Wild Free and Happy Sample 08

[Note: This is the eighth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 199 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Domestication of Fire

Before hominins learned how create fire, they very carefully preserved the flames of a naturally caused fire by feeding it fuel.  Burning sticks could be taken to other locations and become the source of additional fires.  Folks were extremely careful to preserve the live embers because, if they ever went out, the unlucky brothers and sisters might begin to smell like cat food.

Once upon a time, in an African wilderness, we aren’t sure when, someone figured out how to conjure a dancing flame into being.  Whoa!  In the hominin saga, that first glowing ember was the equivalent of an asteroid strike — a big one.  It catapulted our ancestors outside of the family of life, and into a spooky new realm of supernatural power and danger.  It was the magic ring that gave our ancestors the ability to eventually become the dominant animal on Earth (for a while). 

Unfortunately, the powerful magic was not delivered with warning labels attached.  The gift box did not include powerful herbs and potions to inspire profound wisdom and godlike foresight.  No animal needs these abilities.  Hominins are animals.  The Great Spirit apparently had a mischievous sense of humor.

The four elements are earth, water, air, and fire.  Pyne perceived the first manmade fire to be an act of staggering ecological audacity.  Tropical primates had found the keys to the mastery of fire.  Good grief!  The event is reminiscent of the old Sorcerer’s Apprentice tale, in which a half-clever trainee recklessly conjured a hurricane of big magic that he was powerless to stop, which soon got totally out of control. 

Without domesticated fire, hominins could have remained perfectly sustainable tropical primates, like baboons.  With fire, we acquired an impossible responsibility to use it with flawless wisdom, generation after generation, wherever we went.  The ancestors of baboons effortlessly lived sustainably for several million years by simply living like baboons — brilliant!  When hominins domesticated fire, they lost the magnificent inherent stability that comes from simply being ordinary animals, like all the others.

Some scholars have speculated that if space aliens had visited Earth 100,000 years ago, our ancestors would have appeared to be nothing more than ordinary animals.  For a long time, I accepted that.  Now I don’t.  Those visiting space aliens would have noticed that one species — and only one — maintained fires in their encampments.  This practice was not the slightest bit ordinary.  Hominins were the only animals who could deliberately ignite or extinguish a fire.  By and by, when hominins go extinct, so will domesticated fire, and the monsters it conjured into existence.

Paleoanthropologists and archaeologists have endless screechy arguments about the dates when prehistoric changes happened, like the domestication of fire.  Pretty much, everyone agrees that it happened at least 400,000 years ago, and the most likely suspect was Homo erectus.  Others point to two million year old ashes in the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.

The Swartkrans Cave near Johannesburg is a special site.  Many years of assorted stuff has built up on the floor, and the crud has been carefully excavated.  In the oldest layers, no charcoal is found.  It is an era before fire.  At this level, there are complete skeletons of big cats, and the scattered gnawed bones of the critters they ate, including more than 100 individual hominins.  In this era, cats were the top predator.  Higher up, charcoal is found in newer layers, about 1.6 million years ago, the age of fire.  Here are found complete hominin skeletons, and the scattered bones of the critters they gnawed, including big cats — hominins were now the top predator.

Today, a growing number of scientists think it’s time to announce the end of the Holocene Epoch (from 11,700 B.P. to now), and declare the arrival of the embarrassing Anthropocene Epoch.  Epochs are time periods in geologic history that leave behind a layer of residue that is unique and recognizable.  Carboniferous was the coal era.  Jurassic was the era of petroleum and natural gas.  The Anthropocene is the era when humans conquered the Earth, and unwisely initiated massive and irreversible change.

If you ever want to start a bloody fistfight at a bar full of scruffy drunken scientists, ask this: When did the Anthropocene begin?  Some say 1945, the dawn of the nuclear age.  Some say 1800, the kickoff of the Industrial Revolution.  Some say 8000 B.C., the Agricultural Revolution.  Paul Shepard thought that the game changer was the Hunting Revolution, when hominins learned how to make and use deadly stone tipped javelins and lances, hunt in packs like wolves, kill too many large animals, and feed their energy-guzzling oversized brains with highly nutritious grass fed organic meat.  Ronald Wright called this transition “the perfection of hunting,” the first progress trap (a difficult to undo “advance”).

