In Collapse, Jared Diamond argues that civilizations choose to collapse by neglecting their ecology. He spends most of his volume pointing to numerous examples of how civilizations collapsed because of ecological problems on Easter Island, Greenland, the southwest United States, and the Yucatan peninsula. He highlights the ecological role in conflicts in Rwanda, Haiti, Montana, China and Australia; he even provides a map which illustrates the nearly perfect overlap between the world’s most ecologically distressed areas, and its most politically distressed areas. Perhaps to shield himself from the charges of geograhpical determinism that came of his previous volume, Guns, Germs & Steel, Diamond includes a few examples of societies that faced ecological problems and “chose” to survive: in the New Guinea highlands, Tikopia, and the Tokugawa shogunate. Yet, it is precisely in these “counter-examples” that we see where Diamond’s model goes awry.

A while back I came to realize that people seem to want things to be complicated. Simple solutions are uniformly treated with skepticism, while complicated solutions are hailed as being salvation. And this routinely repeats itself despite comparative success rates. Simple and elegant solutions always work better than complicated and contrived solutions. Why? As you might expect, the answer is very simple.

One of the most basic concepts of the New Tribal Revolution is the realization of the Food Race. Essentially the Food Race is the name Daniel Quinn gave to the observation that every year civilization grows more food, which is inevitably followed by civilization being made of more people. In order to feed this excess of people we then grow more, which in turn causes an increase in the population. Daniel Quinn called this an “experiment run 10,000 times,” which might actually be an understatement. But suffice it to say that we’ve tried this quite a few times now with no variation on the result.

During any upheaval in a culture there are two general reactions. The first reaction is to hold ever tighter to the foundations of your beliefs. The second is to discard those beliefs and attempt to find new ones. The more massive this upheaval, the more extreme the reactions are.

Yesterday I got an unexpected day free. I was sent home shortly after having arrived at work. I wasn’t fired, just sent home. Since my daily commute would make me returning home foolish, especially when my scheduled after-work activities were taken into account, Miranda and I went to Cedarville State Forest. Cedarville State Forest is where the Piscataway used to winter. Apparently it was ideal due to a mild climate and good hunting grounds. It was a clear day, with but a single cloud in the sky. After a picnic we went on a hike along one of the trails. Figuring we had ample time and the day was certainly clear, with no sign of rain. The other hikers were mercifully few, it being so late in the year. All the trees had turned, with the obvious exception of the frequent Holly and Pine trees, and carpeted the ground in fresh leaves. The air was just sufficiently moist to make breathing a pleasure and the leaves crunch at just the right times. The day was unseasonably warm, but no insects took an interest in us. We saw frogs, horses, and Miranda believes she saw a wild cat. The trees were friendly, and wind often caressed us in a breeze.

Agriculture uses resources. This is about as simple as it gets. Agriculture is a method by which resources are transformed into food energy with which humans can sustain their lives. Ultimately there are two kinds of resources that agriculture uses in order to achieve this: solar energy and chemicals found in the earth. Both of these resources are ultimately quite limited. We have found new ways to increase the number of resources in the Earth, specifically by using oil, which has been discussed at length. However, solar energy is also limited. Indeed, on a yearly basis the amount of solar energy that arrives on Earth does not vary exceptionally, as such we can deal with solar energy as a constant energy input per year.

A particularly heated thread at IshCon has recently laid bear my fundamental disagreement with Matthew Kabwe, a.k.a. “Ghost.” It essentially comes down to one of the oldest philosophical questions humanity has ever considered: do we have free will, or is our fate predetermined? Matt cannot accept the inevitability of collapse, because that would entail, in his words, “an absolutist deterministic fatalistic binary zero-sum game with no room for the core of my faith, the third option, which is that walking away is possible and even a good idea.” This objection is sufficiently common to warrant a full explanation.

Invariably, the threat of our own civilization’s collapse is readily answered with the hope of technological progress. Progressivists deny that we face any systemic problems, only technical problems, with technical solutions. As we have seen in the previous theses, this is most certainly not the case, but the question remains: could these systemic problems be solved through the proper application of technology? Technophiliacs and techno-utopians often wax poetic for the prospects of our technological future. Science fiction like Star Trek often portrays this vision, where technology has solved all of our problems. But ultimately, such hopes are statements of belief, not fact–and a belief that is not very well-grounded in reality, at that.

I had ten staples removed from my head today.

They’d been there for almost two weeks. On November 20th my roommate Crystal Hoffman and I were attacked on the street. We were walking home from a nearby bar and had decided to take a shorter route through a somewhat more dangerous neighborhood, because the longer route leads through an area where there are no sidewalks.

The United States justifies possessing sufficient nuclear arms to obliterate all multi-cellular life on Earth several times as a deterrent. We have these weapons so that no one else would dare use them. Which is an interesting battle plan really:

North Korea: I use my +2 nuclear armament to destroy all of your allies in South Asia.

United States: I destroy the rest of the world.

All in a day’s work…or probably a lot less…say…two hours?