[D66] The Collapse of Global Civilization Has Begun

[R.O.]

https://medium.com/@FeunFooPermaKra/the-collapse-of-global-civilization-has-begun-b527c649754c


  The Collapse of Global Civilization Has Begun

David B Lauterwasser
David B Lauterwasser
Nov 14, 2017 · 26 min read

But this doesn’t mean we have to give up hope.


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A temporary settlement of the Penan, Borneo 1993 © David Hiser

Only the fewest today think that global civilization is on the brink of 
collapse — but it’s doubtful that the Romans, the Greek, the Mayans or 
the Mesopotamians saw their own fall coming either. We hear about new 
obstacles on a daily basis; most of the news consist of disturbing 
stories on increasingly overwhelming issues that, plainly spoken, seem 
impossible to solve. And yet, no one even recognizes that it is 
/collapse/ that starts to unfold all around us.

Civilizations are characterized by the emergence and expansion of 
cities, as the Latin root of the word suggests (lat.: “/civis/” = 
inhabitant of a city), that, in some instances, turn into states. A city 
is a permanent settlement of humans where more humans live than their 
immediate environment can support. Therefore, the city requires the 
import of food and other resources from the surrounding area. The use of 
the term ‘require’ hereby implies that if the rural population doesn’t 
agree on exporting the product of their work, the city comes and 
forcefully takes it (Scott, 2017; Jensen, 2006). The city continuously 
expands as its population grows, requiring evermore resources from the 
rural surrounding, and therefore depleting an ever-increasing radius of 
land. Civilizations can, by definition, not be sustainable, since every 
expansion on a finite planet logically has a limit — and “colonizing 
other planets” is obviously nothing but science fiction. Earlier 
civilizations reached this limit after a few hundred or thousand years, 
but with the advancement of technology we repeatedly found loopholes 
that allow us to artificially modify conditions in our favor. As we 
slowly reach the limit of technological, physical and biological 
possibilities to further expand as a civilization, it is of utmost 
importance to understand /what/ is happening and /why/.

If we can learn one thing of the past collapses of major civilizations, 
it is that all of those showed some (if not most) of the following 
symptoms during or immediately before their imminent collapse: 
environmental destruction, depletion of vital resources (such as water, 
arable soil and timber), famine, overpopulation, social and political 
unrest, inequality, invasion or other forms of devastating warfare, and 
disease.

Think for a second. I guess you will be able to come up with a current 
example for each of the points listed above in under a minute. If not, 
here are a few examples:

*********************************

ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION

Virtually every environmental crisis ever recognized as such in the last 
century has since worsened. All goals set by the Earth Summit in Rio De 
Janeiro (1992), its follow-up Rio+20 (2012), the Kyoto Protocol (1997), 
the Copenhagen Agreement COP15 (2009), and the Paris Agreement (2016) 
have failed to make a considerable difference.
At the latter event, politicians agreed that climate breakdown must be 
mitigated, and half-hearted promises were made to set utopian goals for 
a reduction in CO2 emissions.
No matter what you look at, may it be deforestation, atmospheric carbon 
levels, species extinctions, polluted rivers, every aspect has gotten 
worse year after year. Governments doesn’t seem to be able to solve this 
crisis, and neither is the public. Recently the Global Carbon Project 
announced that, despite all the efforts and the fact that overall carbon 
emissions from fossil fuels and industry have experienced only “flat 
growth” over the last two years (a sign of hope for many), the carbon 
emissions will once again grow by 2% in 2017 — and the trend is expected 
to continue next year.
It seems like all our efforts are destined to fail.

Forests all over the world continue to be destroyed in the name of 
economic growth, progress and development, and we civilized humans set 
in motion what some call the Sixth Mass Extinction Event. In the past 40 
years, we lost half of the world’s wildlife, and species extinctions 
proceed at an unprecedented rate — estimated at 10,000 species per year 
(WWF), or about one species per hour.

Simultaneously, the decrease of insect populations across Europe by over 
70%, already bearing the label Insectageddon, is believed to have 
disastrous impacts on human crops and ecosystem stability in the coming 
decade.