James Scott thought that the good old days ended with the domestication of fire.  In his mind, the nightmare world we live in is the result of four domestications — fire, animals, plants, and humans.  Domesticated fire, like livestock, required breeding, feeding, and oversight to keep it from running away from its master.  Domesticated fire was as addictive as heroin, a habit impossible to willfully quit.  The habit eventually spread around the world.  Carleton Coon noted that only a few folks made it into the nineteenth century without becoming fire makers — the Tasmanians, Andaman Islanders, and the Pygmies of the Ituri forest.

Fire altered the traditional food chain.  Man-eating predators were intimidated by all-night fires and burning torches.  So, fewer hominins were violently killed and eaten.  This diminished a population check on our ancestors, which may have disturbed the stability of functional ecosystems.  Other checks include disease, starvation, conflict, accidents, and so on.  John Reader wrote that, under ideal conditions, if two humans, and their descendants, all had large families, the clan would explode to 4 billion in just 500 years.  Man-eating predators are good for us.  They weed out the sick, elderly, injured, inattentive, and unlucky.  We all feed each other. 

Fire kept our ancestors warmer.  Humans have three million sweat glands to cool us off in hot weather.  In cold weather, the body directs more warm blood to the skin.  One thing that struck Europeans about primitive people was that they seemed to be impervious to cold.  During his famous voyage, Darwin was surprised to observe natives who wore little or no clothing during bitterly cold weather in Tierra del Fuego.

On the Kalahari, night temperatures in June and July can dip below freezing.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was with a group of naked San people during a night when their water froze.  Their only protection was a kaross — an animal skin wrapped around their shoulders. 

Tropical people go naked, like chimps and baboons, because clothes are unnecessary, making them requires work, and pointless work is moronic.  Modern consumers waste lots of energy, because much of their sense of “cold” is merely a belief induced by cultural programming.  Also, they want to wear shorts and tee-shirts indoors, in the middle of winter.   I’ve taught myself to be far more tolerant of cooler temperatures than I was 30 years ago.  I wear more layers, and waste far less heat.

Fire enabled folks to survive in regions having extended cold weather.  So they eventually expanded into much of the northern hemisphere, previously home to wooly mammoths, sabertooth cats, and many other species of megafauna.  By making uninhabitable regions habitable, fire increased the global carrying capacity for the hominin hordes — more territory, more food, more hominins.

Fire was used on a large scale to manage landscapes for more productive hunting and foraging.  It was used to drive animals into bogs or streams, off precipices, or into locations where they could be confined and killed.  It burned off cover that concealed hidden nests or burrows.  Flame was used for optimizing grasslands to attract more game — it consumed dead vegetation and woody brush, encouraging the growth of fresh nutritious green forage.  It left behind a banquet of roasted grasshoppers.  It discouraged visits from bloodthirsty flies and mosquitoes.

Fire enabled slash-and-burn agriculture (swidden), which replaced forest with cropland.  Crops were grown for a year or so, until soil fertility was depleted, at which point another area of forest was slashed down.  The depleted fields were left to recover for ten or twenty years, when they were slashed again.  After multiple slash-and-burn cycles, the land was rubbished.  Daniel Hillel reported that in Indonesia there are more than 39.5 million acres (16 million hectares) of land that is incapable of supporting either agriculture or forest.

Fire has long been used as a weapon of mass destruction during violent conflicts.  Cities built of wood often fed the flames of horrific firestorms that claimed many lives.  Even in peacetime, structures heated with open flame fireplaces frequently went up in smoke, often igniting the rest of the village.  For many centuries, firefighting technology was an ineffective process of hauling buckets of water by hand.  Deadly fires were very common, and a great source of fear.  The Christian concept of Hell was intensified by the terror of frequent fires in early times.

