• for: gene culture coevolution, carrying capacity, unsustainability, overshoot, cultural evolution, progress trap

• Title: The genetic and cultural evolution of unsustainability

• Author: Brian F. Snyder

• Abstract

• Summary
• Paraphrase
  • Anthropogenic changes are accelerating and threaten the future of life on earth.
  • While the proximate mechanisms of these anthropogenic changes are well studied
    • climate change,
    • biodiversity loss,
    • population growth
  • the evolutionary causality of these anthropogenic changes have been largely ignored.
  • Anthroecological theory (AET) proposes that the ultimate cause of anthropogenic environmental change is
    • multi-level selection for niche construction and ecosystem engineering.
  • Here, we integrate this theory with
    • Lotka’s Maximum Power Principle
  • and propose a model linking
    • energy extraction from the environment with
    • genetic, technological and cultural evolution
  • to increase human ecosystem carrying capacity.
  • Carrying capacity is partially determined by energetic factors such as
    • the net energy a population can acquire from its environment and
    • the efficiency of conversion from energy input to offspring output.
  • These factors are under Darwinian genetic selection
  • in all species,
  • but in humans, they are also determined by
    • technology and
    • culture.
  • If there is genetic or non-genetic heritable variation in
    • the ability of an individual or social group
  • to increase its carrying capacity,
  • then we hypothesize that - selection or cultural evolution will act - to increase carrying capacity.
  • Furthermore, if this evolution of carrying capacity occurs - faster than the biotic components of the ecological system can respond via their own evolution,
    • then we hypothesize that unsustainable ecological changes will result.

This is a good quote and raises two ideas:

• Gary Snyder is a very interesting member of the Beat Generation when considering Beat Spirituality because in his explicit involvement in Buddhist practice. His depiction in Kerouac's The Dharma Bums is also revealing of his character and significance in the movement.
• Buddhism mixes, in the Beat Generation, with ideas of freedom (one of the all-times American values). As I want to consider how the Beats reacted to the American values of mid-century society, it is interesting to consider how they personally understood the ideal of freedom. Buddhism is one of the ways in which they re-invented it and connects to freedom from the ego, or the self. Other writers, for instance William Burroughs, considered freedom in more institutional/political ways (see his book Naked Lunch).

Why, though? Kerouac was a lifelong scholar of Buddhism, and so were other Beats like Ginsberg and Snyder. Indeed, Gary Snyder officially became a Buddhist and a disciple of Miura, and Ginsberg had a student-teacher relationship (together with a friendship) with the known Buddhist master Trungpa Rinpoche. This should be enough to consider them, at least at some points in their life, as Buddhists.