Pianka, Mims, Misanthropy & Genocide
by Jason GodeskyAn interesting exchange developed over the weekend: first, “Meeting Dr. Doom,” published Friday by The Citizen Scientist, related Forrest M. Mims III’s account of a speech by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, recipient of the 2006 Distinguished Scientist award from the Texas Academy of Science (PDF)–and apparently much beloved by his students–at the 109th meeting of the Texas Academy of Science at Lamar University in Beaumont, 2-5 March 2006. In the speech, according to Mims, Pianka advocated killing 90% or more of the current human population–”His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world’s population is airborne Ebola (Ebola Reston), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs.”
According to Mims:
When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn’t merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause.
Of course, an actual transcript of Pianka’s remarks hasn’t surfaced. My mother likes to recount the tale of her college course, where her fellow students were appalled by Swift’s Modest Proposal, and condemned him as a horrible villain. Were Pianka’s comments similarly satirical, missed by Mims but not by the applauding audience? Or has Mims simply taken a very different interpretation of Pianka’s remarks from Pianka and everyone else?
The controversy deepens as we take a closer look at Mims himself. The Citizen Scientists, the publication that released this account, is itself edited by Mims, and begins with a disclaimer. P.Z. Myers has more at Pharyngula, with “Pianka and Mims“:
Forrest Mims is not a credible source. He is a disgruntled creationist with a serious dislike of the science establishment, who has been carping for years about it. He has an overt bias and it is in his self-interest to play up accusations of ‘evil’ among scientists. They rejected him, after all, so they must be bad…and here’s proof!
More damningly, Myers did find another account of Pianka’s speech–sans genocidal plans. In short, it looks more and more like Mims’ account is, at best, misinterpreting Pianka’s intended meaning.
But what of the question itself–a genocidal “cleaning” of 90% of the human population, to bring us into line with ecological reality? I’ve been accused of the same madness, by the so-called “Peak Oil Optimist,” Rob McMillin, who, in his critique of my article, “The Opposite of Malthus.”
Your description of peak oil as an inevitable condition requiring the death millions is why I have such contempt for those arguments — and macabre ghouls like you, sir. “Accepting the inevitable, however, is a far cry from the actual commission of murder”? Bullshit! The tort law calls this same willful negligence. Quite frankly, people such as yourself plead they only hope to explain the inevitability of that future, when what they actually hope to do is to disengage the real possibility of saving lives — thus proving themselves right (”Being able to grow more food just means we’ll have more people consuming an even larger percentage of the earth’s resources”). What I said about cheering on the iceberg just to prove your own correctness still applies. If you can’t see it, too bad on you. My offer still stands; you think we’re all gonna die? Come out shooting, motherfucker, and we’ll see just who wins that engagement.
This accusation is usually the centerpiece of arguments against primitivism, such as “Civilization, Primitivism & Anarchism,” and “The Poverty of Primitivism.” I’ve been compared to Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and the Devil more times than I can count, because I’ve continued to espouse that humans are not exempt from biological laws–including carrying capacity, and overshoot. Die-off became inevitable the very first time we responded to a famine by increasing the intensity of our agriculture; ever since then, we’ve only been postponing it, by making the die-off that much more horrific when it finally occurs.
When the Pianka controversy hit MetaFilter, it did so with the rationale, “to save the planet.” I was not the only one reminded of George Carlin’s routine:
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles…hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages…And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet…the planet…the planet isn’t going anywhere. WE ARE!
We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
Environmentalists are often typified as “misanthropic” because, we’re told, they hold animals and trees in higher esteem than their own species. What needs to be understood is that this is not an either/or situation. A healthy ecology is not simply a luxury to be preferred only by misanthropes–it is essential to human life. Any society that lives at the expense of its ecology cuts its own foundation out from underneath itself. In the end, environmentalism doesn’t make sense as an attempt to “save the earth”–it only makes sense as an attempt to save the human species. Environmentalists aren’t the misanthropes–it’s everyone else!
To prefer businesses, economies, or industry to ecology is to prefer monetary wealth to human life. Environmentalists prefer the health and welafe of the human species; everyone who isn’t an environmentalist prefer something else above human life and happiness. What could be more misanthropic than that?
So we come to the essential, inescapable puzzle we now find ourselves in. We’ve overshot our carrying capacity, and the foundation of our society is crumbling. We face imminent and total collapse. Billions will die. When it’s done, if only 90% of the current population is killed off, we might count ourselves lucky.
Yet it is far beyond the ability of anyone to engineer that. Catastrophe on such a scale cannot be planned and implemented; it can only happen on its own, as a response to the terrible choices we have made. In 1925, Alfred Lotka wrote:
The human species, considered in broad perspective, as a unit including its economic and industrial accessories, has swiftly and radically changed its character during the epoch in which our life has been laid. In this sense we are far removed from equilibrium — a fact that is of the highest practical significance, since it implies that a period of adjustment to equilibrium conditions lies before us, and he would be an extreme optimist who should expect that such adjustment can be reached without labor and travail. … While such sudden decline might, from a detached standpoint, appear as in accord with the eternal equities, since previous gains would in cold terms balance the losses, yet it would be felt as a superlative catastrophe. Our descendants, if such as this should be their fate, will see poor compensation for their ills and in fact that we did live in abundance and luxury.
I once read of a friend of Darwin’s who sought to build an ethical system based on the principle of evolution by natural selection. His conclusion was that, though evolution may be inevitable, it is nonetheless a monstrous process, and one may even go so far as to decide what is “good” insofar as it hinders that process, and “bad” insofar as it helps it along. Of course, our understanding of evolution has advanced since those days, and we now know that it typically operates in a far less, well, “Darwinian” fashion, but we might say the same of collapse.
In the end, nothing is created or destroyed–it only changes form. To gain, something of equal value must be lost. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Equilibrium–homeostasis–must always be restored. That which is not sustainable, perishes. We left equilibrium behind a long, long time ago; returning to equilibrium is as inevitable as it is horrific. Preparing for it is the best we can do, the most we can do to preserve as much human life as possible. All the same, helping it along is a thought almost too horrific to countenance.
Well, shit.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 April 2006 @ 4:24 PM
jason -
here’s another account that shows pianka’s meaning in his speech may have been skewed:
(i found it on the cac-st message board)
http://rense.com/general70/massdeath.htm
Comment by post_civH/G — 3 April 2006 @ 8:05 PM
Hi Jason
The “sans genocidal plans” account contains this:
“He’s a radical thinker, that one! I mean, he’s basically advocating for the death of all but 10% of the current population!”
Mims isn’t the only one who thought he heard Dr. Pianka advocate mass killings.
Comment by Krauze — 4 April 2006 @ 2:08 AM
Having been accused of such things myself, I’m not so quick to condemn Pianka. There’s a big difference between recognizing the inevitability of die-off, and engineering it yourself. At least ebola is quick–we may prefer it before all is done. So, I don’t see “advocating for the death of all but 10% of the current population” as the same as “mass killings.” Knowing that die-off is going to occur, and that in the long-run it’s probably a good thing, is something you could say of me, too. Implementing a genocide is quite another thing entirely.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 9:03 AM
I agree whole-heartedly about your description of what is truly “misanthropic”. Modern society continue to cut away at its own ability to survive & thrive–for short term effect.
Environmentalist’s except for perhaps a fringe who truly loathe humanity to the degree that they place mtythic ideas upon how wonderful animals & trees are compared to humans. Most folks who believe in Environmentalism do it for self-serving purposes. Ultimately humans will reap what they sow in terms of toxins, pollution, unsustainable environments etc.
But in the mean time I can buy any pre-packaged food you can think of, and buy an abundance of plastic toys…Since being a good consumer pretty much directly impacts the environment negatively, simplification of lifestyle could be viewed as an ethical imperative, not only one geared towards survival.
Comment by bubba — 4 April 2006 @ 10:17 AM
This must be where the GOP got their post 9/11 rhetoric. If you don’t worship a specific set of environmentally destructive behaviors centered around high-tech luxury and mass consumption then you must hate humanity, just like if you don’t worship a specific set of reactionary policies then you must hate America.
Comment by scruff — 4 April 2006 @ 1:21 PM
Environmentalists do not have the best interests of others at heart: they just want to tell others what to do. Environmentalism always involves coercion. Free enterprise involves choice. That is why I am a market-anarchist (anarcho-capitalist) and consider environmentalists usually some sort of fascist.
If you want to preserve nature, buy it. Put your money where your mouth is, instead of relying on gov’t guns and thugs with badges.
Comment by Mark — 4 April 2006 @ 2:55 PM
You’re painting with a mighty broad brush there, Mark. There are some environmentalists who want to preserve the environment through regulation. The environmentalists you’ll find here, though, don’t think regulation is very effective at accomplishing anything, and under no circumstances should be entrusted with something as vital as our ecology. Our ecological crises are systemic consequences of the system we live in; the only solution possible is to change the system itself.
Of course, I’m not entirely sure which one involves greater coercion: government regulation, or the much-vaunted “free enterprise.” Both are horrible forms of dictatorship. “Buying” nature simply buys into the corporate line. Capitalists do not have the best interests of others at heart: they just want to tell others what to do. Capitalism always involves coercion. Put your money where your mouth is, instead of relying on corporate guns and thugs with financial backing.
(Easy game to play, isn’t it?)
As a final word, you’re simply abusing the word “fascism” with a statement as silly as to “consider environmentalists usually some sort of fascist.” If you think they’re authoritarian, fine, say so, but fascist? “Fascist” isn’t just some catch-all for any authoritarian scheme, it’s quite specific. You wouldn’t call Stalin a “fascist,” would you? So, which is the “Master Race” for environmentalism? Who is the singular, unquestionable Leader of environmentalism? Fascism denotes a suspicion of science and intellectuals; environmentalism embraces them. Fascism is centered around the notion of national identity; environmentalism is most often found in conjunction with ideas to eliminate notions of national identity. Fascist regimes pursue a policy of continual war; environmentalism is most often connected with peace groups. I mean really, it’s just an absurd comparison to make.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 3:08 PM
Pianka responds. See also, The Panda’s Thumb, “Forrest Mims: ‘crazy kook,’ says Pianka,” Pharyngula, “Texas Academy of Science getting death threats over Pianka.” Added bonus, from The Guardian, “Silence in Class.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 3:35 PM
In as much as we don’t know *exactly* how things are going to go down, there are myriad ways to look at the problem. In a “pure thought” world, it isn’t difficult (for me) to look at the situation and see that mankind (as things now stand) has the capacity to turn the planet into a sterile place unable to support life and therefore, that the danger (mankind) ought to be eliminated for a world of life to survive.
The way that things are going, it doesn’t look as though anyone will be put on the spot to make such a moral judgment though… we’re self-destructing in a way that suggests that a very subtle under-conscious, unifying communicative thought is taking place to bring about the needed change! Horrible and beautiful at the same time (in a “pure thought” way).
Without being too over-simplistic, I have to say that I find the overall thrust of thought here somewhat confusing. The notion that survivors of the coming collapse of civilization should re-adapt into pre-historic life patterns seems more romantic than practical (and depends on the ratios of survivors to wildlife being right). But this is just another example of the greatest of the many problems that face us, that being the fact that we don’t know precisely how things will go. Each possibility requires a different response and the possibilities are all grey areas, given that there are so many perceivable variables to apply to one’s calculations (and what of those that we don’t recognize?).
It is still possible, for the moment, to buy your family a lifetime’s worth of basic foods. I suspect that most of us here are fairly convinced that the world is going to fall down around us in a rather short time but…… how many of us are convinced enough to gamble all of our worldly goods on our perceptions about the future? How many of us are willing to abandon the last luxuries of our current lifestyles in order to become fully immersed in our strategy as a way of gaining advantage in this coming collapse?
As we all know (and wrestle with), the *way* that things play out will be crucial to our choice of personal strategies. Will it play out slowly, incrementally, with organized societal responses of adaptation over our life-spans and more? Will another unprovoked war throw the delicate world balance so out of whack that radical changes end up taking place at breakneck pace, sending city dwellers on life-or-death escapes into the wilderness, with an accompanying discarding of the law and an overnight acceptance of jungle law?
Few of us (if any) have unlimited resources, and being so, one can’t stock up stores to have the proper reply to any and all vexations that the future might bring. We’re left in a position of constant compromise, juggling how much sleep we need (as the clock ticks away not only the seconds of our lives but also counts down to that unknown, the moment of collapse) in regard to absorbing information that we will carry with us, regardless of how much we can carry on our backs.
Does it make sense to invest in real estate when the near future could make all titles of ownership a joke worthy of a bitter laugh? How much ammunition should we put away? How many fellow humans would we be willing to put a bullet into in the defense of our property? How many in defense of our family? Is there a number that becomes too many, and if so, why? I’ve heard it said here that foragers will be left alone by marauders as they will carry nothing of worth…..is what we carry the only “worth” that we have? What about sexual value? What about the entertainment value that those hopelessly maddened by jungle law will get from the screams of a captive, who is, after all, *something* that they have power over in a mad world? Never underestimate the capacity of humans with regards to sadism, especially when the world they’ve known is pulled out from under them.
As you can see, the deeper down this hole you go, the darker it gets. Perhaps, as we try to look TRUTH in the face (it’s always been difficult, don’t feel too bad about your sense of helplessness with regard to it), we should cultivate a sense of *possibilities*. I came across a wonderful, poignant book recently, called “Our Vanishing Landscape”, written by Eric Sloane in the mid-1950’s. It concerned the gradual loss of what 19th century America had been about, the canals that were built to transport goods, the wind/water mills that produced a bewildering array of goods, the incredibly subtle intelligence that went into the usage of technology during that time. This was a pre-petrol era that used brainpower instead of oil to power civilization. We still have records of how these things were done, we *could* re-absorb the knowledge and be an even more vital world than we are now. It’s all a matter of how greedy we are on a mega-scale, and how our representatives react to crisis.
A regular thread woven through the thoughts on this site is one communicating a lack of faith in the potential of agriculture. I still haven’t ascertained if this is thoughtful or willful. I, for one, see it, in an adaptive way, as being our savior in the future. Adaptation (to whatever our fate is going to be) requires us to stretch our capacity for “clever”. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture gardens sprouting up everywhere, on stepped rooftops, in some new natural hydroponic, suspended system that creates space where we thought we had none, on the decks of thousands of abandoned oil tankers, down the walls of tenement buildings, on pergolas high above streets, on shade casting netting, within the branches of tall trees and so on and on and on.
My instincts tell me that, one way or another, there will be a die-off. There will be humans that are too calcified for change who will fall to the wayside or bring about their own downfall trying to bend the world to an archaic vision. There will be political monsters who will violently exploit the fears of those who cast themselves under their protection. There will be upheaval upon upheaval until those remaining think that they simply can’t bear any more of it. I also sense that eventually (in my lifetime?) things will grow quiet, save for the music of nature. Those remaining will try and fail, try and succeed and will winnow the worthy from the worthless. In doing so, they will (I think) rediscover the 19th Century, remembering that wind and water and gravity can be put to work. People will invest in their minds, becoming walking references about the subjects that they’ve found useful. The debris of our current civilization will give them a step-up to the technology of the 19th Century, with no real need for petroleum. They’ll fight the weather we created (creating fortress homes for several hundred years) but they’ll live through it and will, hopefully, learn from our mistakes.
Anyway, that’s a little slice of how I see it. Actual truths and the playing out of history may vary from the proceeding.
Comment by Jim K. — 4 April 2006 @ 8:14 PM
Well said on capitalism, Jason. It is clear to me that it has been an engine of much of the environmental destruction. A system based on cooperation and sharing would not need all kinds of regulations to prevent it from destroying the planet. I don’t want to regulate anyone, but I want to share the fruits of my labor with everyone except those who claim to “own” the means of production.
Comment by Ryvr — 4 April 2006 @ 8:23 PM
Anyone who travels or at least reads knows that socialist countries have the most environmental damage. I can cite many examples, but it shouldn’t be needed. Opponents of the free market are out of touch with reality and history.
Comment by Mark — 4 April 2006 @ 9:06 PM
Sterile?
If nothing else, there is absolutely nothing humans can do against bacteria, viruses, single-celled organisms or extremophiles.
More importantly, humans exist at one of the highest trophic levels. Anything that posed that much of a danger to life on earth would wipe us out long before it really got underway. If a man is standing at the top of a large tower, and smashing the bricks beneath him, he’s going to fall to his own death well before he’s succeeded in knocking down the whole tower.
Well, historical life patterns never worked. The only life patterns we’ve ever tried that worked have been the pre-historic ones, and now we’ve pushed it along to crisis levels, where either you go back to the way that worked for millions of years, or you die. Once that’s over, the “romantics” will be the only ones left.
We’ve got at least four here. We call ourselves, “the Tribe of Anthropik.” Pleased to meet you.
Ever play StarCraft? Know what it means to “turtle”? Hint: it’s not usually a winning strategy….
You sound like you’ve watched one too many of those old movies from the ’30s. There’s a Romantic in here, but I don’t think it’s me. Yes, people can be plenty sadistic, but sadism is never the equal of hunger. We’re talking about hungry, desperate people. Do you attack some people you heard about living in the woods, try to hunt them down on their own turf, in land they know like their own soul, whose powers of perception and stealth have been honed by their way of life to the nigh-mystical, just to rape them? Or do you crack a rock over the head of someone from the rival gang and eat him?
Sadism is a past-time for the well-fed–it’s a simple question of Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs–and we’re not talking about the well-fed here.
I don’t see a possibility in the scenario you describe. It contradicts known principles of human psychology. A possibility, above all else, must be possible–and in order for your possibility to become possible, humans must act in a way they’ve never acted before (even though they’ve experienced such events in the past). That is not something I think is terribly likely.
Pre-petroleum, yes, but not pre-agriculture. We can never go back to that, because the first time we did that, we killed the soil. We were only able to continue farming thanks to the petroleum. Now that’s going. There’s nothing left to farm.
The nature of agriculture is to spurn adaptation, to defy it. It is not adaptive; it is the opposite of adaptive. It is the refusal to adapt. Of course, such a thing can never last very long. The reason we don’t believe agriculture can continue doesn’t have anything to do with our desires–I began as a devout Roman Catholic who wanted to prove this all wrong–but an understanding that agriculture doesn’t happen just because we want it to. There are prerequisites–prerequisites that are no longer met.
I can imagine myself flying unaided through the air, or myself with bat-like, demonic wings. That doesn’t mean it’s realistic. Imagining gardens is one thing; planting them quite another; making them sufficient to feed an urban population another thing yet.
To be fair, exactly the same is true of every other agricultural economy. Capitalism in and of itself is probably not so bad. Trade, truly free and fair trade, between two consenting, uncoerced parties, can be a good thing. But that’s not what we have–we’ve never had that. We never will, so long as it remains in an agricultural context. It’s not capitalism that’s so destructive, nearly so much as agriculture.
As are its proponents.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 10:11 PM
Anyone who travels or at least reads knows that socialist countries have the most environmental damage.
so the only possiblies are either capitialism or socialism? booorrrrrrrring. pretty ideological, id say. it’s like a republican saying: “If we didnt have democracy, we’d have fascism.” even though, both forms of government are esstientally authoritarian and demeaning.
Comment by Scott — 4 April 2006 @ 10:34 PM
Good point Scott. I no longer view a large-scale socialism or communism as either feasible or desirable, though perhaps a little less nauseating to me than capitalism.
Mostly, I think we will do well with limited sized tribes operating on flexible, cooperative, and sharing trade and work schemes. I just think it is important to withhold support from those who would advocate for economic competition or private ownership of means of production. Those would result in attempts to reassemble complexity and create pain. Let’s not do it again. No more capitalist owners after the collapse!
Comment by Ryvr — 4 April 2006 @ 11:01 PM
“Sterile?
If nothing else, there is absolutely nothing humans can do against bacteria, viruses, single-celled organisms or extremophiles”.
Nothing? What if what we’ve done/are doing to the environment destroyed the atmosphere, started a chain reaction that killed all ocean life, all land dwellers, all vegetation, and unfiltered UV light literally sterilized the surface of the Earth? Yes, you might see the survival of some underground life (we’re not sure of that, the reaction *could* reach underground with the extrapolation of catastrophic variables) but complex forms may have been generated by extra-planetary incoming “seeds” (Mars maybe?) that could be past their prime, as it were…given the age of the planets and other unknowns. I suspect that such a scenario is unlikely but then again, we’ve never done this to a planet before (that we know of) and don’t have any comparative information to base such a conclusion on. So, we have to assume that one possibility is that we *are* capable of destroying all life on the planet.
“More importantly, humans exist at one of the highest trophic levels. Anything that posed that much of a danger to life on earth would wipe us out long before it really got underway”.
Given that we don’t really know what we’ve started (by way of unbalancing Earth systems) we can’t really make the assertion you seem so confident of. We may have initiated something that will spin out of control, yes, killing us first but perhaps sucking the whole thing down a horrible vortex. We don’t have enough information yet or the needed smarts to analyze what we see happening now.
” how many of us are convinced enough to gamble all of our worldly goods on our perceptions about the future?
We’ve got at least four here”.
Perhaps you can point me to your gamble of all of your worldly goods? I’m new here and I’d find that quite interesting.
“Ever play StarCraft? Know what it means to “turtle”? Hint: it’s not usually a winning strategy….”
No, I’m not familiar with it. Needless to say, we’re not playing “StarCraft” here and what strategies are successful in a particular game may not be successful in the coming real-world crisis. I gather that you’re implying that gathering resources as an aid to surviving the collapse is pointless. As I tried to say before, we don’t know how this will play out and therefore we don’t have a way of establishing a foolproof strategy. It could be that a scenario will arise that will require one to have a simple antibiotic on hand and that simple thing could allow one to bypass the common death of 90% of the humans on the planet. As you know, huge numbers of American Indians, absolute masters of the primitive arts, were felled due to exposure to disease that settlers were immune to. What is your suggestion in a case like this?
“Yes, people can be plenty sadistic, but sadism is never the equal of hunger”.
I have a great deal of respect for much of your thinking but you appear to be missing some important elements of human behavior. Hunger is misery and misery looks for something to latch onto. When people are desperately unhappy they sometimes seek to make someone else more unhappy than they are. I know this because I’ve seen profoundly awful examples of it. If you’ve concluded that those who seek to “make their living” by taking what they need from others will leave foragers unmolested because they (the thieves) are hungry, you’ve made a critical error in judgment. I’ve seen it with my own eyes in Africa and I’m convinced that this is a universally human attribute, not confined to Africans alone.
“I don’t see a possibility in the scenario you describe. It contradicts known principles of human psychology”.
I’m sorry, but I’m not clear on your point here. Elaborate?
“Pre-petroleum, yes, but not pre-agriculture. We can never go back to that, because the first time we did that, we killed the soil”
Have you ever planted anything? Have you read (if not practiced) anything about Permaculture or similar ideas? I ask because you seem so convinced of yourself here and my own observations are completely at odds with yours. Many gardeners have proven that poor land can be reclaimed and made fertile again and have documented it thoroughly. I can only assume that you’re referring to corporate mega-farms that are reliant on the petrochemical support line as small scale operations are perfectly capable of sustainable organic farming.
“The nature of agriculture is to spurn adaptation, to defy it. It is not adaptive; it is the opposite of adaptive. It is the refusal to adapt”.
Look, I’m clearly missing some aspect of your philosophical approach here that will probably require archival reading. I am, however, a little stunned by the logic of this. You see, agriculture is simply an extension of a natural process. An oak drops acorns as an evolution developed strategy. The “aim” of the oak (if it can be put that way) is the hope that the acorn will be covered with enough earth to provide adequate conditions for the initial sprouting, growth and genetic continuation. Farmers simply piggyback onto this process, for their own benefit and ultimately, the genetic “aims” of the plants being farmed. One only has to observe the fantastic array of plant reproductive strategies to realize that your claim that agriculture is a refusal to adapt to see how wrongheaded that thought is. Sustainable farming/gardening is the very model of adaptation as it follows the very path of nature. Forest gardening is yet another permutation of the same process and is utilized by many “primitives” who are less concerned with the world fitting into their preconceived conceptual framework than you seem to be. When you get right down to it, who’s being less adaptive, you or them?
“Imagining gardens is one thing; planting them quite another; making them sufficient to feed an urban population another thing yet”.
True enough, yet given the likely parameters of a future population, I think (in a *very* realistic way) that it’s easily doable. It was doable in the past and we’ve developed systems that are vastly superior to archaic models. Medieval farmers managed to keep the populations alive with productivity that is dwarfed by modern sustainable methods. They also grew a fraction of today’s available plants, meaning that the nutritional productivity available today is also head and shoulders above that that managed to keep our ancestors alive. It’s anything but unrealistic to picture a future with a successful non-petroleum based system of agriculture. If survivors did nothing but gather leaves to extract protein from them, they would be involved in an survivable system of agriculture. I can only assume (at this point) that our differences concerning this are more semantic that reality based.
Comment by Jim K. — 5 April 2006 @ 5:05 AM
Hey –
What you are missing is quite simple… Jason is using the Anthropological definition of agriculture… whereas all of the counterpoints you are offering are technically defined as ‘horticulture’.
The difference between the two is fundamentally the benefit/cost ratio. Agriculture is ‘beyond the point of diminishing returns, whereas horticulture is below that.
Also, just a quick point, ‘organic farming’ CAN be sustainable if it is using permaculture style principles. However, MOST organic farming today is, in fact, ‘agriculture’ as practiced before petroculture. That is NOT sustainable, it is simply a little bit slower to break down. Note that the ‘dustbowl’ was created by ‘organic farming’ as was the desert that was once the fertile crescent.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 5 April 2006 @ 8:48 AM
Interesting comments, ultimately I have become keenly interested in moving beyond the theatre of ideas/imagined (be they rationale or not) predictions for the near future.
I think its clear that most believe a collapse will occur, and likely within the next 6-14years (depending on what areas you fixate on when making your prediction, also dependent upon your view of humans/civilizations ability to adapt quick enough to stave off–a quick collapse scenario).
Ultimately there will be groups that will survive a post-collapse scenario with most of the methods listed in the archives here. The issue is not what may work in isolated/special cases–but what is likely the most adaptable & realistically manageable for most. Certainly if you have access to large sums of money, and begin preparing now–you could probably create a fortress, store up enough food to get your through the next 20years no problem. But the vast majority of folks don’t have the money this requires.
Some folks will likely survive in isolated villages, maybe even a small number of towns that begin preparing now, might make it. Some gov’t factions may survive in some form, bunkers etc? Who knows, the main point is that hunter-foraging is the most adaptable form of human survival.
I for one plan to do the following.
1. Store some food, ideally enough to have small group survive for 1year. Use this to supplement horticulture, hunting, or during a stressful time period where violence, desperation will set in.
2. Learn & practice some basic foraging skills, learn local food products & what Not to eat!
3. Continue to hunt as available to provide extra protein for diet.
4. Gather family/friends that are willing to sacrifice material pursuits–to invest in simple technology.
5. Continue to cut away at debt, expenses, and “lifestyle” by simplifying hobbies & consumer habits (practicing frugality).
6. Spend time staying physically healthy through physical training & real life activities (gardening, hunting, hiking etc).
7. Carpe the Diem, enjoy the day, and plan for the future, without getting bogged down into a depression–dwelling overly much on the negative aspects of the destruction of the ecosystems, wars, disease, etc. Since today is all I have for sure, and the future is uncertain.
Comment by bubba — 5 April 2006 @ 9:24 AM
That’d do it, but we’re not doing anything like that. The atmosphere has very powerful feedback systems that work against that, and there’s really nothing humans are even capable of doing that could achieve such a result. From a fantastic premise, you’ve derived a fantastic conclusion. Not unexpected, but still not a possbility. When your premise starts with, “What if X,” where X also is not a possibility, then you’re talking about an argument that may be sound, but it is not valid.
Sure we do. The earth is a self-regulating system, nigh an organism if we go with Lovelock’s “Gaia Hypothesis,” that has many negative feedback loops to check for such imbalances. The earth moves between equilibrium states, but it always brings conditions back under control. Processes on earth, as a rule, do not escalate–they extinguish. To escalate, you need some driver (like humans) pushing it along, against the earth’s own feedback systems. Eliminate the driver, and those feedback systems become dominant, moving everything back into balance. My confidence is based on nothing more than a sound understanding of ecology; your alarm is coming from pure fantasy.
We’re currently in training, learning how to live the forager life. Once the training is complete, we sell everything, get some land, and move off into the woods.
Not usually, but in this case, it is. See, when you “turtle,” you have a resource base limited to what you have locked away, whereas everyone else has access to the full resources of their environment. That means you will always have fewer resources than everyone else. That means that while they have renewable resources, you are dependent on a dwindling supply. That’s why “turtling” simply postpones inevitable defeat.
Everyone who digs out a bunker digs out his own grave, in my opinion. Bunkers aren’t terribly helpful. Even a well-stocked bunker can only hold so much, and it will never be equal to those who spend that time learning how to hunt and gather their own food, how to build their own tools, etc. Your tools will break down; your food will run out. Then what will you do?
The reason “turtling” always fails in StarCraft doesn’t have to do with a game–it has to do with the essential nature of the strategy itself, and the reason why all this talk of “bunkers” is as misguided as the suggestion to farm.
Doesn’t really matter; regardless of the situation, the bunker solution is always a poor strategy. It’s a problem with the strategy itself, regardless of what it’s in response to.
A fine example. If you stock up on antibacterial soap, your soap will run out. If, however, you instead learn to identify plantain–which is as common as dirt, and is antibacterial (as well as antiviral and a load of other things besides)–then you have a renewable source of antibiotics that will never run out.
No amount of bacterial soap would have helped that. The Europeans were disease-ridden due to domestication, and they brought all kinds of diseases the Native Americans had never encountered before. They had no resistance. That’s the very definition of an epidemic. There’s nothing you can do about it. There’s nothing we can do about it now. The good part is, epidemics come from new diseases adapting to the human ecology, and without domesticated animals or complex societies, there’s really not much opening for any new epidemics to get started.
