Agriculture is often considered the turning point that made the development of civilizations possible. But this narrative contains an implicit assumption: that the land is cultivable everywhere. In the regions of the great North this assumption collapses: with the ground frozen, “summer” lasting a few weeks and the light disappearing for months, agriculture has always been impracticable for some peoples, the peoples of the cold. These indigenous communities inhabiting the Earth’s Arctic, subarctic, and circumpolar regions live without agriculture: for thousands of years, human societies have not only survived, but have built sophisticated cultures without ever planting a field.
The biological limit of agriculture
Agriculture, far from being an indispensable achievement, represents a highly specific ecological strategy, which can emerge and stabilize only in the presence of favorable environmental conditions: including fertile soils, relatively mild temperatures and predictable seasonal cycles.
In the Arctic and subarctic regions the presence of permafrosta layer of permanently frozen soil that prevents roots from penetrating deeply, drastically limits the possibility of cultivation, while the brevity of summer further reduces the time available for plant growth.
These limitations already existed tens of thousands of years ago, when groups of Homo sapiens they inhabited the cold steppes of Eurasia during the last ice age. To survive, these people had to use hunting and breeding of large herbivores, reindeer, bison and mammoths.
Rather than transforming the environment to make it productive, these societies adapted to its natural productivity, developing extremely sophisticated systems of mobility and ecological knowledge.
Society beyond agriculture
The failure of the use of agriculture emerges, with particular clarity, in cases where agricultural societies have attempted to expand into ecologically marginal, hostile or impracticable environments.
An emblematic example is represented by the Norrone colonies, founded in the 10th century, in Greenland. Groups from Scandinavia attempted to reproduce their own economic model based on livestock and agricultural production in Greenland. For several centuries, these communities managed to maintain a precarious balance, but with the arrival of the so-called Little Ice Age, characterized by progressive climate cooling, their dependence on a fragile agricultural system became a critical factor.
In the same territories, the Inuit not only survived but continued to prosper, thanks to an economy based on the hunting of marine and terrestrial mammals, which allowed them to access energy resources regardless of soil fertility.
A third example comes from Siberia, where populations such as the Nenets and the Evenki have developed subsistence systems based on nomadic reindeer herding, a species capable of feeding on lichens and other plant forms that are not nutritious for humans.
In the last two examples we discover that for the survival of human beings an accurate and careful reading of the context that surrounds us is fundamental. In fact, the possibility of experiencing a place strictly depends on the ability of a people to adapt to it, and enter into dialogue with nature and its local specificities.
Imposing a life and economic model, as the Norrone colonies did, often leads to results opposite to those hoped for.
The contemporary crisis and new agricultures
If for millennia the inability to cultivate has mainly characterized the coldest regions of the planet, today climate change is producing phenomena that threaten soil fertility even in historically agricultural areas.
Among these, salinization represents one of the most critical challenges: the accumulation of salts in the soil – caused by the increase in temperatures, the reduction of precipitation and the intrusion of sea water in coastal areas – compromises the ability of plants to absorb water, making once fertile land progressively unproductive.
In response to this crisis, forms of agriculture are emerging that, for the first time in history, no longer depend directly on the soil. Hydroponic farming, for example, allows you to grow plants in liquid nutrient solutions, eliminating the need for soil and dramatically reducing water consumption.
Vertical agriculture, developed in closed and controlled environments, allows food to be produced on multiple levels, optimizing space and making cultivation possible even in urban or climatically hostile contexts.
Even more advanced systems, such as aeroponics, nourish plants through direct misting of the roots, further increasing efficiency.
These innovations mark a profound conceptual transformation: agriculture can be separated from the soil for the first time, paradoxically approaching the logic of societies that, by necessity, have never depended on it.
Rethinking survival
In the present, a time in which climate change is altering global agricultural balances, these experiences of cold societies take on a new meaning, showing us that agriculture is not the only way to sustain human life, but one of many possible strategies.
More than representing a distant past, they show a fundamental principle: human resilience does not depend on a single technology, but on the ability to continually reinvent one’s relationship with the environment.
