And… to be quite frank, sometimes a tree branch dies and needs to be cut off for the health of the tree…

But agreed with jhereg… if you want to use the tree analogy, we’re really talking about a pretty small side branch… that is killing the large, robust, main branch that is humanity… and threatening the rest of the tree besides…

Janene

I see what you’re saying, but I’m not sure that we, as a species, have changed enough to make equating the move back to a H/G way of life with lopping off an ‘evolutional’ branch entirely reasonable.

I [b]think[/b] I avoided a run-on sentence there….

Staying with this tree analogy, your proposal is to lop off the entire branch of our societal evolution that represents ‘civilisation’, and start evolving again from the ancestor branch of ‘hunter-gatherers’. I see the possibility that this ‘civilisation’ branch could continue to somewhere good, and we just need to prune a bit.

Marcus

if there is *any* perceived value in metals, regardless of use (jewelry, etc), then you immediately have a problem with H-G lifestyle. The people who can make metal goods will be able to trade those metal goods for food, and will specialise in making those goods…division of labour -> private property -> hierarchy -> war -> slavery, all over again

I think there is an essential problem with this: namely, without a reliable means of producing a surplus, there is not enough food to support such specialists. Even if metals are valued for tools, hunter-gatherers cannot produce a reliable surplus. Their existence is far too moment-to-moment, and they cannot very easily store food to trade to specialists.

Apocolyptic visions have been with us for as long as history records, but somehow we’ve always managed to avoid the actual downfall.

Untrue on both counts. Apocalyptic visions date back reliably to the Second Temple period 2,000 years ago, so they’ve been around only ²/₅ as long as there have been historical records. During that time, several apocalyptic collapses have been recorded. All civilizations collapse, and when seen in its proper perspective, it’s easy to see what a rare anomoly civilization is. We can hardly expect it to endure—particularly when it is fundamentally built to not endure.

We need to evolve upwards, not collapse downwards, in my opinion.

That implies that evolution is a straight line we move along.

A few points I’d like to make, having done some living history and experimented with pre-industrial technology:

- you can smelt with charcoal. I have done this, and it’s perfectly possible, if a little tricky the first few times. Taking rusted hunks of iron or steel from a landfill in 10,000 years and producing workable iron is perfectly possible using bronze-age tools. Charcoal will reach the necessary temperatures for smelting and working iron (the Romans used it almost exclusively for all their iron-working in Britain)

- you can make a workable plough from copper or bronze, and given the abundant amounts of copper and tin in our landfills, this shouldn’t be a problem at all. Once you’ve got bronze, getting to the Iron Age is possible

- if there is *any* perceived value in metals, regardless of use (jewelry, etc), then you immediately have a problem with H-G lifestyle. The people who can make metal goods will be able to trade those metal goods for food, and will specialise in making those goods…division of labour -> private property -> hierarchy -> war -> slavery, all over again But then, I’m a pessimist about this stuff.

- if we assume that metal is impossible, then there are several alternatives to provide the tensile strength for a plough. Ceramics or treated wood, for example. Pre-industrial civilisations have proven extremely good at finding ingenious (and very complex) solutions to problems. The chemical process of extracting a usable dye from the woad plant would stun a modern chemist, but dark-age peoples managed it with no understanding of chemistry and only using commonly available ‘chemicals’.

I’m right with you that living as a hunter-gatherer would be a much more viable and satisfying way of life, and that humans evolved to live at a tribal or band level of organisation, which we feel much more comfortable at. I’ll work at finding ways to do this without requiring the apocolyptic vision that you have, however. Apocolyptic visions have been with us for as long as history records, but somehow we’ve always managed to avoid the actual downfall. People have died in their countless billions, yes, and whole civilisations have collapsed and died, but we have always managed to recover and carry on. We need to evolve upwards, not collapse downwards, in my opinion.

Keep up the good work, we need this.

Marcus

Also, they had a pet ocelot. That was just freaking adorable.

The AZTEC INDIANS of North and Central America are shaving with razors made from the volcanic glass obsidian.

I got that from this interesting website.