Is it possible to have a pastrolist society that is also industrial? If so how?

[Shades of Eternity]

This is something that I thought about in the middle of the night and curious to see what we come up with.
Is it possible to have a pastrolist society that is also industrial? If so how?

 

[aco175]

First thought was Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The future has the peaceful, docile people opposed by the cave-dwelling brutes that eat them. I want to recall there was some machines that the underground people used that the surface dwellers knew nothing about, having split from humans over hundreds of generations.

The idea could be expanded upon. It seems the Mockingbird movies with different districts follows similar with some people being farmers and others holding the military.

 

[GothmogIV]

Imagine a world where the majority of the manufacturing, producing, and distributing is automated, and areas of production are proscribed and limited (perhaps underground, as aco175 said). The surface could be pastoral, and the people living there could benefit from advanced goods without necessarily having to produce them themselves. "Pastoral on the streets/industrial in the sheets..."

 

[Aldarc]

This is something that I thought about in the middle of the night and curious to see what we come up with.
Is it possible to have a pastrolist society that is also industrial? If so how?

You mean like industrial revolution era Great Britain?

 

[aco175]

Is being pastoral a mindset? I'm thinking of the American Industrialization period and how many moved from the farms to the city to get away from something or to move to something. It is easier to work a machine for 8 hours and get paid likely more than a farmer who just worked 14 hours that same day. There is also more stuff a city can offer than a farm. As a young person, there is more opportunity as well.

Maybe farms can offer something that prevented people moving to the city as industry made farming easier and needed less people to do it. Is there some part of faith or community that led to people staying and society develops where most everyone has some sort of farm and city never grows large.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

I don't think I understand the definition of "pastoralist" being used here. By its proper definition pastoralism is about herding livestock, often in a semi-nomadic fashion. For once wiki is actually fairly accurate on the subject.

It doesn't have anything much to do with farming, even when practicing sedentary pastoralism where your animals don't move around much. If anything, organized large scale agriculture is the enemy of pastoralism, since it limits herd migration, access to water sources (especially with extensive irrigation) and competes directly for fertile land that's highly desirable for forage. The two lifestyles can and do cooperate with one another in some circumstances (as both do with industrialism) but even fairly minor imbalances in the system (often due to long-term weather anomalies) can lead to hostility and violence very easily.

The eloi certainly aren't any kind of pastoralists except in some sort of poetic sense. Not going to see them running a cattle drive. They're pretty much farm animals themselves, regardless of what the Time Traveller may think.

 

[John Dallman]

Is it possible to have a pastoralist society that is also industrial? If so how?

Assuming you mean the full sense of pastoralism, with no crop-growing, just herding animals, the difficulty is that you have very few people, and they have to stay on the move or their herds run out of food and die. It's much easier to develop craft industries if people can stay in one place and mine coal and ores.

You can have a separate group that stays in one place, makes stuff, and trades it for food, but they are in a very precarious position. If there's a drought and the herds are thinned out, the pastoralists will put keeping their families alive ahead of trading food for metalwork, and the craftsmen starve.

I think this only works as an aftermath of the collapse of an industrial society: the remaining industry is largely automated, including the sources of its energy and raw materials, and the people are wandering herders, who have some way to convince the automated factory to give them stuff. This may result in some odd uses of industrial production, like armour made out of wire from paperclips, or a vast supply of small ceramic knives, but swords being much cruder.

 

[Squared]

Assuming you mean the full sense of pastoralism, with no crop-growing, just herding animals, the difficulty is that you have very few people, and they have to stay on the move or their herds run out of food and die. It's much easier to develop craft industries if people can stay in one place and mine coal and ores.

You can have a separate group that stays in one place, makes stuff, and trades it for food, but they are in a very precarious position. If there's a drought and the herds are thinned out, the pastoralists will put keeping their families alive ahead of trading food for metalwork, and the craftsmen starve.

I think this only works as an aftermath of the collapse of an industrial society: the remaining industry is largely automated, including the sources of its energy and raw materials, and the people are wandering herders, who have some way to convince the automated factory to give them stuff. This may result in some odd uses of industrial production, like armour made out of wire from paperclips, or a vast supply of small ceramic knives, but swords being much cruder.

Yeah this is the best I could come up with myself. The scale of industrialization is just so far beyond pastoralists.

To take it a step further. In the distant future, humanity created fully autonomous factories and cities requiring no human input. Eventually humans forgot how everything worked and civilization devolved until very few humans are left. Then for some reason food production stops and humans are forced into a pastoral life as the robots chase them off of the former farms.

I don’t know, I have to stretch pretty far to make that work.

^2

 

[John Dallman]

Then for some reason food production stops and humans are forced into a pastoral life as the robots chase them off of the former farms.

If you have conventional agriculture replaced by hydroponics, vat-grown algae, or some other method that relies on industry, then a breakdown becomes more plausible. The landscape has all been made into parks or solar energy collectors, giving you places for herds to roam. The problem becomes "where did the animals come from?" which has some surreal solutions, such as rabbit ranching.

 

[The Soloist]

Well if you have Star Trek Replicators...