The future will be green… or black. (1 of 4)
A down-to-earth vision of how to avoid the worst
***THIS IS PART I of IV***
Click to go to Part II, Part III, or Part IV
The world we know is falling apart. It is being torn apart, in fact, by us modern humans and our improvidence. Reading the newspaper, watching the news, or simply walking through a town these days easily awakes this feeling us. Climate breakdown is devastating the planet, wildlife disappears at ever-increasing rates, and social polarization and the worldwide trend towards political authoritarianism sets the stage for civil unrest or even war.
The underlying problem and the most existential threat we face today is the annihilation of ecosystems through destruction and pollution. This massive anthropogenic disruption causes unprecedented global warming and a myriad of other accompanying problems, such as the Sixth Mass Extinction Event, the degradation of ecosystems and the concomitant food insecurities and social instability, and soaring inequality.
The situation is so dire that some scholars start concluding that it is too late, and that nothing can be done anyway. Climate breakdown, despite being ‘fought’, ‘battled’, and ‘combatted’ by the public for decades, is raging on at breakneck speed and is now considered ‘out of control’ and ‘unstoppable’.
Renewables won’t save us, technology won’t save us, and it is fairly realistic that even our worst-case scenarios might be true and the Earth will turn into a hothouse. Despite all our recycling, reduced meat consumption, cycling, and showering, CO2 emissions continue to rise, more oil is being extracted and burned, more species go extinct, more forests are being razed, and more rivers polluted year after year.
We pass threshold after threshold, yet nothing happens to change our course towards extinction. Public mood slowly shifts towards desperate- and hopelessness.
To find a way out of the mess we’ve created, four questions are of utmost importance:
1. Who is responsible for this ecological crisis?
2. What does ‘living sustainable’ even mean?
3. What the hell do we do about all those problems?
4. And, more importantly, how do we do this?
In the following, I will attempt to answer those fundamental questions from my own perspective and knowledge, and draw up a rough draft of one (but not the one) possible solution, or at least a direction. I don’t consider myself an expert of any kind — I’m just a man who loves his natural habitat — and I am fully aware that my proposals are still sketchy and fragmentary — but I feel like time is running out fast. Our situation has no precedent in history, so we’ll just have to try what works, and how. If we have a vaguely defined goal (which is what I’m trying to outline in the following chapters), we can just start working towards that head over heels and figure out the exact methods in the process. If we just stick to a few basic principles, the range for failure is limited to a minimum. There is no time to lose.
I will deliberately refrain from talking about any political issues, because it should be evident by now that this is undeniably an ecological — not a political! — problem. It therefore needs ecological solutions, not political ones. Talk about political “solutions” is a waste of time, an unnecessary detour with limited possibilities for success. ‘The environment’ does not care about more petitions, protests, agreements, talks, promises, reports, meetings, campaigns, discussions, laws and regulations, about humans talking to humans about humans, men in suits in offices in cities, nor does it about who’s being called president or prime minister. Politics is too bureaucratic, too theoretic, too alienated from the real world, takes too long, is too corrupt, and too unreliable. There is too much opposition and too much self-interest.
We are on our own on this one, and no politicians will magically save the world for us.
Because I live in the tropics, I am most familiar with this particular ecology, and consequently many examples will be drawn from tropical settings. While certain examples or techniques are clearly limited to the tropics, they might be applied in other climates as well in one form or another — thinking this through is up to the interested reader. The outline of the ideas presented here should be sufficient to adapt them to almost all climate zones that can be sustainably inhabited by modern humans.
Not all of my thoughts on this topic are easy to digest, some sound quaint at first, and some are highly controversial. But for lack of alternatives to the current way of living (and slightly altered versions of it), I will try to lay out a roadmap to a better world for us and every other organism. This obviously includes a good bit of unprecedented optimism — and I will be accused of utopianism, idealism, naivety, and probably a few other, less friendly things. But the world I have in mind is not a bad one, and maybe you happen to find some of my ideas soothing and nurturing as well. The problem is not humanity by and large, it is merely our current culture of death and destruction.
There is no reason to give up all hope yet.
