Nowadays people relocate to the city because that's where the jobs and money are. When I was young, I chose not to do that. In my mind, the tourism industry in rural Quebec offered a better quality of life than the big city economy. As far as I'm concerned, civilization is rural and dotted with villages.
Enormous amounts. I saw one estimate recently - I have no idea how accurate it might be however, but it was from a serious site - that London could drop annually by as much as 20c if the AMOC goes. That seems an excessive claim tbh, but then when you look at its actual latitude...
And that's just southern England. The Arctic gets one hell of a lot less solar radiation.
It used to be thought they took millennia. No matter how long they take, I think it's a given that trying to establish a new civilisation at the Ground Zero of a new glaciation period is probably going to face some serious challenges.
In 'ZAMM/LILA' (I forget which), Pirsig posited that cities were a semi-conscious level far beyond the capability of the mortals within to comprehend: much as our own cells cannot comprehend the ego that dominates the individual collective body.
But just as individual mortal humans grow old and die, to the amazement of cells....
'Language' (Along with intelligence), are inherent to all living things. It may be more or less complex, but always existent.
Which will probably come as a bit of a shock to the actual cells in it, if they are individually healthy.
Of course, it's not a pure analogy, as humans unlike cells can migrate en masse and perhaps overload other areas or fit in with needs there. The overwhelming majority of cells can't migrate to other bodies, fortunately. Or those who work in hospitals would become huge, lol.
I'm sure there's a Doc Who script in there somewhere - or Stephen King. ;)
The Washington Post just published an article that Joe Rogan used to basically tell Bernie, who he was interviewing, that climate change is a hoax or very close to one. The article basically said that after scientists collected and processed the data, rigorously, they found that we are in the middle of a general cooling period, and that in ages past the Earth was sometimes and on average, much hotter than now.
Sadly, WP is doing the yoemen's labor of keeping people ignorant of what that really entails. As your article correctly points out, yeah there will still be a planet an probably still humans, but the conditions (easy access to energy and materials) that led to stable prosperity will be gone. Uncertainty will be the daily reality, and the population will be much smaller likely after some horrifying wars.
But WP doesn't tell you that - it just tells the average reader that it was hotter in the past, and they let the imagination of the reader go to the logical conclusion that 2.0C increase in GAT is somehow no big deal.
Palm trees in northern Canada? What is wrong with that?!
Try telling them that means most of the current world we know will be uninhabitable and we will no little prosperity, and somehow you are the crazy one.
This much hotter / much cooler thing make no sense.
It's all a matter of timescale. During some periods, Earth was hotter and at some other periods, Earth was much colder. And indeed, on the very long term, that is averaged on 100s of millions of years, Earth is actually hotter than it is now. So no ice cap and palm trees on the Groenland latitudes is the normal state of things.
But none of this means anything when it comes to human lifespan. Not even to civilization and maybe just barely to the whole human history...
You do understand that, since Bezos took over, the editorial policy of the Washington Post has changed from facts and truth to "personal liberties and free markets", right?
"News" these days is not much more than entertainment that supports infinite consumption. That was even stated in Fox News' defence in the 3/4 billion dollar defamation suit they lost. They argued that they should not be held to verifiable facts, as they were an "entertainment outlet".
I'm reading Human Rewilding in the 21st Century by James M. Van Lanen, which, among other things, show just how much Graeber and Wengrow got wrong. It's been fascinating! So much we don't know.
Reading Graeber and Wengrow, I found their description of human history far too idealistic. Or to put it another way, far from being sufficiently deterministic. So an other point of view might be useful.
There is a great deal that we do not know about paleoclimates. In previous, hotter periods with aligators in the arctic circle, the temperature had a mych lower gradient around the globe.
It is unknown how the earth produced this equible climate, but it did not have large deserts (hyper arid areas), oceon dead zones, or wet bulb temperatures at the equator that were fatal to mammals. The fossil record and the geology paint a picture of world that is tropical or subtropical almost everywhere. The most plausible explanation that I've seen is that the Hadley cells switched from 3 Hadley cells per hemisphere to 1 per hemisphere.
