In November I gave a seminar talk for the Planetary Limits Academic Network about why I believe modernity to be a dead-end, while also touching on underlying attitudes that drive us in this destructive direction. When presenting the narrative that sequential development of agriculture, writing, money, science, and fossil fuels collectively constituted a decisive trap leading us to the current state, I got pushback from a few in the audience over the notion of determinism. See my Time on the River post for a flavor of this narrative.
Fans of Graeber & Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything (and there are many, especially in the left-leaning academic circles from which I hail) tend to be—like the authors—allergic to suggestions of determinism. They find the notion very appealing that we could just as well have designed and conjured the ideal technological society: egalitarian, global, peaceful, prosperous, clean, and all the rest. See Abundance as recent example of such eco-modernist fantasy. I was honestly stunned by the gross simplifications in Graeber & Wengrow’s book, which elicited a sharp critique from me.
The moderator of the seminar prodded Chris Smaje, in attendance, to comment on my negative portrayal of agriculture. Chris has written, among other books, A Small Farm Future, runs a blog of the same name, and is generally an advocate of a small-scale agrarian response as a path to exit modernity—which in itself I believe is a fine (transitional) strategy.
The discussion prompted Chris to draft a blog post, which he passed by me to avoid misrepresentation and to solicit comments. We had an engaging e-mail exchange for a bit, and last week his post (By the Rivers of Babylon: debating agrarianism with Tom Murphy) went live. This post offers my follow-up response on the subject.
Debate is a Strong Term
While Chris used the word “debate” in his post, our interactions really had none of the adversarial quality that such a label might imply. First, if you created 100 person-sized bins into which random members of our culture could be sorted according to their sense of modernity’s degree of viability, Chris and I would be wedged into the final bin together—and enjoy the company: he seems like a genuinely pleasant guy. Thus, compared to throwing darts at the phone book (remember those?), Chris and I are far closer than most. Our exchange had none of the tension that a conversation between me and Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, Sean Hannity, or even “lefties” like Ezra Kein or Bill McKibben would have, where sparks would be more likely. (As pointed out before, I’ve moved too far off the usual spectrum to be recognized as “friendly” to any pro-modernity camp, whether left or right.)
Given our broad agreements, the conversation about whether agriculture is intrinsically bad news therefore represents an issue on the margins. But even here, we found common ground in that we each seek a better understanding, so that we were both listening to each other, admitting the limits of what we know for sure, and not just mansplaining. I value such explorations. In this particular case, we are each eager to resume in some form now that our initial essays are posted.
At the risk of undercutting these fine sentiments, I will disclose the concern that Chris is bodily committed to agrarian pursuits as his life’s purpose—in a way that may make it more difficult to land in a place disparaging agricultural practices entirely. The Upton Sinclair quote comes to mind that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” That said, I did not get the sense that Chris was entirely unwilling to examine the prospect that agriculture is problematic in the long term (and he said as much, explicitly).
Meanwhile, here I am doing the opposite of defending my life’s work in astrophysics, as I was primarily a contributor to the destructive machine of modernity. I wish the whole tragedy had never happened—that’s right: even the alphabet. Moreover, I am biting the hand that feeds me in the sense that my metabolism is almost wholly dependent on agricultural practices, even if I’m unhappy about the predicament. Maybe I’m dumber than the man Upton Sinclair had in mind. But I’m stuck on agricultural support, and can’t (easily, legally, socially, communally) ditch it for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Besides, Earth cannot sustain 8 billion hunter-gatherers (or 8 billion food-growers, for that matter; see the post 8 Billion Will Die!). Whatever transition lies ahead will certainly continue to involve humans growing food for many generations. Off ramps are great, and necessary. What Chris is doing is something I wish many more people would embrace, and I don’t want in any way to disparage his important efforts.
Much of the lack of convergence between us comes down to timescales of interest, and (ugh) metaphysical preferences.
The Remaining Gap
While careful to note that metaphors can never fully capture a complex reality and will always have flaws, Chris takes two metaphors I have used and runs with them. The first is the River metaphor, and the other is the menagerie metaphor employed in my critique of the Graeber/Wengrow book.
Chris basically likes the river metaphor—at least its late-stage expression—agreeing that we are now caught in a turbulent torrent fueled by fossil energy and capitalism. Escape has become perilous.
However, Chris seems less willing to cast aspersions on agriculture, writing, or money—able to imagine ways in which these practices need not be deal-breakers. For me, a focus on fossil fuels and capitalism has an insufficient temporal horizon, excluding the imperial conquests running rampant long before either of these recent influences came to prominence. When the world still ran on renewable energy, the forests of Europe and Britain were denuded. The solar/wind-powered British navy could no longer sustain its ship-building requirements using domestic timber, beginning to source prime wood from around the world. It seems to me that well before the fossil fuel era the core predicament was already present as an expression of ecological detachment. “New” land was assessed not for the peculiar ways its Community of Life thrived—or with any interest in tucking into that peculiarity by embracing local Indigenous ways—but for its potential as a substrate for cookie-cutter importation of the exploitative “one true way” via planting and extraction.
So, when indeed did ecological ruination of Earth become essentially baked in? For starters, maybe it was the Big Bang itself. Maybe it was life forming on Earth. Maybe it was the Chicxulub impact. Maybe it was primates branching into Homo. Maybe it was the adoption of fire, or flint knapping, or the atlatl. Maybe it was agriculture, or writing, or money. The argument is not one that can possibly be settled, because we’re simply not smart enough. The most appropriate stance is one of skepticism. This is why I distrust anything that originates in meat-brains, and favor instead what evidence the universe hands us (though meat-brain interpretations inevitably vary, including my own).
Timescales
We are reasonably confident that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, Earth is 4.5 billion years old, Chicxulub cleared out (most) dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and humans appeared as new members among ten million other species about 3 million years ago. Fire has been utilized by humans for 1.5–2 million years, and our particular species branched off the evolutionary tree about 250–300 thousand years ago. Evidence for complex hunter-gatherer societies (somewhat hierarchical) began appearing maybe 30–40,000 years ago. Otherwise, small-band, egalitarian, “immediate return” hunter-gatherers predominated. The climate stability of the Holocene kicked in around 12,000 years ago, ending a long series of ice ages that had characterized the entire human saga leading up to it. Shortly thereafter, agriculture took root in independent starts around the globe. Any claim of coincidence in this timing ought to be treated with great skepticism.
It was at this inflection point—again hard to argue coincidence, especially in light of storable food surplus—that human population began its inexorable expansion. The doubling rate had been tens of thousands of years prior to this epoch, and was suddenly reduced to a few thousand years: an order-of-magnitude jolt. That’s not insignificant! The embrace of agriculture marked a true turning point, for rather plausible reasons. It is questionable practice to diminish the many causal influences at play.
As a rough mathematical guide, starting at a population of (say) 10 million humans 10,000 years ago and sustaining a doubling time of 2,000 years (a paltry 0.035% per year), humans would reach a population of 10 billion (thousand-fold increase) in about ten doublings, or approximately 20,000 years. Okay, so we managed to accelerate the process to achieve the same result in half the time (bravo?). But so what? What’s 10,000 years against timescales relevant to ecology and evolution? Even before the cascade of subsequent (inevitable?) elaborations, agriculture alone appears to have put us on a track to ecological overshoot—by experimentally detaching us from the intricate web of time-tested ecological relationships within which we became human in the first place, and by which the other organisms of Earth abide.
Chris points to the earliest known agrarian tools being 23,000 years old, casting agricultural practices as having “been around for a substantial part of Homo sapiens history. Not really a historical eye-blink.” Perhaps this is a semantic mismatch, but should a phase lasting less than 10% of the total be called “substantial,” or is it closer to a “blink,” or does it occupy the nebulous middle-ground? Also, a minor point is that picking the most extreme outlier (23,000 years) may not fairly characterize the widespread adoption of agriculture, which by all accounts awaited the arrival of the Holocene. It isn’t particularly surprising if developments this major have sporadic long-tail slow-burn precursors spanning millennia (still contextually short, in any case). Chris takes the longer view thusly:
Biological evolution came up with humanity. It worked for a short while… In the longer term even [local agrarianism] might not prove sustainable, and may at best be part of a trajectory toward a world that ends up with a much lower human population involved mostly in foraging once again. I don’t have a problem with that—I’m not committed to defending agrarianism for the sake of it, although I do baulk at overdrawn ‘foraging good—farming bad’ dualisms.
