[Sdpg] Eden was a Garden, Not a Farm, Toby Hemenway( Published in Permaculture Activist #60, May, 2006)

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

Eden was a Garden, Not a Farm  Toby Hemenway
http://www.patternliteracy.com/sustag.html

Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?

(Published in Permaculture Activist #60, May, 
2006 www.permacultureactivist.net/)

Jared Diamond calls it “the worst mistake in the 
history of the human race.”(1) Bill Mollison says 
that it can “destroy whole landscapes.”(2) Are 
they describing nuclear energy? Suburbia? Coal 
mining? No. They are talking about agriculture. 
The problem is not simply that farming in its 
current industrial manifestation is destroying 
topsoil and biodiversity. Agriculture in any form 
is inherently unsustainable. At its doorstep can 
also be laid the basis of our culture’s split 
between humans and nature, much disease and poor 
health, and the origins of dominator hierarchies 
and the police state. Those are big claims, so let’s explore them.

Permaculture, although it encompasses many 
disciplines, orbits most fundamentally around 
food. Anthropologists, too, agree that food 
defines culture more than our two other physical 
needs of shelter and reproduction. A single 
home-building stint provides a place to live for 
decades. A brief sexual encounter can result in 
children. But food must be gotten every day, 
usually several times a day. Until very recently, 
all human beings spent much of their time 
obtaining food, and the different ways of doing 
that drove cultures down very divergent paths.

Anthropologist Yehudi Cohen (3) and many 
subsequent scholars break human cultures into 
five categories based on how they get food. These 
five are foragers (or hunter-gatherers), 
horticulturists, agriculturists, pastoralists, 
and industrial cultures. Knowing which category a 
people falls into allows you to predict many 
attributes of that group. For example, foragers 
tend to be animist/pantheist, living in a world 
rich with spirit and in which all beings and many 
objects are ascribed a status equal to their own 
in value and meaning. Foragers live in small 
bands and tribes. Some foragers may be better 
than others at certain skills, like tool making 
or medicine, but almost none have exclusive 
specialties and everyone helps gather food. 
Though there may be chiefs and shamans, 
hierarchies are nearly flat and all members have 
access to the leaders. A skirmish causing two or 
three deaths is a major war. Most of a forager’s 
calories come from meat or fish, supplemented 
with fruit, nuts, and some wild grain and 
tubers.(4) It’s rare that a forager will 
overexploit his environment, as the linkage is so 
tight that destruction of a resource one season 
means starvation the next. Populations tend to 
peak at low numbers and stabilize.

The First Growth Economy

Agriculturists, in contrast, worship gods whose 
message usually is that humans are chosen beings 
holding dominion, or at least stewardship, over 
creation. This human/nature divide makes 
ecological degradation not only inevitable but a sign of progress.

While the forager mainstays of meat and wild food 
rot quickly, domesticated grain, a hallmark 
innovation of agriculture, allows storage, 
hoarding, and surplus. Food growing also evens 
out the seasonal shortages that keep forager populations low.

Having fields to tend and surpluses to store 
encouraged early farming peoples to stay in one 
place. Grain also needs processing, and as 
equipment for threshing and winnowing grew 
complex and large, the trend toward sedentism accelerated.(5)

Grains provide more calories, or energy, per 
weight than lean meat. Meat protein is easily 
transformed into body structure—one reason why 
foragers tend to be taller than farmers—but 
turning protein into energy exacts a high 
metabolic cost and is inefficient.(6) Starches 
and sugars, the main components of plants, are 
much more easily converted into calories than 
protein, and calories are the main limiting 
factor in reproduction. A shift from meat-based 
to carbohydrate-based calories means that given 
equal amounts of protein, a group getting its 
calories mostly from plants will reproduce much 
faster than one getting its calories from meat. 
It’s one reason farming cultures have higher birth rates than foragers.

Also, farming loosens the linkage between 
ecological damage and food supply. If foragers 
decimate the local antelope herd, it means 
starvation and a low birth rate for the hunters. 
If the hunters move or die off, the antelope herd 
will rebound quickly. But when a forest is 
cleared for crops, the loss of biodiversity 
translates into more food for people. Soil begins 
to deplete immediately but that won’t be noticed 
for many years. When the soil is finally ruined, 
which is the fate of nearly all agricultural 
soils, it will stunt ecological recovery for 
decades. But while the soil is steadily eroding, 
crops will support a growing village.

