Wild Free and Happy Sample 13

[Note: This is the thirteenth 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 200 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.]

Modes of Communication

All forms of life, both plants and animals, seem to communicate in various ways, sending and receiving information with the life around them, via sounds, smells, chemicals, behaviors, gestures, and so on.  When I walk through a forest, I often hear warnings of my arrival being announced by noisy birds or squirrels.  On dark nights, when I quietly wander past a pond where the spring peepers are roaring in celebration, they all suddenly become silent.  In a rainforest, some calls warn of an approaching leopard, while different calls broadcast a snake alert. 

Modern humans do not perceive or understand most of the constant communication taking place in the natural world.  Jon Young learned nature awareness from his mentor, Tom Brown, and became highly attuned to bird language.  One time, he went along on a field trip with ornithology students.  He heard a call that warned of an approaching Cooper’s hawk, and mentioned this to the others.  The professor winced and hissed “that’s impossible!”  A minute later, the bird flew by.  The students were amazed.  They wondered why their highly educated professor did not understand bird language.

Clive Finlayson mentioned that hunters in Spain still use traditional technology to attract birds.  During breeding season, they blow on rabbit bone whistles that imitate the mating calls of quails.  Upon hearing the fake urgent pleas for hot romance, lust-crazed males would speed to the hunters, who could then catch them with their bare hands.

Nonhuman animals communicate about the here and now: “tiger coming.”  Without words, baboons can communicate irritation, contentment, excitement, and so on.  In addition to this basic mode, humans also have the ability to vocalize unusual sequences of grunts, clicks, gasps, and moans.  Words enable the possibility of extremely complex communication.  We can jabber about the here and now, the future, the past, events in other places, and a million other subjects.

Communication is sometimes mysteriously telepathic.  Robert Wolff was astonished by the Sng’oi people of Malaysia.  Whenever he made a rare unannounced visit, someone would be waiting for him on the trail, ready to lead him to their current camp.  How did they know he was coming?  They said that a feeling inspired them to go to the trail, be there, and respond to what happened.  Jon Young told a similar story about the Bushmen of the Kalahari.  Whenever you came to visit them, someone would be waiting.

We are the word critters.  Words bounce off our lips and tongues, zoom through the air, and plunge into the ears of others.  We learn words, speak words, hear words, think words, dream words.  Nobody knows exactly when hominins began using words, but many scholars have imaginative opinions, none of which are supported by compelling archaeological evidence.

The first words babies learn are nouns (mama, dada).  Then comes verbs, stuff to do (pee, poop, eat).  Later comes feelings (happy, sad, tired, afraid), and abstractions (good, bad, progress, capitalism).  At about 18 months, we begin assembling words into sequences.  Everything significant to us has a name — other people, species of plants and animals, rivers, hills, stone formations, stars, tools, and countless others.

Paul Shepard wrote about two scientists who raised young chimps in their home, along with their own children of similar age.  The chimps were at least as intelligent as children, until the children were three or four, learned language, and left the chimps in the dust.  If the kids had been raised by wild chimps, they would have grown up to be intelligent animals, free from the enormous burdens of our cultural baggage, much of it unwholesome and crazy making.

Complex language was certainly an asset for survival in the hunter-gatherer days.  It increased our ancestors’ ability to conjure clever new tricks and accumulate them.  Over time, the power of the word critters intensified.  At some point in the long journey, excess cleverness forced them to swerve over the line of ecological balance, and into the helter-skelter lane.  Hominins got too big for their britches in the dance of the family of life.

 Cleverness never rests.  The growing herd developed a growing ecological footprint.  Food resources became more and more scarce, forcing the transition into plant and animal domestication.  By and by, this led to a huge escalation in the power of the word critters.  They learned how to encode words into visual symbols that could be penned or painted onto papyrus, scratched into clay, chiseled into stone, cast into metal, converted into digital pixels, and so on.  Then the word symbols could be arranged into sequences that conveyed important, detailed, informative meanings (similar to the fascinating stories told to hungry San trackers by the spoor of horny warthogs).