For reasons of convenience, I have published the answer to each of the four questions separately, so you can read one at a time whenever you have a few minutes. For the full version, click here.
All parts of this essay are of course completely free to access and not hidden behind a paywall. If you are more comfortable reading offline or on an ebook reader, you can also download the .pdf, .epub, and .mobi file here.
Part I: Who is really responsible for this massive ecological crisis (and who’s not)?
“True, western societies are much better off materially than they were 40 years ago, but why is there so much crime, vandalism and graffiti? Why are divorce rates so high? Why are we seeing declines in civic engagement and trust? Why have obesity and depression reached epidemic proportions, even amongst children? Why do people call this the age of anxiety? Why do studies in most developed countries show that people are becoming unhappier?”
– Richard Tomkins, Financial Times (October 17, 2003)
The answers you hear to the first question differ greatly, yet they all have one thing in common. Some people blame the meat and dairy industry with its factory farms and farting cows, others say it is all the fault of Big Oil. “Deforestation!”, you will hear, or, more generally speaking, “Big Agriculture.”
“It’s cheap air travel,” some will suggest, others might include container ships or even cars. Yet others will point at the fishing industry, the mining industry, or, on the luddite side of the spectrum, industry or technology itself (“the techno-industrial system!”). Consumerism or capitalism might be blamed. Progress and development. People will point out the US or China, based on statistic evidence. Occultists and pagans accuse the decline in spiritualism, and old-school environmentalists the decline in reverence for wild Nature. Managers, bankers, CEOs, politicians, all are suspects.
Of course, all of the aforementioned contribute to the problem. But the one common thread that connects all of them is wealth, and concomitantly power. Money is the dividing factor when it comes to environmental impact.
Study after study after study after study has proven the obvious: wealth is the number one indicator for environmental damage and the size of the carbon footprint. Wealthy countries have a vastly larger ecological footprint compared to “underdeveloped” and even most “developing” countries. Yet within those wealthy countries, there is a vast schism in terms of ecological damage between the well-off and the poor as well. Measuring the contribution of single nations (thinking in terms of nation-states is so twentieth century!) distracts us from the real culprit — the rich. One thing that the oil, meat, agriculture, timber, transportation, advertising, technology, aviation, shipping, automobile, and mining industries have in common with the government officials, politicians, bankers, and investors is that the people in the ranks wielding considerable power are all rich.
Instead of blaming the littering, trash-burning slum inhabitants and rice farmers of the developing world or the fast-food-consuming, plastic-wearing socially disadvantaged of the developed world, we should put focus on the inconspicuous-looking, well-dressed rich people hidden behind tinted limousine windows, in spacious lofts high above the city, or behind tall hedges on their country estates.
Rich people lead a disproportionately more destructive lifestyle than poor people. Sure, people from developed nations are statistically responsible to a higher degree than inhabitants of poor countries, and city people are generally more pollutive than their rural counterpart. But the excessively wealthy (and those who strive desperately to become like them) are most to blame, regardless of their nationality (but especially so if they are living in the urban or suburban centers of the developed world). The elite of Bangladesh, Nigeria or Guatemala is many times more dangerous to the environment than the lower class of the US or Europe. This is not so much about nationality, skin color or gender, (like the media wants you to believe — a distraction?) as it is about wealth — there are quite a few superrich women and black people, for example, who consume and pollute much more than lower class Caucasian males — so just blaming “white men” (like the left all too often does) shows injustices that we should definitely work to eliminate, but ultimately misses the point. It is first and foremost a class issue, and you can appreciate this whether you call yourself a communist or not.
All this indicates that we ought not look to the upper class when it comes to solving the pressing issues we’re facing. We cannot wait for them to make changes, because they won’t. Real change would cause them to lose their jobs and dramatically reduce their standard of living.
They might employ some fancy talk about “sustainable development” (which itself is a textbook example of an oxymoron), or publish 200-page-long “sustainability reports” for their shareholders (that nobody ever reads), they might change the color of their websites to green, use pictures of the natural world to advertise their products, or pay for fake ‘sustainability certificates’ for their companies — yet all this is merely window-dressing a slaughterhouse.
