Sublime

The foragers became farmers.

One camp, usually referred to as “environmentalist” or “pro-environment,” holds that our current environmental problems are serious and in urgent need of addressing, and that current rates of economic and population growth cannot be sustained.

In writing about the situation at the end of the Late Bronze Age in his book Scales of Fate, Monroe describes the interactions of the various powers in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean as an “inter-societal network,” which agrees with the picture presented here. He points out, as I have, that this period is “exceptional in the treaties, laws, d

Cities are remarkably resilient and the vast majority persist. Just think of the awful experiment that was done seventy years ago when atom bombs were dropped on two cities, yet just thirty years later they were thriving.

A lot of evidence indicates that we are destroying the foundations of human prosperity in an orgy of reckless consumption.

There is another great debate about farming: did it spread through imitation, or did it spread because migrant populations of farmers displaced the hunter-gatherers? The answer in Europe seems to be the latter. The provisional evidence suggests that the early agriculturalists from Anatolia arrived as migrants in Western Europe around 6000 BCE and l

A first set of factors involves damage that people inadvertently inflict on their environment, as already discussed.

The other camp holds that environmentalists’ concerns are exaggerated and unwarranted, and that continued economic and population growth is both possible and desirable.

In our view, the key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence. Every human society, from the hunting band to the empire, has been informed by the interactions of megapolitical factors that set the prevailing version of the “laws of nature.”