Fire had a spiritual aspect in every traditional culture.  Jacob Grimm mentioned the needfire rituals that were once common in many regions of Western Europe.  Every year at the summer solstice, each home in the village let their hearth fire die out.  A new fire was kindled into existence by a spinning drill (never flint and steel), and everyone took home a bit of the needfire to light their hearth for the coming year.  Often people and livestock were passed through the glowing embers for purification and protection.  Fire was highly sacred business.  Many old pantheons had fire gods, goddesses, and myths. 

Domesticated fire is Earth-shaking super-big juju.  James Scott concluded that the accumulated ecological impacts of manmade fire on this planet overwhelm those caused by the domestication of plants and animals.

Cooking

The domestication of fire kicked open the door to a revolutionary change in the hominin saga — a technology called cooking.  Cooking softened and pre-digested food.  Ancestors were able to extract more nutrients from each mouthful.  Better nutrition facilitated the development of bigger brains.  Infants could be weaned sooner when softened food became an option, so births could be spaced closer together.  The toothless elderly benefitted from access to soft food.  Chewing was less work, so hominins evolved smaller teeth compared to other primates.  Also, digestion took less processing, so our guts got smaller, and tummies flatter.

Cooking transformed some foods that had been toxic or indigestible into edible nourishment.  By increasing the variety of plant foods we could eat, and the amount of nutrients we could extract from them, it became possible for an area of land to feed more ancestors.  Thus, cooking boosted an ecosystem’s carrying capacity for hominins.

Cooking gave us the keys to industrial civilization.  Imagine the astonishment when early hominins watched some heavy rocks in the fire turn red and melt into a liquid form.  The first smelter was born.  Metallurgy gave us the ability to fill rivers with spilled blood, to reduce cities to ashes, and to ravage ecosystems in countless, devastating, and irreparable ways.

The ancestors also learned about cooking clay.  They were baking figurines in primitive kilns 25,000 years ago.  This knowledge eventually evolved into baking pottery and bricks.  Sand could be cooked into glass, limestone into cement, wood into charcoal, water into steam, crude oil into distillates (gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc.), and on and on and on. 

Children of the Sun



All life requires energy to survive, and our primary source of energy is the sun, a fireball of nuclear fusion.  On Earth, the plant people absorb this energy and convert it into simple carbohydrates.  Humans and other animals extract these nutrients from edible plants, and/or from the flesh of plant eating animals.

Alfred Crosby’s book, Children of the Sun, presents a history of how humans access energy.  It’s a good companion to his earlier book, Throwing Fire, a history of projectile use, spanning from thrown stones to nuclear weapons.  Both discuss the rapid acceleration of innovation, population, and ecological impacts.  This growing instability over the centuries is largely off the radar in our day-to-day lives.  Most of our brain cycles are engaged in the here and now, a pushbutton wonderland of nonstop magic.

Crosby reminds readers of the obvious fact that fossil energy is finite, and the large, high quality deposits are approaching their finish lines.  We are making little effort to wrap our heads around the notion that our high-impact energy-guzzling lifestyle has an expiration date.  Instead, we pretend — with all our might — that the here and now is perfectly “normal,” and everything is excellent.

When the spirits of our wild ancestors observe today’s “normal” they see a nightmarish insane asylum.  Powerful historians like Crosby can vaporize the walls of our madhouse, and allow us to perceive the hundreds of centuries of turbulent cultural evolution that preceded our birth.  We can observe the spirit of progress transition from an occasional draft, to a strong wind, and the full-scale hurricane of today.

In the 200,000 years since the first Homo sapiens punched in at the time clock, almost all generations have been wild nomadic hunter-gatherers, living in a manner that was far simpler, and much closer to sustainable.  For almost the entire human saga, this slower, gentler mode was the long term “normal.”  But it wasn’t normal.

Some scholars have speculated that if space aliens had visited 100,000 years ago, humans would have appeared to be ordinary animals of no significance.  Wrong!  We were roasting steaks with domesticated fire, a spooky trick never performed by ordinary animals.  Fire was domesticated prior to Homo sapiens, maybe 500,000 years ago, maybe a million, nobody knows.