Yes, but nowhere near as intently as they seek to alleviate their own misery. First you eat, then you make someone suffer. You’re talking about a mass-scale suicide mission just for spite.
The people in Africa perpetrating their genocides are well-fed. The militias are supplied, they get food. They’re the ones doing the butchering. Once again, sadism is an activity of the well-fed, not the starving.
Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs. You don’t worry about self-actualization when you’re hungry. You worry about food.
Gardening and permaculture are horticulture, not agriculture. Horticulture might be sustainable; horticulture might work. The trade-off is, horticulture doesn’t scale. If you scale it, it becomes agriculture. To subsist on horticulture, you need to accept a much lower population density–a village of no more than a few hundred people.
Not in the least. Organic farming–intensive agriculture done without industrial equipment or petrochemicals–deplete the soil very rapidly through monocropping. Industrial agriculture was an innovation in scale, not kind. Organic farming is simply what farming meant for the first ten thousand years. It’s the type of farming that turned the Fertile Crescent into a blasted wasteland, and the abundant fields of the Great Plains into the Dust Bowl. Organic farming turns rich, arable land into a lifeless desert in short order. It is sustainable only by comparison to industrial farming.
Well of course it is–isn’t everything? That’s what makes “natural” such a useless word. Setting yourself on fire is a natural process. Cyanide and arsenic are completely natural. “Natural” does not mean “good.”
We get sedentary villages prior to the innovation of farming. The climate changed, and their sedentism could no longer be maintained. They were required to adapt–give up sedentism, and get back to nomadic foraging. They instead tried to defy adaptation, by beginning to farm.
Their population–which was already unsustainable–began to grow. Rather than cut their losses then and there, they farmed more, to defy adaptation and avoid the drop in birth rate that adaptation demanded. This escalated for ten thousand years, through the Late Bronze Age Crises and the several points at which Western civilization very nearly ended, and each time that an adaptation was required, we defied it by simply farming more.
Now you’re right, that is “natural,” because everything is natural and “natural” is a fairly meaningless word. But it is very much a defiance of adaptation, an attempt to cheat adaptation and evolution, and set oneself beyond such concerns. It is an ultimately doomed attempted, an inherently flawed strategy that can never succeed–but it is, nonetheless, an attempt.
I see something inherently flawed with the notion that transforming a species into a domesticated “slave race” bred only to our own service is the model of adaptation, but most importantly, horticulture is not agriculture, and “sustainable farming” is an oxymoron.
The gardens? Yes. Feeding a city with them? Hell no. It’s a simple matter of scale, and horticulture doesn’t.
It’s never been done, by anyone, and it’s not possible. In the Middle Ages, huge tracts of land needed to be farmed to supply very modest cities by today’s standards. Very little wilderness could be tolerated, because of how much food was needed for those centers that, today, would count only as very small cities. It required constant, back-breaking labor on the part of almost the entire population.
It’s anything but realistic, you mean. What are you going to plant in? Dead sand? Because that’s what’s left. The centuries of medieval, organic farming that you’re romanticizing killed the soil. We didn’t switch to industrial methods out of simple greed; we did so because the land was giving up. It was turning to desert from all the centuries of organic farming. The only reason there’s still wheat growing in the Wheat Belt is because of feet of fossil fuel fertilizer layed down every year. Without it, Iowa would be as agriculturally productive as the Kalahari. Such is the result of all those previous centuries of organic farming. So, what are you going to plant it in?
If she’s using permacultural principles, then the first thing the organic farmer needs to do is … give up organic farming. Organic farming entails monocropping, large yields consistent with an agricultural scale, on so on. To be permaculture, you need to accept a lower scale, one that no longer counts as any kind of farming.
Organic farming is simply the type of farming we were up to before we began using oil to farm. The kind that destroyed the Middle East and devastated North America. I suppose if you wanted to classify permaculture as a kind of organic farming one could say that, but I’m not sure how useful the term “organic farming” would be if it became that broad, so broad as to contain things that aren’t farming at all.
And then die at year 21?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 April 2006 @ 10:15 AM
“And then die at year 21? ”
I certainly wasn’t suggesting this approach, just saying that a few wealthy groups will likely use the ‘bunker’ approach & succeed at it.
Dying at year 21 isn’t really the issue is it? We could die tomorrow from a stroke, a car, a natural disaster who knows–maybe our disturbing modern diet & sedentary lifestyles.
Ultimately I don’t think we are immortal, so at some level this is about survival (surviving longer) and at another level it is about philosophy/ethical considerations.
“All technology breaks down”, sure so do stones, wood etc. I didn’t think primitivism was about permanence?
Many tools, such as well constructed Knives etc. will last a lifetime…learn to sharpen & your are set.
Complicated technology is not a good use of money/energy but likely will exist for some time. Guns and the like will continue for quite awhile, even after a collapse.
If the point of surviving the collapse, is only to live as long as possible, and surviving for 20years is not “good enough”? Then the primitivism camp will have problems, since unforeseen occurences befall us all…Live vigorously, smell the roses, enjoy the sounds of nature & the love & companionship of friends/family–we were not built to last forever.
If that is the goal, religion or nanotechnology should be where you put your energy/efforts.
Comment by bubba — 5 April 2006 @ 1:11 PM
The difference being, when a primitive tool breaks (and they do, regularly), you can just as easily replace it. When you die, someone else follows you. Perhaps not permanence, but sustainability. Hunkering down for 20 years is not sustainable–when the 20 years are up, what do you do? In that sense, it’s simply more of the same: postponing the inevitable.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 April 2006 @ 1:22 PM
Hey –
Comment by Janene — 5 April 2006 @ 1:54 PM
Sustainable is a subset of organic?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 April 2006 @ 1:59 PM
Hey –
NO! Exactly the opposite. (or, umm, no, ‘totally unrelated’, more like)
I got the impression that Jim was conflating the two — ie if it is organic then it must be sustainable. I was pointing out that this is NOT the case.
Why else would I have talked about ‘organic farming’ creating the dustbowl and the mesopotamian desert?
Wow… I must be doing something wrong today
Janene
Comment by Janene — 5 April 2006 @ 4:07 PM
Well, there are some things that are organic, but not sustainable. That would make sustainable a subset of organic. What’s sustainable, but not organic?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 April 2006 @ 4:11 PM
Hey –
hmmm…. well, quite literally, anything done in sufficiently low quantity is sustainable, right?
Janene
Comment by Janene — 5 April 2006 @ 4:19 PM
Not if the resource in question has a replenishment rate of zero.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 April 2006 @ 4:27 PM
“Jason is using the Anthropological definition of agriculture… whereas all of the counterpoints you are offering are technically defined as ‘horticulture’.”
I suspected that there was a semantic obstruction somewhere here. Thanks for clearing that up.
“Also, just a quick point, ‘organic farming’ CAN be sustainable if it is using permaculture style principles. However, MOST organic farming today is, in fact, ‘agriculture’ as practiced before petroculture”.
“Most”? Do you have figures on that? I’m pretty interested in this subject and my own impression of the “organic” movement is that it’s considerably removed from *monocropping done organically*.
Comment by Jim K. — 5 April 2006 @ 5:24 PM
I don’t know of any organic farm that doesn’t monocrop. That’s kind of what makes it a farm, versus a garden….
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 April 2006 @ 5:26 PM
Hey –
True… do you have any suggestions of a resource that has a replenishment rate?
Janene
Comment by Janene — 5 April 2006 @ 5:41 PM
Original Picasso’s.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 April 2006 @ 5:51 PM
Hey –
Sorry about the double post — I got a phone call half way through posting the last one…
For resources I would have to do some work, but I can tell you that I have looked into most of the CSA’s in and around Northern Illinois, and I have several organic farms within a couple miles of me, and they all rely on ‘traditional’ methods.
Likewise, if you pick up a book or visit a website deadicated to teaching ‘organic gardening’ you generally will find the focus is on ‘traditional methods.’
Now, simply remember that ‘traditional methods’ are pre-1950’s pre-petrocultural agriculture. The same techniques that created the dustbowl and Iraq…
Janene
Comment by Janene — 5 April 2006 @ 5:53 PM
The desert–not necessarily the war in said desert.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 April 2006 @ 5:56 PM
Doh!
Call that point and match
:-)
Janene
Comment by Janene — 5 April 2006 @ 7:11 PM
“The atmosphere has very powerful feedback systems that work against that, and there’s really nothing humans are even capable of doing that could achieve such a result”.
As I’ve said before (in different words), we’re dealing with an unprecedented situation for which we have no appropriate historical data. When you say that there’s *nothing* that humans are capable of doing to result in the virtual sterility of the Earth, you’re speaking rhetorically and exaggerating for emphasis. The truth of the matter is that we have no way of really knowing what we’ve done.
” The earth moves between equilibrium states, but it always brings conditions back under control. Processes on earth, as a rule, do not escalate–they extinguish”.
That could be a dangerously antique belief to grasp onto for comfort. I think it’s safe to say that what we’ve done to this planet is unlikely to have an historic precedent and therefore it would be arrogant to presume that we understand it and can say with certainty that the Earth will recover. Such an event may be statistically likely but we can’t *honestly* make such a claim.
“Perhaps you can point me to your gamble of all of your worldly goods? I’m new here and I’d find that quite interesting.
We’re currently in training, learning how to live the forager life. Once the training is complete, we sell everything, get some land, and move off into the woods”.
Ah. Future tense. So, in other words, none of you have made the jump that I had originally proposed. Plans and intentions aren’t the same gamble as actually doing it.
“See, when you “turtle,” you have a resource base limited to what you have locked away, whereas everyone else has access to the full resources of their environment”.
You’ve made a jump in logic that was never proposed. Are you suggesting that anyone who stores up resources is somehow committed (How? By contract?) to utilize nothing but what they have stored? Is this how you really think or are you trying to wriggle away from something that stands in opposition to your personal philosophy? I suspect that most people who stock up items that they might find useful in a crisis do it from the standpoint of *augmentation* rather than *total reliance*. Now, your moral code may imply that such reserves are a sign of weakness (or whatever else one could dream up) but looking at it as realistically as possible, I find it difficult to see any harm in it and there’s the potential for a great deal of good coming from it.
“If, however, you instead learn to identify plantain–which is as common as dirt, and is antibacterial (as well as antiviral and a load of other things besides)–then you have a renewable source of antibiotics that will never run out”.
I have a good deal of interest in herbal healing and try to use it whenever I can. However, there are any number of plagues that would cause me to drop plantain in lieu of modern antibiotics if the health of my family was involved. Even people living the forager lifestyle you promote could be exposed to any number of governmentally contrived bioagents as you flit around the edges of new future wars and internal conflicts. Would you gamble their lives for the sake of philosophical purity?
“The people in Africa perpetrating their genocides are well-fed. The militias are supplied, they get food. They’re the ones doing the butchering. Once again, sadism is an activity of the well-fed, not the starving”.
It saddens me to inform you that you know not of what you speak. You may be speaking in generalizations but the world doesn’t care to follow our generalizations. As I tried to tell you before, I have enough experience to recognize the fault of your thinking. You can tell me what I’ve seen was really just a dream and my desire would be to want to believe you. However, sights seen with your own eyes have a resonance in memory that dreams/nightmares never do. Trust me on this one bit: hungry people are capable of unimaginable sadism.
“To subsist on horticulture, you need to accept a much lower population density–a village of no more than a few hundred people”.
Interesting. So what of the Hong Kong model? What of the new techniques for close interplanting? A complete vegetarian diet can be grown in about 700 square feet and if you add in medicinal herbs, under 1000. While I’m not suggesting that it would be easy to keep a contemporary urban society well fed like this, that’s not really what we’re talking about. “Village” communities (with the spacing that such terms imply) would have no problems with this and could be far larger than you suggest. By the way, the numbers above are sustainable as they also include the growing of composting crops.
“You see, agriculture is simply an extension of a natural process.
Well of course it is–isn’t everything? ”
There’s no need for sarcasm. I suppose one could call twisting the genes of a plant in a lab “natural” if one simply wanted to brush off the term, but a natural process is something specific, as you know.
“I see something inherently flawed with the notion that transforming a species into a domesticated “slave race” bred only to our own service is the model of adaptation, but most importantly, horticulture is not agriculture, and “sustainable farming” is an oxymoron”.
Ah! We finally get to the quick of it. You have a philosophical belief system that equates the growing of food with the enslavement of that species (and this colors your entire outlook). Look, what is the internal programming of a kernel of corn? It is to find it’s way into the soil, grow, be pollinated and bear fruit, and so, succeeds in the continuance of it’s DNA. How is horticulture in defiance of that? Ancient foods have been brought to this time thanks to the husbandry of humans. Many species not valued as foods (and therefore not cultivated) have disappeared off of the face of the Earth (yes, many at the hands of man). Nevertheless, your anthropomorphic characterization of plants as “slave species” is your own self-limiter that will become difficult to live with, upon extrapolation.
” It’s a simple matter of scale, and horticulture doesn’t”.
Is this another semantic problem? So everyone grows their own 1000 square foot garden….when does “scaling up” begin in your mind?
“It’s never been done, by anyone, and it’s not possible”.
(heh) And here I thought of *myself* as being a pessimist! Not possible to grow enough “gardens” to feed a given population? Look, you’re a smart guy, you can’t really believe what you’re saying. Is this just stubbornness or are you really unable to grasp how achievable this is?
“In the Middle Ages, huge tracts of land needed to be farmed to supply very modest cities by today’s standards”.
Thanks for making my point for me. Farming then was terribly inefficient and destructive. Practices that have been developed over the last half a century have radically improved crop output whilst making growing sustainable without any outside input.
“It’s anything but realistic, you mean. What are you going to plant in? Dead sand? Because that’s what’s left”.
Look, if you want to be obstinate and belligerent, fine. I’m here to exchange ideas and information and that’s difficult if you insist on using parameters that are demonstrably untrue. Obviously, the planet is chockablock with land other than “dead sand” and a look over nearly any livable landscape is proof enough. Even if it were as you say, it’s very little work to make nearly any land productive, I know this empirically because I’ve done it repeatedly.
“The only reason there’s still wheat growing in the Wheat Belt is because of feet of fossil fuel fertilizer layed down every year. Without it, Iowa would be as agriculturally productive as the Kalahari”.
(sigh) Friend, that’s utter rubbish and you know it. I could go virtually anywhere in Iowa, and without the aid of any fossil fuel, I could make a plot of land easily capable of feeding ten families, fertile and thriving and with surprisingly little work. You clearly have an inborn hatred of farming but you’re letting it interfere with your perception of reality in a very profound way. I get the sense that you don’t *want* the growing of plants for food to be workable because you have so much invested in it NOT working.
“To be permaculture, you need to accept a lower scale, one that no longer counts as any kind of farming”.
And if all food was grown in Permaculture systems? What would that be called? Farming maybe? Or doesn’t that fit the semantic guidelines? From the definition I’ve heard here, it would seem to. Or are you going to assert that food can’t be grown large-scale, in Permaculture systems?
Comment by Jim K. — 5 April 2006 @ 8:24 PM
I think this pic says it all.
http://www.staggeron.org/images/pianca_ebola_butcher.jpg
Comment by Lysander — 5 April 2006 @ 8:32 PM
“I don’t know of any organic farm that doesn’t monocrop. That’s kind of what makes it a farm, versus a garden….”
Tell me something: Is a “truck farm” that grows a wide assortment of fruits and vegetables (for sale at the family roadside farm stand) a “farm” or a “garden”? Is this “monocropping”?
I ask because this is my idea of how most organic farms work best and the example that I’ve seen most of. I realize that there are corporate enterprises that have jumped on the “organic” bandwagon in order to profit from the demand for organic foods and that they can meet “organic” standard without being sustainable or really environmentally friendly. Still, there’s an equally vigorous movements of small farmers who operate in a very different manner than that.
Comment by Jim K. — 5 April 2006 @ 8:36 PM
It’s really not that unprecedented. There have been bigger climate shifts, hotter periods, and bigger extinction events than we’re experiencing now. The panic isn’t for the earth; the earth has survived such things in the past. The panic is for us–we haven’t!
Not only is it precedented, it’s been exceeded quite a few times.
We’re already laying down time and money on those plans. I’m making decisions about housing, a car, etc., based on those plans. Our lives are already changing for them.
That’s usually the plan. Every “bunker” plan I’ve ever heard involves staying in the hole “till it’s over.” And then what? Everything you knew is gone, and you never took the time to learn what comes next. Those that survive will do so in spite of their bunkers, because they spent time preparing to live in the new world–though, they’ll still have done so more easily, had they spent more time on the transition, and less time on that useless bunker.
No, but the probability of the American government releasing its biochemical weapons on its own citizens as a final act of spite like some comic book villain with a “scorched earth” policy is about as likely a scenario as an alien invasion–and deserves about as much of our time and attention as an eventuality we need to prepare for.
Which group are you referring to? The Janjaweed? The Hutus? Who? In every case in Africa that I know of, it was an act of genocide on the part of the well-fed, against the starving.
I don’t know about those, but Hong Kong isn’t self-sufficient, so I’m guessing they suffer from one of the usual flaws of all other ecotopian schemes.
If I had a nickel for every scheme somebody told me was “sustainable” that turned out to be catastrophic, I wouldn’t need to keep working to buy land out in the woods to keep the G-men off my back.
It wasn’t sarcasm. “Twisting the genes of a plant in a lab” is most certainly natural. If a beaver builds a dam, we call it natural, but if a human builds a dam it isn’t? The concept of “natural” is, itself, based on anthropocentrism.
As do you, but it really has little to do with my assessment. My philosophical beliefs were formed because of my assessment, not vice versa.
The point of diminishing returns–when you need to start monocropping to get more efficiency out of the fields. Permaculture may be sustainable, but only if you cap its productivity fairly low, at the village level. If everyone has their own 1,000 square foot garden, then you start to wipe out the untended wilderness–what permaculturalists call their “zone 5″–that’s so critical to the gardens’ success. The gardens start to die, etc.
Quantity of food is not relevant; density of food is. It doesn’t matter if there’s enough food to feed your city in California if you’re in Florida, and there’s no way to get it there. You don’t just need the food for a large population, you need the food close by. Yes, I do believe that people need food to survive. I really do believe that. I know it’s crazy, but there you are…
Not really … they still don’t scale. Permaculture’s never supported a dense population, and since its techniques are identical to horticulture, I don’t see how it could do any better than a horticultural village. We’ve discussed this at length elsewhere–even with permaculture guru, Toby Hemenway.
Looks are decieving. Those amber waves of grain are growing in oil, not soil. We’ve been over this, too, many, many times.
Half the top soil in Iowa is completely gone right now. The Dust Bowl was precisely because it had become a desert. 74% of North American drylands are affected by desertification. So … that’s utter rubbish and you know it.
I was a zealous Roman Catholic before I found out the facts about agriculture. Based on that, I came to my interpretation of it–after spending five years trying to debunk it.
Gardening, as in horticulture.
It can’t … we’ve covered this before, at length.
Since you usually have a grove of just apple trees, and then a grove of pear trees … that’s monocropping. So are fields of grain, orchards … if you have a whole field full of the same plant, it’s monocropping.
You make it sound as if those corporations are in a minority. They make up the vast majority of the organic market.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 April 2006 @ 10:12 PM
Actually, Jim truck farming generally is monocropping. Although truck farmers do grow a large variety of crops, each one has its own area in which it is grown. If any intercropping is done at all, it is only two species. But the intercropping even at that level is rarely done. Crop rotation provides a degree of mitigation, but even the big hundreds of acre fields get crop rotation done every few years out of necessity too.
Also, I’m familiar with the 1000 square feet to support a person garden concepts. What they don’t include is the source of seed. They require replacing one crop immediately with another grown from seed acquired from somewhere else.
I see horticultural practices in a very positive light, but cannot see how they can save the 6+ billion people on the planet currently. Some of us will make it. And some of us who do will likely garden as you suggest.
Are you really claiming that such techniques can be employed to support a human population the size we currently have? If not, then the dieoff Pianka appearantly referred to will still have to happen.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 5 April 2006 @ 10:23 PM
“It’s really not that unprecedented. There have been bigger climate shifts, hotter periods, and bigger extinction events than we’re experiencing now”.
If you’d been paying attention you’d know that’s not what I was speaking of. What is unprecedented is the particular kind of climate change we’re in the middle of, caused by particular activities by humans. We don’t know exactly what we’ve done and we don’t really have a clue as to what is going to unfold because of it.
“We’re already laying down time and money on those plans. I’m making decisions about housing, a car, etc., based on those plans. Our lives are already changing for them”.
Good for you! I’m heartened to hear that you’re following up rather that simply talking about it. All the same, it was a current level of commitment that we were addressing.
“That’s usually the plan. Every “bunker” plan I’ve ever heard involves staying in the hole “till it’s over.”"
Well, I’m humbled to actually be the one the disabuse you of this notion. I have seen articles by halfwits who seem to be pursuing this “strategery” but I personally don’t know anyone who’s that dangerously ill-informed. Virtually every survivalist I’ve run across sees their supplies as augmentation of of what they expect to produce, grow, harvest or manufacture. You’ve clearly been on a track with this that the rest of us aren’t traveling and it’s distorted your views. Happy to have cleared it up.
“the probability of the American government releasing its biochemical weapons on its own citizens as a final act of spite like some comic book villain with a “scorched earth” policy is about as likely a scenario as an alien invasion–and deserves about as much of our time and attention as an eventuality we need to prepare for”.
(???) Tell me something…have you turned on a television between 1999 and now? We have a government that spies on it’s own citizens (in defiance of existing law) and seems to think that Quakers and vegans are terrorists (look it up). We had an anthrax attack against Democrats and some perceived “liberals” that the Bush administration hasn’t bothered to actually investigate. But let’s take the question out of the American political scene and instead propose that the coming collapse has the potential of resulting in (among other things) a nuclear exchange of considerable magnitude. Is that is likely as an alien invasion? So, you’re out in the wilderness, possibly completely unaware that said exchange has taken place. Your moral code obviously prohibits the possession of radiation detectors, dosimeters or potassium iodide, so what happens to your tribe? Why would you ignore likely potentials simply because your philosophical motivations prohibit the ownership of needed items?
“Which group are you referring to? The Janjaweed? The Hutus? Who? In every case in Africa that I know of, it was an act of genocide on the part of the well-fed, against the starving”.
No one has asked me about this for quite a while now. The people who know me are aware that this is an “out of bounds” area in that it left me pretty damaged. I spent 18 months in a mental hospital being treated for PTSD (which wasn’t the most successful case, ultimately) thanks to the scenes burned into me. As the particulars of the event are unimportant to our conversations I will only say that a conflict arose between people who’d been painfully hungry for a very long time and that their actions pretty much turned your assumptions about situations like this upside down. I’d really rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.
“I don’t know about those, but Hong Kong isn’t self-sufficient, so I’m guessing they suffer from one of the usual flaws of all other ecotopian schemes”.
Yes, well their systems (HK) aren’t even trying to be self sufficient or attempting to squeeze the maximum growth areas out of them.
“As do you, but it really has little to do with my assessment”
Another miscommunication, I guess. I don’t believe that growing plants equals the enslavement of a species.
” If everyone has their own 1,000 square foot garden, then you start to wipe out the untended wilderness”
Given that we’re talking about huge reductions in population I’m afraid I don’t get it. Clearly we’d be increasing untended wilderness.
” It doesn’t matter if there’s enough food to feed your city in California if you’re in Florida, and there’s no way to get it there.”
And given that I’m not suggesting that people tend their gardens 3000 miles away, your California-Florida premise makes no sense.
“Yes, I do believe that people need food to survive. I really do believe that. I know it’s crazy, but there you are…”
Did I suggest something to the contrary?
“We’ve discussed this at length elsewhere”
“We’ve been over this, too, many, many times”.
“It can’t … we’ve covered this before, at length.”
Well, I think you’ve established that no new ideas on this are possible. Or that you don’t want to hear anything that doesn’t conform to the way you’ve decided it is. How did that happen?
“Half the top soil in Iowa is completely gone right now.”
And as I’ve said, virtually no soil is unredeemable. This is easily proven by anyone who understands basic composting and elementary gardening. Do you have an intellectual block to this?
“I was a zealous Roman Catholic before I found out the facts about agriculture.”
You’ve said that before so it obviously has some meaning to you. Does anyone else here understand this cryptic connection?
“Since you usually have a grove of just apple trees, and then a grove of pear trees … that’s monocropping. So are fields of grain, orchards … if you have a whole field full of the same plant, it’s monocropping”
I know a number of people who call themselves “truck farmers” who use a scaled up version of “Square Foot Gardening” to make their living (and to feed their families). If you know the system then you know that it involves complex interplantings. If you put it all on a grid and showed a single plant type being grown, you might assume that it’s monocropping as that plant is represented all over the garden. When you look at it in reality, however, you’re looking at an average of what, about 100 plants per square food, most of them different. Is this monocropping? Their orchards might have a dozen apple trees, a dozen pears, a dozen peaches, a dozen plums, a dozen cherries and all of them evenly interspersed, none of them next to a similar fruit. Is that monocropping?
“You make it sound as if those corporations are in a minority. They make up the vast majority of the organic market.”
Ah, they make up the majority of the *commercial* market. That is by no means a majority of “the market”in total.
Comment by Jim K. — 6 April 2006 @ 5:08 AM
“Actually, Jim truck farming generally is monocropping.”
Read the above. The type of (what I continue to think of as) farming I’m suggesting has no monocropping (as I define it from how I perceive it) whatsoever.
“Also, I’m familiar with the 1000 square feet to support a person garden concepts. What they don’t include is the source of seed. They require replacing one crop immediately with another grown from seed acquired from somewhere else”
I’m not sure what system you’ve seen that precludes seed growing in this space (it doesn’t require much room at all at this scale) but I’ve seen it done. If you’re not happy with the 1000 s.f. number for seed growing, I’m more than willing to call it 1010 foot so that there’s no question of it being done.
“I see horticultural practices in a very positive light, but cannot see how they can save the 6+ billion people on the planet currently.”
I imagine it could be done but I’ve never suggested it. If you follow the thread back, you’ll see that we’re talking about massive population losses. The realty is likely to be that each survivor will have as much growing land as she/he could handle (and more) rather than squeezing it into 1010 square feet.
Comment by Jim K. — 6 April 2006 @ 5:23 AM
Hey –
Jim:
The current climate change is human created — sure — but the chemical soup that we are releasing into the atmosphere is not significantly different from the chemicals released by volcanic eruptions or meteor devastation… both of which can occur in a much smaller time frame than what we are doing.
Have we created massive devastation? Yes. Have we possible set in motion one of the most significant die-off events in earth history? Quie Possibly. But as Jason noted, the Earth’s correction systems ae quite advanced and will kick in and start to repair the damage we have wrought if given just HALF a chance.
J- what’s that stat on Pitt that you have given? During the big black out, the air quality over the northeast improved by how much in how little time?
So what happens when eventually those supplies run out? What you are forgetting is that by artificially propping up your population with this stored food, you will eventually run into the problem that your population is too large to be supported ‘naturally’ by the environment in which you live.
By living within the range of production that you environment provides, you are also allowing your population to slowly adjust to that range of production. But if you do NOT allow your population to adjust, you WILL end up with a crisis situation. Then what? Do you allow your population to crash? Or do you escalate your efforts and push yourself right back into this precarious situation of neverending increases in production?
Its not about moral code, its about practical necessity. Exactly how much ‘probably useless’ stuff do you want to stash, monitor, cart around, etc? All that extra stuff weighting one down is MUCH more likely to kill you than save you. You cannot prepare for every single possible scenario, so you pick the ones that most concern you that you are most easily able to address… and then you get on with your life and don’t worry about the rest.
So you will tell us about your personal crisis, but you are unwilling to note country/culture/event and date? Sounds fishy to me.
I believe Jason was pointing out that you have your own philosophical beliefs that color your argument.
So… you know some people that do this… and Chandra and I both express that we have been unable to find examples of this in our own communities… That tells me that either you live in an area that is particularly progressive in this respect, or that you are only mentioning those that fit your premise. In either case, that hardly justifies the assertion that ‘in most cases’ organic ‘farms’ are not traditional agriculture.
So you think that the seedlings to fill 1000 square feet of layered plantings can be grown in 10 square feet? Wow. Not even close. At BARE MINIMUM, with sequential, three season planting, you are probably looking at at least 500 square feet. And then there is the MASSIVE additional labor required to plant, transplant (three times) and maintain the greenhouses…
Janene
Comment by Janene — 6 April 2006 @ 9:07 AM
That’s a load of bullshit laid by a lot of political interests who’ve taken it upon themselves to obfuscate the issue. We know exactly what’s happening–carbon dioxide levels are rising dramatically. Not to unprecedented levels, but dramatically. All of the “confusion” is deliberate obfuscation on the part of vested interests. The truth of the matter is really clear cut.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 April 2006 @ 9:09 AM
Nothing to do with Pitt–it was central PA. We have a study on it in the Vault: Marufu, et al, 2004. “The 2003 North American Electrical Blackout: An Accidental Experiment in Atmospheric Chemistry.” [PDF]. In the abstract, they claim that within 24 hours of the 2003 blackout, there was a fifty percent reduction in ozone, and visibility increased by 40km.
Passing up on a good car, or a house, is a pretty high level of commitment, I’d say.
I have.
Anecdotal “evidence” doesn’t “clear anything up,” so you can drop the condescension. Janene’s already pointed out so many ways in which you’re unwilling to deal in anything but vague generalities and useless anecdotes, and this is just one more.
