Is Hunting and Gathering Really Better Than Agriculture?

 

Popcorn Overlook, Lake Burton, Georgia

Answering the question of the title of this entry, an article first published 37 years ago written by Jared Diamond says, "YES!" 

Comprehending precisely why civilization is unsustainable requires a rather extensive knowledge of the technology of agriculture. But it isn't enough to simply understand agriculture in and of itself, one must also comprehend how ALL technology use reduces and/or removes negative feedbacks which once used to keep our numbers in check with the rest of nature. Agriculture may have started this process in earnest, but it also provided for innovation in many other fields (pun intended) as I wrote about in this article. Language (both oral speech and written material such as this article) and fire and simple technologies preceded agriculture and were formative innovations. Just like everything else in this blog, these innovations were all seen to be good things by most people until we "lifted the hood to see what's underneath."

That's the one true thing about this blog - that I keep finding more and more items which we were all conditioned to believe are good things which in reality have very dark sides to them. Agriculture, technology, civilization, and quite literally many more subjects (those three main topics cover a LOT of ground!) ALL have dark sides making them unsustainable. So, to be honest, we've been running down the road to extinction for a very long time. We just didn't really know it, and for most people, The Limits to Growth study was probably the first time such a concept even entered one's mind. William Catton, Jr. brought a reminder to us in 1980 in Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. 

So perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising that something we've been led to believe was an awesome development in our "history of progress" turns out to be less than stellar. It really isn't until one realizes that agriculture, technology, and civilization are uniquely tied together and form the basis of the ideas behind this blog that he or she understands precisely why hunting and gathering really were better than agriculture (because it was the only sustainable way to live, basing our lives on the renewable energy and resources of plants and animals). I hate to be the bringer of even more bad news (or, possibly one can see this as a good thing), but this is what we will also be returning to, as the predicaments we face will make any other existence temporary at best. I must make it clear that it is possible that we may not even reach this existence; we may go extinct before living like this on a large scale becomes necessary ("large scale" being the planetary population and numbering in the tens of millions to possibly hundreds of millions, nowhere near the more than 8 billion currently inhabiting this planet today). Another article written from a person in the field who is witnessing ecological collapse tells a story that should scare the heck out of anyone. I've heard stories of the same type in my own neck of the woods, and a member in the group I run on Facebook tells us that she will not be harvesting any hazelnuts this year due to a false spring last fall that caused her 200 hazel trees to bloom. She is worried about her apple trees' roots due to all the rain they have experienced in the UK since October and says that farmers in her area can't get spring wheat planted or herbicide put on due to the continuing rain. 

One of the best ways to answer the question of whether hunting and gathering is better than agriculture comes to us from an older documentary I posted in my last article, What a Way To Go: Life At The End of Empire. Daniel Quinn points out the reality at the 1:15:00 mark. Part of my posting this video again is to point out how each time you watch it, you'll notice something new or gain a different perspective than the first or the last time you watched it. Rex Weyler points this same exact experience out in an article from December which describes his experience with "warm data" inspired by Nora Bateson. It is an excellent article that brings many questions to our shared set of circumstances, which is apparently precisely the purpose of his adventure. 

Equally up to the task of providing questions (and quite a few answers, too, for that matter) to assist in the search for acceptance is a new one from Tom Murphy with this quote:

"When holding all the factors together, in relation to each other, it is exceedingly difficult to argue that modernity is at all likely to succeed. In order to contrast our actual situation with the sorts of contextual inputs that would offer convincing—but counterfactual—evidence that modernity has a decent chance of sustaining itself, consider the following list of statements in an alternate universe:

• Versions of modernity have succeeded numerous times in the universe, as evidenced by advanced alien civilizations almost everywhere we look.
• Modernity has been around on our planet for millions of years, so that life on Earth is fully adapted and compatible in an evolutionary sense.
• Modernity is not reliant on non-renewable energy sources, and has not been so for tens of thousands of years.
• Modernity hasn’t needed to mine new materials from geological deposits for countless millennia.
• Biodiversity is holding steady: with population increases balancing decreases; and extinctions consistent with background rates.
• Forest cover, fresh water, habitat, are all stable—as is climate in keeping with long-term natural variation (i.e., no anthropogenic contribution).

Each of these is demonstrably and overwhelmingly false, yet many would have to be simultaneously true to be convincing. Modernity, therefore, doesn’t have a leg to stand on in arguing for prospects of its long-term continuance. It’s empty, sputtering hope. Not only do we obviously lack the track record to demonstrate longevity (on timescales relevant to evolution), but this set of conditions cannot be convincingly illustrated even in theory—while paying attention to the full context. No one really knows how any of this could work, long-term, in anything other than vague, hand-wavy form.

Some might say that I am equally hand-wavy—unable to offer conclusive proof of modernity’s terminal condition. Sure: no one can claim certainty about the future, but I ask: which seems like a safer bet to manifest into the indefinite future:

1. A new mode unknown to exist elsewhere in the universe, causing lightning-fast ecological degradation on Earth (mass extinction), and by means that are not evaluated in terms of ecological sustainability; or
2. A reversion to the way things have worked for 99.9998% of Earth’s history?"

Seriously, one almost has to laugh at these questions, and yet there are still folks who don't seem to get it. I put these links in the last two paragraphs in a particular order for a good reason. To get people to change their mode of thinking, even if only temporarily; to see how their perspectives change, is an important part of the acceptance phase. Rex's experiment is mind-bogglingly similar to the experience I had when I discovered overshoot. All of a sudden, comprehension brought about by an "unlearning" of cultural conditioning which we were indoctrinated with clears one's mind in a "light bulb" moment and allows one to see past cognitive filters and our own denial process. For me, there has been the driving force of curiosity, partly due to the counterintuitive feel (based on the indoctrination mentioned above, which seems to contradict the facts [see wetiko for more on this phenomenon]) to what one learns when discovering overshoot. Very few people seem to realize that civilization is unsustainable, or that overshoot is the root predicament causing all the symptom predicaments, or that our behavior of technology use is what causes overshoot, or that our habit of innovation is what leads to technology use...and all of this suddenly led to me thinking of this song by The Fixx.

Anyway, the real trick that I've been working on for the last month has been on the topic of acceptance. We all have trouble with it, because it is human to deny reality. Still, we also have the capacity to accept the facts and cast aside false beliefs. Some of what I have written about I hope might be able to help to shine some light on this to anyone who has had trouble with acceptance of the predicaments we face. Civilization as we know it will end soon because it is unsustainable. It's important for people to accept these realities and begin the task of learning how to live without the level of technology use we enjoy today, because soon the party will end. Time to Live Now!