Jared Diamond is a hack. Couldn’t keep reading after that section.
That part was hard for me too.
I don’t agree with much of the article at all, he’s approaching it complety from a philsiophical bent which i think is self defeating eg why does Monbiot propose producing vegan food in labs as the only way foward ? Becase farming has gone past a tipping point of sustainability. To then equate how we farm (mega industrial farming) to his litte plot of land is folly. As someone who does much the same its in no way able to sustain 8 Billion people, I don’t even sustian myself, just supplement it. (My parter does lots of the work, i do the grunt work)
I’m not sure what the article even hopes to achieve?.
I do agree that no language is nonsese but I also agree with Diamond that agriculture was the worse of all mistakes, in hindsight…
For me anarchonprmitivism is the only sustainable system to live upon the planet, it’s “perfect” in that respect.
But we only know that with hindsight We can see that for example the Australian First Nations peoples lived 60,000 years in balance. That doesn’t mean no impact, as they killed mega fauna to the pont of extinction but the introduction of any top predator has that effect eg the domestic cat in Australia has sent countless species extinct.
In every society that survived millennia, inequaity was always the key.
A good segue is Tom Murphys series here on the cancer of modernity
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/07/metastatic-modernity-launch/
