Wild Free and Happy Sample 35

[Note: This is the thirty-fifth 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.] 

The Curse of the Soil Molesters

If you are a lucky one, and your high school education provided you with a competent understanding of environmental history, you would probably be bored out of your mind by now, reading my tiresome jabber about stuff that every teen should know.  But, if you have been institutionalized for years in a more typical school system, there’s a chance that you’re stumbling through some uncharted territory here.  If so, it’s time we had an embarrassing “birds and bees” talk about soil molesters — the naughty things they do in their fields, and how their actions harm the region, the nation, the generations yet to be born, and the long term health of the planet’s ecosystem.

The birds and bees talk I got at age 15 had to do with boys, girls, sex, and reproduction.  The primary objective was to help kids avoid unintended and unwanted pregnancies.  With regard to my relationship with soil, I never got a similar talk, I had to figure it out on my own.  If we want to avoid ignorantly creating unwanted wastelands, the safe and effective prevention is abstinence — never, never, never engage in invasive and abusive forms of intercourse with highly fertile ecosystems.  Remember how our wild ancestors lived.  Think!

At the dawn of agriculture in Mesoamerica, folks majored in growing corn, beans, and squash.  They used techniques that were similar to other regions of the world where plant domestication emerged.  Their farm equipment was digging sticks and hoes, so the first places they molested were often along shorelines, rivers, wetlands, and flood plains, where the soils were soft and moist.  When the planters first rammed their digging tools into fertile virgin soil, the initial harvests could be impressive.  But with every year, when a field was replanted, the nutrients in the soil were a bit more diminished, and the harvest was a bit smaller. 

Depending on soil quality, a field could produce decent autumn harvests for up to maybe six years.  When “evil spirits” (nutrient depletion) eventually reduced yields, the field was abandoned, and a new one was cleared.  The abandoned field might be given a rest for maybe 10 or 20 years, to recharge its soil a bit.  Then, it might be cleared again, and returned to production for a while.  This cycle might be repeated a few times, sometimes for several generations, but not forever.  There is no free lunch.  Long term agriculture is a progressive and terminal pathology.

In Mesoamerica, this was called the milpa system, in other regions similar practices were called slash and burn, swidden, or shifting agriculture (milpa means corn field).  Milpa is the opposite of wild and free.  Big Mama Nature adores healthy soil, and strives to protect it.  Where rainfall is generous, she clothes the land with forest.  Where rain is more modest, she covers the soil with grassland.  Wild and free has three huge benefits.

(1) Protected soil retains moisture better than bare naked soil that is exposed to the sun and wind.  Consequently, wetter soil encourages a wetter ecosystem, promoting the existence of springs, streams, ponds, wetlands, and a greater abundance of many forms of life.  Magnificent swamps are home to far more biodiversity than deserts.  Both forests and wild grasslands send roots deep into the ground, so they can better retrieve nutrients and water, hold the soil in place, and continuously improve soil health and fertility with each passing century. 

In the milpa system, the primary crops are annuals, plants that live just one season and then die.  Trees and many grassland plants are perennials, plants that have longer lifespans.  Annuals have to be replanted every year, after the farmer first pulverizes the soil surface.  This disturbance encourages some of the precious carbon stored in the soil to be released into the atmosphere.  It also encourages the moisture in the soil to evaporate, which makes annuals more vulnerable to drought.

(2) Protected soil is held in place by the green blanket of vegetation, which prevents it from being blown away by the wind, or washed away by rain or snowmelt.  Bare naked sloped land is especially prone to water erosion, which can rip deep gullies into hillsides over time.  Earlier, I mentioned the catastrophic erosion in the Yellow River watershed that created gullies 600 feet deep (183 m).  Paul Shepard noted that massive erosion in the watershed of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers dumped so much soil into the Persian Gulf that 35,000 square miles (90,650 km²) of salt marsh was created.

Once upon a time, on a lovely Sunday in June, Wes Jackson was driving through Mennonite country in Kansas.  He stopped to observe a Mennonite’s field, which had recently been planted.  During the previous night, a hard rain had dumped up to five inches (12 cm) in some places, a normal event in that region.  Mennonites devote extra effort to being good stewards of the land.  Compared to industrial agriculture, their methods have lower impact.  Looking at the field, Jackson observed that the rain had washed the seeds away, and the ditches were clogged with rich black mud.  It was a wipeout. 

Then, Jackson went to inspect a prairie not far away.  It was not damaged at all.  In fact, it had been invigorated by the refreshing rain, and none of its soil had run away.  Prairies can absorb 14 times more moisture than tilled cropland.  Forests and prairies can be fairly eternal, but cropland has an expiration date.  Sooner or later, the soil is depleted, and the cropland becomes wasteland.  This can take many generations, it’s not an immediate house-on-fire threat, so it’s easy to pretend that all is good.  But the damage caused is cumulative and almost always irreparable.

Richard Manning noted that a healthy wild prairie can absorb 5 to 7 inches (13-18 cm) of rain in an hour with no runoff.  A field of corn or soybeans can absorb 0.5 to 1.5 inches (1.3-3.8 cm) in an hour, and the excess water runs off almost as fast as from a parking lot.  This difference explains the catastrophic 2008 floods in the U.S., following several days of generous rainfall.

