Thesis #28: Humanity will almost certainly survive.
by Jason GodeskyAs beneficial as collapse may ultimately prove to be for the state of humanity (see thesis #27), the process itself will likely be horrific. Ultimately, the only sustainable level of complexity is the stone age (though this allows a great deal more complexity still than the popular imagination permits, as we discussed in theses #22-24). But complexity is a function of energy; complexity allows more energy to pass through a society. Most of that energy takes the form first of food, and then, of people (see thesis #4). In short, we face a severe problem of overshoot–and the drop in our carrying capacity to its sustainable level will mean the die-off of some 90% or more of the current population.
We can certainly excuse those authors who have worried for the extinction of our entire species facing such a grim scenario, as with Christchurch’s comments n 2004, “…if we continue our present growth path, we are facing extinction. Not in millions of years, or even millennia, but by the end of this century.” Or, Sun Microsystems’ co-founder Bill Joy’s “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” first published in Wired magazine, long acknowledged as the “Bible” of techno-utopians, where he writes about how our technology may succeed in driving us into extinction.
We must remember two crucial facts, both of which are contrary to everything we’ve been raised to believe. First, civilization is fragile, and second, humans are not.
John M. Shanahan once called civilization, “a thin veneer over barbarianism.” That quote was repeated often during the weeks that followed Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 landfall on the Gulf Coast. The exaggerated media reports of looting and violence showed us what we have come to expect of uncivilized humanity, “anarchy,” in all its pejorative meaning. However, in the months that followed, we learned that portrayal was grossly exaggerated. What was underreported, however, was the formation of small, egalitarian “tribes” among New Orleans’ survivors. Allen Breed wrote “French Quarter Holdouts Create ‘Tribes’” for the Associated Press, published 4 September 2005, which began with:
In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming “tribes” and dividing up the labor. As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim.
While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods — humanity.
“Some people became animals,” Vasilioas Tryphonas said Sunday morning as he sipped a hot beer in Johnny White’s Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. “We became more civilized.”
By such a definition, civilized behavior is the antithesis of civilization. New Orleans collapsed in the face of Katrina. The rebuilding efforts that have followed are precisely what we see whenever one region collapses in a peer polity sytem. This makes New Orleans a microcosmic preview of what awaits us with collapse.
As we saw in New Orleans, it does not take much to disrupt civilization’s control. More importantly, civilization’s very foundations are extremely weak. Civilization is utterly dependent on cereal grains for the bulk of its diet–a small handful of closely-related grasses. They are extremely tempermental plants, susceptible to even minor fluctuations in temperature, sunlight, and rainfall. A proverb of unknown attribution asserts that every civilization is three meals away from revolution; it is a basic application of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Whatever need we may have to remain memebers of a large-scale, hierarchcial, exploitative society is not the equal to our basic, physical needs. If those cannot be met by a civilization, that civilization will dissolve. With a changing climate, the end of the era of fossil fuels, and the increasing fragility of complexity and its escalating probability of a cascading disaster in an era of diminishing marginal returns, how much longer can civilization provide for our basic needs?
That said, humans are omnivores. Wild foragers enjoy a far more varied diet than we do. To starve an agriculturalist requires nothing more than a dry spell, or a hot year; to starve a forager would require the extinction of nearly the entire of the plant and animal kingdoms (and even then, the forager might have a chance of surviving off of fungi). Before the advent of civilization, humans had adapted to nearly every environment on the planet. Culture allows us a means of adapting more quickly, and omnivorism makes us virtually impervious to starvation. That has made the human being comparable to the cockroach as one of the most adaptive organisms on the planet.
We must understand, then, that collapse is the end of civilization–and not necessarily the end of humanity. Those who depend on civilization for their survival will perish along with it; those who are able to make themselves independent of civilization will enjoy the foragers’ bounty, and as much an assurance of survival as this world ever provides.
If survival is so easy, why are we facing such a catastrophic die-off? That sad fact is a testimony to the power of acculturation. The ultimate cause of death will be lack of food. Violence or disease may constitute proximate causes, but these will be ultimately the result of the contracting flow of energy through society. Lack of food will give rise to food riots; riots will give way to mobs and gangs and ultimately, the grisly cannibalism that seems to mark the final moments of every collapsing civilization. Before that, nation-states will wage war for the resources they need, invading oil-rich countries and maneuvering against each other for those fields. Of course, lack of nutrition inhibits the immune response, and the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” historically, have always ridden together: war disrupts the growing and harvest seasons, leading to famine, which in turn leads to pestilence, and all of them to death. So why is it that people starve to death? Most commonly, people starve to death surrounded by edible matter–just no food. There is the essential issue, because “food” is not just edible matter, it’s the culturally constructed subset of edible matter. That mismatch has garnered a small fortune for the producers of “Fear Factor.” Bull’s penis is entirely edible–it’s even a high-priced delicacy consumed by China’s elites to bestow sexual potency–but it isn’t “food.” At least not in our culture.
ome of the examples of this mismatch are simply astounding. The single most famous example of cannibalism in American history is that of the Donner party–a group of 31 settlers bound for California who became trapped in the Sierra Nevadas in the winter of 1947. Though fed with pine nuts by Paiute Indians earlier in their travels, they still resorted to cannibalism and ultimately starved to death–in the middle of a large pine grove. They used the pine trees for fuel and even cut many of them down, but they never used them for food. It simply never occured to them: pine nuts and pine bark simply were not “food.” Pine had long been a “starvation food” for Native Americans in these areas; when all else failed, you could always eat the pine. It was rarely the first choice, but in desperate circumstances, it would suffice. The Donner party was desperate, and ate every “food” they could think of–even rawhide, bones and leather. But they didn’t eat things that weren’t “food”–and pine simply wasn’t “food,” even though they had been fed a meal of pine nuts a short time before.
Or, consider the plight of the Viking colonists of Greenland, as related by Jared Diamond in Collapse. Fish had long been a staple of Norse life, and like other staples (bread in European cultures, or rice in Japan), that entailed two, seemingly discordant attitudes. First, every meal required some portion of it: it is the prescence of some amount of the staple, more than portion size, that separates a “meal” from a “snack.” Secondly, eating just the staple is a sign of poverty, as in “bread and water.” Yet, in Greenland, we find no sign of fish associated with the Viking settlements. Couldn’t it simply be a matter of the fish not being preserved very well, or otherwise hidden from us? Diamond runs through a number of the theories proposed on this account, most of which are patently ridiculous, and comes to a very good point with this:
The trouble with all those excuses for the lack of fish bones at Greenland Norse sites is that they would apply equally well to Greenland Inuit and Icelandic and Norwegian Norse sites, where fish bones prove instead to be abundant.
Yes, fish bones decompose faster, so we need to look at contemporary Norse sites for comparison, to see how much of their fish bones survived. Short answer: a lot. Even more at the Inuit sites, because Greenland isn’t just a fisherman’s paradise–it’s also an archaeologist’s dream. The soil composition and the cold means that nearly everything in Greenland is incredibly well preserved. We have preserved sheep lice and fecal pellets from the Norse colonies–both of which decay far more quickly than fish bones. As Diamond put it:
Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland refuses initially to believe the incredible claim that the Greenland Norse didn’t eat fish, and starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding … I prefer instead to take the facts at face value; even though Greenland’s Norse originated from a fish-eating society, they may have developed a taboo against eating fish.
In the end, the Viking colonies of Greenland starved to death–next to a sea teaming with fish. To the end, they never touched them. Their Norse cousins lived on fish; they knew this. They lived in full view of the Inuit, who lived happily as they starved to death. They called them skraelings–”wretches”–because they were naught but ignoble savages. Savages who survived–and quite happily–while the civilized Europeans died a long, agonizing death. They ate their herds of cows, even the young, all the way down to the hooves–a clear sign that they had given up on the future. They ate their dogs. And again, in the end, they ate each other. But to the very end, they never ate fish.
The Arneborg study does show that the Greenland Norse were incredibly adaptive, learning to change their diet to match changing circumstances. It’s not a lack of desperation that’s at fault here; it’s a lack of imagination. It’s the cultural construction of food. We like to point to such stories with modern pride and think how we could never be so foolish, but unlike them, we don’t know that we can eat pine bark, or dandelions, or plantain, or burdock root, or any of the other thousands of plant and animal species that surround us–even in the middle of the city. These things are easily learned, but as Daniel Quinn once suggested, the greatest impediment to learning is not the difficulty of acquiring knowledge–that is done easily–but the curiosity to seek that knowledge in the first place. We have defined “food” to be solely our domesticates. They are clearly packaged and labelled. We need not concern ourselves with those things in the wild that we can eat; they are not food.
We feel the cultural construction of food very deeply, because it is the primary means of our species’ adaptation. Culture can learn far more quickly than biology, and what we are willing to eat or not is very literally a matter of life and death. Acculturation sets our notion of food at a level as powerful as any genetic instinct, and for the most part, this is highly adaptive. It allows us to use culture to learn what is edible and what is poisonous in a new environment quickly, and its deep effects make sure we heed that knowledge and stay alive. However, civilization has abused that adaptation to hold our food supply hostage, as it were, redefining food to a very narrow selection–a selection it can control. Such is the foundation of civilization, and such is the very thing that collapse threatens.
Such collapses have happened before, so we need not reach blindly for some idea of its implications. Many primitivists have expressed fears that, desperate and starving, a “land grab” may ensue; farmers may begin tearing into the forest for more land; people will flee the cities and the wilderness will collapse under the weight of so many human refugees fleeng their collapsing civilization. Such fears seem logical–far more logical than the assertion that people will simply “choose” to die–but they are also unprecedented. Every prevous collapse has seen a contraction of farmland, not an expansion. For the most part, those lands not currently under cultivation are left wild for a reason–usually, that they are useless for cultivation. Even the most ignorant farmers know this; even dead farmland without the fossil fuel-based fertilizers need to eke crops out of it are better than the “useless,” uncleared land beneath our forests. Our zombie movies provide a picture of popular psychology in the kind of catastrophe collapse entails. We do not “run for the hills”; we run to the cities for help.
Always, however, there is a small minority that chooses to separate itself from civilization and live another, more sustainable way. The Pueblo people retain almost no memory of the Hohokam, the Anasazi, and the other civilizations that preceded them, before they collapsed in the same horrific manner. Those who survived were those who left civilization behind to live a different way, a sustainable way. If they are “Noble Savages,” it is only because of how savagely natural selection did its work–leaving only the most noble to survive. Yet in their myths, many of the Pueblo seem to echo this sentiment exactly. They tell a story that this is not the first world humans have lived in; several worlds have passed before, only to be destroyed by the decadence of humanity. Yet, each time, some minority remembered the ways of their ancestors, and they were permitted to pass into the next world. Natural selection eliminated the civilizations of the Hohokam and the Anasazi; it allowed the Pueblo to survive because they found a new, sustainable way to live.
Ultimately, there is a merciless elegance to the horror of collapse. Its destruction is not arbitrary or random. Every individual human being will be presented with a choice, as to whether or not we wish to die. We will have to choose, whehter we will remain civilized even unto death, or whether we will choose to find a new way to live. It is a choice. The Greenlanders, the Hohokam and the Anasazi all chose to die as civilized men, rather than imagine a different life. They were aware of alternatives that lurked on their periphery. They probably did not understand it as a choice, nor did they ever really concieve of the alternative. The choice was made on a much deeper level. For them, there was never any other choice–they were civilized. So they were born, and so they would die. Nothing else was even concievable. A choice made from such deep convictions that it never enters the conscious mind is a choice, nonetheless.
The collapse will be natural selection in its most amoral, merciless form. We cannot–must not–take away any individual’s choice. That choice is the last sacred thing we have left. We cannot choose death for them through violence; yet it would be just as wrong to force them to choose life. Nearly all of our species will likely choose to die, just like every other time the choice has been posed. That cannot be changed. What we can change is ourselves, and our own choice. We can help as many people as we can to understand the situation we now face, and the choice that they must make. We cannot choose for them–but we can make sure they understand that they do have a choice. We will always be a fringe of a fringe, but every last individual we can reach is a whole world of possibilities we have saved–as the Talmud teaches, “whoever saves one soul, is regarded as if he had saved a whole world.” (Mishna Sanhedrin 37a)
You seem to gloss over the fact that 6.5 billion people CANNOT choose to live as foragers. In fact, if everyone chose to forage that would practically ensure the extinction of the human race.
