In class, we came up with the following notes/questions (pasted below)
Please address any of these questions and/or the larger question of whether agriculture was a mistake.
Please read other people's postings before you jump in, so you can see who you agree with and who you disagree with.
* * * NOTES FROM CLASS * * *
what do we mean by “better off”?
What makes a civilization successful?
Lots of jobs? Economy? Military might?
Sustainability/Stability?
Justice? Is the death penalty okay/just?
Everybody has a role to contribute?
People’s basic needs are met (food, shelter)
Cultural achievements
Technology – how do you use it?
Progress – technological, economic, agricultural (quantity v quality)
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5 comments:
After reading the textbook information this weekend, I am convinced that hunting/gathering was more effective than agriculture. I still would not take it to the extreme that it agriculture is the worst mistake in the history of the human race, but now I do believe that hunting/gathering over-rides agriculture. I think the quote that finalized my change of opinion was the following: (“…food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of farmed foods or even on a single species.” P. 81-text. It assured that agriculture is not reliable, and I understand that hunter and gatherers had a wide range of areas for game and crops. What I thought was interesting was that these two quotes seem to oppose eachother : “Why work harder for food less nutritious and supply less capricious?” p. 82-text, and “…agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work.”-p. 1-Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race-Diamond.Can anyone clarify that for me?
I'm not sure this will fully clarify it, but I'll give it a shot: Agriculture is more efficient and gets you more food, but it's less nutritious. The capricious point is harder to resolve. If there is more food using farming, then you can store it... so that seems to be a wash. But speaking of washing, that spinach scare can't happen in a hunter-gatherer world -- at least not on such a large scale. If some kind of fast-speading virus contaminated our food supply, we might have serious problems. If something contaminated the food supply of hunter-gatherers, they'd move or switch to another supply. They have more options.
I think it might help to not think about farming from the perspective of the US, where we have SO MANY options in our grocery store... but to think of it from the perspective of the 3+ billion people who eat one or two kinds of crops, and if those crops do badly, they have few to no options.
The answer to hunter-gathering or farming seems obvious to me. If you farm and you have a really bad winter, what do you do in the spring when none of your crops grew? In a hunter-gatherer setting, you can just move on. You aren't as dependent on one particular spot. You can move and find food somewhere else without as much trouble or any trouble at all. Even in text that isn't supposed to be biased seems to lean very strongly toward the hunter-gatherer side. Honestly, where is a strong piece of evidence that supports farming? I haven't seen one yet.
I agree that hunter gathering was the stronger of the two. I agree with Laura's comment on how farming is affected by the seasons. With hunting and gathering you can just pick up and leave and go to a different location. That is an advantage and it provides the people with different types of animals to hunt for. I also believe hunting and gathering was superior because it didn't expose the people to as many diseases as farming did. All in all I too do not think that switching to agriculture was the "biggest mistake in the human race". However I do think that hunting and gathering was a better choice for civilizations becuase it did not make way for gender inequality.
Thanks for writing this.
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