Survival

14th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards - Finalist How different might the history of our species have been had our hunter-gatherer forebears failed to migrate out of Africa in time to survive 70,000 years ago when threatened by extinction due to climate change brought on by the last ice age? Simply put, we would not exist. Now, similarly threatened, we too must act quickly if we hope to survive. Yet despite all the signs of a potential greenhouse mass extinction, again due to climate change, this threat is still being ignored. Like the passengers aboard the Titanic, who knew that in two hours and 40 minutes they would either be in a lifeboat or drowning in the cold waters of the Atlantic but waited a full hour before taking action - we too are not getting our lifeboats ready. This book is a wake-up call and looks to evolution itself for guidance on how to avoid extinction. Evolution, the author claims, seems firmly on the side of survival and has left evolutionary survival patterns - adapt, innovate, mature, and migrate to survive or go extinct. Survival depends on how we adapt and innovate as well as on whether we can mature and migrate. Unfortunately, misuse of the adapt and innovate patterns over the last 200 years has driven us to the brink of self-extinction. What can be done? Survival, this book claims, will not emerge from the products of adapting and innovating - science, technologies, and inventions - but by migrating and maturing to evolutionary maturity - maturing beyond the ability to drive ourselves and other species to extinction - and by restoring Earth's habitats and species and a return to sustaining our lives from within Earth's ecosystems, as our forebears did. And failing these, like them, we must be free, willing, and able to choose to migrate - to other planets if necessary - to survive.

Pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer economies were waterhole economies, and were the only human economies that never collapsed. Ninety-seven percent of the time Homo sapiens lived on Earth, or until about 12,000 years ago, all peoples were foragers of wild food, living a type of subsistence lifestyle in economies that relied on hunting and fishing animals, foraging for wild vegetation and other nutrients, and converging around waterholes to slake their thirst. Their economies required a daily pursuit and collection of wild foods to make a living, collecting numerous species over whose reproduction and sustenance they had no control. And yet, they were the only human economies that persisted without collapse for 97 percent of our species' existence, and somehow managed to do so for those 290,000 years mostly without ravaging the planet's habitats and ecosystems and destroying its biodiversity, nor threatening the pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies that relied upon them to make a living, with risks of a potential extinction the way twenty-first century economies are threatening humans today. It bears asking (don't you think?): Is there something our pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer forebears knew about how to make a living and survive on this Earth, without destroying its ecosystems and biodiversity, that Neolithic Revolution through twenty-first century humans, notwithstanding all our accumulated knowledge, science, technologies, innovations, and supposed superiority - still don't get? Clearly, the answer must be yes. But what? Join me in exploring what modern humans may have forgotten.