Tyndall Center Director Anderson: Rapid Emissions Reduction Hard: 4-6C Far, Far Worse

[GliderGuider]

15. No doubt it will

Social change generally happens in response to impacts, not in anticipation of them. There will be impacts, so there will be change. What direction will the change be in? I hope we will suddenly become a wise, aware, forward-looking, altruistic species, but I'm not very optimistic on that score. Our track record from the past 10,000 years is not encouraging. We're far more likely to fragment into a large number of regions, provinces, principalities and city-states, each playing a more and more vicious form of beggar thy neighbor.

Something very strange happened to the human species when we developed agriculture.

Behaviorally speaking, humans appear to be essentially two different species pre-ag and post-ag. It appears that before agriculture we lived within limits, accommodated ourselves to our environment, and didn't apply much innovative horsepower to our way of life. Then in the blink of an eye, we became what looks like another species entirely - one that rejects limits, molds the environment to our own needs, treats everything but us as a resource, and innovates like crazy.

The more I look at the period around the development of "totalitarian agriculture" the stranger it seems. Our behaviour changed so radically the shift feels more genetic than cultural. So much so that that people like Jay Hansen can say our current behaviour is genetically mediated. He can even retroactively edit pre-agricultural human history to accord with that view - and very few people object.

What the hell happened to cause such an enormous break in our behavior? It seems to be wrapped up in the mystery of why we developed agriculture - maybe it's even the same question. But I have yet to see a satisfactory explanation of either why we did it or for the drastic break in values and behavior that went along with it.

A decent answer to that question would seem to be at the heart of the conundrum, and might give us some clues as to how to approach the coming shift.