Vessels

Public domain

Before people worked in offices in the city, all of humanity was tied to the land. Once the beasts of burden were harnessed, humanity started to escape the limits of their own frailty. Across four millennia; the horse pulled the cart, the ox ploughed the field, and the donkey carried a messiah or two. The cereal crops harvested by these agricultural humans could both sustain the farmers and their animals. The humans ate the grain and the animals (both the working ones, and the unemployed ones bred for meat) ate the stalk.
And so it continued through the rise and fall of Rome, Shakespeare's lost weekends, all the way up until roughly 1910. The increasingly popular automobile was now speeding past startled horses, fuelled by the black gold. Unfortunately the hare had quite an appetite and it's food supply took a few million years to grow. Also, it's hard to find, far underground and non-renewable.
So we find ourselves in the modern day, plodding along, mostly stuck at red lights, wondering how we'll feed little Tin Lizzy. As if we've come full circle in 100 years, we're beginning to feed our transport. But unlike splitting the cereal between man and beast, we've dedicated entire fields solely to fuelling the automobile, whilst pushing human-grade crops to the side. The key feature of pre-industrial society is that it was sustainable. That does not mean zero-growth. It means gradual increase that does not entail deforestation, desertification, landslides and flooding. You can only flex the planet so much before it snaps.

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