**8. Return to foraging**

It is time for sociologists to emancipate themselves from certain assumptions that have been imbedded too deeply in the surrounding modern culture. Human lives depend on adaptively using the planet on which we evolved. Not all major changes in human ways of using it have been actual progress. This might have been easier to see if academic departments had not become too large and unwieldy, so that sociologists and anthropologists largely drifted apart into separate disciplinary organizations. Sociologists mostly focused their attention on "modern" societies and their components, and largely lost interest in non-literate peoples, in hunter-gatherer societies. We knew, as taken-for-granted background, that some people especially in hunter-gatherer societies had long ago discovered ways of "managing" local ecosystems (and begun planting and harvesting crops and herding consumable or otherwise useful animals). We assumed this was an important step forward. We assumed it was a permanent achievement, that could be just accepted as a given fact. Pre-agricultural societies became the province of anthropologists, and ceased to interest most sociologists.

Ecologically speaking, those early people had taken steps to ensure local portions of nature would more reliably provide nutrition for the human species, perhaps to the detriment of local populations of other competing species. We never doubted that advancement by *Homo sapiens* from foraging to farming was advantageous, and if ever superseded it would be by another advancement.

With the industrial revolution, however, some *Homo sapiens* became committed to reliance again on natural resources *not* subject to annual renewal by humanly managed processes of reproduction among domesticated resource species. Industries and the general public in modern societies seemed to suppose *rates of discovery* of previously unfound deposits of iron ore, coal, petroleum, etc. were equivalent to *replenishment* of stocks being drawn down by our extraction efforts (which we conventionally called "production," even though nature, not human effort, had *produced* the substances we were taking out of the Earth). As long as

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discovery rates matched or exceeded depletion rates we were comfortably oblivious of future supply problems.

We *Homo sapiens* tended not to ask how sapient this conventional thoughtway truly was. But a substantial portion of our species (we called ourselves "the developed nations") had reverted to foraging―hunting and gathering resources available only in places and amounts determined long ago by nature, not by human management. We had new foraging tools―e.g., drilling rigs and enormous offshore oil platforms, vast digging machines, dynamite, chainsaws, huge pumps, etc.. But reverting to foraging in support of modern living (on a planet we seemed to forget was finite) could not ensure an onward-and-upward future for our species. It ensured instead that we would rapidly deplete nature's deposits of one essential resource after another and continue building our societies around unrealistic expectations of perpetual growth in numbers and affluence, on a planet that would not get any larger.

Some sociologists today define their field as a humanistic study (involving "qualitative" reasoning). Others favor a quantitative approach, regarding themselves as adherents of "scientific method." For both types, until they escape the blinding assumptions of the surrounding culture enough to see that reversion to foraging has been a *retrograde* step―which must have serious adverse consequences―sociological efforts to explain future social change will misfire.
