The magical reach of the blogosphere has allowed me to make some of the most amazing connections of my life. One of these was with a kossack known here as WarrenS who very kindly sent me a couple of books a few months back as a gift. I was still deep into Jon Lee Anderson’s 750-page tome, CHE at the time and so was a while getting to Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and Beyond Civilization, the two books Warren sent.
I fully expected both books to be of interest, chosen as they were by a guy whose intellect I had come to respect, but I had no idea just how interesting they would prove to be. I’ll not pretend to review them here but I do want to discuss some of the ideas at their heart, as they are so pertinent to our present predicament.
The advent of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, commonly viewed as the beginning of humanity’s rise, was also, in the longer view, the beginning of our downfall. Having figured out how to raise more food than we could eat led inexorably to an expansion of our population, which at first and for the longest time was not particularly alarming. But every time we grew more food than it took to sustain us, our population grew. No one foresaw that we would one day outgrow the planet’s capacity to sustain us...yet here we are.
Quinn divides humanity into two camps he calls takers and leavers. The leavers are traditional tribal societies, hunter-gatherers whose ethos is take what you need and leave the rest. The takers are agriculturalists whose ethos is take everything. The leavers see man as belonging to the world while the takers see the world as belonging to man. The leavers strive to live in harmony with nature - the takers seek to subdue it. The leavers want to care for the earth and think of themselves as living in ‘the hands of the gods’ as part of nature and members of the community of life. The takers want to conquer and rule the earth and view themselves apart from nature with the power and right to kill whatever displeases them. Leavers might kill a deer, a rabbit or a buffalo for sustenance, but it takes a taker to wipe them from the face of the earth.
Modern society is a taker society. We have all but eradicated the leavers of the world, killing them for their land – which we have long assumed to be our right. We pride ourselves on our advancement and think of the consumer life as our birthright. We see our bright, shiny, plastic, neon artificial existence as unquestionably a good thing, a mark of our superiority. Only backward peoples live simply on the earth.
We think of the leavers of the earth as living a hand-to-mouth existence full of anxiety and uncertainty. They live without banks, insurance, credit cards or security. They don’t have jobs or paychecks or pension plans. We assume that their lives are desperate and miserable.
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.
Leavers have little in the way of modern comfort and convenience. Yet they are born, live for a time and then die...just as we do. Many of our perceived advantages are illusory, and many of them may well be more trouble than they are worth. Certainly, taken as a whole, they are precisely that if the price is ultimately the death of the biosphere and the end of the community of life.
It’s not like the leavers don’t enjoy their lives, they do, and it can be argued that, on the whole, they enjoy them more than we enjoy ours. Our lives, for all our modern contrivances, are not exactly worry-free. We still face calamity, uncertainty, illness and death. We just do it differently. We seek to avoid our own nature, the nature of life and the way of the world instead of simply embracing them...but in the end, there is no escape.
Why all this talk of leavers? Are they not passé? Relics of a time gone by before man became advanced? Not really. The leavers are the future of mankind, assuming there is a future at all...and that is an increasingly large assumption. If we survive the coming apocalypse of our own making, we will do so by returning to the leaver’s worldview. Whatever of our ‘advancements’ we manage to keep will need to fit into the view that we belong to the world and not the other way around, that the world is to be cared for, not conquered, and that we are a part of the community of life, not its judge, jury and executioner. We need to be looking to the Native Americans and their ilk for guidance as we go forward into a very different world. Civilization, as we have known it, is coming to an end.
We need hope and we need it badly. Indeed, our need for a reason to believe in the future is so desperate that we find ourselves clutching at straws. ‘The Stimulus Has Saved the Economy’ the headlines blare, even at progressive venues like Daily Kos, when we all know the truth is much darker and less simplistic. The can has been kicked a little further down the road is closer to the truth.
Well, yes, if you throw a large enough amount at the issue, something will stick for a little while. That's not a surprise. Neither is it a recovery. It's just a very expensive way to hide the underlying problems. And it doesn't just hide them, of course, it makes them worse at the same time. Going as deeply into debt as we have, as individuals and as a nation, is bad enough. To pretend you can solve the problems caused by that debt without paying it off, or even seriously addressing it for that matter, is far worse.
It should be obvious, for instance, that the trillions thrown at Wall Street banks are wasted penny for penny, because those banks are, hard as it is to imagine, even deeper in debt than the government and its citizens. The fact that both the banks and the government continue to attempt so painstakingly to avoid anyone from taking a look at the bad loans and toxic paper they have in their vaults should tell you all you need to know on the subject.
