Environmental Ethics

Author(s): S M Jain
Publisher: Prakrit Bharti Academy

Page 46

earth since about 3 lakh years and for 99% of this time human population has been very limited within carrying capacity of the ambient environment and its constituents, the natural sources. Before advent of agriculture mankind lived on products of natural forests and the population was conditioned by naturally available food. Recent experiments in Germany on wolves have proved that their fertility was controlled according to food available in their forest habitat. During food scarcity due to natural or other causes fertility or birth rate was reduced proportionately. The same was true for humans when they lived on naturally available food. Dr. Robert Dudley of the University of California has categorically stated that primate ancestors of homosapiens were dependent on fruits of variety of species available abundantly in natural forest and this predilection was passed on to humans. Paleolithic man was purely fruitarian. It was neolithic man who became partially hunter. The assumption that man was initially hunter and subsequently turned fruitarian is fallacious and wrong. It did take time to develop implements for hunting even of stone. Obviously the humans fed themselves on abundantly available fruits, nuts, seeds, flowers, leaves etc. from forests.
Birth and onslaught of agriculture :
The population started rising with advent of agriculture about 10000 years ago. The beginning of agriculture was accidental when some ancestor of ours accidentally dropped edible seeds of grasses collected by him from forests, around his hamlet nearby a water source a stream or so. He was amazed to see around his hamlet the same grasses and their seeds which he was collecting from forest within 3 months. He reflected and thought that it would be easier and less laborious to grow seeds nearby than to go round and collect these from forests. It was this sense of lethargy that gave birth to agriculture and subsequent sense of greed to grow more and more that triggered rapid extension of agriculture. More and more people followed the man who first discovered agriculture. As food supplies increased population also increased
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