Sure you can find anecdotal reports of this lifestyle (decadent food and preoccupation with appearance) but the idea that paleolithic peoples lived healthier, longer lives than the life that is possible for first-world people today is ridiculous. On the global biocentric scale, paleolithic people lived a “better” life, but if you want to be “prissy” then you’d better aspire to the life of a health conscious postmodern japanese, european, canadia-merican, etc.

The evidence is against you here, but I’m not going to rehash it yet again. The Thirty Theses already went through this in extensive detail. If by “prissy” you mean using petrochemical cosmetics, then you have a point. But no modern model spends as much time on her appearance as the average, traditional Haudenosaunee man, who had practically all day to dote on his hair and makeup. That’s what we mean by “prissy.”

rimitive lifestyles are better for the overall ecology because primitive peoples are subject to the same painful evolutionary selective pressures that all other life is. Parasites, predation, starvation, trauma, disease, etc….even considering zoonotics and the common cold, we (as first-world people - hey lets not kid ourselves, none of us are posting from Darfur) have it much easier than primitive peoples did.

Except for the shorter life expectancies, greater incidence of disease, chronic malnutrition, and far, far shorter amounts of liesure time … to name a few. Again, take a look at the Thirty Theses. There’s far too much evidence disproving your baseless assertions here to go through it yet again. It’s time to move on.

…if the environmental destruction of the 20th century has no significant impact on the ability of a landscape to support human life then what is so worrisome about it?

Didn’t say it hadn’t. The old-growth forest that used to grow on the Allegheny Plateau has been greatly diminished. But at its height, it supported the Seneca, the most populous tribe of the Haudenosaunee, who were one of the most populous groups north of the Rio Grande. How many people are going to be trying to hunt and gather there in the next few decades? If it’s even 10% of the old Seneca population, I will be shocked. The bottle-neck of imagination is much more restrictive than the ecological resources.

If we get to the point where the Allegheny Plateau is worse off than the Kalahari, just give up. Life on earth is at an end.

How many people could the Allegheny forest support, and what would be the impact if a sizeable portion of new people beyond this carrying capacity (say 10-20% more) kept wandering into it from the degrading industrial world year after year?

Why would people wander in? As things get more desperate, people flock to the cities more, not less. There’s never been a collapse before where these wandering hordes appear–people always flock to the cities. So why will this time be any different? People are still people, and they still act and react like people.

What if people cut down the forests with hand saws for fuel and timber? What if people sent in herds of goats to nibble down the brush?

It took trains to make lumbering the Allegheny feasible, because sure, you can cut it down, but then you need to drag the wood back home. If there’s less energy, then you don’t have energy to get the wood back home, either, for all the same reasons people weren’t cutting down those trees before the railroads the first time around. The mountains haven’t moved.

On one hand you acknowledge the massive environmental degradation that occurred in the fertile crescent with primitive agriculture (but avoid that agriculture continued to be the dominant form of society there) while on the other hand you deny that a similar fate could befall much of the rest of the world (and again fail to consider that primitive agriculture could hang on and make life difficult or impossible for HGers).

You’re glossing over a lot there.

1. I never avoided the fact that agriculture continues in the Fertile Crescent. Barely. The crop yields are horrible, and most of their food needs to be imported. Which is precisely what I’ve said.Agriculture doesn’t have another couple centuries in it to put the same fate on the rest of the world. What agriculture can destroy, it already has. It already has turned the Great Plains into a desert on par with the Formerly Fertile Crescent.
2. Yet some places remain unfarmed to this day. Like the Allegheny Plateau … or the Rockies, or the other big wilds still extant. They’ve all been skipped over for good reasons: they can’t be farmed. It doesn’t really matter that agriculture has to expand, these are places where it can’t expand. When they try (and they do, continuously), they fail. To this day, people keep trying to farm the Allegheny Plateau. It doesn’t work. You end up with a farm that just goes bust. This isn’t going to change just because farmers find themselves with less energy, and less ability to farm. See, if your ability to farm is reduced, you’re not going to be able to suddenly farm the places that were always impossible to farm before; rather, you’ll have a hard enough time just keeping the farmland you already have. That’s how it’s happened in every previous collapse, without exception. They are always (always) preceded by huge contractions in farmland.
3. There’s enough space for hunter-gatherers now, and that space only gets bigger as civilization shrinks.
4. I don’t consider the possibility that “primitive agriculture” (whatever that means) could hang on, because agriculture of any kind requires soil. The only soil we have now is made out of natural gas. What is this “primitive agriculture” going to grow out of, sunshine and happy thoughts? Because it doesn’t have any soil to grow. It makes for a pretty easy prediction. Here’s some other “out on a limb” predictions while I’m at it: cut off a man’s head, and he’ll die; bust your computer, and you’ll have a hard time getting online; burn your only copy of your novel, and you’ll have a hard time getting it published … man, what kind of freaky, prophetic power do I possess?

