The invention of agriculture transformed the future of the wild animals scavenging for food that were humankind. Agriculture turned their history on end. Agriculture was their first great revolution. Developed barely 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, it changed their relationship to nature. It brought an end to the uncertainty of hunting and gathering. It resulted in the first surpluses and gave birth to cities and civilizations. For their agriculture humans harnessed the energy of animal species and plant life, from which they at last extracted the profits. The memory of thousands of years scrabbling for food faded. They learned to adapt the grains that are the yeast of life to different soils and climates. They learned to increase the yield and multiply the number of varieties. Like every species on Earth, the principal daily concern of all humans is to feed themselves and their family. When the soil is less generous and water becomes scarce, humans deploy prodigous efforts to mark a few arid acres with the imprint of their labor. Human shaped the land with the patience and devotion that the Earth demands in an almost sacrificial ritual performed over and over. Agriculture is still the world’s most widespread occupation. Half of humankind tills the soil over three-quarters of them by hand. Agriculture is like a tradition handed down from generation to generation in sweat, graft and toil because for humanity it is a prerequisite of survival. But after relying on muscle power for so long, humankind found a way to tap into the energy buried deep in the Earth. These flames are also from plants. A pocket of sunlight. Pure energy-the energy of the sun-captured over millions of years by millions of plants more than a hundred million years ago. It’s coal. It’s gas. And above all, it’s oil.
And this pocket of sunlight freed humans from their toil on the land. With oil began the era of humans who break free of the shackles of time. With oil, some of us acquired unprecedented comforts. And in 50 years, in a single lifetime, the Earth has been more radically changed than by all previous generation of humanity. Faster and faster. In the last 60 years, the Earth’s population has almost tripled, and over two billion people have moved to the cities. Faster and faster. Shenzhen, in China, with its hundreds of skyscrapers and millions of inhabitants, was just a small fishing village barely 40 years ago. Faster and faster. In Shanghai, 3,000 towers and skyscrapers have been built in 20 years. Hundreds more are under construction. Today, over half of the world’s seven billion inhabitants live in cities. New York. The world’s first megalopolis is the symbol of the exploitation of the energy the Earth supplies to human genius. The manpower of millions of immigrants, the energy of coal, the unbridled power of oil. Electricity resulted in the invention of elevators which in turn permitted the invention of skyscrapers. New York ranks as the 16th-largest economy in the world. America was the first to discover, exploit and harness the phenomenal revolutionary power of black gold. With its help, a country of farmers became a country of agricultural industrialists. Machines replaced men. A liter of oil generates as much energy as 100 pairs of hands in 24 hours, but worldwide only three percent of farmers have use of a tractor. Nonetheless, their output dominates the planet. In the United States, only three million farmers are left. They produce enough grain to feed two billion people. But most of that grain is not used to feed people. Here, and in all other industrialized nations, it’s transformed into livestock feed or bio-fuels. The pocket of sunshine’s energy chased away the specter of drought that stalked farmland. No spring escapes the demands of agriculture, which accounts for 70% of humanity’s water consumption. In nature, everything is linked. The expansion of cultivated land and single-crop farming encouraged the development of parasites. Pesticides, another gift of the petrochemical revolution, exterminated them. Bad harvests and famine became a distant memory. The biggest headache now was what to do with the surpluses engendered by modern agriculture. But toxic pesticides seeped into the air, soil, plants, animals, rivers and oceans. They penetrated the heart of cells similar to the mother cell that is shared by all forms of life. Are they harmful to the humans that they released from hunger? These farmers, in their yellow protective suits, probably have a good idea.
The new agriculture abolished the dependence on soils and seasons. Fertilizers produced unprecedented results on plots of land thus far ignored. Crops adapted to soils and climates gave way to the most productive varieties and the easiest to transport. And so in the last century, three-quarters of the varieties developed by farmers over thousands of years have been wiped out. As far as the eye can see fertilizer below, plastic on top. The greenhouses of Almeria in Spain are Europe’s vegetable garden. A city of uniformly sized vegetables waits every day for the hundreds of trucks that will take them to the continent’s supermarkets. The more a country develops, the more meat its inhabitants consume. How can a growing worldwide demand be satisfied without recourse to concentration camp-style cattle farms? Faster and faster. Like the life cycle of livestock which may never see a meadow manufacturing meat faster than the animal has become a daily routine. In these vast food lots, trampled by millions of cattle, not a blade of grass grows. A fleet of trucks from every corner of the country brings in tons of grains, soy meal and protein-rich granules that will become tons of meat. The result is that it takes 100 liters of water to produce one kilogram of potatoes, 4,000 for one kilo or rice and 13,000 for one kilo of beef. Not to mention the oil guzzled in the production process and transport.