Dear Casper,

First of all, I would recommend you to read, besides Descola's Beyond Nature and Culture, at least The Perception of the Environment and Being Alive, by Tim Ingold. In this sense, they have been arguing for a long time about what I guess you call "pre-modern forager societies" (I am not sure what that really means; neither other categories we usually use).

In addition, I would be very careful about the conception of your "guidelines" and what you mean by that. From the "naturalist" point of view chosen by Descola, a guideline would imply a cultural pattern already laid down in advance to any personal involvement in the environment and, therefore, ready for transmission. If the draft of such guidelines would be possible, there would have no problem in transposing them from the environmental contexts of those pre-modern forager societies to the urban contexts inherent to the notion of "civilization" (in regard to the "city").

The question would be, then, whether such things as "cultural patterns" and "transmission" can even exist. If not, the answer for a "sustainability" along guidelines that cannot be transmitted as cultural patterns or mental models but re-created by a continuous education of attention would might lead to such transformation of "civilization" and the "city" that one could just say to have overcome both of them.

Regards,

Pedro