Gi, 3 million is still an order of magnitude smaller than the pre-Columbian population. As for selling meat to the townfolk—transportation has, in most periods of history, been a significant factor in trade. Only in the petroleum age have we had the energy to make it negligible. With the close of that age, it will become a major factor again, particularly with something that spoils as easily as meat. I’m afraid that alone will force towns to depend on a fairly small radius around them, and preclude such trade as any major factor.

Check out this fantastic article by Lovelock:

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article338830.ece

J

BTW Jason, love the story but neglected to post before now. Good Show

However, one quick point on the elephants… you may be reaching a little bit, here, simply because of the disparity of horse and elephant lifecycles. Horses mature within two years…but elephants… isn;t it more like ten? Scratch that, its a two year gestation with maturation falling around 13-14. So over fifty years, you are only looking at three generations (as compared with the horses: 80 years gives roughly 30 - 40 generations) (link)

Janene

Here’s evidence for the declining numbers of hunters:

[url]http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=HUNTERS-01-22-04&cat=AN[/url]
[url]http://www.manchesterjournal.com/localnews/ci_4694984[/url]
[url]http://www.examiner.com/a-394307~Trends_indicate_number_of_younger_hunters_on_the_decline.html[/url]
[url]http://www.srd.gov.ab.ca/fw/hunting/numberhunters.html[/url]

Note that it’s very much tied to age and early hunting experiences. I’m starting to think that it really is probable that a lot of people in the States today wouldn’t turn to hunting and foraging wild foods; which, to be honest, is something that I’ve been having a hard time accepting up til now.

As for hunting, as noted elsewhere, that’s an option most people don’t think of. When economy goes bad, hunting declines.

personally i think your the one who is doing the ignoring because you like tribalism, but the simple mater of fact as times get rough people cling to what is familiar.

Then you missed the whole point of the story. These people did not become tribal out of ideology; they were driven into it not because they liked it, but because it worked. That was one of the main things I wanted to express here; tribes will not emerge out of ideological conviction, but out of practical necessity. What we face is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

Pick a small town at random, and it’s not likely to survive. But what will be left throughout the midwest will not be the “abo-trekkers” of today, but the descendants of those towns that did survive. They have a tight-knit community; they have farms, and just as often, personal gardens. When times get tough, they’re the most likely to adopt increasingly horticultural/permacultural techniques in response, even if they don’t use a term like that to describe it. They’re the most likely to be hunters, too.

your basically saying here, that people with little or no knowledge of the tribal way of life will when the going gets rough jettison /everything/ they learned up to that point and adopt this way of life and be successfully at it? no that won’t happen.

No, I’m saying they’ll continue with what they know—all that will change is the emphasis they place on X, rather than Y. When the fields aren’t doing well, they’ll spend more time on their gardens, and they might start hunting more. Most won’t, but some will, and this story isn’t about the most that won’t, because by 2050, they’re already dead. They’re not jettisoning anything.

what is most likely to happen is the preacher is instead of being the tribal leader, is instead a firebrand fundamentalist preacher who would go on about how the rough times they are now having are do to their sins and thus the people must repent as he tells them how.

Isn’t that what he is? Evangelical Christianity is incredibly fickle; even in relatively static times, it reinvents itself completely with each new generation. Religion’s role is primarily adaptive—it relates us to our way of life in important ways. This is rarely understood directly by the priests involved, of course, but they are moved by that “invisible hand” nonetheless. With fields failing and all the food coming from hunting and gardening, a mythology of dominating nature becomes patently absurd. The preacher couldn’t stand up and preach that, he’d be laughed right off the pulpit, because the everyday life of every one of his congregation betrays the very notion. There are animistic tendencies already latent in Christianity; all that’s needed is the pressure to need them. As for the rate of change, as I said, evangelical Christianity is a very fickle form.

the grandmother would instead of finding solace in your Utopian tribalism saying all she learned up to this was wrong. would instead chastise the grandchild for questioning the preacher.

