Almost everyone misunderstands what culture is. Most think it is soda pop, pop stars, blue jeans, language, and TV. Some think it is capitalism, communism, or progressivism. Some see culture as Western culture or Eastern culture.

Look at the motorcycle picture. The motorcycles will fool you. All of the people above belong to the same culture, as does a soccer mom in a Chicago suburb. Keep guessing. This makes a huge difference in how we understand what is happening today and where we are going.

Our Culture

The answer is, that we are all Takers. We all belong to the same culture, tea tottaller or Taliban, one culture. The Dali Lama or Duncan Donuts cop, one culture. Our Taker culture began 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution when they locked up the food, began the population/food race, invented war, started privatizing land, and ended the formerly one universal religion of animism. It was forgotten in just a few generations that there used to be probably 10,000 unique Leaver cultures before our now universal Taker culture — The Great Forgetting.

Some suggest that modern progressive exuberance has replaced Christianity as the modern religion or culture. The belief is that “here and now” and a better life for each generation from technology has replaced Christianity’s faith in an “unseen unknown afterlife” and will culminate in a technological singularity that will save humanity.

They are right to identify exuberance, but today’s exuberance is the same that caused a tribe of agriculturalists between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers to start overtaking their Leaver neighbors in an unending conquest that is now largely complete. The age of Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and Manifest Destiny are past examples of the same exuberance. The ultimate hubris was inventing one god in a human form. Today, all but one or two million Leavers, versus of 6.8 billion Takers, are left alive or are not yet assimilated.

It’s Pointless To Discuss Anything Else

Peak oil and financial collapse seem important because they immediately affect us and are within our lifetime scale. But, they are just noise along the way of our 10,000 year Taker cultural odyssey. Nothing will change for our children until our culture ends. It will be one rise and fall, migration and conquest, resource war after resource war on and on until our culture is replaced with a resilient diversity of many new cultures. Until then we are just building and operating the Taker prison for our children and ourselves. Only when our culture ends, will the earth be allowed to start healing itself. A change of leadership of the same culture is also a waste of time.

Here comes the important part of the essay: discussing anything else today except walking away from our culture is pointless. This has to do with the difference between programs and vision or story. When Columbus invaded Haiti, he brought with him the greatest virus of all, a new cultural story.

The story of Leaver cultures before the agricultural revolution was, “Humanity belongs to the earth.” The Taker cultural story is, “The earth belongs to man.” This has been the crux of the creation and perpetuation of our culture for the last 10,000 years. We have had technology since the digging stick; technology has nothing to do with culture. It is how you value humanity in relation to “our relations” or the earth and what you do with the technology that matters.

A program is doing more of the same. If the effort in Afghanistan is failing, send more troops. If test scores are falling, spend more on a failed educational system. If the banks are failing, send them more money.

A program is like a stick in the river of our culture. Programs run contrary to the cultural story. Recycling is a program to combat our consumer economy. Smart grids are a program to combat our excessive use of cheap fossil fuel energy. Green building is a program to combat urban sprawl. Food aid is a program to combat the population/food race. Organic farming is a program to combat industrial totalitarian agriculture.

Programs are fruitless efforts to combat the symptoms of our cultural story that the world belongs to man. Until the story is reversed, all programs are a complete waste of time. If new cultures do not replace our Taker culture, there will be no change in course – no Great Turning. If you truly want peace, social justice, and Ecotopia, you have to starting living under the remembered story that humanity belongs to the earth.

The Problem is Not Humanity

Humanity has lived on the earth for three or four million years. For millions of years we lived in harmony or symbiosis with the ecosystem. We had a stable population. A "give it to them as good as you get it" erratic retaliator strategy existed instead of war. Tribalism and animism were the universal human organizational structures and religion. Tribalism is the one and only evolutionarily proven human social organizational system. Tribalism is to humans what herds are for deer, pods are for whales, schools are for fish, and hives are for bees. The problem began 10,000 years ago when our culture was created.