The big question is less about the final state and more about the transition. Large mammals have lived successfully in equible climates that were more than 4 degrees warmer, but an exstinction even between here and there would definitely ruin humanity's day.
I think hunter-gatherer societies are the most likely. At least for a while until some new form of society starts to build. Civilisation is inherently unsustainable so I don't see one emerging on the back end of this collapsing one. Of course, 8.2 billion people can't hunt and gather on this planet (which is the only one we have), so there is bound to be a mass die-off. The time-line is unknown, though.
These guys seem to be just about the only ones who are both realistic (backed by data and research) and pessimistic (acknowledging that oil must eventually end).
The market has become "peak oil aware", and the US EIA has been "cooking the books" to disguise that it's already happened. In the past ten years, they've added in increasingly desperate non-oil quantities to the number of barrels of oil produced, and the energy content of each barrel of oil continues to decline. Art Berman thinks that a barrel of oil produced today only contains 95% of the energy of a barrel of oil produced ten years ago.
Better start taking control of your own food supply
I’m deeply skeptical that the Graeber-Wengrow thesis was simply an extension of Graeber’s anarchist-socialist ideology. But even on its own terms, the argument strains credibility. At best, it overgeneralizes from a few outliers—sites like Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük—which were exceptional, not representative.
A seasonal gathering place for ritual, feasting, or drunken mating festivals is not a city. And calling these sites “egalitarian” just because we don’t see palaces or elite homes is misleading. Hierarchy can exist without stone monuments—through ritual authority, monopolies on knowledge, or informal power structures.
The broader idea that cities emerged from a neat, gradual accumulation of agricultural surplus has become a lazy meme. In reality, subsistence farming today rarely produces any substantial surplus—so why assume early farmers, with worse tools and less knowledge, did better?
Omer, Moav and Pascalis (2020) offer a more realistic account: surplus didn’t arise from abundance, but from coercion. Grain is storable, visible, and taxable—making it ideal for appropriation by elites backed by weapon-wielding thugs. Marvin Harris noted that the very idea of “surplus” is a projection—modern assumptions about wealth and efficiency read backward onto cultures that had no such framing.
The reality looks messier, more contingent, and far less egalitarian than Graeber and Wengrow wanted it to be.
"subsistence farming today rarely produces any substantial surplus — so why assume early farmers, with worse tools and less knowledge, did better?"
While I agree with your larger sentiment that Graeber and Wengrow are misguided by social (rather than energetic) concerns, as a subsistence farmer for some fifteen years, I think there is more to it.
As a co-op communal subsistence farm, we housed ourselves, fed ourselves, and had $10k to $20k left over at the end of the year, which we largely re-invested in infrastructure like greenhouses and farm equipment. We did this by focusing on "artisinal" value-added products, like goat-milk soap, hard cheese, and preserved food. Such product diversity is not a modern affect! Through the ages, "subsistence" farmers made soap and preserved food!
Excluding "tools" powered by fossil sunlight, bronze-age tool were pretty useful. (Although I wouldn't like parting with my soil-blockers.) It seems fair to exclude powered tools; except for hay-making equipment, we used very little fossil sunlight, and we were a net carbon sink.
As for "knowledge", I think we humans have forgotten much of which early agriculturalists learned over thousands of years. Some Permaculturalists may have deep knowledge of soil chemistry and biota, but what we attribute to science, early agriculturalists may have "known" in a more spiritual manner, attributing productive practices to the gift of gods or spirits.
The 800-pound gorilla in the room is fossil sunlight. Not so long ago, it took a dozen or more people "on the land" to support each person in a city. Today, each farmer supports ~700 in cities.
A reversion to the mean is inevitable. The future will be powered by current photosynthesis. I just hope we don't lose all our fossil-fueled knowledge in the process.
Jan, you speak in the past tense, like you no longer are part of the co-op communal subsistance farm. What happened? Did you leave, or did it break up, or did some misfortune befall it?
We failed at creating an egalitarian critical mass. At the end, it more resembled a successful family farm than a co-op. So we had nobody to take it over when misfortune happened.
I admit that if I had done some things differently, it might still be around. But there were lots of issues that contributed to its demise.
First off, we had significant mental illness issues with more than one person. This drove people away who might have been significant contributors.
