ABSTRACT
Modern civilization, in all of its aspects and everywhere on the planet, is plunging ever deeper into a multiplicity of crises that call into question its governing principles, practices, and institutions. The viability of an industrial civilization that lives by exploiting nature is threatened by the emergence of ecological scarcity. Ecological scarcity is therefore an overall social challenge rather than a series of discrete problems for specialists in ecology, economics, and engineering. The ecological and social forces unleashed by the agricultural revolution ignited a vicious struggle for economic survival, political hegemony, and military supremacy that launched humanity on a tragic trajectory toward civilization. Natural resources and human labor are socially organized to produce economic wealth and military power: primitive agriculture gives way to large-scale intensive cropping dependent on irrigation; villages turn into cities and towns peopled by traders and artisans; and occasional skirmishing becomes more or less perpetual war fought by professional soldiers.
