A Short History of Western Civilization
by Jason GodeskyFor most domesticated people, the suggestion of civilization’s fundamental unsustainability seems as preposterous as trying to disprove gravity. All of recorded history falls under the heading of civilization, and besides, have we not seen its spectacular growth and progress, even in our own lifetimes? How could we possibly call something like that unsustainable? Of course, a closer look at that history reveals a very different pattern; not the 10,000 year tale of progress we’ve normally heard, but a desperate 10,000 year race to stay ahead of the consequences of our own, unsustainable way of life. Western civilization seems particularly apt, because we descend from the people who went west, and ever since then, west has always seemed pregnant with hope and opportunity. “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” as the famous quote misattributed to Horace Greeley admonished as late as the nineteenth century. A simple ecological fact created that attitude. As Derrick Jensen put it, “Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.” Only in the West could we find land that we hadn’t killed off yet.
We can hardly escape the unsustainability of agriculture, cultivation by means of catastrophe. Tilling, the act from which the word “agriculture” etymologically derives, acts as an emulation of natural catastrophe. In his classic article, “The Oil We Eat,” Richard Manning provides an excellent summation of how agriculture began.
Domestication was also a radical change in the distribution of wealth within the plant world. Plants can spend their solar income in several ways. The dominant and prudent strategy is to allocate most of it to building roots, stem, bark—a conservative portfolio of investments that allows the plant to better gather energy and survive the downturn years. Further, by living in diverse stands (a given chunk of native prairie contains maybe 200 species of plants), these perennials provide services for one another, such as retaining water, protecting one another from wind, and fixing free nitrogen from the air to use as fertilizer. Diversity allows a system to “sponsor its own fertility,” to use visionary agronomist Wes Jackson’s phrase. This is the plant world’s norm.
There is a very narrow group of annuals, however, that grow in patches of a single species and store almost all of their income as seed, a tight bundle of carbohydrates easily exploited by seed eaters such as ourselves. Under normal circumstances, this eggs-in-one-basket strategy is a dumb idea for a plant. But not during catastrophes such as floods, fires, and volcanic eruptions. Such catastrophes strip established plant communities and create opportunities for wind-scattered entrepreneurial seed bearers. It is no accident that no matter where agriculture sprouted on the globe, it always happened near rivers. You might assume, as many have, that this is because the plants needed the water or nutrients. Mostly this is not true. They needed the power of flooding, which scoured landscapes and stripped out competitors. Nor is it an accident, I think, that agriculture arose independently and simultaneously around the globe just as the last ice age ended, a time of enormous upheaval when glacial melt let loose sea-size lakes to create tidal waves of erosion. It was a time of catastrophe.
Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.
Could this annual, man-made catastrophe continue sustainably? Does a year of growing crops heal the land? No. Monocropping poisons the soil for the very same reasons that running a car in a sealed garage will kill you. With all the plants of the same species taking the same things out of the soil and putting the same things back in, the soil becomes useless for that kind of plant. Moreover, the constant disturbance leads to erosion. In the case of the Fertile Crescent where Western civilization began, salinization also contributed, due to improper irrigation. As permaculture founder Bill Mollison wrote in “Introduction to Permaculture“:
For every head of population —whether you are an American or an East Indian— if you are a grain eater, it now costs about 12 tons of soil per person per year for us to eat grain. All this loss is a result of tillage. As long as you are tilling, you are losing. At the rate at which we are losing soils, we don’t see that we will have agricultural soils within a decade.
William Koetke put it even more starkly in The Final Empire, as he argued that we can see the soil as the basis of all life on earth:
In 1988, the annual soil loss due to erosion was twenty-five billion tons and rising rapidly. Erosion means that soil moves off the land. An equally serious injury is that the soil’s fertility is exhausted in place. Soil exhaustion is happening in almost all places where civilization has spread. This is a literal killing of the planet by exhausting its fund of organic fertility that supports other biological life. Fact: since civilization invaded the Great Plains of North America one-half of the topsoil of that area has disappeared.
When agriculture began in the Middle East, the Fertile Crescent didn’t sound like a cruel joke, as it does today. In fact, we know now that at that time, Iraq was covered in an old growth cedar forest so thick that the sunlight never touched the ground. These giant evergreen trees could grow as tall as 130 feet, with enormous trunks 45 feet in circumference, and 4, 5, or even 7 trunks sprouting from the same, gigantic base. When the authors of the Bible looked for a metaphor for the glory of G-d, they could not help but come back to those cedars. Around 2700 BCE, the first civilized myth—the Epic of Gilgamesh—described vast tracts of that cedar forest in what we now call southern Iraq. It tells how Gilgamesh defied the gods, who told him that they kept the forest as sacred to themselves. They warned Gilgamesh that if he cut down their forest, they would punish his people with fire, or possibly drought. But Gilgamesh defied them and cleared that forest to make way for cities and agriculture. By 2100 BCE, soil erosion and salt buildup had turned the “Fertile Crescent” into the desert we know today. The centers of civilization moved north, to Babylonia and Assyria, where the soil remained viable, but they continued cutting down the forest as well, and the same thing happened again. In time, the old growth cedar forest vanished (the celebrated “cedars of Lebanon” are the only remaining portion), and the land turned into a desert by a few thousand years of agriculture. The blasted wastelands we see on the nightly news in Iraq did not happen naturally; they show us the legacy of the Agricultural Revolution.
That was how the race began. Farmers needed to expand into new territories, before their old lands gave out and died. We have no reason to believe that this expansion happened peacefully. The idea that agriculture spread peacefully, as hunter-gatherers recognized the ease it brought, seems preposterous given what we know now from the archaeological record. Finds like those at Dicksons’ Mounds show that agriculture led to severe and sudden malnutriton, disease, and a much abbreviated lifespan. It involved a great deal more labor, far less leisure time, and significant compromises of health. Even modern primitive peoples make the same points. When asked why they won’t farm, one Ju/’hoansi in the Kalahari replied, “Why would we farm, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” Or, as Sitting Bull put it:
White men like to dig in the ground for their food. My people prefer to hunt the buffalo as their fathers did. White men like to stay in one place. My people want to move their teepees here and there to the different hunting grounds. The life of white men is slavery. They are prisoners in towns or farms. The life my people want is a life of freedom. I have seen nothing that a white man has, houses or railways or clothing or food, that is as good as the right to move in the open country, and live in our own fashion. … The white men had many things that we wanted, but we could see that they did not have the one thing we liked best—freedom. I would rather live in a tepee and go without meat when game is scarce, than give up my privileges as a free Indian, even though I could have all that white men have.
The historical trend that no wild human would willingly give up their way of life for farming, but would fight to the death rather than become civilized, does not seem like a recent one, either. As Richard Manning writes in his book, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization:
The same group of anthropologists concluded that this culture’s [Linearbanderkeramik or LBK] sweep through Europe took no more than three hundred years, a blitzkrieg by the standards of the day. And it is appropriate to employ the war metaphor here, in that the record suggests, contrary to conventional ideas about rational and peaceful cultural diffusion, that there was almost no intermixing among the wheat farmers and the salmon-eating, cave-painting Cro-Magnon already resident.
The curious part of this is that there was probably not an inherent ecological reason for conflict. That is, the LBK people didn’t blanket the region, at least not at first, but tended to cluster in villages where loess soils were concentrated, leaving the river-valley bottoms and mountains untouched. That would have left a viable niche for hunter-gatherers. A coexistence with mutually beneficial trade could have developed between the two cultures, but the record says it didn’t. There is almost no record of Cro-Magnon artifacts in LBK villages and vice versa. Cro-Magnon sites seem to cease being occupied at about the time of LBK arrival. In fact, the record seems to show that the Cro-Magnons maintained a sort of buffer zone between themselves and the newcomers, leaving even in advance of the advancing farmers.
The exception to the absence of artifacts from one culture in settlements of the other is evidence that the two sides swapped spear points, probably not as trade goods. “All these artifacts are weapons,” note Price, Gebauer, and Keeley, “and there is no reason to believe that they were exchanged in a nonviolent manner. … The evidence from the western extension of the LBK leaves little room for any other conclusion but that the LBK-Mesolithic interactions were at best chilly and at worst hostile.”
Genetically, the demic diffusion model has gained ground, reinforcing the archaeological evidence (see “Tracing the Origin and Spread of Agriculture in Europe” by Pinhasi, Fort and Ammerman, “Genetic evidence for the spread of agriculture in Europe by demic diffusion” by Sokal, Oden and Wilson, “Y genetic data support the Neolithic demic diffusion model,” by Chikhi, Nichols, Barbujani and Beaumont, and/or “Clines of nuclear DNA markers suggest a largely Neolithic ancestry of the European gene pool” by Chikhi, Destro-Bisol, Bertorelle, Pascali and Barbujani). Linguistic evidence offers further suggestive evidence; the linguistic isolation of the Basques reflects their genetic isolation, suggesting that today’s Basques may descend from the same hunter-gatherers who painted the caves at Lasceaux. But all of this suggests that today’s Europeans do not descend from pre-agricultural natives; they descend overwhelmingly from Neolithic invaders. “Demic diffusion” gives us an academic term for violent conquest and near-on genocide. Agriculture did not spread peacefully into Europe as savages grasped its superiority; it spread into Europe as part of a genocidal wave of conquest, as farmers expanded to find new lands where they had not yet killed off the soil.
But always, agriculture felt the deserts on their heels. After the genocide and the expansion, the new lands would ultimately fail, just like the old. Already 2,300 years ago, Plato wrote about the impact of such “sustainable” agrarian methods in southern Europe:
What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man. … Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.
In “The Oil We Eat,” Manning comments on this passage:
Plato’s lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country’s soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By the fifth century, though, wheat’s strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major “corrective” famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period.
By 500 BCE, Greek coastal cities had become landlocked due to deforestation, which lead to soil erosion, which filled in bays and the mouths of rivers. The Meander River became so silted that its course changed, weaving back and forth, giving us our word “meandering.” Greece suffered from massive soil erosion that degraded agricultural quality over the few centuries of the city-states.
As Manning noted, the grand strategy of agriculture worked for a few thousand years, until, during the Roman Empire, it reached the Atlantic. Western civilization ran out of “west” to expand into. Gilgamesh’s Sumerian culture had failed, and Babylon and Assyria succeeded it; then they failed, and Greece, to the west, succeeded them; then Greece failed, and Rome, to the west, succeeded them; then Rome failed, and the western provinces—Britain, France, Germany and Spain—succeeded it as the major powers of the Middle Ages. But once Western civilization reached the Atlantic, it became much more difficult. Rome collapsed, the dark ages ensued, and medieval Europe struggled on the brink of collapse. Even as early as the Roman Empire, enormous birth rates became necessary just to keep society afloat in the face of such catastrophic mortality. As Peter Brown wrote in The Body & Society:
Citizens of the Roman Empire at its height, in the second century A.D., were born into the world with an average life expectancy of less than twenty-five years. Death fell savagely on the young. Those who survived childhood remained at risk. Only four out of every hundred men, and fewer women, lived beyond the age of fifty. It was a population “grazed thin by death.” In such a situation, only the privileged or the eccentric few could enjoy the freedom to do what they pleased with their sexual drives. Unexacting in so many ways in sexual matters, the ancient city expected its citizens to expend a requisite proportion of their energy begetting and rearing legitimate children to replace the dead. Whether through conscious legislation, such as that of Emperor Augustus, which penalized bachelors and rewarded families for producing children, or simply through the unquestioned weight of habit, young men and women were discreetly mobilized to use their bodies for reproduction. The pressure on the young women was inexorable. For the population of the Roman Empire to remain even stationary, it appears that each woman would have had to have produced an average of five children. Young girls were recruited early for their task. The median age of Roman girls at marriage may have been as low as fourteen. In North Africa, nearly 95 percent of the women recorded on gravestones had been married, over half of those before the age of twenty-three.
The High Middle Ages restored much of the complexity of the Roman Empire after the brief reprieve of the “Dark Ages.” This came about because of two primary factors that both conspired to greatly increase the energy available to medieval society. The first we call the Medieval Warm Period, a climatological increase in the energy available to Europe—at its most basic level, in simple terms of heat. This became available to human society in a number of ways. Wikipedia notes:
The Medieval Warm Period, the period from 10th century to about the 14th century in Europe, was a relatively warm and gentle interval ended by the generally colder Little Ice Age. Farmers grew wheat well north into Scandinavia, and wine grapes in northern England, although the maximum expansion of vineyards appears to occur within the Little Ice Age period. This protection from famine allowed Europe’s population to increase, despite the famine in 1315 that killed 1.5 million people. This increased population contributed to the founding of new towns and an increase in industrial and economic activity during the period.
On an interesting side note, William Ruddiman’s “Early Anthropogenic Climate Hypothesis” suggests that humans may have altered climate as early as the Agricultural Revolution, as a result of the same deforestation that caused so many effects already noted. The Holocene interglacial, Ruddiman argues, should have ended some time ago, but deforestation and the raising of livestock counter-balanced that natural trend by warming the atmosphere; in that case, modern global warming shows us a change in degree, rather than kind. But the end of the Medieval Warm Period, marked by the Little Ice Age, certainly lends credence to Ruddiman’s hypothesis: the Black Death led to a dip in Europe’s agricultural productivity, which led in turn to a sudden dip in temperatures, as if with less agriculture to warm the atmosphere, the earth seemed to tend naturally towards a return to ice age conditions.
