Wild Free and Happy Sample 64

 [Note: This is a new section from the rough draft of Wild, Free, & Happy. This is probably the end of the body text.  These samples start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE (if you happen to have some free time). 

Helter Skelter

Stephen Pyne has spent a lifetime thinking about fire.  Without the ability to use fire as a powerful tool, humans could have never migrated out of tropical Africa and colonized the outer world. 

When human pioneers eventually reached the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, they discovered plant and animal species that were especially ideal for domestication.  This region became known as the Cradle of Civilization.  Its development enabled us to accelerate our long and painful march to the staggering eco-horrors of today. 

Pyne is especially concerned about industrial fire.  Its combustion of fossil fuel results in carbon emission levels that are turbocharging an angry swarm of catastrophes.  “Our ecological effects have had the impact of a slow collision with an asteroid… together we have so reworked the planet that we now have remade biotas, begun melting most of the relic ice, turned the atmosphere into a crock pot, and the oceans into acid vats.”

Fire made us the unusual creatures we have become.  Our colonization of the world was like a spreading human wildfire that expanded across unspoiled wildernesses in search of fuel.  We enjoyed feasting on megafauna until they became scarce, at which point we advanced into new regions.  Over time, hungry humans ran out of unoccupied territory to expand into.  Oh-oh!

Groups had to revise their menus to include different food sources.  Aggressive groups could attempt to smash their way into territories inhabited by other groups.  As the millennia passed, and populations grew, friction between groups increased and spilled blood became more common. 

Weaker groups were more likely to be swept aside.  For example, of all the surviving wild cultures, the San people have the oldest DNA.  Their time-proven way of life was incredibly sustainable.  Their original homeland territory was vast, but over time, farmers and herders eventually snatched most of it away, forcing the San to retreat to the harsh Kalahari Desert.  By the 1970s, their traditional way of life had taken a serious beating.

Alfred Crosby summed up a bedrock lesson of history: “Winning streaks are rarely permanent.”  Like the traditional San people, most of the countless wild cultures that once existed sooner or later got blindsided by stuff like disease, colonization, capitalism, genocide, urbanization, and so on.  The wild cultures that still survive are not safe and secure.  Intruders from the outer world rarely enjoy a warm and fuzzy reputation for being kind and caring ladies and gentlemen. 

Meanwhile, in the fast lane, the human wildfire learned how to paddle down rivers, sail across oceans, roll on railways, drive across continents, fly through the clouds, zoom to the moon, vaporize cities, produce enough food to feed billions, blindside a stable climate, exterminate vast forests, and turn Earth into a loony bin for hordes of lost and confused primates.

Big History is a million-page catalog of countless bloody dog-eat-dog conflicts between tribes, nations, religions, and empires.  The strongest usually triumphed over the weakest, because the weak had no right to what they could not defend.  But those who remained in the fast lane were still vulnerable to getting blindsided by brutal surprises.

Sadly, glowing screens and motor vehicles are more precious than wooly mammoths or healthy planets.  The wizards of progress are guiding us toward a future of unimaginable prosperity, decarbonized energy, and tremendous achievements in family planning.  Everyone will eagerly cooperate.  Really?  Well, if you believe it, it’s true!

Animal in the Mirror

Pyne noted, “Without fire humanity sinks to a status of near helplessness, a plump chimp with a scraping stone and digging stick, hiding from the night’s terrors, crowding into minor biotic niches.”  In other words, an ordinary wild animal.

Since Neanderthals disappeared from the stage, our closest living relatives are now the chimps and bonobos, with whom we share up to 99 percent of our genes.  They have lived in the same forests, in the same way, for several million years, without degrading their ecosystem, starting a fire, or fooling around with tools fancier than sticks or stones.  They luckily benefit from their isolation, and the fact that their traditional habitat does not contain valuable resources that are tempting to greed monsters from outer space.

In his book Grandfather, Tom Brown shared a beautiful story he heard from his mentor Stalking Wolf, a traditional Apache from desert country, who traveled widely over the years, from the Amazon to Alaska, living off the land, and learning from it.  One time, while in Alaska as winter approached, he frantically had to stock up on food and firewood for the coming months. 

A bit later, when the snows arrived, he became fascinated by the ptarmigans, birds that survived in the frigid climate by their wits alone, sleeping in cozy snowdrifts.  They belonged in this arctic land, like the lizards belonged in Death Valley.  Lizards could not survive in Alaska, and ptarmigans could not survive on the desert. 

With the use of specialized tools, our species could survive almost anywhere.  But Grandfather felt uncomfortable because humans without fire and tools can only survive in special ecosystems.  He deeply wanted to genuinely belong somewhere, like the ptarmigans and lizards.  Over the passage of time, their way of life had become fine tuned for surviving in the ecosystems they inhabited.

Dear reader, this is a tremendously important point.  Animals that are wild, free, and happy are perfectly at home in the wild ecosystems they inhabit.  Like squirrels in an oak forest, they live where they belong, and remain intimately attuned to their habitat.

Our hominin ancestors fanned out across the planet, and eventually generated assorted impacts, including numerous extinctions.  Today, most of the mob of eight billion no longer lives and thinks like healthy wild animals.  A number of cultures have developed worldviews and lifestyles that are self destructively unclever, and ferociously brutal to the family of life.

Jay Griffiths wrote that humans evolved as highly alert nomadic hunters and foragers.  “We were made to walk through our lives wildly awake.”  Modern lifestyles are often mind-numbing routines — the opposite of the freedom we so deeply need.  When healthy wildness deteriorates into passive obedience, we become vulnerable to the burning pain of cage rage.  Very often, the daily news seems to be a barrage of batshit crazy cage rage stories from a wheezing world.

Timothy Scott Bennett concluded that we modern consumers were born and raised in captivity, something like zoo animals, the opposite of free, wildly awake, and at one with the land.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi biologist.  One of the spirits in their tribal traditions is Windigo, a monstrous demon cursed with a voracious appetite.  The more it eats, the hungrier it becomes.  In the old days, Windigo was notorious for hunting too hard, and not sharing with others, leading to hunger times.

Later, uninvited pale faced invaders from outer space smashed into tribal lands.  Native folks were stunned by their pathological foolishness.  Around the world, colonists have now created countless Windigo whirlwinds of mining, deforestation, industrial agriculture, overhunting, and insatiable shopping. 

Today, the hurricane of daily news from around the world shouts that the Windigo spirit has become a horrific global superpower.  Billions of folks everywhere eagerly dream of having more, more, more.  Even the superrich are maniacally grabbing and hoarding as much status glitter as possible.  This is not the path to a balanced and healthy future.

The Future?

In the preceding pages, I have explored my core question: how did things get to be this way?  Now what?  Humankind is deep in overshoot, and zooming down the path to a treacherously exciting future without brakes or safety nets.  My computer has a wonderful Undo function that can easily vaporize a sequence of mistakes.  Nature does not.  If you broke it, you bought it.

For folks who have more than a dozen working brain cells, the growing number of climate change reports and news stories are overwhelming.  It’s not a fake news hoax (unless you pretend it is).  Indeed, folks who yank off their blinders can discover a nonstop firehose of heartbreaking stories about floods, furious storms, heat waves, droughts, crop failures, melting glaciers, massive wildfires, and on and on — week after week after week.

Our foolishly unclever culture, hobbled by limited understanding and foresight, has successfully conjured into existence a colossal whirlwind of bad juju.  Eight billion consumers, with their famously big brains, are stampeding down the fast lane to a turbulent blind date with the rough justice of overshoot.  How embarrassing!

Fare Thee Well!

