Safety Nets



Today, a few billion humans live in affluence.  Their unsustainable societies have social safety nets made possible by nonrenewable energy.  When they are disrupted by hurricanes, earthquakes, or famine, food relief is usually shipped in from other regions, preventing mass starvation.  For most of the human saga, each clan or community was on its own, far less likely to be rescued by outsiders.

The San people have the oldest DNA of any living culture.  Their DNA is the genetic foundation of nearly all modern humans.  Until recent decades, they had a sustainable safety net, but herders, farmers, and others have pushed them off most of their traditional territory.  The San now inhabit the Kalahari Desert.  On average, two of every five years are drought years, and severe droughts occur one in every four years. 

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lot of time with the San.  She wrote her first book about them in 1958, and her third book in 2006.  Like any intelligent culture, their safety net included careful family planning, to avoid the suffering caused by overpopulation, and its trusty companions: environmental degradation, hunger, and conflict.

Because of low body fat and hard work, San women began menstruating later.  Some did not have monthly periods.  Children were usually nursed for about four years, which further reduced mom’s fertility.  Most of the women had one to four offspring.  Nomads moved frequently, and belongings and infants had to be hauled long distances.  A woman could only carry one infant, so just one twin was kept.

When a child could not be kept, the woman gave birth alone, away from the camp, and buried the newborn before it drew breath.  In their culture, a newborn did not immediately become alive, so disposing it was OK.  Crippled or badly deformed infants were not kept, because they would be a drain on the wellbeing of the band.  To avoid unwanted pregnancies in harsh times, it was common for folks to abstain from intercourse. 

Richard Lee wrote about the San.  Their primary food was mongongo nuts, which dropped once a year, but could be gathered all year long.  Their secondary food was meat.  The Kalahari provided them with about 100 edible plant species, which they were careful not to overuse.  The San expected periodic times of scarcity, so they reserved some plant species for drought food.  Portions of their territory were set aside for lean times.

John Reader wrote about an extreme drought in Botswana that lasted three years, resulting in the deaths of 250,000 cattle and 180,000 people.  The San didn’t starve.  Each week they spent 12 to 19 hours foraging for their sustenance.  They knew how to live.

The outlook for our highly unsustainable society is daunting.  It depends on a stable climate, and ever-diminishing energy resources.  Our safety net is something like a time bomb — tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…

The San thrived by carefully adapting to their wild ecosystem.  Consumers thrive by eliminating wild ecosystems and replacing them with forest mines, soil mines, mineral mines, permanent settlements, and complex industrial systems.  Our way of life cannot survive a three year disconnect from fossil energy, or three years of abnormal weather.

In the far north, the Eskimos also had safety nets.  The super-frigid arctic was an immensely challenging habitat for hairless tropical primates.  Beyond seasonal eggs and berries, little foraging was possible.  Meat was the primary food, and hunting was never reliable.

Storing meat or eggs in a treeless land inhabited by hungry polar bears and wolves was not easy.  Their food preservation methods would gag suburban consumers.  In Greenland, Knud Rasmussen got salmonella after eating kivioq, a yummy delicacy made from dead auks sewn inside a seal gut and left to rot for two months.  This was before antibiotics.  He died.  

Life was hard.  Knud told the story of a man named Qumangâpik, who had four wives and 15 children.  The first wife froze to death, the second was buried by an avalanche, the third died of illness, and the fourth froze to death.  Of his 15 children, one starved, four were frozen, and five died of illness.  Qumangâpik froze to death, along with his wife and two little children.

Knud’s buddy, Peter Freuchen, went to Greenland in 1906, built a trading post, married a native woman, and wrote about wild Eskimos — before their traditional lifestyle had been destabilized by disease, guns, booze, bureaucrats, and missionaries.  In the 1920s, during a severe storm, his sled dogs refused to continue.  So he crawled under the sled and took a nap.  When he awoke, his left leg was frozen solid.  It thawed, rotted, and had to be amputated.

In the arctic, safety nets had to rely far more on population management.  Survival depended on the lads who brought the meat home.  Without hunters, everyone starved.  Second in importance was their wives, who could bear more children once the lean times had passed.  Least important were the elderly and children, especially female youngsters, who would not grow up to be hunters.  There were times when starving mothers strangled and ate their own children.

When hunting was bad, suicide was common.  Elders would take one-way walks into the frigid night.  Old women sometimes asked a son or daughter to stab them in the heart with a dagger.  Old men sometimes asked a son to hang them.  At the conclusion of a joyful farewell party, father and son would rub noses, and then dad would be hoisted up, to begin his journey to the other side, where game was always abundant. 

