There's history, and then there's prehistory. The former shows us that as a critical resource gets tite, the power elite, rather than cutting back on consumption to buy time to look for a solution, actually *increase* their exploitation of the lower classes. This stifles innovation, things get worse, and as Diamond says in his book by that name, the whole system goes into "Collapse".
It's a natural result of the group think the elite uses to convince themselves that they deserve support. But in the pre-history outlined by Gimbutas in "The Language of the Goddess" on the chalcolithic cultures of SE Europe... well look at what Joseph Campbell closes his forward to that work with:
"The message here is of an actual age of peace and harmony with the creative forces of nature, which for a spell of some 4000 prehistoric years, anteceded the 5000 of what James Joyce has termed the 'nightmare' (of contending tribal and national interests) from which it is certainly time for this planet to wake." [his parens]
He wrote this over 25 years ago, and even with his fame, hasnt awakened any significant numbers. If people want peace and sustainability, you'd think they'd go there and look at the ancients who been there and done that. Bear with me while I try to recall an outline....
From 8000 to 4000 BCE, dozens of trading towns, hundreds of villages, no signs of warfare. [that's a period]. Goodison & Morris, refer to this on the flyleaf of "Ancient Goddesses" where they set out to dig into a virgin tel to look for signs of warfare. Down 4000 years of occupation layers, just one house fire; no general layers of burnt rubble such as is always left after a place has been sacked.
And as noted in this thread, these agrarian villages were evenly distributed on the floodplains of the rivers that empty into the West end of the Black sea. Every 3km. Each village had about 8 sq miles of land that they farmed for 4000 years without destroying the fertility of the land. The soil cores show they used crop rotation, and the tree pollen shows they never clearcut the forests. The bone middens show the diversity of wild life that was there when they got started 10,000 years ago, and it was *ALL STILL THERE* 4000 years later. The didnt drive a single species to extinction.
And yet, all these people today, concerned about the environment and sustainability, dont know anything about it. Partly, this is due to group think. The Christians, Moslems, and Jews today would rather preach about peace than actually have to live that way. Its a whole different psychology when you replace their tyrannic Father God figure with the Great Earth Mother as the accepted concept of the divine.
Imagine the problems GW Bush or any other demagogue would have trying to work up a mob or an army by claiming that *he* speaks in *HER* name. So the first clue about sustainability is a religious reformation.
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