A Burning Issue Rethinking the Transition from Hunter-Gatherer to Industrial Sociometabolic Regimes

摘要

Hunter-gatherers are commonly seen as having a fundamentally different sociometabolic regime from agrarian and industrial societies because they are thought to directly appropriate the products of natural ecosystems without modifying those systems in order to enhance their productivity. However, ethnographic and archeological evidence reveals that many hunter-gatherers extensively employed fire to manage their ecosystems so as to increase production of desirable wild resources, thus engaging in colonization of nature that is not qualitatively different from that practiced by other types of society. They systematically burned wild vegetation in order to increase populations of edible wild plants consumed by humans and promote growth of forage for game animals. Deliberate ecosystem burning by Australian Aborigines represented an energy expenditure of 1,512 gigajoules per capita per year (GJ/capita/yr), a level of energy use that is more than three times higher than the United States (445GJ/capita/yr). It is their profligate consumption of biomass energy that explains why the quality of life of many hunter-gatherers was often better than that of traditional settled peasant farmers. Hence, the extent to which hunter-gatherers have a distinct type of sociometabiolic regime is called into question. It can be argued that in the course of social evolution, there have been only two sociometabolic regimes. In one type, which includes hunter-gatherers, swidden agriculturalists, and industrial societies, extrasomatic energy does most of the productive work, whereas in the other type, that of premodern settled agriculturalists, production is largely dependent on human muscle power.