Wild Free and Happy Sample 37

[Note: This is the thirty-seventh sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 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.] 

Potato

Two super foods were domesticated in the New World, potatoes and corn.  It’s possible to grow both without draft animals and plows.  Both plants produce more calories per acre than any Old World crop plant, except for rice, an Asian super food.  Super foods possess especially powerful juju for accelerating the growth and collapse of dense and self-destructive populations. 

Potatoes (affectionately nicknamed “spuds”) can be grown in a wide variety of soils and climates, at elevations ranging from sea level up to 14,000 feet (4,267 m).  Spuds originated in the Andes region of western South America.  They are now grown in at least 149 countries.  There are still many varieties of wild potatoes in the Andes, and they come in every size, shape, and color.  The tubers of some varieties contain bitter toxins, which encourage hungry critters to eat other stuff.  Spuds are smarter than they look.

It’s unclear when they were first domesticated, but it was certainly prior to 2000 B.C.  There are maybe 400 types of domesticated spuds.  Prudent farmers might plant 50 to 60 varieties in their fields, because something that kills one is less likely to kill all.  Spuds are awesome.  The plants mature rapidly, in just 90 to 120 days.  Per day, they produce more food energy per acre than any other crop plant.  An acre of potatoes produces up to four times more calories than an acre of grain.

John Reader noted that potatoes are an especially nutritious plant food.  Compared to cereal grains, spuds provide a better mix of carbs, protein, vitamins, and minerals.  The carbs are primarily starch, which is released into the body more gently than carbs from fats or sugars.  Spuds are a good source of B vitamins, and deliver lots of vitamin C.  Grains have more protein, but spuds provide protein of higher quality, including essential amino acids that the body must acquire readymade. 

Reader says that, of all foods, potatoes provide the “best all-round package of nutrition.”  In Ireland 200 years ago, adult males consumed an average of 10 pounds (4.5 kg) per day.  With a glass of milk with every meal, they would get 4,000 calories per day, and receive all the required nutrients.  At times of hard labor, lads would sometimes eat up to 20 pounds per day.  While Irish peasants were often dirt poor, dressed in rags, and living in mud huts, they had a healthier diet than most Europeans.  Unfortunately, being well nourished enabled higher birthrates.  Population soared almost 500 percent in 154 years (1687 to 1841).  Danger!

Inca Empire

Spuds are associated with the Inca (Inka) civilization, whose capital was Cuzco (Cusco), Peru.  The founders were the Quechua people, who were hunter-gatherers long before they became farmers.  Hunter-gatherer cultures were living in Andes by 12,000 years ago, and they were the ones who eventually domesticated potatoes. 

The Inca civilization was sort of a flash in the pan, existing from about 1438 to 1533, until snuffed out by Spaniards, and their diseases (smallpox, influenza, typhus, measles).  Preceding the Incas, there were a number of civilizations that rose and fell in the Andes region over the span of several thousand years.  The Inca Empire had a population of maybe 6 to 14 million, overseen by an elite class of 15 to 40 thousand.  The elites were not universally loved, and many folks celebrated the arrival of the tyrannical Spanish, which they saw as a great liberation from unbearable oppression. 

The Inca Empire was 2,200 miles long (3,540 km), and 190 miles (306 km) wide.  Prior to the tsunami of Europeans and their slaves, the Incas were the largest empire that ever existed in North and South America.  They were home to 40 percent of the combined population of both continents.  The range of the empire was essentially limited to habitat that was suitable for llamas and alpacas, extremely important animals that provided meat, manure, hides, and fiber.  The Incas had no wheels, no writing, no iron or steel, no riding animals, and no draft animals to pull carts or plows — but llamas were used to haul loads of stuff.

The Incas grew food on terraced plots, and built irrigation systems.  They built stone cities and temples, cut tunnels through mountains, crossed rivers with rope suspension bridges hung from stone towers.  They built causeways across wetlands, and cut pathways along the sides of steep slopes.  They had 14,300 miles (23,000 km) of paved roads, long enough to encircle the globe.  Teams of relay runners could carry messages 1,491 miles (2400 km) in five days.  Great roads also accelerated the spread of diseases, Spaniards, and missionaries.

The original staple food for folks in the high Andes was potatoes, which were often grown in rotation with quinoa and kañihua (cañihua) — two plants that produce high protein cereal-like seeds, but neither are technically cereals, because they aren’t card-carrying members of the grass family.  The seeds of both can germinate at or near freezing temperature. 

Plots of cropland were periodically fallowed, and herds of llamas and alpacas were moved in to drop steaming gifts of precious fertilizer all over the place.  In season, folks dined on fresh spuds.  Surplus spuds were freeze dried into chuño, a nutritious commodity that the tax collectors came to collect.  Chuño could be stored for years.  Archaeologists at one site found chuño created 2,200 years ago.

Chuño can be made at elevations above 13,000 feet (4,000 m) during the long dry season, when there are freezing temperatures at night, and bright sunlight in the daytime hours.  Chuño country is not far from the equator, but high elevations create an unusual combination of “tropical noon and arctic midnight,” which is perfect for freeze drying. 

The process for making chuño could take two months.  It involved freezing, soaking in cold water, freezing again, rubbing, squeezing, and drying in direct sunlight.  The complicated process removed the water, skins, and toxins.  The end product was light, firm, highly nutritious, and chalk-white.  Incas also freeze dried the flesh of birds, fish, alpacas, and llamas.  The word “jerky” came to us from the Andes.

Civilizations cannot exist for long if they don’t have effective systems for storing substantial quantities of food (usually grain) to keep folks fed during lean seasons, lean years, and wartime.  In the Old World, the emergence of agriculture and pottery-making were closely associated.  When dried grain was stored in sealed ceramic containers, it was not lost to rats and mice.

Incas stored chuño, jerky, and corn in thousands of frosty underground warehouses scattered throughout their empire.  Stored food provided abundant fuel for the rapid expansion of their empire — road building, urban construction, military adventures, and so on.  It also provided a social safety net.  Some say that Incas never starved.  Fifteen years after defeating the Incas, one Spaniard commented that food stored near Xauxa enabled him to feed 2,000 troops for seven weeks. 

