It is Nature, who will bring a dieoff, unless we go for atomic war or for global Pol Pot's Cambodia instead.

Sorry, you may bark on such concept, but history is clearly teaching us that any revival of civilization leads to following overshoot and a dieoff.

And I wouldn't believe in any "this time it will be different" reassurances.

Why are the two , h-g and agriculture, being treated as if they are mutually exclusive?

That has never been the case, agriculture has coincided with hunting and game meat in small villages everywhere until recently.

Same goes with forging wild plants, which people do still today .

Why can't there be a healthy medium?

Maybe because in a world of 7+ billion people the only sustainable hunting to be done is for rodents and long pork and the only gathering to be done is weeds. The reason hunting and gathering is still feasible to any extent today is because agriculture provides 99.999999999% of the calories of humanity. Once agriculture fails we'll pick the planet clean of anything wild that is edible far in excess of its ability to regenerate (just as we're doing with the oceans) not to mention burning the forests for fuel. We should treat what's left of the wilderness like a fragile antique.

I know the current population cannot be sustained, period.

Once the natural gas feedstock is gone we're going back down to 18th century levels if not farther.

But after the die off I think the two could be utilized effectively together. No combination of solutions will keep 7+ billion people alive on this planet post peak.

And besides, Evolution should make a creature more able to withstand crisis in its ecosystem the longer it remains there and adapts to it.

Humans developed and evolved in this way until the age of oil.

Up until the nineteenth century people would be able to pick up the pieces and adapt after a major catasptrophe.

People today can die by the dozens when electricity goes out in a city for a few days, a relatively minor occurance.

There was no such concept of an apocalypse in our sense of the word. Modern people view an apocalypse ending either with imminent destruction of the planet, or large scale failure of our technology.

People 160 years ago would only conjure images of divine armageddon or the second coming of christ when thinking of a true apocalypse.

Disasters would not spell the end of civilization. But in our technophillic world, a relatively little disaster can literally shatter our civilization.


I digress, The point is that when we first developed agriculture that "evolution" a natural product of our larger mind helped to stabilize our species place in the ecosystem.

If their were large scale die off of animals and plants due to drought or disease we now had the ability to store food through the debacle and have specialized "healers' to treat us. Thus improving survivability and making our species more resilient.

Well balanced rural agricultural communities still maintain a knowledge of how to hunt and what is good to eat for forage. Thus even if this resilient nodule of civilization fell apart, they could revert to an earlier state easily.

Though we have left this way of life far behind I believe we will return to it to our "evolutionary benefit'

ALSO agriculture is not a specifically human activity. Some species of ants maintain self sufficient underground fungal farms that sustain the population through times of instability when other colonies die off.

So if those ants are turning their back on evolution..... I dont see how its un-natural.

I think the irony in all of the anti-agriculture rhetoric is that the #1 peak oil prep is, you guess it--agriculture. You can call it horticulture or gardening but its still agriculture and it's still in support of the domestic lifestyle that people rail against. At the end of the day you have to drop the idealism and tend to your own survival and that ain't h-g. The closest you can come to hunter-gatherer within the confines of civilization is being a homeless vagrant and that's no life I think any of us want. So we better learn to make the most of agriculture because that's all we really have to work with.

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From mos6507
"we better learn to make the most of agriculture because that's all we really have to work with."

To be sure !
The continuation of agriculture during the "die off "will probably be severely disrupted ,
not least by the transportation of millions of tons of grain across the world to countries not necessarily friendly or stable ,
the whole of the middle east is food import dependent ,
farming require some peace , that failed at the end of the Roman empire when a ferocious taxation combined with widespread raid by band of armed immigrants barbarians ,
they quickly became the ruling power providing " protection " to farmers

The earliest farmers were tubers collectors in Papua , around 9000 BC , they were practicing the same crops in the same way in living memory

Hunting and farming aren't totally exclusive ,any farmer will tell you the wildlife is as keen as people for eating the crop , one of the function of the above protectors was to hunt game relentlessly , which they did with a will

A few places such as the American north East saw tribes switching back and forth between hunting and farming
while in the Amazon Mississippi basin large kingdoms arose only to be whipped out by European borne diseases

Mega cities are the first obvious victims of disruption of food supply ,
small country towns will struggle but might become the nucleus of a post crisis polity if the survive looting

simgle farms would survive by stealth or by having a " protector "


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Mos is just so fucking on!

