Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization

My son and I are preparing for our last trip of the summer – our annual 5-day adventure in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. A little taste of something like our hunter-gatherer ancestors’ life style. 

It occurs to me that one big difference between them and us is the material that our gear is made of. Ours will mostly be poly-something and theirs was mostly animal byproducts. But perhaps the biggest difference is that we can’t replace our gear ourselves but rely on a complex web of exchange.

I’m thinking these thoughts because I just finished Spencer Wells’ Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization.  I picked up the book a couple weeks back after hearing an interview of Wells, “Seeds of Destruction,” on Minnesota Public Radio. Click here for that. 

Wells is into tracing the movements of our ancestors from the near die-off ~70,000 years ago (we got down to between 2 and 10 thousand humans) to world dominance and what all that means for where we might be going in the future and how.

The die-off/rebound period is a good news/bad news thing about our natures. The bright side is that confronted with an environment that wasn’t working for how we had become accustomed to living, our ancestors made cultural adaptations that were successful beyond anything the planet had ever seen. 

The bad news is that it took a near die off before we were ready to let go and change. With peak-oil and global warming staring us in the face, I wonder if it’ll take a near die-off before we are willing to change dramatically.

“Had my back to the wall for so long, it’s stuck,” is a Bob line that comes to mind. 

Pandora’s Seed reinforces and gives lucid examples about what’s already clear: the way we’ve been directing our greed for about 70,000 years has reached its limit. We now need to want less with as much creativity as we’ve applied to wanting more. 

Here’s one of Wells’ last bits:

“…at the present critical point in human history, were we have the tools to begin to solve some of the problems set in motion by the neolithic Revolution, saving ourselves will mean accepting human nature, not suppressing it. It will mean reassessing our cultural emphasis on expansion, acquisition, and perfectibility.”

Imho, one way through this is for humanity to rediscover meaning in our spiritual inheritance (in the postmodern context not through Fundamentalistically pretending to be premoderns) and redirect our aspirations for living a life that counts to plumbing the depths of the nature of being itself.