At some point prior to the Inca era, corn from Mesoamerica arrived in the Andes.  Corn produced high yields, was suitable for long term storage, did not require labor-intense freeze drying, and was easy to transport (but nutritionally inferior to spuds).  Corn cannot be grown at elevations above 8,200 feet (2,500 m).  Where it could be grown, folks grew corn instead of spuds.  Inca leaders actively encouraged the intensified production of corn, and John Reader called this decision a “masterstroke.”  Folks had to build new terraces and irrigation systems to grow more corn.  Potatoes remained the most important crop, but the decision to deliberately maximize the output of super foods lit the fuse for the explosive growth of the Inca Empire.

So, once the Inca leaders were defeated and out of the way, the kind and loving Spaniards shape shifted into cruel, greedy, demonic monsters.  They snatched all the awesome gold and silver treasures in Cuzco, melted them down, and shipped eleven tons of it back home.  Then, they learned about the Potosí silver mine, assembled lots of forced labor, and created a boom town.  In the year 1592, Potosí produced more than 400 tons of refined silver.  By and by, back in Spain, this tsunami of wealth blindsided an already wobbly economy with soaring price inflation.  It also funded the creation of the Spanish Empire.  The royalty, giddy with enormous wealth, decided this was a good time to go on the warpath. 

In addition to gold and silver, lots of other stuff was sent back to the Old World, including turkeys, guinea pigs, cocoa, and tobacco.  A planet-rocking time bomb was also shipped back home — two super foods: spuds and corn.

Super Foods Supercharge Europe

Clive Ponting noted that until about 1800, most of the world’s great cities were outside of Europe.  In the year 600, Rome was home to 50,000, while 100,000 lived in Teotihuacán in Mexico.  Of the 100 towns and cities in Europe in 1000, half were in Italy.  In 1086, London had a population of just 10,000.  The staple foods in Europe were cereal grains, which produced far fewer calories per acre than spuds, were far less nutritious, and far more laborious to plant.  Corn and spuds could be planted with simple hand tools and human muscle power.  Wheat, rye, barley, and oats grew best in soil that was pulverized by harnessing a plow to oxen or horses — a far more resource-intensive process.

Spuds arrived in Spain by 1570, and gradually migrated across the continent, arriving in Scandinavia 100 years later.  The adaptation of corn also spread slowly.  Dirt poor subsistence farmers, who constantly felt the cold breath of starvation on their backs, were exceedingly conservative.  They were never eager to impulsively throw all caution to the wind, and bet their survival on weird exotic crops from outer space.

Alfred Crosby noted that skeptical farmers were eventually convinced that the exotics were better in many ways than the crops they traditionally grew.  Over time, corn became a staple in southern Europe.  Potatoes were widely adopted in northern Europe, where they produced far more nutrients per acre than traditional grain crops.  It took 5 acres (2 ha) of grain to feed a family of five, but just 1.5 acres of potatoes.  Farmers could raise potatoes on marginal soils, using only a spade.  Unlike grains, spuds needed no grinding or milling.  Like grains, potatoes were also vulnerable to molds, fungus, and weather that was too wet or cool.  Western Europe was best suited for growing healthy forests and wildlife, rather than spuds, cereals, livestock, and tropical primates.

Grain could be stored for years, but not spuds.  Europe’s climate was unsuitable for making freeze dried chuño.  Western Europe had mild winters during which the ground rarely froze.  Spuds could be left buried in the field for several months, unharmed by light frost, until springtime warmth returned. 

Spuds provided some extra security for farm families.  When grain is ripe, it has to be harvested and stored.  William McNeill noted that full granaries were treasure chests of essential nutrients, which made them primary targets for annoying visitors, like tax and rent collectors.  Collectors grabbed the grain, but left the spuds alone, because they were too much work to dig up, and they couldn’t be stored indefinitely.  Landlords and nobles wanted grain.

Passing troops were even more despised than the collectors.  In the old days, armies did not haul around caravans of food supplies.  Instead, they stopped at farms, confiscated their stored grain, and left the peasants to starve.  This was a common practice, and more than a little discourteous.  In wartime, while soldiers were dying on the battlefield, peasants were dying in their huts, which seriously disrupted the stability of food producing rural communities.  How smart was that?

During the War of Austrian Succession (1740-48), Fredrick the Great was astonished to discover that far more spud growing peasants survived, compared to those who grew grain, lost it, and starved.  Like the tax and rent collectors, passing troops didn’t have the time or desire to dig up fields of potatoes.  It was much faster and easier to empty the granaries and march on.  Fredrick realized that if folks planted more spuds, wartime would be less devastating to society.  It was wise to be nice to peasants.  So, he distributed free seed potatoes throughout his kingdom. 

McNeill noted that others soon joined the parade.  Leaders in Austria, Russia, and France recognized the strategic advantages of joining the spud cult.  Over time, the resistance of conservative peasants melted away.  More and more came to the conclusion that they preferred boiled potatoes to death by starvation. 

This inspired a wave of innovation in agricultural practices.  Traditional processes were fine-tuned for maximizing grain output.  New and improved processes were needed to accelerate spud production, and clever folks came up with some bright ideas.  In the traditional system, every year either a third or half of the cropland was left fallow, to suppress weeds.  In the new system, fallow land became potato fields.  Amazingly, the amount of grain harvested was not diminished, and spud harvests provided a mother lode of bonus calories. 

Before long, bonus bambinos were squirting out of wombs, at just the right time.  See, turning fallow land into potato fields required additional labor, because happy weeds now had to be mercilessly killed, in late spring and early summer, by workers with hoes and spades.  By utilizing this extra labor, farmers could now produce two to four times more calories per acre, and feed even more bambinos.

McNeill’s big idea was that potatoes radically changed world history during the era spanning from 1750 to 1950.  Spuds had become popular in Ireland and the Scottish highlands, but were especially important on the vast European plain, which spanned from northern France, Germany, Poland, and eastward into Russia. 