Comment by JimFive — 17 January 2006 @ 1:43 PM
Gloss over? That was one of the main points above. No, 6.5 billion cannot choose to be foragers. 6.5 billion will never make that choice, either. 90% or more will choose to die. That can’t be changed. What CAN be changed is which group we, individually, choose to be in.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 2:23 PM
Yes, but JimFive’s point still remains. If 6.5 billion people DID become foragers, it would ensure the extinction of the human race.
Comment by Anonymous — 17 January 2006 @ 2:27 PM
Yes, that is true. But I didn’t “gloss over” it–it was one of my main points. If aliens ate us all, that would ensure our extinction as well. Which is probably a more likely scenario than 6.5 billion people choosing to be foragers. It’s a straw man, and it’s irrelevant. No one is suggesting that everyone become foragers, or even that it would be possible.
My point is there’s going to be a die-off, and there’s nothing we can do to change that. But the human species will survive that die-off. The survivors will be that minority that chooses to become foragers. It will be a very small minority, but each of us, individually, can choose whether or not we will be in it. There’s nothing we can do to change the aggregate, but we can choose what we do ourselves.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 2:34 PM
How could we ever choose which group we are in?
I’m sure that anyone would do anything to survive.
Won’t the ones with the biggest guns survive?
Or just the ones with a stroke of luck.
No one can tell who will or won’t survive. How exciting!
Comment by Gunnix — 17 January 2006 @ 4:47 PM
Correction: I’m sure that anyone would do anything that they can think of to survive. There’s the key. At all times, 90% or more of the civilized population is incapable of concieving of the possibility of living as a forager. It’s all well and good to postulate hypothetical scenarios, but this has happened before. You may well believe that people would do anything to survive, but in the past, people have always been limited in their options to those things they could concieve of.
Not if they never think to go after you. It doesn’t matter how big your gun is, if it never occurs to you to point it at me and fire it. The Vikings in Greenland starved to death, but they never thought to attack the Inuit for food. The Inuit never really registered for them as an option, or as someone who had food to steal. They simply did not exist inside their mental frame. Even a starving civilized person looks down at the poor, wretched foragers–no matter how well they eat.
It’s actually pretty easy to tell who will or won’t survive. If you’re dependent on an unsustainable system that’s crashing, you won’t survive. If you’re dependent on a stable, sustainable system, you will survive. It’s really as simple as that.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 4:56 PM
Oh I forgot to say. What a great and inspiring article. Thanks a lot for your effort!
Comment by Gunnix — 17 January 2006 @ 5:05 PM
Er, Jason, the Donner Party was caught in the the mountains during the winter of 1846-1847, not 1947.
Sorry to nitpick.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 17 January 2006 @ 6:47 PM
Oh wow … now that’s a typo.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 7:23 PM
It would still be nice to have actual proof that such very little land on the Earth is arable.
I don’t understand how you can say people stick together and form tribes and then say there will be cannibal gangs everywhere. I guess the cannibals are cooperating if they are in gangs.
Interesting that computer people like yourself and that Sun Microsystems are so similar.
The Donner Party didn’t eat each other. This is a recent scientific finding. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060113/ap_on_sc/donner_party
You say they have to choose, but then, you say if they are dependent on an unsustainable system, you won’t live. But you say people will have to choose. Because they will have a choice. Does that mean anyone will be able to get their needs from the wilderness if they put their mind to it, or they need to know these certain skills beforehand that fill books in order to survive?
Comment by planetwarming — 17 January 2006 @ 8:20 PM
I wonder what contradiction you have to the possibility of people cutting down trees not for agriculture but warmth.
Comment by planetwarming — 17 January 2006 @ 8:30 PM
One thing to keep in mind is that is has been relatively common for people to become cannibals when starving, it is very rare for people to kill eachother for food. The exceptions are almost entirely in cultures where cannibalism was already practiced ritually or in the context of war (easter island, etc). In most cases people have chosen to die rather than kill eachother. Maybe it’s partly because by the time they are hungry enough to so completely disregard cultural propriety, they are to weak to follow through.
Comment by limukala — 17 January 2006 @ 8:35 PM
“I wonder what contradiction you have to the possibility of people cutting down trees not for agriculture but warmth.”
Well, dead people don’t need much warmth, and it doesn’t take all that long to starve if all the food is cut off. Also, most people live in cities and there aren’t all that many trees left withing walking distance of most cities, so people may be cutting down a lot of trees, but it will be limited temporally and geographically. In the end it would probably be a lot less trees than are cut down to make toilet paper and 5,000 square foot mcmansions every year.
Also, the worst deforestation is occuring in the tropics, where people don’t need fire for the heat, and most poor already use wood for cooking. The deforestation will actually probably lessen with the collapse of lumber hungry industry, even when increased woodfuel consumption is taken into account.
Comment by limukala — 17 January 2006 @ 8:47 PM
Actually, it’s really not as simple as that, because if you have no “hands-on experience” in the sustainable system, you still won’t survive.
Primitive living skills can only be acquired through “field-training,” not by reading survival books or watching survival videos while wrapped up in the comfort of our favorite recliner. It just doesn’t work that way. So even if 6.5 billion people suddenly decide to head for the woods, 6.49+ billion of them will die within the first week because they won’t have a clue about how to survive in such a harsh environment. And it will be harsh.
The true test, before the test, will be who among us has the courage of their convictions?
Assuming we agree that collapse is the inevitable outcome of the converging crises that we face, and assuming that we agree with your assessment that the hunter/gatherer/forager will be in a much better position to survive than the rest of humanity, we really need to demonstrate the courage of those convictions.
We need to invest the time and money to be “field-trained” in primitive living skills and, in order to hone our newly acquired skills, we need to have the discipline to voluntarily “field-test” that training at least a few weeks per year in the wilderness area of our choice. Only then will we be ready when the time comes.
However, if we choose to just talk-the-talk from the comfort of our favorite recliner, and order our survival books online through Amazon, then, sustainable as the hunter/gatherer/forager concept might be, not only will we be among the first to head for the woods, we will also be among the first to be claimed by the woods. RIP
Comment by George — 17 January 2006 @ 8:59 PM
Tom Brown Jr. has great books, and I assume his classes are pretty killer too, but I’d rather save my money to get some land. It might be more fun to live in a foraging society, but seems horticulture would be an easier transition and more stable, provided you have enough time to get things set up right. If that fails, then out to the woods. At least Hawaii has the advantage of being comfortable year-round and totally full of edible plants and animals I am familiar with. I have already done quite a bit of foraging and have friends who have done that exclusively for 3 months at a time. I also know an uninhabited valley that used to be a thriving hawaiian village, and so is full of banana, breadfruit, guava and avocado trees (and easily captured wild goats and pigs, all you need is a 5 foot length of rope). I wouldn’t want to try roughing it in the cold lands, brrrr.
Comment by limukala — 17 January 2006 @ 9:18 PM
Shit, I’m fucked. You just described me, George.
Comment by planetwarming — 17 January 2006 @ 9:37 PM
Well, don’t feel alone because I just described myself, too. Depressing.
I’m in the very early stages of researching primitive living schools. BOSS seems to have about the best primitive living field training I can find. So far, anyway. Be prepared to spend a lot of money, though. I’d like to go, but not sure I could ever afford it.
To make matters worse, as I recall, I read that right before the Y2K crisis, enrollment in survival and primitive living schools quadrupled. Once peak oil hits the mainstream media and more and more people get spooked by it, you can only imagine what the enrollment in survival and primitive living schools will be then. So, even if you can afford it and want to go, if you wait too late, you probably won’t be able to get in.
We may have to talk “limukala” into taking us with him to his secret valley in Hawaii!!
Comment by George — 17 January 2006 @ 10:32 PM
What would you consider proof, if not the foregoing?
Well, yes. Cooperation isn’t always warm and fuzzy. But I’m talking about a diversity of approaches. Some will go it alone, and die. Some will try to stick it out in the cities, and die. Some will try to hold out in their bunkers, and die. Some will try to make the cities sustainable, and die.
That’s what makes it natural selection–the only ones who will survive will be the ones who work together to form a community that isn’t dependent on an unsustainable system. Ideology has nothing to do with it; in fact, I suspect rednecks will outnumber us. But there it is.
You should read your own link, where it says:
Now, I have no doubt they’re right, that cannibalism in the Donner party was not nearly so rampant as sensationalist claims have made it. But they did resort to cannibalism, and more importantly, many of them did starve to death. The cannibalism is less relevant to this argument than the fact that they starved in the middle of a large pine grove.
You can choose to make yourself independent of our unsustainable system, or you can choose to remain a part of it. In so doing, you choose to live or die. The skills necessary are not as difficult to learn as is the initial leap to even consider them in the first place. That’s the choice; it’s the choice of whether to remain as we’ve always known, or try something new.
They certainly will. But in crises, people go to the cities. They’ll cut down the trees near the cities. They won’t be able to import a lot of timber when there’s no gasoline, after all. Of course, there aren’t many trees in the cities, so arson will become a problem. But you’re not going to go clear-cut a national forest for fuel–how would you get there? Where’s all that energy coming from? And how are you going to take it back?
Easter Island? The Anasazi and the Hohokam? Listening to Jared Diamond’s Collapse audio book on the ride up to Poughkeepsie, it became almost comical how every account ultimately ended the same way: with people hunting each other for food.
In small-scale cases where they all know each other, you’re right. But in cases of civilization collapse … not so much.
That is true. Once you’ve made the choice, you still need to learn how. The basic education of any six-year-old forager is lacking for us. In 1744, an offer of higher education with paid tuition was made to the Onondaga. Their chief, Canasatego, answered:
That said, the basics of identifying wild edibles can be learned in a weekend. The basics of hunting can be learned in a weekend. In a week, even an adult can learn the basics necessary for the most rudimentary survival. It may take a lifetime to perfect those skills, but such perfection is a matter of quality of life, not bare survival. I agree with everything you say about needing to learn the skills necesary, but one can get up to the level of being able to survive very quickly once one chooses to do so.
Several months ahead of you.
I’m just getting my theory in order before I start talking about more practical experiences publicly. But, I’m also phasing myself in gradually, because that’s a luxury I can afford right now. And I’m going to spend some time on those very quality of life issues. I have no doubt there’s a marginal return curve–new skills become more difficult to learn, and add progressively less to quality of life. But for now, what I learn is very simple, and has huge advantages.
Schools aren’t necessarily the only way to learn these skills, though. You want to learn the basics from someone who knows what they’re doing, but ultimately, perfection is just a matter of doing it–and that’s something you can do on your own. People who know what they’re doing don’t necessarily have to be paid tutors, either. Know any good hunters? Take them up the next time they ask if you’d like to come along. My dad’s a great fisherman, and I’m hoping to get him to come with us in the spring.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 11:28 PM
Remember, freshly cut down trees don’t burn well. People will burn things that are easy to burn first. Books, furniture, clothing, their homes, etc. The first winter should kill off most of the people who will die, if only because they’re all a bunch of pansies. “Put on a damn sweater you nitwit!”
All in all there is about a 1 in 10 chance of survival (sounds better than over 90% of people will die, no?). But is an average. In the cities, your chances are about 1 in a million, litterally. In the woods, knowing what to do, in an established and practiced tribe, etc? Your odds are probably whole numbers.
Note: 1 in 10 would indicate the survival of about 700 million people. (assuming a population of 7 billion at the time of collapse)
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 18 January 2006 @ 12:11 AM
While it may not take too much time to learn the basics of survival, I still think George has a very valid point about experiencial knowledge. Especially when it comes to finding food in winter. Hunting is a lot harder than you make it sound, especially without guns. It not only took native americans a lifetime (or at least a couple decades) to perfect it, but it took generations of inherited knowledge to encourage the process. It’s also a lot easier to learn something when you are a small kid. I just can’t imagine that a 30 year-old suburbanite could ever possibly match the tracking abilities of your average australian aborigine or apache scout, and if you can’t find the game, you can’t eat it.
Wild edibles are much easier to find and identify, but winter is a very hard time to find edible plants, which is why most foraging and horticultural cultures eat much more meat during the cold months. The best advice I can think of is to find a swampy area with a lot of cattails. Cattails produces 8 edible food products that span all four seasons. In a study by syracuse U they were found to produce “140 tons of rhizomes per acre near Wolcott, NY. That represents something more than 10 times the average yield per acre of potatoes. In terms of dry weight of cattail flour, the 140 tons of roots would yield approximately 32 tons.
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/duffyk43.html
You can get that in the winter. So if any of you live in a swampy area, your set. If not, come on out to Big Island, land is still pretty cheap and food is everywhere. The only problem is that there are still a lot of Hawaiians pissed of at the american invasion, so anti-haole sentiment is pretty strong in places, and who know how that will play out after collapse.
I have to say though, that with my limited knowledge (limited, but still more than a weekends worth) my wilderness survival experience was largely cold and hungry, and that was in the late summer (damn those summer nights are cold though if you only have shorts and a t-shirt). It seems optimistic to think that you could fend for yourself in the woods after a lifetime of pampered city life with only a weekend crash course in necessary skills. I think George is right when he says you’d better practice before your life depends on it. Now, JG, you say you can learn the basics of survival in a weekend, but you still admit to plans to practice. You are right in that you could learn the basics in a weekend, but I contend you would need substantial real-world experience to make that work fulltime, even if it is mostly self-taught. If you don’t have the advantage of being raised as a forager, than you either need good knowledge of the specific area you plan to live in during all seasons, so you know where to find what (such knowledge is crucial in the fact that foragers almost never starve), or you need at least some practice in all conditions.
If the crash comes slowly enough it won’t be a problem, but if it happens suddenly at the beginning of winter, it will be pretty tough for all but the most experienced survivalists.
Comment by limukala — 18 January 2006 @ 1:32 AM
I live in Australia. I grew up on a farm. I was hunting pigs, kangaroo and goats from the age of 10. I also spent time on the coast fishing and snorkeling for fish etc. We had a vege garden and an orchard. My parents taught us everything we need to know in order to survive.
i am an engineer (mechanical/sructural) as well and know how to fix almost any engine or device. i can also build as my parents built most of the houses we lived in.
I am ready for whatever happens.
Me and my partner recently moved back to a remote coastal region, one of the places I grew up. We have set up a garden and got the hang of the local game and fishing areas.
you are right about the experience thing. Lots of tricks to learn. One of the hardest is how to outsmart the food-source in order to hunt it and be sure of your next meal. Its about allowing your instincts to work again. that depends on how buried they are under the tonne of shite we have to deal with these days…..
Comment by holotropik — 18 January 2006 @ 6:05 AM
He does indeed! But forming a community, learning the basics, choosing to learn the more advanced skills … these are simply a matter of making a choice. There are ways to accomplish these things–if you choose to do so.
It is hard, but doing it well is a matter of practice, not learning. It’s fairly easy to learn how to kill and properly dress an animal. Now, becoming good at those things is another story, but it’s not a matter of learning, so much as practice.
Probably not–but 30-year-old suburbanites routinely learn the basics well enough to provide for themselves. Ability is easy; mastery is hard. But mastery is not necessary for survival–just abilty.
He is right–because your life does depend on it! But, again, we’re talking about the difference between ability and mastery–the difference between living cold and hungry and not living at all. Though, with a community, you’ll generally not be cold or hungry, either.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 10:45 AM
But how can we have a community when even mentioning something to any people you know they look at you like you are crazy and it’s totally out of their sphere of reality that they are willing to deal with. I guess primitive schools are good for meeting those people too.
It would be nice if during the crash I could meet all these people from primitive skills schools in the woods that know what they are doing. But it seems that they probably wouldn’t teach me and allow me to be a part of their tribe. I guess I have to bring something to the table first and there might be a relatively lot of people to the ratio of people who know what they are doing who will be around these primitively-smart people who they will turn away.
I think having a rat trap (a mouse trap only bigger) and mouse traps might be good to have. I don’t have any experience with making traps.
I’m kind of doing a training for a career that will take two years, and I’m scared of all this freaking out about 2006/2007 that maybe I should just get trained in truck driving for a few weeks, earn some money and then go to a primitive school as soon as I get enough money to pay for it.
Thanks for the BOSS suggestion.
Comment by planetwarming — 18 January 2006 @ 12:12 PM
They are–but they’re not the only places. I felt very alone when I started, too, but over time, sticking to it has brought like-minded folk out of the woodwork. We’re appealing to human nature itself with a message that’s universal to all humanity–you just need to figure out the right way of putting it.
I know we’d expect you to bring something to the table before we let you join us. Don’t you have any friends that you go fishing with, go camping with? That’s more important than ideology.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 12:26 PM
Jason,
I think you take the 90% die off in past collapses and all the survivors being foragers as your premises and draw a conclusion that 10% of the people became foragers and survived. However it is possible to draw a conclusion that some unknown number of people (more than 10%) decided to become foragers but only 10% could be supported by foraging.
So even if you switched to foraging there may not be enough food for you because there is too much competition.
This is assuming a relatively undamaged ecosystem. When you are in the middle of suburbia with seas of asphalt all around then it gets harder to find food. Then there is the loss of species and destruction of habitats.
On the plus side there is probably more deer now than ever because all the wolves are gone.
Comment by DigitalDjigit — 18 January 2006 @ 1:56 PM
Actually, quite the opposite. The number that decided to change their lifestyle was the greatest bottleneck. With the Pueblo, for instance, we see them separating from the Anasazi and the Hohokam in the last days of the empire, but it’s much less than the ecosystem can support, so once the Anasazi and the Hohokam are gone, the Pueblo population rises up to what the environment can support.
I’d make a wild guess that it will be something closer to 1% that ever even tries to make a living beyond civilization, which wil be much less than the ecosystem can support. I think that 1% will have excessive room and resources for so few people, and that those survivors will see a population boom as they rise up to the natural carrying capacity.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 2:18 PM
I learned of the imminence of civilization collapse by this website. Where did you learn that civilization collapse was so imminent?
=============================
They are–but they’re not the only places. I felt very alone when I started, too, but over time, sticking to it has brought like-minded folk out of the woodwork. We’re appealing to human nature itself with a message that’s universal to all humanity–you just need to figure out the right way of putting it.
Comment by planetwarming — 18 January 2006 @ 2:39 PM
I started the blog here with my autobiography: my beginnings as a faithful Catholic, the impact Daniel Quinn’s Ishamel had on me, my two attempts at a “tribal business” (Tribal Dawn and Anthropik Media), and my eventual turn towards primitivism. It was no single factor that convinced, so much as a continual investigation which, frankly, I undertook hoping to exonerate civilization from Quinn’s accusations. Instead, I found out that Quinn had drastically understated the case.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 4:10 PM
It’s most likely that the collapse will occur in stages. The first stage will be when food and energy are no longer available in urban areas. At this point many urbanites will die and some will try to migrate to rural areas. At this point the government will probably collapse, as there will be no food or supplies for the military. If only 10% survive this stage, there will still be 30 million people in this country. People in rural areas will be desperate to survive due to lack of energy and fertilizer. They will not allow a peaceful migration of urbanites. In spite of all of its flaws, agriculture will be the most effective method of providing food at least in the short term. Maintaining control of arable property will be the means of insuring survival. Land will be defended vigorously.
Those few wild areas left will be “homesteaded� by “country boys that know how to survive�. In these areas hunter-gathers will be as popular as Native Americans were on the frontier.
Although this will not be a sustainable situation it could easily last a generation. By the time population declines to carrying capacity, the wild areas will look like Haiti.
In order to be one of the 1% that are left to hunt and forage it will be necessary to survive this first generation. I think the chances of surviving this far will depend much more on being well-armed and proficient with modern weapons than having hunter-gather survival skills.
Comment by Bob Harrison — 18 January 2006 @ 4:58 PM
Hey Bob –
I read that and my gut instinct says, yeah, that makes sense, you’re probably right… however, as I have come to understand it, this is exactly the opposite of what has actually happened in previous instances of collapse… so I think the strong money is on Jason’s scenario.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 18 January 2006 @ 5:04 PM
Those stages may bear out, but collapse accelerates itself. The occurence of each element makes the next occur all that much faster. It feeds on itself, and begins to happen more quickly. Those stages may hold up, but they will pass very quickly–a matter of months–leaving the entire process over the course of perhaps as little as a decade.
The key is the same key to survival that foragers have used all this time: don’t live on arable land. What wilderness is left, is left precsely because it is not arable. They may not like you, but if your land is worthless to them, they’re not going to fight you for it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 5:06 PM
Me too I have the problem of where to learn the skills to survive in nature. I live in Belgium (Flanders) and there’s not much nature at all. There aren’t many interesting courses either (I’m following one to become herborist), and I don’t know people who have the same ideas (even many people in the squats seem uninterested in living in nature). On the internet the only courses I find which look interesting are in the US. Other survival courses here cost so much that I’d never be able to pay for them and many of them are not teaching many primitive skills at all.
I’m learning stuff by myself, but I would learn it so much faster from someone who’s experienced.
Comment by Gunnix — 18 January 2006 @ 7:08 PM
Much of the wilderness that remains in this country (parts of Appalachia for example) is wild because it would not be useful for commercial farming. Federal and state forests and land held by timber and mining companies can and would be homesteaded.
Comment by Bob Harrison — 18 January 2006 @ 9:07 PM
To take some land I know well, let’s consider the Allegheny National Forest.
This is an area in northwestern Pennsylvania, an area well known for extensive corn farming. For hundreds of years, farmers have been trying to make inroads into the Allegheny National Forest, but they’ve never gotten very far. The forest is very tough, and as verdant as the soil is for forest, it’s useless for corn or wheat. All attempts to tame it have failed. Today, the government’s opening it up for logging, but even that isn’t going so well–the trees aren’t very good lumber material.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 10:21 PM
Did I also mention that there’s some really good oil underneath the Allegheny National Forest? Wikipedia:
But even that isn’t enough to counterbalance the sheer, overwhelming problems that civilization faces in trying to tame that wilderness.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 10:23 PM
I think we need to differentiate between survival skills and primitive living skills. They are not the same. Survival skills are meant to keep you alive for a week or so to give rescuers time to find you. If they don’t find you, the odds are you will die. Primitive living skills are meant to keep you alive forever. In the scenario that we are describing, primitive living skills are the only thing you should be interested in learning.
How long it takes to learn the basics of, or perfect, primitive living skills is not the issue. The basics will not keep you alive. It’s how long it will take you to develop enough proficiency in those skills to enable you to live for an extended period of time in the wilderness of your choice. Proficiency takes time and you cannot and will not get that level of proficiency over a weekend or even a few weeks or even “very quickly.”
As I have said, you first need to learn those skills in a field setting from someone who knows what they are talking about. Then, you need to put yourself through a “realistic” drill at least once per year. That drill should last enough consecutive days in the wilderness of your choice to really test your abilities.
My guess is that the drill needs to last at least a solid two weeks and a month would be even better. And I’m talking no contact with the outside world during your drill. Otherwise, you are not testing your primitive “living” skills, you are simply testing your primitive “visiting” skills. Becoming proficient in the first may keep you alive when/if the time comes. Becoming proficient in the second will simply sacrifice you to the wilderness.
Yes, but are you several months ahead of me in the right direction?
That is why I asked the above question. If you think primitive living skills means learning the “civilized” way to hunt and fish using “civilized” hunting and fishing gear, then, right off the bat, you are setting yourself up for failure when/if the time comes to make your move. Any “civilized” stuff you take with you into the wilderness will ultimately break, malfunction, or simply wear out from overuse. Then what will you do?
