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’.”