Thanks for this thoughtful response. I love the idea that we are all human. I think about evolution way more than I probably should. I want to know what makes us human. I used to think we evolved to be compassionate coooperators, but then something happened with agriculture and we started the slog towards selfishness and concentration of wealth and power. In this essay, I think I'm suggesting that we had an intermediate Peasant stage that didn't necessarily tend to deplete resources and concentrate wealth and power.

I have been meaning to finish David Graber's book the Dawn of Everything - from what I read so far, he questions the dominant Jared Diamond-esque narrative of human history. He says that there are many ways to organize civilization and community and some of them did very well with compassion and collaboration while others did equally well with oppression and selfishness. Agriculture did not necessarily lead to selfishness, but it did make the potential consequences of selfishness that much worse.

I have been thinking about how to make city people into new peasants. It will either be due to the entire collapse of the economic system, or some sort of gradual shift. I'm hoping for gradual. There is a LOT of farmland that is currently used for growing crops for animal feed. The countryside is relatively empty of people. Yet, an acre of land that is deliberately planted into crops that are food for people could support roughly 10 times the calorie needs than the same acre in corn or soy for animal feed. So if/when the economic system collapses, the transition is possible. I'd prefer a gradual shift. In my climate change novel (see my pinned stories) postscript (which unfortunately, I deleted) I tried to imagine what city peasants could look like. It would have to be more than growing arugula in community gardens. I think it would have to look like each block having access to land outside of the city. And people taking turns caring for the crops and foraging or heading out en masse to plant and harvest. It would involve teens and elders, too.

Lots to think about. Cheers.