Wild Free and Happy Sample 10

[Note: This is the tenth 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 199 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.] 

Genetic Evolution

Charles Darwin achieved fame for popularizing the knowledge of genetic evolution, a normal and natural life process.  All living things have genes, and their offspring inherit copies of them.  No other critter, living or dead, possesses genes exactly like yours.  Each of the billions of cells in your body carries a copy of your unique genes.  Cells exist for a while, then die.  New cells are created to replace them.  Every hour, your genes are duplicated countless times as your body replaces dead cells with new ones. 

The genes in every cell are incredibly complex, and it is normal and natural for boo-boos to occur in the duplication process.  The mutations are purely random, and they are called genetic drift.  It is not unusual for mutated genes to be passed from parent to offspring.  For some offspring, random mutations might be beneficial in some way.  Other offspring can be diminished by mutated genes, leading them to become less able to survive, thrive, and reproduce. 

Everything on Earth, and all beings in the family of life, are constantly changing.  Food resources can increase or decrease.  Drought can be washed away by deluge.  Parasites, viruses, volcanoes, fires, floods, invasives… the wheels of change keep spinning.  Glaciers become tundra, tundra becomes grassland, grassland becomes forest, and then the parade reverses.  Stability is a temporary state, change is the long-term norm.  Evolution helps the family of life adapt and survive.  Species unable to adapt to change disappear from the stage.

In the animal world, if predators get too good at hunting, they deplete their prey, go to bed hungry, and maybe starve.  If prey get too good at escape, the growing herd will decimate the vegetation, and maybe create a desert, so everyone starves.  If the predators gradually become one percent faster, the prey gradually become one percent faster, not two.  Balance requires predators to be slightly better at their sacred obligation — limiting the herd — but not too good. 

The speed of genetic evolution varies.  Species with slow rates of reproduction, like elephants, can take many generations or millennia to adapt beneficial new features.  Evolution proceeds much faster in species with brief lifespans.  This is why pathogenic bacteria can quickly develop resistance to antibiotics, and insects to insecticides.  Some plants develop resistance to a new herbicide in as few as four years.  Some fungi can develop resistance to a new fungicide in just three years. 

We try so hard to control everything.  Big Mama Nature just howls with laughter, gushing tears, at our comical experiments in playing fake god, silly efforts that regularly bite us on the ass.  She has no use for two-legged stewards, or managers, or sustainable growth maniacs.  She gets along best with animals that are wild, free, and happy.  It’s survival of the fit-ins.  Ecological loose cannons need not apply.

Today, we’re living in an especially exciting time!  The treacherous sorcerers of innovation and progress have conjured a colossal curse on the family of life.  The curse has overloaded the atmosphere with crud, which is destabilizing the climate to a degree that seems certain to turbulently blindside life as we know it.  Thanks to genetic evolution, the surviving species will eventually adapt to wrecked ecosystems, and a heavily scarred family of life can continue on its sacred journey.

And now, dear reader, we need to stop here for a moment, sit down, take a deep breath, and have an extremely embarrassing birds-and-bees discussion on the difference between genetic evolution (yum!) and cultural evolution (danger!). 

Cultural Evolution

Genetic evolution is billions of years old, as old as life on Earth.  Its realm is the metamorphosis of genetic information over time.  Cultural evolution is the realm of learned information — beliefs, ideas, knowledge, and so on.  It has emerged recently, in the last few million years.  It’s essentially a hominin fad, a spooky quirk of swollen brains.  Innovation and progress are two of its monster children.  These children are as unpredictable as two year olds with a box of hand grenades.

In hominins, genetic evolution proceeds at a snail’s pace, but cultural evolution can boogie like a herd of gazelles on meth.  It might have taken our ancestors a million years to genetically evolve vicious claws and fangs, and we may have blinked out before succeeding.  Instead, cultural evolution inspired our ancestors to invent lances and javelins — fake claws and fangs. 

When someone’s leg is amputated, they can be fitted with a prosthetic leg, so they can walk again.  Dentures are prosthetic teeth.  Warm clothing is prosthetic fur.  Heated dwellings provide a prosthetic tropical climate, so tropical primates can survive far from their normal habitat.  Prosthetic claws and fangs eventually made the ancestors capable of killing critters bigger than themselves, bringing home more meat at the end of the day, and feeding more bambinos.

Chimps don’t do this.  They snatch insects and lizards with their hands.  Their small scale hunting is far less likely to rock the ecological boat.  This is why there are not seven billion pudgy chimps staring at cell phones while driving.  Indeed, their million year track record with this effective strategy has to be categorized as genuinely sustainable.  Chimps set an excellent example for the last surviving hominins — humans — who are beginning to swirl the drain.  Alas, we have been bedeviled by a compulsive obsession with every type of prosthetic device that greedy capitalists can imagine.  Zombie consumers endure mindless jobs in order to acquire and proudly display as many of this season’s trendy status symbols as possible.

Anyway, our ancestors got totally addicted to cultural evolution.  They shifted from chimp-type hunting, to stones and clubs, then scavenging, persistence hunting, thrusting spears, projectile javelins, bows and arrows, nets, snares, harpoons, horses, guns, and on and on.  Like junkies, prosthetic addiction requires shooting up bigger and bigger doses to continue experiencing the beautiful soaring flights of euphoria.  Like junkies, cold turkey withdrawal from prosthetic addiction is excruciatingly painful.  Imagine your president, and her husband, stumbling around naked in the Congo, gobbling termites, slugs, bird eggs, berries, and lizards.

Cultural evolution in weaponry enabled our ancestors to extract more food resources from the ecosystem, so the land’s carrying capacity for humans increased, for a while, as long as overhunting didn’t deplete the prey, and chill out the feast.  Each advance in hunting technology temporarily increased the food resources available for hungry hominins, encouraging their numbers to grow.  Inevitably, the ecological boat began to rock, and sometimes overturn. 

As you can see, innovation is risky.  It often has unintended consequences.  Chimps are conservative, and teach us that innovation is unnecessary for enjoying a million years of healthy sustainable living.  The humans that are currently decimating the chimps’ forest, and the entire planet, present a different, and very important lesson.

Chimps have almost no understanding of the human-caused Earth Crisis.  Their knowledgebase is modest, limited to local affairs, in the here and now.  They learn by observing and imitating their elders.  They lack the cultural information needed to destabilize the planet’s climate systems, acidify the oceans, eliminate forests, and generally behave like insane idiots.  They learn exactly enough to live sustainably from birth to death.  Perfect!

When I was a young lad, I was forced to spend years institutionalized in a series of educational penitentiaries.  Like an assembly line, students had their brains filled with cultural information.  I was taught about history, numbers, reading, writing, human supremacy, the daffy pursuit of status, and the sacred principles of unsustainable living.  Our mission in life was to get a job, work hard, accumulate status trinkets, and spend our lives moving as much stuff as possible from nature to landfills — a remarkably toxic game.  I shudder at the amount of stuff that has passed through my life.

Americans, British, and other colonizers created boarding schools for the children of the wild aboriginal people they conquered.  Kids were snatched away from their families, communities, and cultures.  They were forbidden to speak their own language, or sing their songs.  They had their brains filled with the cultural information of industrial civilization.  The kids suffered tremendous emotional damage from this brutal process, and many were seriously wounded for the rest of their days.

Priests used to boast: “Give me your child for his first seven years, and I will have him for life.”  The cultural information you are imprinted with in childhood usually solidifies like concrete, and those beliefs are carried until your final breath.  This works perfectly in sustainable wild cultures, where kids learn time-proven knowledge.  It sucks in super-toxic cultures, where everyone is taught to be mindless eco-terrorists.  Derrick Jensen once noted that unquestioned beliefs are the most dangerous and destructive things in the world.

Humans are not in serious trouble because of crappy genes.  Genes did not get us into this mess, culture did.  Every human that squirts out of the womb is a wild animal, ready to spend a lifetime in a healthy tropical ecosystem.  We don’t become batshit crazy critters until we are trained by a batshit crazy family and society.  If you had been born into a wild, free, and happy tribe in the Amazon rainforest, you would have grown up in a sane culture, and you would be living in a low impact mode that has respect and reverence for the natural world (until the maniacs on bulldozers arrive to introduce you to progress).

Genetic information is passed from one generation to the next via reproduction.  Cultural information is passed via words, images, and demonstration.  We acquire it from TV, websites, books, classrooms, conversations, and so on.  We absorb a knowledgebase that has accumulated over many generations.  Each new generation has no need to spend decades reinventing the wheel, clothing, or the fire drill. 

