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Living Borders
Another strange thing I have noticed thanks to my job: plants simply don’t recognize human borders. Plants will climb over or slip under fences, sneak their way around corners and up walls, and generally make a mess of nice clean edges. And yet, at the very same time, people regularly use plants to demarcate borders and to provide what is called “screening” in the biz, affording a certain measure of privacy between houses which are close together.
Working on people’s yards is therefore kind of odd sometimes because you want to make sure that you maintain screening, but you also have to wage ceaseless war against the encroachment of plants (and weeds) belonging to neighbors. It’s a very immediate experience of the ridiculousness of human borders and our obsession with delineating ownership of spaces. On numerous occasions, we’ve had to determine where the property line is exactly, so we know how far to work during that session. Sometimes if they are around, we’ll run into neighbors during this process who will happily point out where these lines are, but jokingly add that if we want to work on their yard, then we are certainly welcome. It’s a joke that’s not funny the first time or the tenth time you’ve heard it, and yet you laugh politely anyway.
Author David Abram (big with the primitivists), who I had the pleasure to see speak several years ago, describes the role of the shaman in terms which call to mind this peculiar nature of plants as boundaries. He says the shaman is distinguished by “the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture-boundaries reinforced by social customs, taboos, and, most important, the common speech or language-in order to make contact with, and learn from, the other powers in the land.”
We touched on this subject a little bit recently as well with people like farmers and others who live closer to the land than most of us do. On the one hand, the activities of these people could be seen as enabling civilization to occur, but on the other, they are sometimes looked at culturally as being the “most wild” among us. An idea which occurred to me after reading Michael Pollan’s thoughts of the Greek god Dionysus, who was a liminal figure responsible for both domestication and intoxication. Pollan writes in The Botany of Desire:
… Dionysus was a figure of the fluid margins, slipping back and forth between the realms of wildness and civilization, man and woman, man and god, beast and man. I found Dionysus depicted variously as a wild man with foliage sprouting from his head, a goat, a bull, a tree, and a woman. Friedrich Nietzsche paints Dionysus as a figure able to dissolve “all the rigid and hostile barriers” between nature and culture.
The Greeks regarded Dionysus as the antithesis of Apollo, god of clear boundaries, order, and light, of man’s firm control over nature. Dionysian revelry melts every Apollonian line, so that, as Nietzsche writes, “alienated, hostile, or subjugated nature…. celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, man.” By worshipping Dionysus and getting drunk on his winw, the Athenians temporarily returned to nature, to a time when, as the classicist Jane Harrison writes, “man is still to his own thinking brother of plants and animals.” The odd, ecstatic worship of Dionysus, which needed no temple, always took place outside the city, returning religion to the woods where it had begun.
… In the Golden Bough, James Frazer says that, in addition to the grapevine, Dionysus was also the patron of cultivated trees and specifically credits him with the discovery of the apple. He was in fact the god of domestication itself, bringing “wisdom from the very breast of nature” (Nietzsche), teaching men not only to ferment wine but also to hitch their plow to the ox. Dionysus brought wild plants into the house of civilization, but by the same token his own untamed presence reminded people of the untamed nature on which that house lways rests, somewhat unsteadily.
What all these things, taken together, mean to me is that boundaries aren’t actually hard and fixed places where one thing is irrevocably separate from another. Instead, boundaries are the place where two things mix, here intimacy is at its absolute greatest and most heatedly passionate - skin on skin, fluids mixing. It seems like an all-important reconfiguration of our mental concepts as we strive to dissolve hard dichotomies which no longer really serve us in our investigations or lives.
October 3rd, 2006 at 11:39 am
This is what permaculturalists are talking about when they talk about “edge.” Boundaries aren’t fixed lines: they’re ongoing negotiations between one community (in this case, the human community) and the other communities that surround it.
October 3rd, 2006 at 12:42 pm
i see the role of the shaman as a reporter from beyond the border. to boldly go……..(?) we live in a predominantly left brained, visual society perfect for media saturation of the visual left brain. the shaman is equally comfortable in the right brained kineasthetic realm of disorder, chaos and flexibility, creativity and the systhesis of answers. there is no structure and boundaries in this paradigm, no laws, bylaws and moralising……..just alternatives. the shaman brings back a basket of these alternatives for the community to try as they see fit……..for the next thing they want to do.
October 3rd, 2006 at 1:46 pm
a human is basically just a digestive tube w. meat wrapped around it, taking in and then excreting nutrients from its surroundings
the meat is made out of these nutrients, the body also continually breathes in from the air around it and back out, the largest organ is the skin, which is the inside?
which is the outside? where is the border or boundary between human and not-human? you can’t take a human out of their environment and pop them into an isolation chamber and say “here is the human without food, water or air - the true human, cut off from the filthy enviornment” - that human will not be a living human but a corpse
point being the boudary between inner and outer is more fluid than we normally think of it, we are able to maintain the semblace of individual persisitence but its only a semblance, every 7 years or so every cell in the body is replaced, the cells are completely built out of ingredients from the environment and are sloughed back out to it on a continual basis as well…
we are separate from air, water, nutrients only because we think we are. those things are what make us up, we are just air, water nutrients in organized form
October 3rd, 2006 at 3:38 pm
rev, you are bang on. some are uncomfortable with that kind of characterisation but some just plain seek out discomfort. we are a bundle of basic stuff held up in some kind of enduring force or energy field……….i have had a lifelong fascination with that force……..the boundaries we establish are arbitrary.
in tokyo if you don`t fit in the subway car, a nice gentleman will shove you in with his foot. in new york he`d get to eat the foot for his trouble.
so boundaries are also cultural.
the fluidity of the boundries remains a fact. we think that they are immutable at times and that can be a good or bad, depending on the situation.
my son and i we in a restaurant and he was doing a maze puzzle on his place mat. he was struggling with it so i showed him a simple way to solve te puzzle. i drew a straight line across the page from start to finish.
not one rule broken.
problem solved.
sometimes problems are a matter of perception……..little else.
