War and Permaculture

a long read

Let us get straight into the Permaculture way of doing things, if I want to design a farm, village, town or whatever in an appropriate way I need to understand a lot of stuff about whichever it is.

Right, our ethics, we can cut straight to → does warfare care for the Earth? NO. Does warfare care for people? NO. Does warfare create abundance and share it, for a minority who run or have shares in the various defense industries yes, for the vast majority of people it’s again a big NO.

If something doesn’t go through the Permaculture ethic ‘filters’ then we don’t use it or we eliminate it from the system. War and conflict fail the test so they need to be removed from our systems.

War, analysis

When did the whole warfare thing kick off? No real evidence has been found for organised conflict before people started to become sedentary. So for more than 160,000 years we find no traces of organised conflicts between groups of modern humans. The earliest traces that have been found for warfare are in Jabal Aṣ-Ṣaḥābah amongst the Qadan culture known to have been early developers of crop raising and harvesting. The current theory is that climate change caused scarcity and brought on repeated conflicts. These happened around 14,000 BP which is quite a long time ago and we’ve been warring ever since. So climatic changes reducing yields can provoke organised armed conflicts. Noted.

The Talheim Death Pit dates to around 7000 BP, the pit seems to be evidence of a massacre but other evidence shows that there were regular inter-tribal conflicts. The reason seems to be ‘raptio’, the capture of women from one tribe by another to be enslaved or forced into marriages or concubinage. Noted

It’s difficult to write this stuff without including expletives as in ‘what the ****?’.

After that things accelerate, more and more wars with increasingly destructive weapons and into the 20th and 21st centuries and we have weapons so powerful they could destroy the biosphere as we know it. Defense spending is huge, in 2023 global defence spending rose to a record $2,200,000,000,000 '($2.2 trillion). To put this in perspective the Thomson Reuters Foundation estimates that we need to spend $5 trillion annually on climate change mitigation. Investing the defense spending would get us nearly half way there. You could keep the name, defense spending, just divert it to defending humanity from the consequences of climatic forcing. It would seem to make more sense to try and ward off a very real existential threat than carry on funding defense and warfare.

A moot point is to ask if it’s possible to design and rebuild our societies in ways that make war impossible. We can reject the idea that warfare is innate to us as for more than 90% of the history of modern humans we didn’t do it. What can it be that drives us to war? Convincing human beings to wage is something we mastered probably since we started it, Sapolsky explains it quite well here. The question is why do we keep doing it?

Resource wars are seen as a type of war yet many conflicts seem to occur as different peoples fight over resources. Environmental stress, where something like a prolonged drought forces people to move and they come into conflict with neighbouring peoples. The personal ambitions of dictators, emperors, autocrats and suchlike? In this article Christopher Blattman discusses five reasons wars happen, the invasion of the Ukraine and discusses some reasons for it.

Many researchers would contend that wars became almost inevitable when we became sedentary and invented private property, inheritance and agriculture. I would reply that it wasn’t what we did but how we did it. For some, yet to be understood reason, we switched from a survival strategy based on equity and mutual aid to on which is based on aggression, wealth accumulation and wealth inequality. Over this period we also see an enormous change in women’s social status, from being equal members of hunter-gatherer groups to increasing levels of subjugation in sedentary ones.

The neolithic agricultural transition brought with it increases in disease and mortality and at the same time faster population growth. An argument can be made that hunter-gatherer women, in charge of their own fertility, would vary the number of children they had according to resource abundance and the number of children that could be physically carried. Breast feeding delays the return of ovulation and significantly reduces fertility (lactational amenorrhea). Sedentary women started to have more children, perhaps because of a better work to calorie ratio or perhaps because they were increasingly encouraged and subsequently forced to bear more children as the group needed increasing numbers of people capable of defending ‘their’ land and harvests. Cattle were domesticated around this time and their milk could have been used as baby feed and that would mean the women reduce the lactational amenorrhea period.

The earliest form of an arms race was a wombs race, forcing women to produce more and more children because potential enemies were doing the same.

Today we see more and more pressure being put on women by governments to have more children and to start earlier. We also see the hard won rights that women won back, to be in control of their own bodies, being stripped away. We seem to be back in a wombs race for both economic and military reasons.

It’s still difficult to write this stuff without including expletives as in ‘what the ****?’.

What can we do about war?

Mulching is used in gardening to cut plants off from a vital resource, light. Could we use a similar strategy to move us away from the cycles of peace to war to peace to war?

Dictators and autocrats are more prone to war. In that case could we mulch them out? This could be difficult as who’s going to be the next political leader that starts manipulating their political system to become a war-mongering autocrat? I’ve written before about how it’s not the leaders who are the main problem it’s the followers, they are what light is to a plant. A leader who has trouble gathering together more than a few mates in the Pub isn’t going to get into a position to start a war. Studies have shown that people with ‘more developed’ theory of mind are less suggestible and less likely to believe liars and propaganda. So a potentially very powerful way of helping pêople avoid become sheep-like undiscriminating followers is to ensure that everyone has access to an education system adapted to everyone’s individual needs and one which doesn’t leave anyone behind.

Resource wars caused by real or perceived resource scarcity. Some scarcities are real but caused by poverty, stuff is available but people don’t have the money to buy it. In 2023 in the USA one in 8 households lacked access to an affordable, nutritious diet, and yet in the same country nearly 40% of food goes to waste (unsold or not eaten).

Resource scarcity is often a problem of a lack of an equitable distribution of resources both within and between countries. The current economic systems seem inefficient at equitable distribution and needs changing. Immediate action can be taken by citizens ensuring that resources are shared equitably within their local communities. Acting this way corresponds to our, normally, prosocial and compassionate psychological hardwiring inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It is still there, people who have jobs that help others and when introduced on a TV game show or some such will get a spontaneous round of applause from the audience.

Our current agricultural systems are inefficient and we have the tools and models to improve them. I presented these in a previous article.

There is a strong causal link between climatic variations and conflict. The ‘little ice age’ caused years of crop failures in France and immense suffering because of the harsh winters this coupled with political inertia led first to the Flour wars and then to the storming of the Bastille. Climatic forcing is leading us to a world where extreme events are becoming more frequent and more severe. We know how to create climate change resilient systems and we must get on with putting them into place. At the same time we must restructure our agro-socio-economic systems to remove those factors which are causing climate change.

In order to get people to fight they have to believe in their own moral superiority and that ‘the others’ are inferior to them. Even better they believe the ‘others’ are barbaric and bestial, as Sapolsky explained in the video linked to above. The types of propaganda and political speeches that can push people to see others as being ‘the enemy’ can be counteracted effectively by better general education (theory of mind) and ‘pre-bunking’ which is psychological inoculation, I discussed in this article.

We have to believe that it is possible to build a world where war just doesn’t happen and more than that we have to understand we have our individual roles to play. We can’t rely on hoping that someone else will do it for us, history has shown that this doesn’t happen. Permaculture is based on 3 ethics, care for people, care for the Earth and equity. Permaculture designers and engineers base their choices and decisions on these ethics, we could all do well to copy their example.