Letters to the Editor
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Green?
There will be one advantage if climate change forces increased concentration of the urban population. Most of humanity will be living closer to their last remaining abundant food source.
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I hope you mean rats and pigeons,
Silverback.
Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.
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Funny that
I've been reading Eric Hoffer's "Between the Devil and the Dragon" (Try finding that easily; I had to shell out $75 to get myself a copy!). One of the essays in the book, an essay written decades before Jared Diamond put pen to paper, makes a convincing case for the development of agriculture and animal husbandry arising from the needs of diverse peoples thrown together into collective living arrangements by dramatic climate change. It was the birth of urban, cosmopolitan man that necessitated agriculture, not the other way round. It's amazing to me how the work of a mostly forgotten thinker with no formal education is now vindicated by leading academics.
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Another hat in the ring
While in university I attended a lecture as part of an ongoing special lecture series which posited yet another possible catalyst for the origin of civilization. The name of the lecturer eludes me at the moment (my apologies) but she stated that the climatic record showed frequent global instabilities in the first few millenia following the last ice age. Such were the variations in her opinion (and her charts), that agriculture could not have been reliably maintained for long consecutive periods, thus stifling settlement and perpetuating hunter-gatherer societies. She observed that these fluctuations 'calmed down' at about the time the first civilizations began to arise. This seems to me to be every bit as plausible as the theories mentioned above. We'll never know of course, but I would wager that civilization arose from a combination of these factors and probably from others that we haven't even come up with yet.
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Whereas
I remain unconvinced that humanity has ever come close to achieving civilized societies.
Or ever will.
"The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history." Joseph Conrad.
Certainly we have remained true to our founding principles.
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All I want for Christmas...
Great article!
-David
Psst... ask Santa for a spell checker.
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Civilization and Progress
In "The Art of Living", Lin Yutang said,
"Civilization is largely a matter of seeking food,
while progress is that development which makes food more and more difficult to get."
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Great article
This is one of those "Doh!" moments, though, where the minute I read it, I wonder why we didn't all realize this years ago.
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Saharasia by James DeMeo
If you check out DeMeo's book, you'll find that the drought was more likely the end of "civilization" and the beginning of slavery, war, genocide, poverty and misogyny- in a word, patriarchy. It wasn't positive, inevitable, or preferable, and it happened through violence rather than growth. We're only now beginning to understand what we've lost, but many of us in the Goddess movement are working to bring it back.
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MAINSTREAM ACADEMIA FINALLY COMING AROUND
While it is good to see this kind of work being accepted, published and promoted, Brooks is hardly the first to point out many of the "complexities" associated with human society and climate change.
James DeMeo has expounded on much of this in his volume, " Saharasia", a geographical study of the ancient historical origins of human violence and warfare, drawing upon global archaeological and anthropological evidence, and presenting substantial proof that our ancient ancestors were non-violent, and far more social and loving than are most humans today. Moreover, Saharasia points to a dramatic climate change in the Old World, the drying up of the vast Sahara and Asian Deserts, with attending famine, starvation and forced migrations which pushed the earliest humans into violent social patterns, a trauma from which we have not yet recovered in over 6000 years.
"Famine and starvation is a severe trauma from which survivors rarely escape unscathed. A lot of people die, families are split apart, and babies and children are often abandoned, and suffer enormously. Starvation affects surviving children in an emotionally severe manner. They shrink from the exhausting heat and thirst, emotionally withdraw from the painful world, and simultaneously suffer a severe stunting of the entire brain and nervous system due to protein-calorie malnutrition. Even if such starved children later get all the food and water they want, they are deeply scarred in an emotional-neurological manner which forever changes their behavior - specifically, there is an implanted inhibition of any impulse of a pleasure-seeking, outward-reaching nature, and a discomfort with deeper forms of body-pleasure, in both maternal-infant or male-female expressions. Additionally, the child's view of the mother, who could not protect or feed the child during the famine period, is thereafter colored with suspicion and anger. These attitudes and behaviors are deeply protoplasmic in nature, and are passed on to ensuing generations no matter what the climate, by social institutions which reflect the character structure of the average individual at any given period of time."