[Note: This is the thirty-third 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.]
The
Monster Mash
Mesopotamia was one section of an ancient region known as the
Fertile Crescent. The Fertile Crescent
has misty borders, and no two maps agree, but it’s blob-shaped. [MAP] One finger pokes westward toward Turkey. Another spreads down along the east coast of
the Mediterranean and plunges deep into Egypt.
Another heads south toward the Persian Gulf. The Fertile Crescent was a ground zero
location for the emergence of plant and animal domestication. Eventually, it became the birthplace of a
ridiculously unsustainable culture known as Western Civilization.
For uncertain reasons, domestication independently emerged in
at least eight regions, following the end of the last ice age. Population pressure (growing resource
scarcity) must have been a primary factor.
Backbreaking farm labor was not something that folks indulged in for fun
or kinky pleasure. Domestication wasn’t
a brilliant innovation, it was more like a graveyard headstone for the very
long era of hominin wildness and freedom, a sharp turn for the worse.
As the last ice age gradually rode off into the sunset, the
Fertile Crescent ecosystem inhaled a deep breath of fresh springtime breezes,
opened its eyes, smiled, and felt the power of new life surging within it. Generous winter rains nurtured abundant
greenery. Ancient myths describe a
Garden of Eden. Large areas were clothed
with wild cereals, like wheat (emmer and spelt), and barley. There were also fruit and nut trees.
Someone estimated that there are about 200,000 species of
plants in the world. Of those, only a
bit more than 100 have been domesticated.
Preference has been given to plants that are easy to grow and produce
lots of food — especially food that is storable and/or high in nutrients. Jared
Diamond pointed out that, of the twelve biggest crop plants today, five of
them are cereals — wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum. Cereals provide half of the calories that
humans eat today. Pulses (peas and
beans) provide protein. A diet based
primarily cereals and pulses is not guaranteed to be nutritionally complete.
Diamond noted that only 14 large herbivore species have been
domesticated, and that they were not evenly distributed around the world. For example, North America had none, and
Europe had one (reindeer). Neither
sub-Saharan Africa nor Australia were home to native plants or herbivores that
were suitable for domestication. In
these regions, the Aborigines, San, Pygmies, and many others did just fine with
wild plant and animal foods. They lived
lightly, built no cities, had no bosses or rulers, did not hoard personal
belongings, and maintained a respectful and intimate relationship with their
ecosystems. Imagine that!
The Fertile Crescent, on the other hand, was very
different. It had wheat, barley, and
pulses. Also, in addition to huge herds
of delicious wild gazelles, the Crescent was unique because it was home to four
species of large herbivores that were suitable for domestication — goats,
sheep, pigs, and cattle. Obsidian was
common too, an excellent stone for making cutting blades and sharp weapon
points.
At first, I wrote “the Fertile Crescent was cursed with
riches,” a tantalizing booby trap of treasures that entranced naïve tropical
primates. The abundance triggered
terrible hallucinations that inspired them to chop down forests, build ghastly
cities, and develop impressive world-class wastelands. But I realized my mistake and deleted those
words.
In fact, the original ecosystem itself was perfectly OK —
wild, free, happy, healthy, and beautiful.
Its problems didn’t begin until tropical primate refugees wandered in. They were homeless vagabonds who had strayed
far from their ancestral roots in Mother Africa, and they were cursed with
being a bit too smart for their britches — and quite a bit lacking in wisdom
and foresight.
Peter Ungar wrote that our wild ancestors were a part
of nature, but domestication drove them apart from it. As the control freak hysteria bloomed, an
abusive relationship was born, and over time became deeply rooted and
dangerous. Over time, the one-two punch
of plant and animal domestication conjured a furious host of monsters into
existence, an ever growing tsunami of ecological devastation.
Like all other animals, tropical primates are mostly focused
on the here and now. We instantly pay
acute attention to immediate risks like lions, tornados, or rattlesnakes. Risks that take decades or generations to
snowball into terrific destruction are of little or no concern to us. They might seem like theoretical abstractions,
farts in the bathtub. Since few of us
have a competent understanding of environmental history, we may not even
recognize the presence of powerful trends, directly in front of our eyes, which
will eventually hurl our civilization off the cliff.
