Slash and burn farming: recently cleared field in Burkina Faso, semi-arid forest zone.

Economies as Trophic Flows

“…We did not arrive on the planet as aliens. Humanity is part of nature, a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the source of human sensibility and acquire a knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built. It is reckless to suppose that biodiversity can be diminished indefinitely without threatening humanity itself.” — E. O. Wilson

Abstract

The concept of keystone species and trophic ecological flows, developed by wildlife ecologists in the last several decades, have not been sufficiently integrated with our models of social change and economic diversification within the human species. Observations of hunter-gatherers called the Kua, during intensive fieldwork during the late 1970s indicated that, in addition to the role of deliberate use of fire to set back succession communities and increase species variability and density, a community like the Kua would, over the course of several generations, redistribute over 10 million plants over a landscape of about 10,000 square miles. This and other observations lead to the hypothesis that humans may have evolved as an important keystone species. A second example is presented from fieldwork undertaken in a horticultural village in Burkina Faso illustrates the reasons why a horticultural economy can be sustainable and compatible with high wild biomass; indeed, why people using this economy also can generate positive trophic cascades within their ecosystem. This paper also presents a model that as cropland increases from 20 to 40 % of the total land use, the cultural ecology passes tipping points to negative trophic flows, convergent with shifts from usufruct to private tenure and onset of social stratification.

1. Introduction

On July 14, 2016, a team of researchers at the University College, London, announced that species biodiversity worldwide had fallen below levels considered safe for ecosystem stability. [i]

“For 58.1% of the world’s land surface, which is home to 71.4% of the global population, the level of biodiversity loss is substantial enough to question the ability of ecosystems to support human societies. The loss is due to changes in land use and puts levels of biodiversity beyond the ‘safe limit’ recently proposed by the planetary boundaries — an international framework that defines a safe operating space for humanity.

“It’s worrying that land use has already pushed biodiversity below the level proposed as a safe limit,” said Professor Andy Purvis of the Natural History Museum, London, who also worked on the study.

“Decision-makers worry a lot about economic recessions, but an ecological recession could have even worse consequences — and the biodiversity damage we’ve had means we’re at risk of that happening. Until and unless we can bring biodiversity back up, we’re playing ecological roulette.”

The team used data from hundreds of scientists across the globe to analyse 2.38 million records for 39,123 species at 18,659 sites where are captured in the database of the PREDICTS project. The analyses were then applied to estimate how biodiversity in every square kilometre land has changed since before humans modified the habitat…”

We cannot exist outside of nature. Our whole evolution as a species has been, and still should be, attuned to the rhythms and limits of nature. We forget that at our peril. From the looks of the latest reports from ocean biologists, climate scientists, and ecologists, our peril has never been greater. That is why we need to stop discussing “the environment” and “nature” as if it was outside the world inhabited by humanity.

Models of human social and economic history have also tended to overlook the role of ecosystem feedbacks. Some models presuppose that technological and social changes represent progressive stages, an inevitable unfolding of our species’ destiny. Others seek causality in on-going cognitive and behavioral evolution. The reasons for the domestication of plants and animals, for the emergence of civilizations — like the models of their collapse, have been sought in genetic change — as each increase in complexity selects for higher intelligence, in shifts of consciousness, or, more frequently in cumulative cultural changes — the “ratchet effect” — caused by human ingenuity, technological innovation, increased harnessing of energy sources, higher levels of cooperation, conflicts within or between groups.

However, these are all insufficient to account for the initial lengthy period of very slow change, and relative economic and social stability, that characterized over ninety percent of our species existence. Models asserting that agriculture was a “discovery” imply that humans who remained foragers were too mentally deficient to figure out that seeds would grow if planted, or else, that it was only in certain “richer” ecosystems that sedentary and larger communities were possible, which begs the question about whether sedentary life was desirable. There is even a suggestion that the emergence of villages and cities was made possible by a genetic mutation that permitted hyper-cooperative — “eusocial” — societies to take off.[ii]

Oddly enough, the concept of eusociality was developed to describe social insects[iii], and yet, few other models developed by other wildlife biologists and ecologists have so far been suggested for humans, despite the possibility that they might have far greater evolutionary significance and explanatory power. A salient example is the following: it is commonplace in this field today to speak of keystone species, and to consider the contribution of cascading feedbacks in terms of whole ecosystem responses.[iv]

On the west coast of British Columbia the sea otters were over-trapped during the eary years of the fur trade. The sea urchins proliferated and ate all the kelp, and then the herring had nowhere to spawn, and salmon and other fish predators almost vanished. This is what happens with negative trophic flows: cascading and often devastating impacts on one species after another leading to loss of ecosystem diversity, stability, and drops of overall carrying capacity. Fortunately when otters were protected, trapping stopped otters recovered and positive trophic flows resumed. Similarly, the reintroduction of grey wolves to Yellowstone Park set off series of changes, beginning with grazing patterns among species like wapiti. The vegetation near rivers rebounded, beavers returned, and populations of insects, amphibians, and birds as this vital habitat were restored.

Sea otters and wolves are considered “keystone” species. These concepts of keystone species and trophic ecological flows, developed by wildlife ecologists in the last several decades, have not been sufficiently integrated with our models of evolutionary process, social change, and economic diversification within the human species.

2. Background

Most of my life has been devoted to exploring these concepts: testing hypotheses about human cultures as collective cognitive niches: systems that organized and operationalized learned and shared information, technology, and techniques to the management of ecosystems. Modeling ecological systems feedbacks, and seeking tipping points in the events leading to the domestication of plants and animals seemed a worthy objective. I also hoped that this exercise might indicate later critical links in the chain of those socio-economic changes culminating in the establishment of a number of centers of civilization around the world.

This paper documents some specific observations made during fieldwork during the period 1975–1985. The first few years of research were conducted in Botswana among Kua hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari. Afterward, research was within one of the “green revolution” institutes in West Africa, studying the economies and cultural ecologies of horticulturalists and pastoralists in the Sahel.

2.1 The Foraging Systems and their Ecological Effects

Among the three language groups of foragers surveyed in the south eastern Kalahari, there were similarities in keeping with the emerging picture of human life within this ancient economic system: their organization of work by division of labor, their tolerant childcare, their long life spans, their tendency to see all of the natural world as a manifestation of an interconnected physical and spiritual being, their overall health, general relaxed attitudes, and abundant leisure time.

The material culture of these Kalahari groups was similar to that of other hunter-gatherers around the world. The group of foragers I ended up studying in depth, the Kua, lived in close proximity to the Bantu-speaking farmer-herder cultures that had penetrated southern Africa some 800 years earlier, the Kua had kept their language and technologies intact, and Many were still getting most of their day to day food from foraging.

Seasonally, about 40% of them worked at payment-in-kind jobs within the Bantu economy — they acted as living scare-crows, they helped with the sorghum and millet harvests, they herded livestock, and they did piecework such as making baskets and woven grass granaries, curing animal skins, and making wooden spoons and mortars.

The Kua were perceived by the people of the agro-pastoral economy as a source of extra labor, and thus were tolerated close to the permanent springs and boreholes during the driest part of the year. These boreholes had augmented the number of springs in the fossil river valleys; springs that were in the past, the center of winter encampments for hunter-gatherers. During the period of fieldwork, these winter encampments still persisted, and they brought together groups speaking different languages. At such times, the Kua, and their neighboring G/wi and !Xo often held joint ceremonies and exchanged information, jokes., songs, dances, and — sometimes — intermarried.

During gathering trips, I observed women deliberately taking a handful of berries or nuts and tossing them on the ground and then heeling them into the dirt. I asked why, and was told this was a way of thanking the plants for their bounty.

I also observed the trickle of small seeds and nuts and berries that tended to dribble out of the carrier sacs each time they were put down on the ground; on occasions when a woman paused to spend a few minutes digging up a wild root.

Such small losses of gathered material were hardly noticed, but the cumulative effect was not hard to imagine. Dozens of trips by parties of women, circulating through miles of terrain around each hunter-gatherer camp, repeated over thousands of years as camps appeared and disappeared over the landscape: the resultant increase in range and diversity of species of food considered desirable by the human forager is stunning. Imagine this: 400 women x 6 plants dropped/trip x 3 trips/week x 52 weeks x 100 years = 37,440,000 plants dropped — if even a third of these grew into a new plant, that is over 10,000,000 plants distributed across the landscape.

Planting near camps (“returning to the mother”) of useful wild food plants was common as well. I observed wild tubers and onions, which were not eaten within two days, and starting to wilt, casually being replanted behind the camping site. Women joked about this as their way of “farming” — and indeed, on gathering trips, they would detour past any old campsites to harvest plantations of tasty root crops.