Yeah, so? Governments do whatever is in their best interest. Spying on their rivals has an obvious benefit for them. Using “terrorism” to arrest your rivals has an obvious benefit. I expect the government to do anything that has a benefit for them, regardless of however ruthless it might be. The reason I think it’s silly to believe the government will gas us all as its final act isn’t because of their high moral standards, it’s because there’s no benefit to it. Government’s made up of people–they’d be gassing themselves.
Yes it is. People don’t lob nukes because they can, they do it because there’s a benefit. Oil wars aren’t between nuclear powers, and there’s still much intact to make a nuclear strike worthwhile. Once the internal unrest begins, you’re not going to nuke yourself. Until I hear a realistic scenario where nuclear weapons would have a benefit, no, the missiles are going to stay in their silos. Governments don’t let loose all their destructive power just because they can, they only do it if there’s a benefit to doing so.
Has nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with expected value. Every extra item you take with you as a forager is a double-edged sword. It might be useful in itself, but it also weighs you down. That’s why foragers are so non-chalant with their possessions–that and, everything they have is easily replaced. So, every possession has a negative value for weighting us down, with a probability of one. There is a tiny, tiny probability–along the lines of the martians landing–that any of these items will become useful. So, the expected value for all of these things is negative. Same kind of statistical analysis when you make any gamble. Same reason why there are so many poor lottery players.
OK, but the flip-side is we just dismiss that whole segment and pretend it was never brought up. I’m not going to just take your word for it, because you’ve already referred to a number of things that are blatantly untrue. Without specifics, you have no counter-argument. The only people who massacre are well-fed.
At first, but not if everyone’s well-fed with their 1,000 sq. ft. gardens.
You kind of are. For large population centers where everyone has their own garden, and spaces in between their gardens, the furthest garden is going to be pretty damn far away.
You talked about how easily the Middle Ages were able to feed large populations with sustainable agriculture. I pointed out that (a) it wasn’t sustainable, (b) it wasn’t easy, and (c) the populations weren’t very large compared to modern standards. I made the point that people need food, and food doesn’t just come out of thin air. You asked if I really believed something so silly.
No, I’ve established that you’ve yet to mention any new ideas, and I’m not interested in having the exact same discussion for the umpteenth time. I’ll let you know if you ever get to something new.
No, the problem is that I do understand what’s involved in nursing soil back to life. It’s very difficult, has an iffy prospect of success, works only on small patches at a time, and while it’s underway, you really can’t use it for food. You can never get something for nothing. Do you have an intellectual block to this?
My bias before was to disbelieve anything that suggested that civilization was wrong or flawed. Learning the facts of the matter was fairly traumatic for me personally, and turned my whole worldview upside down. So the usual allegations of “bias” don’t work on me–I’ve been moving against my bias for most of my life.
Yes it is. The majority of all organic food sales in the U.S. are made through supermarkets. They dwarf the farmers’ markets and roadside stands, which are, for the most part, not organic.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 April 2006 @ 9:41 AM
“The current climate change is human created — sure — but the chemical soup that we are releasing into the atmosphere is not significantly different from the chemicals released by volcanic eruptions or meteor devastation… both of which can occur in a much smaller time frame than what we are doing.”
That may or may not be the case, as I’ve repeatedly said, we don’t have that information. I’m not particularly invested in any of the potentials, I just standing up against the rather astonishing “it can’t happen” orthodoxy here. It’s a little like you’re insisting that a particular substance can’t cause cancer whilst willfully ignoring that the context isn’t as pure as you’re portraying it, that the substance interacts with myriad substances, from hormone-creating plastics that our foods are packaged in to the list of ingredients in a shampoo bottle. So it is with our external environment, where we’ve loaded it with things far more exotic than that which comes out of a volcano or even from an incoming meteor. These things don’t “clean up” quickly, some of them have half-lives in the tens of thousands of years. Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether and depleted uranium and all of the millions (who knows how many, given the potential interactions and recombinations) of other substances that do not exist in natural and/or concentrated forms may not have any effect that ends up contributing to the demise of this planet… but to angrily insist that they *can’t* is as bold a display of ignorance as anyone could wish to see! Earth’s “correction systems” may not be up to the challenge this time, given the unprecedented groupings of toxins that we have so cavalierly spewed about us, we simply DO NOT KNOW. Is it too difficult to agree with me on *that*?
“What you are forgetting is that by artificially propping up your population with this stored food, you will eventually run into the problem that your population is too large to be supported ‘naturally’ by the environment in which you live”.
Where did I ever speak about artificially propping up *any* population with stored food? I’m talking only about those few who will attempt to carry our human DNA into the future (and there will be damned few of us). So, as regards this unintended elite, tell me something: Do you shop at a grocery store, or do you live off of woodchucks that you’ve trapped and arrowroot that you dig up on a regular basis? I suspect at least *some* of your food, for the moment, is coming from commercial sources…. I’m right about that, aren’t I? If this is so, you view it as an interim step, one that allows you to become more practiced in survival arts prior to your goal of becoming a pure forager, right? Well, stored foods, the example you’ve chosen, are really no different. They allow one a space of time to become more proficient, more adapted to whatever degree of self-sufficiency that they’ll be forced to live with. You, yourself said “By living within the range of production that you environment provides, you are also allowing your population to slowly adjust to that range of production”, so what is the argument here? We have no idea of how fast or slow this entire thing will implode and I for one go out of my way to encourage people to put supplies by so that if things fall rapidly they won’t be left with nothing but hunger and an outstretched hand looking to be filled. A situation of that kind is much more dangerous that having some basic supplies on hand….I would think that a realist would recognize that as common sense.
“Exactly how much ‘probably useless’ stuff do you want to stash, monitor, cart around, etc? All that extra stuff weighting one down is MUCH more likely to kill you than save you”.
I hope you’ll permit me another question? In the pantheon of world class “foragers”, where would you place the American Indian tribes? I’d venture to say that they had it down to an art and I suspect that you’d agree with me. Did they wander about with just the buckskin on their backs or….did they carry more than that? North America has a climate of extremes and as such, requires a surprising amount to keep one reasonable happy and comfortable. While most of the tribes remained in one area and lived in permanent dwellings, the Plains Indians lived in the tipis that we so often think as representing an Indian “house”. Tipis were made of buffalo hides, from 15 to as many as 50 of them. In addition to tipis, they had fur rugs for winter sleeping and underfoot. They had ceremonial clothing (some of it quite bulky), cooking and storage pots, stone tools, the instruments of war and preserved food. When they moved from one camp to another, all of this was gathered together, the poles of the tipi would form travoises and all of the aforementioned would be piled on and dragged by horses. It was considerably more than just “the clothes on their backs”, eh?
Most of the other tribes lived fairly permanently, on their established tribal lands. They stored food against famine and to have the pleasure of eating something out of season. These master foragers actually had quite a bit of cargo they kept close by and in simpler times at that. We, today, face potential dangers (particularly in the shadow of a collapsing civilization) that they would never have dreamed of. What should one have on hand to deal with them? Well, that’s been a source of controversy for many years and as you’ve said, you pick the ones that concern you most and you do the best you can to go on with your life. It would be foolish, however, to pretend that these dangers don’t exist, simply because you don’t want to be bothered with the acquisition and storage of basic supplies.
“So you will tell us about your personal crisis, but you are unwilling to note country/culture/event and date? Sounds fishy to me”.
I doubt if you can realistically imagine how reluctant I was to bring this up in the first place. It isn’t just an acute social embarrassment for me, it involves the exposure of a trauma that is personally quite painful and has no place in a forum like this. If you’ll travel down-thread you’ll see that I only alluded to it having encountered strong assertions of something that I knew from experience to be untrue. If the subject hadn’t involved a significant error in thinking, concerning a potential life-or-death situation, it would’ve remained another one of the many personal secrets that are hidden in media such as this. Sounds fishy to you? I’m a gentle soul at heart and would rather be called a liar than to unwrap my wound and force you to carry a picture of it for the rest of your life. I have never even revealed the full story of this to my wife, as the details are so horrific as to be “non-transferrable”, not to the ones that I love and care about… and as I am an individual with a modest sense of responsibility, not even to strangers that may be lurking in this forum (the last thing I need is for some sensitive soul to read my story and have their own life tarred with the smell of my nightmare, I have more than enough karma hanging on me as it is).
It’s curious that this should become an issue in this particular forum. This site, by the subject it addresses, concerns a higher level of “reality”. It’s about facing very unpleasant things (the collapse of civilization) and developing strategies to survive it. We both probably look at people around us, caught in the rat race in order to purchase the emblems of their success (the SUV, the House, the Big Screen Plasma TV) and we laugh at what they call “reality”. I would imagine that your image of “reality” is considerably different than that, as is mine. It’s possible that you too have suffered some significant form of emotional/mental trauma, as many of us have. If so, you’ll feel a resonance with the soldier who comes home from an awful wartime experience when he/she reveals how *altered* their sense of “reality” has become, how the power of an event can show you just how shallow your perception of reality has been before that point.
They’ll tell you (if they’re capable of speaking of it) that it’s a terribly lonely feeling. Some people simply can’t adjust. They recognize that, in a way, they’re speaking a different language than those around them…it sounds superficially the same but it…..isn’t. Things around them that used to have meaning end up looking absurdly hollow. Words used by those around them might have now profound meanings. Everything seems different because your perspective has been forcibly pushed out in all directions and in ways that defy articulation. You might actually want to reflect on this condition, given the way that things are going and the horrors that we’re all likely to face in the not too distant future. It’s with a certain amount of irony that I suspect that the “collapse of civilization” will bring with it a personal sense of re-attachment as those around me finally stand in the world I’ve been in for some time now.
” That tells me that either you live in an area that is particularly progressive in this respect, or that you are only mentioning those that fit your premise”.
Actually, I don’t have a “premise”, just a retelling of what I’ve seen. And yes, my area may be more progressive than many in this regard.
“So you think that the seedlings to fill 1000 square feet of layered plantings can be grown in 10 square feet? Wow. Not even close”
Look, it’s one thing to discuss ideas and it’s another to project ideas onto me that I’ve not only said but never dreamed of. I never said that seedlings could be grown in that space, I said SEEDS. If you don’t believe that one can grow more than enough seeds in an area that small (it’s just an arbitrary figure anyway) then you ought to do a little research on it (I think you’ll find I’m right.
Comment by Jim K. — 7 April 2006 @ 4:57 AM
Jason,
I could spend the time answering your comments line by line but time is valuable and your comments show me that I’d be wasting it. It’s funny (in a sad way) to hear you talk about adaptation. You may not actually be able to see how your own mind works (it’s a not uncommon problem) but you are so emotionally invested in the ideas that you’re presenting that you’ve calcified into them. I never got around to going through the archives here but I suspect that the same scenario has played out over and over again, where someone sees the flaws in your approach and tries to point them out, only to see your repeated refusal to listen to any criticism. One worn out commenter walks away and another new innocent wanders in to point out the same obvious things and so the cycle continues. It’s a game you seem to enjoy but as I’m actually living a virtually self sufficient life and doing the impossible (feeding my family off of that “dead” soil!), I don’t have time to play like this. Have a good time while you can because, as has long been said, “The end is near”.
Comment by Jim K. — 7 April 2006 @ 5:25 AM
Hey –
Of course we do not KNOW… the question is one of probabilities. I find the idea that we will *likely* cause permanenet damage to the ecosphere to be a statement of hubris. And I find the possibility that we will eliminate ALL life (including the aenerobes and other bacterias that are potentially capable of surviving in interstellar space to be absurd. Can we agree on that?
So… after a year of learning to forage a drought starts. Reduces food availability for the entire season. Are you going to switch to harder to find/further away/ less preferred food sources or are you going to use your stored food?
The former choice would serve to provide a little bit of resistance and reduction to your groups birth rate. The latter would not… that’s propping up your population…
The Plains Indians are HARDLY a good example of sustainable culture. they MAY have been, but the only existed for a short period of time and built thier culture in reaction to European incursion. Perhaps other cultures with hundreds or thousands of years of continuity would be better models.
The being said, I never said a forager should carry NOTHING, I pointed out that each additional thing carried created an energy drain… and so the value of that item needs to be compared to the cost of carrying it. If the cost/benefit ratio is less than 1… then forget it.
Again, I don’t want to hear your personal story if you are unwilling to share it. (although you now spent another 3 paragraphs alluding to your personal trauma that you ‘don’t want to talk about’) What we are asking for is simply the technical reference. Country and year. Something that we can look at to determine for ourselves whether you may have a point.
And whay would you need a special place to grow seeds? Seeds come directly from the parent plant. And the only appear on mature plants, so you would, in fact, need lots of space… but again, you don’t need any supplemental space to grow ’seeds’ — and you’re telling us that you support your family by growing plants???
I’m very confused.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 7 April 2006 @ 8:31 AM
“We just don’t know, do we?”
“Sure we do–it’s X.”
“That may or may not be, but we just don’t have that information.”
“…Yes, we do. It’s X.”
“Perhaps. But do we really have that information?”
“YES! IT’S X!”
You can say we don’t have the information till you’re blue in the face, it doesn’t change the fact that we do, in fact, have the information.
Like? We never made something from nothing. Petrochemicals come from petroleum, which is a fossil fuel–it comes from living things. None of these things are new compounds.
Some don’t, but none of them are new. Uranium is not new.
Then by no means should you ever open a science book, because it will be filled with such bold displays of ignorance.
Yes–because it’s not an unprecedented grouping. It’s quite precedented. It’s even been occasionally exceeded. It’s not up to the challenge this time, but it was the last time when it was worse? That’s a little hard to swallow. Your premise is an ignorance of geological history, so it’s not unexpected that you’d come to a completey absurd conclusion from a patently false premise.
Most Native American tribes weren’t foragers at all.
A few things, but ultimately, very little. Read Marshall Sahlins’ “Original Affluent Society” for a feel for how Native American foragers approached possessions.
The Plains Indians were never a very stable culture. They were formed out of the refugees created by European contact, whether by aggression or disease. They formed a new culture around two European imports: guns and horses. The latter is why their mode of living so much more resembles pastoralists like those in Mongolia, than foragers.
Yes, because, as mentioned above, they weren’t foragers.
As little as possible. The modes of possession they had were a luxury afforded by the stability and abundance of the Holocene and stable relations with their neighbors. We have neither; that means foraging, rather than the various forms of horticulture and agriculture practiced by the tribes you’re talking about. To maximize efficiency, any forager knows–travel light.
Most of the dangers you’re talking about don’t exist–you’re just scaring yourself silly without any reason.
That doesn’t translate into “gullibility,” and it doesn’t mean we’ll just take your word for it when you tell us about the dragon in your garage. If you don’t want to provide us any evidence, that’s fine, but then you can hardly expect us to take your claim as “true,” can you?
I’ll admit that I was emotionally invested in these ideas. My investment was in proving them to be untrue, so I could continue on a happy, quiet life and live the American Dream that I’d been promised. It’s cost me more than you could know, but I couldn’t find any way to disprove them. That’s my emotional investment–not quite what you were expecting, is it? My bias is to believe you. Unfortunately, what you’re saying is pure bullshit.
It’s funny (in a sad way) that you can’t recognize the irony in your last comment. My bias is to disbelieve everything I’ve been saying. I’ve been pulled down this road kicking and screaming the whole way. And yet, you can’t recognize your own biases–which seem to be far stronger, and far more blinding, than any bias I’ve ever held. “Remove the plank from your own eyes first, that you may see clearly.”
Not exactly. If their flaws are actual flaws, I change my position. Most recently, the subject was metals. More often, though, we get someone like you who points out “flaws,” where the “flaw” is in the commenter’s own understanding. I point out why their “flaw” is no flaw at all, they get angry and defensive because their biases blind them to the real situation, accuse me of being emotionally invested in my ideas and accuse me of being incapable of appreciating the inerrant truth that they possess. But the fact of the matter is, I do change my mind, and with some frequency–I just require someone to make a good argument first. You, like so many before you, have done nothing of the sort.
Hardly. Responding to you has been extremely taxing for me. But letting your comments stand might convince a lurker that you have something resembling a point. This is like a suicide hotline in some ways–allowing your BS to stand unchallenged is going to cost people their lives in the near future, so as aggrevating and taxing as it is, I have to keep plugging away, responding to stupid claim after stupid, unsusbstantiated claim.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 April 2006 @ 9:39 AM
To expand on Janene’s point about seeds coming from MATURE plants. Many garden food plants are biennials. In order to produce seeds they need to remain in the ground for two years undisturbed. Even though they would normally, in the course of producing food only in the 1000 square feet plan, have been pulled up, composted and replaced by at least two other crops during that time. Figure you’re planting 25 non-perennial vegetables. Odds are that at least 10 of them will be binnial. If you, conservatively, keep 2 of each of those you are losing at least that 10 square feet you mentioned - for two whole years. So you’ve expanded to make up for that, but this fall you have to leave another 10 square feet to produce seeds for those plants again or you can only eat them every other year. So maybe, with a very limited selection, you’ve managed to increase your area by only 20 square feet to accomodate those 10 species. But you also have your annuals that you need seed from. The plants you are using to produce seed cannot be used for food, since annual plants quit producing fruiting bodies and their leaves become unpalatible or even inedible once they are allowed to go to seed. For the 15 species you’re going to have to increase the area by at least another 5 square feet. Much more if some of those species are squash and the like.
Doesn’t sound too bad so far we’re up to an an increase of only about 25 square feet. But if you’re planting more species/varieties, the areas increase. I’d expect that a good 1000 square foot garden would have 50 to 100 species and varieties in it. So double or quadruple that area increase. An additional 100 square feet. Hmmm not bad.
But wait! We forgot to grow seeds for our green manure crops. Since in the normal course, they are plowed in just as they start to flower, there must be an area set aside to let them seed. Figure another 5 square feet minimum for each type of green manure you use, since you need LOTS of seed for them. Figure another 25 square feet.
Things are still hunky dory, we’re still closer to Jims 10 square feet estimate of increase rather than Janene’s estimate of 500. BUT, where are you getting the leaves and grass clippings from that you are using for mulch around the young plants and adding to the compost to increase it’s bulk and balance carbon/nitrogen ratios? Now it’s all of the sudden looking like Janene’s estimate is rather concervative.
FYI the majority of my information on this concept comes from “The Self-Sufficient Gardener” by John Seymour. Not all of it of course. I have been studying lots of references on gardening and composting and the like for years.
Oh and Jim, I have been looking all over this site. I can vouch that Jason is more interested in really understanding the factors at play in the world right now and in human nature in general than he is in backing up his opinions.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 7 April 2006 @ 1:03 PM
Hey Chandra –
What vegetable plants are biennials? Raspberries, I know… but most other stuff I am familiar with is annual, plus the few perennials (artichoke, asparagus, rhubarb) that modern westerners consider food (I’m working on expanding my notion of vegetables as we speak… daylily buds, mmmm…
)
Also, I have to admit, that my research is pursuing self seeding of all of my annual plants… but that becomes a problem if you are trying to maintain a regular rotation period — whereas I’m just trying to develop garden that never require much more than harvesting once established.
By contrast, I’m looking at Jim’s suggestion that a single 1000 foot plot could provide all foodstuffs, and I’m imagining that all of the plant stocks would need to be at LEAST 8-10 weeks old before planting out if the ’schedule’ is to be kept. Now, a ten week old plant can be significantly smaller than a fruit bearing plant, but when you add in the pots and watering/light sources that are needed, that probably significantly increases thier space needs… (I am assuming the ‘nursery’ is some sort of greenhouse, while the ‘garden’ is outdoors)
Janene
Comment by Janene — 7 April 2006 @ 1:22 PM
Janene,
Off the top of my head garlic (all allium?) and carrots are biennial. At least with the allium you can plant the bulbs and don’t have to wait for seed, though.
Comment by JimFive — 7 April 2006 @ 2:23 PM
Hey –
No, Allium are all perennial.
Now as a garden plant, many bulbs, including garlic, are planted in the fall, then if harvested, that is done the next year. Onions, on the other hand, are generally planted and harvested the same year because they are not hardy enough to survive northern winters (although I am looking into Egyptian (clustering) onion — if it is hardy to Zone 5 it’ll be sweet)
Other Alliums — chives etc, are strictly perennial because you harvest the greens, not the roots…
Janene
Comment by Janene — 7 April 2006 @ 2:52 PM
Janene,
You’re right, I was thinking about parsley not garlic as the biennial in my herb garden.
Comment by JimFive — 7 April 2006 @ 3:01 PM
Yes it is. People don’t lob nukes because they can, they do it because there’s a benefit.
That’s true of rational people. But neither Bush nor bin Laden look to me terribly rational. Seymour Hersh’s latest alleges that the Bush Administration has ordered an attack upon Iran with bunker-busters (among other things). If that happens, what will be the reaction in Pakistan? And if the Pakistani nukes let fly, will the Israeli nukes be far behind?
Irrational, yes. But all three actors in this scenario — the Bush Administration, Islamic militants in Pakistan, the Israelis — are comprised of many people who not only believe in Heaven, but also seem content with their actions sending us all there sooner than later, whether we’ve asked them to do so or not.
Beyond that, there’s apparently a pretty good chance of an accidental nuclear war being touched off within the next decade. The nukes are on hair-trigger status, and the systems frequently (so I’ve read) fuck up to the extent that they require human intervention to prevent the initiation of a nuclear war.
And this is with fairly stable systems in place. What happens when the onset of collapse begins to erode those systems’ viability?
That may or may not be the case, as I’ve repeatedly said, we don’t have that information. I’m not particularly invested in any of the potentials, I just standing up against the rather astonishing “it can’t happen” orthodoxy here.
I don’t see the point of this argument. Even if we have unwittingly put into place a series of events which will completely and irretrievably destroy all life on the planet, so what? If there’s nothing we can do to reverse it, why worry about it?
I doubt if you can realistically imagine how reluctant I was to bring this up in the first place. It isn’t just an acute social embarrassment for me, it involves the exposure of a trauma that is personally quite painful and has no place in a forum like this.
Assuming what you say is true, I’m having difficulty following the logic of your argument. You’re saying that nomadic foragers will be more susceptible to sadistic acts of aggression than will the intrepid gardeners planting in every available space in Hong Kong, or the organic farmers growing on their thousand-square-foot plots?
Comment by Eddie — 8 April 2006 @ 2:16 PM
It has been claimed:
“Permaculture may be sustainable, but only if you cap its productivity fairly low, at the village level. If everyone has their own 1,000 square foot garden, then you start to wipe out the untended wilderness–what permaculturalists call their “zone 5″–that’s so critical to the gardens’ success. The gardens start to die, etc.”
Why is this a requirement? I have been researching permaculture extensively, and I have yet to find someone who has shown why that “zone 5″ is essential. All my research has suggested that the “zone 5″ was created to preserve wilderness and heal the Earth. I have yet to find another source to back up the fact that zone 5 is critical to the gardens’ success.
That Zone 5 may be essential to supplement the permacultural diet with foraging. But that is different than saying that the garden requires that untended land.
Yes, Havana might not be self-sufficient. But permaculture is widespread in the city, an area with little wilderness. Those gardens don’t seem to require that untended wilderness (zone 5).
Comment by Taylor — 14 April 2006 @ 9:00 AM
Also, what about the ornamental perennial gardens that currently exist in urban/suburban areas? They don’t seem to require wilderness either.
Comment by Taylor — 14 April 2006 @ 9:03 AM
Hey Taylor –
Well, there are a couple of answers to your questions…
First off, and I forget this myself frequently, Permaculture is not ONLY a gardening technique… it is a complete lifestyle/mental pargadigm, of which natural wilderness is critical if you are developing a truly holistic approach to living on the planet, in your ecology and community. So on this level, Zone 5 is a critical component of the mental paradigm itself.
From a gardening/horticultural standpoint, its even more subtle but it may vary well be even more critical than we guess. Zone 5 represents habititat… for plant, animals and fungi that DON’T live in the garden itself. Seeing as how permaculture is all about the complex relationships between different species of organisms in a healthy ecology, Zone 5 thus becomes both the nursery and the ‘game preserve’ so to speak. If you eliminate Zone 5, then you are also, potentially, eliminating necessary components to the long term health and survival of the other zones.
Now, personally, I am not a terribly big fan of the ‘Zone’ component of Permaculture — but only because I do not like the rigidity of it (and zones 3 & 4 don’t fit well into my plans as they are). In my own projections, I will use all of the zones, but they will be ‘all mixed up’ — certain components of Zone 5 may reside immediately outside my front door, while components of Zone 1 may flourish in the ‘back 40′. Again, like the initial composition of the Zone Idea — this has ALOT to do with Mental Paradigm and the difference between where I am going, and what Permaculture itself is trying to achieve.
RE: suburban gardens. You’re both right and wrong… in the strict sense suburban gardens do not have Zone 5’s — but they also are not permaculture — they take massive amounts of work, fertilizer, water supplementation etc. I know, because I have been a ’suburban ornamental gardener’ for years — and every effort I have made to reduce maintenance has been quite obvious in the gardens themselves.
However, it is ALSO true that suburban gardens DO have a certain relationship with Zone 5… every community has some forest preserves, parks, abandoned lots etc where you will find various wild species of organisms. The part they play in the health of our gardens is unknown… but that does not mean it is irrelevant…
Janene
Comment by Janene — 14 April 2006 @ 9:28 AM
Janene, thank you. And, you are right.
I know many people who live in suburban areas. Every time I have been there, I have seen lots of “untended” areas along with gardens–ornamental and vegetable. In fact, many suburbs are full of forest preserves surrounding them–look at the California metropolitan areas.
Comment by Taylor — 14 April 2006 @ 9:32 AM
“First off, and I forget this myself frequently, Permaculture is not ONLY a gardening technique… it is a complete lifestyle/mental pargadigm, of which natural wilderness is critical if you are developing a truly holistic approach to living on the planet, in your ecology and community. So on this level, Zone 5 is a critical component of the mental paradigm itself.”
Exactly. And all of my research on Zone 5 has argued that. There is no reason why I would argue against that.
“From a gardening/horticultural standpoint, its even more subtle but it may vary well be even more critical than we guess. Zone 5 represents habititat… for plant, animals and fungi that DON’T live in the garden itself. Seeing as how permaculture is all about the complex relationships between different species of organisms in a healthy ecology, Zone 5 thus becomes both the nursery and the ‘game preserve’ so to speak. If you eliminate Zone 5, then you are also, potentially, eliminating necessary components to the long term health and survival of the other zones.”
That makes sense. However, I had just seen examples like Havana, and then examples on “Village Blog” about permaculture gardens in shantytowns that didn’t have a strict Zone 5 around them. And then, there’s the example of the gardens of Hong Kong.
But of course, maybe their “zone 5″ are the little areas that are not cultivated. And even lawns and ornamental gardens are surrounded by “zone 5.”
“RE: suburban gardens. You’re both right and wrong… in the strict sense suburban gardens do not have Zone 5’s — but they also are not permaculture — they take massive amounts of work, fertilizer, water supplementation etc. I know, because I have been a ’suburban ornamental gardener’ for years — and every effort I have made to reduce maintenance has been quite obvious in the gardens themselves.
However, it is ALSO true that suburban gardens DO have a certain relationship with Zone 5… every community has some forest preserves, parks, abandoned lots etc where you will find various wild species of organisms. The part they play in the health of our gardens is unknown… but that does not mean it is irrelevant…”
You’re right. I was just noticing a claim on this website that I had not found backing for on our sites, and wondering where the claim came from, based on my knowledge. The Havana gardens don’t seem to have a “Zone 5″ either…yet they still seem to be producing food.
Also, there are numerous Chinese cities, other than Hong Kong, that have had gardens for centuries. Maybe there’s a “Zone 5″ there I cannot find.
As for the mental paradigm, I agree entirely. But arguing a mental paradigm is different from arguing whether something is essential.
Comment by Taylor — 14 April 2006 @ 9:39 AM
I might also add that in Dmitry Orlov’s essays, he describes the kitchen gardens of Russians, and he describes them as “areas of cultivated and wild plants co-existing together,” and these took place in several Russian cities and “suburban-dense” areas.
Perhaps Zones 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, can be partly mixed together.
Comment by Taylor — 14 April 2006 @ 9:41 AM
Hey Taylor –
Yes, I think that the zones CAN be intermingled — mostly depending on what one means by intermingling and the net quantity of space involved.
Most cities have had some level of gardening… but that is not the same thing as permaculture. I think that is a key point. How are those city gardens maintained? How much material is being ’shipped’ in to make them work? Even before petro-culture, were city gardens being supplemented with manure and other organic materials brought in from the rural fringe? If so, then they are not self-sustainable.
Another thing of note: I cannot speak for cities in other parts of the world or even the US, but I do know that Chicago has a ‘deer problem’. This tells me that there is still a fair amount of untended, wild places in the city of Chicago, and I suspec that this is true of most (or all?) cities.
Now, what happens if the current world population turns to 1000 sq foot personal gardens for thier food supply? This is vastly MORE space than is currently used by modern industiral agriculture. And in terms of the cities, it is an even greater change in land use. That implies to me that in order to accomplish this in the city, whatever remains of ‘wild untended land’ in and immediately around those cities must be replaced with gardens. So then where is your nursery/game preserve? And if they are literally necessary to the health of the whole, it will be too late once we realize our folly.
One of the things we have talked a lot about on this site IS permaculture… but even more so the topic is systemic properties. The relationship between the material reality of how we live and how we think and that effects of how we think on how we live. (With some disagreement over the directionality and importance of each) I, personally, do NOT think that you can separate out one part of the system — the mental/physical paradigm shift — from the rest of the sytem and expect to get the same results.
So when we talk about Zone 5 as Necessary to the paradigm, that’s not just ‘best case scenario’ it really is critical to the success of the whole. If we eliminate Zone 5, then we are basically telling ourselves that we CAN control the natural environment 100% with NO negative consequences. That we really can be ‘gods’, that we are the equal to nature herself and superior to all of her component parts (ie all species, natural processes etc). This is a dangerous, IMO, view of the world and it is EXACTLY what has lead to our current environmental and population crises.
