The Fall of Man

At the beginning of Eisenberg's The Ecology of Eden, he describes the fall of man as not an event that was over in an instant, but rather the decline of our connections with nature. He opens his book in this way, drawing the reader in and making them question their own relationships and how humanity has gotten to the point that it has. He brings up our alliance with grasses, our consumption of the long-dead, and our destruction of the soil as evidence, and uses this as the base of his argument as he progresses through the book.

When I first read this opening paragraph, I did not think much of it. For someone not particularly verse in Christian mythology, it seemed like something rather unremarkable to my own  worldview. However, after having read through the entire book, this opening line becomes much more thought-provoking. By comparing the fall of humanity, what Christianity seeks to redeem itself from inherently, he makes many of his readers think about just how different human life is now from what it would have been before agriculture, or even before the industrial revolution. He primes readers for thinking about what is to come, and I think that this metaphor is incredibly powerful for just that reason, tying in the earth to religion before the two have even been fully defined.