Should we return to hunting/gathering?

I am asking myself this honestly. There is much about Western civilization circa 2010 that is ugly and exploitative, make no mistake. I just watched Crude, Joe Berlinger's 2009 documentary about the hideous pollution of the Ecuadorian Amazon by oil companies. Without question, Chevron-Texaco bears some responsibility, as does Ecuador's own nationally controlled petroleum industry. All for ... oil.

It's fair to ask: Why are we so dependent upon oil? A better question: What is oil used for? There is a long list here, and it's by no means exhaustive. A small sampling:

• CDs and DVDs
• Ammonia
• Antihistamines
• Antiseptics
• Asphalt and other paving materials
• Computers
• Clothes
• Crayons
• Deodorant
• Detergent
• Eyeglasses
• Fertilizer
• Floor wax
• Guitar strings
• Insecticides and insect repellent
• Ink
• Insulation
• Jet fuel
• Life jackets
• Plastics
• Refrigerators
• Saccharine
• Shoes
• Telephones
• Upholstery and curtains
• Wax

Again, that's a sampling. The real list is much longer. Suffice it to say that our civilization itself depends on oil.

How did we get here? The anarchist thinker John Zerzan pins the blame on the development of agriculture itself. I first read his essay, "Agriculture: Demon Engine of Civilization" in the original Feral House book, Apocalypse Culture. To say that Zerzan blew my mind would be an understatement. I've since read several of his books and, frankly, I find it difficult to challenge his arguments. I'm beginning to think he's right. If I could quote the second paragraph from the above-mentioned essay:

Agriculture is the birth of production, complete with its essential features and deformation of life and consciousness. The land itself becomes an instrument of production and the planet’s species its objects. Wild or tame, weeds or crops speak of that duality that cripples the soul of our being, ushering in, relatively quickly, the despotism, war and impoverishment of high civilization over the great length of that earlier oneness with nature. The forced march of civilization, which Adorno recognized in the “assumption of an irrational catastrophe at the beginning of history,” which Freud felt as “something imposed on a resisting majority,” of which Stanley Diamond found only “conscripts, not volunteers,” was dictated by agriculture. And Mircea Eliade was correct to assess its coming as having “provoked upheavals and spiritual breakdowns” whose magnitude the modern mind cannot imagine.

As an American and a Westerner, I know I'm the zenith of consumption evil. I live in great comfort, thanks in no small part to the oil industry. I am both thankful and suspicious of the shoddy practices in the Third World that get that oil to us. Oil's products are everywhere in my home. How much death and destruction do these things represent?

But I wonder, too: Am I the Stalin of the environment? Am I the smiling annihilator who culls what he needs from the innocent? As scarcity dictates our future increasingly (peak oil, peak water, peak everything may well come into play, and we all know what happens when resources become scarce), maybe it's time for ordinary joes like me, for workaday American Christians and others, to put down our politics and begin to disengage. It will mean hard decisions. It will mean no more movies, no more technology at all, goodbye to everything in the long list linked above (at a minimum), to say nothing of everything that farms produce, and living off the land and dying much, much younger, as do all hunter-gatherers.

Or there is the other course, always the other course: Stop living. And along the way to embracing death, encourage others to take the same path. If there are too many people here now, and the population is only growing worldwide, then people like me must lead by example. Since I am easily a net abuser of the environment and of people I will never meet through the mere acts of living in American civilization, my death will be a virtuous act, whether by my hand or not. A small step, but a necessary one. I am the equivalent of garbage, of waste; I am human waste, and all that implies.

Am I insane? I just read a very good essay by someone who certainly doesn't seem to be that would suggest, at a minimum, I am indeed insane and so is everyone else at a most fundamental level. To quote the essayist, Ray Grigg:

Are we poised on the edge of chaos, that uncertain place where ordered balance tips and neither our remedial efforts nor nature's resilience can stop a descending slide into chaos? No one knows. But the evidence suggests we are moving inexorably toward such a critical point.

And some thinkers are beginning to get the uncomfortable impression that our collective human behaviour is delusional, founded on inherently dysfunctional assumptions that are incompatible with the way nature operates.

The task, however, of convincing the insane that they are insane is formidable, requiring more of the penetrating powers of the therapist than the persuasive arguments of the philosopher.

Environmental thinkers, such as Bill McKibben, see a way out of this, a big-picture plan to move toward a happier and healthier world for all concerned, including humans. He's surely right in diagnosing the problem, as a review of his new book, Deep Economy, points out:

• Our ideas of growth and development can’t involve the rest of the world (or even Americans) living like Americans.
• If the Chinese ate meat like Americans, they’d use 2/3 of the world grain harvest.
• If the Chinese owned cars like Americans, they’d use more than all the oil currently produced globally.
• If the Chinese ate fish like the Japanese, they’d consume more than the current global harvest which is already not sustainable.
• Now think what if India, SE Asia, and Africa followed suit.

I do not share his optimism; I don't believe in utopia. It is human nature to foul one's own nest, to chuck cigarette butts out the car window, trash into the streets, to dump wherever we can, so long as it's out of sight. We are the problem itself; not the cause, not "part of the problem," but THE problem. Human extermination is, thus, the only way out. But how to achieve this in greater numbers?

Let me suggest that maybe suicides, and those who struggle with the idea's consideration, should be hailed as people who see reality more clearly, who are not deluded into thinking all is well when it isn't. Let me suggest that maybe those who die have done a service for the entire planet (including its human occupants), no matter how old they are, no matter how they die, no matter the pain of . The only thing that holds me back is the apparent grave harm I would do others by killing myself (I don't understand why, but I am assured that this is so by numerous people; perhaps you, rare reader, would stand in the other column and encourage me to think beyond them?). And then there are the animals who depend on me, although I've made arrangements for their care post my mortem.

I do hope that one day, humans in environmentally balanced numbers will live in harmony with the earth. What a gift that would be to our children (at least, those who survive). But it will take a lot of human slaughter to get there. Is it time to see massive human death as the ultimate benefit?