While spuds required more farm labor, skyrocketing population growth provided more workers than needed in the fields.  Surplus people provided a labor force for the Industrial Revolution, which developed rapidly in northern Europe.  Low wages and miserable working conditions were more desirable than starvation.  The transition to fossil energy turbocharged the boom years.  The era of 1750 to 1950 was also a time when Europe established colonies and built empires.  McNeill noted that the entire world was rapidly and radically transformed.  Then, around 1947, European empires began disintegrating, and a new era began.

He wrote that without potatoes, Germany would have never grown into a leading military and industrial power in Europe after 1848.  Russia would not have become a major threat to Germany after 1891.  Millions of Europeans would not have migrated to America and other regions.  And so, the humble dirty spud triggered an avalanche of chaotic bad craziness that blindsided societies all around the world.

Alfred Crosby wrote that, aided by potatoes and corn, both Europe and America were able to harvest far more food.  People were better nourished, so child mortality dropped.  The population of Europe leaped from 80 million in 1492, to 180 million in 1800, 390 million in 1900, and 556 million in 2019.  Europe was bursting with people, and many migrated to colonies — Australia, New Zealand, southern Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Canada, and the U.S.  Bottom line, world population leaped from 450 million in 1500 to 7.8 billion in 2020.  Crosby concluded, “Calories can make as much history as cannons — more in the long run.”

Monocultures Beg For Trouble

Jeffrey Lockwood studied locusts.  He described a swarm that visited Plattsmouth, Nebraska in June 1875.  It was 110 miles (177 km) long, up to a mile (1.6 km) high, and travelled at 15 miles per hour (24 km/h).  They visited for ten days, and covered maybe 198,000 square miles (512,817 km²).  This swarm may have included 3.5 trillion locusts, and there were many other hungry swarms.

Where the swarms touched down, they devoured the greenery.  They voraciously ate the clothing off of the clueless settlers, who had not majored in environmental history.  In a few hours, a field could be rubbished.  To express their deep gratitude to the settlers, for so generously providing such a wonderful banquet, the departing swarm might leave behind 940 million eggs per acre.

The ambitious American settlers suffered from get rich quick fever.  In an era of above average precipitation, they plowed up large regions of western plains and planted wheat.  Unmolested plains ecosystems are home to a highly diverse mix of species.  Big Mama Nature cherishes diversity, and detests manmade monocultures (spit!).  It turns out that wheat was a grass that locusts considered to be the most delicious food of all, and wheat was the primary crop on the western plains.  Locusts were far less interested in gobbling up grazing land or dairy pastures.

Wheat was first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, homeland of the Judeo-Christian culture.  Wheat thrived in the Mediterranean climate, which provided generous winter rains to germinate the thirsty seeds.  The Bible mentions locusts 28 times.  Richard Manning once said, “The domestication of wheat was humankind’s greatest mistake.”  (Or, was it corn, or potatoes, or rice, or…?)

As I bike around my town, I often see pennies lying on the street.  For most folks, the low value of a penny simply does not provide sufficient motivation to stop, bend over, pick it up, and take it to the bank.  This is something like a healthy diverse ecosystem — the things that critters value are widely scattered.  Now, compare that to a monoculture.  Let’s dump a sack of $100 bills on the street, a dense concentration of value.  This treasure promptly attracts a large excited swarm and is rapidly swept away.  Right?

Similarly, infectious diseases are far more likely to create epidemics in large, densely populated cities, with poor sanitation, and lots of malnourished people — especially societies that are interconnected with complex networks of long distance trade and travel.  This is a highly vulnerable combo — a dense monoculture of people, plus high mobility ($100 bills).  It’s much safer to live in small, remote, isolated villages that have clean water, adequate nutrition, and little or no contact with the outside world (pennies).

Like the wheat and locust duet, it’s a similar story with other crop plants.  Unnatural density is begs for trouble.  James Scott wrote that both humans and crops are vulnerable to viral, fungal, and bacterial diseases.  Crops can be damaged by snails, slugs, insects, birds, rodents, and other mammals.  Weeds can diminish their access to sunlight, water, nutrients, and space.  A serious vulnerability for civilizations is that their survival depends on a successful annual harvest of just one or two staple foods.  Over the centuries, many have gotten blindsided by droughts, deluges, floods, fires, pests, frosts, storms, crop diseases, and mean enemies.

Hunter-gatherers were more like the pennies scenario, low density people, in isolated groups, who obtained their nutrients from widely scattered local sources — healthy diversity, not goofy sprawling monocultures.  Wild folks could live perfectly well by looking for pennies, because they couldn’t imagine something as ridiculous and unbearable as living in mobs of weird smelly strangers and pursuing an obscenely wasteful $100 lifestyle.

And now, an important story.  John Reader was impressed by how nomadic foragers benefitted from their time-proven ultraconservative way of life.  Some plant and animal foods were regularly eaten.  Others were deliberately set aside to be famine food.  Some groups also reserved portions of their land as a safety net that was only used in lean periods.

In the 1960s, anthropologists in Botswana were astounded to observe how well the San people lived during the third year of an extreme drought in the Kalahari, one of the harshest ecosystems on Earth.  Neighboring Bantu farmers were hammered by three consecutive crop failures, and 250,000 of their cattle died.  United Nations famine relief kept 180,000 farming people on life support.  Some farmers who didn’t get food relief had to forage for wild food, putting further strain on food resources.  Still, the San were able to acquire their food with just 12 to 19 hours a week of effort.  They dwelt in a desolate “wasteland” that no civilized people could survive in, and they lived well and joyfully. 

And so, dear reader, please remember this snapshot of ultraconservative wild survival, because it is strikingly different from stuff on the following pages about crop failures, blights, famines, and so on — the life threatening vulnerabilities of being completely dependent on the ups and downs of a small number of domesticated food plants.

