Greetings! The following is a rewrite of samples
25 and 41. They will be combined into
one section and moved much later in the manuscript, before Sacred Energy. One more step closer to the end!
SACRED FOREST
As mentioned earlier, after the last Ice Age wound down,
glaciers and ice sheets melted and retreated, eventually allowing the expansion
of tundra, grassland, and forest.
Grassland spurred the momentum of the human experiment by boosting herds
of game. In wooded regions, hunting was
more challenging, and forests interfered with the growth of trendy new fads
like herding and farming.
This is why civilization emerged in the grassland regions of
the Fertile Crescent, where wild wheat and barley grew in great abundance, as
did herds of wild game. Bountiful lands
made living easier. They also had a
prickly habit of stimulating population increase. The uncomfortable pressure of crowding and
friction inspired some folks to envision escape. Maybe they could create a more pleasant life
in the forest frontier of Europe’s wild west.
Some of them packed up and left.
In Europe, Barry
Cunliffe noted that as the climate warmed, wild folks migrated northward
from the Mediterranean. By 7000 B.C.,
they were present in a number of locations.
In lean regions they were nomadic, and in places of abundance they
settled down. At the same time, forests
were also migrating northward, encouraged by the changing climate.
By around 4000 B.C., forest expansion stopped, when it
finally reached regions that were too chilly for happy trees. By this time, folks were raising crops and
herding livestock in a number of permanent settlements. These communities were expanding their fields
and pastures, which required murdering happy trees.
Over time, this increasingly abusive relationship between the
two legs and the tree people led to tremendous destruction. In the good old days, forests originally
covered 95 percent of west and central Europe.
Jed
Kaplan and team wrote a paper on the prehistoric deforestation of
Europe. It included stunning maps that
illustrated the shrinkage of forests between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 1850. [Look] Deforestation went into warp drive between
1500 and 1850, driven by the rise of colonization, industrialization, and other
dark juju. The voracious human swarm was
swerving deeper and deeper into mass hysteria.
Humankind’s war on forests has been intensifying for several
thousand years. It’s a huge and complex
subject. Forests have suffered from many
impacts, including firestick farming, agriculture, herding, industry, warfare,
construction, consumerism, climate change, and population growth.
In this chapter, I’ll share a few snapshots from the ripped
and torn photo album of the relationship between two legs and the tree
people.
Humbaba’s Roar
The Fertile Crescent was where plant and animal domestication
shifted into high gear. It was in this
region that the first civilizations began popping up all over, like a painful
burning rash of deforestation, soil destruction, slavery, patriarchy,
exploitation, aggression, self-destruction, etc.
It’s interesting that the oldest known written story is the Epic
of Gilgamesh, the saga of Gilgamesh, a lunatic king who ruled over the city
of Uruk, located along the Euphrates River in Sumer (now Iraq). By around 3100 B.C., Uruk was the biggest
metropolis in the world. Today, Uruk is a crude
pile of brown rubble sitting amidst a desolate barren moonscape. [Look] It has an important message for folks today:
“Don’t live like we did.” But humankind
is a herd of sleep walkers, wandering lost in a foggy dream world.
The story was originally scratched into clay tablets in
cuneiform script. Over the course of
2,000 years, components of the story unified into a single narrative by around
1800 B.C. In the story, King Gilgamesh
was a lecherous slime ball who worked hard to expand low-tech, muscle powered,
organic agriculture along the Euphrates River (a process now known as
Sustainable Development™).
Gilgamesh was probably a real king who lived somewhere
between 2900 and 2350 B.C. The growth of
Uruk led to massive deforestation along the valley, which unleashed immense
erosion and flooding. In the story,
Humbaba was the sacred defender of the forest.
Gilgamesh whacked his head off, and proceeded to cut trees like there
was no tomorrow. Rains then washed the
soil off the mountains, down to bedrock.
And so, whenever the floods blast down the river, the noise of
catastrophic destruction is referred to as “Humbaba’s roar.” It’s the first sound I hear every morning.