You Cannot Invent a New Social Organizational System

Here is the rub. You just can’t invent a new social organizational system like a tribe. We have been trying to perfect a new social organizational system called civilization for 10,000 years. But, civilization continues to fail more each year for more people and species. If civilization was going to create world peace and plenty for all it would have done so already. It never can because a story based on one species taking everything it can get its hands on will never work. We even treat members of our own species as poorly as we do all other species we exploit.

The Great Remembering

The only solution worth discussion is developing new cultures that live by the original story that humanity belongs to the earth. Going green is not enough. Driving a hybrid and having a backyard vegetable garden is not going to get you there. It’s deeper than that. I am beginning to think we are going to have to start depaving, give up our iPods, and start making music for ourselves. I am not sure how far this is going to have to go. But I do know that it has to go back to a level in which our population and method of consumption allows the earth to start rebuilding biodiversity and topsoil.

We will have to remember our relationship with the cultivars, how to give support to get support, how to live on local sunlight, and we might even have to remember animism. We have a long way to go. I am starting the journey for my children and myself.

Hierarchies have strong defenses for attacks from below. However, they have no defense from abandonment. The point is we have to create new cultures that borrow what we can from the present that fits within the structure of the past. This is the only way we will make a difference. We have to become the change we want to see, find like-minded friends, and start our own local tribes. We must develop a high enough level of group self-reliance that will allow us to walk away. We need doers, not talkers, not surfers, and not bloggers. We need to be walking toward something better, not away from something we don’t like. Its time to start living your truth.

Visit www.culturequake.org to learn more about the book Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture and the blog. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC

Notes:

Daniel Quinn
Ishmael

Joanna Macy
The shift to a life-sustaining civilization, The Great Turning

Ernest Callenbach
Ecotopia

Marija Gimbutas
The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe

Dan Piraro
Bizarro

depave.org
About Depave

The question is actually, not “what are we going to do?”, but is “how are we going to make a living?” First lets rule out the obvious, we can no longer make a living as Homo consumer. Peak oil will put an end to our happy motoring and consuming lifestyle before we get the chance to consume the world.

A new International Energy Agency (IEA) report shows the decline of global oil production has been recalculated at 9.1% per year, up from 5.8% earlier in 2008. The weakened global economy will buy us a couple more years, but after that the decline of world oil production will be far steeper than its rise. We started the last century slowly, but we are now running our fossil fuel economy full speed with the easily extracted oil gone and only the hard or impossible to extract left.

The end of plentiful cheap energy will mean a reduction in the complexity of our society so significant that few today comprehend it. I wonder if President-elect Obama has any idea what is in store for us. Watch to see if restoring “growth” is his mantra when inaugurated. This year we saw the end of investment banking and the beginning of the end of suburbia in the form of the mortgage crisis. Peak oil’s curtailment of happy motoring has not even kicked in yet.

Next, the experiment of the agricultural revolution is a failure as it has created overpopulation and overshoot of carrying capacity via a food race. The food race drives population growth with growth in food production; every increase in human population is met with an increase in food production.

The agricultural revolution made us powerful, but it has also meant the greatest mass extinction since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Just when we need earth’s resilience in her biodiversity the most, Homo modern is destroying it by converting what is left into human biomass.

Combine agricultural revolution population growth with peak oil and you get a nightmare. At the start of the last century, there were only one billion on the planet, today there are almost 6.8 billion. That means that 5.8 billion people are here one way or another because of oil, and oil is about to run out.

The obvious being eliminated, that we are not going to make a living as fossil fuel consumers nor as hunter-gatherers. How are we going to make a living in the future?

What if I told you I had a way to make a living that has worked for 150,000 generations and it does not involve running into the forest to live by hunting, fishing, and harvesting wild food?

The answer is tribalism or as I describe in my book Culturequake: The End of Modern Culture and the Birth of a New World.

Tribalism is misunderstood by Homo modern as “living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.” Hunting and gathering is only one way of making a living; there are thousands of other ways to make a living. The important point is not “what” you do to make a living, but “how” you make a living. Make a living doing what ever you are best at, whether it is on a permaculture farm or fixing bicycles, it makes no difference.

