Why Societies Collapse

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse gives a talk on why societies collapse. Three of his five factors that contribute to collapse are environmental problems, failure to adapt to environmental problems, and climate change. He also includes social problems such as hostile neighbors and collapse of essential trading relationships. I have not read his books but perhaps he gives a more well-rounded view of collapse than Hughes, while still focusing on the environmental issues.

Popular Culture, the Oil Spill and America's Desire for a Quick Fix

http://www.youtube.com/user/BPplcv=JL6ooGCMlSs&feature=pyv&ad=6746177293&kw=environmental#p/u/0/YNq6vW-9_Nc

The BP YouTube channel appeared as a suggested link on the side of a clip from Bambi. YouTube has served as a major cultural institution in our modern society. It directs our interests, provides access to mainstream popular and tickles our funny bone. The societal role of YouTube continues to expand as our information society becomes more and more reliant on technology. Across the globe, people are now using YouTube as a major mechanism of societal change. Social networking and viral videos have helped elect President Obama and overthrow Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

It is not surprising that British Petroleum, which is viewed as one of the greatest environmental villains of the last decade, has turned to YouTube and other cultural outlets to spearhead its public relations campaign. The BP oil spill is an environmental catastrophe unlike other environmental woes of the past and present. Unlike global warming or deforestation in the Amazon that are far away or abstract issues, the BP oil spill washed up on our own shore, affected our own wallets and presented us with a singular villain to blame. Americans were willing to place blame at the feat of the BP much more quickly than to they would be able to look introspectively at their own actions for the root cause of Global Warming or deforestation. By being able to name a unique scapegoat and ignore all potential responsibility stemming from our veracious appetite for oil, we as a country were able to rally together and combat this “unnatural disaster” in a way that we will never be able to approach global warming.

Viewing the series of videos on the BP channel and listening to the individual stories of disaster on the Gulf and how “BP made it right” forced me to think about the concepts of root cause and the quick fix. As we discussed in class at the beginning of the semester our society longs for a simple explanations, a root cause, a scapegoat and a quick fix. The oil spill in the gulf seemingly had all of these characteristics this may seemingly explain why the catastrophe has all but disappeared from the public eye. Acknowledging these motivations and the important role they will play will be crucial as we go forward with environmental and global warming policy.

The Trouble with Lutts

Ralph Lutts' “The Trouble with Bambi” may have made some valid points about Disney’s portrayal of man the hunter, but in doing so he makes one criticism of the environmental movement which made me lose track of what those were. He draws from a Forbes critic’s review of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature. I doubt the critic read more than the jacket sleeve to portray McKibben as being raised on a Walt Disney view of nature. Bill McKibben, a meateater himself, admits that he was raised on readings of “Little House on the Prairie.” In McKibben’s ideal world, the Bambi hunter’s cottage would be something for Americans to aspire to- minus the subsequent forest fire. McKibben's titles may be sensational at times, but he is writing for a general audience- not an easy group to lasso without a gimmick.

Lutts' use of a book review to illustrate his point seems cheap to me. That the review comes from a business magazine makes it seem even more so. Clearly, McKibben’s critiques of consumerism pose a threat to the interests of the Forbes reader. But to the hunter (and Lutts) he is more likely an ally. He may tell him to lose the bonfire and get a more efficient woodstove for the cottage, but at the end of the day he would likely be thankful for the venison and for knowing that a few less people were relying on a global food system.

The trouble with the trouble with wilderness

Bill Cronon's "The trouble with wilderness" is one of the most widely read essays in the field of environmental history. You might want to check out some of the responses it spurred. Here is a link to one, "The trouble with Bill Cronon's wilderness," by Samuel Hays:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3985060

But remember, the precis assignment does not include personal opinions--only a summary of Cronon's piece.

Defining Wilderness

The Morgan Library & Museum Online Exhibitions: Illuminating the Medieval Hunt

The Morgan Library & Museum Online Exhibitions - Illuminating the Medieval Hunt - Ex Libris of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Spain

A digitized collection of 50 plates from Livre de Chasse can be viewed here, with accompanying commentary. Great resource.

dog kennels

Beauty and the Beast...the end of the hunt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7_zopLtpdk

The Hunter becoming The Hunted! (with a little help from a princess) =]

copyright Disney, of course.

Gawain's Word

once again YouTube to the rescue . . .

