Page 212 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

anthroposphere 97

They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame,
see the system as the source of its own problems, and find courage to
restructure it. • Donella Meadows (1941-2001)

Agrarianization ing habits. In the heyday of agrarianization, the anthro-
The history of the past ten thousand years may be read posphere was marked by conspicuous differences in cul-
as a series of events accompanying the agrarianization of ture or civilization—differences resulting to a large extent
the anthroposphere—a process whereby human groups from the interplay of gains in power by some groups and
extended the domain of agriculture and animal hus- accommodation to power losses by others.
bandry all over the world, and in so doing made them-
selves increasingly more dependent upon this very mode Industrialization
of production. Around 1750 the immense deposits of fuel energy that
The agrarian way of life was based on a new human had lain virtually unused by any living species began to
monopoly—the monopoly of control over pieces of ter- be exploited for human purposes. A series of innovations
ritory (fields)—in which people more or less successfully provided the technical means for tapping these supplies
subjected vegetation and animal life to a human-directed and for using them to generate heat and mechanical
regime.The result was twofold: elimination of competing motion. No longer were people completely dependent
species (parasites and predators) and concentration of on the flows of energy that reach the earth from the
resources and people in ever greater densities. Although sun and that are partly converted into vegetation by
agrarian regimes sometimes suffered decline, their over- means of photosynthesis. Just as at one time humans
all tendency was to expand. had been able to strengthen their position in the bio-
Expansion did not take place in a uniform and even sphere by learning to control fire, they now learned the
fashion. In fact, the unevenness of its development was art of using fire to exploit the energy contained in coal,
a structural feature of agrarianization. From its very oil, and gas.
beginnings, agrarianization was marked by differentiation These innovations stimulated great accelerations in
—initially between people who had adopted agriculture extensive growth.According to a rough estimate, the total
and people who had not. Eventually, in the phase of human population must have reached one million at
industrialization, the last nonagrarian peoples vanished, some time in the Paleolithic, ten million at the time when
and with them this primary form of differentiation. agrarization began, a hundred million during the first
Still, various forms of differentiation within the agrar- stages of urbanization, a thousand million at the begin-
ian (or, rather, agrarianizing) world continued. Some ning of industrialization.The next tenfold increase, to ten
agrarian societies went much further than others in har- billion, is expected to be completed within a few gener-
nessing matter and energy for human purposes, for ations. Along with the increase in human numbers, net-
example, by means of irrigation or plowing. In societies works of production, transport, and communication have
that grew accustomed to higher yields of agrarian pro- grown worldwide so that the anthroposphere is now
duction, competition to control the wealth thus generated truly global. Universal acceptance of a common system
usually led to social stratification—the formation of dif- of time measurement, based on Greenwich mean time, is
ferent social strata marked by huge inequalities in prop- a telling example of how common standards of orienta-
erty, privilege, and prestige. Another closely related form tion are spreading all over the world. At the same time,
of differentiation typical of this phase was cultural diver- the inequalities between and within human societies that
sification. In Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, northeastern arose as structural features of advanced agrarian regimes
China, Egypt, the Mediterranean basin, Mexico, the persist in industrial society. Those inequalities now also
Andes region, and elsewhere, agrarian empires developed exert disturbing global pressures, as do the many eco-
that are still known for their distinct cultures, each with logical problems such as global warming, which are gen-
its own dominant language, system of writing, religion, erated by the way in which the anthroposphere is
architecture, dress, methods of food production, and eat- currently expanding.