Beyond Hunting and
Gathering
Earlier, I jabbered about how some hunter-gatherer cultures
used firestick farming to boost the availability of wild game and special
plants. This involved limiting forest,
and encouraging the expansion of customized grasslands. The tree people were never fond of this. Over time, this expansion encouraged the
intensification of farming, herding, civilization, industry, and aggressive
deforestation.
Other cultures used a different survival strategy, mindful
self-control. They understood the need
to pay close attention to reality, to recognize the signs of approaching
limits, and to avoid scarcity by adjusting current patterns. Sometimes reproduction taboos were used to
reduce the birth rate. Mindfulness could
avoid having an abusive relationship with the tree people, but modern society
displays little interest in it. It’s not
good for jobs or the economy.
Let’s take a quick peek at the relationships that several
cultures had with the tree people.
(Prehistoric dates are not certain, different sources cite different
dates.)
Britain
When the glaciers of the last ice age began melting, sea
levels were much lower than today.
England was connected by dry land to Ireland, Scandinavia, and
continental Europe. Barry Cunliffe noted
that most of Western Europe essentially became a vast forest. This expansion of forests displaced natural
grazing land, which affected the abundance of large herbivores.
By 9000 B.C., hunter-gatherers had apparently made some small
clearings in the forest to attract game.
By 6500 B.C., rising sea levels had made Britain an island, like it is
today. It was no longer connected by dry
land to neighboring regions. By 4500
B.C., when farmers and herders began to trickle in, Britain was largely a
forest, except for the highlands. Hunters
dined on red deer, wild boar, aurochs, and so on. By 3000 B.C., substantial clearances for
cropland and pasture were increasing. By
A.D. 1100, just 15 percent of Britain was forest. By 1919, it was five percent. Britannia was essentially stripped naked, a
ghastly painful open wound.
J.
B. MacKinnon mentioned a story about Mark Fisher, a British scientist who
visited the U.S. From an overlook in the
White Mountain National Forest, he could gaze down on 800,000 acres (323,748
ha) of woodland, an overwhelming experience.
He burst into tears and had a long, hard cry. At Yellowstone, he saw wolves in the wild for
the first time, and he dropped to his knees.
Fisher dreams of rewilding the U.K. — introducing long lost critters
like beavers, lynx, wolves, and so on.
Ireland
The story in Ireland was similar to Britain in many ways, but
Ireland got much more rainfall, annually receiving 50 to 200 inches (127-508
cm) of precipitation. The wet climate
encouraged the growth of lush temperate rainforests. Frederick Aalen noted that early
hunter-gatherers arrived about 8,000 years ago, when the isle was covered with
a dense unbroken forest. Folks lived
along coastlines, lakes, and streams. In
the forest they created some openings to attract game, but these were
apparently small in scale.
Then came a paradise-killing event of dark juju. Farmers and herders began arriving around
3500 B.C., and the war on trees commenced.
By the end of the 1600s, the destruction of native forests was nearly
complete. When Aalen wrote in 1978, only
three percent of the island was occupied by natural forest or tree farms.
Deforestation had many unintended consequences. William MacLeish noted that in the good old
days, the rainforest wicked up a lot of moisture from the land, and then
released it into the passing breezes, which carried it away. When the trees were gone, this dispersal
process wheezed. Meanwhile, the Gulf
Stream faithfully continued delivering warm rainy weather from the
Caribbean. So, the heavy rain continued,
and the water remained where it landed.
Consequently, water tables rose, bogs spread, and the ground turned
acid.
Deforestation blindsided the rainforest ecosystem. The new manmade grassland ecosystem seemed to
be a perfect place for raising enslaved livestock. Winters were mild, the grass was green all
year, and there was no need to grow, cut, and store hay for winter feed. Barns were not needed to protect livestock
from the cold. Milk and meat were
available all year round. Herding worked
well, but the very rainy climate made it rather risky to grow grain, despite
the rich soils.
In A.D. 1185, King Henry II sent Giraldus
Cambrensis to visit Ireland and produce a report. He mentioned many beautiful lakes, where some
of the fish were larger than any he had ever seen before. Common freshwater fish included salmon,
trout, eels, and oily shad. Along the
coast, saltwater fish were abundant. The
woods were home to “stags so fat that they lose their speed.” There were numerous boars and wild pigs. Wolves had not yet been fully
exterminated. He said it was common to
see the remains of extinct Irish elks.
