Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels summary

In today’s day and age, less than 1 percent of the population still gets its food from hunting and gathering.

It can be hard to imagine a time when all humans were foragers – but for the first 90 percent of human history, that’s exactly what we were. Our energy source was all around us: in the wild fruits, nuts, and animals with which we coexisted.

Our early foraging ancestors only had to spend three or four hours a day hunting or searching for food. Sound like paradise? Well, keep in mind that most foragers only lived to the age of 25. And they could only collect about 5,000 kilocalories per day at most.

Around 7000 BC, though, things started changing. Foragers began to do something unusual: they replanted the wheat they found in the wild. Before long, they stopped moving around at all, and instead of hunting for their meat, they got it from large animals they domesticated. They had learned how to generate lots of calories while staying in one place. In other words, farming was born, and with it came many other changes.

Picture a day in the life of a typical early farmer. Your land lies somewhere warm and fertile – perhaps Mesopotamia. You have a wife who stays home and cares for your many children. Every day, you wake up and spend the vast majority of your time working, with the occasional social call here and there.

Whether you know it or not, these conditions dictate your most deeply-held values. But what exactly are those values?

Northwest Europe, late seventeenth century. Coal miners have just made a remarkable discovery: coal can be burned to generate energy.

But that’s just the beginning. You can use that energy to power engines that pump water out of the mines, allowing you to dig deeper and discover more coal. And, with this surplus of coal, you can power all sorts of previously-unimaginable things. One of these things would turn out to be the steam engine.

The world today is remarkably homogeneous when it comes to moral values.

A 2007 poll found that 80 percent of people globally are pro-democracy. A 2009 poll of 16 countries found that 86 percent of respondents considered gender equality important. And a cross-continental Gallup poll conducted between 2008 and 2010 found that 69 percent of people are absolute pacifists when it comes to violence.

Without a doubt, fossil fuels have shaped how our societies are formed, and which values they hold dear. But we know that technology – both in energy and other areas – is developing at a mind-boggling pace. How might our values adapt to a world that may soon look very different?

One theory that attempts to answer this is called the “Soothing Scenario.” It holds that as countries like China and India continue to develop economic and political power, they’ll start adopting values like freedom and democracy to a greater extent.