You are what you eat, right? It’s more than a simple cliché; it’s a biological truth. The foods you eat are broken down chemically into the building blocks of your body. You are literally made of food. Civilization makes us sick, largely because it feeds us foods we have no adaptation to. Our civilized bodies are made of alien food–bird food, milk for baby calves, but precious little human food. Foragers enjoy a far better life than we do, on many levels, but the transition from civilized to forager is not an easy one. How much of a benefit could we expect, even if all the stress and iniquity of our civilized lives remains constant, just from eating like a forager?

Collapse is inevitable. We know this; it’s a basic function of civilization. A civilization that doesn’t collapse is like a fire that doesn’t burn. As we saw in the Thirty Theses, the question is not if our civilization will collapse, but when. Steve Lagavulin’s “Timeline for Unfolding Crisis of Mankind” was one of the first attempts to piece together a timeline of the collapse we are expecting, and I could copy his caveats almost verbatim here. Predicting the future is frought with peril. Predicting specifically which factor will deliver the coup de grace is almost impossible. This exercise is possible only because there are so many factors converging in a very short time frame, that the probability of at least one of them exerting sufficient stress to end our civilization becomes very, very high.

The Stone Age is making a comeback. It doesn’t matter if we want it or not. Collapse is inevitable; civilization is unsustainable, and it must end soon, one way or another. The key to survival is to separate ourselves from our doomed civilization, to ensure that when it dies, we are no longer dependent on it. Critics of primitivism like to point out that the Stone Age way of life is only viable if some 99% of the world’s population dies off. They are right; but we face precisely that in the near future. There is nothing that can change that, but we can change how we react to that fact. As we saw in thesis #20, thesis #27, and thesis #30, collapse is not necessarily such a bad thing. It is far preferable to the alternative. Every human being will be faced with a choice: to die as civilized people, or to thrive in a new Stone Age. Our myths of “the primitive” cloud our understanding of what that means, and leads us into despair. It shouldn’t. We should not hear “Stone Age” and think of a life that is “nasty, brutish and short“; rather, we should understand that living in the Stone Age means being free for the first time in our lives.

Nuclear power has, ironically enough, become the new panacea touted by environmentalists and the Bush administration–two groups one rarely finds on the same side of any issue. We see nuclear power raised here routinely as the “solution” to Peak Oil, and a means of perpetuating our current level of complexity indefinitely. “Gunnix,” a regular commenter here, recently took us to task for our views on nuclear power, so this article is our response: why we don’t think that nuclear power will create any kind of significant solution to the problems our civilization faces in the near future.

No life evolves in a vacuum. Every animal, plant, fungi, and microbe in existence evolved with other animals, plants, fungus, and microbes around. It would seem likely that animals would evolve methods of interacting with other members of the community of life. Not simply in predator/prey relationships, but also in relationships between species that do not eat one another.

The details of these interactions vary as much as one would tend to think. However, the broad nature of these interactions is surprisingly specific. Any life form can and will compete with other member’s of the same species to the best of their ability. However, no species will use it’s energy to exterminate cross-species competition.

To date, we have discussed the impacts of collapse primarily as they affect the First World. The Worldwatch Institute’s “State of the World, 2006” report provides an excellent occasion to take stock of how these issues are likely to play out in some other locales. This year’s report takes a special focus on China and India, the two most populous nations on earth, accounting for more than 1/3 of the total human population over just 8.7% of the earth’s available land surface between them. The fate of China and India in a state of collapse is of far greater concern to the bulk of humanity than the fate of the privelaged First World. Unfortunately, their prospects are perhaps the most grim.

Political corruption is nothing new. Once upon a time, the Romans called it “patronage,” and not looking out for your friends once you got into power was a shameful lack of loyalty. That’s supposed to be one of the defining differences between “ancient” and “modern” states, but neither one was as pure as all that. In the Roman Empire, with dedication and a lot of luck, you could succeed on merit. And in the United States, you can still buy power for your friends. Just ask Jack Abramoff. The Abramoff scandal has caused a lot of turmoil in the Republican government, from the replacement of Tom DeLay by John Boehner as Speaker of the House, to today’s accusations that he met Bush “almost a dozen” times. The Abramoff scandal’s all about loopholes and fundraising and all kinds of sordid practices that legions of lawyers have spent their lives trying to obfuscate and confuse, so try to stay with me here–this is about to get incredibly complicated.

I can see the history books now. “The Cartoon That Was Heard Around the World.” And everyone thought that an assassination, or other physically violent act, would start World War 3.

For those of us who already live in caves, good on you mate, this is what has been happening:

A Danish newspaper printed a cartoon depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammed as a suicide bomber. Despite their earlier editorial decisions. Muslims world wide are not pleased. Danish goods are being boycotted in Muslim countries. Several have died in protests and riots, and many are calling for acts of violence involving deaths of certain cartoonists. Other European papers have reprinted the cartoons in question claiming that they do so in support of “freedom of the press.” Iran is holding a contest of holocaust cartoons in response.

The United States, United Kingdom, Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan all have nuclear weapons. Many assume that Israel has nuclear weapons, but this remains unconfirmed. North Korea may also have them, and Iran’s bid is of great concern to many world governments.

Why is this a concern? Because there is the fear that they may use them. Or, more specifically, that it is considerably harder to exert force on a nuclear power. If Iran becomes a nuclear power they must be treated with the same respect as other nuclear powers, a respect born of fear.

It’s been an unseasonably warm winter so far, including the warmest January on record. According to NOAA’s report, this past month saw “an average temperature of 39.5 degrees F, which is 8.5 degrees F (4.7 degrees C) above the 1895-2005 mean of 31.0 degrees F.” Nor is this merely a stateside phenomenon; the Aussies are reporting the same thing down under. At the same time, Europeans are dying from the cold. The reasons for such enormous variability, from record highs to lethal cold, is not exactly mysterious–even a layman like myself was able to predict Europe’s temperatures, back in September. Europe’s lethal cold and last year’s hurricanes are both part of the same phenomenon: the extinction of the Gulf Stream. Even that is a mere sideshow to the much bigger problem of global warming.