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as
Zerzan and Derrick Jensen advocate a purposeful resistance movement
designed to hasten civilization’s end. [18] In this they owe a clear
though too seldom mentioned debt to Edward Abbey. The Monkey Wrench
Gang opened multiple generations’ eyes to the option of direct action
against perpetrators of environmental destruction. Says Jensen today,
“Systems of power are created by humans and can be stopped by humans.
Those in power are never supernatural or immortal, and they can be
brought down.” [19] Though this raises the frightening specter of
triggering loss of life before it would happen otherwise, the argument
is that bringing down civilization sooner would leave more life intact
than would a delayed and drawn out collapse. We face hard choices.
The
frst daunting challenge, though, faced by those against civilization
lies in disabusing enough people of the ingrained message that our way
of living is a great thing. Perhaps, in the end, our best hope lies in
building resistance as we work to soften the landing through efforts,
for instance, to address population growth and to protect biodiversity
we
hear about our consumption, through agriculture and the human
population growth it drives, of the very web of life on which we and
all other species depend for our survival?
Paleontologist
Niles Eldredge writes, “Agriculture represents the single most profound
ecological change in the entire 3.5 billion-year history of life....
Indeed, to develop agriculture is essentially to declare war on
ecosystems.” [12]
Author
Lierre Kieth says, “The truth is that agriculture is the most
destructive thing humans have done to the planet... [It] requires the
wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems .” [13]
Once
the cycle of agriculture and population growth was underway, of course,
there seemed little choice. We did what we could to keep feeding our
growing numbers. We’ve trapped ourselves. As Keith puts it, “Except for
the last 46 tribes of hunter-gatherers, the human race is now dependent
on an activity that is killing the planet.”
Soil mining
Further
making crop cultivation unsustainable on anything like a scale to feed
billions is its often inevitable erosion of the soil and depletion of
soil nutrients. This happens at rates far faster than natural rates of
renewal.
Soil
microbiologist Peter Salonius writes, “The simple shallow rooting habit
of food crops and the requirement for bare soil cultivation produces
soil erosion and plant nutrient loss far above the levels that can be
replaced by microbial nitrogen fxation, and the weathering of
minerals.” [14]
Already
we have lost perhaps one third of all arable land worldwide. [15] We
are using it up just as we are coal or oil. Keith coins the term
“fossil soil.” It may have taken ten thousand years for us to see it,
but that is barely an eye blink in human history.
Some
hunter-gatherer societies have long included small scale gardening in
their repertoires. But once we upped the scale, clearing land and
increasing production to produce food surpluses, we committed to
agriculture proper and the trouble began. While a more ecologically
sensible option such as permaculture moves farming in a more
sustainable direction, it was never intended to feed increasing
billions of people. [16] If it were it would still run into the problem
of transforming wilderness, turning the land excessively to human
consumption with all that implies for the web of life. Planting crops
on any large scale means seriously damaging ecosystems. Agriculture
cannot be sustained.
Few people want to hear that agriculture is unsustainable.
Fewer still care to consider that the civilization it supports
will therefore come to an end.
Who wants to hear their whole world
is going to go away?
Meanwhile,
participants in the growing “rewilding” movement work today to prepare
for a post-civilization world. No gloom and doom in this group,
rewilders like Peter Bauer (AKA “Urban Scout”), Jason Godesky, and
Emily Porter acknowledge a collapse of civilization is inevitable and
work with zest toward a shift to a tribal, wild way of living. [20]
[21] [22] Learning aboriginal living skills and exploring ways of
creating more genuine connection with the earth and those close to
them, they strive to “undo domestication.”
Critics
argue they’re romanticizing a lifestyle Thomas Hobbes rightly
characterized as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Others
insist “we can’t go backwards.” These are predictable responses, imbued
with the same pervasive cultural message to which we are all subject.
It tells us constantly that the development of civilization was an
amazing improvement and that its course has been one unbroken line of
progress. Everything’s getting better all the time, isn’t it? A look at
our ecological plight alone suggests it’s not, and Marshall Sahlins,
among other anthropologists, easily debunked Hobbes’s view beginning
in the 1960s. [23]
It
is diffcult, as well, for most people to appreciate what a tiny moment
of human history civilization has occupied. Without perspective it’s
natural to assume this way of living will and should continue for eons
to come. Debate continues, but the notion that the hunter-gatherer life
is a terrible one is as absurd as suggesting the gorilla life or the
lion life is terrible. It’s wrong on its face. [24]
How
much evidence do we need to see that civilization is not the ultimate
expression of human existence after all? It has been a momentary
detour, the feeting, cameo appearance of a dysfunctional approach to
life, the result of straying from living at one with the natural world.
Whatever the path to civilization’s wind-down, if we can preserve
enough biodiversity, those coming out the other end will have the
chance to enjoy anew a different, yet satisfying way of living, the
only way proven sustainable for humans. Racing toward a precipice, can
it be wrong to embrace once again a life which worked for over two
million years when it has become obvious the current approach is an
abject failure? We don’t have to go backwards; we need only nurture who
we really are. Whatever our course, we have only to consider the
agricultural origins of our ecological crisis to understand
civilization is an unsustainable trap.
Overshoot and collapse
The
historical view of humanity’s ecological path leaves no doubt we long
ago overshot human carrying capacity. Our numbers are today supported
only by temporary measures such as our use of limited stores of fossil
fuels and, more fundamentally, the use of agriculture and our
consumption of our own life support system. In his classic text,
Overshoot, William Catton calls such supports “phantom carrying
capacity.” [17] They are not carrying capacity at all; they cannot last.
Contrary
then to the popular notion that our technologies have increased
carrying capacity, we have created only a carrying capacity illusion.
We’re a species which evolved to live in the millions, yet here we sit,
well into the billions. It’s basic to ecology that when a population
overshoots carrying capacity it must inevitably return to a lower
number, often via a crash.
It
is of course not only our numbers which will come to an end.
Civilization is made possible by agriculture. Agriculture is
unsustainable. If it weren’t obvious already, you can see where this is
going. There’s no predicting the timeline of civilization’s collapse.
Techno-fxes and any resiliency industrial society possesses may draw it
out. No matter, a better future, indeed the only future for humanity
and the rest of Earth’s inhabitants is one beyond civilization.
What we could do, what we might do
Few
people want to hear that agriculture is unsustainable. Fewer still care
to consider that the civilization it supports will therefore come to an
end. Who wants to hear their whole world is going to go away? Yet as
surprising as it may seem, there is room for optimism. The way our
will be diffcult, but will open to a new beginning.
Ideally
we could begin systematically scaling back agriculture and gradually
dismantling civilization. We could turn instead to small scale,
localized horticulture and then to tribal, non-industrial and
non-agricultural ways of living. The transition could include a
concerted worldwide effort to support humane, voluntary measures
enabling our numbers to decline gradually and dramatically. Perhaps
most importantly, we could work to spread a different view of our place
in nature, acknowledging that we are of the earth, just one of millions
of species, as much subject to ecological laws as any other. At some
point, the few surviving hunter-gatherer groups on Earth might serve as
mentors rather than objects of academic study. This, however, would be
an exquisitely delicate undertaking, as the last thing such groups
need today is the increased intrusion of those of us in civilization.
But
despite converging ecological catastrophes we show few signs of such a
massive, voluntary shift. Those with vested interests in the status quo
see to that. So writers such
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