by h2 » Wed 29 Oct 2014, 16:25:20
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')aw, I believe it was agriculture coupled with a failure to grasp the exponential function.
I agree, no question, though it's easy to get caught into a single view of agriculture as a monolithic thing. Large scale agriculture that produces aa surplus beyond the needs of the coming year, I'd refine it to. Lots of examples of small scale ag that work ok. Maybe ag as the primary source of our daily calories, that's more accurate. Oil is just the nail in the coffin, just lets ag drive huge tractors/harvesters, then drive the food around, nothing intrinsically new or qualitatively different in that.
I can't help but follow the research on neanderthals, they had bigger brains than us, they were social, they talked, and they lived for about 250k years in EurAsia, I'd call them a heck of lot smarter than us, and they didn't have ag. Maybe not smart like we like to think of smart, but smart as in being able to follow natural sources without destroying their ecosystem. 250k years is enough to give some credit I think, it's better than we did here in the USA, we've knocked the ecosystem out in about 400 years. Some modern humans have also lived sustainably, maybe with some ag, but not if it gets too large scale. California first nations did very well, they left the place really nice for us, who have ruined it in about 100 years, they had been here for probably 10-20k years. So they get the gold star, maybe that vaunted 'instinctual egotism' some people insist on saying we suffer from is nothing more than a genetic aberation, at worst, or a genetic/social construct created by a resource extracting society?