Dearest reader, congratulations!  One way or another, you’ve arrived at the skanky rear end of this word dance.  Pressure is visibly rising around the world, rivets are popping on the Titanic, and the global circus has become a freakshow of wildfires, climate catastrophes, conspiracy theories, religious fanaticism, cocky neofascism, merciless dog-eat-dog greed, berserk cage rage, pathological status seeking, fire-breathing patriarchy, and all-purpose bad craziness.  Something seems to be out of balance.  Like the old Chinese proverb warns, we are living in interesting times.

OK!  I’ve said what I needed to say.  I hope you’ve had some kind of meaningful experience with my literary monsterpiece.  Good luck!  Do your best!

An Innocent Booboo?

Finally, a weird idea.  Kindling the first domestic fire by spinning a fire drill stick was not, in any way, an obvious thing for a wild African primate to do.  The uncomfortable possibility is that maybe just one individual ancestor (a kid?) discovered it purely by accident, and it consequently unleashed two million years of change and catastrophe, and created the global horror show outside your window.  Whoops!  Undo! Undo! Undo!  Shit!

Wild New World

 

Dan Flores is a historian who has been studying the stormy relationship between humans and the family of life for many years.  He calls this subject Big History.  Wild New World is a fascinating and disturbing masterpiece.  It’s a thick book loaded with ideas gathered over a long career.  The core focus is on North America, which was once an Eden-like paradise of abundant wildlife.  What happened?

Our species emerged in beautiful Mother Africa maybe 300,000 years ago.  Maybe 60,000 years ago, adventurous folks began wandering off into the outer world.  Our exploration of the planet was underway.  Folks went east to Asia, and north to Europe.  By maybe 45,000 years ago, folks were in Siberia and northern Asia.  So far, the earliest evidence of humans in America dates to maybe 25,000 years ago.

Flores described two important discoveries in New Mexico.  At Folsom (1908), the bones of 32 extinct giant bison, 12,450 years old.  At Clovis (1914) the bones of extinct mammoths, 13,000 years old.  At both sites, flaked flint points were found with the bones, smoking gun evidence of human hunting.  A huge surprise!

Humans were team hunters skilled at killing delicious wild animals, preferably jumbo sized megafauna.  As bands of pioneers migrated into new frontiers, a number of megafauna species gradually went extinct, in one region after another, a sequence corresponding to the timeline of human arrival. 

Today, our culture celebrates human brilliance.  We’re simply too smart to disrupt the planet’s climate — global warming is a hoax!  We deny responsibility — not our fault.  Similarly, we’re too smart to cause mass extinctions — not our fault. 

It’s much more comfortable to blame prehistoric climate change.  But the wiped-out species in America had survived for millions of years, including numerous eras of unusual heat and cold.  They weren’t dainty weaklings.  Why did this killer climate shift only exterminate large animals, not small?  Why did it just affect America, but not other continents at the same time?  Hmmm…

In the 1960s, Paul Martin began using a new technology, radiocarbon dating, a better tool for dating prehistoric artifacts.  This enabled him to compare the dates of human presence in North America with the dates of extinctions.  He learned that human arrival came first, and extinctions came later — during a process that took maybe a thousand years. 

Stunned, he referred to this process as “blitzkrieg overkill,” because of its unusual speed.  To Native Americans, this implied that their venerable ancestors foolishly hunted too hard.  They’ve never been fond of the paleface settlers who foolishly obliterated their ancient homeland, and they especially disliked Martin.

We’ve now learned that as the human diaspora advanced around the world, the same pattern followed: arrival first, then extinction.  By 2006, Martin had learned more.  He wrote, “I argue that virtually all extinctions of wild animals in the last 50,000 years were anthropogenic.”  Yikes!  The indigenous white folks of Europe had done it too!

Evolution had fine-tuned us for living in tropical climates.  Many of the new lands we wandered into had uncomfortably chilly non-tropical climates.  We were forced to develop innovative solutions, like needles, awls, sewn clothing, and protective shelters. 

When we arrived in new regions, the wildlife was clueless.  Mysterious bipedal primates did not trigger danger alarms, because we didn’t fit the standard predator template.  “We were a brilliant new predator with sophisticated weapons, dogs, and fire.”  For a while, hunters enjoyed the pursuit of fearless prey, many of whom became victims of fatal tameness, like dodos.  During the Lewis & Clark expedition, Clark once bayoneted a wolf that calmly walked past.

Hunting focused on jumbo sized animals that didn’t breed like bunnies, or zoom like gazelles.  Small groups of humans roamed across vast roadless wilderness on foot, armed with Stone Age weapons.  Game was depleted over the course of centuries, and the process of decline could have been imperceptible to living generations.  As game got scarce, the diaspora advanced into new regions.

Everywhere we migrated, the megafauna had evolved large strong bodies, a traditional defense against fierce predators, like sabertooth cats.  Unfortunately, when the predators were bloodthirsty primates from outer space, jumbo size was a vulnerability, and high speed escape was not an option.  The big guys could be killed with primitive spears.

America was the last major stop of the human diaspora, which had begun maybe 35,000 years earlier.  During this long process, pioneers had become highly skilled survivalists.  When the Beringia land bridge emerged from the sea, they advanced from Siberia into the “American Serengeti.”

I was shocked to realize the very long time spans of evolutionary history prior to human arrival.  The camel family in North America blinked out 10,000 years ago, ending a 40 million year residence.  Horses went extinct 9,000 years ago, after enjoying four million years here.  Mammoths wandered in from the Old World 1.5 million years ago.  It’s heartbreaking to comprehend the impact of the blitzkrieg.

IMPORTANT!  So, a number of species blinked out.  When the American megafauna extinction surge wound down, what came next was 10,000 years (100 centuries) of relative stability, according to Flores.  The human pioneers remained, and eventually coevolved with the species that survived.  This preserved the continent’s downsized wildlife community.  Humans learned ecosystem limits, established wise taboos to avoid overhunting, and nurtured a culture of profound respect and reverence for the entire family of life. 

Species that survived extinction now had less competition.  With the giant bison gone forever, the much smaller bison we know today exploded in number.  They reached reproductive age faster, and successfully coevolved with the remaining survivors.  

Sadly, the 100 centuries of stability zoomed off a cliff 500 years ago, when visitors from the Old World began washing up on the Atlantic coast — something like a bloody asteroid strike.  The aliens brought with them an assortment of deadly infectious diseases for which natives had zero immunity.  There were maybe four million natives in 1492.  Epidemics rapidly spread westward, killing about 90 percent of them within 100 years. 

This die-off sharply reduced hunting pressure on the wildlife, which was free to grow explosively.  In 1585, Thomas Hariot was astonished by the fantastic abundance of animals he saw in Virginia.  It was an Eden created by disease.  Settlers were free to hunt like crazy in a wilderness where there were no rules or regulations. 

In addition to diseases, colonists also imported their infectious worldview.  Their religion had roots in a herding society that treasured enslaved livestock, and detested predators.  Their Old World culture was built on a foundation of human supremacy, domestication, civilization, manufacturing, fanaticism, patriarchy, environmental devastation, and pathological self-interest. 

From time to time, Flores stopped to take a long hard piss on the notion of self-interest, a demonic quirk in the settler’s worldview.  I suspect it emerged with the rise of farming, herding, personal property, and individual salvation.  Its one all-consuming question has been “how can I get what I want?”  We suffer from an insatiable lifelong pursuit of social status, to the fullest extent possible, by any means necessary.  Nothing else matters.  Sorry kids!  Sorry wolves!

The traditional worldview of most tribal cultures majored in cooperation instead.  It nurtured mindfulness, and profound reverence for the family of life, the mother of their existence.  They were something like the folks who made the passionate cave paintings at Chauvet.  With few exceptions, the named gods of Native Americans were animals — coyote, raven, rabbit, etc. 

In the Old World religion, humans were very special critters, the other animals were not.  By and by, settlers from the Old World flooded into America.  They had domesticated animals and religions and economic ideas wherein “animals were not kin but resources.”  Their lives had no sacred significance.  So, the more hides, pelts, and furs you could take to market, the more cool stuff you could get.  Yippee!

Native folks thoroughly detested the monstrous colonists, but were fascinated by the unusual stuff they had.  Fifty deerskins could be traded for a metal pot.  Hatchets, axes, and knives were more expensive.  Whiskey was intoxicating.  The desire for this stuff was powerful, but it wasn’t free.

It was in the self-interest of the market, and the colonies, to leave nothing of monetary value unmolested.  Wild animals were pests that stood in the path of progress, and their extermination would continue until it was no longer profitable.  For natives, all options sucked.  They struggled to do their best.

In 1972, I was a roller coaster operator.  Riders slowly went up the steep hill, and then rapidly zoomed downhill screaming their brains out.  Flores provides readers a similar experience.  Most of his book describes the terrifying mass insanity that ravaged America in the last 500 years.  Readers will scream their brains out as they plunge deep into the cesspool of Big History, our horrifying monster closet.

Flores wrote that the invaders forced “a transformation of a hundred centuries of Native America into a re-creation of Old World civilization on a new continent.”  Five centuries ago, Old World folks and animals arrived, “and then, like some new contagion spreading inland from the coasts, proceeded to effect a widespread demolition of almost all that was here.”

In one year, 1743, the port at La Rochelle, France “took in 127,000 beaver pelts, 30,300 marten furs, 12,400 river otter furs, 110,000 raccoon pelts, along with its big haul for that year, the stripped skins of 16,500 American black bears.”

“In 1874 Bozeman market hunters were hip-deep in the big bonanza.  That year they shipped out 48 tons of elk skins, 42 tons of deerskins, 17 tons of pronghorn skins, and 760 pounds of bighorn skins.”

“Governments at all levels paid money for the heads or ears or scalps of a suite of animals — wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, grizzly and black bears, jaguars, bobcats, lynx — for the single purpose of promoting agricultural economies.”  Dead animals (or meat chunks) injected with strychnine were put everywhere to poison scavengers — wolves, coyotes, eagles, vultures, ravens, magpies, foxes, skunks.  It was sold in bulk in every store.

To delight ranchers, Montana put out 3,567,000 poison baits to kill predators.  Between 1883 and 1928 Montana shelled out payments on 111,545 wolves and 886,367 coyotes.  In one year, a wolf killer earned enough to buy a ranch and livestock.

Passenger pigeons, had been in America for 15 million years.  My father was in diapers when the last one died in 1914.  “The largest nesting site ever reported, near Sparta, Wisconsin, in 1871, spread across 850 square miles (2,200 km²).”  One flock was estimated to have 3.7 billion birds. 

Life on Earth is powered by energy.  Sunbeams feed the plants, and plants feed the critters.  Agriculture and herding amplified the energy flow for humans.  More recently, the flow has been explosively accelerated by burning fossil hydrocarbons, which are not limitless or harmless.  We can now temporarily feed more than eight billion.  We’re heating the planet into a toasty concentration camp crematory.  The machine’s guiding force is insanely clever childish self-interest, which is dumber than dog shit, but far more powerful than foresight, wisdom, cooperation, and mindful self-control.  SCREAM!!!

Flores, Dan, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals & People in America, W. W. Norton, New York, 2022.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 25.5

 [Note: This is a new section in my rough draft of a far from finished book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  It will be inserted before sample 26.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

STUMBLING INTO DOMESTICATION

In his lecture, Four Domestications, James Scott described four turning points that radically changed the course of the human saga — the domestication of fire, plants, animals, and ourselves.  We domesticated ourselves by radically changing the way we lived, in order to protect and nurture the survival and growth of crops and herds.  We controlled their lives, and they controlled ours.  Many tasks had to be performed at specific times for optimal results — tilling, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, etc.  Herders also fine-tuned their ongoing schedules and activities for the benefit of their livestock. 

We’ve already looked at the domestication of fire, and how this superpower radically altered the human saga.  It enabled tropical humans to survive in chilly non-tropical regions (snow country), colonize the planet, and eventually become participants in monstrous fire-breathing industrial civilizations.  This chapter will focus on plant and animal domestication, which mostly began within the last 13,000 years, and fired up the turbochargers for our high-speed one-way rocket ride into the unknown.

Supply and Demand

Mother Africa was the homeland where hominins first evolved maybe six million years ago.  Experts do not agree on when humans first emerged.  Estimates range from maybe 250,000 to 400,000 years ago.  For almost the entire human saga, our ancestors were nomadic foragers — hunters and gatherers.  Around 60,000 years ago, some pioneers decided to see the world, and began exploring the tropics of southern Asia, on a path toward Australia. 

Around 42,000 years ago, humans were present up north in Europe, a region with a temperate climate.  It was a major shift, moving outside of the tropical climate for which evolution had fine-tuned us.  The curiosity of these explorers helped to accelerate our journey to a stormy future.  Long term survival in a non-tropical region required loads of radical innovations.

As mentioned earlier, William Rees proposed two fundament ecological concepts.  (1) Every species will expand to all locations that are accessible to them, where conditions might allow their survival.  (2) When they expand into new habitat, they will utilize all available resources, until limits restrain them. 

Humans regularly bumped into limits as they colonized the world, and cleverness often provided ways to bypass the obstacles.  As long as wild foods were abundant, there was no need to pursue farming or herding, which required far more time, difficulty, and risk.  Large game was our ancestors’ preferred food but, over time, hunting a bit too much could gradually deplete the delicious herds.  Efforts then had to shift to class B and class C foods — small game, forest animals, waterfowl, fish, shellfish, insects, and so on. 

Barry Cunliffe noted that as the last ice age weakened, the climate warmed, and the more comfortable Holocene era began.  The forests of Europe were able to migrate northward from the Mediterranean, displacing some tundra regions, and their megafauna residents.  These forests were home to more solitary game like aurochs, boars, elk, deer, and small animals.  The total biomass of these forest animals was only 20 to 30 percent of the biomass of the tundra herds they replaced.  Reduced access to easy meat motivated lifestyle changes.  Folks learned that it was easier to survive in locations close to coastlines, lakes, rivers, and wetlands, where a year round supply of foods might be gathered.  This new way of living apparently worked well enough for a while. 

Diana Muir wrote an environmental history of New England, from the ice age to today.  On the tundra, folks hunted mastodons, horses, bison, and four species of mammoths.  There were sabertooth cats, giant bears, giant beavers, and musk oxen.  As the climate warmed, forests spread northward.  When the tundra megafauna declined, folks hunted for deer, bear, beaver, moose, waterfowl, turkeys, and heath hens. 

Rivers had huge runs of salmon, shad, and alewives.  Stuff like acorns and shellfish were reserved for famine food.  As game got scarce, shellfish became a mainstay.  An adult male would need 100 oysters or quahogs each day.  Thousands were dug and smoked for winter consumption, a tedious job.  In the lower layers of huge shell dumps were oyster shells 10 to 20 inches across (25 to 50 cm) — oysters 40 years old.  In higher levels, the shells got smaller and smaller. 

Eventually, the seeds of domesticated corn (maize), squash, and beans reached New England.  Tribes that pursued the new experiment could produce more food, and feed more people.  When fields were first cleared, and the virgin soil was still highly fertile, agricultural land might sometimes produce a hundred times more food than an equal area of wild land used by foragers.  Of course, population pressure is a predictable cause of social friction and bloody conflict.  Because they had no livestock, they had no manure to help conserve soil fertility, which declines over time, shrinking the harvests.