Their remains were usually found in bogs, often in groups.
The herding life allowed the Irish people to survive, sing,
and dance. They did not have the
slightest interest in the dreary backbreaking work of agriculture, a stupid
fad. Cambrensis felt great pity for the
uncivilized natives. “Their greatest
delight was to be exempt from toil, and their richest possession was the
enjoyment of liberty.”
Maximum Security
Forests
Rhineland
Julius
Caesar roamed around Western Europe and wrote a report in 51 B.C. He was the emperor of Rome, and his mission
was to expand the Empire, collect tribute payments, acquire military
conscripts, and vigorously spank uncooperative subjects. During this campaign, he focused his
attention on provinces of Celtic people in what is now France, Belgium, and
England.
He had also hoped to conquer the wild Germanic tribes that
lived on the east side of the Rhine, but this fantasy promptly came to an
end. The Rhine was a large, treacherous,
swift moving river. No bridges. It took a lot of effort and luck to get from
one side to the other, and once you set foot on the German side, a super
violent welcoming party was eager to immediately cut you to bloody bits.
Each tribe preferred to keep their homelands surrounded with
a barrier of uninhabited wilderness. The
Germans were primarily wandering herders who built no permanent
settlements. They had no granaries
loaded with valuable food for raiders to swipe, and no roads to make invasions
quick and easy. When danger threatened,
the people and their herds vanished into the deep forest mists.
For the German herders, nothing would have been dumber than
to eliminate the vast ancient forests that provided this security system. The Roman legions were fine-tuned for open
battlefield combat, where heavily armored lads attacked in rigid
formations. Wild Germanic tribes
excelled at hit-and-run guerilla warfare.
On the west side of the Rhine were the Celts of Gaul
(France), who were subjects of the Empire.
Their forests were mostly gone, roads crisscrossed the land, and folks
were forced to engage in the backbreaking misery of muscle powered organic
agriculture. Their granaries stored the
result of months of hard work.
Stored grain was treasure that villainous raiders found to be
irresistibly tempting. It was impossible
for farmers to hide or quickly move their treasure. Raiding was popular, because it was much
easier than honest work. Consequently,
highly vulnerable farm communities required constant military protection, for
which they had to pay dearly. In several
Western European languages, the words for “road” and “raid” evolved from a
common root.
So, the Celts that Caesar described did not reside in the
primordial forest that their wild ancestors once enjoyed. They were the opposite of wild and free. Peasants were essentially wealth generating
livestock controlled by local strong-arm elites. On the east side of the Rhine, the Germanic
tribes had not destroyed their forests.
They were alive and well, wild and free.
Tacitus was
a Roman historian who wrote Germania in A.D. 98 (150 years after
Caesar). It described several fiercely
independent tribes of that era. They
preferred the thrills and excitement of raiding to the drudgery of
farming. “They even think it base and
spiritless to earn by sweat what they might purchase with blood.” Perhaps they learned this effective and
profitable strategy from the Romans.
Tacitus wrote a fascinating description of the vast Hercynian
forest. From the Rhine, it spanned east,
across modern Germany, to the Carpathians, and all the way to Dacia
(Romania). A quick traveler could cross
the forest north to south in nine days, but it was very long, from east to
west. Caesar noted, “There is no man in
the Germany we know who can say that he has reached the edge of that forest,
though he may have gone forward sixty days’ journey, or who has learnt in what
place it begins.”
Pliny also mentioned it:
“The vast trees of the Hercynian forest, untouched for ages, and as old
as the world, by their almost immortal destiny exceed common wonders.” In those days, there were still a number of
primeval forests in the world.
Scandinavia
In Sweden, forests also provided freedom and security for the
common folks. Vilhelm
Moberg celebrated the fact that peasant society in Sweden had largely
remained stable and functional for 5,000 years.
In most of the regions of Europe, peasants endured many centuries of
misery under the heavy fist of feudalism.
Many Norse and Swede settlements were lucky to be protected by their
vast, dense, rugged, roadless forests.