We were fairly leveraged, with equity to debt ratio of about 60%. This meant that mortgage payments sucked a lot of money away that could have gone into improvements and development.
The final nail was when my then-wife was diagnosed with a rare cancer. I remain a huge fan of Canada's health care system, but Canada lacks the critical mass to support treatment of many rare diseases. There were only ~40 annual cases of peritoneal mesothelioma in all of Canada, and most of those are in Quebec, where the asbestos mines were. There was only one surgeon west of Quebec who did the complicated HIPEC surgery she needed.
We gave the three long-term residents — none of whom had any equity or farming experience — a chance to continue operations. They came up with a plan that would have discontinued all farming operations, instead making mortgage payments by renting out rooms. None of them had any experience renting rooms, but I did, and it is a dreary way to make mortgage payments!
So some 60 shareholders were asked to liquidate and wind up the co-op, and they agreed. All shareholders were paid out in full, except three who sued us and settled for less, and me. As the founder, it only seemed right that I should absorb any loss, which amounted to about 12%, which was cheaper than paying rent and buying food for 15 years.
It was both the high point and the low point of my life. It's not been easy getting over it!
I'm very sorry for all that hardship, Jan. Did your wife survive? It's hard enough to deal with such a challenge even without the complications of managing a farming co-op.
Jason Bradford (resilience.org) tried to establish a regenerative farming venture intended to facilitate rehabilitation of previously chemically farmed lands to be gradually turned over to small farm holders, but the operation got too big and he abandoned it. I replied to a recent posting of his asking about trying a new venture, but to my knowledge, no reply.
We need some new models for both investment in and operation of small scale, primarily subsistence enterprise.
Best wishes and sympathy for all you have had to go through.
Unfortunately. She dumped me a year later! That's a whole 'nuther story!
I'm still trying. I'm currently here: https://HearthstoneVillage.ca, but they aren't into sustainability as much as I'd like. I'm working on them!
The problem with "new models" is nobody knows how to deal with them. We were a registered BC Cooperative Association. But banks wouldn't loan us money — "We don't loan money to communes", one actually told me! (A "commune" is a term-of-art where everything, including income and assets, are shared.)
We finally got a loan, but at commercial rates, even though all the people living there were in the co-op, so we should have received homeowner rates. That would have saved us nearly $1,000/month in interest! We couldn't get insurance at less than twice the homeowner rate. And the local land-use planning people didn't know what to do with us. The province turned us down for the homeowner property tax benefit.
At least there are no building codes where I am now!
Oy! You are brave to share your marital story. So very sorry.
You're not the first to tell how unprepared the system is to deal with something like what you want to do. The same recent resilience dot org article by Jason Bradford talks about it.
We need a different investment model that could obtain property without debt. I think it could be done.
Insurance and local / regional land use regulation are a whole 'nother can of worms. Jason Bradford talks about agricultural zoning that doesn't permit construction of a residence on the property. And g-d forbid you want an off-grid tiny home without plumbing.
I wonder how much actual communication is going on here. What you, Art, claim is not a city, may be something that Graeber would consider a city. I'm not sure either of you has a monopoly on the definition of a city. So maybe you're both right - that there were large seasonal gathering places, and that permanent huge settlements exacting tribute from the surrounding countryside were later developments. Where you draw the line for the word "city" seems a bit arbitrary.
You may also be in a word game over the meaning of "egalitarian." Status hierarchies can exist in economically egalitarian societies. It looks to me like Graeber, and therefore the Honest Sorcerer, is taking a narrower meaning of the word "egalitarian" than you.
I'm also not convinced that neolithic subsistance farmers possessed less knowledge that moderns. When your family has occupied the same place for hundreds or thousands of generations in a stable Holocene climate, they kinda get to know the place. In order to stay put for so many generations, they must have had regenerative practices, so they had better soil, and maybe also better seed than moderns, only 5 or 6 generations after first plowing the soil they stole from the indigenous peoples. And now that we've lost the Holocene, all bets are off.
Which came first, coercion or surplus? Is this like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg? Perhaps there were baby steps. A little coercion. A little surplus. A little more coercion. And so on. Asking which came first is a litte like trying to determine which sibling started the fight.