October 3rd, 2006 at 3:52 pm
A Theory of Power, chapter 1
October 3rd, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Tim , I think this post and the responses would make a good first chapter in your projected book. You have held up an idea in a clever and sincere, and intellectual way and thought provoking way.
This seems like a beginning concept of a larger picture to me. It stands all by itself though.
Gurfjieff , a favorite of mine , makes the point that there are three foods for humans. The literal food we eat. The air/energy we take in. The impressions that are taken in and also digested.
This third one is the only one we can control sometimes. How we digest these impressions , to form a part of our being.
I found your post here a tasty little meal.
October 3rd, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Jason:
But cities are always parasitic because even the smallest city (c. 5,000 people) is far, far more dense than even the most productive sustainable plots. The largest self-sustaining horticultural villages rarely break 300 people. To populate a city of 5,000 requires regular imports of food from a farmed hinterland dedicated to feeding the city. Humans exist fairly high up in the trophic levels, so it takes a good deal of food to feed 5,000 people.
Why does something have to be self-sufficient in order to be sustainable? Why is it that because cities must rely on regular imports of food from a farmed hinterland, they MUST be absolutely and inherently unsustainable? Why is relying on imports inherently unsustainable? The larger horticultural villages, for example, that did rely on imports and tribute–why were they unsustainable since the cultivation was not unsustainable? Why is relying on imports of food inherently unsustainable? I just don’t get it.
Like in Egypt, the agricultural system allowing for those imports and producing those imports was sustainable with the flooding of the Nile. The Nile River did support Egypt before the Aswan Dam.
Okay, I understand your opinion and your evidence. You think it is equal to horticulture, but I still am open to the possibility that it might be a synthesis, or a midpoint, since there are midpoints between horticulture and agriculture (like the Iroquois). You think it is reinventing the wheel–but I’m here to argue with you since I don’t think I’ve done enough research on it to agree with you or not. For all I know, you might be right. But I’m still open to the possibility that it is more than reinventing the wheel.
Maybe their brains were too stupid to resist in the first place. I fail to see how this does not benefit the domesticated animals, however, since they are fed, and while this may result in loss of biodiversity for the Earth, when we create grazing land, is this not benefical to the domesticated livestock? So how is this not beneficial to those cattle? When a pastoralist raises his cattle for his needs, and the cattle are fed and protected, how is that not a symbiosis between the pastoralist and the cattle, even if it might be at the expense of everyone else?
This is not an argument of sustainability, I am just extrapolating on your point about things that are good for one thing but evil for another.
As for your arguments about civilization’s growth, I still can’t understand your evidence, but I’m going to do other research. I’m done talking about it here.
Finally, just because I said your claims were unique does not mean that I was not open to the possibility that others have said those claims, or that they were false. I was saying that since this was the first time I had heard them, I did not understand where they were coming from. You obviously have done research and made citations for your arguments–I just didn’t know them. I also was baffled by your claims, and still am baffled by many of them. I just don’t get them, even when I was Taylor (and I am Taylor), even after I’ve read everything–your articles, even all 30 of the 30 Theses. So I just didn’t get it.
October 3rd, 2006 at 4:53 pm
As for your analogy on the Geneva Convention, sure, that does mean a war is going on, but it does mean that is not an absolute war–and they are ways of curbing that war. It also means that some ways of waging that war can be sustained by an ecology–sure, the Egyptians might have destroyed the Nile River Valley’s ecology and its arability eventually (but we cannot prove that since they were colonized, so we don’t know if they were able to do it), but it is true that regardless of whatever destruction they did to that ecology (or extinctions that they caused in the area), before the Aswan Dam, the Nile River was arable and sustained the Egyptian civilization for 5000 years, just like the Yellow River did sustain the Chinese civilization for 5000 years and was able to repair some of the damage and extinctions the Chinese made to their ecology. The Earth was able to repair some of that damage that allowed those civilizations to be supported during that time.
October 3rd, 2006 at 4:58 pm
Oops! A typo on the quotes.
True, it might be a small part, but then, the Chinese (who did return their human manure) must have returned other wastes to the soil as well. Humanure in itself might not be sufficient, but that plus other nutrients might be. Whatever it is, according to this source (The Humanure Handbook):
The Asian people have recycled humanure for thousands of years. The Chinese have used humanure agriculturally since the Shang Dynasty 3-4000 years ago. Why haven’t we westerners? The Asian cultures, namely Chinese, Korean, Japanese and others, evolved to understand human excrement to be a natural resource rather than a waste material. Where we have human waste, they have night soil. We produce waste and pollution; they historically have produced soil nutrients and food. It’s clear to me that Asians have been more advanced than the western world in this regard. And they should be, since they’ve been working on developing sustainable agriculture for four thousand years on the same land. For four thousand years those people have worked the same land with little or no chemical fertilizers and, in many cases, have produced greater crop yields than western farmers, who are quickly destroying the soils of their own countries through depletion and erosion.
And why is this inherently parasitic? Chinese cities did return some nutrients to the soil, and to the ecology (not just their wastes). If the agricultural system produces a surplus, and that can support a city, why is that city inherently a parasite?
Why does something have to be self-sufficient in order to be sustainable? Why is it that because cities must rely on regular imports of food from a farmed hinterland, they MUST be absolutely and inherently unsustainable? Why is relying on imports inherently unsustainable? The larger horticultural villages, for example, that did rely on imports and tribute–why were they unsustainable since the cultivation was not unsustainable? Why is relying on imports of food inherently unsustainable? I just don’t get it.
