Amazing and humbling to read about technological marvels from 1400 years ago. It really puts our modern achievements in a new light. It's tempting sometimes to think of innovation as a recent phenomen, but people have been innovating and solving the same problems for thousands of years. To be honest, I didn't even know they HAD e-commerce back then!
People seem to take for granted that since agriculture is one of the oldest technologies, it must be a "solved problem" and our modern approach is optimal.
When in reality, modern industrial agriculture is one of the most ham fisted and naive approached to the problem: just bulldoze, fertilize, irrigate, and spray everything into submission. With many negative consequences of course, which we generally refer to as "unsustainable".
Because understanding all the complex relationships within an ecosystem, and then how to engineer it to yield surplus material for human use without intolerable negative consequences, is in fact a cutting edge and poorly grasped science.
The "biocultural legacy" is an empirical approach to this problem refined over milenia, which we would do well to understand and appreciate.
I'd hardly call the solution to Malthusian traps "ham fisted". Modern industrial agriculture, or at least fertilizer use, has let us escape from constant famine.
Yeah, it's a weird catch-22 for modern ag: don't use aggressive chemical herbicide and pesticides, but mechanical weed control has it's downsides too: with compacting that ground or erosion or use too much fuel.
Non-syndicated Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/news/2025/11/06/landscapes-that-...