How does a society function with 90% of the population farming? So say the average family spends 10000 on food each year, that means every farmer will only get 1000 a year. How does that society function? Since only 2% of the population farms each farmer would get about 500K a year in revenue. That makes more sense considering all the expenses.
Also what happens when there is a food surplus? Is the extra food just burned? I don't get how we could ever go back to an Agarian society.
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we wont go back to an agrarian society unless we are pressured to do so
if the food can be farmed with a low share of the population, it makes room for other work and that is good
So why the hell do guys like Jefferson want to do it?
because you're more self sufficient and don't depend on jews giving you some bad, low paid job
en.wikipedia.org
I would like for society to move into the self-sufficient direction, but, total agrarian society just doesn't seem viable anymore.
Ok but how does it work in a free market when there is a food surplus? Like do the farmers that produce surplus food just burn their food considering they can't sell it to anyone?
probably, in the agrarian society the economy is pretty fixed, you're self sufficient but you also aren't really able to benefit from overproduction
That seems kind of stupid. How would you not be self sufficient if 1% of the population were farmers if they produced enough for everyone else.
Or hopefully store it. What happens in the US is that the government will buy the oversupply of things to support the price so that farmers don't get put out of business by a bad season, since we'd all fucking starve without them. This is where government cheese comes from. They also sometimes pay them to keep an area fallow for a while to reduce supply and support a price floor.
A totally agrarian society could not work at our population size. We also couldn't maintain our tech level since there would be nobody to do the non-farm work.
you're self-sufficient as a country but you will need to offer the owner useful services or you're out of the equation
you're right though food is so damn cheap it's almost never the problem
I don't understand. I don't get how having extra people farm when they don't have to benefits a single person.
Sounds terrible why would anyone support this?
>I don't understand. I don't get how having extra people farm when they don't have to benefits a single person.
the benefit is that the single person can't lose their way of working for themselves (when they farm their own food they can't lose their job), otherwise it's inefficient
True. I get it now but am not for it.
This is partly why there is pressure to create canned and preserved goods which last for a long time. This means your products are more valuable for traders, since they have a better chance of reselling them. This also makes it possible to sell to large factories and cities.
A problem with this is that the market is flooded with flour, sugar, dried fruits, spices, etc. They don't fetch a very high price anymore. To make it viable today you'd have to be some kind of biologist with cutting edge technology to grow very scarce spices like vanilla beans outside of their natural environment. They are scarce because the people living in their home region are nonwhites and they cannot possibly grow enough of them or stop plagues.
I think growing fresh foods locally is probably valid since there's such a massive quality difference between local strawberries and Driscoll's strawberries, but you'd need competitive prices which is why few people do it. Fundamentally you can't make it worth your while at such a smaller scale, and the small scale is intrinsic to fresh foods.
Trade exists. There are different quality levels of food. A lot of the US's wealth came from food exports. They either didn't have enough food or wanted higher quality food from us. If there is a surplus and nobody is buying the lowest quality food can be composted for higher quality food in the future, while only the highest quality food is eaten. In addition to that food surplus allows for population growth, which was once a serious factor in the strength of countries. Now it is still important, but less so. When 90% of the population is farming well the population can over double each generation.
Which part sounds terrible?
Because that 90% feeds itself and only has to buy things like clothes, tools, lumber, and then trade for crops they don’t grow. It’s a very stable type of society, you’re looking at it the wrong way.
Why should everyone be potty trained, Why not 2% get potty trained, and 98% hire that 2% to be butt wiping bathroom jockeys. Then a butt jockey could make good money or else if everyone was trained and hired themselves or their neighbor, then they would make less money.
> Also what happens when there is a food surplus
Freeze it, or have more kids to eat it, or grow less food.
> if the food can be farmed with a low share of the population, it makes room for other work and that is good
If Monsanto can mass produce poison crap food, that frees up more labors to shine King Georges shoes, for the privilege of eating said poison crap.
Big brother and central planning shouldn't interfere.
> A totally agrarian society could not work at our population size.
There is 7 acres in America per American.
>We also couldn't maintain our tech level
Farmer/inventors: Edison, Ford, Wright brothers. The first particle accelerator was built in a barn.