Like in Egypt, the agricultural system allowing for those imports and producing those imports was sustainable with the flooding of the Nile. The Nile River did support Egypt before the Aswan Dam.
October 3rd, 2006 at 5:00 pm
As for the quantity of food, I don’t know requirements or statistics, but obviously, agriculture was able to feed settlements of people much larger than 5,000 people even before industrialization, even though the cities might not have been self-sufficient.
As for Egypt, it is still true that before the Aswan Dam, the Nile River retained its arability for over 5000 years.
October 3rd, 2006 at 5:04 pm
Finally, as for misery, yes. I do want that life, retiring at 65 and working at 18. I do like that life. I like cities and urban living (which civilization can only provide for). I like the hustle and bustle. I like my life, my church, and all the other comforts I have. And I can’t understand why I can’t convince you why I like civilization and why some person might like civilization, but then, I’m sure you can’t understand why I like civilization and why I can’t accept that nobody likes civilization.
All of your theories are just a blur to me, and I just don’t get them. But then, I get this uncontrollable urge to post here, so if you want to stop talking to me, just do not respond, and I will not respond back. Comments do close on this post after five days.
October 3rd, 2006 at 5:04 pm
And that five day rule applies to other posts as well, for that’s how Tim runs this site.
October 3rd, 2006 at 6:11 pm
To aid the perplexed, I believe Taylor’s carrying over our discussion from a closed thread.
That’s not an uncommon claim, but almost always a fairly shallow one. Even 100% perfectly efficient use of all waste would still not be able to provide all the inputs required to keep such a system going—since the plants do some living, and then the humans do some living, and that all removes energy from the loop, so on each cycle there’s less energy going back in than before.
That’s not what makes it unsustainable. It’s a question of scale, and what it takes to maintain that scale, and what an ecology can take. It’s a very exceptional ecology that can produce enough density of food to support the density of population that would qualify as even a small city. This is a sliding scale that depends a lot on things like scale and trophic levels. If humans were simply herbivorous, our carrying capacity would be much larger (and notice that to get larger populations, we’re forced to adopt increasingly vegetarian diets, even when it becomes disastrously unhealthy for us as individuals (that might seem like an odd statement to First Worlders, but most civilized people at most times have only rarely tasted meat, generally subsisting off of cereal grains almost exclusively)). Humans are apex predators, so we exist at very high trophic levels. Each successive trophic level requires a longer and longer chain back to the ultimate energy source (the sun), so each one has an increasingly inefficient route, so each one has a successively smaller possible population. It takes a large grass population to support sheep; it takes a large sheep population to support wolves. Get it?
That’s like saying that there was nothing wrong with the burning house until the supports collapsed. What the Nile was previously supporting was an escalation that would either collapse (like putting the fire out), or eventually burn down the house.
Well, look at the techniques: seedballs, intercropping, food forests, etc. These aren’t just like horticultural techniques, these are horticultural techniques. The Haudenosaunee were using Fukoka’s seedballs centuries ago; North America was covered in food forests in 1491 (see Mann’s 1491); the Maya had “garden cities” nearly identical to the permacultural success story of Havana. If the techniques are exactly the same, what’s the difference?
The Norse preserved memory of the auroch—the giant, nigh-monstrous wild ancestor of cattle. It was enormous and incredibly intelligent. Hunting one down and killing it was how a boy proved his manhood. It was quite similar in many respects to our stories about dragons. So no, they weren’t very stupid to begin with. Take a look at Ted’s article, “The Wild Brain.”
But you’re right that even the most exploitative relationship is not entirely one way. Slaves must be fed, clothed and sheltered; wage slaves must be paid; serfs must be protected from raiding lords; clients must be defended by their patron in court. Likewise, livestock are fed in return for being kept captive in horrid conditions (I’m including a fenced acre of grassland, as offered by the kindest “organic” farms, in that), milked and eventually slaughtered.
Far more important than whether or not we want to use some perverse sense of symbiosis to describe our slave species is the fact that our domesticates are extremely few in number, and closely related. We destroy massive biodiversity in order to support a very small number of closely related large, herbivorous herd mammals.
When ants “farm” aphids, they protect the plants aphids eat from other insects. They do not plant them, and they do not tear out other, competing plants. They do not keep aphids captive, nor do they slaughter them. Their effect on biodiversity is wholly positive. The effect of our farming on biodiversity is wholly negative. That’s all the difference in the world.
Look into the Prisoner’s Dilemna, and you’ll see how people can be compelled to do things that are merely possible, even when no one really wants to.
That doesn’t follow at all. It means some wars are fought more voraciously than others, but they all end up in the same place: destroying themselves. It’s simply the difference between killing yourself quickly or slowly.
So how would you go about doing that? If you don’t want to destroy the river’s ecology, you need to keep your complexity below the Aswan Dam level. Remember, it doesn’t matter if it’s the Aswan Dam or something else: there’s all kinds of ways that complexity can break an ecology.
So, at some point, you need to stop your complexity from growing before it reaches that point. What does that mean? It means your economy stops growing. It means investment in the future has to become, at best, a 50/50 shot of getting anything out of it. The expected value for investing in your infrastructure must reach zero. That’s what it means to stop your complexity from growing. Of course, at that point, why would anyone put forth the effort to keep the grain supplies up, to keep the roads in repair, to build up the cities? These things are expensive, and we do it only because we can count on growth. Most of our investments, most of the time, will get us more than we put in. We’ve even formalized it as investment. Without it, the roads fall apart, the cities decay, the armies desert, and the people find easier ways to get what they need than toiling for the state all day. Civilization takes a lot of work, and without growth, it’s simply not worth it.