The hunter gatherer romanticism that permeates this thread is a myth. I have been hunting the same 60,000 acres for forty years. It is an area loosely referred to as River Ranch in central Florida. It was initially set up as a hunting preserve by an oil company when they decided to sell lots of flat woods to locals to gain hunting rights. We have bow season, black powder season and regular hunting season. If the preserve were not continually restocked every living thing would be dead in two weeks. There simply is not enough game in the woods to feed the population.

No one is claiming that we could have 7 billions of hunters-gatherers in any case.
However it is claimed that issues related to overshoot will result in massive population crash and there is also a high possibility that farming in most current agricultural areas would become simply unfeasible due to climate change, FF depletion, top soil depletion, water shortages etc.
That is typical after collapse of civilizations (look on Mayans, Egyptians or Romans or some Middle East ancient civilizations).
Agriculture tends to fail altogether or at least it is severely curtailed for centuries after civilization collapse.

So collapse of our civilization would quickly reduce most of humanity to h-g again.
Initially there would be a very short period of hunting because (as you have noted) all game would be gone within few weeks and hunting would be over.
There would be few decades of cannibalism though and at the end few dozens of millions of survivors would become to be a pure gatherers.
They will be gathering earthworms, cockroaches etc.
From time to time with some luck they might hunt a rat perhaps.

"Cloud9"

The hunter gatherer romanticism that permeates this thread is a myth.

For sure ....too many hunters, not enough local born game
especially as Florida isn't exactly good soil country
inland Australia had some hunter gatherer until recently
the population density was less than 0.1 per square Klic
on the other hand in exceptionally favorable
such as amongst the salmon hunters of the pacific North West
the permanent population could rise to the size of a smallish village


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Actually the fishing point is an interesting one.

Modern people still rely on wild catch for the vast majority of their sea-food.

Not to mention we throw out twice as much by-catch.

Never really looked at the fishing industry as a "hunter" industry,but thats what it is.

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There is an increasing reliance on auquaculture ,
practically all the salmon , trouts and prawns are farmed now ,
the laws of farming then , more or less , apply

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The hunter gatherers fished out the grand banks.

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yep , the biggest ..amongst many others


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I predict that is something which will never be: a population with cultural taboos against overbreeding. What will happen in practice to such a group is not sustainable living happily ever after. Instead, what will happen is conquest and extermination by more numerous neighbor groups where reckless rapid breeding is the norm.

Nature provides man a means for keeping his numbers in check: low-technology warfare. As an additional benefit, while keeping the population within sustainable limits, it also improves the breed, so that man becomes a higher-quality animal as time and generations go by.

Jerry Abbott

Yes, the Leaf-Cutter ants. We could take a cue from these ants:
Wikipedia Link

So basically, their "landfill" is also their grave site.

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The mad cow disease spread after bovine carcasses were grinded and fed back to cattle
, also when times are hard , the neighbors are an instant source of nutritious proteins


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Soylent Green is people!!!

Got any links for this???

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There is no substantial change in modern Humans ( homo sapiens sapiens )
and through the whole world it can be confidently assumed that we can interbreed
easily across the population spread , with fertile offsprings , so we are of the same specie , that's the definition

We are a self domesticated animal , and wide geographical variations in the genotype are to be expected
it's called sub-species
it used to be called races but the term has got a bad name and is now used only for wheat cultivar

the main variation with the ancestral Cro Magnon are often smaller lower jaw and smaller stature ,
they were very tall but that could have been a local trait
the smaller jaw is due to softer food in the diet , much to the profit of dentists

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