Epilogue

The following is the rough draft of the last section of my upcoming third book.

So, here we are in the twenty-first century.  We are not a generation born wild and free, running around naked in lush tropical rainforests, nibbling on fruit, nuts, and grubs.  We inherited an age of challenges, the result of a long string of risky experiments.  Negative consequences have piled up over the centuries, and we now stand in the dark shadow of a mountain of predicaments.

Humans are not cursed with defective genes, but we have succeeded in creating a highly unsustainable way of living and thinking — a defective culture.  The clock is running out on this troublesome experiment.  It would be wise to acknowledge this, and mindfully explore saner ways of living and thinking.

Like all other animals, humans focus their attention on the here and now, the immediate vicinity.  Many animals are capable of foresight.  Some know that panthers hunt at night, so they sleep in the trees.  With regard to the manmade realm of techno-innovation, foresight is largely impossible.  Nobody could have imagined the enormous consequences of metal making, fossil energy, or the domestication of plants and animals.  A few wild cultures still live sustainably with barely any technology.

Low impact cultures do not believe in human superiority.  They do not suffer from a persistent itch to hoard personal property.  They have exactly what they need.  They do not control and exploit the ecosystem, they adapt to it.  They have time-proven cultures in which everyone practices voluntary self-restraint.  In this manner, they could enjoy extended periods of real sustainability, living in a healthy wild ecosystem.

High impact cultures, by definition, cannot have a long-term future.  In their spooky fantasies, the primary goal is to pursue economic growth, by any means necessary, for as long as possible, without regard for the generations yet to come.  Nothing is more important than perpetual growth, at any cost.  This is the dominant paradigm in consumer societies, where it is perceived to be perfectly normal and intelligent.

But deviants on the fringe, who enjoy an amazing ability to recognize the obvious, warn us that normal is insane.  For revealing this inconvenient truth, they are called doomers.  But the consumer hordes, who are enthusiastic lifelong participants in the most destructive culture in human history, are the true champions of doom.

Consumers are annoyed by the truth tellers, and denounce them for their negativity, but it’s actually the other way around.  Sending tons and tons of waste to landfills, via a lifetime of recreational shopping, in an effort to gain social status, is a heartbreaking tragedy.  It’s a path of ferocious negativity.

The truth-telling deviants are not doomers, they are simply more present in reality.  For them, the foolishness in our culture becomes less invisible.  Being present in reality, in the fullness of the darkness, puts them in a far better position to think clearly and make wise decisions.  They become less vulnerable to peer pressure.  They become less willing to mindlessly do what a mindless society expects of them.

In the process of healing from acute ignorance, you cross a painful threshold.  One day, you realize that the consumer fantasyland has little relationship with reality.  Big storms are coming, and the future will not be a prosperous and pleasurable joyride.  This realization hurts.

When this occurs, despair is an appropriate response.  It’s OK to grieve for the loss of a major long-held illusion.  At the same time, it’s also appropriate to celebrate your mind-expanding awakening, your successful return from the realm of the living dead.  Despair is like a hangover, a painful headache resulting from an unhealthy binge.  It’s a normal temporary experience on the long journey to growth and healing.

The consumers scream, “We can’t go back,” and that’s true.  We also cannot indefinitely remain on our current dead-end path.  John Trudell, the Santee Sioux activist, summed it up nicely.  “There is no old way, no new way.  There is a way of life.  We must live in balance with the Earth.  We must do it.  We have no choice.”

Eight words precisely describe the one and only sustainable destination, “We must live in balance with the Earth.”  That sacred destination has never been farther from where we now stand.  So, what should animals with legendary big brains be doing?  Obviously, we need to change how we think and live.

At the moment, consumer society feels little or no desire to question its mode of living and thinking.  Many have chugged the Kool-Aid of the techno-wizards, and have a blind faith in the wondrous solutions promised by clever experts.  Many others have little or no understanding of reality, because they suffer from ignorance, or limited ability to think.  Still others can sense the growing darkness, but are paralyzed with fear and powerlessness, and block out the yucky feelings with false hope.

Nothing can stop the coming storms of change, all paths lead to turbulence.  You can’t save the world.  You can’t fix everything, but you can use your gifts, and do what you can to confront ignorance, protect your ecosystem, and lessen the long-term damage.  There are infinite opportunities for doing beneficial work.

It’s time for unlearning, identifying the silly nonsense we’ve absorbed over the years, and hurling it overboard.  It’s time for learning, continuing our exploration of reality.  It’s time for communicating, helping each other learn.  It’s time to get outdoors, without electronic distractions, and develop an intimate relationship with the planet of our birth.  It’s time to grow and heal.

We are living in the most momentous century in the entire human experience.  It will be a time of immense learning and awakening.  As our glorious house of cards disintegrates, we will experience a beautiful die-off — countless idiotic myths, fantasies, and illusions will lose their hypnotic power, tumble into the tar pits, and never again entrance us.

It will be a century of huge lessons, an era of tremendous enlightenment.  No, climate change was not a hoax!  Yes, there really are limits!  Concepts like carrying capacity and overshoot will become well understood by any who survive.  The powerful storms of the Great Healing will inspire a great tide of questioning, critical thinking, and clear understanding.

No matter what we do, the Great Healing will eliminate a number of key predicaments, even if we don’t change our ways.  Whether or not we get serious about rapid population reduction, the current population bubble will become an ex-predicament.  Finite resources will certainly strangle the mass hysteria of consumer mania.  As we move beyond the era of climate stability, every ecosystem will be hammered by big changes.  The consumer lifestyle will no longer be an option.

Big Mama Nature has little tolerance for overshoot.  One way or another, sooner or later, some form of balance will be restored, with or without us.  But if we summon our power, and strive to live with responsibility, we may be able to prevent some destruction.  It’s essential to understand the mistakes that got us into this mess, so we will not be tempted to repeat them.  Learn!  Think!  Heal!

Tarzancíto

The naked wild boy lived on his own, scampering around the jungle between Ahuachápan and Sonsonate, in El Salvador.  Villagers had been aware of him for a couple years, but efforts to catch him always failed.  He was a superb runner, swimmer, and tree climber.  Folks called him Tarzancíto (Little Tarzan).  The lad lived on a diet of wild fruit and raw fish.  He slept up in the branches to avoid becoming a warm meal for hungry predators.

When a woodcutter finally captured him in 1933, the boy was about five years old.  You must understand that Tarzancíto was not, in any way, delighted about his “rescue,” and he took every opportunity to escape.  He was a healthy, happy wild animal, and all he wanted to do was go back home, to the jungle.

He often attacked and bit his captors, but they were civilized people, and refused to let him go.  In their minds, it was intolerable to allow a young boy to be illiterate, unbaptized, naked, and free.  Proper young boys should understand words and numbers, sleep indoors, wear clothing, and eat cooked food on a clockwork schedule.  Tarzancíto hated this.

His life in the jungle had been enormously stimulating, because the land overflowed with an abundance of living beings, all of them fully alive, free, and dancing to the wild music of the big beat.  It was no different from living in paradise, because it was paradise.  Compared to the rapture of life in the jungle, life in a box in the village was crushingly empty, dull, and sad.

I think about Tarzancíto with great fondness.  The lucky lad was merely five years old, but he could live at one with the land, easily, confidently, and happily.  Indeed, the human journey originally began in a similar jungle, long, long ago.  The jungle is the womb of our species, our sacred home, the mother of our evolution.  Nutritious food was available year round, and we could enjoy a wonderful life without tools, weapons, clothes, fire, or cell phones.  We were simply ordinary animals, thriving in pure fairyland.

To this very day, all of our wild relatives in the family of life continue to exist as ordinary animals, living in a state of balance, innocence, and integrity.  Their populations are not exploding, they are not erasing vast forests, they are not poisoning the sacred waters.  Deer continue to live like deer, ducks continue to live like ducks, but most humans have forgotten how to live like humans.

The amazing thing is that all humans everywhere are still born as ordinary wild animals, ready for a thrilling life in the jungle.  Sadly, almost none of them are born into tribes of wild jungle people anymore.  Most are born into societies of consumers, where they are raised to be the opposite of wild, free, and healthy.

Ordinary animals rarely get the respect they deserve.  Exactly what happened to the countless millions of mastodons, wooly mammoths, Irish elk, sabre tooth tigers, cave bears, aurochs, and on and on?  Everyone agrees that they were not driven to extinction by ordinary wild animals.  A number of reputable scholars have concluded that most or all of the megafauna were exterminated by human tool addicts, notably lads with the deadly new stone-tipped lances — creatures that had abandoned ordinary, and had come to live outside the laws of nature.

Long, long ago, our ancestors started farting around with simple tools of sticks and stones.  So did the ancestors of chimps.  The ancient chimps were blessed with good luck, and never swerved into the tool addict lane.  Yes, they used sticks to fish for termites, but this useful trick never mutated into a dependency.  Chimps can still survive perfectly well without termite sticks.  Our ancestors were not so lucky.  Gradually, across long spans of time, our cleverness with tools increased.  Eventually, we became highly addicted to them, and could no longer survive without them.

Our ancestors were not evil.  It was with good intentions that they innocently slid deeper and deeper into the technology trap.  They invented better hunting tools, killed more critters, and ate very well, for a while.  Their numbers grew to the point where they could not all fit in Africa anymore.  Many clans packed up and migrated to other continents, into challenging non-jungle ecosystems where it was impossible to survive without new and improved technology.  We are the only species that wears clothes.

It was inevitable that we would wake up one day with our backs up against the wall — too many humans, not enough wild food.  We started farting around with domestication, and our success with it was the most unlucky event in the entire human journey.  This led to the emergence of civilizations, insane societies obsessed with a single idea — perpetual growth.  These runaway trains doomed the long-term survival of far less destructive hunter-gatherer groups, most of which have now blinked out.

There’s a very important lesson here.  In a number of ways, we remain ordinary wild animals.  Like every other species, humans have almost no powers of foresight, because animals who live within the laws of nature have no need for foresight.  I could be gazing at a group of wooly mammoths right now, if only the inventor of the stone-tipped lance had the foresight to imagine the consequences of giving weapons of mass destruction to a gang of scruffy-looking illiterate longhaired rednecks.  Lions and tigers and bears have no need for long-term thinking, because they live in their natural manner.  They simply hunt with tooth and claw, an ancient time-proven method that doesn’t rock the ecological boat.

Likewise, the first farmers could not begin to imagine the catastrophic changes that their clever new stunt would unleash.  New innovations that provided short term benefits tended to be highly contagious.  If your neighbors adopted guns, horses, or corn-growing, you would be wise to do likewise, in order to survive.  Few hunter-gatherers refused knives, pots, or axes.  Bows and arrows spread to just about everywhere.  In the wake of stone-tipped lances, the disaster of technological innovation snowballed exponentially, and has yet to slow down.

Today, our civilized world is rolling and tumbling into a turbulent era of collapse, downsizing, and healing.  There are far too many of us, living far too hard, but the temporary bubble of abundant energy is thankfully moving toward its conclusion.  The remaining days of extreme madness are numbered.  It would be grand if this led to great awakening, and inspired us to explore better ways of living.  If humans manage to survive the coming storms, they would be wise to remember the lessons of Tarzancíto — live as simply as possible, joyfully.

A Short History of Progress

Every year, Canadians eagerly huddle around their radios to listen to the Massey Lectures, broadcast by the CBC.  For the 2004 season, Ronald Wright was the honored speaker.  He presented a series of five lectures, titled A Short History of Progress.  In 2005, Wright’s presentation was published as a short book, and it became a bestseller.  Martin Scorsese’s movie, Surviving Progress, was based on the book. 

It was an amazing success for a story contrary to our most holy cultural myths.  Wright believed that the benefits of progress were highly overrated, because of their huge costs.  Indeed, progress was approaching the point of becoming a serious threat to the existence of humankind.  “This new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past.” 

He pointed out that the world was dotted with the ruins of ancient crash sites, civilizations that self-destructed.  At each of these wrecks, modern science can, in essence, retrieve the “black box,” and discover why the mighty society crashed and burned.  There is a clear pattern.  Each one crashed because it destroyed what it depended on for its survival. 

Wright takes us on a quick tour of the collapse of Sumer, Easter Island, the Roman Empire, and the Mayans.  He explains why the two oddballs, China and Egypt, are taking longer than average to self-destruct.  The fatal defects of agriculture and civilization are old news for the folks who have been paying attention.  It has become customary for these folks to believe that “The Fall” took place when humans began to domesticate plants and animals. 

Wright thinks the truth is more complicated.  What makes this book unique and provocative is his notion of progress traps.  The benefits of innovation often encourage society to live in a new way, while burning the bridges behind them as they advance.  Society can find itself trapped in an unsustainable way of living, and it’s no longer possible to just turn around and painlessly return to a simpler mode.  Like today, we know that the temporary bubble of cheap energy is about over, and our entire way of life is dependent on cheap energy.  We’re trapped.

Some types of progress do not disrupt the balance of the ecosystem, like using a rock to crack nuts.  But our ability to stand upright freed our hands for working with tools and weapons, which launched a million year process of experimentation and innovation that gradually snowballed over time.

We tend to assume that during the long era of hunting and gathering our ancestors were as mindful as the few hunting cultures that managed to survive on the fringes into the twentieth century.  But in earlier eras, when big game was abundant, wise stewardship was not mandatory.  Sloppy tribes could survive — for a while.

Before they got horses, Indians of the American west would drive herds of buffalo off cliffs, killing many at a time.  They took what they needed, and left the rest for legions of scavengers.  One site in Colorado contained the carcasses of 152 buffalo.  A trader in the northern Rockies witnessed about 250 buffalo being killed at one time.  Wright mentioned two Upper Paleolithic sites I had not heard of — 1,000 mammoth skeletons were found at Piedmont in the Czech Republic, and the remains of over 100,000 horses were found at Solutré in France. 

Over time, progress perfected our hunting systems.  Our supply of high-quality food seemed to be infinite.  It was our first experience of prosperity and leisure.  Folks had time to take their paint sets into caves and do gorgeous portraits of the animals they lived with, venerated, killed, and ate.

Naturally, our population grew.  More babies grew up to be hunters, and the availability of game eventually decreased.  The grand era of cave painting ended, and we began hunting rabbits.  We depleted species after species, unconsciously gliding into our first serious progress trap. 

Some groups scrambled to find alternatives, foraging around beaches, estuaries, wetlands, and bogs.  Some learned how to reap the tiny seeds of wild grasses.  By and by, the end of the hunting way of life came into view, about 10,000 years ago.  “They lived high for a while, then starved.”

Having destroyed the abundant game, it was impossible to return to simpler living.  This was a progress trap, and it led directly into a far more dangerous progress trap, the domestication of plants and animals.  Agriculture and civilization were accidents, and they threw open the gateway to 10,000 years of monotony, drudgery, misery, and ecocide.  Wright says that civilization is a pyramid scheme; we live today at the expense of those who come after us. 

For most of human history, the rate of progress was so slow that it was usually invisible.  But the last six or seven generations have been blindsided by a typhoon of explosive change.  Progress had a habit of giving birth to problems that could only be solved by more progress.  Progress was the most diabolically wicked curse that you could ever imagine.  Maybe we should turn it into an insulting obscenity: “progress you!” 

Climate scientists have created models showing weather trends over the last 250,000 years, based on ice cores.  Agriculture probably didn’t start earlier because climate trends were unstable.  Big swings could take place over the course of decades.  In the last 10,000 years, the climate has been unusually stable.  A return to instability will make civilization impossible.

Joseph Tainter studied how civilizations collapse, and he described three highways to disaster: the Runaway Train (out-of-control problems), the Dinosaur (indifference to dangers), and the House of Cards (irreversible disintegration).  He predicted that the next collapse would be global in scale.

Finally, the solution: “The reform that is needed is… simply the transition from short-term thinking to long-term.”  Can we do it?

We are quite clever, but seldom wise, according to Wright.  Ordinary animals, like our ancestors, had no need for long-term thinking, because life was always lived in the here and now.  “Free Beer Tomorrow” reads the flashing neon sign on the tavern, but we never exist in tomorrow. 

The great news is that we now possess a mountain of black boxes.  For the first time in the human journey, a growing number of people comprehend our great mistakes, and are capable of envisioning a new path that eventually abandons our embarrassing boo-boos forever.  All the old barriers to wisdom and healing have been swept away (in theory). 

Everywhere you look these days; people are stumbling around staring at tiny screens and furiously typing — eagerly communicating with world experts, engaging in profound discussions, watching videos rich with illuminating information, and reading the works of green visionaries.  It’s a magnificent sight to behold — the best is yet to come!

Wright, Ronald, A Short History of Progress, Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, 2005.

Xhosa Cattle Killers

When the Dutch Afrikaners (Boers) invaded the Eastern Cape region of South Africa, the Xhosa tribe fought them long and hard.  Beginning in 1779, eight bloody frontier wars were fought.  In 1806, the British replaced the Afrikaners and continued the struggle to conquer Xhosa land.  In 1853, a lung disease began killing off the Xhosa’s cattle herds.  Problems worsened when a severe drought hit.  Things started looking grim.

Then, in 1856, after decades of terrible struggles and misfortunes, an 11-year old Xhosa girl named Nongqawuse had a vision.  She communicated with spirits of the dead and they informed her that the colonist invasion was being caused by the fact that their cattle had been cursed by witchcraft.  The spirits then gave her some important instructions in order to remedy this situation.

To lift this curse and return to days of peace and plenty, the living Xhosa had to do three things:  stop cultivating their fields, destroy their grain reserves, and kill all of their cattle.  If they did this, the whites would be driven into the sea, the dead would return, and they would refill the granaries, restore the crops in the fields, and bring herds of immortal cattle.

At this point, the Xhosa split into two groups, the believers and the non-believers.  In 1856 and 1857, the believers did as the ancestors instructed them.  They dumped their grain and slaughtered 400,000 cattle.  Having destroyed their food supply, tens of thousands then proceeded to die of starvation.  Tens of thousands were forced to go to towns and take oppressive low-paying jobs.  Only 37,000 remained on their lands, out of 105,000.  By the 1870s, white settlers occupied most of the Xhosa’s lands.  The surviving Xhosa were rounded up and moved to reserves in British Kaffraria.

Many might consider the attempt to crush the British army via spiritual warfare to be a bit crazy.  But the Europeans, travelling thousands of miles to enslave Africans and seize control of their lands, seem rather normal.  They were, after all, civilized people, and they were simply behaving like well-educated predators, bringing progress to people who were doing just fine without it.

The cattle killers remind me of today’s climate killers.  The polar bears are crying, the arctic ice cap is rapidly melting, 2012 is the warmest year in recorded history, and the scientists of the world are virtually unanimous in placing the blame on human activity. 

The climate killers understand that the weather has been bewitched.  To lift this curse, we must borrow like there’s no tomorrow, pray every hour for the recovery of double-digit economic growth, drive everywhere everyday, and fill our garages to the ceiling with consumer products via rituals of recreational shopping.  It’s sure to work!  Our elders would never deceive us.  Ack!

Today’s word is foresight.  Mother Nature was a brilliant designer.  She created life systems so well balanced that foresight was not built into the instincts of any animal — beyond the avoidance of immediate risks (don’t pet the pretty rattlesnake).  The deer did not worry about the health of their ecosystem, or the wellbeing of generations yet-to-be-born.  They didn’t have to.  Wolves would never eat all of the deer.  Beavers would never create vast clear-cuts.  Packrats would never remove the tops of mountains in order to hoard black stones.  Humans would never exterminate the billions of passenger pigeons — before they got into the tool making business.

The tool making business started out slowly, with sticks and stones.  But cleverness and tool making went hand in hand, each stimulating the other.  When we invented cool stone-tipped lances, large slow animals began to disappear forever.  We couldn’t foresee the consequences.  The domestication of plants and animals opened the floodgates to 8,000 years of catastrophes that continue to worsen.  We failed to foresee.  The geniuses of Uruk never imagined that farming would inevitably transform their lush green breadbasket into a barren wasteland.

Ferocious wild aurochs were reduced to dim-witted milk machines, which were imported to Africa.  The Xhosa learned the hard way that confined herds of animals were prone to disease and vulnerable to droughts.  They learned the hard way that creating a way of life that was dependent on milk machines was far less secure than the nomadic foraging of their ancestors.

With the Industrial Revolution, we began mass-producing tools that had nothing whatsoever to do with providing the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter — stuff like automobiles, airplanes, televisions, computers, nuclear reactors, and ships.  One very sad day, ships loaded with insane European murderers washed ashore in Xhosa country.

Like all other animals, humans live in the here and now.  Right now, that shiny Prius in the driveway is an awesome status symbol.  It shouts out to the world that we are big, important people, not bicycle-riding lowlifes, and substance abusers.  The melting icecaps and crying polar bears are pure abstractions, as are the weird predictions of climate experts staring at colorful graphs on their computer screens. 

A way of life that reliably provides a jumbo burger and fries for dinner is good enough.  Regular meals are not symptoms of a problem that requires our attention.  We’ll wash down the burger with fizzy sugar water, and trust that the toolmakers will take care of the future.  They always do.

I don’t believe that it’s impossible to learn foresight.  Imagine a world where seven-point-something billion people felt compelled to carefully contemplate the consequences of their choices.  Our population would deliberately go into free-fall.  Farm country would heal, returning to forest and grassland.  The lights would go out, and our machines would rust in peace.  Civilization’s roar would be silenced, replaced by the sweet music of a recovering ecosystem.

Would foresight drive tool making into extinction?  Would we abandon our tools, migrate to warmer regions, rip off our clothes, and dine on nuts and fruits, lizards and insects?  Could we permanently forget the idiotic notion that humans are the supreme species?  Could we return to the family of life and live happily ever after?