We logged over 75% of all forests in the 10,000-year history of our 
culture, and logging continues at breathtaking speed (currently 
deforestation proceeds at a rate of 48 football fields per minute, while 
we concomitantly lose 30 football fields of topsoil per minute).


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© National Geographic

POLLUTION & EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS

The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has skyrocketed to 400ppm (the 
highest in over 800,000 years), and the emissions from today will stay 
there for another century.


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© National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Despite extensive lobbying, it is now known that the biggest 15 ships 
produce as much pollution as all the cars in the world. They burn the 
dirtiest of all fuels, and have to pay surprisingly low taxes for it. 
But nothing that we do pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster 
than air travel, yet new airports are build and existing ones extended, 
and the number of airplanes in the sky on any given day continues to rise.

The world’s hunger for oil and the companies’ increasing difficulty to 
meet the demands by conventional means have created over one trillion 
liters (!) of highly toxic sludge from tar sand processing in Canada. 
Those ponds cover an area of over 220 km2 — as big as 73 Central Park’s.
But those are not the only extremely hazardous black lakes there are — a 
giant lake filled with thick, black sludge in China was recently dubbed 
“the worst place in the world”. It is a result of our worrying 
dependency on smartphones: in inner Mongolia, the ‘rare earth’ minerals 
needed to build them are processed, and the vast amounts of biohazardous 
and radioactive waste is discharged arbitrarily into the landscape right 
next to the factories.
Even if the industry would disappear tomorrow, their carcinogenic waste 
would stay with us for centuries, polluting skies, rivers and soil.

Microplastics are found not only in the oceans, but in alarming 
quantities in most tap water all around the world. They even made it 
into the atmosphere, making it literally impossible to escape the 
plastic particles small enough to enter the cells of your body, where 
their toxicity increases the chance of cancer and other diseases.


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© Guardian — Tap water everywhere contains large amounts of plastic fibres

All those problems will, due to climate breakdown, only get worse in the 
future (Lynas, 2009). Positive feedback systems now lead to unstoppable 
changes on the surface of the planet. Rapidly melting ice caps mixed 
with increased air pollution leaves a dark layer of dirt on the surface, 
enhancing further warming and melting of the ice. Forest fires all 
around the world contribute to an ever-hotter climate, which in turn 
leads to even bigger, more devastating forest fires.

Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the World Meteorological 
Organization, said: “The past three years have all been in the top three 
years in terms of temperature records. This is part of a long term 
warming trend. We have witnessed extraordinary weather, including 
temperatures topping 50C in Asia, record-breaking hurricanes in rapid 
succession in the Caribbean and Atlantic reaching as far as Ireland, 
devastating monsoon flooding affecting many millions of people and a 
relentless drought in East Africa.”

Sea levels have already risen considerably, and even the most 
pessimistic forecasts have proven to be true. In his 2006 documentary 
/An Inconvenient Truth/, Al Gore claimed that sea level rise will flood 
the 911 memorial — at that time ridiculed — which actually happened 
during hurricane Sandy.
Hurricanes increase in intensity every year, leaving behind 
post-apocalyptic landscapes like seen in the Dominican Republic and 
Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria.

RESOURCES

Resources such as oil, phosphorus, antimony, indium, silver, copper, 
sand, and others long have peaked, hence officials do what they can to 
ensure the public that everything is alright and no problems are ahead — 
it would cost them their jobs and render their occupations superfluous 
if they said the truth.

The only “official” numbers on how much oil remains are presented 
annually by — you guessed it — BP. Not very convincing. Those numbers 
are presented in confusing fashion, since BP’s calculations are based on 
“current consumption levels”. But guess what, consumption is increasing, 
and despite so-called renewable energies having a small share of the 
overall energy created, our world still relies heavily on fossil fuels. 
This is not going to change anytime soon.
If you do the same calculation with the average growth rate in oil 
consumption, you’ll end up at a date somewhat 15 years earlier (2052). 
And remember: this is only if all discovered oil fields can successfully 
be exploited, whether they are under the Arctic ice shield or in the 
Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. Furthermore, this is supposed to be the 
day where we arrive at zero barrels of crude oil, so scarcity will start 
much sooner.

