There’s an extremely interesting debate going on over at John Michael Greer’s blog, The Archdruid Report, discussing the viability of the primitivist vs. the agrarian response to the coming collapse. The most interesting thing about it is the stances of the two main debaters, Greer and Anthropik’s Jason Godesky.

Godesky is a prolific writer on primitivism and strongly believes that the best response to the coming collapse will be something close to the hunter-gatherer life. Greer, on the other hand, believes that a more moderate response, one that more fully embraces agriculture, will be best. To me, their positions approximate two main aspects of myself that have often been in contention with each other (as readers of my past posts will know).

Godesky states his basic position, in response to another commenter who essentially says what I feel about our civilization.

All learning involves mistakes. The question is, do we throw away what we have learnt and return to the start, in which case we inevitably repeat the same mistakes as our descendants will think no differently than our ancestors did, or do we go forward from the foundation we have built?

Mistakes? Learning? That would imply that somewhere, this pattern [of the failure of agricultural cultures] didn’t hold. Where is that? The Middle East? No, they turned that into a desert. China? No, chronic starvation and massive desertification. Sub-Saharan Africa? No, they’re expanding the Sahara at a terrifying pace. Western Europe? No, look at the depletion of soil illustrated by height differences between American colonialists and their Western European contemporaries. North America? No, it took them only a few centuries to turn the Great Plains into a desert. So where is this secret success story of all the things we’ve learned from agriculture? I think what we’ve learned is that agriculture doesn’t work. That’s what we’ve learned. [Emphasis added.]

This is part of Greer’s response.

The point of The Archdruid Report is the centrality of myth and narrative in the way we construct our future. When Jason (or … any of a dozen other examples) proposes yet another rehash of classic apocalypticism — which is what all of them are doing — to my mind the important point is the narrative they’ve chosen. Of course they can find facts to back up their convictions, and I could do the same if I wanted to play that game; for every fact, as some wag pointed out, there’s an equal and opposite fact.

In response to Jason’s short list of places where agriculture has failed, for example, I could point to southeastern Europe, where grain farming has been continuously practiced for well over 7000 years and is still chugging away; to Japan, where rice farming was sustainably practiced from the late Jomon period 4000 years ago until the coming of industrial agriculture; and to many others. F.H. King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries documents methods of agriculture — and here we’re talking large-scale cereal crops — that have been viable in the same place over millennia. David Duhon’s One Circle similarly documents that it’s possible, and indeed easy, to grow enough food to feed one person on 1000 square feet of soil with no chemicals and nothing but hand tools — and you don’t need fertile soil; you can start with bare sand, as the organic gardeners did at Findhorn, if you’re willing to compost your own feces. Once you establish and manage a complete nutrient cycle, you’re good to go.

… But … this is beside the point. You’ve got your preferred mythic narrative — a classic narrative of apocalypse in which evil gets punished and the righteous survive and prosper by returning to the Good Old Ways. As you’ve suggested, I’ve got a different narrative, one that has links with the Romantic movement but actually goes back a good deal further. The argument I’ve been making in this blog all along is that the narrative I’ve been proposing — the myth of cyclic change — is a more useful tool for making sense of our current historical situation than such more popular narratives as the myth of progress or the myth of apocalypse.

What’s my position on the whole agriculture debate? Honestly, I don’t know. Jason is not a purist in his primitivism (unlike some of the more idealistic people I knew at Teaching Drum) and Greer is not an absolutist either. But they’re squaring off and that’s making for some sparks as well as some lively debate among very intelligent people regarding the fate of our future, and how best to face that fate. I’m quite enjoying it.

At this point, what I’m most drawn to is Greer’s emphasis on narrative, or myth — because in my experience, encountering our own beliefs about ourselves and the world is where long-term change and learning really happen. I think that has to come first, and I’m still at the delicate stage of adjusting my narrative of the world, and still have my bouts of denial (even amidst rising gas prices and the increasingly abundant evidence of ecological catastrophe). Only after I establish a meaningful myth of my path into the future will I be able to take action. I’m not quite there yet. Most of these people are way ahead of me.