(3) Protected soil is often an ongoing miracle of continuous improvement.  Several thousand years ago, as the glaciers melted, Iowa’s soil was exposed to warm sunbeams for the first time in ages.  Vegetation recovered and, with each passing century, the happy prairie created an ever growing layer of tremendously fertile black topsoil.  Before settlers arrived in the nineteenth century, the soil was remarkably deep in places.  Because the sod layer was so healthy, thick, and rugged, native people with corn seeds could not rip it open with digging sticks or hoes — much to the delight of the prairie, and Big Mama.

The Iowa Association of Naturalists became freaked out by soil erosion in Iowa.  In 1999, the state was losing 240 million tons of its “black gold” every year.  This incredible treasure of soil had been created over thousands of years by a thriving tallgrass prairie.  Half of it had been lost since 1848, as the settlers launched a full-scale war on the soil, armed with the insanely destructive steel moldboard plows manufactured by a demon-possessed madman named John Deere.

Jared Diamond once visited Iowa, and observed a church in corn country that was more than 100 years old.  He said that the churchyard was like a table, a plateau elevated ten feet (3 m) above the surrounding fields, which had been savagely molested by the radicalized fanatics of the Deere cult.

Geologist Walter Youngquist noted that half of Iowa’s topsoil had been flushed down the Mississippi River, and dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.  On some Iowa hills, streaks of the ancient tan and gray marine clays, which had long been buried under the black gold, were beginning to see the light of day once again.  He wrote, “The great enemy of soil and, therefore, civilization, is civilization itself as we know it — the human-induced accelerated rate of erosion.”  From a human timescale, topsoil is a finite nonrenewable resource.  Destroying it is foolish.

The Danse Macabre

The emergence of plant domestication in both the Old World and the Americas typically triggered a devastating chain reaction of consequences — increased food production, deforestation, soil destruction, ballooning population, technological innovation, social stratification, bloody warfare, patriarchy, empire building, civilization, megalomania, ridiculous decadence, collapse, and ruins.  Then, if anything was left of the ecosystem, folks dusted themselves off, regrouped, and repeated the same mistakes, again and again, until the land was absolutely and permanently wrecked.

The transition to domestication, in multiple regions, was an extreme shift away from maybe two million years of the traditional hunter-gatherer way of life.  Our wild ancestors rocked the boat far, far less.  They were lucky to enjoy a very long era of wild, free, and happy — the calm before the storm (or the wellbeing before the epidemic).

William McNeill wrote that both plants and animals can become hosts to diseases.  Some microparasites simply enjoy an ongoing free ride on their hosts, snatching some nutrients, but not too many.  Others seriously weaken their hosts and kill them.  McNeill imagined that, in addition to plants and animals, there was a third category of hosts — ecosystems.  Over time, some human societies became foolishly clever, and mutated into macroparasite (large predator) roles, attacking and degrading healthy ecosystems.  McNeill thought that the relationship between these rogue societies and the family of life came to resemble “an acute epidemic disease.” 

When agriculture escaped from Pandora’s Box of powerful evils, it created something like a devastating infection in the family of life.  This reminded me of a meme from the era of bubonic plague epidemics: the dance of death.  Everyone was sick and dying, especially the priests, who visited the sick.  Why didn’t God even protect his own special agents?  Hello?  Many lost their faith.

Johannes Nohl reported that during plague years, a number of communities in Europe engaged in country dances, in order to dispel depression.  In 1424, a Scottish lad named Maccaber arrived in Paris.  Folks believed he had supernatural powers.  He initiated an ecclesiastic procession, the Maccaber Dance (Danse Macabre) — the Dance of Death.  Every day, for months, crowds of men and women danced in the cemetery.  Folks wore scary masks to drive away the evil spirits.

The notion of a dance of death is sort of a fitting description for how ecosystems were impacted by the emergence and expansion of agriculture.  Let’s sketch out a generic pattern for how agriculture triggered its own whirlwind of evil spirits.  The horror began with clearing and planting in soft moist soils.  This led to more food, more people, and tired soil.  This led communities to gradually expand the size of the milpa, until it reached the limits of prime locations to deflower.  Then, planting began to move up slopes.  If forests covered the slopes, as they often did, the tree people were chopped down.  This led to more food, more people, more soil depletion, and more erosion and gullying.

As communities expanded their realms, at some point they were likely to bump into other communities, and generate some friction and sparks.  The survival of each settlement required folks to protect their stores of corn and beans — precious treasures that opponents were eager to swipe or destroy.  Consequently, many Native Americans surrounded their communities with tall and sturdy wooden palisades.  Dean Snow wrote that corn spread into Iroquois country around 1350 to 1400.  Population grew, villages got larger, longhouses got longer, and most villages had double or triple palisades.  This defensive strategy was similar to the Old World practice of building fortifications, moats, and walled cities.