Well put—even if one might balk at different spelling conventions. Real life is always complex and nuanced. Context matters. As for “short while,” humans have participated in ecological communities for timescales I would characterize as relevant: much longer than the brief agricultural phase that we call “history.” What is a sufficient duration? Chris suggests:
People lived substantially local agrarian lives for many, many generations without their societies devolving to a growth-oriented, world-eating, predatory system of states”
Is that long enough to be fully relevant? Is even 1,000 or 10,000 years long enough to prove-out in ecological—or even societal interaction—terms? I am seriously skeptical. To me, these short-run experiments are still isolated in a “cage” before fully interacting with the wider post-agricultural world or proving themselves in ecological terms. What became of such enclaves?
Counterfactuals
A fair bit of the mismatch in perspectives concerns differing tolerance for counterfactuals. It likely boils down to dissimilar metaphysical stances, which happens to me a lot lately as I occupy a minority position within our culture. Part of where the disconnect shows up is in how much stock one puts in the human mind as the driver (I am systematically and perhaps relentlessly critical of meat-brain prowess). Chris says:
…it strikes me that if there’s some fateful human tendency that’s hustling us downstream to oblivion, it lies in our human ability to abstract a world-as-it-might-be beyond immediate sensory experience.
If abstraction is the driving force, it becomes hard to explain why it took so many thousands of generations to go from spears to atlatls to bows and arrows. Even the “eye-blink” transition to agriculture took more than a hundred generations (3,000 years): long enough that Graeber & Wengrow gripe that something so gradual can’t really be called a “revolution.” That’s some sluggish abstraction going on. On the timescale of a single meat-brain’s earthly tenure, it seems that the spark of ingenuity takes a back seat to the incrementally-evolving state of material/cultural conditions—itself rapid next to ecological evolution.
Our lens on what humans are, fundamentally, is highly distorted by living in a (demonstrably) most unusual time. The sort of abstraction that is commonplace today, for instance, didn’t really take off until after the advent of phonetic alphabets, as brilliantly explored in David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: a profoundly insightful book. Agriculture was already well in hand—and had already permanently degraded some regions into desert—by the time abstraction entered in a significant, accelerated way.
But let’s edge back to the question of causality—central to counterfactual games:
There’s nothing much we can do about this world-as-it-might-be symbolic capacity we have, simultaneously humanity’s blessing or genius and also our curse. Writing, farming and so on were not the cause of our malaise but the result of it.
Maybe. It seems a bold assertion, especially given that less than 0.5% of humanity’s time on Earth (<5% of Homo sapiens) has been spent in this farming/writing mode. The pace of innovation (applied abstraction) has not been constant over this vast temporal span, even on a per-capita basis. The level and type of abstraction we take for granted today is not characteristic of humans across all time and ecological lifeways (the amazing Pirahã people offer a great example). As indicated above, abstraction was itself boosted immensely by the super-catalyst of writing (as the Abram book elucidates). Just as the chicken–egg conundrum is unresolvable as inextricably-interconnected joint phenomena, the suggestion that abstraction caused farming is suspect.
Chris invokes Stephen Jay Gould’s assertion (cute/fun, but unfounded in my view) that “If you could spool through the history of life on the planet on repeat play over and over again the outcome would be different every time.” Would it? What does it even mean to invoke the impossible? What are the rules, and who gets to make them? Does every fundamental particle start in the same exact state and quantum superposition, or are we instantiating each time a fake mental universe that didn’t happen? Do quantum probabilities (which we interpret to be a source of randomness) actually respond to connections we have not elucidated, so that they would dutifully repeat the same branches, or are they free to go willy-nilly? We simply don’t know enough to make these grand claims: they’re far beyond our pay-grade. What we do know is that what happened happened, in one huge causal tangle beyond our cognitive capacity to track. It seems we have to settle for the one instance as the only real evidence we’ve got. Everything else is unfounded mental speculation, worth almost nothing, in my view.
Chris goes on to say that claiming it had to go the way it did is:
…[on] shakier ground unless you establish that there are larger—evolutionary?—forces at play such that these events were always going to happen.”
That’s exactly what I’m suggesting (and my main point in the Graeber/Wengrow critique): dynamics, even those not smoked by our meat-brains from a great temporal distance, are relevant—not to be ignored or discounted. The Holocene is important. More factors than we can possibly identify play a role: how would we stop them from doing so? Counterfactuals build a fake universe in a tiny (cerebral) corner of the universe that can’t possibly rival the power of the actual universe—which has no choice but to process all factors at once, interactively. When we run counterfactuals about the past, we leave out untold number of contributing elements and conjure a stripped-down, simplified, decontextualized, fantasy version in our heads (dispatching thousands of years in a few paltry brain-seconds) that has very little to do with the actual workings of the vastly-more patient and full-context universe.
It feels like hubristic ground, to believe we can accommodate the universe in our skulls! We really don’t know what we’re doing. I’m thus deeply skeptical that we have the mental power to engage in meaningful counterfactualism. As if I have any standing to do otherwise, I defer instead to the real, single universe as it has run: complete with myriad unintended consequences and unsuspected influences.
Chris uses phrases like “But it’s not impossible to imagine…” which raise a red flag for me: entering dangerous territory in which we are unqualified to make conclusive statements. Imaginations are not constrained to be realistic.
This, then, is perhaps the basic metaphysical split. I view humans and their activities as products of a universe just doing its thing (deterministic bent) instead of as generators of a universe designed to suit. As mentioned in my last post, I believe the “pain point” isn’t so much about the fungibility of past events as it is about malleability of the future. Adopting the view that the past went the one way it could go seems like saying that we can have no impact the future: that it’s all “long written in the stars” as Chris phrases it. But that’s not what determinism says at all.
Even a deterministic future is open-ended and wholly unpredictable: not one bit of it is yet written anywhere. Determinism does not mean predetermined: lots of unexpected developments can—and very much will—happen. In fact, we suck at the whole “expecting” game. So, just as humans were genuine (albeit constrained) factors in the path we traveled to this point, humans undoubtedly will be (constrained) players/partners in shaping the future—in response to the various stimuli presented. In the deterministic view, it is as inevitable that we will shape the future as it was that the past went the way it did. Ideally, we learn from past experience so that our reactions might avoid previous pitfalls going forward. This is the essence of feedback, which the universe does not prohibit and basically all Life employs as the core engine of evolution.
Who’s got the right metaphysics, here? We obviously can’t know. The reason I land where I do is not because I find it to be the most appealing or mentally expedient, but because it is based on substantial empirical evidence (it’s how the universe of matter and interactions actually appears to function, with no known exception at any scale of experience). My sense is that the more common metaphysics leans primarily on affinity: we don’t want to believe in determinism, as it seems to rob us of some elevated, transcendent (but illusory) status.
Cages and Wrap-Up
In my critique of Graeber & Wengrow, I charge them with setting past (often brief) societal arrangements in non-interacting isolation—like beautiful but caged animals in a menagerie. Chris expands on this metaphor, detailing various options for the way things could play out once the cage doors are opened. I had a hard time getting into it. The key is that the animals will all interact in some way, which Graeber & Wengrow basically ignored. Also of paramount relevance from my point of view: the full-context experiment has already been done, and we live the result. Our imaginings of how it might otherwise have gone are surely of little value next to the real deal. Graeber & Wengrow were perplexed as to why we are stuck in modernity, but I would say that’s because they didn’t even acknowledge the dynamics (e.g., game theory) of a cage-free scenario.
From my perspective, the circumstantial evidence does not look great for agriculture: suspicion is fully justified. The practice separated us from more deeply-embedded and ancient ecological roles as members of a Community of Life, promoting ourselves to masters who get to decide which beings live or die (i.e., weeds, pests). Sedentary lifestyles built possessions and (hereditary) patriarchy, while surplus drove expansion, a security industry, hierarchy, and accounting (thus writing and money). All of that really happened, and not according to some grand plan. My sense is that these elaborations couldn’t have been stopped from emerging (somewhere), and once that whole horse/barn thing happens the inherent expansionism and competitive advantages overwhelm ecologically-based communities. How many times must we witness the story play out, with few or no tracks heading in the opposite direction? The overall flow is clear.
