the Tien Shan forests of eastern Kazakstan, this highly sought-after taste treat started out as a small, bitter, pea-size, berrylike fruit. Over time, with our care, it has evolved into some twenty thousand varieties, of which more than seventy-five hundred are raised in commercial quantities. None of these even remotely resembles the original plant product.
Wheat grew almost everywhere, but in Scotland, this wild grass turned keystone crop became adapted to the low light, short growing seasons, and harsh weather patterns of that region. It produced robust, hardy spears laden with the largest, most nutritious kernels of wheat germ in the world. Corn also changed dramatically from its maize ancestral roots, becoming identified with the typical double-ear-bearing tall plant that grows as “high as an elephant’s eye”—quite different indeed from its inconspicuous lowly grass plant parents.
Plants on a Leash
Once we learned how malleable the genetics of plants were after their domestication, vast numbers of new crops were selected from wild plants and tamed in remarkably short pe
riods of time. When they were introduced, many of them changed forever the way people ate. Marco Polo brought pasta back from the Orient, and with the introduction of the tomato from South America into Italy, helped to create a set of cuisines that today is emulated in most of the civilized world. The potato, of which there are some 4,500 varieties today, also originated in Peru and spread into Europe and the British Isles. This starch-laden tuber revolutionized table fare for generations wherever it grew. In fact, there were not too many places it did not grow. It literally thrived in the nutrient-poor soils of Northern Hemisphere climates, making it the ideal addition to many cultures whose usual fare consisted of salted, dried fish. So dependent did some cultures become on “invader” species such as the potato that when these new crops succumbed to plant diseases, eliminating them from the local diet, starvation and even death ensued among large populations; witness the potato famine of the 1800s in Ireland. Mass emigration of Irish people to North America, Australia, and other parts of the world as the result of that agricultural catastrophe redistributed the human gene pool from that small island country, enriching the recipients as well as the donors. Another plant that humans learned to tame very well was rice. Rice cultivation in Asia became almost a religion in itself, as this important grain was established as the keystone crop for the entire region. It remains the basis of most of the cuisines for one-fourth of the world’s population.
Trouble in Paradise
As discussed above, along with all the benefits of farming came the failures. These events were bound to happen no matter what the crop or where it was planted. Adverse weather (floods, droughts), plant diseases, and insect pests all conspired to limit the amount of a given crop. Nature had never planned for monocultures; biodiversity was and still is the rule that enables the establishment of functional ecosystems. Resiliency in nature is related to the number of species a region can support, not the number of individuals of a single species, such as corn or wheat. Granted, many of the grasslands, tundra, and alpine forests harbor just a few dominant species, but there are plenty of other plants and animals interspersed among them to help even out the flow of energy from one trophic (energy) level to the next. Farming excluded any invader that might take away nutrients from the crop of choice. As we will see in the next chapter, we have gone to great lengths to ensure that we get back only that which we plant. It was and still is an unnatural way to behave ecologically. Without being supplemented for depleted nutrients (i.e., fertilized), the soils were not rich enough on their own in most places to support more than a few years’ worth of a given plant. Exceptions abound, however: Volcanic ash left over from centuries of geologic activity produced some of the richest soils on Earth, and farming thrived in these regions. And as pointed out earlier, floodplains were also rich in nutrients, as proven by the sustainable cultures of Egypt and Italy.
Yet never did it occur to any human population, regardless of the time period or the fertility of the land, that what they were doing to the environment by farming was actually destroying the very tapestry of what allowed us to evolve into human beings; namely, an intact ecosystem. Instead, we contrived a series of edicts that later became etched in stone that gave us “permission” to lord it over the lowly life forms we could now eliminate from our immediate living space. Therein lies the crux of the problem.
World Domination
A philosophical subtext arose out of most of the popular Western-based religions that were established following the original waves of the first agricultural revolution. It stated unequivocally and without any thought other than to the betterment of humans that God has given us permission to dominate over the land and its natural processes.
The Old Testament was explicit:
GENESIS 9:1–2. Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the earth, on every bird of the air, on all that move on the earth, and on all the fish of the sea. They are given into your hand.
Perhaps the reason all of the earth’s wildlife is fearful of us is because we have, indeed, been fruitful and multiplied, and have now filled up the earth to the point of threatening to overwhelm all the rest of the natural world. The strong desire to preside over natural processes has led to a conscious multicultural arrogance that we can in fact do it. When things go our way, we get a false sense of actually being in control of our own destiny. In stark contrast, adverse weather events—floods, cyclones, dust storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and heat waves—and other unwelcome natural phenomena, such as tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the emergence and reemergence of a wide variety of infectious disease agents, continue to give us pause, and force us to rethink this central theme. Numerous insightful and creative mythologies, and a robust fiction-based literature, pits “man against nature.” In the real world, nature usually wins. One colorful bumper sticker sums it up this way: nature bats last. In fact, another far less well-known quote from that very same Old Testament reads:
LEVITICUS 25:23–24. The land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants. Throughout the country that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.