In the conflict game, the cardinal rule is strength in numbers.  At first, a village might be managed by a tribal chief.  Then, multiple villages would unite, and live under the protection of a warlord.  Later, these alliances merged together into kingdoms or empires.  Communities that prepared for conflict were more likely to survive than communities that attempted to avoid the mother of conflict via family planning — reproductive taboos.  By and by, civilizations appeared, and initiated full-scale warfare on ecosystems.

Big shots in lofty power centers got very big headed and heavy handed.  Their minds floated in a giddy dream world, soaring with grandiose infantile visions of full dose megalomania.  One day, in an online encyclopedia, I was looking at a discussion of pre-Columbian (before 1492) civilizations in the New World.  I was suddenly walloped by a mind expanding dope slap.  SMACK! 

My eyes scanned a series of photos of ancient Mesoamerican ruins.  They were strangely similar in many ways — huge pyramids, elevated temple platforms, sculptures, palaces, streets, and plazas.  It was spooky how these New World images resembled the ruins created by the early civilizations in the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean basin.  Civilizations around the world, totally isolated from each other, clearly exhibited symptoms of the same acute disease — the curse of cleverness, domination, patriarchy, and self-glorification.

Why were so many people forced to spend their lives engaged in monumental construction projects that survived centuries longer than the brief explosion of decadence and egomania that created them?  What could be more ridiculous?  Well, (blush!) today’s industrial civilization has succeeded in boosting human foolishness and mindless destruction to levels never before believed to be possible.  No generation has created more and bigger ruins than the voracious mob alive today.

Beginning around 1200 B.C., a series of New World civilizations appeared here and there, aggressively devoured their resource base, enjoyed a giddy orgasm of debauchery, and then plummeted into oblivion.   The parade included the Olmecs, Mayans, Aztecs, Toltecs, Oaxacans Incas, Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and so on.  This pattern of growth and collapse was also the norm in many regions of the Old World — Uruk, Babylon, Phoenicia, etc.  Like fireflies, they blink on for a moment, then off.  In unsustainable cultures, what goes up must come down, no exceptions.

Old World civilizations were fuelled by junior grade propellants like wheat, barley, and rice.  New World civilizations were turbocharged by two highly potent propellants: corn and potatoes.  Clive Ponting noted that in A.D. 600, wheat powered Rome was home to 50,000.  At that time, in the Valley of Mexico, corn powered Teotihuacán was home to 100,000 (others say 150,000).  It is located about 18 miles (30 km) northeast of Mexico City. 

The Old World had many powerful things that Mesoamerica did not — livestock, horses, wheels, ships, and advanced metallurgy.  Maybe the Romans were handicapped by their inferior food, or by the persistent barbarian attacks, or by the waves of infectious diseases nurtured by animal domestication, or by their soils depleted by several centuries of wheat farming, or by their lead pipe water distribution system.

In 600, hungry dirty Europeans were struggling to survive in what we now call the Dark Ages, while Teotihuacán was a state of the art masterpiece of monumental architecture (look at online images).  There was the Street of the Dead, the Pyramid of the Sun, and the Pyramid of the Moon.  Aztecs ominously referred to Teotihuacán as “the place where men became gods.”  The society was destroyed in about 650, and everything flammable was burned.  By 900, it was an abandoned ghost town.

Much later, in 1521, when Spaniards arrived, the Aztec civilization of Tenochtitlán (Mexico City) was one of the biggest cities in the world, with a population of about 200,000 (some say 250,000), which was five times larger than London.  The invaders were amazed to see a big city in which the streets were not stinky and slippery with deep horse shit.  Aztecs are also known as the Mexica.

In an effort to recycle soil nutrients, the Aztecs fertilized their fields with human poop.  Imagine how much poop 200,000 people can plop every day.  Imagine continuously moving that poop out to the cornfields — without the benefit of wheeled carts or (nonhuman) beasts of burden.  Despite challenges, their population was soaring to new heights — until Old World diseases rumbled into town like a mega-death steamroller.

Several of the Spanish invaders wrote down accounts of what they observed, including the Aztec rituals of human sacrifice.  Prisoners were taken to the top of the temple-pyramid, where they were cut open, their beating heart removed and offered to the sun, and their corpse kicked down the steps.  Several Spaniards estimated that the number of folks sacrificed was maybe 20,000 per year.  On one especially sacred occasion in 1487, according to Aztec sources, the dedication of the main pyramid in Tenochtitlán was even bloodier, possibly more than 80,000.

Michael Harner focused his attention on the human sacrifices.  What was their purpose?  He noted that scholars tended to consider the practice shocking, but sacrifices were not unique to Mesoamerica.  Old World cultures had their own tradition of bloody mass murders that were inspired by periodic outbursts of holy hysteria and rabid intolerance.

Harner contemplated the notion that there was more to the rituals than good old fashioned religion.  Long before the rise of the Aztec culture, the deer in central Mexico had been hunted to scarcity.  Tenochtitlán was built on a manmade island on the western shore of Lake Texcoco.  The lake was too shallow and salty for fish to live in, so the meat department majored in domesticated turkeys and hairless dogs (Chihuahuas).

