No matter your cause, it’s a lost cause until we rediscover a healthier way to relate to each other and our world.

How society is organized affects everything: economics, government, health, environment, and culture. They are all inter-related and self-reinforcing. If one has a great idea for a forever battery, or cure for cancer, it won’t make much of a difference in the long-run. Unless changed, society will continue to consume the world, slowly unraveling from too many people chasing too few resources.

We have no working models that offer cradle-to-grave security, that get rid of money, and offer care for the world and each other as we do for ourselves. Single issue activist or political efforts at best buy us a little more time.

Organization Is Not Adaptation

We may think there are several forms of society, but today there is really only one social organizational system. Civilization has replaced tribalism. Tribalism is the social organization that we evolved in. It can be a red flag for a species to change its organizational system. This is different than adapting to a new habitat. This just means a species has moved, and has adapted a new location. But it continues organizing itself the same. Birds fly in flocks, dear run in herds, whales swim in pods. We evolved for millions of years making a living with Nature in diverse, locally adapted tribes.

These two aspects are essential for humanities’s success: diversity, and wild livelihood. Civilization breaks both of the original human tenants. Civilization replaces small, locally adapted societies with monopoly domestication. Globally, agriculture and resource extraction has replaced Nature. Agriculture is short-term because it is dependent on removing wild ecosystems and mining the remaining topsoil until its gone. Fertile forest and prairie ecosystems collapsed when they were removed and plowed under. Civilization leaves deserts in its foot steps. The America’s have some of the best remaining farm land because we have only been mining soil in earnest for about 100 years. In another 100 years our children’s grandchildren will have mostly dead mineral matter or dust. Climate is rapidly warming today because we removed the wild ecosystems that created and stabilized it.

Democracy, dictatorship, capitalism, socialism are all the same social system: civilization. Civilization maintains large static populations through domestication. It is is enforced by the control system. Humans evolved and survived through tribalism in harmony with Nature, diversity, and a love of the sense of place and fellow species. Destruction of Nature is the antithesis of living in harmony with Earth. This is why focusing one’s efforts on anything other than evolving society will not prevent humanity from consuming Earth’s ecosystems. A farm field starts to turn to dust as soon as you turn off the irrigation or don’t replant it next year.

Activism: Where to Focus Your Energy

Economics. Economic activism shifts making a living from domestication to living in harmony with wild Nature. In harmony means reducing human population so that our burden is lowered to allow a natural restoration of long-term biodiversity.

Money must be eliminated to end inequity and commoditizing Nature and labor. Rent must be replaced with ownership to allow economic freedom. The beauty of a indigenous housing is that it is locally adapted, is the same for everyone, and when you’re done you can push it over and plant a garden.

Trust me, I know how money works at all levels. I am a self-owned entrepreneur, served Fortune 100 companies, have an MBA in finance, and a BA in accounting. I get how money just makes more money, and how hierarchies naturally are self-maintained with privilege, education, and money.

Its all connected. Livelihood is tied to environment. The world is where we get our resources. Economics is also related to public health, and reproduction because our population determines how much we displace other species.

Government. This is the most visible aspect of the control system. Government maintains hierarchy, inequity, and the monopoly of civilization through markets, laws, etc. I have seen this at the highest levels when I interned on capital hill in Washington D.C., and in the Executive Office of the President in college. Hierarchy is the White House Christmas party.

Government replaces and essential element of tribalism with binding decisions. The U.S. government forced Native American tribes to create tribal councils to sign away resources. Prior to that no one was in charge to sign a contract with Peabody Coal company. Tribalism is not anarchy or chaos. It applies diverse cultures, and languages to make a livelihood with Nature. All people and species are equal.

Public Health. Indigenous peoples generally have had better health and teeth than civilized peoples from a better diet physically activity. I know. I am 62 years old, and have gone from 100 mile ultra races last year to 2600 mile thru-hiking this year — on a vegan diet. Before that I spent decades as an alpinist, big wall rock, and ice climber.