The big picture here is an endless struggle for survival, in which limits periodically stomped on the brakes, and cleverness often found new ways to temporarily sneak around them.  Cleverness is not an all-powerful miracle-making magic wand.  It also has limits, as the folks on Easter Island discovered, when the last tree fell (whoops!).  It’s not easy to cleverly sneak around food scarcity.  Options often boiled down to starvation, mindful family planning, or a blind leap into the mysterious realm of food production.

Cradle of Civilization

Jared Diamond seriously wondered why some cultures could remain rich and powerful for centuries, while many others rarely, if ever, had an opportunity to sniff prosperity’s butt.  He invested a massive number of brain cycles in a quest to find answers.  In 1987, he published his boat-rocking essay, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” [Link or Link]. 

He wrote, “Archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress.  In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.  With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism that curse our existence.”

Ten years later, in 1997, Diamond published his classic, Guns, Germs, and Steel, in which he presented a book length discussion of what he had learned.  Domestication emerged independently in maybe nine locations around the world, but one region in Eurasia played a starring role in influencing the chain of events that eventually led to the bruised, beaten, and bleeding world outside your window.

It began one day, thousands of years ago, when some intrepid pioneers happened to stumble into an amazing jackpot known as the Fertile Crescent, the Cradle of Civilization.  Gasp!  It was as if their wildest dreams had come true!  The place was home to a great abundance of wild game and plant foods — a heavenly paradise. 

Life was grand for a while, but as the mobs grew in number, they naturally smacked into more and more annoying limits.  Cleverness inspired behaviors and illusions that put folks on the treacherous path to farming and herding.  This generated a surge of temporary prosperity, while it permanently degraded the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, as centuries passed, the forests, soils, and wildlife got rubbished.  Paradise deteriorated into depleted cropland, deserts, ancient ruins, and persistent bloody conflicts.  The Fertile Crescent (like every other region), was not an ecosystem that could tolerate endless agriculture.  Diamond noted that farming is a slow motion act of ecological suicide.

In 2002, five years after Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond published a paper, “Evolution, consequences and future of plant and animal domestication.” [Link]  It presented some additional thoughts.  The emergence of domestication, maybe 10,500 years ago, inspired tremendous changes.  It commenced in Eurasia, primarily in the Fertile Crescent and parts of China, where the whims of “biogeographic luck” provided perfect conditions for seriously dangerous mischief. 

Not only were wild foods abundant, but an unusual number of the plant and animal species possessed characteristics that made them suitable for domestication.  Despite centuries of trial and error, clever humans have discovered that it’s impossible to domesticate the vast majority of plants and animals.  To be suitable for domestication, species must have specific collection of vulnerabilities.

For example, Diamond listed six obstacles that made it impossible to domesticate most large animal species.  Any one of these could prevent enslavement: (1) a diet not easily supplied by humans, (2) slow growth rate and long birth spacing, (3) nasty disposition, (4) reluctance to breed in captivity, (5) lack of follow-the-leader dominance hierarchies, and (6) a tendency to panic in enclosures or when faced with predators.  

Diamond wrote that there are maybe 200,000 wild plant species in the world, of which about 100 have been domesticated.  The Fertile Crescent was home several wild grasses that produced large cereal seeds (barley, einkorn, emmer, and spelt), a rich source of carbohydrates.  There were also several varieties of pulses (peas, beans, and lentils) that provided protein.  In the whole world, purely by random chance, the Fertile Crescent was the biggest treasure chest of future super foods, both plant and animal.  It was essentially ground zero for the birth of civilization.

Globally, there are 148 species of large land-dwelling mammalian herbivores and omnivores that weigh more than 100 pounds (45 kg).  Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 51 of these species, but none of them have been domesticated, because they luckily failed to meet all of the six criteria for enslavement.

Of the 148 species, just 14 have been domesticated.  Nine of the 14 only had regional significance, but five species eventually became multinational superstars.  The Fertile Crescent was home to four of the five: the goat, sheep, pig, and cow (horses are the fifth) — an amazing coincidence. 

Of the 14 domesticated species, 13 of them originated in Eurasia.  Consequently, it’s no coincidence that Eurasia played a primary role in the growth and spread of acute, highly infectious, epidemic crowd diseases.  Farming and herding created communities of humans that lived in unhealthy proximity to unnatural concentrations of livestock, poultry, rats, fleas, mosquitoes, etc. 

This encouraged a number of animal pathogens to adapt to human hosts, including influenza, smallpox, tuberculosis, plague, measles, and cholera.  Diamond noted, “Such diseases could not have existed before the origins of agriculture, because they can sustain themselves only in large dense populations that did not exist before agriculture, hence they are often termed crowd diseases.”

Nomadic foragers lived in small groups, enslaved no livestock or poultry, and periodically moved their camps — a brilliant strategy for avoiding diseases.  On the other hand, humans who lived in crowded villages and cities made tremendous advances in unsanitary living.  Crap and garbage was all over the place, all the time.  Rivers were the source of drinking water, and the dumping place for sewage and filth.  A later chapter will take a closer look at disease.

Diamond noted four developments that dimmed the future for hunter-gatherers, and encouraged the expansion of farming and herding.  (1) Over time, hunting gradually made large game less abundant.  (2) We learned new skills for collecting, processing, and storing foods.  (3) Societies competed, spurring innovations that improved our ability to survive.  (4) Growing populations required large-scale food production.

Folks who inhabited a paradise of plant and animal super foods, learned lots of tricks for maximizing food production.  Population surged, spurring the emergence of cities and civilizations.  Civilization encouraged the development of stuff like metallurgy, industry, deforestation, soil destruction, warfare, overcrowding, patriarchy, and slavery.

So, let’s rephrase what William Rees said about species.  (1) “Every civilization will expand to all locations that are accessible to them, where conditions might allow their survival.”  As they expand, they will take along their livestock, crop seeds, weaponry, culture, technology, religions, and diseases.  (2) “When they colonize new habitat, they will utilize all available resources, until limits restrain them.”

Eurasia spans from Europe to China.  The earliest centers of domestication were the Fertile Crescent and parts of China.  State of the art food production provided both centers with powerful advantages over their more humble neighbors.  The two centers became hubs for territorial expansion, and their languages, genes, tools, and cultural influences have spread around the world. 

This is a spooky story.  From the two hubs, the realm of farming and herding spread in many directions.  In the sixteenth century, European travelers began noticing striking similarities in Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and European languages.  They appeared to have a common ancestor.  As the years flowed by, scholars noticed that lots of other languages also had similarities.  A category was created to name this large assortment.

Visit Wikipedia’s discussion of Indo-European Languages.  See the maps that show how this language family spread across the Old World over time.  Around 500 years ago, the age of global colonization exported them to the Americas, Australia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere.  Today, the native language of about 46 percent of humankind, is an Indo-European tongue.

Drop a pebble in a calm pool of water, and rings of ripples spread in every direction.  Diamond wrote that humankind’s long and stormy story of food production, population growth, civilization, and global domination, began in the Fertile Crescent.  The pebble is called domestication.

Diamond lamented, “If they had actually foreseen the consequences, they would surely have outlawed the first steps towards domestication, because the archaeological and ethnographic record throughout the world shows that the transition from hunting and gathering to farming eventually resulted in more work, lower adult stature, worse nutritional condition, and heavier disease burdens.”

Looking back from the twenty-first century, we can readily see the many unnecessary wrong turns that our ancestors made.  At the same time, we can observe the world around us today, and readily see the catastrophes that those wrong turns triggered.  It’s heartbreaking.  Cleverness without foresight is a deadly duo.  It sure is an interesting time to be alive!

Wild Free and Happy Sample 34

[Note: This is the thirty-fourth 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 203 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.] 