For years they have been pushing back the date of when exactly the world 
will run out of oil, because they constantly seem to find new reserves. 
Even if that might be the case, it is worth noting that those newly 
discovered oil fields are in the most inaccessible places, since all the 
fields that are easily exploited are already empty. Those new oil 
reserves require increasingly dangerous, expensive and destructive 
technology: offshore drilling, fracking, and the extraction of oil from 
tar sands.


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© BP — Will the oil price really continue to drop? What justifies this 
sharp decline, and how does it fit into the context of a world slowly 
but surely running out of oil?

While the question of how much oil there is really left leaves room for 
speculation, I recommend looking at the graphs yourself.

War over resources are supposed to increase, and it is even the most 
basic resources that inspire conflict. With the Tibetan glaciers 
melting, China, India, and all countries around the Mekong River can 
expect serious water shortages in a few years. In China alone, over 
28.000 rivers have dried up already, according to the Ministry of Water 
Resources.
All in all, an estimated 2 billion (!) people are in danger.
“Many experts say that wars were fought over land before, but nowadays, 
wars are fought over energy and soon there will be wars fought over 
water,” said Lobsang Sangay, the head of the Tibetan Administration in 
Exile.

FAMINE

At a time where even pro-business and pro-development Forbes Magazine 
writes that “Capitalism Will Starve Humanity Until 2050” (unless it 
“changes” — whatever that means — but this big change is yet to come), 
it should be clear that we’re very close to the total collapse of global 
food supply. In the article, the only problem addressed is overfishing 
of the oceans (not even the ongoing acidification or pollution is included).

A sophisticated simulation called ‘Food Chain Reaction’ was built by 
experts of the State Department, the World Bank, and multinational 
agrobusiness giant Cargill, along with other independent researchers and 
specialists. It involved the participation of 65 officials from 
countries all over the world, as well as key multilateral and 
intergovernmental institutions.

“By 2024, the scenario saw global food prices spike by as much as 395 
percent due to prolonged crop failures in key food basket regions, 
driven largely by climate change, oil price spikes, and confused 
responses from the international community.”

The importance of this simulation lays in the fact that it was created 
partly by powerful organizations, who would lie to the public but not to 
themselves — as it was the case with Big Oil publicly denying climate 
breakdown, but internally preparing for its effects. They might tell the 
public that we have another 40 years or so worth of oil in the ground, 
but they themselves know that 2024 would be a much closer call for 
either scenario.

Now, remember, all those factors examined here are interrelated. No oil 
means consequently no food in the supermarkets. You can imagine what 
would happen.

According to reports by a government contractor, “the US national 
security industry already plans for the impact of an unprecedented 
global food crisis lasting as long as a decade.”

OVERPOPULATION

The world is, in contrast what humanists and futurists might say, vastly 
overpopulated (Their error is to think the planet is empty and just 
waiting to be filled up with humans). That means we have exceeded the 
carrying capacity of this planet by several billion people. There is no 
way that such number of people could ever live in a sustainable 
relationship with their environment.
More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, in some 
cases in apartments so small that they are called ‘coffin homes’.

The numbers are staggering: “The built world that sustains us is so vast 
that, for every pound of an average person’s body, there are 30 tons of 
infrastructure: roads, houses, sidewalks, utility grids, intensively 
farmed soil, and so forth”, says Jedediah Purdy, author of /After 
Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene/. Without this enormous 
construct to sustain our current population levels, we would fall back 
somewhere between ten and two hundred million. If anything would happen 
to any part of the infrastructure listed above, the consequences would 
be severe.

When we talk about overpopulation, we also have to include the fact that 
domestic animals for human use outweigh wild terrestrial mammals by a 
factor of 25 to one. Civilized humans come with a lot of luggage.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL UNREST

Saying that society falls apart is no longer an exaggeration. Every day 
there are huge protests and clashes with the police all around the 
world. The public is divided into ever more fractions that are unable to 
come to any compromise. Whether left or right, conservative or liberal, 
pro- or anti gun, refugee, abortion, vaccines, or climate change, the 
two opposing fractions are doing nothing but hardening their own hearts 
against the other side. They are trapped in echo chambers on social 
media that only confirm what they already believe to know, and therefore 
intensifies their conviction of their own righteousness.

