Published in C for Conscious' 'Sustain' issue n.1 - read full issue here
“As a species, we have, without fault, been getting better and better. This moment, right now, is the best time to be alive. Everything used to be worse and any discontent or doubt must stem from following the wrong career path, driving the wrong car, lacking dietary supplements, or not drinking enough water. “
This is the storyline that pervades our civilised society. It says that every step towards a more civilised state is a step called progress, for only civilisation can tame the inherently violent, savage and unruly species named Homo Sapiens and relieve it from wretchedness into its full potential. According to the narrative of perpetual progress, we have never had such knowledge and sophistication, we have never lived so long nor have we had so much agency on the world around us. We have never been so human and emancipated from our animalistic state. This rings true, yet something doesn’t quite add up: If we are at the best version of ourselves and always getting better, why is it that our very existence is threatened by a global catastrophe enacted by our own greed-ridden hands? And what if the solutions which we so desperately seek to our problems have actually already existed in our past, long before we first woke up civilised?
I propose that, instead of looking into the future for the next invention that will relieve our planet of its ails for a few instants before engineering another problem, we look into our past: At the practices that benefited us as well as our earth for tens of thousands of years before the dawn of civilisation. The practices that are still used in indigenous communities who have evolved as long as the rest of us, but have never seen the point of changing the way in which they interact with their environment, because it is the most sustainable. We tend to equate change with progress, and that may be a fundamentally wrong point of view.
The fact is that 99% of Homo Sapiens’ time on earth was spent hunting and gathering in nomadic troops. For 99% of our time on earth, we lived harmoniously with our planet, espousing its ebbs and flows as we moved with it. Our ancestors didn't see a reason to change their ways for almost two hundred thousand years, for the very simple reason that, they worked. They benefited our environment as much as they benefited us. Actually, we have reason to believe that our foraging ancestors led a happier life than we do today. Of course there was starvation, predators, disease and climate catastrophes that rendered life challenging, but these issues were common and actions toward their solutions became habits. Our gene pool is saturated with the knowledge of ancestors who have gone through these ordeals, a knowledge which we make little to no use of today. In fact, a sudden draught drying up the berry trees in a valley may have been easier to navigate then the office burn-out which a lot of us end up going through today. None of our distant ancestors have had to endure such levels of stress emerging from ever-changing sources. They may have led difficult lives, but they knew what to expect. The stakes that make up our living have never evolved so rapidly, further and further away from what forged our belonging for so long. We are lost, a long way away from home, looking for the stop button on a racing treadmill.
It is evident, from the research gathered on indigenous groups that societies living away from civilisation evolve into more egalitarian structures. Men and women generally enjoy equal rights and power, decision-making and attribution is distributed, individuals can often move from one tribe to another and the weight of caring for children is balanced between multiple members of a tribe, who act as an extended family. Not only do these arrangements create less tension than centralised power structures; contrarily to the civilised Man, foragers have more time to spend in leisure and with family, considering that the process of gathering food takes only a few hours a day. Today, while getting a take-away takes just a few minutes, only the most fortunate and wealthy enjoy the freedom of leisure.
This begs the question of why we ever chose to part from this utopian life, and indeed, it was not so much a choice as something that looked more like the treadmill which we can’t get off of. Explained broadly, civilisation found birth with the advent of agriculture, which, like much of evolution, happened by mere chance. In a time of need, in a specific environment that called for food provisioning, our ancestors discovered that they could interact as creators and plant seeds in the soil, providing for their families all year long. As this practice appeared disparately throughout the world, the generations of those who adopted it forgot their nomadic ways and settled for a less diversified diet that rendered them weaker and made their teeth decay yet enabled them to live longer, feed more offspring and grow into villages. Once the population had multiplied and hunter-gathering practices were forgotten, there was no other way. While agriculture eventually took over most of the world and nomads became settlers, it is fascinating to note that it spread at a painstakingly slow rate. Unlike other techniques like pottery design or flint-knapping that spread between tribes like wildfire, farming found its way into our daily realities over thousands of years.
The practice of agriculture fundamentally changed the way in which we interact with our environment. From being one with our world, we were positioned against it. Instead of contributing to our local ecosystems, we started working against them, to grow food faster and in more quantities for more mouths. From a world that belonged to no one and everyone, we became proud and protective owners. From seeing ourselves as extensions and servants of our Mother Earth, we were told we were superior to it and everything non-civilised. The advent of agriculture revolutionised our power dynamics and created the nature vs human duality, which our ancestors never could have fathomed, and from which we must part in order to have a viable future on this planet.
Interestingly, no part of this ‘progress’ came naturally to our species, there have been many more accounts of men fleeing civilisation to go back to indigenous ways rather than so called ‘savages’ choosing society. Foragers almost never joined settlements willingly and retreated in some of the harshest environments of our planets to keep living harmoniously with their surroundings. That’s how inhuman they found the practices of the ‘modern’ Man.
The good news is that this dual mind-set which most of us are born into has never been something innate, rather, it is a way of living which we have, by the wavering meanderings of chance, been forced into. Unlike what our overwhelmingly popular narratives say, what makes us human never stemmed from this duality, but rather from our interconnectedness with our environment and our mutually beneficial practices. The narrative of perpetual progress is proven wrong, as we progress further and further away from who we are at the source, destroying our environment and reassuring ourselves long into the night that the sun has not quite set yet. Civilisation did not forge us into human beings, rather it pushed us further and further away from the initial definition of the word.
I do not presuppose, however, that the forager ways could be adopted by our population at large as a solution to our climate crisis. Our demographic is much too outsized for such practices. Rather our solutions can be found in reconnecting with ways which proved agreeable for tens of thousands of years before the inadvertent slip that was agriculture. Our solutions will come from entering in conversation with those contemporary indigenous peoples who have not lost the meaning of being human. We must, alongside what the newest technologies have to offer, remember what is innate to us, our profound connectedness with our natural environment as well as the egalitarian ways in which we have, for eons, innately organised our societies.
We must find a way to step off the treadmill and remember. For our future looks either like a modern manifestation of our distant past or a precipice from which we will inevitably fall. If we want a better future, we will need to know more about how the world was before our ancestors first woke up civilised.