Had the people not also used fire to set back succession communities, resulting in a complex mosaic of communities in different stages of regrowth, it is clear that the human foraging pattern alone already played a much greater role in shaping their ecosystems in positive ways than do the activities of most other primates. But they did use fire.[v]

These observations from the Kalahari do not represent recent or isolated effects of hunter-gatherers on their ecosystems. Use of fire for environmental management, and deliberate as well as unconscious redistribution of various collected plants was not unique to the Kua. Cahuilla/Apache elder Lorene Sisquoc describes a reciprocal relationship with the plants and the land. “The plants are waiting for us to come take care of them so they can take care of us. In Temalpakh, Katherine Saubel writes that the Cahuilla word for an oak grove, meki’i’wah, means ‘the place that waits for me.” [vi]

Moreover, here is a quote, from an archaeological study, that is intriguing:

“People were most likely manipulating plants from as early as 50,000 years ago in the lowlands, Jones says. That’s around the time humans likely first arrived. Scholars had long classified these early inhabitants as foragers — but then came the studies at Niah Cave. There, in a series of limestone caverns near the coast, scientists found paleoecological evidence that early humans got right to work burning the forest, managing vegetation, and eating a complex diet based on hunting, foraging, fishing, and processing plants from the jungle. This late Pleistocene diet spanned everything from large mammals to small mollusks, to a wide array of tuberous taros and yams. By 10,000 years ago, the folks in the lowlands were growing sago and manipulating other vegetation such as wild rice, Hunt says. The lines between foraging and farming undoubtedly blurred. The Niah Cave folks were growing and picking, hunting and gathering, fishing and gardening across the entire landscape.” [vii]

This brings us to an inescapable conclusion: humans evolved as a keystone foraging species, ideologically animating whole ecosystems as part of a sacred dance of relationship. Is it going beyond the realm of reason to suggest that humans remade their world? That the Garden of Eden is metaphor, not morality fable? We still live there; we are still in nature, still affecting everything in the garden.

2.2 The Slash-and-Burn Systems: start of negative ecological flows?

Did these positive trophic flows end with the domestication of plants and animals? The earliest farming systems are believed to have resembled those found in tribal societies even today: they tend to be based on what has been called shifting or “slash and burn” horticulture. Such systems tend to mix a variety of domesticated plant species together on small plots near settlements and to integrate trees with small clearings of staple crops.

These are socio-economic systems, whose successes and failures appeared to be balanced on the brink of negative trophic flows. This was the balancing act that I sought to understand when I undertook fieldwork in one of the places where the process of domestication began many thousands of years ago: the Sahel of western Africa.

Here, no hunter-gatherers remained. I found that huts were more substantial and villages that were frequently at least eighty years old. There was still abundant wildlife, despite over 4000 years of economies dominated by production of domesticated food sources. In fact, in much of the region, the landscape between villages seemed to be dominated by “wild” nature.[viii]

However this “wild” appearance was deceptive: these were landscapes shaped mainly by human presence. In the southernmost climatic zone, 80% of a village territory was in various stages of secondary growth. The species composition at each of the stages of succession are different than in the temperate version illustrated below[ix], and proceed a bit faster, but it is easy to see that there was a diversity of habitats produced by the mechanism of ecological recovery after land has been cleared for any reason.

This “wild” mosaic actually represents the “commons” that was managed communally. The areas under cultivation at any one time were subject to temporary “usufruct” tenure, so the food produced there was the property of the cultivators. There was no private property.

In most of the horticultural systems in these West African villages, 20% of the land is cultivated in any given year. Soil fertility declines after 5–10 years, and in anticipation of this, new forest plots were cleared in the forest. Cut trees and brush piles were dried out burned to release chemical nutrients back into the soil. This is arduous work, and undertaken by task groups of younger men as much as 3 years before the final abandonment of older plots.

The slash and burn horticultural system produces a mosaic of open meadows, scrubland, and forest, representing various stages of ecological succession from bare ground. It follows that the landscape thus produced supported vast species diversity. Generally, young climax communities in this part of the world take about thirty years to begin to establish themselves, but many species of plants and animals are found more abundantly in the secondary, tertiary, and penultimate succession communities than in the final stage of succession.

In fact, these diverse subclimax and open pioneering succession communities make up a good deal of the landscape created by tribal peoples who still use “slash and burn” farming systems. The human activities actually create much higher biomass than exists in a uniform climax forest.

The tipping points where formerly sustainable horticultural systems start to slide into negative trophic flows appear as cropland exceeds 20% of landuse. It is quite precise. It happens when more than 20% of the forest — or wild ecosystem — is reduced to bare soil in any given year, and the cause may be either increased population or an increase in commercial or “cash” cropping. When population increases, people must respond to increased food needs by clearing larger fields or prolonging cultivation on each plot. A similar dynamic occurs with adding cash crops. This sets in motion changes that eventually lead to a crisis of soil fertility, because the progressive restoration of soil fertility by means of plant succession still requires the same amount of time. Shorter fallow periods give insufficient time for regeneration. With each annual cycle, ever more land must be cultivated to sustain production levels. This lowers the regenerative time even more. The cultivation of 30% of land eliminates stage IV of the succession community. A drift to 40% eliminates stage III. This represents the young forest of maturing pioneer species mixed with saplings of the climax species.

Land use of this intensity cannot preserve even young climax forest. The mature trees in tiny “sacred groves” constitute a source of seedlings for the late third, and for the fourth stage, of forest regeneration, but once these stages of ecological succession are eliminated, they cease to function except as sad reminders of the past.

Even if the population has stabilized by this point, however, the slide into ecological collapse may continue as long as people keep having to compensate for fertility declines by cultivating larger and larger areas.

Introducing herds of domesticated livestock, pastured on the weedy meadows of the first stage succession, can stave off collapse of soil fertility if their manure is applied to cropland before replanting. Livestock, as the name implies, represent risk insurance on the hoof. However livestock can inhibit young trees from getting established, stalling succession at stage two. To make matters more complicated, people tend to step up their hunting and woodcutting to supplement shortfalls in food supply and income. This increases deforestation and also hastens the collapse of the local wildlife population.

The only thing that can delay this slide towards collapse is the institution of social controls over use of the remaining commons. This can occur through taboos on eating certain wild animals, or even important livestock, on using certain wild plants, cutting down certain species of trees, or even by elimination of keeping large livestock locally. Livestock often continue as a risk management strategy, but herders will take the animals to distant forage in any unclaimed commons.

The gradual increase in percentage of land under cultivation in any given year, and of land under permanent cultivation or use as pasture, appeared, thus, to be at least partly a function of population density. It was possible to detect early stages of this process in the ICRISAT study villages, where vaccinations and the introduction of other modern medical and sanitation were alleviating the formerly high levels of infant and child mortality. As development and population growth progressed, deforestation, soil loss, and dropping water tables could be documented, and were made worse by drought. I wrote a paper on this with our team agronomist, Willem Stoop.[xi]

2.3 Permanent Commercialised (developed) Farming Systems: impact on local ecological flows and village communal-cooperative institutions

Sub-Saharan Africa now has one of the fastest rates of population increase on the planet. We take for granted that lowering of childhood mortality and a general modernization of healthcare is necessary humanitarian aid, along with economic “development” assistance all across the globe. Such aid is usually aimed at rural economies whose land use is dominated by subsistence activities.

I was necessarily immersed into an institutional environment of “development”. Our institute[xii] was working with the national agricultural “extension” sector to encourage the adoption of ploughs drawn by draft animals, the use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and new varieties of cultivars offering higher yields with such inputs.

My institute was dedicated to helping the “small farmer” — but addressed this goal as if this hypothetical farmer existed as an individual, rather than as part of a community. This is understandable as a common orientation of rural socialists and economists whose models derive from agricultural systems where farmland was privately owned.

Moreover, and again, understandably, the promotion of “modern” technologies such as improved varieties, ploughs, tractors, mono-cropping, cash cropping, planting larger fields and de-stumping was done to increase the earning power of this hypothetical small farmer, not just his food supply. Cash crops like cotton and peanuts were encouraged. This diverted land from subsistence crops. Even the sale of surplus cereal crops — taboo in many West African tribal societies, was encouraged.

Individualization of profit-oriented ventures, through cash crops, encouraged by a focus on each household as an income generating enterprise, has however had the unfortunate side effect of crippling traditional risk management systems, since it can create conflict between small farm cash income and the allocation of surpluses to granaries managed by the lineage elders and village headman. Pursuit of cash income from sale of livestock, of “bush meat”, of wild plant foods, medical herbs, and of firewood to markets outside the local area, meanwhile, undermines communal risk management of the “commons”, as individuals find their own interests in conflict with those of more traditional leaders.

The task of managing risk, therefore, falls more and more on the individual household unit. Livestock are a common investment against famine, since they could be sold off in larger towns to buy food. Headmen find it difficult to enforce limitations on herd size when it even puts their own household at higher risk in the next drought. Under increasingly competitive conditions, higher stocking rates on the commons curtailed the establishment of pioneering saplings: fallow land can never entered stage three of the succession.

Ecologically negative consequences, rural dependency on external cash economies outside local control, and socio-economic inequality are all patterns that take many years to unfold. By contrast, visits international humanitarian aid workers, development institutes, researchers, and extension agents tend to provide only short-term snapshots of situations in any one community. Those farmers, who adopted the Green Revolution model, appear to outsiders to be “early adopters” and entrepreneurial leaders. Rising household cash income and national figures showing increasing volume of agricultural exports testify to the benefits of modernizing farming systems, making possible government investment in national programs for things like education and transportation infrastructure.

