Wild Free and Happy Sample 25.5

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

STUMBLING INTO DOMESTICATION

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

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

Supply and Demand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cradle of Civilization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forest Rewrite

Greetings!  The following is a rewrite of samples 25 and 41.  They will be combined into one section and moved much later in the manuscript, before Sacred Energy.  One more step closer to the end!

 SACRED FOREST

As mentioned earlier, after the last Ice Age wound down, glaciers and ice sheets melted and retreated, eventually allowing the expansion of tundra, grassland, and forest.  Grassland spurred the momentum of the human experiment by boosting herds of game.  In wooded regions, hunting was more challenging, and forests interfered with the growth of trendy new fads like herding and farming.

This is why civilization emerged in the grassland regions of the Fertile Crescent, where wild wheat and barley grew in great abundance, as did herds of wild game.  Bountiful lands made living easier.  They also had a prickly habit of stimulating population increase.  The uncomfortable pressure of crowding and friction inspired some folks to envision escape.  Maybe they could create a more pleasant life in the forest frontier of Europe’s wild west.  Some of them packed up and left.

In Europe, Barry Cunliffe noted that as the climate warmed, wild folks migrated northward from the Mediterranean.  By 7000 B.C., they were present in a number of locations.  In lean regions they were nomadic, and in places of abundance they settled down.  At the same time, forests were also migrating northward, encouraged by the changing climate. 

By around 4000 B.C., forest expansion stopped, when it finally reached regions that were too chilly for happy trees.  By this time, folks were raising crops and herding livestock in a number of permanent settlements.  These communities were expanding their fields and pastures, which required murdering happy trees.

Over time, this increasingly abusive relationship between the two legs and the tree people led to tremendous destruction.  In the good old days, forests originally covered 95 percent of west and central Europe.  Jed Kaplan and team wrote a paper on the prehistoric deforestation of Europe.  It included stunning maps that illustrated the shrinkage of forests between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 1850. [Look]  Deforestation went into warp drive between 1500 and 1850, driven by the rise of colonization, industrialization, and other dark juju.  The voracious human swarm was swerving deeper and deeper into mass hysteria. 

Humankind’s war on forests has been intensifying for several thousand years.  It’s a huge and complex subject.  Forests have suffered from many impacts, including firestick farming, agriculture, herding, industry, warfare, construction, consumerism, climate change, and population growth.

In this chapter, I’ll share a few snapshots from the ripped and torn photo album of the relationship between two legs and the tree people. 

Humbaba’s Roar

The Fertile Crescent was where plant and animal domestication shifted into high gear.  It was in this region that the first civilizations began popping up all over, like a painful burning rash of deforestation, soil destruction, slavery, patriarchy, exploitation, aggression, self-destruction, etc. 

It’s interesting that the oldest known written story is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the saga of Gilgamesh, a lunatic king who ruled over the city of Uruk, located along the Euphrates River in Sumer (now Iraq).  By around 3100 B.C., Uruk was the biggest metropolis in the world.  Today, Uruk is a crude pile of brown rubble sitting amidst a desolate barren moonscape. [Look]  It has an important message for folks today: “Don’t live like we did.”  But humankind is a herd of sleep walkers, wandering lost in a foggy dream world.

The story was originally scratched into clay tablets in cuneiform script.  Over the course of 2,000 years, components of the story unified into a single narrative by around 1800 B.C.  In the story, King Gilgamesh was a lecherous slime ball who worked hard to expand low-tech, muscle powered, organic agriculture along the Euphrates River (a process now known as Sustainable Development™). 

Gilgamesh was probably a real king who lived somewhere between 2900 and 2350 B.C.  The growth of Uruk led to massive deforestation along the valley, which unleashed immense erosion and flooding.  In the story, Humbaba was the sacred defender of the forest.  Gilgamesh whacked his head off, and proceeded to cut trees like there was no tomorrow.  Rains then washed the soil off the mountains, down to bedrock.  And so, whenever the floods blast down the river, the noise of catastrophic destruction is referred to as “Humbaba’s roar.”  It’s the first sound I hear every morning.

Beyond Hunting and Gathering

Earlier, I jabbered about how some hunter-gatherer cultures used firestick farming to boost the availability of wild game and special plants.  This involved limiting forest, and encouraging the expansion of customized grasslands.  The tree people were never fond of this.  Over time, this expansion encouraged the intensification of farming, herding, civilization, industry, and aggressive deforestation. 

Other cultures used a different survival strategy, mindful self-control.  They understood the need to pay close attention to reality, to recognize the signs of approaching limits, and to avoid scarcity by adjusting current patterns.  Sometimes reproduction taboos were used to reduce the birth rate.  Mindfulness could avoid having an abusive relationship with the tree people, but modern society displays little interest in it.  It’s not good for jobs or the economy.

Let’s take a quick peek at the relationships that several cultures had with the tree people.  (Prehistoric dates are not certain, different sources cite different dates.)

Britain

When the glaciers of the last ice age began melting, sea levels were much lower than today.  England was connected by dry land to Ireland, Scandinavia, and continental Europe.  Barry Cunliffe noted that most of Western Europe essentially became a vast forest.  This expansion of forests displaced natural grazing land, which affected the abundance of large herbivores.

By 9000 B.C., hunter-gatherers had apparently made some small clearings in the forest to attract game.  By 6500 B.C., rising sea levels had made Britain an island, like it is today.  It was no longer connected by dry land to neighboring regions.  By 4500 B.C., when farmers and herders began to trickle in, Britain was largely a forest, except for the highlands.  Hunters dined on red deer, wild boar, aurochs, and so on.  By 3000 B.C., substantial clearances for cropland and pasture were increasing.  By A.D. 1100, just 15 percent of Britain was forest.  By 1919, it was five percent.  Britannia was essentially stripped naked, a ghastly painful open wound.

J. B. MacKinnon mentioned a story about Mark Fisher, a British scientist who visited the U.S.  From an overlook in the White Mountain National Forest, he could gaze down on 800,000 acres (323,748 ha) of woodland, an overwhelming experience.  He burst into tears and had a long, hard cry.  At Yellowstone, he saw wolves in the wild for the first time, and he dropped to his knees.  Fisher dreams of rewilding the U.K. — introducing long lost critters like beavers, lynx, wolves, and so on.

Ireland

The story in Ireland was similar to Britain in many ways, but Ireland got much more rainfall, annually receiving 50 to 200 inches (127-508 cm) of precipitation.  The wet climate encouraged the growth of lush temperate rainforests.  Frederick Aalen noted that early hunter-gatherers arrived about 8,000 years ago, when the isle was covered with a dense unbroken forest.  Folks lived along coastlines, lakes, and streams.  In the forest they created some openings to attract game, but these were apparently small in scale.

Then came a paradise-killing event of dark juju.  Farmers and herders began arriving around 3500 B.C., and the war on trees commenced.  By the end of the 1600s, the destruction of native forests was nearly complete.  When Aalen wrote in 1978, only three percent of the island was occupied by natural forest or tree farms. 

Deforestation had many unintended consequences.  William MacLeish noted that in the good old days, the rainforest wicked up a lot of moisture from the land, and then released it into the passing breezes, which carried it away.  When the trees were gone, this dispersal process wheezed.  Meanwhile, the Gulf Stream faithfully continued delivering warm rainy weather from the Caribbean.  So, the heavy rain continued, and the water remained where it landed.  Consequently, water tables rose, bogs spread, and the ground turned acid.

Deforestation blindsided the rainforest ecosystem.  The new manmade grassland ecosystem seemed to be a perfect place for raising enslaved livestock.  Winters were mild, the grass was green all year, and there was no need to grow, cut, and store hay for winter feed.  Barns were not needed to protect livestock from the cold.  Milk and meat were available all year round.  Herding worked well, but the very rainy climate made it rather risky to grow grain, despite the rich soils.

