The forager/garden-farm way of life and the monocrop agriculture way of life are mutually exclusive. The compulsory city-states that we associate with "civilization" depends fundamentally on taking over land for monocrops. The agro-forager way of life depends on managed biodiversity, with many interdependent species.
Thus throughout history you have the repeated pattern of displacement, slavery, genocide, "re-education" and oppression of foraging people and garden farmers by monocrop-powered militarized states. It's been a 10,000 year global war, and it is close to having been "won" by civilization. The losers, of course, are all indigenous people worldwide, as well as the basic livability of our planet and probably 80% of its species.
The irony, of course, is that monocrop agriculture isn't sustainable. It's had a good run, but we're coming up against some really tough limits soon. The Green Revolution bought some time, but it's probably going to be a very hard landing. All that biodiversity took millions of years to radiate, and only a short time to destroy. Human cultural diversity took 100,000-500,000 years to develop many different of ways of life, and only a short time to liquidate.
I only hold out hope that enough species, ecosystems and cultures are left to help guide civilization toward something sustainable. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.
It's also pretty well established that in state-free, agro-forager areas of land with relatively non-low population density, foraging people have tended to ensure the sustainability of their lifestyle by eliminating the menfolk of bands of hunter foragers from rival tribes; a common theme seems to have been indiscriminately hunting and killing a member of a rival tribe as a male rite of passage. And it's widely believed humanity wiped out most large mammals long before the emergence of cities in the Quaternary Extinction Event.
The story of, say, Kalimintan or the pre-Columbus United States might be mostly unwritten, but definitely isn't a story of love and harmony for everything around it.
Yeah, I mean it's not like anthropologists and the oral histories of the tribes themselves have ever recorded the practice of head hunting on multiple continents or anything...
It is peculiar that you have suddenly chosen to emphasize head hunting in relation to forager lifestyles, because head hunting is not a practice typically associated with hunter-gatherer bands. Its a practice typically associated with horticulturalists (e.g. Jivaroan peoples, various Austronesian groups, e.g. in New Guinea and Melanesia) organized into tribes or chiefdoms. There is endemic inter-group conflict in tribes and chiefdoms (understood as types of social organization), and that inter-group conflict may be a consequence of populations approaching the threshold of ecological sustainability (for given socio-technological capabilities), and may periodically relieve such pressures; such conflicts might even be regulated by a ritual calendar of sorts: indeed, that was more or less the thesis of Roy Rappaport's Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People.
But, and I repeat, these are horticulturalists, not foragers. And so, again, I say, "No, its not "pretty well established" that the sustainability of a foraging lifestyle was maintained by inter-band conflict." In almost every case, the kinds of conflict people mention, are referring to horticulturalists.
It's true that the same population pressures associated with headhunting and ritualistic warfare tend to also result in hunter-gatherer tribes developing some form of horticulture as a less-easily-depleted food source, but that supports rather than detracts from my observation of the necessity of adopting extreme measures for population control to ensure the long term sustainability of pure hunter-gathering as a way of life for the masses
Either way, if one is to draw the distinction between city states with monocrop agriculture and the "the forager/garden-farm way of life" the poster I was originally replying to did, the Jivarons and arguably even the Dayak Iban belong more to the latter than the former. And ultimately it was the former intensive agricultural form of social organization which proved more ecologically sustainable in the long term without artificially keeping population densities down, and the latter hunter/forager form of organization that is suspected of wiping out most of the world's large mammals to hasten the transition to agriculture in many parts of the world.
Similarly, the pastoralist agriculture way of life wasn't sustainable, and it fell to mass-production capitalism in the 30s and 40s. The Green Revolution could be viewed as the final death knell of that societal organization: now, small family farms worked by hand labor are virtually extinct, and all of the seeds are owned by Monsanto, which charges monopoly prices for a single harvest with no possibility of using the seeds from that harvest for the next (they've been genetically engineered to be sterile), and they require large fossil-fuel fertilizer inputs to grow anyway.