Organic non-gmo food is high demand, and low supply now. Monsantos is cheap.
Vanilla is rare, because grow time is long, pollination window is short, and only one insect can pollinate it, which only inhabits Mexico.
Adam smith said, agriculture is the one area that low tech countries can compete against high tech countries. This is because agriculture is unpredictable and requires labor. People becomes overconfident in trying to make it easier, but it really does require labor and attention, not some lazy man's technology.
It's not that we couldn't maintain tech level because farmers are stupid, they are often very smart. It's because with 90% of the population farming there literally aren't enough people to do the non-farm work.
>7 acres per American
Of arable land? Or are you including deserts, mountains, and forest?
>low-tech countries competing against high-tech at anything
kek. low tech countries are low tech because their people are retards.
If everybody did a personal subsistence gardening and community/public subsistence farming (particularly for cities; urban/vertical/indoor farming), I think there would be less strife. There should also be cheap, minimal dwelling areas to mitigate any renting crisis.
>It's because with 90% of the population farming there literally aren't enough people to do the non-farm work.
What non farming work? Most non farming work exists to uphold the exponential redundancy that was created by only 2% of people farming.
>Of arable land? Or are you including deserts, mountains, and forest?
Do orchards not grow in the desert? Ask the ancient Sumerians. mmm garlic and onions too.
Does broccoli and greens not grow in the mountains? Ask the Italians.
Do mushrooms and and low sunlight plants not grow in the forests? Ask me. Yes, with zero effort.
>kek. low tech countries are low tech because their people are retards.
"good times creates weak men, weak men create hard times".
peak phosphorus in 100 years, long term irrigation inevitably leeches salts up from deep underground and renders it inarable see: every site of ancient civilization
You think soil erosion will be a future catastrophic event? That mass industrial farming is not sustainable?
Just like red lining gears in a car for a long time?
We simply automate the rest of production until minimal human involvement is required.
ditext.com
agriculture is "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race"
To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?
For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving.
cont
Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.
From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?
The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass.
While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers?
>smith farmland grows tomatoes
>johnson farmland grows lettuce
>stevens farmland grows carrots
>perry farmland grows spinach
>carpenter dairy farm raises cows
now you can make a salad
Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"
While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.
So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don't tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.
How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.
In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.
Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner's sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.
One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.
Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."
There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early fanners obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three high-carbohydrate plants -- wheat, rice, and corn -- provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities.
Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses.
Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the elite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts -- with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.
Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together.
When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.
As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
Thus with the advent of agriculture and elite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.
One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.
As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn't want.
At this point it's instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
tl;dr? agriculture is shit.
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us?
Uh... what? Do you mean a modern agricultural society with modern techniques? It doesn't work; the market simply can't bear the supply and suppliers leave the market.
>How did it work before?
You have to remember that until the green revolution crop yields were pretty shit. In ratios, a seed to seed yield would be something like 1:7 in a good year; for every seed planted, you would reap seven seeds. 1:3 was considered baseline for food security for the family. In modern society, you expect typical yields of something like 1:30.
What this also means is that food is much more expensive in terms of raw value to those who do not produce food, and that the food that is surplus for every family is slight. So, you would have 90% of people farming, but it would take the surplus of this 90% to actually feed 10% who were uninvolved.
>What happened to food surplus?
You store it, or convert it to something usable.
Jared (((Diamond))).
>tl:dr agriculture a shit
In the short term, it is. It's simply not as productive as mobile hunter gathering in terms of safety, variety, or work for reward.
The real thing that is neglected in his statement, as he sort of glossed over in GGS is that civilization and knowledge accumulation is the byproduct of agriculture. Most writing systems evolved to record harvests, which later became basic tax systems which later allowed labor division which created civilization. And as romantic as the image we have of hunter gatherers, the other harsh reality is process improvement doesn't happen in these societies; things are stagnant. Warfare favors those who are not hunter gatherers as they can accumulate wealth and knowledge. The accumulation of resources allows continuation regardless of circumstance.
tl;dr Agriculture is only shit at the start
>the other harsh reality is process improvement doesn't happen in these societies; things are stagnant.
as opposed to current society where health and well being is regressing with each passing year?
things being "stagnant" is inherently a bad thing, it means things were stable.
pic related is a direct result of agriculture. morbidly obese hunter-gatherers didnt exist
>things being "stagnant" is inherently a bad thing,
isnt*
If having to see fatties is the price I have to pay in order to be able to own a sports car, I'll deal with it.
fair enough. i dont guess it matters if our grandchildrens children have a habitable planet since we wont be around.
