Pandora’s Seed – The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
Hunger drives us. Appetite is our motivation. The result, as this book suggests, is not always in our best interests.
The premise of Pandora’s Seed is that switching from a hunter-gather culture to an agrarian one – probably driven by climatic changes which made food more scarce – set off a series of events which are ultimately responsible for making the planet more crowded, sedentary and unhealthy.
In Well’s view, as the population expanded, fed by the (over)production of grains, hierarchies and inequalities developed, resources were stretched and wars to protect those limited resources became the norm. In an agrarian world we control rather than cooperate with nature and this, the book argues, has also altered human mythology and led to the current rise in religious fundamentalism as individuals try to claw back some raison d’être in their lives and communities.
It’s a book of enormous breadth drawing on Wells’ own field of genetics but also on philosophy, mathematics, anthropology, biology, sociology and historical record. If the book has a fault it is that in combining all these references Wells sometimes makes his point the hard way – through lengthy anecdote and explanation. On the plus side this breadth is testimony to the fact that all things are connected; that there are only a few degrees of separation between our best and worst decisions and their consequences.
The answer to the ultimate question of the book: “where is this taking us?” is that if we don’t change course, our destination is quite simply economic, political, social and environmental breakdown.
Wells’ ultimate solution – to ‘want less’ – may, at first, seem simplistic. But continued expansion is clearly no longer an option and the small seed of hope the book plants is that in controlling our appetites, in understanding that just because we can doesn’t mean we should, we fundamentally shift our whole relationship to the future. Wanting less provides a blueprint for applying technology sensibly, distributing resources fairly and living together peaceably. The depressing alternative is that we continue to be the architects of our own destruction.
Pandora’s Seed- The unforeseen cost of civilization
Spencer Wells
Allen Land/Penguin
Hardback
£20
- The review was published in the October 2010 edition of Geopgraphical.