This year alone, there were over 50,000 (!) recorded incidents of gun 
violence in the United States — 307 of which were /mass shootings./


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© Gun Violence Achieve

Radical groups, sometimes militarized, are on the rise all over the 
planet. Whether patriot groups in the US, FARC in Colombia, pirates at 
the coast of Somalia, ISIS in the Philippines, Boko Haram in Nigeria, or 
underground right-wing terror cells in Europe, everyone seems to prepare 
for some final war.

Technology, once viewed almost exclusively in positive terms, encounters 
more and more skepticism as Big Tech tightens its grip around our 
personal lives. A large number of people in the developed world is 
seriously addicted to smartphones — no wonder, since they are in turn 
specifically designed to make us addicted. More studies emerge every 
week showing the huge downside of advanced technology, that most of us 
so far have simply overlooked. The effects of our highly technologized 
society on our children are spine-chilling — and its consequences even more.

Managers, CEOs, bankers, politicians and other members of the upper 
class systematically avoid paying taxes, therefore robbing the public of 
money that is desperately needed in the communities. The leak of 
millions of documents, called the /Panama-/ and /Paradise Papers/ shows 
the sheer scale of this peerless fraud. A global plutocracy has reached 
unimaginable power. Oligopolies control the economy, politics and 
society. Dystopia is here.

On an international level, democracy doesn’t seem to work anymore. With 
the emergence of more and more authoritarian leaders such as Trump, 
Putin, Erdogan, Chan-Ocha, Duterte, and Órban, the world slowly starts 
shifting towards an uncertain future.
Politics has always been a dirty business. But in the digital age it 
gets increasingly hard for politicians to hide their wrongdoings and 
corruption. Without portable cameras in everyone’s pocket and all 
information being stored online it is impossible to hide things as long 
as governments used to do back in the days — until everyone involved was 
beyond the reach of persecution: retired or dead.

How many times have we witnessed governments change from liberal, to 
conservative, and to liberal again, all ruled for by people who really 
believed that this election will finally set things straight. It is 
unbelievable to me that people still fall for this.

Economic collapse is imminent, not only because of all the bubbles yet 
to burst (like the debt bubble, the student-loan bubble, the tech 
bubble, or the giant real estate bubble that caused China’s double-digit 
growth and led to vast half-finished ghost towns for millions of 
inhabitants — China used more cement in three years than the US in the 
entire 20th century for those projects, which in turn is one of the 
reason the world is running out of sand), but simply because economic 
growth is reaching its absolute limit.


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© Bill Gate’s Gatesblog

We are trapped in a dilemma: we collectively decided that we “need” 
economic growth, yet economic growth destroys the planet and continues 
to deprive us of the last freedoms and resources. There is no logical 
approach to solving this fundamental crisis that undermines even the 
most basic assumptions about ourselves and our place in this world. If 
our economy is not growing anymore, what else is there to do? If, after 
all the cumulative effort, the contraption we’ve built will collapse in 
on itself anyway, where’s the point? Good question.


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© The Economist — The world economy seems to stagger.

INEQUALITY

Global inequality is worse than ever — and probably even worse than 
that. Poverty is a trap, and being rich literally pays off. Banks take 
money from those in debt (the poorer you are the more you have to pay), 
and pay money to bigwigs, who receive more money the richer they are.


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© World Economic Forum — The richest 1% now own more wealth than the 
remaining 99%.

The many other gaps between men and women, black and white, East and 
West, developed and developing are nowhere near closed as well.

WARFARE

With the erratic Donald Trump as president of the United States, and 
Putin, who wants to keep up with the United States renewal of their 
nuclear arsenal, a nuclear arms race has once again started that was 
already called a Cold War 2.0.
With North Korea shooting missile after missile in Japan’s direction and 
sending threat after threat over the pacific for fear of their own 
nation’s continued existence, nuclear war has become a real possibility.
The climate between Pakistan and India (both nuclear powers) is as tense 
as ever, with India showing increasing concern about possible conflict 
with China in the future, too. China is involved in an ongoing genocide 
in Myanmar, for the sake of building a pipeline through the country to 
supply China with oil.
Israel still doesn’t let anyone inspect their nuclear weapons arsenal 
and their increasingly fascist government is a ticking timebomb in the 
Middle East.

