Can we go Back to the Woods?

[Huby7]

Hey all,

Glen (Some know him as RedWolfReturns) gave me permission to post his thoughts about some of the mental roadblocks people have when it comes to discussing hunting and gathering as a lifestyle choice in 2007.

I will post two of his posts below. The posts are from the Teaching Drum Outdoor Living School’s Yahoo! Discussion Forum.

Thank you,

Curt

Over the years I’ve noticed that population seems to always be brought
up as a fundamental roadblock whenever primitive hunter-gatherer living
is mentioned as a solution to our current ecological problems. “We cant
have 6 billion people out hunting and gathering! They’ll wipe out all
the game in no time!” or so the argument goes. This argument used to
baffle me, but I think I’ve finally figured it out (just in the last
week or so), so I’m eager to share.

The thing is, this roadblock is really only based on a trick our minds
play on us. It’s an understandable mistake, but it has no basis in
actual reality.

Think about it. If a person lives in an industrial agricultural society,
he consumes huge amounts of earth resources to make, heat & cool the
large house he lives in (usually as an individual, sometimes as a member
of a small family), the car(s) he (individually) owns, the dozens of
outfits of clothing he has, the TV he watches, the computer he uses, the
toys he plays with. He has a house with multiple rooms, and goes to
whole other buildings (also each with multiple rooms) for various other
activities (work at an office, church at a church, school at a school,
shopping at a store, etc.) He consumes massive energy inputs (all coming
from earth resources) to fuel all of this, and all of that energy comes
to him from a massive infrastructure that also must be built and
maintained using earth resources.

All of these resources are gotten for him and moved to him via methods
(mines, factories, etc.) that involve considerable “collateral damage”
to their surrounding ecosystems due to the large scale of their operations.

Nearly every day he takes out a big sack of trash, and this goes to an
ever-expanding landfill.

As for his food, it comes to him via industrial agriculture. What does
that mean? I actually grew up in Alaska during a time when my family
turned 2600 acres of Alaskan wildland into a farm. What we did was to
slash & burn (kill) all life on that land (we knocked down all the trees
with a dozer, and I remember it was a peak year for the snowshoe hare
population…my older brothers would take a .22 out with them and come
back with hundreds of hares who were just standing around bewildered as
their habitat was destroyed out from under them). Once the land was
cleared, then it was plowed up and planted to rows of grain. Any
animals, plants, insects that tried to reclaim that land were fenced off
it, otherwise kept out, or killed outright (using herbicides and
insecticides).

If we go to the grocery store, that is pretty much where all our food
comes from (only now it has been packaged and shipped using far more
resources taken from other areas, and with massive amounts of waste as
meat & vegetable spoil along the way).

Our food comes from land where we take (nearly) everything and leave
(virtually) nothing for other species.

Overall consumption per individual? Massive.

Now contrast this with a primitive hunter gatherer. He lives outside and
takes shelter with his community/family in a simple dwelling only when
necessary. That dwelling is built for the community in minimalist style
(multiple people sharing one space, and that one space being used for
multiple purposes – i.e. work, play, spiritual purposes, living, etc.).
That space is heated or cooled to minimal levels for comfort, since the
people who live in it are themselves capable of being comfortable in a
wide range of temperatures. The clothing the primitive hunter gatherer
uses are basic, and he only has as many outfits as he needs. His tools
are simple. He has no TV, computer, stereo, and no other recreational
toys – his life is his play and his work. To gather all these resources
he goes out into a diverse ecological community of wild life and
(mostly) takes only what he needs. In the process he produces virtually
no trash.

Same for his hunting & gathering & fishing & trapping. His food comes to
him as he goes to a diverse community of wild creatures and specifically
targets and takes only what he needs to satisfy his hunger & the hunger
of his community. Food is shared, and used immediately. Again, waste,
spoilage and trash are virtually zero.

Overall consumption per individual? Incredibly minimal.

So how is it that minimal consumption per individual multiplied by
billions of individuals can add up to more impact than massive
consumption per individual when multiplied by billions of individuals?

It can’t. Our minds are playing a trick on us.