Valhalla Rising

Hi Everyone,

Reading the Sun today (friday feb 11) i saw a review for Valhalla Rising, a foreign film. I was wondering if anyone had seen it? The review opens 'In the beginning there was man and nature', a direct quote from the opening of the movie, which is about a scandanavian gladiator type person around the year 1000 who escapes and joins a crusade (from what I can tell from the review). It is well reviewed and sounds like it could have an interesting impression of nature. If I can find a copy of it I'll post again and let everyone know where.

-Robin

Gladiator Movie

What is the name of the movie we watched about the gladiatorial games in Rome? I thought it was a BBC documentary but I can't find it.

Joni Mitchell Primitivism

Going on today's lecture on music, Joni Mitchell's song Big Yellow Taxi came to mind where she asks farmers for "spots on her apples " but to "leave [her] the birds and the bees". Here is a video of her singing this song in 1970.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgMEPk6fvpg

Go Paleo!

This is my friend Doug. Doug recently went "paleo," paleolithic that is. This is a diet that recommends we go back to eating like cavemen- meat, seeds, nuts, berries, and vegetables. Carbohydrates are merely an invention of agriculture and are something that we did not evolve to eat. Check out the website: http://www.livingpaleo.com/
Sorry, Doug, but you're a primitivist if I've ever seen one.

CAFO + Snow = 85,000 chickens squashed

The heavy snows on the East Coast have led to roof collapse all over the Northeast. One particular collapse led to the death of 85,000 chickens in one go.

Ridiculous, and a powerful reminder of what our food systems look like:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/04/85000-hens-killed-in-conn_n_818575.html

Re: Alcock Review of Hughes

Hey all. I just wanted to post a little bit about our discussion of Susan Alcock's book review of Hughes today. The more I think about the review, the more I feel that we misrepresented her arguments in class. With all due respect to the anonymous student who wrote the e-mail that Professor Tantillo gave us today, I really don't feel that Alcock's criticism was that Hughes only focused on environmental reasons for the downfall of classical societies. As the student (who was not directly addressing Alcock's review, but a more general sentiment in class that Hughes only mentioned environmental problems) correctly points out, Hughes does make it very clear that he is not arguing for a simple cause and effect, but rather a contribution to the fall of ancient Greece and Rome. I don't think that Alcock would dispute this argument. Alcock states that she objects to Hughes second argument, that "environmental degradation can be linked to the 'decline of classical civilization'." Alcock goes on to say that "this teleological view of Mediterranean history (with everything going downhill from the Greco-Roman period) no longer seems so clear cut today." In that sense I feel that Alcock's argument is that Hughes wrongly picks the collapse of the Roman empire as not only an endpoint, but as evidence that his conclusions were valid. I understand that the book has to end somewhere, and the fall of the Roman empire is probably a good place for that to happen, but it does seem that Hughes made the fall of rome the end all be all of classical civilization, which only added to the credibility of his argument. Take Hughes' closing argument for the book (194), "Environmental changes as a result of human activities must be judged to be one of the causes in the decline of ancient Greek and Roman civilization, and in producing the stark conditions of the early Medieval centuries." While I think Hughes' argumentation in the previous chapters supported the first half of his statement, I'm pretty certain that the extension to the Medieval centuries, the post Greco-Roman period that Alcock is discussing, is both unwarranted and baseless given his claims. While I am no scholar on post Greco-Roman Mediterranean history, asserting that the environmental problems of classical civilizations produced hundreds of years of underdeveloped society simply doesn't sit right with me as no evidence is provided. Additionally, would Hughes argue that the only reason that the enlightenment and renaissance were able to rekindle what he thought was the greatness of classical situation was because there was a hiatus in which no environmental degradation occurred? I highly doubt there is evidence for that, and I wouldn't be surprised to find much environmental abuse throughout the middle and dark ages. Therefore, I do feel that Alcock's concerns were somewhat justified, in that Hughes dismisses all post-Roman societies as "stark" civilizations resulting from the collapse of Greece and Rome. Given her argumentation, I feel that this is not the consensus among modern historians.

The San people of the Kalahari Desert

Though I've been a vegetarian for 17 years, this is the one instance where I was able to find beauty in hunting.

Kanye's new video is about this class.

Somebody needs to do a term paper on Kanye's new video, Runaway. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7W0DMAx8FY

Forest destruction? The border between animals and humans? Gender studies? Sex? American history? Race relations? Pop culture? This video has it all.


Here's one article that highlights some possible interpretations:
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1650682/kanye-wests-runaway-very-expressive-media-student.jhtml

"And of course, there's the matter of the phoenix herself, which serves a dual purpose in 'Runaway.' On one hand, she plays into the larger theme of man versus nature; and, on the other, she's a very pretty metaphor for Kayne's triumphant return to the spotlight... 'I think she embraces nature and how, in a sense, we're ignoring it. And how she has fallen and we are trying to civilize her, and she can't; it's destroying her.'"