While it seems an eternity to our fleeting lives, 10,000 years is far too fast for a real vetting. Even before the destructive embellishments of writing and money (and later science, fossil fuels, and capitalism), agricultural practices were transforming lush habitats into deserts as one-time nutrient-mining operations, together with deposition of salts and other unvetted imports. Agriculture has simply not had time to prove itself, and has every indication of being an ecological misfit that has monotonically pushed us toward this moment of planetary peril.
I contrast short-lived agriculture with fire, which in itself may well be a bridge-too-far, but at least fire was ecologically tolerated for millions of years. I can’t ignore that fact, making fire and agriculture non-equivalent. To be self consistent, I can’t argue against the idea that fire eventually and inevitably set us up for agriculture. But recognizing so does not mean that a future is precluded where fire-wielding humans can once again live in ecological reciprocity for another few-million years: we have an established real-world precedent, and that’s huge. The same can’t (credibly) be said for agriculture. If we do come to embrace non-agricultural ways going forward, the return of climate instability may hold off a large-scale resurgence of agriculture—and deep depletion ensures that a fossil fuel episode won’t repeat for many millions of years, if ever.
I am strongly supportive of a small-scale agrarian transition period away from large-scale agriculture as the human population (presumably/inevitably) deflates toward ecologically-sustainable numbers—the only other long-term-viable option being to collapse to zero. However, I am highly dubious that such inherently problematic (dualist, separatist) practices can be viable in the long term, in an ecological context—especially if unable to acknowledge and remedy the deep flaws/dangers intrinsic to such an approach. It seems worthwhile to again point out: we have zero proof that agricultural practices can run the ecological marathon, while knowing that pre-agricultural modes endured for far longer. That’s not nothing.
The Precautionary Principle would seem to apply here. It is dangerous to continue playing with a “fire” that has burned us badly enough to initiate a sixth mass extinction. I am reminded of one common reaction to escalating mass-shootings: “guns don’t kill people,” so… we should have as many as we want? The danger should be evident. Why play Russian Roulette with planetary health? It isn’t hard to identify legitimate dangers of agriculture, as evidenced by the actual trajectory of the last 10,000 years, so why play with fire/guns when other (proven) options exist? Sure, we can agrarian our way in that direction, but maybe let’s not presume it to be a viable longer-term solution: just a way to phase out the worst practices as we lick our wounds and explore other ways of being. It seems that Chris and I do not fundamentally disagree on this point.
Best is to admit that we don’t really know what we’re doing. We’re not smart enough to design a substitute for ecological integration. The most impressive thing we’ve ever designed—or even the collection of all such things—is absolute child’s play next to Life in evolved, ecological relationship. Humility serves us well. Look outside the skull for answers—for what’s proven to work.
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"When the world still ran on renewable energy, the forests of Europe and Britain were denuded. The solar/wind-powered British navy could no longer sustain its ship-building requirements using domestic timber, beginning to source prime wood from around the world."
True, but what's stopping us from just repeating the cycle of collapse and recovery? Absent fossil fuels, this iteration of modernity would've burnt out, and provided millennia of recovery time, allowing the cycle to restart.
Sure, it's not life-friendly (or eco-conscious or whatever), but it's what humans would have done and probably what they will do too.Fossil fuels are unsustainable, I'll give you that, but is agriculture? I'd argue that the ecological limtis on agriculture are loose enough that humans as a species are more likely to disappear first (or at least that agriculture would last til the next ice age (~100k years away?) and have resurgences in suitable interglacials.
"As for “short while,” humans have participated in ecological communities for timescales I would characterize as relevant: much longer than the brief agricultural phase that we call “history.” What is a sufficient duration? Chris suggests:
People lived substantially local agrarian lives for many, many generations without their societies devolving to a growth-oriented, world-eating, predatory system of states”
Is that long enough to be fully relevant? Is even 1,000 or 10,000 years long enough to prove-out in ecological—or even societal interaction—terms? I am seriously skeptical. To me, these short-run experiments are still isolated in a “cage” before fully interacting with the wider post-agricultural world or proving themselves in ecological terms. "
Also true, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and this goes both ways. IMO, "I don't know" is more appropriate than "I don't think so".
"From my perspective, the circumstantial evidence does not look great for agriculture: suspicion is fully justified. The practice separated us from more deeply-embedded and ancient ecological roles as members of a Community of Life, promoting ourselves to masters who get to decide which beings live or die (i.e., weeds, pests).
The great oxygenation event also broke the rules of community of life back then (1.5 billion years of rules by the way!) by introducing a whole new element into the system, and it literally enabled complex life to exist. I don't think agriculture has that power, but just pointing out divergences arent all bad.
It was at this inflection point—again hard to argue coincidence, especially in light of storable food surplus—that human population began its inexorable expansion.
What's to stop us from repeating this cycle- rise to unsustainable levels, fall down, and rebuild- unto eternity? What if the river just puts us back on the shore again, looking again at the shallow stream now that we've blocked off the fossil fuel rapids?
Even before the destructive embellishments of writing and money (and later science, fossil fuels, and capitalism), agricultural practices were transforming lush habitats into deserts as one-time nutrient-mining operations, together with deposition of salts and other unvetted imports.
I feel like this is overgeneralising and bashing agriculture in bad faith. Sure, SOME practises were like that, but were they all?
China took good enough care of their land to farm it for 9 thousand years, and its not like it was an isolated case
Swidden agriculture literally increased biodiversity by stimulating forest growth to a climax state
Andean terraces *prevented* desertification in a mountainous region
I'm not saying agricultuyre is sustainable as a fact, I'm saying the picture you paint is a bit too uniform, and that not all disruptions are bad. I'm tired of walking, that stream looks fun!
Good to point out here that not every instance of involvement in a plant's growing cycle is dangerous. Many tribes that look pretty-darned sustainable do practice something more like horticulture: nudging and nurturing as opposed to assuming full control. The attitude and strength of connection to an intact ecology is pretty important.
In terms of long-term agricultural sustainability, flood plains deserve special attention, because they already maintain nutrient cycles by consistently importing materials. So, yes, exceptions exist on the margins of the primary practice.
As far as rinse-and-repeat, possibly. In one sense, it becomes more likely if elements of agricultural practice are maintained and don't need to be started from scratch (seems likely). On the other hand, what if it's 1,000 years to an ice age due to the anthropogenic slap? Instability might possibly make agriculture non-competitive against other ways of living. And depending on how successful modernity is at kick-starting the sixth mass extinction, all "hope" of agriculture resurging could be decisively terminated.
Obviously, we can't know, so that practically any engagement in the subject involves a sizable dose of speculation and opinion (usually with some rationale). Attachment to the practice runs very strong in our culture, obviously.
The floodplains example is interesting. I live near a community that is built on a big river's floodplain. The soil was incredibly fertile, so farmers came here, and built farms everywhere in the flood plain. Of course the river would still flood, destroying people's homes, so at some point the river was corralled into concrete and earthen banks and not allowed to flood anymore, depriving the farmland of the very fertility which made it so attractive in the first place. Now when the river floods (rarely, because it's so corralled), it's a "disaster;" and it's poisonous to the land due to all the toxics from human-made things that are flooded in the process. And because the river is no longer allowed to flood, farmers must bring in amendments. These days, those amendments are often "sludge" from factory farms and waste-water facilities, and the "sludge," we now discover, is filled with concentrated poisons like PFAS and microplastics.
The entire "build where it's fertile and then prevent the process that made the land fertile" part of agriculture always seems to me to be a deal-breaker on agriculture no matter what other arguments one makes pro- or con-.
“ In terms of long-term agricultural sustainability, flood plains deserve special attention, because they already maintain nutrient cycles by consistently importing materials. So, yes, exceptions exist on the margins of the primary practice.”
Not marginal at all, though. China fed 200 million people off river basins, not a trifle.
On the other hand, what if it's 1,000 years to an ice age due to the anthropogenic slap?