The Automatic Earth
And while mighty transfers of wealth, from the bottom to the top, serve to prop up for a time the massive house of cards that is our economy, next to nothing is being done, ACES notwithstanding, to intervene in the planetary ecocide now well under way.
Within just a few decades, experts are warning, the tropical reefs strung around the middle of our planet like a jewelled corset will reduce to rubble. Giant piles of slime-covered rubbish will litter the sea bed and spell in large distressing letters for the rest of foreseeable time: Humans Were Here.
How global warming sealed the fate of the world's coral reefs
We are going to have an apocalypse of sorts, one of our own making. The only question is will it be gradual and gentle or devastatingly sudden and catastrophic, whether it will come on tiptoes or in hobnail boots. So far so good for the tiptoe scenario...but then again, one never knows. The future is notoriously difficult to predict. I believe there is only one thing certain – if we don’t manage to change our ways profoundly and rapidly, we will very likely succeed in wiping ourselves out and in the process bring the community of life to all but a total end.
It is estimated that 200 species a day are going extinct as a direct result of human activity. If this continues, one of these days one of those species will be our own.
Last year, there were more than 90 oil spills per day in the United States.
Alaska Wilderness League
People find it hard to imagine nothing ever being the same again – but things are never going to return to ‘normal’. We’ve turned that corner. Things are going to become increasingly different. Quinn has something to say about this in Beyond Civilization.
No paradigm is ever able to imagine the next one. It’s almost impossible for one paradigm to imagine that there will even be a next one. The people of the Middle Ages didn’t think of themselves as being in the ‘middle’ of anything at all. As far as they were concerned, the way they were living was the way people would be living to the end of time. Even if you’d managed to persuade them that a new era was just around the corner, they would’ve been unable to tell you a single thing about it – and in particular they wouldn’t have been able to tell you what was going to make it new. If they’d been able to describe the Renaissance in the fourteenth century, it would have been the Renaissance.
We’re no different. For all our blather about new paradigms and emerging paradigms, it’s an unassailable assumption among us that our distant descendants will be just exactly like us. Their gadgets, fashion, music, and so on, will surely be different, but we’re confident that their mindset will be identical – because we can imagine no other mindset for people to have. But in fact, if we actually manage to survive here, it will be because we’ve moved into a new era as different from ours as the Renaissance was from the Middle Ages – and as unimaginable to us as the Renaissance was to the Middle Ages.
Daniel Quinn in Beyond Civilization
So how do we prepare for a vision of the future we cannot yet imagine? One meme at a time says Quinn – more about that later.
Expect increasing hysteria from conservatives who fear change above all else because change is coming one way or another – and I’m not talking modest changes in our usual way of doing things, a little tinkering with the healthcare system or modest changes to the status quo. I’m talking about wrenching, jarring, bone-deep changes in nearly every aspect of our lives. I’m talking about a fundamental transformation of civilization. I’m talking about moving from a taker civilization to a leaver civilization...and it’s not a matter of choice. If we survive at all, it will be because we manage to weather this transition and the changes that are roaring down on us all like a runaway freight train. The best we can hope for is to get through it.
It would help if we’d start willingly making changes now, like significantly reducing our greenhouse emissions and such. That may be too much to ask though of what has become an almost totally dysfunctional society. We have come to a point where we cannot bring ourselves to do the right things, even when virtually all of our smartest members understand to a very large extent what the right things are. It may take the utter collapse of the global economy to force the necessary changes for our ultimate survival. I guess we can always hope for that. # Sigh. #
We are killing the world's coral reefs and their situation is virtually hopeless.
Magnifico’s diary, Reefer Sadness: "The future is horrific"
The world’s coral reefs are projected by experts to be dead in forty years, which will surely lead to cascading catastrophes leading ultimately to the death of virtually every ecosystem in the entire biosphere. It’s a very narrow window we have to work with – and it takes an optimist to see any window there at all.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t wish suffering and cataclysm on mankind – but I do see it as, to some degree, inevitable. We need to be thinking hard about changing our ways and meeting these challenges. I would advise learning about growing your own food and becoming self-reliant in ways you may have heretofore thought primitive. Primitive living is the new radical chic. Those who have gone off the grid and become self-reliant are way ahead of the pack. The survivalists are likely to have the last laugh on planet earth. I say learn to sew and preserve food. Learn to garden, raise chickens (they lay eggs) and discover permaculture, primitive architecture, off the grid living...and first-aid.
