International Rewilding Discussion Forum

The truth is that for the first time we are bereft of a positive vision of where we are going. This is particularly evident among kids. Their future is either Road Warrior post-apocalypse, or Blade Runner mid-apocalypse. All the futuristic computer games are elaborations of these scenarios, heavy metal worlds where civilization has crumbling into something weird and violent (but more exciting than now).

The Afterculture is an attempt to transmute this folklore of the future into something deep and rich and convincingly real. If we are to pull a compelling future out of environmental theory and recycling paradigms, we are going to have to clothe the sacred in the romantic. The Afterculture is part of an ongoing work to shape a new mythology by sources as diverse as Thoreau and Conan and Dances with Wolves and Iron John. The Afterculture is not "against" the problems of our times, and its not about "band-aid solutions" to the grim jam we find ourselves in. It's about opening up a whole new category of solutions, about finding another way of being: evolved, simpler, deeper, even more elegant. Even more cool. Even very cool.

• The Arcanists.  Before civilization ended, we did create nanobots: powered by solar energy and run by artificial intelligence.  Unfortunately, the AI didn't always reproduce without errors, and they began to grow without limit.  One of the original programmers has survived for 400 years, known in obscure legends only as "the Grand Arcanist," he founded the Ordo Arcanum.  Only they know about the nanobots.  Only they know how they once proliferated to the point of nearly wiping out all life on earth, before the Grand Arcanist learned how to keep up with their mutations.  The Arcanists keep an eternal vigil on the ever-mutating nanobots now.  The little machines give them seemingly magical powers which they summon by spoken commands, but the constant mutation has made those commands an English-derived gibberish.  They roam the world as the unsung heroes keeping back one of the last legacies of civilization.
• The Cult of the Fleshmongers.  Somewhere between transhumanists, plastic surgery, and self-mutilation, you'll find one of the Fifth World's worst groups of bad guys.  They generally lament the passing of the old world, and hope to restore humanity to its proper place—as living gods separated from the filth of other life, fit to judge who should live and who should die.  To do so, they seek to restore the perfection of the human form to its godlike state, which they pattern, as often as not, on mannequins.  The Fleshmongers perform hideous rituals to mold their victims into their twisted vision of divine "beauty."
• The Undertaker.  In the first land I developed, the Land of the Three Rivers, the Undertaker follows a buzzard familiar.  He doesn't stay with a particular family, but instead roams the land.  The buzzard leads him when death is close, where the people will need him.  Wherever he goes, death soon follows.  He performs last rites, comforts the bereaved, buries the dead, and from time to time, settles restless ghosts

All of this, however, is theoretical. This hypothesis is easy to test: calculate carrying capacity, and compare it to actual human population numbers. This is precisely what Russell Hopfenberg of Duke University did in his 2003 study, “Human Carrying Capacity is Determined by Food Availability.” [PDF] As you might imagine from such a title, he found that the numbers lined up almost perfectly.

There is a significant complication in this, however, which critics of this stance are eager to point out. The First World is facing a population growth decline–the world’s richest nations are growing by the smallest percentages. Italy has been very concerned with its low growth rate, only 0.11% according to a 2003 estimate. Italy has the 201st highest population growth, and the 100th highest agricultural growth. Meanwhile, Singapore has the sixth highest population growth rate, and the 147th highest agricultural growth rate–out of 147.

If population is a function of food supply, why is the most significant growth taking place in those areas producing the least food?

The answer, I think, lies in globalization. How much of what you ate today came from your own bioregion? Unless you do a significant amount of your grocery shopping at Farmers’ Markets or eat only USDA-certified organic food, probably not a lot. In 1980, the average piece of American fresh produce was estimated to have traveled 1,500 miles before it was consumed. Interestingly, those same countries which produce so much food but don’t see it translate into their population, are also the heaviest exporters, and the impoverished countries with significantly rising growth rates are often the recipients. When the First World rushes in with foreign aid, food, and humanitarian aid to a desert area in the midst of a famine, we serve to prop up an unsustainable population. That drives a population boom in an area that already cannot support its existing population. The result is a huge population dependent on outside intervention that itself cannot be indefinitely sustained. Eventually, that population will crash once outside help is no longer possible–and the years of aid will only make that crash even more severe. In the same way that the United States’ policy of putting out all forest fires in the 1980s led to an even worse situation in its forests, our benevolence and good intentions have paved the way to a Malthusian hell.

Another part of the answer lies in our ecological footprint. In the passage above, Garrett Hardin made the distinction between the calories it takes to maintain a human body, and the “work calories” humans use to do anything else. While it is certainly true that population is a function of food supply, standard of living–how many work calories we recieve, in addition to mere maintenance–is an important factor in that equation. Not only how much food is available, but how much food each individual demands. The dwindling First World has the largest ecological footprint; the growing Third World has the smallest. Italy comes in at #25 with 5.51 hectares per person (1996); Somalia is #114 with 0.97.

This is ultimately why education appears to have an effect on population: because higher education raises the standard of living, increasing the ecological footprint so that fewer people can live off the same amount of food, reducing the population. However, the problem we face is not one of Malthusian catastrophe. If we could not feed our population, we would not have such a population in the first place. The problem is the ecological consequences of such resource exploitation. Expanding ecological footprints do nothing to lessen this. Also, this trend can only continue so far, because the First World needs the Third. Our prosperity comes from the triumph of the corporate model, but the corporation itself runs on externalized costs. Our economy could never function if we had to pay the full and total cost for the luxuries we enjoy. Consider simply our oil costs–never mind the way it is built in to, say, our food. The Arab population oppressed under Saudi rule pays the balance for our cheap oil. Low prices at WalMart are made possible by cheap Third World labor. It is a grim economic reality that, given ten apples and ten people, for one person to have nine apples, the other nine must split one between them. In the conclusion to their 1996 study on ecological footprint, Wackernagel and Rees stated, “If everybody lived like today’s North Americans, it would take at least two additional planet Earths to produce the resources, absorb the wastes, and otherwise maintain life-support.” Since we have but one earth, this conclusion can also be spun around in the form that each of us essentially has three slaves whose existence is one of constant misery for our benefit.