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1
Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 14, 2011, 07:06:35 PM »
Lots to respond to. I feel I have been kinda hogging the discussion here, so this time I will respond briefly.
People who have a political ax to grind are eager to point out that Kwakiutl slavery was different from say Southern slavery. Well, yes, of course, but it was still slavery. If someone from a neighboring tribe hunted you down, brought you to his village to work for his family, permanently, and was free to kill you, if he so chose, at the next feast or other celebration, would you be in the mood to pick the fine points of slavery systems? This raises my hackles... apologetics for predatory behavior.
Yes, they were a ranked society, not a class one. I never did claim otherwise. The big men were elites with all sorts of special privileges (including keeping more slaves than others), and it is from such elites that stratification historically grew. Sigh. As long as people close their eyes to what really went on and paint it all in rosy colors... even slavery! then we are back to dogma, not real knowledge, eh?
People who have a political ax to grind are eager to point out that Kwakiutl slavery was different from say Southern slavery. Well, yes, of course, but it was still slavery. If someone from a neighboring tribe hunted you down, brought you to his village to work for his family, permanently, and was free to kill you, if he so chose, at the next feast or other celebration, would you be in the mood to pick the fine points of slavery systems? This raises my hackles... apologetics for predatory behavior.
Yes, they were a ranked society, not a class one. I never did claim otherwise. The big men were elites with all sorts of special privileges (including keeping more slaves than others), and it is from such elites that stratification historically grew. Sigh. As long as people close their eyes to what really went on and paint it all in rosy colors... even slavery! then we are back to dogma, not real knowledge, eh?
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 13, 2011, 08:52:31 PM »
Yup, very true, the immediate return folks are really the only ones who are proofed against the evils... mostly, IMO, because elites are an expense they can't afford... 
Trouble is, though, that immediate return societies are easy prey to those who intensify and go through the whole "more food, more people, more weapons" crap. You know, the whole Parable of the Tribes dilemma. (A horrible real life example were the Moriori, off New Zealand.)
If subsistence were our only problem to solve, then immediate return people would lead the way. But we also gotta deal with the problem of power.
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Yeah, the evils. Civ... I think of it as the final culmination of all those evils.
I am reading Jason's essay #10, very interesting, I had not seen it before. I think a lot of what I have been fishing for is right there. He also goes into intensification, btw.
Well, Toby Hemenway has claimed that hortis are more egalitarian, but frankly, all of Oceania was settled by hortis and they were not really egalitarian at all. People make all sorts of claims, and then you look into it, and it does not pan out.
Trouble is, though, that immediate return societies are easy prey to those who intensify and go through the whole "more food, more people, more weapons" crap. You know, the whole Parable of the Tribes dilemma. (A horrible real life example were the Moriori, off New Zealand.)
If subsistence were our only problem to solve, then immediate return people would lead the way. But we also gotta deal with the problem of power.
--
Yeah, the evils. Civ... I think of it as the final culmination of all those evils.
I am reading Jason's essay #10, very interesting, I had not seen it before. I think a lot of what I have been fishing for is right there. He also goes into intensification, btw.
Well, Toby Hemenway has claimed that hortis are more egalitarian, but frankly, all of Oceania was settled by hortis and they were not really egalitarian at all. People make all sorts of claims, and then you look into it, and it does not pan out.
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 13, 2011, 06:54:34 PM »
Peter, I think I will have to take your advice and read the books you recommend. There is much we can learn from those who tweaked the landbase in different and sometimes saner ways than we.
None of these ways are proof against negative environmental impacts. And too many people adds up to an environmental problem in the long run, no?
You have pointed out one thing to look out for that I think is really important. Not cultivating (or I would add foraging) full time. But does that not point back to intensification as the culprit? (Cultivation of any kind is not, per se, a backbreaking task... unless, of course, you do it from dawn to dusk.)
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"Forest gardening", "Permaculture" or "Horticulture" are example of subsistence strategies that are heavily engaged in land management in a way the builds soil and biomass. It might mean more people in dense areas, and that leads to more social problems, but not environmental ones.
None of these ways are proof against negative environmental impacts. And too many people adds up to an environmental problem in the long run, no?
You have pointed out one thing to look out for that I think is really important. Not cultivating (or I would add foraging) full time. But does that not point back to intensification as the culprit? (Cultivation of any kind is not, per se, a backbreaking task... unless, of course, you do it from dawn to dusk.)
