Robyn Davidson is, perhaps, best known for her trek by camel across Australia's outback. Her books, "Tracks" and, "From Alice to Ocean: Alone Across the Outback" detail that journey.The following is excerpted from another of her books, "No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Fate of the Planet".
TRANSCRIPT - Robyn Davidson:
For thirty years on and off, I have been visiting, reading about, living or travelling with traditional nomads all over the world.
Wherever I have l
ooked, I've found that those ways of life are under enormous pressure and will, I believe, soon disappear. Given that we have been nomadic since our time as Homo sapiens sapiens began - about 200, 000 years ago - and given that we have planted crops and lived in settlements for only ten thousand of those years, that strikes me as an extraordinary fact.
During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve.
We get out of cul-de-sacs by retracing our steps to find out where we went wrong. I would like to suggest that one wrong turning occurred when we gave up cultures of movement, for cultures of accumulation. I do not mean to say that we should, or could, return to traditional nomadic economies. I do mean to say that there are systems of knowledge, and grand poetical schemata derived form the mobile life, that it would be foolish to disregard or underrate. And mad to destroy.
The agricultural revolution transformed the earth and changed the fate of humanity. It produced an entirely new mode of subsistence, which remains the foundation of the global economy to this day. It gave us greater quantities of low quality food, and a rapidly increasing population dependant on that food. And there is no going back. Without human labour hacking at weeds, felling trees or redirecting water, domesticated grains would die out, and without that grain, so would we. Agriculture provided no exit other than famine.
By requiring humans to become sedentary, it changed the way we conceive of our place in nature, and it changed the way we distribute goods. Pre-agricultural peoples saw themselves as embedded in and working with nature, rather than struggling against it. Because they were mobile foragers, they didn't produce surplus, and they couldn't carry much weight.
In 10 000 BC all human beings were hunter-gatherers, by 1500 AD I per cent were hunter-gatherers. Less than .001 per cent of people are hunter-gatherers today.
Agriculture set us on a path to the urban then the industrial revolutions, and finally to the wild consumerism of late capitalism. Like previous chapters of the agricultural story, the present one is achieving material wealth, longer life, greater choice - all the benefits that people like me enjoy. But they are available to the few at the expense of the many. This is axiomatic. The pyramidical social structure, which formed around the storage of grain, with goods, power and resources concentrating towards the top, is as fundamental today as it was in those first cities of five thousand years ago.
Most importantly, the generation of our wealth requires an increasing pillage of the environment. Global warming should be terrifying enough to galvanise us into changing habits of consumption. It does not appear to be doing so. Four billion years of life on earth. Millions of those reigned over by the dinosaurs. Us lot a mere 200 00 year blip and according to Lord Rees, the UK Astronomer Royal, we are not looking good to get through the next century, let alone compete with the dinosaurs.
In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to Godliness. The Hindu Sadhu, leaving behind family and wealth to live as a beggar; the pilgrims of Compostela walking away their sins; the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora; the Hajj. What could this ritual journeying be but symbolic, idealized versions of the foraging life? By taking to the road we free ourselves of baggage, both physical and psychological. We walk back to our original condition, to our best selves.,
While there can be no literal return to previous modes of living, there might be ways into previous kinds of thinking. Pilgrimages, let's say, to newly imagined territories where, instead of dismissing the traditional as useless to modernity, we might integrate the best of each.
But if that is too much too expect, at least attention to nomadic world views might get us closer to finding whatever solutions to the disintegrations of modern life are actually available to us.
