Posts Tagged ‘primitivism’
Quote of the Day: Interplanetary Archeologists of the Future
“Cultural Man has been on earth for some 2.000.000 years; for over 99% of this period he has lived as a hunter-gatherer. Only in the last 10.000 years has man begun to domesticate plants and animals, to use metals, and to harness energy resources other than the human body (…) To date, the hunting way of life has been the most succesful and persistent adaptation man has ever achieved. Nor does this evaluation exclude the present precarious existence under the threat of nuclear annihilation and the population explosion. It is still an open question whether man will be able to survive the exceedingly complex and unstable ecological conditions he has created for himself. If he fails in this task, interplanetary archeologists of the future will classify our planet as one in which a very long and stable period of smallscale hunting and gathering was followed by an apparently instanteneous efflorescence of technology and society leading rapidly to extinction. ‘Stratigraphically,’ the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear as essentially simultaneous.”
—Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, Man the Hunter (1973).
Against Civilization
Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato all talked about how the world is being destroyed by agriculture — the soil was washing down the hills into rivers and killing the rivers. This is as old as civilization because that’s what civilization is. We are not the first people to realize this. We talk about the oceans — two-thirds of all animal breaths are made possible by the plankton that the oceans produce, and the plankton populations are collapsing now, because the oceans are dying. If the oceans go down, we go down with them. There will not be life on land if the plankton go. This is what we are facing now, and it does require a solution that is commensurate with the problem. So all of this withdrawal into your own backyard garden is not in any way going to address the fact that the plankton are collapsing, and that is why we need a resistance, not a withdrawal. Personal solutions aren’t political solutions, and it is only through political solutions that we can take apart the political institutions that are actually murdering our planet.
Alternet has an interview with Aric McBay, Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen, authors of Deep Green Resistance. Via LGM.
More Stuff
* Whoa: The UN international climate change conference is in chaos as the G77, which represents 130 developing countries “pulled the emergency plug” suspending the talks over wealthy countries’ reluctance to discuss a legally binding emissions treaty. I hope this is just a negotiating tactic in response to the so-called “suicide pact” and not a true collapse of the talks.
* If anyone tries to tell you that uncertainty about climate change is a reason for inaction, he’s either a fool or a scoundrel. Probably a bit of both.
* Two from ChartPorn: an interactive map showing the estimated effects of a 4 Celsius degree change in global temperatures and Climate Anomalies, 2007-09.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Hundreds of billions in crime money knowingly laundered by banks during credit crunch.
The Observer reports that an estimated $352bn of drug and mafia money was laundered by the major banks at the peak of the credit crunch, while regulators turned a blind eye, since the highly liquid criminal underworld was the only source of the cash necessary to keep the banks’ doors open.
* ‘In the lawless mountain realms of Asia, a Yale professor finds a case against civilization.‘ Via MeFi.
In Zomia’s small societies, with their simple technologies, anti-authoritarian tendencies, and oral cultures, Scott sees not a world forgotten by civilization, but one that has been deliberately constructed to keep the state at arm’s length. Zomia’s history, Scott argues, is a rejection of the mighty lowland states that are seen as defining Asia. He calls Zomia a “shatter zone,” a place where people go to escape the raw deal that complex civilization historically has been for those at the bottom: the coerced labor and conscription into military service, the taxation for wars and pharaonic building projects, the epidemic diseases that came with intensive agriculture and animal husbandry.
* Nicholas Stephanopoulos on phasing out the filibuster. Via Matt Yglesias, who notes the real problem with this proposal:
If we actually were in a situation where Democrats were clamoring for a restoration of majority rule and Republicans were blocking it, then I think a clever compromise would be just what the doctor ordered. But as best I can tell only Tom Harkin has any real interest in doing this. A few public option stalwarts, like Sherrod Brown, have pressed for the use of reconciliation to do health care. But even on this proponents of majority rule seem to be a minority of the Democratic caucus. Which is to say that the issue is less that Republicans are insisting on the filibuster in order to preserve their ability to block legislation than it is that Democratsare insisting on a supermajority rule in order to preserve each individual member’s ability to make demands.
* And I’ve used this precise argument from xkcd many times with regard to both climate change and evolutionary biology. It’s logically sound, but, alas, gets few results.
Eco-Monday!
Eco-Monday.
* “It’s not as safe, it’s bad for our planet and it’s clearly more expensive”: Why can’t we just stop drinking bottled water?
* Climate change ‘faster and more extreme’ than feared.
* A specter is haunting American environmentalism – the specter of failure. All of us who have been part of the environmental movement in the United States must now face up to a deeply troubling paradox: Our environmental organizations have grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to go downhill, to the point that the prospect of a ruined planet is now very real. How could this have happened?
* And according to Peter Salonius, a Canadian soil biologist, “humanity has probably been in overshoot of the Earth’s carrying capacity since it abandoned hunter gathering in favor of crop cultivation (~ 8,000 BCE).”