And it's likely that mass-production capitalism is beginning to die as well, killed by robotics, computers, the Internet, micro-manufacturing, and the Information Age. The key developments of that revolution are just in the labs right now, so it's a bit unclear what form the eventual civilization will take, but the writing's already on the wall.
Life has never been about sustainability. You could look at each phase of evolution - from protists to eukaryotes to vertebrates to land-dwellers to dinosaurs to mammals to humans to hunter-gatherers to agriculture to industrialization to information - as a phase-change in complexity levels, one which usually kills off the vast majority of diversity at the lower levels. In other words, life is a pyramid scheme, and death is a natural part of it. Death doesn't mean the absence of anything, it means the emergence of something new and unforeseen.
> In other words, life is a pyramid scheme, and death is a natural part of it. Death doesn't mean the absence of anything, it means the emergence of something new and unforeseen.
Interesting view about the link between life and death.
Yes, that is an interesting point about the cycle of life and death -- or "recycle" of matter and energy into new forms over time. The fossil record tends to show that -- life emerges into vast diversity and then gets reduced to a few very successful forms and stays that way until some disaster (asteroid, volcanoes, atmospheric change, etc.) and then eventually there is a new radiation of diverse life and then it reduces again...
One might see the same thing happening capitalism (as a stretch). There is a lot of diversity (like with early microcomputer manufacturers in the 1970s and 1980s) and then only a couple standard forms are left -- until the cycle repeats with laptops and then smartphones as conditions change (like cheaper small parts leading to discontinuities in what is possible). And before that, there was a lot of diversity too with early computers in the 1940s and 1950s until IBM dominated the computing landscape until the microcomputer came along.
With trees, there may be lots of seedlings out there getting mostly shaded out but essentially for a big tree to fall and open up a spot in the canopy where they can find lots of sunlight to grow into.
That said, the insight only holds -- for a reasonably short timescale -- as long as there is a vibrant ecosystem or culture surrounding the death to fill in the hole. Otherwise, it might be a long time before, say, the matter involved in a supernova becomes anything living again...
Although, as in a comment someone made on heavier matter created by neutron stars merging, the metal rings we were are a legacy of such events long ago. So, as I see it, I have a couple recycling bins. The ones for compost or bottles get recycled on a timescale of months or yeaar. By contrast, the trash can contents gets recyled on the order of tends of millions of years when the landfill eventually slides under a continental plate somewhere and down into the Earth's mantel to be melted down as magma and then become a mountain to become eroded or mined... Or, in a worst case, the landfill will eventually get absorbed by the Sun in a few billion years when it becomes a Red Giant. So, what bin I put something in when I discard it is a question of how quickly I want it to be recycled. :-)
To return to the hunter/gatherer lifestyle would probably require shrinking the population by 99%. The process of doing that would probably kill most of the rest before they adapted. (How much woodcraft do you know? Very, very few people could build a fire without matches.)
Crop rotation has been used for most of the history of sedentary civilizations. Monoculture was used mostly in very early civilizations, and recently in the modern times (since oil-based fertilizers have made crop rotation less important in some ways).
Monocrop agriculture is certainly not meaningful here. Agriculture is, maybe.
Which fertilizers are those? I was under the impression that nitrogen fertilizers were by far the most important. We get the nitrogen from the sea of it that we're swimming in -- no need to dig it out of the ground. The Haber process also uses hydrogen, which probably comes from WGSR, is that what you mean? If so, I strongly suspect that fertilizer production necessary for human survival would easily be economical on electrolytic hydrogen.
Hydrogen is for the most part produced from natural gas through steam reforming (only a small fraction is produced through electrolysis). And the Haber-Bosch method requires substantial heating which is also usually supplied by burning oil or gas based fuels.
That's an interesting take and seems like a compelling explanation about the 'struggle' between monocrop and biodiverse cultures. Do you have handy any references or other further reading on precisely that topic?