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 13, 2011, 04:37:44 PM »
Sorry. Trying for clarity and missing pieces.
I am questioning the assertion that any particular kind of subsistence is immune from the pull toward the evils for which we know this civilization.
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Aren't you actually questioning the assertion that any particular kind of cultivation (that is, plowing/monocropping of grains) led to civilization.
I am questioning the assertion that any particular kind of subsistence is immune from the pull toward the evils for which we know this civilization.
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 13, 2011, 04:29:09 PM »
Oh and to your question, did plowing/monocropping grains make this civ possible? Sure. But there were other civs. Norte Chico (Caral) was based on fish-orchards-veggies. No grains. They did have irrigated fields... and did not ruin the land.
See? There is no pat answer to either the question of how to get food out of the ground sustainably, or what exactly was the root of the nastiness we have inherited.
I am sniffing past ag... into surplus-based intensification, and beyond.
Kwakiutl intensified. Yurok did not. Why?
See? There is no pat answer to either the question of how to get food out of the ground sustainably, or what exactly was the root of the nastiness we have inherited.
I am sniffing past ag... into surplus-based intensification, and beyond.
Kwakiutl intensified. Yurok did not. Why?
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 13, 2011, 04:04:24 PM »
Thank you, John! Maybe I am losing track too... I wuz beginning to feel that arguing with you guys is like arguing God with the atheists... 
Ok... so here is the trail I am on. I noticed, a while back, that forager societies, some of them, already went astray. In other words, there were peoples like the Kwakiutl, who inhabited a rich foraging territory... and a while down the road, we see elites, slavery, high population, economic warfare (potlatches) and ostentatious destruction of wealth. Yikes! You don't need ag to go astray...
Yet on the other you have Tolowa and coastal Yurok, same environment, same subsistence techniques, and yet... egalitarian sanity.
How does your model explain it?
So I reached past the ag explanation. Does that make any sense?
Ok... so here is the trail I am on. I noticed, a while back, that forager societies, some of them, already went astray. In other words, there were peoples like the Kwakiutl, who inhabited a rich foraging territory... and a while down the road, we see elites, slavery, high population, economic warfare (potlatches) and ostentatious destruction of wealth. Yikes! You don't need ag to go astray...
Yet on the other you have Tolowa and coastal Yurok, same environment, same subsistence techniques, and yet... egalitarian sanity.
How does your model explain it?
So I reached past the ag explanation. Does that make any sense?
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 13, 2011, 10:16:30 AM »
JohnF: there is a great deal of hype in permaculture. Wise to be wary of the claims.
Well, that is relative. Birds, rodents and grazers love to feed off a field. And until recently, even fields of grain were full of other species, I myself remember fields of wheat ablaze with wild red poppies. The chemically-nuked fields are a very recent phenomenon.
And when the Indians burned swaths of eastern forests, weren't they taking habitat away from certain species, while favoring others?
Peter, thank you, I am thinking it through.
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Any time you monocrop you're taking habitat directly away from other species.
Well, that is relative. Birds, rodents and grazers love to feed off a field. And until recently, even fields of grain were full of other species, I myself remember fields of wheat ablaze with wild red poppies. The chemically-nuked fields are a very recent phenomenon.
And when the Indians burned swaths of eastern forests, weren't they taking habitat away from certain species, while favoring others?
Peter, thank you, I am thinking it through.
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 11, 2011, 07:26:11 PM »
Monocropping worked for the Egyptians. The Nile replenished the soil every year, and their plow and monocrop cultivation went on for 3000 years.
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 09, 2011, 09:22:14 AM »
I slept on it, Peter, and decided to use the word cultivation for all the various modes of cultivation, good, bad and indifferent. I did not mean to sow confusion.
Bereal and Peter: how does horticulture enhance succession? The picture I have in my mind is people burning down a forest section, planting stuff in the ashes, and letting it grow for a few years. Also planting some fruit and nut trees. Then the soil becomes exhausted and the band moves on... to return in say 20 years when the trees planted are bearing fruit, and the soil has replenished itself -- and again burning it down and planting etc. -- a cycle of clearing, growing, and leaving alone, and clearing again. (?)
Definitely. That is the turn around we must make. Great paragraph, btw.
Perhaps we would profit by thinking of helping foods grow, encouraging foods to grow, helping our favorite plants, helping the forest or prairie thrive... yah, co-adaptation. Mutual aid, not just among humans, but with the rest of livingness as well.
