Excerpts and Notes

Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization

This book got some exposure on The Daily Show.  While I'm not so sure that this is the best venue, it does expose the ideas to at least an audience of 2 million or so.  For another view on the topic, you might want to read Against The Grain or some excerpts.

Selected excerpts from Pandora's Seed:

Forward epigraph:

True, western societies are much better off materially than they were 40 years ago, but why is there so much crime, vandalism, and graffiti? Why are divorce rates so high?  Why are we seeing declines in civic engagement and trust? Why have obesity and depression reached epidemic proportions, even amongst children? Why do people call this the age of anxiety? Why do studies in most developed countries show that people are becoming unhappier? -- Richard Tomkins, Financial Times, October 17, 2003

Overeating and low levels of physical activity, leading to obesity, and cigarette smoking, leading to hypertension and caner, are the major causes of preventable death in the world today.  As my own doctor says, "It's really not that complicated -- exercise and don't smoke and you'll be healthy." But such a prescription is not so easy to follow, as we have a couple of things working against us in the form of evolutionary baggage.  First, the desire to eat is a basic survival instinct, so it's unnatural to try to reduce the amount of food we consume.  Second, our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have found the idea of exercise for exercise's sake ludicrous... [p.69]

I think that we can design a society -- more vertically integrated -- that enables members to get exercise through activities such as gardening, farming, and winemaking.  Sure beats sitting behind a desk.

Innovation is a complex process, but at its most basic it involves imagining new ways of solving a problem and then implementing them.  The first step requires the sort of imagination that is reflected in the creation of art...and the second requires some way of explaining the innovation to others. [p.112]

I need help with the second.

There is a problem with the success of our cultural adaptability, though.  In the process of creating a densely populated, agricultural way of life, we were forced to subsume our individual desires for novelty to the desires of the broader culture. In contrast to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, who were free to explore any and all cultural possibilities, from fishing for salmon to hunting mammoths on the central Asian steppes to creating beautiful artistic depictions on the walls of French caves, their Neolithic descendants were forced to channel theirs in order to suit the broader needs of society.  In effect, minds that had once been free, with the endless territory of the Paleolithic globe in which to realized their musings, were now caged, limited in both geography and focus.  We had gone from living in "the original affluent society," as anthropologist Marchall Sahlins famously referred to hunter-gatherer populations, with free to [sic.] time to devote to seemingly idle activities, to being a group of worker bees with looming deadlines to meet. [p.113]

And we are so far down the road that we cannot even understand the frustration of those artisans -- aka Luddites -- that were drug kicking and screaming into the industrial age. I think that we can get some of this freedom back and keep some of the comforts that meaningful, not mindless, technology has provided.

As a species that has long been accustimed to growth, expansion, and consumption, we will have to use our ingenuity in new ways to create a lifestyle with long-term sustainability.  It's certainly not going to be an easy transition, but just as with the other crisis points in our species' history, we do possess the intellectual abilities to adapt. First, howver, must come a sea change in our worldview. [p.183]

Bring it on!

 

 

Against The Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization by Richard Manning

Highly Recommended.  Get out of the cult by looking at agriculture from another angle.  Here are a few excerpts from Against The Grain:

...some New World settlers considered smallpox a net gain for their god.  John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, was blunt about the matter: "For the natives, they are neere all dead of small Poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess." [p.59]

Gotta love that Christian perspective.  For a clear-eyed explanation of the source of Christianity, watch the first 30 minutes of this film.