Since I got up this morning, I have experienced no jarring
evidence of the growing global climate catastrophe. If I wasn’t devoted to regularly paying close
attention to a narrow fringe of the info stream from the outer world, the
climate crisis would seem insignificant, and easy to sweep under the rug. Just another hoax. La-de-dah!
In the mainstream mindset, ecological sustainability is simply not a
matter for primary concern, or a proper subject for polite conversation. If nice people on TV tell us that electric
cars are sustainable, then… << SHAZAM! >> …they are!
Eco-History Heroes
“The sky is falling!
The sky is falling!” Shut up
Chicken Little! You’re nothing but a
messed up negativity bomb, a batshit crazy doom pervert. What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see that everything is beautiful,
and the best is yet to come? Get a life! Jeez!
Well, in the old folk tale, Chicken Little had a long and annoying habit
of screaming fake warnings of danger.
Then, one day, when genuine danger was actually rushing toward the
village, nobody believed Chicken Little, and what happened next was not happy.
With regard to the ecological impacts of plant and animal
domestication, a substantial portion of the Chicken Little warnings have not
been hysterical false alarms. They are
very often accurate and serious. Every
farmer understands that tilling leads to erosion, that the precious topsoil is
nonrenewable, and when it’s gone, game over.
When many irrigation pumps are working to empty an ancient fossil
aquifer, everyone knows that this water is nonrenewable. The aquifer will run dry in a predictable
number of years, and the temporary flourish of prosperity will screech to a
halt and disintegrate. Everyone
understands the irreparable damage caused by logging and overgrazing over time. So what?
We will have a nice warm dinner tonight.
All is well.
Unfortunately, many catastrophes take decades or centuries
for the hammer to finally drop — like how salinization transformed
Mesopotamia’s prosperous agriculture into a lifeless brown wasteland. If I can probably get away with unsustainable
behavior that benefits me, I just might be tempted to do it. All other animals have figured out how to
live sustainably. Humans are the only
critters that ravage ecosystems, often unknowingly, and often selfishly.
(Sigh!) The memorable
meme of the week is, “common sense is a punishment.” Making a commitment to being present in full
dose reality is a mind altering experience.
It can overwhelm you with righteous rage, or reduce you to a flaccid
puddle of despair. It can make you
quietly laugh at the absurdity of it all, the unbelievable comedy of errors,
the fantastic power of ignorance.
Anyway, for me here at the keyboard, the task of presenting a
thorough and well-organized analysis of the consequences of plant and animal
domestication is challenging. The impacts
have been huge, complex, and all tangled together — not easy to sort into neat
and tidy subject packets. So I
won’t. My fuzzy plan here is to
intuitively meander where the muse inspires, jabber about stuff that feels
important to say, and let my dear readers fill in the blanks. I don’t want this document to end up being
30,000 pages long, and neither do you.
And now, at last, I shall get to the point of this
heading. Throughout the centuries,
wizards have appeared who had the amazing ability to perceive reality, to
actually see big juju that was happening right in front of their eyes. They had something like Superman’s x-ray
vision, allowing them to see what others could not — the total insanity of
their culture, the staggering irreparable damage to the ecosystem, the complete
disregard for the generations yet to be born.
Of the mountains of stuff that we acquire and discard in
life, almost all of it is silly crap that no healthy animal needs — cars, TVs,
cell phones, etc. Food is
different. Food matters. It’s a powerful addiction for which death is
the only release. Domestication has a
lot to do with food. Domestication has
also created countless highly destructive unintended consequences. Environmental history books are packed with
these horror stories. Who reads
them? Most folks seem to be floating on
a comfortable cloud of blissful ignorance and childlike magical thinking. Things will turn out OK.
Since you have managed to make it this far in my long and
windy word dance, there’s a fair chance that you might be a bit interested in
this realm of knowledge. While I still
have your attention, I’d like to recommend a few of my favorite sources of high
quality brain food. Most are free
downloads (ask Google), and others require a visit to your friendly local
library. If you develop an intimate
relationship with this knowledge, you may get up one morning, look in the
mirror, and see that there is a brand new Chicken Little in the world. Hooray!
