how we got here, to the modern crisis of unsustainability

HOMO DISTINCTION:
bipedalism
tool making
control of fire
language
abstract thought / imagination
anxiety
control/protection values
culture / religion / sky gods
domestication
patriarchy / kingship
population growth and dispersion

NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION:
crises of population density
agriculture
self-production dependency
productivity values
produce / private property
fences / walls

CIVILIZATION:
cities / states / empires
writing / literacy
class division / power elitism
high and low culture / high and low people
ambition / wealth accumulation
“progression” and developmentalism / growth
alienated labor
alienation from nature / estrangement

MODERNITY:
institutions / nation-states
withering of community life
atomization of the individual and the nuclear family
mechanization / growth of the technosphere
control of electricity
hypertrophy in all aspects
overshoot in all aspects
financialization
internet

Those phenomena set us on trajectories away from the basic, natural, healthy reality of living in nature, on the Earth, in community.

Over time we’ve become increasingly ungrounded, living more and more within:
. our cultural cocoons
. the human-fabricated technosphere rather than the natural ecosphere

Over time we’ve become divorced from / alienated from:
. the ecological communities of other fauna and flora
. the social communities of face-to-face relationship, personal-scale interdependence with other people

* * * *

The trajectories became parabolic and, ultimately, unsustainable.