Ultimately they do nothing except for a few superficial changes, which they then focus all the publicity on. Their own private lives will not change, since (especially rich) people have a hard time reducing anything — once they have a certain standard of living, it seems almost impossible for them to give it up again. They might say they have no choice, they are just doing their job, people depend on them, but those are all blatant lies. Nobody needs mansions with five bedrooms and a vast park around them, or several vacation homes. Nobody needs private jets or luxury cars. Nobody needs to travel halfway around the planet every other week to attend “business meetings”, “charity events”, or fancy dinner parties. Nobody needs “luxury”.
Species extinctions of famous and beloved species like rhinos, elephants, or certain bird species are driven directly by rich people’s desire for “luxury goods” — rare and expensive items they use to distinguish themselves from the masses and show off their “status”. And even worse: plainly shooting rare animal species for fun is a favored pastime activity of the wealthy.
We cannot count on the rich people to steer us away from catastrophe, because they will be in their five-star bunkers or their private hideout in New Zealand, high above the ever-rising sea levels, or on board their 30m luxury yacht drinking champagne — while the rest of us fights for the few places that are still livable in the near future.
Even though I don’t have a lot of faith in political institutions, all this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vote for environmentalist politicians, protest environmental crimes, or lobby environmental issues. It just means that we shouldn’t count on this strategy alone to bring about the required change. Chances of success are arguably slim, and it’s well-nigh impossible to beat the system at its own game (“if voting would change anything, they’d make it illegal”), but having people at least try to fight the rich ‘the legal way’ already helps keeping the rich at bay and avoiding the worst. So if there is a protest, you might as well join. Just don’t think that that’s enough.
It also doesn’t mean that all rich people are necessarily devils. We might be able to forgive them if they show real remorse — like using all their (stolen!) money to liberate land (during the transition period towards a regenerative mode of living), let it rewild, and make it accessible for people pledging to take good care of it.
Contrary to popular opinion, the system exists not because the people need it, it exists because the few who profit from it have enough power to maintain the status quo. People existed long before there even was any system, and they were fine without it. The people are under the false impression that they need the system, but only because the rich and powerful (some of whom own and control the mass media) purposely show no attractive alternatives to consumer-capitalism. And why should they? If there would be any alternative, even if only slightly better, millions of unhappy and involuntary urban workers would quit their jobs, withdraw from city life, and finally desert from this stressful, time-consuming and exploitative system. This would cause the rich great losses in potential profits, and leave them with a smaller workforce to keep the system running (and make themselves richer in the process). The rich peoples’ jobs and livelihood depends on the people having no alternative, so that they will stay docile, keep consuming, and go to work despite not liking it. The elites constantly spread untrue gossip through their propaganda channels to maintain the status quo: Humans need the system, because who will feed them if not genetically modified crops, industrial farming and supermarkets? Humans need technology, because otherwise how would they survive and what would they do in their free time? Look at what we have, look at how far we’ve come! Aren’t all those shiny toys we produce great? Don’t they make your life better? Oh, imagine how grey and somber your life would be without all those things! You are truly lucky to live in our civilization!
If you try to challenge a rich person face-to-face by pointing out their disproportionate share in the damage inflicted on the natural world, they will sometimes warn you not to “bite the hand that feeds you” — you depend on the employers to get money and on the system for the basic necessity of life, so you better not dare to insult its rulers. Of course, they don’t really feed you, they merely give you money which is not edible. Feeding someone implies intimate care, and to them you’re a replaceable cog in the machine.
Anyway, it becomes much easier to criticize elites if you feed yourself, since only then can you bite as many hands as you want without ever fearing to go hungry. This is what they are really afraid of, and this is why this society makes it so difficult for people to pursue a self-sufficient lifestyle. When you don’t depend on them for your food and water, they lose control and influence over you.
This is the direction in which we should go. There are alternatives, and they might be even better on the individual level than everything our civilization promises.
Surprisingly enough it is anthropology — a field of study that came into being with the sole purpose of finding evidence for the alleged superiority of Western civilization — that may finally bring the house of cards down.
Humans outside or on the fringes of our civilizations have led a content, purposeful and happy life, at least as long as we left them alone. Primitive people not only have the smallest ecological footprint of all humans, their simple life is — contrary to popular belief — full of joy, leisure and pleasure.