As you point out, reality looks messy and contingent. Or you might say, complex and chaotic. Graeber and Wengrow may have gotten stuck on one piece of the puzzle, but just because there are many pieces doesn't invalidate the piece they got stuck on. It just means their picture is incomplete.
"A seasonal gathering place for ritual, feasting, or drunken mating festivals is not a city. And calling these sites “egalitarian” just because we don’t see palaces or elite homes is misleading."
#########
Nowadays we'd call that a campground or holiday park.
As for humans and cities, perhaps we need to employ Occams razor. Humans love to party and we love our drugs. Could we simply have gotten together because we love festivals and a good time? Did agriculture come about because we developed an affinity for beer and wanted an abundant and reliable supply? Hmmm...
Saharasia : the 4000 BCE origins of child abuse, sex-repression, warfare and social violence in the deserts of the Old World : the revolutionary discovery of a geographic basis to human behavior https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999932124602121
Trying to make sense of the actions of the world's ruling bureaucracies, especially the concerted move toward having all of us accounted for digitally. It occurs to me that these people are fairly intelligent and are all looking at the same spread-sheets, which are telling them that the carnival period of converting fossil fuel energy into economic and population growth is coming to an end, and that implementing a system of surveillance and control is the best way to handle the unrest that will accompany the inevitable decline.
Nowadays people relocate to the city because that's where the jobs and money are. When I was young, I chose not to do that. In my mind, the tourism industry in rural Quebec offered a better quality of life than the big city economy. As far as I'm concerned, civilization is rural and dotted with villages.
With the collapse of AMOC, surely the northern glaciation will begin again?
If so, forget any "Arctic civilisation". Unless it's by Neanderthals/Sami.
Let's say the AMOC collapses by 2040. How much glaciation do you think can happen in 40 years, by which time we're at +4^ C, and heading for +5?
Enormous amounts. I saw one estimate recently - I have no idea how accurate it might be however, but it was from a serious site - that London could drop annually by as much as 20c if the AMOC goes. That seems an excessive claim tbh, but then when you look at its actual latitude...
And that's just southern England. The Arctic gets one hell of a lot less solar radiation.
Well, colour me pink. I thought glaciers took decades to form.
It used to be thought they took millennia. No matter how long they take, I think it's a given that trying to establish a new civilisation at the Ground Zero of a new glaciation period is probably going to face some serious challenges.
In 'ZAMM/LILA' (I forget which), Pirsig posited that cities were a semi-conscious level far beyond the capability of the mortals within to comprehend: much as our own cells cannot comprehend the ego that dominates the individual collective body.
But just as individual mortal humans grow old and die, to the amazement of cells....
'Language' (Along with intelligence), are inherent to all living things. It may be more or less complex, but always existent.
Anyway, I'll shut-up, lol.
"individual mortal humans grow old and die, to the amazement of cells"
Apoptosis much? :-)
As with all eukaryotes, humans live *much* longer than any individual cell in our bodies.
Naturally. There are extremely few original cells in our bodies by the time we come to buy a farm.
However, I don't think that biologists argue that "death" is caused by all our cells dying all at once spontaneously.
I could be wrong, it was my weakest topic at school. :)
Nonetheless, death of the organism results in death of all the cells, including the various resident biomes.
Which will probably come as a bit of a shock to the actual cells in it, if they are individually healthy.
Of course, it's not a pure analogy, as humans unlike cells can migrate en masse and perhaps overload other areas or fit in with needs there. The overwhelming majority of cells can't migrate to other bodies, fortunately. Or those who work in hospitals would become huge, lol.
I'm sure there's a Doc Who script in there somewhere - or Stephen King. ;)
The Washington Post just published an article that Joe Rogan used to basically tell Bernie, who he was interviewing, that climate change is a hoax or very close to one. The article basically said that after scientists collected and processed the data, rigorously, they found that we are in the middle of a general cooling period, and that in ages past the Earth was sometimes and on average, much hotter than now.
Sadly, WP is doing the yoemen's labor of keeping people ignorant of what that really entails. As your article correctly points out, yeah there will still be a planet an probably still humans, but the conditions (easy access to energy and materials) that led to stable prosperity will be gone. Uncertainty will be the daily reality, and the population will be much smaller likely after some horrifying wars.