The books referenced in the linked article appear to discuss the topic in historical/anthropological context. I haven't read them yet but from the reviews I have read, they look promising.
As a teenager I read the novels of Daniel Quinn (known best for Ishmael), which is non-scholarly and has its problems. However, it prompted me to pursue a degree in bioanthropology. Most of the enthographic literature is consistent with the hypothesis that people don't willingly join civilization (city-based, hierarchical societies) when given the choice. Civilization has its clear advantages but its externalities have not nearly been solved.
But seriously, the domain of anthropology (cultural as much as biological) is where all relevant scholarship has been done. People make fun of anthropology for not being STEMy enough, but as a field it has a 100+ year history of delivering the goods. There's a classic essay by Marshal Sahlins called "The Original Affluent Society" that has been both influential and controversial. You can also look into the distinction between hoe-based farming and plow-based farming.
For most of human history populations have been very low. ~10 million or fewer people worldwide before city states means land simply was not an issue. There was not enough people to clear and farm all the land for a long time.
The earth has 130 million square km of land. If ~10% makes good farm land that's 1km per person ~(247 acres) which is far to much to farm by hand.
PS: Currently 11% of land is under cultivation, much of that is only viable due to irrigation. But, we also use a lot of land for city's, suburbs, roads, etc that would have been great farm land.
That said, grinding up rocks to make rock dust is a fairly good way of making the Earth fertile again, so collapse is an ideological choice not a certainty: https://remineralize.org/
And nowadays we can make robots to do many dangerous or repetitive tasks instead of requiring human chattel slaves or wage slaves to do them.
The biodiversity issue is not so easily solved. We can potentially recreate biodiversity through genetic engineering and simulated evolution (even as I might prefer the natural kind) -- but no guarantees on that. The ongoing loss of the wild origins of many crops is indeed one of the greatest tragedies of modern times. And such biodiversity is so cheap to preserve relative to the abundance agriculture provides. For an illustrative xkcd on the loss of mammalian biodiversity on land: https://xkcd.com/1338/
The needless loss of cultural diversity is also tragic -- although that is a much more complex topic given various conflicts of cultures. One can see such an ongoing loss almost everywhere in the world with a TV or internet connection -- as mass media drives out much local culture and family traditions by being a "Supernormal Stimuli" crowding out everything else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli
Frankly, my biggest concern about a potential collapse is not that is not that we don't have the know-how or technology or resources to make the world work for everyone. We clearly do, even for populations much larger than currently and even without spreading into the ocean or Antarctica or underground or outer space. Bucky Fuller pointed that out decades ago.
The biggest concern is whether nukes and bioweapons and drones (and other fruits of the same advanced technology that could provide abundance for all) get thrown around in final tantrums by a very few people upset that their ideology or personal extreme power and privileges are being challenged. Or that such weapons get unleashed by accident while they are being kept in readiness for elite tantrums over ideology and poltical power (i.e. "War is a Racket" according to Major General Smedley Butler). Unlike previous collapses, nukes and engineered plagues and killer robots make any next collapse potentially very different -- even as the same underlying technologies make so much more possible. Or as I summarize in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
Thus throughout history you have the repeated pattern of displacement, slavery, genocide, "re-education" and oppression of foraging people and garden farmers by monocrop-powered militarized states. It's been a 10,000 year global war, and it is close to having been "won" by civilization. The losers, of course, are all indigenous people worldwide, as well as the basic livability of our planet and probably 80% of its species.
The irony, of course, is that monocrop agriculture isn't sustainable. It's had a good run, but we're coming up against some really tough limits soon. The Green Revolution bought some time, but it's probably going to be a very hard landing. All that biodiversity took millions of years to radiate, and only a short time to destroy. Human cultural diversity took 100,000-500,000 years to develop many different of ways of life, and only a short time to liquidate.
I only hold out hope that enough species, ecosystems and cultures are left to help guide civilization toward something sustainable. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.