Modern famine is the result of bad government, but so was ancient famine.  Bad government is a part of the syndrome, a chicken-and-egg problem.  Population explosion generates the need to grow more food, but agriculture is the cause of that population explosion, and agriculture creates government.  The hierarchical, specialized societies that agriculture builds are wholly dependent on the smooth operation of their infrastructure, on stability, on transportation.  Dams must be built, canals must flow, roads must be maintained, and government must be established to order those tasks.  Government leaders emerge from the social hierarchy that agriculture's wealth makes possible.  Failures occur as frequently as humans fail.  To hold agriculture blameless and government responsible for famine is like holding a lion blameless for a child's death on grounds that it was the lion's teeth that did the biting.  Poverty, government, and famine are coevolved species, every bit as integral to catastrophic agriculture as wheat, bluegrass, smallpox and brown rats. [p.73]

Wheat, maize, and rice are chronically in surplus worldwide, largely because of the "success" of the Green Revolution.  Yet we continue to grow more and more of these very crops, not because they are needed but because we know how to grow these crops -- and these alone -- abundantly, easily, and well.  This is the situation that has caused the world to rely on three grain crops for more than two-thirds of its nutrition. [p.97]

This killing of the gulf [of Mexico] raises the issue of resource allocation in addition to the environmental issues.  The Dead Zone has already seriously damaged what was once a productive fishery, meaning a high-quality, low-cost source of protein is being sacrificed so that a low-quality, high-input, subsidized source of protein can blanket the Upper Midwest. [p.100]

The environmental historian Donald Worster has extended Wittfogel's thinking into our time, especially in his book Rivers of Empire:  Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West.  Worster argues that hydraulic societies have entered a new period he calls the Capitalistic State Mode:

Where water control is carried out comprehensively these days, it is by means of modern technology -- electric pumps that can lift an entire river over a mountain range or mammoth concrete dams that create artificial lakes over a hundred miles long.  The early hydraulic societies, organized along agrarian state lines, have all now disappeared, along with the apparatus they operated.  In their place stand the new modern hydraulic societies, the most developed of them spiraling outward in the American West, and these societies express the reigning mind of the marketplace men, the technological wizards, and the ubiquitous state planners.

If anything, modern irrigation has spawned a culture even more rigid and hierarchical than before -- the social cost of the technology.  The environmental cost, however, is even more pronounced.  [p.101-02]

Governments...got in the business of making nitrogen cheap, and farmers lapped it up, but it created a welfare state.  Emblematic of that state is a deep-seated irrationality that ignores cause and effect.  Farmers worldwide operate in an economic never-never land where governments escalate subsidies and other protectionist measures as a sort of arms race, a system that has taken on a logic of its own.  No single set of market solutions will turn that system around. [p.113]

Indeed, the attitude has been that if we can concoct some form of basic gruel (preferably one that chews up surpluses) to maintain a stock of poor people sufficient to provide cheap labor and a stock of hogs and cattle sufficient to meet the culinary needs of the better folks (and somehow show a profit in the bargain), then the problem of world nutrition will have been solved.  At least this approach might solve the problem of foreign hunger.  The problem of feeding the domestic poor would require a bit more finesse. [p.179-80]

A thirty-two-ounce soda and a tank of gas is America distilled to its seminal fluids. [p.182]

The notion of progress is a creation of agriculture.  I can't prove it, because the idea of progress is too deeply burned into us to be extracted and examined.  It is our secular religion. [p.185]

The political system cannot be counted on to reform agriculture because any political system is a creation of agriculture, a coevolved entity.  The major forces that shaped and shape our world -- disease, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, trade, wealth -- all are a part of the culture agriculture evolved.  We carry the evidence of its disease in our bones and blood, of its pollutants in our cells, as surely as those ten-thousand-year-old skeletons of farmers are deformed and decayed by the very same infectious diseases, stoop labor, and exploitation.  Just as surely, agriculture dug the tunnel of our vision.

Truly, there are steps to be taken, changes to be made, but the last place we can look to make those changes is at the top of the political hierarchy.  That only ensures that our drive for change will be converted to currency in ADM's account. [p.187]

I do not take population as a given; if we accept that six billion as inevitable, we are doomed.  If the human endeavor takes as its primary reason for being the feeding of however many people issue from senseless acts of reproduction, then the human endeavor is pointless. [p.188]

Visit a sister site, ParadigmClub.org, for an idea on how to start to work our way out of our current predicament.  We have to live completely differently -- and have fun doing so.