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  • From: Ben Martin Horst <ben.martinhorst@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] permaculture - Biofuel Illusion
  • Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2006 23:44:34 -0700

Just a clarification of terms for the sake of clear discussion:

Anthropologists use the term "forager" to describe a system in which people come across food and eat it as they
find it. Presumably our early ancestors (australopithecines and maybe Homo erectus, ergaster, and neandertalensis) used this strategy, and while it's possible that early members of Homo sapiens used it as well, there is no record of any historical culture using this method.

"Hunting-gathering," on the other hand, refers to a subsistence pattern in which people go out and find food, then bring it back to a homesite for storage and distribution. The operative word is "gathering:" hunting occupies a high status position in many of these societies, but it's the gathering of plants, fungi, insects, shellfish, etc. that provides the majority of the diet. They often use elaborate food preservation techniques, including fermenting and drying. Historically, anthropologists have assumed that these groups didn't actively plant anything, but there's a rapidly growing body of evidence that these groups have actively manipulated their environments to a radical degree, including intentional encouragement of certain species. This type of participation in the ecosystem simply wasn't apparent to Western anthropologists steeped in agricultural tradition, though I have a hunch that permaculturists doing anthropological fieldwork among many of these people would immediately recognize many of the practices agriculturists were blind to.

-Ben


Toby Hemenway wrote:
There's a nice, short book called "Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers" by
Colin Tudge that advances the idea that humans developed gardening
techniques long, long before the Neolithic "dawn of agriculture" 10,000
years ago. We've had fire for 500,000 years, so you can bet we've been
tending plants a long time, too. "Pure" hunter-gathering, as Paul suggests,
probably disappeared before the genus Homo arose.

And yes, population is a key to sustainability. Pack in too many of any
species, human or not, of whatever cultural practices, and you'll degrade
the environment (look at rabbits, cattle, elephants--there are countless
examples). Agriculture took the lid off of human numbers, and the Earth has
been been going downhill ever since. We need to develop structural
constraints on population or nature will do it for us.


Toby
www.patternliteracy.com





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