So, if your complexity ever stops growing, you collapse.
So, in order to have your sustainable, isolated Egypt, you need to stop your complexity from growing before you reach the point where your ecology can no longer support it. At the same time, you cannot allow your complexity to ever stop growing. That’s a contradiction; it can’t happen. So if the only way to have a sustainable civilization is a contradiction, that means that you can’t have a sustainable civilization. Does that make any more sense?
Because the city requires the countryside, but the countryside does not require the city. The city feeds off of the countryside, and gives nothing back to it.
Much less than they took. If they didn’t, then what you have there is a counter-proof of the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy, which will certainly revolutionize our understanding of physics forever.
And if I burn my house down, it will take several minutes to collapse, so obviously the fire has nothing to do with it, right? In a geologists’ estimation of an ecology’s rise and fall, 5,000 years is a rounding error.
Really? You like being told when to do your work, and when to stop, and when you can eat and when you can go home? You like being told when you can see your family, and when you can’t? That’s the job part. The thing itself—the part most people usually enjoy—is something we can usually do whether or not it’s part of a civilized life. You can teach kids with special needs in civilization or outside of it, but inside of it you’re going to have a boss, who will tell you what to teach and when to teach it and how, and you will have no option to do otherwise. If you’re saying you like civilization, you’re saying that’s the part you like. Just so we’re clear. It’s like the movie Office Space. Lots of people truly love writing software. How many people love writing TPS reports?
Those have nothing to do with civilization. The hustle and bustle is usually the overstimulation we need to compensate for the monotony of wage slavery, but you get exactly the same thing in a forager fair. Your church is a particularly tribal enclave, offering the feeling of a pseudo-tribe nestled in the heart of civilization. The comforts of civilization, as I’ve argued elsewhere, are greatly overbilled. Primitive life is far more comfortable than we imagine it to be. So you’re once again reaching to our illusions about civilization for whar you like about it. What do you like about civilization that’s actually unique to it? War? Oppression? Genocide? Mass extinction? Perhaps disease? Starvation?
Because you keep proving my point. You never mention anything that has anything to do with civilization, you just keep repeating illusions about civilization. The things you like about civilization are things you’d have more of without civilization—they’re all things that are diminished by civilization, not gifts from it, and that’s exactly what I need to help people understand—even if you refuse to.
October 3rd, 2006 at 6:40 pm
So people can be vegetarians? You once argued that people had to have meat. So I guess that it is possible for people to live as mostly vegetarians, and thus, it would be possible for people to live as vegetarians (since I do know quite a few people who live as vegetarians).
Why not? What if it’s the only life people know, and they’ll invest in it because they do not know any other way. What if it is keeping people alive who would starve to death since the ecology could not support them if they were not civilized? Is that not enough of an incentive to invest in civilization? Quite frankly, if the end of civilization means mass starvation for most people, then I would invest in it until the bitter end.
No, it doesn’t. You seem to be able only to define civilization as something that must grow. That just seems like an extremely narrow-minded definition to me. I cannot see why an isolated Egypt would not be able to stop their complexity from growing, since obviously the ecology can support a certain level of civilization, and why you assert it cannot happen. I cannot see why Egypt could not stop growing, like any civilization. You’ve stated your backing, I just don’t get it.
But don’t we protect the plants our domesticated animals eat from other animals as well?
Cities. Suburbs. Small towns. Specialization. Social stratification. Indeed, what I familar with. I am falling apart now because if you are right, then everything I have known all my life–the small towns I visit, the farms I have visited, my neighborhood, will be gone to pieces. I don’t see how you can see that as nothing but evil–and why you cannot understand why people will not rejoice when their lives are shattered by this collapse. I just cannot deal with, and am breaking down by it. Why can you see this only as evil?
I’m going to go now and deal with this mental breakdown that I must suffer. I cannot see why you cannot understand the suffering of people who will see their lives shattered and the misery they are going to feel, and why you can see yourselves as nothing but miserable in civilization.
Also, you have mentioned that there are fairs that primitive people have. Where is the evidence for this? How often are those fairs?
I haven’t read Charles C. Mann, but I thought he speculated that there were civilizations and urban centers in North America as well. Didn’t he also speculate a population of 200 million in the Americas?
But obviously the limit of complexity was not limited to sustainably supporting a small city in the Egyptian territory at the Nile River. You often draw the line at sustainability from civilized to primitive–but obviously that line does not apply in Egypt, because as I said before, they did not become unsustainable until the Aswan Dam.
YES! THAT IS PRECISELY WHAT I LIKE! WHY CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?
In fact, I find comfort in knowing that I do not control my schedule, since, quite frankly, I wouldn’t know how to control it myself, and am suffering a nervous breakdown thanks to your ideas on primitivism that have made it even difficult for me to structure my life.
How can you deny that the Egyptians did have a sustainable level of complexity for 5000 years before the Aswan Dam? All the evidence is there. Why don’t you get it?
What does this have to do with the burning of one’s house? How could we know that the Aswan Dam was going to make them unsustainable? Again, to use your analogy, the house was not burned down for the first 5000 years. So why does that make them unsustainable before the Aswan Dam? I just don’t get it.
True, but it’s a big world out there, and I just can’t see why rules about the inherent unsustainability of cities would apply in EVERY ecology, and why cities can only function with what we call “civilization,” and why there cannot be a city in another type of society that is not called “civilization,” but something new, and why such a new society cannot be created.
Also, it seems that there were quite a few ecologies out there, since there were more than one semi-tropical floodplains that did renew their nutrients, and that was required in the ancient days of civilization.