The infamous ‘Doomsday Clock’ is again at two and a half minutes to 
midnight — the closest since 1953.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria might have been defeated on the 
ground, but the ideas and the hate will sure stay, inspiring new jihadi 
movements to sprout up. In a vicious cycle of violence, terrorist 
attacks in the West are answered with bombing campaigns, which in turn 
fuel the propaganda of radical Islam.

Warfare itself changes, too. There is a tendency towards automation, and 
digital warfare is an increasingly real threat.
Drones are used on a regular basis against weaker countries, even though 
they cause more civilian deaths than regular battles. It is just very 
convenient to randomly fire missiles into crowds of alleged terrorists 
from eight kilometers above.
Combat robots are developed and tested by armies all around the world.

Ever more powerful weapon technologies are being built despite 
international agreements on their ban — and used, as seen with the sarin 
gas attack in Syria and the ‘Mother of all Bombs’ dropped on a 
mountainside in Afghanistan by the Trump administration.

DISEASE

Public health isn’t increasing either, and pollution might be the number 
one reason — pollution now kills more people than smoking, hunger, 
natural disasters, war, murder, AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria together. 
While we continue to destroy Nature, this very act unleashes more diseases.
With the advancement of globalization, and despite popular opinion, 
global health continues to decline.

The nutritional value of our food is at a historic low, vital 
phytonutrients have virtually disappeared from our daily meals, 
industrial sugar in almost every processed food poisons generations, and 
biodiversity declines as a direct result of conventional agriculture. 
We, as a society, are “overfed but undernourished” — for the first time 
in human history there are now more over- than underweight people in the 
world.

The air in New Delhi, a city with a population of 26 million people, has 
reach a toxicity equal to smoking 50 cigarettes per day. The most 
polluted cities on earth are almost exclusively located in India, China 
and Saudi Arabia./
/ This is not because Western countries are cleaner, it is because they 
simple export their own pollution.

There seems no way out of the opioid crisis in the US — Big Pharma 
lobbied doctors and lawmakers into easily prescribing them, getting 
millions of people addicted, and now, as the Trump administration cracks 
down on painkillers, those people are forced into use of heroin and 
fentanyl.

The World Health Organization and numerous other experts have 
continuously warned of the disastrous consequences of a post-antibiotic 
world, where even the smallest infection might end deadly and surgery is 
not an option anymore. Yet no one can think of a way to reduce 
antibiotic prescriptions by doctors or the use of antibiotics in factory 
farming. Antibiotic-resistant “superbugs”, who will most likely kill 
millions in the next decades, emerge on a worrying scale in China, 
India, and even in the Western world.

*********************************

Everyone, this is how collapse looks like. It may take years or even 
decades, but we have already set it in motion. We are at the beginning 
of a gradual downwards spiral, that accelerates as it spins on into the 
abyss. Watch it slowly unfold over the next few years, and better make 
plans for what you will do — because many members of the upper-class 
elites who know and understand the world on a global level are already 
making emergency plans for the coming cataclysm.
You see, I am by far not the only one who thinks like this (there are 
Theodore Kaczynski, Paul Kingsnorth, Derrick Jensen, Edward Abbey, and 
John Zerzan, just to name a few more popular advocates), nor the first 
one to point this out (just think about Thomas Malthus, who warned of 
collapse in 1826).
A NASA-funded study focusing on only two issues concluded that “Two 
important features seem to appear across societies that have collapsed. 
[…] The stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the 
ecological carrying capacity and the economic stratification of society 
into Elites and Masses.” According to the researchers, “collapse is 
difficult to avoid. […] Elites grow and consume too much, resulting in a 
famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society.”

>From collapses of past societies we now know that in most cases, there 
is not one single factor that we can attribute this collapse to, but 
rather a series of interrelated events (Scott, 2017).
Our globalized society shows not only some, but /all/ of the factors 
that led to collapse of past civilizations, and through the use of 
advanced technology we have been able to create conditions worse than 
any other civilization ever had to endure. Some might think, “Well, if 
technology has brought us so far, it will sure bring us further”, and 
they might even be right — but only for the next few years. It is 
obvious that the techno-industrial system can’t continue to try to fix 
occurring issues forever. There are simply not enough resources left. 
Like the Roman Empire when it began to decline, we’re in a period of 
overshoot, that will inevitably be followed by collapse (Tainter, 1988).
Time is running out.