By contrast, when we see Zone 5 — ie that which we do NOT control, do NOT totally understand, and do NOT possess — as a critical component of the ‘garden’ we are ackowledging that there are pieces we simply do NOT understand, cannot recreate and cannot control. It humbles us and posits humans as participants in the great cycle of life rather than its master.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 14 April 2006 @ 10:20 AM
“Another thing of note: I cannot speak for cities in other parts of the world or even the US, but I do know that Chicago has a ‘deer problem’. This tells me that there is still a fair amount of untended, wild places in the city of Chicago, and I suspect that this is true of most (or all?) cities.”
Absolutely. In fact, I can speak from my own knowledge of the city of Chicago, having visited the Chicago area. Forest preserves border the city in many places (especially the north and western border), and there are quite a few parks.
“One of the things we have talked a lot about on this site IS permaculture… but even more so the topic is systemic properties. The relationship between the material reality of how we live and how we think and that effects of how we think on how we live. (With some disagreement over the directionality and importance of each) I, personally, do NOT think that you can separate out one part of the system — the mental/physical paradigm shift — from the rest of the sytem and expect to get the same results.
So when we talk about Zone 5 as Necessary to the paradigm, that’s not just ‘best case scenario’ it really is critical to the success of the whole. If we eliminate Zone 5, then we are basically telling ourselves that we CAN control the natural environment 100% with NO negative consequences. That we really can be ‘gods’, that we are the equal to nature herself and superior to all of her component parts (ie all species, natural processes etc). This is a dangerous, IMO, view of the world and it is EXACTLY what has lead to our current environmental and population crises.”
Of course. I was never arguing about eliminating Zone 5 entirely. Rather, I was just discussing whether or not it was possible to have gardens in areas that are not directly connected to wilderness, even though that “Zone 5″ wilderness will definitely exist.
“Most cities have had some level of gardening… but that is not the same thing as permaculture. I think that is a key point. How are those city gardens maintained? How much material is being ’shipped’ in to make them work? Even before petro-culture, were city gardens being supplemented with manure and other organic materials brought in from the rural fringe? If so, then they are not self-sustainable.”
Of course. We cannot speak to all cities, but one example I am aware of is the urban gardens in Chinese cities. I can site the following from “Examples of Urban Agriculture in Asia.
Wherever it is practiced in Asia, urban agriculture is intensive and highly successful. Skinner [18] reported that, in six large Chinese cities visited, well over 85 per cent of the vegetables consumed by the urban population were produced within the bounds of the municipality. Vegetable production, highly structured spatially, has evolved as part of the traditional ecological complex tied to pig breeding and recycling of night-soil (human manure) and rubbish produced by the urban population for application to vegetable fields. In Guangzhou, up to nine crops a year may be grown sequentially on a single field. In Hong Kong, six yearly crops of cabbage are not uncommon. Similarly, Karachi, where rains are never heavy and fluctuate widely from one year to another, takes advantage of its dry river flood plains to produce half of the city’s fresh vegetables [12]. The high productivity of small and marginal spaces in urban agriculture has been so well demonstrated that Ganapathy [4] reported that an area of six square metres can produce all the vegetable needs for a family of four for a year.
Many Asian countries have been promoting home gardening: The degree of success has varied. Most of these efforts have been directed toward the rural area and are only beginning to be extended to urban areas. The campaign has been variously called “the Green Revolution campaign” and “Project Compassion” in the Philippines and Saemaul Undong (”New Community Movement”) in South Korea. It has been linked to a “Green Book” in Malaysia to encourage local food production. Indonesia has also adopted the microhorticulture approach as a longterm solution in the fight against widely prevalent vitamin-A deficiency. Similar programmes are being implemented in Thailand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and other Asian countries [19].
Again, I am not suggesting that this is enough to feed the total demands of urban populations. Rather, I am just arguing whether or not the land can be cultivated sustainably, regardless of the output.
And, like I said, I totally agree, there must be a Zone 5 somewhere. In fact, that Zone 5 does exist in the “Russian” agriculture example I mentioned. Further in the article I quoted, Dmitry Orlov says another bit about Russians and their kitchen gardens:
Forests in Russia have always been used as an important additional source of food. Russians recognize, and eat, just about every edible mushroom variety, and all of the edible berries. During the peak mushroom season, which is generally in the fall, forests are overrun with mushroom-pickers. The mushrooms are either pickled or dried and stored, and often last throughout the winter.
And in this interview:
I saw something like this near the town of Puschino south of Moscow on the banks of the Oka River. There was a biosphere reserve on the north side of the river, and they kept the river corridor relatively pristine. People would go out on the weekend with baskets and harvest the forest: a kind of modern age hunting and gathering.
Three things amazed me. One was how pretty the landscape was; the people there appreciated the beauty and they kept it beautiful. Second, I was impressed by how competent they were; the people knew plants and animals. They were natural historians. The third thing was how productive the land along the river appeared to be.
Thank you for clarifying this issue. We cannot eliminate zone 5. We can definitely intermingle it with our other zones. (And this is even done in many metro areas, where I see suburbs and cities exist alongside preserves as well on maps.)
I’m leaving for an Easter trip…so I won’t be responding to any more comments.
Comment by Taylor — 14 April 2006 @ 12:58 PM
“Yes, I think that the zones CAN be intermingled — mostly depending on what one means by intermingling and the net quantity of space involved.”
Exactly. Like in Russia.
Comment by Taylor — 14 April 2006 @ 1:00 PM
“Now, what happens if the current world population turns to 1000 sq foot personal gardens for thier food supply? This is vastly MORE space than is currently used by modern industiral agriculture. And in terms of the cities, it is an even greater change in land use. That implies to me that in order to accomplish this in the city, whatever remains of ‘wild untended land’ in and immediately around those cities must be replaced with gardens. So then where is your nursery/game preserve? And if they are literally necessary to the health of the whole, it will be too late once we realize our folly.”
Interesting. I was just talking about the feasibility of cultivating that land IN GENERAL…not about cultivating all land in cities.
But of course, I would assume that there is a lag between that realization of that folly…so it might be that before the gardens die, the area might be cleared.
But, of course, if you use the example of the city of Indianapolis, there are several “preserves” in that city, and areas were people routinely are quite spread out (some where people have 1-2 acres of land).
Comment by Taylor — 14 April 2006 @ 1:03 PM
Two typos:
“areas where people routinely are quite spread out.”
And that interview comes from CONTEXT magazine, and the speaker is David Orr.
Comment by Taylor — 14 April 2006 @ 1:03 PM
Hey –
Yeah, me too.
Have a nice holiday
Janene
Comment by Janene — 14 April 2006 @ 1:04 PM
And, like I said, I don’t believe humans are gods and can control nature entirely either, so this discussion is closed.
Comment by Taylor — 14 April 2006 @ 1:07 PM
“What vegetable plants are biennials?” The following families are generally biennial Cruciferae (cabbage, broccoli, turnips, radishes…), Umbelliferae (carrots, parsnips, celery, fennel…), and Chenopodiaceae (beets, spinach, chard)
Comment by ChandraShakti — 15 April 2006 @ 5:59 PM
how old are you scruff? if you are 50 can you be our gardener please
Comment by Anonymous — 3 May 2006 @ 6:04 PM
I’m not old enough to be your gardener. Sorry.
Comment by scruff — 3 May 2006 @ 9:12 PM
Janene:
“From a gardening/horticultural standpoint, its even more subtle but it may vary well be even more critical than we guess. Zone 5 represents habititat… for plant, animals and fungi that DON’T live in the garden itself. Seeing as how permaculture is all about the complex relationships between different species of organisms in a healthy ecology, Zone 5 thus becomes both the nursery and the ‘game preserve’ so to speak. If you eliminate Zone 5, then you are also, potentially, eliminating necessary components to the long term health and survival of the other zones.”
Thanks again, Janene.
I know it’s been a while but I was just confused since while I had seen this justified before, it did not jive well with other examples I had read about, such as the gardens of Havana, where there did not seem to be any “nature preserve” yet the gardens seemed to be doing just fine. However, there are many nature preserves outside of Havana and, according to “Community Solution” forest cover is expanding. So perhaps that’s the “Zone 5″ in that permaculture setup.
It just seemed unclear with examples like that whether or not “Zone 5″ was essential to the gardens or whether or not it was essential for protein to supplement the horticultural/permacultural diet. I do agree that there should be wilderness preserved, and that when foraging is a part of one’s diet, you do rely on it for protein, which is likely to be what makes h/p-culture sustainable. But that is a different argument than whether or not it is essential to the garden.
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 12:46 PM
And that’s the original claim by Jason that I was questioning.
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 1:02 PM
“The point of diminishing returns–when you need to start monocropping to get more efficiency out of the fields. Permaculture may be sustainable, but only if you cap its productivity fairly low, at the village level. If everyone has their own 1,000 square foot garden, then you start to wipe out the untended wilderness–what permaculturalists call their “zone 5″–that’s so critical to the gardens’ success. The gardens start to die, etc.”
This claim.
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 1:06 PM
But then, if the gardens start to die with the wiping out of “Zone 5,” then why hasn’t this happened in Havana, where people have small, “1000 sq ft” gardens close together with little wild space? Granted, they’re not feeding the entire population, but they’re still gardens.
Unless, of course, you consider the wilderness areas outside of Havana as their “zone 5.”
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 1:42 PM
The wilderness outside of Havana would be the zone 5 in question. Furthermore, Havana’s gardens are still very young and unproven.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2006 @ 1:54 PM
Ah, a nice language misunderstanding. I misunderstood you. It seemed from your claim that you felt that the wilderness had to be right next to the gardens. Of course, it is not in Havana, but there is indeed wilderness outside of Havana.
Of course, this is more than capping the permacultural productivity at a village level, but there is still a zone 5. I guess there can still be a zone 5 around even if the horticulture is being performed in a non-horticultural village, and is being produced at a higher level than a village.
I still agree that zone 5 is important for conservation and for foraging (as Dmitry Orlov put it in his essays about Russia, see “Post-Soviet Lessons for A Post-American Century”, even Russians forage with forested areas around their cities–for mushrooms), which could be the zone 5 for those gardens as well.
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 2:07 PM
Well, people need protein. Where’s it coming from? Havana is still part of an industrial society, so meat is imported from farms. If there was no industrial society, things would be different. Havana’s population would need a sizable wilderness nearby to hunt meat.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2006 @ 2:17 PM
Yes, but that’s different than saying that that is important for the survival of the garden, which was what I was questioning, not about the human needs of protein, as well as the argument that the sustainability of permaculture was only possible if it was capped at the village level.
There is a difference about needing untended wilderness for protein vs. needing untended wilderness for the survival of the garden. Of course, it could be both, but I guess, as Janene pointed out, we don’t entirely know.
Unless, of course, people agree to go vegetarian. I do remember reading on Bill McKibben’s “The Cuba Diet” that many people are vegetarian in Cuba. Whether or not that is healthy or would be self-eliminating due to malnutrition in the future is another issue, of course.
However, according the this article, found on “http://www.greens.org/s-r/38/38-06.html,” Havana does provide for some of its protein:
“In Havana alone, 30,000 residents tend 8,000 community gardens and small farms producing vegetables, fruit, eggs, medicinal plants, honey, and such livestock as rabbits and poultry. “
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 2:33 PM
No, it’s not really critical to the survival of the garden, but of the gardeners.
As for vegetarianism, it’s simply too difficult to get enough protein that way, so it can never work as a society-wide solution. That’s why there’s never been a vegetarian society anywhere. There are plenty of ways to provide protein from a garden, from protein-rich plants, to some small livestock, but this cannot provide for the full protein needs of a community on its own. This must be supplemented. For now, Havana is supplemented with imports of meat; in the future, if it is going to survive, it will need sizable wilderness for hunting. This is the same balance of protein sources used by horticultural tribes, providing up to a village level of population density.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2006 @ 2:43 PM
“For now, Havana is supplemented with imports of meat; in the future, if it is going to survive, it will need sizable wilderness for hunting.”
This might be why pastoralism emerged. It was not just a way of life dependent on those agricultural societies, but the agricultural societies could have just been as dependent on the pastoralists for their needs of meat.
But I’m still skeptical about the claim that horticulture can only support villages no larger than 300 people. I say this simply because I have done a bit on research on horticultural tribes before which suggest that while in many environments, like the Amazon rainforest, this may be the case, this is not in the case of every environment.
I have read about other horticultural societies, like the Arawaks. According to this article on Carribean prehistory (found on the website http://www.cr.nps.gov/seac/outline/06-carib_prehistory/index-2.htm):
The Arawak culture is noted for large village sites of 1,000 to 5,000 people controlled by chiefdoms, with heavy emphasis on the cultivation of yucca and cassava, with supplemental hunting and shellfish-gathering, and the creation of ball courts or ceremonial plazas attached to the larger settlements.
I’ve also read of exceptional forager societies with villages larger than 300 people, such as the Chumash, who settled the area of California now occupied by Los Angeles. According to this article (found on http://www.cabrillo.edu/~crsmith/anth6_scoastal.html).
(The Chumash and Gabrielino who occupied the southern California coast (from just north of present-day San Luis Obispo to south of Los Angeles) and adjacent offshore islands developed one of the most complex expressions of cultural development known among peoples with a gathering-hunting-fishing subsistence base. In many ways, the coastal and island dwelling Chumash, along with the Gabrielino, were among the most exceptional Formative Period cultures. They were fishers of exceptional ability and were unique in California in that their subsistence centered around ocean fishing (and to a lesser extent, the hunting of sea mammals). Without doubt their most outstanding technological feature was the frameless plank canoe, or tomol. With their swift multi-plank canoes, the Chumash and Gabrielino were capable of navigating long distance in open seas. The plank canoe had a profound effect on the development of a maritime economy and, coupled with the richness of the fisheries of the Santa Barbara Channel, allowed the rise of fully sedentary communities of as many as 1,000 or more inhabitants, an unheard of village size in the rest of native California).
And then there’s the example of several Iroquois tribes, cited by this article (from http://www.adamsheritage.com/pre/stlawrence.htm).
The villages housed up to two thousand people. The fishing settlements were probably satellite settlements to the main villages. Each village contained up to forty large, multi-family longhouses and was protected by a tall, defensive palisade of closely set vertical poles enclosing an area of up to 3.5 hectares.
While I agree that the 300 limit is pretty obvious in tropical areas, what about these other tribes in other environments?
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 3:17 PM
“For now, Havana is supplemented with imports of meat; in the future, if it is going to survive, it will need sizable wilderness for hunting.”
Or access to farmland which it can use to raise those animals.
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 3:35 PM
No, pastoralism emerged in conjunction with agriculture, rather than horticulture, and the creation of a whole subject ecosystem of domestication.
You’re confusing two different statistics here. Villages are only a few hundred people, but a single chief would rule over several villages, so the population of a chiefdom could go into the thousands, even while individual villages only numbered in the hundreds.
Now, the central village would, in some very complex chiefdoms, live off of the produce of neighboring villages, and reach very large numbers. However, this begins to tip the balance from horticulture to agriculture. The Iroquois and the Kwakiutl are both in our “Exceptions that Prove the Rule” series, but for some of these larger, more complex chiefdoms, the more obvious comparison would be Cahokia.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2006 @ 3:54 PM
So why does the article read “village sites of 1000-5000 people?”
The Chumash, it seems, are quite similar to the Kwakiutl.
So the Iroquois were agricultural? I had assumed that the Iroquois were a horticultural people, since they did not use monoculture, yet still acquired villages larger than 300. Or maybe monoculture is not inherent to agriculture?
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 5:13 PM
As I wrote in the article above, the Haudenosaunee are a very unique example, in that they straddle the boundary of agriculture and horticulture in a lot of ways. They’re very ambiguous.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 September 2006 @ 5:36 PM
So I guess, like many types of horticulture, the jury is still out as to whether they were sustainable.
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 5:39 PM
So I guess, like many types of horticulture, the jury is still out as to whether they were sustainable.
But the Iroquois still, like other horticulturalists, did hunt and forage to supplement their diet, and did not plant monoculture fields.
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 5:40 PM
Jason wrote:
“You’re confusing two different statistics here. Villages are only a few hundred people, but a single chief would rule over several villages, so the population of a chiefdom could go into the thousands, even while individual villages only numbered in the hundreds.”
Interesting. So there have been horticultural chiefdoms, like the Arawak.
However, the article stated that the “village sites were 1000-5000 people.” I did not find a part of that article suggesting that those were the sizes of the chiefdoms. If you can find it, I’ll definitely eat some humble pie.
Another example, however, where a few articles suggest horticultural villages larger than 300 people is the Taino Indians. I have four sources here that argue the ancient Taino villages are larger than 300:
The article, “Deep Look: The Tainos?” at http://www.discoverhaiti.com/history00_1_1.htm, which reads:
The villages contained an average of one to two thousand people living in irregular houses arranged around a plaza. The typical village of the Taino contained a flat court in the center of the villagewith houses surrounding it. The regular houses had a circular shaped figure with poles providing its primary support.They had dirt floor and roofed dwelling and were covered with woven straw and palm leaves. These houses were called ajoupas. They received guests on wooden stools.
This article, “Los Tainos of Puerto Rico, Part 1″ from “http://www.pacaritambo.com/Tainos.html”
Classic Tainos lived in large permanent villages in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Each village was governed by a cacique (chief). Villages contained one to two thousand people and ranged in size from a single structure to 50 or so houses. All houses were made of wood and thatch and several families lived together in one house. Houses were arranged around a central plaza and the cacique’s house, always the largest and best made, was situated on the plaza itself. Houses were called bohÃos. BohÃos were either conically or square shaped with the predominant form being conical. This because only caciques lived in the square ones (caney). BohÃos had dirt floors and no inside walls separating the families. Goods were stored in baskets which were hung on walls. Villages were loosely organized into district chiefdoms. Each village was ruled by one of the village caciques in the district.
This article, “A Note on Tainos: Whither Progress?” at http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/41/013.html
By all descriptions, Taino life and culture at contact was uniquely adapted to its environment. Population estimates vary greatly but put the number of inhabitants in Española (Santo Domingo/Haiti) at approximately half a million to seven million. Estimates for Cuba vary from 120,000 to 200,000, with newer estimates pushing that number up. Whether one takes the low or the high estimates, early descriptions of Taino life at contact tell of large concentrations, strings of a hundred or more villages of five hundred to one thousand people.
The article in Wikipedia about the Taino culture estimates the largest village to be about 3000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C3%ADno).
Yet the Taino’s cultivation practices seem to be similar to horticulturalists, and they supplemented their diet with hunting and fishing. They also raised some fish as well.
From “A Note on Tainos: Whither Progress?”
The Taino islands provided a vast array of edible fruits. The Arawaks made specific use of many types of trees and plants from an estimated floral and faunal range of 5,800 species. The jagua tree they used for dyeing cotton, the jocuma and the guama for making rope, the jucaro for underwater construction, the royal palm for buildings and specific other trees for boats, spears, digging tools, chairs, bowls, baskets and other woven mats (in this art they flourished), cotton cloth (for hammocks), large fishing nets and good hooks made of large fish bones. Inspecting deserted seashore camps, Spanish sailors found what they judged to be excellent nets and small fishing canoes stored in water-tight sheds. Further upriver in the villages, they saw large fields of corn, yucca, beans and fruit orchards covering whole valleys. They walked through the squares of villages, all recently swept clean, where they saw many kinds of drying tubers, grains and herbs, and sunlight-tight storage sheds with shelves packed with thousands of dried cassava (casahe or cazabi) torts. In one village, sailors found large cakes of fine wax, a local product. (Rivero 1966)
From “Deep Look: The Tainos?”
Tainos ate mostly meat and fish, essentially their primary source of protein. They also ate birds, small mammals, snake and any other animals. Their diet also comprised sweet potatoes, beans and peanuts as well as corn. They brought guava from South America as well as animals like agouti and opossum. They had cassava and manioc for staples, which provided flour for them to bake after having extracted the poisonous juice from those roots. They also hunted for bats, snakes, various rodents, worms and other mammals. However, they were not men-eaters! The Taino practiced a system of agriculture that was maintenance free. They used a shifting method of agriculture to avoid exhausting the soil.
And then, from “Were They Savages?”
Fishing and hunting were common among all three tribes, but the Tainos had a sophisticated agriculture system, which was perfectly adapted to conditions of island environment. There were fields of knee high mounds, called conucas, planted with yuca (manioc), batata (sweet potato), and various squashes and beans. Taino agriculture gave the highest returns of food in continuous supply by the simplest methods and modest labor (Sale, 99). This was due to the fact that the mound configurations were very resistant to erosion and flooding and adaptable to almost all topographic conditions including steep hillsides, (Sale 99). These environments of tropical forests, 60 to 70 foot trees, many birds, and the sweet smell of flowers made their surrounding seem quite delightful. Other crops were those of tobacco, cotton, fruits, and calabashes.
This could be another example, like the Iroquois, of an ambiguous case between horticulture and agriculture. They planted plants in mounds (like the Iroquois) and also hunted, fished, and foraged to supplement their diet.
Comment by Taylor — 5 September 2006 @ 11:18 PM
“No, pastoralism emerged in conjunction with agriculture, rather than horticulture, and the creation of a whole subject ecosystem of domestication.”
So, animal husbandry and ranching to feed urban populations is not pastoralism?
But it could still be true, even when pastoralism emerged via agriculture, that the agricultural society the pastoralists in question traded with could have been dependent on the pastoralists.
Comment by Taylor — 6 September 2006 @ 9:11 AM
“There are plenty of ways to provide protein from a garden, from protein-rich plants, to some small livestock, but this cannot provide for the full protein needs of a community on its own. This must be supplemented.”
So what are the protein requirements of a community? Small livestock, like chicken and rabbits, or eggs, is not enough protein?
Comment by Taylor — 6 September 2006 @ 9:21 AM
[blockquote]Small livestock, like chicken and rabbits, or eggs, is not enough protein?
[/blockquote]
And, just for completeness, since we’re talking about Cuba, don’t forget guinea pigs and pigeons.
Comment by jhereg — 6 September 2006 @ 11:16 AM
Also, what about suburban areas? They are fairly low-dense, and having grown up in one, have “forest preserves” and wild areas surrounding them. Lawns could be made into horticultural gardens, and there are also large open parks that could be used to raise larger animals, like cattle, to supplement protein needs. Wild areas could also be used for hunting (and I see quite a bit of them in some suburban areas, like the Chicago area and the Indianapolis metro area). Yes, there are lots of people there, but they are quite spread out and there is a bit of open land (and there could be even more if parking lots and roads were torn up). I even hear of some permacultural activity going on in suburban areas, as well as horse-breeding in some lower-dense suburban areas (like one suburb I am familiar with, Barrington Hills, where each person lives on five-acres of land).
Similar ideas have been written about by permaculture guru David Holmgren, in his article “Retrofitting the Suburbs for Sustainability.” (found at http://www.energybulletin.net/5104.html)
Similar articles can be found on this website, “Raise The Hammer: Suburbia Project,” (at http://www.postcarbon.org/node/1350/view) which also talk about how open land can be gardened.
I’m just mentioning because I have not seen much mentioned on this website about suburbs, just cities and rural areas.
Comment by Taylor — 6 September 2006 @ 2:39 PM
“horse-breeding in some lower-dense suburban areas (like one suburb I am familiar with, Barrington Hills, where each person lives on five-acres of land).”
Typo. Each family lives on five acres of land.
Comment by Taylor — 6 September 2006 @ 2:42 PM
Finally, I’m not trying to argue with you. I was just sharing research I had done about a few “exceptional” tribes that seemed to be horticultural. My other research does support your claims, like the tribes of the Amazon.
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 9:48 AM
A self-sufficient village maxes out around 300. The tropics are actually pretty good for providing food, particularly if you use locally-adapted methods, like slash-and-burn. Any more than this, and you start to face hard choices, like planting the same gardens too often in succession, or splitting up your population. This holds across the board.
Now, there have been some fairly large villages on record. These were not sustainable. They were typically the head villages of chiefdoms, and survived through tribute from other villages. The head village is, itself, utterly vulnerable and completely dependent on the surrounding villages bringing it food. This order is usually maintained through force, whether it be physical or religious coercion. Either way, it is a very volatile order that requires a specifically large energy source to maintain such complexity—usually, full-blown agriculture, or something very near it. As I discussed elsewhere, the Haudenosaunee were, in many ways, quite agricultural. They are frequently classified as such by anthropologists, though their particular brand of agriculture definitely problematizes the divide between agriculture and horticulture.
Typically not, no.
Yes, the bond is typically at least somewhat symbiotic. See “On Pastoralism.”
Remember, you need enough protein to provide for the physical bodies of everyone in the community. It is typically difficult, logistically, to raise enough chickens, rabbits or the like in an urban or village context to provide that much protein. Some plants are rich in protein and can provide for some of this shortfall. Grain or potatoes, eaten in sufficiently large quantities, can do the trick (though such quantities cannot be raised in a sustainable manner). Agricultural peoples provide the rest with raised livestock. Horticultural peoples hunt. The number of small livestock and protein-rich vegetables that can be used can lessen the need for other sources, but it should be remembered that our primary dietary need is sufficient protein. Energy is needed as well, but not as critically. Micronutrients—vitamins and minerals—make up a small but critical element of our nutrition.
Most of suburbia has a population density far exceeding even the largest sustainable village. Your suggestions would certainly be a move in the right direction, but I do not think they would be sufficient.
Take a look at some of Kunstler’s books. Suburbia is probably in the worst situation of all.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 September 2006 @ 11:45 AM
“A self-sufficient village maxes out around 300.”
Unless, of course, you are in an exceptional foraging area, like the Kwakiutl, the Tlingit, and the Chumash.
“As I discussed elsewhere, the Haudenosaunee were, in many ways, quite agricultural. They are frequently classified as such by anthropologists, though their particular brand of agriculture definitely problematizes the divide between agriculture and horticulture.”
Not only that, but it kind of challenges certain definitions you mention about agriculture–specifically that it absolutely necessitates monocropping (which the Iroquois did not do) and total reliance on agriculture (which the Iroquois were not either). This suggests the Iroquois might have been sustainable since they did rely on the wilds for protein, and could not destroy them.
“Now, there have been some fairly large villages on record. These were not sustainable. They were typically the head villages of chiefdoms, and survived through tribute from other villages. The head village is, itself, utterly vulnerable and completely dependent on the surrounding villages bringing it food. This order is usually maintained through force, whether it be physical or religious coercion.”
Why does lack of self-sufficiency equate unsustainability if the food delivered to the village is grown sustainably? Why does maintaining something through force automatically mean it is unsustainable? Since the Taino Indians still relied on wilderness for hunting, and their cultivation was not monocultural, doesn’t this mean that there is a structural limitation on their growth, and thus a level of sustainability? There is also little evidence of eroding soil on their cultivated land, as can be seen in this article, at http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/history/precolumbian/tainover.htm:
The Arawak/Taino had a developed system of agriculture which was virtually maintenance free. They raised their crops in a conuco, a large mound which was devised especially for farming. They packed the conuco with leaves to protect from soil erosion and fixed a large variety of crops to assure that something would grow, no matter what weather conditions prevailed.
“Most of suburbia has a population density far exceeding even the largest sustainable village. Your suggestions would certainly be a move in the right direction, but I do not think they would be sufficient. Take a look at some of Kunstler’s books. Suburbia is probably in the worst situation of all.”
Those suggestions were based on literature I read from David Holmgren. Kunstler is accurate about the car-dependence of suburbia, but it is true that even if suburbia cannot sufficiently provide for the dietary needs of a community, there is still more room to meet whatever dietary requirements can be provided in land that can be cultivated than in cities. This suggests that suburbs would last longer when they became “garden suburbs” before they end up collapsing, assuming people actually make the effort to do that, of course. But if they became “garden suburbs
Again, I am only making these replies to clarify your claims. Now I understand why horticulture “doesn’t scale,” as you mention–because of horticultural peoples’ reliance on hunting.
“Agricultural peoples provide the rest with raised livestock.”
But how is that not sustainable if the other dietary needs are being produced by horticulture/permaculture?
I’m also semi-skeptical of your claims that agriculture is inherently unsustainable. While I do agree about your points on monocropping, I have also heard claims that three sites–the Chinese, the Egyptians, and the Incas had a level of sustainability in their ancient production systems (not their modern ones, obviously) because of exceptional environments. The Chinese’s fields were replenished by the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, as well as their practice of terracing which seems to slow down soil erosion and their recycling of nutrients such as straw, animal and human manure into the soil. The Japanese did not cut down their mountain forests, and apparently their rice paddies had nutrients replenished by rainfall from the mountains as well as also composting humanure and other nutrients. The Egyptians, it seems, were able to farm their land (before the Aswan Dam, of course) because the flooding of the Nile replenished their soils with the nutrients. The Incas’ terracing practices seem to have saved them from eroding soils (the Andes Mountains is not a desert, after all, like the Fertile Crescent). They also did not appear to switch to the Green Revolution until they were colonized by the “West.”
Unless, of course, there is another aspect to their agricultural production or their society that makes them unsustainable.
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 1:01 PM
Still, as a person with no car, stuck in the suburbs with little money to buy a car and to get to a wilderness area, and little money to purchase land or join an ecovillage, I’m afraid I’m going to come to terms with my doom in my neighborhood. I’ll enjoy whatever life my community has left, and then will pass on. I did not choose to live here–I was born in a city, and my family moved here when I was five. I have no way out.
Besides, I personally think that you are wrong in claiming that people who die will choose to do so. While I do agree that no one will try, there is a distinction between between choosing something and not having a choice. Why do you argue in Thesis #28 that people can choose to live or die if, should they all choose to live, there would be a wildlife extinction crisis? Yes, it’s likely no one will make that choice, but in the hypothetical scenario that they do, they would not be able to make it anyway.