Clive Ponting wrote an incredible information packed book on environmental history.  Most readers have never felt the gnawing hunger of living during an extended food shortage.  We have no memories of the “good old days” of wholesome, low-impact, horse powered, organic agriculture.  Ponting summed it up like this: “Since the rise of settled societies some ten thousand years ago the overwhelming majority of the world’s population has lived in conditions of grinding poverty.”  He added, “Until about the last two centuries in every part of the world nearly everyone lived on the edge of starvation.” 

In the old days, “All but about five percent of the people in the world were peasants, directly dependent on the land and living a life characterized by high infant mortality, low life expectancy and chronic undernourishment, and with the ever-present threat of famine and the outbreak of virulent epidemics.”

Ponting’s perception of the past is very different our culture’s romanticized version, which presents us with stuff like the paintings of happy dancing peasants by Pieter Breughel.  Having read loads of environmental history, I know that Ponting was not a creep who invented fake history.  The era of muscle powered agriculture indeed gave the planet and its critters a painful beating.  Of course, today’s fossil fuel powered nightmare has enabled us to beat the planet even faster and harder, in ways never before believed to be possible.

Potato Blight

John Reader wrote that spuds first arrived in Ireland between 1586 and 1603.  At that time, its population was somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million.  By 1845, when the blight began, it had soared to 8.5 million, and the survival of about 90 percent of them depended almost entirely on potatoes.  Well-nourished peasants had higher birth rates, and stronger resistance to disease.  But when the blight nuked the spuds, a million peasants, weakened by hunger and disease, stood in long lines to take selfies with the Grim Reaper.

Because Ireland had a wetter climate, it was not an ideal place to grow cereals.  Spuds could often tolerate dampness that would rot oats.  So, potatoes were less risky, produced lots of calories, and didn’t require a draft animal and a plow.  Ireland was the first nation in northern Europe to largely switch from cereal crops to spuds. 

Before long, the exotic tubers were popular everywhere, from the palace to the pigsty.  Brian Fagan noted that the population explosion had been fueled by several varieties of outstanding, gourmet spuds, like the Black, Apple, and Cups.  But the production of these types could not keep up with the growing numbers of spud addicts.  Feeding large families on small plots of land inspired a determined search for varieties of spuds that were even more productive.

By 1835, the Lumper, or horse potato, won the competition and became the dominant spud on the Emerald Isle.  It came from England, where it had been developed for use as livestock fodder.  The remarkably unexciting Lumper was coarse and watery, less nutritious, more vulnerable to disease, but indispensable life support for dirt poor peasants who had way too many kids.  On the plus side, Reader said that the Lumper was 20 to 30 percent more productive than the fancy upper class spuds it replaced.  On the downside, every single Lumper in every single field was an exact genetic clone (imagine a world with 7.8 billion Donald Trumps).  What could possibly go wrong?

The famous Irish famine of 1845 was, in some ways, no surprise to anyone.  Back in the good old days, crop failures, famines, and epidemics were commonplace.  For example, Clive Ponting wrote that between the tenth and eighteenth centuries, France had 89 famines that were widespread national disasters, of which 26 of them hit in just the eleventh century.  England suffered numerous local famines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Famine rocked all of Europe from 1594 to 1597.  Famine struck Belgium and Finland in 1867 and 1868.  Rinderpest zoomed into Europe from Russia, where it killed 1.5 million cattle from 1709 to 1714.  And so on.

Anyway, long before the late blight fungus arrived in Ireland, crop failures in 1740 and 1741 killed 400,000 Irish people.  The late blight didn’t arrive until 1845.  John Reader mentioned a theory that the late blight fungus originally emerged in the highlands of central Mexico.  By and by, it migrated to South America.  From there, in about 1841 or 1842, it hitched a ride with a shipment of potatoes to the United States.  In 1843 the first outbreak of blight appeared in New York and Pennsylvania, and then spread along the east coast.  Two years later, in 1845, it had spread west to the Mississippi, and north into Canada. 

Meanwhile, in 1843, farmers in Flanders and Belgium were suffering losses from viral diseases and dry rot.  To cure the problem, they ordered what they thought were healthy seed potatoes from the U.S. (where the blight was raging).  Oh-oh!  In the winter of 1843-44, the late blight fungus crossed the Atlantic in a load of spuds.  Transatlantic trade in potatoes was made possible by new and amazing high-speed steam ships, and by the use of ice to prevent spoilage.  Previously, sailing ships were too slow to deliver a load of spuds in good condition. 

It’s interesting to note that sailing ships were also too slow to deliver live cholera microbes to the New World.  But then, in 1832, a speedy new steamship from Britain was able to zoom across the ocean, and deliver cholera to a population in Montreal that had zero immunity.  Before long, many were surprised when they erupted with firehose diarrhea.  From there, the disease spread like lightning across the New World.  Once again, millions took selfies with the Grim Reaper.

I need to pause for a second here to emphasize an important notion: there’s no place like home.  During the maybe three million years when our wild ancestors lived in a low impact manner, they dined entirely on local wild foods.  They naturally spent their lives in the region where they were born, because they were not migratory critters like geese, storks, or butterflies.  They never forgot the creator’s instructions on how to live like tropical primates, which is why they lived very well for a very long time.  They didn’t invent cars, planes, and other goofy stuff.  Every day, they simply walked to work — perfectly sustainable transportation.

Spuds evolved in the Andes, where they adapted very well to a unique high elevation ecosystem, and enjoyed happy and fulfilling lives.  In recent centuries, travelling tropical primates, who were far from their homeland, discovered spuds, and eventually carried them to distant lands that were less ideal than the Andes.  When planted in Europe, they triggered a scenario similar to the “bull in a china shop” proverb.  Prior to farmers, about 95 percent of west and central Europe was a healthy happy paradise of primordial forests.  This harmonious situation was not in any way improved by deforestation, spud addiction, and huge swarms of tropical primates with voracious appetites.