It’s simply impossible to kill or rob invisible folks who live in
unknown wilderness settlements. Moberg
glowed with gratitude for his nation’s forests, which allowed the rustic
peasants to preserve their freedom until the industrial era metastasized.
Aggressive invaders from elsewhere found no roads, and soon
became perfectly lost. Behind every bush
might be a man with a crossbow. The
local folks knew every hill and rock in the woods. They could pick the ideal time and place to
strike. When trouble was advancing, they
gathered as many belongings as possible, and vanished into the greenery.
My Norse ancestors told the story of Ragnarök, the twilight
of the gods. Some creepy gods had
temporarily subdued nature, but in this great battle, the forces of nature
rubbished the gods, and cleansed the Earth with a great flood. Peter Andreas Munch described the dawn of a
new era: “Out of the sea there rises a new earth, green and fair, whose fields
bear their increase without the sowing of seed.”
A man and woman survived.
From them sprang a new race of people.
A few minor deities also survived.
One was Vidar, a son of Odin (Viðr means forest). Vidar was known for being strong. His home was in a vast and impenetrable
forest. Rasmus Björn Anderson wrote that
Vidar was the god of wild primordial forests, where neither the sound of the
ax, nor the voice of man, was ever heard.
He is silent, dwells far away from, and exercises no influence upon, the
works of man, except as he inspires a profound awe and reverence. This was a culture filled with a deep respect
and reverence for creation, in its wild and unspoiled form. Forests were holy places.
Forest Mining
In the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and
herding, forests had served as a limit to growth — grain, grass, and herds
don’t thrive in shady places.
Deforestation cleared away the towering giants and let the sunbeams
shine in. When metal axes came into common
use, lumberjacks could reduce vast tracts of primeval forest into rotting
stumps and erosion gullies. Early
villages and cities were built with the mutilated carcasses of countless tree
people. The rise of civilizations would
not have been possible without innovative advances in unsustainable forest
mining and soil mining.
George
Perkins Marsh was a brilliant American hero that few modern folks have
heard of. He published Man and Nature
in 1864. This gentleman from Vermont
served as the U.S. Minister to Italy.
While overseas, he visited the sites of many once thriving civilizations
in the Fertile Crescent. What he
observed was terrifying and overwhelming.
Each of them had seriously damaged their ecosystems and self-destructed
in similar ways.
Massive levels of soil erosion created surreal
catastrophes. He saw ancient seaports
that were now 30 miles (48 km) from the sea.
He saw ancient places where the old streets were buried beneath 30 feet
(9 m) of eroded soil. He stood in
mainland fields, 15 miles (24 km) from the sea, which were formerly located on
offshore islands. He saw the sites of ancient
forests, formerly covered with three to six feet (1-2 m) of precious living
soil, where nothing but exposed rock remained.
Far worse, Marsh was acutely aware that every day, back home
in America, millions were currently working like crazy to repeat the same
mistakes, glowing with patriotic pride at the temporary prosperity they were
creating on their one-way joyride to oblivion.
In a noble effort to cure blissful ignorance, he fetched pen, ink, and
paper and wrote a book to enlighten his growing young nation.
Sales were respectable for a few decades, but America did not
see the light and rapidly reverse course.
Folks thought that the cure was worse than the disease (like today’s
climate emergency). A radical shift to
intelligent behavior would not have been good for the highly unintelligent
lifestyle. Tom Brown’s mentor, Stalking
Wolf, lamented that our culture was “killing its grandchildren to feed its
children.”
Marsh’s book has stood the test of time fairly well. It presented a wealth of vital information,
none of which I learned about during 16 years of education. Forests keep the soil warmer in winter, and
cooler in the summer. Springtime arrives
later in deforested regions, because the land takes longer to warm up. Forests absorb far more moisture than cleared
lands, so after a good rain, runoff is limited, and flash floods are less
likely.
Deforestation dries out the land. Lake levels drop, springs dry up, stream
flows decline, and wetlands are baked.
Back in the fourth century, when there were more forests, the water volume
flowing in the Seine River was about the same all year long. When Marsh visited 14 centuries later, water
levels could vary up to 30 feet (9 m) between dry spells and cloudbursts. In 1841, not a drop of rain had fallen in
three years on the island of Malta, after the forest had been replaced with
cotton fields. And on and on. The book is a feast of essential
knowledge.