I’m also amazed that people who predict an inevitable die-off often think of themselves as the survivors, and try to survive. If billions must die, don’t they have a responsibility to lay down their lives for the good of the Earth? Frankly, that’s what I think, and I think I’m going to go down with my ship to free room for other “rewilded” people.
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 1:27 PM
However, it is also true that while cities have not been entirely self-sufficient, agricultural urban societies like China have had lots of urban agriculture in their cities. As this article points out, cities in China may not be able to provide for all of their needs, but they still can provide for much of their vegetables and some of their protein.
I am not arguing that it is sustainable, but I am arguing that some level is possible. However, I also believe that “sustainability” is a semi-oxymoron, since everything is sustainable on some timeline. Ran Prieur pointed this out, and then considered another way of putting it: “Why not ask, “How long will it last?” and “Will it last until changing environmental conditions or will self-destruct at a certain time before those conditions?” A healthy man who is shot is still healthy compared to a man who ate junk food and died young of a heart attack, even if they both died at the same age.
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 1:41 PM
Correction: “Most people who predict a die-off consider themselves the survivors,” and “why don’t most people don’t think they have a responsibility to die?”
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 2:36 PM
Yes. There are maybe a dozen or so places on the planet where that’s possible, so it’s an exception hardly worth mentioning.
Actually, I tend to classify the Haudenosaunee, like most anthropologists, as horticulturalists, rather than agriculturalists, and for largely these reasons. They obviously exhibit a very intense form of horticulture, with extremely complex structures, but it does show that there are midpoints possible between agriculture and horticulture.
Because force can never be maintained forever. It makes the larger village a relic of complexity: it is unnecessary. In a pinch, it will be discarded as a luxury that can no longer be afforded.
Absolutely. There’s a lot of measures like that that WILL be adopted as collapse progresses, because they HAVE to be, but they will likely not be sufficient. There are many more benign ways to be unsustainable than our current “culture of maximum harm,” to borrow Daniel Quinn’s phrase.
That’s the big one, I think. But it’s also very much based in a specific location. Some horticultural techniques require a hill, or a forest, or a clearing, etc. They can’t be applied to just any terrain. Very often, as in permaculture, the most active areas are “edges,” so just making it bigger actually reduces productivity.
Horticulture/permaculture does not produce enough absolute food to justify the raising of large livestock. Large livestock really only makes sense on a plains-like environment. Notice pastoralism is always practiced on semi-arid grasslands, and pastures are always made to resemble a grassy meadow. That’s because large livestock are, without exception, large, grassland-adapted grass-eaters. If you’re a horticulturalist practicing permaculture in the forest, it’s simply not worth your while to clear land to raise livestock.
Yes, notice, “exceptional environments.” What makes agricultural unsustainable is its compulsion to grow, which compels it to leave those exceptional environments where it might otherwise work. The Egyptians expanded in the New Kingdom, and collapsed. The Inkas expanded beyond their niche, and would have collapsed had the Spanish not destroyed them. Unlike exceptional foragers like the Kwakiutl which are kept from expanding, agriculture is compelled to expand, and once that begins, it becomes unsustainable.
I disagree with Diamond’s portrayal of Japanese “sustainability.” Forest management certainly curbed the destruction underway prior, but this simply made Japan unsustainable on a slightly longer timeline.
This is the same problem I have with Kant. If we all chose to flush our toilets at the exact same moment, we’d be in a lot of shit, wouldn’t we? Societies do not have choices; individuals do. This line of logic is trying to project “people” as a society. There is a difference. No matter what happens, most people will choose to remain in their society and ultimately die with it, largely from a failure of imagination—or, more accurately, a refusal to imagine. But you, as an individual, always have the choice of which segment you want to be in.
Even now, Taylor, you’ve made your choice. I respect that, and wish you luck, but the fact of the matter is you do have a choice. You may not have a car, but you do have legs. Foragers routinely cover more distance than that, so your decision to remain is very much a choice. You make that choice for your own reasons, evaluating the things that are important for you. All I’m here to do is to highlight the fact that you do have that choice, whatever it may be.
I think the critical difference will be imagination more than anything else. I think I’ll be among the few survivors not because I’m more talented, or smarter, or more favored by fate—if anything, I’m less so—but I have the imagination to consider the possibility of life beyond civilization. There is no fairness to die-off, and there is no virtue common to its survivors, but it is not a random killer, either. Civilization will end, and all who depend on it will die without it. That’s most of us. Those who aren’t dependent on it, will fare as well (or as poorly) as ever.
But I do think that the number of people with the imagination to try will be far less than the number of people that could be physically supported, so I think what we need desperately are MORE people choosing to survive, not less. That’s why I slog it out on the internet, in the hopes that I can spark just a few more imaginations, and maybe a few more will survive who might not have.
A sustainable society is one that can last indefinitely, barring any major shifts in climate, invasions, or other such shocks. Since such shocks are inevitable, a sustainable society is not an immortal one, but when it dies, it will not be its own killer.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 September 2006 @ 2:43 PM
Also, what about the Pueblo Indians, the survivors of the Anasazi? Were they the “chiefdoms” you mention? Because there are reported estimates of Pueblo villages larger than 300, like the Zuni, as mentioned in this article.
Or perhaps they were like the chiefdoms you mentioned above.
Jason wrote:
“Grain or potatoes, eaten in sufficiently large quantities, can do the trick (though such quantities cannot be raised in a sustainable manner).”
How so, if most horticulturalists still have grains growing in them (and potatoes have been grown by horticulturalists?)
I apologize for being so dumb, I am just trying to learn what the actual food requirements are for a person. It’s interesting what you mention about vegetarianism–given that while there is no totally vegetarian culture, there are cultures that eat less meat than others–I hear that many Amazonian horticultural tribes eat a smaller amount of meat than the Inuit, which of course, must eat more meat as they are in a different environment. I also know that Cubans are mostly vegetarian as well, as well as some Indians in India, like the Jains. But then, the Jains are not “primitive,” and no “primitive” culture is vegetarian, so that doesn’t really count.
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 2:48 PM
Yes. There are maybe a dozen or so places on the planet where that’s possible, so it’s an exception hardly worth mentioning.
Why? They’re still exceptions nonetheless. I’m not arguing they aren’t exceptions, but should they not be examined since they do exist? The Iroquois are obviously one of them, since they do act like horticulturalists and do have villages larger than other horticulturalists.
That’s the big one, I think. But it’s also very much based in a specific location. Some horticultural techniques require a hill, or a forest, or a clearing, etc. They can’t be applied to just any terrain.
Agriculture doesn’t look the same everywhere either. The Chinese did not terrace hills and mountains, but still farmed them. There may be less limits, but still are limits–the Chinese, after all, may have invaded the Tibetan plateau but was still not able to conquer the whole world the way the Europeans were.
Yes, notice, “exceptional environments.” What makes agricultural unsustainable is its compulsion to grow, which compels it to leave those exceptional environments where it might otherwise work. The Egyptians expanded in the New Kingdom, and collapsed. The Inkas expanded beyond their niche, and would have collapsed had the Spanish not destroyed them. Unlike exceptional foragers like the Kwakiutl which are kept from expanding, agriculture is compelled to expand, and once that begins, it becomes unsustainable.
Precisely. But it doesn’t make sense to make blanket assumptions about the unsustainability or sustainability of something without forgetting those exceptions. Also, the agriculture might have been unsustainable in the areas they expanded, but that doesn’t make it unsustainable in their “niche.”
The Earth is not uniform, each ecosystem is different; thus, whatever means of subsistence a people uses is going to be different, regardless of its sustainability. Mass wine production is unsustainable but it still is not grown everywhere because it only works in the present environment of places like France for the time it is sustainable.
Of course they collapsed. But did you not define collapse at one time to mean collapsing back to pre-agriculture, or the Stone Age? According to your definition, that would not be collapse.
But the Egyptians and Chinese didn’t collapse back to a pre-agricultural society, they just shifted back to the places where agriculture happened to be sustainable. So did China. If the Incas were not conquered, they would have too. But despite their collapses, they still had some farmland that was sustainably farmed because of those exceptions. They would have been subject to collapse, but an indefinite cycle of growth and collapse until that indefinite cycle changed (due to colonization by the West).
Again, the fact that those societies expanded doesn’t mean that some parts of their areas could support farming. Many areas in China and Egypt prior to modern agiculture were farmed for thousands of years straight.
Because force can never be maintained forever. It makes the larger village a relic of complexity: it is unnecessary. In a pinch, it will be discarded as a luxury that can no longer be afforded.”
But what if the energy to provide that force still remains? What if that pinch does not occur? Since many of those arrangements often involve the smaller villages just as dependent on the larger villages as vice-versa (or as believed by the inhabitants of those villages). People are creatures of habit, as Ran Prieur points out. If they believe in a hierarchal society, they will invest in it until there is no energy left. Not all energy sources are non-renewable.
Even without larger villages that are controlled by chiefdoms, why does this mean that their power cannot be maintained as long as there is sufficient energy to maintain them? The Kwakiutl and the Tlingit in the Northwest Coast region maintained their hierarchy for 10,000 years because of the predictability of the salmon runs. Now, I’m not arguing that they wouldn’t have to change their society should the salmon runs disappear (which they did), but what other situation would have caused that to happen?
Also, what’s the difference between a chief and a Big Man?
Even now, Taylor, you’ve made your choice. I respect that, and wish you luck, but the fact of the matter is you do have a choice. You may not have a car, but you do have legs. Foragers routinely cover more distance than that, so your decision to remain is very much a choice. You make that choice for your own reasons, evaluating the things that are important for you. All I’m here to do is to highlight the fact that you do have that choice, whatever it may be.
Not when you are not within walking distance from wilderness sizable enough to supplement your horticultural diet or forage, or, like myself, cannot afford primitive skills or a car to get to a place to acquire them.
Consider–how do you expect a poor African-American in Detroit who cannot leave his neighborhood to be able, with his feet, to get to wilderness to forage?
“A sustainable society is one that can last indefinitely, barring any major shifts in climate, invasions, or other such shocks. Since such shocks are inevitable, a sustainable society is not an immortal one, but when it dies, it will not be its own killer.”
Precisely my point.
But if agriculture can be sustained in a few “exceptional areas,” even though they expand beyond them, doesn’t that make the society sustainable in those “niche” areas?
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 3:15 PM
This is the same problem I have with Kant. If we all chose to flush our toilets at the exact same moment, we’d be in a lot of shit, wouldn’t we? Societies do not have choices; individuals do. This line of logic is trying to project “people” as a society. There is a difference. No matter what happens, most people will choose to remain in their society and ultimately die with it, largely from a failure of imagination—or, more accurately, a refusal to imagine. But you, as an individual, always have the choice of which segment you want to be in.
I disagree with Kant for those same reasons. But individuals, together, are people. If people did choose to survive, and were aware of life beyond civilization, then some people would still have to die. That was my point. What is “society” but a not a group of “people,” which is comprised of “individuals?” Individuals can choose only if the vast majority chooses to die. I choose to die because I am letting another person live, because for everyone who lives, millions must die for them, if the planet can only support millions after the collapse. You are, in some way, “selfishly” relying on those ignorant people who are going to die for your life.
I’m in a metropolis surrounded by development at least 50 miles around, and in some directions more. There are forest preserves, but they are meager compared to whatever my foraging or horticultural tribe would need. My metropolis is surrounded by farmland, and not much wilderness. Again–while there is still wilderness in many areas of the planet, if people still need wilderness despite being permacultural or horticultural, where can people go if they want to survive? It seems that, there are only a few places people can go (unless permaculture does not rely on large wildernesses for hunting). Even national forests make a small percentage of our country’s land–in the Midwestern U.S. much of the wilderness has been cut down.
Also, I am not challenging your claim that civilization is inherently unsustainable, I am challenging your claim that agriculture, in all cases, is inherently unsustainable, when there do happen to be a few “exceptions that prove this rule” in niche locations, which of course is where civ started. Those areas in China, Egypt, and Japan were farmed for thousands of years without soil erosion prior to colonizations by Europeans. Exceptions do need to be mentioned, since they do confuse the mind if one makes a blanket assumption about something and then hears about the few exceptions. Interesting about the Japanese–I hear that they were still able to farm their soil, though, due to their collection of human manure. I could not find a source for soil erosion in Japan due to their farming–do you have one?
Even in this collapse, after all, there are likely to be some hangers-on, even if they will eventually collapse later. Or perhaps there will be Neolithic kingdoms in the Fifth World that are in semi-tropical floodplains that will indefinitely expand and collapse, since their land’s nutrients will be replenished indefinitely (until the climate changes again) by the rivers. Who knows? There will still be semi-tropical areas, just at different latitudes.
At the same time, the temperate forests of Greenland, Siberia, and Antarctica may become arable because of the warming, which could be the site of various Neolithic kingdoms, regardless of their sustainability.
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 3:29 PM
Typo:
Consider–how do you expect a poor African-American [born] in Detroit who cannot leave his neighborhood to be able, with his feet, to get to wilderness to forage?
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 3:31 PM
Typo:
Consider–how do you expect a poor African-American [born] in Detroit who cannot leave his neighborhood to be able, with his feet, to get to wilderness to forage?
Not to be racist, just to give an example of poverty.
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 3:32 PM
Because force can never be maintained forever. It makes the larger village a relic of complexity: it is unnecessary. In a pinch, it will be discarded as a luxury that can no longer be afforded.
It is not unnecessary if the abandonment of that village results in the deaths of people in that society, unless there is a constricting flow of energy or resources to the village. Again, people do not willingly starve–even those in our society who are going to die are not going to die without a futile fight–just look at Israel’s water war, nor do they see themselves as choosing to die.
I am confused by your claim that complexity is initially abandoned by ideology. What I have read on your site argues that what happens first is that complexity is abandoned when there’s not enough energy to maintain it, thus making ideologies that promote simplicity able to survive. The simple fact that your movement is a fringe and that I am thought of as committing blasphemy when I discuss primitivism to most people I talk to in my suburb shows how much people are willing to abandon “egalitarinism” for mere “ideology.” A shortage of resources is different than a change of ideology.
This will be my last post unless you reply, Jason. I’m not going to bore you anymore. I’ll shut up.
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 3:51 PM
But the point still remains. Without that pinch, if the food is being grown sustainably (and horticulture can provide a small surplus), then the village can last as long as it receives that tribute. Those chiefdoms I mention with those larger villages were not supported by monoculture, regardless of whether or not it was agriculture or horticulture.
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 3:53 PM
Horticulture/permaculture does not produce enough absolute food to justify the raising of large livestock. Large livestock really only makes sense on a plains-like environment. Notice pastoralism is always practiced on semi-arid grasslands, and pastures are always made to resemble a grassy meadow. That’s because large livestock are, without exception, large, grassland-adapted grass-eaters. If you’re a horticulturalist practicing permaculture in the forest, it’s simply not worth your while to clear land to raise livestock.
Why not? There just is not enough energy to clear land, or is there?
Also, permaculture/horticulture can be practiced in semi-arid grasslands, like the horticultural tribes of the Great Plains of North America, like the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Kansa.
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 3:59 PM
Unlike exceptional foragers like the Kwakiutl which are kept from expanding, agriculture is compelled to expand, and once that begins, it becomes unsustainable.
So if those societies did not expand from those areas it would be sustainable (in theory)?
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 4:03 PM
Taylor:
I am confused by your claim that complexity is initially abandoned by ideology. What I have read on your site argues that what happens first is that complexity is abandoned when there’s not enough energy to maintain it, thus making ideologies that promote simplicity able to survive. The simple fact that your movement is a fringe and that I am thought of as committing blasphemy when I discuss primitivism to most people I talk to in my suburb shows how much people are willing to abandon “egalitarinism” for mere “ideology.” A shortage of resources is different than a change of ideology.
I can certainly understand. I’ve tried my best to argue primitivism with people. They just don’t get it.
But I think Jason underestimates the power of ideology in keeping hierarchal structures afloat. If the villages have enough food (energy) to provide to the larger village, and they believe in the legitimacy of the chief, then they will definitely provide for that village. Maybe in those chiefdoms, arguing about returning back to self-rule could have been considered just as blasphemous as it is when you try to argue the virtues of primitivism today.
Comment by villagerman — 7 September 2006 @ 4:33 PM
A self-sufficient village maxes out around 300. The tropics are actually pretty good for providing food, particularly if you use locally-adapted methods, like slash-and-burn. Any more than this, and you start to face hard choices, like planting the same gardens too often in succession, or splitting up your population. This holds across the board.
Unless, of course, in theory, you are in an environment where you can cultivate more intensely, or you are ambiguous, like the Iroquois. Horticulture outside the tropics is not always slash-and-burn.
I’m glad you mentioned the spectrum on horticulture/agriculture though. I’ve learned a lot from this discussion between Taylor and you, Jason, since those chiefdoms (Taino, Pueblo, Iroquois) Taylor mentioned did not meet the requirements for full agriculture.
Comment by populus — 7 September 2006 @ 4:38 PM
Either way, it is a very volatile order that requires a specifically large energy source to maintain such complexity—usually, full-blown agriculture, or something very near it.
Like the chiefdoms of the Arawak, Taino, and Iroquois, that Taylor and you have talked about. It isn’t always agriculture all cases.
I think you are right in emphazing exceptions, but I think Taylor is right in pointing out that these exceptions “debunk” the fact that patterns of subsistence univerally “equate” such limitations (village sizes, bands, etc.), which is what I think he is challenging, as well as the fact that there are even subtle borderline cases between horticulture/agriculture (which might be why even tribes you classify as horticultural are often classified as agricultural).
Especially since chiefdoms can form by a chief taking control of numerous villages that are self-sufficient. Whether or not he’ll last long is one thing, but he can still try. Religious coercion is a powerful thing if it can be “afforded” by energy.
Comment by Laro — 7 September 2006 @ 4:47 PM
villagerman:
I can certainly understand. I’ve tried my best to argue primitivism with people. They just don’t get it.
I can understand entirely.
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 4:48 PM
Jason wrote:
Grain or potatoes, eaten in sufficiently large quantities, can do the trick (though such quantities cannot be raised in a sustainable manner).
How is this so? Horticultural tribes routinely plant grains and beans as part of their gardens. Just look at the Hopi and their varieties of corn.
Comment by ozaukeegirl — 7 September 2006 @ 4:54 PM
Jason wrote:
“The head village is, itself, utterly vulnerable and completely dependent on the surrounding villages bringing it food. This order is usually maintained through force, whether it be physical or religious coercion.”
Why must it be force if they are all part of the same chiefdom, and might do it out of loyalty to a chief?
Comment by Laymannaus — 7 September 2006 @ 5:19 PM
I think Taylor is right. If there is loyalty to a chief, and the food production methods are sustainable, then the village could last. Of course, if the loyalty fades, and the chiefdom collapses, that is a different story, but that doesn’t make the village unsustainable if it is importing food grown sustainably. I personally think the Iroquois were sustainable because of their reliance on wilderness, and thus their inability to destroy it all.
Comment by Laymannaus — 7 September 2006 @ 5:25 PM
Jason wrote:
I disagree with Diamond’s portrayal of Japanese “sustainability.” Forest management certainly curbed the destruction underway prior, but this simply made Japan unsustainable on a slightly longer timeline.
I am interested in this claim. I have read about Japan and I have heard about how their soil did not erode because of night soil. I wonder, though, how does this make Japan less unsustainable if the forest management involves the forest being used sustainably? Second-growth forests are still ecosystems, as you have pointed out before.
Comment by Stoneboy — 7 September 2006 @ 5:29 PM
“The Chinese did not terrace hills and mountains, but still farmed them.”
Typo. I meant, the Chinese did not terrace flat areas in their territory, but still farmed them.
Comment by Taylor — 7 September 2006 @ 6:42 PM
I agree with Taylor when he says “sustainability does not equal self-sufficiency.” If food is grown sustainably and must be imported to feed a village, then the village is sustainable. Sustainability is about whether or not an ecology can sustain a village, not if humans do not like their living arrangements. If humans overthrow a chiefdom, and that makes the large village unsustainable, that doesn’t mean the village wasn’t sustainable when the chiefdom was around if it was being supported by sustainable cultivation, whatever degree of cultivation it was (horticulture/mid-hort,agriculture).
Comment by Stoneboy — 7 September 2006 @ 7:47 PM
Taylor, the proliferation of your comments is somewhat unmanageable. Could you take some time to organize your thoughts, and consolidate future responses into a single comment? It would be much appreciated.
The Pueblo are excellent examples of tribe-level societies. They are not chiefdoms, but they are larger than bands. Clans and sodalities criss-cross their society, providing a level of complexity not found in simple bands. They are horticulturalists, and more importantly, matrilineal.
Notice in the article you link to, the discussion of how these large villages were frequently abandoned: obvious evidence that the large village was not tenable. Today, the Pueblo of Sandia Village in New Mexico has 344 inhabitants (2000 census). This more detailed report gets into specific archaeological methods, and comes to the conclusion that Castle Rock pueblo had a maximum population of no more than 150 people.
In other words, ancient Pueblo ruins show precisely why later Pueblo villages fit so neatly within the range I’ve previously mentioned, and for the very reasons I’ve predicted: anything larger is simply not sustainable. Larger villages are quickly abandoned, and the Pueblo eventually settled into a pattern of villages of about 300, or less, which continues to hold today.
Note that I was talking about quantities. Both grain and potatoes are very limited as sources of protein; they are primarily supplies of carbohydrates. To get enough protein from such sources requires almost constant, day-long consumption. The Irish under English rule were long so debased that the only crop they could grow was potatoes (potatoes do well in the cold, rocky terrain the English left over for the Irish to provide their own subsistence, taking all the good land for themselves), and since this was their only source of protein, they needed to eat potatoes almost constantly to keep from frank malnutrition. Hence the stereotype of Irish constantly eating potatoes.
To consume wheat or potatoes in the quantities necessary to replace other sources of protein requires quite a bit of crop yield. Increasing output to such daunting levels pushes cultivation along the diminishing returns curve far beyond the domain of horticulture, and well into agriculture. So, in order to provide protein from wheat or potatoes, requires growing enough wheat or potatoes to provide that much protein. Since they are both a very small percentage protein, and humans are 100% protein, very large crop yields are necessary for this. Such absolute crop yields push cultivation well into agriculture. Thus, in order for a horticultural society to provide its protein needs from plant sources (as meager as they are, wheat and potatoes are among the best plant sources of protein, surpassed only by nuts and beans), it would have to cease being horticultural and become agricultural. If agriculture is not an option, due to climate, soil, or other factors, then providing protein from plants is simply not an option. Understand? The fact that horticulturalists do grow some wheat and potatoes (and they have) does not mean they grow enough to provide that kind of protein.
See Cordain, et al, 2000. “Plant-Animal Subsistence Ratios and Macronutrient Energy Estimations in Worldwide Hunter-Gatherer Diets”
It’s correlated with latitude, of course, but even at the most equatorial latitudes, foragers preferred meat, and even the most vegetable-loving foragers derived most of their diet from animals.
The Cubans, as well as the Jains, are poor examples of vegetarian societies not because they aren’t primitive, but because they’re not vegetarian societies. Cuba is not vegetarian, and the Jains are not a society—they are a social group inside a society. Individuals and groups obviously are capable of being vegetarian, but the costs and burdens of it are far too much to be implemented on the scale of a whole society, thus, no vegetarian societies.
Our Exceptions that Prove the Rule series has already looked at most of the societies you’ve brought up, but they do nothing to change the fundamental rules we’re discussing here. If I say, “If I let this ball go, it will drop,” is that a true statement? What if the ball happens to be resting on a counter, and I simply have my hand over it? That’s a trivial counter-example that does nothing to address the fundamental issue—gravity. Likewise, minor geographical flukes do nothing to change the fundamental balance of a population and a sustainable food supply.
Yes, and Europeans needed grasslands, but the difference is, agriculture scales. If you want 10 times more food, you can simply farm 10 times more land, and you’ll get it. The same does not hold for horticultural techniques. If you garden 10 times more land, you won’t get 10 times more food; you might even get less food. Because horticulture does not allow for such simple growth, horticulture does not allow for arbitrary expansion. China could terrace any hill or mountain; Europe could farm any plain. They had a source of energy unlike the Kwakiutl salmon run, because they could take it with them. This is a feature all forms of agriculture have in common. The same cannot be said of horticulture. Horticulture relies on too many varied crops, cooperating with one another and forming a viable ecosystem, a “food forest.” This cannot simply be reproduced anywhere. Horticulturalists would not have been able to sweep across Eurasia and North America as the Europeans did.
But they’re obviously not sustainable in their niche. Because their energy source can go with them, they’re always compelled to expand beyond their niche whenever the opportunity arises. They then become unsustainable, and their collapse does more than destroy their expansions; it also collapses their core. So even in their niche, it is an unsustainable strategy, because the strategy brings with it an inevitable expansion beyond that niche. Understand?
No, I did not. I defined collapse as Tainter did: the sudden loss of an established order of complexity. I have argued that the collapse that we are currently in leaves no viable level of complexity but the stone age, so that this collapse will return us to that level of complexity, but this is not a defining point of collapse. There have been many collapses, and very few have progressed all the way to the stone age. Previously collapses did not go all the way back to the stone age, because agriculture remained viable in many parts. This was not universally the case, however. The Anasazi and the Hohokam, for instance, suffered the kind of collapse we face, where the possibility of agriculture is precluded. Our collapse will be to the stone age not because this is an essential element of collapse, but because we have eliminated the possibility of agriculture without high levels of complexity.
Which is why past example is so illustrative. As Tainter points out, complexity is a function of energy; you have merely illustrated this basic fact once again. When and where do we find energy provided on the level required for chiefdoms, on a sustainable basis?
The answer is: rarely. The Pacific coast of North America has the majority of our examples, but a few other, particularly intensive horticultural societies can also be found. These are very exceptional geographical flukes.
Furthermore, there is some debate among anthropologists about just how stable the “chiefdom” is. Some have suggested that what we call a “chiefdom” is necessarily a transitionary state from tribe to state, and that a chiefdom cannot be sustained without either moving on to statehood, or collapsing to tribalism. We do know that chiefs that do not progress to very complex chiefdoms or proto-states have a fairly high turnover rate. So, is there such a thing as a sustainable chiefdom? I suspect there is something to this line of reasoning, and that the chiefdom is not a sustainable level of social complexity, but this cannot be proven.
As for ideology, it is a means people use to adapt to their reality; no more, no less. When reality changes, ideology changes quickly. When reality remains constant, revolutionaries complain of how difficult it is to change people’s ideology. That is because the revolutionary is asking the people to adopt an ideology contrary to their reality, in other words, an ideology that fails in its most essential purpose of adaptation. This is the essential truth behind Victor Hugo’s famous quote, “On résiste à l’invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l’invasion des idées,” commonly translated as, “No army can stop an idea whose time has come.” The inverse is also true: if an idea’s time has not come, no army can force it.
The divide between Big Man and Chief is one of the most essential thresholds in social complexity: the division between ascribed and attained power. The Big Man has attained power: he has influence because of the network of debts and influence he has carefully woven. The Chief has ascribed power: he has power because he’s the Chief. “Power,” as we usually use the term, typically refers to ascribed power. If you’ve ever heard someone tell you to “respect the office even if you don’t respect the man,” they were invoking your social obligation to obey ascribed power. When we crossed that threshold, social complexity left behind the power of influential, charismatic friends, in favor of institutions of power.
I’m in Pennsylvania. California is within “walking distance” from me. “Walking distance” is only meaningful within a given time frame.
As for acquiring skills, they are easily learned: online, or from a few books that could be obtained for less than $100. The primary problem is practice. Education can help, but in a pinch, you can always teach yourself. Admittedly, the cost may be higher for you, but that’s the nature of the universe: what do you want, and how much do you want it? I won’t try to change your mind, but for the sake of everyone else here it should be noted that you have made a choice.
Walking. Most of Michigan is fairly wild. A week’s walk will put a man well into the woods.
Not if it’s compelled to take the first opportunity to expand beyond that niche, putting it on a road to collapse, which is preciselty what it does.
And I only have the choice to flush my toilet at 9:24 PM EST if everyone else doesn’t make the same choice. Would you say I don’t have a choice to flush the toilet at 9:24 PM EST because of that?
Your choice has nothing to do with the choices 6.5 billion other people make. That’s true of each of us, all the time. That’s why predicting groups is so much easier than predicting individuals.
People aren’t going to survive just because millions die on their behalf. People will survive if they have the imagination to even consider a life beyond civilization. There’s too few of us as there is. I don’t see anything selfish in that. Selfish would simply be running off into the woods. Instead, we’re doing it in a very public way, to try to inspire others’ imaginations, to try to help as many others as we can to also survive. That’s why I’m spending the few free hours I have every weeknight answering criticism like this, opening myself up to the slings and arrows of internet scorn from all over the world. It’d be much easier to simply make our exodus—but that would be selfish.
Too few have the imagination to survive, and you’re bothered by feelings of guilt? Survivors’ guilt is never a rational reaction, but if you’re intent on indulging it pre-emptively, consider this: if everyone who has the imagination to try in the first place doesn’t, the very survival of our species comes into question. Billions are going to die; this can no longer be changed. You can honor that by siezing the moment and helping create a new world, or you can succumb to despair and let the species die off.
And what happened? The first window that opened, they expanded, and collapsed. There is no niche in which agriculture is sustainable, and this is why.
In thesis #29, I wrote:
Without the ability to expand, these exceptions will be small, isolated, and prone to quick collapse. This kind of exception is a product of a rare geographical fluke. It is no more germane to an understanding of the principles applied to agricultural life than the Kwakiutl are illustrative of the general principles of foraging. It’s an exception, an outlier: it tells you nothing about the curve.
There’s too much of a break involved. Most crops will need to be re-domesticated. Will domesticable species be available in these new forests? Where are the riverine flood plains that will permit domestication to take place? Agriculture does not arise in just any place: it requires a very specific convergence of climate and geography.