Do you want papers? I have papers. Suffice it to say for now though thay we’re committing ice sheets to melting thay coukd take up to 10k years alone to melt, not exactly what happens during an ice age. When it does come back though, agricukture is probably done i agree (maybe some in the tropics ?) again though, there’ll probably be a next interglacial. As for the sixth mass extinction- yeah.z
Also, I feel like i might be hitting this point too many times, but of the examples I gave, *none* of them were "environment-cheating", as i like to call it by being in floodplains. All of them are human made nutrient recycling systems!
Piggybacking to a certain extent on the earlier comment, isn't the demand that a strategy (e.g. agriculture) come "pre-approved" on ecological timescales a somewhat unreasonable standard to which to hold the defence?
Having been a frequent reader of this blog, I can see how this skepticism ties into the rest of the philosophy on this blog (as also outlined above, i.e. the inadequacy of the human mental apparatus to properly envision the consequences of a course of action, etc.). However, it seems like in view of this restriction any debate (be it adversarial or no) on the merits of this or that practice must inevitably reduce to a simple perusal of the archaeological record.
[N. B. I'm not claiming that the entire article reduces to this; there were of course several other arguments made.]
Indeed, pre-approval can't happen. The question is: what do we make of the turn to agriculture with the benefit of hindsight? Because it was a significant departure from prior modes, it ran a great risk, and I would say that the evidence is now more clear about where such a turn leads.
Our reaction will have consequences. I, for one, would treat agriculture with skepticism and not wave off the current consequences as a historical quirk that might just as easily have gone another way. Is agriculture scary enough in its ultimate potential for calamity to persuade us to try something different? We're not operating in the complete dark, thanks to the archeological record plus lived experiences of the present.
Thanks!
I'm mostly inclined to accept your arguments about "time on the river".
But there is one point: if the practice of sustainable agriculture and horticulture were long enough in time (and even if it led to the extinction of, say, an additional 3,000 species, out of the background), but would create a coevolutionary loop between humans and other animals, insects and plants, and it would be quite stable. The species richness of the Holocene is not as widespread in more deep time and it is not a fact that other interglacial periods were more impressive in diversity. Besides, after all, the collision of continents, and the subsequent colonization by invasive species, hybridization, extinction – all this is in the order of things. (I do not discount the human impact, it is orders of magnitude greater). Deserts have their own ecological connections, and is not such a high biodiversity there, but the methods and methods of survival are no less impressive than in the humid tropics. Again, I do not want deserts everywhere, but anything in the long run would become the "normal" state of affairs. Of course, I am for the existence of man as a humble cohabitant, not a master.
Thank you! 🙂
All fair points, and easier to stomach if I didn't take the prospect of a sixth mass extinction seriously (so that the balance that could in principle emerge may very well not materialize). And even if we collectively don't take the 6ME seriously (as many don't), the phenomenon itself is not fazed, and perhaps even more guaranteed to proceed due to a failure to respond to the stimulus. Maybe a mass extinction is part of a normal state of affairs, in which case all I can say is that I hope not.
Life on earth solely depends on sunlight and minerals. Nary a godly soul or a cosmic consciousness around. After millions? billions? of years the combination of sunlight and minerals formed DNA, and out of that, photosynthesis. And so, after more billions of years and millions of interactions within previous environments, we humans are here along with the rest of the world's current species. The only characteristic that separates our species from others is our unthinking arrogant selfishness and the ability to develop nonsense narratives to justify our selfishness.
I do like Chris's work, and Tom's, so it's good to see a meeting of minds on this, even if it's not a full agreement.
I do fully expect a 'small-farm-future', but it won't be farming in the current sense. Farming conjures up images of mono-cultures spread over acres, supplying demand in a market. It won't be that, it'll be small groups of people practicing horticulture in small sheltered spaces over small acreages – the unstable climate will prevent anything more grandoise – and it will be to fulfil local needs. Nor will it be the American wet dream of rugged individual homesteaders thriving in the wilderness – people going it alone will never manage. One broken arm or random crop failure and they are done.
But I have simpler measuring metric about whether anything humans do is sustainable or not. Quite simply, do any of the other 10 million species do it? Do any other species farm? Write? Use money? Use art? Have borders? Have nation states? Have religions?
If not, then we're doing it wrong and shouldn't be doing it.
Do any other species farm? Not really. Ants harvest honey dew off aphids is one
I know of, but they don't breed the aphids and corral them in a protected space then eat them.
Do other species use religion, writing, money, nation states? Not that I know of.
Other species have breeding territories, but they don't drive out all the other species, just drive off rivals of their own.
Do other species do art? Yes, is it bower birds, collect human garbage to decorate nests? I think it is a puffer fish that makes elaborate seafloor sand circles. There will be others, but they are all dating related. So, do art. Humans were doing art long before money or farming. I think we are safe to do art.
But all the rest, nah. If if doesn't appear in nature, it isn't natural, so will be selected out, as Bill Rees quaintly puts it. That's not deterministic, it's just common sense to me, and physics.
It seems there's merit to your metric. My main caveat is that perhaps nature provides many instances of species doing something no other species on the planet does. What matters is whether ecological relationships tolerate the aberration.
So, I would suggest a version like: If you're doing something no other species does, watch out! Running a unique experiment not ecologically vetted presents a serious risk, so that failure should not be at all surprising.
Leaf-cutter ants harvesting and carrying leaves to their fungus gardens is probably as close as it gets to farming by other species.
No soil tilled or eroded in the process,though,and the nutrients are not removed from the forest.
The biosphere is filled with living art. The fact that birds appreciate beauty just as much as humans do is shown by the sexual selection of birds.
Regarding agriculture on flood plains,it is an example of nutrient replenishment, rather than nutrient cycling. The local nutrient enrichment is coupled with nutrient depletion in the region supplying the deposited topsoil.
I like your measuring metric Mark. It's the same logic that helped me land on fire. Things start making even more sense when you buy into Richard Wrangham's cooking hypothesis that cooked food allows resources to be shifted from the gut to the brain… eventually producing bigger brains… culminating into this insane & unique sapien awareness level.
If you don't buy into that hypothesis, then I guess it's easy to imagine that "fire-wielding humans can once again live in ecological reciprocity for another few-million years". And if you don't buy into the MPP then you might think those fire-wielding humans won't ever try to bust through solar energy constraints during the many Holocene type periods that will come along during those few million years.
ps. Yes, I had to take that cheap shot Tom. Can't restrain myself. I still liked this essay a lot. You got me thinking and that's all I can ask for. Keep up the good work.
The leaf cutter ants started agriculture about 65 million years ago by growing a fungus. Probably closer to animal husbandry with the animals in constraning pens. Fungi are more closely related to Amimalia than Plantae.
[edited]
Chris: "People lived substantially local agrarian lives for many, many [is that different from just one "many"?] generations without their societies devolving to a growth-oriented, world-eating, predatory system of states"
Really? Isn't this an illusion because there hadn't then yet been enough time for them to do so? Surely they were on their way to (if not already there) being growth oriented and predatory? And, as history shows, that's exactly where they ended up.
Tom: "Even a deterministic future is open-ended and wholly unpredictable: not one bit of it is yet written anywhere"
Can we say that with any certainty? If the past happened exactly as it should, a result of all of the interactions of matter and energy acting according to what we think of as the laws of physics, then when we reach the future, the same will be true of what will then be a tacked on piece of history. And it's impossible for us to comprehend the universe in our meat brain; it may be that what we think we know about it is completely wrong.
Your point about climate instability is usually ignored by the farming advocates (I've tried) but is a critical point. Even if collapse happens in a relatively orderly way, any gradual return to local farming would likely be rendered pointless by unpredictable weather patterns.
As for where it all went wrong. It didn't go wrong. It just went the way it went. "Wrong" is a subjective judgement about what happened. It was inevitable anyway, so, if the universe had a start, that's where it all "went wrong."
Fair enough that we can't truly know how the universe works, but you bring up another "tricky dance" regarding determinism that meat-brains don't handle so well in the "…when we reach the future, the same will be true…" comment. My take, for what it's worth, is: even if the universe can only go one way, not even the universe "knows" which way that is, so it's open-ended in the predictable sense. It's not written yet, but scribed real-time in the only way all the material interactions allow it to be. Meanwhile, humans (and bees and rivers) will be active agents/actors in how it all plays out. The evolutionary feedback mechanisms that have shaped sophisticated stimulus/response arrangements in living beings will continue to operate—interactively altering the path in non-trivial ways. Wanna be a part of that, able to sense it playing out?
