Lierre Keith At Berkeley City College - Part 2

[fileboy2002]

Sure, by all means, let's return to the neolithic era. Let's go back to time when the average life expectancy was around 30 years. Let's return to an era where starvation and exposure and predation by animals were an constant threats, where something as trivial as nearsightedness could prove fatal. The best thing about primitivism is that it is so self-evidently undesirable, it will only ever appeal to a fringe. Thank goodness for that.

[shirehorse91]

@fileboy2002 She doesn't uphold the Neolithic because it's an agricultural era. She's talking about the Paleolithic and yet she doesn't suggest returning to that period or ending technology.

[fileboy2002]

@shirehorse91 You're right; I should have said Paleolithic. She doesn't directly call for ending technology in this particular speech, but that would be the inevitable consequence of ending agricultural society. You simply cannot have a technologically advanced society without agriculture.

[shirehorse91]

@fileboy2002 It's difficult to determine what conclusions she comes to because she's not specific. She recommends pasture raised animals, diversity in farming rather than mono-crops, and perhaps an agriculture than uses wetlands and prairies.

She is right, though. Pastures are teeming with life such as song birds, hawks, eagles, deer, rabbits, wolves, bears, foxes, etc.

[fileboy2002]

@shirehorse91 She calls agriculture the most destructive human activity in history. She traces the roots of global warming not to the beginning of the industrial age, but to the beginning of agriculture itself thousands of years ago. That is a blanket condemnation of agriculture, not a critique of current farming methods. Keith is a primitivist. Her vision of a sustainable future without agriculture would require the mass die-off of most of the human race. It's just unacceptable.

[shirehorse91]

@fileboy2002 But, she doesn't say that. She doesn't like mono-crops and tiling. It's tilling that she claims is the destructive practice. Perhaps no-till would work for her, but she doesn't say. She doesn't say much about what should be practiced although she recommend pasture raising and multiple crops. She not a primitivist because she doesn't say return to a non-agricultural lifestyle, but merely highlights what the problems are.

[fileboy2002]

@shirehorse91 But she DOES say we need to return to a non-agricultural lifestyle. She says it repeatedly, in fact. Listen again. Listen to some of her other speeches. Her idea is that human beings should plant nothing, cultivate nothing. Human beings, like every other animal, should subsist on whatever nature provides locally. To do otherwise is to practice an unsustainable way of life. She doesn't call herself a primitivist, but that is what she is.

[gigar9000]

@fileboy2002 i think what we should do is to grow meat on natural lands. maybe eat some veges too.

[fileboy2002]

@gigar9000 Can't object to that. 

[fosheezeey]

As long as money determines our decisions we will continue to see the degeneration of our environment, freedoms and quality of life.

A resource based economy is inevitable if we are to continue to survive on this planet. We can not survive on a system that relies on the cyclical consumption of resources on a finite planet. We can educate ourselves and others on a Resource Based Economy, we still have the tools and ability to come together and work toward a more sustainable/sane system.