It’s another evening hunkered at my office. Power is still
out at my home, which means there has been no light, heat, or water (I’m on a
well) there since the 29th of October. Snow is falling tonight as is
the temperature. This poses a threat to my pipes in which some water no doubt
lingers. Though I’m NJ born and raised, I’m increasingly aware of the
advantages of the Southern states – the sky high real estate taxes in NJ, which
I paid today, are at this point just a secondary issue. Yet, long before central
heating – even before property taxes – NJ
was a populated land. The Lenni-Lenape lived here. What were they thinking?
I suppose they were thinking that, on balance, it was worth
shivering through a few months. By the time of the Dutch arrival, the Lenni-Lenape
were not quite sedentists, nomads, farmers, or hunter-gathers. They were a mix
of all four. They planted crops in the spring, traveled to the Jersey Shore
The toughest part of their lifestyle surely was the planting
and harvesting. That they bothered to do
it suggests their numbers already were taxing the environment. Anthropologist/historian
Jared Diamond commented that settled agriculture was "the worst mistake in the history
of the human race."
The Lenni-Lenape were halfway to making it.
Why did Jared say that? Because hunter-gatherers have
easier, healthier, and more relaxed lives. Most of the handful of surviving
hunter-gatherer peoples live in extremely marginal environments. Yet even in
the Kalahari Desert the !Kung spend between 12
and 19 hours per week collecting food. The Hazda nomads in East
Africa spend 14. They have a two-day work week and can spend the
rest of their time as they like. In temperate regions, rich with game and
edible plants, the task would have been much easier. Hunter-gatherer diets are
more varied and nutritious. So much so, that, based on skeletal evidence,
between 14,000 BC and 3000 BC, as farmers superseded hunter-gatherers, average
height fell by 6 inches (15cm) and life expectancy dropped by 7 years.
No one knows for sure why, despite the disadvantages, people
settled down after so many thousands of years as nomads, but the most
convincing hypothesis is “by accident.” The one advantage to farming is
productivity: 25 people can live off 25 acres instead of 25,000 acres (or more).
Nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples are careful about their births since they have
to carry everything with them, including small children. Still, such control is
never perfect and numbers can grow. If population ticks up enough to overtax a
reasonable foraging range (while neighboring tribes limit the option of moving),
it makes sense to supplement wild foods with some planted crops. The resultant surplus
then allows population to tick up some more. At some point it simply isn’t
possible for all the people to live off the natural wildlife. They are
dependent on the crops and have become sedentary farmers in spite of
themselves. Oops.
As soon as there were full time farmers producing surpluses,
there were full time politicians and their goons to take the surpluses away
from them; the politicians then enhanced their own power by re-gifting the food as though it were theirs
to soldiers and other retainers. They never have stopped doing that. Toss in
some bean-counters who figure out a way to scratch down records of the leaders’
swag, and we have civilization.
Now that I describe it, civilization isn’t sounding like a
very good idea either… All the same, lacking the skills to live off the land in
NJ (much less the Kalahari), I’ll be happier when my lights are back on.
(PS -- All I’ll say about the election is that I vote third
party. To steal and remold a line from a more mainstream partisan, voting for
major party candidates just encourages them.)
Steve McQueen in Papillon (1973). Papillon escapes from Devil’s Island and discovers the simple life. Why does he
leave here again?
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