You're right, we can't possibly predict the future even though it all plays out according to physics. Indeed, even though we have no control over what we do, what we do is also unpredictable. I can't help but sense it playing out, it is an interesting time.
RE: "Fans of Graeber & Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything (and there are many, especially in the left-leaning academic circles from which I hail) tend to be—like the authors—allergic to suggestions of determinism. They find the notion very appealing that we could just as well have designed and conjured the ideal technological society: egalitarian, global, peaceful, prosperous, clean, and all the rest."
You are right, of course!
"The Dawn of Everything" is a biased disingenuous account of human history (https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity & https://offshootjournal.org/untenable-history/) that spreads fake hope (the authors of "The Dawn" claim human history has not "progressed" in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system… so there's hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book's dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavor geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.
Fact is human history since the dawn of agriculture has "progressed" in a linear stage (the "stuck" problem, see below), although not before that (https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). This "progress" has been fundamentally destructive and is driven and dominated by “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html) which the fake hope-giving authors of "The Dawn" entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding and acknowledging the nature of humans). And these two married human pink elephants are the reason why we've been "stuck" in a destructive hierarchy and unequal 2-class system , and will be far into the foreseeable future (the "stuck" question — "the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode?" or "how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles" — [cited from their book] is the major question in "The Dawn" its authors never really answer, predictably).
Worse than that, the Dawn authors actually promote, push, propagandize, and rationalize in that book the unjust immoral exploitive criminal 2-class system that's been predominant for millennia [https://nevermoremedia.substack.com/p/was-david-graeber-offered-a-deal]!
One of the "expert" authors, Graeber, has no real idea on what world we've been living in and about the nature of humans revealed by his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn't know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they've been wanting that for thousands of years (and that's not the only ignorant notion in that title) — see https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html. Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!
[edited]
As a forager and gardener, I am curious where you draw the line between agriculture and gathering. When I find a particularly good nut tree I always plant some nuts elsewhere; when I find mushrooms that are too far gone to eat I often carry them to another spot to spread their spores. Meanwhile every garden I tend has edible weeds in and I tend to eat those, and also to let them go to seed (which I do less with the inedible weeds; growing annuals that thrive on disturbed ground, I get plenty of both). I do grow some grains on a micro scale, and this year intend to forage some as well…
I am neither a hunter nor a rancher but I imagine that similar overlaps occur. Is it still hunting if you plant a forage crop for the pheasants or leave out a salt lick for the deer? What about if you burn an area to encourage the new growth that attracts and provides habitat for some animal species which you want to eat? Is it still a ranch if your cattle are confined not by fences, but by the position of a pond or well? How do nomadic herders fit in?
I know that my grandparents who grew up on (small, mixed) farms also foraged and hunted; my parents did a small.bit of foraging but nothing like the amount I do, but then neither of them gardens as much as I do either. My household of three adults is not quite self-sufficient in produce — that would be truly astounding given that I have access to a tenth of an acre in growing space — but there are several foods we just don't purchase because I grow or forage all we need, and several more we only purchase for a few months of the year; our grocery spending is going down rather than up most years.
Some people also draw a line between farming and horticulture. I can kindof see the point, but… I think the small mixed farms my grandparents grew up on had quite a lot of horticulture going on. It makes sense to grow a wide diversity of species so that in the years with extreme heat/rain/pests/whatever it's more likely that something will pull through and you'll still obtain a yield. Similarly diverse habitats are better for foraging (and presumably hunting too).
This may seem like a cop-out, but I don't believe any of us have the capacity or authority to establish bright lines of the sort you ask me to provide. Any such line would surely be contextual to a locale and how its ecology functions: how nutrients move, how fragile or robust soils are, etc. Judgment comes via evolutionary success or failure, and the sixth mass extinction has my attention. What's important, then, is whether a practice can persist for many tens of thousands of years without spiraling out of control. And all it takes is spiraling *somewhere* to envelop "innocent" practitioners. The problem, then, is agriculture's proven potential to get out of hand with nothing to stop it. While not every fire is dangerous, playing with the stuff invites disaster.
Some Amazonian bands appear to live in approximate ecological balance in partial reliance on horticulture, so maybe it's okay in that sort of place. Novel, "invented" practices that are unlike those found in the rest of the Community of Life run a great risk of being ecological failures (see comment by Mark Bevis). Most dangerous is the impression of separateness and supremacy (a metaphysical dualism) that can be instilled by the agricultural deviation. The genie escapes from the bottle…
I also don't think there's a bright line between agriculture and gathering: in fact that is kindof my point! But if there isn't, then your claim — which, if I understand it correctly, is that agriculture itself (rather than in a particular context) is problematic in a way that foraging is not — seems difficult to justify.
I do think that overfinancialised industrial monocropping of grains, oilseeds and pulses is much worse for biodiversity and our own long-term survival than, say, gathering hazelnuts, but we don't have to look too hard to find examples of hunter-gathering behaviours that have been deleterious. Overfishing or whaling might be the most obvious, but there are plenty of land animals and plants that have also suffered from over-harvesting, some to extinction. So in the right context, hunter-gathering can also spiral out of control.
The biomimicry standard is an interesting one, and I think it has some merit, but I don't think it excludes all agriculture. Ants absolutely will protect aphids from ladybirds, I've observed this myself on garden plants. A breeding pair of swans will drive off geese, and bees and wasps will defend their hives. So I don't think we can discount the "excluding other species" part of farming. Beavers create dams with profound ecosystem effects. Rats and mice and squirrels certainly store food for later in the year, so our human habit of acquiring and preserving surplus is also found in nature. Squirrels also plant trees, probably more oak trees than humans do, so causing food plants to grow is allowed in this standard. Gophers have extensive social networks and so do some cats; wolves have some kind of social organisation structure (though my current understanding is that in the wild this isn't as pronounced as the social hierarchy in, say, domestic hens).
Cooking our food is pretty weird, but it seems possible to cook our food without exceeding carrying capacity, especially using coppice and pollard methods to extend the lives of trees, enable easier harvesting, and promote biodiversity through varied habitat. (Coppicing mimics megafauna effects on tree limbs. In some ecosystems fire may be a better way of managing woodland, though I'm not entirely clear on how to also use it for fuel in that case, but I'm sure it can be done or has been done…) Heating our living spaces can certainly be done in such a way as to not exceed local carrying capacity, though in the West it mostly isn't (with some exceptions of course: I know Chris Smaje has more trees in his woodlot now than he did when he took on the land he tends). So the difficulty here seems to be not so much "too many people" as "too many people in too small a space to produce that much fuel sustainably", possibly with a side of "some people have houses with twenty rooms and want to keep all of them at 20°C all year round".
Travelling long distances for better conditions is something migratory birds do every year (and transhumance is a fascinating practice, if you'd like to go down that rabbit hole). Transporting food long distances is enough less common that I can't think of any immediate examples of non-humans doing it, but while pre-modern trade routes certainly existed (for example, for dried camas bulbs from Pacific coastal Turtle Island, and for spices and dyes in Asia and the Near East), they were at a much smaller scale than today's global freight networks. The global freight networks exist to take advantage of it being cheaper (or possible at all) to produce something in one place than another; I am not aware of this occurring in any non-human communities.
Allow me secure tenure of a little land, and I will produce as much as I need for my family in as sustainable a way as I can, and a bit to trade with neighbours, and a smaller bit to trade further afield, and a bit to pay some taxes and tithe to charity, and a bit to put by for lean years. Make me pay rent so high that I have to put nearly all of the land to grains and can't save anything at all, and I'll subsist on potatoes until the land is exhausted or the potato blight comes along, but that doesn't mean the blight or the potato was at fault: it was the system of extracting wealth from one place to another, the system of extracting wealth from someone else's labour, that caused the real problem.
Maybe the line between what is potentially sustainable and what is just too dangerous to mess with has less to do with the manner of production than with how the benefits are distributed afterwards. I do get frustrated with how caught up I am in extractive systems that I would not choose if given a choice, but I am working very hard on some aspects of a more local livelihood, particularly in growing as much food as I can, as sustainably as I can, on the land available to me. I also forage widely and in fact have more years of experience foraging than gardening, largely because of land access issues.
