Posted 1/01/2008 04:55:00 PM by Douglas

Great article about how agriculture ruined the world. Or did it?

About 12,000 years ago people embarked on an experiment called agriculture and some say that they, and their planet, have never recovered. Farming brought a population explosion, protein and vitamin deficiency, new diseases and deforestation.

Well, duh. Some of us know that it's impossible to "live" as a human without destroying part of your environment, no matter how self righteous that hybrid makes you feel. But still, what has agriculture done for us?

The invention of agriculture and the advent of settled society merely swapped high mortality for high morbidity, allowing people some relief from chronic warfare so they could at least grind out an existence, rather than being ground out of existence altogether.

Ahh, farming: providing for long, uninteresting lives for the last 12,000 years. But there's hope:

There is a modern moral in this story. We have been creating ecological crises for ourselves and our habitats for tens of thousands of years. We have been solving them, too. Pessimists will point out that each solution only brings us face to face with the next crisis, optimists that no crisis has proved insoluble yet.

Based on mankind's history, I'm going to have to go with the optimist view on this one: I don't think we can create a problem we can't solve.

When we eventually reverse the build-up in carbon dioxide, there will be another issue waiting for us.

Exactly. So won't someone please get Al Gore to shut his festering pie-hole?