The Human Problem

I have a serious problem with humanity. It is a problem that I feel we all have, and need to fix if we want to survive ourselves. I recognize that writing this will label me as a hypocrite in many eyes—no less because I enjoy my indoor plumbing and gas stove. Over my limited years of life I have made many observations of how people work and operate in their world and out of it. The conclusions I have come to are not always well-formed or complete thoughts, but they are conclusions just the same. I’m going to make an argument that humans aren’t natural, because we have severed our ties with nature.

Bear with me. Think on these things yourself. If you think I am wrong, argue your case.

My first observation: we don’t know where anything comes from anymore. The children I have taught don’t know where that steak they had for dinner came from, they don’t know where the water comes from when they turn on the hose, or the textbooks they lug to school each day. What is more horrifying is that they don’t care.

Why has nature become something that we have to drive to? At what point did humanity become separate from the natural world, and why would this be desirable?

I think the root is in the fact that history has set us up this way. If Anthropology 101 taught me anything, it was that agriculture drastically changed the course of human culture. Before agriculture was popularized we were hunter-gatherers. There were not many of us (limited food meant a finite number of children survived) but all fossil indications point to a robust and healthy kind of man. As an aside, the remains of hunter-gather women have been found with injuries likely sustained in hunts. This kind of lifestyle was difficult but rewarding—we still existed within in the natural law and those individuals who were fit were more likely to produce young.

With the advent of agriculture we started living in large stationary groups and our population burgeoned with the increased but unvaried food supply. When people aren’t starving more tend to survive, even if said children aren’t fit, because such a society allows for radical specialization of talents.

Allow me to postulate with the help of an example: a family of agricultural people lives with several other family groups—their large groups size becoming more of a necessity as more people need to be fed and protected from bands of other people trying to steal their goods. With this stationary lifestyle, the “town” begins to evolve. Women, who are not useful to work in the fields while pregnant, begin to take on more responsibility towards the children, sick and old. The divide between genders widens. Because the old and the crippled are more likely to live now that their caretakers have the time and the advantage of not being on the move, they can contribute to caring for the young even more, so even the sick survive to breed.

However (fossil evidence supports this) because of agriculture, people are now eating one or two types of food instead of the varied diet they had as hunter-gatherers. Physiologically, humans are built for that varied diet of plants and meat, and they suffer under the new diet. Bone density goes down, illness and plague run rampant (also a symptom people living in close proximity), and everyone is generally more unhealthy. Still, there is plenty of food to go around, and they continue to breed despite being far unhealthier than their hunter-gatherer counterparts. In the end they out-compete the hunter-gatherers because there are more of them.

This sets the stage for the rest of human history. Even in situations where there weren’t “more” of us, we steamroller everything because our technology gives us power beyond ourselves. The natural population controls are fought against. The advent of war, which came hand-in-hand with agriculture (we had territory to defend), is a bloody compromise.

Repeat this pattern throughout the years and eventually humans are able to separate themselves from their natural roots, at least in an illusionary sense. Today we don’t even have to watch the weather as it pertains to our crops. Agriculture has been evolving too, and we have been moving away from the natural order as we follow it. This drive is fueled by the need to fuel our biomass, which continues to grow.

Agriculture was a step back from nature because, to a certain degree, we protected ourselves from the ebb and flow of natural patterns by being able to store food and protect ourselves with our numbers. As hunter-gatherers, our adaptation to this would have been to be nomadic and dynamic to the natural fluxes—and yes, people would have died. But death is part of the natural order.

In conclusion, this process has drawn us away from our ties with the land. Through technology and advanced farming techniques the land has become something we farm, something we live on, not with. Our fear of global warming is warranted, because we fear things bigger than ourselves (perhaps another explanation for the population surge?). I don’t think it is a fear or horror at what we might have done—the responsibility lies with a faceless other and not individuals to most of us. I think this is another symptom of our separation that we cannot recognize how everything we do affects the world around us. Multiply that by six billion? Well, I’m sure you can guess where my thoughts on that lie. In a hunter-gatherer society, such selfish and unnatural ways of living would have killed you outright. Today, the consequences are the same, but drawn out over a longer period. The stakes are higher though, because now we are destroying the livelihood of every other living thing on Earth.

But, as one of the children I taught said (with a smile on his face): “I want to go out with a bang!”

He was the one whose parents packed him pre-cut-and-packaged apples in his lunch. He didn't even eat them.