The other element came from technology. The import of the horse collar from China allowed medieval farmers to use horses rather than oxen to pull their plows—one of the greatest technological advances in agricultural history. To quote Manning again from Against the Grain:
Arguably the biggest technological leap of the era was the invention of the horse collar about 1,500 years ago in China. Before this, tillage in both Europe and Asia had depended heavily on oxen and a throat-and-girth yoke that suited those ponderous beasts. The same harness was used on horses, but was so inefficient that it greatly limited the load and mobility of these much faster animals. A smaller horse collar allowed a quantum leap in the load a horse could pull, so fields became larger and more widespread almost immediately. This invention traveled quickly from China to Europe.
The complexity of the High Middle Ages renewed the misery of the Roman Empire; pestilence, plague, and famine provided the ecological counter-balance to keep society in balance.
France—”by any standards a privileged country,” according to its great historian, Fernand Braudel—experienced seven nationwide famines in the fifteenth century and thirteen in the sixteenth. Disease was hunger’s constant companion. During epidemics in London the dead were heaped onto carts “like common dung” (the simile is Daniel Defoe’s) and trundled through the streets. The infant death rate in London orphanages, according to one contemporary source, was 88 percent. Governments were harsh, the rule of law arbitrary. The gibbets poking up in the background of so many old paintings were, Braudel observed, “merely a realistic detail.”
The High Middle Ages by no means became sustainable thanks to this misery, however; it merely slowed their descent, as they ran into the hard, ecological limits Rome never quite reached. The crisis of the High Middle Ages seems very similar to our own “peak oil” problem, what we might call “peak wood.” As Richard Cowen writes:
The situation was different in England and France. Much land had been cleared for agriculture in Roman and again in medieval times, and the population was much denser than in mountain Germany and Bohemia. Although metal mining was never on the enormous scale of the Central European strikes, many small mines exploited tin, lead, copper, and iron deposits. All these ores were smelted with charcoal, and with heavy demands on the forests for building timbers for castles, cathedrals, houses, and ships, for building mills and most machinery, for barrels for storing food and drink, and fuel for the lime-burning, glass and brewing industries and for domestic fires, the English and French found that they were approaching a major fuel crisis.
A fuel “crisis” implies a lack of supply, and the other factors involved are supply and transport. Overland costs of transport were very high except for the highest-value goods, and it was simply not economic to carry bulky material like wood for very far on a cart. So thinly populated areas in forest land had no fuel crisis at all, whereas large cities soon felt a crisis as woodlands close by were cleared.
The discovery of the New World changed everything for Europe. William Catton puts this in excellent perspective as the beginning of the “Age of Exuberance” in his book, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, where he writes:
Discovery of the New World gave European man a markedly changed relationship to the resource base for civilized life. When Columbus set sail, there were roughly 24 acres of Europe per European. Life was a struggle to make the most of insufficient and unreliable resources. After Columbus stumbled upon the lands of an unsuspected hemisphere, and after monarchs and entrepreneurs began to make those lands available for European settlement and exploitation, a total of 120 acres of land per person was available in the expanded European habitat—five times the pre-Columbian figure!
Changelessness had always been the premise of Old World social systems. This sudden and impressive surplus of carrying capacity shattered that premise. In a habitat that now seemed limitless, life could be lived abundantly. The new premise of limitlessness spawned new beliefs, new human relationships, and new behavior. Learning was advanced, and a growing fraction of the population became literate. There was a sufficient per capita increment of leisure to permit more exercise of ingenuity than ever before. Technology progressed, and technological advancement came to be the common meaning of the word “progress.”
But the aura of limitless opportunity had another effect: further acceleration of population growth. To go into some details not shown explicitly in Table 1, between 1650 and 1850, a mere two centuries, the world’s human population doubled. There had never before been such a huge increase in so short a time. It doubled again by 1930, in only eighty years. And the next doubling was to take only about forty-five years! As people and their resource-using implements became more numerous, the gap between carrying capacity and the resource-use load was inevitably closed, American land per American citizen shrank to a mere 11 acres—less than half the space available in Europe for each European just prior to Columbus’s revolutionizing voyage. Meanwhile, per capita resource appetites had grown tremendously. The Age of Exuberance was necessarily temporary; it undermined its own foundations.
Most of the people who were fortunate enough to live in that age misconstrued their good fortune. Characteristics of their world and their lives, due to a “limitlessness” that had to be of limited duration, were imagined to be permanent. The people of the Age of Exuberance looked back on the dismal lives of their forebears and pitied them for their “unrealistic” notions about the world, themselves, and the way human beings were meant to live. Instead of recognizing that reality itself had actually changed—and would eventually change again—they congratulated themselves for outgrowing the “superstitions” of ancestors who had seen a different world so differently. While they rejected the old premise of changelessness, they failed to see that their own belief in the permanence of limitlessness was also an overbelief, a superstition.
With the colonization of the Americas, the sharp contrast of agriculture’s toll left clear evidence in the comparative heights of Europeans vs. Americans. Richard Manning, again from “The Oil We Eat”:
The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his hosts at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans present were a good head taller than all of the French. Indeed, colonists in all of the neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as well as a lower infant-mortality rate—all indicators of the better nutrition afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin soil.
But the discovery of a new world to plunder did not suddenly make the strategy sustainable. The same pattern played out again, as farmers expanded westward to find soil they had not yet turned to desert, and committed a genocide against anyone they found who got in their way. Once again, we can hardly point to the expansion of agriculture as a peaceful process of cultural diffusion. As Benjamin Franklin noted, “No European who has tasted Savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.” Or, as J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in Letters from an American Farmer:
There must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans! There must be something very bewitching in their manners, something very indelible and marked by the very hands of Nature. For, take a young Indian lad, give him the best education you possibly can, load him with your bounty, with presents, nay with riches, yet he would secretly long for his native woods, which you would imagine he must have long since forgot; and on the first opportunity he can possibly find, you will see him voluntarily leave behind all you have given him and return with inexpressable joy to lie on the mats of his fathers.
Indeed, the very first English colony in the New World—at Roanoke—promptly abandoned civilized life, leaving a sign: “Gone to Croatan.” The example of Indian freedom, and the distance from European centers of power, created a new dynamic in Western civilization. In his article, “Founding Sachems,” Charles C. Mann writes:
Not every European admired this democratic spirit. Indians “think every one ought to be left to his own opinion, without being thwarted,” the Flemish missionary monk Louis Hennepin wrote in 1683. “There is nothing so difficult to control as the tribes of America,” a fellow missionary unhappily observed. “All these barbarians have the law of wild asses—they are born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle and bit.”
Indians, for their part, were horrified to encounter European social classes, with those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy compelled to defer to those on the upper. When the 17th-century French adventurer Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan, tried to convince the Huron, the Iroquois’s northern neighbors, of Europe’s natural superiority, the Indians scoffed.
Because Europeans had to kowtow to their social betters, Lahontan later reported, “they brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having.” Individual Indians, he wrote “value themselves above anything that you can imagine, and this is the reason they always give for it, that one’s as much master as another, and since men are all made of the same clay there should be no distinction or superiority among them.”
Influenced by their proximity to Indians—by being around living, breathing role models of human liberty—European colonists adopted their insubordinate attitudes. Lahontan was an example, despite his noble title; his account highlighted Indian freedoms as an incitement toward rebellion. Both the clergy and Louis XIV, the king whom Lahontan was goading, tried to suppress these dangerous ideas by instructing French officials to force a French education upon the Indians, complete with lessons in deferring to their social betters. The attempts, the historian Cornelius J. Jaenen reported, were “everywhere unsuccessful.”
In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into competitors for colonists’ allegiance. Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because their members—surrounded by examples of free life—always had the option of voting with their feet.
What we today consider the greatest mark of Western civilization—democracy—came not from Western civilization, but from the example of the sustainable societies that Western civilization had to destroy, genocidally, in order to maintain its existence. It seems noteworthy that as that genocide has progressed and native influence has waned, the “democracy” of Western civilization has become increasingly symbolic, with a steady erosion of civil liberties dating all the way back to the contests of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans vs. Hamilton’s Federalists, immediately following the Sullivan Campaign in 1779 that did so much to break the Haudenosaunee.
If the “Founding Fathers” of the United States seem prescient, that surely follows from the predictable, ecological pattern they could already observe. George Washington considered soil exhaustion from monoculture co-equal with slavery as something that would lead the U.S. to disaster. The practice of cotton farming in the south quickly ran through the soil, pushing cotton farmers westward once again. The contest over western states entering the Union represented a wall that this pattern ran up against; that made cotton farmers desperate, and ultimately contributed greatly to the United States Civil War.
After the war, the same ecological pattern pushed the country’s westward expansion into the Great Plains. In short order, farming turned the prairie into a desert, becoming the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, a distinctly faster progression than had occurred in previous expansions. The website “Managing Wholes” puts the problem in perspective quite well:
Massive erosion during North America’s Dust Bowl years (1931-1938) has been blamed on inappropriate use of technology (ploughing the prairies), overpopulation in the affected region, and lack of rainfall. Many people believe that the problems related to the Dust Bowl have been solved—by resettlement of some of the remaining population, the establishment of National Grasslands and the Soil Conservation Service, government spending and regulation, and the return in most years of “normal rainfall.”
Yet the United Nations reports that Texas and New Mexico are some of the fastest, most severely desertifying areas of the world. We have lots of names for this problem: droughts and floods, weeds, overgrazing, wildfire, endangered species, and the chronic downtrodden state of the agricultural economy (in spite of massive subsidies, enormous technical improvements, and overseas markets). These are problems for that tiny sector of the economy known as agriculture. We have separate government agencies in charge of each of the symptoms.
In “The Oil We Eat,” Richard Manning observes that underneath the imported, petrochemical fertilizer, America’s breadbasket, source of so much of the world’s food, may have already become a desert.
Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find what Iowans call a “postage stamp” remnant of some, it most likely will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. Settlers’ accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a moldboard plow. A robbery was in progress.
Does this sound like the history of a sustainable system? With the conquest of the Americas, the strategy has reached its end. In 1960, we ran out of arable land. Since then, cropland per capita has steadily dropped, even while food per capita has risen. That phenomenon comes from the last chapter of Western history, the Green Revolution—a subject that will recieve the attention it deserves in another article. Suffice to say, while it provides a new twist, it does not deviate very much from the established pattern, and it certainly does not make the system any more sustainable.
The history of Western civilization, when we look at it in ecological terms, could hardly fall into the narrative of progress, and the expansion of an idea because of its recognized brilliance. Rather, it better fits the narrative of a desperate attempt to escape, with brutal genocide as its hallmark. Kirkpatrick Sale offers an excellent summation, by looking at some of the other examples of where this strategy has led.
And here’s the kicker: in the end, agriculture always failed. It was an environmental assault on the earth that was almost never sustainable for much more than a few centuries without disruption and devastation: in the long history of empires dependent on agriculture and irrigation (Babylonia, Sumeria, Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Inca, Aztec) we may read the story over and over again, of the exhaustion and salinization of the land, the destruction of forests, the overgrazing of fields, the compaction of soils, the extinction of wild animals, the silting and salting of rivers, the alteration of climate, erosion, desertification—and, as agriculture and its attendant systems began to fail, the revolt of the underclasses, or the collapse of the imperial systems, or the invasion of outsiders, or often all three. Nature always ended up having her revenge: of all the places where agriculture started, only one, central China, remains a productive agricultural area today; the rest are deserts or jungles.
No, I’m not abandoning the subject of cities; in fact, I intend a big article on that, later. But this came up in this MetaFilter thread about Urban Scout, and it occurred to me that I don’t have a single place I can point to with the full history of Western civilization, with all the best points. That’s what this is for. Regular readers may suffer a certain sense of déjà vu reading this; I recycled a good deal of material, since the goal here was primarily concentrating everything in one place. There’s some new stuff, but if you’re wondering, yes, that feeling that you’ve read this before is not just in your head.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 September 2007 @ 1:22 PM
Jesus Christ! I finally got around to perusing that MetaFilter thread.
I stopped halfway thru, and now I’m wondering why I stuck around that long….
Comment by jhereg — 6 September 2007 @ 3:07 PM
Since I’m a lame person, I’m going to quibble over a single paragraph of yours regarding the Early Anthropogenic Climate Hypothesis. It seems to me that the Holocene has been a pretty typical interglacial. It’s been going for about 11,500 years, which is not exceptionally long. The last interglacial, the Eemian, lasted around 15,000 years, and there have been others in the past that have gone on for longer. Yes some have been shorter, but the length of our current interglacial is far from unprecedented.
