Introduction
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Today's crisis is pervasive and deepening, accelerating its impact on all of life in our biosphere. Many are now beginning to question the nature and validity of modernity/mass society/the techno-culture. Maybe it's the problem, not the solution. It could be that the dynamics of this frightening, worsening reality goes all the way back to civilization itself. What is driving it all forward to a non-future seems to go deeper than capitalism, for example. We must face truly stark times and begin, together, to question all the givens and move toward solutions that undo what some very basic institutions are delivering.
When people began domesticating animals and plants just 10,000 years ago, our species began a downhill slide. This is the premise of the anti-civilization movement, which is based on several decades of archaeological and ethnographic research. There is mounting, convincing evidence that domestication of animals and plants brought previously unknown side effects: hierarchy, gender inequality, disease, haves and have-nots, soil depletion and the creation of deserts, and a host of other ills. These negative trends have continued to build momentum, and now appear to be leading to worldwide catastrophe.
John Zerzan is a leading theorist of the anti-civilization movement. John's arguments are based in part on an assessment of human prehistory that is now part of the standard university curriculum. Contrary to long-held stereotypes that described prehistoric human life as "nasty, brutish, and short," for the past few decades, scholars have considered our two-million-year existence as gatherers and hunters as the only successful human adaptation to the planet. Origins alone do not contain the whole solution to the why of the emptiness and the deteriorating quality of social existence today. But looking at how life was once and for such a long time, combined with existing indigenous wisdom, may point to a way forward.
View the 6-minute film Adventure of a Speck of Dust.
Link to Wikipedia biographical information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerzan