Beyond the mongongo tree: Good news about conservation tillage and the environmental tradeoff

Excerpt

IN human history there have been two dominant kinds of food economies. One might be described as nonmanipulative, a natural economy of benefit to primitive tribes who could collect food from nature without disturbing its balances. In his book People of the Lake, anthropologist Richard Leakey describes the Kung people of East Africa as having a food economy of this kind.

Leakey calls the Kung gatherer-hunters rather than hunter-gatherers because the Kung do not really hunt much. Nor do they cultivate crops. These aboriginal people live mainly on the nut of the mongongo tree, which grows abundantly on the tops of the dune hills in the Great Rift Valley of Africa. The average Kung eats 300 mongongo nuts a day, a diet that contains the same calories as two and a half pounds of rice and as much protein as a 14-ounce steak.

Mongongo nuts are easy to fetch. You just pick them up. There is no danger of over-harvesting, for the greater part of the production of each tree rots uncollected beneath it. “Why should we plant,” said a Kung to one of Leakey's colleagues, “when there are so many …