God is Red



God is Red fascinated me.  Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2006) was a Yankton Sioux activist.  His great-grandfather was a medicine man.  His grandfather was a chief who became a priest.  His father rose to an executive position in the Episcopal Church.  Deloria graduated from a seminary, but chose not to become a minister, because of his father’s frustrations.  He sought a path that could be of greater benefit to Native American people.

There are three editions of God is Red (1973, 1992, 2003), spanning a turbulent 30 year era — aim for the newest version.  The book provides important views omitted from the glorious saga of Western civilization.  Even the 1973 edition was well ahead of mainstream society in foreseeing ecological catastrophe, the destination of our runaway train.  We’re not a good path.  Why are we on it?  That’s the question that drives this book.  Deloria’s search for understanding is presented from a Native American perspective.

All civilized people are descendants of tribal ancestors.  Unique religions emerged in each tribal homeland, fine-tuned to its landscape, ecology, and climate.  Every homeland had sacred places where the community participated in special ceremonies.  All members of the tribe had deep roots in the homeland, and all shared the same worldview.  A tribal person “does not live in a tribe, the tribe lives in him.”

In modern society, neighborhoods are constantly-changing swarms of occupants having highly diverse incomes, ethnicities, religious beliefs, and political views.  People may live side by side for years, yet have nothing in common, and sometimes intense differences.  Many do not know the names or faces of most folks in their neighborhood.  This is not a coherent community sharing a profound sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of their ecosystem.

The Western conception of time is not about the eternal cycles of passing seasons; it is linear — a bloody one-way pilgrimage from the miracle of creation to the tumultuous end of the world, a constantly intensifying cyclone of population, progress, pollution, and bad craziness.  Humans are simultaneously the crown of creation, superior to all other life on the planet, yet each newborn inherently flawed, via the curse of original sin.

Jesus of Nazareth was a radical and intriguing Jewish thinker who lived in occupied Palestine.  He was not fond of the Roman storm troopers, materialism, or greed.  Just live simply and be nice.  At that time, in the Mediterranean basin, and in many surrounding regions, the tribal era was long gone.  It had mutated into a number of civilizations.  Common folks lived under the thumb of elites.  Life was harsh.  Regional bloodbaths were common.

For a while, the members of the Jesus movement were all Jews.  When Jesus died, his followers believed that he was the long anticipated Messiah, and that he “would return almost immediately with an angelic army to judge the world.”  So, they quit working.  Before long, they went bankrupt.  They had no doubt that he would return during their lifetime.  They were wrong.  He didn’t. 

A bit later, they opened the door to allowing gentiles into the Jesus movement.  From this point forward, it was no longer a community having a common ethnic identity.  This was the first step on the path to becoming a multinational religion, the one and only absolute truth for everyone, in every place, for all eternity.

Over time, the Jesus movement expanded into other regions.  In Rome, many joined the parade.  Growing numbers led to the birth of a religious institution — the Roman Catholic Church.  By and by, the Roman Empire was rotting away from decadence and delirium, softening it up for a spectacular blind date with vicious mobs of bloodthirsty barbarians.  The collapse of the Empire created a power vacuum that was taken over by the Church, which proceeded to expand its domain and accumulate enormous wealth and power.

True believers waited for the return of the Messiah for years, then decades, then centuries.  This was getting boring.  One day, a revelation from God arrived — the Messiah could not return until all nations had heard the story of Jesus.  So, believers shifted their preaching and teaching into high gear.  Like the Roman Empire, the Roman Church became devoted to perpetual growth and the accumulation of wealth.  Kings and Popes worked hand in hand to conquer, colonize, and convert distant lands.  The missionaries wanted to save heathen souls, and the states wanted to relieve the converts of their valuable resources, exploit their labor, and collect taxes.

And so, Christendom spread across Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia.  Colonists eventually arrived in America.  Epidemics of Old World diseases rapidly spread, killing maybe ninety percent of the Indians.  The buffalo robe fad exterminated 40 to 60 million bison.  Fur traders nearly eliminated the beavers.  Loggers mowed down vast virgin forests.  The cavalry slaughtered those Indians who resisted surrendering their freedom.

Tribal folks were not amused.  They were confused, perplexed, and pissed.  A missionary would convert them to the one true faith, and a year later the next missionary would inform them that the first one was a demonic fire hose of lies and deceptions.  All the black robes read the same book, but none agreed on what it meant.  WTF?  Especially aggravating was the enormous gulf between the beautiful beliefs they taught, and the relentless brutality of the colonial society, and its frantic gang rape of their ecosystem.  Meanwhile, back in Europe, instead of brotherly love, Christian nations endlessly waged war on one another.

When the Church shifted into globalization mode, and the Reformation shattered it into numerous denominations, the sweet teachings of Jesus largely got thrown under the bus.  Many express deep concern for zygotes embedded in uterine walls, but display far less compassion for the infants that eventually squirt out of the womb.  When American economic interests are threatened, reverence for human life stops, and the Marines are sent to mow down the enemy of the month, as well as innocent bystanders.

Deloria maintained a sense of humor.  He had a lot of fun with his chapter on popular Christianity — the theme parks, Jesus freaks, pussy grabbing faith healers, shameless money-hustling televangelists, and mega-church prosperity cults.  “The evangelical and fundamentalist wing of Christianity dwells on the figure of Jesus, and on the theology of old time religion.  Yet their knowledge about Jesus, his times, and the early church is nearly nil.”  Sunday school taught me nothing about the Crusades, the Inquisition, or the Thirty Years War.

