"It is widely accepted that that our crafty hunter gatherer ancestors also wasted, overkilled, and sent large numbers of prey animals into extinction. The point is that at some point humans got "smart" enough to dominate their environment but not smart enough to realize that doing so would lead to their own (and the planet's) downfall."
Indeed, one of the theories on why mankind first adopted agriculture was that he was FORCED into the tedious practice by over-hunting. Thus, it was not a question of epiphany but necessity:
"Indeed it is suggested that even the 10 million hunter gathers who may have existed before agriculture may have been a non sustainable number. Evidence for this can be seen in the Pleistocene overkill(8), a period from 12,000 to 10,000 BC in which 200 genera of large mammals went extinct. In the Americas in this period over 80% of the population of large mammals became extinct.(9) That this was due to over hunting is one controversial hypothesis. If correct than the advent of agriculture (and civilisation) may even have then due to the absence of large game which forced hunter gathers to 'settle down' and find other ways of obtaining food."
Then, with the birth of agriculture came the birth of hoarding, incessant warfare and eventually its prime expression: the state.
I think some primitivists offer a valuable critique of civilization that could potentially enrich anarchist theory. There's no reason why, for instance, we could not develop a society somewhere between Zerzan, Kropotkin, Bakunin and Tucker.
I just dislike the either/or paradigm embraced by people like Jensen -- it's "either" civilization "or" primitivism. Jensen once said, "I want civilization brought down and I want it brought down now!" This does not help. Such thinking is the luxury of the priveleged.
As for overpopulation and resource scarcity:
"Frances Moore Lappe, Joseph Collins, and Peter Rosset have shown in their book World Hunger: Twelve Myths that the world already produces enough grain to provide every human being on the planet with 3,500 calories a day. This estimate does not take into ac- count many other commonly eaten foods, such as vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Altogether, there is enough to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day. Hunger persists despite the fact that increases in food pro- duction during the past thirty-five years have outstripped the world's population growth by about 16 percent. According to Dr. Peter Rosset, Executive Director of Food First, "The true source of world hunger is not scarcity but policy; not inevitability but poli- tics. The real culprits are economies that fail to offer everyone opportunities and societies that place economic efficiency over compassion."8
Andrew Kimbrell, President of the International Center for Technology Assessment, argues that one of the greatest causes of world hunger is food dependence-the fact that increasing num- bers of people do not grow their own food but must purchase it with scarce cash. Food dependence comes from industrial society's enclosure of land, which forces peasants off the land so that it can be used for export crops. "The result of enclosure," writes Kimbrell, "has been, and continues to be, that untold millions of peasants lose their land, community, traditions and most directly their food independence.,19 Flocking to cities, former peasants become the new urban poor. But are the megafarms that displaced them re- ally so efficient? According to Kimbrell, "Conventional efficiency analysis completely ignores the social and environmental cost of large-scale industrial farming. The costs of water and air pollu- tion, topsoil loss, biodiversity loss are not consideredu-nor are the human health costs of eating pesticide-laced food or the so- cial costs stemming from the millions of dislocated peasants. None of these costs are factored into the "real" price of food produced on industrial farms. In 1989the United States National Research Council was commissioned to assess the efficiency of large in- dustrial farms as compared to smaller scale alternatives; their conclusion was that "well-managed alternative farming systems nearly always use less synthetic chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics per unit of production than conventional farms. Reduced use of these inputs lowers production costs and lessens agriculture's potential for adverse environmental and health ef- fects without decreasing-and in some cases increasing-per acre crop yields. . . ."lo
Biotechnology builds on the failed assumptions at the core of industrial agriculture. As agricultural biotech takes hold, farm- ers are becoming ever more dependent on giant corporations like Monsanto-not only for pesticides and fertilizers (of which they will eventually need more, not less), but also for patented, gene- engineered seed. The enclosure of the biological commons will soon be complete. And should the centralized, industrial food system ever fail for any reason (i.e., natural disasters, corporate mismanagement or financial woes, or the unexpected ecological side effects from altered genes), the present simmering crisis of world hunger could explode into world famine."