Hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society

[JustinG]

The most significant type of environmental change brought about by Precolumbian human activity was the modification of vegetation. [...] Vegetation was primarily altered by the clearing of forest and by intentional burning. Natural fires certainly occurred but varied in frequency and strength in different habitats. Anthropogenic fires, for which there is ample documentation, tended to be more frequent but weaker, with a different seasonality than natural fires, and thus had a different type of influence on vegetation. The result of clearing and burning was, in many regions, the conversion of forest to grassland, savanna, scrub, open woodland, and forest with grassy openings. (William M. Denevan)[

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Am ... ecosystems

I don't think anyone is claiming indigenous peoples didn't alter the natural environment (humans are part of nature after all), and different types of indigenous societies cannot, of course, all be treated as the same. But I do think there is a difference between altering the land in a way which allows for 60,000 years of occupation and degrading it within 250 years (which is the situation with indigenous and non-indigenous Australians).

[Soul_of_Shu]

All is valuable. Inherently valuable by being unique - each experience, each form, each life story, etc..

'Being Unique' is another, complementary way of singing in the "single voice" of differentiation, as Deleuze expresses the Spinozan aspect of his philosophy.

We are absolutely in agreement here. ^_^

Another take is that if Nature's 'valued' human expression is to be saved, it will be through the metamorphic transfiguration of Its Ideation, this current metacognitive egoic expression being an incipient, yet integral, stage of that evolving process, awaiting some defining phase transition. And as far as how unique such a novel expression will be, I suspect that we ain't seen nothin' yet ... no-thingness notwithstanding

[Jim Cross]

Justin,

Fundamentally human behavior hasn't really changed. The extinction of the megafauna and the significant alteration of the environment even in prehistoric times is evidence of that. What has changed is our technology and our population so we do more damage today than we did a few thousand years ago.

Human behavior needs to change but romanticizing the indigenous isn't the way forward. Even if they were more virtuous in some way, we don't have a way back unless we want to let a couple of billion people die.

[SanteriSatama]

Justin,

Fundamentally human behavior hasn't really changed. The extinction of the megafauna and the significant alteration of the environment even in prehistoric times is evidence of that. What has changed is our technology and our population so we do more damage today than we did a few thousand years ago.

Human behavior needs to change but romanticizing the indigenous isn't the way forward. Even if they were more virtuous in some way, we don't have a way back unless we want to let a couple of billion people die.

It's not romantizing to observe the self-evident fact that our ancestors have been able to find sustainable ways of life and live accordingly. Without ancestral ability of sustainable adaptation we would not be here. What would sustainable adaptation mean on the new level of global village, we don't know in any greater detail, but it would be hubris of immense stupidity not to share with and learn from sustainable ways of life past and present.

Controlled fires has been mentioned as a long tested and good method of primary production in the form of food forests / multilayer gardens in certain ecosystems. And we know that the yield per acre with "permacultural" horticulture can be far far more than monocultures of field cultivation. The latter is primarily a political system, not based on sound horticultural practices. .

[Jim Cross]

Justin,

Fundamentally human behavior hasn't really changed. The extinction of the megafauna and the significant alteration of the environment even in prehistoric times is evidence of that. What has changed is our technology and our population so we do more damage today than we did a few thousand years ago.

Human behavior needs to change but romanticizing the indigenous isn't the way forward. Even if they were more virtuous in some way, we don't have a way back unless we want to let a couple of billion people die.

It's not romantizing to observe the self-evident fact that our ancestors have been able to find sustainable ways of life and live accordingly. Without ancestral ability of sustainable adaptation we would not be here. What would sustainable adaptation mean on the new level of global village, we don't know in any greater detail, but it would be hubris of immense stupidity not to share with and learn from sustainable ways of life past and present.

Controlled fires has been mentioned as a long tested and good method of primary production in the form of food forests / multilayer gardens in certain ecosystems. And we know that the yield per acre with "permacultural" horticulture can be far far more than monocultures of field cultivation. The latter is primarily a political system, not based on sound horticultural practices. .

It's somewhat debatable how sustainable some of those methods were. There's plenty of evidence of population booms and busts. Plenty of civilizations rose and fell. Plenty of evidence of violence when the methods were not quite so sustainable.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/hun ... bel-sahaba

Permaculture doesn't typically involves the use of controlled fire. Keep in mind that fire releases carbon into the atmosphere.