Health also comes from cradle-to-grave security by mixing ages. The old care for the very young so the adults work. As the young grow, they learn from the adults. Youth learn wisdom while the old are kept young by the youth. Wisdom comes from making good decisions; making good decisions comes from making bad decisions.

Most of modern medicine is spent on reversing the self-inflicted damage civilized chemicals and diet has done to our bodies and minds.

Environment. We have wrecked the wild Earth. There is almost nowhere that we have not destroyed. I have see it first hand hiking thousands of miles a year. Humans cause 75-85 percent of wildfires. Wild fisheries are destroyed by dams. Our right to do what ever we want with Nature can be so extreme that, foresters sometimes cut down old growth trees, dead or alive, so that spotted owls cannot live in them. Farming destroys the soil. I know, I was an organic seed farmer for 10 years helping preserve open pollinated heirloom vegetable varieties. Corporate monopolies produce hybrid and genetically modified seeds to increase prices, sell more chemicals, and prevent you from saving seeds by selling you hybrids in garden catalogs.

It takes Nature a 100 years to grow an inch of soil . It takes her tens or hundreds of thousands of years to evolve an intact, diverse climax ecosystem. We have ripped almost all of them out to grow more food, timber, and mining for more people. Even if you stopped farming tomorrow, we have killed the native seed bed, fungi, and diverse web of life that an ecosystem is. It won’t grow back on land or sea until civilization had been gone for thousands of years.

The problem is not humanity. Humans lived in harmony with all life as we evolved. It is the mind-virus called civilization that is killing the planet.

Natural resources are part of the environment, and one of them is oil. You can’t make a solar panel with a solar panel; that’s a problem. The shale revolution has turned the U.S. into the world largest oil producer. But all wells eventually run dry, and there are a limited number of them.

Do that math, at the end of the American civil war there were about 1 billion, and we were not using oil. Today there are 8 billion people, and we are using oil full throttle. That means 7 billion people are here because of oil. Oil is eventually going to run out. And, so are the aquifers used for agriculture.

Environmental amnesia is one of my favorite terms. It means that we live too short of lives to appreciate the damage we are doing to the natural world for future generations. Human population will eventually drop to maybe 10x less than today. We won’t be here to see it, but civilization will be the cause.

In my mind, what matters is not the rise and fall of human population, but all the other voiceless species we are taking down with us.

Culture. This is everything else, spirituality, religion, language, family, and education. Ironically, the next generation is as poorly programmed as we are despite having more information at their fingertips than any other time in human history.

Humanities’s Achilles heal is that we are so smart, that our cerebral cortex can override common sense. Modern society takes away alternatives to living outside of civilization. The knowledge is not taught, land is locked up, food and housing are not free, hierarchies are protected, and wage slavery is enforced.

Religion reinforces society. Most religions are monotheism, or have a small host of deities. Other religions teach that if we meditate, choose the middle way, emptiness, everything will be ok. Many offer a do over in the next life if you don’t get this one right, or heaven if you do get it right.

Before civilization, animism was the universal spirituality. Believing in the fire of life everywhere. We see the fire when we’re in the meadow or forest. When we die we give your fire on to the next. Animism has no book, text, or gods with magic powers.

Activist might consider two things. First, hierarchies have strong defenses from attacks from below, but they have no defense for abandonment. Second, we have no working models that transition humanity from civilization to a hybrid tribal future.

Focus on Community. If your are an innovative, energetic, activist, consider putting your energy into creating a better community model. Reminder that all communities need a tribal business to survive. Wrap it all together into a working model that will build community, resolve some of the issues discussed above, and continue into the future.

The Future is Feminine

Men got us into this mess. Women may have to take charge, and clean it up. Women have a longer-term view than the destructiveness of dominion and civilization. There will be no quick fix. It took men thousands of years to destroy what worked for millenia. It will take us just as long to find our way back to harmony with Earth and the other species.

Something as simple as allowing only women to vote in solely publicly funded elections would bring a brighter future sooner. The future is feminine.

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To learn more about when things last worked, how things came to be the way they are now, and possible solutions, read Culturequake: The Restoration Revolution by Chuck Burr.

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