“There is absolutely no cruelty connected with this,” Freuchen emphasized.  “Fear of death is unknown among them, they know only love of life… they believe themselves to be the happiest people on earth living in the most beautiful country there is.”  There was no shame in eating the dead, or killing and eating children and dogs.  Survival required it.  It was OK.

Vilhelm Moberg described family planning in heathen Sweden.  When a child was born, the father decided its fate.  If he allowed it to live, it was sprinkled with water and given a name.  Sickly and deformed infants were exposed (abandoned outdoors).  In times of famine, even healthy newborns were exposed, especially girls.  The old and infirm were dispatched by pushing them off the ancestral cliff (ättestup) or by clobbering them with the ancestral club (ätteklubbor).

Anyway, contact with civilization has now succeeded in eliminating most sustainable cultures.  Infectious diseases have hammered wild people everywhere.  Outsiders introduced the San to dogs and horses, which made overhunting far easier.  They now live in permanent villages where alcoholism, individualism, and violence are common.  Their traditional way of life is essentially over.

Initially, Freuchen and Rasmussen were proud of their efforts to help the Eskimos enjoy the wonders of modernity.  Guns made it far easier to hunt (and overhunt).  Guns made so much noise that they scared caribou away — they abandoned their normal migration routes, and entire communities starved.  Loud gunfire scared seals away.  Seals shot with guns often sank, and were lost.  By 1908, Rasmussen had profound regrets.  The Eskimos appeared to be on the path to extinction.

Gretel Ehrlich visited Greenland several times between 1993 and 1999.  Unlike the Kalahari, Greenland had valuable resources to attract greed freaks — cod, seals, walrus, birds, minerals, and so on.  Natives became addicted to the money economy, and now enjoy year round access to edible food-like substances imported from elsewhere, fueling population growth.  By killing extra fish and wildlife, they earn the money needed for TVs, electricity, telephones, cigarettes, booze, snowmobiles, motorboats, guns, ammo…  Many were hunting and fishing as if they were the last generation.

Please note that the sustainable wild cultures mentioned above would perceive our obsession with perpetual growth, our insatiable hunger for status trinkets, and our weirdness about abortion to be absolutely insane.  An Eskimo gent once told a white foreigner, “Alas, you are a child in your thoughts.”  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…

Image: “Greenland Storyteller,” from Rasmussen’s book.

Ehrlich, Gretel, This Cold Heaven — Seven Seasons in Greenland, Pantheon Books, New York, 2001.

Freuchen, Peter, Book of the Eskimos, World Publishing Company, Cleveland, 1961.

Freuchen, Peter, Arctic Adventure — My Life in the Frozen North, 1935, Reprint. The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut, 2002.

Lee, Richard B., The Dobe !Kung, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1984.

Moberg, Vilhelm, A History of the Swedish People, Pantheon Books, New York, 1970.

Rasmussen, Knud, The People of the Polar North, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., London, 1908.

Reader, John, Man on Earth, Perennial Library, New York, 1990.

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, The Harmless People, Vintage Books, New York, 1989.  Second edition. 

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, The Old Way — A Story of the First People, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2006.

Extra credit homework:

Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England by Dorothy L. Haller

Old Fashioned Family Planning

The bubble of cheap energy has enabled a sharp increase in food production, and a sharp increase in population.  All bubbles are temporary.  The coming decades will be a time of huge and turbulent change.  Food production is being threatened by rising energy costs, an increasingly unstable climate, unsustainable water mining and soil mining, and the growth in chemical-resistant pests, weeds, and pathogens. 

We are approaching Peak Food, while population growth continues.  It is most perplexing that population remains a taboo subject for polite conversation among friends and family, and among the leaders of the world.  We are choosing to let nature solve this problem, and she certainly will. 

For most of human history, family planning was just ordinary business — making common sense choices in order to encourage survival and stability.  It’s important to understand that the modern mindset is a strange quirk in the human journey.  In order to gain a broader perspective on our morals, let’s take a quick look at the history of infanticide in some civilized societies.

William Lecky wrote that the Greeks were devoted to the greatest happiness principle.  “Regarding the community as a whole, they clearly saw that it is in the highest degree for the interests of society that the increase of population should be very jealously restricted.”  Infanticide was considered normal throughout most ancient Greek civilizations. 

Infanticide was also common in Rome, during its Empire phase.  Lecky wrote that an ancient law required “the father to bring up all his male children, and at least his eldest female child, forbidding him to destroy any well-formed child till it had completed its third year, when the affections of the parent might be supposed to be developed, but permitting the exposition of deformed or maimed children with the consent of their five nearest relations.”

