The real roots of early city states may rip up the textbooks
The forager&#x2F;garden-farm way of life and the monocrop agriculture way of life are mutually exclusive. The compulsory city-states that we associate with &quot;civilization&quot; depends fundamentally on taking over land for monocrops. The agro-forager way of life depends on managed biodiversity, with many interdependent species.<p>Thus throughout history you have the repeated pattern of displacement, slavery, genocide, &quot;re-education&quot; and oppression of foraging people and garden farmers by monocrop-powered militarized states. It&#x27;s been a 10,000 year global war, and it is close to having been &quot;won&quot; by civilization. The losers, of course, are all indigenous people worldwide, as well as the basic livability of our planet and probably 80% of its species.<p>The irony, of course, is that monocrop agriculture isn&#x27;t sustainable. It&#x27;s had a good run, but we&#x27;re coming up against some really tough limits soon. The Green Revolution bought some time, but it&#x27;s probably going to be a <i>very</i> hard landing. All that biodiversity took millions of years to radiate, and only a short time to destroy. Human cultural diversity took 100,000-500,000 years to develop many different of ways of life, and only a short time to liquidate.<p>I only hold out hope that enough species, ecosystems and cultures are left to help guide civilization toward something sustainable. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.