Richard Manning noted that when spuds are planted in regions outside their Andes homeland, they can be far more vulnerable to insects, fungi, and viruses.  Apparently the late blight fungus is widely dispersed, and usually dormant.  Its wakeup alarm goes off when the weather gets too damp or chilly.  Writing in 2000, Manning noted that in upstate New York, a 100 pound sack of ordinary spuds could be bought for $6, but organic spuds would cost $30.  The difference is because no other food crop is blasted with so many pesticides, in order to zap insects and fungi. 

In Brazil, some regions get sprayed 30 times during the growing season.  Also, unlike cereal grains, potato seeds are living tissue that can transfer disease from this year’s crop to next year’s.  So seeds also get blasted.  (Potato seeds are chunks of tubers grown last year.  Each chunk must have an “eye” on its skin, a potential embryo for a new plant.)

Sorry!  Back to the blight.  The summer of 1845 was a cool and wet one.  Blight struck Ireland, and parts of Belgium, France, and the Netherlands.  Then it spread to Demark, Wales, Scotland, northern Italy, southern Norway and Sweden.  Four months later, 772,204 square miles (2 million km²) of fields were ruined.  It was a memorable and heartbreaking experience.

Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote about the Irish famine.  The 1841 census revealed that Ireland was probably the most densely populated region in Europe, thanks to spuds.  The census noted that half of the people resided in rather unpretentious affordable housing units — small, windowless, single room, mud cabins.  In 1845, the fields were looking fine and healthy — until three weeks of wet and cool weather spoiled the party.  The crop failure was partial.  Fields of cereal crops were not harmed.

In 1846, the blight was severe, and the harvest of both spuds and grain was a poor one.  They weren’t going to have enough seed potatoes to plant all the fields in the spring of 1847.  Across much of Europe, the 1846 harvest was a total or partial failure.  Black fields stretched for hundreds of miles, and the stench of rot was overwhelming.  By September, not even folks with money could acquire food.  They ate cabbage leaves and blackberries.

Across Europe, the winter of 1846-47 was extremely long and severe.  The Thames was jammed with floating ice.  By January, the Irish folks in county Mayo looked like skeletons.  The sheep, cattle, poultry, and dogs were gone.  The one remaining pig would not be long for this world.  The blight in 1847 was light, but the planted acreage was just 20 percent of normal, for lack of seeds.

In 1848, all the land got planted, and the people were giddy with hope that their troubles were over.  Things looked awesome, until the middle of June, when the wet weather would not stop.  The blight was severe.  In July, some fields would turn black overnight, and millions of ripe spuds rotted in the ground.  Even spuds stored away before the blight rotted.  Cereal crops were also damaged by heavy rains.  There was little to harvest.

In the end maybe a million emigrated, and a million died.  Woodham-Smith noted that mortality records were incomplete.  She estimated that for every person who died of starvation, ten died from disease.  The most popular pathogens were two types of “famine fever” — typhus and relapsing fever, both were spread by lice, and both were quite unpleasant.  A bit less popular was dysentery, which was caused by contact with fecal borne pathogens.

Farmers rarely if ever have a plan B when their crops fail, or their granary is swiped.  Their leaders may or may not come to their rescue.  The Irish didn’t get much help.  Earlier in this chapter, we looked at the San people of Botswana who easily survived a three year drought.  Not being chained to one piece of land, and not being heavily addicted to monoculture crops, allows more options for survival — and a healthier, more enjoyable life. 

The Mountain People



Anthropologist Colin Turnbull was born London in 1924, and raised in a surreal upper class family, which he described in his important book, The Human Cycle.  World War Two jolted the pampered lad into the bloody real world.  In the 1950s, he spent lots of time in the Congo, with the Mbuti Pygmies, who inspired his masterpiece, The Forest People.  It was a beautiful life-changing experience to live with healthy, happy humans who were profoundly in love with their sacred forest — nothing like the zombies of England.

When war in the Congo zapped his plans for another visit, he accepted an assignment to learn about the Ik tribe in northeastern Uganda.  The government wanted a plan for transforming them into law-abiding taxpaying farmers.  For unknown thousands of years, they had been hunter-gatherers in the Kidepo Valley, an arid mountainous savannah.

In 1962, their traditional lands became a 540 square mile (1,399 sq km) wildlife preserve, the Kidepo Valley National Park.  Hunting was banned, and the Ik were moved into the mountains.  They were expected to magically shape shift into farmers in a region that experienced droughts about one in every four years.  Turnbull’s study ran from 1965 to 1967, and the first two years were back-to-back droughts.  Crops withered in the fields, the granaries were empty, and about 2,000 people began to starve.  Turnbull described the cultural meltdown in The Mountain People. 

Turnbull wrote, “The hunter and gatherer gives little thought for the morrow, getting his feed fresh, from day to day, with the ready assurance of someone who has come to terms with the world around him.  He knows the world he lives in as few others do, and he lives in sympathy with it, rather than trying to dominate it.”  A farmer can lose a year’s work in one night.  A hunter can only lose a day’s work.

When he first got there, the famine was just beginning.  Two months later, the horror began.  People became totally self-centered.  Their two interests in life were now food and water.  Most became habitual liars, and most took every opportunity steal Turnbull’s stuff.  They pulled many juvenile pranks on him, hoping for him to get hurt or die.  “The people were as unfriendly, uncharitable, inhospitable, and generally mean as any people can be.”  They laughed hard at anyone’s misfortunes.  It was amusing to steal food from the feeble, and push them down.

Upon being weaned at age three, youngsters were thrown out of their parents’ house.  Evicted children formed bands and wandered the countryside looking for something to eat.  Lucky ones found some figs, the unlucky ate dirt and pebbles, and soon died.  Feeding children and elders, who couldn’t take care of themselves, was a foolish waste of precious nutrients.

Turnbull was often scolded for his idiotic generosity.  He was feeding folks who were soon to be dead, cruelly prolonging their misery.  Adults refused to feed their starving parents, or let them into their house.  When they died, most were quickly buried in the family compound, in secrecy.  If the villagers found out, they would expect a funeral ceremony, which required a feast.