It's possible that agriculture will turn out only to be a transitional strategy, but I don't accept that it is definitely an inherently flawed strategy and foraging is not.
In re. overfishing and whaling being deleterious foraging behaviours, isn't this a bit sophistic seeing as how the demand fuelling both of these practices generally arises from a largely agrarian population?
Perhaps there are localized examples (e.g. a fishing community overfishing in a lake), but this comes down to a "tragedy of the commons" style argument, which Ostrom and others have shown is rarer than one might expect at small scales. Admittedly, it is difficult to say exactly when the scale changes from small to large, but this is always a problem when changing from analog to digital.
Possibly — or possibly it's true that foraging is only deleterious when there are large enough trade networks — but I think it's possible that the same could be true of agriculture.
I do think that agriculture is easier to convert to industrial practice than most foraging (ocean fishing being, perhaps, a sad exception). It's difficult to use large machines to gather wild mushrooms or dandelion leaves and you won't find a CAFO full of caribou. It's difficult to intensify the production of human food in truly wild spaces except by a) having a lot more workers or b) cultivating those spaces. But there's an awful lot of farming that ultimately is still done by humans with hand tools, too: there are no grape pruning machines that I know of, no tomato picking machines. And while grapes and tomatoes are not "staple" crops in the way wheat or fava beans can be, they are certainly items with substantial international trade for their processed products, made possible only by "cheap" transport.
Is the demand for wild fish driven partly by sedentary agricultural lifestyles? Maybe. But maybe it is also driven by denying people access to land for subsistence use, in either agriculture or horticulture, so that most people in the West have to purchase the majority of their food. I don't see that as a problem with agriculture itself but as a problem with some people extracting the value from other people's labour; a problem with land as a rent-seeking or speculative investment rather than as an investment in one's own ability to produce what one needs; a problem with the bargain that was the enclosure of the commons.
It's true that sustainable foraging-dominant human habitats are vulnerable to exploitation when their people are put into direct competition with extractive economic systems, but I think the same is true of sustainable agriculture-dominant human habitats, and just because the human prisoners of those extractive economic systems are eating rice or wheat or maize every day doesn't mean that rice or wheat or maize are to blame for the extraction and exploitation.
You might be interested in the work of Gareth and Samuel Lewis regarding what human-scale agriculture can look like.
I'm loth to burden our host with further moderation obligations, but permit me to make two observations.
Firstly, I wonder if the point about trade network size doesn't circle back to agriculture again? Admittedly, pre-agricultural (even pre-Sapiens unless I'm misremembering) trade can be adduced from finds of knapped flints, etc. several hundred kilometres away from their primary sources. However, some degree of division of labour and a secondary sector seem like prerequisites for higher-volume trade. Can the food-surpluses necessary to subsidize this secondary sector exist (long-term) in a non-agricultural society?
Next, in re. the demand for wild-caught fish: the precise mechanism may be difficult to pin down, and may have much to do with the factors you mention. But whatever the proximate cause, all examples of societies wrecking fisheries are largely agricultural.
Indeed, said society must not depend on fish for calories (otherwise they would fall prey to negative feedback before precipitating significant damage). [The precise dynamic is definitely more complex and depends on the reproduction rate of the fish, etc. But I think the general heuristic is valid.] So a basic threshold of agricultural activity seems necessary to serve as a bulwark against this Lotka-Volterra feedback.
Sincerely,
-M
P.S. Thanks for the literature reference.
I don't see why food surpluses can't exist in foraging societies, but again, I'm not sure the line between foraging and agriculture is quite so easily drawn. I find it very hard to believe that my ancestors didn't, on finding a nut tree with particularly tasty and large nuts, save some to plant somewhere more convenient. I find it very hard to believe that they didn't save and scatter seeds from fruit. I find it hard to believe they didn't pull up or cut back the plants they didn't want. Maybe this looked more like horticulture or permaculture or something than industrial-scale monocropping, but just because it doesn't involve tidy rows of grain doesn't mean it isn't agriculture.
Yes, any division of a continuum (foraging monoculture) into discrete parts cannot but be contentious.
There is a computation in [1] of the energy consumed by organisms of different sizes as fractions of the primary productivity of an ecosystem (i.e. photosynthesis); most animals (resp. protoctists, etc.) fall on a fairly smooth curve, whereas we stand out, subordinating a larger fraction of primary productivity to our needs because of "agriculture". Perhaps (very theoretically) this could be taken as a definition: significant deviation from the average ratio for comparably sized animals (accounting for diet).
Coming back to the question of foraging stably producing surpluses, it seems as though this should quickly produce the incentive structures that give rise to "agriculture". Producing a surplus demands an increase in labour (relative to not producing one). The incentives driving one person to doing this presumably apply more widely, so unless this in an aberration, the average working hours for the society should be higher. At this point I submit it would not make sense/be sustainable for say half the village to spend double the time foraging, and proto-agriculture would be the inevitable result [i.e. more settled, more localized, increased subordination of local primary productivity].
Sincerely,
-M
[1]: Fig. 1.1 of Gorshkov, Gorshkov, Makarieva, "Biotic Regulation of the Environment", originally from Gorshkov V.G. (1981) "The distribution of energy flow among the organisms of different dimensions" Journal of General Biology, 42(3), 417-429 Available at http://www.biotic-regulation.pl.ru/abstract/job81.htm (in Russian).
Thanks Tom.
On a side note, yes, the Piraha do seem to be remarkable. Did seem? Are they still there? I was quite taken by Daniel Everett's description of them. Have you seen anything about them other than Everett's book?
But what I mostly wanted to say was that when I read 'Don't Sleep There Are Snakes' I couldn't escape the impression that the Piraha had consciously formed their language and community to exclude the hierarchical world pressing onto them. As if they'd escaped a large oppression in the past, and were dead set on preventing it happening again. I have no evidence for this impression…
But if so, then we all could make ourselves Piraha, right?
We may see the collapse of agricultural systems in the next few decades.
https://sustainablesociety.com/315-beyond-fed-up-six-hard-trends-that-lead-to-food-system-breakdown/
Also, has anyone here read the paper "Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization"?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328719303507
Enjoying the debate, both here and on Chris' blog.
The "is agriculture bad?" debate, though interesting, seems quite pointless.
As you point out Tom, our meat brains will never know the answer to that. Time scales are too long for us to make that call. The jury will always be out.
I'm not sure what "success" is in evolutionary terms anyway?🤷
Ultimately all organisms go on one of two paths. Either they evolve or they become extinct.
6ME, if it happens, is just part of that process.
If we take the deterministic approach, will humanity destroy itself through nuclear war?
Or will we be able to step back from the brink?
If the answer has already been determined, then why worry? (Even if our meat brains can never predict the answer)
I think Chris is less interested by the "bigger picture" and is looking in shorter time scales.
I think we can all agree that BAU is not an option. Fossil fuel dependent food production is on borrowed time.
Hunter Gatherer societies are perhaps the most favourable human social structures, but its not realistic for us to transition to that.
As modernity falls apart, a form of ""small farm future", seems to me, the least worst option.
How we get from here to there is the main focus of Chris' blog.
If indeed, a hunter gathering future is best, then I think, what is now called Australia would be my favourite place to be.
Climatically too tricky for a agricultural based "civilization" to emerge.
The river analogy perhaps is also too linear. Perhaps things are always cyclical.
After all, a river has to make it back up to the top of the mountain somehow.
Just a further though on Australia.
Has it actually been too difficult to start agricultural there or did the inhabitants decide it wasn't worth the bother for 60,000 years?
If agricultural was possible, why wasn't it adopted?🤔
This all sits alright for me, except the part: "If the answer has already been determined…" But that's pre-determined, which isn't a condition of determinism. Future events only become "real" when the plodding path happens to lead to them. Until then, in a sense all plausible futures are on the table, as far as even the universe can make out. There's only one way to get there, down a path no one yet knows. Operationally, then, we have every motivation to influence that path (and that motivation is part of how it all works, anyway: already part of the whole).