Paul Ehrlich once spent time among the Inuit of Hudson Bay, Canada.  He was surprised to discover that the entire knowledgebase of their cultural information was known by everyone — how to hunt seals, tan pelts, weave a net, sew a coat, and so on.  In Ehrlich’s own culture, nobody knows even a millionth of our cultural information.  It’s impossible to learn it all, and the knowledgebase is constantly growing, faster and faster.  Folks can get a PhD from Stanford without ever learning a single thing about science.  The survival of humankind is dependent on ecological sustainability, but most PhDs know nothing about it, nor do our political leaders.

Here’s a half-happy idea: William E. Rees reminded us that cultural evolution is also subject to something like natural selection.  Maladaptive cultural mutations, like the belief in perpetual growth, limitless resources, or utopia-bound progress will eventually push the civilization off the cliff, into the compost bin.  Stuff like motorized transport, industrial manufacturing, and agriculture will inevitably go extinct because depletion of resources will pull the plug on them.

The more daunting challenge has to do with wisely and deliberately tossing overboard the maladaptive hallucinations that infest our throbbing thinkers — hierarchy, patriarchy, human supremacy, materialism, disconnection from nature, and so on.  Our culture never stops pushing us to run at full speed to the cliff.  We are completely unprepared to proceed with a healthy, cleansing, cultural evolution enema.

The Wayfinders

Long, long ago, Teutonic storytellers told tales by the fire.  Many of them mention a deity who was a wisdom seeker, singer, poet, and warrior.  Odin had two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, who daily flew out over the world, observed the events, and returned to report the news.  The names of his birds meant “thought” and “memory.”  Odin cherished these ravens.  He knew that the loss of thought would be terrible, but that the loss of memory would be far worse.  Thought is clever and useful, but memory is essential and indispensable.  When thought is disconnected from memory, the result is the world outside your window.

Wade Davis is very tuned into the high cost of forgetfulness.  Modern folks have not only forgotten who we are, and where we are from, but we are busy erasing the surviving remnants of much ancient knowledge.  There are about 7,000 languages in the world today, and half are approaching extinction.

When we wander amidst an endless herd of loud and smelly consumers, it’s easy to forget that our worldview is just one of many.  Our culture is a freak in human history, because of its blitzkrieg on future generations of all species.  Most perceive this to be perfectly normal; it’s all they know.  In his book, The Wayfinders, Davis takes us on a fascinating tour, visiting lucky people who have not been cut loose from their past.

We have been trained to perceive other cultures as inferior and primitive.  When the British washed up on the shore of Australia, they failed to recognize and respect the incredible genius of the Aborigines.  Through tens of thousands of years of trial and error, the natives learned how to live in balance with a damaged ecosystem that was hot, dry, and lean.  The white colonists have attempted to transplant a European way of life, which is starkly inappropriate, and can only exist temporarily.

The Aborigines have a network of travel routes that were sung into existence by the ancestors.  The songs describe the landmarks that travelers will find along the route.  If you know the song, you know the route.  Songs are maps.  The routes are called songlines.  The entire continent is spiritually alive, and the people have a remarkable awareness of place, and a profound reverence for it.

The Polynesian culture is found on thousands of islands scattered across a vast region of the Pacific.  The Spanish first encountered them in 1595, when they arrived in the Marquesas, a society of 300,000 people.  Within a month, eighty-five percent of the people died from European diseases.  For some reason, the islanders thought that the visitors were demons.

Polynesians were highly skilled at sea travel.  They built excellent catamarans, using Stone Age technology, that were fifty percent faster than the floating monstrosities from Spain.  Even with their state of the art sextants and charts, Europeans remained primitive navigators who got nervous when they drifted beyond sight of land.

Davis went on a voyage with Polynesians who remembered the ancient knowledge.  The navigators always knew exactly where they were.  They paid careful attention to the wind, clouds, stars, wave patterns, sky colors.  They noted the water’s salinity, phosphorescence, plant debris, and temperature.  Sharks, dolphins, porpoises, and birds provided information.  For example, white terns indicated land within 200 kilometers (124 mi.), and boobies stayed within 40 kilometers (25 mi.) of land.

On the Sahara, the people who understand the desert do not get lost.  They can read the winds, the texture of the sand, and the forms of the dunes.  They can smell water.  In Canada, the vast province of Nunavut is home to the Inuit people.  They were geniuses for surviving in a harsh climate with Stone Age technology.  Travelling by dogsled in the long months of darkness, they never got lost, because they were experts at reading the snow.