Famines were a crappy time to be born.  Nobody was happy to see you, nobody cared.  When out foraging, mothers put their babies down roughly, and didn’t watch them carefully.  Maybe a hungry leopard would relieve her of her little bummer.  One time, a leopard ate a baby.  Sleepy from a delicious meal, the cat laid down for nice nap.  Men found it, killed it, and ate it, baby and all.

Turnbull once took pity on an old woman who was close to death.  He wanted to create a new village, where the abandoned people could be properly cared for.  She was not interested.  She wanted to die near her son, who would not take care of her.  Turnbull fed her, and gave her some food.  She burst into tears, because this triggered memories of “a time when people had helped each other, when people had been kind and good.”  She was the last survivor who remembered the good old days.

Stuff like this fills most of the book.  Turnbull spent 18 months eating by himself in his Range Rover.  For some reason, he got the blues.  He hoped “that we who have been civilized into such empty beliefs as the essential beauty and goodness of humanity may discover ourselves before it is too late.”  “Most of us are unlikely to admit readily that we can sink as low as the Ik, but many of us do, and with far less cause.”  Whoa!

I first read The Mountain People in 2001, and it snapped my mind.  It was an unforgettable book that you wished you could forget.  I was blindsided by the misery, cruelty, and horror, and this was the impression that I took away from the book.  In 2017, I read the book a second time, and it blew me away again, for another reason.  Near the end of the book, Turnbull shared some troubling conclusions that I was too dazed to grasp in my first reading.  He held up a mirror, so his well-fed readers could see their own deformities, and get their noses rubbed in them.

Having spent years with the Mbuti, he had directly experienced a healthy functional society.  Before that, he had grown to adulthood in twentieth century Western society, a world of atomic bombs, concentration camps, and the brutal extermination of tens of millions.  It was the opposite of a functional society.  It had become pathologically individualized and de-socialized — similar to the Ik, and in many ways worse.  The Ik give us a taste of our days to come.

“We pursue those trivial, idiotic technological encumbrances and imagine them to be the luxuries that make life worth living, and all the time we are losing our potential for social rather than individual survival, for hating as well as loving, losing perhaps our last chance to enjoy life with all the passion that is our nature and being.”  Today, Americans speed down the highways in their motorized wheelchairs while the polar ice melts, and monster hurricanes obliterate societies.  Sorry kids!

Here is a comment, from 45 years ago, that could have been written today.  “The state itself, is resting ever more on both intellectual and physical violence to assert itself.”  Heads of state and their assistants fill the air with “loud-mouthed anti-intellectual blabberings.”  The populace learns not to believe, trust, love, hope, or think.

The Mbuti enjoyed a society harmonized by a common set of beliefs, values, and lifestyles.  Everyone was on the same channel.  Our society is a cranky boisterous mob of numerous competing cultures, classes, and religious beliefs.  “In larger-scale societies we are accustomed to diversity of belief, we even applaud ourselves for our tolerance, not recognizing that a society not bound together by a single powerful belief is not a society at all, but a political association of individuals held together only by the presence of law and force — the existence of which is a violence.” 

Love is not a hardwired function, like breathing.  It has to be learned.  When love is not reciprocated, it dies.  The Ik demonstrated that love can go extinct.  When lonely consumers are starving for love in modern society, many choose to purchase companions. “The keeping of pets, which is one of the characteristics special to civilization, indicates a deterioration in human relationships.”

The Ik were excessively individualistic, spending their days in solitude and boredom, rarely forming significant relationships.  Each one was alone, and content to be alone.  Turnbull often sat with Ik men on a ridge overlooking the valley, gazing into space.  Day after day, all day long, not a word was ever spoken.  This reminds me of the spooky smart phone cult in my town today.  People gather around tables in a café, each silently gazing at their glowing screens.

The Ik expelled their children from home at age three.  Westerners wait until kindergarten, when the kids begin their decades of institutionalization.  The state now oversees health, education, and welfare.  We are indoctrinated with an “individualism that is preached with a curious fanaticism.”  This radical individualism “is reflected in our cutthroat economics, where almost anything is justified in terms of an expanding economy and the consequent confinement of the world’s riches in the pockets of the few.”

When it was released in 1972, The Mountain People got a lot of attention.  Immediately, hordes of dignified scholars explosively soiled their britches.  Heresy!  The Ik were nothing but an extreme exception, a bizarre mutation!  Civilized humans are moral and virtuous!  We are the greatest!

Turnbull, Colin M., The Mountain People, Touchstone, New York, 1972.

HERE is a 5-minute video about Colin Turnbull and the Mbuti.  The narrator says, “His advisor at Oxford wrote that Colin Turnbull is tall, fair, handsome, impulsive, and elusive.  All his screws are loose, real communication with him seems impossible.  Perhaps one has to belong to one of the backwards races in order to get his wavelength.”

Surviving the 21st Century



In the old Three Stooges comedies, whenever Curly did something dumb, angry Moe gave him a dope slap (SMACK!).  With regard to humankind’s war on the future, a number of thinkers have been inspired to write passionate dope slap books, including Man and Nature (1864), Conservation of Natural Resources (1910), Checking the Waste (1911), Our Vanishing Wild Life (1913).  Dope slap books are a two-step: (1) describe the terrible growing harms, and (2) provide a motivating pep talk loaded with rational solutions — based on the assumption that the society is rational.

In the last 30 years, a tsunami of dope slap books have flooded the market.  The latest comes from Australian science writer Julian Cribb, Surviving the 21st Century.  He does a great job of providing a competent and sobering introduction to ecological reality in 2017 — vital knowledge that every 16-year old (and their teachers) should know (but don’t).  He’s good at explaining complex challenges in an understandable way.

The book has ten chapters, each discussing a category of serious risks.  (1) Dangerous overconfidence in human brilliance.  (2) Mass extinctions.  (3) Degrading the planet.  (4) Industrial warfare.  (5) Climate change.  (6) Pollution.  (7) Feeding an overgrown herd.  (8) Urban growth and disease.  (9) Moronic beliefs that trump scientific facts.  (10) It’s time for action — think like a species.