But WP doesn't tell you that - it just tells the average reader that it was hotter in the past, and they let the imagination of the reader go to the logical conclusion that 2.0C increase in GAT is somehow no big deal.
Palm trees in northern Canada? What is wrong with that?!
Try telling them that means most of the current world we know will be uninhabitable and we will no little prosperity, and somehow you are the crazy one.
This much hotter / much cooler thing make no sense.
It's all a matter of timescale. During some periods, Earth was hotter and at some other periods, Earth was much colder. And indeed, on the very long term, that is averaged on 100s of millions of years, Earth is actually hotter than it is now. So no ice cap and palm trees on the Groenland latitudes is the normal state of things.
But none of this means anything when it comes to human lifespan. Not even to civilization and maybe just barely to the whole human history...
You do understand that, since Bezos took over, the editorial policy of the Washington Post has changed from facts and truth to "personal liberties and free markets", right?
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/nx-s1-5309725/jeff-bezos-washington-post-opinion-section
"News" these days is not much more than entertainment that supports infinite consumption. That was even stated in Fox News' defence in the 3/4 billion dollar defamation suit they lost. They argued that they should not be held to verifiable facts, as they were an "entertainment outlet".
I'm reading Human Rewilding in the 21st Century by James M. Van Lanen, which, among other things, show just how much Graeber and Wengrow got wrong. It's been fascinating! So much we don't know.
Sounds interesting.
Reading Graeber and Wengrow, I found their description of human history far too idealistic. Or to put it another way, far from being sufficiently deterministic. So an other point of view might be useful.
Sounds good, but it doesn't show up in any of my alternative book sources.
Where did you get it? Is a soft copy available? (I don't have room for books at present!)
I got it via interlibrary loan.
Thanks for the book recommendation. It looks super interesting. I just ordered a copy.
There is a great deal that we do not know about paleoclimates. In previous, hotter periods with aligators in the arctic circle, the temperature had a mych lower gradient around the globe.
It is unknown how the earth produced this equible climate, but it did not have large deserts (hyper arid areas), oceon dead zones, or wet bulb temperatures at the equator that were fatal to mammals. The fossil record and the geology paint a picture of world that is tropical or subtropical almost everywhere. The most plausible explanation that I've seen is that the Hadley cells switched from 3 Hadley cells per hemisphere to 1 per hemisphere.
The big question is less about the final state and more about the transition. Large mammals have lived successfully in equible climates that were more than 4 degrees warmer, but an exstinction even between here and there would definitely ruin humanity's day.
I think hunter-gatherer societies are the most likely. At least for a while until some new form of society starts to build. Civilisation is inherently unsustainable so I don't see one emerging on the back end of this collapsing one. Of course, 8.2 billion people can't hunt and gather on this planet (which is the only one we have), so there is bound to be a mass die-off. The time-line is unknown, though.
"Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear."
https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/peak-shale-amid-maximum-pessimism
Thanks for that useful link.
These guys seem to be just about the only ones who are both realistic (backed by data and research) and pessimistic (acknowledging that oil must eventually end).
The market has become "peak oil aware", and the US EIA has been "cooking the books" to disguise that it's already happened. In the past ten years, they've added in increasingly desperate non-oil quantities to the number of barrels of oil produced, and the energy content of each barrel of oil continues to decline. Art Berman thinks that a barrel of oil produced today only contains 95% of the energy of a barrel of oil produced ten years ago.
Better start taking control of your own food supply
I’m deeply skeptical that the Graeber-Wengrow thesis was simply an extension of Graeber’s anarchist-socialist ideology. But even on its own terms, the argument strains credibility. At best, it overgeneralizes from a few outliers—sites like Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük—which were exceptional, not representative.
A seasonal gathering place for ritual, feasting, or drunken mating festivals is not a city. And calling these sites “egalitarian” just because we don’t see palaces or elite homes is misleading. Hierarchy can exist without stone monuments—through ritual authority, monopolies on knowledge, or informal power structures.
The broader idea that cities emerged from a neat, gradual accumulation of agricultural surplus has become a lazy meme. In reality, subsistence farming today rarely produces any substantial surplus—so why assume early farmers, with worse tools and less knowledge, did better?