They are proud of their way of life, and not afraid to defend it with their very lives. Don’t believe me? Ask a member of one of the few still remaining tribes of ‘savages’ if they think they need technology and a sheer endless flow of material goods.
Yanomami shaman and jungle inhabitant Davi Kopenawa, who already spoke to the parliaments of several Western countries in his campaign to defend the Amazon rainforest, scolds us and our culture:
“It is the white people who are greedy and make people suffer at work to extend their cities and accumulate their merchandise [consumer goods] there, not us! This merchandise is truly like a fiancée to them! Their thought is so attached to it that if they damage it while it is still shiny, they get so enraged that they cry! They are really in love with it! They go to sleep thinking about it like you doze off with the nostalgia of a beautiful woman. It occupies their thoughts even after they fall asleep. So they dream of their car, their house, their money, and all their other goods — of those they already possess and those they desire again and again. It is so. Merchandise makes them euphoric and obscures all the rest of their mind.
As for me, I do not have a taste for possessing much merchandise. My mind cannot set itself on it. In the beginning its attractive, yes, but it quickly gets damaged and then we start to miss it. I do not want to keep such things in my mind. For me, only the forest is a precious good. Knives get blunt, machetes get chipped, pots get black, hammocks get holes, and the paper skins of money come apart in the rain. Meanwhile, tree leaves can stiffen and fall, but they will always grow back, as beautiful and bright as before.”
His words are collected in a remarkable book that everybody should read in their lifetime, if just to extend their horizon and get a more wholesome perspective on humans and our place in this world. In ‘The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman’, he explores and explains his own and our culture in great detail, and makes it clear that our behavior is neither natural nor necessary. Another, much simpler way of life is actually much better in terms of quality than the monstrous cities we’ve built for ourselves and that we are so proud of.
“For me, it is not at all pleasant to live in the city. My thought is always worried and my chest short of breath. I don’t sleep well there, I only eat strange things, and I am always afraid I will be hit by a car. I can never think calmly in the city. It is a worrisome place. People constantly ask you for money for everything, even to drink or urinate. Everywhere you go you find a multitude of people rushing in every direction though you don’t know why. You walk quickly among strangers, without stopping or talking, from one place to another. The lives of white people who hurry around all day like ants seem sad to me. They are always impatient in the city an anxious not to get to their job late or be thrown away. They barely sleep and run all day in a daze. They only talk about working and the money they lack. They live without joy and age rapidly, constantly busying themselves with acquiring new merchandise, their minds empty. Once their hair is white, they disappear, and the work — which never dies — survives them without end. Then their children and grandchildren continue doing the same thing!”
Recorded, transcribed and translated, the words of this tribal elder resonate with our current crisis, and show that an alternative does not only exist, but that it is being pursued successfully for hundreds of thousand years until this very day. Those leading this lifestyle are not only proud of it, but they won’t trade it for anything:
“I know now that our ancestors inhabited this forest from the beginning of time and that they left it for us to live in after them. They never mistreated it. Its trees are beautiful and its soil fertile. The wind and the rain keep it cool. We eat its game, its fish, the fruit of its trees, and its wild honeys. We drink the waters from its rivers. Its humidity makes the banana plants, the manioc, the sugarcane, and everything we plant in our gardens grow. We travel through it to go to the reahu fests we are invited to. We lead our hunting and gathering expeditions along its many trails. The spirits live in it and play all around us. Omama [the god who created sky, the rivers, the forest and its inhabitants] created this land and brought us to existence here. He planted the mountains to hold the ground in place and turned them into the houses of the xapiri [spirits], whom he left to take care of us. It is our land and these are true words.”
It is the reckless invasion of our culture with its missionaries, gold miners, loggers and poachers that made him come out of the forest and speak up for his people and the forest itself.
“These white people are truly enemies of the forest. They do not know how to eat what comes from it. They can only clear it like koyo [leafcutter] ants. And all this not to grow anything there! Just to sow weeds [grazing grounds] they abandon as soon as they become stunted and their cattle grows skinny!”