Apparently, as the story goes, even the Reverend Billy Graham was unaware of this passage when someone read it to him at a debate on Creationism versus evolution.
Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Stewardship is an integral part of our moral contract with the natural world that surrounds us. One place that still exemplifies this concept is the country of Bhutan, a land of gentle, friendly people. I had the privilege of visiting that small kingdom years ago in October, during their harvest season. I was struck by the fact that their religion, a form of tantric Buddhism, did not permit the use of draft animals. All farming was done by hand, right down to the harvesting and winnowing. Their crops were simple but balanced, allowing for a healthy life: rice, wheat, chili peppers, tomatoes, and some leafy green vegetables. The entire country was fully engaged in the harvest when my wife and I arrived. Many of the festivals we attended celebrated this singular event. On one memorable occasion, we witnessed six people on a hillside lined up in two rows on either side of a blue plastic tarpaulin, their only apparent concession to anything modern. Each held a wooden two-pronged pitchfork. These hand-crafted farm implements were indistinguishable from those used by the world’s first wheat farmers some ten thousand years ago. One person stood at the end of the tarp and tossed a healthy bunch of newly cut buckwheat into the air. The other five, two on one side and three on the other, immediately beat the wheat down onto the tarp, knocking the grains of wheat off the spears. The unseparated mixture was then taken to a field lower down in the valley where the wind blew strongly in one direction. Later that day, in that same valley, my wife and I watched awestruck as one woman stood with her back to the wind and winnowed the grain from the chaff by pouring large baskets of the beaten mixture downwind. The weight of the grain allowed it to fall at the feet of the winnower, while the lighter chaff accumulated some ten feet away. Again, I could not help thinking that I had time-traveled back to the very origins of agriculture. These are images I will take to my grave.
Trouble in Paradise Redux
Bhutan has a population of around seven hundred thousand. Because almost everyone farms, they produce more than enough food for themselves, with enough left over to export to places like India in exchange for a few of the modern essentials, such as gasoline. Bhutan’s population will never exceed its food supply as long as everyone takes part in the process of producing it. But even in this idyllic society, there are problems looming on the horizon. Bhutan’s current biggest problems are related to urbanization; obesity, heart disease, and illiteracy seem to be foremost on the mind of the minister of health. The hope is that they will reach a balance with their conscious intent to modernize. It would be a shame to see this example of a self-contained society collapse for the same reasons as so many others have done in the past.
A Modern Synth
esis
The current collective worldview of how we should conduct our lives in context with the rest of the earth’s living entities recognizes the same basic facts, regardless of the culture: namely, that nature is never wholly predictable, that it often poses threats to our very existence, and, above all, that it can never be fully understood. The development of the modern applied science of public health has added hard data in support of that notion, and has led to the following realization regarding the consequences of altering the terrain for whatever purpose, be it agriculture, settlement, or industrial development: We are at risk of acquiring an illness (albeit unpredictable and certainly unintended) related to any human activity that significantly rearranges the natural landscape. The global scientific community is rapidly coming to consensus that the way in which we must carry out our lives at both the individual and population level, and at the same time avoid adverse health consequences, is to strive to achieve a degree of ecological balance with the rest of the earth’s life forms.
Chapter 3
Today’s Agriculture
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
—NELSON MANDELA
Sour Grapes
To get a feel for what it must have been like to live at the pinnacle (i.e., the last gasps) of the first agricultural revolution, we need look no further than to John Steinbeck’s take on farm life, set in what can only be described as one of the all-time worst periods of American history. His classic novel The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, but he wrote most of it during the height of the Great Depression, while all the tragedies of that period were unfolding right in front of him. Steinbeck focused on the plight of the farmer and agriculture, in general. He used the fictional trials and tribulations of a typical rural American family from Oklahoma after their farm failed, as so many other farms had also done, to illustrate what U.S. farm life had become. In simple language and with powerful declarative sentences, the author puts the reader smack on the back of the Joad family truck as they slowly wend their way westward toward the land of “milk and honey,” the Central Valley of California. They had been “evicted” from their homestead by one of the most severe and long-lasting droughts in that region since records were kept. It is important to note that droughts are part of the normal precipitation pattern for all tall grass prairies. Viable farming operations for most domesticated crops are impossible in those semiarid ecosystems, as wheat and barley cultivars require significant quantities of water. But farm they did. Homesteading in what was to become known as the “dust bowl” even had the official seal of approval from the U.S. government. But after about twenty unusually wet years (1910–1930), the whole thing went sour. Apparently, nothing could undo what these well-intentioned dirt farmers had inadvertently done; that is, to lay bare the landscape by plowing and planting. Not even the most sincerely offered prayers had any effect on reversing the disaster they now faced.
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