Between collapse and post-scarcity

Taken together, all of these human traits—intellectual, communicative, and social—have not only emerged from natural evolution and are inherently human; they can also be placed at the service of natural evolution to consciously increase biotic diversity, diminish suffering, foster the further evolution of new an ecologically valuable life-forms, and reduce the impact of disastrous accidents or the harsh effects of mere change.

Amongst climate change debaters, there is a recurring argumentation between the two extremes of post-scarcity and collapsism, which dates back at least to the seventies when the limits to growth first came to general consciousness.

Probably because P2P Theory is inherently more optimistic and recognizes human agency, our p2p research list seems to be more attractive to post-scarcity thinking. I’ve made my position on the more simplified techno-philiac versions of such thinking clear in a recent statement.

Paul Fernhout sent us an interesting excerpt from the debate of the seventies, in which Murray Bookchin, founder of the social ecology movement and himself an author on post-scarcity, takes aim at the ‘collapsist’ deep ecology movement.

Murray Bookchin:

“In failing to emphasize the uniqueness, characteristics, and functions of human societies, or placing them in natural evolution as part of the development of life, or giving full, indeed unique due to human consciousness as a medium for the self-reflective role of human thought as nature rendered self-conscious, deep ecologists essentially evade the social roots of the ecological crisis. They stand in marked distinction to writers like Kropotkin who outspokenly challenged the gross inequities in society that underpin the disequilibrium between society and nature. Deep ecology contains no history of the emergence of society out of nature, a crucial development that brings social theory into organic contact with ecological theory. It presents no explanation of—indeed, it reveals no interest in—the emergence of hierarchy out of society, of classes out of hierarchy, of the State out of classes–in short, the highly graded social as well as ideological development that gets to the roots of the ecological problem in the social domination of women by men and of men by other men, ultimately giving rise to the notion of dominating nature in the first place.

All of which brings us as social ecologists to an issue that seems to be totally alien to the crude concerns of deep ecology: natural evolution has conferred on human beings the capacity to form a second (or cultural) nature out of first (or primeval) nature. Natural evolution has not only provided humans with ability but also with the necessity to be purposive interveners into first nature, to consciously change first nature by means of a highly institutionalized form of community. It is not alien to natural evolution that over billions of years the human species has emerged, capable of thinking in a sophisticated way. Nor is it alien for that species to develop a highly sophisticated form of symbolic communication or that a new kind of community—institutionalized, guided by thought rather than by instinct alone, and ever changing—has emerged called society. Taken together, all of these human traits—intellectual, communicative, and social—have not only emerged from natural evolution and are inherently human; they can also be placed at the service of natural evolution to consciously increase biotic diversity, diminish suffering, foster the further evolution of new an ecologically valuable life-forms, and reduce the impact of disastrous accidents or the harsh effects of mere change.”

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