No Planet B: comparative reflections on hydraulic engineering and zoonotic epidemics in the Jordan Valley in Early Neolithic time and Twenty First Century

Abstract

This article focuses on the critical importance of knowledge, a key trait of human culture, in multi-species environmental coadaptation and niche co-construction in human evolutionary history. It draws upon two cases of hydraulic engineering and associated zoonotic epidemics in the Jordan Valley, which has been part of the planetary crossroads of human migration and cultural exchange (including the exchange of knowledge) since prehistoric times. The first case is based on existing archaeological studies of the Neolithic town of Jericho as it was 10,000 years ago in today’s Palestine, and the second is based on our ethnographic fieldwork on a Pumped-Storage Hydropower (PSH) project under construction since 2017, 110 km away from Jericho, located in today’s Israel. Following recent observations by ecologists that the Earth is becoming one single ecosystem and our only ecological niche, this article undertakes a comparative analysis of human knowledge and its part in niche construction at local and planetary scales. The neolithic people of Jericho eventually left their town due to ecological crises and dispersed into small agro-pastoral communities for survival and re-adaptation. Today, as we can infer from the PSH case study, human beings have no Plan(et) B and must adapt to the changing environment through knowledge innovation and exchange. We call for cross-disciplinary approaches to studying social-cultural processes of sharing and innovating knowledge that are adaptive to today’s ecological changes at a planetary level.