I also am wondering if you are familiar with Graham Hancock and his work about the Underworld, on this site. He basically considers the possibility that there might have been civilizations during the Ice Age, before the 10000 year old start that archaeologists agree with, and that their ruins were flooded with the rise of the Holocene interglacial, and cites where he thinks those ruins are. If this is true, then maybe civilization is much older than we think. But I’m not here to debate Hancock, of course, since it has not been proven yet.
I also cannot understand why something must automatically be unsustainable if it has only been around for a short time, like 10000 years. True, foraging has been around for two million years, but it had to be around for only 10000 years at one time as well. Permaculture and horticulture have been around for around 12000 years as well.
But why does that absolutely make it unsustainable?
Then how does that explain the claim I cited that the land had been farmed for 4000 years without any erosion or degradation, compared to other places like the Fertile Crescent that had been desertified by then? Obviously their soils did not erode as much.
I’m going now. I’ll suffer my nervous breakdown as I come to terms with the fact that everything I have seen now must perish because of things that I cannot even understand.
October 3rd, 2006 at 6:40 pm
This does not make sense. What if those regulations were able to regenerate damage done by that war, like the reforestation of Japan?
October 3rd, 2006 at 6:42 pm
Why can’t you understand why I am falling apart with the prospect of my life being shattered due to collapse?
October 3rd, 2006 at 6:51 pm
Okay, I understand, but I’m not convinced that permaculture is just horticulture. I’m just going to keep an open mind here, so I won’t argue this any further.
October 3rd, 2006 at 7:33 pm
That’s the part I can understand, Taylor. But pretending it’s just not so simply because it’s unpleasant is nothing more than hiding. If it’s true, you’re going to need to come up with a vision of yourself, your life, and the world that makes peace with that. Finding a way to cope with this will be the greatest spiritual crisis humanity has ever faced—but the challenge is to deal with it, not to hide from it.
A good number of my in-laws are vegetarians. Individuals can certainly be vegetarians. But it’s a difficult way to live that generally requires an unsustainable level of complexity to support it. It can’t be supported on a society-wide basis, it’s simply too contrary to human nutrition needs. But people can be more or less vegetarian. You can eat more vegetables and less meat, to the point where it’s unhealthy. That’s where most civilized people have lived most of their lives through most of history.
You can always just keep your money. You only invest if the expected value is greater than zero. Otherwise, you keep your money. It doesn’t matter how indoctrinated you are—we’re as blind to any other way as anyone has ever been, but none of us are willing to invest in a stock the promises to break even at best.
No, altruistic self-sacrifice is not a reliable basis for a society. Some might continue at it, but most will give it up long before that. You can’t expect everyone to give everything they have in full knowledge it will never be enough.
Well, think about it for a little bit. What would it mean for a civilization to stop growing? What would be the full ramifications?
If you destroy 5,000 species of plants so that one species can do very well, does that have a positive or negative effect on the biodiversity of that place?
If you protect several species of plant that aphids use for food without destroying any other species in the process, does that have a positive or negative effect on the biodiversity of that place?
Archaeological and ethnographic. Annual or sometimes even more often. They brought together thousands of people for weeks at a time, with the larger fairs being the least frequent.
I don’t know his exact numbers, but cities in North America is no speculation, there were a number of full-blown civilizations here. Several of them collapsed even before European contact, leaving behind simpler, sustainable horticultural societies in their wake.
So if you achieve the level of complexity much lower than the Aswan Dam, wherein you must increase your complexity every year, you don’t think that qualifies as crossing that threshold—since you now will reach that level, no matter what you do?
All right, you’ve convinced me. But you’re also a very special case, Taylor. If you really need someone to hold your hand and make all your decisions for you, a tribe can provide that, too. But you also know that you have a condition that makes you different in this regard. So, which is better? A society where we’re all forced to be subject to someone else? Or one in which you can have someone guide you through your whole life if you need that, or you can be free if that’s what you prefer? But you’ve convinced me that my position needs ameliorating: humans might not want freedom if they suffer from the sort of problems you do. I think that in itself is pretty telling, don’t you? You know you have a problem. If the only way someone can like civilization is if they suffer from a problem like yours, don’t you think that says something?
It wasn’t sustainable. To be sustainable, it must be able to go on indefinitely, without eroding its own basis in each iteration. The Egyptians were growing their complexity during that entire time. They were building towards that level of complexity. So it’s exactly the same as that burning house. The fire gets bigger and bigger, but it takes a while before it does enough damage and crosses that threshold where everything comes down. You’re focusing on the particular beam that happened to give way first, and arguing that if the fire hadn’t started in the kitchen, the house would’ve never fallen down. I’m saying that it doesn’t matter where the fire starts, or what gives way first, there’s no such thing as a sustainable house on fire, because eventually, either the fire will be put out, or the house will collapse, regardless of what gives way first.
Even if it had never been conquered, Egypt would either have stopped growing, or it would have reached the point where it broke the river valley. If it stopped growing, it would collapse. So, one way or another, it’s always going to collapse, just like no house is ever going to burn forever.
Every ecology is vastly different. On IshCon, people talk about “the way of 10,000 ways.” Think of complexity levels from 0 to 10,000. This area can support 2. That one, 9,726. That one, 794. And so on. If we were able to assign rates like this, then the smallest civilization might be a 9,342. It might fit in a few places. But here’s the catch: it has to grow. Next year, it has to reach 9,343, and if it doesn’t, everyone’s going to leave. If it’s still growing, but not fast enough, so maybe it takes a year and a half to reach 9,343, that’s a depression.
So if 10,000 is the most any ecosystem can support, and you start that high, and you have to increase it every year or it will fail, then is that sustainable? How long before you reach 10,001?