These older cultures learned how to adapt to their ecosystems, because this encouraged stability and survival.  They were blessed to inhabit ecosystems that did not provide ideal conditions for the birth of industrial nightmares.  Unfortunately, they have been “discovered.”  They now live in the shadow of spooky people from industrial nightmares.  Many natives have been absorbed into the consumer monoculture, and have lost their identity.

All species routinely produce mutations.  The mutants that can smoothly blend into the ecosystem, and live in balance with it, have a decent chance at continuing in the dance of evolution.  Disruptive mutants eventually end up on the bus to Extinctionville.

Experts now believe that the San people of the Kalahari may be the oldest culture on Earth.  As humankind migrated out of Mother Africa, folks found themselves in ecosystems quite different from their tropical place of origin.  Different regions inspired different cultural mutations.  

Social Darwinists typically imagine a hierarchy of cultures, with industrial civilization at the gleaming pinnacle.  Every student in our culture has this dodgy notion repeatedly pounded into his or her brain.  It is a sacred myth that is commonly mistaken for truth.  Colonists felt a religious obligation to illuminate primitive people, invite them into the wondrous world of wage slavery, and provide them with brassieres and Bibles.

Well, Big Mama Nature is in a rather furious mood these days, and she’s in the process of pounding an unforgettable lesson into our cheesy civilized brains.  It’s called reality — reaping what you sow.  Our culture is a psychopathic mutant, an immaculate failure.  We could not be farther from the pinnacle of successful adaptation, or closer to the tar pits of Extinctionville (can you smell the methane?).

Davis takes us on many intriguing side trips.  In remote regions of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta we find cultures that escaped from the colonial invaders, and have not been severed from their roots.  They call themselves the Older Brothers, the guardians of the world.  We are the immature Younger Brothers, the zombie-like demolition crew.  They are sure that the Younger Brothers will eventually wake up — when Big Mama Nature pulls the rug out from under us.  They invite us to join them, and live with respect for life.

Our culture has created a monster that is a menace to all life on Earth.  A culture of perpetual growth is both insane and suicidal.  We need to stop destroying ancient cultures.  Every culture that goes extinct removes important knowledge for living on Earth.  Older cultures provide living proof that there are other ways of thinking and living, and they can inspire us to search for the long-forgotten wisdom that lies outside the walls.  Stable long-lasting cultures are far more interesting than flash-in-the-pan burnouts.  Imagination gets better mileage than despair or denial.

Davis, Wade, The Wayfinders — Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, Anansi Press, Toronto, 2009.

YouTube has several videos of Davis talking about The Wayfinders.

The Future Eaters

After spending more than 20 years reading hundreds of books describing various aspects of the Earth Crisis, The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery stands out.  It provides a sliver of hope for the future that is not built on magical thinking.  Flannery is a lad who is madly in love with the Australian region, and he dreams that it will eventually heal, far down the road someday.

Here’s the story.  Hominids evolved in Africa, and later migrated into Eurasia, where they lived in some regions for a million years before Homo sapiens drifted in.  In ecosystems where the fauna coevolved with hominids, the critters clearly understood that two-legs were predators, and they behaved accordingly.  But when Homo sapiens first appeared in Australia, none of the critters had ever seen a two-leg before, so they had no fear.

The fearless elephant seals on King Island weighed up to four tons.  They would calmly sun themselves while humans killed the animal sitting beside them.  On Kangaroo Island, men could walk up to fearless kangaroos and dispatch them with clubs.  Millions of birds were killed with sticks.  Flannery referred to these hunters as future eaters.  Future eaters were Homo sapiens that migrated into lands where the ecosystem had not coevolved with hominids.  Australians were the first future eaters, but far from the last.

The first phase of future eating was to hunt like there’s no tomorrow.  For example, New Zealand was loaded with birds.  Moas were ostrich-like birds that could grow to 10 feet (3 m) tall, and weigh 550 pounds (250 kg).  Future eaters arrived between 800 and 1,000 years ago, and by 400 years ago the moas were extinct.  Today we have found many collections of moa bones, some containing the remains of up to 90,000 birds.  Evidence suggests that a third of the meat was tossed away to rot.  Obviously, the birds were super-abundant and super-easy to kill.