“Infanticide” means actively killing a child (drowning, strangling, poisoning, etc.).  “Exposition” means setting the newborn down somewhere, and then walking away.  In Rome, exposition “was certainly not punished by law; it was practiced on a gigantic scale and with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with the most frigid indifference, and at least, in the case of destitute parents, considered a very venial offence.”  Lecky added that the abandoned infants were often taken in by speculators “who educated them as slaves, or very frequently as prostitutes.”

With the emergence of Christianity, the elimination of unwanted babies was strongly denounced, but it certainly did not disappear.  There were no food stamps for poor folks living on bread and water.  Much later, Christians built foundling hospitals, where unwanted infants could be left in the hands of the church.  So, far fewer babies died at home, but the mortality rates in foundling hospitals were extremely high.  Some have called this “legalized infanticide.”  Most infants perished from neglect, and many were mercifully put out of their misery by wet nurses.

William Langer noted that in 1860s Britain, dead babies were frequently found under bridges, in parks, in culverts and ditches, and even in cesspools.  He quoted the coroner of Middlesex, England, Dr. Lankester: “the police seemed to think no more of finding a dead child than of finding a dead dog or cat.”

In many civilized societies, female children were the most commonly destroyed, because they were less likely to benefit the family economically.  Edward Moor wrote, “In India, China, Persia, Arabia, &c. there exists a decided preference to male children.  The birth of a boy is a subject of gratulation; of a girl, not.”  Moor described infanticide in India, “Every female infant born in the Raja’s family of a Ranni, or lawful wife, is immediately dropped into a hole dug in the earth and filled with milk, where it is drowned.”

Langer made one statement that I will never forget.  He said, “In the seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries to China were horrified to find that in Peking alone several thousand babes (almost exclusively female) were thrown on the streets like refuse, to be collected each morning by carriers who dumped them into a huge pit outside the city.”  This practice remained common into the 1830s.

John Cave-Browne noted that infanticide in India was especially prevalent among the upper classes.  The Rajpoot caste was elite, second only to the Brahmans.  In one Rajpoot tribe, the children under five years old averaged 20 girls for every 100 boys.  It was shameful to have a daughter marry a man of a lower caste, and a father lost honor if his daughter remained unmarried.  Whenever possible, daughters were betrothed prior to puberty.  If a suitable groom could not be found, the father felt compelled to pay a man to marry his daughter.  Once his daughter was married, the father lost prestige to the groom, “the very title ‘father-in-law’ (Soosur) is used as a common term of scorn and reproach.”

Because girls were in low supply and high demand, grooms paid large dowries for their brides.  Also because of this high demand, women had a low tolerance for sub-perfect husbands.  Cave-Browne said, “Few women remain constant; it is no merit to do so; many change four or five times in the course of their lives; some more frequently.”  When this happened, the family of the ex-husband demanded their dowry back.  Every time his daughter married, the father was responsible for lavish wedding expenses. 

So, sons increased a family’s wealth, and daughters decreased it.  Sometimes daughters were poisoned by smearing the mother’s breast with an ointment containing poppy, datura, or the Mudar plant.  Some were buried alive.  Some were strangled with their umbilical cords.  Many were drowned.  Dead daughters were preferred to the possibility of diminished family honor and wealth.  Allowing daughters to live could bankrupt the family.

The stories above describe what life was like in some civilizations prior to the temporary bubble of cheap energy and prosperity.  Today, in modern societies, family planning is made easy with readily available contraceptives and safe clinical abortions.  At some point in the future, as the collapse proceeds, this will no longer be an option.  What will life be like when we move beyond the cheap energy bubble?

Prior to civilization, wild cultures also discarded unwanted infants, but they put a far greater emphasis on pregnancy prevention, which saved a lot of wear and tear on mothers’ bodies.  Taboos placed many restrictions on when intercourse was allowed.  Typically, births were few, and widely spaced.  Hunting bands clearly understood how many mouths their land could sustainably support, and they did what was needed to preserve stability.

An essential part of our healing process is unlearning the dysfunctional beliefs and values of an insane culture that is ravaging the planet.  We need to outgrow them.  One way or another, effective family planning is mandatory for any form of sustainable living.

Cave-Browne, John, Indian Infanticide, W. H. Allen and Co., London, 1857.

Langer, William L., “Infanticide: A Historical Survey,” History of Childhood Quarterly, vol 1, pp. 353-365, 1974.

Lecky, William Edward Hartpole, History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, Longmans, Green, and Company, London, 1869, vol II.

Moor, Edward, Hindu Infanticide, J. Johnson and Company, London, 1811.