The World Without US: The World Without Farms

"Yet it was the farm that begat the city. Our transcendental leap to sowing crops and hearing critters-- actually controlling other living things-- was even more world-shaking than our consummate hunting skill. Instead of simply gathering plants or killing animals just prior to eating them, we now choreographed their existence, coaxing them to grow more reliable and far more abundantly." (Weisman, 2007) As we incorporate more technology into farming we lose jobs and increase the use of herbicides, fertilizers and pesticides. Volti looked at one such example in Pakistan, "To take one particularly notorious example, after Western experts introduced large tractors into Pakistan, farm owners replaced farm laborers with the new machines. In one region, 40 percent of these workers lost their jobs, and thus were forced to migrate to the cities and lives of dire poverty. Per-acre crop yields hardly increased at all." (Volti, 2009)
"With the rise of industrialization and the provision of such things as irrigation pumps, mechanized farm implements, and chemical fertilizers, the labor requirements of agriculture steadily dropped, until today less than 5 percent of the work force in most industrial countries is engaged in farming." (Volti, 2009)

Within an Environmental classroom there are several topics that could be studied after reading this chapter in The World Without Us. The short list includes