Forces Driving More
lacked essential nutrients for plant growth. Right from the start,
yields would be low. After a few growing seasons, with the soil further
depleted, yields would drop even more. At some point, they had no
choice but to abandon the plot, move on, and start over.
Reinforcing our sense of how food was scarce, even the pigs and
chickens were undersized. Most of their energy was expended scav-
enging about for roots, rotten vegetables, or scraps of food that fell
through the suspended platform the family occupied. Since the house-
hold couldn’t subsist on such scrawny creatures for all their protein,
they supplemented their diet with fish from the river.
As we followed the river deeper into the bowels of the jungle, it
became clear that formal education wasn’t much of an option. The
people’s future seemed locked into subsistence. As I thought about
their circumstances compared with mine, geography notwithstanding,
the primary difference came down to science—the same science I took
for granted.
Before I was born, my ancestors had already hitched their future
to science. There was no turning back. As their beneficiary, I don’t
need to live near arable land or bodies of fresh water. I don’t have to
structure my life around seasons for growing food. The delicate balance
of sunshine, temperature, and rainfall that separates subsistence and
hunger from prosperity and plenty can be ignored. There is no need
to dirty my hands harvesting tubers or scavenging fruit. I can block
out knowledge of how animals are killed and then eviscerated. Even
learning how to cook and prepare food that is free of pathogens and
parasites is now optional.
Thanks in part to science, it is easy to forget that abundance of food
even exists. You and I can be as knowledgeable or ill-informed as we
choose, while still reaping the benefits of science and the surpluses
that science makes possible. Each of us can choose to write off the past
or take the present for granted. Though science is built on knowledge,
its benefits still extend to those who openly reject such knowledge.
There is, however, one fact about science that merits remembering—
this exchange between you, the reader, and me, the author, would not
have occurred without science. Why? Our parents and innumerable
generations before them would not have been born.