Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/599676
1 0 6 | t h e c l e v e r r o o t grapevine and cannabis in Central Asia, to name but a few. Natural topography, climate, soil, plants, and animals define a region. Our Earth's terroirs are the product of billions of years of geological formation of the landmass, along with 500 million years of the plant kingdom's evolu- tion from a simple algae into the incredible complexity of today's flora and the amazing diversity of inter-dependent life forms that exist on the planet. Humanity has evolved in a world of extreme diversity and has been influenced by regional environments. This evolutionary influence must have been minimal during humanity's long migra- tion from the African continent to Europe, Asia, and the Americas but more apparent when we became semi-sed- entary and more dependent on local naturally occurring resources. The richest terroirs of the planet have been at the origins of sedentary life and civilization. If indeed, as anthropologist and geographer Jared Diamond says in The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of Human Animals, "agriculture grew from human behav- iors and from responses or changes in plants and animals, leading without conscious plan toward domestication of plants and animals," then the land's abundance and fertil- ity has been a defining factor of the transformation. The word psycho-geography was defined in 1955 by French theorist Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environ- ment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." However the concept can be traced back to Paul Vidal de la Blanche, father of the French school of geography, who stated in his ground- breaking work Tableau de la Geographie de la France (Outline of the Geography of France) that it is impossible to understand a culture without taking into account the land, and equally, that one cannot appreciate the land without understanding the culture of its people. We Are What We Eat The Fertile Crescent region in Central Asia was the birth- place of wheat, oats, barley, grapes, and olives. Southeast Asia saw the rise of bananas, sugar cane, yams, rice, sago, and taro, and the Americas were the birthplace of tobacco, avocados, maize, pumpkins, squash, potatoes, and cacao. These three matrices of early agriculture have shaped very different civilizations, myths and people; ter- roir, agriculture, and human evolution are interconnected at the deepest level; the land's sustenance in all its variet- ies could well be the source of human diversity. Ethnologist Leo Frobenius and, later, mythologist Joseph Campbell introduced the notion of paideumatic influence, "the tendency of cultures to be shaped—in their major symbolic inspiration and dominant forms—by their own geography, soil and climate." This geographic force molds not only culture but the organism's makeup of its inhabitants as well; societies living in the same environment on different continents possess similarities that are attributed to a convergent shaping by the environment, the Amazoni- ans Indians of South America and the Dayak of Borneo are a clear example. PHOTO: KIM SALLAWAY The concept of terroir and the system of Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée that is used in the wine industry has to be rep- licated in an effort to pro- tect California's heritage cannabis.