A few years ago, I had an ah-ha moment when it comes to what we as humans would need to do
to live in a sustainable manner. It is very easy. All we have to do is leave our homes, take off all of our clothes, and learn to live on the raw food we are able to gather with our own hands. We have a built-in transportation system, so that is not a problem.
Some animals are eusocial, that is, organized in away that allows for cooperative brood care and other joint tasks. If we follow that approach, we would get our extended families to join us living in nature, au naturel. We could then co-operate on tasks such as child rearing and gathering food.
Nature’s Provision for Order
Nature is organized in a number of ways that make certain that there will be modest change over time to adapt to new conditions, but that no one species will dominate. These are a few of the basic parts of the system:
1. Animals tend to have more offspring than required to replace the parents. Through natural selection, offspring that are best adapted to changing conditions tend to survive and grow to adulthood.
2. Animals tend not to kill all prey available because if they did so, they would have no food source in the future. Species are usually fairly balanced in their abilities, so that population will fluctuate within a range, rather than result in a total die-off.
3. Nature provides a great deal of redundancy, both in number of offspring, and in back-up systems. We have two ears and two kidneys, and two of many other parts of the body. The goal isn’t maximum efficiency, but to have a good chance at survival, even in the case of injury or damage to one part.
4. Nature has built-in instincts to prevent depletion of shared resources, sometimes called Tragedy of the Commons. Among primates, one of these instincts is an instinct toward territoriality. Males of the species tend to mark off territory much larger than they would need simply for gathering food, and will fight others to death who try to enter to their territory (Dilworth 2010).
5. In primates, another instinct that prevents excessive population of any one species is a tendency toward hierarchical behavior when population becomes too crowded for resources (Dilworth 2010). Nature’s plan is that if there is an inadequate amount of resources, there will still be some survivors. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy will lose out, but those at the top will survive.
6. Each plant or animal requires energy-related inputs (food for humans) and eliminates waste. What is waste for one species acts as an input for other species. For example, plants need carbon dioxide, even though it is a waste produce for humans.
Using Nature’s approach, there is a balance over time. One species may dominate for a time, and then another. The world tends to cycle from state to state. There is never a complete die-off, no matter how bad things get. Because of natural selection, species evolve to fill new niches. Climate change is a concern from humans’ perspective, because we are the potential losers. But Nature is probably equipped to deal with the issue, in one way or another.
The Hunter-Gatherer Economy
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Humans, as hunter-gatherers, were “sort of close” to following Nature’s pattern. Man’s big deviation from the pattern of other animals was learning to burn biomass over one million years ago. Burning biomass made man better able to cope with cold weather. Humans also evolved a higher level of intelligence, perhaps in part because cooked food allowed better absorption of nutrients, allowing humans to put energy previously used for creating big jaws and digestive apparatus into a bigger brain.
As humans became smarter, they found ways to circumvent survival of the fittest, both to live longer themselves, and to allow more offspring to survive to adulthood. (Dilworth 2010) If hunter-gatherer groups wanted to avoid over-population, they had to adopt customs that would keep population down. Such customs might include infanticide, sexual abstinence during nursing, or frequent wars with neighboring tribes.
Research on hunter-gatherer groups that have survived until modern times suggests that very often they spent only a few hours a day hunting and gathering food, allowing much time for leisure activities (Sahlins 1972). Humans were tall (men averaged 5’10″ in height), had few dental cavities, and showed other signs of excellent health (Wells 2010).
As hunter-gatherers, there was no need for money or land ownership. Sharing within the clan seems to have been typical, perhaps as a gift economy, where status is gained by how much one can give away. Thus, all had access to food. There was no storing up goods for a “rainy day.” The only “storing up” was what nature provided in terms of stored body fat that prevented starvation if food was unavailable for a short period of time.
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