All these factors—storable food, surplus, 
calories from carbohydrates, and slow feedback 
from degrading ecosystems—lead inevitably to 
rising populations in farming cultures. It’s no 
coincidence, then, that farmers are also 
conquerors. A growing population needs more land. 
Depleted farmland forces a population to take 
over virgin soil. In comparison, forager cultures 
are usually very site specific: they know the 
habits of particular species and have a culture 
built around a certain place. They rarely conquer 
new lands, as new terrain and its different 
species would alter the culture’s knowledge, 
stories, and traditions. But expansion is built 
into agricultural societies. Wheat and other 
grains can grow almost anywhere, so farming, 
compared to foraging, requires less of a sense of place.

Even if we note these structural problems with 
agriculture, the shift from foraging at first 
glance seems worth it because—so we are 
taught—agriculture allows us the leisure to 
develop art, scholarship, and all the other 
luxuries of a sophisticated culture. This myth 
still persists even though for 40 years 
anthropologists have compiled clear evidence to 
the contrary. A skilled gatherer can amass enough 
wild maize in three and a half hours to feed 
herself for ten days. One hour of labor can yield 
a kilogram of wild einkorn wheat.(7) Foragers 
have plenty of leisure for non-survival 
pleasures. The art in the caves at Altamira and 
Lascaux, and other early examples are proof that 
agriculture is not necessary for a complex 
culture to develop. In fact, forager cultures are 
far more diverse in their arts, religions, and 
technologies than agrarian cultures, which tend 
to be fairly similar.(3) And as we know, 
industrial society allows the least diversity of 
all, not tolerating any but a single global culture.

A Life of Leisure

We’re also taught that foragers’ lives are 
“nasty, brutish, and short,” in Hobbes’s famous 
characterization. But burial sites at Dickson 
Mounds, an archaeological site in Illinois that 
spans a shift from foraging to maize farming, 
show that farmers there had 50% more tooth 
problems typical of malnutrition, four times the 
anemia, and an increase in spine degeneration 
indicative of a life of hard labor, compared to 
their forager forebears at the site.(8) Lifespan 
decreased from an average of 26 years at birth 
for foragers to 19 for farmers. In prehistoric 
Turkey and Greece, heights of foragers averaged 
5'-9" in men and 5'-5" in women, and plummeted 
five inches after the shift to agriculture (1). 
The Turkish foragers’ stature is not yet equaled 
by their descendants. In virtually all known 
examples, foragers had better teeth and less 
disease than subsequent farming cultures at the 
same site. Thus the easy calories of agriculture 
were gained at the cost of good nutrition and health.

We think of hunter-gatherers as grimly weathering 
frequent famine, but agriculturists fare worse 
there, too. Foragers, with lower population 
densities, a much more diverse food supply, and 
greater mobility, can find some food in nearly 
any conditions. But even affluent farmers 
regularly experience famine. The great historian 
Fernand Braudel (9) shows that even comparatively 
wealthy and cultured France suffered country-wide 
famines 10 times in the tenth century, 26 in the 
eleventh, 2 in the twelfth, 4 in the fourteenth, 
7 in the fifteenth, 13 in the sixteenth, 11 in 
the seventeenth, and 16 in the eighteenth 
century. This does not include the countless 
local famines that occurred in addition to the 
widespread ones. Agriculture did not become a 
reliable source of food until fossil fuels gave 
us the massive energy subsidies needed to avoid 
shortfalls. When farming can no longer be 
subsidized by petrochemicals, famine will once again be a regular visitor.

Agriculture needs more and more fuel to supply 
the population growth it causes. Foragers can 
reap as many as 40 calories of food energy for 
every calorie they expend in gathering. They 
don’t need to collect and spread fertilizer, 
irrigate, terrace, or drain fields, all of which 
count against the energy gotten from food. But 
ever since crops were domesticated, the amount of 
energy needed to grow food has steadily 
increased. A simple iron plow requires that 
millions of calories be burned for digging, 
moving, and smelting ore. Before oil, one plow's 
forging meant that a dozen trees or more were 
cut, hauled, and converted to charcoal for the 
smithy. Though the leverage that a plow yields 
over its life may earn back those calories as 
human food, all that energy is robbed from the ecosystem and spent by humans.

Farming before oil also depended on animal labor, 
demanding additional acreage for feed and pasture 
and compounding the conversion of ecosystem into 
people. Agriculture’s caloric yield dipped into 
the negative centuries ago, and the return on 
energy has continued to degrade until we now use 
an average of 4 to 10 calories for each calorie of food energy.

