Box Roots and genes

From the first Natufian villages near the Jordan to the transgenic plant laboratories of Monsanto in Saint-Louis in the United States, from the destruction of forests in the Neolithic era to the erosion of the soil today, from plow to satellite-guided robots, From Spanish merinos to Dolly, the first cloned sheep, agriculture has had a significant impact on the history of humanity and contributed to the emergence, then to the flourishing of most civilizations, and sometimes to their decline. Through the history of this sector, it is a whole essential part of the evolution of our societies that opens up to us, with its eminent or lesser-known characters who will build this epic that is both technological and social, cultural and ecological, religious and botanical, animal and economic, local and global. Without forgetting all these generations of peasants, struggling laboriously, at all times and in all latitudes, against misery and hunger. This sector stands out as central to the questions that our society is asking itself today, as to its relationship to plants and animals, to food and health, to territories and landscapes, and as to its concerns about major global environmental issues. In this sum-book, the two volumes of which are brought together here in a box, the journalist Denis Lefèvre tells us about the evolution of agriculture through the ages and leads us to reflect on the issues that persist today: how to feed the whole current population and the prospect of 9 billion Earthlings in 2050? How to rethink the relationship of Man with the living? « A reference book, fascinating and of great richness. A book on the human-nature relationship since the beginning of humanity, a kind of history of human ecology, one might say. » Dictionary of sustainable development