Wild Free and Happy Sample 28

[Note: This is the twenty-eighth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 202 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Sheep

Mouflon are the wild ancestors of sheep, and they still survive because they are faster than Olympic athletes on steroids.  They excel at racing across steep, rocky landscapes.  They also have large curled horns, capable of rattling the brains of their bloodthirsty foes.  Long ago, folks sometimes discovered mouflon youngsters, brought them back to camp, and raised them.  Unlike rowdy aurochs, the young lambs were less challenging to raise in captivity.

Paul Shepard noted that wild animals have a stable genome.  Thus, the genes of today’s mouflon are likely much the same as their ancestors 800+ thousand years ago.  But during the process of domestication, breeders deliberately selected for characteristics more beneficial for milk production, wool quality, and ease of control.  Bye-bye stable genes.

After dogs, sheep were among the first critters to be domesticated, maybe 11,000 years ago.  During this tragic demotion, their brains eventually became 24 percent smaller than their wild ancestors.  They lost a lot of their survival skills.  I’ve seen several reports of wolves killing dozens of sheep, and only eating one or two.  When wolves ran into large prey that acted so abnormally helpless, it was surreal and mystifying.  The sacred kill is usually a more dignified ceremony. 

In the old days, sheep shed their winter wool when springtime brought warmer temperatures.  Over the centuries, clever humans have “improved” the sheep they own and exploit.  Because of selective breeding, modern sheep are more likely to retain their wool, rather than scatter it all over the countryside.  This makes it easier for herders to collect as much of their precious wool as possible. 

In Australia, folks discovered one domesticated sheep who had managed to escape six years earlier, and enjoy a life of freedom.  Unfortunately, the miserable critter had never been sheared, and was carrying around 93 pounds (42 kg) of filthy wool.  This beat the previous record of another sheep found in New Zealand that carried so much wool it could barely walk.  It was blind, crippled, and near death.  Unshorn sheep are vulnerable to dying from heat stroke in warm weather.

Domesticated sheep are also vulnerable to pests like scab mites, that thrive in herds of confined prisoners.  The mites multiply and cause skin lesions, which lead to wool loss and open bleeding wounds.  Complications include hypothermia, infections, and death.  Mites are spread via the herder’s clothing, sheering tools, fence posts, and bits of wool hanging from bushes.

Mouflon manage their own lives, and fully take care of themselves.  Enslaved sheep require a lot of human assistance.  Shepherds are needed to protect them from bloodthirsty predators — noxious pests that must be aggressively exterminated whenever possible.  Smart shepherds are careful to avoid overgrazing.  Sometimes sheep also need to be provided with hay, water, salt, and shelter.

Kassia St Clair noted that some types of sheep were selectively bred to produce white wool, which is easier to dye.  This would be a vulnerability for wild ones, because it would make them far more visible to predators.  I learned about St Clair’s book when I read Claire Eamer’s fascinating essay, No Wool, No Vikings. 

Viking Sheep

For the first 250,000 years, our ancestors ran around naked in the tropics.  With the colonization of snow country, folks were confronted with the new possibility of freezing to death.  In the early days, it was fashionable to wear clothing made of animal skins and pelts, ideally cut and sewn into stylish tailor made active wear.  This clothing kept folks fairly warm, until it got wet.  Much later, innovation provided colonists with wool clothing, which stayed fairly warm even when wet.  The adaptation of clothing was another radical transition in the human saga.  It opened up vast regions of uninhabited land for exploration and colonization.

St Clair wrote that Vikings used wool to make their clothing, mittens, blankets, and sails.  A blanket required the wool of 17 sheep.  It took two highly skilled women more than a year to make a typical square sail.  To outfit an average Viking cargo ship and crew, making the clothing, bedding, and sails would require 440 pounds (200 kg) of wool, and ten person years of labor for producing, shearing, carding, spinning, weaving, and finishing the products.  Some believe that, in the old days, folks in snow country might have spent more hours making cloth than acquiring food.