Comment by Anonymous — 6 September 2007 @ 4:55 PM
Your average interglacial tends to be 10-20ky, so in those terms, the Holocene would be pretty typical. But Ruddiman makes the case that on its own, the Holocene would have been a very short interglacial, something like 5ky. He goes into all the reasons to think that, and I think the Little Ice Age buttresses that argument somewhat, but that is the Early Anthropogenic Climate Hypothesis. I think it has something to it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 September 2007 @ 5:09 PM
The theory that the Black Death caused the Little Ice Age is interesting, but I’m skeptical. In fact, most things I’ve read have said the opposite. The planet had already been cooling by the time of the Black Death, and people were weakened by malnutrition caused by the cooling climate and were therefore more vulnerable to the plague disease. Also, Europe rebounded from the plague and eventually had a population equal to its previous level(and then would surpass it, even before the Little Ice Age ended). The population in England in 1750 finally reached its 1300 level, intensively working the land and destroying forests at similar levels by this time. The Little Ice Age would continue for another 100 years despite this.
Comment by Anonymous — 6 September 2007 @ 6:03 PM
I read most of that Metafilter thread. Those people are the future rampaging mobs that will help evolution bottleneck the human population down to a reasonable level, and in the process erase predisposition to denial and complete idiocy from the gene pool. G-d bless their blackened little hearts.
Did you really pay $5 for all that?
Comment by Paula — 6 September 2007 @ 7:11 PM
Anonymous, I see your point, and I recommend you read Ruddiman’s paper. It’s worth noting that the cooling of the Medieval Warm Period did follow once Europe started to reach its limits, and growth started falling. The lag is to be expected, I think. I don’t think it’s really proven, but there’s certainly enough there to suggest the possibility.
Interesting side note: Stradavarius violins were made from pines grown in the Little Ice Age. Those pines had less sunlight, so they didn’t grow much from year to year. That made the wood much denser as it developed much more slowly. So the unique sound of a Stradavarius is partly the result of Stradavari’s talent, and partly the sound of the Little Ice Age.
Paula, I paid my $5 some time ago. MeFi keeps me up-to-date on interesting things, but I just got so sick of the blatant misinformation that would happen so often in the threads. What can I say? I’m a glutton for punishment.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 September 2007 @ 9:37 AM
It’s also interesting to note that the Little Ice Age ended at about the time European industrialism got underway, namely around 1850.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 7 September 2007 @ 10:34 AM
I just read that entire metafilter thread and Jason,
I must say you have way more patience than I do. Either that or you are some kind of masochist.
Wow, the groupthink is shocking.
A sample for those who are lucky enough to ignore the thread:
Challenge: How would a tribe deal with TB (or cholera)
Jason: Well, those are zoonotic disease that pretty much require civilization to be a problem.
Challenge: Fine, they won’t exist, how would you treat them.
My Response: WTF?
Jason: Umm…The best we can.
I also wanted to point out that natural disasters don’t exist in a nomadic context becase they are only disasters when they cause $X millions of damage to property.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 7 September 2007 @ 10:45 AM
A little from column A, a little from column B….
I doubt they’re really ready to get into anything that “controversial.” We’re still stuck on whether or not 10,000 years is a long time.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 September 2007 @ 11:13 AM
Ditto that, and
Though I know it takes a while for someone who thinks they are benefitting from civilization to see the harm it’s done, let alone get that it can never be sustainable. It took me weeks to months to come around (in no small part thanks to Anthropik) even thought I was predisposed by never really liking this culture, and knowing a lot of systems science and ecology. What allowed my mind to open was seeing that there was somewhere else worth going: that foragers and horticulturalists can live better lives than we do. Most of the time, learning a new idea is more a case of unlearning an old idea, and the one I had to unlearn was that “primitive” people are worse off than we are.
I keep wanting to ask those who are arguing for civilization: “You mean you are actually happy living the way you do?” But I guess for many of those who even care, they believe if we can just save the salmon or one forest or the ozone layer, life will then be better for them (kind of like the corporate schlub who thinks that with one more promotion they will finally like their job; it’s just another variant on believing growth will solve all our problems).
If civilization lives, the salmon will die.
It might be hardest to win over enviro types: it’s nearly impossible for them to realize that saving the salmon this year or next, or whatever goal they’ve dedicated their hearts and efforts to, isn’t going to help. Civilization will eventually kill every ecosystem until it kills the ones that sustain it.
For me, a key argument is: Name one ecosystem that is better off for civilization having entered it. (Even if there were one, there are thousands that are worse off). How long can we keep that up? How can a culture dependent on converting ecosystems into humans be sustainable? What would ever lead you to believe that civilization will–or can–stop eating ecosystems? Even if we temporarily slowed down, as soon as a group gets hungry or jealous of what their neighbors have, they’ll eat their ecosystem. Literally.
Jason, I admire your persistence in the face of vitriol, idiocy, and fearful closed minds. Thanks for sticking with it, because for every Termite, Fandango, or even more reasonable Salvia out there, I’ll bet you’ve pried open a fair number of lurker’s minds.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 7 September 2007 @ 11:11 PM
Wow. Thank you, Toby. You reminded me of why I do what I do.
Now I think I’m going to have that copied by hand by some monks trained in calligraphy and illumination, and hang it up on my wall. Then I’m going to brag to everyone I know about how I helped convince one of the best permaculturalists in the world that primitive cultures had it goin’ on.
I don’t have any illusion about reaching the people invested in “stopping” me (though that I seem to have now started a real dialogue with “It’s Raining Florence Henderson” is very rewarding); I just try to tell myself that I’m helping put a corrective out there for silent readers I’ll never hear from.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 September 2007 @ 12:08 AM
Haha. I concur with Toby. Just thought you would want to know that me and Willem praise your name at least twice a day. We call you the “Machine Gun” because of your ability to shoot and kill people’s arguments with hardcore archaeological and anthropological evidence that we can never remember or have become to lazy to look up or read about. Seriously I am looking forward to the day you publish your book so instead of telling people who want facts to read “Limited Wants, Unlimited Means” I can give them yours. For now I’ll just keep directing them to the 30 theses. I know I said thank you for coming to my defense already, but thank you again. It really means a lot to me, as stupid as it is, and as much as I played it off, it really did hurt my feelings quite a bit.
Comment by Urban Scout — 8 September 2007 @ 12:30 AM
Hey Jason, Iam one of the silent listeners on the metafilter thread. Thanks for debate ! I may or may not agree with you on some points, but you did a great job in presenting your points of view and offered food for thought for anyone seriously interested in these issues. The debate was quite interesting because it presented views from across the spectrum, from outright deniers to middle grounders to you. Fantastic. Lets keep the conversation going wherever possible, and eventually people will choose by themselves.
cheers,
Chaitanya
Comment by Chaitanya from India — 8 September 2007 @ 2:50 AM
Urban Scout, ha, thanks! I know how you must feel. Truthfully, they get to me, too. You played it cool, but you’re still human, so I can imagine. Glad I could help.
Chaitanya, thank you very much. That’s really all I could ask for; you’ve confirmed that my efforts are worthwhile.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 September 2007 @ 9:44 AM
[Being Totally Shallow] I’ll bet at least half the men were jealous because they know they wouldn’t look even half as sexy in a loincloth.
[/BTS]
Comment by venuspluto67 — 8 September 2007 @ 10:30 AM
Hey –
Wow, guys. Just wow. I’m glad you have the patience, J, cause I ran out a long time ago……
Now I have a couple points on your article, though…. first a question. I noted this before and you have posted the quote again:
Do you know… is this saying that they were married by twenty three, or married and died by twenty three?
On the Little Ice Age…. isn’t the theory re: the collapse of the glacier and ensuing damp of freshwater into the north atlantic fairly well founded? If there is not something new there, does it really require further theorizing as to why it occurred? Strikes me, from what I know, as an Occum’s Razor sort of issue. Just curious if I am behind on something……….
Scout… you go, babe. We all know you got it going on….
Janene
Comment by janene — 8 September 2007 @ 10:57 AM
Extremely good article!!!
This one will be passed on to friends.
Comment by Torjus Gaaren — 8 September 2007 @ 2:07 PM
What makes me do a double-take is that so many people think if we could just make the culture of empire sustainable, all our problems will be solved…. and they work toward that end as if sustainable enslavement was a good and desirable thing.
Comment by Paula — 8 September 2007 @ 10:15 PM
I just read the entire thread (to-date) — and I’m a very slow reader. But it was god damned fascinating! I do have a question:
Is it known that this was causal? (Or, are you even arguing that it was causal?)
Comment by Eddie — 9 September 2007 @ 12:33 AM
it may be cliche, but damn, mean people really do suck.
i didn’t even read half of that thread, because it was making me ill to let some of those peoples’ words into my head, but Jason, although we may not always agree on details, i must add my own approval of you taking the time to wade in there and defend your friend. these newfangled interweb tubes are one nasty place sometimes!
(how was hide-tanning class? did yinz go? i got stuck in family obligation land and had to bail.)
patricia
Comment by patricia — 9 September 2007 @ 1:59 PM
Hi Jason,
Thanks for a very interesting article. I was a bit curious about the last quote: “of all the places where agriculture started, only one, central China, remains a productive agricultural area today”.
Do you have any material about how China avoided ending up as a desert?
Comment by Aaron Tostenaes — 9 September 2007 @ 4:24 PM
Jason, your patience and persistence is a thing of legend. Thanks as well for giving us all some good information to argue with that we might not have otherwise known.
Comment by scruff — 9 September 2007 @ 9:17 PM
Aaron, Jason has the “facts”…but basically, as ever, rice balances its population equations with famine, but in the case of China (and surrounding) things are sometimes less brutal/obvious…rice ag. is one of the less obviously UN-sustainable forms. additionally, there are many larger cultural issues (see Burke) that have allowed China to trudge along in a sort of stasis for much longer than the usual Western Ag. cycle. but in the end, the hard realities are much the same (to my understanding.)
in any case, they are now embarking on some kind of super-fast Western-style “progress” anyway.
poor China.
-p.
Comment by patricia — 9 September 2007 @ 9:22 PM
Aaron,
see this post:
http://anthropik.com/2006/10/oriental-myths/
Comment by _Gi — 10 September 2007 @ 12:43 PM
I know I saw something more recent but this is a 2006 article about China fighting desert expansion.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 10 September 2007 @ 1:20 PM
Thanks Jason. Great summation and well needed.
Comment by Peter D — 10 September 2007 @ 10:47 PM
Another excellent article.
The funny thing about this, of course, is that the average American wage has actually stagnated the entire time I’ve been alive. I know that’s not exactly what you mean by growth, but I’m saying that whatever growth “we’ve” seen within our lifetimes is entirely predicated on chipping away from the average citizen of empire and concentrating it somewhere else. These people who defend civilization are defending their own exploitation.
I’m a sometime poster over at the progressive siteAmerican Samizdat, and I’ve started to float a few primitivist ideas over there, trying to keep my statements as “conservative” as possible. Some time ago, on the occassion of the United Nations International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (Aug 9), I posted a note broadly supportive of contemporary indigenous peoples, whose political struggles today are largely the same as they were when they first came into contact with civilization. Even this was too much for some of the contributors at AmSam. The post was met with a “hooray for the noble savages” along with the usual littany of Bell Curve-ish “scientific” “facts” about indigenous life and practices: infanticide, geriatricide, crap life expectancy, and on and on.
I’m preparing a response to the use of the term “noble savages,” drawing on some of your work, Jason. I’m grateful to you for your tenacity and erudition.
A question for everyone over here at Anthropik: How do you see “primitivism” relating to the enduring political struggles of the global indigenous population?
Comment by the.thistle — 12 September 2007 @ 12:53 PM
Wow, thanks for writing this, and writing it so well. Now I can point people at it instead of trying to explain it myself.
Comment by Hobo Stripper — 13 September 2007 @ 8:34 AM
Jason, you are 100 per cent right, but there are only so many hours in the day (and therein lies the paradox - how do you _do_ this?)…
You code … you are married to Giuli … you write Anthropik … given that this is all true, I refuse to believe that you sleep and eat … or that you are therefore still alive …
Tell me the source of your energy. I could do with it.
(And no, ‘naked idealism’ will not suffice
)
Comment by Eric — 16 September 2007 @ 10:39 AM
Married by 23.
There could be multiple causes, of course. There’s always all kinds of theories running around, no matter how established one explanation may be.
We know these cultures had many ways to increase the salmon population, so yes, it’s known that this was causal: the salmon population went up because native populations relied on them for food, and actively protected them.
It’s been a hell of a week, only in part because, as you said, mean people suck. We’ve had a few hundred things going on here ourselves and couldn’t make it. Hopefully, things will be resolved by October so we can go to the Advanced Primitive Skills class.
Mostly by constant famine and plague, which only made it slightly less unsustainable. China’s still turning its landbase into desert, just a little more slowly. See “Oriental Myths.”
Primitivism means an appreciation for the original forms of human society; “primitive,” as in primus, first. In my own opinion, without support for modern indigenous populations is simply bankrupt. How can you work to promote rewilding domesticated people without supporting the struggles of already wild people resisting domestication?
I write prodigiously. I once wrote a 300-page book in 48 hours. What can I say? We all have our talents.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 September 2007 @ 9:24 PM
So middle eastern ecosystems and agriculture collapsed thousands of years ago? And when agriculture collapses then people revert to a HG lifestyle?
Didnt people keep leading an agricultural lifestyle in the middle east and “rome” for that matter up until today?(excluding some nomad traders and the more effect of the recent green revolution based import of foreign food for oil in the middle east).
Didnt much non green-revolution farming take place on flood plains where silt replaced eroded soil? Isnt this sustainable as long as there are mountains eroding upstream?
Doesn’t this suggest the future (at least in our lifetimes) is one of more desparate agriculture as the green revolution support system falters rather than rewilding? Might not future desparate agriculturalists still have the upper hand when competing with nascent HGers against a backdrop of intense competition and environmental degradation?
If farmer populations originally spread with agriculture (ie farmers killed off and replaced HGers rather than interbreeding) doesnt this portend that the same farmer populations would fail with the failure of agriculture? Wont population attempts at “rewilding” or “turning feral” instead give way to those peoples who have done it all along? Except there really arent any HGers left in the world, but I suspect the masses in the third world have a head start on those in the first world in knowing how to get by under difficult conditions. Political breakdown ahead suggests they could be migrating into our backyards soon enough, and I doubt they will be that impressed by dandelion leaf salads and hand made dream catchers.
Comment by Void_genesis — 17 September 2007 @ 12:43 AM
Many did: Ur, Assyria, Babylon and so forth all collapsed. You can chart a veritable cascade of collapse across the Middle East from the very beginnings of agriculture.
Not necessarily; cultures collapse to the next highest level of complexity possible. In the case of the Middle East, as the article outlined, cultures were able to expand and deplete new lands, until those collapsed, and they could expand again. Those living in the old imperial centers could still support a higher level of complexity, because they had complex neighbors. Notice, Babylon is closer to the Fertile Crescent than Persia; the Babylonian Empire fell when it was conquered by Persia. Did Babylon become full of hunter-gatherers? Of course not; it had complex neighbors as agriculture spread like some kind of terrible disease, destroying one land entirely before moving on to the next. Babylon retained a higher level of complexity, because it was propped up by Persia, which was still in the process of destroying its landbase.
But there have been collapses that have led to returns to hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Those happen when the resources necessary to sustain higher complexity no longer exist. When the Hohokam and the Anasazi destroyed themselves, for instance, they didn’t leave anything behind them that could support any further civilization. The Hopi and Pueblo who followed after them lived in horticultural villages.
They’ve tried, but they long ago ceased to be self-sufficient. They’ve been propped up by more complex neighbors for quite some time.
Not always. Soil may not be the only element being used, and escalating agricultural production enough will begin to make the flood plains themselves unsustainable. Over-farming leads to erosion, which silts rivers and impedes the floods which once renewed the soil. See Greece’s examples in the article.
No. We’ve gone as far west as we can. There’s nothing left to expand into; the last possible complex neighbors to prop everybody else up are finally beginning to fail, and there’s nowhere else to expand into. The previous model to keep this system going has finally reached its ultimate limit. It shouldn’t take more than a few moments’ reflection to realize that these are the limits that such a strategy had to run into eventually.
No. Look at the assets Europeans had in North America: virgin soil. Soil’s only virgin once, though. The same problem comes up again with fossil fuels or metals. Civilization really only gets one shot, because that shot uses up everything that a second one would need. Future desperate farmers will still have the same salted, unusable soil as Babylon, they just won’t have Persian neighbors to trade with.
No. Farmer populations can’t grow if they don’t have food.
I have no doubt that most people who survive will do so entirely by accident. They won’t have any philosophical preferences for small, egalitarian societies, hunting & gathering, or permaculture; they’ll be the ones who stumbled into those things simply because they worked, and no other reason than that. You could largely say the same of the Industrial Revolution, in reverse. And just like that, while most people were simply adapting and along for the ride, those who understood how the Industrial Revolution had changed the rules of technological invention were the ones who did best in the Industrial Revolution and were at its forefront, so, too, do those who begin rewilding now stand to do much better as civilization collapses. It’s always better to choose something consciously and embrace it, than to simply wait for it to happen to you.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 September 2007 @ 4:38 PM
Hey Jason
I still suspect that the outcomes for individuals will be very diverse depending on their location and habits, and the decisions of everyone else around them. My personal strategy is a mixed one to hedge my bets, and given that agriculture is more complex (particularly with its requirement for the right range of biological material to be available to work with) my first focus is to gather all that together. HG-ing is always there as a default, and working with plants and animals this way has already keyed me into recognising wild edibles everywhere I go.
Even though they have had a lot of deforestation Rome/Greece/Middle east do still have areas with fertile soil and adequate water that can support a substantial amount of agriculture, even if they have managed to expand their populations beyond this base through trade and the green revolution. Of course when oil tails off there will be a big crash everywhere, but the persistance of agricultural societies in these prime fertile spots could greatly complicate any re-establishment of HGers.
I am also interested to see your take on the study of Australian Aborigines I sent you a while ago. Did it get spam filtered? It was pretty unique how it compared the time and energy balance of them collecting various tubers and grains.
Shane
Comment by Void_genesis — 18 September 2007 @ 10:19 PM
Not really. What you can grow in the native soil there might spring up, but it’s so nutritionally bankrupt that you’re not going to be able to last very long on it. We didn’t pick up the Green Revolution on a whim; it became a necessity.
Only in the very short term. What the soil can support can only last a few years, a decade at the most in some of the most fertile pockets.
No, I got it. Fascinating stuff. I’m convinced: seems clear that foragers often used cereal grains as starvation foods in winter, particularly the foragers in the most inhospitable areas, like the Australian aborigines. That doesn’t really change my argument about grains, though, since it’s still something we have no adaptation to eating as any large part of our diet.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 September 2007 @ 4:40 PM
Jason,
What is up with the G-d thing? When I first started reading your theses, I figured it had something to do with irrational anti-Christian sentiment that comes from many militant atheists and secularists. But I don’t see such sentiment reflected in the theses as a whole. Quite the contrary, I get the notion that you consider such sentiment to be destructive. What, then, prompts you to write G-d instead of just writing God?
Comment by alphaniner — 21 September 2007 @ 7:05 AM
alphaniner,
Anti-Christian among secularists and atheists would normally be presented by not capitalizing god or by saying gods. Not spelling the name of G-d is a sign of respect for the Jewish belief that one should not write the name of G-d in case it should get accidentally defaced.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 21 September 2007 @ 8:48 AM
To clarify, Jews believe that the name of G-d should never be used in any medium that might be destroyed, since that would destroy the name of G-d, showing disrespect. Sound echoes forever, it just becomes too soft to hear very quickly, so speaking it is okay. But no matter what you write it on, you’re writing in a medium that might one day be destroyed. So you don’t write the name of G-d, you write something close to it so people know what you mean. Hence, G-d.
I don’t necessarily subscribe to that belief, mind you, but I think the respect it shows for the numinous is something we could use more of. Far from a bit of irrational anti-Christian zealotry, it’s an expression of respect for the numinous, whatever its nature might be.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 September 2007 @ 5:35 PM
From Jason-
“No, I got it. Fascinating stuff. I’m convinced: seems clear that foragers often used cereal grains as starvation foods in winter, particularly the foragers in the most inhospitable areas, like the Australian aborigines. That doesn’t really change my argument about grains, though, since it’s still something we have no adaptation to eating as any large part of our diet.”
This paper really supports my contention that humans have been eating grains for a lot longer than 10, 000 years, so the potential for adaptation of some kind is extended out. Except the whole human thing isnt about adapting our physiology to the food, rather adapting our behaviour and habits to make nearly anything edible.
It seems to me still that when we move a crop species and leave behind the tricks to using it is when we have a lot of trouble (look up the pellagra epidemics from poorly treated corn in europe). Soybeans in the USA food supply follow a similar pattern-unfermented soy flour is finding its way into everything. The other manifestation is when technology changes peoples relationship with familiar food, like when white rice became cheap in indonesia and beriberi epidemics ensued. Our own relationships with wheat have followed a similar pattern with flour bleaching and fast sugar driven fermentation of bread becoming normal.
And it never made sense to me that the first agriculturalist people particularly would choose to grow those plants that they had no experience eating. Sedentarism with the capacity for larger grain stores, larger mill stones, and pots for fermentation, probably changed grain eating from something marginal/last resort to something central over time (though even medieval sorts ate much larger quantities of root vegetables than we do today).
You may be interested to hear that I got sick the last five times I ate out. I figured out the connection was to eating industrial wheat flour- however the sourdough fermented/freshly hand ground wheat I had been making myself and eating all the time doesnt seem to cause any problems. That said I will be probably moving away from wheat and using more oat and barley (and non-grass grains like buckwheat/amaranth/quinoa) in the future (they taste better for one thing!). A new pressure cooker does long soaked brown rice to perfection too. And I have made root crops a bigger part of my carbohydrate source than grains too (just harvested 15kg of parsnips from 4sq m of my veg bed and they slow roast to perfection).
Comment by Void_genesis — 1 October 2007 @ 10:29 PM
Habits and customs can only go so far in making things edible, though. No matter how much you process it, cyanide will never be a healthy part of this complete breakfast. I’ll grant you that cereal grains certainly seem to have played their part in human evolution as a starvation food, but that’s rather what I said already. Since we only ate them when under duress, we developed only the most superficial adaptations for them. We still lack the deep adaptations needed to make a regular diet out of them, and the health impacts of that maladaptation are plainly evident.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 October 2007 @ 4:25 PM
yeah, i remember a similar discussion from a while back. i think people are confused & mislead by statements like “grains aren’t food” (paraphrasing).
but i think anytime the subject of diet comes up, a lot of basic communication seems to get tossed out the window (by most of us, to be quite quite honest).
seems like we run into this a lot. we can eat grains, but we really, [i]really[/i] shouldn’t make them a staple. but, then that’s true about so many foods. i think that, like most of mainstream america, we often (tho’ not always) tend to get too wrapped up in [i]what specifically[/i] is on the menu and gloss over that we’re looking at a [i]really frickin’ huge menu[/i] from which we should select a [i]really frickin’ huge variety[/i].
like when “rabbit starvation” comes up (pretty often, really). but, really, the risk there is when rabbits are really your [i]primary food source[/i]. this is a risk that we barely even need to spend time on [i]as long as we understand that we should always be seeking a really frickin’ huge variety of foods[/i]. go ahead, eat rabbit. eat deer too. and ‘coon, and possum and turkey, and crow and doves and grouse. eat potatoes, eat parsnips and carrots and burdock. eat evening primrose and sunroots and groundnuts and peanuts and beets and garlic and dandelion and camas and chicory and kudzu and cattails. eat walnuts, eat acorns and chestnuts and hickories and hazelnuts. try to eat upwards of 300 different foods a year, [i]that’s[/i] the context we evolved in.
Comment by jhereg — 3 October 2007 @ 8:38 AM
First, I wish to express my admiration and enthusiasm for the material presented on this site and on related sites, and for the participants.
Because I’m new here, I’d like to say a few words about the overall subject at hand, and then a few about the Western Civilization essay.
For many years now I have been thinking along the same lines as many of you seem to think. Like most of you I was born into the American technocrat middle class. I was fascinated with internal combustion, science and the power to control. I liked walking in the New England woods when I was a kid, but I understood very little about the real world.
I encountered wilderness when I moved to California. I also came face to face with the day-to-day destruction of the environment through population expansion, industrial agriculture and the other modern evils. This brought me to my view that agriculture was the beginning of the end, and humanity is on course for wild expansion followed by severe contraction. It is inevitable, simply a matter of resources, scale and time.
For years I annoyed people, during lunch conversations or over beers, bouncing such unpopular opinions off of them. It seemed to me that I was about the only person around who thought like this, and many people told me that I needed professional help. My views contributed to the end of my first marriage; my wife interpreted my criticism of civilization, money, surplus, agriculture, etc., as personal criticism of her. To some extent I was guilty as charged, I suppose.
Regarding the Western Civilization essay, please consider the following:
Jason writes: “What we today consider the greatest mark of Western civilization—democracy—came not from Western civilization, but from the example of the sustainable societies that Western civilization had to destroy, genocidally, in order to maintain its existence.”
I’m not convinced that the New World societies destroyed by expanding Western civilization were ’sustainable’; and overall, the statement is very simplistic. Which New World societies are you referring to? Certainly the agriculturists of the New World, e.g. the Maya and Anasazi who had already collapsed in pre-Columbian times, and probably the Aztec and Inca, were on the same course as the Westerners: expansion, environmental destruction, collapse. It is clear that the hunter-gatherer people of North America were practicing a ‘more sustainable’ lifestyle than either Westerners or New World agriculturalists, but to claim that their societies were ’sustainable’ is far too simplistic. Even HG societies can eat themselves out of existence. There is ample evidence that human migration to the New World from Eurasia ca. 10k to 20k years ago caused the decline and extinction of numerous species that had evolved in the absence of human presence.