Tribalism has been proven over three million years to be the evolutionarily proven form of human social organization. Bees make a living in hives, deer in herds, whales in pods, birds in flocks, and humans in tribes. There is no getting around it. If you think that civilization is the new answer, you are deeply mistaken. In the mere blink of an eye, 500 generations, civilization has brought the world to the point of mass extinction. It might be working for a wealthy westerner, but it is not working for the other 95 percent of the human population nor the 30 million other species on the planet.

Tribalism has two primary components that enable the average person to make a living from generation to generation without being stressed out or exploited. First, a tribe is simply a group of people making a living together. Everyone in the tribe does not even have to have the same beliefs, they just have to want to make a living together.

Second, tribe members have a strong incentive to share what they have made or found with other tribal members. This gives everyone else a strong incentive to share as well. There is no one leader or boss like our hierarchic agricultural revolution culture. Being the main scheduler for example is just another job. When food is scarce everyone goes hungry; no one keeps a surplus to themselves.

Generally, tribes are thought to be fewer than 150 people. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized this number of people to be the limit with whom we can maintain stable social relationships in which we know each person. He suggests that numbers larger than this require more restricted rules, laws, and enforcement. I suggest this number does not require a hierarchy; everyone can be an equal.

So what should you do? The universal advice I got from older people when I was growing up was to, “do what you love to do and you will be good at it.” You will make the biggest impact with your life that way. Seek like-minded people and find a way to make a living together that you all enjoy.

Based on my experience as an entrepreneur I would also say follow the path of least resistance and watch for serendipity. Try multiple things and see which one gets the most traction. Also, walk before you run. Try your ideas on a hobby, part-time, or club scale to get started. You could start with your neighbors and each could plant a different fruit or nut tree and you could exchange harvests in the fall. Create a micro-neighborhood edible perennial nursery business. The possibilities are endless. Have fun with it.

One idea I am considering is to start by creating a virtual tribal community. We cannot all move in next door to each other overnight, but like-minded people could put their properties into a land trust for the benefit of the community. This would create a patchwork to start with within the existing suburban culture. You could coalesce closer together over time as the opportunities arise.

In regards to finding like-minded people, try hosting a potluck to discuss how things are changing and neighborhood sustainability; see who shows up. Also I cannot emphasis enough about learning about permaculture and even taking a two week intensive permaculture design course (PDC). You will meet your tribe of like-minded people there. See the permaculture resources below.

Have no hierarchy; work from a group consensus. Produce no surplus that would be concentrated; make just what you need locally and your population will be stable and will not be in overshoot. If you concentrate resources or work within a hierarchy, you take away the incentive for tribal community members to share what ever they find with the rest of the community.

Do this and you give your children a bright future. The one great benefit of a tribal community is cradle-to-grave security. In our Homo modern culture, we “make things to get things.” In a tribal or Leaver culture, you “give support to get support.” It is a completely different story or cultural meme. Memes are to cultures what genes are to people.

Also, by living a better story, we create a new cultural meme that is more likely to be replicated than our current modern cultural story or meme that, “civilization must continue,” and “the world was made for man.” I mean really, how poor a story are these?

A far better story is that we and our children can make a living without destroying most of the other life on earth. The real exciting part is that not only can we survive, but we can thrive! We can thrive amid a riot of cultural diversity among different tribes all making a living differently. We will also be living within the natural carrying capacity of our surroundings; a far greater result than what we have today.

So this is our resolution for the new year. To find “our people” and to make a living together. Maybe being laid off from building pyramids for someone else could be a blessing in disguise as an opportunity to walk away from modern consumer culture.

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Postscript: Use this winter as a time to catch up on your reading. Besides reading Culturequake, I recommend Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway and the Permaculture for Beginners DVD which is coming soon from Geoff Lawton at Permaculture Research Institute of Australia.

Other excellent resources:

• Beyond Civilization, by Daniel Quinn
• Dunbar’s Number
• Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, by William Catton
• The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore
• Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Reside of Earth Culture, by Chuck Burr
• Geoff Lawton:
  The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia
• Peter Bane:
  Permaculture Activist
• "A Return to Tribes" by Jan Lundberg

Visit Culturequake.org to learn more about the Culturequake book and the online Magazine. ©2008 Chuck Burr LLC