In A.D. 1185, King Henry II sent Giraldus Cambrensis to visit Ireland and produce a report.  He mentioned many beautiful lakes, where some of the fish were larger than any he had ever seen before.  Common freshwater fish included salmon, trout, eels, and oily shad.  Along the coast, saltwater fish were abundant.  The woods were home to “stags so fat that they lose their speed.”  There were numerous boars and wild pigs.  Wolves had not yet been fully exterminated.  He said it was common to see the remains of extinct Irish elks.  Their remains were usually found in bogs, often in groups.

The herding life allowed the Irish people to survive, sing, and dance.  They did not have the slightest interest in the dreary backbreaking work of agriculture, a stupid fad.  Cambrensis felt great pity for the uncivilized natives.  “Their greatest delight was to be exempt from toil, and their richest possession was the enjoyment of liberty.”

Maximum Security Forests

Rhineland

Julius Caesar roamed around Western Europe and wrote a report in 51 B.C.  He was the emperor of Rome, and his mission was to expand the Empire, collect tribute payments, acquire military conscripts, and vigorously spank uncooperative subjects.  During this campaign, he focused his attention on provinces of Celtic people in what is now France, Belgium, and England. 

He had also hoped to conquer the wild Germanic tribes that lived on the east side of the Rhine, but this fantasy promptly came to an end.  The Rhine was a large, treacherous, swift moving river.  No bridges.  It took a lot of effort and luck to get from one side to the other, and once you set foot on the German side, a super violent welcoming party was eager to immediately cut you to bloody bits.  

Each tribe preferred to keep their homelands surrounded with a barrier of uninhabited wilderness.  The Germans were primarily wandering herders who built no permanent settlements.  They had no granaries loaded with valuable food for raiders to swipe, and no roads to make invasions quick and easy.  When danger threatened, the people and their herds vanished into the deep forest mists.

For the German herders, nothing would have been dumber than to eliminate the vast ancient forests that provided this security system.  The Roman legions were fine-tuned for open battlefield combat, where heavily armored lads attacked in rigid formations.  Wild Germanic tribes excelled at hit-and-run guerilla warfare.

On the west side of the Rhine were the Celts of Gaul (France), who were subjects of the Empire.  Their forests were mostly gone, roads crisscrossed the land, and folks were forced to engage in the backbreaking misery of muscle powered organic agriculture.  Their granaries stored the result of months of hard work. 

Stored grain was treasure that villainous raiders found to be irresistibly tempting.  It was impossible for farmers to hide or quickly move their treasure.  Raiding was popular, because it was much easier than honest work.  Consequently, highly vulnerable farm communities required constant military protection, for which they had to pay dearly.  In several Western European languages, the words for “road” and “raid” evolved from a common root. 

So, the Celts that Caesar described did not reside in the primordial forest that their wild ancestors once enjoyed.  They were the opposite of wild and free.  Peasants were essentially wealth generating livestock controlled by local strong-arm elites.  On the east side of the Rhine, the Germanic tribes had not destroyed their forests.  They were alive and well, wild and free.

Tacitus was a Roman historian who wrote Germania in A.D. 98 (150 years after Caesar).  It described several fiercely independent tribes of that era.  They preferred the thrills and excitement of raiding to the drudgery of farming.  “They even think it base and spiritless to earn by sweat what they might purchase with blood.”  Perhaps they learned this effective and profitable strategy from the Romans. 

Tacitus wrote a fascinating description of the vast Hercynian forest.  From the Rhine, it spanned east, across modern Germany, to the Carpathians, and all the way to Dacia (Romania).  A quick traveler could cross the forest north to south in nine days, but it was very long, from east to west.  Caesar noted, “There is no man in the Germany we know who can say that he has reached the edge of that forest, though he may have gone forward sixty days’ journey, or who has learnt in what place it begins.” 

