The Lifeboat News
[ Message Archive | The Lifeboat News ]

    Re: I am not against civilizational collapse .. Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on June 11, 2019, 9:02 pm, in reply to "I am not against civilizational collapse .."

    Hi, sorry for the delayed response...

    Yes, I tend to view civ as more or less equivalent to empire, though if we're pinning it down to the use of agriculture then it was kicking around for a few thousand years before the first full-blown empires emerged.

    'I feel that what you refer to as nature is everything apart from us, i.e. All the things we are ruining.' - not sure why you bring this up, I almost never use the word 'nature' because of the split it implies between 'us' (humans) and 'them' (non-humans) and the superiority that most often goes along with this - an othering process enabling their destruction at our hands. Like it said in the DM manifesto, 'The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it.' ( https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/ )

    So I think we're actually more-or-less in agreement about 'human nature' being inseparable from the wider whole - we're just another species of primate in the order of mammals. Where we probably differ is on the hi-tech aspects. Yes, tool use is inherently part of our makeup as a species (we're not the only ones either) but the trouble comes when that tech steps over boundaries of sustainability. I can't see how a space program, to use your example, could exist independent of a highly complex, fossil fuel dependent civilisation, with all the mining, infrastructure, specialised jobs etc this would require. So it's not just the 'few acres of forest' so much as the ongoing, highly damaging demands made by a hi-tech civilisation, which continues to expand its impacts that is the real problem for me.

    'I really want to know where we came from.' - great, me too I often reach for the findings of scientists to try and make sense of the world around me, and filter a lot of information through the general theories that have been developed. In a country without a surviving indigenous population I'm forced to rely on the disciplines of archaeology, geology, ecology etc to try and build a picture of what this place was like when there last was a sustainable human presence. But I'd much rather speak to a local tribal elder, all things considered! There's something wrong IMHO, when knowledge is specialised, professionalised and alienated from the lived experience of people on a day-to-day basis. It sounds like you're most worried about superstitions and religious dogma taking people away from reality. Fine, I'm often the first to ask for verifiable evidence when people start on long screeds about their 'watery bints'. But then, mythology is often the best way to encode knowledge and pass it on to the next generations in oral cultures. For example, I heard that aboriginal australians have stories mentioning coastlines that disappeared under the sea over 7,000 years ago:

    '"These stories talk about a time when the sea started to come in and cover the land, and the changes this brought about to the way people lived – the changes in landscape, the ecosystem and the disruption this caused to their society," he said. [...] "Anything that goes back thousands of years – nearly 10,000 years in some cases – has to be quite exceptional," he said.

    "It's a remarkable time period when we consider our own memories and what we can remember even with the aid of books and other information.

    "I believe these stories endured that long partly due to the harshness of Australia's natural environment, which meant that each generation had to pass on knowledge to the next in a systematic way to ensure its survival." '     - https://phys.org/news/2015-09-landmark-paper-aboriginal-memories-years.html

    In other words there were practical day-to-day reasons for passing this knowledge on, and the stories would have been familiar to every member of the tribe from a young age as part of their shared identity. Copies of 'on the origin of species' almost certainly won't be around 7,000 years from now, but if the ideas prove useful in the contexts people find themselves in then the concept of evolution itself might. I've a feeling that much of the hyper-specialised research accumulated over the last couple hundred years is going to be lost and forgotten post-crash - especially the stuff that never even got printed out but is sitting on a hard drive somewhere (requiring computers, electricity, the internet etc to access). Hard to consider from the viewpoint of those who put so much time into it, but at the end of the day maybe knowledge is a practical thing that has to stay relevant to lived experience, and if it isn't then maybe it's okay to let it go. If you disagree, well, Get thee to a monastery!

    cheers,
    I

    Message Thread: