Wild Free and Happy Sample 25.5

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

STUMBLING INTO DOMESTICATION

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

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

Supply and Demand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cradle of Civilization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wild Free and Happy Sample 05

[Note: This is the 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 199 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Savannah Pioneers

When our ancestors moved from the forest to the savannah, they began a journey into an entirely different way of life.  Critters that evolution had fine-tuned for arboreal living were poorly prepared for surviving on open grassland.  They were not big, strong, or speedy.  They didn’t have horns, fangs, or claws.  They couldn’t digest grass.  They had to adapt to different sources of food, and different threats to their survival.  It took centuries of trial and error to develop new ways of living, and hundreds of thousands of years to evolve new and improved bodies fine-tuned for their unique experiment.

In the early days, our ancestors were not apex (top level) predators, they may have been more like walking meatballs, easy prey for big cats, packs of hyenas, huge crocodiles, and other hungry carnivores.  Chris Stringer mentioned genetic research indicating that today’s Earth-pounding mob of Homo sapiens trace back to an ancestral population of about 10,000 breeding individuals.  Earlier, a million years ago, in the Homo erectus era, there were just 20,000 breeding individuals.  For a very long time, our ancestors existed not too far from the brink of extinction.  It wasn’t easy being a highly vulnerable ground-dwelling primate.

Scavenging and Primitive Hunting

Our ancestors on the African savannah were hunter-gatherers, and their diet majored in plant foods, with a regular supplement of highly nutritious animal foods.  In the early chapters of the great hominin adventure, they were not expert hunters with effective weapons.  Meat was acquired via scavenging and primitive hunting.  With bare hands, they could grab critters like grubs, grasshoppers, termites, maggots, snails, shellfish, lizards, and frogs.  They could kill animals sleeping under bushes, dig up others from their burrows, chase down slow moving aardvarks and porcupines, and snatch immature youngsters.  Large birds could be knocked down by throwing clubs.

It’s easy to forget that rocks can be lethal weapons.  Wendell Bennett wrote that the Tarahumara people of Mexico threw stones with remarkable accuracy, killing rabbits, birds, and animals up to the size of coyotes.  Some of their groups did more hunting with stones than with bows and arrows.

Alfred Crosby wrote that any human more than eight years old, male or female, can throw projectiles farther and more accurately than any other species.  This ability gave us the power to effect change from a distance.  Well-thrown projectiles could drive away hungry predators or kill a plump bunny for dinner.  Researcher Frans de Waal noted that stone throwing chimps also have “impressive long-range aim.”  (Ouch!)

Crosby noted that a few hundred years ago, Europeans visiting Samoa got a painful lesson in the superb stone-throwing skills of the natives.  Of the 61 men sent ashore, 12 were killed by well-thrown rocks.  Humans also invented the rock-throwing sling, which was even more deadly, especially when loaded with lumps of lead.  Many of the conquistadors visiting Mexico had life-changing experiences while getting stoned by the angry sling-twirling Indians.

Scavenging is getting meat from carcasses that you didn’t kill — leftovers from large carnivores, or animals that died from other causes.  In later times, as the ancestors became more skilled at hunting, scavenging was not abandoned.  Meat is treasure, no matter how it is acquired.  Scavenging was often less work and less dangerous than pursuing and killing an animal.

During the day, our ancestors paid careful attention to the skies.  When vultures flew in a specific direction, they might be en route to a fresh carcass.  Circling vultures were strong evidence of a banquet directly below.  Once you got a hot tip, it was best to move quickly, in an effort to beat other scavengers to the banquet.

Hyenas work in gangs, and can quickly strip the scraps off carcasses, leaving few leftovers, if any.  Their arrival time was sometimes delayed by their need to stop, pant, and cool off from time to time.  Our ancestors were far better at shedding heat, an important advantage.  If hyenas or jackals arrived first, it was sometimes possible to mob them and drive them off.  On lucky days, it was possible to steal lunch from a lone cheetah.