All of this is understandable, especially in the light of accompanying improvements infant and childhood survival rates, rising life expectancy, provision of more safe and secure water supplies, access to educational opportunities, and rising literacy.

People cannot see what they not looking for.

I remember in vivid detail the day I learned this. It was during a long series of interviews, as part of my inventory of granaries. This was done to get an idea of surplus food production in each village. All the lineage heads had many more granaries than did individual households, because every household gave a certain amount from their harvest to their lineage heads, who in turn were obliged to pass some on to the village chiefs.

As I was being dragged over a series of enormous structures, in the compound of a village chief, I was thinking darkly about how he was enriching himself by exhorting tithes and extra work from each poor farmer in the village.

The chief turned to me and announced — with a happy sigh: “I have here grain from eight years! I think I frowned at him. I thought — but did not say “…well lucky you.”

Then he deflated my bubble of discontent, totally. Because the next thing he said was, “I have enough to feed the whole village now during the next drought!”

Suddenly, I saw him; really saw him. He wasn’t this schemer who had “power” over these poor struggling villagers. He was the focus of all their hopes to survive famine. He was their risk insurance strategy. This tired old guy, who, even as I watched, was fussing over insect damage in one granary and checking for signs of mold and moisture damage; this gruff, gray-haired granddad, was in fact laden with the responsibility and working his heart out to live up to it.

I went back to my tent and looked back over the previous weeks of notes from all these interviews with lineage elders and village chiefs and just had a good cry. I suddenly loved them all very much. It was a major revelation for me. I felt like Saul on the road to Damascus.

Many years after I left West Africa, archaeological evidence turned up from that same region, showing that drought did not interfere with the supply of millet available to villagers in the Sahel hundreds of years ago. The system is real and it was still working when I saw it in the 1980s.[xiii] That insurance system, so memorably exemplified by my conscientious village chief, worked.

It is not, therefore, coercive power but additional obligation to their community, that best defines what it means to be a “big man” in a tribal society. Lineage systems sent mutual responsibility up and down along either patrilineal or matrilineal lines. The term “first among equal” was embodied in lineage heads standing at the fulcrum where all risks are concentrated. In most cases, the “buck” stops at the house of the village chief.

Entrusted with careful management of communal surplus food stores, with projects like organizing communal fields to build up stocks after a famine, headman can become more than embodied insurance policies. They are often also instrumental in mobilizing task forces drawn from the whole village, to undertake ongoing cycles of forest clearance, the maintenance of roads, bridges, and irrigation channels. They tend to be agents of social control: hearing disputes between people and assigning penalties to miscreants. Most important of all, they prevent overuse of the commons. All of these duties falling on a few people in each community confers on them an organizational authority seldom seen among mobile hunter-gatherers.

Headmen, thus, may sometimes seem like rulers rather than public servants. But this is deceptive. For individual and households, risks arising from harvest failure, betrayal, interpersonal conflict, accident, fire, disease, or death; as well as for community-wide collective risks, of drought, epidemic disease, volcanic eruptions, severe storms, attacks, raids, and poaching, survival of the community may be down to the conscientiousness of a handful of people. No commercialized insurance companies need apply.

Unless made explicit, the critical contributions that institutions of traditional leadership make to community resilience can be underestimated. Indeed, absent such information, no development agency or government policy maker can be blamed for overlooking logic of communal risk aversion strategies.

Even local people find it hard to articulate this logic to outsiders: unlike the immediate benefits od food aid deliveries or windfall profits from selling elephant ivory or an orphaned baby ape, the long term advantages embodied in traditional political and kinship systems, in usufruct tenure systems, and in management of village commons, appear vaguely old-fashioned. Sometimes they might even be perceived as odious in curtailing individual profit-making opportunities. It is not always clear to people how the cost of such opportunities might be increased risk to everyone else. Risks due to conflicts between communities are also managed through a combination of diplomacy and occasional resort to violence. Tribal leadership has, historically, been instrumental in regulating warfare[xiv], a process that can result in long term regional prosperity.[xv]

Insofar as they used coercion, traditional tribal leaders enforced rules that permitted sustainable use of the communal resources. These consisted of the village land base, not just the small temporary clearings used for crops, but all the mosaic of secondary growth — the meadows, the shrubby areas where young pioneering trees were becoming established, the more mature forest, as well as the sacred groves of old growth forest.

The use of the commons was carefully monitored in direct proportion to the conscientious care of lineage heads and village chiefs. Over-use, whether by over-grazing, excessive hunting, excessive harvesting of trees (or their fruits), was discouraged by means of public shaming and fines. The conditions that Elinor Ostrom had discovered, which permitted collective management of the commons, were met.[xvi]

Until they are not… and it is then that negative trophic flows develop. Serious ecosystem collapse follows. It is rare in social science to see this process actually unfold in real time. I did; it still takes my breathe away. The village, in our study, where new technology and cash crops was being adopted the most rapidly was in the most ecological trouble.

Half of the village territory had been lost years earlier: a large area of forested land, part of which fell across this village’s territory, was declared an elephant sanctuary: essentially, a new national park. At first the villagers did not understand that they were now prohibited from clearing land there for new fields. They tole me that those who did do this were abuptly escorted out of the new park by soldiers summoned by the new crew of park authorities. The villagers had therefore lost access to a large part of their former “commons”. They were no longer permitted to clear land in these forests and this had serious consequences: they had to deal with a swift decline in soil fertility because their fallow period was abruptly halved. As crop productivity plummeted, many of these villagers took to chemical fertilizers like ducks to water. Since access to subsidized fertilizers and plough and draft animals was tied to the cash cropping of cotton, they also began to cultivate cotton for sale.

The year following a cotton crop, soil fertility was sufficiently augmented to produce a cereal crop. This offset the declines and reduced the rate of field enlargement but did not solve the problem, since more land overall was cleared due to the addition of cash cropping. Meanwhile, water tables were falling as more forest were cut down to make way for these crops. The appearance of incentives, to supply an almost infinite outside market, caused many younger households to devote more land to the production of cash crops and set less aside to contribute to communal stores.

Larger extended families, with the largest areas under cultivation, tended to have more of these “entrepreneurial” younger households. Since these larger families were frequently politically prominent, and lineage heads and village chiefs jointly authorized the land to be used by each family, poorer land — land cleared after only reaching the first stage of succession, was often left to the smaller families whose households had not “invested” in plows or fertilizers.. Headmen who tried to enforce the traditions were told — often by their own sons and nephews — that they were standing in the way of progress.

These “adopter” families were getting wealthier and more influential due to cash crops, and taking over more and more land. As can be expected, they preferred land that had recovered the longest, leaving less for smaller subsistence farmers. Older and smaller households lost out; as the risks of poor harvests on the exhausted soils increased, some even found they got more regular meals if they worked for larger farmers than if they risked farming on their own. In other words, a landless class was developing. Meanwhile, traditional usufruct tenure was giving way to inherited “farm tenure” where sons inherited farmland from their fathers. The next logical step would be private property

Local extension services considered this village a great success story.

This example from a small West African village highlights a set of interconnected processes. Increased effective population density, shortened fallow, soil fertility decline, the unfolding of the “tragedy of the commons, privatization of risk as well as property, the emergence of a poverty and landlessness coincided with a new “propertied” class who interests no longer aligned with community welfare… and all this happens as tipping points into negative flows result in an extractive slide toward extinction of the commons — and “wild” ecosystem collapse.

3. Discussion

I would like to propose the two related hypotheses:

1) Humans evolved as a keystone species. The oldest form of cultural ecology, based on a hunting and gathering economy, permitted humans to occupy many different ecosystems. This keystone aspect of the human niche possibly goes back at least 2 million years.

2) Humans use cultural transmission to maintain a cumulative set of practices, which generated positive trophic flows. These practices were embedded in ideological narratives about interconnectivity and relationship. The interface between the physical environment, and the species within it framed more than an ecosystem, it linked human intentionality and sacred meaning.

The keystone role, thus, was not just transmitted as a collective economic and organizational behavioral niche, but also as a conceptual, cognitive niche. It was an outcome of the living stream of culture, not just of human nature. So, more than in most species, humans are susceptible of ideological drift rationalizing the development of ecologically simplifying and destabilizing practices causing negative trophic flows and ultimately leading to demographic collapse.

It also means that the present wave of species extinction, plastics pollution, soil erosion, and climate change through human activity is not inevitable due to some species-specific tendency maladaptation; rather it is a misadventure of a cultural kind, and can be rectified by altering our ideas, practices, and technology. We don’t have to become post-human to fix our relationship to the planet.

