John Feeney

Time for an update listing a few simple, related points which underlie my thinking today.

A much fuller version of these and other ideas will appear in a new article I've written. I'll post a link once it's published. [Update: Expect a link in August late July to the new article.]

(In the meantime I'm working on another article and a short story. It's nice now just to focus on my current primary interests: pre- and post-civilization topics including rewilding, hunter-gatherer lifeways, anthropologically informed conjectures, primitive skills, and our relationship with the earth.)

So here's the gist...

Civilization is inherently unsustainable. A key reason for this is that civilization is founded on agriculture. Agriculture circumvents the natural processes which regulated human population numbers prior to its inception. It is the basic ecological factor which has caused our numbers to overshoot carrying capacity so enormously. Along the way, agriculture destroys topsoil and ecosystems, tearing down the web of life, our global life support system. Agriculture is therefore unsustainable. 

Civilization will therefore come to an end. Because the human population is deeply into overshoot, we know that ending will involve a tremendous decline in our numbers. Converging issues such as peak oil, climate change, topsoil and groundwater depletion, and the human-caused sixth mass extinction event in Earth's history suggest this will occur not many centuries from now, but sooner. Precisely how much sooner, no one can say. But it is possible we are already in the midst of some stage of collapse.

Though this signals the potential for some very tough times ahead, it is in the long run wonderful news. It means an end to what's killing the earth.

Hunting and gathering is the only human way of living proven sustainable. Fortunately, it is a rich, generally pleasant, fulfilling way of life, not perfect but immune to many of the basic problems plaguing civilization and much less prone to others. It's natural for humans, the life we evolved living. Thomas Hobbes' speculation that life in a "state of nature" is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" is just wrong, a well debunked myth. Yet its endurance creates resistance to a way of life, for the long term human future, in harmony with the earth.

The value in rewilding thus becomes clear. "Rewilding" refers to reclaiming what we've lost with civilization, undoing domestication, returning to a more natural or wild state, a state typical of hunter-gatherers past and present. 

We see then, as well, the reason for calls for a resistance movement from writers such as Zerzan and Jensen. Every day civilization remains intact brings more destruction of the web of life. Resistance aimed at hastening civilization's fall might therefore preserve more biodiversity, more life, human and nonhuman than a strategy of merely waiting and watching. We face hard choices.

If you're actually interested in this topic, see the "core ecological issues" page for some highly relevant links.

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Image source: David Barrie's photostream, flickr.com, creative commons license