The roots of our domination culture lie in thousands of years of reliance on slavery as an energy source. Barry Lord, in [[Art & Energy - How Culture Changes]], describes the tight link between a period's primary source of energy, and its culture. >  Because we think of it in moral terms, it is difficult to acknowledge that slavery was above all a source of energy. Maintaining that energy source through conquest and/or breeding was as vital to slave-owning societies as finding new sources of oil or natural gas is to us today. For many centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution, slavery was accepted in the vast majority of human societies as the only way that a truly sophisticated civilization could be sustained. > Until the 18th century, slavery was the default-mode source of energy wherever there was a reliable supply of slaves. Slavery was not necessarily the dominant source of energy in many slave-holding societies. But it was the source that could always be counted on to meet any growth in energy requirements. In this way, for thousands of years in many parts of the world, the availability of slaves actually discouraged finding alternative energy sources. As long as slaves were available, there was no motivation to develop a new "cutting-edge" energy source. > Slavery was a social-political institution that provided a renewable source of energy. >Just as today we are obliged to accept the values that come with oil and gas as we drive to and from work and play – whatever we may think about the effect on the environment – so almost everyone in slave-owning societies accepted the moral propriety of exploiting this most important source of energy. The culture of domination —absolute power to buy and sell other human beings, and freedom to beat or even kill them on a whim — affected all aspects of human relations in slave-dependent socíeties. Despite religious pretensions, the slave-owners' rights were limited only by the energy audit implicit in any slave's body: it was obviously wasteful to destroy one's own property. > The abolitionists who finally succeeded in making slavery illegal were eliminating the use of a source of energy that had been considered a necessity for civilized life on most of the planet. They were able to do so only because a still more efficient organization of labor was available — the system of wage labor that accompanied coal as a revolutionary new energy source. Source: [[Art & Energy - How Culture Changes]]