Omer, Moav and Pascalis (2020) offer a more realistic account: surplus didn’t arise from abundance, but from coercion. Grain is storable, visible, and taxable—making it ideal for appropriation by elites backed by weapon-wielding thugs. Marvin Harris noted that the very idea of “surplus” is a projection—modern assumptions about wealth and efficiency read backward onto cultures that had no such framing.
The reality looks messier, more contingent, and far less egalitarian than Graeber and Wengrow wanted it to be.
"subsistence farming today rarely produces any substantial surplus — so why assume early farmers, with worse tools and less knowledge, did better?"
While I agree with your larger sentiment that Graeber and Wengrow are misguided by social (rather than energetic) concerns, as a subsistence farmer for some fifteen years, I think there is more to it.
As a co-op communal subsistence farm, we housed ourselves, fed ourselves, and had $10k to $20k left over at the end of the year, which we largely re-invested in infrastructure like greenhouses and farm equipment. We did this by focusing on "artisinal" value-added products, like goat-milk soap, hard cheese, and preserved food. Such product diversity is not a modern affect! Through the ages, "subsistence" farmers made soap and preserved food!
Excluding "tools" powered by fossil sunlight, bronze-age tool were pretty useful. (Although I wouldn't like parting with my soil-blockers.) It seems fair to exclude powered tools; except for hay-making equipment, we used very little fossil sunlight, and we were a net carbon sink.
As for "knowledge", I think we humans have forgotten much of which early agriculturalists learned over thousands of years. Some Permaculturalists may have deep knowledge of soil chemistry and biota, but what we attribute to science, early agriculturalists may have "known" in a more spiritual manner, attributing productive practices to the gift of gods or spirits.
The 800-pound gorilla in the room is fossil sunlight. Not so long ago, it took a dozen or more people "on the land" to support each person in a city. Today, each farmer supports ~700 in cities.
A reversion to the mean is inevitable. The future will be powered by current photosynthesis. I just hope we don't lose all our fossil-fueled knowledge in the process.
Jan, you speak in the past tense, like you no longer are part of the co-op communal subsistance farm. What happened? Did you leave, or did it break up, or did some misfortune befall it?
All three, actually!
EcoReality Co-op (http://EcoReality.org archived website) is no more.
We failed at creating an egalitarian critical mass. At the end, it more resembled a successful family farm than a co-op. So we had nobody to take it over when misfortune happened.
I admit that if I had done some things differently, it might still be around. But there were lots of issues that contributed to its demise.
First off, we had significant mental illness issues with more than one person. This drove people away who might have been significant contributors.
We were fairly leveraged, with equity to debt ratio of about 60%. This meant that mortgage payments sucked a lot of money away that could have gone into improvements and development.
The final nail was when my then-wife was diagnosed with a rare cancer. I remain a huge fan of Canada's health care system, but Canada lacks the critical mass to support treatment of many rare diseases. There were only ~40 annual cases of peritoneal mesothelioma in all of Canada, and most of those are in Quebec, where the asbestos mines were. There was only one surgeon west of Quebec who did the complicated HIPEC surgery she needed.
We gave the three long-term residents — none of whom had any equity or farming experience — a chance to continue operations. They came up with a plan that would have discontinued all farming operations, instead making mortgage payments by renting out rooms. None of them had any experience renting rooms, but I did, and it is a dreary way to make mortgage payments!
So some 60 shareholders were asked to liquidate and wind up the co-op, and they agreed. All shareholders were paid out in full, except three who sued us and settled for less, and me. As the founder, it only seemed right that I should absorb any loss, which amounted to about 12%, which was cheaper than paying rent and buying food for 15 years.
It was both the high point and the low point of my life. It's not been easy getting over it!
I'm very sorry for all that hardship, Jan. Did your wife survive? It's hard enough to deal with such a challenge even without the complications of managing a farming co-op.
Jason Bradford (resilience.org) tried to establish a regenerative farming venture intended to facilitate rehabilitation of previously chemically farmed lands to be gradually turned over to small farm holders, but the operation got too big and he abandoned it. I replied to a recent posting of his asking about trying a new venture, but to my knowledge, no reply.
