Tanada wrote:
Humans today are like those two winged birds of 65 MM ybp. We have spread world wide from extreme mountain communities in Tibet and the Andes down to below sea level establishments in the dead Sea and Caspian Sea basins below sea level. We also extended from the hottest deserts to the most humid tropical zones to the north polar zone beyond the Arctic Circle by long established communities that were able to self support..
I would like to focus on this part of your post cause you packed in a lot of information. Which was great by the way. Staying centered on the topic of the resiliency of our species moving through calamitous events.
I am completely with you on the hybrid vigor of all those mixed races of humans spread around the world and how this builds resiliency. We no longer have any remaining populations of humans vulnerable to disease like the Pre Columbian indigenous peoples. I am also in agreement that the sheer reach of our presence physically around the planet in all bio regions and continents and how this increases the survival chances of our species just as in your two winged bird analogy.
Hybrid vigor and the reach of our geography. I am with you there. These are arguments in favor of surviving major external calamities.
The greatest weakness to your two winged bird analogy is the fact that today our global civilization is becoming quickly a single vast mono culture culturally and in the structure of our global human habitat, tethered to technology, tethered to our digital devices, tethered to pretty much a single economic system. We are basically in one habitat, a human urban habitat. If we were going to take your two winged bird analogy and apply it to humans in terms of habitat diversity I would point to the example say of first nation (eskimos) up in the arctic, the bushmen of the Kalahari or native peoples of the Amazon basin. Here we see the incredible adaptability of humans in totally different habitats surviving. But they are gone. Today we have basically a single habitat.
Let’s not even go so far back as these noble HG peoples. Let’s go to the early 20th century when agrarian areas around the planet were still functioning as self sufficient and self subsistence enterprises with a myriad of farm practices and thousands of varieties of crops planted. How many varieties of apples, varieties of wheat, rice, etc.
Today? Our farmers are as tethered to technology as our urban dwellers, they are indentured servants to banks and agro businesses and the genetic diversity of our major crops like corn, wheat, rice and soy are reduced to a very few varieties, high yielding, but only high yielding with the agro chemical and petro chemical fertilizers in a mechanized farming practice that is integrated with distribution systems that are highly interdependent. This is happening all over the world to agriculture. Globally we are mechanizing our food production. This makes us quite vulnerable. Let's take China. The biggest migration story in human history was the last 25 years as over 500 million chinese left agrarian self subsistence life styles and migrated into urban areas working in factory jobs. In one fast generation all of that subsistence agrarian knowledge is out the window. Puff. gone.
You mentioned in your post Tanada all those habitats humans currently occupy. This was perhaps true still even as recently as 100 years ago. Have any of us really grasped the extent of the monoculturalization that has penetrated all aspects of modern civilization from how we communicate, how we grow food, the interdependence of our economic system, energy distribution etc. In a very very short time all around the planet the old knowledge of self sufficient agrarian life, small cottage industry skills, all of that is largely being replaced with a single global economy that removes humans every day more and more from the organic regions where they live, from the skill set they not too long ago still could pull from in order to survive.
We have the reach geographically. We have the genetic hybrid vigor. But we do not have the habitat diversity as you stated. We are a genetically diverse vast monoculture reaching around the globe. This is not a resilient arrangement.
What is promising though with all of this is the speed to which the contraction can actually happen. With such a high percentage of our global population dependent on this monoculturalization, the correction can be swift and fast, the suffering quickly over with. There will be pockets all around the planet of folks rediscovering resiliency in their bio regions untethering themselves from this mono culturalization and they will be using applied technology to re integrate with their natural habitats. Not as a concept but as a practical survival strategy.
A huge percentage of urban dwelling humans can die off really really fast given the right circumstances of calamitous events because occupying a single habitat and being highly dependent on technology makes us extremely vulnerable.
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
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