Today we’re flying along on a joyride to Judgment Day, which is mere months or days away, maybe.  In polite conversation, it remains rude to contemplate our responsibility for leaving behind a somewhat habitable planet for the kiddies.  “It takes incredible willpower to pretend that history is the unfolding of a divine plan for humanity.  In less than two and a half centuries, American whites have virtually destroyed a whole continent.” 

Deloria concludes, “Who will find peace with the lands?  The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things.  Who will listen to the trees, the animals and the birds, the voices of the places of the land?  As the long-forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meaning of the lands of their ancestors.  That is when the invaders of the North American continent will finally discover that for this land, God is red.”

Deloria, Vine, God is Red: A Native View of Religion, 3d ed, Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, Colorado, 2003.

YouTube offers a number of Deloria videos.

The Life and Adventures of William Buckley



William Buckley was born in Cheshire, England in 1780.  He was trained to be a bricklayer, but the monotonous work bored him.  He joined the militia and was a soldier for four years.  Then, he met some scruffy lads, and got busted for receiving stolen property.  In 1803, he was rewarded for his mischief with a one-way nine-month pleasure cruise to a luxurious resort for white trash in Middle of Nowhere, Australia.  He never saw his family again.

It was not a high security penal colony, because fleeing into the vast wilderness was essentially suicide.  In just three months the prison routine got unbearably boring, and Buckley joined three other lads in a great escape.  One was shot by a guard, and the two others soon lost their courage and gave up.  Buckley was a stubborn cuss, not an obedient bootlicker.  He refused to surrender, bid farewell to his cowardly mates, and abandoned the British Empire.  Good luck Willy!

A mile or two later, in an incredible act, he passed through a time warp, and entered a vast Stone Age wilderness inhabited by cannibals, venomous snakes, and vicious packs of dingo dogs.  He was free as can be, suddenly a clueless unarmed hunter-gatherer in a reality quite similar to 40,000 B.C.  For the next 32 years, he never saw a civilized person, forgot his mother tongue, ceased knowing what year it was, and continuously worked to improve his survival skills.  Fresh air, sunshine, and absolute freedom.  Imagine that!  His escape inspires pleasant fantasies for daydreaming corporate inmates trapped in cubicle farm workstations.

In the next several months, Buckley ate shellfish and occasionally observed a few passing natives.  One day he stumbled upon a grave with a spear sticking out of it — Lucky Willy’s salvation.  He took the spear, and used it for a walking stick.  Later, while having a pleasant nap, he was spotted by two native women, who returned to their camp with wondrous news of a white man.  Everyone came to see him, and he was given the name Murrangurk, the name of the corpse in the grave, previous owner of the spear.  They believe that after death, souls return as white men.  They were very happy to find him, and Willy now had relatives who held him in great awe.

Over time, he mastered their language.  He learned a great deal about hunting, fishing, and foraging.  He now dined on organic swans, emus, shellfish, shrimp, opossums, squirrels, large ants, roots, wombats, kangaroos, black snakes, grubs, lizards, toads, rats, and mice.  Yum!  Technology included long spears, short spears, spear throwers, boomerangs, tomahawks, shrimp nets, and fire-making sticks.  Their portable mansions were bark tents.  They weren’t too interested in clothing, fashionable folks wore a few strips of hide.

His saga often mentions seeing gatherings of 100, 200, and 300 natives, which surprised me.  My minimal knowledge of Aborigines, based on twentieth century commentaries, led me to believe that they lived in small groups in a harsh land where food was scarce.  Buckley indicated that they were intimately attuned to the cycles of the seasons, knowing when and where abundant food was likely to be found, for a temporary span of time.  They lived a wandering life, trying to move from one food banquet to the next, improvising along the way.

Buckley arrived in Australia in 1803, just one year after the first non-Australian arrived in the wilderness.  Willy spent 32 years with the Wathaurong Aborigines in the Port Phillip and Geelong districts (near Melbourne), and then made contact with sailors in 1835.  In about 1849, as he neared the end of his life, he told his story to impoverished journalist John Morgan.  Buckley could not read or write.  The saga he told was based entirely on memory, long after the events occurred.  He especially remembered the events that had made the deepest impressions on him — conflict and bloodshed.

Throughout the short book, he describes numerous violent events.  Many folks were speared to death, and many of their corpses were eaten.  Very often, women were the cause of bloody disputes.  These conflicts were commonly resolved by spearing the woman, or the man who was with her, who was not her husband.  Whenever someone was speared, the family of the victim was obliged to seek revenge, immediately, or at a convenient opportunity in the future.  If the chief offender was not available, a member of his family would do.  Sometimes two tribes clashed in large rumbles, and several died in the process.

Buckley reported that all deaths were believed to be the result of human agency, never natural causes.  For example, when a man from an enemy tribe died from a snakebite, Buckley’s tribal brother-in-law was suspected of sorcery or something.  The enemies attacked and speared the family that had kindly adopted him.  Buckley became an orphan in a dangerous world, and he cried and cried for hours.

He felt safe and relaxed when living alone by a river or shore, but dangerous people could suddenly appear at any hour.  Any day he could become the main course at dinner.  One white man who met him later in life said he was of “a nervous and irritable disposition, and a little thing will annoy him much.”  Another noted that he “was always discontented and dissatisfied.”