Imagine a thick forest full of many different types of life. A fire goes through. A decade later, the only trees there are the ones with fire-resistant seeds. What happened? Did all the trees convert to fire-resistant seeds? No, it was natural selection. Collapse will mean the end of civilization, and everyone dependent on civilization will either die, or stop being dependent on it. The result will be that a hundred years afterwards, everyone will be primitivists. This won’t be because of mass conversion: it will be because they’ll be the only ones to survive.
EROEI is too low. There may not be enough energy to clear land, but more often, the energy cost is far too high compared to the return. It’s more economical to hunt.
Except they’re systemically incapable of an agricultural society to pass up an opportunity to expand.
Complexity is a function of energy. Ideology forms to adapt us to whatever level of complexity the energy permits. That’s why it’s so difficult to convince people of the virtues of primitivism. As Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” This was more true than he ever realized.
“Loyalty” is what we develop to rationalize and justify our situation. We make the best of it. It’s energy that determines our situation; the rest is our adaptation to it.
The Haudenosaunee conquered a huge swath of North America inside of 400 years. They were voraciously expansionistic. I do not think they can be considered sustainable in any reasonable sense of the term.
This underlies the more important point: chiefdoms are unsustainable levels of complexity. Either it will progress into agriculture and statehood, or it will fall back into a horticultural tribe. The Haudenosaunee were well on their way to statehood; they were, in fact, one of the primary models of the United States’ “founding fathers.”
It’s my understanding that they’re still eroding their soil and diminishing their forests, just at a slower rate that seems positively sustainable compared to us.
Only if the system that ensures imports is, itself, sustainable. It isn’t.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 September 2006 @ 9:34 PM
I noticed some similarities in the criticism I’ve been recieving of late, as well as an amazing amount of solidarity and agreement among those critics. It prompted me to check in to something…
I see that Taylor, Stoneboy, Laymannaus, mont, ozaukeegirl, Laro, populus, villagerman, Palatia, Artemis, and Odense have all been posting from the same IP address—the same address aksum used to use. Given that these individuals have been creating an air of solidarity by backing each other up, this raises the ugly question of whether or not this is a classic case of sock puppets. I’d hate to throw around accusations like that, especially since there are plenty of benign explanations, so I hope someone from that IP address can explain what we’re seeing here.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 September 2006 @ 10:46 PM
Taylor, the proliferation of your comments is somewhat unmanageable. Could you take some time to organize your thoughts, and consolidate future responses into a single comment? It would be much appreciated.
My apologies. I’m somewhat absent-minded, and have been my life. I often read something and then just forget something and think, “Aha! I might as well mention this!” I’ll try to be better in the future.
I also have to apologize for creating this case of “sock puppets.” Again, I was actually trying to cover my own absent-mindedness. I just went on a frenzy of comments based on certain parts of your replies that I realized I didn’t want to look like it was one person since I was too embarrassed. So I pretended to be those various names and thought if I created “fake support” it would seem as if it was various people. I was unaware you could see IP adresses; again, I have a diagnosis of autism, which causes me to be so absent-minded. I’ll try my best in the future to not do things like this. I am also “aksum.” I now admit to my own mental inabilities–perhaps my absentmindedness is only apparent because I am in civilization. I am ashamed, and plead guilty for making false solidarity.
So, yes, it’s a case of sock puppets, but not to damage you.
Most of Michigan is fairly wild. A week’s walk will put a man well into the woods.
I won’t argue with you there.
Our Exceptions that Prove the Rule series has already looked at most of the societies you’ve brought up, but they do nothing to change the fundamental rules we’re discussing here. If I say, “If I let this ball go, it will drop,” is that a true statement? What if the ball happens to be resting on a counter, and I simply have my hand over it? That’s a trivial counter-example that does nothing to address the fundamental issue—gravity. Likewise, minor geographical flukes do nothing to change the fundamental balance of a population and a sustainable food supply.
Of course they do not. But at the same time, there still is a reason for something. The ball drops when you let it go because of the law of gravity. Yes, it will always drop, but that is still because of gravity. Likewise, most foragers are nomadic bands because that is the only level of complexity that can be sustained in most cases. Of course exceptions do not disprove those rules–but they do illustrate that in a few situations, higher complexity can be sustained, and it is.
Notice in the article you link to, the discussion of how these large villages were frequently abandoned: obvious evidence that the large village was not tenable. Today, the Pueblo of Sandia Village in New Mexico has 344 inhabitants (2000 census). This more detailed report gets into specific archaeological methods, and comes to the conclusion that Castle Rock pueblo had a maximum population of no more than 150 people.
In other words, ancient Pueblo ruins show precisely why later Pueblo villages fit so neatly within the range I’ve previously mentioned, and for the very reasons I’ve predicted: anything larger is simply not sustainable. Larger villages are quickly abandoned, and the Pueblo eventually settled into a pattern of villages of about 300, or less, which continues to hold today.
Okay, my mistake. Thank you for pointing that out to me. This raises another question that I asked in another forum as Stoneboy–how often were the villages continously inhabited? Like I said in my response there–I don’t disagree with the norms, but I do try to keep an open mind about exceptions, because I have noticed that most rules do have exceptions.
My research on Sky City, an Acoma Pueblo village, claims it is the oldest continously inhabited village in North America. I found this on various articles, like this one. I’m not arguing it’s true, and if you can find evidence arguing that Pueblo Indians were as migratory as other horticultural societies–I’ll definitely accept it.
I’m also up for keeping an open mind–if I do find evidence or an example that shows that there have been larger self-sufficient villages, I’m going to try to analyze the research. I’ll take it with a grain of salt, like everything, but I’m not going to passively dismiss it because of past knowledge.
If agriculture is not an option, due to climate, soil, or other factors, then providing protein from plants is simply not an option. Understand? The fact that horticulturalists do grow some wheat and potatoes (and they have) does not mean they grow enough to provide that kind of protein.
Yes. I was, however, creating a hypothetical assuming it was in the context of an ecology that was. Obviously, not all ecologies can support all subsistence strategies.
Which is why past example is so illustrative. As Tainter points out, complexity is a function of energy; you have merely illustrated this basic fact once again. When and where do we find energy provided on the level required for chiefdoms, on a sustainable basis? The answer is: rarely.
The Pacific coast of North America has the majority of our examples, but a few other, particularly intensive horticultural societies can also be found. These are very exceptional geographical flukes.
Furthermore, there is some debate among anthropologists about just how stable the “chiefdom” is. Some have suggested that what we call a “chiefdom” is necessarily a transitionary state from tribe to state, and that a chiefdom cannot be sustained without either moving on to statehood, or collapsing to tribalism. We do know that chiefs that do not progress to very complex chiefdoms or proto-states have a fairly high turnover rate. So, is there such a thing as a sustainable chiefdom? I suspect there is something to this line of reasoning, and that the chiefdom is not a sustainable level of social complexity, but this cannot be proven.
Okay, so it’s a moot debate. Again, I am not arguing about the “norm,” I’m arguing about exceptions. Just because they are exceptions does not make them illegitimate–there are, even today, after all, in our globalized civilized world, some “pockets” of egalitarian hunter-gatherers. This doesn’t make them invalid.
Also, when you suggested that “force” cannot be maintained indefinitely, I thought you were suggesting that this was due to an inevitable revolt by the subjects of a chiefdom. I argued that I rarely heard of this happening due to ideology, but due to a loss of energy, like Tainter said. I thought you were suggesting it was caused solely by ideology.
It’s also true that sustainability is subjective to a timeline–if sustainability is defined as “sustaining for a year,” then the present-day U.S. society would be sustainable. It’s like what Ran Prieur said again–when determining sustainability, ask how long it will last, and how it will end. Sustainability does not mean impossible, it just means impossible indefinitely due to internal reasons. There was a time lag from when the Zunis inhabited their large pueblos to when they abandoned them.
Not all unsustainable societies are created equal–the timeline for the unsustainability of past agrarian societies is much different than modern society, despite similar unsustainabilities.
People aren’t going to survive just because millions die on their behalf. People will survive if they have the imagination to even consider a life beyond civilization. There’s too few of us as there is. I don’t see anything selfish in that. Selfish would simply be running off into the woods. Instead, we’re doing it in a very public way, to try to inspire others’ imaginations, to try to help as many others as we can to also survive. That’s why I’m spending the few free hours I have every weeknight answering criticism like this, opening myself up to the slings and arrows of internet scorn from all over the world. It’d be much easier to simply make our exodus—but that would be selfish.
Too few have the imagination to survive, and you’re bothered by feelings of guilt? Survivors’ guilt is never a rational reaction, but if you’re intent on indulging it pre-emptively, consider this: if everyone who has the imagination to try in the first place doesn’t, the very survival of our species comes into question. Billions are going to die; this can no longer be changed. You can honor that by siezing the moment and helping create a new world, or you can succumb to despair and let the species die off.
I am not implying intended “selfishness,” I am implying literal “selfishness.” No, you’re not being selfish since you’re scenario of a lack of imagination is accurate. However, the situation would change if people did have the imagination and there were people trying to escape. Again, another hypothetical; not a challenge of what situation is likely to happen.
The divide between Big Man and Chief is one of the most essential thresholds in social complexity: the division between ascribed and attained power. The Big Man has attained power: he has influence because of the network of debts and influence he has carefully woven. The Chief has ascribed power: he has power because he’s the Chief. “Power,” as we usually use the term, typically refers to ascribed power. If you’ve ever heard someone tell you to “respect the office even if you don’t respect the man,” they were invoking your social obligation to obey ascribed power. When we crossed that threshold, social complexity left behind the power of influential, charismatic friends, in favor of institutions of power.
Thanks for the explanation.
I’m in Pennsylvania. California is within “walking distance” from me. “Walking distance” is only meaningful within a given time frame.
As for acquiring skills, they are easily learned: online, or from a few books that could be obtained for less than $100. The primary problem is practice. Education can help, but in a pinch, you can always teach yourself. Admittedly, the cost may be higher for you, but that’s the nature of the universe: what do you want, and how much do you want it? I won’t try to change your mind, but for the sake of everyone else here it should be noted that you have made a choice.
Okay, another misunderstanding of language, I apologize. Yes, I have made a choice, and if you believe it is a choice, that’s fine; I won’t convert you. In fact, I think there’s room for both of us: you survive and perpetuate the species, and I understand that if everyone could choose, people would not have that choice, and I choose to die. The truth still remains that individual choices are made possible by the fact that the majority of the world’s people will die.
Put it another way: I am reminded of a folk tale in which a prince asks the king of a kingdom that the kingdom make the loudest noise in the world for his birthday. The king makes a proclamation that everyone, at a specific time, shall yell “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” After the proclamation is spread, a few people decide they aren’t going to do it. However, this idea spreads to the whole kingdom to the point where no one yells “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” and the prince does not get his wish. If billions must die, yet billions are going to die, then we might have a choice, like in that story–where if everyone screamed birthday, an individual could choose and it wouldn’t matter. But if billions were aware of their predicament, it would be a different story, and that’s all I’m pointing out.
And what happened? The first window that opened, they expanded, and collapsed. There is no niche in which agriculture is sustainable, and this is why.
Again, this seems to be another semantic issue. You are defining agriculture’s sustainability as equating whether or not the society is sustainable. Okay, agricultural societies are unsustainable because they grow and collapse. All I was arguing, though, is that there are still environments that can support agriculture even though the society is unsustainable without exhausting the soil, like the Nile and the Yellow River in ancient times. Soil exhaustion is only one factor in agriculture’s unsustainability. I am also not saying that this means that the principles of monoculture bleeding the soil are false either. What I was pointing out, however, is that since there are areas that have been continously farmed for thousands of years because they are exceptions is that this might be the reason why, despite their collapsing due to infinite growth, they did not collapse back to the Stone Age. The Egyptians and Chinese did collapse many times–but did not return to the Stone Age when they collapse.
I suggested that since they did collapse many times, but did not return to the Stone Age, and that those original farming areas have been continously farmed, that is why they did not return back to the Stone Age. Egypt and China have been around for over 5000 years, after all. The “sustainability” I was pointing out was not in the society, but in the constant return back to the complexity that was sustainable with the exceptional farmland that would not be depleted. The Nile and Yellow Rivers were farmed for five thousand years, without the loss of topsoil, unlike the Fertile Crescent, and the Andes Mountains did not become barren desert. So there is indeed a difference.
China did expand and collapse a few times in its history, and so did Egypt. But it’s also true that their limitations to expansion were much less than Europe’s–so while they could transport their agriculture, there was still another limitation involved.
Another issue here is timeline. Soils do not exhaust immediately–that’s why it can take centuries, or sometimes millenia before the society collapses or it learns that the conditions that allow that farming to work in one area do not work in another area. That time lag, to me, is why expansion can take place, even though the specific type of agriculture is only suited to the floodplain. A farm in a field that is replenished by a floodplain looks the same when it is not flooded as a farm in a non-floodplain that is eroding the soil. It still has taken two centuries for America to get to this point of collapse, regardless of its unsustainability.
I still, however, stand by my point that in theory, if agriculture did not lead to topsoil erosion in any given environment, and the society stuck to that environment and did not grow, that society would be sustainable.
Without the ability to expand, these exceptions will be small, isolated, and prone to quick collapse. This kind of exception is a product of a rare geographical fluke. It is no more germane to an understanding of the principles applied to agricultural life than the Kwakiutl are illustrative of the general principles of foraging. It’s an exception, an outlier: it tells you nothing about the curve.
Of course. But general principles still must be based on certain basic laws. The apple does not drop in a vaccuum, it drops because of gravity. Exceptions do prove laws, but the laws also explain why those exceptions exist. At the same time, it is true that if an agricultural society did not need to expand, and its agricultural base was sustainable, it would be sustainable. I’m not saying this is the way it actually is. Because again, collapse does not occur out of a vaccuum–if it is due to a need to expand that cannot be met, then that is the reason. Things are the case for reasons. Horticultural villages are limited because of the limits of horticulture–that’s a reason, like the law of gravity.
There’s too much of a break involved. Most crops will need to be re-domesticated. Will domesticable species be available in these new forests? Where are the riverine flood plains that will permit domestication to take place? Agriculture does not arise in just any place: it requires a very specific convergence of climate and geography.
Okay, my mistake–I was a little too certain about my prediction. But of course, we don’t know if this is going to be a part of that ecology. But it is true that, if there is a flood plain that is semi-tropical and does have domesticable crops, then it might happen. Not that it will, but that since that is land that has been never farmed, and that will be drastically different than now, it could be.
But they’re obviously not sustainable in their niche. Because their energy source can go with them, they’re always compelled to expand beyond their niche whenever the opportunity arises. They then become unsustainable, and their collapse does more than destroy their expansions; it also collapses their core. So even in their niche, it is an unsustainable strategy, because the strategy brings with it an inevitable expansion beyond that niche. Understand?
Yes, but the point still remains–the original “core” is still farmed, even though other areas cannot be farmed again. If so, why didn’t China return to the Stone Age after it’s first collapse, and didn’t until now after it has been conquered and been forced to transform to the Green Revolution? Because there was still arable land that could support China before it expanded beyond those limitations. Regardless of the expansion agriculture brings, not all land that has been farmed uniformly depletes at the same time, and I’m also sure that there is a lag between when initial expansion begins where land that is truly arable is farmed before expansion begins when land is not actually arable, but erodes after a certain timespan.
Imagine a thick forest full of many different types of life. A fire goes through. A decade later, the only trees there are the ones with fire-resistant seeds. What happened? Did all the trees convert to fire-resistant seeds? No, it was natural selection. Collapse will mean the end of civilization, and everyone dependent on civilization will either die, or stop being dependent on it. The result will be that a hundred years afterwards, everyone will be primitivists. This won’t be because of mass conversion: it will be because they’ll be the only ones to survive.
Precisely; I mistook you as suggesting that these events arise from ideology and mass conversation, my mistake. Of course a forest fire eliminates trees that are not fire-resistant. It is due to survival.
As you have noted before, survival does not have much to do with ethics, it’s about what survives. I personally, for example, disagree with the idea that somehow all people in civilization are absolutely miserable, but if the only people who will survive are those who believe that, that’s fine. I also believe that collapse increases as well as decreases quality of life depending on who you are–it’s not one or the other. Emotions are subjective–people feel differently to different things, and just because people who believe in “y” emotions die out while people who believe in “x” emotions survive doesn’t make emotions absolute truths. Since I am not surviving, I’m not going to argue about this anymore.
No, I did not. I defined collapse as Tainter did: the sudden loss of an established order of complexity. I have argued that the collapse that we are currently in leaves no viable level of complexity but the stone age, so that this collapse will return us to that level of complexity, but this is not a defining point of collapse. There have been many collapses, and very few have progressed all the way to the stone age. Previously collapses did not go all the way back to the stone age, because agriculture remained viable in many parts. This was not universally the case, however. The Anasazi and the Hohokam, for instance, suffered the kind of collapse we face, where the possibility of agriculture is precluded. Our collapse will be to the stone age not because this is an essential element of collapse, but because we have eliminated the possibility of agriculture without high levels of complexity.
My mistake. I based this on your argument with John Michael Greer where you argued the fall of Rome was not collapse because it was not sudden. I side with Greer on this, though, because it was still a loss of complexity, regardless of it not being sudden. I also misunderstood you as thinking that if a collapse did not return a society back to pre-agriculture (I’m not saying Stone Age because there have been agricultural Stone Age societies) it was not a catabolic collapse, but a maintenance crisis, and thus not a collapse.
The fact that those ancient collapses did not return to the Stone Age because some land was still arable supports my point above–that the collapse was due to expanding into land that would inevitably exhaust, but the society continued at a lower agricultural complexity because of that land that was still arable, and did not exhaust until forced modernization (the Egyptians and the Chinese were conquered, and as I said before, the Nile did replenish the nutrients to the soil prior to the Aswan dam). As for the Incas, we don’t know for sure, but since their original land was arable and was not losing its soil, maybe they would have just gone back to a lower level of agricultural complexity. But we don’t know for sure, so I don’t think it’s worth debating.
Complexity is a function of energy. Ideology forms to adapt us to whatever level of complexity the energy permits. That’s why it’s so difficult to convince people of the virtues of primitivism. As Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” This was more true than he ever realized.
Absolutely. I misunderstood your initial claim, and I agree entirely.
The Haudenosaunee conquered a huge swath of North America inside of 400 years. They were voraciously expansionistic. I do not think they can be considered sustainable in any reasonable sense of the term.
This underlies the more important point: chiefdoms are unsustainable levels of complexity. Either it will progress into agriculture and statehood, or it will fall back into a horticultural tribe. The Haudenosaunee were well on their way to statehood; they were, in fact, one of the primary models of the United States’ “founding fathers.”
This is how misunderstandings like this occur. You say that chiefdoms are inherently unsustainable in this paragraph. Yet you said before that that claim was not yet proven. If it is not proven, how can you argue that it is? If you aren’t, I apologize for taking your words too literally. And then I do point out that there are exceptions like those coastal Indians not to disprove a general rule but to further understand the rule.
But at the same time, I do not think expansionism is created equal either. When the Spanish invaded South America to settle there, they were expanding and settled there. But it seems to me the Iroquois were just converting people already settled in an area to their confederation. Or am I mistaken? I’ll definitely correct myself if I am.
Also, there’s a second dimension here. A society might be expansionist initially, but the question is whether or not it can survive the ultimate end of expansion. The Iroquois were not a civilization, and maybe they could have been able to stop growing at a certain time.
It’s also true, however, that there was a certain level of sustainability in their cultivation.
Only if the system that ensures imports is, itself, sustainable. It isn’t.
Precisely. However, I was questioning whether or not this was due to the inevitable revolt inside of chiefdom or due to the cultivation practices of the chiefdom. Obviously, if a chiefdom consists of just villages of a few hundred people, as was the case with many Arawak kingdoms, then the chiefdom might be sustainable. There have been chiefdoms in New Guinea that are like this as well.
The practices of those two chiefdoms I cited–the Arawak and Taino–appeared to be similar to horticulturalists. This would suggest sustainability barring an uprising. But the point still remains–imports only work if the imports are sustainable.
I’ve placed my thoughts here on one long comment. Now I won’t be adding numerous comments.
It’s my understanding that they’re still eroding their soil and diminishing their forests, just at a slower rate that seems positively sustainable compared to us.
Be a little more specific. Are we talking about the management before or after the forced opening of Japan by Westerners? Yes, their soil began to erode after they were forced by the West to modernize. But that’s different than saying that, prior to the invasion, the soil was being eroded and the forests were slowly being deforested. Again, there was land prior to the Meiji Restoration that was farmed for a timeline long after the Fertile Crescent became a desert as well.
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 1:07 AM
Hey, I’m not trying to pick nits here, but, well, this isn’t quite right:
[quote from=Jason]
(as meager as they are, wheat and potatoes are among the best plant sources of protein, surpassed only by nuts and beans)
[/quote]
Amaranth and quinoa are both better sources of protein than wheat & potatoes. They’re also not cereals, being related more to spinach, beets and chard than to any grains.
It would still be a poor idea to try to live just on amaranth or quinoa, however, but then that’s true of almost any food.
Comment by jhereg — 8 September 2006 @ 7:50 AM
Precisely; I mistook you as suggesting that these events arise from ideology and mass conversion, my mistake. Of course a forest fire eliminates trees that are not fire-resistant. It is due to survival.
The same reason why foragers must move around is the same reason why horticultural villages move as well–because of food supply. But there’s still a reason. It’s not out of a vaccuum, and that same reason is what allows for exceptions that can be explained by the same reason.
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 7:57 AM
The first paragraph was to fix a typo.
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 8:23 AM
Well, I’m glad the sock puppetry issue has been addressed. That doesn’t have much to do with your autism, Taylor: we all think of things we should’ve said, and feel embarrassed about piping up too much or too often from time to time. It’s the point of creating false support that makes sock puppets so deceitful, and why it’s such a denigrated practice.
I found this on Sky City:
Sounds pretty typical: large festivals, and a steady population of about 300 or less. In this case, much less. The 2000 census lists 2,802 residents, but this also includes the entire reservation, not just the pueblo, and off-reservation trust lands. In other words, it’s a lot more than just the village itself.
It’s not a question of validity, but relevance. It’s a big wide world, and pretty much everything will happen once, but what does that really tell you? It’s first and foremost a world of patterns, and it’s understanding those patterns that are most important. We could sit here and list exceptions and squabble over minutiae, but where does that really get us?
No, ideology is never a main driver in these things. Ideology is an adaptation, not a prime mover. Even ideological revolutions are not driven by ideology first: the ideology is, itself, an adaptation to greater material realities. The Bolshevik Revolution did not have nearly so much to do with the glories of Marxism, than the end of the age of coal and the inability of the Czar to maintain the energy required for that level of complexity. Marxism was a well-adapted ideology for that moment.
Again, see the Exceptons that Prove the Rule series. That’s exactly what they’re about.
Agricultural societies must expand by their very nature, to the limits of their ability. This was explained in the Thirty Theses in terms of the Prisoner’s Dilemna. So, an agricultural society is no more capable of not expanding and staying in its niche, than the earth is capable of not spinning on its axis.
The core also suffers collapse. See Egypt’s New Kingdom. It’s a rare civilization that’s able to deplete all of its resources so thoroughly, so most collapses leave the door open for succeeding civilizations, as in China. Collapse always goes back to the next highest level of complexity that can be supported. It’s a special case where all intervening levels have been dismantled, and collapse goes all the way back to the Paleolithic.
Well, I don’t believe that, either. People are very good at making peace with whatever situation they’re in. We’re adaptable animals. So adaptable that the rates of suicide and depression we suffer in civilization are completely inexcusable. People will undoubtedly mourn civilization’s passing, but it’s simple fact that every measurable criteria of quality of life improves in a simpler society. People are adaptable; we make the best of whatever situaton we’re thrown in. If we can make the best of civilization, we can certainly make the best of collapse.
You’ve thoroughly misunderstood that argument. The argument over Rome was Greer’s suggestion that Rome didn’t fit Tainter’s definition of collapse, because it wasn’t sudden. Greer was problematizing Tainter’s definition of collapse. I suggested that the Third Century Crisis could still fit Rome’s collapse under Tainter’s definition. Greer suggested two types of collapse: catabolic collapse, and the maintenance crisis. I’ve suggested that Rome suffered a maintenance crisis—a type of collapse—because its primary limit was its own complexity, rather than a loss of energy. I understand catabolic collapse as a process that builds on itself, instigated by a society running into material, energy shortages.
Incorrect. Usually, the core was exhausted, and it was the periphery that permitted succeeding civilizations, as with Rome.
You’re right, it’s not proven. It’s a claim I believe is true, but it’s not proven yet.
It’s hard to tell, since we weren’t there to see it, but the Seneca began along the banks of the Great Lakes in upstate New York, and by the time the Europeans got there, there were Seneca chiefs in West Virginia. They were known for brutal warfare and torture of their enemies. When the Europeans got there, there was no one in the Confederacy that wasn’t a member of one of the Six Nations. Other tribes maintain histories of being driven from their lands by the Haudenosaunee. The land I live in was once home to the Allegwi, who became the ancestors of the Omaha after they were chased down the Ohio and then the Mississippi by an alliance of the Haudenosaunee and the Lenni Lenape. So, I don’t think it was an unprecedented matter of tribal conversion: I think it was a much more common example of simple territorial expansion.
The Prisoner’s Dilemna suggests otherwise. They possessed the means of increasing their complexity at will. If one tribe decided not to, the next might, and then gain ascendancy over all others. That suggests that complexity would soon drive up well beyond sustainable levels.
Before.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 September 2006 @ 9:59 AM
Taylor, I suggest getting your hands on a copy of “Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places” by ‘Wildman’ Steve Brill. The man lives and forages in New York City.
As for your example of living in downtown Detriot… I been there, horrid place, but also less than two days determined walking will get one well into the woods. Once there, you can survive on pine inner bark until you figure out what else you can eat. There’s plenty of pine in that region.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 8 September 2006 @ 12:22 PM
Jason, I’ll read this over the weekend. I’ve just caught a fever, and am going to have to rest until I am no longer ill.
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 1:16 PM
Sounds pretty typical: large festivals, and a steady population of about 300 or less. In this case, much less. The 2000 census lists 2,802 residents, but this also includes the entire reservation, not just the pueblo, and off-reservation trust lands. In other words, it’s a lot more than just the village itself.
Okay, that discards that example. But it does raise another possible exception to another “rule.” Numerous sources suggest that Sky City has been continually inhabited for a long period of time, and one suggests that it had been inhabited since 600 A.D. This seems to be an exception to other horticultural societies that typically relocated their villages as a result of their cultivation, unless there is another source you can find that disproves these sources. I am not arguing about the size, just how long it has been inhabited. I also have heard that Tikopians continously inhabited their villages for long periods of time because of their perennial gardening that was typically immobile, and they had to stay in one place to maintain it, as well as the Lawa, cited by Gumph in Kotke’s the Final Empire.
It’s not a question of validity, but relevance. It’s a big wide world, and pretty much everything will happen once, but what does that really tell you? It’s first and foremost a world of patterns, and it’s understanding those patterns that are most important. We could sit here and list exceptions and squabble over minutiae, but where does that really get us?
It shows us that looking at patterns blinds us to exceptions and vice-versa. The Iroquois were semi-horticultural, and were able to drive a pattern of conquest from it, and lived in larger villages than other horticulturalists.
I think that, in our complex world, there’s a spectrum between sedentism and nomadism, from full nomads to fully sedentary people, and villagers that relocate every 2-5 years, or villagers that relocate every 50-100 years (like the Zuni Pueblo Indians), and seasonal nomads, like the Illiniwek who would stay in farming villages and then leave during the winter to hunt animals. It’s not cut and dry.
No, ideology is never a main driver in these things. Ideology is an adaptation, not a prime mover. Even ideological revolutions are not driven by ideology first: the ideology is, itself, an adaptation to greater material realities. The Bolshevik Revolution did not have nearly so much to do with the glories of Marxism, than the end of the age of coal and the inability of the Czar to maintain the energy required for that level of complexity. Marxism was a well-adapted ideology for that moment.
Okay, my misunderstanding here.
You’ve thoroughly misunderstood that argument. The argument over Rome was Greer’s suggestion that Rome didn’t fit Tainter’s definition of collapse, because it wasn’t sudden. Greer was problematizing Tainter’s definition of collapse. I suggested that the Third Century Crisis could still fit Rome’s collapse under Tainter’s definition. Greer suggested two types of collapse: catabolic collapse, and the maintenance crisis. I’ve suggested that Rome suffered a maintenance crisis—a type of collapse—because its primary limit was its own complexity, rather than a loss of energy. I understand catabolic collapse as a process that builds on itself, instigated by a society running into material, energy shortages.
Then what did you mean when you said this in “The Memetics of Peak Oil”:
Rome’s a very special case–I’m not sure if I’d really call it “collapse” at all. You started your paper with a problem in Tainter’s time element in his definition of collapse, pointing to the Roman Empire, and came up with two forms of collapse: maintenance crisis and catabolic collapse. I took away a slightly different interpretation from the facts you presented: that catabolic collapse is collapse, and maintenance crisis is simply a loss of complexity. I thought the most powerful part of your idea of catabolic collapse was the fact that it’s a self-reinforcing cycle. In other words, there’s lots of ways to reduce complexity, but collapse is the process whereby that reduction occurs in a positive feedback loop.
What you said here suggests you believe that collapse is only collapse if it is catabolic, unless I have misunderstood your argument again. Greer challenged you, and I agree with him.
I also noticed that Greer believed the fall of Rome was partially a catabolic collapse, due to depletion of energy sources. This theory has also been discussed on Edward Goldsmith’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, in which he argues that the fall of Rome was partly due to the erosion of soils in North Africa, which, of course, would be less energy, making it somewhat of a catabolic collapse. Is suddenness an inherent part of catabolic collapse?