When our ancestors burned biomass like wood, they were utilizing the solar energy stored by the tree.  Fire provided some benefits.  It intimidated hungry predators.  It enabled our ancestors to survive in regions outside the tropics.  It made cooking possible, a huge advance.  Cooking partially predigests foods, making it easier for our guts to extract more nutrients from them.  It also transforms a number of inedible substances into edible sources of nutrition.  Chimps spend six hours a day chewing raw foods.  Of course, progress is never free — fire making eventually led to huge unintended consequences, like megafauna extinctions, industrial civilization, the population explosion, and an unstable climate. 

It’s fun to play “what if…”  What if that first fire starter, who learned how to make sparks with friction, had been ripped to shreds by hyenas prior to his or her discovery?  Without fire, furless hominids could not have survived in chilly non-tropical regions.  The snow monkeys of Japan solved this challenge by evolving heavy winter coats.  Would Homo sapiens have ever evolved at all, limited to a raw food diet?  Would the Americas and Europe of today still be human-free wildernesses, home to healthy populations of mammoths, bison, and sabertooth cats?

Over time, our ancestors got better at hunting and basic survival.  When some groups moved out of the tropics, they encountered conditions for which evolution had not fine-tuned them.  They needed tighter shelters, warm clothing, and food storage for the lean seasons.  Clever innovations could increase the odds for survival, and the cleverer we got, the better.  Over the millennia, our addiction to innovation snowballed.  Like an arms race, the groups possessing the most powerful juju were likely to displace or erase the bubbas with inferior juju.

And so, the clever ones spread around the globe.  Growing numbers eventually ran out of uninhabited lands to colonize, leading to growing friction.  Too much cleverness eventually led to what Ronald Wright called “the perfection of hunting.”  By killing megafauna a bit faster than they could recover over the centuries, big game gradually got scarce.  Our menu shifted toward small game, and then to aquatic edibles.

The domestication of plants and animals was another Earth-shaking innovation.  We could now exploit solar energy more efficiently.  More people could live on less land.  Never before had we controlled so much energy.  Population grew, spurring instability.  The enslavement of animals like horses and oxen provided us with pack animals to carry stuff, and traction animals to pull stuff.  No longer was the work in human communities performed solely by human muscle power.  Enslaved animals could be exploited in many ways.

By A.D. 1000, clever ones had learned how to capture more energy with waterwheels, windmills, and sailing ships, but muscle power was still the primary energy.  We were drifting toward the limits of utilizing solar energy via agriculture and burning wood.  As forests disappeared, the clever ones began burning coal.  Eventually, mineshafts reached the water table, and muscle powered gizmos were unable to remove the water fast enough.  So, brilliant lads invented steam engines that could pump water and keep the mines dry.

Until maybe 1700, human society ran primarily on the muscle power of humans and animals.  The steam engine, like the domestication of plants, animals, and fire, was a major advance with horrendous unintended consequences.  The speed of innovation became a constantly accelerating whirlwind — locomotives, steamships, and multiple-spindle spinning machines.  Lighting switched from the flickering hearth fire, to candles, then whale oil lamps, then coal gas, then kerosene, then electric lights.

Steam engines were pushed to the sidelines by internal combustion engines, which were used to power automobiles, tractors, trucks, locomotives, ships, and many other machines.  Gasoline couldn’t run a sewing machine 100 miles away, but electricity could.  We invented generators, installed power grids, built hydroelectric dams, and nuclear power plants.  We invented telegraphs, telephones, radio, television.  The herd grew explosively from one billion to two, three, four, five, six, seven…  Zoom, zoom, zoom…

For a while, the Peak Oil doomsters made us nervous, with their predictions that the production of conventional oil would likely peak around 2005, which it did.  But we got distracted by the growing production unconventional oil from oil shale (fracking) and tar sands, and returned to pretending that we have no limits.  Let’s go shopping!