In the Andes, the Incas also performed sacrifices, but on a much smaller scale.  Their meat department was more generous, including llamas, alpacas, and guinea pigs.  Because long distance travel was extremely difficult, the people of the Andes didn’t acquire turkeys or Chihuahuas from Mexico, but they did get corn.  On the other end, Mesoamerica did not acquire llamas, alpacas, guinea pigs, or potatoes from the Andes.

While it’s possible to be fairly well nourished on a diet majoring in corn and beans, it takes some luck.  Both have to be consumed during the same meal, in adequate portions, in order to assemble essential proteins.  Adding some meat to their diet could help compensate their protein requirements.

John Reader noted that fat is essential for the absorption, transport, and storage of vitamins A, D, E, and K.  Growing children especially need two types of fat.  Arctic folks can enjoy excellent health on a diet of blubber and raw meat, but Aborigines would abandon a kangaroo that had too little fat.

Reader noted that we need to consume 40 to 50 nutrients, including carbs, fat, protein, 14 vitamins, and 15 minerals.  The building blocks of proteins are 22 types of amino acids.  From the food we eat, we can assemble 12 types of amino acids.  We cannot assemble the other 10 types, they must be consumed readymade.  These are called “essential” amino acids.  All 10 are present in plant foods, but not in the ideal proportions.  When our diet is missing just one essential amino acid, protein assembly ceases. 

It is possible to get by on a combo of cereals and beans, but this option was not practical until the era of agriculture.  For non-farmers, meat is an essential component of a healthy diet.  Different types of animal foods provide proteins, but we need to reassemble them into forms that our bodies need.  Reader said that the one and only animal food that provides the exact mix of required proteins readymade is human meat.  Full scale cannibal cultures are impossible, because the rate of consumption would far exceed the rate of reproduction.

Harner proposed the theory that the Aztec sacrifices had two roles, one was religious, and the other was about reducing malnutrition.  Aztecs often raided their neighbors, and brought back prisoners.  They did not annex their land, but they left behind survivors to breed replacements that could be captured during future raids.  Prisoners who were not eaten on the battlefield were taken back home, where they were kept in sturdy wooden cages, in which they were fattened up for an upcoming sacrifice.

Bernal Díaz was a Spaniard who was an eyewitness to sacrifices.  He wrote:  “Moreover every day they sacrificed before our eyes three, four, or five Indians, whose hearts were offered to those idols and whose blood was plastered on the walls.  The feet, arms, and legs of their victims were cut off and eaten, just as we eat beef from the butcher’s in our country.”

In the sacrifice process, the heads were also removed.  In Tenochtitlán, their skulls were displayed on a rack near the temple.  Two soldiers were assigned the job of estimating the number of skulls on the rack.  They concluded about 136,000 skulls (not including the ones on the towers).  Sacrifices were also normal events in other Aztec cities.

As school children, we were taught that civilization was an outstanding achievement, a great leap forward.  We also learned that our wild ancestors, who had far less eco-impact, were primitive, stupid, and pitiable.  Their lives were “nasty, brutish, and short.” 

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 32

[Note: This is the thirty-second 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.] 

Plant Domestication

The domestication of crop plants is an enormous subject.  It has enabled and accelerated a long sequence of unfortunate unforeseen consequences over the centuries.  Of course, the same could be said for the domestication of animals.  If domestication had never occurred, life in the twenty-first century would look nothing like the world outside your window.  There would be no windows.

Our population would not be zooming down the fast lane to eight billion, nine billion….  We would not be helpless sitting ducks today, standing in the path of an onrushing out of control climate shit storm.  Wild folks would have never conjured techno-nightmares like automobiles, cell phones, cities, nuclear bombs, or pesticides.  Agriculture produces megatons of surplus food, which enables societies to feed and clothe herds of nerds, who are highly skilled at maximizing unsustainability in every imaginable way.

Agriculture was not an amazing invention created by a brilliant mad scientist.  For four million years, every hominin who had more than two brain cells clearly understood that plants grew from seeds.  Agriculture was not an awesomely cool fad that spread like wildfire around the world.  As long as wild foods were adequate, it would have been ridiculous to deliberately shift to tedious, miserable, backbreaking work. 

When hunters have an unlucky day, they can lose a day’s work.  When farmers have bad luck, they can lose more than a year’s hard work, and have no safety net to catch their fall.  Crops can be zapped by drought, deluge, late frost, early frost, fire, storms, plant disease, enemies, wildlife, insects, and so on.  High rewards came with high risks.

Kat Anderson described how hunter-gatherers in California “tended” the wild landscape to encourage the growth of wild plants that were useful to them.  They didn’t strip the living green skin off the land, pulverize the naked soil, and plant seeds.  That would have been ecologically insane.  They had no need to do that.  They had plenty to eat because their time proven culture was well adapted to their land, and because they hadn’t stumbled into the trap of domestication.

Mark Nathan Cohen wrote an important book that described how agriculture emerged independently in several different regions.  It was a jarring transformation for humankind.  Hominins had been hunters for four million years, a highly successful strategy.  Until 10,000 years ago, everything on the menu everywhere was wild foods.  By 2,000 years ago, most of humankind depended on food produced on farms.