…if the environmental destruction of the 20th century has no significant impact on the ability of a landscape to support human life then what is so worrisome about it?

How many people could the Allegheny forest support, and what would be the impact if a sizeable portion of new people beyond this carrying capacity (say 10-20% more) kept wandering into it from the degrading industrial world year after year?

What if people cut down the forests with hand saws for fuel and timber? What if people sent in herds of goats to nibble down the brush?

On one hand you acknowledge the massive environmental degradation that occurred in the fertile crescent with primitive agriculture (but avoid that agriculture continued to be the dominant form of society there) while on the other hand you deny that a similar fate could befall much of the rest of the world (and again fail to consider that primitive agriculture could hang on and make life difficult or impossible for HGers).

The kalahari is a relatively undisturbed environment, so I don’t think it makes a useful comparison. It is harsh in some ways but the the Kung have had a long time to adapt to it.

“Disturbed” isn’t really a useful measure. Every ecology is “disturbed” on a daily basis. Ecologies are the products of disturbance. If not humans, then wolves, badgers, deer and every other living thing continues with that disturbance.

The Allegheny national forest is an ironic example as it *was* recently more desolate than the kalahari desert. It was completely deforested in the early 1900s by logging.

Yes, people called it the “Pennsylvania Desert,” but more desolate than the Kalahari? Seriously? Even at its worse, that comparison is absolutely ridiculous.

But the immediate future seems more likely to see us clinging to industrialisation and going back to the coal age.

That’s not going to work out as well as the proponents expect, as we’ve already discussed on Anthropik.

What is to stop us leveling places like the Allegheny forest again and beyond?

Lack of energy. There is some amount going on right now, but now there’s a tension against the amount of energy it takes to decimate it. But even if it goes back to the Allegheny Briar Patch, you’re still not looking at anything even remotely like the desolation of a place like the Kalahari Desert.

Add in climate change and it gets even more complex.

Climate change simply means you have to be quick and adapt quickly. Which is something hunter-gatherers are in a better position to do than anyone else.

This doesnt make civilisation look any better but it is consistent with my position that no-one other than the super rich can expect easy luxury in the coming decades (and even they risk mobs and guillotines).

The super-rich currently enjoy easy luxury because they have a civilization to provide it to them. They’re precisely the people who can’t expect an easy life in the future. But those who choose to rewild, choose to live the way humans have adapted, which is a fairly easy, carefree way of life, even in places where no other way of life can even survive.

The Allegheny national forest is an ironic example as it *was* recently more desolate than the kalahari desert. It was completely deforested in the early 1900s by logging.

If history did somehow fast forward to leaving a small remnant human population in a world much like our current one I can see how having primitivist skills would be a great advantage. But the immediate future seems more likely to see us clinging to industrialisation and going back to the coal age. What is to stop us leveling places like the Allegheny forest again and beyond? Add in climate change and it gets even more complex. This doesnt make civilisation look any better but it is consistent with my position that no-one other than the super rich can expect easy luxury in the coming decades (and even they risk mobs and guillotines).

My main question is “how is a historic notion of luxury relevant to likely future primitivist lifestyles?” given that at least in our lifetimes we will be living in a massively degraded and shifting landscape compared to that of our paleolithic ancestors.

The past was a paradise of sorts, but what is likely to be the future?

I’m just perplexed about why the paleo ethos has to be pimped and moulded into our modern attitudes toward luxury and leisure. Especially when what is really relevant is how a paleo approach to living is going to actually pay off going into the future where I doubt any of us will be sucking down oysters and adjusting our eyeliner for much of our time.

A spoonful of sugar may make the medicine go down, but what are we actually swallowing?