…but plants are differentiated from animals in terms of a developed nervous system that can scientifically be proven to generate experiences of pain for animals that there is no proof for with plants.

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?

Ok, but hunter-gatherers in California ate ALOT of acorns. And you don’t need to “produce” acorns. Nor walnuts. They just GROW.

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.

Since a large amount of the nutrition of many hunter-gatherers comes from gathering, there’s not much of a problem already.

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.

In other words, assuming there was an intact California tribe, I could simply hang out and eat the gathered plant foods and have many of my nutritional needs met.

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.

But I’m not trying to convince a majority here, but merely to provide a minoritarian option within our discourse and praxis. The reason is because I DESIRE IT. That’s reason enough, and if I can find an ecological manner to pursue my desires, it’s certainly a minoritarian option there’s no reason to have prejudice against.

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?

But I personally do not want to kill animals. That is not the way I want to be in the world.

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.

In other words, a permacultural model utilizing horticulture could solve soil-problems if property divisions didn’t work against them.

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.

Since human beings have choices about the number of babies they will produce…

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.

Again, in general, I agree with much of what you’re stating. I’m just working for a model of multiplicity, and it sounds like from your RPG work that in a sense, you are aiming at the same thing.

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!

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%.

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

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”

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Similarly, Egypt, until the completion of the Aswan dam, survived because of the annual flooding of the Nile which brought new soils

David