Walter
Lowdermilk was deeply inspired by Marsh’s work. In the 1920s and 1930s, he visited China,
Western Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. His mission was to study soil erosion, and
write a report for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They created a short booklet that was very
readable and filled with stunning photographs.
Over a million copies of it were printed. Conquest of the Land Through Seven
Thousand Years is available as a free download. [Link]
Industrial Wood
Marsh generally discussed the environmental impacts of
deforestation that he had observed at the sites of extinct or wheezing
civilizations. These catastrophes were
usually the unintended consequences of clearing forest to expand cropland or
grazing land. Over the passage of
centuries, clever people discovered many new ways that dead trees could be used
to generate wealth and power.
John
Perlin wrote an outstanding history of deforestation. It’s a modern book (1989), and much easier to
read than Marsh. It devotes more
attention to the political, military, industrial, and commercial motivations
for forest mining. It visits locations
including Mesopotamia, Crete, Greece, Cyprus, Rome, Venice, England, Brazil,
and America.
Dead trees were used to build houses, bridges, temples, and
palaces. Wood was made into fences,
docks, wagons, furniture, tools, and barrels.
It heated homes and fueled industries that produced metal, glass,
bricks, cement, pottery, lime, sugar, and salt.
Staggering quantities of wood were consumed by industry. Very importantly, wood was used to build
cargo, fishing, and war ships. Navies
sped the spread of colonies, empires, trade networks, and epidemics.
Cultures that mindfully limited their numbers, and continued
living in a low impact manner, had no future.
Their thriving unmolested forests looked like mountains of golden
treasure in the eyes of civilized sailors cruising by — and civilized people cannot
tolerate the sight of unmolested forests; it drives them nuts. In other words, if you didn’t destroy your
forest, someone else would.
Perlin described the copper industry on Cyprus in around 1300
B.C. Copper was used to make bronze,
which was in high demand during the Bronze Age.
For each 60 pound (27 kg) copper ingot produced, four acres of pine (120
trees) had to be reduced to six tons of charcoal. Each year, the copper industry on Cyprus
consumed four to five square miles (10-13 km2) of forest. At the same time, the general society
consumed an equal amount of forest for heating, cooking, pottery, lime kilns,
and so on. Can you guess what inevitably
happened to the forests, soils, industry, and affluence of Cyprus?
Shortages also affected the use of firewood. In chilly regions, a city of one square mile
might depend on 50 square miles of forest to provide the firewood it consumed
year after year. In the good old days,
this was often possible. Later, as
forest area decreased, and population grew, limits spoiled the party.
If Perlin’s work sounds interesting, but you can’t get his
book, a similar book is available as a free download. In 1955, Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter
published Topsoil
and Civilization. Readers are taken
on a neat journey, during which they discover how a number of ancient
civilizations destroyed themselves. The
free PDF is HERE. It is not available in some countries, for
copyright reasons, but I once saw a pirate copy on Google.
New World Forest
Richard Lillard described how early European visitors
experienced the ancient forests of North America. When standing on mountaintops, they were
overwhelmed by the fact that as far as they could see in any direction there
was nothing but a wonderland of trees.
The intense experience of perfect super-healthy wildness was surreal,
overwhelming, almost terrifying.
Walking beneath the canopy at midday, the forest floor was as
dark as a cellar, few sunbeams penetrated through the dense foliage. At certain times, some sections of the forest
were absolutely silent, a spooky experience that bewildered the white folks. They saw vast numbers of chestnut trees that
were nearly as big as redwoods.
British visitors to early settlements were stunned to see
amazing luxury — wooden houses, sidewalks, fences, and covered bridges! Commoners were free to hunt large game
because the forest was not the exclusive private property of anyone. In the old country, their diet majored in
porridge. Now it could major in wild
grass-fed meat. Commoners were free to
cut as much firewood as they wished, and keep their cottages warmer than the
castles of royalty. Michael
Williams mentioned one winter night when the king of France sat in his
great hall. He was shivering as he ate
dinner, the wine in his glass was frozen.
William
Cronon noted that settlers with sharp axes went crazy on the forests,
cutting them down as if they were limitless.