Lions were another story.  To drive them away from a kill, surprise was important.  You and your buddies should suddenly charge, waving your arms, shouting, throwing rocks, swinging clubs, or maybe start a grass fire upwind.  Smart scavengers never tried this when lions were just beginning their lunch feast, and were still very hungry.  It was best to wait until they were full and ready for a nap.  Lions rarely consume brains or marrow, and sometimes leave some meat scraps for the intrepid.

It was also important for scavengers to pay attention to trees.  When leopards didn’t completely consume a kill at one sitting, they stored the leftovers up in the branches.  Leopards are night creatures.  If you found their unguarded stash in the daytime, there was less chance of getting shredded and devoured by an angry cat.

Right now, your eyes are following a track of squiggly scratches, and your mind is comprehending meaning from them.  My thoughts and actions created those tracks, and they contain specific meaning for those who have learned how to interpret them.  The farther you are able to follow my tracks, the more you will learn about me.

Similarly, animals leave behind tracks and other signs as they move across the land.  Folks who are skilled at reading this information can accumulate pieces of a story.  They can perceive a fantastic amount of information by studying spoor — footprints, urine, feces, saliva, blood, fur bits, feeding signs, smells, sounds, and so on.  Spoor provides clues about the animal’s species, gender, size, behavior, direction of travel, time of passage, and so on. 

Fresh tracks left by a game animal indicated that it had passed through the area, and the direction it was moving — essential information for hungry hunters.  Also, spoor left by large carnivores indicated predators on the move.  Following their tracks might eventually lead to a recent kill, and a carcass to scavenge.

The San

Louis Liebenberg is a South African lad who has spent years on the Kalahari Desert with the San people (other names include Khoisan, Bushmen, !Kung).  He was not a nerdy anthropologist, he directly participated in hunts, and eventually became a skilled tracker.  He wrote two outstanding books about tracking, scavenging, and persistence hunting.

One time, Liebenberg asked some San trackers if they could actually recognize the spoor of an individual antelope.  They burst out laughing at his incredibly stupid question.  They couldn’t imagine anyone not being able to do this.  When they see a human footprint, they immediately know which individual in their band made it.  Children can identify the tracks of their parents.  Footprints are as unique and recognizable as faces.  To see the footprints of an unknown stranger was highly unusual, and would inspire caution. 

More anthropology books have been written about the San than any other wild people.  Geneticists have found that they have the oldest DNA of any living culture — it is the genetic foundation of nearly all modern humans.  Their genes are the closest to the ancient female from whom all living humans descend, known as Mitochondrial Eve.  Thus, your family tree likely leads back to ancestors similar to the San.  (Pygmies are the second oldest living culture.)

The San have been hunter-gatherers since the dawn of humankind, and they enjoyed a way of life that managed to survive into the 1970s.  Eight hundred years ago, the San homeland included all of southern Africa.  Since then, Bantu and European herders and farmers have displaced them from lands suitable for grazing and agriculture, forcing the San into the Kalahari where, on average, two of every five years are drought years, and severe droughts occur one in every four years.

There are large regions of the Kalahari that are quite flat, an endless landscape having no notable landmarks for a white boy like me, who would quickly become hopelessly lost, and turn into vulture chow.  The San, on the other hand, always know exactly where they are, across large regions, because they orient themselves by the layout of plant communities, noting their size, shape, position, and unique features.  They know the face of their land as well as they know the faces of their family.

Richard Lee wrote about the San.  Their primary food was mongongo nuts, which dropped once a year, but could be gathered all year long.  Meat was their second most desired food.  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 lived in one of the harshest environments on Earth.  At the same time, hungry farming people had shifted to foraging during the drought, so the San lands were supporting a larger population than that of normal times.

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

Because of low body fat and vigorous physical activities, San women began menstruating later.  Some did not have regular monthly periods.  Children were usually nursed for about four years, which further reduced their mom’s fertility.  Most of the women had one to four offspring.  Nomads moved frequently, and belongings and infants often 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. 

Jon Young is the star of several YouTube videos on nature connection.  He was an early student of Tom Brown, the famous author of many books on tracking and nature awareness.  Young visited a number of wild cultures to find those that remain most closely connected to nature.  He discovered that the San people were incredibly well connected.  They refuse to enter houses, because people who live indoors go insane.

Young says that with the San, you always feel safe.  They are super intelligent, super happy, super vital, and great problem solvers.  You never feel competition.  The people are in love with every aspect of the ecosystem around them, celebrating with childlike wonder through all stages of their life.  Every person in that community is committed to the flowering of every other person.  They are incredibly aware of their surroundings at all times, because a brief lapse of attention can kill you in lion country.

One-Straw Revolutionary

Long, long ago, hip folks in the Beatles era were jabbering about Masanobu Fukuoka’s book, The One-Straw Revolution.  It explained how he grew healthy food via natural farming, a low budget, low impact approach.  On his farm in Japan, Fukuoka was growing grain, fruit, and vegetables without plowing, cultivating, chemicals, compost, fertilizer, fossil energy, erosion, pruning, or regular weeding.  He farmed like this for more than 25 years, and his yields were comparable to those at conventional farms.

The Japanese edition of his book was published in 1975, at a time when oil shocks had spurred interest in energy efficiency.  When the English version was published in 1978, it was an international smash hit, and Fukuoka became a celebrity.  Larry Korn was the book’s translator.  He’s a California lad who worked on Fukuoka’s farm for more than two years.  Now, in 2015, Korn has published One-Straw Revolutionary, which is the subject of this review.  It describes Fukuoka the man, and his philosophy, with glowing praise.

Korn detests conventional industrial farming, because it has so many drawbacks.  A bit less troublesome is organic farming done on an industrial scale.  At the positive end of the spectrum, he sees Fukuoka’s natural farming as very close to the ideal, both environmentally and philosophically.  A bit less wonderful than natural farming are permaculture and old-fashioned small-scale organic farming.

The ideal is something like the California Indians that were fondly described in M. Kat Anderson’s book, Tending the Wild.  They were wild hunter-gatherers who included wild plant seeds in their diet.  They devoted special care to the wild plant species that were important to their way of life.  Most folks would consider this to be mindful foraging — tending, not farming.

These Indians did not till the soil, and were not warlike.  Nobody owned the land.  There were no masters or servants.  There was no market system or tax collectors.  They had a time-proven method for living, and this knowledge was carefully passed from generation to generation.  The Indians were wild, free, and living sustainably — in the original meaning of the word.  When the Spanish invaders arrived, they saw these Indians as lazy, because they worked so little.

Fukuoka, on the other hand, resided in a densely populated industrial civilization, which was eagerly adapting American style industrial agriculture.  While the Indians foraged in a healthy wild ecosystem, Fukuoka worked on an ecosystem that had been heavily altered by centuries of agriculture.  He raised domesticated plants and animals.  Fukuoka was experimenting with radically unconventional methods, and had no traditions or mentors to guide him.

He practiced natural farming on one acre (0.4 ha) of grain field, and ten acres (4 ha) devoted to a mix of fruit trees and vegetables.  When Korn arrived in 1974, Fukuoka was assisted by five apprentices, who were not at all lazy, and rarely had a day off.  Cash had to be generated to purchase necessities and pay taxes, so surplus food had to be produced.  Food shipped off to cities carried away phosphorus, potassium, and other minerals that never returned to the farm’s soil.  Thus, his natural farming was quite different from California tending.

On the plus side, Fukuoka’s experiment benefitted from rich soil and generous rainfall — especially during the growing season.  Vegetables could be grown year round in the mild climate, and two crops of grain could be harvested each year.  On the down side, few succeeded in duplicating his success, even in Japan.  It took years to get the operation working, requiring extra servings of intuition and good luck.  Korn warned, “In most parts of North America and the world the specific method Mr. Fukuoka uses would be impractical.” 

In the natural farming mindset, the strategy should not be guided by intellect; nature should run the show.  Fukuoka talked to plants, asking them for guidance.  When he planted the orchard, he added a mixture of 100 types of seeds to wet clay, made seed balls, and tossed the balls on the land.  Seeds included grains, vegetables, flowers, clover, shrubs, and trees.  Nature decided what thrived and what didn’t.  Within a few years, a jungle of dense growth sorted itself out.  But sometimes nature gave him a dope slap.  In the early days, Fukuoka allowed nature to manage an existing orchard, and he was horrified to watch 400 trees die from insects and disease.

My work focuses on ecological sustainability, at a time when the original meaning of sustainability has largely been abandoned, and replaced by sparkly marketing hype.  I go on full alert when I see “sustainable agriculture.”  In my book, What is Sustainable, I took a look at what Korn calls “indigenous agriculture,” which is often imagined to be sustainable.

California tending was far different from the intensive corn farming on the other side of the Rockies, which led to soil depletion, erosion, population growth, health problems, warfare, and temporary civilizations like Cahokia.  In his book Indians of North America, Harold E. Driver estimated that less than half of North America was inhabited by farmers, but 90 to 95 percent of Native Americans ate crop foods, indicating that farm country was densely populated.  In corn country, defensive palisades surrounded many villages.

In 2015, humankind is temporarily in extreme overshoot, as the cheap energy bubble glides toward its sunset years, and the climate change storms are moving in.  Obviously, feeding seven billion sustainably is impossible.  At the same time, highly unsustainable industrial farming cannot continue feeding billions indefinitely.  It’s essential that young folks have a good understanding of ecological sustainability, and our education system is doing a terrible job of informing them.

The California Indians provide an important example of a vital truth.  When voluntary self-restraint was used to keep population below carrying capacity, people could live sustainably in a wild ecosystem via nothing more complex than hunting and foraging.  They had no need for farming, with its many headaches, backaches, and heartaches.

Korn’s book got exciting near the end.  Farming was just one facet of Fukuoka’s dream.  As a young man, he attended an agriculture college, and then endured a dreary job as a plant inspector.  His mind overloaded, his health fell apart, and he nearly died.  In 1937, he had a beautiful vision, quit his job, and went back home to the farm. 

In his vision, he suddenly realized that all life was one, and sacred.  Nature was whole, healthy, and perfect — and nothing our ambitious intellects imagined could improve this harmonious unity in any way.  Humans do not exist in a realm outside of nature, no matter what our teachers tell us.  Heaven is where your feet are standing.

The world of 1937 was a filthy, crazy, overpopulated train wreck, and this was largely thanks to science, dogmas, and philosophies.  Intellect alienated us from our “big life” home.  Civilization had created a dysfunctional world that was far too complex.  The lives of most people were no longer intimately connected to the natural world.

In agriculture, the herd of experts insisted that plowing, pruning, cultivating, chemicals, and weeding were mandatory for success.  One after another, Fukuoka abandoned these required tasks, made some needed adjustments, and didn’t crash.  His farm got simpler and healthier.

No other animals harm themselves by pursuing science.  Fukuoka realized that people should be like birds.  “Birds don’t run around carefully preparing fields, planting seeds, and harvesting food.  They don’t create anything… they just receive what is there for them with a humble and grateful heart.”  Bingo!

How can we reorient to nature?  “For most of us, that process begins by unlearning most of the things we were taught when we were young.”  The healing process requires abandoning many, many beliefs and behaviors that our culture encourages.  We need to waste less, spend less, and earn less, take only what we need, and nothing more.  “Wearing simple clothing, eating simple food, and living a humble, ordinary life elevates the human spirit by bringing us closer to the source of life.”

Korn, Larry, One-Straw Revolutionary, Chelsea Green, White River Junction, Vermont, 2015.

Changes in the Land

Historian William Cronon was one of a group of scholars that pioneered a new and improved way of understanding the past.  Environmental history put the spotlight on many essential issues that were ignored by traditional history, and this made the sagas far more potent and illuminating.

His book, Changes in the Land, is an environmental history of colonial New England.  It documents the clash of two cultures that could not have been more different, the Indians and the settlers.  It describes the horrific mortality of imported diseases, and two centuries of senseless warfare on the fish, forests, soils, and wildlife.

The prize at the bottom of the box is a mirror.  The patterns of thinking that the colonists brought to America are essentially our modern insanity in its adolescent form.  We are the unfortunate inheritors of a dysfunctional culture.  It helps to know this.  It helps to be able to perceive the glaring defects, things we have been taught to believe are perfectly normal.

Cronon was the son of a history professor, and his father gave him the key for understanding the world.  He told his son to carry one question on his journey through life: “How did things get to be this way?”  Schoolbook history does a poor job of answering this question, because it often puts haloes on people who caused much harm, folks who faithfully obeyed the expectations of their culture and peers.

In Cronon’s book, alert readers will discover uncomfortable answers to how things got to be this way.  We have inherited a dead end way of life.  In the coming decades, big challenges like climate change, peak oil, and population growth seem certain to disrupt industrial civilization, as we know it.

We can’t return to hunting and gathering anytime soon, nor can we remain on our sinking ship.  To continue our existence on Earth, big changes are needed, new ideas.  This presents a fabulous opportunity to learn from our mistakes, to live slower, lighter, and better.  Cronon’s book reveals important lessons — what worked well, and what failed.

In the 5,000 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Europe had been transformed from a thriving wilderness to a scarred and battered land, thanks to soil mining, forest mining, fish mining, mineral mining, and a lot of crazy thinking.  During the same 5,000 years, the Indians of northern New England kept their numbers low, and didn’t beat the stuffing out of their ecosystem, because it was a sacred place, and they were well adapted to living in it.

In southern New England, the Indians regularly cleared the land by setting fires.  This created open, park-like forests, which provided habitat attractive to game.  Burning altered the ecosystem.  One early settler noted a hill near Boston, from which you could observe thousands of treeless acres below.  This was not a pristine ecosystem in its climax state.

In the north, the Indians did not clear the land with fire.  The trees in that region were too flammable, so the forests were allowed to live wild and free.  Indians travelled more by canoe.

In the south, where the climate was warmer, Indians practiced slash and burn agriculture.  Forests were killed and fields were planted with corn, beans, and squash.  Corn is a highly productive crop that is also a heavy feeder on soil nutrients.  After five to ten seasons, the soil was depleted, and the field was abandoned.  The Indians had no livestock to provide manure for fertilizer.  Few used fish for fertilizer, because they had no carts for hauling them.

This digging stick agriculture was soil mining, unsustainable.  Corn had arrived in New England just a few hundred years earlier, too recently to produce civilization and meltdown, as it did in Cahokia on the Mississippi.  Corn spurred population growth, which increased the toll on forests and soils.  (Other writers have noted that corn country was not a land of love, peace, and happiness.  Most Iroquois villages were surrounded by defensive palisades, because more people led to more stress and more conflict.)

The colonists imported an agricultural system that rocked the ecological boat much harder.  Their plows loosened the soil more deeply, encouraging erosion.  Their pastures were often overgrazed, which encouraged erosion.  They aggressively cut forests to expand pastures, cropland, and settlements, and this encouraged erosion.  Harbors were clogged with eroded soil.  Their cattle roamed the countryside, so little manure was collected for fertilizer.  They planted corn alone, so the soil did not benefit from the nitrogen that beans could add.  They burned trees to make ash for fertilizer.

Cronon devotes much attention to the eco-blunders of the settlers.  A key factor here is that their objective was not simple subsistence.  They had great interest in accumulating wealth and status, and this was achieved by taking commodities to market, like lumber and livestock.  The more land they cleared, the more cattle they could raise.  It was impossible to be too rich.

This silly hunger for status has a long history of inspiring idiotically reckless behavior.  When a colonist gazed on the land, his mind focused on the commodities, the stuff he could loot and sell.  He noticed the enormous numbers of fish, the millions of waterfowl, the unbelievable old growth forests, the furbearing animals — all the things that his kinfolk in Europe had nearly wiped out.

Indians hunted for dinner, not for the market.  They did not own the deer, elk, and moose that they hunted, so nobody freaked out if a wolf ate one.  These wild animals had coevolved with wolves, so a balance was maintained.  Colonists introduced domesticated animals that had not coevolved with wolves.  The slow, dimwitted livestock were sitting ducks for predators, which boosted wolf populations, which led infuriated settlers to launch wolf extermination programs.

