Waterhole Economies re-imagines economic success through the survival-based, ecosystem-conscious lifeways of hunter-gatherers while exposing how profit, surplus, and endless growth can turn modern economies into engines of collapse. Why was this an important book for you to write?

Because human survival, the goal and outcome of pre-agriculture Hunter-Gatherer economies, is no longer the goal and outcome of modern human economies as it was for those 290,000 years of our species’ existence that preceded the Neolithic Revolution and the adoption of agriculture.

Hence, this book focuses on humanity’s post-Neolithic economic choices and how these might well turn out to be de facto choices to go extinct.

Humans must choose to either return to the survival-driven life-ways that enabled humanity’s collapse-free economic existence, or continue its current life-ways and risk extinction.

What first inspired you to use the waterhole as the central image for the book’s economic and ecological arguments?

This is a book about human survival,and that survival model began and took shape around the waterhole.

Waterholes were often the primary sources, if not the only sources of water, and hence were indispensable to all species’ survival – predator and prey alike.

While all species needed to quench their thirst to survive, they also needed to learn that they must be willing to share this indispensable resource with other species in need. It forced species, predator and prey alike, to co-exist, and that to survive they must be willing to share, to live and let live – a survival metaphor modern humanity has long abandoned.

From an economic perspective, though indispensable for survival, waterholes were freely available to all species – from the industrious dung beetle to the massive elephant – from those who merely needed a sip to those who needed multiple gallons at a time.

We learn that products and services that are essential for life and survival (food sources, water, sunshine, oxygen, as well as airconditioning in these scorching days, while they would be in high demand, were never intended to be governed by humanity’s economic laws of supply and demand, nor have their availability manipulated by pricing mechanisms – but rather were intended to be freely available and shared, not monopolized by any single species as is commonplace among modern human economic systems.

Here is where the economic principles of the market, demand and supply, fall apart. The economics of the waterhole leaves no room for the economics of Adam Smith et al.

Today, modern human economies utilize resource scarcity to manipulate demand and supply, as is being done with petroleum products. On the contrary, the economics of the waterhole taught species that sharing enabled survival, whereas hoarding drove economic collapse and death.

Hence our pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer forebears learned that freely sharing the Earth’s resources enabled theirs, as well as all Earth-life species’ survival.

How can modern societies adopt the principles of sharing, restraint, and coexistence without romanticizing hunter-gatherer life?

The principles of sharing, restraint, and coexistence, though practiced by hunter-gatherers more than likely may not have begun entirely with them.

Rather, these life-ways were more than likely practiced by other Earth-life species, the majority of whom predated humanity.

Humans then were the Johnny-come-latelys, and more than likely, adopted most of these life-ways from other biodiversity species that predated them. So romanticizing Hunter-gatherer life might well be little more than humanity crowing for the home team.

Modern humans can also adopt these life-ways by imitating their pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer forebears, the way they, more than likely, imitated the life-ways of other earth-life species that preceded them.

Which present-day economic practice do you believe poses the greatest threat to long-term human survival?

Farming to grow food and burning fossil fuels to generate energy pose the greatest threats.

Farming and agriculture began soon after the Neolithic Revolution and have become one of the greatest threats to human survival. To adopt agriculture was to declare war on nature, on Earth’s ecosystems and biodiversity that comprise the very foundations of life, and has led to the extinction of innumerable Earth-life species.

Similarly, the use of fossil fuels as an energy source generates greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that trap and enable the buildup of heat in Earth’s atmosphere- which, in turn, is driving global warming and potentially human extinction.

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