Bereal and Peter: how does horticulture enhance succession? The picture I have in my mind is people burning down a forest section, planting stuff in the ashes, and letting it grow for a few years. Also planting some fruit and nut trees. Then the soil becomes exhausted and the band moves on... to return in say 20 years when the trees planted are bearing fruit, and the soil has replenished itself -- and again burning it down and planting etc. -- a cycle of clearing, growing, and leaving alone, and clearing again. (?)
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Do we see it as us, humans, "growing" food - thus implying that we are the only beings taking action (that the plants, soil, etc are just objects that we act on), and also implying that the food "we grow" is "ours" (that we are entitled to exclusive use of it, if we wish)? Or do we see it as us participating in the cycle of life (which would happen with or without us, just maybe in a different way), along with many other beings in a wider community of life? That we are helping the plants to do what they are already doing?
Definitely. That is the turn around we must make. Great paragraph, btw.
Perhaps we would profit by thinking of helping foods grow, encouraging foods to grow, helping our favorite plants, helping the forest or prairie thrive... yah, co-adaptation. Mutual aid, not just among humans, but with the rest of livingness as well.
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 08, 2011, 07:42:33 PM »
Peter, when I opened up this topic, I said my take goes against one of Jason’s theses. That is why I respectfully placed it in the manure pile. Please feel free to place it there again. I did not open the topic to argue against Jason or to debate definitions which people do until the cows come home (a recent anthro paper listed 10 different definitions of horticulture!).
I figured folks here would be interested in my take on things, and understand what I am talking about, and help me think it through further. And I wuz right!
Indeed, why would anyone argue that cultivation is bad? Except perhaps the most adamant theoretical primitivist. But people feel free to say ag is bad, because they first define it as destructive (e.g. intensive grain growing on lands other than those replenished naturally, like with the Nile). I am trying to take a different angle than Diamond did, and see if we can gain some understanding from it.
I did not mean to imply that intensification of food production is inherently destructive. I am saying that for those of us looking for the key to what went wrong in late Paleolithic into Neolithic and eventually ripened into the monster of “this civilization”, intensification points in the direction of greater understanding. Or in any case, that is the hypothesis that I am trying out.
Here is another way to look at my logic:
1. Hoticulture is a subset of cultivation
2. Horticulture is not inherently good
3. Good means beneficial to the land
4. Horticulture will do damage if the land is pushed beyond what it can bear (via ratcheting intensification of food production)
I figured folks here would be interested in my take on things, and understand what I am talking about, and help me think it through further. And I wuz right!
Indeed, why would anyone argue that cultivation is bad? Except perhaps the most adamant theoretical primitivist. But people feel free to say ag is bad, because they first define it as destructive (e.g. intensive grain growing on lands other than those replenished naturally, like with the Nile). I am trying to take a different angle than Diamond did, and see if we can gain some understanding from it.
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If you were to intensify horticulture on the other hand, you would end up with old growth forests. Because it's succession based, not field based like agri (field) culture (cultivation).This part, I don’t understand. What do you mean you would end up with old growth forests? Ratcheting economic intensification – pushing the land to produce more and more – will eventually lead to a severe problem. And indeed, traditional horticulturists, when pushed to intensify, begin to shorten fallow periods and burn more and more forest… with predictable dire consequences. So you must be thinking in a different way. How?
I did not mean to imply that intensification of food production is inherently destructive. I am saying that for those of us looking for the key to what went wrong in late Paleolithic into Neolithic and eventually ripened into the monster of “this civilization”, intensification points in the direction of greater understanding. Or in any case, that is the hypothesis that I am trying out.
Here is another way to look at my logic:
1. Hoticulture is a subset of cultivation
2. Horticulture is not inherently good
3. Good means beneficial to the land
4. Horticulture will do damage if the land is pushed beyond what it can bear (via ratcheting intensification of food production)
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 08, 2011, 07:29:19 PM »
Oakcorn, I have also fantasized about families getting together to set apart larger zones 7. But basically, private land ownership gets in the way of permaculture, IMO.
Bereal:
Not what I have been hearing. For example the book 1491 goes against that older hypothesis.
You make a great point about living with the land rather than apart... I guess there are at least two approaches... one is to set land aside, and even call it tabu, as some cultures have done, and then the other model, of tending it in its wild state. I think both can work. I have a hard time imagining the latter working with us afterculture folks. Takes far more skill than the first method, don't you think?