3.1 Evolutionary trends in development

Lineage-based tribal societies, arguably, are organizational outcomes of the kinds of delayed return economies sometimes observed among hunter-gatherers. Such economies developed wherever harvestable surpluses of fish, game, or wild plant food were followed by a dry or cold season of greater scarcity. The organizational work involves, not only timely harvesting, but preparation of equipment, task forces for processing, building of storage facilities, and careful management of outlays over the lean season to make supplies last. In these activities, and in the social roles accorded to elders within kinship units, lineage based tribal organizations are a direct extension of cooperative risk sharing seen among mobile foragers; indeed, even the sustainable management of “the commons” in many cases reflects cosmologies derivative of the ecologically wise and benign animism of foragers.

For most people in both foraging and simple subsistence farming and herding economies, there was far greater risk associated with poor environmental management and abuse of human relationships, than with temporary individual misfortunes caused by illness, accident, or loss of material property. Food security resided in relationships of mutual trust and conscientiousness, assuring rights to receive help from a common pool of surplus, not in the ups and downs of crop production on each household plot. Significantly, too, it also resided in the sustainable management of the common land base, mot in the ability of each household to competitively maximize the exploitation of that commons.

In fact it clearly shows why both early colonial land clearance for agriculture and more recent logging and other extractive industries are so strongly resisted: these literally imperil the integration and sustainable survival of these low intensity land use economies. State-sponsored take-over of forested territory thus, essentially, sweeps the economy out from under the tribal and band level societies.

Diverting the flow of products from any region to benefit capital enterprises has continued long past “independence”, of course. In Africa, this is because new national elites are often scions, of families prominent in leadership of dominant chiefdoms, persons who have been educated abroad, and who today have both private and political investment in development enterprises, whether they are beef export industries, palm oil production, mining corporations, oil companies, firms logging for timber or pulp, agribusinesses, or even the tourism industry.

Forcible removal of whole minority communities, as well as assassination of any leaders who actively refuse to allow more invasive “development” projects, such as mines, oil fields, wholesale forest clearance, damming of rivers, and (of course) complete usurpation of traditional lands. In most of the “developing” world, this sets “westernized” elites, in each developing country, against less powerful tribal groups.

3.2 Food security and sustainable land use

Wild ecosystems, like open parkland savanna, like the Kalahari, and denser forests, like the one swept up into a new national park in Burkina Faso, may appear “under-utilized” or even as “wilderness” to an outsider advising the government on where to put a wildlife park. But they are often anything but that. Indeed everywhere we see “development” proceeding in rural areas today, even vast “wild” forests, jungles, steppes, and savannas bursting with wildlife, it is safe to assume that virtually all these landscapes are — or were until recently- managed for hundreds, even thousands of years by foragers, subsistence farmers, and nomadic pastoralists.[xvii]

Is it any wonder then, that all over the world indigenous people are rising up to defend the last of their landscapes and watersheds from dams, oil infrastructure, logging, mining, commercial agriculture, especially oil palm and soybeans, expanding into tropical forests today? Given the overwhelming military power deployed by such states, resistance has often proven futile; ecosystems go down like dominos.

3.2.1: The Ecological Imagination: implications for future demographic / migration/ urbanisation issues

One might ask why horticultural, pastoral and hunter-gatherer economies did not ALL overpopulate their landscapes and develop into agriculturally based states. Part of the answer to this is that social networks have always facilitated the movement of individuals — and families — away from dying ecosystems and economies at population hotspots. The human physical and psychological responses to stress, thus, often trigger dispersal away from landscapes before real damage is done. People are very sensitive to perceived increases in hardship and daily drudgery. They react to long hours and diminishing returns with higher levels of irritation and squabbling.

Hunter-gatherer mobility in fact appears to be calibrated by social factors, resulting in levels of land use intensity that forestall overhunting and over-harvesting. Similarly, I discovered that almost all of the villagers in the West African samples had many (often non overlapping) individual networks of kin and friends in many other villages, so they could move to a place with better conditions.

Decline in the availability of land, in the fertility of the soil, in the local wild biomass, and in water tables, therefore, generally caused out-migration as well. Out-migration, especially among the younger generation, can actually lead to the extinction of small farming communities. Then the abandoned landscape may gradually regenerate. In the Sahel, however, if water tables sink too far below the surface, natural regeneration time for forests appeared vastly prolonged; in some regions desertification was occurring.[i]

If people cannot leave, the result to increased tension is ideological transformation: a spiritual rhetoric rationalizing the need for renewal.[ii] The record of history and ethnography both suggest that the human mind tends to respond to stress by calling upon spiritual beliefs; even if these consist of nothing more profound than folk statistics: “what goes around, comes around” or “it’s Karma!” Daniel Kahneman’s insight into the lower energy costs of “fast thinking” rather than engaging in data collection and the testing of hypotheses (slow thinking) suggest that people have evolved to react quickly to immediate problems on the basis of a kind of received wisdom lodged in collectively believed aphorisms and plausible just-so stories. It takes far less energy to initially place causality in the realm of the social and even the “superstitious”, rather than to engage in the harder work of finding it in the mundane analysis of the material world. Fast thinking is, moreover, often based on a faulty and superficial correlational bias, which misconstrues causality; it may even be based on magical thinking.

Cargo cults, ruinous property destruction, acts of mass suicide, and deliberate and horrific massacres, as described by Samuel Hearn between Dene and Inuit in the Canadian Arctic, were all based on magical thinking. These illustrate the range of collective responses humans are capable of in response to inescapable stress. Scapegoating, witch burning, mob lynching, massacres, genocide, war: all are heavy and bitter lessons about a dark and frightening side of human nature.

We need to learn more about ideologically motivated evil: about how people can be motivated by absolute conviction that whole ethnic or religious minorities, or whole classes of people must be suppressed or even killed in order to restore order and prosperity. This is such a widespread phenomenon that just contemplating a list of groups and organizations that have at various times been targeted by national governments, mobs, and/or conspiracy theories is tantamount to recent world history: at various times members of all of the following have been persecuted: various religious groups (“Pagans” and “witches”, Jews, Muslims, Catholics) various political groups (Jacobians, Communists, Al Quaeda, ISIS, “infidels”, IRA, Bader-Mynhoff, “FLQ) and even some economically labeled categories (aristocrats, landowners, capitalists, and “welfare queens”). In most cases attempts were made to rally support to defeat or even to annihilate people in the denigrated category: for the “good” of the nation, the fruition of a divine plan, preservation of a superior race, or redress of some supernatural imbalance. Conspiracy ideation can clearly take hold of individuals as well as groups; terrorism often begins with the conscription by conversion of one person at a time, through networks.

No wonder so many people find comfort in beliefs that evil springs from possession by “the forces of darkness”. No wonder we wrestle with the implications of evolution. If we were not deliberately created with deeply evil side to our nature, to battle our way through life, then why does this capacity for merciless and murderous rage exist in us? Hence the attractiveness of this idea: humans actually evolved with inter-personal and inter-group competition, with aggression, murder, genocide, and war. It is in our biology!

Well, yes… and no. It is certainly biology, but is not war that shaped it. We humans inhabit, not just a physical and collective landscape, but also a collective mindscape. Our cognitive niches not just symbolic, they are also conceptual. While, like many other species, we become aggressive in response to stress, we hyper-cooperatively share thoughts, including whole bodies of explanatory thought. And some of the explanations are wildly imaginative.

Religion, by its very nature, is wildly imaginative. Story telling dominates, and regularly features accounts of actual contacts and conversations between supernatural beings and ordinary humans. Mythology incorporates such elements, often incorporating divine motivation to the foundations of whole ethnic groups, states, and empires. Mythology and religion thus operate to create collective mindscapes that bond people together by orchestrating similar individual reactions to stressful events. In state societies, many persons grow up inhabiting a conceptual mindscape where superiority of numbers and weaponry represent investment in security.

Given this logic, it has often been asserted that modern humans replaced “archaic” subhuman species by deliberate violent genocide; and that tribal agro-pastoralists dispatched hunter-gatherers the same way. After all, we know how brutally states replaced tribal societies in the recent and earlier historic past, so it apparently seemed logical to assume that violent conflicts and genocide are aspects of human nature.

The approaches taken by philosophers and scientists specifically interested in human revolution and behavior, however, have undergone a long-lasting and acrimonious split over this issue. While Thomas Hobbes account of a human nature based in self-interested cooperation — the “social contract” — remains central to much political philosophy, but his other ideas about human nature rested on a poor understanding of human evolutionary past. Not only Hobbes, but also Hume, Descartes, and Rousseau, even went so far is to assume a each individual to be a blank slate upon which the collective could write. And what it wrote, in “primitive” times before the formation of the state — before the “social contract” — was either a miserable (Hobbes) or a noble but savage (Rousseau) existence.

Savagery, and selfishness were, however, always baked into these models. It is long been past time that a mindscape, always seeking causality in violent competition, was over-turned. In biology, the model of “nature red in tooth and claw” has gradually given way to more sophisticated models that integrate ecological science.

In microbiology and wildlife biology, every time some ecology was stirred into the data mix, there has been a major shift.

Ecological concepts like symbiosis led to the recognition that cellular “energy powerhouses” — mitochondria — in the cells of complex plants and animals were bacterial organisms within each cell, not actually normally occurring organelles. In forestry there is a major revolution occurring today, as research reveals the complex interactions between trees, and also among tree roots and fungal mycelium in transporting nutrients and information throughout whole forest ecosystems.

