Head Start

Penelope said, you must have read Bruce Chatwin? I hadn't. She told me that I really should read his ideas about our nomadic natures. My friend Kate had also pointed me to his book Songlines during my first urban camping trip. I haven't read him. I will.

After mentioning my urban camping in the article, Penelope wrote, "A state of near ceaseless traveling puts the couch surfer in a transnational zone, an idea dear to Pico Iyer, the travel writer and novelist who has been chewing over notions of home and nomadism for 25 years."

Her article was published three days after I started teaching a three-week university course in which we were asked to apply argumentation theory to Professor Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel.

The author of this Pulitzer Prize winning book made a case for the geographically favorable environmental conditions of the past causing the differences between first and third world countries of the present.

People in regions with geographically favorable environmental conditions were able to make a switch, earlier than other regions, from nomadic hunter gatherer practices to sedentary agrarian societies.

The switch from nomad to farmer caused large interacting societies, which led to the development of technology, writing, immunization and organizing systems.

Societies that made the switch faster than others had the head start on today's balance of power.