I think I only just noticed on Friday that it was spring. Yes, there have been a few warm and sunny days this past month, more than welcome after the endless night of winter, but they seemed illusory, like it was too good to be true just yet. When I left the apartment that morning, there could be no doubt that the season had arrived. The scent of the air, the small warmth of the breeze, and the morning sunshine meant spring, for certain. I noticed how green the grass was, how without noticing it the trees had all started budding and blooming. My drive north to State College for a meeting was an endless panorama of mountains turned green, with brilliant dots of purple, scarlet and white revealing the blossoms of spring among them. I finally planted flowers today, turning a desolate patch of weed into a more attractive plot of ordered flowers, and while my back aches from the work, I always feel at home when I'm working with plants, rare though that may be anymore.
For over ten thousand years our species has been cultivating the earth in one form or other, and while it's hard to say just how long we've been cultivating flowers I know that when I'm planting and tending I'm engaging in an act as old as civilization itself. I wonder what made us decide to start this special kind of madness, the cultivation of plants as no other animal does, for food and for pleasure. There are benefits of course, in a more stable food supply, but as anthropologist Jared Diamond pointed out there are significant drawbacks as well. Skeletons of people who lived after the advent of the Neolithic Revolution, as the initial transition to farming ten thousand years ago is called, show signs of sickness, people made old before their time by their labors, their health wracked by a monotonous diet. The skeletons of the old hunter-gatherers, in contrast, showed them to be reasonably healthy, much more so than their hard-working peers. Even food security is not guaranteed. A year without enough rain can mean starvation for many, especially before the advent of a global commerce network.
The Neolithic Revolution, a long process of domesticating both animals and crops rather than a single event, changed the face of the globe as well. Our drive to grow fields of grain that stretch to the horizon changed the atmosphere even before the burning of fossil fuels vastly accelerated this process. Agricultural fields have a lower albedo than forests, reflecting less sun back into the atmosphere and absorbing more warmth, thus warming the planet. In his book Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, William Ruddiman made the argument that humans have been changing the climate of our planet from the very beginning of what we recognize as human civilization because of this very basic fact. The spread of agriculture across the globe thus meant a warmer planet than the one we occupied before we took up the plow, but nothing compared to the hothouse we seem intent on creating now.
In an ironic twist, a warmer world means an earlier, hotter spring with shifting weather, and a hotter planet will mean the destruction of much land that is currently under cultivation. Some of the plants we grow will do better in a warmer world, but many will fare worse, to say nothing of the fates of a plethora of animal species that don't look to be doing so well as we fecklessly keep putting more greenhouse gases into the air. The further irony seems to be that the end result of industrial civilization is going to make it increasingly hard to grow our food, the very act that began civilization in the first place. This is a grim thought indeed; I think I'll return to my flower beds.
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