Meanwhile, well-fed future eaters gave birth to growing numbers of baby future eaters.  More killers + less prey = trouble.  The party got ugly.  Friendly neighbors became mortal enemies.  Moas disappeared from the menu, and were replaced by Moe and Mona from a nearby village.  Cannibalism beats starvation.  Overhunting and overbreeding, followed by bloody social breakdown, was a normal pattern in the world of the future eaters.

Following the crash, the survivors had two options: learn from their mistakes, or fool around with new mistakes.  The New Zealanders didn’t have time to get their act together before they were discovered by palefaces.  It was a different story in New Caledonia, where the future eaters arrived 3,500 years ago.  They partied hard, crashed, did the warfare thing, adapted to their damaged ecosystem, and were having a nice time when Captain Cook washed up on shore.

Future eating contributed to extinctions.  In Australia, large animals were going extinct by 35,000 years ago.  Most megafauna in the Americas vanished 11,000 years ago.  In New Caledonia, it was 3,500 years ago.  In recently settled New Zealand, big animals went extinct 500 to 800 years ago.

In Africa, Asia, and Europe, some megafauna managed to survive, because of coevolution.  The unlucky ones were domesticated, which led to radical changes in our way of life.  Enslaved horses facilitated the bloody spread of the Indo-European culture from Ireland to India.  Along with oxen, horses enabled the expansion of soil mining.  Vast forests were eliminated to make room for growing herds of hooved locusts.

Australia is an unusual continent.  It has been geologically static for 60 million years.  Most of the soil is extremely old, and very low in nutrients.  Consequently, the fauna that won the evolution sweepstakes were energy efficient, majoring in marsupials and reptiles. 

On other continents, soils often contain twice as much phosphate and nitrates.  Lands having rich soils produced energy-guzzling ecosystems, including large numbers of megafauna.  The most energy-intensive species of all are warm-blooded carnivores like us.  Europe has 660 million people, and Australia has 17 million.

In addition to feeble soils, Australia has spooky weather, driven by the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO).  The climate unpredictably swings between droughts and floods.  Droughts can last for many years, and then be washed away with a deluge.  These freaky swings encourage cautious lifestyles, weed out energy-guzzling species, and make agriculture especially unreliable. 

Flannery wonders if it’s moral to “live as a vegetarian in Australia, destroying seven kilograms of irreplaceable soil, upon which everything depends, for each kilogram of bread we consume?”  This question is relevant in all lands.  There is no free lunch in farm country.

Anyway, before humans arrived in the Australian region, the ecosystems were self-sustaining.  Then came the future eaters.  Extinctions included species that had performed essential ecosystem functions, like controlling woody brush.  When brush got out of control, it reduced grazing land for herbivores, and encouraged devastating wildfires.

To reduce this new imbalance, Aborigines periodically lit fires to keep the fuel from accumulating.  Unfortunately, during burns, soil nutrients went up in smoke, especially nitrogen.  Exposed soils were vulnerable to wind erosion.  The land got drier.  Centuries of burning produced a downward spiral that was largely irreversible.  There was no undo command.

The hunters must have had turbulent times as the initial era of plenty and prosperity dissolved into scarcity.  Then, “for 60,000 years Aborigines managed the crippled ecosystems, preventing them from degenerating further.”  For the last 12,000 years, surviving evidence suggests that they lived in a stable and sustainable manner.  They succeeded at this by learning the most important trick of all — adapting to their ecosystem.  They were forced to return their future eater badges and uniforms, and they were glad to do so.

Meanwhile, back in Eurasia, the nutrient rich soils were sprouting the biggest and craziest mob of future eaters to ever walk the Earth.  For the last 12,000 years, they have exploded in number, exterminated the megafauna, laid waste to forests and fisheries, and spilled oceans of blood.  Then, they discovered Australia, and imported the future eater mindset, with predictable results.

Today, the human population of the planet is almost entirely future eaters.  Our binge of plenty and prosperity is wheezing, bleeding, and staggering.  Climate change and the end of cheap and abundant energy will derail civilization as we know it.  We are proceeding into an era of scarcity and conflict.  When the smoke eventually clears, we would be wise to learn the most important trick of all. 

On the plus side, we are the first future eaters to comprehend the catastrophic effects of our future eating lifestyle.  It’s never too late to learn, think, and grow.  There’s never been a better time to question everything.  In a thousand years, if we make it, we may be asked to return our badges and uniforms.  There is hope!  Hooray!

Flannery, Timothy Fridtjof, The Future Eaters — An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People, George Braziller, New York, 1995.