My vote for
the most sustainable food system humans have ever experienced is for the hunter-gatherer
existence. Before the advent of
agriculture roughly 10-11,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans lived only
as hunter-gatherers for well over 100,000 years while causing limited ecological
disruption. Some hunter-gatherer
cultures continue to exist today, but worldwide, most of us live by the blessings
of agriculture.
A
hunter-gatherer’s life is a subsistence one, with little beyond life’s
fundamental material necessities. Hunter-gatherers
have limited capacity to carry and store goods and possessions (Diamond, 1997;
Finkel, 2009). It is only through the
advent of agriculture that societies can develop highly specialized roles (political
leaders, merchants, artists, teachers, soldiers, priests, scribes, and
technology specialists).
Life as a
hunter-gatherer may offer a sense of deep freedom (Finkel, 2009), and compared
to early farming communities, the hunter-gather life apparently offered a
superior existence (Diamond, 1987).
However, it is a life very, very distant from our present world of material
comforts, cherished electronic devices, and relative security. Visual snapshots of traditional lives can
make this point much more powerfully than I.
Click here and here.
In my professional
travels in four continents, I have never gotten the sense that there is a
groundswell of people poised ready to relinquish a 21st-century material
lifestyle. Yes, some of us make some
progress in simplifying our lives. For
example, I often buy local; all year, I ride a bike or walk as much as possible;
I drive a four-cylinder; I recycle; etc.
Did you see the
wealth in that last sentence? I own a
bicycle; I own a car; I eat three square meals a day, made of delicious,
diverse foods of my choosing, in a kitchen with running water, a gas range, a
refrigerator, heat and A/C. Heck, I have
shoes! Several pairs! And boots!
And running shoes! And soccer
shoes! I have lived overseas in regions of
deep poverty, and…let’s just say that living a subsistence life does not seem
to me to be a joyous, freely made choice for most people in the 21st century.
But what if
a global transformation occurred in human thinking, and we agreed the world
over to return to the simplicity of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Could we?
Hunter-gatherers
need at least 2.5 km2 (=250 hectares) of land surface per person
(Diamond, 1987; Diamond, 1997). The
United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization states that Earth has 13.4 billion
hectares of ice-free land (FAO, 1993).
Dividing 13.4 billion hectares of land by 250 hectares per person gives 54
million people as Earth’s maximum carrying capacity for hunter-gatherers. Dividing 54 million people by our present
population of 7.3 billion people gives a proportion of 0.007, which is equivalent
to 0.7%.
This
“back-of-the-envelope” calculation suggests that the most sustainable food system
humans have ever experienced cannot even accommodate one percent of our present
population. What are we to do
with the 99+%? And do we even dare to
look a mere 35 years ahead to mid-century, when the global population is
expected to be well over nine billion?
This
calculation suggests to me that addressing the challenges of food-system
sustainability will be…well…challenging.
In fact, extremely so. Probably
more challenging than most think. And it
isn’t just a challenge due to our high current population, nor to our continuing
population growth. The inexorable march
of climate change introduces “jokers” into the deck. As geophysicist Ray Pierrehumbert said at the
2012 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, “we are running an uncontrolled
experiment with the Earth, and we have to live in the beaker.”
Challenges
indeed.
Look for
more on this line of thought in Part 2 of this two-part series.
Citations
1.
Diamond, J. 1987. The Worst Mistake in the
History of the Human Race. Discover Magazine, May 1987, pp. 64-66.
2.
Diamond, J. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Norton and
Company, New York.
3.
FAO, 1993, FESLM:
An international framework for evaluating sustainable land management,
Section entitled “Issues
of Sustainable Land Management”
4.
Finkel, M. 2009. The Hazda. National Geographic, October 2009.