And every “civilized” item you bring with you into the wilderness binds you to the very collapsing civilization you are trying to escape, and also increases the chance that you will be consumed by that wilderness when those items are no longer available for use. If the situation develops where you are forced into the wilderness, it should be viewed as a permanent transition, not a temporary one. Or do you plan on hiking 50 miles back to the nearest town with your trusty Visa card when you run out of ammo or snag and lose your last lure? That is not the mindset of a hunter/gatherer/forager. That is the mindset of a weekend warrior.
I would be willing to bet that none of us knows even one person that truly possesses primitive living skills. I am talking about someone who can head off into the wilderness with virtually nothing and make it work. A person who can do that is a true hunter/gathere/forager. Given that, BOSS-type operations are about the only place to learn these skills — books and videos will only give you a “feel” for what it’s all about. However, if you can’t or won’t “seriously” drill yourself once per year in a “realistic” field situation, I’m not certain you should spend the time or money on it.
And let’s not forget that Mother Nature is a two-faced bitch.
She will entice you with her pristine beauty. She will seduce you with her vast resources. But if you come to her unprepared, she will do everything in her power to kill you. She will send snowstorms and frigid temperatures to freeze you. She will send lighting to fry you. She will send flash floods to drown you. If she can’t get you that way, she will send crazed animals to eat you. She will send venomous reptiles and insects to poison you. And if you are lucky enough to escape her still, she will send clouds of flies and mosquitoes in an attempt to drive you insane. You don’t want to mess with this bitch.
I wouldn’t either. In fact, if the wilderness of your choice has extreme winter or summer conditions, the more skills you will have to know in order to live there for an extended time. And field-testing your skills during those extreme seasons becomes even more important if you want to ensure your survival when the time comes.
I think a wilderness area with a moderate climate is best. I agree with limukala, Hawaii is probably ideal, assuming the locals don’t barbeque you. Other than that, I think the lower levels of the Cascades or the Sierras and even central Arizona would be best. Anyplace else in the US just gets too cold in the winter, or too hot in the summer.
Famous last words. Sorry, but I have to agree with Jason on this. I think you will be better off than most, but only initially. If law and order break down in the cities, there will be a wholesale exodus. There is a name for groups of desperate, starving people roaming the country side. They call them uncivilized marauders. If they happen to stumble upon your little patch of heaven, in the twinkling of an eye, they will turn it into your little patch of hell. They will not respect your ownership rights. They will eat your food. They will steal your belongings. They will rape your women. If you put up any resistance, they will slaughter you without hesitation.
Think I’m exaggerating?
Better do some research on the farmers who tried to defend their land in Zimbabwe after Mugabe took over and any semblance of law and order vaporized. I’ve seen the pictures. Farmers hacked to death. Farmers with half their faces blown off. Both men and women. Young children — still in their school uniforms — left hanging by the neck from the shower head.
Okay. So there is a lot of pent up hatred over there and, given the history of the country, that hatred may be warranted. But guess what? Maybe it’s different Down Under, but there is also a lot of pent up hatred in the US and, given the history of the country, that hatred may also be warranted. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst, and the worst is Zimbabwe in the USA. I would not want to be in a position where I felt I had to defend a piece of land in order to survive, especially in the US.
I think you should stay on your career path and do what you can with whatever time and money you have. Remember, even though the signs of crisis are everywhere, there is a saying that those who live by the crystal ball are forever doomed to eat crushed glass.
No one really knows that collapse is imminent. You simply do the research and make a call based on that research. To get you started, check out this link that Jason provided in an earlier thesis pertaining to collapse, and read through Savinar’s site and follow the links he provides. In fact, if you Google any of this stuff, you’ll have more reading material than you ever wanted.
I don’t see collapse happening within a decade, assuming it does at all. We will first go through a worsening of the energy crisis that we are already in. That will probably lead to a recession either this year or next. That may lead to a depression around 2010. If collapse does come, I think it will “start” during the depression, but, I agree with Bob, I think total collapse will probably unfold over a period of decades. In fact, didn’t Tainter say that even a quick collapse occurs over a generation or two?
Comment by George — 19 January 2006 @ 12:09 AM
I lived in the Appalachians 350 miles south of the Allegheny National Forest. Although there will be differences, I think the conditions are very similar. To live off of this kind of land, you clear only flat areas and allow grass to grow. You raise sheep, a cow, some free running pigs, maybe a couple of beef cattle. Pigs will graze and also forage for mast in the woods. Trees are not cut on the slopes. You use manure to fertilize a vegetable garden. You can grow a little field corn for the animals in winter. You use a work pony or mule for planting and to bring in hay for the winter. In the 80’s my wife and I, with no experience, left jobs in D.C. and lived off 100 acres in this manner for five years. We moved into a 100-year-old popular log house. From gravestones on the property it was inhabited since at least the 1880’s and the soil in the 30 cleared acres was still able to grow ample grass. No fertilizers or chemicals were used.
Comment by Bob Harrison — 19 January 2006 @ 12:14 AM
I’ve got to agree with George on this. How many of the people here have hunted (successfully) not with rifle and ammo, but with a spear alone? How many of you know _anyone_ that has? I’ll allow iron-tipped spears. (I’m confident the number of succesful stone-tipped or wood-only spear-hunting expeditions is going to be nil.)
Jason might be right that some people will survive the collapse, but I really doubt people like us will be amongst that number, ‘prepared’ or not. The people that will inherit the earth are those that have not yet given up hunter-gatherer ways, or who are only a generation removed from those ways and still have some practical connection to them and to the body of knowledge their parents had. In Australia, I imagine some of the traditional Aborigines will survive. No one else will, once the bullets run out.
I think we are completely overestimating the capacity to adapt suddenly by modern people. Take Tasmania, which has a temperate climate. Hikers lost in the Tasmanian south-west die within days-that’s equipped with down sleeping bags, waterproof gear, cooking stoves, and so on. That does not mean people couldn’t survive there. Indeed, the Tasmanian aboriginals, who had the lowest level of tech recorded amongst pretty much anyone, could survive even in the south-west (they’ve left cave paintings on the West Coast).
The point is, they could do it, but we can’t. Our link with that sort of adaptability is gone. We need tech-Iron Age tech specifically, and more probably gunpowder age.
Comment by Eric — 19 January 2006 @ 1:02 AM
To survive as a hunter-gatherer in a rural area seems to me to be perfectly simple. Around here it would be easy to hunt and trap enough birds and mammalian critters to live on and supplement that food with as much plant material as you wanted with minimal effort, and if you were caught short you could always eat insects, snails and worms and/or cut the edible core out of small trees. If you were on the coast, feeding yourself would be a simple matter of paddling out in a kayak and fishing for two or three hours a day.
I find it very strange that most people have convinced themselves this is somehow impossible, but also very encouraging. If they are going to crowd together in cities with other (mostly insane) people and imagine they will somehow come up with some magical solution to their problems because of their superior “education” then they are doomed to die off fairly rapidly, which will be very helpful to the rest of us. Not only will we have a veritable Garden of Eden to live in without their interference, but we won’t even have to suffer the bring-down of watching them die or tripping over their corpses. Nice one, guys.
Comment by Cornfed — 19 January 2006 @ 3:25 AM
Having read the comments re: surviving. I think it’s going to be a mixture of both. It’s going to be harder than some people imagine and easier than you think.
The key, I’ll still stick to, is community. Get enough people, with enough skills, and already open-minded to this kind of collapse scenario and you have a better chance of surviving than, say, the lone primitive-skills student or the ‘holy-crap, we’re starving!’ ex-civilized mobs.
Or maybe it’s just because I have faith in people. As long as we’re working on the situation (and not just expecting some salvation from an unknown source), then I think we’ll be okay.
That still leaves plenty of people to die sadly enough.
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 19 January 2006 @ 5:33 AM
I actually think Alaska might be safer from other people even though it’s colder. And I think being near the ocean is probably easier to get food, especially when you are just starting out. I don’t know. Maybe, I’m underestimating the size of Appalachia and the friendliness of the Appalachian survivors.
I have to Allegheny Forest camping. It was a forest retreat by this group to protect the forest from logging for cherry trees they planted the last time they logged it. That’s back when I was all about environmentalisty make a difference nonsense.
Your diatribe about Mother Nature being a two-faced bitch reminds me of a similar writing in that vein:
http://www.m4040.com/Survival/Mother%20Nature.htm
I am deathly terrified of bears. So, maybe I should make a shield or something to carry with my spear.
I think it’s a good idea to get some modern stuff to have just in case you need it and also get the primitive living skills.
I actually made a little movie when I was a kid in which I starred. I went to a fortune-teller who had a crystal ball which I did with shadow puppets from sticks and paper. The fortune-teller said something bad will happen to you today that will change your life forever. And so, I rushed home and sat there and showed me saying many years passed ordering pizza and saying I’m not going outside and let that bad thing happen to me. So, it was like reacting that way was the bad thing.
I don’t know though. I don’t think I want to have a Confuscious words of wisdom let me delude myself. Jason said about the that the Great Depression even had economic growth. If it doesn’t have that, I don’t know if things won’t precipitously won’t collapse overnight. Feel free to argue why that isn’t possible. I just see Kunstler’s predictions and everything and I am concerned. I’d rather be prepared anyway. Trucking isn’t going to last of course, It will be the first to go. But when that goes, so will everything else. I just watched a video of the guy from From the Wilderness who said “Be careful of the decisions you make now, because they may mean the difference between life and death.” Or something to that affect. Which is what Jason said too.
Comment by planetwarming — 19 January 2006 @ 10:34 AM
There’s also the distinction I’m interested in, since primitive living skills are indeed the only thing I’m interested in learning, and that’s the distinction between survival and living. Now, my original claim was that surviving is a choice, because it is a simple matter to learn how to survive once one is open to the possibility. But you are correct, there is a difference between mean, base survival, and a comfortable life.
How can you say the basics will not keep you alive? You don’t need to hunt well to get enough food to live on. Food abounds in the wilderness for those who can recognize it. Basic survival is not difficult. Living well may take a long time to perfect, but what else do you have to do while seeing to basic survival?
Of your suggestion, yes. Of where you’ve progressed with that suggestion, I have no idea, because I don’t know how long you’ve followed your own advice, but the Tribe of Anthropik has been following precisely the plan you outline for about half a year now. We’re still too “green” to make too much of the winter, but with the spring of 2006, things should kick into high gear.
I wasn’t suggesting such simple steps as an end point, but as a first step. Anybody can smoke out a rabbit, or catch a fish, or provide some otherwise meager food. But, if you have a few years still (as we do), then you can take that time to learn to live well. A good first step would be learning to hunt with a rifle. That lets you focus on the unviersals of hunting for meat–identifying meat animals, tracking, dressing, bleeding, skinning, etc. Once you have all that down, even rednecks hunt with compound bows. Take a step up. If the collapse should proceed in earnest while you’re still hunting with that compound bow, you still have several years in it, and arrows can be retrieved and reused. In the meantime, start making your first bow of your own. While going out and hunting primitively for a weekend after a day of white-collar work may be way too much of a jump for most people to make, civilized hunting would not be. Once you’re used to that, bow hunting is not such a huge leap. Once you’re used to that, making your own bow is not such a huge leap. Try to do it all at once and you’ll just become frustrated and despair. Take it in steps, and it’s all quite simple, and easy to progress through rapidly.
Probably not, but we probably do all know someone who possesses each individual skill. It’s up to us to learn those skills from those people, and put them together.
I agree, using it is essential. But I’m just talking about the skills it takes to be able to drill in the first place. If you can do it for two weeks, you can do it for the rest of your life–however uncomfortable that life may, at first, be. But in doing it, you’re also practicing it, so even that discomfort will alleviate. We’ll probably never be on par with your average indigenous predecessor in that region, but I think we will eventually be able to figure out how to live well, nonetheless.
Yes, that’s the way I see it playing out, too. But 2010 is only four years away. By 2012-2015, that depression will likely deepen into something the likes of which we’ve never seen before, and collapse will be unmistakeable. 2012-2015 is the range in which all these forces–Peak Oil, global warming, mass extinction–converge. If any of them are going to bring down civilization, all of them will be reaching that point in the range of 2012-2015. That’s just 6-9 years from now.