We need some new models for both investment in and operation of small scale, primarily subsistence enterprise.
Best wishes and sympathy for all you have had to go through.
►Did your wife survive?◀︎
Unfortunately. She dumped me a year later! That's a whole 'nuther story!
I'm still trying. I'm currently here: https://HearthstoneVillage.ca, but they aren't into sustainability as much as I'd like. I'm working on them!
The problem with "new models" is nobody knows how to deal with them. We were a registered BC Cooperative Association. But banks wouldn't loan us money — "We don't loan money to communes", one actually told me! (A "commune" is a term-of-art where everything, including income and assets, are shared.)
We finally got a loan, but at commercial rates, even though all the people living there were in the co-op, so we should have received homeowner rates. That would have saved us nearly $1,000/month in interest! We couldn't get insurance at less than twice the homeowner rate. And the local land-use planning people didn't know what to do with us. The province turned us down for the homeowner property tax benefit.
At least there are no building codes where I am now!
Oy! You are brave to share your marital story. So very sorry.
You're not the first to tell how unprepared the system is to deal with something like what you want to do. The same recent resilience dot org article by Jason Bradford talks about it.
We need a different investment model that could obtain property without debt. I think it could be done.
Insurance and local / regional land use regulation are a whole 'nother can of worms. Jason Bradford talks about agricultural zoning that doesn't permit construction of a residence on the property. And g-d forbid you want an off-grid tiny home without plumbing.
I wonder how much actual communication is going on here. What you, Art, claim is not a city, may be something that Graeber would consider a city. I'm not sure either of you has a monopoly on the definition of a city. So maybe you're both right - that there were large seasonal gathering places, and that permanent huge settlements exacting tribute from the surrounding countryside were later developments. Where you draw the line for the word "city" seems a bit arbitrary.
You may also be in a word game over the meaning of "egalitarian." Status hierarchies can exist in economically egalitarian societies. It looks to me like Graeber, and therefore the Honest Sorcerer, is taking a narrower meaning of the word "egalitarian" than you.
I'm also not convinced that neolithic subsistance farmers possessed less knowledge that moderns. When your family has occupied the same place for hundreds or thousands of generations in a stable Holocene climate, they kinda get to know the place. In order to stay put for so many generations, they must have had regenerative practices, so they had better soil, and maybe also better seed than moderns, only 5 or 6 generations after first plowing the soil they stole from the indigenous peoples. And now that we've lost the Holocene, all bets are off.
Which came first, coercion or surplus? Is this like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg? Perhaps there were baby steps. A little coercion. A little surplus. A little more coercion. And so on. Asking which came first is a litte like trying to determine which sibling started the fight.
As you point out, reality looks messy and contingent. Or you might say, complex and chaotic. Graeber and Wengrow may have gotten stuck on one piece of the puzzle, but just because there are many pieces doesn't invalidate the piece they got stuck on. It just means their picture is incomplete.
"A seasonal gathering place for ritual, feasting, or drunken mating festivals is not a city. And calling these sites “egalitarian” just because we don’t see palaces or elite homes is misleading."
#########
Nowadays we'd call that a campground or holiday park.
Honest, you views on the energy situation are sound. On global warming...highly debatable.
https://realclimatescience.com/#gsc.tab=0
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705
https://climatethemovie.net/
As for humans and cities, perhaps we need to employ Occams razor. Humans love to party and we love our drugs. Could we simply have gotten together because we love festivals and a good time? Did agriculture come about because we developed an affinity for beer and wanted an abundant and reliable supply? Hmmm...
Saharasia : the 4000 BCE origins of child abuse, sex-repression, warfare and social violence in the deserts of the Old World : the revolutionary discovery of a geographic basis to human behavior https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999932124602121
Trying to make sense of the actions of the world's ruling bureaucracies, especially the concerted move toward having all of us accounted for digitally. It occurs to me that these people are fairly intelligent and are all looking at the same spread-sheets, which are telling them that the carnival period of converting fossil fuel energy into economic and population growth is coming to an end, and that implementing a system of surveillance and control is the best way to handle the unrest that will accompany the inevitable decline.