Corn

Corn is a jumbo-sized tropical grass that can grow 10 feet (3 m) tall.  Some exotic strains can grow to 43 feet.  In many countries outside the U.S., “corn” means any type of grain, and “maize” is specific to the plant Zea mays (mays/maize).  Somewhere around 8000 B.C., corn was domesticated in Mesoamerica (the region spanning from central Mexico to Nicaragua).  Experts have many different opinions about when, where, and how it happened.  Over centuries, the wee, humble, mild-mannered wild grass was transformed into an amazing Super Plant — and a time bomb.

Domesticated corn, cattle, sheep, and wolves (dogs), are ecologically hobbled.  These mutants have little ability to survive outside the human sphere.  With corn, the rugged husks securely hold the kernels on the cob, inhibiting their ability to fall to the ground and produce the next generation.  If a field of mature corn is abandoned, the corn plants are likely to go extinct within two years or so. 

Even the corn of colonial America was phenomenally productive.  Paul Weatherwax wrote that typically, for each seed planted in Indian farming, folks could harvest 300, far better than Old World grains.  When conditions were perfect, it could yield up to 2,000 seeds.  Today, 33 percent of the U.S. corn crop is used for animal feed.  North American tribes had no livestock to feed, and turkeys were good at foraging.  Thus, essentially the entire harvest was food for humans, minus some seeds set aside for sowing next year’s crop.  After the seeds were stripped off, the cobs made excellent tailpipe cleaners (tree-friendly predecessors of toilet paper).

Corn began migrating into the eastern U.S. around maybe A.D. 200, but the heat loving tropical grass did not enjoy the shorter summers and cooler climate.  By 900, it had adapted to the temperate climate, and its use expanded.  By 1200, the corn culture had spread from Florida to Ontario.  In South America, corn expanded into regions of Peru and Chile.

Alfred Crosby noted that early white settlers in America were amazed by corn.  Sowing a bushel of wheat might yield 12 to 20 bushels at harvest time.  A bushel of corn might yield 200 bushels or more.  Corn was a fairly reliable producer that could be grown using simple tools and unskilled labor.  It could do OK on marginal soils, required minimal weeding, and could survive several frosts.  It also stored well.  Husks discouraged losses to birds.  When mature, ears could be left on the stalk and harvested later, without risk of spoilage.

In America, both settlers and Indians were far better nourished than the feeble porridge eating commoners of Europe.  Most folks in the future U.S. lived in rural areas, in low density, which discouraged epidemics.  Well-fed settlers bred like roaches and many of their kiddies survived to adulthood.  Folks had access to abundant land for expansion.  By 1775, the U.S. population was doubling every 25 years.  In 1790, half of Americans were younger than 16 years old.

Colonists brought with them a collection of Old World diseases.  Those pathogens had been created by combining dense crowds of malnourished people, with dense crowds of non-human animals, all living together in conditions terrible hygiene, filthy water, streets filled with garbage and excrement, and millions of fleas, lice, and rats.  Native Americans had no immunity to the deadly pathogens.  Clive Ponting wrote that up to 90 percent of them died from disease.  The death toll during the sixteenth century may have been close to 100 million. 

Among the Indians who survived the epidemics, the corn-growing tribes were the most vulnerable.  European colonists aggressively destroyed their fields and stored grain.  Nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes were not chained to a place by their food supply, so they could disappear into the forest, and kill settlers when they had the strategic advantage, when they were in the mood for rough justice.  But, for good reason, they often avoided contact with white folks, because the settlers were walking reservoirs of highly contagious deadly diseases. 

Hominins were nomadic for four million years.  More recently, humans have discovered that sedentary living provides some benefits, but they come at high cost to their health, security, sanity, their children, the environment, and so on.  Jared Diamond wrote a fascinating essay on the emergence of domestication.  It had a catchy title, “The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race.”  He noted, “In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.” 

Diamond mentioned the research done by George Armelagos, who studied the skeletons of 800 Native Americans found at the Dickson Mounds site in Illinois.  The upper level (newer) skeletons were farmers, and those found lower (older) were hunter-gatherers.  At birth, a hunter had a life expectancy of 26 years, and a farmer was 19 years. 

Hunters enjoyed a high quality diet of wild foods.  Farmers got adequate calories from starchy foods, but their corn-based diet lacked some amino acids, vitamins, and minerals.  Farmers lived in greater density, which was better for sharing diseases and parasites.

Farmers had almost 50 percent more tooth enamel defects, four times more iron-deficiency anemia, three times more bone lesions, and more spinal damage, probably from hard physical labor.  James Scott mentioned that women who regularly ground corn while squatting on their knees had deformed toes.

Forty years after Diamond’s heretical essay, Peter Ungar published a book that included newer research on changes in bones and teeth over the centuries.  He noted that in the New World, the average caries rate (tooth decay) for corn eaters was five times higher than for hunter-gatherers.  Also, corn eaters had far more caries than folks who ate Old World grains.

Importantly, Ungar did not forget to mention that even corn eating Indians had far better teeth than modern Americans who, for no good reason, consume staggering quantities of a devilish health-thrashing substance known as sugar.  It helps bacteria stick to the teeth, making it easier for them to colonize, accumulate, and produce lactic acid.  Sugar took away my mother’s teeth before I was born, and later gave her diabetes (which I got too).

And then, the choir sat down, and Michael Pollan stepped up to the pulpit, and proceeded to deliver a ferocious hellfire and brimstone attack on the Devil’s food — sugar.  Americans are getting as fat as heck, and their kiddies are likely to have a lower life expectancy than their mommies and daddies.  The old proverb says, you are what you eat.  Thus, literally, what Americans mostly are is processed corn.

Most of the excess calories we consume are made of corn.  Traditional table sugar (sucrose) is made from sugar cane or sugar beets.  In 1970s, the new kid on the block appeared — high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).  A bushel of corn (35 l) can produce 33 pounds (15 kg) of HFCS.  Junk food made with HFCS is extremely cheap, one dollar can buy 1,200 calories of body rotting garbage.  HFCS is commonly used in making processed foods, breakfast cereals, and soft drinks.  By 1999, the average American was annually devouring 37.5 pounds (17 kg) of HFCS, in addition to table sugar.  In 2018, we consumed 62.4 pounds of sugar (both HFCS and table sugar).

Of the world’s primary grains, corn has the most nutrient deficiencies.  In unprocessed corn kernels, the niacin is not in a free form, so your body can’t utilize it.  Niacin (vitamin B₃) is an essential nutrient.  Also, corn has some protein shortcomings — too little tryptophan or lysine (important amino acids).  Native Americans eventually figured out how to address these two challenges.

For the niacin issue, the solution is called nixtamalization, which is a happy bouncy word for the process of treating corn with an alkaline solution — lime or wood ash, plus water.  The corn is soaked and cooked in the solution.  This softens the kernels, loosens their hulls, and transforms the niacin into a free form that your body can use.  Hooray!

After the processed kernels are washed, their hulls are removed.  The softened kernels (hominy) are easier to grind.  Ground hominy is called masa, which can be made into a dough, unlike ground corn that has not been processed.  Masa is used to make products like tortillas, tamales, and tortilla chips.

As non-Native Americans became corn eaters, many did not know about the niacin quirk.  Poor folks whose diet majored in cheap untreated corn meal often got pellagra.  In the 1880s, 100,000 poor Italians suffered from it.  In 1916, 100,000 Americans had pellagra, and the disease killed 7,500 every year, mostly poor southerners.  It affected twice as many women as men.  Without treatment, folks with pellagra can die in four or five years.  The way to prevent pellagra is also the way to cure it — shift to a diet that is at least slightly better (added milk, eggs, meat, legumes, greens, etc.).