No, actually, part of Tainter’s definition of collapse is its suddenness–occuring over a decade or two. Greer’s paper starts off by pointing out that some of Tainter’s examples–especially the Roman Empire–defy that. He goes on to distinguish between catabolic collapse and a maintenance crisis in order to explain that discrepancy, but in fact, one of Tainter’s main points is precisely the opposite of your claim.
Which is, by and large, why those areas that remain, remain. Allegheny National Forest is full of slopes. Not good for farming.
It only takes one generation to break the continuity of a people’s knowledge forever, and for most descendants of ingidenous peoples, that has already happened. But I agree, those foragers who have survived will continue to do so. But there will also be survivors from civilization, and they will be the ones who choose to see the wilderness as a source of nourishment and shelter, rather than a menace to be survived. Yes, life in the wilderness is not always easy–but life in civilization is never easy. Yet, we see cities as wonderful refuges of safety, and the wilderness as a harsh, unrelenting killer. Why is that, when you’re so much more likely to die in the safest city, than in the most dangerous wilderness?
What, because Tasmanian Aborigines are some alien species? Hikers die in Tasmania not for their lack of ability to adapt, but for their lack of imagination. They’re not willing to learn how to survive there from the Aborigines. It’s their lack of curiosty, more than their lack of knowledge, that kills them.
I mentioned that most people will choose to die, didn’t I? To all those who were incredulous that anyone would make such a choice, behold the mechanism by which it happens.
Amen.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 January 2006 @ 11:09 AM
JimFive:
Jason:
I haven’t had time to get back to this but here goes:
There is a distinction between CAN NOT and WILL NOT. I agree that 6.5 billion people WILL NOT choose to survive. However, I also argue that 6.5 Billion people CANNOT choose to survive.
You have presented the arguement that survival is a choice that is available to all people. That is untrue. First, as I pointed out above, if everyone could choose to survive that would ensure their destruction thereby showing that the choice is illusory. Secondly, there are many people in the world that, even if they wanted to choose to survive, have no way of implementing that choice. As an example, look at the people in New Orleans who “chose” to stay in the path of a Category V hurricane because they had no way to leave town.
The idea that EVERYONE has the choice is illusory. Some people have the option, many don’t.
Comment by JimFive — 19 January 2006 @ 1:07 PM
Proving why that is not the case is precisely the point I was getting at. It is true. You are correct, if everyone made that choice, it would not be possible. However, almost no one is going to make the choice. 95% or more of the population will choose to die; 5% or less will choose to survive. That cannot be changed. But which part of the distribution will specific person X be in? That is up to specific person X. This is where free will comes in. Societies are so predictable in aggregate precisely because of the randomness of free will. We cannot change the shape of the distribution, but each and every one of us can choose where in that distribution we will be.
The people in New Orleans are a fine example of what I mean by a deep-seated choice. In choosing to live in New Orleans, they chose to live in a bowl surrounded by a lake, a major river, and the Gulf of Mexico, in a location known for hurricanes. Their allegiance to city life was made long before Hurricane Katrina ever began to form. I didn’t say we’d have a choice of whether or not we’d be subject to this problem or that problem. If you choose to live in the wilderness, you also choose to adapt to the cold, and to learn to live through storms and tornadoes and whatever else. If you choose to live in a city, you choose to be buffeted by hurricanes and die in the collapse. But there is a choice there. The choice was made long ago, that they were New Orleanians, and not swamp-dwellers.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 January 2006 @ 1:15 PM
In the analogy as presented, there were many people in New Orleans that saw the Hurricane coming and yet could not leave. They had no means to leave. They were too poor or too sick to leave. Even if they wanted to choose to leave, they could not implement that decision. They, in reality, had no choice.
The collapse of civilization is going to present the same problems to many people.
You cannot implement a choice to live If…
A. You cannot travel the required distance to find food.
B. You have special medical needs (Acute diabetes, blindness, etc).
or even if
C. You don’t know enough to live. It’s easy for us in middle class America to say that it’s easy to learn, but there are many people in the world who are illiterate and uninformed, not by choice, but by circumstance.
If you need to assuage your guilt by positing free-will and claiming that all those who die have made their choice you certainly may. But for many, there is the option of die sooner or die anyway. There isn’t anything any of us can do about that.
Comment by JimFive — 19 January 2006 @ 2:35 PM
It is true that a “catabolic collapse” occurs as a result of environmental impact.
However, it seems that not all “catabolic collapses” have been sudden. The time for the collapse to begin might have been sudden, but the collapse itself was not sudden.
Consider Easter Island.
As Jared Diamond poined out in Easter’s End:
Then he goes on later to say:
Unless I am mistaken, it seems that this “catabolic collapse” took more than a few decades.
Was the Mayan collapse a “catabolic collapse,” since a drought caused the collapse? While the onset was sudden, that collapse also took place in a period of centuries, and many of the survivors were horticulturalists.
As John Michael Greer writes about the Maya in his “Catabolic Collapse” paper:
It is also interesting that that “final collapse” was preceded by two other collapses, as Greer writes below:
While this does not disprove the suddenness of other catabolic collapses, it appears that not all “catabolic collapses” were sudden.
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 2:36 PM
Hey Jim –
Looking at New Orleans… consider the ‘5% that chose to live’ as perhaps the small number of people that responded to the disaster with cooperation. Somewhere I know that link has been posted a few times, here. So not only is the decision made when choosing where and how to live (as Jason pointed out — the foolhardiness of living in NO in the first place) but also in the specific, individual responses to the disaster itself.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 19 January 2006 @ 2:55 PM
The choice lies in the lifestyle. You have to choose that, along with the good and the bad that come along with it. You can’t choose to live in a city, and then expect to escape the hurricane. The choice we face in collapse is the choice of our lifestyle, not whether or not we can escape any given disaster that choice entails.
Frankly, our literacy may be more a stumbling block to this kind of learning than an asset.
Indeed you are; you’re conflating two distinct population crashes, both of them rather sudden. The first was the end of Easter Island’s civilization–the second was the die-off of those survivors that resulted from European contact. Two distinct mortality crises, with a plateau between them.
Collapse progresses to the next lowest sustainable level of complexity. Though there was a significant drought, the Mayan collapse left most of the soil still fertile, allowing the survivors to move to horticulture. They moved to the next lowest level of complexity. Crashing all the way to the Stone Age isn’t a result of catabolic collapse always and everywhere; it’s the result of catabolic collapse when the next lowest level of sustainable complexity is the Stone Age.
The “final collapse” was about a decade, if I recall correctly. I would characterize that as a catabolic collapse–brought on by a decade of harsh drought. The preceding two centuries had seen a maintenance crisis brought on by the diminishing marginal returns of complexity, setting it up for the final, catabolic collapse.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 January 2006 @ 3:03 PM
Janene:
There are basically 3 options:
1. Leave New Orleans (Become a H-G early and Live)
2. Stay in New Orleans and cooperate (Stay within the structures of civilization and try to live).
3. Stay in New Orleans and count on the government (Choose to depend on civilization and die)
In the above you choose option 2. However, eventually, anyone who stays within the structures of civilization is going to run into resource depletion and will have to choose either 1 or 2.
My initial point, just so that we don’t lose it, is that not everyone has all of these options. The sentence in the article that I am disagreeing with is:
At the extreme, someone who is disabled enough that they cannot travel the required distance to find food cannot choose option 1 and by extension of the above, option 2 becomes option 3. So they end up with a choice between dieing and dieing. They, in fact, CANNOT choose to live.
This scenario (of a person who literally cannot live without the artifacts of civilization) is the easiest to articulate of those people with no choice. But there are others as I mentioned earlier in the thread.
Comment by JimFive — 19 January 2006 @ 3:35 PM
But there still was a plateau between those crashes (1700-1770). What was happening between then? If the Easter Islanders no longer had a civilization, then what did they have? Chiefdoms? Warring tribes?
It seems like we have different definitions from when the “civilization” collapses to when other forms of “society” collapse. Collapses have occurred, after all, in societies other than civilizations, (such as the Ik tribe of Uganda, a foraging society that collapsed during colonization).
As Jared Diamond points out, it did take over 150 years for the last statue to be taken down in clan warfare. From “Easter’s End”:
It may also be that Easter Island was not a civilization, since it did not have “cities” as you define them. There are, after all, a few hierarchal societies that exist without cities and agriculture (such as the Tlingit in the Northwest Coast and the Chumash of Southern California.)
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 3:45 PM
A typo.
That “existed” without cities and agriculture (such as the Tlingit in the Northwest Coast and the Chumash of Southern California) before the European conquest.
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 3:50 PM
It is also interesting that, according to Clive Ponting, “collapse” got underway in 1500.
From Clive Ponting’s “The Lessons of Easter Island”
This suggests that while each individual “catabolic collapse” might be sudden, there might be several plateaus that occur during the collapse as the society is collapsing. In other words, those various “collapses” were sudden, but another collapse was along the way.
Since Easter Island was a “catabolic collapse,” it might be that each individual collapse was sudden, but there were still “plateaus” between those sudden collapses. Unless Ponting is mistaken, his essays shows a collapse circa 1500 and circa 1600–one hundred years apart.
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 3:58 PM
Horticultural tribes, I believe would be the correct anthropological category. The essential point being that this is not a continuous process of collapse, but a catabolic collapse, followed by two centuries at a stable level of complexity, followed by a catastrophic encounter with Europeans. To characterize it as a two-century collapse seems unwarranted. Tearing down the statues does not support that point, either; Turkish soldiers only blasted the nose off the sphinx in the 1800s. Should we conclude from this that the end of the New Kingdom took some 3,000 years?
Complexity is a feature of all societies; we can speak of societies that are more or less complex, but not of societies that have no complexity. Civilization, as we discussed in thesis #13, is the phenomenon that arises when a society gains the means to arbitrarily raise its own complexity. Various Northwest Coast tribes of Native Americans had a significant throughput of energy from salmon runs, allowing them to achieve unusual levels of complexity. But, they did not have the means of arbitrarily increasing their complexity to any level they desired–however many salmon ran was the number of salmon that ran. It was outside of their power to control.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 January 2006 @ 4:01 PM
Thus our misunderstanding is over.
Easter Island’s crash was sudden–followed by two centuries of stability. I thought that those two centuries were the process of collapse.
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 4:05 PM
Are you thus saying that once a civilization can no longer arbitrarily raise it’s own complexity, it has “collapsed” from being a civilization to another form of society, like horticultural tribes?
Thus, was the collapse of the Easter Island civilization over when that interval of horticultural stability took place, or when it could not longer increase complexity?
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 4:09 PM
Not quite. A collapse is any sudden loss of complexity. If it isn’t sudden, it isn’t a collapse–it’s just a loss of complexity. Greer’s main issue is this subject of suddenness. The issue of when a society becomes, or ceases to be, a civilization is a different, but related, concern. A collapse usually means losing the complexity that once allowed that society to arbitrarily raise its complexity, but not always. In theory, it’s entirely possible for a society to lose its ability to arbitrarily elevate its complexity, and thus lose its status as a civilization, but retain its past level of complexity, and thus not collapse. In practice, however, this is never the case, because of the issues of competition and depletion that we’ve discussed throughout the foregoing theses.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 January 2006 @ 4:24 PM
Yes, that’s true. But then, isn’t it likely that “collapse” consists of various sudden collapses then? Easter Island had sudden collapses, but it had more than one, progressing over a period of over 200 years. Between those collapses, a period of stability ensured.
The same could actually be said about the Mayans, who resorted back to being horticultural tribes during a sudden collapse, and then retained that stability until the Spanish conquest.
However, it is interesting that the Mayans did not all collapse at the same time. They did not “all fall down” at once. As John Michael Greer pointed out in another essay, “The Long Road Down: Decline and the Deindustrial Future:”
Perhaps Greer is making the same mistake I did: Mistaking a long collapse for sudden collapses and then a period of stability. My question then is: If a sudden loss of complexity occurs, but that loss is to a level of complexity that will prove to be unsustainable in 100 years, is the society still collapsing during that 100 years, or is there no collapse until after that 100 years to the next sustainable level of complexity?