The main point is that we can’t speak of ’sustainable’ in absolute terms, we must refer to scales of population and time. Given a set of initial conditions, i.e. a stockpile of resources that are renewed over a given time scale, lifestyle sustainability is a continuum, a tradeoff between scales of population size, individual consumption and time. New Wolrd HG societies had a significant impact on their environment in the 10k+ years of pre-Columbian expansion, and it’s very difficult to argue that, left alone, those societies wouldn’t have eaten themselves out of their own niche.
The horseshoe crab has been occupying its niche for about 250 million years, without significant change.
Another point I’d like to raise in general, is that I haven’t seen much attention paid here to the middle ground between grain-growing, land-plowing, city-building agriculturalists, and nomadic pastoralists. Much has been written here about the expansion of agriculture into HG territory, e.g. the lack of trade (other than spear points) between neolithic HG people and ‘civilization’ in Europe. I suspect that the expansion of nomadic people with domestic animals proceeded settled agricultural expansion both in time and in space. In my mind, the battle wasn’t really between HGs and farmers, it was between HGs and those with domestic animals. Throughout the era of agricultural development in Eurasia, agricultural settlements were under threat of ‘barbarian’ (I love that term) raids by nomadic pastoral people.
Agricultural civilization is vulnerable on many fronts. The major vulnerability is the resource depletion that drives continuous expansion, as discussed on Anthropik, among other place, at length. Ultimately this will mean the disappearance of classic expansionist agricultural civilization. But the the presence of surplus and fixed settlements by themselves are huge vulnerabilities that drive agriculturalists to ‘defensively’ outcompete wandering raiding societies.
Another general point I’d like to make is that agriculture (same for horticulture, not that I claim to be an expert in the difference), tools of metal and stone, medicine, weapons, slavery and other features of civilization came out of Pandora’s Box. I suspect that even after the upcoming severe contraction, the ‘blessings’ won’t go back into that box. Eliminating greed from human psyche is not a trivial thing, and it won’t happen just because the oil ran out. There will still be (relatively) rich people and poor people for a long time to come, but the divide will be much wider than today. With a substantially contracted population, the remaining oil, coal and topsoil will last a lot longer than they would at today’s rate of consumption. This is still not a ’sustainable’ situation, but it is ‘less unsustainable’ than that of today.
I think that in our lifetimes (I’m about halfway through mine, if all goes well) we will see a major part of this change, but we will not see its completion.
–”Too Human”
Comment by Too Human — 3 October 2007 @ 11:49 AM
hey Too Human, good to meet you
I believe Jason isn’t including the Aztec, Maya, Inca, etc civilizations in that statement. Rather, I believe the reference is to the Seneca/Haudenosaunee, Shawnee/Shawano, Apache, Ojibwa, Sioux, and the hundreds or so other tribes that existed as hunter/gatherers (with many, probably all, engaging in some level of horticulture).
Undoubtedly, human migration did have an impact on these species (as would the introduction of most, if not all, predators). However, as you say, it doesn’t appear to be quite as simple as that. There is also ample evidence that many of these species were in decline due to environmental factors prior to the introduction of humans into the Americas. Still, tho’, eventually, an ecological balance was achieved, with a place for humans quite firmly established.
Absolutely they had a significant impact on their environment. But was that impact positive or negative to the overall ecology/bioregion (humans included)?
I actually think a pretty strong argument exists. In the 10k period of which you speak; on the one hand, humans wreaked horrendous ecological damage on the Fertile Crescent, Europe, China, etc; on the other hand, humans worked with local ecologies to build the Amazon rainforest and the Great Plains (which, again, we subsequently turned into the Dust Bowl; using traditional, organic farming methods I might add). So they do appear to be qualitatively different re: “sustainable”, not merely different in scale.
Comment by jhereg — 3 October 2007 @ 12:55 PM
I see your points. Yes, I agree, Jason did not imply that Anasazi, lowland Maya et. al. were sustainable. Clearly the North American HG tribes were living far ‘more sustainably’ than the expansionist agriculturalists of the ‘Old World’ during the 10k years preceding New World colonization; and clearly they were living ‘more sustainably’ than the Westerners who displaced them. No arguments there.
But comparing a ‘more sustainable’ society to a ‘clearly unsustainable’ society does not make the case for absolute sustainability.
Basically the HG tribes referred to were living like pre-agricultural, pre-pastoral neolithic societies of the Old World. 10k years isn’t that long. Pre-agri/pastoral Eurasian human expansion time scale was more than an order of magnitude greater than that, but was it sustainable?
I suppose I’m being picky. Perhaps most readers here have already adjusted in their minds that ’sustainable’ often really means ‘kinda sustainable, over a reasonably long period of time compared to Western Civilization, with a reasonable density of people, enduring cycles of population growth and decline’. But in the ‘perma’ context of permaculture, I still think the case for sustainability for any human population is quite weak. Cockroaches, sure, horseshoe crabs, sure, we can see the evidence; but it’s not so clear for humans. HG survival strategy is to live lightly and stay on the move, never eating yourself out of existence; this is clearly a superior long-term strategy than exponential expansion, but population expansion impacts HG environments too.
I guess what I’m really getting at is that I see people trying to make cases like “X is a sustainable lifestyle”, and “Y is an unsustainable lifestyle”. The latter is easy to show. For the former, we need to start asking ourselves “For a given set of initial resource and renewal rates, what is the sustainable population for a particular level of individual consumption?”
Comment by Too Human — 3 October 2007 @ 1:17 PM
actually, Jason is fond of saying as much, nor do i have any particular disagreement on this point.
a fair question. i don’t know if we can answer it, but a fair question, nonetheless.
eh, doesn’t hurt to repeat it.
hmm, do i understand you, correctly? you suspect that no human culture can achieve “absolute” sustainability? i suppose, i can see that case, but i don’t really believe it. again, we have evidence of human cultures which not only didn’t destroy their landbase, but actually enriched it.
population levels tend to follow food. due to the way that HG cultures go about food procurement, ecological balance appears to stay stable(granted, we only have evidence for a relatively small amount of geologic time).
um, i think i see what you mean, but, how well can we track such variables? i don’t believe reductionism can provide the clarification you crave on this.
so, ultimately, from a pragmatist’s pov, i think we need to look at things carefully enough to go the right direction, but with enough flexibility to change course when/if req’d.
ultimately, our species will go extinct as will (eventually) every other species, whether because we are fundamentally unsustainable or from some other cause. i just accept this and consider the basis of “sustainable” whether i have a positive or negative influence on my bioregion. that’s good enough for me.
Comment by jhereg — 3 October 2007 @ 2:33 PM
I’m not sure why you think humans are different than other species.
I think you end up answering your own question without realizing it. A society that does not exhibit population growth or decline over a protracted period of time would appear to be stable. If it could be shown that such population stability existed and that the environment had not been degraded by that population then that would indicate sustainability. I suspect that that information exists for some hunter gatherers. The !Kung have been fairly well studied and I suspect that could be shown for them, however the population decline due to encroachment from civilization might be difficult to control for.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 3 October 2007 @ 3:36 PM
“hmm, do i understand you, correctly? you suspect that no human culture can achieve “absolute” sustainability? i suppose, i can see that case, but i don’t really believe it. again, we have evidence of human cultures which not only didn’t destroy their landbase, but actually enriched it.”
Yes, I think you do understand me correctly. Perhaps my concern stems from not being familiar with the details of human cultures that enriched their environment. Could you please point me to some links?
“due to the way that HG cultures go about food procurement, ecological balance appears to stay stable(granted, we only have evidence for a relatively small amount of geologic time).”
My concern with this situation is that we are not quite like the other animals. Some years ago I spent a decent amount of time volunteering in wildlife rehab, mostly raptors. I came to appreciate the differences between us and them, and was envious of them in some respect. A hawk does not seem to experience angst. He does not question what he does or why he does it. “I eat mice. I barf up mice into the beaks of my fledglings.” They don’t take more than they need, because there’s no need to. They have more young than they can support, and allow some to die. No need to fret about it.
Humans have developed a peculiar sense of self awareness, a consciousness not seen in other animals, at least not to the same degree. We realize that we have choices. We can decide where to live in the food chain. This can be positive or negative. The negative side is greed. The positive side can lead to conservation. If I design a better shelter, I can use less wood, and save more for my fellow humans, and leave more to replenish the forest. Or I can decide to use more wood make myself more comfortable.
The trouble with humans has always been that those who decide to be greedy can outcompete those who don’t in the short term. The long term effects of greed don’t show up for, well…a long time. This is precisely where we find ourselves today.
For this reason principally among others, I am suspicious that ‘absolute’ sustainability is a poor concept for describing post-peak human societies.
“um, i think i see what you mean, but, how well can we track such variables? i don’t believe reductionism can provide the clarification you crave on this.”
I suppose I am looking for a quantitative model. I sense that there is significant work being done on them, developing frameworks based on photosynthetic capture, climate, environmental fertility, technological state, etc., to estimate the carrying capacity for a region. I am interested in developing numerical models of this, but I need to learn a lot more. Do you remember the text-based computer game from years ago, where you ran a kingdom? With each turn you decided how much grain to plant, how many peasants to feed, how much grain to store, how big an army to support, etc. The goal was to maximize longevity of your kingdom before the inevitable collapse. Modern games along the same lines include ‘Age of Empires’, and to a limited extent, strategy games such as ‘Medieval Total War’. I think we could learn a lot by modeling ecosystem sustainability using a computer game approach. (I must confess at this point, I’m employed as a games developer).
“ultimately, our species will go extinct as will (eventually) every other species, whether because we are fundamentally unsustainable or from some other cause. i just accept this… ”
Agreed. Furthermore, my glass-is-half-empty side thinks that we will have ‘deserved’ extinction, and that the loss of our species is insignificant. I don’t wish any suffering on any living creature, human or otherwise, and in no way do I ‘want’ to see great suffering as the human race contracts, and ultimately disappears. But we will reap what we sow.
Comment by Too Human — 3 October 2007 @ 4:01 PM
I like the cut of your jib, Too Human!
Absolutely. There’s no such thing as relative sustainability. You’re either sustainable or you’re not. That kind of abuse of the term, talking about something that’s “more” or “less” sustainable is how you get to the point where people start saying that sustainability is somehow ill-defined. It’s not ill-defined, it’s just much abused. Its definition could hardly be more precise: if d(R)/r(R) > 1, you’re not sustainable. Otherwise, you are.
So when I referred to the sustainable societies of North America, I meant exactly that. You mentioned the “Overkill hypothesis” when you wrote:
That’s a common myth repeated by people trying to discredit Native Americans (usually to justify the historic commission of genocide, by bringing them down to our level). Unfortunately, there isn’t ample evidence for that hypothesis. See “Overkill, Overchill and Human Nature,” as well as “The Ecological Saint” section of “The Savages Are Truly Noble.”
Long timelines are not necessary to determine sustainability, but they help. As I said before, if d(R)/r(R) > 1, you’re not sustainable; otherwise, you are. If you can see that your landbase has been noticeably degraded after one year, no further observation is necessary; you know you’re not acting sustainably. By the same token, if you can see that your landbase has become noticeably richer after one year, no further observation is necessary; you know you’re acting sustainably. It’s the closer cases that take long periods of observation; the extremes are immediately recognizable.
I’m still not sure if horticulturalists are entirely sustainable; they, too, have only been around for about 10,000 years. But the odds are definitely in their favor. As Derrick Jensen is fond of pointing out, a thousand years of salmon fishing by tribes in the Pacific Northwest resulted in more salmon. The horticulturalists in North America created the Amazon rainforest and the Great Plains. These cultures didn’t just cancel out their effects, they managed to give back even more than they took; they managed to make their ecologies better because of their prescence. They went beyond mere sustainability; they actively made the world a better place.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 October 2007 @ 7:01 PM
ooh, i really don’t agree with this. a single year is far too small a sample, way too much risk of abnormalities taking place (climate, non-human populations, etc).
one decade seems more reasonable, but one lifetime far more so. i suspect that we can have a fairly good idea that if our landbase is noticeably richer after 1 lifetime (say ~60 years), that the relationship to the land is sustainable. granted, that still doesn’t mean that the culture is sustainable, that would take quite a few generations, imho.
either way, it seems to me that we have reasonable enough examples that horticulturalists are at least “more sustainable”, with excellent that they are sustainable in the short term (before adjusting for cultures spiralling into civilizations), my biggest point of concern is what about after we make that adjustment? i still think there’s reasonable evidence to call them sustainable, but i’m not really convinced that it’s conclusive.
as long as you understand that a model is just a model…
we’ll never really be able to collect, much less process all of the information required. models are very useful, but they’re only useful in the sense that they provide a foundation upon which to predict events.
actually, on this particular point, i’m not sure i could agree less. pathological behaviour is just as apparant in other species (see recent elephant behaviour in africa, for example; or check out how goodall’s research methods changed chimpanzee behaviour; i suspect, but have no evidence, that dolphin behaviour has also become dramatically pathological over the last decade or two, most likely as a result of various traumas;). so, if it is true that humans are inherently pathological with no legitimate possibility of recovery (which i, personally, doubt) as a result of some past trauma, then, yes, we probably are “doomed” (as are numerous other species now).
i just don’t believe that we’re past the point of recovery.