His wild days ended when he met some sailors on the shore.  They were utterly surprised to see a dirty, nearly naked, six foot five inch (2 m) white man with long flowing hair, and a spear.  It took him some time to remember English.  He was greatly relieved to return to civilized society.  He worked as an interpreter for colonists.  Their mission was to meet native chiefs, and buy their land for a pile of trinkets.  The natives had no chiefs, and no concept of owning land or selling it, but they did have a fondness for blankets, knives, and stuff.  They did not understand what these transactions actually meant.

Buckley the bricklayer built the chimney for the first brick house in a primitive frontier settlement now known as Melbourne.  Before long, a steady stream of ships was unloading settlers.  Pissed off natives found exciting new opportunities in sheep rustling, looting, and spearing terrorists.  There were many conflicts, and the well-armed terrorists eventually conquered the Aborigines, and profitably began mining the soil, grassland, forests, and wildlife.  Buckley married the widow of a friend who had been speared.  Soon after, he got typhus.  In 1856, he died of injuries received from being run over by an ox cart in Hobart.  The end.

This is a short book, and Morgan was not a master wordsmith.  The book is a unique snapshot of a time, a place, and a life — a reminder of the era of low impact living.  It’s an effective antidote for those who suffer from the illusion that wild tribes of hunter-gatherers universally enjoyed idyllic lives of love, peace, and happiness.  It’s also sad. 

Today, two centuries later, the wild ecosystem of 1803 has been severely and permanently damaged.  This is not a path with a long future.  The Aboriginal path very closely resembled genuine sustainability.  All paths include some conflict and bloodshed, some coherence and happiness.  We live in interesting times.

Morgan, John, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, 1852, Reprint, William Heinemann Ltd, Melbourne, 1967.

Savages



One day in 1991, a strange letter arrived at the Rainforest Action Network in San Francisco, where Joe Kane was working.  It was from members of the Huaorani tribe of Ecuador, wild folks who have lived in the Amazon rainforest for thousands of years.  Their jungle home had fantastic biodiversity, including many species that live nowhere else on Earth.

The letter said that DuPont-Conoco was planning to destroy their ecosystem and culture.  The Indians were perfectly happy with their traditional way of life, and they had no interest in being destroyed.  They just wanted to be left alone.  Help!  Kane quit his job and moved to South America.  Several years later, he published Savages, which described his exciting, chaotic, and painful adventure.

Unlike our society, Huaorani men and women really have equal status.  It is never OK to give orders, or to raise a hand against a child or woman.  Family harmony is important.  A priest was amazed by them, “They are joyful in a way that is complete and without self-consciousness.”

The Huaorani strive to be in tune with the abundance of the forest, so they will always have enough to eat.  Sharing is essential.  “There is no higher manifestation of this ideal state than unqualified generosity, and no act more generous than to give away food.”  In the days prior to contact with outsiders, most natives never encountered more than seventy or eighty people during their entire lives, most of whom they knew by name.  Imagine that — a world without strangers or loneliness.

Hunting in a dense rainforest is not easy.  Their technology included spears and blowguns.  Poison darts would kill monkeys in the branches above, requiring the hunter to climb up and retrieve them.  Over time, the feet of men who spent a lot of time in the treetops changed shape, making it easier for them to climb (see image above).  Big toes bent outward, providing a tighter grip.

Until the 1950s, the Huaorani had almost no contact with the outer world.  Then, the missionaries arrived, to save the souls of the demon worshippers.  They believed that the Indians needed to live in permanent settlements, clear the jungle, become farmers, join the cash economy, and pay taxes.  Their children needed to learn Spanish, and get a proper civilized education, so they could abandon their backward culture and language.  Maidenform brassieres were distributed to the jungle camps, so women could conceal their shameful boobs.

The missionaries were walking disease bombs, and they knew that the natives had no immunity to the pathogens they brought into the rainforest, but they were on a mission from God.  Even ordinary influenza could wipe out uncontacted people.  It was vitally important to convert the savages to the one and only genuine interpretation of Christianity, before other missionaries arrived and introduced them to one of the many false interpretations (especially Catholic), condemning their souls to the eternal fires of Hell.

The missionaries held the natives in low regard and, likewise, the natives resented the freaky aliens.  The Huaorani word for outsiders was cowode (cannibals).  In their culture, sickness, misfortune, and death were never the result of mere bad luck, they were always caused by sorcery conjured by others.  When someone died, even an infant, justice required relatives to identify the culprit and kill him or her in revenge.  While this clashes with the virtuous morals our culture has invented, it kept their numbers stable.  Their ecological ethics were far superior to those of the aliens.

Kane became friends with Enqueri, a smart but unreliable Huaorani lad who could speak Spanish.  In 1956, his father and friends killed five missionaries, because soon after missionaries visited, many died from ghastly diseases.  It was easy to determine the source of this sorcery and deliver rough justice.

Clever missionaries realized that two could play this game.  After deaths, they would accuse the native shamans of demonic acts, and grieving families believed them.  By 1991, most shamans had been murdered.  Kane met a shaman named Mengatohue.  “He could enter an ayahuasca trance and become a jaguar.”  Missionaries told schoolchildren that he was an agent of the devil.  Kids mocked him.

Rachel Saint was the sister of one of the speared missionaries, and she continued to pursue his work.  One of her first native converts, Toña, became a preacher.  He attempted to convince the Huaorani that their traditional culture, everything they knew, was totally wrong.  Enqueri said that Toña “brought with him an evil so strong that it killed a child.”  To avenge this misfortune, he was killed with seven spears.

In 1967, oil was discovered in Huaorani country, an estimated 216 million barrels, enough to fuel American gas-guzzlers for about thirteen days.  In 1969, Saint created a protectorate (reservation) for the Huaorani, with a school and chapel.  Before long, all 104 Indian residents had polio, 16 died, and another 16 were crippled.