It’s interesting that the oldest written story found so far is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the saga of a lunatic king who built the imperial city of Uruk, in what is now Iraq, in about 2700 B.C.  The story, scratched into clay tablets, describes a lecherous slime ball who worked hard to expand organic agriculture by deforesting lands along the Euphrates River, which triggered catastrophic erosion and flooding, and pissed off the gods.  By 3200 B.C., Uruk was the biggest city in the world, home to 25,000+ people.  Today, Uruk is a crude pile of brown rubble sitting amidst a desolate barren moonscape.  Its spoor has an important message for ambitious glory seekers: “Don’t live like we did.”

In a previous section, we jabbered about how the rate of technological innovation was accelerated when people lived in dense populations, and were exposed to ideas and gizmos from other cultures, via long distance exploration, trade, and conflict.  In the digital age, the flow of exotic information has shifted into warp drive.  Technology enables written words, spoken words, and images to be sent to the other side of the planet in a second, with the click of a mouse.

On my bookshelves are rows of manuscripts written by many thinkers, from different cultures, from different eras — a crowd of interesting minds and stories.  We have never before been able to store such vast amounts of information.  And we have never before lived in such a destructive manner.  This is not a coincidence.  Almost all of that information is about stuff that is unhealthy, unnecessary, and unsustainable.

Industrial civilization is already in the early stages of collapse, and this is obvious to folks who are paying close attention to reality.  Some worry that collapse will lead to a catastrophic loss of accumulated information.  Some day in the coming decades, the grid, the lights, the laptops, and the cell phones will go dark forever.  I expect that there are folks alive today who will see the last car die, and the last supermarket close.  Without ongoing maintenance, time will eventually compost our wonderful libraries.  When the oceans of modern data evaporate and fade from memory, our information will come from fireside stories, the here and now, and the ecosystem we inhabit.

Jon Young has devoted his life to helping people restore three types of severed connections — connection with others, connection with self, and connection with nature.  My generation grew up playing outdoors with the neighbor kids.  I was lucky to live close to forests, lakes, and open land.  We had no iPods, cell phones, video games, or laptops.  Our social networking was face to face, in the here and now, and preferably outdoors. 

We were at home in nature.  We built forts, climbed trees, went swimming, and caught frogs, turtles, salamanders, night crawlers, and fish.  We played until mom called us home.  Where I live now, it’s common to see tweakers, junkies, and other homeless folks camping amidst trash piles throughout the neighborhood.  It’s getting unusual to see children playing.

Most of us spend most of our lives indoors, and our visits outdoors usually take place in manmade surroundings.  Few of us spend our entire lives in the place we were born, and develop an intimate and reverent relationship with the wild ecosystem around us.  This is a most unusual situation for tropical primates, or any other animals.  We’re like the lads who walked on the moon in their silver spacesuits — lost, disconnected, homeless wanderers.

Folks in a post-collapse world are going to be devoting most of their attention to daily survival.  This will require them to actually wander out into their ecosystem, on foot, and attempt to blend into it.  When the land provides you with fish, nuts, and berries, you develop a spirit of gratitude and respect — connection.  Your life will come into communication with the family of life around you.

Collapse is a strong medicine that will delete us or cure us.  It will liberate us from countless toxic addictions, behaviors, beliefs, and relationships that have led us to the brink.  So, cheer up!  Time is running out for the most insane and destructive experiment in Earth’s history.  Better days are coming.  One way or another, healing will begin.

Limits to Growth

The Club of Rome was formed in 1968.  It included big shots and experts from 25 nations.  Social and environmental challenges had grown beyond the ability of individual countries to manage.  It was time to study the big issues, and develop strategies for dealing with them.  Their research began with the Project on the Predicament of Mankind.

In 1972, Limits to Growth was published, authored by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows.  (Here is a free PDF of the book.)  They developed a computer model that allowed them to tinker with variables like population, food, pollution, and resources, and create possible scenarios for the coming decades.  This allowed them to understand which variables were best for leveraging desired improvements. 