I think that trick lies in the fact that we imagine those billions of
people leaving the land they currently use (more than 90% of the planet)
and moving their subsistence base onto the (mostly wild) land they
currently don’t use (less than 10% of the planet). Then I think we add
to this by projecting modern hunting tendencies (using guns, going after
big game animals as staple foods, wasting most of the carcass, etc.,)
into primitive hunter-gatherer living. Lastly, I think we tend to
imagine this all happening in one big massive event – as if 6 billion
people would all wake up tomorrow and go hunting instead of going to the
grocery store.

We imagine suddenly denuding our (currently preserved) small
ecologically diverse wild areas in this future scenario, but we forget
that we are currently denuding the other 90% of the planet (which used
to be ecologically diverse) in order to live as we do now. We also
forget what “unsustainable” means. It means it can’t go on – in other
words, if we continue to live this way, we will get to that last 10%
eventually (once we get desperate). We also forget that cultural change
takes time. It took many generations for us to get here, and it will
likely take many generations for us to find balance as a people once again.

But all that is really implied in a gradual shift from industrial
agriculture to primitive hunting and gathering is a shift in living
habits where ever we live (i.e. from massive consumption to minimalist
consumption, from massive interference to minimalist interference, from
taking everything, to taking only what we need and leaving the rest for
others, and from living without awareness, to living with intimate
awareness of our relations).

If we took only what we needed and left the rest for others, our
population would (of course) have to be less. And if we started doing
this today, our population would begin to gradually decline. The earth
only provides so much food fit for humans, so unless we continue to
clear everyone else off the land and use it to produce only food for
ourselves, our population will naturally balance.

Our population only gets this high because we have adopted a food
procurement system in which we completely monopolize the land which
surrounds us.

This is all that really lies at the core of the whole civilized v.s.
primitive and agriculture v.s. hunting-gathering debate.

Sustainability isn’t a hard thing to achieve, it is the only thing that
works (in the long run), and so it will happen whether we want it to or not.

The only question is: will we be proactive and enjoy the process by
beginning it now, or will we wait until it is too late and be victimized
& traumatized by the process as it is forced upon us unprepared?

Second Post:

[Huby7]

Somehow Glenn’s second post didn’t make in my first post. And I forgot to mention in my first post to feel free to share your thoughts on this.

Here it is:

Hey Dawn, the important thing to realize is that all of the theoretical
consumption you’re having trouble imagining relative to the city of
Chicago is already happening right now. The simple fact is, the current
global consumption rate (per individual) for civilized people is 100
times that of “primitive” hunter gatherers. Here in “first world”
America, consumption rates are probably more like 1000 to 1 on average,
while a wealthy upper class individual might consume 100,000 or even a
million (1,000,000) times what a single modern hunter gatherer (like a
!Kung San Bushman or Siberian tribesman) would in the company of his
people.

You see, a hunter gatherer may range over a thousand acres to get what
he needs, but he only takes what he truly needs within that thousand
acres (let’s say he takes 1/10th of 1% of all that is there). Because
of this, millions of other lives can share that thousand acres with
him. If times get hard, he will go hungry and make less children (but
he almost never starves), so his population stays in balance with the
available food. He has no motivation to have more children unless there
is more food. An agriculturalist may only need three acres of land to
get what he needs, but he takes 90%+ of what is there (and much of what is taken is simply waste – land cleared, weeds pulled, pests killed,
etc.). From one point of view, it may seem like the agriculturalist is
consuming less (3 acres vs. 1000 acres). But this is an illusion. What
is really happening is that the hunter gatherer is taking only what he
needs (1/10th of 1% distributed throughout the whole 1000) while keeping his population in check, and the agriculturalist is creating
considerable “collateral damage” in getting what he needs (consuming
9/10th x 3% of the 1000 expanding piece by piece) while his population
continually grows.

More importantly, the hunter-gatherer continues to have an intimate,
caring relationship with nearly everyone else living on that 1000 acres,
while the agriculturalist begins to care less and less about all those
“wild” creatures which “invade” his three acres (and only cause him
trouble…“weeds” choking his garden, rabbits eating “his” garden,
coyotes “stealing” his chickens, etc.,).