If you want to make something that’s not compelled to grow, you need to take away our power to increase our own complexity. It needs to be out of our hands, because if we control it, we’ll never lower it—we’ll only raise it. That’s no longer a civilization. Once we’re subject to something outside ourselves, though, we’re subject to some carrying capacity, and there is simply no reasonable carrying capacity that can allow for 6.5 billion humans this high up in the trophic levels. There’s no reasonable carrying capacity that would allow us to continue hogging 40% of the earth’s surface for just one species, or gobbling up 200 species every day to keep our biomass up. Permaculture’s kind of what you’re looking for: some sustainable level of high complexity that allows as large a human population as possible. Even that is measured in millions, not billions.
It’s a classic case of overshoot. Trying to avoid die-off now would be like trying to make 6,000 reindeer sustainable on St. Matthew’s Island. It’s just not possible.
I really don’t take anything Hancock has to say seriously, sorry.
No, that just means it’s unproven, and that it should be treated with suspicion. In this case, the monumental failure of agriculture in such a short period of time is nothing short of breathtaking. For horticulture, I consider it reason to reserve my judgment and merely consider it possibly sustainable. But even the most catastrophic evolutionary mistakes of the past took more than just 10,000 years—and of course, they never destroyed themselves so spectacularly.
That makes it parasitic. Its reliance on agriculture makes it unsustainable.
If you give back 60% of the energy you get in waste, then you’re degrading the land much more slowly. It lasts longer. At the same time, degradation is undeniably taking place (just more slowly) Again, some methods are more voracious than others—the difference between killing yourself quickly and killing yourself slowly.
Diamond greatly overstated the effectiveness of the reforestation programs. Even at their height, Japan had lost significant forest cover compared to the pre-Jomon period. It was a temporary slowing of the war, but in no way a reversal. In fact, since the reforestation effort was held at great political will contrary to the will of the farmers, it’s a basic question of culture vs. civilization, and at best a momentary victory of culture over civilization. Momentary being the key word.
That’s always true, of every single day of your life, whether civilization collapses or not.
October 3rd, 2006 at 9:34 pm
So I guess trophic levels explains why ant civilizations and ant cities (as well as bee cities) are sustainable while human cities are not, since humans exist at a higher trophic level and ants and bees exist at a low trophic level.
October 3rd, 2006 at 9:46 pm
Well, that’s part of it. The bigger part is that referring to “ant farms” or “ant cities” or “bee cities” is a meaningless bit of anthropocentric projection and deeply, deeply flawed metaphors.
October 3rd, 2006 at 10:16 pm
Hey , Have you ever heard of primitivists anonymous ? , I think they hold meetings out there somewhere. The first step is the hardest. Admitting you are powerless against it. Real tears are sometimes shed when that happens.
October 3rd, 2006 at 10:20 pm
What’s the twelfth step, technocracy?
October 4th, 2006 at 8:42 am
Okay. Again, see, I think the real reason I’m falling apart is that I just hear so many different opinions on this topic, and I don’t know who to agree with. You have your arguments, and you have your ideas, but so do others. I am not using this to debunk you, I’m just saying that I don’t know who to state is right. You believe that collapse is inevitable and is happening, and many others do as well. But others do not, and I just do not believe I know who to believe just yet.
As for your blanket assertions and assumptions, I’m surprised when you claim you make few blanket assumptions. You have many times in the past, and it is these assumptions that have confused me. For example, in “The Shape of Collapse: Small Town America,” you claimed in a comment that:
Humans are not, cannot be sedentary animals. Any solution that proposes sedentism is not a solution at all, just a postponement.
This seems like a blanket claim to me. Yet it did not make sense with the fact that there have been sustainable sedentary societies at one time (and just because a society cannot be sedentary in the future due to changing conditions does not make them sustainable now with present conditions).
Then we saw the misunderstanding–you consider it fair to posit rules even though there are exceptions, whereas I believe that a rule can only be a rule if there are no exceptions, since exceptions may prove larger rules, but if there is an exception to a rule, the rule must be scrapped. The Kwakiutl were part of a sedentary region, and the California coast had a similar region (as well as more inland parts of the Pacific Northwest).
But then you seemed to argue as a rule that horticiultural villages with this:
Again, I am aware of horticultural villages that move during this time period, but I am also aware of permanent horticultural villages, and the examples I cited there (the Mandan, Hidatsa, the river valley tribes in the Great Plains) were those of villages I had heard were permanent due to their location on the rivers.
Of course, you did argue a little differently by saying:
So what I speculated was right–it is specific to an ecology. But then, if 300 people is a large village in a horticultural society, and not a smaller village, if smaller villages can stay in one place, does that mean that villages of 300 people cannot be sedentary and stay in one place for a long time absolutely? Must they be nearly nomadic? This seems like it is specific to whatever ecology you are in as well. I don’t think it makes sense to make that as a blanket assumption either.
Then I noticed that you would make blanket ideas many places, while seeming to ignore the exceptions in other places, like that foraging must be nomadic, or foragers must live in tribes. Again, while you have argued that I am missing the forest for the trees by nit-picking on exceptions, I think this works both ways: focusing on exceptions can blind us to general rules as well, but focusing on general rules can blind us to exceptions.
Other thing that seemed to confuse me was your blanket limit of horticultural villages being only able to support villages no larger than 300 people, and that permaculture could only support villages no larger than 300 as well. Again, I am not debating this since I have seen your evidence, and am going to go off and research other people’s evidence to see what I think is right. The problem is, that the more research I do, the more confused I get since everyone does have a little different slant on each topic. But when I did briefly research horticultural societies, I did find out about larger villages in some horticultural societies (like the Taino chiefdoms and the Iroquois). You explained that they relied on tribute from other societies, and that the Iroquois were a midpoint between horticulture and agriculture.
This confused me, however, as I had heard about the Cherokee, who had lived in villages between 350-600 people. (Type in on Google “Cherokee village 350-600″ and you’ll see references to this.) Was this a chiefdom society? How do you explain this?
