Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [20]
1.
Long before the Holocene, Paleolithic human systems had already evolved powers beyond those of any other species, managing to engineer ecosystems using fire, to innovate collective strategies for hunting, and to develop other tools and techniques that revolutionized human livelihoods from hunting and foraging.5 The extinction of megafauna across most of the terrestrial biosphere demonstrates the unprecedented success of early human engineering of ecosystems.6 Those extinctions had cascading effects (trophic downscaling) caused by the loss of dominant species, leading to forest loss in some regions and forest regrowth in others.7 Paleolithic humans, with a population of just a few million, dramatically transformed ecosystems across most of the terrestrial biosphere and most coastal ecosystems,8 demonstrating that population size is not the main source of the transformative power of human systems.
The onset of the Holocene, which began with the end of the last ice age, roughly corresponds with the start of the Neolithic Age of human development. During this period, agricultural human systems began to displace earlier Paleolithic human systems,9 and human systems became dependent upon the entirely novel, unambiguously anthropogenic process of clearing native vegetation and herbivores and replacing them with engineered ecosystems populated by domesticated plant and animal species.10 This process allowed available land and resources to support many more people and set the stage for massive and sustained human population growth way beyond what was possible by Paleolithic systems. In ten millennia, the human population surged from just a few million to billions today.11
While the warm and stable climate of the Holocene is widely credited with enabling the rise of agriculture, more complex forms of human social organization, and the general thriving of human populations to a degree far exceeding that of the prior epoch, it was not these new climatic and biophysical conditions themselves that brought the Paleolithic era to an end. Rather, Paleolithic human systems failed to compete with a new human system built upon a series of profound technological innovations in ecosystem engineering.12
The dramatic, sustained rise of agricultural populations, along with their eventual success in dominating Earth’s most productive lands, demonstrates that the main constraints on these populations were not environmental.13 The Malthusian model holds that populations are ultimately limited by their environmental resources — primarily the ability of a given area of land to provide adequate food.14 But this model makes little sense when engineered ecosystems have long been the basis for sustaining human populations.
Throughout the world, food production has risen in tandem with the density of agricultural populations. Populations work harder and employ more productive technologies to increase the productivity of land only after it becomes a limiting resource. This results in a complex interplay of population growth, labor inputs, technology adoption, and increased productivity — a process of agricultural intensification that still continues in many developing agricultural regions today.15
Until the widespread commodification of agricultural production over the last century or so, agriculturalists — and likely their Paleolithic hunting and foraging predecessors — used the minimal amount of labor, technologies, and other resources necessary to support their livelihoods on the lands available to them.16 In most regions, yield-boosting technologies, like the plow and manuring, had already been developed or introduced long before they became necessary to overcome constraints on local food availability for subsistence populations.17 Improving agricultural productivity facilitated rising population growth