4 Sustainable Agriculture and Food
hunter-gatherers have plenty of time for leisure, often working fewer hours than
agriculturalists, and the caloric returns of their activities are good.
Richard Lee and Richard Daly’s later Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and
Gatherers (1999) is an important and comprehensive volume containing case stud-
ies of more than 50 of the world’s remaining hunter and gatherer peoples. These
tell a story of resilience in the face of change, and of the many ways they are
affected by modern problems. Thematic essays discuss prehistory, social life, gen-
der, music and art, food and health, religion and indigenous knowledge. In their
introductory essay, Lee and Daly make the point that the world’s hunter-gatherer
peoples – the Arctic Inuit, Aboriginal Australians, Kalahari San and other similar
groups – represent the oldest and perhaps most successful human adaptation. Until
12,000 years ago, virtually all humanity lived as hunters and gatherers. Yet in
recent centuries they have suffered the ill-effects of modernity. However, fascina-
tion with hunting peoples and their ways of life still remains strong. Hunters and
gatherers stand at the opposite pole from the dense urban life now experienced by
a large proportion of humanity. Yet these same hunters may hold the key to many
contemporary concerns – about diet, politics, communities, physical activity and
relations with nature. A late Australian Aboriginal writer is quoted here, ‘modern
ecology can learn a great deal from a people who managed and maintained their
world so well for 50,000 years’.
The third paper in this section is from Hugh Brodie’s The Other Side of Eden
(2000). His fieldwork experience is mainly from the polar and boreal north, and
he weaves the experiences of native hunter-gatherers into a narrative that reveals a
paradox: agriculture is a settled activity, yet has been fundamentally expansionist;
whereas hunter-gathering is a mobile activity, cultures and communities self-
regulate and stay in the same areas over thousands of years. This points to a prob-
lem – current narratives often describe hunter-gatherers as the backward and
irresponsible peoples, yet left alone they do not seek to impinge on others. This
chapter, entitled Mind, explores some of the differences between communities,
and shows how change has often been destructive to whole hunter-gatherer
peoples. Says Mary Adele, an Innu of Labrador, ‘on the land, we are ourselves. In
the settlements we are lost.That was why they made our minds weak’. Some believe
that hunter-gatherers will inevitably become extinct; others that they represent
ways of living that are instructive. Says Brodie, ‘without hunter-gatherers, human-
ity is diminished and cursed; with them, we can achieve a more complete version
of ourselves’.
The fourth chapter of this opening section focuses on the Innu of northern
Labrador, and analyses the environmental and health benefits of hunting lifestyles
and diets. They have undergone profound transitions in recent decades with impor-
tant implications for conservation, food and health policy. The change from perma-
nent nomadic hunting, gathering and trapping in the country (nutshimit) to
sedentary village life (known as ‘sedentarization’) has been associated with a marked
decline in physical and mental health. The overarching response of the national gov-
ernment has been to emphasize village-based and institutional solutions. Samson