The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis by Ruth DeFries Page B
Authors: Ruth DeFries
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the shores of rivers or ready sources of water.
The highly developed agriculture still could not save the ancient Chinese from the scourges of disease, drought, and famine. One province or another suffered from famine nearly every year.Untold millions died of starvation. Human excrement that fertilized the fields carried diseases, such as schistosomiasis, known as snail fever for the parasitic worms that hatched in snails, crawled under the skin of a barefoot farmer, laid eggs, and infected the unfortunate victim. Cholera epidemics from water contaminated with human and animal wasteswept through the population.
With dense populations and land and nutrients too scarce to spend on raising animals for slaughter, meat was a rarity in the Chinese diet. As a result, Chinese society circumvented the energy conundrum that compounds when people use animals for meat. With so many calories lost in the transfer up the food chain, the energy cost of meat in the diet is immense, though the gain in protein might be worth the cost. If the cost in calories to feed, butcher, and carry the animals exceeds the payback in calories gained from eating the meat, it’s a losing proposition from the standpoint of energy. The ancient Chinese stayed out of the red by eating plants and animals that didn’t cost more human calories to produce than the payback received from eating the food.
For thousands of years, and despite famines and disease, the Chinese systems of waterworks, waste recycling, and meat-sparse diets supplied enough food to sustain millions of city-folk, not to mention the farmers themselves. While Europeans were living through the Middle Ages, the largest cities in the world were in China: Chang’an in the year 800, Hangzhou in 1200, Nanjing in 1400, andBeijing in 1500. Cities were surrounded by rings of fertile soil within a day’s journey of the urbansource of night-soil.
Early Chinese civilization was not the only culture to manipulate nutrient cycles to keep its soils fertile, nor the only one to use animal manure to replenish nutrients and animal muscle power to supplementhuman labor. In early antiquity, Egyptians were cultivating nitrogen-replenishing clover every other year as fodder for livestock, alternating it with a year of barley or wheat. Wood carvings from Japan depict farmers carrying night-soil to the fields. And in medieval England, so prized were the sheep droppings that the nobles forbade peasants to remove the nutrient-rich manure from a lord’s land. But for many centuries, no society rivaled the Chinese in their mastery of the conundrums of settled life.
Europe Ratchets Up
It took some centuries before animal power made its way from the ancient river civilizations to Europe. Collar harnesses had originated in China during the fifth century CE . Invaders from central Asia might have carried the new type of harness to Europe, where it becamewidespread by around 1000 CE . Unlike harnesses in Roman times, when yokes choked horses pulling heavy loads, animals wearing the new collars had weight distributed across their shoulders. The collars enabled horses, and not just oxen, to pull heavy plows. Because horses worked faster and needed less food than oxen, the energy return in terms of human calories from the harvest increased for each calorie fed to an animal. Iron shoes nailed to horses’ feet, beginning in Europe around the ninth century, protected their hooves from cracking and made the animals even more useful, as they could then work year-round in wet soils. The moldboard plow, another Chinese invention, which cut deeper and in heavier soils, replaced the ard. Donkeys and mules became part of the animal labor pool beyond horses and oxen.
With the moldboard plow in medieval Europe, the fields produced far more for each investment of human labor. The medieval animal-based technology made possible the expansion of agriculture into the wet, clay-rich soils of northern Europe’s forests and wetlands.Famines
The highly developed agriculture still could not save the ancient Chinese from the scourges of disease, drought, and famine. One province or another suffered from famine nearly every year.Untold millions died of starvation. Human excrement that fertilized the fields carried diseases, such as schistosomiasis, known as snail fever for the parasitic worms that hatched in snails, crawled under the skin of a barefoot farmer, laid eggs, and infected the unfortunate victim. Cholera epidemics from water contaminated with human and animal wasteswept through the population.
With dense populations and land and nutrients too scarce to spend on raising animals for slaughter, meat was a rarity in the Chinese diet. As a result, Chinese society circumvented the energy conundrum that compounds when people use animals for meat. With so many calories lost in the transfer up the food chain, the energy cost of meat in the diet is immense, though the gain in protein might be worth the cost. If the cost in calories to feed, butcher, and carry the animals exceeds the payback in calories gained from eating the meat, it’s a losing proposition from the standpoint of energy. The ancient Chinese stayed out of the red by eating plants and animals that didn’t cost more human calories to produce than the payback received from eating the food.
For thousands of years, and despite famines and disease, the Chinese systems of waterworks, waste recycling, and meat-sparse diets supplied enough food to sustain millions of city-folk, not to mention the farmers themselves. While Europeans were living through the Middle Ages, the largest cities in the world were in China: Chang’an in the year 800, Hangzhou in 1200, Nanjing in 1400, andBeijing in 1500. Cities were surrounded by rings of fertile soil within a day’s journey of the urbansource of night-soil.
Early Chinese civilization was not the only culture to manipulate nutrient cycles to keep its soils fertile, nor the only one to use animal manure to replenish nutrients and animal muscle power to supplementhuman labor. In early antiquity, Egyptians were cultivating nitrogen-replenishing clover every other year as fodder for livestock, alternating it with a year of barley or wheat. Wood carvings from Japan depict farmers carrying night-soil to the fields. And in medieval England, so prized were the sheep droppings that the nobles forbade peasants to remove the nutrient-rich manure from a lord’s land. But for many centuries, no society rivaled the Chinese in their mastery of the conundrums of settled life.
Europe Ratchets Up
It took some centuries before animal power made its way from the ancient river civilizations to Europe. Collar harnesses had originated in China during the fifth century CE . Invaders from central Asia might have carried the new type of harness to Europe, where it becamewidespread by around 1000 CE . Unlike harnesses in Roman times, when yokes choked horses pulling heavy loads, animals wearing the new collars had weight distributed across their shoulders. The collars enabled horses, and not just oxen, to pull heavy plows. Because horses worked faster and needed less food than oxen, the energy return in terms of human calories from the harvest increased for each calorie fed to an animal. Iron shoes nailed to horses’ feet, beginning in Europe around the ninth century, protected their hooves from cracking and made the animals even more useful, as they could then work year-round in wet soils. The moldboard plow, another Chinese invention, which cut deeper and in heavier soils, replaced the ard. Donkeys and mules became part of the animal labor pool beyond horses and oxen.
With the moldboard plow in medieval Europe, the fields produced far more for each investment of human labor. The medieval animal-based technology made possible the expansion of agriculture into the wet, clay-rich soils of northern Europe’s forests and wetlands.Famines
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