In the past, when a civilization was in the process of collapsing, other 
surrounding societies could take advantage of their vulnerability, and 
sometimes merge the remains with their own empire. This is not an option 
anymore in times of global interdependency on international trade and 
transportation. If one goes down, the others follow. The Domino Theory 
of collapse.

It is also impossible to recreate our civilization, since we already 
burned all the fossil fuels needed for the technological advancements 
that allow a global civilization to temporary sustain itself.

Fantasies of “colonizing the universe” are not helping us either — we 
humans evolved over millions of years to fit exactly into the conditions 
found here on Earth — this atmosphere, this temperature, this chemical 
composition of solids, liquids and gasses, this gravity, this UV 
intensity — and it is absurd to think that we could create a functioning 
ecosystem on an entirely different planet all by ourselves in a matter 
of decades. Even the most ambitious plans for colonizing Mars will fail 
because of resource depletion and any given combination of all factors 
leading to collapse listed above. If, against all odds, anyone gets to 
“escape” Earth, it will not be you, anyway — it will be the one that 
pays the most.

Free energy is nowhere around the corner, neither is truly sustainable 
energy.
Solar panels are made from sand, which is running out. The production of 
photovoltaic plates for solar panels requires tremendous amounts of 
energy, involves the excessive use of highly toxic chemicals and creates 
vast amounts of waste products such as silicon tetrachloride (three to 
four tons of which are produced for every ton of the desired 
polysilicon), which forms hydrochloric acid upon contact with water, is 
often casually dumped somewhere and already devastated landscapes in China.
Constructing dams kills river ecosystems and creates one billion (!) 
tons of greenhouse gasses a year. Wind turbines are producing millions 
of tons of trash and kill birds, bats and insects.
Furthermore, all of the above technologies depend on the same old, dirty 
system of mining, transporting, smelting, refining, shipping, 
assembling, manufacturing, distributing and constructing.
The only sustainable form of energy on this planet comes in form of 
calories.

You might call me a pessimist now, but I don’t think you would find 
enough positive news to outweigh the above. This is not pessimism, this 
is what actually happens.
Neither is this alarmism. The only alarming thing is that there are 
people blind enough to think that everything will work out just fine, as 
long as we just recycle, invest more money in solar companies, drink 
fair-trade coffee, buy a brand-new Tesla, or drive a bicycle to work.

Politicians continue to ensure us that “the best days are yet to come”, 
yet most of us feel the opposite — it is the worst days that are yet to 
come. And worse those days will be. As with earlier collapses, the 
aftermath must be horrifying. But would it be really that bad?

I’ve heard people calling the announcement of collapse ‘elitist’, since, 
according to the logic they apply, you automatically approve of millions 
— if not billions — of people dying. They hold the unquestioned 
assumption that it will be “the others” who will suffer the most, which 
is true — but only as long as civilization exists and continues to 
suppress and exploit them. Millions, maybe billions, will die anyway if 
this system continues to wreak havoc on this planet.

Actually, it will be the global elite which will be hit the worst: the 
urban populations of the Western world with no knowledge of basic 
survival or the ecosystem around their cities.
The global rural poor might actually be better off without the 
capitalist system stealing their land or exploiting and enslaving them. 
Consider the words of Anuradha Mittal, former co-director of Food First, 
who said that former granaries of India now export dog food and tulips 
to Europe. Same goes for many of the urban poor, who live in slums not 
by choice but because they were forced to relocate, thanks to the 
actions of multinational corporations and banks — they still have the 
knowledge of how to live a life as subsistence farmer.

The ones hit hardest by global collapse will be those in the highest 
ranks of our civilizations’ hierarchy.

Feeling hopeless yet? Despite the overwhelming horror all this might 
induce at first, there is no need for nihilism and despair.

********************************


  A New Hope

But not all is lost — as presented by James C. Scott and Joseph Tainter, 
the “Dark Ages” following previous collapses were often a time were 
personal freedom flourished, and repressive systems were replaced by 
community efforts to support each other.

