Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization (Paperback, 1st pbk. ed)

In this provocative, wide-ranging book, Against the Grain, Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives and brought an accompanying increase in our need for nourishment. For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Manning believes we were at our most human: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive. But our reliance on food made a secure supply deeply attractive, and eventually we embarked upon the agricultural experiment that has been the history of our past 10,000 years. The evolutionary road is littered with failed experiments, however, and Manning suggests that agriculture as we have practiced it runs against both our grain and nature's. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation, erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in the devil's bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and the planet's.

General

Imprint:	North Point Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	February 2005
First published:	February 2005
Authors:	Richard Manning
Dimensions:	210 x 141 x 16mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	232
Edition:	1st pbk. ed
ISBN-13:	978-0-86547-713-1
Languages:	English
Subtitles:	English
Categories:	Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Life sciences: general issues > Evolution
LSN:	0-86547-713-2
Barcode:	9780865477131

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Review This Product

Interesting book

Tue, 5 Nov 2013 | Review by: Tanya K.

"Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization" provides a historical outline of the socio-economic effects that agriculture has had on civilization, from the hunter-gatherer society to commercial industrial commodities agriculture. The book is a combination of documented history, anecdotes and the author's personal observations, written in a clear and easily understood style. I found this book rather interesting, especially the details on grain growing and hybridization, and how grain for food eventually became grain for "stuff" (aka commodities).

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