"...mein Acker ist die Zeit", Aufsätze zur Umweltgeschichte - Oapen

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logical areas that have to be cultivated and developed and the conference stimulated
future agendas in this sense.
Personally, I appreciated the discovery or adoption of human skeletons as a
source for serial history by my colleagues from history at the conference, if you
forgive me this professional bias. However, skeletons are just one cipher for the
importance of biological materials in economics. But the importance is not always
in the market values of biomaterials, as cereals, meat, oil, or herring. It is also in the
biological rules, dependencies and determinants that govern the exploited plants or
animals themselves.
First: We have heard about seeds and harvests, but isn’t that surprising that since
the thirteenth century up to 1800, the overall harvest in Europe, with the exception
of (I’m entering a private conversation with Bruce Campbell) some areas in Spain,
the overall harvest was of a ratio, say, of one to four, maybe fivefold or at the most
sixfold? You lose one fourth by rodents; you use one fourth or one third for seed
and you end up with one point something grains per harvest as a gain. This is not
very promising and this is how one immediately realizes that agriculture was a high
risk enterprise and why these regimes were so much endangered. Taking this into
account, why is it that there is no genetic improvement over these 500 years and
how did they overcome this situation in the eighteenth and nineteenth century,
although no formal genetics had been discovered by that time? (And how would
one at those times manage to control wind-pollination of grains?). This aspect
needs to be extended also on livestock. The basic question is: what are the issues
of productivity in terms of economy in classical genetics? Or: was there an impact
of genetic improvement or impairment on the economy?
Second: Vermin. I really was surprised that you were talking extensively about
weather conditions, but forgot about the vermin. Next to weather, vermin is the
most endangering agent in an agrarian society. There were hardly any remarks on
vermin here, they are also missing in economic history. Richard Hoffman made
some and I was very thankful for that. Of course we have to admit that almost
nobody has really looked up so far meticulously the archives for vermin. There is
no history of vermin in the medieval, only scarce and scattered knowledge for
Early Modern times. Why? Economic historians should know that in agrarian regimes
the economy totally depends on harvests. Anything that endangers the harvest
endangers economy.
Third, and this is my last point, I would like to look at cities in terms of ecology.
Cities are the key invention to understand human ecology, since there is no other
invention dominating the face of the earth as cities are. By 2015, more than 75% of
the world population of humans will live in cities and this percentage will increase
further. If there is a story of success in the evolution of human ecology, it is this:
the city is the mother of inventions. In my opinion, economic historians are only