The Company (oil interests) helped Saint create and operate the protectorate.  They wanted to clear the Huaorani off their traditional lands, so they could build roads, do seismic testing, drill wells, and construct pipelines without bloody resistance.  Saint was thankful for their kind assistance, but regretted their dark side, the booze, prostitution, and violence that came with the full-scale capitalist blitzkrieg.  However, she never doubted that God was smiling on her holy ethnocide.

Ecuador’s government was impressively corrupt and incompetent.  They excelled at boosting debt, stashing stolen funds in Miami banks, and driving up food prices.  Seventy-nine percent of the people lived in poverty.  Officials were desperate for income from the oil industry, and they cooperated in every possible way.  Soldiers kept journalists and activists out of oil country, and the Company was free to pollute the land to the best of their abilities.  Toxic crud was dumped anywhere, and pipelines often leaked.  Rivers turned black, fish died, birds died, caimans died, bananas died, and natives got very sick.  For natives, middle age was 25.

Ecuador was also eager to rid their crowded cities of poor people.  The government promoted the colonization of the rainforest.  When roads were built, a four-mile strip (6.5 km) on each side was dedicated for settlement by colonists.  They flooded into the wilderness, erased jungle, built flimsy shacks, and attempted to produce coffee and cattle on low quality rainforest soil that was quickly depleted.  Many became laborers for the Company, where the work was hard, and the pay meager.  No effort was made to interfere with widespread illegal logging.

Colonization was a rapidly spreading cancer that wouldn’t stop until its ecosystem host was destroyed, including the tribal people.  There was fierce conflict between the Indians and colonists, many died, and many shacks were burned, but the cancer persisted.  A wise guy once noted that the words “road” and “raid” come from the same root.  No place is safer than a vast roadless forest.

The struggle against modernity continued, on and on, with little success.  Kane liked his Huaorani friends, but he wasn’t willing to dedicate his life to their struggle.  To the powerful, he was an annoying troublemaker, so he was unlikely to die from old age.  Kane returned to California and wrote his book.  By the last page, everything was worse, a saga of endless bullshit, craziness, and tragedy.  There are millions horror stories similar to Kane’s, for every commodity utilized by industrial civilization.

José Miguel Goldáraz was a Spanish priest who had spent 20 years in South America.  By and by, he lost interest in soul saving, and became an activist.  He had no doubt that the natives would kill oil workers in defense of their land.  “When the Huaorani kill, there is a spiritual discipline to it.  Americans kill without knowing they are doing it.  You don’t want to know you are doing it.  And yet you are going to destroy an entire way of life.  So you tell me: Who are the savages?”

Chevron vs. the Amazon is a 2016 documentary on YouTube.  Abby Martin visited oil country in Ecuador to observe the current state of affairs. 

Kane, Joe, Savages, Vintage Books, New York, 1996.

Photo: “Feet” by Phil Borges.

The Old North Trail



In 1891, Walter McClintock graduated from Yale, with plans to join his father’s prosperous carpet making business in smog-choked Pittsburgh.  Luckily, he was spared from a dull job by getting very sick with typhoid fever.  To recover, he took a trip to North Dakota, where he fell deeply in love with the west.  He worked as a photographer for a forest survey project, and became friends with the team’s Blackfoot scout, Siksikakoan.  Later, Siksikakoan introduced him to the elderly chief Mad Wolf.

Once Mad Wolf came to trust McClintock, he adopted the young lad as his son.  Mad Wolf hoped that if his people had a white leader, they would receive better treatment from the incoming settlers, many of whom were not skilled at behaving with common decency.  McClintock spent lots of time with a number of elders, listened to many stories, and several years later wrote The Old North Trail.  He also took more than a thousand photographs, many of which illustrate the book.  Today, a century later, Amazon lists his book as a best seller.  It’s fascinating and easy to read.

The Blackfeet lived on the plains east of the Rocky Mountains, from Montana up into Alberta.  When the painter George Catlin met them in 1832, he said they were the happiest Indians or all.  The Old North Trail was an ancient footpath that passed through their territory.  In places, old ruts are still visible.  Today, some suspect that it may have been 2,000 to 3,000 miles long, linking Canada and Mexico.  Because many tribes used the trail, travel was dangerous.  It was a common place for ambushes and tribal wars.

In the old days, the Blackfeet used dogs as beasts of burden.  Sometime before 1750, they acquired horses, triggering radical change.  Horses greatly increased their ability to hunt, feed more people, wage war, haul trade goods, and zoom across the plains at superhuman velocity.  Corn farmers became highly vulnerable to horse-mounted raids by neighboring tribes, forcing many to abandon their fields and become nomadic.  After 1780, the Blackfeet were hammered by wave after wave of deadly diseases.  Their population dropped by maybe 90 percent.

By 1883, white folks had succeeded in nearly exterminating the buffalo, and this made the traditional Blackfoot life impossible.  The tribe was forced onto reservations, given ration tickets, treated like dogs, and were not allowed freedom of travel.  Missionaries introduced them to sin, hell, damnation, guilt, and submission.  Teachers taught youths the ABC’s of civilization, using the English language.

By the time McClintock arrived, many young Blackfeet were disoriented victims of cultural genocide, largely indifferent to their tribe’s customs, traditions, and religion.  During important ceremonies, many would be drinking, gambling, or horseracing.  Only the elders still remembered the traditional ways, and their days were numbered.  McClintock wanted to record the story of these people, before their culture ceased to exist.  The Blackfeet people fascinated McClintock, and he described them in a respectful manner.

