OUR COOPERATIVE DARWINIAN MOMENT - Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels - page 94

the population just prior to the Industrial Revolution. And for those who do manage to struggle on,
levels of culture and technology might plummet to a depth far below what could have been pre-
served had action been taken.
We have a population bottleneck, as William Catton calls it, ahead of us no matter what we do
at this point. 5 Even if a spectacular new energy source were to appear tomorrow, it would do little
more than buy us a bit of time before we bumped up against another natural limit. However, we still
get to choose how to pass through that bottleneck. We can exert some influence on factors that will
determine how many of us get through, and in what condition.
Cooperative or Competitive Adaptation
A worst-case scenario is likely to be averted only by an effective, cooperative effort to adapt to
scarcity and to recover from crises.
Fortunately there are perfectly good reasons for assuming that collaborative action along these
lines will in fact emerge. We are a supremely cooperative species, and even our earliest ancestors
were dedicated communitarians. Other species, though they often squabble over food and potential
mates, likewise engage in sharing and cooperative behavior. 6 Members of one species sometimes
even cooperate with or offer help to members of different species. 7 Indeed, as evolutionary theorist
Peter Kropotkin pointed out in his landmark 1902 topic Mutual Aid , evolution is driven by cooper-
ation as much as by competition. 8
More to the point, hard times can bring out the worst in people, but also the best. Rebecca Solnit
argues in A Paradise Built in Hell 9 that people tend to cooperate, share, and help out at least as
much during periods of crisis as during times of plenty. A critic might suggest that Solnit stretches
this argument too far, and that collapsing societies often feature soaring rates of crime and violence
(see, for example, Argentina circa 2000); nevertheless, she supports her thesis with compelling ex-
amples.
Assuming we fail to prevent crisis and merely respond to it, we might nevertheless anticipate
a range of possible futures, depending on whether we set ourselves up to compete or cooperate.
At one end of the competitive-cooperative scenarios spectrum, the rich few become feudal lords
while everybody else languishes in direst poverty. At the other end of that spectrum, communities of
free individuals cohere to produce necessities and maximize their chances for collective prosperity.
Back at the “competitive” end of the scale, there is hoarding of food and widespread famine, while
at the “cooperative” extreme community permaculture gardens spring up everywhere. With more
competition, people perish for lack of basic survival skills; with more collaboration, people share
skills and care for those with disabilities of one kind or another. Competitive efforts by investors to
maintain their advantages could lead to a general collapse of trust in financial institutions, culminat-
ing in the cessation of trade at almost every level; but with enough cooperation, people could create
a non-growth-based monetary system that acts as a public utility, leading to a new communitarian
economics.
It's a Setup
In the real world, humans are both competitive and cooperative—always have been, always will
be. But circumstances, conditioning, and brain chemistry can tend to make us more competitive or
more collaborative. As we pass through the population-resource-economy bottleneck in the decades