Viking long ships were yet another radical transition.  Sailing boats were not a new idea.  Folks used them in other regions, like the Mediterranean.  Coastal regions of Scandinavia were not home to many sheltered, deep water harbors, so Viking ships were built with a shallow draft, so they could be landed on beaches.  This made them great for surprise attacks and fast getaways.  The use of sail power was enabled by keels that could be lowered in deep water, and raised when beaching.

These new boats allowed Vikings to raid communities that had formerly been safe and secure for centuries.  In A.D. 98, Tacitus wrote about the Suiones, who lived along the Swedish coastline.  For them, the sea provided an invincible defensive barrier.  It was impossible for enemies to attack them by water.  But the new boats set the stage for the Viking era — several centuries of raiding, pillaging, bloodshed, and colonizing that rocked northern Europe. 

Remarkably, the design of longboats also made them capable of travelling on the open ocean.  Rugged woolen sails allowed them to cross the Atlantic and build an outpost at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada.  In those days, most of humankind spent their entire lives fairly close to their place of birth.  Imagine gaining the ability to sail to unknown lands more than a thousand miles away.  This was a mind-blowing possibility.  It rubbished the traditional perception of space and limits.

Long distance sea travel flung open a ghastly Pandora’s Box.  Sailing ships enabled aggressive conquerors to colonize vast regions around the world.  Environmental history is loaded with horror stories of pathogens delivered by long distance sea travel — potato blight, anthrax, Dutch elm disease, chestnut blight, white-nose fungus, bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, influenza, and countless others.  Millions of unlucky indigenous people have been conquered, enslaved, and/or killed by alien invaders from distant lands.

Anyway, wool was big juju.  Prior to the nineteenth century, clothing was the product of extremely labor-intensive processes.  For hardworking common folks, clothing was precious, carefully mended and patched, and passed on to the next generation.  When someone died in a hospital, the clothing of the deceased had to be removed and given to the lawful inheritors.  Many folks owned little more than what they were wearing.  Like moon explorers, wool space suits enabled tropical primates to survive in frigid life-threatening environments.

White Gold

St Clair also discussed English wool.  The Normans were Vikings who colonized the north coast of France and smelled like sheep.  In 1066, they conquered England.  By the thirteenth century, England had become famous for its high quality wool.  Regions that produced the softest, richest wool could sell it for very high prices.  Most of the cloth makers that bought the wool were not English, many were Flemish or Florentine.  Ships that carried the wool to buyers were prime targets for pirates, eager to snatch the precious white gold, and get rich quick.

On the manors of wealthy aristocrats, the peasant tenants were given rights to use specific strips of cropland.  Assignments would change from year to year, because some cropland was regularly allowed to lie fallow and recharge.  Beside cropland, there were also common pastures, and common forests, which the whole community could use.  Tenants raised livestock, hunted, foraged, grew vegetables, and cut firewood and timber.  The survival of the peasant community was dependent on always having access to the commons.  Even with access, the lives of most were brutally harsh and marginal, compared to modern couch potatoes. 

By 1297, half of the total English economy was generated by the wool industry.  Before long, ambitious aristocrats realized that they could make far more money from raising sheep than by collecting rents from their dirt-poor tenant farmers.  This deep hunger for wealth slowly led to a process known as the enclosure movement.  Fences and hedgerows were created to prohibit tenants from entering the commons.  They were not amused, they were doomed.

Graham Harvey wrote that the enclosures began in England, during the fourteenth century.  They gradually spread over the passage of several centuries, and then surged from 1750 to 1860.  Simon Fairlie noted that between 1760 and 1870, about 7 million acres (2.8 million ha), about a sixth the area of England, was changed from common land to enclosed land.

One source estimated that, in Scotland alone, a half million peasants were driven off the land by the enclosures.  No food, no home, no future.  Across the U.K., the dispossessed were forced into filthy, disease ridden cities, where there were no social safety nets.  Rioting became popular, as did infant mortality.

John Reader noted that the enclosure movement led to the breakdown of a long standing culture of land-based subsistence living for many.  Tenant communities had benefitted from the mutual support of extended families.  They were replaced by a small number of shepherds.  With the tenants gone, there were fewer horses and oxen on the manor, so more grass was available for sheep.  Tennant cottages and outbuildings were demolished.  Several hundred villages disappeared, except for their churches.  Aristocrats enjoyed getting higher income from their manors, and raising sheep was more dependable than agriculture.  From year to year, grain harvests were quite vulnerable to the mood swings of weather and luck.