Incorrect. Usually, the core was exhausted, and it was the periphery that permitted succeeding civilizations, as with Rome.
Yes, that was the case with Rome, but I was referring to Egypt and China. Was that the case there as well?
Also, I was referring to the agricultural activity in those areas, not the collapse of the society. Yes, the core collapsed. But agriculture still continued in those core areas flooded by the Nile and the Yellow Rivers at that lower level of complexity. The society collapsed; the agriculture in those areas did not, which enabled another Egyptian and Chinese kingdom to form which then led to another collapse. The collapses are evident–but the soil did not erode in those areas nonetheless, and that was my point.
Agricultural societies must expand by their very nature, to the limits of their ability. This was explained in the Thirty Theses in terms of the Prisoner’s Dilemna. So, an agricultural society is no more capable of not expanding and staying in its niche, than the earth is capable of not spinning on its axis.
I’m confused by the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It seems to be based on assumptions that there are other civilizations that are there ready to conquer that civilization, and it must pre-emptively grow.
That was the case many times, but if a civilization was isolated and did not have other civilizations to worry about, how would that be the case? That suggests that in other cases, civilization’s need to expand is due to other reasons, like to find new farmland to replace exhausted farmland. The civilization in the Fertile Crescent, at one time, was the only civilization in the area, was it not?
Consider Iceland. Jared Diamond does talk about Iceland a lot, but Iceland did not grow beyond its island, and it did not collapse. Why didn’t it when it could no longer grow? It also had land that is made arable by volcanoes that replenishes the soil there.
You have often used the argument in other forums as evidence for civilization’s inability to not grow by using the Great Depression “where the growth rate only shrank by 75 percent.” Toby Hemenway challenged you, and you were not able to provide a reliable citation. I was not able to find any other citation either. He also showed how GNP shrank during that time, and that economic growth is determined by that GNP. And you were not up to defending your point. But it’s an important point, because if Hemenway is right, then that means that civilization does not always have to grow in specific cases (even though, of course, the pattern is right), and you’ll have to change your claim.
There have been shrinkages in the past that have not resulted in the total collapse of civilizations. The Bubonic Plague wipes out 1/3 of the population–which obviously meant a shrinkage of society, yet Europe did not collapse.
Also, there have been times when energy consumption has gone down without a total economic collapse. US oil consumption went down in the 1970’s and we did not have a total collapse when oil production went down. Cuba may not be sustainable, but it did cut its oil consumption in half.
This also challenges your argument that Jevon’s Paradox (that increases in efficiency always result in increases in consumption). Yet that did not happen in the 1970’s until production went up. This suggests that Jevon’s Paradox holds only if there is more energy to be consumed–not if there isn’t. We’ll increase our energy consumption with efficient vehicles if we can, but not if we cannot, like that one time in the 1970’s and in Cuba.
On chiefdoms: You’re right, it’s not proven. It’s a claim I believe is true, but it’s not proven yet.
But it does prove that non-monocropped cultivation can sustain chiefdoms for a period of time.
It’s hard to tell, since we weren’t there to see it, but the Seneca began along the banks of the Great Lakes in upstate New York, and by the time the Europeans got there, there were Seneca chiefs in West Virginia. They were known for brutal warfare and torture of their enemies. When the Europeans got there, there was no one in the Confederacy that wasn’t a member of one of the Six Nations. Other tribes maintain histories of being driven from their lands by the Haudenosaunee. The land I live in was once home to the Allegwi, who became the ancestors of the Omaha after they were chased down the Ohio and then the Mississippi by an alliance of the Haudenosaunee and the Lenni Lenape. So, I don’t think it was an unprecedented matter of tribal conversion: I think it was a much more common example of simple territorial expansion.
This seems like a good example of how bioregions shape societies. The Kwakiutl was one of numerous tribes in a bioregion that were highly complex but limited due to salmon runs. The Iroquois seem to have been one of many societies that could grow because of their cultivation techniques.
The Prisoner’s Dilemna suggests otherwise. They possessed the means of increasing their complexity at will. If one tribe decided not to, the next might, and then gain ascendancy over all others. That suggests that complexity would soon drive up well beyond sustainable levels.
Yes, but that does not mean that their farming practices were relatively sustainable. Here is where we part ways: I define sustainable cultivation as one that does not deplete the soil, you define it as one that does not allow expansionism.
On Japan. Before.
Hmm. I could not find any evidence for soil erosion because of the Japanese practice of humanure on their fields (see, The Humanure Handbook) until the Meiji restoration, that balanced the nutrients in the soil along with the fallow periods in their rice paddies. I know you argued that the Edo Period’s cultivation was unsustainable in another field, but I could not find any evidence to back you up.
Basically, what I’m trying to do here is validate opinions by various people. For the past three years I’ve been on and off numerous primitivist websites, and I have noticed that this one is extremely unique in many ways.
A lot of the conclusions you make are not mentioned or supported by other websites, and other primitivists (most primitivists agree with Zerzan).
Yet you also believe that if someone does not practice Godeskian primitivism, they will die in the crash. This is similar to what Christians say, and I’ve read the “Eschatology of the Left,” so I’m not using that against you, I’m just making a point about language.
With your rules about sustainability, I could show you how almost every other project of creating a sustainable culture is doomed to fail because it overlooks something. It’s also true that when something is overlooked, people rarely are aware of it–the protagonist in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild did a lot of extensive research before going into the wild, and he still turned up dead. I’m not saying this means the Tribe of Anthropik will fail; but it means that if you overlook something, you may not know that you have. You’ll try your best, I’m sure, but then, so did people who have failed.
For example, one website, in one of it’s essays, argues that one part of our population problem is due to our modern medicine and how it has increased the average human lifespan, and that other species are going extinct in part because we’re living longer, and we should allow ourselves to die “naturally.” But since the average human lifespan due to that medicine in Western countries is no different than the average lifespan in forager tribes (just other agrarian societies), that point is moot. But the author is still primitivist.
So then you made the following claims: civilization was inherently unsustainable because it must always grow, monocropping is inherent to agriculture, and you argued, contrary to what Ran Prieur said when you wrote Thesis #29, that horticulture cannot drive a pattern of conquest, and that horticultural villages can be no larger than 300 people. These were claims I did not find much backing for on other sites, and all claims require backing to be valid. I also found what I felt were exceptions to those rules.
For example, you claim that monoculture is inherent to agriculture. Then you claim that only agriculture can drive a pattern of conquest. Yet you also point out that Polynesians and Iroquoisan tribes were expansionist. But their cultivation does not fit the one definition of agriculture–monocropping. So if horticulture cannot drive a pattern of conquest, and their cultivation was quite horticultural, what made that possible? Many people do not make the distinction between horticulture and agriculture the way you do–to them, agriculture is all forms of cultivation, and this is not just in IshCon circles. Obviously, not all forms of cultivation that lead to conquest exhaust soils and are monoculture.
Another problem here is that I define a rule differently than you–a rule must be absolute, IMO, whereas, you can state a rule without it being an absolute. With my definition, exceptions prove rules, but they debunk others.
Another confusion came when I read about the people of the Loetschental Valley, mentioned in Dr. Price’s book. They’ve lived in the same valley for 1200 years, and have a fixed population of 2000. Their cultivation practices are no doubt agricultural. Yet their population did not explode and they did not seem to enter a “food race” like you mention is inherent to agriculture, and that village did not absolutely grow. They have also, as Price said, created “a world unto themselves” for 1000 years. Price later analyzed soil content in the village in this chapter, and suggested that their cultivation was not eroding their soils. He also pointed out about how the Yellow River farmland in China was still farmed because of the flooding of the river.
So this confused me. I was seeing exceptions to these rules everywhere. They do not debunk obvious rules–soils still need nutrients and monoculture does bleed soil of nutrients, that’s a rule. But is it a rule that agriculture=monoculture and that only agriculture can support conquest and hierarchy? That’s the rule that I felt was being challenged.
I also read other stories like villages of the Cherokee, which claimed to be 350-600 people. Then I read the other sources, like the Pueblo and the Hopi Indians. Some of them were my misreading, and I will admit to that. Others were due to tribute and conquest, like the Arawaks and the Taino. They are geographical flukes, yes, but they are still societies.
So, that’s why I’m here. I’m here basically to see why your opinions differed, and why it was that most of your opinions were not backed up on other sites. People do not make claims in a vaccuum; there has to be backing for them. Otherwise, they’re bald assertions. I wanted to see what yours were, and couldn’t find explanations to some of them even though I’ve read all of the 30 Theses. I did not see any mention of hunting, after all, as absolutely essential to the nutrition of hort/permaculturalist peoples until I wrote to you.
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 3:48 PM
“I was seeing exceptions to these rules everywhere.”
Typo. I was seeing exceptions to these rules in these cases, and wondered what the difference was between your definition and theirs.
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 3:52 PM
Another thing that also got my mind going was the permaculture debate in January. I agree–there are many similarities to what is called permaculture and tribal horticulturalists, and many permaculturalists are not aware of that. But I do agree with Ran Prieur in his comment that there is one difference–many horticulturalists grow only annuals (e.g. slash-and-burn), whereas most permaculturalists grow a mix of perennials and annuals (like forest gardening and succession cultivation).
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 4:40 PM
Oh, and I have read the Exceptions that Prove the Rule series. Very well-written.
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 4:41 PM
Well, I don’t believe that, either. People are very good at making peace with whatever situation they’re in. We’re adaptable animals. So adaptable that the rates of suicide and depression we suffer in civilization are completely inexcusable. People will undoubtedly mourn civilization’s passing, but it’s simple fact that every measurable criteria of quality of life improves in a simpler society. People are adaptable; we make the best of whatever situaton we’re thrown in. If we can make the best of civilization, we can certainly make the best of collapse.
Still, I believe quality of life is subjective to how people feel. Yes, many people will feel their quality of life has been increased, but I think it is wrong to think that somehow ALL people will feel this way. As for whether or not suicide rates are inexcusable, the point still remains–not ALL people in civilization kill themselves, and most people do not see this as evidence of their own misery. This is where I will part ways with you, Jason. I don’t think emotions can be absolutes.
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 4:46 PM
As for vegetarianism, I agree absolutely on your point that individuals and groups can be vegetarians but not societies.
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 4:47 PM
My quote:
“This seems to be an exception to other horticultural societies that typically relocated their villages as a result of their cultivation, unless there is another source you can find that disproves these sources. I am not arguing about the size, just how long it has been inhabited.”
An addition. As Stoneboy, I knew the river valley examples I gave, if that is accurate, are exceptions, not rules.
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 8:01 PM
My autism strikes again. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Okay, no more comments!
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 8:02 PM
Just a quick point.
Swidden ‘agriculture’ (aka slash and burn) IS, in fact, based upon perennials and trees. It is, really, one of the best examples of horticulture using natural succession in thier cultivation techniques.
hmmm… I’m not finding a good link for you, so I will simply explain how I understand it (it is NOT what most sites are saying, so take it as you will)
In traditional swidden agriculture, a parcel of forest is cut, dried and burned. then it is planted with annuals. At the end of the first season, fruit and nut seedlings are added, along with (possibly) some perennial plants. In the second year, annuals are again planted in the ‘open spaces’ between trees and perennials. This process continues for 2-5 years at which point the ‘active cycle’ is complete: trees are beginning to mature enough to begin harvesting, but otherwise the plot is left to mature into ‘new’ old growth forest.
Of course, this would be one of many parcels worked each year, each at a different stage of succession.
Janene
Comment by janene — 8 September 2006 @ 8:05 PM
Janene, thanks.
ChandraShakti, I’m aware of Wildman Steve. I’ve also been to Detroit, but I didn’t know how wild the area was around it.
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 9:54 PM
Here’s a good link by Toby Hemenway:
[url]http://www.patternliteracy.com/beyondwilderness.html[/url]
Comment by jhereg — 8 September 2006 @ 11:08 PM
Nice article, jhereg.
Comment by Taylor — 8 September 2006 @ 11:35 PM
I would not posit any such rule. Rather, moving villages is something tied to village size. Large villages cannot be maintained with horticultural production; villages much larger than 300 fission, disperse, or die off. Sometimes they’re nearly nomadic: inhabiting a given location for a few decades, then picking up and setting up a new village elsewhere when they exhaust the land.
However, smaller villages are perfectly capable of supporting themselves with shifting cultivation and horticultural techniques. They can remain where they are for centuries, with their fields orbiting around them.
It works on every level. It’s not just competition between civilizations, but at every level of society: between landed gentry, between corporations, between lords and vassals, whatever. If, as in Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, there are no appreciable competitors for the civilization as a whole, but the lords of the various nomes are caught in this kind of escalation, what will happen to Egypt’s resource base?
Greenland, and it’s quite obvious it grew to the very limits of its ability. There was a second colony established as soon as it became possible. They competed with one another, to expand as much as they could. It was Greenland, so they couldn’t expand much, but it did happen. Farmers competed with one another to farm larger plots of land; cowherds tried to raise more calves than the next one over. The cathedral Diamond spends so much time on was, itself, a forum for such competition.
When I found out about the problems we face, I didn’t go study primitivist dogma. I studied the facts. I studied anthropology, particularly the known principles of energy use and sustainability found among existing sustainable cultures.
Then I came back to look at the primitivist literature, and found it severely wanting in that factual basis. So yes, you’ll find things here very different than at other websites. My sources are not found online, but in scholarly journals. My evidence is not a thought experiment like Zerzan’s critique of symbolism, but actual facts from actual sustainable societies (who, of course, universally have a deep symbolic life). If you want to verify my data, don’t look at other primitivist websites; look at a peer-reviewed journal of anthropology.
A lot of people who’ve failed are the same type of people who tell us we do too much theorizing and we need to go “do something” for its own sake. See, we don’t need to understand all the rules. Sustainability is something of a black box to us. We see how others have made it work, and we don’t need to understand how they made it work: we just have to do the same thing other sustainable societies have done. This takes time, so along the way, we try to understand what we can of why it works, and why so many others have failed, because right now, there really aren’t any success stories—just failures. Of course, there’s also no one who’s just accepted sustainable societies for what they are. We either romanticize them or denigrate them, or otherwise think we can improve on what evolution’s come up with. And then they fail.
I said no such thing. Horticultural societies often fight wars of conquest. They are often warlike and violent. Keeley shows that horticultural tribes are among the most violent peoples on earth. But they may be sustainable, none the less. I’m increasingly convinced of that possibility, as well as a spectrum from “pure” foraging, to intense horticulture. I also am increasingly convinced that permaculture may be a very important part of our transition from where we are now, to sustainable societies. But horticultural societies are the same ones that produce Big Men. They are often warlike. They are generally not nice places to live.
All permaculture is horticulture, but not all horticulture is permaculture.
Naturally, which makes it difficult to measure. But for a population—and it is a population’s quality of life we’re talking about here—there’s a bell curve. Some people are very picky and aren’t happy unless everything’s just so; others will gladly endure any hardship. Most of us clump in the middle around the things we’ve come to call “reasonable expectations.” So the question is not how an individual feels about this or that development—that’s an impossible question to answer, and a banal one to ask. What’s important here is how that bell curve relates to what a society expects. Ours pushes most people, most of the time, below the threshold. Tribal societies tend to never approach the mean. These things become meaningful long before they become absolutes. Such absolutes are meaningless, because they simply do not exist. So there are some of us that don’t kill ourselves? Well yippee! The point remains that our threshold is now so far above the mean that it’s dragging with it a threshold of suicidal despair that’s now claiming a growing tail of that bell curve. In tribal societies, the threshold is so far below the mean, you almost never see a suicide like that. It’s not just that there are X numbers of people who are that absolutely crushed by our low quality of life, but that almost all of us are diminished to one degree or another by it. For most of us, it’s within our tolerances, but there’s a difference between a happy life and a tolerable one.
Websites tend to be activist, which are against swidden, because with the population booms in the Amazon, swidden’s careful balance has been lost, and it’s now become the main cause of rain forest deforestation. So, activists trying to save the rain forest are trying to stop swidden cultivation, so they posit it as inherently unsustainable. But in fact, Janene, the understanding you’ve shared is the same found in the anthropological literature. Hard to find online, but relatively easy to find in a good library. Swidden cultivation is so far the only sustainable form of cultivation that’s been used in the tropics, but it must be very carefully balanced to remain so, so it’s very easy to push out of whack.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 September 2006 @ 10:44 AM
Well, thank you for your clarifications. My discussion is over, except for one more thing to mention:
I was not trying to posit rules of motion and horticulture, either–I know of some that move and others that don’t (and I have heard that in river floodplains, horticultural production does not need to shift because of the flooding of the rivers).
I also am increasingly convinced that permaculture may be a very important part of our transition from where we are now, to sustainable societies. But horticultural societies are the same ones that produce Big Men. They are often warlike. They are generally not nice places to live.
I agree. I traveled to Ohio to visit my grandfather for the weekend. When traveling through rural Indiana and Illinois, I saw very little wilderness–just rows and rows of monocropped corn and soybeans. And I also have heard of ecovillages in those areas.
I realized that if permaculture and horticultural production must be supplemented by hunting for wilderness, and it does not provide enough EROEI for raising livestock (although it’s possible that there are exceptions) to supplement protein, that might be the end of those ecovillages. The wilderness that supplemented those societies with hunting is not there anymore. It’s been cleared.
I have yet to find other permaculturalists acknowledge this requirement for permaculture. And I know of ecovillages that do not account for this either. That’s why I tried to verify your claim. While I have heard arguments about permaculture preserving wilderness, I could not find another claim arguing that permaculture could not entirely meet the nutritional needs of people, and that wilderness was essential for hunting animals. You were the only one who argued that. So I wanted to know where the backing was for that claim.
Numerous ecovillages are surrounded by farmland, yet, of course, they are below 300 people. Yet where is their wilderness? This is another example of how a group who is quite aware of sustainability might end up perishing anyway.
I agree with you about the black box of sustainability as well.
And finally, in areas where there are wilderness, while the ecosystems are indeed healthy, they are still different from their “pre-European” state. Permaculture might be the way we bridge the gap from the resurgence of wilderness to the present–for the simple fact that survivors will still need to eat before the wilderness becomes “pristine” again.
Comment by Taylor — 11 September 2006 @ 12:22 PM
Also…
On Greenland…I did not mention Greenland, I mentioned Iceland. Iceland did compete to the best of its ability, but it did reach the limits of its expansion, and did not collapse. Remember, Iceland is cited as one of Diamond’s “success stories.”
On Egypt…yes, that would deplete their resource base. But not if some part the resource base was being replenished, like with the flooding of the Nile. I was not saying the core does not experience collapse but that the farmland at the core is still arable.
Again, my point still remains–the core of the society collapsed but the Nile was still arable, which allowed a smaller, agricultural society to continue. All I was suggesting was that, since the Nile river valley was still arable despite collapse, and remained arable as long as the Nile flooded its banks, those collapses would indefinitely return the society back to the level supported by the Nile’s arable land until that land ceased to be arable.
And of course, sustainability means many things to different people. There are people who believe things are sustainable that are not (agrarians often cite pre-industrial societies as sustainable when they are not, after all, and research them to use examples of sustainability, Marxists analyze communist societies and cite them as sustainable as well when they are not).
Comment by Taylor — 11 September 2006 @ 12:29 PM
Well, there are sort of two schools of thought regarding wildnerness “regrowth”. Some people tend toward wanting to actively help wildnerness “regrow”, while others would rather just leave it alone. I’m not sure which would be better, although, I would encourage anyone who intends to be actively involved in “regrowing” wilderness and/or rewilding domesticated plants (heck, maybe even animals too) to become familiar with permaculture and/or Fukuoka’s “natural farming”.
Comment by jhereg — 11 September 2006 @ 12:49 PM
Hey –
Thanks for the link, Jhereg, I finally realized sometime yesterday evening that I had been recalling Toby’s article:-)
Janene
Comment by janene — 11 September 2006 @ 2:49 PM
I would not posit any such rule. Rather, moving villages is something tied to village size. Large villages cannot be maintained with horticultural production; villages much larger than 300 fission, disperse, or die off. Sometimes they’re nearly nomadic: inhabiting a given location for a few decades, then picking up and setting up a new village elsewhere when they exhaust the land.
This is interesting as well, as the Iroquois, one of those “intensive horticultural” societies with villages in the thousands, according to what I have researched, did relocate those villages of thousands every 5-10 years. Perhaps that is what made those exceptional horticulturalists sustainable in their cultivation (but, of course, not on their growth). But, of course, you could argue that cultivation that allows growth is inherently unsustainable, so this may be moot as well.
As for scholarly research, yes, I’ll try to look up that when I read your claims later. That must be where you got the claim of the limits to village size and horticultural production, unless, of course, the village relies on imports like in the horticultural chiefdoms of the Arawak and Taino. BTW, are they classified in anthropology as agriculturalists, or horticulturalists, or a midpoint to them? Because they seem similar to the Iroquois. And of course, there’s a difference between self-sufficient villages supported by horticultural production (that often max out at 300) versus horticultural villages that are not self-sufficient. And your rule of fission or die applies in the context of self-sufficiency, of course.
And as for the sustainability of the Arawak and Taino, we don’t know about their unsustainability, nor do we with other chiefdoms (and they are exceptional). So debating it is pretty moot. But, as you even admitted, the logic still remains: Imports of feed a larger village would be sustainable if the system is sustainable, and unsustainable if the system is not.
Comment by Taylor — 11 September 2006 @ 7:37 PM
Also…when I argued that you made the claim that horticulture cannot drive a pattern of conquest, I was basing that on what you argued in your response toward Ran Prieur’s inital comments on Thesis #29.
There, you said…
“No-till agriculture” is horticulture, which is sometmes also called “hoe agriculture.” Horticulture cannot arbitrarily raise its level of complexity, because of the limits on production. Permaculture is the same. Ergo, no, they cannot drive a pattern of conquest. They are limited by the same kinds of factors that limited Cahokia and the tribes of the Pacific Northwest.
Unless I misunderstood that point to.
Comment by Taylor — 11 September 2006 @ 7:41 PM
Such absolutes are meaningless, because they simply do not exist.
That’s precisely what I’m trying to argue. Most rules have exceptions, and that’s all I’m saying. The level of the exception can be debated, but there likely will be one. But I can also see how your writing style can mislead people like me into thinking you are making absolute statements when you are not.
Comment by Taylor — 11 September 2006 @ 8:00 PM
Also…while horticultural production in the tropics is almost always shifting, is that another rule? That horticulture must always have some form of shifting cultivation for sustainability? It could be, of course, with exceptions like river valley horticulturalists.
Obviously, some forms of agriculture have been “shifting cultivation” as well, like the fallow periods of Medieval agriculture. (This does not make it sustainable, of course, but it is a form of shifting cultivation.)
Comment by Taylor — 11 September 2006 @ 8:16 PM
And to clarify, does that mean a horticultural village of 300 is often “nearly nomadic,” depending on what environment it is in? This seems like an environmental-based rule as well.
Comment by Taylor — 11 September 2006 @ 9:10 PM
Finally, where did you conclude that permaculture is a form a horticulture, and bound to all limitations of horticulture? All my research on other websites argues that it is a form of agriculture, or a synthesis between the two. And this is the first place where I have heard the claim argued that permaculture can only support a village of 300 people. There are numerous projects that argue that permaculture can sustain cities and suburbs, yet this is one of the few rebutalls to that (basically, that permaculture cannot provide enough food to sustain an urban or suburban population because of EROEI, and thus it cannot be used in conjunction with raising livestock.)
Oh, not again! Too many posts! I’m so sorry, just bear with me. That’s the thing about autism–you try your best and you still fail!
Comment by Taylor — 12 September 2006 @ 4:32 PM
Don’t ecovillages typically do a fair bit of trading? Even so, they’re always integrated within a larger context, so it muddies the waters considerably. Don’t forget that farmland is simply the lowest level of succession. Left alone, it becomes wilderness in relatively short order. But can you hold out for 20 years while it replenishes?
This is one of my beefs with many permaculturalists. There is a distinct tendency amongst them to feel very proud of themselves upon reinventing the wheel, thinking they’re the first people to ever accomplish such a thing. I also have found many of their calculations of sustainability to be rather shallow, neglecting critical factors like this routinely.
This isn’t universal, of course. An increasing number of permaculturalists have come around to see that the techniques they invented are nearly identical to the same techniques employed by horticulturalists for millennia. Others have opened up to a deeper sustainability analysis, and discovered similar limitations as we’ve discussed here. Toby Hemenway is one of the leading permaculturalists in the world; his Gaia’s Garden basically introduced the concept to North America. We’ve had some really great dialogues with him here on these issues, and I think we’ve largely reached a consensus on these matters–a consensus that Hemenway’s helped take back to the permacultural commuity. See “Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?” an article he originally published i Permaculture Activist, largely summarizing the consensus we originally came to.
The backing is about 10,000 years of experience from people using the exact same techniques, and what limitations they ran into. This isn’t a hypothetical that’s never been tried before, after all.
Iceland is part of a larger system. That’s like saying you’re an exception because you don’t expand. Let Iceland fare for itself—like Greenland had to—and watch what happens. Note that Iceland’s GDP had a growth rate of 2.10% from 1990-2000. So, Iceland’s GDP doubles every 33 years, or three times every century. If Iceland were to maintain that, in 2106, they’d have an economy eight times larger than today’s. Does that sound like a model of sustainability to you?
I think you’ve established an artificial cut-off point. It was the nature of agriculture that not only permitted, but compelled such endless expansion of complexity through the prisoner’s dilemna. The flooding of the Nile could rejuvenate the soils exhausted by a year of farming so that the scheme was sustainable in that small scope, but focusing on that scope is meaningless, because you have a society that’s constantly increasing its complexity as much as possible. Eventually, it reaches the point of complexity where it builds something like the Aswan High Dam, which has the unintended consequence of undercutting the ecological basis of such complexity. Any system of ever-increasing complexity is self-defeating in this manner.
Unless and until the expansion cycle reached the point where it was able to severely impact even the arability of the Nile itself. So, the cycle cannot be continued endlessly. Each cycle makes the next more precarious, and each cycle builds on what complexity is left from the last to reach greater heights of complexity. The result is less a sine wave than an unsteady escalation.
Sustainability with growth is impossible, and I’ve argued elsewhere why I do not think the Haudenosaunee had a sustainable culture.
Anthropologists often classify them—and the Haudenosaunee—as agriculturalists. I’m not so sure, but then, I’m not sure if the distinctions drawn in anthropology are very precise. It’s a fuzzy boundary in anthropology, and they prefer to talk about the “cultivation continuum.” Yet it seems to me that there must be some critical difference. The best I can think of is the point of diminishing returns.
Well, that’s like saying a square could be round if it were a sphere. A system that relies on imports to a central village is unsustainable. That scheme requires outlying villages to send their surplus to the central village, which means they have the ability to create an arbitrary surplus, which means they can choose to make more surplus. The Prisoner’s Dilemna takes over; the system is compelled to expand. The first village to choose to expand its surplus will have an advantage over the others, and could even become the new center. So the race is then on.
You’re confusing conquest and expansion. I admit, my choice of words here did not help to clarify that. Horticulturalists routinely conquer one another, but they’re rarely able to expand the total pattern of horticulture. Notice that the Maya city-states were at constant war with one another, but the total sphere of Maya life did not change very much. The Maya intensified their cultivation to the point of agriculture and had large, monocropped fields, but they also practiced many horticultural techniques; some of their “garden cities” and “forest gardens” are of particular interests to permaculturalists, so they give us an extreme example, where agriculture fuels particularly intense warfare, but horticultural techniques define a limited ecological niche. Horticulturalists conquer one another, but they don’t really conquer new land: their techniques are far too specific to a given location. They cannot be easily exported, like agriculture usually can.
(The limitation of the Maya was not only because of this niche, of course, though Leibig’s law of the minimum seems relevant; Diamond’s axis hypothesis in Guns, Germs & Steel also explains why the Mesoamerican civilizations were so hemmed in by geography. Their crops eventually adapted and spread well into North America—even to the Haudenosaunee—but the expansion was generally too slow to carry states along with it.)
Shifting cultivation is one of the ways anthropologists have defined horticulture, quite apart from its sustainability. According to some anthropologists, if it doesn’t have shifting cultivation, it isn’t horticulture, but agriculture. I’m not sure if this is a good criterion, though; were the medieval kingdoms that used fallowing horticulturalists? I think that’s somewhat absurd.
Now, shifting cultivation need not mean short-lived villages. If the village is carefully balanced in its population, then the “active” field can migrate around the village. In the rain forest, such an orbit is typically 25 years. Rain forest takes about 20 years to regenerate. So the field comes around to an old site only after it’s had a chance to regrow. This is a careful balancing act, though, and if the population isn’t carefully balanced, the orbit will move too quickly, and the village will have to be abandoned.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 September 2006 @ 10:27 AM
Don’t ecovillages typically do a fair bit of trading? Even so, they’re always integrated within a larger context, so it muddies the waters considerably. Don’t forget that farmland is simply the lowest level of succession. Left alone, it becomes wilderness in relatively short order. But can you hold out for 20 years while it replenishes?
Of course not, that was my point. I was basically stating that since there is no wilderness, and everyone would starve after 20 years, that this would mean doom for ecovillages even if they could support themselves with horticulture.
Again, you might convince yourself that there will be enough land to support the few foragers who choose to forage, but outside of you and there are disagreements. Just ask Steve Thomas.
This is one of my beefs with many permaculturalists. There is a distinct tendency amongst them to feel very proud of themselves upon reinventing the wheel, thinking they’re the first people to ever accomplish such a thing. I also have found many of their calculations of sustainability to be rather shallow, neglecting critical factors like this routinely.
Okay. But you see, I am not going to passively agree with what people say until I find other people backing them up first or a logical basis to back them up.