The book concluded that we were on a path to big trouble, but it was not too late to avert disaster.  World leaders did not leap to action, so 20 years later the second edition was published, Beyond the Limits.  It announced that humankind was beyond overshoot, and it was time to slow down.  Despite millions of copies sold, consumers kept consuming, and leaders kept snoozing.  In 2004, the third edition was published, Limits to Growth — The 30-Year Update, the subject of this review.

All three books present two very important ideas.  First, our planet is finite, so economic and population growth cannot continue forever.  There are limits to growth.  Nothing could be more obvious to anyone who has more than two brain cells, but our culture stubbornly refuses to accept this.  It is impossible to ever have enough.  We are hell-bent on perpetual growth, by any means necessary, at any cost.  Sorry, kids!  Even the most prestigious universities on Earth remain hotbeds of the perpetual growth cult, which is the equivalent of the flat Earth cult of centuries past.

Second, humans have moved beyond the limits.  We are currently on a path that cannot continue for more than a generation or two.  Sorry, kids!  Exponential population growth continues, and exponential growth in resource consumption is growing even faster.  Climate is becoming unstable.  Cropland is being destroyed.  Rivers and aquifers are being drained.  Forests are vanishing.  Fossil energy is finite.  And so on.  There are no silver bullet solutions, but there are countless ways to weaken the monster.

Naturally, the perpetual growth cult is yowling and screeching.  They denounce the Limits to Growth research, asserting that the “predictions of the future” were wildly inaccurate, and therefore all of their ideas are pure balderdash.  Of course, those who have actually read the book(s) know that the authors were careful to repeatedly remind readers that the various possible scenarios of the future were not predictions.

So, there are limits to growth, and we are beyond the limits — this begs the question: what next?  The hurricane of predicaments that comprise humankind’s war on the planet is enormously complex.  We have countless options, and the better ones include slowing down, consuming less, fewer kids.  With regard to what next, the book gets fuzzier.

The intended audience is not the billion hungry souls living on less than two dollars a day.  The authors are writing to the educated, wealthy elite — folks who will yowl and screech if anyone makes a move toward their air conditioner, refrigerator, or vehicle.  They cannot wrap their heads around the notion that life can be both pleasant and sustainable, because sustainability implies terrible sacrifice, an unbearable reduction of their precious high-status, high-waste standard of living.

Because this elite audience is jittery and spooked, the discussion becomes more acrobatic and dubious.  For example, “A global transition to a sustainable society is probably possible without reductions in either population or industrial output.”  Not all growth is bad.  Poor folks need some growth so they can escape from poverty, and discover the magic of family planning.

Of the ten scenarios presented in the book, only one results in a sustainable future, which is inhabited by eight billion happy humans.  This scenario includes the highest number of major changes.  In it, “the system brings itself down below its limits, avoids an uncontrolled collapse, maintains its standard of living, and holds itself very close to equilibrium.”

Our predicaments have been accumulating for centuries.  The Agricultural Revolution sharply disturbed our relationship with the family of life, and the Industrial Revolution greatly magnified these imbalances.  Consequently, it’s time for the Sustainability Revolution.  The book mentions three ways of contemplating sustainability.

Most well known is the Brundtland Report, which defines sustainable development as “…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”  It fails to point out the huge difference between wants and needs.  Needs are about the basic necessities for survival: food, clothing, and shelter.  Consumers often perceive needs as everything money can buy. 

Another approach is the Herman Daly Rules.  (1) Renewable resources such as fish, soil, and groundwater must be used no faster than the rate at which they regenerate.  (2) Nonrenewable resources such as minerals and fossil fuels must be used no faster than renewable substitutes for them can be put into place.  (3) Pollution and wastes must be emitted no faster than natural systems can absorb them, recycle them, or render them harmless.

The Daly Rules are clearer, and they imply backing away from industrial society and traditional agriculture, which is rational and daunting.  His second rule is perplexing.  It’s OK to use energy and minerals to make solar panels, but what would we need electricity for?  Rule two would seem to prohibit using energy and minerals to make computers or refrigerators, because they are not renewable, and they require the existence of a vast and unsustainable industrial society.  Readers are warned that a sustainable society “would be almost unimaginably different from the one in which most people now live.”

