The World’s Warring States Period
The fear of climate change overshadowed a much more eminent threat to humanity, which has now come to pass unremarked. The world is at its maximum utilization for land dedicated to livestock.
My take is that we are about to enter the World’s Warring States Period. We will be enmeshed in a battle for dominance via resource distribution. Over the next 100 years, we can expect to see occasional skirmishes due to resource contention, resulting in borders and population centers relocating. Ultimately, I believe the global map of political borders will look similar to the current one at a glance, but on closer inspection, many seats of power will be quite shuffled around.
So then, let’s take a survey of the history of food so that we can envision the future of it. What does our current food production system look like, and how did we get here?
It’s always shocking to consider the true scale of time on which humanity has existed. While homo sapiens are theorized to have evolved roughly 300,000 years ago,¹ we have only been practicing agriculture for about 12,000 years.² The leading theory as to why we began farming would be due to climate change — in this case, a global ice age had just ended, and new plant and animal species were flourishing. Previously, humans had been a migratory species, following animal migration paths; now, humans saw that they could form stationary communities if they cultivated their own plants and animals rather than subsisting by hunting and gathering, which had forced them to roam large areas for food. Forming stationary communities would allow them to keep surpluses, and led to the formations of villages with more complex social orders, eventually leading all the way to long-term calendar keeping and multi-generational society planning.
