On the recommendation of a friend, I just finished reading author Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael." The author won the one and only Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award of $500,000.00 for this novel about a gorilla who tries to teach the narrator and others there is a way to live in greater harmony with the natural world.
The gorilla, whose name is Ishmael, makes the point to the narrator several times throughout the story that the advent of agriculture in the fertile crescent of Persia 6000 years ago changed man's view of nature and led to the advent of work, religion, laws and the myth that the natural world was created for man to plunder. Agriculture allowed man to act like the gods and so decide what species should live and which should die. This then led to monocultures and, ultimately, man's current industrial agriculture techniques. A thought-provoking book which I coincidentally finished just as the American restaurant chain, Chipotle, began to release a series of videos around this same theme of agricultural sustainability.