Let me put it point blank.
This stagnation has put these "societies" at the complete and utter mercy of those who didn't maintain the hunter gatherer lifestyle. They will be paved under because they're simply not competitive.
>Is fat people good????
Is being wiped out good?
>his stagnation has put these "societies" at the complete and utter mercy of those who didn't maintain the hunter gatherer lifestyle. They will be paved under because they're simply not competitive.
this doesnt make agriculture a good thing for anyone or for the planet
>Is being wiped out good?
no, but it's inevitable thanks to agriculture. the population on earth will keep going up more and more until we no longer are capable of supporting it whatsoever
>this doesnt make agriculture a good thing for anyone or for the planet
Literally, it does for those who partake. The reason there are no more hunter gatherers in the civilized world isn't because they suddenly decided to start farming, it's because they were either wiped out or taken in chains.
Agriculture is the most viable human survival strategy. Why? Because it's the most productive use of resources.
>no, but it's inevitable thanks to agriculture. the population on earth will keep going up more and more until we no longer are capable of supporting it whatsoever
Versus what? Knowledge and wealth accumulation at least give humanity a chance to survive where as the lifespan of species is always painfully limited.
Humanity post agriculture can change rapidly. Pre-agriculture humanity was as vulnerable as any other species.
>or the planet
If we manage to wipe ourselves out the planet will be fine. Something else will eventually evolve to replace us.
>So say the average family spends 10000 on food each year, that means every farmer will only get 1000 a year.
Where is the average family size 10 people?
I have grown very much, with zero irrigation. In fact most of my labor exist to channel water away as quickly as possible. In fact I have food right out side and have never watered them.
Can't grow a plant in a lake, nope.
>The agricultural revolution spread until today
The "agricultural revolution" is what happened when Jews bankrupted American farmers and cause the great depression. So they could come in with Monsantos, and have Goyim dependent on the circulation of their central bank notes.
This was an overthrow of Jefferson vision.
Pic related is someone whom doesn't plow.
> With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality
>a habitable planet, for the planet
You are totally brain fucked by Jewish school.
Listen the only way you can save the planet is if you sell your organs and donate them to the Jewish donation foundation. Hurry up Libtard.
>Literally, it does for those who partake.
only in the short term. you need to widen your perspective. humanity would last much longer as a species if we weren't doing things that cause the population to increase hundredfold
>Why? Because it's the most productive use of resources.
this is only true because of the population boom. and the population boom is currently destroying the planet and reducing the quality of life for humanity as a whole.
>Versus what?
a more sustainable world with a higher quality of life for the people in it.
>Knowledge and wealth accumulation at least give humanity a chance to survive where as the lifespan of species is always painfully limited.
only in first world countries. all of which are regressing into total degeneracy
>Pre-agriculture humanity was as vulnerable as any other species.
i've never heard of anything like what happened at hiroshima or nagasaki happening in during pre-agriculture humanity because nuclearly bombs weren't possible.
It doesnt work that way there are tons of farming applications that are designed to produce goods for other farming - like producing hay for cows and horses to eat and growing cattle corn for silage feed. Not all farms produce food directly for the market, a fair chunk of it is intra business trade, for example cattle lots buying hay to feed their herd.
>Literally, it does for those who partake.
only in the short term. you need to widen your perspective. humanity would last much longer as a species if we weren't doing things that cause the population to increase hundredfold
>Why? Because it's the most productive use of resources.
this is only true because of the population boom. and the population boom is currently destroying the planet and reducing the quality of life for humanity as a whole.
>Versus what?
a more sustainable world with a higher quality of life for the people in it.