The authors favor a third approach to sustainability, the Ecological Footprint model, which compares the impact of human activities to the planet’s carrying capacity.  They calculated that humankind’s current footprint requires an area 1.2 times the Earth — we have exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity by twenty percent, and this is unsustainable.  The footprint is defined as “the total area of productive land and water ecosystems required to produce the resources that the population consumes and assimilate the wastes that the population produces, wherever on Earth that land and water may be located.”  The footprint model is vague and imprecise.

The scenarios in the book are based on measurable variables, like cropland area, industrial output, energy reserves, population, and so on.  They do not include unknowns like war, floods, earthquakes, epidemics, and climate instability. 

A serious weakness in their computer model is the assumptions used to project crop yields.  Nine billion could be fed in 2100 if cropland area was not diminished, if food production doubled worldwide, if degraded land was restored, if erosion did not increase, if irrigation capacity did not diminish, and if there was adequate energy and fertilizer.  These assumptions are impossible to take seriously.  Agriculture is highly unsustainable already.

No book provides the solutions we wish for — a healthy future, with a high standard of living, quickly achieved via easy, painless changes.  Limits to Growth is a classic, and it takes a unique approach to describing our predicaments, and evaluating responses to them.  It’s nourishing brain food, easy to read, and a bit sugarcoated.

Meadows, Donella; Randers, Jorgen; and Meadows, Dennis, Limits to Growth — The 30-Year Update, Chelsea Green, White River Junction, Vermont, 2004.

God Save Me From A Normal Life — Part Two

My father was born 100 years ago.  One hundred years from now, the seven-point-something billion people alive today will be gone.  There will be no cars, TVs, computers, phones, and so on.  The vision of a technological wonderland will be forgotten and extinct, replaced by many new low-tech survival-oriented pursuits.  If humans continue to exist, they will not be very fond of our generation, and the messes we left for them.

Every civilization eventually exhausts essential resources and collapses.  As predictable as the sun, civilizations rise, peak, and then set.  In the wake of every collapse, the survivors usually regroup and repeat the same mistakes.  It’s the easiest option, or the only option.  This is a primary curse of the agricultural era — once the dirty habit of soil mining takes root, it’s very hard to quit before the ecosystem is entirely wrecked.

As the collapse of modern society unfolds, the consumer lifestyle will eventually go extinct.  Returning to a genuinely sustainable mode of nature-based living will not be possible until nature recovers and the human population adjusts to the new scenario.  This may take a generation or three.

Meanwhile, the safe bet is that muscle-powered subsistence farming and herding will once again become the primary human activities, utilizing severely depleted cropland and grassland, without the magic chemicals and machines.  The survivors will strive to recreate something resembling a pre-industrial peasant way of living — a backbreaking lifestyle, with a short life expectancy, in which everyone lives close to the brink of starvation.  (Some scientists speculate that changing climate may blindside agriculture at some point.)

The long-term future of these neo-peasants is easy to predict.  After 10,000 years of experiments in agricultural civilization, there is no place where the cropland and grassland remains as fresh and healthy as it was on day one.  Indeed, vast areas have been reduced to waste, and new wastelands are being created at an ever-growing rate.  Agriculture is a dependable path to ruin, because it is almost always unsustainable in the long run.  Industrial society is a dependable high-speed path to ruin. 

Wise guys persistently question the wisdom of remaining on any obvious, clearly marked path to ruin.  Our ancestors were not imbeciles or evil monsters.  With good intentions, they innocently adopted agriculture.  It was impossible for them to foresee the disastrous long-term consequences of their experiment.  Today, we cannot plead ignorance.  The long-term consequences are far better understood (but generally disregarded).  Like all other animals, humans primarily live in the here and now.  Long-term thinking had no purpose when we lived in balance with nature.

