ABSTRACT
The various ways in which members of our species have lived for the past 70,000 years is the topic of this chapter. From the small-group life of the forager, in which existence is tenuous but social responsibilities are clear, certain human groups evolved to the sedentary agricultural life. Nature’s products, now manageable and marketable, changed societal arrangements and altered human relationships with the nonhuman world. Eventually the human capacity to extract materials on a large scale and to buy, sell, and trade them without actual ownership increased the social distance between a subset of people and insulated them from the natural environment. In a select few societies, material wealth, military power, and technological innovation have allowed for a synthetic existence that is both inaccessible and debilitating for much of the world’s population. Our species has engineered its environment at every point along this evolutionary continuum. For much of this history (and prehistory), human social groups have been able to adapt to anthropogenic environmental change on the regional scale. A dual consequence of our sociocultural evolution is that it has: 1) allowed for anthropogenic environmental change on a global scale; and 2) compromised social mechanisms of collective action. Cooperative reciprocity, one of the inherited instincts that we may bring to bear on environmental problems, appears to have been weakened in the synthetic societies where collective action is needed most.