Civilized culture might not have any plans for the event of collapse of 
infrastructure, trade, industry and medicinal and food supply. Most 
people imagine some kind of post-apocalyptic ‘Mad Max’ scenario where 
the ones with the most guns rule and a more primitive but still 
civilized lifestyle emerges that brings back the horrors of our own 
/civilized/ past — famine, plague, slavery, and the “law of the 
strongest” (sometimes falsely called “the law of the jungle”). This 
nightmarish tale was the inspiration for a number of Hollywood movies 
that further put focus on the alleged inevitability of some chaotic, 
violent future for humanity (Think about “The Book of Eli”, “World War 
Z”, “12 Monkeys”, “I Am Legend”, “The Day After Tomorrow”, “The Matrix”, 
“Oblivion”, “28 Days Later” and even kids’ movies like “WALL-E”). As a 
response to those nightmarish scenarios, some buy ammunition and canned 
food in anticipation of the cataclysm — but when the last bullet is 
fired and the last can of beans emptied, they are back at exactly the 
point where they started.
This vision of the future is indeed terrifying, since after all it is a 
very likely scenario — even though most people would prefer to have some 
alternative.

What we lack is an idea of what to do, a short- and long-term plan for 
when things go south. We seem to have all the knowledge in the world, 
but yet we lack the simple knowledge of /how to live/.

But you can call of the search and cancel the think tank meetings: There 
already /is/ a truly sustainable lifestyle, proven successful for three 
million years and counting and custom-tailored for us humans by the 
indisputable power of evolution: tribalism.

Evolution came up with a social organization for every animal, carefully 
selected through trial and error until reaching the optimum. It 
organized whales in pods, baboons in troops, wolves in packs, buffalo in 
herds, birds in flocks, ants in colonies, bees in hives, school in fish 
— and humans in tribes. There is a way for every single animal that 
works for this animal within the limits of its ecological niche (and 
therefore for all the other animals inhabiting this niche, too).
Who are we to think that after only a few thousand years we came up with 
something better, more successful?! There was no rational impulse to 
carefully construct something considering any possible limits and 
boundaries, people just started building like fury! The one big 
long-term study on whether civilizations are sustainable enough to 
successfully replace tribalism will soon come to a final conclusion: /No/.

We have to get off our high horse and come in contact with the Earth 
once again. We have to realize the huge mistake we made, the “worst 
mistake in the history of the human race”, as anthropologist and 
best-selling author Jared Diamond called it. We have to remember the 
“original affluent society”, as another anthropologist, Marshall 
Sahlins, famously wrote.


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The original affluent society: Members of the Penan tribe eat in their 
hut. Borneo, 1993 © David Hiser

Most modern-day anthropologists are already united in the ability to see 
through the racial bias of earlier times, and come to surprisingly 
positive conclusions about the exact same people that were considered 
“savages” whose lives were “nasty, brutish and short” in times of 
colonialization. They see people who are peaceful, content, and happy, 
who carefully consider their actions, avoid confrontation, and have no 
significant impact on their environment. If you think I am perpetuating 
the “Noble Savage Myth”, just watch a documentary about any primitive 
tribe, or read a book by someone who experienced their life first hand.

Without even one exception, all of the problems listed in the first part 
of this essay are directly motivated by and justified with the 
unquestioned assumption that we humans can do with this world as we 
please — we can destroy, improve, relocate, build, dam up, extract, cut 
down, construct, dig out, burn, and dump as much as we want, like gods, 
shaping the world to fit our desires. This misbelief, called 
anthropocentrism, is what caused all those terrible things in the first 
place.
The underlying theme of our own culture’s mythology was formulated by 
Daniel Quinn as follows: “The world was made for man, and man was made 
to conquer and rule it.” We have lived by those words until now, and it 
almost killed us. It has shattered this once beautiful and thriving 
planet into pieces, dust and trash.
But this is no inherently human belief. It is the belief of only one 
single culture. A culture that rose from the first agrarian settlements 
to a globalized techno-industrial civilization.


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An intruder killed for trespassing on the territory of the Tagaeri 
tribe, once part of the Huaorani (Ecuador), who crossed the border of 
their land. The Tagaeri’s lives are under constant threat by 
missionaries and illegal loggers, poachers and gold miners, who often 
bring disease and violence.

