Ishmael

to the point where game becomes scarce, then it begins to shrink.”

“It would in ordinary circumstances, but you’ve changed those circumstances. You’ve decided the law of limited competition doesn’t apply to hyenas.”

“Right. So we kill off our other competitors.”

“Don’t make me drag it out of you one word at a time. I want you to work it out.”

“Okay. Let’s see. After we kill off our competitors for the game… our population grows until the game begins to get scarce. There are no more competitors to kill off, so we have to increase the game population…. I can’t see hyenas going in for animal husbandry.”

“You’ve killed off your competitors for the game, but your game has competitors as well—competitors for the grasses. These are your competitors once removed. Kill them off and there’ll be more grass for your game.”

“Right. More grass for the game means more game, more game means more hyenas, more hyenas means… What’s left to kill off?” Ishmael just raised his eyebrows at me. “There’s nothing left to kill off.”

“Think.”

I thought. “Okay. We’ve killed off our direct competitors and our competitors once removed. Now we can kill off our competitors twice removed—the plants that compete with the grasses for space and sunlight.”

“That’s right. Then there will be more plants for your game and more game for you.”

“Funny…. This is considered almost holy work by farmers and ranchers. Kill off everything you can’t eat. Kill off anything that eats what you eat. Kill off anything that doesn’t feed what you eat.”

“It is holy work, in Taker culture. The more competitors you destroy, the more humans you can bring into the world, and that makes it just about the holiest work there is. Once you exempt yourself from the law of limited competition, everything in the world except your food and the food of your food becomes an enemy to be exterminated.”

4

“As you see, one species exempting itself from this law has the same ultimate effect as all species exempting themselves. You end up with a community in which diversity is progressively destroyed in order to support the expansion of a single species.”

“Yes. You have to end up where the Takers have ended up—constantly eliminating competitors, constantly increasing your food supply, and constantly wondering what you’re going to do about the population explosion. How did you put it the other day? Something about increasing food production to feed an increased population.”

“ ‘Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.’ Peter Farb said it in Humankind.”

“You said it was a paradox?”

“No, he said it was a paradox.”

“Why?”

Ishmael shrugged. “I’m sure he knows that any species in the wild will invariably expand to the extent that its food supply expands. But, as you know, Mother Culture teaches that such laws do not apply to man.”

5

“I have a question,” I said. “As we’ve gone through these things, I keep wondering if agriculture itself is contrary to this law. I mean, it seems contrary to the law by definition.”

“It is—if the only definition you have is the Taker definition. But there are other definitions. Agriculture doesn’t have to be a war waged on all life that doesn’t support your growth.”

“I guess my problem is this. The biological community is an economy, isn’t it? I mean, if you start taking more for yourself, then there’s got to be less for someone else, for something else. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes. But what are you getting at by taking more for yourself? Why do it?”

“Well, this is the basis for settlement. I can’t have settlement unless I have agriculture.”

“Are you sure that’s what you want?”

“What else would I want?”

“Do you want to grow to the point where you can take over the world and put every square foot of it under cultivation and force everyone alive to be an agriculturalist?”

“No.”

“That’s what the Takers have been doing—and are still doing. That’s what their agricultural system is designed to support: not just settlement—growth. Unlimited growth.”

“Okay. But all I want is settlement.”

“Then you don’t have to go to war.”

“But the problem remains. If I’m going to achieve settlement, I have to have more than I had before, and that more has got to come from somewhere.”

“Yes, that’s true, and I see your difficulty. In the first place, settlement is not by any means a uniquely human adaptation. Offhand I can’t think of any species that is an absolute nomad. There’s always a territory, a feeding ground, a spawning ground, a hive, a nest, a roost, a lair, a den, a hole, a burrow. And there are varying degrees of settlement among animals, and among humans as well. Even hunter– gatherers aren’t absolute nomads, and there are intermediate states between them and pure agriculturalists. There are hunter–gatherers who practice intensive collection, who collect and store food surpluses that enable them to be a bit more settled. Then there are semi–agriculturalists who grow a little and gather a lot. And then there are near–agriculturalists who grow a lot and gather a little. And so on.”

“But this is not getting to the central problem,” I said.

“It is getting to the central problem, but your vision is locked on seeing the problem in one way and one way only. The point you’re missing is this: When Homo habilis appeared on the scene—when that particular adaptation that we call Homo habilis appeared on the scene—something had to make way for him. I don’t mean that some other species had to become extinct. I mean simply that, with his very first bite, Homo habilis was in competition with something. And not with one thing, with a thousand things—which all had to be diminished in some small degree if Homo habilis was going to live. This is true of every single species that ever came into being on this planet.”

“Okay. But I still don’t see what this has to do with settlement.”

“You’re not listening. Settlement is a biological adaptation practiced to some degree by every species, including the human. And every adaptation supports itself in competition with the adaptations around it. In brief, human settlement isn’t against the laws of competition, it’s subject to the laws of competition.”

“Ah. Yes. Okay, I see it now.”

6

“So, what have we discovered here?”

“We’ve discovered that any species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.”

“Any species? Including man?”

“Yes, obviously. That’s in fact what’s happening here.”