His book is a magical 500-page voyage into another time and place.  Readers can soar away from the spooky nightmare world of automobiles and cell phone zombies, and imagine living in wildness and freedom.  The Blackfeet elders shared fond memories of a way of life that was far more in balance with the circle of life.  In the good old days, “the mountain slopes abounded in beaver, wapiti, moose, mountain sheep, and grizzly bears, while immense herds of antelope and buffalo roamed over the plains.”

One night, McClintock awoke to discover a huge grizzly bear stepping over him to finish off his dinner leftovers.  Grizzlies were still common.  Wolves and coyotes often howled passionate serenades under the stars.  Humans were not the dominant species; they were delicious two-legged meatballs.  Modern folks, obsessed with glowing screens, would not have lasted long in a reality where man-eating carnivores were never far away.  To survive, folks actually had to pay careful attention to reality, and behave in an intelligent manner.  Imagine that!

The people wore clothing of animal hides, and lived in tipis, in an ecosystem of scorching summers and long blast-freezer winters.  Powerful storms could race across the plains at astonishing speed.  On a pleasantly warm November day, McClintock noticed distant turbulent clouds that were rushing across the plains in his direction.  Danger!  The temperature sharply dropped, howling winds pounded him, and a whiteout blizzard commenced.  He lost all sense of direction, and freezing to death was a strong possibility.  He managed to return to camp.  The storm lasted ten days.

McClintock wrote, “The Blackfeet subsisted mainly upon buffalo meat, when it could be secured.  They also used sarvis berries, wild cherries, buffalo berries and vegetables such as camas, wild turnips, wild onions, wild potatoes, bitter root, and wild rhubarb.  They secured wild ducks and geese by striking them over the head with long sticks.  Beaver tails were considered a great delicacy.”

A vegetarian would soon starve on the plains.  The Blackfeet survived by killing and eating their animal relatives.  When natives died, their corpses were returned to the circle of life.  The dead were placed upon scaffolds built in trees, called death lodges (like THIS or THIS).  The Blackfeet did not arrogantly interrupt the circle dance of life with buried caskets or cremation.

McClintock was amazed by how well the Blackfeet lived without thrashing their ecosystem.  Whites did amazing things with science and industry, but the Blackfeet were superior in terms of their personal integrity.  In no Blackfoot community could you find the “depravity, misery, and consuming vice, which involve multitudes in the industrial centers of all the large cities of Christendom.”  By thriving in a lifestyle with few wants, they did not deteriorate into infantile consumers.

The last chapter in the book has pissed off many reviewers.  The preceding thirty-eight chapters did not provide, in any way, a flattering impression of settler society.  In 1910, respect for savages was politically incorrect, and publishers were not fond of risky projects.  The Blackfeet were hopelessly screwed.  Whites were here to stay.  Happy endings sold more books.

So, the story concludes with a jarring shift.  McClintock praised the integrity of the Blackfoot people, and was proud of their heroic advance toward Christian civilization.  “The industrious are rapidly becoming self-supporting.  Some of them live in well-made and comfortable houses, and own ranches, with large herds of cattle and horses.  They wear white men’s clothes, purchased from the trading stores, own high priced wagons and buggies and make use of modern farming implements.”  Hooray!

Anyway, the book provides readers with a wonderful peephole into a way of life that was not insane.  Children were raised in a land that was wild, free, and thriving — grizzly bears, not teddy bears.  The good power (Great Spirit) was everywhere, in everything — mountains, plains, winds, waters, trees, birds, and animals.  Everyone was on the same cultural channel, free from the friction of diversity and wealth inequality.  They grew up in coherent communities where it was rare to see a stranger.  [Cool excerpt]

McClintock’s book described how a healthy culture disintegrated into incoherence over the course of just one generation.  Beliefs got us into this mess, not genes.  I’m very optimistic that the coming decades of resource depletion, climate change, and the collapse of our economic system will provide a miraculous cure for consumer fever.  Survival will require paying careful attention to reality, and behaving in an intelligent manner.  Radical change in one generation is not totally impossible when the time is ripe.  Think positive!

McClintock, Walter, The Old North Trail, MacMillan and Co., London, 1910.

A free download of the book is HERE.  Over 1,400 of McClintock’s photos are HERE (click “View all images”).

Silent Spring

Silent Spring is a classic, a powerful broadside against synthetic pesticides.  Now, more than fifty years old, the book still packs a solid roundhouse punch.  With one book, one woman enlightened millions and spurred a loud outcry.  One woman inspired big changes.  Many of the pesticides she slammed have been banned or highly restricted.

Following World War II, Americans had big heads.  We had won the war, invented a terrible new weapon, our economy was booming, and life was great!  We succeeded at whatever we tried.  We were giddy with euphoria.  Then, Rachel Carson rolled a hand grenade into our dining rooms.  Suddenly, Sunday dinners at grandma’s looked far less delicious.  What were we eating?  Would it kill us?

During the war, researchers working on chemical warfare agents discovered substances that were highly toxic to insects.  After the war, greedy minds became fascinated by these super-poisons, and visions of big profits danced in their heads.  Synthetic pesticides were toxic to morals, ethics, and foresight.  And so, a new industry was born, and the production of pesticides increased five-fold between 1947 and 1960.