For the protein issue, beans came to the rescue.  Beans provide amino acids missing in corn.  Eating corn and beans together can provide higher protein content.  One source recommended a blend of three parts beans to seven parts corn.  Also, squash seeds can contain 30 percent protein.  A popular Native American delicacy was succotash, a mixture of corn, beans, dog meat, and bear grease.

On a side note, Lynn White mentioned that folks in Europe also discovered magic beans (peas, lentils, beans).  Prior to beans, the diet of commoners majored in carbs from cereals, and was deficient in protein.  By the tenth century, the addition of beans to the crappy traditional diet spurred a surge in the growth of population and cities.  Wheat provided an adequate source of niacin.  Nutrition is big juju!  Nutrient deficiency diseases like pellagra, beriberi, scurvy, kwashiorkor, and so on, are essentially unknown among hunter-gatherers.

Holy Shit!

Big Mama Nature does a wonderful job of nurturing optimal stability in the family of life.  She does this over the passage of countless millennia, guiding ecosystems to find ways of adapting to ever changing conditions.  On the other hand, cultures of tropical primates that participate in domestication-based cultures have a habit of being as clumsy as a mob of hyperactive two year olds. 

All life depends, directly or indirectly, on essentials like sunlight, water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and so on.  In a healthy wild ecosystem, these essentials are continuously recycled by plants, animals, and the billions of wee folk who work on the composting team.  It’s a beautiful celebration of life that can happily continue until the sun burns out.  And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what is known as sustainability, in its genuine and sacred form (prior to the era overhunting, overbreeding, extinctions, etc.).

In domestication-based cultures, some essentials are depleted, at various rates, which weakens the health of the ecosystem.  Phosphorus depletion is likely to reach crisis stage ahead of the others, since the output of global phosphate mining peaked in 1989, and what remains is of declining quality.  Phosphorus is transferred from the soil to the corn, from the corn to the hog, from the hog to the human, flushed down the toilet and sent to the sea, lost forever.

Poop is precious.  Remember that.  In 1588, Anzelm Gostomski, a Polish gentleman, once proclaimed an eternal truth: “Manure is worth more than a man with a doctorate” (a great slogan for a snarky tattoo).  In the modern world, every trainload, boatload, and planeload of food that moves from the countryside to consumer land is carrying away essential soil nutrients on a one-way ride to a sewage treatment plant, or to the nearest body of water.  This is a pattern that has no long term future.

In the Old World, in the era of low tech, muscle-powered, organic agriculture, every farm and village had livestock, poultry, and tropical primates that were highly skilled at producing generous amounts of excellent homemade fertilizer.  Everyone religiously returned the nutrient rich treasure to the soil, because this was more fun than depleting the soil and starving.  Farming and grazing also injured the land in other ways, which makes the sweet dream of sustainable agriculture very close to impossible in the long run, no matter how much hopium we snort.  Wild hominins lived happily for several million years, and it never occurred to them to chop down the forests and wreck the soil — so they didn’t.

Even modest sized cities could indulge in holy shit rituals.  In 1909, Franklin Hiram King visited Kyoto, Japan.  While traveling down a road one lovely morning, he observed a long caravan of men pulling cartloads of fresh night soil from town.  They were in the process of returning the treasure to the fields that fed them.  Each cart carried six 10-gallon (38 l) covered containers of aromatic plant food.  King noted that he passed 52 of these carts.  Then, on the return trip, he passed another 61 carts.  Other caravans moved down other roads.  He estimated that 90 tons of waste were hauled out of town on that morning.  I wonder if this was a daily routine.

Over in the New World, in better times, there used to be millions of large herbivores, some of which (like horses) may have been suitable for domestication.  Sadly, many of them had gone extinct by maybe 12,000 years ago.  Consequently, most corn farmers owned zero livestock.  In the Andes, some folks owned domesticated llamas and alpacas.  They were beasts of burden, and meat animals.  Nobody rode them or milked them.  One source asserted that these two animals were not kept in large numbers.  Another source mentioned one herder who alone owned 50,000.  When I worked at a technical writing business, there was a slogan on the bulletin board, “Remember: If it’s in writing, it’s true!”

Similarly, in grade school I was taught that Native Americans buried two or three herring or alewives in each mound that corn was planted in, for fertilizer.  James Axtell wrote that this was semi-fake news.  Indians didn’t traditionally do this.  Squanto, a Pawtuxet woman, had previously been kidnapped by terrorists and taken to Spain.  She learned the fish fertilizer trick in Europe.

She managed to escape and return home, where she taught the Cape Cod Pilgrims how to plant corn.  For no good reason, Pilgrims chained themselves to specific plots of private property, and then proceeded to deplete the soil.  New England colonists were delighted to learn that one or two herring buried in a planting mound could sometimes triple the yield.  The natives, on the other hand, had no wheeled carts, and were not bewitched by daffy ideas like private property.  When their current fields were depleted, it was far easier to simply clear new fields.  Hauling lots of slippery fish around in baskets was not pleasurable work.

Paul Weatherwax wrote about early Native American agriculture.  Several societies along the Pacific coast utilized a super fertilizer called guano (bird poop).  At some locations there were enormous deposits that seabird colonies had created over many centuries.  The Inca civilization prohibited killing birds in these colonies.  During the nesting season, nobody could visit the treasure islands.  Law breakers were executed.

In 1585, one observer in North Carolina reported that Indian farmers used no manure or other fertilizer.  In 1635, someone made the same comment about Indians in Virginia.  In the Cuzco Valley of Peru, folks dried human excrement, pulverized it, and stored it until planting time.  In some regions, manure from alpacas and llamas was also used.  In the history of poop, many chapters have yet to be written.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 27

[Note: This is the twenty-seventh 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.] 

Pigs

Pigs are also known as hogs or swine.  The U.K. and U.S. have slightly different definitions of these terms.  For simplicity’s sake I’ll use pigs, and pigs will refer to both piglets and adults of both genders.  In different regions, over a million years or more, the pig family evolved into a variety of different species, including boars, bearded pigs, peccary, warthogs, and so on.  Today, there are a billion pigs on Earth.  The ancestors of domesticated pigs were wild boars, which once inhabited regions of Africa and Eurasia, from Ireland and India to Japan and Siberia.  In North and South America, none of the pig family species have been domesticated.  They remain wild and free. 

Wolves were attracted to human encampments by the enticing aroma of garbage and (remarkably delicious) human feces.  Over time, a portion of the curious but incautious critters lost their freedom and got reduced to dogs, critters unable to survive in the wild beyond the human sphere.  Similarly, some ancestors of wild pigs were lured into the domestication trap by a treasure chest of garbage, feces, and lush gardens.  The moral here is to always avoid human settlements, at any cost, no matter how wonderfully shitty they smell.  Danger!

Peter Wohlleben reported that the super intelligent wild boars remain alive and well in portions of Europe, where they have been labelled destructive pests.  German hunters kill 650,000 each year.  When the shooting starts, boars disappear during daylight hours, and become night critters.  Hunters are forbidden to use night vision devices.  When hunting season begins in France, the boars swim across the Rhône River to Switzerland, where hunting is banned.  As Winston Churchill once said, “Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals.”

Wohlleben says that many folks would never consider eating ape flesh and, if we fully understood how intelligent pigs are, the notion of eating them would gross out those who are confused about the sacred dance (in the family of life, we all feed each other).  Domestication did not reduce pigs to slobbering dimwits, and some types remain capable of surviving in the wild.  Mud-covered pigs are like rich humans at luxurious health spas.  When the mud dries, fleas, ticks, and other parasites are baked into it.  Then, pigs rub on trees to discard the cruddy mud, and the annoying pests trapped in it. 

