Hi again, sorry for the delayed response, a bit pressed for time myself...
Yes, it's a big topic with lots to unpack and it's probably silly of me to just throw out a few sentences and link to a giant online work that nobody's got the time to read. If you would like to carry on debating those points...
'In your history of mankind, to paraphrase, it seems the stone age was followed by the industrial revolution was followed by high tech. And the answer is to go back to the stone age.' - well it was followed by the bronze and iron ages first but yeah, that's the basic understanding (although not all human cultures went through these processes). For me it's a question about fundamental issues of sustainability. Draffan draws the line at the 'stone age', though viewing agriculture as part of the problem would put it before the Neolithic (New Stone Age) Revolution. Anyway, that's a diagnosis, not a prescription. Something can either be sustained indefinitely or it can't. I imagine smelting iron or making a smart phone could technically be sustainable if it was done on a very small scale that didn't cut down forests or mine other resources faster than they could be replenished, but then these practices are tied in to the deeply unsustainable cultures that gave birth to them, and it's hard to see how they would not create an acceleration to further destruction. As we see from history.
'How do you think influenza spreads around the world in one season, and did so in 1918' - exactly, the world was already very well interconnected in 1918. The point is that relative isolation of tribal groups, especially when combined with nomadism and not sharing living space with domesticated animals leaves no evolutionary niche for epidemic disease, especially not one with a high mortality rate.
'Is witchcraft really just a branch of herbalism?' - well I don't know a huge amount about it but yes, there's more to it than that. You seemed to be dismissing it outright though, so I thought it might be worth pointing out that there was some value to the folk medicine that went along with it. Scientific trials have validated a lot of the claims made in traditional herbal medicine, even if 'eye of newt' didn't quite cut it
Thanks for the explanation about science, though I did have a fairly good understanding of that, despite not having formally pursued the subjects beyond GCSE level! Good to hear you speak favourably of observational science. Would you agree that tracking, as described in the above quote, would count as a heuristic process?
Agreed that science and technology aren't inherently destructive, but I think it's simplistic to say 'technology is just tools', as the adoption of any particular piece of tech can have deep, far-reaching effects on the structure of a society. Gunpowder? Cars? Computers? There needs to be a right to refuse tech that proves to be damaging IMO. Unfortunately that just doesn't happen when they're tied into a wider cultural inertia, eg: consumer capitalism dependent on endless growth.