I’ve never known any of these Bible-believing, small-town folk to be that blindly obedient. And wouldn’t her conviction that everything she used to know was wrong fit in with the preacher telling them all about how this is punishment for their sins?

also the conditions that caused the 1900-1950 changes do not exist anymore so i do not see how that can be justification for this.

It shows how we’ve seen periods of such rapid change, and since the process of collapse in our case will make the forces pushing it along stronger in a positive feedback loop, I think we can expect accelerating change, speeding up to a period of simply unprecedented social change—enough to make the rate of change from 1900-1950 seem slow by comparison.

We had a world wide depression and 2 world wars during that time. Not to mention wide spread development of the electric grid, transportation, and communications by the telephone. Granted there were places that remained untouched, but still saying there was no major crisis is a stretch.

That should tell you just how high I’m placing the bar for what constitutes a “crisis.” The World Wars and the Depression, well, that’s just the cost of doing civilized business, no?

Also, the collapse of the heartland has been due primarily to sociological reasons.

I think the division of sociological and economic reasons are primarly artificial. They’re just differing facets of the same underlying system.

Though I beleive it’ll take longer than 50 years for evangelical christianity to evolve into an earth based belief system. Those scary fire and brimestone memes will take more than a few generations to overcome.

If it does, it will be the most remarkable period of theological stability in the history of evangelical Christianity. This is a group that completely reinvents itself every 20 years or so. The evangelicals of 20 years ago cared little about homosexuality, but were very concerned with dancing. Today, they’re “kissing dating goodbye.” Even normally static religions change drastically in the kind of social millieu we face over the next several decades—how can we expect such a fickle group to remain unchanging under those circumstances?

and would take generations for the elephants to populate the plains to that extent

I did mention the horses, didn’t I? Richard Manning includes this in Against the Grain:

The Spaniards attempted to settle in what is now Argentina in the early 1500s, but failed. They did, however, leave behind some horses. When they returned to try colonization again in the 1580s, they found horses in abundance. A traveler at the turn of the seventeenth century reported horses “in such numbers that they cover the face of the earth and when they cross the road, it is necessary for travelers to wait and let them pass, for a whole day or more, so as not to let them carry the tame stock with them.” In 1744, a Jesuit priest in the pampas reported herds of feral horses so numerous that it would take three hours for them to pass by “at full speed.”

That was because the horse was returning to its original habitat. Likewise, the North American plains were once home to the mammoth, a fairly close relative of the elephant. With the depopulation of the continent’s interior already underway, and the unavoidable escape of some specimens from zoos, circuses, and private ranches, I think we’ll see a similar boom for elephants as we once saw for horses. For horses, it took less than 80 years to fill Argentina; to think that elephants could fill up the plains in 50 years is certainly conceivable.

Parent’s change religions, or gives up religion, and the following generation is no longer taught that previous beleif.

I guess I didn’t express that very well, either; this is not a new religion. As far as they’re concerned, this is what Christianity has always been, just like every generation of evangelicals comes up with a completely new interpretation of Christianity and claims it’s the only interpretation they’ve ever had. And the elements are already there in Christianity, waiting to be pulled out for something like this—see “A Very Different Bible.”

The tribal mentality is not so far away as one would think, In many small towns, this relianace on each other and group mentality can be seen. Families are often closer together, they raise their children together and you do see a tribal or clan type of structure. This can be seen in cities also, especially within ethnic or racial groups that live in tight knit enclaves of a specific culture. Gangs today, could also be an example.

Exactly—and isn’t that precisely what we should expect? Humans are tribal animals; where we have no tribes, we create them.

The fact that the Son/Sun is used here is significant, The Sun was the primary force in early aggrarian cultures. I would imagine that over time it would revert to a truely more hunter gatherer worship of the moon.

There’s a long tradition in Christianity of associating “the Son” with “the Sun” (and it isn’t even a pun in Greek or Latin), such as the Apollonian depictions of Christ in the Roman catacombs, or Constantine’s vision at Milan Bridge of the chi-rho in the sun. Sun worship isn’t just an agrarian thing, though (though it’s big with them, as well). Hunter-gatherers are animists, and typically revere the moon no more or less than the sun. Sun worhsip is fairly well known among foragers, too.