Individual access to resources today is the highest it's been in history, particularly amongst the richest 10% of the world.

Unfortunately, we did this by sacrificing our grandchildren's future, and the world's biosphere.

Now disaster is certain due not just to the climate emergency but resource exhaustion, and pollution, and best our hope is now that if we work very hard we can avoid catastrophe.

Given the magnitude of the crime, many look back to our origins.

Zerzan in "Against Civilization argues that the hunter-gatherer societies we know of have a high infant mortality rate and a comparatively short life expectancy but on the other hand spend a lot less time working. He believes that a shorter but less stressful life that could be sustained over generations was overall better than our path today - tremendous material wealth for a few generations and then all future generations having to deal with the consequences of our pathological wastefulness.

There were only every three outcomes for h. sapiens.

The first was to stay primitive hunter-gatherers forever.

The second was to create a world-spanning machine very like Industrial Capitalism, one that endlessly consumes the planet's resources, turning them into endlessly and increasingly delightful Consumer Goods, consuming resources and producing pollution at an exponentially increasing speed, until we decimate the world's ecosystem and destroy our technological society, oh, and a million otherwise innocent species.

The third is that we learned to live in moderation with technology and came to some sort of balance with the rest of the planet.

But humans were never going to do that, were we?

No, we'll shoot the moon! We'll burn all the world's fossil fuels, guaranteeing at least +5ºC of global heating, devastating ecologies all around the world, and rending much of the tropics almost scoured of life.

Given the "wise technologists living in moderation" path was never going to happen, it would have been better to have stayed primitive hunter gatherers forever rather than commit this terrible crime against the planet itself - so goes the argument.

Me, I can't even think at this sort of level.

All I know is industrial capitalism needs to go, or or we will.