Re: ecovillage and sustainability

Aloha,

> We went straight from rural to
> urban (then suburban), laying down arbitrary square grids all over the
> landscape,

The square grids were done right from the start of the Euro occupation of N.
America.  No waiting until urban/suburban became dominant.

> "Other villages have been part of hunter gatherers cultures"
>
> I understand that hunter-gatherers made use of seasonal camps.

Gatherer-hunter is more what most of them were.  Gathering was the steady
staple food supply, hunting was the occasional feast and/or preserve for
winter/lean times.  In N. America anyhow.

See "Changes in the Land : Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England"
by William Cronon for a very interesting eco-cultural perspective on the
systems of those times.  Turns a few old myths upside down.

> If any of
> these camps were to organically grow through the stage of enclave then
> hamlet then onto village size, characteristic of a sedentary lifestyle,
> then hunting and gathering would already have been abandoned.

I reckon they did whatever they needed to to make a go of it.  The above book
documents seasonal agriculturists/gatherer-hunters in pre-contact New England
- some ag in the season, mostly in one place, supplementing with
gathering-hunting as needed, and then back to gathering-hunting for a while
until the ag season came back around.

Villages can be mobile, or at least plenty of historical cultures appear to
have had seasonally mobile villages.

> How many people would be ready to return to hunting and gathering?

Hopefully not very many - there's not much left to gather anywhere near most
large human population concentrations.  Not counting looting supermarkets and
food warehouses, of course.  Or hunt either, though groups like Ducks
Unlimited, etc. have kept certain game animal populations higher than they
might otherwise be.



John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Design & Technology Services
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john-/Gao9/[email protected]
http://eco-living.net

------------------------------------------------
To subscribe or unsubscribe to ecobalance go to:
http://www.ecovillage.org/ecobalance
------------------------------------------------