Lots of excellent wood was simply burned, to clear the way for
progress. They built large houses, and
heated them with highly inefficient open fireplaces. By 1638, Boston was having firewood
shortages.
As clearing proceeded, summers got hotter, and winters
colder. As stream flows dropped in
summer, water-powered mills had to shut down, sometimes permanently. In winter, upper levels of the soil froze
solid on cleared land, and snow piled up on top of it. When springtime came, the frozen land could
not absorb the melt, so the runoff water zoomed away, and severe flooding was
common.
Stewart
Holbrook wrote about the fantastically destructive obliteration of ancient
forests in the U.S. upper Midwest. On
the same day as the great Chicago fire, October 8, 1871, a firestorm
obliterated the backwoods community of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, killing five times
as many people as in Chicago. On this
day, the new word “firestorm” was added to the English vocabulary.
Holbrook interviewed John Cameron, an eyewitness to the
Peshtigo fire. Cameron noted that there
had been little snow the previous winter, and just one rain between May and
September. Streams were shallow, and
swamps were drying up. Logging
operations left large amounts of slash in the woods (piles of discarded limbs
and branches). Slash piles were
eliminated by burning, even when it was very hot, dry, windy, and
extraordinarily stupid.
The morning of October 8 was hotter than anyone could
remember, and the air was deadly still.
At noon, the sun disappeared. By
nightfall the horizon was red, and smoke was in the air, making their eyes
run. At 9 P.M., Cameron heard an unusual
roaring sound. The night sky was getting
lighter by the minute. A hurricane force
wind howled through. Suddenly, swirling
slabs of flames were hurtling out of nowhere and hitting the bone dry sawdust
streets. In a flash, Peshtigo was
blazing — maybe five minutes.
Cameron saw horses, cattle, men, and women, stagger in the
sawdust streets, then go down to burn brightly like so many flares of
pitch-pine. He winced when he spoke of
watching pretty young Helga Rockstad running down a blazing sidewalk, when her
long blond hair burst into flame. The
next day, he looked for her remains. All
he found was two nickel garter buckles and a little mound of white-gray ash.
The river was the safest place that night. People kept their heads underwater as much as
possible, so the great sheets of flame wouldn’t set their heads on fire. Within an hour, the town was vaporized. Big lumberjacks were reduced to streaks of
ash, enough to fill a thimble. In this
village of 2,000, at least 1,150 died, and 1,280,000 acres (518,000 ha) went up
in smoke.
Also on October 8, 1871, numerous big fires raged across the
state of Michigan, where it had not rained in two months. These fires destroyed 2.5 million acres (1
million ha) — three times more timberland than the Peshtigo blaze. This was an era of countless huge fires. For example, in just the state of Wisconsin,
tremendous fires destroyed huge areas in 1871, 1880, 1891, 1894, 1897, 1908,
1910, 1923, 1931, 1936.
Paul Shepard
wrote, “Sacred groves did not exist when all trees were sacred.” In 1990, I chatted on an internet bulletin
board with a Shawnee man named Nick Trim.
He talked about a project 300+ years ago, along the Mississippi. In a kindly gesture, some French soldiers
were teaching the Shawnee how to build log cabins. This required cutting trees. The natives were very nervous about chopping
down living trees, because they were often home to spirit beings, the little
people.
To avoid spiritual retaliation, a respectful process was
essential. They knocked on each tree,
described the situation, and explained why they wanted to take lives. This was followed by a ceremony, prayers, and
apologies to the trees. Then they waited
a day or so, to give any spirit residents adequate time to find a comfortable
new home. This took so long that the
French lost their patience, and the project ended.
Peter
Wohlleben, a German wood ranger, developed an extremely intimate
relationship with the forest he cared for, and wrote a precious celebration of
his love for it. Modern folks who spend
most of their lives in civilized space stations almost never get to know the
tree people. Some do not eat meat
because they sense that animals have souls.
In an interview, Wohlleben conveyed a deeper understanding. Killing an animal is the same as killing a
tree. He once oversaw a plantation of
trees lined up in straight rows, evenly spaced.
It was a concentration camp for tree people.
