Um? Coal became a major factor because the Brits were cutting down their trees for charcoal. Yup. To the extent that the steam engine had anything to do with it it was to create demand for charcoal, and when that source of energy was disappearing, a new one needed to be found. But that is not an indictment of modernity. Demand for energy is demand for energy - whether that energy happens to have negative externalities is what matters - if we produce it with wind and solar we're fine. And the expansion of slavery was related to the expansion of an agricultural economy based on slavery. That that had links to the growth of cotton for the textile industry, and in turn was linked to soil exhaustion by tobacco farming doesn't mean there's some sort of causal relationship between soil exhaustion and slavery. If the economy had been a non-slave based one, it would have expanded the non-slave economy. If they hadn't found a more profitable substitute, soil depletion would have led to a decline in slavery.
but what about large-field monocropping without corvee labour, authoritarian hierarchies, etc? I suspect this is kind of like asking "but what about freeways without cars?" -- i.e. this is a socio-econo-techno bundle, all are part and parcel of the same social dynamic. field ag where land ownership is not concentrated into a feudal/corporate pyramid [the other kind] scheme with ownership restricted to the tiny top tier, would tend to be small-field and diverse, not large-field and monocrop. Balinese rice paddies might be an illustration, or traditional Chinese market gardens, or the very long-running, relatively sustainable peasant and smallholder ag of the Indian plains...
Who cares whether we're working in large fields or small ones? The problem is the work. If the third world slums dwellers were working in smaller non-polluting, sustainable, cooperatively owned factories but still lived under the same material conditions, doing the same work, there would still be a problem with poverty.
Environmental sustainability says nothing about standard of living or quality of life, it just means that it is sustainable over the long term. The life of a sweatshop worker is undesirable not because they are part of an unsustainable system, but because their work and living conditions are poor. The same goes for peasant farmers. Poor housing, lack of running water, lack of electricity, lack of quality health care, lack of all sorts of pleasant material goods... all not good in and of itself.
It's why your view of civilization as bad, and a world where everybody works as a peasant farmer under pre-modern material conditions as good bothers me so much. I see it as no different from someone saying that what the left should aspire to is to turn everyone into third world urban slum dwellers, just minus a hierarchical socio-political system and inequality.
The suspected folly of capitalism is that it provides excellent living standards to us now, at the expense of environment and natural resourses for future generations. The later human "entrants" would be big loosers compared to us. How high is the risk of this sad scenario? Does capitalism needs expansion like us air? Wouldn't "leftish" impluses allow us to live prosperous times much longer?
We'd be in a bad situation. That's why I don't see a post-civilization society.
Does capitalism needs expansion like us air?
Yes, but not of resource consumption. It needs expanding profits, expanding economies but that's something else. More t-shirts, more cars, more downloads, higher end food, more services. Take a pound of coffee beans, make it all at home, drink it all at the 7-11, drink it all at the fancy coffee bar. Same pound of coffee, similar other resources, but to a capitalist economy very different values. What uses more resources - one thousand dollars worth of lawyer is the same one thousand dollars as a thousand dollars of cheap t-shirts at Walmart, not the same resource input. The resource question is independent of the capitalism one. The former is about what standard of living we can have on a sustainable basis, the latter is about how society is organized. If the government sets rules that force the private sector to use less natural resources, it will use less. Just like higher wages and greater equality in the post WWII period didn't cause a collapse of the capitalist system. The capitalists will have to be dragged kicking and screaming economic doom, just as they did then, and their predictions will be wrong, just as they were then.
Indeed, capitalism is supposed to be robust and function under many regimes, perhaps under any restrictions of natural environment and social agreement. After all, what is the difference between physical restrictions and social restrictions? A climate change may restict your buisiness freedoms muh more harshly than a cautios government policy.
Isn't this ironic that today's economy has to be massaged so subtly by the government?
Nevertheless, can capitalism expand much without the consumption growth? It must be able to reduce the stupendous waste of today's operations, if there exists a conceivable package of sufficient incentives. But how much growth may it have without material production?