Seeing the Garden in the Jungle is an excellent overview. it doesn’t reference specific tribes, but it does contain citations, i’m sure you could track it back from there if you wish.
i’m trying to find a good link for the great plains.
Comment by jhereg — 4 October 2007 @ 7:40 AM
Thanks for the insight, and for the warm welcome. I feel strangely at home here.
I’ll accept the notion that that ’sustainable’ means just that, and there are no ‘degrees’ of sustainability. I’m not familiar with your writing on “d(R)/r(R) > 1″, but I’m sure I’ll come across it on this website somewhere. I’m just starting to dig into these resources, there is much to read.
Regarding the Overkill Hypothesis and “That’s a common myth repeated by people trying to discredit Native Americans (usually to justify the historic commission of genocide, by bringing them down to our level).”
The source I’m thinking of is the book ‘Collapse’, by Jared Diamond, that I recently read. I don’t get the feeling that he in partiuclar was trying to justify the genocide, but I take your point. I’ll have to look into it further before I’ll be convinced that these species just disappeared without any help from the newly arrived humans.
“Long timelines are not necessary to determine sustainability, but they help.”
Yes, in particular I think that the long-term case is very important because the societies are rarely static, nor is the climate. There are good years and bad years; practices might be sustainable in ‘good’ years or in ‘good’ regions, and unsustainable in other years and regions. As people move about, as their tastes change, as they discover new sources of food and give up others, as the climate changes, the parameters of the feedback loop change.
Regarding jhreg’s comments…
“as long as you understand that a model is just a model…”
Yes, of course. I was well down the path toward a career in experimental physics when I discovered that there weren’t (m)any jobs in physics, and descended into computer programming and the games business. A model is just a model, but you can learn a lot from them. Computer models can help us gain insight into highly complex problems. Reason is a terribly flawed system for the foundation of humanity, but sometimes it helps.
I’m picuturing an application where a set of parameterized functions are associated with a feedback loop. For starters consider: an area of land; an insolation function describing annual cycle sunlight distribution across this piece of land; temperature function, also an annual cycle; precipitation cycle function; initial conditions such as soil fertility, distribution and population of plant and animal species, each of which is characterized by a resource extraction load and a ‘return’, e.g. how much sunlight they take up, plant growth functions, animal reproductive rates, decay of plants, how many plants they eat, etc.
Humans would be characterized by their consumption of resources and by how they tweak the parameters of the other functions in the system, e.g. changing the distribution of plant species, etc. For most sets of parameters on a reasonable model, I expect that the common result will be wild swings in human population, together with significant environmental impact (parameter tweakage); the goal would be to create a human population that varies slowly, oscillating between two reasonable bounds indefinitely, and which can adapt to variations in external influences such as climate and solar brightness. I’ve described it in terms of parameterized functions, but each of them can be broken down further, e.g. surface insolation can be written out in terms of lattitude, albedo, solar brightness, etc.
The purpose of having this computer model would be to help us visualize how the parts of the system are interconnected, and gain a feel for carrying capacity of a region under given circumstances, and the tradeoffs in environment taken to achieve that carrying capacity.
“actually, on this particular point, i’m not sure i could agree less. pathological behaviour is just as apparant in other ”
I didn’t claim that other species are perfect. We are very much like other species in most ways, but of course we’re much more effective at abusing each other and our environment than other species are. In my estimation, the reason we have been able to take this behavior to unprecedented heights is that our brains are different. We have a more pronouced sense of self, toolmaking skills, and a this half-baked ability to ‘reason’, which in addition to helping us adapt quickly and thrive, helped us morph a basic animal survival instinct into unhealthy human greed.
Comment by Too Human — 4 October 2007 @ 11:55 AM
Hey –
Okay, I’ve been following this and letting you guys hash it out, but now I find myself drawn in
BTW… Welcome, Too Human!
Its not that humans did not ‘help’ the extinction process, its that the human arrival set off the same types of ecological changes that ANY apex predator causes on entering a new ecology. Neither saints nor sinners. Simply predatory animals.
You may not like this very much… and I understand that coming from a scientific background, myself… but I think that any computer model we built would be absolutely and fundamentally flawed, because our logical creations can only mimic complicated systems, whereas the ecology is a complex system. (Jason and I go back and forth on this… I mean complex in the sense of non-linear equations and dynamic interchanges as opposed to the anthropological “number of pieces” which fits better with “complicated” in this case). All that being said, I only know of one way to ‘model’ complex systems like this — and that is with human (and perhaps animal) intuition. Pattern recognition kinda stuff. Can’t be proven, but there are other levels of understanding beyond ‘proof’……..
I want to jump all over this subject… but it is so large and involved… let’s say we re-address this once you have finished Jason’s Thirty Theses…….
Janene
Comment by janene — 4 October 2007 @ 12:33 PM
“the human arrival set off the same types of ecological changes that ANY apex predator causes on entering a new ecology.”
The new arrivals were simply efficient, adaptable, migratory, tool-using predators that, quite naturally, colonized their whole new domain as quickly as resources and reproduction would allow. As for the extinctions, they overharvested a renewable resource, utilized it at a rate beyond its capacity to regenerate itself, and accelerated its demise. Well, I suppose that example is an exception, and in no way indicates a general predisposition to an unsustainable lifestyle. Once they moved on to prey on smaller species that reproduced more quickly, things became stable, right?
It probably took them a few thousand years to colonize the new continents, a few thousand years to kill off the declining choice prey species, and then they were around for a few thousand more years before Westernization set in. Seems to me that the time scale of the human-induced changes in the new world is on the same order of magnitude as the whole data set, so it’s pretty hard to call the system ’stable’ at the onset of Westernization. Generally you need a time span many times longer than those of the major characteristic events to make that call. Otherwise it’s like looking at a single pulse in a heart monitor strip and declaring the patient to be stable.
“Neither saints nor sinners. Simply predatory animals.
Yes indeed. I’m not applying a moral saint/sinner value judgement, I’m interested in this idea of sustainability. But applying the same reasoning, our upcoming population crash is just another perfectly natural phenomenon, one of nature’s little self-correcting mechanisms, and without saintliness or sin we exploited our resources to the best of our natural ability, just like back in the stone age.
“but I think that any computer model we built would be absolutely and fundamentally flawed, because our logical creations can only mimic complicated systems, whereas the ecology is a complex system. ”
Sure, I agree. Long ago I lost my naive notion that science is somehow perfect. Humans are absolutely, fundamentally flawed, not perfect at all, and computer models are just another medium of expression.
“(Jason and I go back and forth on this… I mean complex in the sense of non-linear equations and dynamic interchanges ”
Hmm, well, non-linear systems are not exactly novel. They are much tougher to deal with than linear systems, of course, and I can’t claim to be an expert. Computer numerical modeling is a useful approach to dealing with non-linear systems, chaotic systems, and highly complex systems in general. The biggest problem with computer numerical modeling of non-linear systems is interpretation of the results. The results are very sensitive to changes in the inputs—another way of saying that they are non-linear–so you can’t give much weight to any particular set of results. In fact, the goal of modeling such systems isn’t necessarily to predict a specifc result from a specific set of inputs, it’s to understand how ranges of inputs map to patterns of results. Sure, you can apply ‘intuition’ to this, we all do. (My intuition tells me that we would have a hard time even defining intuition.)
As computing power has risen, people have made significant advances modeling the climate. It seems to me that modeling the ecology is a reasonable next step. Not that it matters in the long run, of course.
Comment by Too Human — 4 October 2007 @ 1:31 PM
Hey –
I don’t know if that is q
Comment by janene — 4 October 2007 @ 1:50 PM
oops… sorry. hit a whole bunch of keys and something happened… apparently, I bumped the enter key
I was saying……. I don;t know if that is quite the “best” way to look at it. when a new predator moves into an ecology, both the predator and the local prey species go through a period of upheaval simply because they have not yet adapted to one another. Did they overharvest? Perhaps… but not for any reason beyond the fact that the declining prey species had not yet adapted strategies to avoid the human predator. And I don;t think it is fair to say they moved on to smaller species or species that reproduced more quickly… I mean, bison are a classic prey species, no matter how you look at it………..
Well… only if you use the more recent dates of arrival AND consider eight to ten as “a few thousand years”……
Now, see, that is exactly where I disagree. How is it possible for a species that is “absolutely, fundamentally lawed” to evolve, thrive and cover the globe? Just because we currently live in a system that is non-adaptive, does not mean that humans are mal-adaptive……….
No, not novel. But absolutely impossible to model. (assuming a model is always a simplification of that which it is modeling). The only way to solve a non-linear equation is to make it non-linear (which is what they do in many cases) or to run out every iteration on a computer.
But have you ever watched a fractal diagram? Really watched it as it evolves over time? I have. And it never surprises me, when I just “go with it”. I know what is coming, even if I could not tell you why. Because there IS an internal consistency, its just that that consistency is not reducible.
Modeling climate (as opposed to weather) is a fairly simple process. Ecology… hell, we don’t know even a fraction of the inter-relationships in any given ecology… so how would we even begin? I’m reading The Omnivores Dilemma at the moment and it is amazingly clear how little we really know about soil. And that’s just one layer (albeit an important layer!) of the total ecology………
Janene
Comment by janene — 4 October 2007 @ 2:03 PM
“Perhaps… but not for any reason beyond the fact that the declining prey species had not yet adapted strategies to avoid the human predator.”
Sure, but when animals evolve over millions of years in the absence of predation, and then predators are introduced, many species will never be able to adapt. The time scales are just not compatible. There are many examples on Polynesian islands. That still doesn’t argue for sustainability: “Well, they only exterminated those species that were really tasty and couldn’t run away. When those disappeared, they found something else to eat.”
“Hmm, well, non-linear systems are not exactly novel.”…”No, not novel. But absolutely impossible to model. (assuming a model is always a simplification of that which it is modeling). The only way to solve a non-linear equation is to make it non-linear (which is what they do in many cases) or to run out every iteration on a computer. ”
I have to disagree here. Non linear systems are not categorically impossible to model, unless your definition of ‘model’ is very tight. Many non-linear dynamics systems have been studied, it is a huge and fruitful field of research. And I never used the word ‘Solve’. In my mind there’s a big difference between ’solving’ a set of equations and ‘modeling’ a system.
But I do agree with you that fractals are really cool. So are lava lamps.
“Modeling climate (as opposed to weather) is a fairly simple process”
Huh? The climate is a highly non-linear dynamical system. Modeling the climate has been a very difficult problem, that’s the primary reason why the politicians don’t ‘believe’ the scientists. It’s a difficult problem.
Have a look here, for example:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001AGUSM..NG51A09R
Here’s a chunk from the abstract:
“The climate system is a highly non-linear dynamical system involving interactions among a large number of variables that are non-local in space and time over a large range of scales, yet the predominant paradigm for discussing climate change remains a linear forcing-response-with-feedbacks representation based on the analysis of very simple electronic circuits. The limitations of this linear representation when applied to a non-linear system are fundamental, so conclusions based on such an analysis, even when used as an approximation, can be highly misleading. We illustrate the key problems of the classical feedback analysis and the results of a non-linear analysis that we are investigating by application of both to Lorentz’ simple climate model. ”
Continuing…
“Ecology… hell, we don’t know even a fraction of the inter-relationships in any given ecology… so how would we even begin? ”
Well you don’t start by trying to model the things you don’t know, and you don’t start by trying to determine fine details. I think I described how I’d begin. I’d break down an analysis into energy inputs, transfer functions (empirical and adjustable)describing how sunlight is captured and transformed into vegetative energy, and distributions of ‘animals’ that consume the vegetative energy and each other; and a transfer function approximating feedback of organic leftovers into the environment, i.e. composting or ‘recapture’ (which ties into soil fertility). The vegetative growth function would depend on temperature, humidity, soil fertility, etc. The vegetative growth and recapture functions could be numerically approximated for a given investigation from whatever is known about real world ecosystems, e.g. temperate forest, grassland savannah, etc.
I’ll readily admit that with this approach it might take a lot of time and effort before the model quality would approach that of the intuition of a learned ecologist, or of an actual primitive practitioner, but I still think it would be a worthwhile endeavor. It could help us understand questions like ‘which climates are more resilient to human population intrusion: wet climates or dry, temperate or tropical,’, blah blah blah.
Comment by Too Human — 4 October 2007 @ 3:20 PM
Hey –
This is an interesting discussion… I hope you agree
Now I’m gonna argue a little…:-)
Well… then let me pose a hypothetical… If instead of humans, lions had found their way into North America and had impacted the extinction event already underway, but over time they found a balance with the remaining species… would you consider lions unsustainable? Seriously.
Non linear systems are partially defined by their ’sensitivity to initial conditions,’ right? So minute changes in the details make huge differences in the result. So how, exactly, would anyone model such a thing? It’s the details, the smallest details, that determine the emergent pattern of behavior.
