>>> cgrimes at tsoft.com 04/10/01 04:23AM >>
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In a sense you can consider pre-industrial cultures to be systems of human organization adapted to particular biomes.
In any event, the biomes or large scale units of plants and animals are organized into interacting communities that share broad environmental conditions of both plenitude and scarcity and most of our biological and cultural history has been concerned with creating ways of living in these diverse circumstances.
Before we start congratulating capitalism and its neoliberal political lackies for anything but a strategic manipulation of their own waste, fraud, and abuse, let's remember that most of human history was accomplished without them. And, it is extremely doubtful that human life prior to their stellar arrival was little more than mean, brutish, and short. That's capital's own record of accomplishment.
Chuck Grimes
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CB: Thanks to Chuck for the greater specification of the adaptive diversity of human cultures. I want to say that some of these areas were true gardens of eden , where people were outside in the sun picking fruit and vegetables from abundant natural growth, as in Northwest Coast of the "U.S.", if it is possible to revive the preinvasion ecology there. So the idea is not that it be all rough and rude.
Picking up on Chuck's point about most of human history being accomplished without them, since "civilization" starts 7,000 years ago, according to civilized scholars, and humans begin 200,000 (?) years ago, that's 193,000 years ( 193/7 is about 27.5 to one, for numerosity) of non-agricultural adaptive modes getting us over as a species. Capitalism is only 500 years old, and has carried out more destruction than all previous modes put together. What are the chances that capitalism will last for 193,000 years ( or actually 200,000 years minus 500, when capitalism started to wipe out old modes) like the modes it looks down upon ?