Harvey wrote that in the Black Death era (1340s), Britain was a backwater.  Three centuries later, it was Europe’s most advanced country.  Wool flooded the U.K. with cash, and for 200 years it was the world’s richest country.  Millions of hungry dirty people in cities were willing to work insane hours, in miserable conditions, for peanuts.  This nourished the emergence of a powerful industrial state.  By 1832, the medieval peasant community had been completely destroyed.  Like I said, wool was big juju.  The gentle sheep had eaten many lives and villages.

My Ancestors

My great-great-grandmother was Sarah Cleaton, who married Edward Rees in 1838.  They were born and raised in the village of Cwmbelan, Wales, where a small stream passing through the village powered a waterwheel at the flannel factory.  Sheep grazed on the surrounding hillsides (formerly lush forest).  Cwmbelan was in the parish of Llangurig.  In 1836, the 49,600 acre (20,000 ha) parish had 37,000 acres of commons.  By 1875, “large quantities of the common land have been enclosed.”

Edward and Sarah had three sons before he died at 23 from “decline.”  Sarah was a handloom weaver, as was her mother Mary, and her sister Catherine.  So were her sister-in-laws, Mary, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Jane Rees.  Handloom weaving was a skilled profession.  It apparently provided something like a respectable middle class income for that era. 

With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and its power mills, 500,000 weavers lost their source of income, according to Clive Ponting.  Many were forced to move to filthy cities.  By 1861, Sarah and her three sons had moved south to Merthyr Tydfil, home to an iron mining district, Dowlais.  She was a barkeep at the Green Dragon pub, and her two older sons mined iron.

Merthyr Tydfil had four ironworks, and a slum known as Little Hell, where a super-poor population of “unhappy and lawless” folks were piled together in conditions of squalor that were at least as bad as Liverpool or Nottingham.  The district had no toilets.  Open sewers encouraged the spread of cholera and typhoid.  Millions of friendly lice thrived on folks who rarely if ever bathed.

Unfortunately, for Sarah and sons, by 1861, the ironworks industry in Merthyr Tydfil got blindsided by new technology, the Bessemer process, and local prosperity was fading fast.  In 1863 they moved to Pennsylvania.

In 1919, her son Richard E. Rees, celebrated his fiftieth anniversary in Columbus, Ohio.  To commemorate the event, he sent a story to a Welsh newspaper.  In it he wrote, “I have worked underground for 65 years; ten in the Old Country, two in Pennsylvania, and 53 in Ohio.”  He was 75 years old, and lived another ten years.

Australian Sheep

Elinore Melville wrote about the introduction of sheep in Australia, where the firestick farming by Aborigines maintained expansive regions of grassland.  Unfortunately, this excellent grassland was supporting the existence of useless vermin called kangaroos.  Britain wasn’t interested in buying kangaroo meat, but they would pay good money for wool.  So, colonists worked hard to exterminate as many kangaroos as possible, as they rapidly expanded the sheep ranching industry.  By 1845 there were 9 million sheep, and in 1854 there were 12 million. 

The British colonists came from a moist land that had reliable rainfall.  Australia was different.  When a herd had stripped the vegetation from an area, shepherds moved the herd to a greener pasture.  The vegetation they devoured had been storing moisture, which slowed evaporation.  The land dried out, and groundwater was not replenished.  Drought followed drought.  Overgrazing often rubbished grassland regions within 7 to 20 years. 

Bill Gammage noted that the native kangaroo grass was excellent (“caviar for grazers”).  It was a deep-rooted, drought tolerant perennial that held the soil in place, retained soil moisture, survived fire, and was highly nutritious.  It remained green after four months without rain, a great asset for wildlife in drought times.  The colonists’ sheep grazed it down to bare clay, killing the precious grass.