I also read about an isolated Swiss village in the Loetschental Valley on this site,, on Dr. Price’s book, which had a population of 2000 people. Price also explains how the agricultural practicies of this society apparently have preserved soil for 1300 years, in this chapter. Again, I am not trying to rebut your claims, but rather, since stories like these confuse me when I hear your claims, see what your opinion is on this objectionable claim in comparison with your blanket limit of 300.
What also confused me was a claim you made on IshCon, which seemed like another blanket claim:
This confused me, as I could not find any evidence arguing why exclusionary specialization had to be inherently unsustainable (another blanket assumption).
What also confused me was with your assertion that civilization is an absolutely evil villain, and then your claim that only gods know good and evil. If there are no moral absolutes, and only gods know good and evil, how can you assertion that civilization, as well as domestication, and hierarchy, are evils, if humanity cannot know good and evil? Aren’t they good for some and bad for others like all other things?
So I was right. There is a spectrum between meat-eating and vegetarianism. People can lower their trophic levels. Again, just because a diet is unhealthy does not mean it cannot be grown sustainably. Like you pointed out, it’s a big wide world, and it does not make sense that in every ecology, complexity above the tribe level MUST be inherently unsustainable.
Horticulturalists, for example, often eat things that are not on the “paleo diet,” yet they still can grow them sustainably.
I don’t necessarily agree with him, but I think his ideas are interesting, and I don’t think they are proven or unproven, one way or the other.
This is where I part ways with you. You believe that Egypt was unsustainable since it was destined to break the river valley. The reality is, that could have taken place on any timeline, and that Egypt did not break the complexity until the Aswan Dam. Without the dam, that could have taken place over a period of another thousand years. So I personally draw the line at unsustainability not when Egypt became a civilization but at the Aswan Dam, since the complexity prior to Aswan was sustainable if it lasted.
Okay, you’ve made your evidence backing the claim that there is no sustainable way to support billions. I don’t know if you’re right since I haven’t done much research. You think you’re right, naturally, but I’m still keeping an open mind here.
What I do not understand, however, is why a society must increase complexity if it can. That just seems too deterministic to me. Why can’t societies choose to stay where they are if their complexity is not eroding their soil?
Here is where I must disagree with you on an absolute claim, since it is obvious that some forms of agriculture are sustainable in some environments if the forms did not increase or expand. I do not believe is an absolute evolutionary mistake.
Also, what other catastrophic evolutionary mistakes of the past have taken more than 10000 years? I’d love to hear about them.
Okay, this is based on the unstated assumption that all forms of agriculture are unsustainable. I’ve read other people who have made this claim and others, and I realize I’m going to reserve judgment since I don’t know who is right, and whether or not agriculture is inherently unsustainable since I’ve heard evidence arguing both ways (like in the Humanure Handbook).
No, because I just do not understand why you must assert that everyone does not like something, since I like it, and my parents say they like that very lifestyle as well.
I must go now. I have responses to your other comments, but I don’t have time to discuss them now.
October 4th, 2006 at 8:47 am
In essence, I cannot understand why the civilized level of complexity must be a “runaway train,” and why civilization must increase complexity. Why is this a necessity and why is it that if a society does not increase complexity, it is not civilized? Why must a society with cities and specialization and hierarchy, which are civilized, always increase its complexity. I don’t get it, so I guess I’m off to do some more research, which will confuse me even more. I don’t know who to agree with, or who is right, not even you or anyone.
October 4th, 2006 at 8:48 am
I’ll just sit here and wait for Chicago and my suburb to collapse. Those areas are going to collapse at some time if your predictions are accurate, right, during the 2012-2015 period? Is that when you think all cities will collapse?
October 4th, 2006 at 10:21 am
Jason is right peaknickster that your city , and other cities will collapse in the not so distant future. Jason is right about the effects of this type of civilization , and the consequences of what we are doing.
What I believe Jason is wrong about is the Alternative of creating a different type of society . Technocracy offers a way off the merry go round. We are a non-growth, non money, system that is secular and humanistic.
We eliminate many of the consumer driven buying practices, but at the same time have a consumer society of people getting their needs and more full filled.
Peaknickster, I urge you to look at www.technocracyinc.org This website is under construction presently , but there is also another listed there as a standby. I think you may find the answer to some of the questions , or some alternative ideas , as to your wondering about possible futures. There is hope. Don`t be afraid.
It is not an either/or question to myself as to the future. We can have a vital , engaging, free, creative society. Or we can spin into some really awful things in the future.
The technocracy programs offers a real alternative to our present culture. No money, no property, no democracy, no political people, religions not used to scare and control people, no corporations, no contracts. In other words a really free society, where science and technology are used to improve the lot of everyone, not just a certain caste or class.
Jason’s world or a nasty version of a collapsed price system may be the future. If it is kiss your good aspects of this great society good bye also.
Explore technocracy, It is a way out . I agree 100% with Jason , that we are doomed under this system. We present an alternative to that doom.
October 4th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
What are those metaphors? How are they flawed? Don’t ants live in hills of over 5000, and bees live in hives with thousands of bees?
Again, I don’t know much about the topic, all I know is that I have seen people criticize your points about human cities being inherently unsustainable because of ant and bee cities, and I basically realized that one of the differences was due to a difference in trophic level, which could be a reason of the difference in sustainability.
But then, ecologies are still different, and ways of subsistence do change trophic levels. I don’t know who to agree with with anything, but I am still curious about why people believe what they believe, so I’m not bought on any claims yet, including that human cities must be inherently unsustainable, or bees, or ants, or whatever.