So agriculture doesn’t just require cropland. It 
needs inputs from vast additional acreages for 
fertilizer, animal feed, fuel and ore for 
smelting tools, and so on. Farming must always 
drain energy and diversity from the land 
surrounding cultivation, degrading more and more wilderness.

Wilderness is a nuisance for agriculturists, a 
source of pest animals and insects, as well as 
land that’s just “going to waste.” It will 
constantly be destroyed. Combine this with 
farming’s surplus of calories and its need for 
large families for labor, and the birth rate will 
rise geometrically. Under this brutal calculus of 
population growth and land hunger, Earth's 
ecosystems will increasingly and inexorably be 
converted into human food and food-producing tools.

Forager cultures have a built-in check on 
population, since the plants and animals they 
depend on cannot be over-harvested without 
immediate harm. But agriculture has no similar 
structural constraint on over-exploitation of 
resources. Quite the opposite is true. If one 
farmer leaves land fallow, the first neighbor to 
farm it gains an advantage. Agriculture leads to 
both a food race and population explosion. (I 
cannot help but wonder if eating high on the food 
chain via meat, since it will reduce population, 
is ultimately a more responsible act than eating 
low on the food chain with grains, which will 
promote larger populations. At some point humans 
need to get the message to slow their breeding.)

We can pass laws to stop some of the harm 
agriculture does, but these rules will reduce 
harvests. As soon as food gets tight, the laws 
will be repealed. There are no structural 
constraints on agriculture's ecologically damaging tendencies.

All this means that agriculture is fundamentally unsustainable.

The damage done by agriculture is social and 
political as well. A surplus, rare and ephemeral 
for foragers, is a principal goal of agriculture. 
A surplus must be stored, which requires 
technology and materials to build storage, people 
to guard it, and a hierarchical organization to 
centralize the storage and decide how it will be 
distributed. It also offers a target for local 
power struggles and theft by neighboring groups, 
increasing the scale of wars. With agriculture, 
power thus begins its concentration into fewer 
and fewer hands. He who controls the surplus 
controls the group. Personal freedom erodes naturally under agriculture.

The endpoint of Cohen’s cultural continuum is 
industrial society. Industrialism is really a 
gloss on agriculture, since industry is dependent 
on farming to provide low-cost raw materials that 
can be “value-added,” a place to externalize 
pollution and other costs, and a source of cheap 
labor. Industrial cultures have enormous 
ecological footprints, low birth rates, and high 
labor costs, the result of lavishing huge 
quantities of resources—education, complex 
infrastructure, layers of government and legal 
structures, and so on—upon each person. This 
level of complexity cannot be maintained from 
within itself. The energy and resources for it 
must be siphoned from outlying agricultural 
regions. Out there lie the simpler cultures, high 
birth rates, and resulting low labor costs that 
must subsidize the complexity of industry.

An industrial culture must also externalize costs 
upon rural places via pollution and export of 
wastes. Cities ship their waste to rural areas. 
Industrial cultures subsidize and back tyrannical 
regimes to keep resource prices and labor costs 
low. These tendencies explain why, now that the 
US has shifted from an agrarian base to an 
industrial one, Americans can no longer afford to 
consume products made at home and must turn to 
agrarian countries, such as China and Mexico, or 
despotic regimes, such as Saudi Arabia’s, for 
low-cost inputs. The Third World is where the 
First World externalizes the overwhelming burden 
of maintaining the complexity of industrialism. 
But at some point there will be no place left to externalize to.

Horticulture to the Rescue

As I mentioned, Cohen locates another form of 
culture between foraging and agriculture. These 
are the horticulturists, who use simple methods 
to raise useful plants and animals. Horticulture 
in this sense is difficult to define precisely, 
because most foragers tend plants to some degree, 
most horticulturists gather wild food, and at 
some point between digging stick and plow a 
people must be called agriculturists. Many 
anthropologists agree that horticulture usually 
involves a fallow period, while agriculture 
overcomes this need through crop rotation, 
external fertilizers, or other techniques. 
Agriculture is also on a larger scale. Simply 
put, horticulturists are gardeners rather than farmers.

Horticulturists rarely organize above the tribe 
or small village level. Although they are 
sometimes influenced by the monotheism, sky gods, 
and messianic messages of their agricultural 
neighbors, horticulturists usually retain a 
belief in earth spirits and regard the Earth as a 
living being. Most horticultural societies are 
far more egalitarian than agriculturists, lacking 
despots, armies, and centralized control hierarchies.

