(See Part 1)
A ‘progress trap’ is a term I encountered in the book entitled A Short History of Progress.
In Chapter 2 the author, Ronald Wright, reveals “what we can deduce from the first progress trap - the perfection of hunting, which ended the Stone Age...”
(See Part 2)
Now, about that first progress trap he writes the following:
“Modern hunter-gatherers - Amazonians, Australian Aboriginals, Inuit, Kalahari bushmen - are wise stewards of their ecologies, limiting their own numbers, treading lightly on the land.”
I know, you’re already ahead of me. You’ve deduced that early man did not tread lightly, were not good stewards. You may also have jumper farther ahead to modern day, our wastefulness, the corner we have painted ourselves into quite nicely.
Hey, not so fast.
["Are we nothing more than a greedy monkey?": photo by GH]
Wright continues:
“It is often assumed that ancient hunters would have been equally wise. But archaeological evidence does not support this view. Palaeolithic hunting was the mainstream livelihood, done in the richest environments on a seemingly boundless earth.”
Stop it. Already you’re thinking about how unwisely modern corporations have decimated the seemingly boundless forests and salmon stocks in the NW region of the US, aka ‘the Pacific North-west.' Let Wright finish.
“(Palaeolithic hunting was) done, we have to infer from the profligate remains, with the stock-trader’s optimism that there would always be another big killing just over the next hill. In the last and best-documented mass extinctions - the loss of flightless birds and other animals from New Zealand and Madagascar - there is no room for doubt that people were to blame. The Australian biologist Tim Flannery has called human beings the “future-eaters.” Each extinction is a death of possibility.”
Okay, it’s my turn to openly reflect on a related matter.
This from an essay I read last night from a book entitled Moral Ground (K.D. Moore, M.P. Nelson):
“We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinctions since the disappearance of the dinosaurs,” said Ahmed Djoghlaf, head of the UN convention on biological diversity. “Extinction rates are rising by a factor of up to 1,000 above natural rates. Every hour, three species disappear. Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct,” he said. “The cause: human activities.”
Sorry, I digress.
Wright says:
“So among the things we need to know about ourselves is that the Upper Paleaolithic period, which may well have begun in genocide, ended with an all-you-can-kill wildlife barbecue. The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game. Most of the great human migrations across the world at this time must have been driven by want, as we bankrupted the land with our moveable feasts... the hunters at the end of the Stone Age were certainly not clumsy, but they were bad because they broke rule one for any prudent parasite: Don’t kill off your host.”
“As they drove species after species to extinction, they walked into the first progress trap.”
“Some of their descendants - the hunter-gatherer societies that have survived into recent times - would learn in the school of hard knocks to restrain themselves.”
Question: Does modern man restrain himself?
Wright concludes:
“But the rest of us found a way to raise the stakes: that great change known to hindsight as the Farming or Neolithic “Revolution.”
And how is that going for us?
We’re inflicting other progress traps upon ourselves.
Now we’re burning rain forests to plant soy for beef cattle.
Now we’re stripping ancient forests in the Pacific NW - at the same time destroying salmon stocks - to send raw wood and jobs to Asia.
Your turn.
Do you know of other examples of Catch-44s, other progress traps?
Are we nothing but greedy monkeys?
Stayed tuned.
***
For context, please read Catch-44, the progress trap, and the greedy monkey PT 1 and PT 2.
Part 1 here.
Part 2 here.
On a lighter note - It Strikes me Funny - please click here
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