In class, we came up with the following notes/questions (pasted below)
Please address any of these questions and/or the larger question of whether agriculture was a mistake.
Please read other people's postings before you jump in, so you can see who you agree with and who you disagree with.
* * * NOTES FROM CLASS * * *
But this begs the question of… what do we mean by “better off”?
What makes a civilization successful?
Height?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#Average_adult_height_around_the_world
Not dying off - stable
Ample Food and resources
Few wars – peace (how do you define peace?)
Freedom (how do you define that?) Not enslaving others
Believe what you want; no censorship
Some form of government or structure (look at third world countries)
Not a lot of corruption
Treatment of native peoples
Live in harmony with nature?
(what is harmony? Treat nature good)
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3 comments:
I think a successful civilization is one where there are no wars. There are also the obvious factors of not dying off and having enough resources. There should be a stable and fair government. The civilization should be advanced enough to have ways to conserve resources. A civilization should not have to have slaves to be successful. A civilization should also be in contact with others civilizations so they can help provide for each other.
I think that we can not really know whether agriculture or hunter-gatherer societies would be better than the other. We would have to know what we would be like today if there had not been a widespread adoption of agriculture. In my opinion we would be better off without agriculture, but there are things I would like to keep that we have now. Both ways heve their advantages and disadvantages.
Continuing on what I said in my last post: I would like to keep some of the technology we have today, such as computers, ipods, dvds, etc. I would want there to be all the books we have. The hunter-gatherers lived healthier lives and they did not get the diseases that farmers did. However most hunter-gatherer groups did not have as much free time as farmers. The farmers can store food and they have complex technologies. However the food they grow does not have the nutrition that the hunter-gatherers' food does.
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