Whether or not you are a leading permaculturalist does not always equate credibility either–David Holmgren is the second-leading permaculturalist in the world as the student of Bill Mollison, the man who made the term. I’m also interested you consider Toby Hemenway the leader of permaculture in the U.S. I did not see others say that, so I guess I must take your word for it.
Yet David Holmgren believes that permaculture can sustain suburbs, garden cities are sustainable, and has many calculations that he uses to back up his points. He also argues that 6 billion people can live off permaculture. He is not a techno-fix optimist, so I cannot just passively admit that his calculations are false until I see them and compare them to your calculations. I want to take things with a grain of salt.
Let’s not forget that Steve Thomas openly argued against your claims of the limitations of permaculture numerous times, and cited calculations like the density of Tikopia. I don’t know what he believes now since he has left your tribe, but he is no dummy either.
On the other hand, I think that while arguing that since permaculture cannot be performed as efficient everywhere does mean that you cannot take the yields of a single garden and equate them to the world, since cities and suburbs typically share a similar bioregion, I could argue that you could calculate the yields per acre to determine what a city or suburb could feed in its city limits. Unless you have a calculation proving me false, I think that the argument of different bioregions does not prove this argument since cities and suburbs do often share bioregions.
The backing is about 10,000 years of experience from people using the exact same techniques, and what limitations they ran into. This isn’t a hypothetical that’s never been tried before, after all.
All right. But it is true that hypothetically, if there are differences between permaculture and horticulture that are not the same, then the rules would change.
Quite frankly, since I don’t know the exact calculations, and I’m not a leader in permaculture, and I’ve chosen to die, I’m going to remain agnostic. You’ll try to convince me that permaculture is subject to the same limitations of horticulture, but then, other people in other permacultural positions will tell me otherwise with their calculations as well, and might even debunk yours. You’re just a person, and just because you’re Jason Godesky doesn’t mean you are right, all the time, without further research.
The proof is always in the pudding–not in what we speculate but what permaculture ends up being able to support. You anticipate one thing, other permaculturalists anticipate something else. Time really is the only way to judge who is sustainable and not.
I think you’ve established an artificial cut-off point. It was the nature of agriculture that not only permitted, but compelled such endless expansion of complexity through the prisoner’s dilemna. The flooding of the Nile could rejuvenate the soils exhausted by a year of farming so that the scheme was sustainable in that small scope, but focusing on that scope is meaningless, because you have a society that’s constantly increasing its complexity as much as possible. Eventually, it reaches the point of complexity where it builds something like the Aswan High Dam, which has the unintended consequence of undercutting the ecological basis of such complexity. Any system of ever-increasing complexity is self-defeating in this manner.
Why is it artificial? Without the Aswan High Dam, the Nile would still be rejuvenating the soil. Prior to industrialism, that ability to build the Aswan High Dam would not have been available. Also, we cannot define the unsustainability of a society after what happens to it when it is conquered. Egypt did not build the dam destroying the Nile’s fertility until after it was colonized by Britain.
Sure, it’s going to escalate complexity, but that escalation was limited prior to the industrial revolution. It was a sine curve that lasted for over 4000 years. And Egypt did not industrialize out of its own volition–it was conquered. To equate that a society is unsustainable because of what happens to it after its colonialization is like saying that Native American hunter-gatherers were unsustainable because they are now living like modern middle-class Americans. Colonialism has a powerful effect on the colonized.
Also, that increase in complexity is based on the decreases of complexity it suffered during the collapse. It will try to increase its complexity but it still collapsed to a lower level as well.
I’m still skeptical of the Prisoner’s Dilemma because there are other reasons why complexity would need to be increased first. Why would that be sufficient to want to expand? Numerous societies have been conquered because they chose not to expand. Just look at how the West conquered every other civilization. I think resource depletion is the cause of more expansionism than Prisoner’s Dilemma. Soils are depleted and a society must get more farmland.
Unless and until the expansion cycle reached the point where it was able to severely impact even the arability of the Nile itself. So, the cycle cannot be continued endlessly.
Unless the Nile does not lose its arability, as you just said.
Well, that’s like saying a square could be round if it were a sphere. A system that relies on imports to a central village is unsustainable. That scheme requires outlying villages to send their surplus to the central village, which means they have the ability to create an arbitrary surplus, which means they can choose to make more surplus. The Prisoner’s Dilemna takes over; the system is compelled to expand. The first village to choose to expand its surplus will have an advantage over the others, and could even become the new center. So the race is then on.
Why? What if the villages were producing a maximum amount of surplus, and were limited by their geographical environment forcing a level of sustainability on them?
The arbitrary raising of complexity is not absolute. Or again, perhaps agriculture is not synonymous with monoculture after all? I’m just pointing out that you seem to contradict yourself. First you state polyculture=horticulture, monoculture=agriculture. But there are even cases in modern industrialized agriculture that have more than one culture–there are a few fields with coconut and banana trees in the tropics practiced with “modern” farming methods. So this seems to be a false distinction.
As for diminishing returns, that might be more accurate. But again, diminishing returns is only unsustainable if the energy inputs needed to make up the shortfall is unsustainable. You cannot argue that the using the flooding of the Nile to replenish nutrients is unsustainable–it flooded annually! And hunter-gatherers do rely on certain “niches” as well. So to argue that it is unsustainable just because climate change would eventually stop the flooding does not make sense either–climate change is going to affect foragers as well as all societies on this world. The Inuit, after all, cannot move northward, and might perish because of this climate change.
Besides, competition does not happen out of a vaccuum. Why is it that just because a society can compete, it will? This does not make sense to me.
Finally, it does not make sense that all factions would want to increase complexity in a society. Wouldn’t there be some factions that wanted to stay the same and remain steady-state in a society?
Horticulturalists conquer one another, but they don’t really conquer new land: their techniques are far too specific to a given location.
This seems to be contradicting as well. So conquest equates conquering a society that has the same subsistence strategy as yours while expansion is conquering an area that is already not horticulturally or agriculturally cultivated? In that case, the Haudenosaunee, Arawaks, and Taino could be sustainable since while they did try to conquer one another in their societies, they still stayed in the same landmass. The Haudenosaunee conquered other horticultural tribes, not other agricultural tribes. The land under cultivation did not increase.
Okay, I’ll stop talking about sedentism and villages. I was just making a point, and you’ve confirmed it.
Iceland is part of a larger system. That’s like saying you’re an exception because you don’t expand. Let Iceland fare for itself—like Greenland had to—and watch what happens. Note that Iceland’s GDP had a growth rate of 2.10% from 1990-2000. So, Iceland’s GDP doubles every 33 years, or three times every century. If Iceland were to maintain that, in 2106, they’d have an economy eight times larger than today’s. Does that sound like a model of sustainability to you?
I was talking about the crises of medieval Iceland as it deforested its territory, not modern Iceland. Also, it is ultimately the growth of resource consumption that equates unsustainability, not economic growth.
Comment by Taylor — 13 September 2006 @ 4:54 PM
Oh, and I’ve read Toby Hemenway’s calculations. Again, what happens, happens. I won’t be around to see it.
Comment by Taylor — 13 September 2006 @ 4:55 PM
Next question. If a self-sufficient village maxes out at 300, and a city is defined as relying on imports of resources, then shouldn’t that mean that technically, a “city” is a settlement larger than 300 instead of the 5000 that is used in archaeology? Small towns, of course, are only small by comparison–many of them would have been considered big cities in an ancient era.
Comment by Taylor — 13 September 2006 @ 5:13 PM
Good for you! But of course, we’ve had this discussion before, and the evidence was considered elsewhere. Links have been provided, and you can read the discussion for yourself, or extend it there if you like.
I didn’t say “leader,” but it is true that Gaia’s Garden was the first adaptation of permaculture for a North American audience.
Well, no, not quite:
Not at all, and we’ve since renewed contact, and I valued his distinct opinion because it was so often opposed to my own. But of course, I naturally think I’m right. I feel I’ve already refuted those arguments, including Tikopia and Havanna, elsewhere.
Calculations “proving” that permaculture could feed 6 billion typically take the form of finding the productivity of the most densely productive permacultural garden, and multiplying its productivity times the land area of the world. This is going to be a vast overestimation of permaculture’s potential. That was my point. My article “Ecotopian Dreams,” and the discussion that follows, includes much more realistic assessments of permacultural capacity.
Consider the actual techniques of permaculture: intercropping, seedballs, forest gardens, and so on. These are not new innovations. These are the defining techniques of horticultural peoples. There is not one new innovation in permaculture that has not been used by horticulturalists for millennia. So, it is quite simple to calculate the capacity of permaculture: it will be subject to all the same limits to growth as horticultural societies. Or do we really expect doing the same thing to yield different results? Didn’t Albert Einstein have a word for that attitude?
Yes, but there aren’t any.
My arguments have never rested on any notion of my personality or any kind of privelaged position; they’ve always been predicated on the evidence. So, that’s a bizarre statement to make, to say the least.
Yet even on its own, it was on a cycle of escalation. Complexity would continue to escalate until something similar came about, regardless of foreign intervention. Conquest merely hastens the process.
That’s simply not true, and that’s exactly what I was saying. The Industrial Revolution was a revolution in scale, not kind. There was no sine wave; it was an unsteady escalation. The Renaissance was significantly more complex than the Roman Empire, but the intervening “Dark Ages” were less so, for instance. Egypt had two dips, but the Middle Kingdom was more complex than the Old, and the New Kingdom was more complex than either one. That’s not a sine curve. Without an industrial revolution, without foreign conquest, without any of it, that escalation would still remain, and that escalation would have to eventually reach something like the Aswan Dam. That’s what I’m saying.
Yes, resource depletion is why we must expand. The Prisoner’s Dilemna is what makes a sustainable civilization impossible even in theory. It’s what has driven what might otherwise have been sustainable levels of complexity—like Egypt—into unsustainability and collapse.
But that cannot happen. Each crest is higher than the last one, each one does more damage to the ecology, each one increases the probability of collapsing the systems that support that arability. If you play Russian roulette every day, and every day you load one more bullet than the last, you’re not going to survive that pattern.
Then you have a different race: who will be the first to successfully break away from the center, and keep the extra surplus for themselves? Even the most solid beliefs are eventually shaken by such temptation. God-kings could not rule by dogma alone to curb the daimyo of Japan, the lords of the Egyptian nomes or even the Maya lords. The first blasphemer willing to commit such heresy wins. It’s just a slightly different game of Prisoner’s Dilemna. We might all be better off cooperating, but if you manage to betray me before I betray you, then you’ll be much better off.
No, I pointed out that anthropologists draw that distinction there. There are several such criteria floating about the anthropological noosphere, and there’s some debate as to which is most useful. My favorite is the one I came up with: diminishing returns.
No, and I haven’t. That particular subset of the system seems to work fine. My problem is that you’re only looking at a subset of the system, and neglecting the fact that you’ve now introduced agriculture, so all players must expand to the greatest extent of their ability, or be crushed by those who do. The lords, the land-owners, the peasants, even occasionally the kings—just ask Narmer. The subset may be sustainable, but the full system is steadily degrading the ecology on which that subset depends, so the system as a whole is anything but.
That’s not my argument. I dallied with the notion upthread, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason this doesn’t work is that escalating complexity inevitably degrades the ecology. The Aswan Dam is a fine example, but others abound. An Egypt left to its own devices might have instead continued expanding south, exerting greater control over the sources of the Nile, and eventually degraded those sources. Greater complexity might have instead led to increasing pollution of the water, or degrading it from overuse. The possibilities are endless; what we know is that Egypt was in a pattern of unsteady escalation for quite some time all on its own, and that high levels of complexity degrade the very ecological systems they depend on.
That’s not what I claimed at all. I suggested a game of Prisoner’s Dilemna. It will happen for the same reason that cartels always fail in the end: the temptation is too much.
In our own society, almost no one wants to increase complexity. But we have to. To stand still is to be run over. Desire doesn’t enter into it; we’re compelled to by the system itself, by the way we gather and use energy. We don’t have a choice. That’s what the Prisoner’s Dilemna means. You know it’s against your interests, but if you don’t do it, you’ll be destroyed by the one who does.
Compare the Haudenosaunee’s territory at the beginning of the Confederacy in 1142, to the territory the French encountered in the 1540s. It is much, much bigger. They were not simply conquering others just like them; they were expanding. The land under cultivation increased, as did the population.
It’s also important to note that the Maya city states lost territory as often as they gained it, while the Haudenosaunee steadily grew.
Iceland was growing as much in the Middle Ages as it is now. Economic growth is dependent on the growth of resource consumption, otherwise it’s not called “economic growth,” but “inflation.”
You just answered your own question. A village between 300 - 5000 is simply a non-sustainable village. After 5000, it becomes a special kind of unsustainable village, called a city. I never said that a city was defined by others supplying its needs. We still refer to a chief’s village, after all.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 September 2006 @ 5:41 PM
Well, no, not quite:
The expectation that we can actually maintain industrial levels of agricultural activity—well, yes, it is possible in intensive gardening to produce more food per hectare than the most intensive industrial systems. But we’re looking at mostly garden agriculture, where there’s a net input of resources, compost materials, and it’s very labor intensive. And most of that is actually in urban areas where people live. So garden agriculture can yield more per hectare than the industrial equivalent form, but with broad-acre agriculture systems you definitely need many more people and you need the infrastructure for people to be able to live on farms.1
That is an argument about population density, not population in entirety.
But he has also said:
In the last few hundred years we have dug millions of years worth of sunlight (fossil fuels) out of the ground to create global industrial culture and economy. The most productive sustainable systems imaginable may be able to provide for the needs of five or even 10 billion people. However they would never sustain large-scale cities, a global economy, and Western material affluence even if all the conventional energy conservation strategies were to be adopted. This is a bitter pill to swallow for Westerners raised on the notion of material progress. This does not mean that the energy conservation strategies promoted for years by Lovins and other energy optimists, and progressively being adopted, are not incredibly important In fact they are essential to make best use of what we have.
This does not make it valid, but it does show that he said it.
You just answered your own question. A village between 300 - 5000 is simply a non-sustainable village. After 5000, it becomes a special kind of unsustainable village, called a city. I never said that a city was defined by others supplying its needs. We still refer to a chief’s village, after all.
That definition has been given by other primitivists, like Derrick Jensen. Of course you’re not Jensen, but then your primitivism is not primitivism entirely. In fact, in your “5 Common Objections about Primitivism” essay, many of your objections are not really against primitivism but against your brand of primitivism, and the objectors are basing it on a Zerzanist or Jensenist primitivism that is false. But you won’t get them to change their minds any more than they would be able to change yours. Also, many people see primitivism as a political ideology like Marxism, not an ecological-based ideology.
Calculations “proving” that permaculture could feed 6 billion typically take the form of finding the productivity of the most densely productive permacultural garden, and multiplying its productivity times the land area of the world. This is going to be a vast overestimation of permaculture’s potential. That was my point. My article “Ecotopian Dreams,” and the discussion that follows, includes much more realistic assessments of permacultural capacity.
I was discussing taking a productive permacultural garden in a city and multiplying it times the arable land in a city and arguing that since a city is typically in a similar bioregion, this can be calculated. I precisely stated you cannot multiply a productive garden and equate it to the world.
In our own society, almost no one wants to increase complexity. But we have to. To stand still is to be run over. Desire doesn’t enter into it; we’re compelled to by the system itself, by the way we gather and use energy. We don’t have a choice. That’s what the Prisoner’s Dilemna means. You know it’s against your interests, but if you don’t do it, you’ll be destroyed by the one who does.
But there have been societies who have died because they did not “expand” the way their conquerors have. Just because you must expand while others do it doesn’t mean you will. You could hold on to your steady-state way of life to the bitter end.
Then you have a different race: who will be the first to successfully break away from the center, and keep the extra surplus for themselves? Even the most solid beliefs are eventually shaken by such temptation. God-kings could not rule by dogma alone to curb the daimyo of Japan, the lords of the Egyptian nomes or even the Maya lords. The first blasphemer willing to commit such heresy wins. It’s just a slightly different game of Prisoner’s Dilemna. We might all be better off cooperating, but if you manage to betray me before I betray you, then you’ll be much better off.
All right. It just seems pretty extreme to argue this as an absolute.
An Egypt left to its own devices might have instead continued expanding south, exerting greater control over the sources of the Nile, and eventually degraded those sources. Greater complexity might have instead led to increasing pollution of the water, or degrading it from overuse. The possibilities are endless; what we know is that Egypt was in a pattern of unsteady escalation for quite some time all on its own, and that high levels of complexity degrade the very ecological systems they depend on.
Okay. But that might not happen either. We don’t know–we can’t know.
Comment by Taylor — 13 September 2006 @ 6:30 PM
Compare the Haudenosaunee’s territory at the beginning of the Confederacy in 1142, to the territory the French encountered in the 1540s. It is much, much bigger. They were not simply conquering others just like them; they were expanding. The land under cultivation increased, as did the population.
It’s also important to note that the Maya city states lost territory as often as they gained it, while the Haudenosaunee steadily grew.
But the people they conquered were also cultivators, and their population increased because once you were conquered, you were part of the Confederacy.
Comment by Taylor — 13 September 2006 @ 6:34 PM
Also, if territory = conquest and expansion, what’s the difference? It just seems to be a name game here. If I am part of the Wilhelm family and my neighbors decide to change their names and become Wilhelms, how has the population changed? Nothing has happened–we’re just all Wilhelms.
So with the Haudenosaunee–the territory might have increased, but is this not just an issue of tribes continuing to cultivate land they cultivated with just the “Haudenosaunee” name they had versus the name they had previously? Otherwise, what is the difference between conquest and expansion? Conquest results in expansion does it not. Unless we consider the Mayans, who did not succeed in expanding. But if they did, it would have been expansion, would it not?
Also, what else would have stopped the Nile’s flooding, other than the loss of the floods?
Comment by Taylor — 13 September 2006 @ 6:54 PM
Iceland was growing as much in the Middle Ages as it is now. Economic growth is dependent on the growth of resource consumption, otherwise it’s not called “economic growth,” but “inflation.”
Yet it clearly was able to change its expansion rate when it depleted its forests, as cited in Jared Diamond. Why did it not collapse then?
Even Cuba may not be sustainable, yet it still did not lose its civilization. But it still nearly “shrank.” I’m basically showing that history teaches us that civilizations can survive some level of shrinkage without absolutely returning to a pre-civ level of complexity. Of course, that is dependent on the resources there.
Comment by Taylor — 13 September 2006 @ 6:57 PM
Also, are exceptional complex chiefdoms that rely on foraging, like the Kwakiutl and Chumash, unsustainable? They have villages between 300-5000. How does the Prisoner’s Dilemma not apply here?
Comment by Taylor — 13 September 2006 @ 7:09 PM
Finally, how is surplus arbitrarily created? What if their form of horticulture is one that produces a surplus? Why does creating a surplus that can feed a large village equate that that surplus can be raised and is being produced? Surpluses cannot be raised indefinitely, even with agriculture.
Comment by Taylor — 13 September 2006 @ 7:22 PM
As for permaculture feeding 6 billion people, I was not arguing about this. I was arguing about population density–not population size. Medieval agriculture can’t feed 6 billion either. But it did feed urban populations (though not on the scale of industrial agriculture). This, of course, is not to argue that Medieval agriculture was sustainable, of course.
Comment by Taylor — 13 September 2006 @ 7:27 PM
My arguments have never rested on any notion of my personality or any kind of privelaged position; they’ve always been predicated on the evidence. So, that’s a bizarre statement to make, to say the least.
It’s not bizarre. Other people seem to get that connotation because you do stand alone–I have yet to see someone that agrees with you 100% any more than you agree with anyone else 100%. Who else has argued the Prisoner’s Dilemma. I’ve yet to see that argued in other scientific, intellectual circles. And outside of primitivist circles, I’ve yet to find the claim that civilization is inherently unsustainable anywhere else. Not even Mark S. Merritt, the man who wrote the master’s thesis about economic growth, concludes this.
Comment by Taylor — 13 September 2006 @ 9:39 PM
Taylor, here’s a suggestion to help you manage your tendency to make so many postings in a row.
Open a word processing program while you read. whenever you think of something to say. type it in there. Keep doing that until you’ve read everything. Read through what you wrote at least twice, get up and go to the bathroom or something and come back. If you don’t think of anything else, then you can cut and paste your posting. Otherwise repeat the process of reading and getting up until your prolific mind settles down.
Just a suggestion to help you manage your autism.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 13 September 2006 @ 11:07 PM
Thanks, Chandra Shakti. I’ll try that.
Comment by Taylor — 14 September 2006 @ 8:40 AM
Wait a minute. You take the point that no one agrees with Jason 100% of the time, and Jason doesn’t agree with anyone else 100% of the time, and you conclude from this that Jason thinks he’s somehow above and beyond everyone else?
I have to tell you something: no one agrees with anyone else 100% of the time. That goes for primitivists like Jensen and Zerzan and yes, even Mark Merritt. Everyone has different experiences, and these experiences lead them to different material (books, scientific studies, school courses, etc.) that informs their opinion. No one has read the exact same set of literature; no one has had the exact same experiences. So why would you assume that someone who doesn’t agree with everyone else is some kind of egomaniac?
Chances are, if you agree 100% with anyone, it’s because you’re not thinking for yourself, or because all your information on a given topic was taken from one source and one source only. How many scientists agree 100% with any other scientist? Seriously, have you ever seen scientists get together? They argue like little old Jewish ladies.
Further, why would you expect the claim that civilization is inherently unsustainable to come up outside of primitivist circles? It is discovering precisely this that makes one a primitivist. But you’ll find other scholarly arguments outside of primitivism that you can piece together into a coherent story. That’s all Quinn did. He saw from math that exponential growth cannot be sustained. He saw from anthropology that exponential growth was an inherent part of civilization. He put the two together. That’s what thinking people are supposed to do. That’s what Jason does. Take two different pieces of information and see how they fit.
Prisoner’s Dilemma is a math game. Jason has a background in computer science, which requires a lot of math. Most primitivists don’t have backgrounds like this, so you won’t hear them talk about the Prisoner’s Dilemma. They have other backgrounds that give them other interesting information and that inform their views.
Jason has never said, “Thou shalt listen to me and agree with all I say. For I am Jason, doer of good things where primivism is concerned.” On the contrary, he’s done his damndest to explain to you and everyone else how he came to believe what he believed by referencing his sources. He’s done nothing that any other writer wouldn’t do. So please stay on focus and debate his actual points.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 14 September 2006 @ 9:33 AM
Then you have a different race: who will be the first to successfully break away from the center, and keep the extra surplus for themselves? Even the most solid beliefs are eventually shaken by such temptation. God-kings could not rule by dogma alone to curb the daimyo of Japan, the lords of the Egyptian nomes or even the Maya lords. The first blasphemer willing to commit such heresy wins. It’s just a slightly different game of Prisoner’s Dilemna. We might all be better off cooperating, but if you manage to betray me before I betray you, then you’ll be much better off.
But if this is limited within a specific group of societies who cannot expand their territories, and the surplus does not get bigger but just changes hands, and the cultivation is sustainable, why is it that if a society is competing for who gets the proper surplus, they are automatically unsustainable? Change of surplus does not equate increasing production–the surplus remains the same. This could be sustainable.
Somebody has to break the ice here. What if no one broke the ice? Or is everyone so terrified of everyone else in a society one person pre-emptively breaks the ice. It seems that pre-emptive strike is not sufficient–but something else, like resource depletion, and pre-emptive strike is used as a precedent. But if resources are not depleted, then what’s the point of conquest?
Why did the Iroquois try to conquer their enemies? Surely they were not depleting their resources. And according to William Kotke, in this chapter, the Haudenosaunee were self-sufficient in their production in their villages.
As for horticulture…I know I’m splitting hairs here, but I just do not feel like I can render a final judgment on it. Just because many of permaculture’s techniques are horticultural does not exclude the possibility that it is a synthesis between horticulture and agriculture, and something different. The Iroquois had horticultural techniques, but they also had agricultural techniques as well. I’m not arguing with you anymore on this. I’ve just seen so much evidence pointing every which way I just don’t know what is true, and that’s why I’m going to bow out of the debate.
Comment by Taylor — 14 September 2006 @ 9:39 AM
Giuli, that’s because I do not see many of Jason’s points here argued other places.
That does not make them an egomaniac, but it does mean that it can get pretty confusing is one person is arguing that reality is “x” and someone else argues reality is “y,” and the person arguing that reality is “x” argues that if you believe in “y,” you will certainly die.
Yes, scientists argue like little old Jewish ladies. And, every scientist will think that they are right in some regard.
I’m also confused when you argue that Quinn argues that exponential growth is inherent to civilization–when in fact he argues that civilization can be reformed by changing minds and it can be sustainable.
Fine, I’ll debate his actual points.
Comment by Taylor — 14 September 2006 @ 9:47 AM
Yes, that’s what make them Jason’s opinions and not Zerzan’s opinions, or Jensen’s opinions. You can’t determine the accuracy of someone’s opinions by seeing how many people agree with him or her. If everything that was true was popular, then evolution really wouldn’t exist, we wouldn’t be running out of oil, and the Rapture would be coming to save everyone who rightly believed that gays and lesbians should remain second-class citizens. Might I add, thank God that a popular vote does not determine reality.
Welcome to the internet.
I can’t find anything he’s written saying that. I have found references to slowly abandoning civilization and moving beyond it. Hence, the title “Beyond Civilization.” But everything he’s written says that civilization cannot be sustained and that changing minds primarily involves convincing people to move beyond it, into actual sustainable societies.
Wonderful.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 14 September 2006 @ 10:35 AM
Okay, Giuli.
Also, because of autism, and how my mind works, I’ve pretty much done debating, so in order to close this discussion, I would prefer it if you closed this post for comments. I will then shut up, and we can go our merry ways. Then I will stop commenting, since I am done debating. That’s pretty much how autism works. If you do not want to do that, however, that is fine. I respect your wishes.
I will welcome myself to the Internet.
Yes, Quinn did write “Beyond Civilization.” But his definition of civilization is much different than yours, which is how the world works. His Leaver and Taker dichotomy is also not totally accurate either. Thank you for your clarifications.
Comment by Taylor — 14 September 2006 @ 12:49 PM
Close the post comments to as a courtesy to help keep Taylor from commenting? That’s pretty funny.
But then he’d get the last post(s)…
Comment by JCamasto — 14 September 2006 @ 1:05 PM
I didn’t expect you to do it.
I’ve read the dialogues now between you and Hemenway, except for the podcast, which I am unable to listen to due to limitations on my computer. But that is another story.
Comment by Taylor — 14 September 2006 @ 1:10 PM
But I am still open to hear what Jason replies to my comments. I will be indefinitely patient.
Comment by Taylor — 14 September 2006 @ 6:14 PM
Don’t ecovillages typically do a fair bit of trading? Even so, they’re always integrated within a larger context, so it muddies the waters considerably. Don’t forget that farmland is simply the lowest level of succession. Left alone, it becomes wilderness in relatively short order. But can you hold out for 20 years while it replenishes?
Of course, perhaps, in this one context, it is adaptable to “turtle,” or store food. If you could store food for 20 years while the wilderness replenishes, then you might be able to hold out.
Comment by Taylor — 14 September 2006 @ 7:01 PM
I’m not expecting to hear from you again, but have a great Mountain Festival! My best wishes to your tribe!
Comment by Taylor — 15 September 2006 @ 3:03 PM
There’s too much of a break involved. Most crops will need to be re-domesticated. Will domesticable species be available in these new forests? Where are the riverine flood plains that will permit domestication to take place? Agriculture does not arise in just any place: it requires a very specific convergence of climate and geography.
Yes, but if global warming does mean that climate zones move up northward, this suggests that there will still be river valleys and floodplains in the future–just farther up north.
Comment by Taylor — 17 September 2006 @ 2:58 PM
There’s too much of a break involved. Most crops will need to be re-domesticated. Will domesticable species be available in these new forests? Where are the riverine flood plains that will permit domestication to take place? Agriculture does not arise in just any place: it requires a very specific convergence of climate and geography.
Yes, but if global warming does mean that climate zones move up northward, this suggests that there will still be river valleys and floodplains in the future–just farther up north. We don’t know if plants will be domesticable, but again–we don’t know. It could be, or it could not. But we do know that those areas are not arable now, and could be in the future.
Comment by Taylor — 17 September 2006 @ 2:59 PM
I’m waiting with bated breath for the glorious news that Mr. Pianka has led by example and made the ultimate selfless sacrifice for mama Gaia, and assumed room temperature. If he is still merely contemplating oblivion rather than enjoying(?) it, please assure him of my pledge to follow directly in his brave footsteps. When the momentous time comes I’d love to hear the particulars of method also. I envision something spectacular, that really makes a statement…like getting shot out of a real cannon, or feeding himself to grizzly bears, or…oh, the possibilities are endless.
If he has already begun the process of reduction to his various elements, I regret to have to inform you that I’ve had a change of heart. I no longer have the mindless urge to bark like a moonbat, and believe just any old faery tale some degreed useful idiot conjures up to replace unvarnished reality. It strikes me as indolent and narcissistic to imagine, religiously, that I am a random collection of molecules, inexplicitly conscious, and cluttering up a once pristine planet with my presence. How seriously should a reasonably intelligent person take someone who insists they are nothing more than magically animate potting soil? It’s a short step from that popular psychosis, to deciding to take the personal choice of alleviating the globe of one more accidentally animated piece of meat out of the hands of the individual, and ‘helping’ them make the ‘right’ choice.
Should that course appeal to you, let me know, so we can arrange a time and place to meet and discuss the matter like men (or your favorite noun). I can guarantee some very warm Southern hospitality.
M. Kilpatrick
Comment by Anonymous — 1 October 2006 @ 5:33 PM
Mr. Kilpatrick … I can’t think of anything to really say in response to that. It rather stands on its own, doesn’t it?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 October 2006 @ 9:42 AM