As illustrated by the examples of keystone species and trophic flows given at the start of this essay, models in wildlife ecology are now dominated by a consensus that views each species in terms of how it influences its entire ecosystem. Niches are not limited to food getting and nesting activities, but as whole systems of interaction that can stabilize — or destabilize — whole ecosystems, and affect the fate of a myriad of other species. If the presence or absence of a specific organism can alter the trophic flows throughout a whole ecological system, then, we may have seriously under-estimated the evolutionary forces involved in the emergence or extinction, of any one species. Especially our own: in fact, even more critically, our genus Homo.

Data emerging from decades of research, indeed, no longer supports mass genocide to explain the disappearance of Neanderthals and other “archaic” humans. Models based on interbreeding, on general assimilation of small populations by wave upon wave of incoming migrants, and possibly, of increased mortality due to introduced diseases to which only limited immunity had time to develop, all feature in possible scenarios more plausible than extermination.

Similarly, the replacement of hunting and gathering by “Neolithic” economies today incorporate prolonged contact, exchanges of materials and labor, intermarriage, and eventual replacement, often under more benign conditions of competitive exclusion of economic options rather than the deaths of entire populations of human beings. At the interface between hunters and gatherers and farmers in the Kalahari, I was impressed by the environmental deterioration — mostly due to livestock grazing pressure, but also due to concentrated hunting and logging by the more sedentary farming populations, which lowered the carrying capacity of these areas and made it impossible for hunter-gatherers to persist there unless they participated in that encroaching economic system.

As long as they had intact wild ecosystems on sufficient land base, the at least some proportion of Kua could opt to remain within a purely hunter-gatherer economy; others could do this at least part of the year. But in the Kalahari, as may have been the case throughout much of Eurasia, people who tended to settle on major water points with good supplies of forest timber for building, and good bottom land intensified their land use. This seems to have been typical of the period before there was any actual domestication of plants and animals, the so-called Mesolithic.

Domestication of many species seems, upon incorporating an ecological model, to been an emergent process arising from intensified management of desired species within a more constrained land use pattern.

Much of what follows from that point was the gradual removal of vital components supporting hunter-gatherer economies. As wild biomass and diversity diminished, reliance on a small portfolio of domesticated species intensified. The stability of early farming economies might even have been dependent for a long time on their co-existence and seasonal overlap with viable forager economies.

It is not clear when the last predominantly hunter-gatherer systems vanished from the centers of domestication. Attempts to develop stable cultural ecologies based on horticulture in these regions seem to have met repeatedly with overpopulation and collapse the early Neolithic[iii]. Is it possible that the onset of ecological degradation and internal strife drove break-away lineages to migrate outward from their cultural heartlands, arriving as newcomers into regions held and managed by foragers, not as conquerors but as petitioners with goods and innovations to offer in exchange for a small place to grow food?

Complex states with internal socio-economic stratification eventually developed around centers of domestication. Might their technological and organizational development have offset the losses and increased conflict resulting from negative trophic flows? It is certain that one strategy would be the extension of land under cultivation — increasing sizes of fields, as was done in our West African study village — and increasing the distances from which food could be transported to augment food supply to the most densely populated centers.[iv]

Tribal organizations have features that let their leaders bump up their coercive powers by means of something called “segmentary opposition”[v] via lineage-based kinship loyalty. They can increase the size of their army in direct response to the opposing forces. Where this develops into a whole warfare complex, it can escalate into a systematic plundering of other communities who lack the same level of military discipline and often have fewer lethal weapons than farm implements.

Communities band together for mutual protection as well as plunder, of course.

“Intense warfare is the evolutionary driver of large complex societies, according to new research from a trans-disciplinary team at the University of Connecticut, the University of Exeter in England, and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS). The study appears this week as an open-access article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences..( )…The study’s cultural evolutionary model predicts where and when the largest-scale complex societies arose in human history. Simulated within a realistic landscape of the Afro-Eurasian landmass during 1,500 BCE to 1,500 CE, the mathematical model was tested against the historical record. During the time period, horse-related military innovations, such as chariots and cavalry, dominated warfare within Afro-Eurasia. Geography also mattered, as nomads living in the Eurasian Steppe influenced nearby agrarian societies, thereby spreading intense forms of offensive warfare out from the steppe belt…. The study focuses on the interaction of ecology and geography as well as the spread of military innovations and predicts that selection for ultra-social institutions that allow for cooperation in huge groups of genetically unrelated individuals and large-scale complex states, is greater where warfare is more intense.” [vi]

Where warfare is more intense it takes a lot more organizational planning and tactics to win, and so classes of people who have the time and resources to invest in the best training and weapons tend to become entrenched as a ruling class.

Some of the most powerful even get into what are, essentially, protection rackets. Leadership based on rank attained through verifiable history of trust-worthy character gives way, under such conditions, to leadership derived from ascribed rank (privilege) and public relations announcements, regularly issued from atop a pyramid created and sustained by social and economic inequality. And elites have been known to protect their own positions before offering support for generalized social welfare. The environment is even further from their interests.

The spotlight, thereafter, has been less on community welfare and more on patriotic identification with divinely sanctioned state and its heroic leaders. The developing military and political elite — whether originating in a pastoral or an agricultural economy, stars in a new spectacle. A supporting cast of specialist military, ceremonial, and business classes cluster, well guarded, in fortified staging areas for the pageantry of superior power. These locations often feature spectacular sets, easily identified, in archaeological and historical contexts, by their impressive architecture and monuments.

Since states and empires — the ultimate “ultra-social” cultural forms that have so far been achieved — support their populations by extracting the local surplus to support activities nonproductive of food and water, states do not just to emerge out of intense warfare, they also to impose internal bans on warfare, murder, witch-hunts, and banditry. They tend to disarm the locals, and define people in non-military activities as civilians.

Once order and authority is enforced, local systems of agriculture and industry can operate with minimal disruption from banditry and civil disturbance, becoming reliable sources in the syphoning of materials toward the rapacious center.

As did all empires throughout history, European nations were able to put off collapse over the past 500 years by colonization (progressively usurping the energy and diversity) of those human societies that were still generating positive trophic flows. No matter where state systems and empires extend their political control, local economies subjected to them tend to push carrying capacity to the limit. Not infrequently, local wild ecosystems disintegrate under the avalanche of negative trophic flows.

No state-level society has so far been able to restore positive trophic flows. Instead states have gotten extremely effective in cost-effective strategies in co-opting local leaders into overcoming any indigenous resistance to resource extraction. We see a modern example of this in the burning of Indonesian forests to clear them for palm oil production, and the plight of the tribal people worldwide as logging, mining, oil drilling, fracking, and commercial agribusinesses encroach the lands remaining to them.

This colonizing and flipping of whole ecological systems from positive to negative flows is ongoing.

Those of us, who have been caught up in this shift, kidded ourselves for millennia about how much better life was in a civilized society, compared to the life of savages (in hunter-gatherer bands) or barbarians (slash and burn horticultural or pastoral tribes). Our monumental buildings, our ploughs and wheels, our gods and weapons, and above all written records and the rule of law, all reassured us that we were the vanguard, the crème-de-la-crème, the “cutting edge” of human evolutionary progress.

We can be forgiven for this hubris. Cultures are to human beings as water is to fish… and we tend not to be aware of cultural change cumulating over time. Each tiny step along the way, each small “improvement” occurred due to somebody solving some problem. Problems varied: some arose with the food or water supply, with finding building materials, with patching leaky roofs or pipes, with the stench and disease attendant to life in settled villages and towns; some arose with transport and exchange of more and more goods over longer and longer distances, others with squabbles over internal rights: to log, to cultivate, to hunt, to graze, to sleep, to raise children, or to just go somewhere; and others arose due to squabbles between whole communities, even whole states.

All solutions, whether the invention of ploughs, of wheels, and sailing boats, or the development of legal institutions or the “art” of war; all these are often simply perceived as the natural progression of humanity through “”stages” to some future that will be better than merely living as a creature among the rest of the natural world.
The development, of medicine, of astronomy, of engineering feats, and of sciences, has thus all orchestrated a confident mythology: that human ingenuity can solve every problem.

We see ourselves almost free of nature’s constraints: the special species, the creature endowed with the intelligence to take us on endless journeys of discovery — we will explore the solar system, and then the galaxy and finally the infinite universe. Our popular culture today is saturated with this message. Science fiction reeks of it.

Some of our brightest minds continue, to this day, to tell us that we become better angels, live ever longer, get ever richer, healthier, and more literate due to the civilizing influences of our complex economies and social institutions. We have entered, not just the industrial age, but the space age! Doesn’t everyone believe that it is human nature to be “barbaric” until exposed to the “civilizing influences” of the Leviathan?[vii]

I wonder if the truth might actually be stranger. We have often needed to believe in evil. That an evil lurks within human nature; to believe that it took civilization to tame it. We often needed, therefore, to incorporate dark violence into evolved human motivations; to see ourselves as the survivors of a million years of interpersonal brutality, competition, betrayal, and treachery; and of mob violence. We have often needed to explain the coercive, and often collective, imposition of injustice and pain, by the strong on the vulnerable: the young, the old, the defeated enemy, and the female.