Indians were not chained to private property.  When their fields wore out, they cleared new fields.  Colonists owned a fixed piece of land, which narrowed their options.  In the winter months, Indians moved to hunting camps, selecting sites with adequate firewood available.  They had nice fires and stayed warm, while the colonists shivered in their fixed villages, where firewood was scarce.

Colonists suffered from an insatiable hunger for wealth and status, which drove them to spend their lives working like madmen.  Instead of belongings, the Indians had a leisurely way of life, and this was their source of wealth.  They thought that the workaholic settlers were out of their minds.  Indians were mobile, so hoarding stuff made no sense.  By having few wants, the path to abundance was a short one.  Even the least industrious wanted nothing.

Liebig’s Law says “populations are not limited by the total annual resources available, but by the minimum amount available at the scarcest time of the year.”  So, despite the seasonal fish runs and bird migrations, life was not easy in February and March, when the game was lean and hard to hunt.  Indians stored little fish and meat.  In rough winters, they could go ten days without food.  They didn’t breed like colonists.

In the south, the Indians were engaged in a high-risk experiment by growing corn, because agriculture is almost never harmless, and it often opens the floodgates to numerous troublesome consequences.

In the north, the Indians were lucky that their home was unsuitable for farming.  They adapted to their ecosystem and lived like genuine conservatives, not looters.  This was a path with a future, until the looters arrived.

Cronon, William, Changes in the Land, Hill and Wang, New York, 1983.

Unlearn, Rewild

Are you glowing with inner peace?  Is your journey healthy, balanced, and joyful?  Do you believe that the world is close to perfection because of technological progress?  None of the above?

Miles Olson is a young man with an old soul.  He has never felt at home in modern society, even in childhood.  The only people who made sense to him were the Native Americans, because they lived with respect and reverence for all things.  When he was 17, he spent the summer living alone on a remote island.  Solitude in wildness is powerful medicine.  In a week or so, he could barely remember his name.

He struggled to find his life’s vision and calling.  There was no integrity in pursuing a career that injured the family of life.  There was no integrity in eating food produced in an atrocious manner.  There was no integrity in devoting his life to robotic consumption.  The “normal” mode was wacko. 

The proper way to live in industrial civilization was to plug into the system, obey the rules, and never ask questions.  But this was not a path with integrity, and Olson refused to submit to a dishonorable life.  So, he commenced thinking.  If the system was destroying the future, then the system was insane.  If the system was insane, then so were its rules.  Therefore, the virtuous choice was to disregard the rules, listen to his heart, and purse a life of integrity, by any means necessary.  He did just that.

He’s been squatting for almost a decade on the fringe of a large unnamed city in British Columbia.  He hunts, traps, forages, and gardens.  He gets profound satisfaction from reducing his dependence on the machine, and reducing the harm he causes.  He wrote Unlearn, Rewild to describe his life as an outlaw with high principles.  (Well, he’s an outlaw to the system, but consumers are outlaws to nature, and nature bats last.)

Unlearning is a process of throwing civilized illusions overboard, of cleaning our minds.  Rewilding means “to return to a more natural or wild state; the process of undoing domestication” — to become uncivilized, to reconnect to place.  The bottom line is that “without genuine, raw connection to wild nature we, as creatures, go insane.” 

All of us have hunter-gatherer genes.  When we were born, our souls expected to spend life as wild and free creatures in a sacred world.  What went wrong?  Olson sees domestication, agriculture, and civilization as being catastrophic mistakes in our journey.

“Sustainability” has become a meaningless word, hijacked and disemboweled by greedheads, nutters, universities, and shameless marketing hucksters.  Nothing is unsustainable anymore.  Our world is totally awesome.  We just need to burn a bit less fossil fuel, make a few minor tweaks, and our way of life will become utopia.  Olson disagrees.  He’s become a revivalist who preaches a fiery message about “radical sustainability” — good old-fashioned fundamentalist sustainability, the genuine article, the most important word in our language today.