* This week’s icon is eco-tastic too—it’s a Greenpeace poster labeled “Stop the catastrophe” I found at grinding.be. The rejoinder in the tag is borrowed from Tim Morton: The catastrophe has already happened.
Derrick Jensen’s ‘Endgame’
Premise Ten: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.
The premises and other excerpts from Derrick Jensen’s anarcho-primitivst tract Endgame are online, a polemic that quickly leapfrogs past the ecotage tactics of groups like ELF to essentially call for open, final warfare against capitalism.
I think we all know that goes.
Olduvai Theory
Named for Africa’s Olduvai Gorge, Olduvai theory predicts that industrial/technological civilization is a “transient pulse” between periods of stable global equilibrium, with the period of highest modernization lasting only approximately 100 years (1930-2030).
Polygraph 22: Call for Papers
Polygraph 22—Call for Papers
http://www.duke.edu/web/polygraph/cfp22.html
Special Issue: Ecology and Ideology
The contemporary moment abounds with speculation concerning our ecological future. Specialists in a variety of fields forecast immanent catastrophe, stemming from a combination of climate change, fossil-fuel depletion, and consumer waste. The recent bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize on a group of scientists studying climate change indicates the degree to which "peace" has come to signify ecological balance; even the declaration by the Vatican of a new set of "7 Deadly Sins for the modern age" includes pollution in an attempt to grapple with the potential of individuals to inflict ecological damage on a global scale.
In the name of an impending crisis felt to be collectively shared, new political, cultural, and intellectual alignments are being forged, just as seismic shifts in the flow of global capital once again threaten to "redistribute" the world’s resources and people. Ecological crisis has become a 24/7 media event, canvassing the planet in the imagery and rhetoric of disaster. From the halls of research and policy to activist documentary and apocalyptic fantasy, at the news desk, podium, pulpit, classroom, and computer monitor alike, all channels are united by a single underlying conviction: the present ecological catastrophe has humanity as its cause.
Precisely because the answer seems so obvious, we want to know: why now? Where are the points of antagonism in the midst of such apparent consensus, and what is at stake in their difference?
The Polygraph Editorial Collective invites papers concerning any aspect of ecology’s relationship to ideology, both interrogating ecology as a location for critique of global capitalism and analyzing the ways in which ecology functions as an ideology in its own right.
Potential areas of interest include:
Political Ecology
Globalization and ecology
Marxism and ecology
"Environmental accounting" as a challenge to the free market
Ecology and capital / consumerism
Ecology as growth market
Eco-Disaster
Peak oil and climate change
Biofuels and the food crisis
Overpopulation and Neo-Malthusianism
Ecology as a rhetoric of control
Figurations of eco-disaster in popular culture
Religion and Ecology
Green apocalypticism and green evangelism
Ecology and world religion
Ecology and gender
Recent articulations of eco-feminism
Eco- & transnational feminisms
Women’s work and the global chain of production
Agricultural work and reproduction
Ecologies against ecologies
"Light" vs. "dark green" environmentalism (i.e. deep ecology)
Primitivism and technofuturism
The status of international Green movements
Polygraph welcomes work from a variety of different disciplines, including critical geography, cultural anthropology, political economy, political theology, science studies, and systems theory. We also encourage the submission of a variety of formats and genres: i.e. field reports, surveys, interviews, photography, essays, etc.
SUBMISSION DEADLINE
December 31, 2008
ISSUE EDITORS
Gerry Canavan
Lisa Klarr
Ryan Vu
CONTACT
polygraph22cfp@gmail.com
‘Running on Empty’
It used to be that only environmentalists and paranoids warned about running out of oil. Not anymore. One of the sadder ironies of our situation is that our civilization’s two major existential threats are in some very specific ways orthogonal to each other, insofar as many of the “solutions” to Peak Oil that are currently technological/economically/politically feasible only make the climate change problem worse, and vice versa. Lenin touches on this difficulty (among others) in a recent apocalyptic rant over at the Tomb, calling (it would seem) for a worldwide revolution in the name of return to primitivism:
It is our viability as a species that is in question. Perhaps the best solution is to rely on the people who gave us colonialism, the arms race, the arms industry, death squads, aerial bombardment, genocide and nuclear annihilation to come up with a neat market-based solution to our imminent demise. Perhaps we should wait and see if they can develop a technological solution. Bear in mind that, as with pharmaceuticals, they may be more interested in giving us something that can help us live with our horrible condition for a while rather than curing the problem. I don’t know if it wouldn’t be better to just take over the whole system ourselves and see what we can do about it. If it calls for a reduction in economic output, then I’m sure we can handle it. If Lafargue’s ‘right to be lazy’ becomes a duty, I can’t imagine too many complaints. Why not?
‘The Original Affluent Society’
Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter’s – in which all the people’s material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.
Cultural criticism from Marshall Sahlins, author of Stone Age Economics.