'Civilised' can be misleading because it conjures up images of cities and people tend to forget that before the cities came a crucial change - we lost our wildness, we started farming.
We domesticated other animals and plants, changing ourselves completely in the process.
"The changes that take place as people are forced from hunting gathering to agriculture are not conjectural, but observed in recent times among the !Kung. Their small-group egalitarian life vanishes beneath chiefdoms, children become excessively attached and more aggressive, there are more contagious diseases, poorer nourishment, more high blood pressure, earlier menarche, three times as many childbirths per woman, and a loss of freedom in every aspect of their lives."
- from 'A Post-Historic Primitivism' by Paul Shepard, in "The Wilderness Condition - Essays on Environment and Civilisation" ed by Max Oelschlaeger, Island Press, (1992)
If we want to heal ourselves and the earth, then a good place to start is to look at agriculture and figure out why we would want to continue such a destructive, tame way of life.
We humans don't have the expertise to take on the ordering of the world, so we should leave it to Nature to figure it out. Life was getting on fine before we started digging and domesticating - becoming gods and deciding what lived and what didn't. (This "eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" - after which we were banished from paradise and forced to till the land and shop in supermarkets.)
Take just one aspect: the interaction of fungi and sunlight. (http://www.eco-action.org/dt/hambler.html) So complex and beautiful - how could we presume to know better?
Agriculture = from 'agri' (ager 'field') + 'cultura' ('cultivation'): the science or art of cultivating the soil, harvesting crops, and raising livestock.
Horticulture = from Latin 'hortus' (garden): the cultivation of an orchard, garden, or nursery on a small or large scale.
Both the above are different from scattering some seeds. They are a lot more intrusive than that. My definition of 'sustainable' is that it doesn't deplete the soil. After cultivation the soil changes its structure. It becomes something else entirely in order to cope with the assault and change in circumstance. It is also left exposed to be washed away by rain and wind. Between 1500 and 1970, one third of the topsoil in the US was lost.
New topsoil takes thousands of years to create, so if we want to live sustainably we need to be thinking of something which doesn't do this.
It's worth bearing in mind that even the organic Amish farmers who use no machines or chemical fertilisers have depleted their soil by HALF in the amount of time they've been living there. When they first arrived the topsoil was sixteen inches, now it's only eight.
Even multicrops or animal husbandry cause soil erosion. The problem is farming - all farming. Why say "industrial agriculture" or "monocropping" when the real culprit is agriculture (including organic and non-mechanised agriculture)?
Farming makes us describe things in a different way than does hunting and gathering. It fundamentally changes our relationship to our home, the earth, from a sacred game of chance to a tactical manoevre of domination. Our stories change, our languages change.
Some people have said to me that there are tribes that practice some form of horticulture as a way to supplement their hunting and gathering, and who don't plant for maximum production. They say that these tribes don't feel a need to clear cut, weed out, or stop `pests` from enjoying the garden.
But even small gardens require all the above. Maybe not as extreme as a modern wheat plantation, but the idea is the same. 'Slash and burn', or it's more politically correct name of 'swidden', agriculture still results in deforestation and the denigration of forest into grassland.
For example, a recent study of the South ForŽ region [of the New Guinea highlands] by Dr. Arthur Sorenson of the National Institutes of Health shows that the ForŽ have inßicted large-scale irreversible damage upon their primary forest habitat over a 400 square mile area of the Central Range. Thick Kunai grass has taken the place of abandoned garden and hamlet sites, following the movement of settlement deeper into virgin forests. A general breaking up of the forest can be seen in regions where gardening has been carried out for many years."
Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches, Vintage Books, New York, 1989 (originally published in 1974)
It's like someone eating a chocolate bar, getting the rush of energy, feeling like running round the place. Woah!! This is great. Lets have more kids, plant some more! But they're empty calories and pretty soon there's a blood sugar crash and the body's firing insulin and the hormones are swinging and it's a disaster, a complete mess. Out of balance, out of synch.
There is no benefit in an arrangement that is out of balance, no matter how small-scale you make that arrangement, though obviously there's less damage when you eat one bar than a whole box of chocolates.
Farming engenders a childish relationship with the land and our genetic slaves. 'Tending' them, 'bringing them up' - an infantile relationship. Does it really matter about the scale on which you do this? Surely it's the fact that we are doing this at all - that we would want to do it - that's important. Another indicator of where our heads are at right now.
I've never gone hunting so I can't tell for sure. But I think you enter a different state of mind when you hunt. "Meditative stillness" is how Gary Snyder put it. It is an act of extreme in-the-momentness, where you are a part of the wind, terrain, light...
I understand that there's a lot involved in questioning agriculture and that it is more familiar to us than hunting and gathering. I don't know how I would survive if I had to live off my wits. I haven't grown up with hunting and gathering going on around me. I haven't the knowledge or skills that my ancestors had or the primitive tribes still left have. I haven't grown with the forest to teach me. I haven't learnt the lessons I need to live wild. It could be scary. It could be alien to me. But that's no reason to swallow the lies I've been told about agriculture and denigrate the hunting and gathering way of life.
From a personal point of view, I like gathering. I get a real kick and happiness out of it and wonder what it'd be like to live like that all the time.
When I tried to garden I fought with the earth and it felt bad. Yeah, it was better than shopping at Tescos, but what the hell wouldn't be?
But when I gather I don't fight with nobody and it feels great! Feels like the way it should be! It puts me in my right place.
Try it and see for yourself.
"You'll be surprised at what resides in your insides!"
- Arrested Development