One of his sermons illuminated the grave misconceptions that torment vegans and vegetarians, and lead them down a dark path into the valley of malnutrition, impaired health, and prickly self-righteousness.  He was once a vegan, until he saw the light, and returned to the normal omnivorous diet that everyone’s ancestors had enjoyed for a million years.

Yes, of course industrial meat production was abominable, cruel, and ecologically foolish.  The dim-witted domesticated livestock and poultry certainly suffer for it.  But why does no one grieve for the thousands of wild creatures murdered by every pass of the plow and combine?  Why do we ignore the blood gushing from our tofu stir fry?  “There are precious few humans that hear the screams of the Earth….”

Olson recommended that we stop feeding grain to animals, and use it to feed hungry folks.  But this would require continued soil mining to produce the grain.  Instead, in the spirit of big dreaming, I would suggest that we cease growing grain for animal feed, and convert that cropland back to grassland, restore the soil to good health, and give it back to the indigenous wild life — let it heal.

He wondered if hunting with firearms was ethical.  How much technology is too much?  When the Cree replaced bows with guns, they killed more caribou.  But “…the ones truly being victimized by this technology were not the caribou.  The caribou were still free, the people had entered a trap.”  This chapter began with a Ran Prieur quote: “Every technology begins as a key and ends as a cage.”  Well said.

Obviously, the turd in the swimming pool is the way we think — our insane culture.  If our civilization burned to the ground today, we’d start rebuilding it at dawn tomorrow.  “If humans had clean minds, like grasses and thistles, we would return to a state of balance when the forces of domestication ceased.” 

It is at this point that the two sacred verbs “unlearn” and “rewild” summon immense power.  Are we capable of firing up our brains and envisioning humankind living in balance with the rest of life?  Yes, if we try.  Are we capable of escaping from our cage?  Yes, with patience and determination.  Is it possible that sanity is contagious?  Let’s find out!  Olson concludes that we would be wise to make some effort to evolve.  It will take generations to create cultures that win the Radical Sustainability seal of approval, but all we have to lose is an insane way of life.

The book has two parts: ideas and endangered skills.  The ideas section describes his philosophy of life.  The skills section is a sampler of essential knowledge for squatters: making traps and snares, skinning and gutting game, medicinal plants, food preservation, sex without pregnancy, tips for cooking earthworms, slugs, and maggots, and so on. 

I learned some new tricks here, but this is not the last book you’ll need to read.  Chestnuts are good food, but horse chestnuts are toxic.  How do you tell the difference?  Camas is good food, but death camas, which looks the same at harvest time, is not mentioned.  Why is it called death camas?

Olson doesn’t write like a dusty scholar surrounded by piles of musty books.  He writes like a cheerful outlaw who has created a rewarding career in harvesting roadkill, foraging for nuts, roasting grasshoppers, and feasting on dandelions.  It’s a loose and feisty tome with strong opinions and a strong sense of hope and enthusiasm.  It’s not flawless and polished — it has some squeaks, leaks, and rattles — but it still works.

Olson has not given us “The Solution” here.  Obviously, this week is an inconvenient time for seven-point-something billion to become squatters.  But the rising cost and scarcity of energy may turn us all into squatters before long, ready or not.  Nevertheless, he is fully engaged in the most important work of our era — finding the path to genuine sustainability.  Truly, every week is a perfect opportunity for unlearning, rewilding, thinking, and living with greater integrity.

Olson, Miles, Unlearn, Rewild, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada, 2012.

Tending the Wild

“Nature really misses us,” laments M. Kat Anderson.  “We no longer have a relationship with plants and animals, and that’s the reason why they’re going away.”  Anderson is the author of Tending the Wild, in which she describes the relationships that California Indians have with the plants and animals, the rocks and streams, the sacred land which is their ancient home.  It’s an essential book for pilgrims who strive to envision the long and rugged path back home to wildness, freedom, and sustainability.

In medieval Europe, hungry dirty peasant farmers succeeded in painstakingly perfecting a miserable, laborious, backbreaking form of agriculture that depleted the soil, and produced minimal yields with erratic inconsistency.  They were malnourished, unhealthy, and most of them died young — whilst the lords and ladies, who claimed to own the land, wallowed in a rich sludge of glitter and gluttony.