No doubt time has both linear and cyclic properties (i.e., Big Bang to Heat Death; entropy; but also days and seasons). No need to force the picking of just one, as there's sense in both. That said, dinosaurs happened once; modernity probably once. One-offs are at least as common as cycles.
In response to
tmurphy
2026-02-05
15.45
Regarding Determinism…
You say
"Future events only become "real" when the plodding path happens to lead to them."
But is that path plodding? It's acting on the laws of physics. It's just so unimaginably complex that we can't see the path.
(And to add to the complexity, we are not just observers, we are part of the process 🤯)
So isn't the whole process on autopilot plotting a course that no-one will ever be able to predict?
Cause and effects beyond our meat brains?
(Though humans can observe some of those cause and effects and "harness" some of them. Or are our actions from observations just part of the determinist path?🤷)
If humans cause the 6ME or we go "nuclear", it's beyond our control anyway?
Once conditions made it possible to farm or split the atom, some humans would inevitably done it,?????
Whether that is a good or bad thing, is just a value judgment, which is redundant if it's all deterministic anyway.
Yes to basically every question/statement. But… the idea of control is tricky. We have no override over what physics will do, so in that sense no control. Yet our (full) selves (body and material entanglements) participate in active ways to be part of what brings about the next steps in the deterministic progress. We're in the "equation," and quite heavily in some sense.
The good or bad valuation is *also* part of the mix. As social animals, part of our (evolutionary) feedback loop governing decisions requires assessment of good vs. bad actions and anticipated outcomes. In that sense, part of the deterministic path *relies* on these creatures making value judgments. There's no "outside."
On cycles…..
tmurphy says
"That said, dinosaurs happened once; modernity probably once. One-offs are at least as common as cycles."
Isn't everything a "one off"?Nothing in an expanding universe can be the same. All the atoms in the same place at the same time more than once?
"Cycles" doesn't mean a repeat. True, the dinosaurs aren't coming back any time soon. (Though some of them did evolve into birds)
(It's the same rule again. "Evolve into something else or become extinct")
One earth orbit of the sun, isn't the same as the last or the next.
Tyson Yunkaporta in his book Sand Talk talks about his culture's understanding of the world and how it is cyclical rather than linear.
I think women probably have a better understanding of how the world is cyclical.
Even the Big Bang could be part of a massive cycle of expansion and contraction?🤔🤷
The rushing river metaphor misses out the whole story.
Modernity's raging torrent will eventually reach the sea where it will be absorbed by the ocean.
Then all those water droplets will be lifted by the sun and deposited back up to the mountain to start the journey all over again.
Perhaps not in human for though.
Metaphors always miss something. Stretching them to all aspects will always break. Take the aligned part and move on, as it helps grasp *some* aspects of the phenomenon in question. We "metaphor" time onto space constantly: forward, backward, far, distant, etc. but don't carry it to the extreme.
I believe you are correct to say everything is really a one-off. Orbits are spaghetti messes when plotted at high resolution. Atoms will not be in the same place, ever. And, there's entropy. So in a strict sense, I would say time is completely "linear" or at least monotonic. But I wanted to respect cultures who have a strong point about cyclic properties that are operationally true. Tides, diurnal, lunar, seasonal, reproduction, cicadas, ice ages, and lots more. The linear part is so slowly evolving (expansion of universe, aging of sun, decay of radioactive elements in Earth) that on a human scale, cycles can be the dominant phenomenology, and there's some real truth, there. I would not object to returning to cultural beliefs in time that are largely cyclical: a great way to connect to Life. But the cycles are *never* exact copies, so cyclic time should not, perhaps, be taken literally.
Thanks to Tom and commenters here for engaging with me so constructively. As Tom's already said, there's a lot of agreement between us and there's much food for thought here. I'm aiming to respond in due course, not to over-emphasise our differences but in the hope that it might be informative.
One point of entry to it is Mike Roberts' comment
"Really? Isn't this an illusion because there hadn't then yet been enough time for them to do so? Surely they were on their way to (if not already there) being growth oriented and predatory? And, as history shows, that's exactly where they ended up."
I don't think history does show that, as I'll try to explain when I reply. But I liked Mike highlighting my two 'manys'. I usually try to avoid superfluous qualifiers. The fact that I doubled one up there perhaps indicates my uncertainty, and I will try to embrace that uncertainty in my reply.
Just mulling over my question above (and now below 🤣)
Why did agriculture not take off in Australia for 60,000 years????
Or was it practiced then abandoned?🤷
Or was the climate not conducive to agricultural?
But agriculture is practiced there now.🤔 So it is/was possible.
Were people making choices not to grow food.?
The deep understanding of the environment was known.
How plants grow, would have been known.
So, why does the idea that if something is possible, someone, somewhere, will do it, not apply to Australia?
One theory of how agriculture started was that some areas were such food "sweet spots", that enough food could be gathered from one location and stored for a year, that the need to constantly move was redundant.
Acorns being one of the possible food sources.
Once a group stays in one spot, it starts to plant other food types close to the primary food source (acorns) to supplement their diets.
So, in Australia, did non of those "sweet spots" exist, to keep people in one place?
In defences of Graeber and Wengrow and TDOE.
It's the bits between the civilisations that is interesting to me. Civilizations come and go in an endless cycle of expansion and collapse. History never really looks at what happens in the bits between, which cover large tracks of time. Mainly because in those in-between times, no-one is writing down what they are up to or building palaces.
If you're interested in a detailed answer, see " Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers" by Sutton and Walshe.
When asked why they didn't plant crops,a San tribesman told the anthropologist " Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world ? "
Some of the Australian Aboriginal tribes lived in their " sweet spots ",
which were fish-rich rivers with a sophisticated system of rock fish traps built by them, for a part of the year, then moved on to other parts
of their territory .
Hi John, there is historical evidence in the form of diary descriptions from the earliest colonisers of Australia that there were farms and roads and buildings. I gleaned this through the 'artist as family' website. I'm sorry I haven't got any links as such but I assure you it's out there.
Hola Tom, he encontrado más críticas a la obra de David Graeber y David Wengrow. Creo que te interesará. Un abrazo. https://www.partage-le.com/2022/01/08/graeber-et-wengrow-au-commencement-etait-un-carnaval-didees-fausses-ou-farfelues-dossier/
[Google translate: Hi Tom, I've found some more critiques of David Graeber and David Wengrow's work. I think you'll be interested. Best regards.]
The informed estimates of annual global soil erosion rates on the land area used for food production vary between 25 and 75 billion tonnes. The informed estimates of the rate of soil formation on that same area is around 2.5 billion tonnes. The soil eroded
is also the most productive and fertile.
Cities convert a cyclic nutrient system into a linear system. As Duncan Brown quips in his book " Feed or Feedback ", cities are the reason this civilization will inevitably go down the tube.
When the whole system of insanity that we currently inhabit is fully comprehended, agriculture is just one facet . Talk about shifting baselines. We're all born into a system that is not sustainable even on a scale of centuries, let alone millennia, but we're all expected to fit into it,and live our lives, raise our offspring to fit into it.
The bright young things trot of to uni, some to become economists,assuming that what they will be taught has a foundation in reality. Mainstream economics is founded
on the assumption that the energy required to allow economic growth will always be there, and the Earth will supply the energy and minerals to allow it continue . Technology will always solve any problems.
The planet is riddled with the toxic products of a toxic system, and what do we do :
Let the tech crazies take us into an even more insane system, with the energy-guzzling A.I. centres supposedly leading us into some imaginary nirvana, while the
biosphere continues its path to oblivion.
Here is an attempt to lay out a concise perspective on determinism and agency from a materialist monist point of view. They are only in opposition in a dualist metaphysics. Some attempt is made to avoid the traps of dualist language, by avoiding a claim on ownership of agency ("I," etc.). Apologies for its length (blog post?).
Everything is an agent: able to effect change. Hurricanes, beavers, electrons, microbes, asteroids, humans, rocks, volcanoes, caterpillars, the sun… This is because the universe is inherently interactive. Every particle interacts, and thus alters the fate of every other. It can't be stopped.
Because of the evolutionary feedback that shapes arrangements of matter called organisms (in English), the interactions that the arrangements have no choice (override of physics) but to carry out are highly interactive in manipulating the macro world to the organism's (or species') overall advantage—as part of the necessary feedback to be what it is. A surviving species has no choice but to be constructed for adaptive response, on average.