Let’s take a quick stroll through a gallery of some important Chicken
Little heroes.
Man
and Nature
Twenty-five years ago, a wise guy recommended that I read Man and
Nature, by George Perkins Marsh, published in 1864. (The second edition in 1874 was titled The
Earth as Modified by Human Action.)
He was a visionary who helped set the stage for the modern ecology
movement, and the study of environmental history. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you? Probably not.
His book was not a bestseller, but it sold fairly well over time. It did not succeed in derailing the
self-destructive juggernaut of industrial civilization, but it was a noble
effort, and its message is still valid and important.
Long ago at school, I learned all about the glories of Greek
and Roman civilization. Marsh was
probably taught a similar load of pretentious doo-doo. As the U.S. ambassador to Italy and Turkey,
he had been able to actually visit regions that were once the realm of thriving
civilizations. What he observed gave him
a powerful dope slap. One way or
another, each had been reduced to an ecological train wreck.
Ancient forest mining in the watersheds of Italy’s Po and
Adige rivers resulted in devastating erosion over the centuries, and huge volumes
of silt spread down the coastline of the Adriatic Sea. Marsh wrote, “Ravenna, forty miles south of
the principal mouth of the Po, was built like Venice, in a lagoon, and the
Adriatic still washed its walls at the commencement of the Christian era. The mud of the Po has filled up the lagoon,
and Ravenna is now four miles from the sea.
The town of Adria, which lies between the Po and the Adige, at the
distance of some four or five miles from each, was once a harbor famous enough
to have given its name to the Adriatic sea, and it was still a seaport in the
time of Augustus. The combined action of
the two rivers has so advanced the coast line that Adria is now about fourteen
miles inland, and, in other places, the deposits made within the same period by
these and other neighboring streams have a width of twenty miles.”
It’s a plump book loaded with fascinating revelations, but it
is written in an obsolete academic style that some bookworms may find rather
tedious and difficult. Apparently, at
the time of writing, there was a serious shortage of periods in the U.S., which
forced Marsh to write sentences as long as 230+ words. (My next recommendation is much easier to
read, and equally important.) There are
several ways of downloading Man and Nature.
Topsoil
and Civilization
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.
Stops include the Nile, Mesopotamia, Crete, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine,
Greece, North Africa, Italy, and more.
Attentive folks will discover that these ecological disaster areas had
many factors in common — a long list of fatal mistakes that civilizations
remain committed to repeating, up to today.
Tom and Vern were not ditzy cheerleaders for civilization. They wrote, “The very achievements of
civilized man have been the most important factors in the downfall of
civilizations.” Civilized man had the
tools and intelligence needed “to domesticate or destroy a great part of the
plant and animal life around him.”
Unfortunately, “His chief troubles came from his delusions that his
temporary mastership was permanent. He
thought of himself as ‘master of the world,’ while failing to understand fully
the laws of nature.”
When reputable scholars make great efforts to describe
serious challenges, it is obligatory to provide a happy ending, where they
reveal their brilliant silver bullet solutions.
Today, there are hordes of hucksters selling magic cures for every
environmental malady, and most of their elixirs have a pungent aroma of hopium
and bull excrement. Tom and Vern’s cure
was soil conservation, a fantasy of permanent agriculture that
could feed a gradually growing crowd for the next 10,000 years. Yeah, right.
At the same time, they were painfully aware that humankind
was ravaging the land. “The fact is that
there has probably been more man-induced erosion over the world as a whole
during the past century than during any preceding thousand-year period. There are many reasons for the recent rapid
acceleration of erosion, but the principal reasons are that the world has more
people and the people are more civilized and hence are capable of destroying
the land faster.” The book is a bit
bipolar, but most of it, the historical passages, are excellent. Great stuff!
Free PDF is HERE. It is not available in some countries, for
copyright reasons, but I saw a pirate copy on Google yesterday.