Perhaps we have even needed to believe that men just “naturally” always had coercive authority over weaker persons, and could dispose them as bargaining chips in trade, or for peace with other men; until feminists, liberals, and civil rights activists fought to overturn this and bring about enlightened democracies.

Meanwhile, some of us don’t believe any of that any more. Some of us never did. Living among savages, we found them far from savage. Living among barbarians, we found them merely …human like ourselves.[viii]

Some of us have come to believe that a person need not be literate to be thoughtful. We have come to believe that a man does not require civilization to develop a compassionate and generous heart. We have seen that men and women can treat one another respectfully without state laws to enforce equal rights.

The lessons of ethnography, history, and archaeology suggest, to some of us, that in many times and places people have preferred negotiation to fighting, have preferred diplomacy to continual war, have preferred an egalitarian ethic over the power to exploit and dehumanize.

Some of us have even dared to say that there were benefits to rational discourse long before the evolution of states; very possibly, long before we became Homo sapiens; just as empathy, grief, love, passion for justice, and the need for the loyalty of intimate companions is far older than humanity, and even, older than Hominidae, if we are seriously consider the latest evidence from primatology and study of other social animals.

Have many of us, today, slipped into ignorance of our most ancient intuitions about our keystone role? Yes. Result: economists’ blind spots; infinite growth on a finite planet; “externalities”; the “Invisible Hand”; markets arising out of “barter” economies[ix]; “debt” as the driver of economic growth; Neoliberal apologists; and even some over-optimistic statisticians.

Have many of us, throughout recent history, either accepted — or fearfully catered to — the paradigms and misconceptions of a powerful elite who — unless one adheres to conspiracy theories suggesting they are all sociopaths — often cannot see past their own self-affirmation fallacies? Yes. Result: elitism; eugenics; hoards of sycophants; even cynical denial-oriented “think-tanks”.

Have some of us, throughout recent history, gone so far as to declare the wealthy and powerful demographic groups on this planet to be the intellectually superior product of the powerful evolutionary forces of the past 10,000 years? Yes. Result: racism; imperialism; creation of a subculture of mercilessly obedient militarism and bureaucracy.

We sincerely embody our mindscapes. Most of this mythology has crept into our minds gradually over historical timescales. Active myth-building has been perpetrated by those who literally could not see the unimaginable injustice done to whole peoples; of the damage done to vulnerable infants and children by the stress of racism, poverty, malnutrition, toxic pollution; of the damaging ecological consequences of building dams and roads, of burning fossil fuels, of vast islands of plastic and other garbage swirling in the middle of oceans, and of increasing shortages of safe fresh water, of the exponential catastrophe of species extinction; and of global climate change. This exercise in tragedy has been vastly accelerated by means of an industrial economy, and is now exponential.

It would be infinitely worse if we merely sought to exonerate our civilization, while fully aware of its effect on the rest of humanity and on the innocent living planet. I don’t believe it. There is no evidence that we are such an evil and selfish species, or that elites are all psychopaths. The evil that unfolds really is banal; a function of belief and imaginative conceptualizations that distort perception.

4. Conclusions

Since the Enlightenment, previous intuitions and old folk science about the nature of the material universe were transformed through the alchemy of tools like microscopes, telescopes, statistics, and adherence to a more standardized methodical system for enlarging knowledge.

Old explanatory concepts were refined and tested. Indeed, they were sometimes tested to destruction. Models that are a better fit with measurable reality replaced them. Whether the instruments of “modern” science interrogated models about the origins and mechanisms of the solar system, of planetary climate, of the origins and nature of life, or of human society, the work has frequently and literally challenged, and slowly changed, our understanding of reality.

It has never been easy; occasionally it has been lethal, for the scientists who have communicated these discoveries and insights.
Resistance to new conceptualizations of our place in the universe and in nature is understandable: old stories are religiously framed, locking origin stories, morality, and the meaning of every individual life, into dogmas at the root of identity politics even today. Identity matters to people.

Overturning religious dogma leads to dismay and even black despair. And not all such despair is warranted. Is it really so terrible that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun? That human emotions and sins do not actually cause epidemics, bad weather, and earthquakes? That the universe, the earth, living things, and humans are not products of a six-day divine magic act, but rather arose due to processes infinitely more mysterious and unintentional? Is it really so outrageous to accept the discovery that humans are animals, sharing most of their DNA with other life forms?

This process continues, and in the social sciences, as elsewhere, there continues to be strong resistance to changes in fundamental concepts.

Why is it upsetting to learn that differences — in human head shape, skin color, or hair texture — do not reflect distance from an apelike ancestor? Who is threatened when ecological and cultural processes are deemed more plausible explanations, than eighteenth century notions about increased intellectual capacity, for the domestication of plants and animals, for invention of wheels, and iron-working? Who gets upset when demographic and ecological variables assume greater salience in explaining the rise of civilization than does speculation about a more cooperative phenotype or a shift to a higher level of consciousness due to literacy?

Some people do get upset. People get politicized when confronted with major challenges to their worldview, even when it does not involve challenges to religious dogma. They see it as a threat to their own identity, and it hardly matters what the scientific evidence shows. Conversely, in assimilating the research, in achieving better understanding our own history, it is easy to fall into reverse romanticism. Research among modern day hunter-gatherers disproves the previous stereotypes characterized by brevity, hardship, violence, and a constant struggle to find enough food, but does the demolition of such previous negative stereotypes necessarily require that we depreciate either farming or civilization?


4.1 Outlook on Future

Certainly there are serious drawbacks to socio-economic inequality: a very tiny proportion of all humanity presently luxuriates in almost incalculable assets while millions starve. The equivalent of a passenger jet full of people now “own” most of the planet. They are enabled by a co-dependent corporate, financial, political, and military subculture.

However, there are also some positive statistical trends demonstrable as the globalization of the industrial economy proceeded, especially in the last century: increasing numbers of democratic governments, declining overall rates of violence and war, improved life expectancy, and rising average monitory income.

4.1.1 Towards positive ecological flows

Acceptance of what science reveals, about the impact of civilizations on ecosystems, need not descend to where the data does not follow: no, humans are not a “plague” species that always destroys mega-fauna, let alone ecosystems. This kind of hyperbole simply makes the unbearable incomprehensible.

The fate of our species is not sealed by anything particularly rapacious in our human nature. To say that humans are inherently selfish, ecologically destructive, and warlike, is unfair to those who have spent lifetimes in the service of their communities, striving to save endangered species, fighting to preserve wild places, doing research into ecological systems, research into the dynamics of social behavior in a multitude of species, including humans.

If our view of humanity is so dark, does this not do a disservice to the remaining indigenous cultures who still see value in positive trophic flows[x]. How can we reconcile the sacrifices of Virunga rangers, in trying to save the remaining gorillas in the park, with a view of human nature so driven to violence and self-interest? We also do a disservice to all those who urgently report on species extinction rates, as do the authors of the report at the beginning of this essay, as well as to those who question our current farming system[xi] and strive to develop more ecologically sound ones[xii], those who are moved to replant forests, those who bring endangered species back from the brink, those who fight to save oceans, coral reefs, wetlands and wilderness.[xiii] Why not learn from the eco-builders; let them all help to save the world?

We need cultural ecologies, not mere economies.

It is not enough, at this point in history, to return our economies and market forces to the service of our general social welfare, as Polanyi yearned. We also need to get our economies back to generating positive trophic flows, and if humans generally managed this in the past, then there is not reason to assume it cannot also be done in the future. Thus, the service of general social welfare is not just an economic issue internal to human societies: at this point, when our species exceeds the carrying capacity of the entire planet every year, our peril is not just economic, it is existential.

A lot of people today use sustainability in the same breath with “organic” or “natural” or “good for the environment” as if these are merely politically correct things for liberal activists and left-leaning intellectual academics to worry about. These are not “causes” within human societies, like women’s liberation or civil rights.

Our utter dependence on the physical realities of life-support on this planet is not a political issue. The tragedy of the commons is now planet wide. If we do not find a way back to our keystone role, if we do not reverse the runaway greenhouse effect, if we cannot dismantle the industrial economy, then we will reap the whirlwind: the unimaginable power of natural processes of will do it for us, and the scale of the losses to all life on this planet will be far greater.

All that is necessary is political will. Throughout history people have fought the hubris of elites and won, people all over the world have died to see justice prevail over corrupt oligarchies, they have sacrificed and struggled to make a world fit for all our children to live in.[xiv] Now the climate, and the survival of a hundred million species, is at stake. It is not just an issue: it is THE issue.

