A Cyborg's Choice: Singularity or Sustainment?

Wahl, Daniel C.

doi:10.2752/144871306x13966268131794

Cited by 1 publication

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“…After all, is it not when we mistrust our world to provide that we will be moved to step in to manipulate it into doing so? Arguably, DR lifeways, from LM through agriculture and today's industrial society, have centered, in large part, around a struggle to control the world around us (see also the discussions in Martin, 1999;Wahl, 2006) with predictable destructive impacts.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given the common conclusion that our global industrial civilization, in anything close to its present form, is fundamentally ecologically unsustainable (Crutzen, 2002;Rees, 2013Rees, [2000; Wahl, 2006), efforts to better understand the nature of ecological sustainability should benefit from exploration of the ecological impacts of earlier human societies. Although we do not know whether Homo sapiens was ever completely ecologically sustainable in relationship with the habitats we have occupied, the extensive and progressive environmental degradation of recent centuries suggests we were once, at a minimum, much less destructive.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Hunter-gatherer land management in the human break from ecological sustainability

Feeney

2019

The Anthropocene Review

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Evidence that human societies built on agricultural subsistence have been inherently ecologically unsustainable highlights the value in exploring whether any pre-agricultural subsistence approaches were ecologically sustainable or nearly so. The land management practices of some hunter-gatherer societies have been portrayed as sustainable, even beneficial. Research suggests such practices may fruitfully inform contemporary land management. As a human subsistence foundation, however, they may not have been ecologically sustainable. Figuring centrally in the late Pleistocene shift from immediate-return to delayed-return hunting and gathering, they enabled population growth, helped make possible the development of agriculture, and appear to have caused early environmental degradation. Consistent with this argument is research locating the origins of the Anthropocene near the Pleistocene–Holocene boundary, as societies were taking greater control of food production. It appears then that immediate-return hunting and gathering, which involved little or no land management, was the human lifeway most closely approaching ecological sustainability. Wider recognition of this idea would assist in understanding and addressing today’s ecological challenges.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%