Sure. But modeling is, by definition, reductionistic and you cannot reduce non-linear systems. Again… by definition.
ummm… from your link:
Only…. Lozenz wasn’t modeling climate. He was modeling weather… and if they are trying to apply the Butterfly Effect to climate… well, they would need to first prove that appropriate. Its the difference between me predicting that it will be 78 degrees in Denver next Thursday and me predicting that next summer, in denver, the weather will be generally pleasant. Which of those predictions would you be more likely to call me out on? And which would be more likely proven wrong?
That’s why you cannot model a complex system.
As far as your questions…. none of those are ‘answerable’ without first establishing the nature of the human presence. The Kalahari is extremely resilient to the intrusion of the San. The amazon is highly resilient to the intrusions of aboriginal amazonian tribes. And so forth. Because those groups are not intruding — they are part of the ecology itself. Our culture… not so much… we manage to kill off pretty much ANY ecological system. Because we are intruders. And that’s the difference.
Janene
Comment by janene — 4 October 2007 @ 4:05 PM
I think this recent discussion on the idea of sustainability has been moving toward what I have been thinking lately too. The very idea of the goal of stability and sustainability I believe is flawed. This is because the biosphere is fundamentally a disequilibrium rather than an equilibrium system. The constant inflow of energy and the constant eventual “waste” of the capacity to do useful work is at the heart of life. Waste is the rule and work is the exception that makes the process interesting.
This ideal of making collective decisions to restrain consumption and wisely manage a resource in perpetuity is fundamentally flawed for the same reason because it is the very opposite of stability and sustainability. It sets up the resource as a non-sustainable one because the potential for it to be more intensively exploited is always hanging there. This feeds into the tragedy of the commons idea. Except to turn the concept around the over-abundant commons is the problem because it is akin to a bucket of gasoline awaiting a spark to burst into flames. Similarly the worlds fossil fuels were unsustainable underground- it was only a matter of time before some creature harnessed the resource. And the dodo population on Reunion island was unsustainable as it was only a matter of time before more efficient predators caught up with it. The classic example of a yeast which consumes the petri dish and ensures its own demise is seeking stability by doing so. No-one asks the question about why the dish of sugar is there in the first place, or what would happen to it otherwise.
The severity of the consequences of breaking these unstable states seems to depend on the rate at which a new “equilibrium” level is reached. The bucket of fuel as a vapour explodes in seconds, causing massive disruption, or gently lights a wick for a month. The dodos are exterminated in years, or readapt defensive traits over generations.
So my take it that there is nothing to be gained overall from attempts at restraint for perpetuity. What matters are the rates of change. The early human populations that exterminated megafauna were at fault only for the excessive rate at which they changed their environments. The industrial human race has experienced a massive spurt of growth based on fossil fuels, and these look set to deplete at rates at least as rapid as their arrival, possibly much faster. The environmental consequences are large and will increase exponentially.
I have never seen the point in trying to steer the rate of consumption of 6 billion people. Far more useful is repositioning your own location, associates, habits, skills, expectations and resources to catch the coming tsunami wave. I will admit you guys are onto something of some use with your rewilding/feralisation philosophy but I still contend that agriculture (or if you prefer to redefine a subset of it as horticulture) will be a prominent part of the adaptation strategies in the future.
Another idea I have been tossing around is that elites are actually part of the solution to “sustainability”, in their own perverse way. Just as “the wolf is the doctor to the deer”, perhaps the elites with their parasitic ways, their tendency to overwork the poor, to send them to war to be slaughtered, to feed them poorly, to dupe the stupid, perhaps this is a mechanism for a nation (whatever the size) to restrain/refresh/renew itself? Does egalitarianism only really work either transiently when resources are temporarily not limiting, or in an ongoing manner where predators or parasites keep population sizes well below their carrying capacity? Could it be that George Bush leaving poor people to drown in New Orleans was actually helping out with the global warming cause and relieving world hunger??
Comment by Void_genesis — 8 October 2007 @ 12:51 AM
China survived for millenia because the soils were added to on an annual basis by great dust storms sweeping down from the north. Only over recent times have they begun to bugger their herritage.
Similarly, Egypt, until the completion of the Aswan dam, survived because of the annual flooding of the Nile which brought new soils
David
Comment by DJC — 8 October 2007 @ 4:57 AM
Hi all,
Sorry (I think) for the radio silence. I was married on the 6th, and spent the following week in Arizona. I feel guilty about the airline flight and motor vehicle fuel, but I feel good about the wilderness hikes and the visits to the Sinagua ruins near Sedona and Flagstaff.
On the flight I read a book that I had never read before, which I suspect many of you have read: ‘Ishmael’, by Daniel Quinn. Very good, and it was surprisingly close to my own interpretation of things, points of view which generally I found disagreed with nearly everyone I’ve talked to over the years. I also picked up a good book, ‘Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest’. I’ve seen references on this site to the Hohokam, and knew little about them, so this book has been quite interesting.
I’ll respond very quickly to the points made by Janene regarding nonlinear modeling, though I suspect that we are tending toward diminishing returns on that thread.
“Well… then let me pose a hypothetical… If instead of humans, lions had found their way into North America and had impacted the extinction event already underway, but over time they found a balance with the remaining species… would you consider lions unsustainable? Seriously.”
Hypothetically, if the lions actually found a balance with the remaining species, then sure, it sounds sustainable to me. However I don’t see a lot of evidence that this is what actually happened with humans in North America. It seems to me that for the most part, humans in North America were on the same course as humans in Eurasia, only at a different pace and with a different set of starting materials (potentially domesticatable crops and animals). I’ll concede that some smaller groups of New World humans (and I admit not having enough information to make a better case) seem to have been living a fairly balanced lifestyle, but the evidence for absolute sustainability is scarce (and I agree with void_genesis regarding the limited utility of the concept of absolute sustainability).
“Non linear systems are partially defined by their ’sensitivity to initial conditions,’ right? So minute changes in the details make huge differences in the result. So how, exactly, would anyone model such a thing? It’s the details, the smallest details, that determine the emergent pattern of behavior.”
In most systems, not all minute changes cause equally dramatic responses. Some factors are more relevant than others. The idea behind modeling such a system is to learn which variables have great effect, and which are less important, and to learn about the interactions between parts of the system, and how they affect overall behavior.
“Sure. But modeling is, by definition, reductionistic and you cannot reduce non-linear systems. Again… by definition.”
You seemed impressed by computer modeling of fractals, yet unwilling to entertain the notion that other complex systems can be numerically modeled. Again, I’m not advocating that one can solve a complex system in the way that one solves a linear system; I’m saying that computer numeric models can be very useful for understanding relationships within complex systems.
“Its the difference between me predicting that it will be 78 degrees in Denver next Thursday and me predicting that next summer, in denver, the weather will be generally pleasant. Which of those predictions would you be more likely to call me out on? And which would be more likely proven wrong?”
Hmmm, I don’t know. It seems that in both cases you are really trying to model the weather. Climate modeling looks at very long time scales and very large geographies, and attempts to predict overall trends, probablilities of variables falling in certain ranges, etc.
“Because those groups are not intruding — they are part of the ecology itself. Our culture… not so much… we manage to kill off pretty much ANY ecological system. Because we are intruders. And that’s the difference.”
Really I think the major difference here is scale. Our culture kills of any ecological system because it kills off bits and pieces, one at a time, multiplied by a bazillion people. One primitive farmer doesn’t kill an ecosystem any more than one hunter does. Population expansions kill ecosystems, and these are far more likely in farming populations than in HG populations.
Regarding the points raised by void_genesis:
“The classic example of a yeast which consumes the petri dish and ensures its own demise is seeking stability by doing so. No-one asks the question about why the dish of sugar is there in the first place, or what would happen to it otherwise.”
The big difference between yeast and humans is that humans can make choices. We aren’t stuck with blind evolution. We are more self-aware than yeast, and we are more adept at manipulating our environments. Therefore many questions that are not interesting to apply to yeast in a petri dish, or lions in North America, are interesting to apply to our own species. We can choose to overpopulate the planet and kill everything; or we can choose to kill off our own species completely in a mass suicide, to save the rest of the planet; and we have a wide range of choices in between. The ‘rewilding’ idea falls toward one extreme on the range of choices. I am skeptical that it could actually work in the forseeable future because it assumes that all participants will somehow substantially reduce greed within themselves and their offspring.
Comment by Too Human — 15 October 2007 @ 10:46 AM
Hey –
Welcome back and congrats on your wedding!
I think you are right that we are, perhaps, beyond the point of diminishing returns on the modeling discussion. We are, as far as I can tell, simply looking at this from vastly different perspectives and unable to see each others… unfortunate. Only omment I have… you noted that I am impressed with computer modeling of fractals… but that is not a model at all. It IS a fractal. It is a fractal equation worked through multiple iterations. That’s why it intrigues me so much, because it IS the system, rather than a simplified model of the system.
Really I think the major difference here is scale. Our culture kills of any ecological system because it kills off bits and pieces, one at a time, multiplied by a bazillion people. One primitive farmer doesn’t kill an ecosystem any more than one hunter does. Population expansions kill ecosystems, and these are far more likely in farming populations than in HG populations.
But see… that’s not true. One primitive farmer DOES kill the ecology anywhere that his plow lands. Now, if only one primitive farmer were doing it, (or 100 or even 1000) it would not really matter. True. But his efforts are still terminal to the land on which he lives. The hunter, by contrast, fills an ecological role — he fills the same role as any predator…..
On the rest of your points… perhaps Ishmael has not really sunk in yet. The most important point I took from that book is the simple understanding that there is nothing wrong with people. Perhaps when (or if) that same realization sinks into your bones, you will understand why the argument about people, thinking and greed does not work for me.
Cheers,
Janene
Comment by janene — 15 October 2007 @ 12:02 PM
Hi Janene,
Thanks for the well wishes.
A fractal is not a model of anything in particular, of course, but it is a visualization of relationships. Computer numerical models can also help us visualize relationships, and therefore have some value. I think you’re trying to read too much into the value of modeling in general. Mathematics and computer applications are just another language, and are as valid as English or shadow-puppets for discussing these ideas. Some models are bad, just as some thoughts are irrelevant, but it’s a bit extreme to rule out a whole category of human thought.
“But his efforts are still terminal to the land on which he lives. The hunter, by contrast, fills an ecological role — he fills the same role as any predator…..”
Predators can and do terminate the lives of whole populations of animals, and gatherers can and do destroy populations of vegetation. You may see these as a ‘good’ ecological role, as opposed to the ‘bad’ ecological role of a farmer, but I see them both as points on a continuum. Bad, large-scale farming destroys ecologies, ‘good’ small-scale farming doesn’t have to have more impact than good, small-scale hunting. Too many hunters, or small numbers of very efficient hunters, can overly deplete other species to their own temporary benefit. Impact is impact.
Trust me, Ishmael has sunk in a reasonable amount. Frankly, I came up with many of those ideas independently, about 15 years ago. I drove people absolutely nuts with my lunchtime conversations. I differ with the author somewhat in my interpretation of the Fall, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: I think his interpretation as ‘who should live and who should die’ is too narrow. In my interpretation, eating the forbidden fruit was the story of gaining consciousness, which is the understanding that we have choices; some of those choices could benefit ‘us’ at the expense of ‘others’, or treat everyone ‘fairly’. The choice of agriculture is just one example of greed. I also differ from the author in the interpretation of the story of Cain and Abel. Quinn seems to think that nomadic pastoralists (Abel) are ‘Leavers’, and were somehow ‘good’, while the agriculturalists (Cain) are ‘Takers’, and are ‘evil’. First, I’m not convinced that an either/or choice of Takers/Leavers is appropriate: everything is a matter of degree, there are many points on the continuum. Pastoralists are favoring certain species over others; their sheep and cows eat the grass that would have gone to the deer and antelope; they are enriching themselves at the expense of the hunter-gatherers, and there was probably great conflict between herders and HG’s in Eurasia for many thousands of years. However in the short term and under the right conditions, agriculturalists are more effective than pastoralists at exploiting the environment to build the power and population of their own tribes, so in the end the farmers outcompete the herders.
I can’t accept Quinn’s argument that the Semitic herders were ‘Leavers’ and the Caucasian farmers were ‘Takers’, and that the story of Genesis was a ‘Leaver’ story adopted by ‘Takers’ as their own. The race issue is an unnecessary complicating factor. In my mind, every human population has its ‘Takers’ and ‘Leavers’. Among the farmers of whatever race, some of the old wise story tellers may have recognized the greed dynamic, and passed down their thoughts in the story of the Fall and of Cain and Abel, as a warning to their ancestors that the agricultural way of life could lead to bad things. One can interpret Cain and Abel as being two members of the same tribe, and the father favors one over the other because he (the farmer) is more productive than the other (the herder), and can support more children, thus making their nation (tribe) great. The wise story teller is trying to tell future generations that there is more to life than power and numbers, and to be cautious of greed. There is no need to assume that only the Semitic Herder Leavers recognized right from wrong.