And it is not only the Yanomami who think like that. On the other side of the globe, in the forests of Borneo in Malaysia, primitive tribes are threatened by encroaching land development and logging operations. The Penan tribe, which got famous after Swiss national Bruno Manser lived with them for six years, holds similar views about our culture and its aspirations. In another account of aboriginal thought, ‘Nomads of the Dawn: The Penan of the Borneo Rain Forest’ author Wade Davis makes their voice heard through word-by-word translations of their speeches accompanying pictures of the astonishing beauty of their life in the forest. Lejeng Kusin, an elderly woman of the Ubong River Penan, finds moving words:
“And if this forest were cut down, if this place were ruined by logging, they wouldn’t need to send two or three people here to assault us and kill is. They could send just one person, and he would be strong enough to kill as all for sure. Because we are not used to seeing open spaces, we are not used to seeing trees that have been felled and destroyed. Because there would be nothing left to make us want to live, because the trees we yearn for would have been destroyed. And if they were to say that we were happy, happy in this place after it is logged, it would really mean that they do not want us to live. They do not want us to be happy. They want to assault us and kill us. Surely we don’t feel happy or proud about the logging because all these bulldozers, all this logging, is harmful to us. This is our problem, this is our difficulty. We can never be happy living on red ground. And we always feel sad and troubled. When we look at the forest that has been destroyed, we feel the way one feels after not having eaten for a long time.
We yearn for the sounds of the forest. We have always heard these sounds. In the time of our grandparents long ago we heard these sounds. That is why we still yearn to hear them. In those times long ago, our lives were satisfying, our lives were fulfilled. And now it is harder for us, because we hear the sound of bulldozers. And that is what we always talk about, we women, when we get together. How will we live, how will we thrive, now that we have all these new problems? To us the sound of bulldozers is the sound of death. We feel sorrowful, we weep, when we see the forest has been destroyed, when we see the red land. It is hard for us to look at the red land.”
Similarly, Mutang Urud, a member of the Kelabit people and a neighbor to the Penan, addressed the UN General Assembly in 1992:
“The government says that it is bringing us progress and development. But the only development that we see is dusty logging roads and relocation camps. For us, their so-called progress means only starvation, dependence, helplessness, the destruction of our culture, and the demoralization of our people. The government says it is creating jobs for our people. But these jobs [as loggers] will disappear along with the forest. In ten years, the jobs will all be gone, and the forest which has sustained us for thousands of years will be gone with them.
Why do we need jobs? My father and my grandfather did not have to ask the government for jobs. They were never unemployed. They lived from the land and from the forest. It was a good life. We had much leisure time, yet we were never hungry, or in need. These company jobs take men away from their families for months at a time. They are breaking apart the vital links that have held our families and our communities together for generations. These jobs bring our people into a consumer economy for which they are not prepared.
An old man I know once asked a policeman why it was he could not blockade a road on his own land. The policemen told him that Yayasan Sarawak [a Malaysian foundation] had been given the license to log the forest, and so the land belongs to the company. This is what the old man said in reply: “Who is this Yayasan Sarawak? If he really owns the land, why have I never met him in the forest during my hunting trips over the last sixty years?”
A woman I know who has seven children once came to me and said, “This logging is like a big tree that has fallen on my chest. I often awake in the middle of the night, and I and my husband talk endlessly about the future of our children. I always ask myself, when will it end?””
The reason why I quote those tribal people at such great length is that they show that an alternative does not only exist, but that it seems to be a really comfortable alternative that works not only for humans but for the entire ecosystem they inhabit.
This might sound ridiculous, but only if you haven’t tried.
I for myself would have never even thought about defending the “civilized” lifestyle I was leading during the years of my adolescence, let alone with my life! I knew it was wrong and destructive, there just didn’t seem to be an alternative to it. This is why I chose to quit my job, flee the city, and head off into what I thought of as “Nature” at that time. I thought that if I learn how to feed and shelter myself, I would be one step further towards independence and true freedom. While this proved to be true, it was studying the lives of primitive tribes that finally showed me a real alternative that is truly sustainable on the long term, and I came to admire the courage of tribes all over the world defending an ancient, natural way of life for humans. I also learned that you don’t have to move into the wilderness to live a much simpler life close to Nature — you can start with severely degraded farmland, as I did, and in a matter of only five years (in tropical climate) you will have a small forest brimming over with life that supplies you with everything you need, from a wide variety of foods to building materials like wood, bamboo, palm thatch and rope.