To control the elm bark beetles that caused Dutch elm disease, two to five pounds of DDT were sprayed on elm trees.  This killed the natural predators of the beetles, as well as 90 species of birds, and assorted mammals.  Worms ate the poison leaves, and the robins that ate the poison worms quit reproducing.  Elms kept dying.  More elms survived in places not sprayed.

To control gypsy moths, a million acres a year were sprayed with DDT.  Sprayers were paid by the gallon, not the acre, so some places were sprayed multiple times.  Bees died.  Cows ate DDT grass and produced DDT milk that was consumed by DDT humans.  Regulators did not block the sale of poison milk.  At the end of the expensive project, the gypsy moths returned.

To control fire ants, millions of acres were sprayed with two new poisons: dieldrin and heptachlor, which were far more toxic than DDT.  Newborn calves died after their first drink of milk.  Piglets were born dead.  Opossums, armadillos, raccoons, quail, songbirds, turkeys, livestock, poultry, and pets died.  In the end, there were more ants in Florida than before.

We know little about what these toxins do to the complex microorganisms in healthy topsoil.  Many of them interfere with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which provide an essential nutrient for all living things.  Some organisms are wiped out, leading to explosions of other organisms.  The chemicals persist in the soil for years, and build up with each new application.  Soil beneath an apple tree can contain 113 pounds (51 kg) of DDT.  Old-fashioned arsenic pesticides keep the soil toxic forever.

Yes, it’s a bummer that all spawning salmon died when New Brunswick’s Miramichi River got sprayed with DDT, while the terrible spruce budworms laughed at the embarrassed entomologists.  When Ontario sprayed to kill blackflies, they wiped out blackfly predators, enabling the fly population to explode 17-fold.  The same thing happened in Florida, where large areas in coastal regions are now uninhabitable because of hordes of pesticide-resistant mosquitoes.

“Resistant” is a keyword in this comedy of errors.  Big Mama Nature routinely produces organisms that are resistant to insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, antibiotics, and antivirals.  We can throw one poison after another at life, and life will become resistant to it.  Winning the war on life is impossible.  Resistance can develop in as little as two months.  The average time is three years.  Insects are reproductive champions, and can promptly refill the land with resistant offspring.  The breeding process in humans is much slower, so it will take us thousands of years to become resistant to pesticides. 

Silent Spring delivered two powerful messages.  It alerted us to the nightmare world of pesticides.  It also turned big floodlights on the incredible incompetence of our experts and regulators.  In 1960, almost everyone was blissfully ignorant about the toxic chemicals in their lives.  In those days, most folks still trusted their elected officials.  They trusted the experts who told them that DDT was harmless, and chlordane was a wonder of scientific genius.  Today, for good reason, we automatically doubt any statements made by leaders or experts because they, too often, have little or no relationship to the full truth.

Carson did not believe that the use of pesticides should be banned entirely, but she did recommend that we shift toward less toxic alternatives, like pyrethins and Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt).  Not surprisingly, malarial mosquitos are becoming resistant to bed nets treated with pyrethin-based insecticides, and many crop pests are now resistant to Bt.

She was fascinated by research in sterilizing male bugs, so that female bugs would not be able to tell the studs from the duds.  Chemo-sterilants were used to render millions of houseflies impotent.  Male gypsy moths found their lovers via sexy scents.  Researchers sprayed this scent all over the place, and were delighted to observe the flying lads falling deeply in love with wood chips that smelled like hot babes.  Ultrasonic sounds could be used to kill blowflies, mealworms, and yellow fever mosquitoes.

About half of the insects called pests are immigrants from foreign lands.  Here, they were not controlled by their natural predators from the old country.  Carson recommended importing the predators and parasites of notorious immigrant pests.  Moving organisms from one region to another is a mistake that has often led to unintended disasters, like the rabbits of Australia, the potatoes of Ireland, smallpox, and so on.  She thought that it was OK for humans to try to sit in the ecosystem’s driver’s seat.

Carson was fighting breast cancer as she finished her book, and she died in 1964, two years after it was published.  If she had lived longer, I think she would have recognized the serious shortcomings of the anthropocentric worldview of her era.  Living like the masters of the planet has been a reliable recipe for countless catastrophes, and it’s the core reason why seven billion people are standing on very thin ice today.

Ecological thinking is the antidote.  Forget control — adapt!  Carson was intrigued by the brilliant rascal Paul Shepard, who could have exorcised her anthropocentric demons, had she lived longer.  She quoted Shepard, who summed it up nicely: “Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity?  Why would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”

PS: Locust is the story of how humans, for once, actually succeeded in driving a major crop-destroying insect pest into extinction — unintentionally — by simply living like civilized people. 

Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring — Fortieth Anniversary Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 2002.

The Other Side of Eden

Hugh Brody is an English anthropologist.  His parents were Jewish, and a number of their relatives died in the holocaust.  Brody spent three decades in Canada hanging out with natives raised in hunter-gatherer societies.  He worked for the government, and made documentary films.

Brody was raised in a nutjob civilization.  He found the hunter-gatherers to be fascinating, because they had many virtues that were missing in modern society.  The natives were kind and generous people.  They radiated a profound love for the land of their birth, the home of their ancient ancestors.  They deliberately had small families.  Nobody gave orders to others.  Everyone made their own decisions.  Children were never disciplined.

He described his experiences in The Other Side of Eden, an excellent book.  It examined the vast gulf between farming societies and hunter-gatherers — the broken and the free.  In many ways, it was a predator-prey game.  Wild people were useless obstacles to the insatiable hunger of the powerful empire builders and soil miners.