Gilgamesh,
Plato, and Ovid
It’s interesting but sad that the Chicken Little movement is
very old. Folks have been jumping up and
down and shouting their pain for a very long time, but civilization is a
merciless steam roller.
The Epic
of Gilgamesh was written in about 2700 B.C.
It described the creation of the city of Uruk, along the Euphrates
River. The process involved massive
deforestation along the valley, which unleashed immense erosion and flooding. 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 destruction is referred to as
“Humbaba’s roar.”
The Greek philosopher Plato wrote Critias in about 360
B.C. In the dialog, the speaker laments
how the land has deteriorated over time.
The forests were almost gone, and so was the rich soil on the mountains
and plains. Rains quickly run off the
bare earth, and springs no longer flow.
The land is drying out. Compared
to the better days of years past, only a skeleton of the earlier land
remained.
Many years later, not long before the time of Jesus, the
Roman poet Ovid wrote a similar poem in the third book of his Amores
collection. It also expressed sadness
for the dark times of his day. Long ago,
wild crops were abundant. The land was
not divided into parcels, and no plows tore into the ground. “Clever human nature, victim of your
inventions, disastrously creative, why cordon cities with towered walls? Why arm for war?”
Conquest
of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years
In the 1940s, Walter
Lowdermilk created the short, quick, and easy primer on the ravages of
early civilizations. In the 1920s, he
visited the Yellow River (Hwang Ho) basin in China. Floods and famines had been hammering the
Yellow River for 4,000 years, sweeping away millions of lives. The basin is covered with a deep blanket of
yellowish, nutrient-rich loess soil, dumped there by winds during the ice
age. Prior to the expansion of
agriculture and population, ancient forests held the upland loess in
place. After the forests were
eliminated, rain runoff increased, erosion increased, and the long era of
catastrophic floods was born. The Yellow
River has long had a fitting nickname: China’s Sorrow. Lowdermilk discovered a surreal nightmare
world of enormous erosion
gullies up to 600 feet (183 m) deep.
In 1938 and 1939, he was sent to Western Europe, North
Africa, and the Middle East, to make observations, and report on his
findings. He visited many of the ancient
sites mentioned by George Perkins Marsh — and he took a camera with him. He saw many devastated wastelands, some
reduced to bare bedrock, which had once been prosperous, densely populated
regions. This wasn’t about climate
change. Common causes included deforestation,
overgrazing, soil salinization, planting on sloped land, and failure to
maintain irrigation canals and hillside terraces.
Lowdermilk boiled the core story down to a booklet. More than a million copies have been
printed. His photos are shocking
testimonials to the unintended consequences of domestication and
civilization. The booklet can be read in
one sitting.
The text bounces from disaster to disaster, providing a brief
description of each. In Tunisia, he
observed the site of Cuicul, a magnificent city in Roman times, which had been
entirely buried, except for three feet (1 m) of one column poking out of the
soil. It took 20 years of digging to
expose the remarkable ruins. Today, the
land can support only a few inhabitants.
Likewise, the Minoan city of Jerash, a village of 3,000 people, was once
home to 250,000. In Syria, he observed a
million acres (404,685 ha) of manmade desert, dotted with a hundred dead
villages.
I don’t want to spoil the excitement of your reading
experience by summarizing most of the subjects.
Keep in mind that the stories he tells are the result of good
old-fashioned muscle-powered organic farming, and organic grass-fed
herding. The harms were the result of
human actions inspired by ignorance or tradition, not the fickle whims of
nature. Compared to modern industrial
agriculture, the early farmers and herders were childlike amateurs at
ecocide. We have, unfortunately, become
champions.
Against
the Grain
James C.
Scott teaches political science and anthropology at Yale. He’s a smooth writer and a deep thinker. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of
the Earliest States, he focused his discussion on southern Mesopotamia,
because it was the birthplace of the earliest genuine states. What are states? They are hierarchical societies, with rulers
and tax collectors, rooted in a mix of farming and herding. The primary food of almost every early Old
World state was wheat, barley, or rice.
Taxes were paid with grain, which was easier to harvest, transport, and
store. States often had armies,
defensive walls, palaces or ritual centers, slaves, and maybe a king or queen.