Horticulture is the most efficient method known 
for obtaining food, measured by return on energy 
invested. Agriculture can be thought of as an 
intensification of horticulture, using more 
labor, land, capital, and technology. This means 
that agriculture, as noted, usually consumes more 
calories of work and resources than can be 
produced in food, and so is on the wrong side of 
the point of diminishing returns. That’s a good 
definition of unsustainability, while 
horticulture is probably on the positive side of 
the curve. Godesky (10) believes this is how 
horticulture can be distinguished from 
agriculture. It may take several millennia, as we 
are learning, but agriculture will eventually 
deplete planetary ecosystems, and horticulture might not.

Horticulturists use polycultures, tree crops, 
perennials, and limited tillage, and have an 
intimate relationship with diverse species of 
plants and animals. This sounds like 
permaculture, doesn’t it? Permaculture, in its 
promotion of horticultural ideals over those of 
agriculture, may offer a road back to 
sustainability. Horticulture has structural 
constraints against large population, hoarding of 
surplus, and centralized command and control 
structures. Agriculture inevitably leads to all of those.

A Steep Price

We gave up inherently good health as well as 
immense personal freedoms when we embraced 
agriculture. I once thought of achievements such 
as the Hammurabic Code, Magna Carta, and Bill of 
Rights as mileposts on humanity’s road to a just 
and free society. But I’m beginning to view them 
as ever larger and more desperate dams to hold 
back the swelling tide of abuses of human rights 
and the centralization of power that are inherent 
in agricultural and industrial societies. 
Agriculture results, always, in concentration of 
power by the elite. That is the inevitable result 
of the large storable surplus that is at the heart of agriculture.

It is no accident that permaculture’s third ethic 
wrestles with the problem of surplus. Many 
permaculturists have come to understand that 
Mollison’s simple injunction to share the surplus 
barely scratches the surface of the difficulty. 
This is why his early formulation has often been 
modified into a slightly less problematic “return 
the surplus” or “reinvest the surplus,” but the 
fact that these versions have not yet stabilized 
into a commonly held phrasing as have the other 
two ethics, “Care for the Earth” and “Care for 
People,” tells me that permaculturists have not 
truly come to grips with the problem of surplus.

The issue may not be to figure out how to deal 
with surplus. We may need to create a culture in 
which surplus, and the fear and greed that make 
it desirable, are no longer the structural 
results of our cultural practices. Jared Diamond 
may be right, and agriculture and the abuses it 
fosters may turn out to be a ten-millennium-long 
misstep on the path to a mature humanity. 
Permaculture may be more than just a tool for 
sustainability. The horticultural way of life 
that it embraces may offer the road to human 
freedom, health, and a just society.

Acknowledgement

I am deeply indebted to Jason Godesky and the 
Anthropik Tribe for first making me away of the 
connection between permaculture and horticultural 
societies, and for formulating several of the 
other ideas expressed in this article.

References

1. Diamond, Jared. The Worst Mistake in the 
History of the Human Race. Discover, May 1987.

2. Mollison, Bill. (1988). Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual. Tagari.

3. Cohen, Yehudi. (1971). Man in Adaptation: The 
Institutional Framework. De Gruyter.

4. Lee, R. and I. Devore (eds.) 1968. Man the Hunter. Aldine.

5. Harris, David R. An Evolutionary Continuum of 
People-Plant Interactions. In Foraging and 
Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation. 
Harris, D. R. and G.C. Hillman (eds.) 1989.

6. Milton, K. 1984. Protein and Carbohydrate 
Resources of the Maku Indians of Northwestern 
Amazonia. American Anthropologist 86, 7-27.

7. Harlan, Jack R. Wild-Grass Seed Harvesting in 
the Sahara and Sub-Sahara of Africa. In Foraging 
and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation. 
Harris, D. R. and G.C. Hillman (eds.) 1989.

8. Goodman, Alan H., John Lallo, George J. 
Armelagos and Jerome C. Rose. (1984) Health 
Changes at Dickson Mounds (A.D. 9501300). In 
Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, M. 
Cohen and G. Armelagos, eds. Academic.

9. Braudel, Fernand (1979). Civilization and 
Capitalism, 15th18th Century: The Structures of Everyday Life. Harper and Row.

10. Godesky, Jason (2005). Human Societies are Defined by Their Food.



Copyright 2006 by Toby Hemenway