Conquered hunters had to be broken — turned into educated, Christian, English-speaking wageworkers.  They had to be made dependent on a farm-based civilization, and this required turning their lives and minds inside out.  It was different in India, where the British colonized people who were already farmers.  These folks were allowed to keep their language, religion, and culture.  The empire simply skimmed off a portion of the cash flow and became a morbidly obese parasite.

Brody’s family was Orthodox and Zionist.  Later in life, his mind-altering experience with hunter-gatherers compelled him to reexamine his cultural programming.  Genesis was essentially the creation story of western civilization.  Eden was paradise, and Adam and Eve were provided with everything they needed.  There was just one simple rule to follow, and they promptly disobeyed it.  God threw them out.

They had two sons.  Cain was a farmer, and Abel was a herder.  God was not a vegetarian, and he loved Abel’s offerings of meat.  Cain got jealous, and killed his brother.  God condemned him to a life of endless toil.  Eventually, God came to loath the troublesome humans, and decided to drown them all.  Only a few were decent — Noah and his family were spared.  God instructed the survivors to spread across the world, multiply, and subdue wildness.

So, the descendants of Noah were cursed to be wanderers, with no permanent home.  Soil depletion, overbreeding, and belligerent neighbors forced them to keep moving.  We think of hunters as being nomads, and farmers as sedentary, but the opposite is closer to the truth.  Hunters tend to remain in the same territory for ages.  Farmers commonly pack up and move when greener pastures become available.

Yes, hunters did eventually migrate to every corner of the planet, but the diaspora took more than 100,000 years.  The new farming game grew explosively, and spread everywhere in a few thousand years.  It was a huge and tragic change in the human journey, because it was thoroughly unsustainable, ravaged everything in its path, and created mobs of rootless broken people.

Over 200 years ago, Sir William Jones noticed that Sanskrit had similarities to other languages, like Latin, Greek, and German.  Other linguists pursued this notion, and discovered many related languages.  These are now known as the Indo-European family of languages, and they are spoken by half of humankind.  They likely originated in the Fertile Crescent, and spread in all directions, as agriculture expanded.

Brody noted that Genesis made no mention of hunter-gatherers, it was a story told by the victors.  This Hebrew creation myth was especially peculiar in that it described two-legs as being superior to all the other animals.  In the stories of wild people, two-legs were often portrayed as the newbies — clumsy, comical, childlike critters who had much to learn from the older, wiser species.

The natives of northern Canada believed that they lived in the most beautiful place in the world.  It gave them everything they needed.  They treated their home with great reverence and respect.  They were extremely lucky that their chilly Eden wasn’t prime real estate for agriculture.  With the exception of horrific epidemics, they were relatively unmolested until the twentieth century.

But then, hell rumbled into Eden.  Obnoxious missionaries told them they were wicked devil worshippers.  The government built permanent settlements for them, with churches, schools, and stores.  Their ancestral land became the property of the state.  Loggers, ranchers, and miners moved in.  A large region of Eden became a training ground for supersonic low altitude NATO bombers.  By and by, the natives became fond of the pain killing magic of oblivion drinking.  The good old days were over.

The residential schools were sadistically cruel.  Children were taken from their families and sent far away.  The kids were beaten for speaking their language.  Many were malnourished or sexually abused.  Many died.  The primary goal of school was ethnocide — eliminating wild culture.  They weren’t really creating improved people; they were breaking them, like ranchers break wild horses.  The children were taught that they were primitive, and that everything they knew was wrong and stupid.  After a year of English-only, they forgot their native tongue.  It took years to relearn it, and many never did.

Control is the foundation of the farming mindset.  Settlers ravage ancient forests with sharp axes and plows.  They exterminate the wildlife and build sturdy fences.  When Brody brought an Inuit elder to England, they took a drive in the country.  Anaviapik was stunned, “It’s all built!”  The original ecosystem was gone.  It was unbelievable.

On one project, Brody hung out with alcoholic natives in an urban skid row.  He noted that white drinkers took great pride in holding their liquor while drinking heavily.  It was uncool to stumble around or slur words.  Respectable boozers remained in control.  Natives, on the other hand, let go.  “There is a welcome loss of self, a flight into another state of being, another kind of person” — a spirit journey.

Control is impossible in the hunting world.  Fish, birds, and game go where they wish, and do as they please.  Weather happens and patterns change suddenly without warning.  Hunter-gatherers must continually pay close attention to the land and its creatures.  A living ecosystem is not a predictable machine.  Intuition and improvisation are essential for survival.  Folks must be open to many states of mind.  Dreams provided important information.  “If there is a trail to be discovered, the dreamer must find it.”

“It is artists, speculative scientists, and those whose journeys in life depend on not quite knowing the destination who are close to hunter-gatherers, who rely upon a hunter-gatherer mind.”

Brody, Hugh, The Other Side of Eden, North Point Press, New York, 2001.

Wild (republished as Savage Grace)

If you only have time for one sentence, hear this: Jay Griffiths’ book, Wild, is one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read.  Wild is a celebration of wildness and freedom.  It celebrates societies that work, societies that have complete respect for their ecosystems, societies that have survived for thousands of years without suffering destructive whirlwinds of mass hysteria.

Griffiths is a brilliant heretic and a proud one.  Her book shows us what happens when madness collides with wildness.  It helps us understand the dark injuries that destroyed our own freedom, and put us on the path to what we have become.  It is 350 pages of full-throttle outside-the-box thinking, written with passion and eloquence.  For outside-the-box thinkers, it’s just awesome.  For light sleepers, it might provide a life-changing wakeup call.