October 4th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
I’m still in the research phase, I guess, and going through phases of helplessly falling apart. You see civilization as some evil, and collapse as some freedom of humanity, whereas I fall apart at the thought since it is the end of everything I know and I have lived to this day, and there’s nothing I know that will survive.
October 4th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
I also fail to see why you think humans are innocent because this is not human nature due to this abberation of civilization. Humans created civilization for a reason in human nature, so there must be some flaw if humans were able to create this trap.
October 4th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
And I still cannot feel the abuse that you claim civilization is similar too. I do not feel like I am a victim of abuse, since civilization has given me a life that I enjoy, and will miss if civilization collapses. I like the prospect of colleges, and universities, and the choice of people getting doctorates or other degrees. I like my career. I love it all. I do not feel abused by it one bit.
October 4th, 2006 at 6:37 pm
Also, even if cities are too dense to support themselves, are suburbs too dense to support themselves? There is much more open land, lawns can be made into gardens, and parks can be made into preserves and grazing land. I’ve read Kunstler’s book about the fate of suburban areas, and he focuses that on the automobile. But suburbs are, because they are sprawling, have much lower densities, meaning that they are able to support themselves with much more food than cities.
October 4th, 2006 at 7:01 pm
So even though the suburbs might lose the automobile, are they absolutely dependent on it and will not last the loss of it?
October 4th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
Another thing on Egypt: how were they steadily destroying the ecology of the area? The Egyptian ecology was supporting them until the Aswan Dam. How was the house “burning” until that happened?
I am not talking about the biodiversity of that place. Yes, it does have a negative effect. I am talking, rather, about the fact that the one species’ requirements are protected, and therefore, it must be beneficial for that one species. Sure the biodiversity is destroyed for the other species–but it is good for the domesticated species. That is why I suggest our relationships with domesticated animals to be somewhat of a symbiosis (between us and those animals, like the cattle and sheep) since they themselves are being benefited, even if it is at the expense of other species and not symbiotic to them.
How is this altruistic self-sacrifice if the investors themselves would starve to death without that civilized society? Why would the investors starve themselves to death?
Why is it not worth it if not maintaining those investments would mean starvation for the investors, who equally rely on that system?
October 4th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
And, again, though unrelated, I guess that what you’re saying is that since permaculture can only support villages no larger than 300 people, it is not possible for permaculture to support a civilization of any size. But then, civilizations are not the only societies that can increase their complexity (the Iroquois did increase their complexity at times).
October 4th, 2006 at 9:22 pm
Peaknickster - I would like to encourage you to share your thoughts and discuss with us maybe some of the other issues raised on this site which are *not* related to the end of civilization. You mind find some additional food for thought in them and I’m sure we’d all enjoy hearing your ideas in another area!
October 5th, 2006 at 11:40 am
Okay, Tim, you are right. I will sit here and wait as my suburb of 33,435 collapses, if Jason is right. But I won’t be writing about other ideas, since I need to focus on whatever life I might have left, depending on whatever futuristic scenario is true.
October 6th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
And that suburb is Northbrook, Illinois, the place I’m sure Jason argues will collapse.
October 6th, 2006 at 10:11 pm
As for China and the laws of physics…again, I don’t know much about the ecology, and I understand the laws of physics…so obviously, if the claim is made that the soil was not being degraded, there must have been something more than just their nutrient return. I’m off to more research on this topic.
Permaculturalists obviously have nutrient returns because of polyculture.
October 6th, 2006 at 10:48 pm
What still confuses me, is this, Jason.
You make absolutist statements and then contradict yourself with certain exceptions to those statements. For example, you have argued: “In 200 years, ALL of humanity will live primitively.”
Then you argue that every human will either go feral, rewild, abandon civilization, or die. No exceptions, absolutely. You have argued that civilization will end. Then you speculate that there will be pockets of civilization in the future for centuries to come (and even have some speculation on where those places will be in the Fifth World). If all of humanity will live primitively, and civilization will end, (assuming we use the definitions civilization has given us of “civilized” and “primitive”), then how do you speculate those pockets? That seems to be a contradiction. Maybe most of humanity, or some of humanity, but how can all of humanity live primitively if you speculate those hangers-on that will exist in the future at the Neolithic?
Do you consider a Neolithic civilization to be primitive?
January 22nd, 2007 at 12:11 am
[…] The Kevin Bacon game is essentially the same thing as conspiracy theory, except it uses actors and movies instead of pulling in pretty much any morsel of information to use as a link in the way that conspiracy theory does. The purpose of this type of thinking is to confound the AI mechanism of the mind and start thinking in clusters, chunks, emoticons. However annoying the AI might be, it also seems to be one of the sources of laughter and emotion as well. The camera of your perception. Can you not go anywhere without taking a picture or video of it? Are you photographing the place or your perception of the place? Which are you glorifying? There are lines in this world which both separate and connect things. Separation is called death (see also: love) and connection is called sex. Lines of sex connect all things to the next. In touching there is closeness, in love lies division. Love songs are always sad songs. They must be by their very nature. I have, in some of my stories and novels, written about androids or robots or simulara — the name doesn’t matter; what is meant is artificial constructs masquerading as humans. Usually with a sinister purpose in mind. I suppose I took it for granted that if such a construct, a robot for example, had a benign or anyhow decent purpose in mind, it would not need to so disguise itself. Now, to me, that theme seems obsolete. The constructs do not mimic humans; they are, in many deep ways, actually human already. They are not trying to fool us, for a purpose of any sort; they merely follow lines we follow, in order that they, too, may overcome such common problems as the breakdown of vital parts, loss of power source, attack by such foes as storms, short circuits — and I’m sure any one of us here can testify that a short circuit, especially in our power supply, can ruin our entire day and make us utterly unable to get to our daily job, or, once at the office, useless as far as doing the work set forth on our desk. […]