Colonists drained wetlands to expand pastures.  Livestock proceeded to compact the soil, which dried out, and cracked.  Springs, ponds, and creeks evaporated, eliminating the critters that lived in them.  When rains returned, rapid runoff encouraged erosion, landslides, deep gullies, floods, silt chokes, and the spread of salts.  An observer in 1853 commented on the growing soil destruction: “Ruts, seven, eight, and ten feet deep (2 to 3 m), and as wide, are found for miles, where two years ago it was covered with a tussocky grass like a land marsh.”

Navajo Sheep

Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, the Navajo moved from Alaska and western Canada down into the U.S. southwest, home of the Hopi, Zuñi, and Pueblo.  In the early days, the Navajo lived as hunter-gatherers.  In 1598 Spanish colonists arrived, bringing with them domesticated sheep, cattle, horses, and goats.  The Navajo became sedentary, and learned sheep herding, weaving, and gardening.  They planted fruit orchards.  When forage was still adequate, livestock provided more reliable access to food, so famine times were reduced.  This new mode of living led to population growth.

The Spanish did not allow the Navajo to own or ride horses, but eventually they acquired them.  Horses made it much easier to hunt, and to raid neighbors.  Stealing sheep was much easier than raising them.  Raiding was about making unannounced visits to neighboring tribes and stealing sheep, horses, women, and children.  Sometimes the defenders were killed and scalped.  Naturally, other tribes responded by raiding the Navajo.  Raiding was an extremely common practice among pastoral societies around the world. 

Peter Iverson noted that by 1846, the Navajo had 500,000 sheep, 30,000 cattle, and 10,000 horses, mules, and asses.  As white settlers moved in, they complained about the Indians.  So, the government ordered the Navajo to relocate to a reservation, where they could become farmers and get rich quick.  The Indians preferred to remain on their land, and continue living in their traditional manner.  This was not the proper response.

So, the government sent Lieutenant Colonel Kit Carson to make the whites happy.  In 1863 his troops brutally attacked the Navajos and destroyed homes, gardens, orchards, livestock, and people.  The 8,000 surviving natives were forced to march 300 miles (480 km) to the luxurious Fort Summer facility.  In 1868, they were allowed to return to a portion of their homeland.  Each family was given two sheep, one male, one female.

The railroad arrived in 1881, and trading posts appeared along its route.  This encouraged the Navajo to weave rugs and make jewelry to be used as trade goods.  They raised large herds of Churro sheep, which produced long, smooth, and less greasy wool that was ideal for hand spinning. 

By the time the Depression began in 1929, the Navajo population had swelled.  Kendall Bailes wrote that by 1933, two million acres (809,000 ha) of Navajo land was severely overgrazed, some of it reduced to desert.  There were huge erosion gullies, and large amounts of silt were moving into Lake Mead, the reservoir at Hoover Dam.  Their herding practices, developed 200 years earlier, when grass was abundant, didn’t work as well in a dryer climate, when there was far less grass.  Animals were starving.  In the western states, the Dust Bowl had begun.

In 1935, the Bureau of Indian Affairs conducted a survey on grazing land.  They found that the Navajo sheep flocks contained more than a million animals, and they were kept on land that could only support 560,000.

The government perceived this to be a very serious problem, for which the obvious solution was a sharp reduction in herd size.  The Navajo, on the other hand, believed that this was the opposite of a problem, it was a sacred gift.  Their livestock were tokens of wealth, status, and cultural identify.  They loved their goats and sheep almost as much as their own children.

The white authorities moved in, without permission, and by the 1940’s, the herds were reduced by half.  According to Iverson, at first the sheep were shipped urban centers to feed poor people.  Eventually, the animals were just taken over the hill, shot, piled up, and left to rot.  The government paid the Navajo for every animal eliminated, but the tribal economy was blindsided.  Navajo resentment over this action remains fierce.  The tribe now has a quota system for herd sizes in grazing ranges.