The root of “domestication” is “domus” (the household). In early Mesopotamia, “the domus was a unique
and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields, seed and grain stores,
people, and domestic animals, all coevolving with consequences no one could
have possibly foreseen.” As a result of
living on the domus, animals (including humans) were changed, both physically
and behaviorally. Over time, some wild
species became “fully domesticated” — genetically altered, entirely dependent
on humans for their survival.
Domestication was also about deliberate control over reproduction, which
“applied not only to fire, plants, and animals but also to slaves, state
subjects, and women in the patriarchal family.”
Domesticated sheep have brains 24 percent smaller than their
wild ancestors. Pig brains are a third
smaller. Protected from predators,
regularly fed, with restricted freedom of movement, the process of
domestication made livestock less alert, less anxious, less aggressive — pudgy
passive dimwit meatballs. They reached
reproductive age sooner, and produced far more offspring.
“The multispecies resettlement camp was, then, not only a
historic assemblage of mammals in numbers and proximity never previously known,
but it was also an assembly of all the bacteria, protozoa, helminthes, and
viruses that fed on them.” The domus was
a magnet for uninvited guests: fleas, ticks, leeches, mosquitoes, lice, and
mites. Unnatural crowds of animals spent
their lives walking around in poop, and drinking dirty water. It was a devilishly brilliant incubator for
infectious diseases.
Dense monocultures of plants also begged for trouble. “Crops not only are threatened, as are
humans, with bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases, but they face a host of
predators large and small — snails, slugs, insects, birds, rodents, and other
mammals, as well as a large variety of evolving weeds that compete with the
cultivar for nutrition, water, light, and space.” Once harvested and stored in the granary,
grain could be lost to weevils, rodents, and fungi. The biggest vulnerability of states was that
they were almost entirely dependent on a single annual harvest of one or two
staple grains. Crops could be wiped out
by drought, flood, pests, storm damage, or crop diseases.
Anyway, the book is fascinating. Readers also learn about the tax game, the
vital slave industry, trade networks, deforestation, erosion, soil
salinization, irrigation, looting and raiding, mass escapes of workers, the
challenges and benefits of being surrounded by large numbers of aggressive
nomadic herders, and on and on. It’s an
outstanding book!
Great,
But Not Free
A Forest
Journey by John Perlin is a fabulous history of forest mining. In the era of domestication, forests were
cleared to create cropland and pastures.
Trees were cut to make lumber.
Wood was like the petroleum of earlier times, a source of both energy
and wealth. It was used for heating
buildings, glassmaking, ceramics, smelting, casting, brickmaking, and so
on. Trees were a form of treasure, and
treeless societies might be willing to take your trees by bloody force (and often
did).
Against the
Grain by Richard Manning presents a rigorous critique of agriculture in an
easy to read format. He slings snappy
lines like: “There is no such thing as sustainable agriculture. It does not exist.” Or, “The domestication of wheat was
humankind’s greatest mistake.”
Agriculture is one of humankind’s most troublesome experiments, and it
is now hopelessly in debt. It has
borrowed soil, water, and energy that it can never repay, and never intended to
repay — burning up tomorrow to feed today.
We know it, we keep doing it, and we have dark hallucinations about
feeding billions more. Agriculture has
become civilization’s tar baby.
Dirt:
The Erosion of Civilizations by geologist David Montgomery provides a
fascinating discussion about an extremely precious substance that we can’t live
without, but treat like dirt. He begins
with an intimate explanation of what dirt is, how it’s formed, and how it’s
destroyed — in plain, simple English.
Then, he proceeds to lead us on an around-the-world tour, spanning many
centuries, to examine the various methods that societies have devised for mining
their soils, and sabotaging their future via agriculture.
He concludes, “Continued for generations, till-based
agriculture will strip soil right off the land as it did in ancient Europe and
the Middle East. With current
agricultural technology though, we can do it a lot faster.” Nature is far smarter. “Mother earth never attempts to farm without
livestock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the
soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animals wastes are converted
into humus; there is no waste; the process of growth and the process of decay
balance one another.”
