Climate Solutions: The Paleo Path
Let’s get real: The paleo path is the only way
Ha! Did you really think I was serous when I preached the techno-optimist path to resolving our climate catastrophe? Or the business-as-usual path? Or the degrowth path? I wanted to give those approaches a fair airing out, and I think I did. But you know as well as I do that the only way this goes down is that we are going to wind up back in hunter-gatherer tribes, as in Palaeolithic times, at a global population level of probably less than a billion. Maybe even more like 100 million, or fewer still. The paleo path is the only way this is going to go.
The paleo path is not a solution to the climate crisis. It’s not a program we can follow. It is simply what is going to happen.
Face it, we are well and truly fucked as a civilisation. We’ve farted too much CO2 and other greenhouse gasses up into the atmosphere, and now we’re screwed for at least several centuries. I don’t need to write yet another list of woes. The climate disasters are already happening, and this is only the beginning, folks. We’re at only 1.2°C above pre-industrial temperatures and we’ve already put up enough of those naughty gasses that we are guaranteed to break 2°C soon and keep going. 2°C is apocalyptic, the end of civilisation right there. By the time we get to 3°C and 4°C, hell on earth will be an understatement.
The heat, the storms, the sea level rise, the crop failures, the pestilence, the deadening of the oceans … it is simply not survivable. (Oops, I wrote a list of woes.) The earth will be hostile to mammalian and sea life for hundreds of years going forward. We’ve really screwed the pooch. And the pooch died.
Will pockets of humanity survive? It’s anybody’s guess. But we are pretty clever and adaptable mammals.
It may perhaps be possible to survive in parts of the Arctic and Antarctic where the heat is not deadly. Maybe we can live in caves, or underground. But trust me, if we survive at all, we will be thrown all the back to the Palaeolithic: small nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes struggling to survive.
On the other hand, a new apex predator may arise, adapted to the new climate conditions, and wipe us out completely. Hello, Cordyceps. Hello The Last of Us. (Cordyceps is a real fungus, by the way. It famously turns ants into zombies. But not humans. Yet.)
There is some good news:
- Humans survived as small hunter-gatherer tribes for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. We should be able to make it through a few or a few dozen rough centuries.
- Anthropologists who have had the opportunity to visit present-day, truly isolated hunter-gatherer tribes find that their people are, for the most part, pretty happy. Imagine, no more 9-to-5 jobs, no more horrible bosses, no more job searching, no more house upkeep. No more loneliness and isolation, because small tribes are close and supportive societies. It could work, and it does!
- The new, unstable climate conditions will probably work out fine for a lot of life on earth: Bacteria, insects, mosses, lichens, fungus, and the good old tardigrades. So life will survive, even if us humans do not. And who knows what evolution will craft next?
Paleo, here we come! Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
— Lannie Rose, April 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
Not written by ChatGTP or other AI (though I am using Chattie for research more and more)
