The luxury trap: agriculture improvements.
By Camila Veizaga
The luxury trap is a phenomenon that started about 10,000 years ago (Wu, 2017). It initiated when humans transitioned to not only cultivating crops, but more important, invented new ways of domesticating them (Harari, 2014). This human-environment interaction shows how small improvements in agriculture that were meant to make life easier, accumulated over time, are needed luxuries with unforeseen consequences. The resource system is the land of Natufians’ descendants in the Middle East and the resource units are the crops produced, cereals in specific. The resource system and units changed the social-ecological system by providing food, determining population growth, giving rise to sedentary lifestyle, and stablishing class hierarchy.
New agricultural techniques and improvements, created new actors through class hierarchy, such as foragers and farmers. As population increased, more farmers were needed to produce more crops and expected to work harder. While, others would adopt roles that did not require as much as work and labor, such as securing food storage.
New agricultural techniques meant having more food and determined population growth. Having more and more people played a key role in the community’s health and created class hierarchies. As population increased, food production would also have to increase. However, because the number of children was greater than adults capable of working in the field, there were times where people, especially children, would starve. As the mortality rate of children would increase, the more food the community could store for better times. In addition, good times would lead to girls reaching puberty early in life and having more children, increasing population and, consequently, demanding more food.
The luxury trap describes how society invests or discovers new ways of living a better life, without realizing that these new ways come with new problems. These unforeseen problems require new approaches that create new issues. And like that, our society relies on these new ways and approaches on solving unintended consequences.
Reference
Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Random House.
Wu, Z. (2017). The luxury trap. Rochester Institute of Technology.
It’s a trap! Wheat, the original Luxury trap
By Bailey Price
The agricultural revolution started around 10,000 years ago. 90% of the calories we consume today came from a period of domestication lasting from 9500BCE to 3500BCE. It was during this time that humans learned to manipulate the environment around them, they controlled the life cycle of plants and animals to better suit their needs. They selected advantageous genes in both flora and fauna. However this process could only be done with species that were easy to domesticate.
In this situation the resource system is the local environment. The units are the plants and animals that were selectively bred for better production. Humans cultivated these crops and livestock animals which provided readily available food that was grown close by, they allowed humans to settle in one place instead of being wanderers. Wheat especially allowed populations to boom and for communities to begin and grow. Unfortunately switching to this grain staple diet negatively affected these new villages, for example, diseases were more rampant with more people in close quarters.
As people continued to gather together to grow crops, small communities grew into villages which grew into cities. The surplus of food provided by the agricultural revolution led to social hierarchies among the large amount of people. People stepped up to control the flow of goods and to govern one another. Village headmen turned into town mayors and rulers of kingdoms as the wheat fields grew over the continent. These rulers controlled the surplus of food, not to redistribute it to their constituents but to create wealth to fund their politics and wars and to build their cities as monuments to themselves. Despite this, humanity benefited from the joining together. Stories and myths were shared, crafting techniques spread, and cultures mixed to create a thriving society.
The agricultural revolution had many different effects on humanity. It spurred economic development by forcing people to create farming communities that grew into wealthy kingdoms. It also heavily affected demographic trends, with dramatic shift in how people lived, going from small nomadic tribes to bustling permanent settlements that had exponentially growing populations. However none of this could have happened without the change in climate patterns. When the last ice age of the time ended temperatures increased as well as rainfall. This allowed for the increased growth and spread of wheat, which became one of the most prominent part of the hominid diet.
The outcomes of this revolution were, well, revolutionary. Much more food was now available to people, causing a dramatic population spike that would not be rivaled until the industrial revolution. However the diet of farmers was worse than that of their forefathers the hunter gatherers. Babies immune systems were weakened after birth from lack of milk because their mothers had to spend more time in the field growing the precious crop. Despite this, evolutionary success is not based off of the general health of people, it is based off of population size and reproduction rate. That is why this era was successful, in that there was an increase in foodstuff that filled bellies and allowed for procreation, not for increased quality of life.
Reference
Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Random House.