Griffiths was born in deepest, darkest England, a devastated island that was once a magnificent rainforest.  She was blessed with the precious curse and gift of having an active mind.  She excelled at asking penetrating questions that were not proper for young ladies (or lads) to ask.  The wardens were not amused.

During her teen years, she hung out with fundamentalist Christians, but what they were teaching could not survive rational scrutiny, and her mind was highly allergic to blind faith.  Painful clashes inspired her to run away.  She abandoned the normal life for which she had been trained.  “I lost a walled city but found a wildness and freedom.  I never regretted it.”

She wandered around the world, but life was not always easy.  “Following a passionate freedom can mean loneliness, penury, humiliation, for we live in a world where the caged hate the free.”  By and by, she floated away into a healthy dance with depression.  Depression is one of life’s valuable idiot lights, warning us that it’s time to pay attention and change paths.

One day, the phone rang, and a friend invited her to Peru, where she could hang out with shamans, use powerful medicine, and recover her lost soul.  So she did, and it worked.  The heavy black clouds soon dispersed.  She spent the next seven years working on her book, travelling from the Amazon to New Guinea, Australia, and Arctic Canada.

We routinely teach our children that wild people are primitive, and that their way of life is inferior and undesirable.  In so doing, we erect a brick wall that prohibits fresh wild notions from flushing the crud out of our wheezing, slobbering imaginations.  Instead, we teach our children to live like there’s no tomorrow, to shop till you drop, to leave nothing behind for future generations.

Griffiths understands that the brick wall must be smashed, for the sake of all life.  Her mind is a sledgehammer.  She takes us on visits to wild ecosystems that stood in the path of the all-devouring global economy.  She listened to the wild people, in a caring and respectful manner, hearing their pain, rage, and despair.  They had a healthy way of life before the invasion.  They needed nothing from us.  They simply wanted to be left alone. 

She took long treks through the jungle with wild people who possessed immense knowledge of the plants and animals.  They perceived that all flora and fauna have spirits (except for domesticated plants).  They saw that all wild beings were animated by the same life force, but different species appeared in different forms.  We were all equal.  When humans lived like equals, rather than masters, they didn’t gang rape their ecosystem, because that would have been inconceivable.

After days of hiking through a perfectly healthy land, a treasure of abundant life, they stumbled upon the town of Maldonado, the cash economy, the modern world — electric lights, pop music, abundant booze and drugs, discarded syringes, splatters of puke, and overflowing outhouses.  Everyone seemed to be mad.  “To me, the forest had been wildly beautiful and the town was a hideous wasteland.”

One chapter was devoted to the vast wildness of the sea, the place where all life began.  The surface of Mars is better known to us than the floor of our oceans.  The underwater world is a realm of immense beauty, and diversity.  Cetaceans, like whales and dolphins, are incredibly intelligent, and they live in an incredibly intelligent manner, exactly as evolution prepared them to live, wild and free, without technology (a brilliant strategy for long-term success).

The ocean is a place where primates have little business, beyond the shoreline.  Civilized primates have become abusive, ravaging the sea life, and filling the waters with toxins, sewage, garbage, and noise.  Climate change is making the oceans so acidic that catastrophic harm now seems very likely.  Wild people didn’t do this — even when they lived too hard, the harm they caused was far, far less than the harm caused by our way of life.

Missionaries were high on the list of people that Griffiths most resented, because their mission was to destroy wild cultures, and convert wild people into literate, employed, Christian consumers.  In Peru, four different missionary groups, using helicopters and speed boats, competed to find uncontacted tribes.  They knew that they would import deadly diseases, but they didn’t care.  In some places, half of the people died within two years of their arrival.  The priests blamed female shamans for the illness, and the angry people killed the shamans.

Common gifts for the converts included axes, tobacco, clothing, and mirrors.  Mirrors enabled people to see their own faces, and become more aware of their individuality.  Jesus saved individuals, not communities.  God lived in heaven, and the Earth was a realm of wickedness, so it didn’t matter, it was worthless.  Missionaries built roads into the jungle, which were soon used by miners, loggers, and other destroyers.  Separated from the family of life, the modern heart gets hard.

Missionaries forced the natives to surrender their sacred objects, which they burned.  Within two generations, traditional knowledge becomes extinct, because it is no longer being passed down to the young, who spend their days in classrooms.  Cultural genocide is emotionally shattering.  In one Brazilian tribe, over 300 natives committed suicide.

In Australia, the invasion of civilization has been devastating for the Aborigines and their home, but the elders maintain a sense of patience, for the noxious cities are nothing more than ugly scabs.  Whites have never possessed the spirit of the land, which remains alive beneath the parking lots and shopping centers.  With time, the disease will pass; the land will heal and thrive once again, to the best of its ability.

Humans are not domesticated, we are genetically wild animals, but so many have been tamed.  “Tamed creatures are dolt-minded and dumb, insipid and bland,” Griffiths tells us.  “The tame are trained only to hear the voice of their tamer, having ears only for command.”  Our wild genes scream in despair, as we go berserk with cage rage.  “Sensible habits and good road safety skills will keep you alive till eighty.  So what?  If you didn’t know freedom, you never lived.”

The myth of human superiority has constructed an enormous ecocidal monstrosity, and its ongoing self-destruction will result in unimaginable harm.  If we cannot find a way to return to our humble place in the family of life, we will have no future.  That’s the message here.

Griffiths, Jay, Wild — An Elemental Journey, Jeremy P. Tarcher, New York, 2006.