As you may have noticed, I purposely avoided to make general claims 
about humanity, and therefore used terms like “/civilized/ humans” in my 
argumentation. I did this to stress the fact that ‘we’ do not represent 
humanity (Quinn, 1996). There is nothing wrong with humans as a species. 
For 99% or our species’ time on this planet, we have been nomadic 
hunter-gatherers, and this most successful of all lifestyles continues 
to this day, where dozens of uncontacted tribes make it clear that they 
are not interested in the development our civilization has to offer in 
exchange for their home, the forest.

Those primitive people, as long as they are left alone by the people of 
our culture and live in “voluntary isolation”, are living proof that the 
lifestyle does still work — so good in fact that it is worth defending 
with their very lives. And there is more: primitive life doesn’t only 
work for humans (who enjoy a varied organic diet and therefore superior 
health, ample leisure time and low levels of stress because of a 
lifestyle characterized by play), it works for other animals, as well as 
plants, rivers, and mountains.
Some may now claim that I “romanticize the past”, but this accusation is 
usually made by people who think it is more ‘grown up’ to romanticize 
the future.

Don’t get me wrong! I am not proposing to “go back to the Stone Age” 
(which of course is physically impossible), nor do I want everyone to 
become a hunter-gatherer. But there is a lot we can learn from those 
(ab)original people, because they have the most important knowledge of 
all, the knowledge that we lack: they know how to live, without 
devastating their environment on which we depend for our very survival.


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Araweté woman playing with butterflies. From: ‘The River is Life’ © 
Alice Kohler

I do advocate self-sufficiency, autonomy, independence, simplification, 
localization and rewilding. Knowing the plants around you, the movement 
of the mammals and the language of birds. Reading Nature’s signs, 
predicting the weather and listening to the wind in the leaves. Doing 
things yourself and not relying on people you don’t know. Feeding 
yourself, planting trees, building your own house, creating and 
nurturing a community and caring about the people you love. Carving a 
flute and mastering it. Reading and educating yourself and others. 
Playing games and laughing. Drinking tea when it’s cold and taking a 
bath when it’s hot.
I advocate trying to do everything yourself, from materials that you 
yourself collected and processed. I advocate quitting your job, going 
back to the countryside, breathing the fresh air, feeling the sun on 
your skin, and letting go. Breaking out of the cage. Being as free as 
you can.

I cannot provide you with a final solution to all of our problems, but I 
can tell you were to look for answers to those problems. I say we make 
the best of our situation, we embrace collapse, and use the opportunity 
to create something better — something that works. The possibilities are 
endless.

I have looked for answers, and I found many of them answered by 
simplifying every possible aspect of my life, spending plenty of time in 
the garden inspecting and observing plants and animals, and looking to 
the indigenous people in whose area I now live if I have any further 
questions. Not to imitate them, but to understand them and learn from them.
And it works! Since I quit my civilized life four years ago, I became 
stronger and healthier than ever before, have more freedom and free 
time, eat better, use much less money, worry less, and am generally more 
happy and content.

Sometimes you have to take a step back to move forward.


  Works cited:

Daniel Quinn: /The Story of B/ (Bantam, 1996)

Derrick Jensen: /Endgame, Vol. 1/ (Seven Stories Press, 2006)

James C. Scott: /Against the Grain — A Deep History of the Earliest 
States/ (Yale University Press, 2017)

Joseph Tainter: /The Collapse of Complex Societies/ (Cambridge 
University Press, 1990)

Mark Lynas: /Six Degrees — Our Future on a Hotter Planet/ (Fourth 
Estate, 2009)

Michael Williams: /Deforesting the Earth — From Prehistory to Global 
Crisis/ (University of Chicago Press, 2003)

Ronald Wright: /A Short History of Progres/s (House of Anansi Press, 2004)

This article was first published on feunfoo.org.

About the author:


Image for post

Dave is recovering from civilization on a permaculture farm in the 
tropics. Here he waits for the collapse and experiments with a lifestyle 
that makes him and every other creature in his garden happy.

Follow David on Instagram and Facebook!

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