But the climate zone doesn’t seem to matter much. There are many people who, fed up with society, successfully pursue this lifestyle all over the world, as far north as Alaska! There are, for example, over 1500 registered intentional communities worldwide, many of which grow their own food and are or aspire to be self-sufficient.
We evolved over millions of years to fit into natural ecological niches, developed a uniquely human lifestyle checked and balanced by our environment, and lived together as a supportive group of a few close friends and family members anthropologists call ‘tribe’. Our body hasn’t changed much since the Stone Age (at least not for the better!), and deep inside we’re still wild animals. We need Nature, we are inseparably part of her, and the more we deny this, the worse it makes us feel deep down.
Now, after a few thousand years of destroying our environment to build shiny things, we think we’ve created ourselves a much better niche than Nature could ever have. But if this new, artificial niche is really all that good seems to be more and more in question. Somehow it doesn’t seem to work on the long term. We have more merchandise than ever before, yes, but to the benefits of civilized life really outweigh the hazards? What about all the invisible dangers, the pollution, the noise, the stress, the constant sensory overload? All the invisible things that slowly erode our sanity subconsciously, without us even noticing until one day we break down?
Just because we can survive in the city doesn’t mean this is how we’re supposed to live. We surround ourselves with nothing but other humans and artifice, and wonder why we sometimes still feel alone in this world. We forget that there is something else.
If we want to find a way out of our crisis, we have to look to the people who know and love their environment, call other living beings their family, and who evidently caused the least damage for the longest period of time. After all, we are exactly the same: the difference between city- and jungle homo sapiens is a mere cultural one. We have to open our ears to their words, and allow them to teach us what we’ve forgotten.
The capitalists on the other hand can’t and won’t have any helpful advice, since they are the most polluting members of society, and pollution, exploitation and destruction is the very basis of their lifestyle and ideology.
They happily blame the end consumer, saying that he or she needs to eat less meat/take shorter showers/install a solar panel/cycle to work/buy organic/donate to a charity/be more ‘mindful’ — but all this merely distracts from the damage they themselves are doing.
The materially richest and the materially poorest are as different as is possible, and it seems more and more that we have to choose sides. The choice is similar to that given to Achilles by the gods: do we want a short life of (false and meaningless) glory, with a violent ending? Or do we want a long, mediocre life at peace, and die of old age? Either we go for protecting Nature, or for destroying it. Every day we make a choice.
And every day, most of us choose to work for the system in exchange for a tiny part of its gains (which are Nature’s losses), just enough to keep us somewhat motivated and docile, never more.
The exploitation and therefore destruction of Nature is absolutely fundamental to financial profit of almost any kind. Without the (self-destructive and evolutionary unstable) idea that Nature is free for everyone to exploit without restrain, capitalism simply wouldn’t be possible. Wealth doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Most capital was once a part of an ecosystem, which got extracted (stolen), deformed, and sold to make a profit. Nature provides so-called “ecosystem services” free of charge (since money is only important to one of the 10 million species on this planet), without which no corporation would make profit. A team of economists calculated in 1997 that for every dollar worth of goods and services consumed by humans annually, 75 cents (!) are provided by the Earth’s ecosystems — completely free of charge, first come, first served.
If you would ask those ecosystems and their inhabitants what they think of this (and if you would understand their answers), it would become obvious that this unpaid service is involuntary, and could therefore more accurately be called ‘ecosystem slavery’. But that sounds closer to the ugly truth, which we are so busy hiding because we are afraid to change our lives.
This ‘ecosystem slavery’ directly causes social inequality as well, since rich people always reap the most profits from destroying Nature — and the poor usually suffer most of the consequences.