Civilization is clearly a cultural system that externalizes the risks of collapse by imposing them on progressively more distant ecosystems and their inhabitants, including less destructive cultural ecologies. Humanity faces the challenge now of undoing this deadly pattern. If we fail, we will not survive, nor will many of our fellow travellers on planet Earth. Someone I took some classes with at the University of Toronto, who was a nephew of Carl Polanyi, apparently said a thing really relevant at this point: ”…change is hard” he said, “at the beginning, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end.” Carl Polanyi’s work is well summarized in the following slide show: https://www.slideshare.net/Stepscentre/polanyi-dialogue-session-for-resilience-2014-conference-final-7-may-14

When we succeed it is possible, do you think, that we will eventually come to consider that it is our journey together that is sacred?

References

[i] African Neolithic Populations Helped Create Sahara Desert, Research Suggests | Archaeology | Sci-News.com http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/african-neolithic-populations-sahara-desert-04702.html#.WM1W6br9q8o.facebook

[ii] http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2013/09/politics-apocalypse

[iii] European Neolithic societies showed early warning signals of population collapse http://www.pnas.org/content/113/35/9751.full

[iv] “…This study sheds light on the agricultural economy that underpinned the emergence of the first urban centres in northern Mesopotamia. Using δ13C and δ15N values of crop remains from the sites of Tell Sabi Abyad, Tell Zeidan, Hamoukar, Tell Brak and Tell Leilan (6500–2000 cal BC), we reveal that labour-intensive practices such as manuring/middening and water management formed an integral part of the agricultural strategy from the seventh millennium BC. Increased agricultural production to support growing urban populations was achieved by cultivation of larger areas of land, entailing lower manure/midden inputs per unit area — extensification. Our findings paint a nuanced picture of the role of agricultural production in new forms of political centralization. The shift towards lower-input farming most plausibly developed gradually at a household level, but the increased importance of land-based wealth constituted a key potential source of political power, providing the possibility for greater bureaucratic control and contributing to the wider societal changes that accompanied urbanization…” Styring et. al. “Isotope evidence for agricultural extensification reveals how the world’s first cities were fed” Nature Plants 3, Article number: 17076 (2017) doi:10.1038/nplants.2017.76
https://www.nature.com/articles/nplants201776

[v] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2844433?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0021909616650981

[vi] See: Math explains history: Simulation accurately captures the evolution of ancient complex societies
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130923155538.htm

Harvey Whitehouse, Jonathan Jong, Michael D. Buhrmester, Ángel Gómez, Brock Bastian, Christopher M. Kavanagh, Martha Newson, Miriam Matthews, Jonathan A. Lanman, Ryan McKay & Sergey Gavrilets: “The evolution of extreme cooperation via shared dysphoric experiences:” Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 44292 (2017) doi:10.1038/srep4429 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep44292

[vii] Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil — commonly referred to as Leviathan — is a book written by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and published in 1651 (revised Latin edition 1668).[1][3] Its name derives from the biblical Leviathan. The work concerns the structure of society and legitimate government, and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory.[4] Leviathan ranks as a classic western work on statecraft comparable to Machiavelli’s The Prince. Written during the English Civil War (1642–1651), Leviathan argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign. Hobbes wrote that civil war and the brute situation of a state of nature (“the war of all against all”) could only be avoided by strong, undivided government.

[viii] By 1945, American anthropologist George Murdock had developed an atlas of ethnographic information, and listed items all modern cultures have in common. Murdock`s list of cultural universalities in modern humans:

Athletic sports, bodily adornment, burial ceremonies, calendar, cleanliness training, community organization, cooking, cooperative labour, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labour, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethno-botany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire-making, folklore, food taboos, games, gestures, gift-giving, government, greetings, hairstyles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation (gain the favour of supernatural beings), puberty customs, religious rituals, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool-making, trade, visiting, weather watching and weaving.

[ix] Ilana Strauss, The Myth of the Barter Economy: Adam Smith said that quid-pro-quo exchange systems preceded economies based on currency, but there’s no evidence that he was right FEB 26, 2016 The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-society-myth/471051/#article-comments

[x] Management of the commons among Alaskan hunter-gatherers.
“Back in 1934, Savoonga and Gambell set their own quotas to keep their food source from being wiped out, said Kava, a current tribal leader. Modern rifles and, later, Lund skiffs were highly effective compared to harpoons and skin boats, he said.

A cap of four walruses per boat per trip was reinstated in 2010 under new tribal ordinances. (Savoonga recently raised the limit from four to six adult walruses because of how hard hunting has become with diminished sea ice.)

“You can make another trip for four more,” say handwritten signs with a drawing of a walrus posted in both Gambell and Savoonga.

When aluminum boats became prevalent, suddenly many more men were walrus hunters and some young, inexperienced captains became too focused on tusks, not meat, Kava said. They were forgetting elders’ guidance.

“The forefathers come up with quota,” Kava said. “We’re like a manager for our food, the subsistence way of life.”” https://www.adn.com/features/alaska-news/rural-alaska/2017/05/27/st-lawrence-island-tribal-groups-tried-to-protect-walruses-now-the-animal-they-rely-on-faces-a-threat-they-cannot-control/

[xi] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-40166313?SThisFB David Gregory-Kumar Science, (Environment & Rural Affairs Correspondent ) “Does ploughing actually damage soils and crops?” BBC; see also: http://www.soultonhall.co.uk/news/27/no-till-biome-experiment-.htm

[xii] See also techniques such as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI):
Stoop, W.A., Uphoff, N. and Kassam, A. (2002) A review of agricultural research issues raised by the system of rice intensification (SRI) from Madagascar: Opportunities for improving farming systems for resource-poor farmers. Agricultural Systems, 71, 249–274. doi:10.1016/S0308–521X(01)00070–1
Abstract

The “system of rice intensification” (SRI) that evolved in the 1980s and 1990s in Madagascar permits resource-limited farmers to realise yields of up to 15 t of paddy/hectare on infertile soils, with greatly reduced rates of irrigation and without external inputs. This paper reviews the plant physiological and bio-ecological factors associated with agronomic practices that could explain the extraordinary yields in terms of synergies resulting from the judicious management of the major crop production factors: time, space, water, plant nutrients and labour. The findings underscore the importance of integrated and interdisciplinary research, combining strategic and adaptive (on-farm participatory) approaches that explore and link bio-physical and socio-economic factors in crop production. Such approaches would permit to unlock currently untapped production potentials of rice and other major cereal grain crops, without extra costs to farmers or to the environment.

(PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222697736_A_review_of_agricultural_research_issues_raised_by_the_system_of_rice_intensification_SRI_from_Madagascar_Opportunities_for_improving_farming_systems_for_resource-poor_farmers [accessed Jun 15, 2017].

SRI is being adapted at various institutes such as the project at Wageningen University https://www.wur.nl/en/show/The-Evolution-of-SRI-as-a-SocioTechnical-Phenomenon.htm, at
IRRI http://irri.org/news/hot-topics/system-of-rice-intensification-sri; and at
Cornell University http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu/aboutsri/methods/index.html

[xiii] “…While indigenous values, beliefs and practices are as diverse as indigenous people themselves, they find common roots in a relationship to land and water radically different from the notion of property. For indigenous people, land and water are regarded as sacred, living relatives, ancestors, places of origin or any combination of the above.

My own, Tsq’escenemc Secwepemc people, for example, express these views daily through our words and place names. Both the word Secwepemc, which is the name of our nation, and Tsq’escenemc, the name of our community, contain the suffix emc, which has multiple uses and translations, including person, the people, land, ground or soil, and even to milk or to nurse.

Versions of this suffix, which are common to all Salish languages, derive from the proto-Salish word tmícw, which means world, dirt, nature, earth, land and spirit in many Salish languages….that the people are of the land and the land is of the people. These kindred spirits are alive and inseparable.

Indigenous epistemologies were all but eliminated by colonization. British and American empires dispossessed indigenous people of their lands in the name of property and productivity…” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/27/western-idea-private-property-flawed-indigenous-peoples-have-it-right#comment-95588211,

[xiv] This list of recommendations will be shocking to some, but it is not as though our current industrial economy is salvageable in any case. We can do this. We have the tools: we know how to restore soil ecosystems, support nutrient recycling and detoxification of water and soils, “re-wild” keystone species, save endangered species, plant trees, restore forests by succession, stop clear cut logging; we also know a thing or two about how to encourage permaculture, agro-forestry, gardening, farmers’ markets, backyard chickens, and bicycles.

We know that over-population and constant high stress levels are not our friends. We how to reduce poverty and injustice: how to educate women (and men), make heath care and family planning available to everyone, support attachment parenting, reduce violence, end homelessness, decriminalize psycho-reactive drug use, treat addiction medically, and guarantee annual income. We are getting better at encouraging compassion and tolerance, and at exposing and restraining the self-affirmation fallacies and corruption that often characterize elites. And we even know that aggressive war can be criminalized, although it is hard to make that stick.

We learned some lessons from the struggle to severely regulate or ban asbestos, lead in paint and pipes and gasoline, use of tobacco, thalidomide, and DDT. So let us use these lessons to severely regulate or ban toxic chemicals in food production and commercial forestry.

Let us dismantle, finally, the economic incentives that make it profitable for a tiny class of wealthy people to further enrich themselves through investment in industrial mining, mono-cropping, palm oil production, animal feeding operations, fishing fleets, rural real estate development, road building, dam building, oil pipelines, predator control, “sport hunting”, “adventure tourism”, cruise ships, air travel, and, eventually, production and use of internal combustion engines for war and trade.