Wise guys persistently recommend that we move in the direction of sustainable living, because all unsustainable options, by definition, have no long-term future.  In a smart collapse, the transition to subsistence farming would be seen as no more than a temporary transition on the high-priority path to a genuinely sustainable future.  It would be awesome to actually acknowledge the big lessons of history, break out of our 10,000-year cycle of repeated mistakes, and strive to live more mindfully.  We inherited big brains; we should use them.

A huge plus is that the new generation of radical thinkers is providing us with a different way of perceiving the world.  Agriculture was a stunning mistake.  The long-tarnished reputation of “primitive” nature-based living has been dusted off, spiffed up, and recast as a brilliant, enjoyable, healthy, time-proven mode for living far less destructively, or even sustainably.  It was not problem-free, but it left far fewer scars.

Half-baked intelligence got us into this mess, and our only hope for survival is a new and improved intelligence, heavily armed with clear thinking, reality-based history, state-of-the-art foresight, respect and reverence for nature, and a fervent, uncompromising contempt for deeply rooted pathological traditions.  With powerful wisdom, perfect luck, and more than a few miracles, humankind may once again be wild, free, and happy, a century or three down the road.  Imagine that.

A huge minus is that the road ahead is treacherously littered with slippery banana peels.  Say hi to the hope and optimism crowd, the “normal” mainstream consumers who comprise the vast majority of modern society.  For them, the consumer way of life is sacred and non-negotiable.  They conjure quirky comforting dreams that the current way of life will continue for the rest of their days.  The economy will recover and grow like crazy, everyone will have high-income work with outstanding benefits, the housing market will make everyone billionaires, everyone will drive monster trucks, death will be cured, and technology will clobber every problem — heaven on Earth!

This is false hope and irrational optimism, better known as denial (or psychosis).  It attempts to distract our attention from the pain of despair.  This psychosis dominates our culture, like the air we breathe.  Everywhere we turn; it’s there — entertainment, education, politics, religion, everyday conversations.  It dominates the minds of most people, for obvious reasons.  It’s all they know.  It encloses their minds in a cocoon of magical thinking, shielding them from uncomfortable inputs.  The world outside of the well-padded cocoon is an intensely unhealthy and unstable reality.  So, close the curtains, lock the doors, roll a joint, turn on the TV, and hope for better days ahead, right?

Is it possible to survive without false hope and irrational optimism?  Yes, in fact, it is.  Some of my best friends are present in reality, and they are quite smart and interesting.  For anyone who is even slightly present in reality, the path ahead is obviously jammed with 800-pound gorillas, as far as the eye can see — climate change, deforestation, mass extinction, energy depletion, economic collapse, wars, famines, pestilence, and on and on.  The deeper you explore reality, the more gorillas you find. 

Sadly, if you outwardly acknowledge the presence of even one gorilla, you suddenly change into an abominable monster of pure negative energy — a sick, pessimistic, brain-damaged doomer!  But wait!  Realistically, isn’t it sick and pessimistic to hope that the most destructive experiment of the entire human journey remains alive and well for as long as possible?  Do you really hope that it continues destroying life on Earth?  Circle the true doomer in this picture.  Everything is backwards.  Words can be very slippery.

If these hope fiends could slip outside their cocoon of magical thinking, they would see that genuine optimism enthusiastically embraces the sane and healthy desire to eventually return to a sustainable way of life.  Genuinely positive people are interested in freeing themselves, overcoming their addictions, rejecting the toxic values of mainstream society, resigning from soul-killing and planet-killing occupations, remembering what it is to be authentically human, and celebrating the perfection of creation (what’s left of it).

But the “normal” hope and optimism crowd has no interest in being enlightened or saved, and any attempts at doing so are usually a waste of time, and more than a little depressing.  They are committed to shopping till they drop.  The mainstream worldview is a maximum-security prison, and it will never open the gates when reason and logic come calling — instead, these sensible visitors will be warmly welcomed with a shower of boiling oil.  Obviously, humankind does not march to the beat of reason and logic — these are new, immature, and unstable mental powers.  So, the human mind is a bouncy slippery fish, and the path to genuine sustainability will not be short or simple.

I shall now reveal an immensely hopeful and optimistic plan that has a very slight chance for success — my reason for writing this book. 

To be continued.