Neighborhood councils to cope with energy decline
I’m reading “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” which is one of the best books I’ve read in years, and a very hopeful one – this 700 page book is full of evidence that agriculture, capitalism, slavery, greed, and the unfair distribution of wealth we have today globally are not inevitable. There is no inevitable evolution of tribe to chiefdom to monarchy to state. Better societies once existed and might in the post carbon future. Plus the latest on dozens of new archeological sites found in the past few decades of forgotten civilizations.
French Jesuits and other explorers recorded the ideas of natives before they were destroyed by the onslaught of settlers. Their insights, political sophistication, and understanding of their cultures were written up into best sellers in Europe, and Rousseau and other philosophers stole their ideas without attribution that gave rise to our modern ideas about freedom, egalitarian societies and more.
Today with 8 billion people, the planet is full, more than full, it isn’t possible to travel so easily as it was before fossil fueled civilizations and find a better tribe or start your own experiment.
And to my surprise, travel was possible in the past. In America, sign language allowed natives to travel widely even if they didn’t speak the tongue of the villages they encountered, and it vastly expanded the ability to trade goods over long distances. The same was true in Australia, see Bruce Chatwin’s amazing book “The Songlines“.
People throughout time and places have always been conscious political actors. Another aspect of this book that gives me hope for the post fossil fuel world is that many societies deliberately rejected agriculture as their only sustenance, perhaps growing food part of the time seasonally, but then moving to hunting and gathering grounds another time of the year, often with huge celebrations of thousands of people. Burning Man is not new…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