Cattle, sheep, goats, and horses are grassland creatures.  Pigs are not.  They prefer to reside in moist and shady places — temperate and tropical forests, close to water sources.  Unlike the other four, nomadic grassland people don’t keep them.  Enslaved pigs are usually kept by sedentary communities.  They can grow up to 770 pounds (350 kg), and have seven litters per year.  Piglets can grow rapidly when food is abundant.

John Reader noted that pigs are remarkably efficient at turning food into flesh.  Because their diet is more nutrient rich than mere greenery, they could convert 35% of what they ate into meat (sheep 13%, cattle 6.5%).  In ten months, the offspring of a pair of pigs can produce 3,200 pounds (1,451 kg) of meat — ten times more than cattle.

While cattle, sheep, goats, and horses are herbivores, pigs are omnivores.  Like stoned potheads with the munchies, pigs are not fussy eaters.  They will chow down on kitchen wastes, slaughterhouse wastes, spoiled spuds, ugly spuds, peelings, excrement, nuts, grains, roots, insects, leaves, fruits, flowers, fish, human corpses, and other carrion.  They have been known to bite, and sometimes kill children.

In many settlements, pigs were proud members of the department of public sanitation, along with rats and dogs, cleaning up crud in the streets discarded by untidy humans and other critters.  In regions of India and China, many pigs enjoyed rewarding careers in the sewage treatment profession.  Outhouses were often built above pig sties.  When steaming turds fell from the sky, pigs would scramble to gobble up the precious gifts from heaven.

For some mysterious reason, folks in the Middle East considered pigs to be unclean.  Both Hebrews and Muslims forbade touching or eating pigs.  Marvin Harris added that pigs provided no milk or wool, and they were not at all interested in being herded.  Pigs were not grass eaters, they ate the same foods that humans did.  Consequently, farmers and gardeners were not fond of them.  Also, hot sunny, arid lands (like the Middle East) were a poor habitat for pigs.  When air temps rise above 98°F (36°C), adult pigs exposed to direct sunlight can drop dead. 

Richard Lillard wrote about the early American colonies.  Many regions were forested, unsuitable for cattle, but heaven for pigs, who could keep themselves fat and happy via rooting and foraging.  For most early settlers, pork seemed like an exotic food, because in the old country, boars were kept in hunting preserves, for the hunting pleasure of wealthy aristocrats.  Bacon was for billionaires, high class lords and ladies.

Back country colonists enjoyed a grand life for a while, when the woods of Virginia and Maryland were swarming with pigs.  The porkers could run free without supervision, because they were fairly safe.  They were not easy prey for wolves or bears, although the alligators of Alabama were connoisseurs of plump, juicy, free range organic ham.  As long as you provided a source of salt, and tossed out some corn every day, the pigs would remain in the vicinity.  Humans were careful to mark which pigs belonged to them.

Pigs, of course, were delighted to raid gardens and crops, which totally pissed off the tillers and planters.  The dirty sweaty lads jumped up and down, yowling and bleating for compulsory fencing laws, but their pleas were ignored.  The majority loved having pigs, because raising them was much easier than the tedious drudgery of agriculture.  Ordinary folks could enjoy a leisurely way of life that provided a decent standard of living.

Simon Fairlie noted that huge numbers of pigs were born and fattened in the frontier forests, and every year their keepers would drive them down hog trails to big cities on the east coast, where they were traded for gold.  Pork was America’s favorite meat until the 1950s, when beef moved into the top position.  The first McDonalds restaurant opened in 1948, and soon became a sprawling empire, serving haute cuisine to America’s hungry, burger-loving billionaire aristocrats.

As I’m writing this, the news had a story about feral pigs, of which six million now inhabit 30 U.S. states, especially Texas.  They are descendants of the pigs brought by Spanish explorers centuries ago.  Feral pigs can grow up to 400 pounds (180kg).  Humans who grow things that pigs love to eat are shocked and infuriated when pigs happily drop by to enjoy the delicious gifts that were so kindly left for them.  The hotheads buy assault rifles and shoot lots of pigs.  Pigs are champions at rapid reproduction, and those that are shot are quickly replaced. 

They also have strong razor sharp tusks, which make cougars think twice about attacking them.  Of course predator eradication programs have sharply reduced the number of pork-loving carnivores that used to roam the land.  The news story was about a 59 year old woman who was recently killed by multiple feral pigs as she stepped out of her car at dawn.  She bled to death.  Attacks like this are extremely rare.

Jared Diamond wrote about the Norse colonization of Iceland a thousand years ago.  It became the most ecologically damaged nation in Europe.  Wildlife took a heavy beating.  Within a few decades of settlement, about 80 percent of the trees were whacked down.  Sheep and pigs foraged amidst the stumps, and prevented forest recovery by repeatedly nipping off the new seedlings.  When the highly erodible volcanic topsoil became more exposed to wind and water, half of it moved from dry land to the ocean, and green countrysides were reduced to deserts.  Today, only one percent of the forest still exists.

Cattle

We’ve already met the huge, powerful, and fierce aurochs, the wild ancestors of cattle.  It’s hard to imagine how such mighty animals were reduced to cud chewing manure makers.  Obviously, the most aggressive bulls were put in the fast lane to the butcher’s chop shop, while those having milder manners were sent to bovine bordellos, where love starved cows eagerly enjoyed their deep affection.  Over the course of centuries, deliberately selecting the most passive bulls for breeding stock, generation after generation, gradually drove the aurochs spirit extinct.  Shamans call this soul loss (i.e., domestication).

Sandra Ingerman wrote that soul loss is a spiritual disease which, in advanced cases, can result in shadow beings who exhibit a “nobody is home” emptiness.  She says that most of us these days are not fully at home.  Jesus said, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”  Indeed!

OK, back to cattle.  The quick and easy path to mild-mannered bulls was to fetch a sharp knife, relieve them of their testicles, and turn them into mellow, easygoing oxen.  In the early days, cattle were used for meat, milk, and hides.  Later, they became a source of muscle power — beasts of burden, and draft animals that pulled carts, chariots, plows, logs, and so on.

Folks eventually quit using oxen for muscle power when someone finally invented a contoured collar harness for horses that allowed them to pull serious loads without strangling themselves.  Horses required a richer diet, but they worked much faster than oxen.  So, farmers could plow larger fields, and fields that were farther from home.  Keith Thomas reported that it wasn’t until oxen were retired from muscle work that roast beef became the iconic centerpiece of English cuisine.  Until then, it wasn’t wise to eat your tractor.

Earlier, we looked at the prehistoric deforestation of Europe.  Actually deforestation was a global human enterprise.  In early times, we created manmade grasslands to attract large herbivores.  With the domestication of livestock, and the craziness of the agriculture fad, and the human population outburst, deforestation continued.  It’s happening right now, on a massive scale, as epidemic soul loss turns folks into weird critters obsessed with killing Big Mama Nature.  This is not a path with a future.

Years ago, I did some hiking in the hills above San Francisco Bay, where cattle were grazing.  Generally, the vegetation was kept neatly trimmed, and here and there were 100 year old oaks.  They dropped lots of acorns every fall, but there were few young oak trees, because their seedlings were routinely nipped off.  Originally, these hills were thriving oak savannahs, covered with a thick undergrowth of sagebrush and other shrubs, dotted with oaks of all ages.  [LOOK]

Especially in coastal regions, California Indians deliberately burned off the cover of dense sage scrub to create grasslands that attracted game.  Later, the Spanish and American colonists created more manmade grasslands for their livestock.  Once the brush was burned off, and cattle introduced, the oak savannah was doomed.  To add insult to injury, the exposed grassland became extremely vulnerable to troublesome immigrants, known as exotic invasive European weeds (more on these in a minute). 

