Instead of natural ecosystems with their haphazard mix of species, farms are taut, disciplined communities dedicated to the maintenance of a single species: us. Before agriculture, the Middle West, Ukraine, and the lower Yangzi Valley had been sparsely populated domains of insects and grass; they became breadbaskets, as people scythed away suites of species that used soil and water we wanted to control and replaced them with maize, wheat, and rice. To Margulis’s bacteria, a petri dish is a uniform expanse of nutrients, all ready for the taking. For Homo sapiens, agriculture transformed the
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