It is distressing to me that so many of us want to cling to the familiar because that widespread and stubborn tendency prevents us from preparing for a future which is sure to be profoundly different. So many want to think that our old way of life can be salvaged, that the economy will be saved, our government restored, that there will always be food in the grocery stores, money in the banks, doctors at the hospitals, casinos in Vegas. And maybe some of these things will be true to some extent for some period of time yet...it is hard to say with any degree of certainty – but they cannot be counted upon. Even if we manage to hang onto electronic communications, science, medicine or any other of the more desirable features of our taker world, get ready for a leaver world. It’s coming...sooner or later. We must learn to live simpler lives, closer to the earth and more in harmony with it. We must stop using pesticides, artificial fertilizer and burning fossil fuels. We must embrace our place in the community of life and work hard to preserve it. We must relinquish our role as takers, cease our self-destructive practices and learn to take only that which we need...and to leave the rest.
It’s time to face the fact that the way we’ve done it is wrong, that there are smart alternatives to western civilization and that our old ways won’t take us much further into the future. We need to become more like the leavers, more like the Native Americans, if we are to survive.
Lest you think I’m all doom and gloom, let me say with equal or greater force that there is a bright side to all of this. It is wisdom itself to embrace the good news as antidote to the bad...and the good news is - we can do this. We must do this. And once we have, humanity will be better off as will the entire community of the living. As the smartest animal, arguably, the fate of the entire community of the living falls to us. There is but one animal that can save the ecosphere...and we’re it. It is up to us to pull it out of the fire – and that would be true even if we hadn’t been the ones to set the fire in the first place.
My son Daniel has decided that permaculture is his life’s calling. He plans to transfer to a university out west to major in environmental studies, specializing in permaculture. He has taught me all I know about the subject, and I know just enough to know it is an important part of the solution to many of our biggest problems: the amount of carbon in our atmosphere, the need for sustainable agriculture for food production, the need to stop acidifying the oceans with our agricultural run-off, the need to allow people to be self-reliant and self-sustaining, and the need to preserve life as if it mattered to us.
Daniel has been telling me about Geoff Lawton of the Permaculture Research Institute and how he has developed permaculture techniques for designing and establishing poly-cultural (as opposed to traditional mono-culture) food forests that will:
Sequester large amounts of carbon
Reclaim wasteland
Harvest water from the air even in arid climates
Produce large quantities of food without insecticide or artificial fertilizer and without large ongoing labor inputs or the burning of fossil fuels
The intelligent application of permaculture techniques could allow us to transform small to medium plots of land (peoples lawns for example) into virtual gardens of Eden.
Here’s a video about how Geoff Lawton reclaimed 2 acres of salted barren desert 2 kilometers from the Dead Sea:
There are numerous hopeful developments in technology and science as well, such as the following: Lower-cost Solar Cells To Be Printed Like Newspaper, Painted On Rooftops and the other developments Meteor Blades talked about in his diary: Good News on Rooftop Solar. Biden Beams.
In Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn, talks about memes as the way to achieve a vision we cannot yet imagine. He says the way to do it is one meme at a time. The term meme, coined by Richard Dawkins, refers to special kinds of ideas that are the cultural equivalent of genes in the biological realm. They spread not through reproduction but through communication and have the power to reshape the cultural ‘organism’. Much of what we are involved in here at Daily Kos is the propagation and spreading of memes. That we have evolved such a robust means of spreading them is a very hopeful development that can help us overcome our cultural inertia or resistance to new ideas. Without the Internet’s capacity for spreading new memes, global warming deniers might have won the debate, Barack Obama might not be our president, and etcetera. Memes have power, and we have powerful new ways of spreading them - all in all, a very hopeful development.
Still, changing our lives and our society into an eco-friendly, sustainable entity while dramatically dialing down greenhouse gas emissions and ceasing the poisoning of the biosphere will require more of the leaver approach to life on earth. And the adjustment is sure to be a tremendous challenge.
I’m not trying to scare anyone, there’s no point in being afraid. I am trying to persuade people to be serious about the coming changes. We need to get our hearts and our heads ready for that which is coming, and we need to be serious about our responsibilities to protect the biosphere and the community of the living. Beyond that, there’s nothing at all worth worrying about...nothing at all.
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.
Here are some helpful and hopeful links Daniel provided me:
The Permaculture Research Institute
The California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture
EarthbagBuilding.com
Finally, I heartily recommend the two Daniel Quinn books so graciously sent to me by WarrenS: Ishmael and Beyond Civilization. They contain some of the most important topical ideas I’ve encountered in a long while. The former is a highly didactic novelization of Quinn’s ideas while the latter is a very straightforward distillation of them.