"Grass: Muscle Power." Fuel: an Ecocritical History
Scott, Heidi C. M. "Grass: Muscle Power." Fuel: An Ecocritical History. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 27–74. Environmental Cultures. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 30 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350054011.ch-002>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 30 September 2021, 20:08 UTC. Copyright © Heidi C. M. Scott 2018. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 2 Grass: Muscle Power For millennia before it was powered by steam, internal combustion, and nuclear fi ssion, the human world ran on muscles. Initially we ran on our own muscles, powered by meat from hunting and tubers, nuts, and fruits from gathering. One of the bracing advances of the agricultural revolution was the extension of our own modest frames to the much stronger bodies of ungulates— animals that walk on hooves— like horses, oxen, and donkeys. Th ese tip- of- the- toe animals run on rough biomass. Graminivores, especially ruminants, are marvelous alchemists that turn things inedible to us, mostly grasses, into power, speed, meat, and milk. (Horses are not ruminants, so they get less energy from grasses than cattle and require higher- calorie cereals in their diet.) Our association with these animate prime movers is diffi cult to overstate. Th ey shouldered a series of revolutions in global human civilization: fi xed settlement, plow- based agriculture, which led to a shift in human diet toward carbohydrates from cereals, huge population increases, the advent of the city- state, class- based hierarchy based on occupation, and beer.
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