July 11, 2006
Kamloops Daily News


Where are we going? It's clear that the sea of humanity is
drifting to cities but it's less clear where civilization is
headed.

For better or worse, the world's poor are moving to cities
at an unprecedented rate. Delegates at the recent World
Urban Forum in Vancouver pondered what to do with all those
new arrivals.

Migrants face an uncertain future in the slums that surround
the megacities of the world. It's hard to see how they will
be any better off without jobs, clean water, sewage
disposal, and housing.

It's the largest migration of people in history. A
population twice the size of Canada is moving to cities
annually. They are the dispossessed people of the world who
are escaping armed conflict, industrialization of farms,
climate change, loss of soil fertility, and subsidies to
first world crops that make local farming uneconomical.

It all started 11,000 years ago. At that time, we were all
hunter-gathers and life was good as long as the game and
fish held out. Why did these people give up the good life?

Jared Diamond, scientist and author, wonders the same thing.
Why did they embrace the agricultural way of life? "They
must of had some reason. Why did they do so around 8,500
B.C. in Mediterranean habitats of the fertile crescent?"

Like today's tentative migrants to cities, hunter-gathers
hesitantly settled down on the farm. After all, it had
never been done before. We tend to think that
hunter-gathers made the switch because agricultural life
would be easier; no worries about where your next meal would
come from. The impression that hunter-gathers lived short,
brutish lives is wrong.

In fact, the lives of early farmers were relatively
impoverished. "Archaeologists have demonstrated that the
first farmers in many areas were smaller and less well
nourished, suffered from more serious diseases, and died on
the average at a younger age than the hunter-gathers they
replaced," says Diamond in his book Guns, Germs and Steel.

It's not that hunter-gatherers were ignorant about farming.
They had contact with farmers and even traded with them.
Faced with the knowledge of what an agricultural lifestyle
was like, they made a conscious decision to continue as
hunter-gathers.

Ironically, the weakness of farmers became their strength.
Close contact with domestic animals created deadly microbes
but farmers eventually developed resistance. What didn't
kill them made them stronger. And those diseases became
deadly weapons in confrontations with hunter-gatherers.

Disease has been the most powerful weapon in history. For
example, before World War II more victims died of war-borne
microbes than of battle wounds.

Meetings between agricultural societies and hunter-gathers
were disastrous for the later. The Spanish conquistadores
may have been a murderous bunch but it was their germs that
decimated North American native populations not their
superior weapons.

Agriculture gave rise to cities. Cities became centres of
political authority necessary to organize labour. Farmers
had unused labour once the harvest was stored. That labour
was organized by kings and bureaucrats to build public works
such as pyramids and irrigation systems. Surplus labour was
also put to use in armies.

Surplus food became surplus wealth. Wealth allowed
specialists to emerge: priests, scribes, craftsmen and
artists. Craftsman forged weapons. Surplus food required
record keeping of who got what. That required accounting.
Accounting necessitated numbers and writing. It's no
coincidence that math and writing developed in agricultural
societies but not hunter-gatherers.

Confrontations between hunter-gathers and agricultural
societies became one-sided not just from germs and steel
weapons, but because of writing. Writing allowed generals
to have advance knowledge of local tactics, customs, and
wealth as a result of written records prepared by scouting
parties and explorers.

More food begets more people and larger cities. More people
require more centralization of laws and police to resolve
the conflicts that arise when people are packed together.

Large cities require mass communications so that everyone
understands what the laws are and what the decrees of the
rulers are. Cities depend on a stratified society in which
the poor provide labour for the rich.

Today's farmer is threatened by industrialization and land
ownership by corporations. The remaining farmers are
employees.

Farmers are leaving the land in masses and moving to an
uncertain future in the periphery of a nearby global
megalopolis. They look longingly at the life they are
leaving behind but like the hunter-gathers before them,
their fate seems inevitable.


David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca

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