In order to retain our sense of reality, it is necessary for us to look briefly at where we are in our understanding of food producing, so that we can appreciate the tremendously valuable advice of the elders, even if we and the anthropologists can only glimpse the larger outlines of it.
Civilised agriculture is a war with the spirit of life and war with the cosmos.
When the climax ecosystem is cleared for agriculture, the earth seeks by all means at its disposal to heal the wound. It sends in the first aid crew to revegetate the area and cover the poor oxidizing and eroding, bare soil. If life finds some unnatural abundance of exotic plants there, like soybeans or designer flowers, it calls in all the species of fungus, micro-organism and insects that can eat up that sickly or unnatural life and reconvert it back into the life stream. What this means is, that it takes energy to fight life which is making an effort to rebalance itself. To do this requires fertilisers, poisons, petroleum, steel mills, agricultural universities, polluted waters, dead seas and so on and on.