Before you spit your smoko out across the kitchen table just hang in there for a sec. This is not an opinion piece, this is just a question.
My brother-in-law had been harping on to me for a while about Sapiens 'A brief history of Humankind' - a cracking read, I'm with you now Matt.
Let me take you back. For about 2.5 million years we humans fed ourselves by gathering plants and hunting animals that lived and bred without our intervention. When we were hungry we found food, when we were fed we socialised, bred, wandered and then slept.
Then, some 10,000 years ago around Turkey, we Homo sapiens started investing almost all of our time into manipulating the lives of some animal and plants. From daylight to dawn we started sowing seeds, watering plants, removing weeds and herding sheep to better pastures. Our work here was thought to provide more fruit, grain and meat. This was deemed the Agricultural Revolution.
Very quickly we as people had to start thinking about the future, something we hadn't needed to do very much prior to this.
Trying to predict the weather, allocation of labour, time to harvest were all on the table now. Anxiety was something that was far more present.
As we continued to work out how to improve agricultural practices, our population started to balloon, both due to the access to more food and also the need for more labour to assist in the increased work load.
On and on this cycle has continued, to a point now where we have cities that contain millions of people in areas that don't produce food to support themselves and a ballooned population that can't just live off the natural remaining food supplies.
Now I am sure your sitting there saying, well what's your point? Well I don't have one, I just find it so interesting that we did this to ourselves.
We created this way of life that is so involved and our time is now devoted to crops and animals that are dependent on us to keep them alive in the environment we have created.
It's a different way to look at it but we have almost enslaved ourselves to these practices in system that seems to be doing nothing but speed up... lets see where it takes us.
If you are keeping something under your hat and keen to chat about it, give TIACS a call on 0488 846 988.
- Ed Ross, conversation starter