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 4:37 PM
I should also note that this entire discussion–from Greer’s essays to my comments–don’t argue with Tainter’s model on diminishing returns, but disputes the timeframe of collapse.
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 4:47 PM
However, since the Mayan drought occurred in 750 B.C., then why were the northern cities still thriving? Is Greer mistaken on this part?
Was this because they had not experienced a “sudden” collapse, yet the city-states mostly affected by the drought did, but later would experience a “sudden” collapse?
Unless I have misinterpreted this data falsely, the data suggests that while collapses are sudden, one collapse rarely takes a society down from one state of complexity to the last stable state of complexity. There are intermediate collapses along the way, and intermediate levels of complexity that later prove to be unsustainable, even in “catabolic collapses.”
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 4:53 PM
Hey –
I may regret this, but what the hell.
Its important to remember that collapse retunrs a society to the next lowest functional level of complexity. But this says nothing about the sustainability of that level of complexity.
By way of analogy… say you earn 100K a year at your job. You buy the big house, the nice cars etc ad infinitum. Then you lose your job. You may be able to ‘borrow against the future’ for a short time, trying to maintain your personal ‘level of complexity’ but at some point, that will become impossible. So you have two choices, sell the house, sell the cars, etc etc and get a home and other items that you CAN support. If you continue to be unable to find a job, you may be able to ‘afford’ that next home for a couple of years…but eventually you will again find that you can no longer support it. this is the stair step down in complexity that we see with the Maya. For Easter Island, its more like you got a job that could support your more inexpensive lifestyle — but then that job was outsourced…
Important point, here, using this metaphor: you can ‘peacefully’ step down the backside of decreasing complexity only if you do so when you still have ‘cash in the bank’ so to speak. Unfortunately, right now, the current state of our society, is akin to the bank knocking on your door with a notice of intent to foreclose. You have a few days left, maybe a month — but there is no way that you can possibly get out from under it before the foreclosure occurs. (technically speaking, you don’t have enough time to sell the house and do all the paperwork…)
Janene
Comment by Janene — 19 January 2006 @ 5:06 PM
I mention that because that suggests that, in our collapse, there will not be a “sudden” return to the Stone Age, but a return to other “functional” levels of complexity first.
As John Michael Greer has stated in “The Long Road Down: Decline and the Deindustrial Future:”
Yes, Peak Oil is only one of the many problems we face. But Greer acknowledges this as well:
You have argued before that other resources have been depleted, such as topsoil, and metals, etc. But since oil will not suddenly run out, won’t our society try to conserve energy until it cannot any more? The Hubbert curve suggests there might still be oil in 2020 and 2030, and even 2050. (Likewise, the final collapse of Easter Island still occurred 200 years after they reached their wood shortages–Peak Wood, that is.)
Even the impact of climate change is quite regional, and always has been. The links to “sudden climate change” you mention point out that those climate changes are more sudden and drastic in some areas than others–and even pointed out the North Atlantic region as an area of the most sudden change, compared to the changes in the tropical regions, which were more of aridity than temperature. This suggest that crop failures will likely be regional than “all-at-once.” And, as we know, global warming has currently caused “erratic weather” rather than a new climate.
As for the mass extinction and environmental problems, it seems they have been masked by oil. If the soil is infertile without oil fertilizers, then this suggests that it has been oil that has made us able to keep civilization going despite the mass extinctions–and thus these will impact our civilization once oil starts to run out.
Since oil is the basis of our energy, and it will not suddenly run out, when we are only producing 70% of the oil we are producing now, won’t we still be able to feed 70% of our population. This also suggests that during this time of decline, our society might do “intermediate” things to reduce complexity that will then prove to be unsustainable as oil production declines further, such as cutting out waste (an issue Jason discussed in your essay “Be afraid, Marco. Be very afraid.”)
The Stone Age may be the final sustainable complexity there is, and it may be impossible to rebuild civilization after that, but it seems that there might be “intermediate” unsustainable levels of complexity that might occur first, that are likely based on the Hubbert curve.
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 5:24 PM
Janene:
Yes, that’s true. I’ve seen the bank metaphor before. But then, oil is not running out, as Peak Oilers point out, it’s just going to start to decline on the bell curve. Of course, that may be steep or gradual, but there’s still a downslope.
Since oil will still not suddenly stop from its current production, regardless of how long it takes, couldn’t that mean that that “cash in the bank” is the remaining oil, and once that is suddenly depleted, the return to the Stone Age begins since the other resources have then been depleted?
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 5:33 PM
Hey –
The problem is that the Hubbert’s Peak Curve is represented by a non-linear equation.
Just as Jaosn discussed how complexity in one area of society fans out to affect ALL manifestations of complexity, the same is true on the down side. Decreasing oil will first lead to decreasing transportation. Without that transportation network, governments will begin to fail, agriculture will begin to fail, energy production itself will start to drop even more (due to lack of support structures in ADDITION to decreasing resources) until ALL levels of complexity are spiralling out of control.
This is why I made such a strong point of our current situation being like “the bank knocking on your door with a notice of intent to foreclose”. I don’t know if you have ever experianced financial calamity… but when this occurs, it no longer MATTERS how much money you might make on a given day, week, month… because it is impossible to make enough to both go on living AND raise yourself out of the hole you have dug. In financial matters, there is the one last possibility of ‘debt consolidation/bankruptcy’ but the planet doesn’t offer those programs for us…
Janene
Comment by Janene — 19 January 2006 @ 5:42 PM
Janene:
But won’t it work in accordance with the down-shaped curve of oil production, just as it worked like that on the up side?
In other words, won’t those manifestations of complexity go down in accordance with the decline of oil? And won’t there be some attempts to conserve energy during the early years of the decline?
As Jason pointed out in “Be afraid, Marco. Be very afraid,” there is waste in our society, and during the recession and depression cycles of this collapse, that waste is likely to be eliminated. Of course, this is going to re-inforce the collapse. But there will still be oil pumping out.
Consider the Cuban example. It experienced a “sudden” loss of oil due to the USSR collapse. This resulted in the failure of its transportation network and agriculture, and it spiralled out of control until it stabilized at the “local” agriculture production, and found other trading partners to give it oil. It was able to reduce its energy consumption by one-half (this is sourced from communitysolution.org and culturechange.org) before returning to the Stone Age, the final sustainable complexity.
While Cuba did collapse in a result in a lower level of complexity, it is bound to collapse again since its current level of complexity is still not sustainable. However, its current level of complexity can currently still be sustained. But it still went through a previous collapse before its coming collapse. Thus, I am simply stating that while the collapse will occur, there will likely be intermediate stages of stability in some areas, like Cuba, before the “final collapse.”
It is interesting, as well, that Cuba also had the same “soil infertility” problems that every country will someday have as a result of industrial agriculture, but was able to “rebuild” soil via horticultural and permacultural practices.
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 6:16 PM
But then, of course, if you lost your house, you could move into an apartment if you had the money to pay the rent.
Maybe the Cuban situation is like that.
But even then, if you don’t get another job, you still will be kicked out of your apartment.
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 6:21 PM
Hey –
If you had enough money for Security Deposit, First and Last months rent… well then, you probably could have paid your mortgage
Janene
Comment by Janene — 19 January 2006 @ 7:03 PM
That’s true, Janene.
But hey, my comments are over. I won’t respond to anyone else’s replies.
Comment by aksum — 19 January 2006 @ 7:12 PM
Jason, you make a point that people depending on civilization will not survive collapse of civilization. You also made a point that each individual has a choice to become independent of civilization and thus prepared to survive its collapse.
However, you forget to mention that this choice is not available for large number of people whose dependence on civilization is organic, not due to their lifestyle, but due to medical conditions, infirmities and handicaps. While living inside civilization, these people can rely on its structures to support their life. However, ouside of civilization they are utterly helpless without any hope of overcoming their conditions. In other words, our civilization supports a large number of sick people who will be unable to live without it. For them, there is no choice.
Comment by _Gi — 19 January 2006 @ 7:57 PM
This has been the most enlightening thesis/replies. If one believes the hardships beyond collapse are just that (hardships), then you will surely die. Believe me, with patience, faith, and imagination, one can adapt to the environment easily.
What may be most important, is your location when others are desperate. Definately don’t be in a city, don’t be in an agricultural area, and it may be best not to lay claim to a territory.
Initially, the harsher the enviroment you can learn to adapt, the less competition you will have for the resources.
Have studied the Upper Pennisula of Michigan, but am thinking more and more about Northern Minneota/Canada.
Comment by Rick Larson — 19 January 2006 @ 11:43 PM
It does not, and I find your criticisms most helpful and constructive. Thank you for your contributions.
Your views here seem to be informed by Greer’s “The Long Road Down,” which you’ve cited a number of times now. One of Diamond’s points in Collapse is that coming down the slope is always a much faster process than going up. It’s a matter of overshoot–demand remains high, but supply is insufficient. As Diamond wrote in his New Year’s 2005 article for the New York Times, “The Ends of the World as We Know Them,” “History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak needs, and hence peak vulnerability.”
I notice that Greer’s examples are very carefully chosen, because the exhaustive list provided by Tainter shows far more examples of sudden collapse, than protracted collapse–which would belie Greer’s main point. Regarding the Maya specifically, though, I’m not expert on that specific field, so I’m forced to rely on the work of others, but in 1491, the Mayan collapse is bracketed under 800-840. Greer makes a point in “The Long Road Down” about how long it took the Mayans to collapse–but he also extends the timeline to 730-870. I fear from this that Greer may be exaggerating the timeline to justify his own conclusions.
I think “How Civilizations Collapse” is important for its mathematical model and its examination of the difference between a catabolic collapse and a maintenance crisis. Past the point of diminishing returns, a society finds that it can no longer answer the problems that any society is faced with. These can slowly erode a society, leading to a maintenance crisis, and “the long road down,” as Greer might say, or a “decline and fall,” as Gibbon might say. That said, there is also a very different kind of collapse–catabolic collapse–where, in addition to diminishing returns on complexity, a society also faces resource depletion. These two factors compound one another, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of collapse that takes place over a much reduced timescale as it accelerates itself.
I wrote that peak oil may lead to collapse–it also may not. Much depends on the depletion rate, as Stuart Staniford explained in his article for The Oil Drum, “4%, 11%, who the hell cares?” Peak Oil will lead to collapse only if the depletion rate is very drastic. Following the graph provided with the article, that would mean half the oil production we have now by 2015. Global warming and mass extinction are also expected to reach important tipping points in that same general timeframe. So, if these factors are going to cause collapse, they will do so sooner, rather than later.
Understand the claim, as well: my expectation is that by 2012 or 2015, the state of collapse will be in full gear and self-evident. I still expect there to be pockets of civilization when I die–diminished cities, perhaps even citadels of the super-rich. But I also expect that these will be the exceptions, rather than the norm, by something around 2050. Maybe there will be a “long tail,” with hangers-on persisting for a century or more. I do not think that is a real challenge to the claim. Perhaps this is where you and Greer part ways; do you consider a society yet “uncollapsed” so long as a single holdout remains? Does the Japanese Empire live on as long as there is a soldier stranded on a Pacific island convinced that the war rages on?
This is precisely what I address in thesis #29. This collapse differs from previous ones in that the next lowest functional level of complexity is the stone age. We have eliminated the feasibility of all intervening levels.
Civilization has no monopoly on medicine. Even those with medical conditions, infirmities and handicaps are not bound to civilization by that. Such people survived without civilization before, and can do so again. Nature is full of powerful medicine.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 January 2006 @ 11:02 AM
Hey –
True… but I think it is also fair to say that most individuals with major medical maladies will not survive the crash… the defining point being thier support network as opposed to actual medical treatment. If they do not have other individuals willing to ‘carry the burden’ of thier illness, then no amount of possible (though perhaps barely concievable) medicine will matter.
