Till There Was You

“We’ve all read about the agricultural revolution about ten thousand years ago-when large groups of people in the Near and Middle East shifted permanently from hunter-gatherers to husbandry.  Many anthropologists and historians, as well as religious scholars, suggest that this transition was the felix culpa, or fall from grace, which led to the life of toil described in Genesis. Everything I’ve read suggest that members of hunter-gatherer cultures-even those alive today, who’ve been driven to the least hospitable regions of the planet such as deserts and dense jungles-work far less to support themselves than people living any other lifestyle. They work three to five hours a day. I’ve also read they feel closer to the rest of the world than we do, that they usually don’t see the world as a dangerous place of eternally warring opposites: me against you, man against woman, man against nature, God against all.” -Derrick Jensen, “A Language Older Than Words”