House of Cards and a Pile of Cards

William Atherton was a Kentucky Rifleman who fought at the Battle of Frenchtown in the War of 1812. He wrote a memoir of defeat (Audio Version Here) and his subsequent capture and imprisonment first at the hands of native tribes people and then with the British.

The memoir has a detailed account of the time he spent as a captive of the Indians. The tribe he was with lived a hunter gatherer lifestyle. (According to Caesar, my ancestors did the same 2000-ish years ago.) Their lifestyle as described by Atherton lacked comfort and the quality of day to day life was largely a function of the availability of game to eat. The life was one of day to day drudgery--a nonstop quest for the next meal. According to Atherton, his captors had no calendar and no concept of weeks or months.

The most important characteristic of grains that makes agriculture and civilization possible is they can be stored--almost indefinitely--in the right conditions. A grain silo is essentially a version of solar storage. One ton of wheat (which you could get from one acre of land) yields roughly 2000 loaves of bread. Storing grain insulates people from the type of privation and drudgery that plagued Atherton's captors.

Agriculture and cities remove people's dependence on nature for sustenance and creates dependence on systems of their own design--engineered systems, e.g. grain silos. Natural systems of life evolve over ages to be stable, or to return to stability, over a huge range of conditions. Engineered systems, by contrast, only tend to be stable over the range of conditions people imagined, and when they fail, they typically have no ability to restore themselves.