My experience with fire as a tool is the 1970's when I sat on a porch one evening and watched an entire hillside of rainforest in embers from the fire the farmers had set to clear the debris. These were farmers working with machetes and axes. The pattern is similar in many parts of the world. Chop it down, set it on fire, get a crop or two, convert to pasture, move on to the next piece of rainforest. The sort of pure environments people here are thinking about no longer exist if they ever did.

[Jim Cross]

I'm very sympathetic to the idea that things need to change.

Ultimately things like permaculture and more intensive agriculture could lead to a rewilding of portions of the world. More equality and reduction of poverty would mean those farmers who hacked down the rainforest wouldn't need to do it. Population reduction would reduce pressure on resources.

Many of those things, however, need more technology not less, but the right sort of technology.

It is actually our prehistoric behaviors now being executed by people with access to modern technologies is the problem.

[SanteriSatama]

It's somewhat debatable how sustainable some of those methods were. There's plenty of evidence of population booms and busts. Plenty of civilizations rose and fell. Plenty of evidence of violence when the methods were not quite so sustainable.

As an evolving empirical science, of course horticulture should be debatable. You give a nice short summary of European history of population booms and busts and violence, so I take that you agree there's plenty of room for improvement?

And for improvement, isn't the proper method to look at relative succes stories to learn from, such as abundant food forests in what is now called California?

Permaculture doesn't typically involves the use of controlled fire. Keep in mind that fire releases carbon into the atmosphere.

I agree that "Permaculture" is very problematic term, as it's a commercial trade mark. But let's not go into that discussion.

My experience with fire as a tool is the 1970's when I sat on a porch one evening and watched an entire hillside of rainforest in embers from the fire the farmers had set to clear the debris. These were farmers working with machetes and axes. The pattern is similar in many parts of the world. Chop it down, set it on fire, get a crop or two, convert to pasture, move on to the next piece of rainforest. The sort of pure environments people here are thinking about no longer exist if they ever did.

I'm a Forest Finn, and our way of life was itinerant swidden until the colonial state structure banned our way of life. Our speciality was "slash and burn" of old spruce forest, which is a big multiyear or multidecade project. And as spruce is relatively recent newcomer in these parts, and strongly monocultural, the local ecosystem chose to create Forest Finns to balance things and to create more biodiversity. Of course the sustainable way to do it includes very long rotations back to old forest (together with complex layering of shorter rotations of succession phases), so in his wisdom the Creator made our tribe also very lazy, as lazy is the easy way to be patient.

What was referred earlier as "indian fires" and similar practice in Australia, etc relatively hot and arid areas where fires are naturally vey frequent, is not same as slash and burn. Burning the shrubs with controlled fires is also a preventive method against big fires which will burn also the trees, while also increasing the nutrient recycling and etc.

A further evolution of slash and burn is to plant also wide variety of edible, medicinal etc. perennials into long term multilayer food forests, instead of just have the crop of rye and turnip.

[Lou Gold]

Jim - It's an error to equate hunter-gatherers with older civilizations. Hunter-gatherer survival was based in large part on mobility and population control. Civilizations are sedentary and experience population booms and busts. Also, there's quite a bit of variance in how civilizations used fire. For example, the Amazonian Terra Preta civilizations used fire to enhance soil productivity and sustain large sedentary populations across long periods of time.

[SanteriSatama]

Many of those things, however, need more technology not less, but the right sort of technology.

Philosopher with deep insight into positive aspects of techonology - Buckminster Fuller - talked about doing more with less. Any case better technology than the current, but better is very hard to exactly define and predict.

[Lou Gold]

I haven't read Deleuze, but metaphysics of process philosophical Unique - which sort of came from Ayahuasca - is very close to Deleuze (at least based on wiki).

I'd love to read more about your Ayahuasca-inspired process philosophy. Have you written it up anywhere?

I've been also developing foundations of mathematics based on more-less relation and relational operators < > as the mathematical aspect of the ontology we've called here 'Divinely Integrated Differentiation'.

That sounds both fascinating and entirely over my head.

DandelionSoul -- A few years ago, at a time when I was fussing over the dissociative model of DID, I drank Daime a for morning hike through a várzea (seasonal flooded forest) in western Amazonia. Being the dry season, many of the trees and shrubs were standing quite individually with sparse vegetation between them, quite unlike a jungle tangle of plants and vines. I asked, "Is this a Dissociated Identity Disorder?" and the inner voice immediately responded, "No! This is a Divinely Integrated Diversity." It was the first time I had heard or read that rendering of DID.