Preceding this shift, hunters had spread around the world.  They had gotten very good at killing large game, and a number of megafauna species had been driven into extinction.  Also, as the ice age weakened, the climate got warmer, and forests expanded into steppe and tundra regions.  Forest was not prime habitat for herds of horses, reindeer, and mammoths.  These herds shrank or dispersed.  So, the menus had to be rewritten to include more offerings of stuff like waterfowl, fish, crustaceans, small reptiles, mollusks, and plant foods. 

Barry Cunliffe noted that the recovering forests of Europe 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.  Less meat led to a significantly smaller population.  It was easier to survive in locations close to coastlines, lakes, rivers, and wetlands, where a year round supply of a wide variety of foods could be gathered.

This new way of living apparently worked well enough for a while.  No wild plants suitable for agriculture were domesticated in early Europe.  At the time, much of the continent was still forest.  The primary food of civilizations is grains.  Grains are produced by grass species like wheat, oats, barley, and so on.  For this reason, large scale agriculture did not emerge in forests or jungles. 

Meanwhile, to the east, in the awesome grasslands of the Fertile Crescent, there was so much wild plant food that some groups had the option of giving up the nomadic life and settling down in delicious locations.  Cohen noted that the seeds of wild wheat (emmer and einkorn) and wild barley provided storable starch (calories).  Storable protein was provided by peas, beans, lentils, and vetches.  In North America, the primary starch was corn, and beans were the main source of plant protein.  Grasslands were also excellent places to hunt.

Cohen noted that the practice of agriculture migrated from its birthplace in the Fertile Crescent.  It moved into southeastern Europe between 7000 and 5000 B.C.  It then spread along the Mediterranean coast, and into the Danube river watershed.  At the time Europe was already inhabited by scattered communities of hunter-gatherers. 

Whether agriculture primarily spread through Europe by migration or diffusion is controversial (probably both).  In Australia, it spread by migration, when outsiders from Britain brought their dirty habit with them.  In North America, it apparently spread by diffusion, as corn and beans spent centuries gradually making a long pilgrimage from Mesoamerica to Ontario.

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, gradually displacing tundra.  The elk, moose, and tropical primates managed to survive.  As megafauna declined, folks hunted for deer, bear, beaver, moose, waterfowl, turkeys, and heath hens.  Rivers had huge runs of salmon, shad, and alewives.

Eventually, the seeds of corn (maize), squash, and beans reached New England.  Tribes that got addicted could produce far more food per acre, and support a larger population.  Their new diet had nutrient deficiencies which had health effects. 

I’ve already mentioned ideas from Mark Nathan Cohen’s book, The Food Crisis in Prehistory, in which the archaeologist and anthropologist explored what drove the transition to agriculture.  Twenty-two years later, he published Health & the Rise of Civilization, which extensively examined how health declined in agricultural societies.  The healthiest people were the hunter-gatherers who dined on large game.

The shift to agriculture took a toll.  Teotihuacan was a city located not far from today’s Mexico City.  It was home to a culture of pyramid builders.  At its prime around A.D. 500, it had about 125,000 people, and was the biggest city in the world.  Cohen wrote that it had very high rates of malnutrition, stunted growth, deciduous tooth hypoplasia, and infant and child mortality.  I’ll have much more to say about human health in a later chapter. 

Anyway, there is strength in numbers, and farmers trumped hunters.  In any region that was suitable for the agriculture of the day, the hunters were in danger.  A dozen healthy, well-nourished hunters were unlikely to triumph against 100 malnourished corn farmers with bad teeth.  Corn typically depleted soil fertility in a few years, so clearing new fields was an ongoing necessity.

Farmers were not friendly new neighbors.  Over time they were more like an uprising, a steamroller.  Muir described how the corn powered Iroquois gathered momentum over time, pushing out the tribes of Algonquin hunters.  Cunliffe wrote that when agriculture moved close to your home sweet home, you had four choices: (1) exterminate them, (2) take up the dirty habit, (3) flee, or (4) be overrun.

Mesopotamia

James Scott, a political scientist, studied the dawn of agriculture in southern Mesopotamia, because it was the birthplace of the earliest genuine states — hierarchical societies with rulers and tax collectors, sustained by a mix of farming and herding.  The primary food of almost every early state was wheat, barley, or rice.  Taxes were paid with grain, because it was easier to harvest, transport, and store than foods that were more perishable.  An entire field of grain ripened at the same time, which enabled one sweep harvesting.

Today, southern Mesopotamia is largely a treeless desert, and many assume that it always has been.  Actually, it used to be wetlands, a cornucopia of wild foods, a paradise for hunters and gatherers.  There was so much to eat that it was possible to quit wandering and live in settled communities.  Edible plants included club rush, cattails, water lily, and bulrush.  They also ate tortoises, fish, mollusks, crustaceans, birds, waterfowl, small mammals, and migrating gazelles.  The ecosystem was generous, and life was good.

