A tale on dancing and growing our food

Must we grow our food... ?

Traduction ci-dessous. Une version française du livre est disponible en librairie mais plutôt rare. La bibliothèque de quartier Mercier à Montréal en a un exemplaire.
Titre: Professeur cherche élève ayant désir de sauver le monde, de Daniel Quinn

Citation :

Terpsichore is among the places you would enjoy visiting in the universe. This was a planet –named after the muse of dancing- where people emerged in the usual way in the community of life. For a time they lived as all others live, simply eating whatever came to hand. But after a couple of million years of living in this way, they noticed it was very easy to promote the regrowth of their favorite foods. You might say they found a few easy steps that would have this result. They didn’t have to take these steps in order to stay alive, but if they took them, their favorite foods were always more readily available. These were, of course, the steps of a dance.

A few steps of the dance, performed just three or four days a month, enriched their lives greatly and took almost no effort. As here on earth, the people of this planet were not a single people but many peoples, and as the time went on, each people developed its own approach to the dance. Some continued to dance just a few steps three or four days a month. Others found it made sense for them to have even more of their favorite foods, so they danced a few steps every second or third day. Still others saw no reason why they shoudn’t live mostly on their favorite foods, so they danced a few steps every single day. Things went on this way for tens of thousands of years among the people of this planet, who thought of themselves as living in the hands of the gods and leaving everything to them. For this reason, they called themselves Leavers.

But one group of Leavers eventually said to themselves, " Why should we just live ‘partially’ on the foods we favor ? Why don’t we live ‘entirely’ on the foods we favor ? All we have to do is devote a lot more time to dancing. " So this one particular group took to dancing several hours a day. Because they thought of themselves as taking their welfare into their own hands, we’ll call them Takers. The results were spectacular. The Takers were innundated with their favorite foods. A manager class soon emerged to look after the accumulation and storage of surpluses – something that had never been necessary when everyone was just dancing a few hours a week.

The members of this manager class were far too busy to do any dancing themselves, and since their work was so critical, they soon came to be regarded as social and political leaders. But after a few years these leaders of the Takers began to notice that food production was dropping and they went out to see what was going wrong.

Part 2
What they found was that the dancers were slacking off. They weren't dancing several hours a day, they were dancing only an hour or two and sometimes not even that much. The leaders asked why.

"What's the point of all this dancing?" the dancers said.
"It isn't necessary to dance seven or eignt hours a day to get the food we need. There's plenty of food even if we just dance an hour a day. We're never hungry. So why shouldn't we relax and take life easy, the way we used to do?"

The leaders saw things very differently, of course. If the dancers were back to living the way they used to, then the leaders would soon have to do the same, and that didn't appeal to them at all. They considered and tried many different schemes to encourage or cajole or tempt or shame or force the dancers into dancing longer hours, but nothing worked until one of them came up with the idea of locking up the food.
"What good will that do?" he was asked.

"The reason the dancers aren't dancing right now is that they just have to reach out and take the food they want. If we lock it away, they won't be able to do that."
"But if we lock the food away, the dancers will starve to death!"
"No, no, you don't understand," the other said with a smile. "We'll link dancing to receiving food - so much food for so much dancing. So if the dancers dance a little, they'll get a little food, and of they dance a lot, they'll get a lot. This way slackers will always be hungry, and dancers who dance for long hours will have full stomachs."
"They'll never put up with such an arrangement," he was told.
"They'll have no choice. We'll lock the food away in storehouses."

"We'll recruit guards from among the dancers. We'll excuse them from dancing and have them guard the storehouses instead. We'll pay them the same way we pay the dancers, with food - so much food for so many hours of guarding."
"It will never work," he was told.
But oddly enough...

(Part 3 – quite soon )

From : Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael, Bantam, New York, 1997, p.51-52

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Devons-nous faire pousser nos aliments ?

Citation :

Terpsichore est un de ces endroits, dans l’Univers, que vous apprécieriez de visiter. C’était une planète – qui tient son nom de la muse de la danse – où les gens émergent dans la communauté de la vie comme les autres. Pendant longtemps, ces gens ont vécu comme tous les autres, en se nourrisant de ce qu’ils pouvaient trouver. Mais après avoir vécu ainsi pendant quelques millions d’années, ils ont remarqué que c’était très facile de promouvoir la croissance de leurs aliments favoris. Nous pourrions dire qu’ils ont fait quelques pas faciles qui produisaient ce résultat. Ils n’avaient pas besoin de faire ces pas pour rester vivants, mais s’ils faisaient ces pas, leurs aliments favoris étaient toujours plus disponibles. Ces pas étaient, bien sûr, des pas de danse.

Quelques pas de cette danse, accomplis seulement trois ou quatre jours par mois, enrichissaient grandement leurs vies et n’exigeaient presque aucun effort. Comme ici sur Terre, les gens de Terpsichore ne formaient pas un peuple unique, mais plusieurs peuples, et avec le temps chaque peuple développait sa propre façon de danser. Certains peuples ont continué à danser un peu seulement trois ou quatre jours par mois. D’autres ont décidé que cela faisait du sens pour eux d’avoir plus de leurs aliments favoris et ont commencé à danser un peu à chaque deux ou trois jours. D’autres encore n’ont pas trouvé de raisons de ne pas vivre surtout de leurs aliments favoris, et se sont mis à danser un peu à tous les jours. Les choses se sont déroulées ainsi pendant des dizaines de milliers d’années chez les peuples de cette planète, qui laissaient leurs vies étaient entre les mains des dieux. Pour cette raison, ils se nommaient les Laisseurs.

Mais un groupe de Laisseurs s’est éventuellement dit : « Pourquoi nous contenter de vivre "partiellement" de nos aliments favoris ? Pourquoi ne pas vivre "entièrement" de nos aliments favoris ? Tout ce que nous avons à faire c’est de consacrer beaucoup plus de temps à la danse. » C’est ainsi que ce groupe s’est mis à danser plusieurs heures par jour. Parce qu’ils ont décidé de prendre leur bien-être entre leurs propres mains, nous les nommerons les Preneurs. Les résultats étaient spectaculaires. Les Preneurs étaient inondés de leurs aliments favoris. Une classe d’administrateurs est aussitôt apparue pour gérer l’accumulation et l’entreposage des surplus – quelque chose qui n’avait jamais été nécessaire quand tout le monde ne dansait que quelques heures par semaine.

Les membres de cette classe d’administrateurs étaient beaucoup trop occupés pour danser, et comme leur travail était si important, ils ont rapidement été perçus comme des dirigeants sociaux et politiques. Mais après quelques années, les dirigeants des Preneurs ont remarqué que la production alimentaire avait chuté et ils ont commencé à chercher pourquoi.

De : Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael, Bantam, New York, 1997, p.51-52