When European explorers arrived in California, they discovered half-naked heathen barbarians who were exceedingly healthy, and enjoyed an abundance of nourishing wild foods that they acquired without sweat or toil.  Clearly, these savages were people who suffered from a lack of civilization’s elevated refinements: agriculture, smallpox, uncomfortable ugly clothing, brutal enslavement, and religious enlightenment from priests who preached the virtues of love, but practiced exploitive racist cruelty.

In 1868, Titus Fey Cronise wrote that when whites arrived, the land of California was “filled with elk, deer, hares, rabbits, quail, and other animals fit for food; the rivers and lakes swarming with salmon, trout, and other fish, their beds and banks covered with mussels, clams, and other edible mollusca; the rocks on its sea shores crowded with seal and otter; and its forests full of trees and plants, bearing acorns, nuts, seeds, and berries.” 

The greed-crazed Europeans went absolutely berserk, rapidly destroying whatever could be converted into money:  forests, waterfowl, whales, deer, elk, salmon, gold nuggets.  Grizzly bear meat was offered at most restaurants.  There were fortunes to be made, the supply of valuable resources was “inexhaustible,” and the foolish Indians were so lazy that they let all of this wealth go to waste. 

There were 500 to 600 different tribes in California, speaking many different languages.  In North America, the population density of California Indians was second only to the Aztec capitol of Mexico City.  They lived quite successfully by hunting, fishing, and foraging — without domesticated plants or animals, without plowing or herding, without fortified cities, authoritarian rulers, perpetual warfare, horrid sanitation, or epidemics of contagious disease.  The Indians found the Europeans to be incredibly peculiar.  The Pit River people called them enellaaduwi — wanderers — homeless people with no attachment to the land or its creatures.   

The bulk of Tending the Wild describes how the California Indians tended the land.  They did not merely wander across the countryside in hopes of randomly discovering plant and animal foods.  They had an intimate, sacred relationship with the land, and they tended it in order to encourage the health of their closest relatives — the plant and animal communities upon which they depended. 

Fires were periodically set to clear away brush, promote the growth of grasses and herbs, and increase the numbers of larger game animals.  Burning significantly altered the ecosystem on a massive scale, but it didn’t lead to the creation of barren wastelands over time, like agriculture continues to do, at an ever-accelerating rate.  California has a long dry season, and wildfires sparked by lightening are a normal occurrence in this ecosystem.

Nuts, grains, and seeds are a very useful source of food.  They’re rich in oils, calories, and protein.  They can be stored for long periods, enabling survival through lean seasons and lean years.  The quantity of acorns foraged each year was not regular and dependable, but many were gathered in years of abundance.  A diverse variety of wildflowers and grasses can provide a dependable supply of seeds and grains. 

The Indians tended the growth of important plants in a number of ways — pruning, weeding, burning, watering, replanting bulbs, sowing seeds.  Communities of cherished plants were deliberately expanded.  The Indians were blessed with a complete lack of advanced Old World technology.  They luckily had no draft animals or plows, so their soil-disturbing activities were mostly limited to digging bulbs, corms, and tubers, and planting small tobacco gardens. 

Today, countless ecosystems are being ravaged by agriculture.  A few visionaries, like Wes Jackson at the Land Institute, are working to develop a far less destructive mode of farming, based on mechanically harvesting the grain from perennial plants.  This research is a slow process, and success is not expected any time soon. 

California Indians developed a brilliant, time-proven, sustainable system for producing seeds and grain without degrading the ecosystem.  So did the wild rice gatherers of the Great Lakes region.  They built no cities, and they did not suffer from the misery and monotony of civilization.  They had no powerful leaders, ruling classes, or legions of exploited slaves.  They were not warlike societies.  Their ecosystems were clean and healthy.  They lived like real human beings — wild, free, and happy.

Tending the Wild is an important book.  It presents us with stories of a way of life that worked, and worked remarkably well.  This is precious knowledge for us to contemplate, as our own society is rapidly circling the drain, and our need for remembering healthy old ideas has never been greater.

M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild — Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005.