Everything began to change as cultivating crops and breeding livestock enabled larger, more complex forms of society. No longer were our forebears subject to the whim of other predators, famine or natural disaster. Now they could prepare for the future, creating surplus during times of plenty as well as tools and forms of infrastructure to progressively expand their newly acquired abundance.
Given the frequency of scare stories surrounding genetically modified foods as embodying the worst aspects of modern technology, it is ironic that many staples we now take for granted were only developed through genetic modification during this period. Carrots, initially harvested in Afghanistan eleven thousand years ago, were once purple and white, while bananas – now the world’s favourite fruit – are sterile and incapable of setting seed, and have been ever since our ancestors began to cultivate them following the last Ice Age. While critics are right to say that a technological fix isn’t, in isolation, suficient to resolve issues of ecological degradation and food scarcity, in a very meaningful sense technology is precisely what underpinned the success of our species in the first place.
A Stretching World
But while the story of humanity’s rise is built on agriculture, and its unique ability to reprogramme the gifts of nature, it now appears that such genius has found the natural limits of our planet. These limits are more obvious than ever and are expressed in a number of ways. The most striking is a sixth mass extinction event, in which one in four mammals is set to vanish. At the same time 90 per cent of the largest fish in our oceans have disappeared, the glaciers that provide drinking water for billions are starting to run dry, and agricultural soils are becoming increasingly salty – degraded by the excesses of industrial farming. In short, the treasures of our planet – mineral, animal and plant – are being decimated, and the rate of their demise is only accelerating.
160
n e w t r av e l l e r s