Topography of Ireland



One grouchy grumpy day, Pope Adrian IV got honked off at Ireland.  The Irish were not paying their tithes, and they were Catholic in name only, living in abominable moral decay.  So, he ordered England’s Henry II to conquer the rowdy heathen barbarians.  Along with the invasion went a secretary, Giraldus Cambrensis (1146 – 1223), a Welsh priest and scholar.  (“Giraldus Cambrensis” was Latin for “Jerry of Wales.”)  Father Jerry arrived in Ireland in 1185, and wrote a description of the emerald isle, Topography of Ireland.  It captured a rare snapshot of what life was like more than eight centuries ago, when the Irish were still tribal people.

At that time, Ireland was a remote and isolated frontier, largely off the radar of civilization.  The landscape majored in forests, bogs, lakes, streams, and swamps.  Boats were the easiest mode of travel.  Stags feasted on the lavish banquet of foliage, becoming chubby and less speedy.  Wolves dined on the abundant boars and wild pigs.  The air and water were clean, and the rivers were loaded with fine salmon, trout, muddy eels, and oily shad.

The tribes of Ireland were wild chiefdoms, and the lads and lasses were primarily cowboys and cowgirls.  The climate was mild, rainfall was gentle and abundant, and the grass was green all year.  Snows were rare, and soon melted away.  It was a paradise for herbivores and herders.  Herders needed no structures to protect the livestock from the cold, and they had no need for cutting, drying, and storing hay.  Organic milk, grass-fed meat, wild fish, and little else, were on the menu every day of the year.

The wild folks had no interest in adapting the latest European fashions — dainty, frilly, colorful attire.  They refused to invest endless hours in the tedious drudgery of spinning and weaving fabric of flax or wool.  Sensible people are not trend junkies, and dressing up in silly duds made you look like a goofy geek from Liverpool.  It was simply too embarrassing.  Sensible people wore skins and furs, which were comfortable, durable, attractive, and suitable for all occasions.

There were veins of ores, including gold-bearing quartz, but the cowboys ignored them.  Mining was brutally hard work, and their cattle refused to eat gold.  Their lands were home to majestic forests, but the cowboys weren’t interested in forest mining.  They had no need for lumber or paper, and their finicky cattle would eat neither boards nor money.  A good deal of the countryside was potentially suitable for use as cropland, but very little was tilled and sown.  Cowboys knew that soil mining was miserable, backbreaking work, and their traditional way of life worked just fine.  Cattle were perfectly happy to eat the delicious grass.

Tribes had abundant leisure time for making a joyful noise.  Father Jerry had travelled as far as Rome, and he considered the Irish to be the finest musicians of all.  Irish music was lively and rapid, and the harmonies sweet and gay.  They mostly played the harp and tabor (a small drum).  In those days, music was still genuinely sustainable.  Musicians did not need huge tour buses, or dozens semis to haul speakers, amplifiers, lighting systems, stages, mega-screens, and dumpsters of cocaine and heroin.

The people were strong and healthy.  They did not waste years in lingering sickness and decline.  They preferred to leap directly from good health to their deathbeds, and promptly get it over with.  They did not know the days of the week, the names of the months, or what year it was.  They kept time by the sun, moon, and seasons.

The Irish have never been fond of Father Jerry’s writing, because he was an obnoxious gaseous sphincter.  For example, “The Irish are a rude people, subsisting on the produce of their cattle only, and living themselves like beasts.”  Or, “This people, then, is truly barbarous, being not only barbarous in their dress, but suffering their hair and beards to grow enormously in an uncouth manner… indeed, all of their habits are barbarisms.”

Father Jerry was certain that the world was very old, close to its end.  He was stunned and perplexed by the Irish indifference to salvation and eternal life.  You see, Saint Patrick had successfully converted all the tribes before he died in 485.  Yet seven centuries later, most of the Irish savages had forgotten everything about sin, damnation, and guilt.  Many Irish remained unbaptized and unmarried — shameless, adulterous, incestuous, illegitimate bastards.  (Writer Michael Ventura heard of an Irish grandmother who, in the 1950s, still referred to Christianity as “the new religion.”)

Anyway, King Henry’s invasion of Ireland was the kickoff for centuries of bloodshed — similar in many ways to English colonization of New England or Australia.  The Irish were low-tech guerilla warriors, skilled at hit and run ambushes.  They used slings to hurl stones with skull-splitting accuracy.  They had spears, javelins, and axes.  The English were state-of-the-art warriors, having chain mail, armor, archers, and deadly swords.  For example, “He who had seen how John de Courcy wielded his sword, with one stroke lopping off heads, and with another arms, must needs have commended him for a most valiant soldier.”