Of course, this could be looked upon as a choice of sorts, as well. It reflects the values and relationship skills of those individuals for thier entire previous lifetime…
Janene
Comment by Janene — 20 January 2006 @ 11:12 AM
Maybe no monopoly, in fact many traditional methods with natural medicines are preferable. However what will happen to a type 1 diabetic without insulin, a person who needs open heart surgery. A hunter with poor eyesight that breaks his glasses or people on dialysis will definitely have problems. Who wants dental work without anesthesia? There are numerous other examples where the lack of modern medicine will drastically affect quality of life or even prevent survival. Also the sources of medicine and the methods used in the past are not well known by we moderns. Healers will be difficult to find initially.
Comment by Bob Harrison — 20 January 2006 @ 12:01 PM
Ever notice that animals don’t brush their teeth? That’s because every animal’s oral chemistry adapts to the food that animal eats. Only civilized folk get cavities and need dental work–and why is that? Could it be because we eat so many cereal grains, even though we have no adaptation for it, and our oral chemistry turns those grains into a powerful acid that eats away at our teeth? Is that why we fnd hunter-gatherer skulls with nice rows of pearly white, and their agricultural grandsons with one or two teeth left in their mouth?
Diabetes, too, is something that comes from eating grain.
Glasses, though, are made from sand. You can make corrective lenses primitively. Ben’s been working on just that, I believe.
Point being, most of the problems you’ve named are the consequence of choosing the civilized life. If you’ve been living that life for sometime, and now face the consequences of that choice, it may be too late to escape those consequences–just like it’s too late now to try to escape the consequences of agriculture. Known treatments in the wild treat those things that foragers had to deal with–which don’t include any of the consequences of civilized life. Some of them have remedies available; some don’t. For those that don’t it’s up to you to find some way to deal with the consequences of your choices. I didn’t say that you might not have already made your choice and now be stuck with it–I said we all have a choice, even if we didn’t know we were making it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 January 2006 @ 12:30 PM
Yes, that’s true. The whole point I was making by commenting that is showing that other people who have also studied collapse have different arguments as well. Since Greer argued “catabolic collapse,” but then argued that most civilizations collapsed under a “rolling collapse,” and he is a relatively informed person, that info was placed here simply to ask the reason for why your opinions differ.
I am aware of Diamond’s quote in the New York Times. I am curious, however, as to one thing. If Jared Diamond made this point, then why did he mention the following below in the New York Times article:
If he is arguing that collapses are sudden, then why, in that same article, does he consider the collapse as starting at 760 and ending at 910?
I really think that the issue here is really the definition of collapse. Maybe Greer and Diamond both have different definitions of collapse. And then, perhaps the Mayan collapse was sudden but had a “long tail.”
That I think is interesting. Since the drought occurred in 780 A.D., what was used to draw the line at 800 A.D?
But then, Diamond himself also extended the timeline as well. Maybe he believes that a 100-year collapse is “sudden.”
Probably the issue is the same here–people are defining collapse differently.
That’s an important clarification. I misunderstood you, and I thank you for clarifying that. I believe that the collapse will be self-evident during that time as well. All I was questioning, however, was the duration of the collapse, and how long it would take before collapse was “total.” It seems obvious, however, the collapse does occur slightly differently in some places than others. Your map in Thesis #26 shows this: even though those “red” countries are being propped up
I believe a society has collapsed versus collapsing after it has achieved a level of “stability”–that is, the resource wars, population crash, etc. have stabilized to a specific level. Horticultural tribes do have warfare, but on a level of stability. Obviously, that level varies.
However, if the pockets of civilization continue, then my definition is that those areas have not collapsed entirely. The “civilization” as a whole might have collapsed, but some areas have collapsed differently than others.
In fact, Greer himself believes that collapse will be evident between 2012-2015 as well. As he further writes in “The Long Road Down:”
Greer does believe that by 2012-2015, the collapse will be evident. And then, hey, maybe his definition of collapse differs from mine, Diamond’s, and yours, and that is how he justifies his positions. Maybe he is mentioning the “long tail” in his position.
That’s true. I was just arguing, however, that that return might occur once we did run out of oil on the downslope of the curve, rather than at Peak Oil.
Cuba, after all, will inevitably collapse to the Stone Age. But it still was able to retain an “Iron Age” complexity after losing half of its oil consumption. It’s not sustainable, but losing half of its oil consumption was not enough to return it to the “Stone Age.”
It’s also true, however, that there are two “Stone Age” complexities as well. Neolithic Stone Age civilizational complexity, and Stone Age hunter-gatherer complexity.
But then, as you are going to say later, “the future will be what we make of it.”
Comment by Anonymous — 20 January 2006 @ 12:49 PM
Oh, and that “Anonymous” was aksum. I was on another computer.
Comment by aksum — 20 January 2006 @ 1:01 PM
Let me put this in the context of my expectations. I expect that after 2012-2015, modern civilization will no longer be tenable. I expect to live in the woodlands of PA, MD and WV, and never come across a town or city again. I also suspect that the last American president’s term may well end in 2112 or later, with a small cadre around DC still trying to keep it going. At what point did it collapse? 2015, or 2112?
When did Mayan society finally collapse? 840, or 910?
When did the Japanese Empire end–when the last soldier held out on a tiny Pacific island died?
*shrug* I really don’t know that much about the Mayans.
We’ll never run out of oil, because before that happens, we’ll reach the point where it takes a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil.
I suppose things can be seen quite differently, depending on the choice you make. I choose to escape civilization, so I think I can expect to see a day soon when it no longer has anything to do with my life–it’s something those crazy people over there do. For those that choose to remain, Greer’s scenario seems much more likely.
That’s not possible. As Tainter said, “Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be.” Cuba maintains its level of complexity because it’s part of a peer polity system, and it’s being propped up. The embargo is far from complete.
Far more than two–there’s a whole range of “Stone Age” complexity. I wasn’t disparaging the Stone Age with that statement. I see a whole world of possibilities within that space. Some things are off the table, yes. We’ll never be able to try this whole “world covered in civilizations” thing again, or even approach it, but there are infinite possibilities still within that space, nonetheless.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 January 2006 @ 1:09 PM
Yes, there is a lot of diversity, and I was not disparaging the Stone Age either.
That, it seems, depends on the author you are listening to. Given the numerous definitions of collapse, I am not really going to try to create a timeframe anymore. In fact, the whole point of this discussion was to show how difficult making a timeframe really is–since it is based on your own perception of collapse.
Yes, we’ll never run out of oil literally. But as I have seen from countless graphs of peaking wells, that point of EROEI falling from 1 to 1 almost always occurs after we’re producing 50-70% less oil since the peak of production. Regardless of how steep the production, I have yet to see a picture of a country that caused the EROEI to fall from 1 to 1 when it approached Peak Oil.
That’s absolutely right. Things can be seen quite differently, and that was precisely my point. (It’s going to be seen differently in Africa, after all, than the U.S.) Your choice is fine–I’m not in the position of forcing you to do anything, just as you have plainly pointed out it is not your duty to force people to die or live.
It’s also true that lots (maybe most) people will choose to remain in civilization, and Greer, again, was basing his conclusions on that. That is indeed Greer’s conclusion. It’s also going to be seen differently if you join an ecovillage as well.
Diversity is good, and ensures the most survival, as you have said. There will be people who try horticulture, there will be people who try foraging like you, and there will be people who try other things, but it is not us to judge them or force them to choose something else. Only time will tell who will live or die. And they’re not going to effect you–so of course it won’t matter.
But won’t Cuba return to the Stone Age once the peer polity collapses?
All I’m arguing, however, is that it did suddenly return to a lower level of complexity in 1988 nonetheless. Of course, it softened that crash by finding another trade partner (Venezuela, from the USSR).
Comment by aksum — 20 January 2006 @ 1:30 PM
Oh, and for another health source…
Those who are interested in the whole “primitive” health issue might want to look on the website
“http://www.westonaprice.org/index.html.”
It is a website that talks about the work of Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist who traveled the whole world to see the health of “primitive” tribes.
A summary of his research can be found on this following page: http://www.mercola.com/2001/jan/21/weston_price.htm
He saw all sorts of “primitives”–hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, horticulturalists, even simpler agrarian societies. In his book, “Nutritional and Physical Degeneration,” which he wrote in the 1930s. In the book, you see pictures of primitives with perfect teeth, old primitives without bald hair, and then, those same primitive groups of people with bad teeth and baldness as they became civilized.
Now, sustainability was not his issue, but his book is quite an eye-opener regarding health.
It is also quite interesting because according to Dr. Price’s research, he found “primitive” horticultural and cattle-raising societies that, while they did not eat grains or dairy as their “sole” dish as a “staple,” still ate wide varieties of the rye crop, and dairy products, yet, according to Dr. Price, their diets still contained the same vitamin contents as the other hunter-gatherer diets that he studied. (He even has specific charts to show his evidence in his book.)
When he vistied isolated mountain Swiss villagers, for example, his pictures show isolated Swiss mountain villagers to have perfect teeth despite their grain and dairy consumption, and he even reports how those villagers who walked barefoot in freezing-cold streams near their villages who were perfectly healthy at the same time, yet part of their diet was based on grains and dairy (but they did not rely entirely on those foods).
In fact, he never found a healthy society that relied on “grains and dairy” as a staple dish.
His charts can be found in his book amd on the website created by his followers.
Comment by aksum — 20 January 2006 @ 1:47 PM
Hey –
Quick Note — on the Weston Price stuff… the big difference he found between ‘healthy’ grain/dairy consumers and non-healthy grain/dairy consumers lay in how those foods were prepared and stored. Specifically, that traditional diets that used a lot of natural fermentation processes tended to be much more healthy than others. The fermentation both breaks down sugars and anti-nutrients AND adds enzymes that makes it possible for us to more successfully digest these foods.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 20 January 2006 @ 2:49 PM
You’re exactly right, Janene.
But he did disprove the idea that “all” grain and dairy products, regardless of their processing, and regardless of what quantity was eaten, would inevitable cause bad health.
Comment by aksum — 20 January 2006 @ 2:56 PM
“inevitably cause bad health.”
A typo.
Comment by aksum — 20 January 2006 @ 2:56 PM
This thesis/debatre has really got me thinking, but I have two questions;
In thinking abuot survival have you considered the pychological issues surrounding the psychosis that we, the civilised carry in all of us. Learning how to cooperate with a group of people instead of walking away could prove difficult for a lot of us. I would also note that the way we raise out children is highly coercive and damaging and this is something that will need to change is we are to move away from civilised thinking patterns
The second is more of a request. Ran runs a Landblog to chart the progress of his ‘escape plan’ and I would love to see a blog by you guys charting your attempts to adapt to a hunter/gatherer lifestlye. As well as being incredibly fascinating it would also offer a lot of insights to the rest of us as you deal with the practicalities of making the shift
Comment by Aaron — 21 January 2006 @ 4:32 AM
Regarding primitive skills, Mr. Godesky wrote:
“Ability is easy; mastery is hard. But mastery is not necessary for survival–just abilty.”
There are so many unknown factors that it seems difficult to talk about any of this stuff without seeming presumptuous. The crash could be sudden or it could be gradual. The climate could change drastically or it could change slowly. However, if the crash is sudden, meaning within decades, and climate change is drastic, then I’m fairly confident that nothing short of mastery of primitive skills would suffice. Part of what makes hunting and foraging “easy” now is the predictability of it all - deer, and most other animals, are quite habitual. After watching a group for several days, you can predict with a great amount of accuracy where and when you need to be in order to take one down. Further, eating wild edible plants is all well and good when you know exactly where they will be and when they will be edible. The trouble is that if the comforts of civilization are suddenly taken away and the climate becomes wildly erratic, not only will the growth pattern of many edible plants change, but the animals which browse upon them will shift in response. Even those of us moderns who have had a great deal of experience with primitive skills would be hard pressed to survive under ideal circumstances, let alone under erratic and highly unpredictable conditions. In the last week here, in New England, it has gone from forty degrees and raining one day to four degrees and snowing the next, twice, and much of it with intense wind. That’s the kind of weather that can kill even healthy, wild, well-adapted animals. What would it do to a bunch of starving suburbanites clad in buckskins? A couple of workshops and a fancy recurve bow isn’t going to cut it if hundreds of thousands of us take to the woods to compete for unpredictable resources. In the journals of Lewis and Clark, there are several accounts of tribes of Native Americans starving. Nevermind that they were, in fact, what we would call “masters” of primitive skills, for more importantly, they lived in a time and a place where the Earth hadn’t yet been paved over and the natural resources terribly impoverished. These were excellent hunters with an intimate knowledge of the land living in a comparative time of plenty, yet still they starved. Even mastery of primitive skills does not guarantee survival, let alone mediocre ability.