Bereal:
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from everything I've learned about the first peoples of America, before European contact (i.e. before the apocalypse of smallpox, invasion, and genocide) the subsistence practices of the cultures of North America were stable
Not what I have been hearing. For example the book 1491 goes against that older hypothesis.
You make a great point about living with the land rather than apart... I guess there are at least two approaches... one is to set land aside, and even call it tabu, as some cultures have done, and then the other model, of tending it in its wild state. I think both can work. I have a hard time imagining the latter working with us afterculture folks. Takes far more skill than the first method, don't you think?
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 08, 2011, 07:22:42 PM »
John, there were tons of primarily horti societies. All of Oceania that I know of, for example. New Guinea too. And many stayed that way. To me, it does not really matter, because if they got into ratcheting intensification of food production, who cares what exact techniques they used? They began to go against the well being of the land.
You are right, surplus gets into it too, and as far as I know, the only people not into surplus were the immediate return folks, and the more simple delayed return people who only kept small surpluses to tide them over the winter and such. Like you say, the immediate return people have built-in limits. Now maybe it will all crash, and immediate return more or less will be the path. But I have set myself the task to imagine a way that would be good for the earth that does not simplify/primitivize all the way. Could be there is none. But I am working on it.
Zerzan goes all the way to language, and I have begun to wonder if he does not have a point… But I don’t feel fatalistic about it, just wondering if we have not been trapped into a language cul-de-sac where it’s mostly become a way to overwhelm and exploit. A different thread!
Sorry everybody, by intensification I mean economic intensification (which is built on top of intensification of food production).
You are right, surplus gets into it too, and as far as I know, the only people not into surplus were the immediate return folks, and the more simple delayed return people who only kept small surpluses to tide them over the winter and such. Like you say, the immediate return people have built-in limits. Now maybe it will all crash, and immediate return more or less will be the path. But I have set myself the task to imagine a way that would be good for the earth that does not simplify/primitivize all the way. Could be there is none. But I am working on it.
Zerzan goes all the way to language, and I have begun to wonder if he does not have a point… But I don’t feel fatalistic about it, just wondering if we have not been trapped into a language cul-de-sac where it’s mostly become a way to overwhelm and exploit. A different thread!
Sorry everybody, by intensification I mean economic intensification (which is built on top of intensification of food production).
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 08, 2011, 07:15:32 PM »Quote
I just meant the line at which we cross into the unsustainable. Though I like the simplicity of trying to boil the whole thing down to intensification, I think it must make it hard to identify the level at which problems develop. To me, the horticulture/agriculture distinction helps with that by identifying specific techniques which usually do or usually don't cause problems.
John: Well, see, and for me, that’s exactly the reason why I abandoned the horti/ag duality because it is not specific techniques, but how those techniques play out in various climates, soil types, water availability, whether prone to salinization or not, natural fertilizers (volcanic ash), and other local characteristics. (Ok ok, I make an exception for the moldboard plow. Baaad shit!)
Aha… the line where we cross over into unsustainable. I am assuming that’s the point where the land becomes degraded, comparing “yesterday” and “today.” What else could it mean?
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 08, 2011, 07:05:19 PM »
Bereal, to be fair to gypsies, I think they cycled too in the old days, before the states began to crush them. I remember that where I come from (central Europe) gypsies would show up to help with the harvest and such, and it was more or less the same people, already known to the villagers.
Yeah, cycling makes much more sense than just wandering...
I think they cycled too in the old days, before the states began to crush them. I remember that where I come from (central Europe) gypsies would show up to help with the harvest and such, and it was more or less the same people, already known to the villagers.Yeah, cycling makes much more sense than just wandering...
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Common Misconceptions / Re: Agriculture: villain or boon companion?
« on: November 08, 2011, 08:26:25 AM »
I imagine that what they have is a mix of what their ancestors brought with them, and those of the species they found that were of use to them. The old forest is gone.
As for zone 7... I don't think wilderness is compatible with carving up land into small private chunks and then setting aside some small amount for zone 7. And permaculturists do not specify percentage, do they?
So much to learn.
As for zone 7... I don't think wilderness is compatible with carving up land into small private chunks and then setting aside some small amount for zone 7. And permaculturists do not specify percentage, do they?
So much to learn.