Thankfully, Crosby provides readers with an embarrassing birds-and-bees talk about EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested).  In the 1930s, the EROEI of oil production was 100:1 — it took one unit of energy to extract 100 units from the underground reserves.  When he was writing in 2006, it had dropped to 17:1.  Today, it’s less.  Low EROEI means that lots of oil will be left in the ground forever, regardless of how high the price eventually rises.  Imagine having a job that paid $100 per day, but the bridge toll to get there was $105.

Crosby offers us no silver bullet solutions.  “Winning streaks are rarely permanent.”  The easiest approach to our challenges is to continue living foolishly and hope for miracles.  The smartest response would be sanity — limit population, cut consumption, live lightly, and abandon nuclear and fossil energy.  “We have every reason to believe that we are capable of environmental sanity; but first we have to accept that the way we live now is new, abnormal, and unsustainable.”  

It’s a short book, and very easy to read — no charts, graphs, or techno-jargon.  Crosby describes the uncomfortable facts of life in a calm and non-hysterical way.  I have zero complaints about it.  It’s an excellent intro to energy.  He briefly discusses the limitations of alternative energy sources.  The limits are more thoroughly discussed in Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society.  The huge downside of nuclear energy is better addressed in Too Hot to Touch.  Other energy-related books include Snake Oil: Fracking’s False Promise, Cadillac Desert, The Big Flatline, The End of Growth, Techno-Fix, and Afterburn.

Crosby, Alfred W., Children of the Sun — A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2006.

Make America Great Again



 

In 2016, the election slogan of TV star Donald Trump was “Make America Great Again!”  One day, a pilgrim on the internet asked, “When was America great?”  For someone deeply immersed in the study of ecological sustainability, the answer was obvious.  America was great at least 15,000 years ago, when America resembled something like the Serengeti — a self-regulating (manager-free) wild ecosystem in a climax phase.

In those days, America was a paradise for the indigenous mastodons, wooly mammoths, wooly rhinos, short-faced bears, cheetahs, saber-tooth lions, jaguars, and many others who are now gone forever.  They had inhabited this ecosystem for millions of years, and successfully coevolved in it.  This was their ancient home and community.

I’m not exactly certain why there were so many extinctions, but all had survived hundreds of thousands of years of recurring ice age cycles.  Experts with their high-tech gadgets assert that many disappeared from the stage in the same era that humans from Siberia arrived.  Of course, other continents had similar experiences.  Europe, Asia, and Australia were also great prior to the arrival of two-legged tropical primates, and then went downhill in the millennia that followed.

Evolution is brilliantly simple — as conditions change, species genetically adapt via natural selection, a slow and steady process that has worked very well for a few billion years.  Our innovative tropical primate ancestors figured out how to sneak around this time-proven process.  For example, learning how to preserve and control fire was a big juju shift that no other animals have made.

With fire, they were better able to fend off predators.  They could stay warm in non-tropical climates.  They learned how to cook, which made it easier to digest food.  Cooking made many inedible substances edible, and these were added to their diet.  Consequently, they could extract more calories from the same territory.  So, the carrying capacity of their habitat increased, which led to more well-fed bambinos.

This process is called cultural evolution — a deliberate way of altering our relationship with the ecosystem via learning and innovation, a process for change that was far faster than genetic evolution.  With clothing and shelters, they could survive in cooler lands.  With weapons and teamwork, they could kill animals much larger than themselves.  When they first arrived in new ecosystems, the wildlife had no instinctive fear of them, which made hunting ridiculously easy.  This led to more well-fed bambinos.

Eventually, we became clever enough to live everywhere, even the Arctic.  Cultural evolution gained momentum, transforming many societies of two-legs into ecological super storms.  Technological innovation has given us the power to poison the oceans, erase vast forests, exterminate wildlife, and disrupt the planet’s climate systems — and we’re bloody proud of this.  We call it Progress.

Our closest living relatives, the chimps and bonobos (like all other animals), did not board the runaway train of cultural evolution.  Their ancestors have lived in the same tropical ecosystem for millions of years, without wrecking it.  Our DNA is ninety-nine percent the same as theirs.  All newborn humans are wild tropical primates, expecting to spend their lives in a thriving Serengeti, but most of their parents have been entranced.  Most newborns squirt out of the womb into a batshit crazy culture.