Yes, humanity is adaptible. But we’ve incurred the greatest, most rapid mass extinction the Earth has ever seen. While I too would like to believe that my offspring might have a future, we can say nothing with certainty.
Comment by Casper — 21 January 2006 @ 3:59 PM
RE: foraging for food in winter. I live in Kansas. While not the most severe climate, we do get winter here. Within 100 yards of my small town home right now [late february] I can find to forage and eat (that I KNOW about currently, I’ll try everything when it comes down to it) daylilies, dandelions, acorns, black walnuts, chickweed, sunflowers, dock root, white clover, crabapples, rose hips, numerous domesticated herbs… and that’s off the top of my head without actually going outside and looking. That’s at least 10 plant based foods to choose from. Probably not enough here to sustain the life of most of the people in this town, but I doubt most of them will even consider eating daylilies, much less dock. And since I can identify them I’ll find them elsewhere as well. And I can sustain the lives of me and my child and a small band willing to learn from me. As for hunting… I do lack those skills, but understand animals fairly well and understand the concept of snaring. That is what I’d likely do rather than go after big game. Though I’d not be above knifing a cow’s jugular for meat. That will be quite effective until they learn to be a whole lot more wary of people than they currently are.
Actually most of the people in this town wouldn’t die off the first year. There’s an elevator with enough grain to last the population quite a while. That’s what most of them will go for.
As for foraging in general, the key is to know how to test unfamiliar plants for edibility. I’ve been practicing that for years now. First the smell test. If it smells really bad, it’s probably not safe. Then touch a tiny portion to your tongue. If it hurts, avoid it. Then nibble that tiny portion and explore it’s taste. If it’s bland or mildly bitter it’s probably ok. If you spit it out immediately, that’s a good sign it’s not a good idea to eat it. If it passes those tests and you don’t notice any stomache ache in the next several hours - day at the outside, you can assume it’s safe to eat and have a larger portion. Get your hands on a field guide to edible plants then get outside and learn to find them. As Jason pointed out, many of the weeds that survive in a city are edible. And don’t forget flowers, a few are poisonous, but the vast majority are edible. Ones I’d expect any American to be able to identify are roses, dandelions, lilac, daylily, and apple blossoms.
I agree with holotropik that “Its about allowing your instincts to work again.”
“But how can we have a community when even mentioning something to any people you know they look at you like you are crazy and it’s totally out of their sphere of reality that they are willing to deal with.” Hmmm… I guess I’m enough of an oddball that I can’t even now stand to spend much time around people who’d look at me like I’m crazy for mentioning it. Sure most of the people around me would, but the people I’ve already chosen to become close to are in agreement with me. It’s just a matter of distance for me to deal with at this point as my “close” pals are spread over a wide geographical area currently.
“And every “civilized” item you bring with you into the wilderness binds you to the very collapsing civilization you are trying to escape, and also increases the chance that you will be consumed by that wilderness when those items are no longer available for use.” Ever heard of a digging stick? Very primitive tool. Just a broken off piece of a tree branch, but very versitile and very useful to a gatherer. And very replaceable. I already make use of one in my gardening and gathering. Though I do plan on taking my knife and bow with me. Thay may not last forever, but they will last long enough for my skills to develop to the point I’ll do ok without them.
“uncivilized marauders…will not respect your ownership rights. They will eat your food. They will steal your belongings. They will rape your women. If you put up any resistance, they will slaughter you without hesitation.” What ownership rights??????????? That’s the point of being a forager. You own nothing that they would recognize as being of value. A reasonably alert forager band will hear them coming a mile away and stay away from them in the first place…. So they find your favorite blueberry patch… so what? They’ll almost certainly blunder past your cattail stand leaving it for you to eat when they’ve moved on to some other area. Sure if you try to defend your land they’ll murder you… But as a forager you aren’t as tied to a plot as a farmer and have no reason to stand there like an idiot and get hacked to pieces.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 25 February 2006 @ 11:54 PM
In the long term, you may be right. But mastery comes from practice, and as soon as you’ve attained competence, you can begin using these skills to survive–such that every day you live pushes you towards mastery.
I’m still confident that a year or two of learning is all it takes to get the competence required to start. A decade of two or practice will give you mastery. Start now, and I think you’ll find your skills are always exactly where they need to be.
Agreed, but as I’ve argued elsewhere, there simply won’t be hundreds of thousands of us. People do not respond to collapse by divorcing themselves from civilization; instead, the rely on it more heavily.
If it happens that even humans cannot survive, I doubt there will be any multicellular life left on the planet at all.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 February 2006 @ 10:13 AM
you guys need to have a list of all the people who died in the donner party and who survived
Comment by Mango — 7 March 2006 @ 1:10 PM
Why? It’s a minor supporting detail, and that information is easily available online. See? Clusty and a few moments give me, “this. So, why would we include it here?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 March 2006 @ 1:17 PM
I think we both agree that some small percentage of humans will be smart and strong-willed and lucky enough to survive a basic lack of food.
If the cities are over-run with rats, for example, some folks will start eating rats.
If, however, the ecosphere of the planet is sufficiently disrupted, there won’t even be rats. So a few nukes here and there could seriously throw off the scenario, as could unforeseen climate shifts.
Another possibility is that degenerative diseases could reduce the intelligence levels of scavenging humans (imagine mad cow disease).
So while I substantially agree with the analysis, I think there are quite a few complexities that haven’t been addressed.
Comment by Rick — 31 March 2006 @ 12:49 AM
Mad cow disease is a very bad example.
This particular malady is linked to cow cannibalism, and that practice is only possible with civilized factory farming.
No civilization, no cows munching on milled bones of other cows, no mad cow disease.
Few nukes will not be sufficient either. For example, to completely eliminate humans on island of Britain, at least 8 large yield thermonuclear devices are required. The worst nuclear winter scenarios push the planet back into the ice age, which we know is survivable both by land and sea animals.
Comment by _Gi — 31 March 2006 @ 12:55 PM
Mad cow disease starts with factory farms.
However, once it gets out into the ecosystem, it can persist.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is not necessarily going to go away if/when civilization does.
Similarly with nukes, they don’t have to kill everyone directly: they just have to sicken the ecosphere so that animals, including human animals, are no longer healthy enough to live in the wild.
There are various possible scenarios for nuclear exchanges which end in total human extinction, due to not just cold but radioactivity. Hunting and wandering in an Ice Age is one thing: hunting in a radioactive Ice Age is another. Hunters need strong teeth: radiation-sick folks (and their children and grand-children) can lose their teeth.
Comment by Rick — 31 March 2006 @ 8:58 PM
By the way, I’m not an expert on “mad cow” or “mad deer,” but I see an awful lot of folks — many with biology Ph.D.’s — giving warnings like these:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow.htm
http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/deer/deermeatkills.html
And most of these warnings seems to include terms like “TSE” (transmissible spongiform encephalitis) and “prion.”
Comment by Rick — 31 March 2006 @ 9:10 PM
Thank you for an interesting article and comments.
A thought: Humans are flock animals with a spread of genetic potential among individuals that increases the groups survival and well-being. You write about people making choices but here I think you are looking at it with Western glasses a la Robinson crusoe - some people who are not as driven to survive may have qualities necessary for the groups survival. You mention that for someone to join your group they must “bring something”. Why this view? By carrying some that are a burden in the beginning you ensure other qualities will survive.
True hunter/gatherer peoples are very careful to include everyone. This is not lovey-dovey thinking, but a survival outlook.
An interesting thought in that vein is that bottlenecks can lead to a a certain type of individual becoming over-represented within the group. And that the future of such a group is invariably a cycle of aggressive civilisation and collapse.
Comment by Eva C — 1 April 2006 @ 3:11 AM
If you have a good number of “dead weights” in your society (although I’m sure they can start off picking berries), then the rest of the tribe has to work overtime to provide for them and teach them the basics. Everyone has to work harder just to tread water, leaving them with less time with which to reproduce. So no one passes on their genes particularly effectively.
This is especially a problem if the most advanced (in terms of primitive skills) members aren’t really that advanced. We’ve only got a few years in which to learn these skills, and by the time we’re out there in the forest, I doubt we’ll be like the !Kung, complaining about their excessively long four-hour workdays. In the beginning, we’ll have to work much harder than your average forager because we’ll still be perfecting our skills.
For true hunter-gatherers, this issue never comes up because their tribes are clans. They’re related by blood, and they’ve been living together in this way for as long as they can trace back. The requirements for adding new members simply don’t exist.
I can’t say I agree. First of all, agriculture can only exist within a certain ecology and climate. Essentially, it could only have arisen during the Holocene. And if global warming does kick us out of the Holocene (which it appears to be doing), no one will be able to successfully practice agriculture for millions of years. By the time another Ice Age comes, sits around for a bit, and then has an interglacial period, humans may no longer exist. Or at least, we’ll be a different species. So it’s kind of silly to blame civilization on a personality type (I assume “A”?).
Second of all, I take issue with your assumption that only the most aggressive will survive. With every collapse, the ones that survive invariably form peaceful communities with an emphasis on environmentalism. The Navajo and the Hopi, for instance. The ones that survive do so because they can consider another way and follow it. The free-thinkers, if you will.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 1 April 2006 @ 11:21 AM
Giulianna,
Yes, many h/g are related by blood, but very strong bonds are made through friendship and marriage. learning how to live in a group where individuals may have different agendas is something they go through too
my comment that bottlenecks can make certain types overrepresented did not mean agriculture or “A” type personality. A balanced group includes individuals with variations of reactions to any given situation. A Western ego assumes that it can do it all, and that it makes the best choices. My point was that being exclusive about who should be allowed into a group is not a good survival tactic. Nor is the work to calorie consumption ratio constant through life. Bring some “dead weights” along, you might find they are a steadying anchor when you need one
Comment by Eva C — 2 April 2006 @ 3:22 AM
And there always will be. The important part is that these scenarios range from the unlikely (like Creutzfeldt-Jakob on any kind of epidemic level) to the trivial case (nuclear war wiping out all life on the planet–trivial, because in that eventuality, none of us have anything else to worry about ever again).
That’s possible, but don’t forget that Creutzfeldt-Jakob also has a fairly low level of occurence. It’s awful, but it’s also thankfully somewhat uncommon–rather like polio.
All very true, but that gets us to the question of how likely a nuclear war is. I don’t think it’s terribly likely, even with the Resource Wars. Nuclear weapons are only useful against large, civilian targets; i.e., terrorism. “Do as we say, or your population will vanish in the blink of an eye.” This is why nuclear powers don’t threaten each other directly, and why the use of nuclear weapons is not a reasonable response for any party in procuring resources like fossil fuels.
It’s very difficult to find someone who doesn’t bring something. I think this is a question of semantics; we very much do value skills and assets that are not currently valued, or may not be immediately obvious. One’s own personality can be an asset, as you say. This was actually one of the major reasons that finally forced me to leave my first tribe, Tribal Dawn.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 April 2006 @ 1:29 PM
Thank You for having comon sense, Jason Godesky. thank you for showing me that I am not the last sane man on the planet. I will survive. I will look for you and others of like mind after the masses have fed on one another.
Comment by Hilary_155 — 19 March 2007 @ 2:08 AM
I’m curious if you have any word on the effort to make corrective lenses primitively?
Mentioned in comment 73 above.
Thanks for the discussion, but please share any info on this!
Comment by John Tobey — 11 June 2008 @ 4:15 PM