[dools]

I remember the first time I genuinely lost my "modern techno hubris", I was about 25 years old.

I was in the throes of lamenting the peak oil situation after watching the doco The End of Suburbia and reading The Long Emergency. I was at the tail end of a mechatronic engineering degree and thought it was just my luck that, after having found something I really enjoyed, it was all about to become obsolete as we devolved into picking through rubbish tips for food scraps.

I became interested in permaculture and went to visit a farm on the outskirts of Sydney to see how it worked. While talking to the guy there about the land, I all of a sudden realised how information rich this environment was, and how similar the task of managing it was to any other creative or engineering endeavour.

I realised that the people who stood in that spot 60,000 years ago and worked with the land to sustain themselves were "doing engineering" as much as I could ever hope to.

It was a tremendous relief to know that I could get the same thrill from engineering a landscape as I could from engineering a microcontroller, and it gave me a respect for Indigenous Technical Knowledge. I thought about how much ITK must have been lost during colonisation, and how we might regain it.

[Cthulhu_]

I love watching this guy on youtube, Primitive Technology, because I see him do things and think, if I were in that situation - or out in the sticks with nothing but my trousers on - I too would get creative with clay and whatever else he's got available to him, with just the basic knowledge of things that I have picked up over the years. And that's just from absorption, if you and a hundred generations of your ancestors lived in that situation they'd thrive.

I can see why there's many that claim that older times were more leisurely, as in, less time spent "working" as people do today. I'm not saying it was easier, but definitely simpler.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Similar experience, about twenty years ago I hung out briefly at David Holmgrens house (Melliodora) in Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Central Victoria (Hepburn Springs), followed by some WWOOFing experiences in Tasmania, where I returned to ten years ago.

My primary income is engineering focused still, and definitely glad I have that permaculture mindset.

[wyager]

> worked with the land to sustain themselves

Most evidence suggests the extent of land-work utilized by early Australians was controlled burns. There is a bit of a recent effort to promote the idea that they may have done extensive planting as well, but there's not much evidence for it. It also would have been kind of a waste of effort - the accessible food biomass was high enough for the relatively small population without planting.

[dTal]

>the accessible food biomass was high enough for the relatively small population without planting

This seems circular. Why was the population small?