This crazy culture imagines that one animal species (guess who) is superior to everything else in the universe, and no other species matters at all.  In this culture, newborns grow up, go to school, get a job, and spend their entire lives wandering around amidst mobs of neurotic insecure tropical primates.  Unlike wild humans, and other wild animals, consumers mature, reproduce, and die in a bleak space station culture of human supremacy.

I once spent nine years in the forest.  Humans would build a cabin in bear country, and live as if they were in a sterile suburban cul-de-sac where everything wild had been exterminated.  They’d put their garbage (bear food) on the porch, which would attract… (guess who).  A hungry bear would dine on the wasted food, the moron would race of the cabin with a high-powered rifle, screaming obscenities at the “problem bear,” and blow it away.  The moron perceived himself to be the lord and master of the ecosystem.  This attitude is perfectly normal in our culture.

You see, the mastodons and wooly rhinos instinctively lived in an ancient time-proven manner — automatically, thoughtlessly, effortlessly — like the other species in the world.  This is exactly why America was great.  It worked!  The American flora and fauna had succeeded in adapting to millions of years of ongoing changes of climate and habitat via evolution and coevolution.  By staying on the traditional path, they did not nervously tap-dance through minefields of their own making.

By adapting fire, clothing, and weapons, two-legs had moved onto a terrifically dangerous path.  They had become far more powerful than bonobos or chimps.  They were en route to becoming the mightiest critters on the planet — via culture, not genes — a treacherous daredevil experiment with no safety nets.

To wisely avoid self-destruction, the innovative two-legs had to have foresight.  They had to have respect and reverence for their ecosystem.  They had to develop traditions and taboos that expected everyone to practice self-restraint.  No other species had to struggle with these highly challenging responsibilities.  Surprisingly, numerous human societies actually succeeded in living mindfully, until being clobbered by… (guess who).  The Koyukon, Ohlone, Ojibway, and many other tribes carefully adapted to their ecosystems, and lived for thousands of years in a low-impact manner.  Great, eh?

Today, I’m living in a culture that generates staggering amounts of scientific data, but has pathetically limited foresight.  There is little respect for this ecosystem.  Self-restraint is seen as a disgusting disability in a consumer culture obsessed with unrestrained self-indulgence, and an insatiable hunger for status and power.  History is clear that cultures like this one routinely trump the wild cultures of reverence, respect, and restraint.  Civilized cultures mindlessly mangle everything in their paths.

The Glowing Screen People inhabit a wonderland of technological progress — not a devastated ecosystem.  They do not perceive the huge gaping holes in the family of life.  They have no awareness of all that has been lost.  They do not grieve the absence of giant condors, giant beavers, giant armadillos, giant bears.  They have no memory of the great American Serengeti.  They will barely notice the passing of the last lions and tigers and bears, and few will grieve their demise.

Well, gosh, we’ve inherited an interesting mess, and it’s getting worse.  This is the opposite of great, methinks.  Genes did not get us into this mess, culture did — it’s a buggy software thing.  Our nightmare is a swirling roaring pandemonium of dysfunctional beliefs, ideas, fantasies, and illusions — toxic cultural baggage.  But our society is not required to continue operating on Ecocide 1.0 until the bloody end.  We have the option of creating an entirely different operating system, in theory.  Attempting to dominate and exploit the entire family of life has been a catastrophic experiment in megalomania and embarrassing foolishness.

We’re not going to bring back the wooly rhinos and mastodons.  America will not return to a healthy stable wild paradise for a very long time.  People capable of thinking outside the box understand that the path to ecological sustainability travels in the opposite direction from the current path of windmills, solar panels, electric cars, nuke plants, voyages to Mars, and happy meals for eleven billion shoppers on antidepressants.

Anyway, I wonder if this was the profound vision of “great again” that Donald Trump struggled so clumsily to convey — turning out the lights, walking away from civilization, going home sweet home, and living happily ever after.