When it comes to population, humans are made of food, so if we
monopolize the land for our food, we always get more humans. Also,
farming takes work which virtually nobody wants to do, so farmers
naturally want to breed more workers to help them with their labors
(even if they’re going hungry), but these laborers also need more food.
Thus, more acres get drawn into agriculture and we get an ever-expanding
“frontier”. In no time, there are two agriculturalists, then four, then
eight, then sixteen and so forth. Before long the thousand acres is
filled up with humans and virtually nothing else. Then the humans start
to starve in mass numbers because they’ve undermined the ecological
community upon which they depend. It’s a cycle as old as civilization
itself, repeated time and time again.

Agriculture was never a solution to population pressures. Starving
people do not start planting seeds, they eat them (and then eat bark or
whatever else they can think of). More than likely agriculture came
first for some other reason (personally I think hunter gatherer life
became so easy in the last 12,000 years that we started getting picky in
the richest, most fertile ecosystems, planting what we wanted to eat
rather than just accepting what the mother gave us), then we unwittingly
created the population imbalances that swiftly followed to put us all on
the work/toil treadmill that has come to characterize civilized life
down through the ages.

So yes, if all the people of the city of Chicago started hunting for
their meat it would be obvious they were killing massive numbers of
animals in an unsustainable way, but the simple fact is that they are
already killing massive numbers of animals in an unsustainable way (and
here I’m talking about wild ones, not just domestic ones). Whether they
eat meat or not, they pay farmers to kill many wild species to make room
for a few agricultural ones. If they could see this, they might take
responsibility for it, but right now it his hidden and kept far away
from their consciousness. The number of acres of land impacted by the
city of Chicago through agriculture is truly staggering. Countless
millions of acres of American plains, Guatemalan valleys, and the
Amazonian rain forest (to site just a few examples out of many), have
had their forests clear cut, have had all their wildlife exterminated
down to even the insects and wild plants, and are now kept in this state
perpetually. Every year in these areas, the earth is plowed over, weeds
are pulled, insecticides are applied, groundhogs are poisoned, coyotes
are trapped, deer are fenced out, etc., to monopolize land for
agricultural consumption.

While driving out of Chicago sometime, stop in an Illinois farm field
and take a walk. Doesn’t matter whether the farm field is growing corn
or beans or potatoes. Look closely at the land, and see what plants,
animals, insects, tracks & sign are there. Look at the ground up
close. Then compare that to what you saw walking through the Northwoods up here at the Teaching Drum. Realize that at one time the land you are walking through was a wild & diverse ecosystem. Take a moment to reflect on the fact that the climate in Illinois is actually wetter,
warmer & more fertile than up here – the land there could support more
life than the land up here, but instead it supports less life because it
is mostly only allowed to support human life.

And as to the question about high-rise buildings. Yes, high rises
conserve space within a city, but they’re ecological footprint is
massive nonetheless. Strip mines for metals, oil drilling in wild lands
for heat and to make plastics, coal mining for electricity, toxic waste
from industrial manufacturing processes, farm fields to feed those
inside and all those who support those inside, roads (which are just
more clear cuts) to bring this all together. One high rise may only sit
atop a few acres of ground, but it requires literally millions of acres
of denuded land to create & support it’s functioning.

When the old timers talk about how all the rivers were fished out, they
are talking about a time when local fishing was being used to support
the high consumption rates of civilized living. Now far away lands are
being used, but since that consumption is still happening, it is coming
from somewhere on earth – someplace IS still getting fished out.
Experts predict we are on the edge of collapse of the world’s major
ocean fisheries, and what do you suppose will happen to local fish when
the far away ones are all gone? These old timers are not talking about
the time when fishing was supporting the low consumption rates of hunter
gatherers that I’m talking about.

My only proposal is that we come together, take responsibility for the
full extent of the reach of our lives, and stop taking more than we
need. Doesn’t matter what we call this, we just need to get clear about it.

[TonyZ]

That’s a pretty awesome post, Curt. A great refute to the ‘we can’t have 6 billion H&G’s’ arguement.

[Huby7]

Thank you, Tony.