“there is nothing wrong with people”
Hmmm, I’m not really passing moral judgements here. In the past the great debate has been ‘people are intrinsically good’ vs. ‘people are intrinsically evil’. In my opinion the real issue is ‘people are basically stupid’. We are just smart enough to screw things up. In every population of people that I know, there are some decent people and some greedy people. This doesn’t mean that greed is ‘evil’ or ‘bad’; in general greedy people don’t understand the consequences of their actions, don’t appreciate the tradeoffs they make. They are smart enough to manipulate the levers of power, but not smart enough to visualize the consequences.
Really, the statement ‘there is nothing wrong with people’ is vacuous. Is there nothing right with people, either? Are people all right and no wrong? Are they perfect? That is nonsense. People are animals, but they are animals with a slightly more highly developed awareness of self and of their environment when compared to other animals. People are not perfect. They are right about some things and wrong about others. That’s why the population has boomed, and why it will crash. It’s all perfectly natural, we are really just a bunch of fuzz stuck on a rock whirling about in space. On a global scale there’s no right and wrong in that sense.
But on a personal scale I’m not happy with humanity. I wish there were less of it. People confuse quantity of life with quality of life. It’s natural for people to want ‘a better life’ for their children–more security, better food, less disease, a longer lifetime, but in pursuit of this we are ruining the planet and building a lot of very crowded neighborhoods.
Comment by Too Human — 15 October 2007 @ 1:53 PM
Hey –
Maybe that is why we are talking past each other. A fractal is a graphical representation of a specific mathematical (non-linear) equation run through its many iterations. That’s what I mean that it is not a model… because nothing has been ‘left out.’
And of course… “All models are wrong, but some are useful”
Of course they do. I don’t see anything as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ merely as functional or non-functional. When a predator or gatherer (human or not) eliminates another species, this is a simple function of evolutionary processes. The problem with farming is that it directly reduces variation… and when that ocurs, evolutionary processes become more fragile.
I’m not a big fan of Quinn’s biblical interpretations, myself…. but, you know, whatever…
As far as ‘nothing wrong with people’ — that says exactly what you followed up with… humans are animals and to think that somehow we evolved as animals and yet somehow don;t work right, are fundamentally flawed or other such arguments just seems like absolute nonsense to me.
Janene
Comment by janene — 15 October 2007 @ 5:48 PM
Taking up TooHuman’s point on humans being different because we are able to self reflect and make choices, well it doesnt usually work out that way in the long run.
Sure an individual or a coordinated and isolated population can choose to exploit a resource at a relatively gradual and sustainable level to maximise the amount of resource accumulatively accessed over time. But the pattern falls apart when another group decides to use the resource at a faster rate, gains the upper hand in the short term, and leads to a longer term decline in the resource base. Such small controlled societies do pop up every now and again in history, but ultimately change their culture or someone else comes along and takes their resource away from them.
The story of yeast in a petri dish is a very relevant one to reflect upon. Yeast simply march across the resource, using it all up, and exhausting themselves. Such a stupid, unsustainable behaviour no? The yeast will destroy their environment and become extinct. Except yeast have been around for just about forever. They dont seem to be going anywhere despite their uncontrolled, unreflective ways. The concentrated resource that appears suddenly causes a wobble in the population density, then dissipates. Consumption, waste, destruction: these are all essential to the living process. Stability and sustainability are illusions- our entire world is perched on a speck of dust buzzing around a fading ember. The sun is akin to the dish of sugar. Our role as living things is to consume, waste and destroy. To eddy the stream of the universe, perhaps slowing it down a smidge.
Humans are the ultimate detritivore and polysymbiont. We use fire to externalise our metabolism. We use microbes to pre-digest otherwise poor quality foodstuffs. We use plants to harvest primary energy. We use other animals to transform energy and materials and tools to enhance our feeble bodies. By consuming the available hydrocarbons locked beneath the earth we have set in motion a massive shift in climate, probably knocking the earth out of its cycle of ice ages. Will this cause untold destruction?- of course. Will it also lead to unimagined benefits?- most certainly. Its just a matter of who wins or loses when and where. That mass of frozen fossil energy was akin to the dish of sugar the yeast consumed. But its presence in the universe is an aberation, and life rushes in to dissipate and destroy it. Put another way the loss of carbon from the biosphere during earlier phases of life on earth was an unsustainable process. At some point the trend turns around and goes the other way.
Humans will survive climate change so long as the atmosphere remains breathable. And if it doesnt then there is little to be gained by imagining that we could have collectively decided to behave in any other way. A world without humans isnt that big a deal. Thats mortality. And temporality. Get used to it
Comment by Void_genesis — 16 October 2007 @ 6:21 PM
“Taking up TooHuman’s point on humans being different because we are able to self reflect and make choices, well it doesnt usually work out that way in the long run.”
I take your point, but I don’t know if I made mine clear. My point isn’t that self-reflection and choice lead to long term success. I’m saying that humans can make choices, do make choices, and always will make choices. Human choices made over the span of human history and pre-history reflect value judements formed over timespans of one or a few human lifetimes–we think about the immediate past, the present, our own future, and the future of our children, but that’s about it. Free will (subject to constraints of nature of course) is one of the chief survival advantages of our species.
It’s nice to postulate a ’sustainable’ system where everyone makes the ‘right’ choices, but I think the probability of that happening is very low.
“But the pattern falls apart when another group decides to use the resource at a faster rate, gains the upper hand in the short term, and leads to a longer term decline in the resource base.”
Yes, this is exactly what I’ve said in notes above. Greed always wins in the short term. It remains to be seen whether it wins in the long term. I think it’s quite likely that sometime in the distant future, humanity will once again be living a pseudo-paleolithic lifestyle.
“Our role as living things is to consume, waste and destroy. To eddy the stream of the universe, perhaps slowing it down a smidge.”
That’s one way of looking at it. Consuming, wasting and destroying are inevitable, but we don’t have to take it to extremes. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, but life isn’t all about cake. When I waste stuff, I recognize the loss and the tradeoffs, and generally I look for ways to reduce my waste. When I see someone else wasting stuff and it impacts me, it pisses me off. Every hike in a clear cut? Beautiful. Ever try to ride a bike through a suburban subdivision? Seems to me that leaving the forest intact and eliminating the subdivision is better for me. I will make choices in my life that reflect what I want, not what some developer of suburban breeder colonies wants.
I worked for a guy who honestly believed that the earth could carry a trillion people, and cities could house a billion each, and moreover, that we SHOULD do this. The prospect nauseates me. There’s more to life than cattle, corn and SUVs carrying around a bunch of kids.
“The story of yeast in a petri dish is a very relevant one to reflect upon. Yeast simply march across the resource, using it all up, and exhausting themselves. Such a stupid, unsustainable behaviour no? The yeast will destroy their environment and become extinct. Except yeast have been around for just about forever. They dont seem to be going anywhere despite their uncontrolled, unreflective ways.”
Sure, that’s true, but it really misses the point. We DO have choices, and yeast don’t. Yes, in the long run we are meaningless fuzz clinging to a rock, and all will be extinguished. So what? In the meantime we have a certain amount of free will, and are subject to a number of environmental constraints, and so we can trade quality of life for quantity of life, and vice-versa. Some people think it’s perfectly OK to consume all of our resources as quickly as possible, in an effort to create the largest population density possible, and in the meantime destroy much of what is beautiful in the world.
“A world without humans isnt that big a deal. Thats mortality. And temporality. Get used to it ”
I suppose I didn’t make my feelings clear. I have no overwhelming love for humanity. I have more respect for a horseshoe crab than I do for most people. There too damn many people in the world right now, and that ruins my day nearly every day. I would prefer that my neighbors were dogs, or wolves, or bears, rather than civilized people like me. I regularly fantasize about the complete extinction of humanity. I would prefer that it didn’t happen through violence and suffering, because I don’t wish pain on any other living creature. But if I were a religious person in the conventional sense, I’d pray every night for mass sterilization. It doesn’t have to be complete—just 99.999999%.
Comment by Too Human — 17 October 2007 @ 10:30 AM
Sorry, I should have responded to this some time ago, but I’ve had very little time online of late.
Well, we can’t scientifically prove that animals experience pain; in fact, I can’t scientifically prove that you experience pain. I can tell that when you say you’re in pain, there’s a certain biochemical signature, and I can see that it’s very similar to what I show when I experience pain, but to make the leap to the conclusion that you experience pain requires empathy. Science can’t make that leap. Scientifically, we know that the chemicals that correspond with our experience of pain exist, in terms of evolution, to motivate us to get away from the source of our pain. And, we know that in plants, while obviously not involving the same chemicals as in animals (since they’re not animals), they do have a very similar response to us. Chemicals are released, signaling defensive measures (such as the release of nicotine in tobacco), just as the chemicals producing pain in animals signal our (admittedly, quite different) defensive measures. I’m sure the plant experience of pain differs markedly from the animal source of pain, but scientifically, you have as much evidence for plants suffering pain as animals. But in both cases, that can’t get you all the way; the last leap requires empathy, seeing yourself in the other.
I respect that you’re answering for yourself here, and I’m not trying to judge you, just trying to understand. This is why that argument has never persuaded me, so I wonder what you think of it?
As do wheat and corn, but people who rely on these things for their diet take an interest in their propogation. Those hunter-gatherers in California did eat a good deal of acorns, though even that did not rise to a majority of their diet (no one thing ever did), but they didn’t simply wait for such an abundant food source to grow. They used fire to clear land and practiced many other methods to ensure that those trees grew well and abundantly. Had they relied on them more heavily, they also would have cultivated them more heavily.
Actually, that estimation came from Lee’s records of the !Kung in the Kalahari, and it turns out that they are rather peculiar among foragers, because their fascination with the mongongo nut severely tipped Lee’s estimate. His conclusion about “gatherer-hunters” has been overturned by more cross-cultural studies. There is a correlation with latitude, as hunter-gatherers nearer the equator eat a larger percentage of their diet from plant sources, but even at the equator, hunter-gatherers get most of their food from animals. In the Arctic, they live almost exclusively on animals, though that’s obviously more to do with lack of options. When given a choice, humans eat a varied diet, with a little more animal than plant, but all around a very generous mix of everything.
I’m not so sure you could. Foragers rarely ever starve to death, but they do experience lean periods of hunger, where food is a little more difficult to come by. In those periods, starvation foods get you through. One of the reasons foragers so rarely starve to death is entophagy; you’ll almost always be able to find some grubs to eat, at least. If you’re unwilling to eat the grubs in a time like that, you may well starve to death. The secret to the success of the forager strategy relies heavily on its dietary diversity; if you take out the main strength, well, you put yourself in a very precarious position, it seems to me.
I can respect that—I suppose my question is, why do you desire it? You don’t need to justify it to me or anyone else, really, but we’re here discussing the matter, and certainly any tribe you join will likely ask you the same question. Them, I think, you would owe some kind of answer to. I don’t think they’d have a right to tell you to do otherwise, but if they’re your tribe, they should know why you do that voodoo that you do so well, no?
This is the part that puts me on edge. Not hostile, just … on edge. It seems like a very agrarian attitude to me. It may not be, but that’s how it feels to me at first blush. It seems like one of civilization’s sacred cows that you’re just having trouble giving up. For you, personally, that’s your own life to deal with, but you’ve repeated the same arguments that I’ve heard for this from inside the Tribe of Anthropik, and that relates to me personally, so I hope you’ll take this all in the spirit it’s meant, not as any kind of command at you or telling you what you must or must not do, but simply what I think about something I think about because people dear to me say the same thing.
I’m not so sure. We have plenty of examples of cultures with no idea of individual property, who nonetheless fell into agriculture, overworked the soil, and eventually did develop ideas of individual property as a result. The oldest Adena culture mounds seem to mark communal ties to the land, but as their sunflower horticulture became increasingly abundant, it became agriculture. The Adena culture gave way to the Hopewell culture, and the communal mounds became lavish burial mounds for individual chiefs buried with their abundant possessions. I would say that the cause for something like that does not lie with any human notion, not even property; rather, the ecology favored the development of agriculture, so it happened, and human notions like property followed as the result of agricultural relationships with the land.
Individual human beings have choices about the number of babies they will produce; societies always produce as many babies as they can feed at their current standard of living, just like any other animal. Throughout history, human population has always risen as a function of food supply. Individual human choices simply cease to matter with large groups, because if there’s nothing to pressure them one way or another, half will choose to go one way, and half will choose to go the other. Individual human choice in a large group ultimately works like the random movement of gas particles; sure, they could all go in one direction, but in order to overcome probability, you’d need some very strong force to compel them. Otherwise, they’ll fill the space. Or, as Charles Darwin’s grandson, Charles Galton Darwin, put it: “It may well be that it would take hundreds of generations for the progenitive instinct to develop in this way, but if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the variety Homo contracipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the variety Homo progenitivus.” So choice really doesn’t affect population levels: you need some kind of material factor, like food supply, to control choice.
Indeed; I’m not trying to challenge you here, simply understand. You’re obviously articulate and intelligent, and best of all, you disagree with me! I can learn a lot from that potent combination!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 February 2008 @ 9:07 PM