What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire Page #8

---

they show every evidence of suffering

all sorts of disease.

this new type of agriculture both required and

allowed more settlement, and with that came the

beginnings of wealth and inequality.

if you go to pre-agricultural towns you'll see a

series of houses, all about the same size.

And almost instantly, when agriculture occurred,

you can go to any town, in any agricultural site in

the world, not just in Western culture,

and see a few very large houses with

granaries connected to them, and a

whole series of smaller houses.

That kind of social inequity began

almost immediately with agriculture.

As Quinn and Manning point out, early

agricultural peoples were not better off

than their hunter-gatherer predecessors.

this was news to me.

The psychologist and cultural analyst

Chellis Glendinning points to other

consequences of settlement and agriculture.

Before, when women were moving around,

and very athletic, and carrying their babies,

and having a diet that

wasn't so high in carbohydrates,

and nursing their babies for long periods of time,

then women didn't ovulate very often.

But when women became sedentary,

women began to have regular cycles.

And so, more babies were born.

And so guess what?

Then you have to make more farms. And then

you have to expand the area that's fenced off.

And then, ooh, maybe you're going to

meet up with someone else who's

coming that way, another group.

And so then you have to have a war.

We're taught to regard agriculture and

settlement as the normal and

natural way for humans to live.

So it was a bit of a shock, to learn how these

basic cultural changes were the fundamental

cause of so many of the problems that have

dogged us through the centuries.

Derrick Jensen speaks to the

end result of all of this cultural change.

I think one of the best lines i ever wrote was that

"forests precede us and deserts dog our heels."

When I think of - or when you think of -

the plains and hillsides of Iraq,

is the first thing that you normally

think of cedar forests so thick the sunlight

never touches the ground?

I think for most of us that's not the case.

But the first written myth of this

culture is Gilgamesh cutting down

those forests to make cities.

Cities. Settlements begat villages

which begat towns which begat cities.

Totalitarian and catastrophic agriculture,

the accumulation of wealth and power,

and increases in population all came together to

give rise to a new form of human culture.:

the culture of cities, the culture of civilization,

the culture of Empire.

I realized, as I was writing the newest book,

Endgame, that i'd been bashing

civilization for probably, eh, ten years now.

And i'd never defined it.

I didn't know what i was talking about.

And so I define it in that book as a way of life

characterized by the growth of cities.

I've defined a city as a collection of people

living in numbers large enough to require

the importation of resources.

A city could be defined, almost, as a

human ecosystem that grossly exceeds

the carrying capacity of its local environment.

As Jensen and Catton point out, because

cities exceed the carrying capacity of their

local environment, and because they require

the importation of resources,

then those who live in cities are locked

into the lnevltablllty of getting those

resources from somewhere else,

from somebody else,

by whatever means is necessary.

Often that means is trade.

But trade requires transport, and transport

requires energy, and energy has to come from

somewhere, and it eventually runs out.

And trade requires willing partners.

But people do not always want to trade.

When trade breaks down, and you need

those resources, what remains is war.

We now need oil to keep our cities going.

Watch the bidding war rage from

trade floors to battlefields.

Watch the Pentagon plan and the patriots act.

Let's stop for a second and regroup. I told you

I've had to challenge some assumptions.

We've been doing agriculture and expanding

and growing and building cities and

accumulating material wealth for so long now

that it just feels like this is how

things are supposed to be.

But how can a way of life that is destroying

It's own support systems be considered

"how things are supposed to be"?

"...they did eat every herb of the land,

and all the fruit of the trees, and there

remained not any green thing... "

Exodus 1 0.:
1 5

Let's move on.

Once our native human intelligence and

creativity was combined with the defining

impulses of empire, things began to snowball.

We kept using more and more sophisticated

technology so we could put off the inevitable.

Which is.:
we've got physical limits.

Using the power of technology, we could break

through the limits and laws and rules

that kept the community of life in balance

for millions of years . . . temporarily. . .

Rules! All the time rules! i'm sick of 'em.

Offscreen Narrator.: Excuse me for

interrupting, boys and girls,

but maybe you would like to find out just

what it would be like if there were no rules.

But how could we do that?

By going someplace where there are no rules.

There's no such place.

But maybe there is a way we

could go to a place without rules.

how?

By using our imagination.

Now let's all pretend real hard. . .

And pretend we did.

thinking we had no limits, our power

to control went right to our heads.

As historian and "geologian"

Thomas Berry put it.:

What i say goes, see? i'm the law around here!

(laughs)

But the belief in the power to control has

proceeded on some faulty assumptions

about the limits of science.

I've been confused about technology.

I've heard all my life that technologies

themselves are neutral, that it all

depends on how we use them,

that they can be used for good or ill, depending

on the wisdom and intelligence of the user.

But, as Jerry Mander explains.:

That's completely wrong. You can

do an analysis of every technology

and find its beneficial aspects

and its negative aspects.

The idea that it's just about the way we use it is

absurd. Because these are built-in factors.

As an example, the difference between nuclear

and solar is more than in how we use them.

Each technology has built-in characteristics

that determine how they end up being used,

and who uses them,

and for what.

Military scientists are not now

working on a solar powered warhead.

And neither am I looking to put a

nuclear water heater on my roof.

Because of this misunderstanding, it's easy to

get trapped in the myth of the technofix. . .

Ever since that division of humans and

human space away from the rest of the world,

there's been one problem arising from

that situation after another, you know.

"Oh dear, we have to pipe in more

water for the more farms", you know.

"Oh dear, now we have to

travel great distances".

"Oh dear, now we need more

resources, we need more land".

Rate this script:4.0 / 1 vote