Humans absolutely play a key role in shaping life on this planet, and will continue doing so for some time. Lots of agency. A real force of nature. As individuals, the atoms within are configured to respond in (best-guess) adaptively beneficial ways, simultaneously weighing many factors. A prefrontal cortex is wired to to provide oversight and act as a sort of referee (or traffic cop) to basic impulses, which in turn provides a window for metacognition (thinking about thinking; an awareness of *some* cerebral processes). But it, too, is wired/configured for adaptive advantage, and is not controlled by "the individual" in a dualist sense. It would be easy for the traffic cop to imagine that by waving arms around, he or she is conjuring/creating the trafic flow. But a traffic cop that did not follow some imposed rule set would not remain a traffic cop for very long: not in actual control in the long game that includes feedback. It's an imperfect analogy, because an actual individual can't override the physics making their body go (and dictating which arms to wave, and how).
And this is the part that fries brains. There is no "you," in the sense that "you" are not in control. If anything, "you" are the arrangment of atoms and all their collective interactions amongst themselves and with the wider world (shaped by direct and inherited experience). So, do *you* have agency? Depends on what is meant by "you." That's where things go sideways. Our culture, language, and perhaps prefrontal cortex don't help "get it right" at all, in a materialist monist stance. A dualist asserts a "mind" that is not "simply" the result of material interactions via standard particles and physics—succumbing to the intoxicating and utterly-convincing illusion of self. For them, "I" am a real agent, not a slave to physics. Yeah? Prove it, somehow. Where's the override? When a single thought happens outside of physics, it'll be huge news.
Hence the struggle between spectator/observer vs. actor/participant vs. director/conductor. The middle set is perhaps the best fit, with a healthy dose of the first, and maybe a smidge of the third, but only interpreted with great care. As actors, humans do still observe actions and consequences of other agents. But humans also play a role on the stage. We (in the dualist sense of separate entity) do not write the script, but the atoms comprising corporeal humans play their part in doing so—with the help and full participation of all the matter in causal contact, including those many bits our culture calls "inert."
The past can't be changed: it went the way it did without violating physics (determined by physical interactions). That past was once a future, so the same can someday be said about "our" future, in hindsight. In advance, it is impossible to know what the script will say, yet we find "ourselves" actively engaged in the creation of words that "we" utter as "we" go: formed by "our" atoms in full interaction with all the other atoms in "our" surroundings, including those in other human actors (together with those in rocks, microbes, weather, the sun, etc.).
If what you say is true then if we humans cause the 6th Mass Extinction it was always going to happen.
The same as an asteroid striking earth and causing a massive extinction event. If it's going to hit, it's going to hit.
It was/is always going to happen. Humans cannot change course. We have no agency to do so.
Just like the asteroid.
Armed with hindsight, yes. One future will be selected. If a nuclear holocaust does actually transpire, for instance, I don't think we have an ontological leg to stand on to say that we had any override to alter the way the universe went.
But this is light years away from saying that nuclear Armageddon is inevitable, or the 6ME. Knowing about the risk alters the feedback loop. If we pay enough attention to the stimulus and mount an all-hands-on-deck response, the future can say that it was the only way things could have gone. So the question is: what inevitable outcome (of the myriad possible) does your response attach you to? Do you resign to the worst or rally for effect? Your constitution and heritage (atoms) will decide, and I wish I knew the answer. Meanwhile, my impulse is to ring the alarm so that we *might* react to avoid the worst.
It's the same as saying that I hope avoidance of the 6ME is inevitable. If true, such an outcome will require motivation in that direction, and alarm-bell-ringers. What am I waiting for?
I tend to think that the 6th mass extinction is inevitable. The only aspect of it that we don't know is whether humans will cause it or whether some other future event will cause it.
“New” land was assessed not for the peculiar ways its Community of Life thrived…(but) for its potential as a substrate for cookie-cutter importation of the exploitative “one true way” via planting and extraction.
My father told me that Captain James Cook exclaimed, gazing at the forests of the Pacific Northwest “Look at all those masts!”
I don’t know if that’s true but it would not be surprising.
Hi Tom, thanks for the meat brain massage, you might like the this tune 'how we met, the long version', it's a favourite of ours
https://youtu.be/9huLGwbpoiA?si=PEJUJzHeJJabHNYp
It has the same history of everything up to this point. I had a question, are you a maker? Thing I like about Chris is that he is practical. I respect hand/body based crafts and skills. As a skilled practitioner I experience an affinity with human ancestors and animals through the processes of my own material body and the materials I'm working with. Not being well versed in philosophy, I cannot situate this point of view as deterministic or not, possibly phenomenogical?
All this is to say the path has been, to me, one of a sensuous interaction of human, animal and material- this 'all that is' that you describe – embodied through fingertips, ears and eyes, muscles and mouths and noses. I try not to stray to far from there.
I understand that the practical side of this cerebral exercise is to wake people up to the consequences of our actions. Thank you for that.
Yes, I have a long history of making stuff—from bird nest boxes to kayaks to airplane detectors to a lunar ranging apparatus. My hands are busy hands. Even in conversation, I am likely to idly explore a piece of material in my fingers.
Having listened to you on Crazy town, I had a feeling that your practical/logical approach was underpinned by a hand based practice.
What is starting to emerge for me is that this is not so much a metaphysical or philosophical discussion but one of aesthetics.
We all like a particular style and feel of language, metaphysics and even philosophy. I like the building of data into models of seemingly irrefutable facts but its an aesthetic, like anything else, and one modality of knowledge and sense making among the myriad available to us.
As a maker you will understand the wordless knowledge embodied in the crafts you practice. And the difficulty of describing these processes in words. There are no easy definitions. Also you will recognise that somedays something works and the next same thing doesn't work, that the way your friend works it – you just can't get to work for you, and maybe that thing which she did, will die with her, cos no else can do it!
So in a passing defence of Greaber and Wengrove, the point that modalities/practices emerge and act and are then folded back into the aeons seems absolutely normal to me. That even now in the raging torent of global empires there are quiet pools and positive eddies of emergence and action.
So the aesthetics are different but the exit strategy via a local agrarian, community sufficiency practice is emerging. Which was all it ever was all that time ago, probably with a then wordless 'agroforestry' along the way(and also co existing in different localities) – to a nomadic foraging, hunting gathering, ranch farm.
The problem with 'farming is bad' is that it is political and is a current tool of land sparing corporate enclosure and even more crazy ideas from the likes of Monbiot. There is so much land even on this little island of Britain, I am wary to, in any way curtail the rights of local agrarian community sufficiency movements, here or anywhere else, to put the aesthetics of categories above real politic.
In response to your post on tmurphy on 2026-02-10 at 16:06, I totally agree with everything except the choice implication in this part:
"If we pay enough attention to the stimulus and mount an all-hands-on-deck response, the future can say that it was the only way things could have gone. So the question is: what inevitable outcome (of the myriad possible) does your response attach you to? Do you resign to the worst or rally for effect? Your constitution and heritage (atoms) will decide, and I wish I knew the answer. Meanwhile, my impulse is to ring the alarm so that we *might* react to avoid the worst."
We don't have a choice. Our choices are products of physics. They "feel" like choices but are just the actions specified by rules of the physical universe (if you believe in materialist monism … apologies for "you" and "believe"). My actions after reading your works will be different that if I had not encountered them … because physics. I can't "choose" to behave/not behave any differently. The idea of choice is the hangup and I think that's why most just can't go there. My cat doesn't seem to have this issue.
I am in full agreement with you. The language I use (especially when trying to connect/convince) does not always reflect the full indifference of the process. But as "you" say, exposure to a stimulus has the chance to alter response—through a wildly elaborate process of physics in organisms tuned to do exactly that: weigh the subtleties of the sensory world and act in a way according to how their arrangements are conditioned (by equally elaborate and sometimes ancient multi-layer processes).
That's exactly what I wanted to say! 🙏 The prefrontal filter or cognitive lining should not interfere with the "clarity" of the immutable physical basis of choice (atomic interaction).
>My cat doesn't seem to have this issue.
Holy s*** I've never heard a more succinct formulation!