So increased aridity caused the Agricultural Revolution -- give me a break, I'm not that dumb.

And don't forget that civilization was a brutal plague upon those happy-go-lucky hunter gatherers!

I think the invention of gunpowder and the growth of penecillin-resistant bacteria are bigger threats to Mr. Daddy and Ms. Hilton than global warming.

In general, stress places a premium on adaptability. Something like a change in climate will always favor cultures whose folkways facilitate innovation. Innovation here includes technology, migration and the supplanting of the less adaptive. Herbert Spencer 101.

Commentary on Nick Brooks research.

Was civilization invented as a rescue operation and not as an imaginative leap forward? Is civilization not the engine of ever-evolving progress as we have been taught? Basing his hypothesis on his own research in the Sahara and on a survey of other "cradles of civilization", anthropologist Nick Brooks suggests that civilization was an adaptive response to challenging climate changes. If correct, this could explain a lot about the way we are today.

When I was in school, I was taught that the constellated forces of civilization, urbanization and agriculture emerged in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East because irrigation allowed more food to be produced and released many people from the burdensome gathering of food to engage in other things like innovating culture and technology. The widely accepted theory still is that civilization was the result of specialization and a bountiful surplus that was a consequence of irrigation and farming.

Civilization is generally portrayed as a great advancement over our hunter-gather past. But, there is also lots of evidence to suggest that the hunter-gather lifestyle offered more leisure time and a better integration between human population and nature than did the new civilizations. If the later view has any merit we must wonder why humans made such a drastic change. If civilization was not progress why did humans go for it?

According to Brooks, it mostly likely it began with climate changes about 5000 years ago that produced less rainfall and forced people to concentrate along the lakes and rivers. Population density increased. More people arrived from regions that were less productive. Population began to overshoot the capacity of even these still fertile niches. Tribes fought for the scraps. There was tremendous incentive to search for ways to increase food production. Necessity -- the clear and present danger of not having enough to eat -- brought forth the enormous undertaking of building a large scale system of irrigation and the hard and soft technologies necessary to sustain both agriculture and cities. This institutionalized a new consciousness of human organization which was used to control both people and nature. Civilization was born.

As food scarcities increased, so did competition for limited resources and the need to satisfy or control desperate populations. Beneficent big men and petty tyrants arrived on the scene. The garden of abundance was replaced by the civilization of scarcity and the consciousness of poverty. Governments, armies and the politics of distribution were the logical result. The hunter-gatherer consciousness of adjustment, informality, flexibility and decentralization gave way to (or was overwhelmed by) the consciousness of consolidation, conquest, centralization and control.

The threat of scarcity and the fear of suffering well may have been the engines that drove humans toward technological civilization. We became "techno-fixers", or at least we tried. Some fixes worked, at least for awhile and for some. These "some", the survivors and controllers, guided the future and wrote the history. They quite understandably named the cumulative societal and cultural development, "civilization", and technological innovation, "progress." Indeed, these words are now so laden with positive value connotations and so embedded in our language and psyche that it would be difficult to use them to signal acts of desperation.

Contrarily, "civilization" and "progress" are easily used in a narrative about the conquest of nature. The story of civilization is full of our rising up above (and against) it: "How we won the war against the untamed wilderness." But, could it be that these exalted words really describe a "worst case" outcome of being "thrust out of the garden"? Civilization and progress may have been more of a by-product of adapting to climate change than an "original sin".

But, however it happened, we were set on a path of endless problem-solving that has driven the quest for new technologies ever since. Thinking that nature might be controlled (or escaped from) became the way of civilization -- the great hope and the great illusion. Progress became a habitual cycle of reaching for solutions to the problems created by the previously set of solutions. We know that the new expressway lane only creates a bigger traffic jam but we build it anyway. And today the single largest category of illness is iatrogenic -- complications introduced by medical treatment.
The advance of civilization was -- and probably will always be -- a mixed bag. The contradictions were felt even if not understood at the time. It is noteworthy that the very same historical era that gave us civilization also gave us the major religious traditions that survive to modern times. At first, they tended to be outward-looking religions of mono-cultural "oneness", of conquest, power and control. But, there also emerged inner-looking traditions of compassion, forgiveness and detachment, possibly as an effort to adjust a consciousness that was tending toward too great a separation from nature, spirit and one another.

A new remedy was offered:

Let go of the illusion. Find the true self. Realize its connectedness to all. Treat all as one. Forgive and forget the past. It was only a learning process. Relationship and change are the only realties. The true life is the way of compassion.

Attitudes like that might still bring peace and sanity to the Middle East.

But, as Nick Brooks says, "Once the cat is out of the bag, it doesn't go back. You can't uninvent technology." Civilization, like the ego, is a fact of life. Originally a situation-specific survival strategy, it became like old scar tissue from a childhood wound. The immediately adaptive solution grew into a limitation to later adaptive flexibility. The result of past techno-fixes is that we now live and think within a psychology of previous investment. Civilization, ego and the fantasy of control became entrenched as habits (of thought and action) of an insecure self and a defended society. Many still live in the waking dream of controlling (or escaping) human and ecological nature through the devices of civilization and the instruments of technology. Just look at the "civilized" attitudes toward the ultimate reality of life -- death.

Of course, I'm using some hyperbole -- exaggerating in order to provoke the deeper-reaching thought that I believe we need in difficult times. There's no denying that civilization has been essential for our survival and -- yes --for our progress. And civilization has always had its discontents (and malcontents). Turning it into yet another judgment against the human race is both harsh and unproductive. We are what we are and we struggle to do as well as we can. Though we get stuck with both our triumphs and our mistakes, we stubbornly maintain a faith that says that we can learn.

Now, in another era of great challenges when the media is full of talk of climate change and the 'collapse of civilization', it may be time to see that the two are connected, that nature and consciousness co-evolve. Maybe now is the time for realizing that learning how to let go of our illusions is as important as learning how to fix them. Perhaps the most meaningful new technologies will be the ones that teach us how to recover the hunter-gatherer mind-set of adaptation rather than clinging to the civilized mind-set of control. Ironically, this may be the way that civilization can save itself.