Long after Jerry’s death, after more than 450 years of fighting, the conquest was complete.  The English victors seized the estates of Irish nobles, and gave them two options.  They could move to a reservation, or be executed.  Thousands of Irish women were sold to the owners of Caribbean sugar plantations.  Countless lads were hung.  One observer noted, “You may ride 20 miles and discern anything or fix your eye upon any object, but dead men hanging on trees and gibbets.”

History is clear that civilization trumps tribes.  It also trumps healthy wild ecosystems.  It trumps the wellbeing of generations yet to be born.  But even before Henry and Jerry washed up on shore, tribal Ireland was not a place of love, peace, and happiness.  Ireland was divided into many túatha, or petty kingdoms, the domains of chiefdoms.  The borders often fluctuated, as chiefs ambitiously pursued the glories of perpetual growth.

History is clear that the accumulation of property, including domesticated livestock, is a routine cause of wealth inequality, social friction, and war.  Before becoming cowboys, the Irish hunted and fished.  They could not capture and hoard wild stags or boars, so they avoided status-seeking mania, and the dark juju of bossy rich jerks.  Countless millions have perished in countless wars resulting from the insatiable obsession of insecure people for more, more, and more.  Today, many blame our woes on capitalism, but the roots of the monster are far deeper.

Father Jerry wrote with flamboyance.  The translation I read was clear and understandable.  However, he was not skilled at remaining focused on his subject, and frequently wandered away to jabber about whatever came into his head.  He wrote many books, including The History of the Conquest of Ireland.  The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis contains both of his books on Ireland, and his two books on Wales.  A free download is HERE.

Cambrensis, Giraldus, The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, George Bell & Sons, London, 1905.

Hegarty, Neil, The Story of Ireland, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2012.

Bonus link: Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland. 

Changes in the Land

Historian William Cronon was one of a group of scholars that pioneered a new and improved way of understanding the past.  Environmental history put the spotlight on many essential issues that were ignored by traditional history, and this made the sagas far more potent and illuminating.

His book, Changes in the Land, is an environmental history of colonial New England.  It documents the clash of two cultures that could not have been more different, the Indians and the settlers.  It describes the horrific mortality of imported diseases, and two centuries of senseless warfare on the fish, forests, soils, and wildlife.

The prize at the bottom of the box is a mirror.  The patterns of thinking that the colonists brought to America are essentially our modern insanity in its adolescent form.  We are the unfortunate inheritors of a dysfunctional culture.  It helps to know this.  It helps to be able to perceive the glaring defects, things we have been taught to believe are perfectly normal.

Cronon was the son of a history professor, and his father gave him the key for understanding the world.  He told his son to carry one question on his journey through life: “How did things get to be this way?”  Schoolbook history does a poor job of answering this question, because it often puts haloes on people who caused much harm, folks who faithfully obeyed the expectations of their culture and peers.

In Cronon’s book, alert readers will discover uncomfortable answers to how things got to be this way.  We have inherited a dead end way of life.  In the coming decades, big challenges like climate change, peak oil, and population growth seem certain to disrupt industrial civilization, as we know it.

We can’t return to hunting and gathering anytime soon, nor can we remain on our sinking ship.  To continue our existence on Earth, big changes are needed, new ideas.  This presents a fabulous opportunity to learn from our mistakes, to live slower, lighter, and better.  Cronon’s book reveals important lessons — what worked well, and what failed.

In the 5,000 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Europe had been transformed from a thriving wilderness to a scarred and battered land, thanks to soil mining, forest mining, fish mining, mineral mining, and a lot of crazy thinking.  During the same 5,000 years, the Indians of northern New England kept their numbers low, and didn’t beat the stuffing out of their ecosystem, because it was a sacred place, and they were well adapted to living in it.

