From Hunter and Gatherers to Global Capitalism and Thereafter
* Book: Garden Earth - From Hunter and Gatherers to Global Capitalism and Thereafter. By Gunnar Rundgren. Garden Earth, 2012
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Contextual Citation
"The market, initially just a tool for distributing surpluses, has become the conductor of the whole food system, from farm to fork. The commercialization of farming also leads us to view land, water, nature as private property and the life of the land, our symbionts, as commodities. The divide between society, culture, the economy and nature that we currently experience is a divide alien to farming, and can never be sustainable. If the transition from hunting to farming was the First Fall of Man, farming as a business is the Second Fall."
- Gunnar Rundgren [2]
Description
"Our society and the capitalist market economy have failed to create well-being for many. Big parts of humanity are as poor today as they were fifty years ago, despite unprecedented growth. Gaps between the rich and poor are abnormal and growing. In addition, the economic system, supposedly managing itself through the “invisible hand”, is in constant need of corrections and controls, because it doesn’t work as it is supposed to. The failures of the industrial capitalist society are not booms and busts or inflation; they are mere symptoms of underlying conflicts. The real failure is that it erodes the human, natural and social capital that it needs for its operation. It lacks the regenerative properties which a successful society and a thriving human civilization need. Finally, it is also based on flawed assumptions of what motivates human enterprise and what the drivers for human progress are. Garden Earth stands out from the current flow of books on climate change, the financial crisis, globalization, the food and agriculture crisis or peak-oil. It avoids the trap of using just one lens to make sense of the world. It does, however, put these present day problems in a wide and deep perspective. The main themes examined by Garden Earth are ecology; society and its power relations; the market economy and capitalism; and, technology and energy."