Bison are also ruminants and, in the good old days, they were wild, free, and happy.  They were not the personal property of status seeking ranchers, consequently, for many thousands of years, they did not rubbish the western U.S. plains.  They did not fool around with fire, or create deserts.  Dan Flores mentioned that the bison herds were lovingly managed by family planning brigades called wolf packs.  They ate maybe four of every ten bison calves.  Wolves were dignified professional predators, not infantile status seekers, so they did not kill as many bison as possible, just enough to fill their growling tummies.  Enough is enough!  Status seeking is for dweebs and weenies. 

¶ Western United States

When European colonists migrated into the western plains of the U.S., they found millions of buffalo that had beautifully coevolved with the ecosystem over millions of years.  The alien white lads came from a culture that had a long tradition of owning and exploiting domesticated livestock, which were imagined to be valuable commodities.  The more you owned, the cooler you were, and the higher your social status.  The settlers soon discovered that the large wild herbivores of the plains were too proud and intelligent to be domesticated and enslaved.  Dang!

The European culture was based on private property — owning land, homes, livestock, and so on.  By the nineteenth century, most of the vast forests of Europe had become cropland and pasture, and almost all large wild animals had been eliminated long ago.  Some survived as characters in fairy tales, where the roles for devious demonic bloodthirsty monsters were often assigned to big bad wolves.

The colonists were incapable of imagining the possibility of transforming into nomadic hunter-gatherers, and enjoying an exciting life of wild freedom.  They were, after all, civilized people, and their religious stories originated in an ancient Middle Eastern culture of herders and conquerors.  Buffalo simply did not fit in their self-centered fantasies of wealth and excess.  You cannot own what you can’t control.  Their hearts were broken when they realized that the continent they had stolen was not home to many millions of passive domesticated livestock that belonged to no one.  Well, they had a good cry, and then put on their thinking caps.

Rather than doing something sensible, like turning around, sailing back to the old country, where countless generations of their ancestors were buried, and spending the rest of their days in filthy cities roaring with deadly epidemic diseases and bloody religious fanaticism, they decided to stay, and rubbish the indigenous people, wildlife, and ecosystems.

Their brilliant plan was to import domesticated shorthorn cattle from northern Europe — purebred passive dimwits, ideal slaves.  They could raise huge herds and become extremely rich cattle barons with ghastly pretentious mansions.  Richard Manning wrote an excellent description of the comedy of errors that occurred in this grassland soap opera.  The healthy, functional wild ecosystem was a serious problem that needed to be fixed, because it was an obstacle to progress and a growing economy.

Well, there were some annoying challenges.  You see, buffalo could remain fat and happy on a diet that majored in grass.  By a lucky coincidence, the western plains produced an abundance of delicious and nutritious grass.  For example, the excellent blue bunch wheat grass remained a nutritious food source throughout the winter.  Unfortunately, cattle gobbled it all up prior to winter, leaving nothing for later.  Oops!  When this primo grass is overgrazed, it can take ten years to recover.

The digestive tracts of buffalo had been fine-tuned by evolution to process the native grasses, so they were 18 percent more efficient than cattle.  The fussy foreign cattle preferred a diet of leafy forbs (broad leafed flowering plants like alfalfa), which were scarce in their weird new habitat.  The frustrated hungry cattle were not impressed, and wanted to go back home on the next boat.  Request denied.

Buffalo were well adapted to the dry climate, and they could comfortably go for several days without needing a drink of water.  Their herds roamed across the land at something like a walking pace.  It wasn’t necessary for them to stick close to water, so they were able to wander and graze over a wide region.  They might not return to a location for several years.  The result was healthy grassland, healthy riparian areas, healthy herds of buffalo, and healthy tribes of Indians and wolves.

The prissy imported cattle, on the other hand, had evolved in a much moister climate, where it was far easier to find a drink whenever they got a bit thirsty.  Consequently, they tended to concentrate their grazing on locations closer water, unload tons of manure, overgraze, and mutilate the banks of the streams (riparian areas).  When riparian lands are undamaged, they can produce far more forage than can surrounding uplands — they are top quality places for indigenous herbivores.  On the other hand, when the vegetation is damaged, the soil dries out, and floods are more likely to carry it away.  Overgrazed land speeds rain runoff, which sometimes leads to spectacular flooding. 

The buffalo were well adapted to surviving in a region where the climate majored in blast freezer winters and scorching summers.  The cattle were adapted to living in a dainty moist climate with moderate summers and mild winters — an ecosystem strikingly different from the plains.  During the super-cold winters of 1885-86 and 1906-07, maybe 50 to 75 percent of the cattle on the high plains died — while the snow-frosted bison remained warm, well-fed, and secretly amused at the misfortune of the hapless illegal immigrants.

Well, the ambitious colonists had still another brilliant idea.  They decided to introduce traditional pasture plants from Europe, so their cash cows could get fatter faster.  Unfortunately, most of these exotic plants promptly keeled over and died, because they were equally unsuited for the plains.  So, the next brilliant solution was to import pasture plants from arid regions of Asia — a disastrous mistake that has caused irreversible damage.

Manning described some of the bummers.  Crested wheatgrass thrived on the plains, and it outcompeted and displaced native plants.  In the winter, this wonder grass retained little nutritional value, and so the mule deer, elk, and antelope starved in endless fields of grass. 

Spotted knapweed suppresses native grasses, and has now spread to 7 million acres (2.8 million ha) in 48 states.  Because of root secretions, most other plants can’t live close to it.  Sheep can eat it, but cattle eat bunchgrass instead, which encourages the knapweed to spread. 

Leafy spurge is now found in 26 states, where it has spread across 2.5 million acres (1 million ha).  It excels at outcompeting most other species, achieving communities that are almost monocultures.  Plants have extensive root systems, and can live for 40 years.  Spurge has a toxic sap.  Cattle will not graze near it, only sheep and goats can eat it.  The plant transforms lands into biological deserts, and it is extremely expensive to eradicate. 

Cheatgrass can survive in low quality soils, and in regions having minimal precipitation.  Only in the early spring does this grass provide significant nutrients to grazing animals.  For the rest of the year, it doesn’t, so animals can starve in a thriving grassland.  Cheatgrass is especially flammable, and it burns hot enough to roast the seeds of native plants, which it has now displaced across large areas.  After a cheatgrass fire, exposed soil is vulnerable to erosion and gullying.  Following a rain, the runoff can be rapid, leading to sudden floods.  Dan Flores wrote that in the U.S. mountain west, cheatgrass had turned 100 million acres (40 million ha) into a biological wasteland.

Eliminating invasive exotic vegetation is prohibitively expensive, and often essentially impossible.  Invasives are here to stay, and their plan is to spread.  Human intelligence remains an unfinished masterpiece.

¶ Australia

Mark Brazil shared a story that was full of crap.  In Britain, cow manure was promptly and properly composted by patriotic royal dung beetles, which returned essential nutrients to the soil.  In Australia, none of the native dung beetles could get the least bit interested in cow shit.  It was too wet, and too out in the open.  Cow pies could patiently sit on the grass unmolested for four years, because nobody loved them.  This deeply hurt their feelings.  Adding insult to injury, Brook Jarvis noted that fussy cattle refused to graze in the vicinity of neglected pies, so the herd needed access to far more grazing land than normal.

Australian flies, on the other hand, discovered that cow pies made fabulous nurseries for their children.  Each pat could feed 3,000 maggots, which turned into flies — dense clouds of billions and billions of flies — which the hard working Christians did not in any way fancy.  Being outdoors was hellish.  In the 1960s, folks imported British dung beetles, which loved the taste and aroma of cow pies.  Oddly, this is one example where an introduced exotic species apparently didn’t create unintended consequences.  When they ran out of pies to eat, the beetles simply died.