On the root cause . . .

In the "root cause of environmental evil" department, this appeared yesterday. enjoy.

from http://hauntingthelibrary.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/green-writer-for-bbc-guardian-demands-end-of-farming-dismantle-civilization/ :

Green Writer for BBC, Guardian, Demands: End Farming, Dismantle Civilization.

Posted on January 27, 2011 by hauntingthelibrary| 24 Comments

Dr John Feeney is a prominent green campaigner who has written for the Guardian newspaper, the BBC, and many other Green journals and websites. He was the winner of the 2007 ECO award. In 2009 he received the Global Media award from the Population Institute for his work.

Now this award-winning Greenie has joined the growing list of ecologists and activists who are saying that the root of the problem is agriculture, which enables humans to “circumvent” nature’s sacred limits and build earth-destroying civilizations. Like many others, he accuses us of being in “denial” over the need to return to a hunter-gatherer way of life:

The problem of agriculture is in part a problem of human numbers. Before farming hu­man population size had been regulated by the same process that works for black bears, dingos, bonobos, rainbow trout, and long-tailed parakeets. It works for all species, gener­ally keeping their numbers within carrying capacity. It’s simple: Population follows food supply. Normal oscillations in available food exert multiple small, cumulative, typically painless infuences on fertility and mortality. With agriculture we circumvented this process. Growing and storing food we could go on growing our food supply. The result has been predictable: more humans.
Canyon County Zephyr. Agriculture: The End of the World As We Know It.

Ah, yes. Overpopulation. At the heart of the global warming movement, just like the rest of the so-called crises, is the deep and abiding belief of Greenies that there are just far too many of you.

Feeney believes that farming has caused “a steep decline in health” as well as “social hierarchies, sexual inequality, fam­ine, slavery, time clocks, money, and a massive upscaling of violence”. He agrees with Jared Diamond’s characterization of farming as “the worst mistake in the history of the human race” and with Paleontologist Niles Eldredge’s comment that to develop agriculture is “essentially to declare war on ecosystems.”.

Feeney believes that once civilizations crumble “a better future” awaits us as hunter-gatherers “beyond civilization” -

It is of course not only our numbers which will come to an end. Civilization is made possible by agriculture. Agriculture is unsustainable. If it weren’t obvious already, you can see where this is going. There’s no predicting the timeline of civilization’s collapse. Techno-fxes and any resiliency industrial society possesses may draw it out. No matter, a better future, indeed the only future for humanity and the rest of Earth’s inhabitants is one beyond civilization.

Feeney believes that this shift is unlikely to happen voluntarily and says “hard choices”, possibly involving “the loss of life”, will have to be made by those who understand that we cannot allow civilization to continue:

But despite converging ecological catastrophes we show few signs of such a massive, voluntary shift. Those with vested interests in the status quo see to that. So writers such as Zerzan and Derrick Jensen advocate a purposeful resistance movement designed to hasten civilization’s end . . . Says Jensen today, “Systems of power are created by humans and can be stopped by humans. Those in power are never supernatural or immortal, and they can be brought down.” Though this raises the frightening specter of triggering loss of life before it would happen other­wise, the argument is that bringing down civilization sooner would leave more life intact than would a delayed and drawn out collapse. We face hard choices.

Though Feeney is pessimistic about a voluntary shift to end civilization, he takes heart from the work of fellow activists who “acknowledge a collapse of civi­lization is inevitable and work with zest toward a shift to a tribal, wild way of living.”

He concludes with the thought that however the collapse of civilization and the end of farming is achieved, it must happen, as it’s not sustainable -

Whatever our course, we have only to consider the agricultural origins of our ecological crisis to understand civilization is an unsustainable trap.

John Feeney lives in Colorado with his family. Presumably not just on nuts, berries and whatever they can hunt down, as he has an internet connection. He is the creator of the PopulationSpeakOut website.

Never too early to start thinking about those term paper topics!

Welcome to Nature and Culture 2011

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the blog for Nature and Culture! Students enrolled in the course will have received an invitation from blogger.com to "join" the blog as an author; but anyone can comment at any time. Enjoy!

Jim

another cat compound

http://green.yahoo.com/blog/guest_bloggers/69/man-builds-cat-sized-village-for-homeless-cats.html

double rainbow guy strikes again

http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/93979?fp=1