[i] Tim Newbold, Lawrence N. Hudson, Andrew P. Arnell, Sara Contu, Adriana De Palma, Simon Ferrier, Samantha L. L. Hill, Andrew J. Hoskins, Igor Lysenko, Helen R. P. Phillips, Victoria J. Burton, Charlotte W. T. Chng, Susan Emerson, Di Gao, Gwilym Pask-Hale, Jon Hutton, Martin Jung, Katia Sanchez-Ortiz, Benno I. Simmons, Sarah Whitmee, Hanbin Zhang, Jörn P. W. Scharlemann, Andy Purvis. Has land use pushed terrestrial biodiversity beyond the planetary boundary? A global assessment. Science, 2016 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf2201

[ii] http://bigthink.com/videos/edward-o-wilson-on-eusociality

[iii] Wilson, Edward O.; Bert Hölldobler (20 September 2005). “Eusociality: Origin and Consequences”. PNAS. 102 (38): 13367–13371. doi:10.1073/pnas.0505858102. PMC 1224642 . PMID 16157878.

[iv] Huxel, Gary R., and Kevin McCann. “Food Web Stability: The Influence of Trophic Flows across Habitats.” The American Naturalist 152, no. 3 (1998): 460–69. doi:10.1086/28618

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/286182?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Marta Colla, , , Isabel Palomeraa, , Sergi Tudelab, , Francesc Sardàa “Trophic flows, ecosystem structure and fishing impacts in the South Catalan Sea, Northwestern Mediterranean” Journal of Marine Systems Volume 59, Issues 1–2 Journal of Marine Systems, Volume 59, Issues 1–2, January 2006, Pages 63–96

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmarsys.2005.09.001

Simone Libralato, Villy Christensen, Daniel Pauly “A method for identifying keystone species in food web models”

Original Research Article Ecological Modelling, Volume 195, Issues 3–4, 15 June 2006, Pages 153–171

Jeong-Ho Han, Hema K. Kumar, Jae Hoon Lee, Chang-Ik Zhang, Se-Wha Kim, Jung-Ho Lee, Sang Don Kim, Kwang-Guk An

“Integrative trophic network assessments of a lentic ecosystem by key ecological approaches of water chemistry, trophic guilds, and ecosystem health assessments along with an ECOPATH model”

Original Research Article Ecological Modelling, Volume 222, Issue 19, 10 October 2011, Pages 3457–3472

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/keystone-species/

[v] Twomey, T. (2013). The Cognitive Implications of Controlled Fire Use by Early Humans. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 23(1), 113–128. doi:10.1017/S0959774313000085 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8833120&fileId=S0959774313000085

Francesco Berna, Paul Goldberg, Liora Kolska Horwitz, James Brink, Sharon Holt, Marion Bamford, and Michael Chazan; “Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa”

PNAS 2012 109 (20) E1215–E1220; published ahead of print April 2, 2012, doi:10.1073/pnas.1117620109
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/20/E1215.abstract

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/human-evolution/news/controlled-fire-cueva-negra-southern-spain-june-2016

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080430767042030

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004724840700084X

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10814-013-9069-x

http://hol.sagepub.com/content/6/4/481.citation

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24073811

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-early-settlers-rapidly-zealand-forests.html

http://oro.open.ac.uk/46319/

[vi] https://www.kcet.org/shows/tending-the-wild/what-happens-when-native-people-lose-their-traditional-foods

[vii] The Myth of the Virgin Rainforest (Karen Coates) Research exploring Borneo’s past and present illuminates the tangled relationship that has existed between humans and the rainforest for millennia. In Sapiens/ 21 APR 2016
http://www.sapiens.org/culture/the-myth-of-the-virgin-rainforest/

[viii] The fact that such forms of forest management are good for ecosystem management, preventing devastating wildfires and augmenting species diversity, has also been shown by researchers in conservation sciences, See Labrière N, Laumonier Y, Locatelli B, Vieilledent G, Comptour M (2015) Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity in a Rapidly Transforming Landscape in Northern Borneo. PLoS ONE 10(10): e0140423. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0140423 and this research was cited in a blog, stating
“It’s long been stigmatized, blamed for destroying forests and releasing greenhouse gases. But, when done properly, shifting cultivation can create natural ecosystems with high biodiversity, rich carbon stocks and low soil erosion. The catch? It needs to be practiced over a large area to allow different plots of land to go through the cycle from crop to fallow, to young forest, to secondary forest. And it takes time.This is what researchers discovered in a recent study that compared the level of biodiversity and ecosystem services in the traditional forest–swidden agriculture system of Northern Borneo with other land uses, such as natural forest and monoculture plantations.” http://blog.cifor.org/40099/slash-and-burn-works-given-time-and-space?fnl=en

David B. Lindenmayer, William F. Laurance A history of hubris — Cautionary lessons in ecologically sustainable forest management Review Article Biological Conservation, Volume 151, Issue 1, July 2012, Pages 11–16

[ix] https://permacultureapprentice.com/building-soil/

[x] I = stage one (weed invasion, grasses, small herbaceous plants, pioneering shrubs
II = stage two (pioneering tree species dominate forested landscape)
III = stage three (seedlings of climax species appear in forest)
IV = stage four (mixed pioneering and climax forest)
V = stage five (forest dominated by climax species of trees) Note that this stage can last hundreds of years and is rarely part of the slash and burn based succession because of this. Instead, small “sacred groves” occur in most village territories, which remain free of logging and constitute a source of seed to recolonized the final stage of the cycling succession communities created by the slash and burn system.

[xi] H.I.D. Vierich and W.A. Stoop “Changes in West African Savanna agriculture in response to growing population and continuing low rainfall” Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment Volume 31, Issue 2 June 1990 : 67 , Pages 115–132

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016788099090214X

[xii] The Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics — ICRISAT, one of a score of such centers funded by the Ford-Rockefeller Foundation’s CGIAR. Note that this is “sister” institute to the forest research center cited above.

[xiii] http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/07/20/486670144/an-archaeological-mystery-in-ghana-why-didn-t-past-droughts-spell-famine

[xiv] http://phys.org/news/2012-09-tribal-courts-war-traditions-stem.html

[xv] “…The Iroquois Confederacy was based on The Great Law of Peace and much of those original teachings were adopted and incorporated into The United States Constitution and later into the United Nations. Now is a good time to consider The Great Law of Peace in light of the pressing issues of our day.

The Iroquoian system, expressed through its constitution, “The Great Law of Peace,” rested on assumptions foreign to the monarchies of Europe: it regarded leaders as servants of the people, rather than their masters, and made provisions for the leaders’ impeachment for errant behavior. The Iroquois’ law and custom upheld freedom of expression in political and religious matters, and it forbade the unauthorized entry of homes. It provided for political participation by women and the relatively equitable distribution of wealth.”
— Bruce Johansen, Forgotten Founders….” http://upliftconnect.com/great-law-of-peace/

[xvi] Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing A Commmons http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmon

[xvii] https://www.vox.com/2016/6/5/11852762/native-indigenous-science-environment
“… the hardest thing is to sit in a room with scientists who think they’ve discovered something, but their scientific discovery just confirms what our oral histories have talked about forever,” says William Housty, a member of British Columbia’s Heiltsuk First Nation and director of Coastwatch, a science and conservation program. “That’s been the biggest hump for us to overcome, to get people to think about our culture on the same level as Western science.”

Rocky though the transition has been, wildlife biologists like Polfus are today pursuing more respectful and participatory relationships with indigenous people. Scientists have partnered with aboriginal Australians to study sea turtle populations; relied on Kaxinawá hunters in the Amazon to investigate the abundance of game species like monkeys and deer; and solicited information from Alaskan Yupiks about walrus migrations.

Renata Leite Pitman, a Brazilian wildlife veterinarian who’s studied Central and South American fauna for 25 years, has leaned on local expertise to learn the calls, scats, and tracks of the elusive forest animals she studies. “I think it’s intuitive — you just learn from what the native people have always been doing,” she says…”

See also …”Recognised as a conservation priority in China, the Sanjiangyuan National Nature Reserve was set up in 2003 and designated a national park in 2016. But the area faces big conservation challenges: government agencies have limited manpower to manage this vast area, and grazing rights to all its grasslands were given to households in the 1990s.

This means that conservation in Sanjiangyuan would not be possible without support from local Tibetan communities. As Buddhists, these communities embrace the value of respecting nature and caring for other living beings. Their system of sacred lands is similar to modern protected areas.

That makes them natural allies for conservation. Yunta’s experience has proven that, with proper training, villagers can become qualified conservationists. Essentially, they are providers of ecological services and should receive benefits from conservation in return…” Meet the villagers protecting biodiversity on the top of the world

Yunta, on the Tibetan plateau, offers hope that there are communities willing to go out of their way to preserve local fauna and ecosystems

https://www.thethirdpole.net/2017/06/09/villagers-protecting-biodiversity-tibetan-plateau/