In southern New England, the Indians regularly cleared the land by setting fires.  This created open, park-like forests, which provided habitat attractive to game.  Burning altered the ecosystem.  One early settler noted a hill near Boston, from which you could observe thousands of treeless acres below.  This was not a pristine ecosystem in its climax state.

In the north, the Indians did not clear the land with fire.  The trees in that region were too flammable, so the forests were allowed to live wild and free.  Indians travelled more by canoe.

In the south, where the climate was warmer, Indians practiced slash and burn agriculture.  Forests were killed and fields were planted with corn, beans, and squash.  Corn is a highly productive crop that is also a heavy feeder on soil nutrients.  After five to ten seasons, the soil was depleted, and the field was abandoned.  The Indians had no livestock to provide manure for fertilizer.  Few used fish for fertilizer, because they had no carts for hauling them.

This digging stick agriculture was soil mining, unsustainable.  Corn had arrived in New England just a few hundred years earlier, too recently to produce civilization and meltdown, as it did in Cahokia on the Mississippi.  Corn spurred population growth, which increased the toll on forests and soils.  (Other writers have noted that corn country was not a land of love, peace, and happiness.  Most Iroquois villages were surrounded by defensive palisades, because more people led to more stress and more conflict.)

The colonists imported an agricultural system that rocked the ecological boat much harder.  Their plows loosened the soil more deeply, encouraging erosion.  Their pastures were often overgrazed, which encouraged erosion.  They aggressively cut forests to expand pastures, cropland, and settlements, and this encouraged erosion.  Harbors were clogged with eroded soil.  Their cattle roamed the countryside, so little manure was collected for fertilizer.  They planted corn alone, so the soil did not benefit from the nitrogen that beans could add.  They burned trees to make ash for fertilizer.

Cronon devotes much attention to the eco-blunders of the settlers.  A key factor here is that their objective was not simple subsistence.  They had great interest in accumulating wealth and status, and this was achieved by taking commodities to market, like lumber and livestock.  The more land they cleared, the more cattle they could raise.  It was impossible to be too rich.

This silly hunger for status has a long history of inspiring idiotically reckless behavior.  When a colonist gazed on the land, his mind focused on the commodities, the stuff he could loot and sell.  He noticed the enormous numbers of fish, the millions of waterfowl, the unbelievable old growth forests, the furbearing animals — all the things that his kinfolk in Europe had nearly wiped out.

Indians hunted for dinner, not for the market.  They did not own the deer, elk, and moose that they hunted, so nobody freaked out if a wolf ate one.  These wild animals had coevolved with wolves, so a balance was maintained.  Colonists introduced domesticated animals that had not coevolved with wolves.  The slow, dimwitted livestock were sitting ducks for predators, which boosted wolf populations, which led infuriated settlers to launch wolf extermination programs.

Indians were not chained to private property.  When their fields wore out, they cleared new fields.  Colonists owned a fixed piece of land, which narrowed their options.  In the winter months, Indians moved to hunting camps, selecting sites with adequate firewood available.  They had nice fires and stayed warm, while the colonists shivered in their fixed villages, where firewood was scarce.

Colonists suffered from an insatiable hunger for wealth and status, which drove them to spend their lives working like madmen.  Instead of belongings, the Indians had a leisurely way of life, and this was their source of wealth.  They thought that the workaholic settlers were out of their minds.  Indians were mobile, so hoarding stuff made no sense.  By having few wants, the path to abundance was a short one.  Even the least industrious wanted nothing.

Liebig’s Law says “populations are not limited by the total annual resources available, but by the minimum amount available at the scarcest time of the year.”  So, despite the seasonal fish runs and bird migrations, life was not easy in February and March, when the game was lean and hard to hunt.  Indians stored little fish and meat.  In rough winters, they could go ten days without food.  They didn’t breed like colonists.

In the south, the Indians were engaged in a high-risk experiment by growing corn, because agriculture is almost never harmless, and it often opens the floodgates to numerous troublesome consequences.

In the north, the Indians were lucky that their home was unsuitable for farming.  They adapted to their ecosystem and lived like genuine conservatives, not looters.  This was a path with a future, until the looters arrived.

Cronon, William, Changes in the Land, Hill and Wang, New York, 1983.