Oh well, I am European. But I love talking about what happened in the past. Invasion and occupation was not a European innovation. It had happened all the time, since agriculture was born and people started building empires.
Rome conquered the Mediterranean and beyond, Arabs conquered North Africa and the Iberian peninsula. Mongols took a large chunk of the known world. Turks came as far as Budapest. But no expansion spread innovation and development like the European, and that includes agriculture. Along with the mayhem, the annihilation and the plunder that also comes with invasion.
If there ever was a time when people lived in something like paradise, it would be hunter gatherers in good times when food was plentiful. Like the aborigines of Australia, maybe.
In Africa, if we are talking about colonialism, before Europeans the population was small, life was short and warfare and slave trade was commonplace. It was not the paradise some think.
Nowhere on Earth was there more than temporary abundance, and civilizations were built and floundered as changing climate, overpopulation and other factors lead to starvation and demise.
At no point in time have we had the tools available we have now, and will need to support a world population of ten billion or more.
You probably agree we should develop ways of securing access to fresh water, with desalination and other techniques, and securing the supply of energy without doing harm. But we should also try to develop even more sophisticated tools, that could make us less dependent on spray chemicals and fertilizers, and keep our high yield without depleting resources. This is not the end of history.
We should also treat animals like they were people, restore the fish stock of the oceans to what they were before, and we should raise our ethical standards quite a bit.
Will politicians fix this? I doubt it. But let’s be aware.
And I like the idea of producing and buying locally when we can.