>Knowledge and wealth accumulation at least give humanity a chance to survive where as the lifespan of species is always painfully limited.
only in first world countries. all of which are regressing into total degeneracy so its only a matter of time
>Pre-agriculture humanity was as vulnerable as any other species.
i've never heard of anything like what happened at hiroshima or nagasaki happening during pre-agriculture humanity because nuclear bombs weren't possible. you didnt have mass deaths occurring at the rates that they do today
>only in the short term. you need to widen your perspective. humanity would last much longer as a species if we weren't doing things that cause the population to increase hundredfold
No, it really wouldn't. Essentially, humanity has the chance to last for eternity with knowledge accumulation. Even if the chance was slight, the chance exists. Humanity sans knowledge accumulation is simply another doomed specie.
>this is only true because of the population boom. and the population boom is currently destroying the planet and reducing the quality of life for humanity as a whole.
Are you serious? People live longer, healthier lives than ever before. And besides, it has nothing to do with population boom, it has to do with division of labor.
>only in first world countries. all of which are regressing into total degeneracy
No, it's not. Everyone accumulates knowledge. Written language is a direct byproduct of agriculture. Nothing changes in hunter gatherer socities because they simply cannot accumulate knowledge
>BUT MUH DEGENERACY!
Fuck you, do you think backwards savages are paragons of some moral fiber?
>i've never heard of anything like what happened at hiroshima or nagasaki happening in during pre-agriculture humanity because nuclearly bombs weren't possible.
Do you know what did happen to that specie that didn't accumulate knowledge? It went extinct. It's environment changed, and it was unable to change with it.
>Which specie?
Virtually every single one. You can find conservative estimates of 99.99% of all of them.
>No, it really wouldn't. Essentially, humanity has the chance to last for eternity with knowledge accumulation.
even when the sun inevitably goes out?
even when overpopulation gets to the point where we can't feed everyone and have to cut down more forests and strip mine more national parks?
>Are you serious? People live longer, healthier lives than ever before.
only in 1st world countries, which are basically the only places on earth to reap the benefits of which you speak.
>No, it's not. Everyone accumulates knowledge. Written language is a direct byproduct of agriculture. Nothing changes in hunter gatherer socities because they simply cannot accumulate knowledge
>Do you know what did happen to that specie that didn't accumulate knowledge? It went extinct.
wrong.
huntercourse.com
Self sufficient homesteading is the answer you're looking for. Keep researching that term and realize it is the sinhle handed solution to almost every form of degeneracy social and personal.
Its more viable now than ever. And it only becomes more and more so as technology and tradecraft of homesteading evolve. Of course you never hear or this, there is no financial incentive to spread propaganda about something which liberates you from consumer needs, liberates you to speak your mind, liberates your time to cultivate your mind and family and LIFE.
The Amish sell their surpluses at a hefty profit to tourists and laugh all the way to the bank.
People do not live longer or healthier lives than their ancestors. Particularly not in America.
Feed it to the pigs, if the excess food is pig, feed it to the birds or chop it up and use it as fertilizer.
Because in pre-industrial agrarian societies farmers can make 90% of what they need on thier own and only have to buy 10% of it from somebody who isnt a farmer. (Ie blacksmith or gunsmith).
You can even make your own gunpowder in such a societey. Simply pile straw and animal shit onto a gravel bed and pour water on it every now and then. Piss on it and empty the chamber pots onto it.
Few months you got a nitre bed which you can then scrape up, add to water, boil down to crystals, then combine with charcoal and sulphur for gunpowder.
Just an example of how truly self reliant pre-industrial people were. You could still make virtually anything for yourself at that tech level.
It wont ever happen again. At our tech level we need 10% population making food so 90% can be specializing in making specialized stuff like cars, computers, or medicine.
>Self sufficient homesteading is the answer you're looking for.
This.
Enough for your family and any extras are for sale.
I dont think very many "self sufficient" people exist anymore. Even the ones who think they are have an incredible reliance on the fact that the rest of societey exists.
Even those 100 mile from nowhere homesteaders in alaska would be right and proper fucked if the provisions they order every 4 months dont show up and get dropped off by the bush plane.
In pre industrial agrarian societies.