Should we end civilization? Primitivism and collapse

Some ten thousand years ago, the sedentarization of human groups, the emergence of agriculture, and the establishment of the first states laid the foundations of our civilization. What if this "Neolithic revolution" was merely an unfortunate parenthesis in the course of human history, as primitivists claim? What if these events, far from being "civilizing," had precipitated humanity into an ecocidal and self-destructive process whose full gravity we are only now realizing? Stimulated by these questions, which have permeated ecological debates since the 1960s, Pierre Madelin critically examines the historical and anthropological foundations of this theory, according to which multiple forms of domination are not inherent to social life, but result from this "founding catastrophe" of the Neolithic. But primitivism turns out to be a political dead end, the author asserts: rather than mythologizing prehistoric life by anticipating the collapse of industrial civilization, would it not be better to mobilize for a transition to an agroecological society?