Womb, belly and landscape in the anthropocene

Abstract

The poet William Cowper, enraptured by the beauty of the English countryside, wrote God made the country and man made the town. He was wrong. Driven by the urgings of womb and belly we made them both. Agriculture, involving the increasingly large scale manipulation (husbandry) of the soil, is what brought it about, and it began with the Neolithic Revolution about 10,000-12,000 years ago. Since then, all the usual geological processes that shape the land surface "have been joined by a new and immensely significant one, never before seen on the planet, and one without which civilization would not exist: agriculture" (Chesworth 2002, p. 5). It was not the first technology available to humans for modifying the planetary surface. That was fire, first controlled by Homo erectus (Stearns 2001), possibly as early as 1.8 million years ago, though evidence for this early date (from Kenya) is controversial. Australia appears to have been transformed by burning soon after Homo sapiens arrived there some 40,000 years ago, and long before agriculture was invented (Head 2000). Similarly pre-agricultural peoples cleared forests in Western Europe by burning, and as a consequence created the acid, ericaceous heathlands referred to in the north of England as moors, maybe as early as 20,000 years ago (Mabey 1980). However, the human activity that ultimately led to the wholesale transformation of the land was undoubtedly agriculture, a process that will be examined in this chapter. I start with the historical context, then proceed to consider the three important ways in which farming has changed landscapes around the world. This leads to a discussion of our ecological footprint, how and why it grew so large, and whether it represents a sustainable state. At the end of the chapter, and with apologies to Shakespeare, I conclude that we bestride the landscape like an ecological colossus. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.