Humankind’s current mass hysteria has an oxymoronic name, Sustainable Growth™, and its destination is oblivion.  We are going to be slamming head-on, at high speed, into crucial limits — a magnificently irrational course of action.  Cribb prefers a mindful Plan B, a gradual, managed, and cooperative path to a slower, simpler, far less crowded future.

All humans have a hardcore addiction to food.  In his 2010 book, The Coming Famine (reviewed HERE), Cribb described the enormous degradation caused by feeding an ever growing population, and presented readers with many rational suggestions.  In the following seven years, the naughty world largely disregarded his recommendations.

In this new book, Cribb dreams of miraculously doubling food production, and feeding the growing mob until we hit Peak People, at ten or twelve billion, in 2060.  All nations will heroically cooperate in rapidly making many rational (and extremely radical) changes, we’ll avoid total catastrophe, and proceed with a bumpy but tolerable decline to a sustainable population of somewhere between two and four billion by 2100.  That’s a big dream.

Is it really possible to feed ten billion?  Readers learn that there are no new plant breeding miracles on the horizon.  In the 1960s, the Green Revolution research had noble intentions — temporarily boost food production, so humankind would have an extra ten years to resolve its embarrassing orgy of overbreeding.  It was a beautiful dream.  Food production actually doubled.  Unfortunately, the population problem was swept under the bed, and the human herd more than doubled, intensifying the original problem.

Hopium addicts have no doubt that the wizards of science will save the day.  GMO plants have been a stunning success at boosting the sales of toxic agrochemicals, but they have had minimal impact on harvest volumes.  The current rate at which we are depleting underground aquifers, and other freshwater resources, is going to crash into limits before 2030.  Destruction of the planet’s remaining topsoil continues at an impressive rate.  Food production trends are not encouraging.

“Outside of a nuclear war or asteroid collision, the biggest shock in store for the human population in the 21st Century will be the impact of climate change on the food supply.”  Luckily, readers discover a plan for doubling food production by solving big problems.  We’ll create a new form of agriculture that can survive in an unstable climate, produce lots of excellent food, and do so sustainably — without using a spoonful of fossil fuel!  We’ll make sustainable oil from algae.

The required inputs for algae farms are sunshine, salt water, and urban wastes.  “Algal oil… can be made into anything you can make from fossil petroleum — ‘green’ fuel, plastics, textiles, chemicals, drugs, food additives.  Furthermore, researchers have calculated, algae could supply the world’s entire transport fuel requirement from an area of 57 million hectares — which is a bit smaller than Switzerland — and can mostly be in the ocean in any case.”

Belief is the subject of the fascinating chapter nine, and something I’ve thought a lot about.  Belief may very well be the biggest threat to the survival of our species, worse than all the other threats combined.  Even the most ridiculous, insanely stupid, self-destructive beliefs can be highly contagious, readily passing from one generation to the next, fully resistant to reason, common sense, or factual reality.  Belief trumps reason.

Belief insists that human-caused climate change is impossible.  Humans do not share common ancestors with chimps and baboons.  Technology can solve any problem.  Perpetual growth is possible on a finite planet.  Good consumers must gain respect and honor by devoting their lives to working hard (at soul killing jobs), recklessly borrowing, impulsively spending, proudly hoarding trendy status trinkets, and promptly discarding trinkets the moment they cease being trendy.

Cribb believes that foresight is our ultimate skill, enabling us to perceive potential dangers, avoid them, and survive.  Wild humans, intimately attuned to the complex patterns of their ecosystem, excelled at foresight.  We don’t.  We are cursed to inhabit an industrial culture that mutates at a furious rate.  New technologies are often obsolete in five or ten years.  We can never become intimately attuned to something similar to a high-speed runaway train.

We’re trapped in a cycle of repeated mistakes, perpetually erecting new empires, watching them self-destruct, and never learning.  We’ve installed at least 440 nuclear power plants before we’ve built a single facility for safely storing the radioactive wastes that can remain highly toxic for a million years.  Nobody had the foresight to predict the staggering consequences of the Ford Model T, or the microchip, or metal smelting.  Hey, let’s colonize other planets!

Crusty old farts like myself, who have been reading dope slap books for 30 years, and observing how little they inspire society, no longer shout and cheer when the latest vision rolls by.  Cribb does an excellent job describing the challenges.  His grand vision requires humankind to undergo an amazing transformation, from the pathetic dullard Homo delusus (self-deceiving human) into the new, wise, and beautiful Homo sapiens (wise human).

Cribb has no doubt that “solutions to all of these challenges exist or can be developed.”  Today, essential information can be instantly shared with people everywhere in the world.  Scientific knowledge grows exponentially every decade.  Intelligent change is entirely possible!  Around the world, young women are having fewer children — voluntarily!  We are not obligated to commit mass suicide.

Understand that this is a textbook for college students.  Universities are monasteries that instruct the next generation in the management of Sustainable Growth™.  They require textbooks that reinforce the loony beliefs of the hopeless Homo delusus.  Cribb makes a heroic effort to tap-dance across a ballroom where the entire floor is covered with greased marbles.  It’s obvious that he is acutely aware of the growing challenges of reality (which are heretical nonsense at the monastery).  He knows that the young novices are likely to learn little or nothing about these challenges — unless he cleverly sneaks them into a gospel that appears to be orthodox.

Today’s novices are 100 times smarter than slobbering geezers over 30.  They are acutely aware that they have inherited a catastrophe.  They don’t need a dope slap.  They know that transforming all of nature into toxic landfill dreck is insane.  Hopefully, Cribb’s book will help the novices bombard the abbots with high-powered questions, and encourage our species to shift toward becoming Homo sapiens.  Good luck!

Cribb, Julian, Surviving the 21st Century: Humanity’s Ten Great Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them, Springer International Publishing, Switzerland, 2017.

The Collapse of Western Civilization

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway are science historians, and they are hopping mad at folks who deny that humans are the primary cause of climate change.  Their outrage inspired them to write The Collapse of Western Civilization, which has been selling furiously in its first month on the market.  It’s a 112-page science fiction rant.