In this region, communities of sedentary hunter-gatherers began appearing by maybe 12,000 B.C.  The first evidence of domestication appears around 9000 B.C.  Then, it took another four thousand years (160 generations!) before agricultural villages appeared.  The first states emerged around 3100 B.C.  In the Middle East, it does not appear that early cultivation was encouraged by declining availability of wild plant and animal foods.  Contrary to common beliefs, in Mesopotamia, cultivation seems to have emerged in regions of abundance, not scarcity.

In the early days, there was no need for irrigation.  Stream banks and river deltas were covered with alluvium — a moist and highly fertile deposit of clay, silt, sand, and gravel that was delivered by annual floods.  It was a soft and loose soil that was ready for sowing.  So, in addition to the wild grains they enjoyed, it was fairly easy to sow seeds in the fresh deposits of alluvium.

Scott mentioned archaeologist Hans Nissen, who studied the ancient Near East.  Nissen noted that for quite a while, the climate had been wet and warm.  With adequate rains, abundant water moved through the streams and rivers.  The Tigris and Euphrates watershed emptied into the Persian Gulf.  Nissen measured the accumulated sediments on the floor of the Gulf.  Thicker layers of organic matter indicated times when lots of water was moving lots of silt.  This study illuminated climate patterns.

Prior to roughly 3500 B.C., so much water flowed into the Gulf that its water level was 10 feet (3 m) higher than it is today.  The north shore of the Gulf expanded quite a ways into southern Mesopotamia.  Much of the region was then wetlands, and folks resided on islands.  It was a paradise for happy wild people — plenty to eat year round.

But then, climate trends gradually shifted toward cooler and dryer.  Less rain led to lower water tables.  The Gulf’s shoreline retreated.  Wetlands began drying out.  It became possible to plant seeds on the highly fertile, newly exposed soil.  For a while the alluvial soils were a sponge that held enough moisture that crops could be grown without irrigation, but this situation was temporary.

Nissen noted that wild grains still grow in Mesopotamia.  Today, in remote locations, folks can gather two or more quarts (or liters) of grain in an hour — a decent supply of calories for minimal effort.  On the other hand, cultivated grain grown in irrigated fields can produce far higher yields, sometimes two or three harvests per year.

Here is where the domestication of wheat played an important role.  Wild wheat grass readily drops its ripe seeds, which maximizes reproductive potential — evolution’s goal.  But this minimizes efficient harvesting.  Lots of seeds drop to the ground and are not collected.  So, over time, selective breeding favored plants that retained their seeds. 

Also, wild wheat seeds are coated with hard husks, which reduce the risk of premature germination.  Farmers have to remove these husks.  This can be accomplished by pounding or roasting, but then the seeds are less likely to germinate.  So, over time, selective breeding favored plants that produced seeds having less troublesome husks.

Annual grain yield was important, but effective storage was equally vital.  The primary objective of agriculture was not to produce millions of morbidly obese rats, or impressive heaps of stinky rotten wheat.  Grain was best stored in large closed vessels of fired clay. 

Gold is dense and shiny, but you can’t eat it.  Its only value is when you find odd people with vivid imaginations who believe that a shiny yellow stone is something of immense value.  Stored wheat, on the other hand, is something you can eat, food that can sustain your survival.  A full granary is truly precious to folks who enjoy being alive, it is a genuine treasure.

History is clear on one thing — stored treasure is fantastically tempting to ambitious hard-nosed folks untroubled by morals, like Vikings, Mongols, or billionaires.  Tacitus, writing in A.D. 98, described the wild German tribes.  “They actually think it tame and stupid to acquire by the sweat of toil what they might win by their blood.”

What may be the world’s oldest story was found etched on clay tablets in southern Mesopotamia — the Epic of Gilgamesh.  It’s the saga of slimy King Gilgamesh who clear-cut ancient forests, triggered massive floods and erosion, and built the city of Uruk.

Nissen spent a lot of time digging up stuff in Uruk, which is now scruffy ancient ruins surrounded by a barren brown wasteland.  [LOOK]  In the days of its glory, was a highly advanced place.  Nissen called this era “the beginning of early high civilization.”  It had writing, large artworks, and monumental architecture.  Gilgamesh built a wall around Uruk that enclosed an area of 1,360 acres (5.5 km²).  The wall included at least 900 semicircular towers.

Around the world, throughout history, it is no coincidence that settlements with stored treasure (especially granaries) have commonly been surrounded by walls, moats, palisades, and so on.  Alfred Crosby wrote a tragi-comical history of the evolution of weaponry, from stones to hydrogen bombs.  Many, many centuries were devoted to a tireless arms race — ongoing efforts to use new tricks for destroying walls, and new countermeasures for defending the stored treasure.

OK, back to Mesopotamia.  As the climate got cooler and dryer, rain decreased, river flows decreased, and the water level of the Gulf dropped.  Less water was available for irrigation.  Plus, as river flows dropped lower, their channels dug deeper into the soil.  This caused even more water to be drawn away from the surrounding land.

In the driest regions, agriculture could not survive without irrigation.  Over time, an enormous canal system was built in Mesopotamia.  The unintended consequence of this brilliant technological masterpiece was catastrophe.  Regular irrigation led to salt buildup in the soil (salinization), which rendered it permanently infertile, killing the golden goose.

Salt-nuked cropland had to be abandoned, forcing folks to concentrate in more urban settlements.  With more people crammed together, conflict levels increased.  To avoid social meltdown, conflicts needed to be brought under control.  This need encouraged the further intensification of civilization — powerful leaders, laws, enforcers, obedient tax-paying citizens, and hard-working slaves.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 22

[Note: This is the twenty-second 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 201 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.] 

Mother Grassland

Hominins originated on the tropical savannahs of Mother Africa, about four million years ago.  Since then, we have evolved, gotten too clever, colonized six continents, driven many megafauna species extinct, maximized food production, and exploded in numbers.  The human saga has been a unique experiment in living that is entirely out of the pattern of all other animals.  In a fantastic joyride of blissful ignorance, we have unintentionally succeeded in rubbishing the planet.  The bedrock foundation of this grand adventure is our deep and enduring relationship with grassland ecosystems.

Grasslands are sprawling green arrays of solar energy collectors that transform sunbeams into carbohydrates.  These nutrients migrate from species to species, up and down the food chain, and enable the existence of the family of life, including large herbivores, the preferred food for prehistoric people.  For the effort invested, they provided the biggest jackpots of meat.  Our intense desire for these animals, and our ongoing dependence on them, guided our evolution from hominins to humans. 

It’s important to understand that herds of large herbivores do not usually reside in forests or jungles.  Large body size is an advantage on grasslands, but can be a disadvantage in dense woodlands.  In terms of vegetation, forests contain much more plant biomass than grasslands, but most of it is elevated out of the reach of hungry herbivores. 

For herd critters, grasslands are the best place to dine on high quality greenery, hang out with friends and relatives, and enjoy a wonderful life of fresh air, travel, and adventure.  Each year, grasslands produce much more new biomass per acre than forests, and it’s conveniently located close to the ground.  Consequently, grasslands are home to far more large animals.  I would expect that most mammalian megafauna species originated in grasslands.

Grasslands, grazers, and large carnivores coevolved for many millions of years.  Much more recently, hominins pushed into the game, and began competing with the carnivores.  By and by, the clever tropical primates, with their terrifying weaponry, expanded into every continent, migrating from grassland to grassland, hunting, feasting, singing, and dancing.

As expanding wild cultures perfected their hunting skills, large game became harder to find, and attention shifted toward smaller animals, birds, shellfish, and so on.  We kept bumping into limits, and some cultures began to lurch toward the domestication of animals and/or plants.

Over time, persistent control freaks eventually succeeded in domesticating some wild herbivore species.  Instead of spending their time chasing increasingly scarce wild critters all over the countryside, they could selectively breed passive dimwitted animals, confine them to limited pastures, and conveniently exploit them in every imaginable way.  Jared Diamond noted that the five most important domesticates were horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs.  All five were domesticated on the grasslands of Eurasia by 4000 B.C.  No mammals were domesticated south of the equator in Africa, humankind’s ancestral homeland.

In some cultures, foragers gathered the energy-dense seeds of wild grasses.  Over time they encouraged these grasses to grow in more locations by sowing their seeds.  Foragers had a natural tendency to gather the seeds that were more convenient to reap, and leave behind seeds that readily fell to the ground.  For example, when wild wheat is ripe, the heads shatter, releasing all of their seeds.  This natural dispersal promotes the survival of the species. 

Year after year, foragers brought home seeds from plants that were (1) less prone to shattering, (2) ripened at the same time, and (3) produced larger seeds.  Over centuries, the seeds they planted became significantly different from wild seeds.  Today, more than half of the calories consumed by humankind come from three grasses: rice, wheat, and corn (maize).  Other popular grasses include oats, barley, millet, sorghum, sugar cane, and bamboo. 

I’ll have more to say about plant and animal domestication in later chapters.  Here, I just want to point out that some hunter-gatherer cultures transitioned into farmers and herders.  Their diet continued to major in grassland plant foods and large herbivores, but it was shifting toward domesticated varieties.  What remained constant was the continued dependence of many cultures on grassland ecosystems.

Graham Harvey, a grass worshipping wordsmith, concluded that humans are essentially creatures of the grass, like hyenas and horses.  Deep inside, we still are.  Long ago we lost our ability to quickly scamper up trees, and leap from branch to branch.  We evolved into bipedal critters fine-turned for walking, running, and surviving in grasslands.

Nomadic Freedom

In the good old days, bands of nomadic hunter-gathers spent their lives wandering across vast grasslands.  It was a way of life that majored in freedom.  Our ancestors were as free as every other wild critter.  No rent, money, landlords, soldiers, slaves, taxes, kings, police, or smart phones.  Indeed, we evolved as nomads, and remained nomads for almost the entire four million year hominin saga.  For hunters to stop roaming, and put down roots, would have been very risky.  Their best option was to follow the herds, which never stopped wandering in search of grass.

Bruce Chatwin was fascinated by the freedom of nomadic life, and the deep human need to always keep moving.  He was born in England in 1940, and spent his entire life in an intensely overpopulated world, boiling with nonstop conflict and bad craziness.  Industrial civilization tends not to inspire a profound sense of joy, wonderment, and celebration among the billions of anxious stressed-out taxpayers born in captivity.

He mentioned a Hungarian epidemiologist who had studied the history of infectious diseases.  The man concluded that humans were not meant to settle down.  Whenever you confine dense populations of humans and other animals in a fixed location, poop happens — lots of poop — excrement all over the place.  Drinking water develops a crappy flavor and aroma.  Before long, pathogens rush through the crowds, weeding out the weak and unlucky — a gold rush for grave diggers.  Nomads live in small bands, and rarely crap in the same place twice.  Their water tastes like water, and their lifestyle is not a magnet for infectious diseases.  Freedom is good for your health.  We’ll take a closer look at disease in later pages.

Today, during the brief era of fossil fuel mania, developed societies can temporarily discourage epidemics by implementing complex, expensive, energy-guzzling systems for waste treatment and water purification.  In wealthy societies, antibiotics are currently controlling the spread of many pathogens, but the benefit of these wonder drugs can only be temporary, because pathogens will never stop mutating into drug-resistant forms.  We are approaching the post-antibiotic era.  Whistling while he works, the Grim Reaper is sharpening his scythe.  Breaking all the laws of nature has harsh consequences, and Big Mama Nature has a deep regard for justice.

Finally, nomadic cultures enjoyed great freedom as long as they remained hunter-gatherers.  These cultures were essentially egalitarian.  There was no hierarchy of power, everyone was equal.  Unequal status was toxic to group cohesion.  Folks who became big headed were a serious problem that had to be promptly resolved.  It was vital that folks in small bands cooperated, shared, and respected one another.

When nomadic cultures shifted from hunting wild animals to herding enslaved critters, they entered a path that led to ugly destinations.  Nothing more reliably turns humans into tyrants, conquerors, egomaniacs, and spectacular idiots than cultures that define personal status in terms of accumulated wealth — personal property.  The lad with 100 cattle looked down on the fellow with 10.  This mindset sparked an explosion of craziness — furious empires of Mongols and Huns spilling rivers of blood.  Status mania continues to this day, but on a dramatically larger scale.  We are not living at the zenith of freedom, or anywhere near it.

Grassland Basics

In the dry land regions of Earth, there are four primary biomes: grassland, forest, desert, and tundra.  Precipitation is a key factor.  Forests and jungles need to receive at least 30 inches (76 cm) per year.  Deserts receive less than 10 inches (25 cm).  Grasslands fit in the middle, 10 to 30 inches.  Grasslands have two seasons, productive and dormant.  In warm climates, they are dormant during the dry season, and recover when the rains return.  In temperate climates, they are dormant during the frosty months, and green when the soil thaws.

Grasslands have evolved to survive in arid climates.  Grasses can live where most other plant species cannot.  There are three basic categories of grasslands: savannah, steppe, and prairie.  [MAP]  Savannahs are grasslands speckled with some trees and brush.  Steppes are called shortgrass prairies, because most plants are less than one foot (30 cm) tall.  Prairies are wetter, and produce tall grass, which can grow up to 13 feet (4 m) high — a horse can disappear in it.

Graham Harvey noted that grasses first evolved about 70 million years ago.  There are now an estimated 12,000 grass species, and they grow in many temperate and tropical regions.  Grasslands are communities of different plants — primarily grasses, mixed with a wide variety of sedges and leafy forbs (wild flowers and herbs). 

These mixed communities maximize the capture of solar energy, make better use of soil resources, and create rich humus.  Humus boosts fertility, and helps retain moisture.  Some plants convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form that is essential for all plants and animals.  Others are good at retrieving essential mineral nutrients.

Following an intense disturbance, grasslands can recover in 5 to 10 years — far faster than a wrecked forest.  Evolution has done a remarkable job of fine-tuning grasslands for rugged durability.  They can go dormant during dry times, and revive when rains return.  They can survive extended droughts and six month winters.  They can recover more easily after wildfires because only a third of grassland biomass is above ground, and vulnerable to flames. 

Beneath the surface, the invisible portion of grasslands is astonishing.  Many plants send roots deep into the ground, to acquire moisture and nutrients.  Some grow as deep as 32 feet (10 m).  In some regions, densely interwoven roots created a thick sod that pioneer farmers cut into bricks that were used to build homes and schools.  Because of unreliable precipitation, trees and shrubs often die before they can grow roots deep enough to tap dependable water.

The seeds of many grassland species can remain dormant for an extended period, until appropriate conditions return, and inspire them to germinate.  Some seeds can survive a ride through an herbivore’s gut and remain fertile, enabling the colonization of new locations.

In 1872, Kansas senator John James Ingalls celebrated the power of grass.  He wrote: “Grass is the forgiveness of nature — her constant benediction.  …Streets abandoned by traffic become grass-grown like rural lanes, and are obliterated.  Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal.  …The primary form of food is grass.  Grass feeds the ox: the ox nourishes man: man dies and goes to grass again; and so the tide of life with everlasting repetition, in continuous circles, moves endlessly on and upward, and in more senses than one, all flesh is grass.”