Rich people can easily escape pollution, heat, noise, rising sea levels, hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, floods, and crop failures. They have the financial means to travel or flee wherever they want, move to higher ground, buy air-conditioning, isolated windows, and food for every price from international markets. They are firmly confident that if they have money, they don’t need the ecosystem. Nature, for them inherently useless for anything else but human profit, is nothing more than a missed opportunity to make money.
It is in their direct interest to eradicate habitat after habitat to make more money. It is not the loggers, miners or poachers that make all the money, they are usually given a ridiculously small part of the profit — just enough to stay alive and continue doing their job.
This is how it has been ever since rich people came into being: once the earliest elites were established, it became business-as-usual for them to expand the territory they exploit, resulting in ever more riches for themselves. All this was and is done at the expense of humans, other animals, and plants inhabiting those wild places, who were and are driven off their land or killed. To keep the money coming in, more land needed to be cleared, more grain needed to be planted, and more resources needed to be extracted. The 10,000-year history of our civilization is characterized by elites leading the transformation of wild places into profitable land, traditionally through forcing commoners to do the work and extracting taxes under threat of violence. In this regard little has changed over the millennia.
If you follow down the lavishly furnished rabbit hole of rich-people-history, you will, like the (purposely apolitical) members of a growing weltanschauung called (Anarcho-)Primitivism, end up blaming the very first system that created the very first elites: the earliest agricultural civilizations and their economic surplus. Without agriculture, no surplus, and without surplus, no elites.
Thinking this through until the very end, it becomes obvious that it all started spinning out of control when humans changed to a sedentary, agricultural mode of living, therefore creating cities, elites, power, wealth, injustice, laws, armies, priests, slavery, organized warfare, famine, epidemic disease, and all the other great joys and wonders of civilization.
Agriculture, roughly defined as monocropping on the field scale (from Latin ‘ager’: field) is inherently expansive and destructive, since the carbohydrate-based diet and sedentary lifestyle enabled by agriculture allows rapid population growth, and because of the opportunities for power it creates.
Stable carbohydrates like grains automatically signal food security to the body, and therefore increase the likelihood of pregnancy in women. With soft food (boiled grains) readily available, children can be weaned earlier, and pregnancies can be spaced shorter when one lives sedentary (as opposed to nomadic, where one has to carry a child everywhere). While tribal life is easier with a limited number of kids, in an agricultural society you can never have enough. First of all to replace the ones dying from malnourishment, famine or epidemic, and second to turn them into a free workforce for creating an ever-greater surplus, which optimally translates to greater wealth and concomitantly power.
We humans are a species walking the fine line between cooperation and competition, peacefulness and violence, egalitarianism and hierarchy, or, how I like to phrase it, between Bonobo and Chimpanzee. We can successfully do both, as history shows, yet one side tends to make people happier — especially in the long run. Humans have a soft spot for power, and while people can live out their most cruel and megalomaniac fantasies in the agricultural land of plenty, hunter-gatherers have developed sophisticated mechanisms to eliminate much this power-drive for the sake of group stability and overall happiness. When Richard Lee went to study the indigenous Ju/’hoan people of the Kalahari Desert, an old healer told him:
“When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”
Anyhow, it is virtually impossible to exert much power over anyone in a society in which everybody knows all skills necessary to survive (and can therefore just run away), and in which people don’t acquire and worship merchandise (that can be appropriated). Leadership in agricultural societies is based on material wealth and bloodlines, while leadership among hunter-gatherers is usually flexible and transitory, and depends on factors such as an individual’s wisdom, knowledge, skill, charisma, cleverness, persuasiveness, or whatever else is needed in a particular situation.
But if even agriculture is wrong, what is the alternative? How can we avoid elites to emerge again and again, how can we stop them from turning us and the ecosystems we inhabit into their servants?
Don’t worry, we don’t all have to become hunter-gatherers in order to avoid the worst — even more so, if we would all start foraging tomorrow, the planet would be devoid of edible plants and wildlife within a week.
There is a better way, a way of resisting, refusing, rethinking, reducing, restoring, rehabilitating, reviving, and rewilding. A way of regeneration, rediscovery, and reconnection.
We will have to change our lives enormously, work hard, and probably shift to an entirely new subsistence mode. But one thing at a time.
First, we need to figure out what the goal is and how we will get there.