The story is a discourse on the Penumbral Age (1988-2093), written in 2393 by a Chinese historian.  The Penumbral Age was a time of paralyzing anti-intellectualism, when humankind failed to take action on an emerging climate catastrophe, which ended up sinking western civilization.  In presenting this story, the authors are rubbing the denialists’ noses in the steaming mess they created, similar to the process of housebreaking a crappy puppy.

By 1988, scientists could clearly see the approach of a huge storm, and they dutifully reported their findings.  They believed that once the public was informed, they would rationally do what needed to be done.  But the public shrugged, and the scientists were too dignified to run out into the streets, jump up and down, and scream warnings.  Also, the scientists were too conservative — temperatures ended up rising far more than they had predicted. 

Early in the twenty-first century, many more people could see the storm, but still nothing was done.  A dark villain moved to center stage — the carbon-combustion complex, a disgusting mob of slimy creeps who made a lot of money in activities dependent on burning fossil fuel.  They created think tanks that hurled excrement and insults at the annoying climate scientists.  Screw-brained economists hissed that government should take a long nap and let the invisible hand of the market magically make the bad stuff go away.  (My favorite line is, “The invisible hand never picks up the check.”)

And so, in a heavy fog of mixed messages, everyone resumed staring at their cell phones, and the world went to heck.  There were terrible storms and droughts.  The ice caps melted, and this opened the floodgates to the Great Collapse (2073 to 2093), when sea levels were eight meters higher (26 ft.).  Twenty percent of humankind was forced to move to higher ground during the Great Migration, about 1.5 billion people.  Thus, 100 percent of humankind would have been 7.5 billion — in 2073 — an amazingly high number!

I just let the cat out of the bag.  This book is a gusher of intoxicating hope and optimism.  While the Great Collapse blindsided the hopelessly rotten governments of the west, China did OK.  The wise leaders of the Second People’s Republic of China maintained a strong central government, free of corruption.  When sea levels rose, they quickly built new cities inland, in safe locations.  When leaders have integrity, miracles happen.

And it gets better.  In 2090, a female scientist in Japan created a GMO fungus that gobbled up the greenhouse gas doo-doo, the storm passed, and the survivors lived happily ever after.  Unfortunately, by that time, there was a total dieoff in Africa and Australia.  Luckily, the northern folks, who contributed heavily to the disaster, survived (minus the polar bears).

The authors note that it’s now too late to halt climate change; it’s time for damage control.  The whole thing could have been prevented if only we had rapidly shifted to non-carbon-based energy sources.  Really?  No expert with both oars in the water believes that renewable energy could ever replace more than a small portion of the energy we currently produce from non-renewable fuels.  If we phased out the extraction of fossil energy, our way of life would go belly up.  The status quo is a dead end, and rational change provides few benefits when it’s a hundred years too late.

Solar panels and wind turbines are not made of pixie dust, rainbows, and good vibes.  They are produced by high-impact industrial processes.  They require the consumption of non-renewable resources.  They produce energy that is used to temporarily keep an extremely unsustainable society on life support.  Hydropower dams are ecological train wrecks.  The authors lament that carbon-free nuclear energy became unhip because of a few wee boo-boos.

The book gives high praise to the precautionary principle, which is old-fashioned common sense with a spiffy title.  If you see an emerging problem, nip it in the bud.  If a new technology is not perceived to be 100 percent safe by a consensus of scientists, forget about it until its safety can be proven beyond all doubt.  Duh!  Common sense says that humankind made a huge mistake by ignoring the warnings of scientists in 1988.

The precautionary principle would also have blocked the development of nuclear technology.  It was spectacularly stupid to build 440 nuclear reactors before the wizards had a plan for storing the wastes, which remain highly toxic for more than 100,000 years.  By 2073, all of these reactors will be far beyond their designed life expectancy.  Decommissioning can take decades, and it can cost more than the original construction.  If the 440 reactors are not decommissioned before the grid shuts down, each will do a lively impersonation of Fukushima, and spew deadly radiation forever.  Or maybe they will be disastrously decommissioned by war, earthquakes, terrorists, or economic meltdown.

Imagine a graph that spans 4,000 years, from A.D. 1 to 4000.  The trend line is fairly flat, except for a brief 200-year period in the middle, which looks like a tall spike, as narrow and sharp as an icicle.  As I write in 2014, we’re very close to the tip of this icicle.  This spike is the petroleum bubble, and its trend line is nearly the same as the bubbles of food production, human population, and resource extraction.  What’s important to grasp here is that the way of life we consider normal is an extreme deviation in the 200,000-year human journey.  It’s a temporary abnormality, and it can never again be repeated.

Oil production is quite close to peak.  The huge deposits are past peak.  Today we are extracting oil from lean, challenging deposits, and the output is expensive.  Costs will rise, production will decline, and economies will stumble until Game Over, which seems likely well before 2050.  Industrial agriculture has an expiration date.  (See The Coming Famine by Julian Cribb.)

Unfortunately, after the peak, our carbon problems are not going to fade away in a hundred years.  The book imagines that the global temperature in 2060, fanned by positive feedback loops, will be 11° C warmer than in 1988.  It’s hard to imagine agriculture surviving such a huge transition, consequently a population of 7.5 billion in 2073 seems impossible.  While the authors wring their hands about rising sea level, Brian Fagan (in The Great Warming) warns that the far greater threat of warming is megadroughts, like one in California that began in A.D. 1250 and lasted 100 years.

The bottom line here is that, even if our enormous carbon emissions were perfectly harmless, we have created such a cornucopia of perplexing predicaments that the coming years are certain to be exciting and memorable.  By definition, an unsustainable way of life can only be temporary.  It’s fun to dream, but I have a hunch that reality may not fully cooperate with the story’s imaginary hope and optimism.  Reality bats last.

Oreskes, Naomi and Conway, Erik M., The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, Columbia University Press, New York, 2014.