Pliny also mentioned it:  “The vast trees of the Hercynian forest, untouched for ages, and as old as the world, by their almost immortal destiny exceed common wonders.”  In those days, there were still a number of primeval forests in the world. 

Scandinavia

In Sweden, forests also provided freedom and security for the common folks.  Vilhelm Moberg celebrated the fact that peasant society in Sweden had largely remained stable and functional for 5,000 years.  In most of the regions of Europe, peasants endured many centuries of misery under the heavy fist of feudalism.  Many Norse and Swede settlements were lucky to be protected by their vast, dense, rugged, roadless forests.  It’s simply impossible to kill or rob invisible folks who live in unknown wilderness settlements.  Moberg glowed with gratitude for his nation’s forests, which allowed the rustic peasants to preserve their freedom until the industrial era metastasized.

Aggressive invaders from elsewhere found no roads, and soon became perfectly lost.  Behind every bush might be a man with a crossbow.  The local folks knew every hill and rock in the woods.  They could pick the ideal time and place to strike.  When trouble was advancing, they gathered as many belongings as possible, and vanished into the greenery.

My Norse ancestors told the story of Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods.  Some creepy gods had temporarily subdued nature, but in this great battle, the forces of nature rubbished the gods, and cleansed the Earth with a great flood.  Peter Andreas Munch described the dawn of a new era: “Out of the sea there rises a new earth, green and fair, whose fields bear their increase without the sowing of seed.” 

A man and woman survived.  From them sprang a new race of people.  A few minor deities also survived.  One was Vidar, a son of Odin (Viðr means forest).  Vidar was known for being strong.  His home was in a vast and impenetrable forest.  Rasmus Björn Anderson wrote that Vidar was the god of wild primordial forests, where neither the sound of the ax, nor the voice of man, was ever heard.  He is silent, dwells far away from, and exercises no influence upon, the works of man, except as he inspires a profound awe and reverence.  This was a culture filled with a deep respect and reverence for creation, in its wild and unspoiled form.  Forests were holy places. 

Forest Mining

In the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding, forests had served as a limit to growth — grain, grass, and herds don’t thrive in shady places.  Deforestation cleared away the towering giants and let the sunbeams shine in.  When metal axes came into common use, lumberjacks could reduce vast tracts of primeval forest into rotting stumps and erosion gullies.  Early villages and cities were built with the mutilated carcasses of countless tree people.  The rise of civilizations would not have been possible without innovative advances in unsustainable forest mining and soil mining. 

George Perkins Marsh was a brilliant American hero that few modern folks have heard of.  He published Man and Nature in 1864.  This gentleman from Vermont served as the U.S. Minister to Italy.  While overseas, he visited the sites of many once thriving civilizations in the Fertile Crescent.  What he observed was terrifying and overwhelming.  Each of them had seriously damaged their ecosystems and self-destructed in similar ways.

Massive levels of soil erosion created surreal catastrophes.  He saw ancient seaports that were now 30 miles (48 km) from the sea.  He saw ancient places where the old streets were buried beneath 30 feet (9 m) of eroded soil.  He stood in mainland fields, 15 miles (24 km) from the sea, which were formerly located on offshore islands.  He saw the sites of ancient forests, formerly covered with three to six feet (1-2 m) of precious living soil, where nothing but exposed rock remained. 

Far worse, Marsh was acutely aware that every day, back home in America, millions were currently working like crazy to repeat the same mistakes, glowing with patriotic pride at the temporary prosperity they were creating on their one-way joyride to oblivion.  In a noble effort to cure blissful ignorance, he fetched pen, ink, and paper and wrote a book to enlighten his growing young nation.

Sales were respectable for a few decades, but America did not see the light and rapidly reverse course.  Folks thought that the cure was worse than the disease (like today’s climate emergency).  A radical shift to intelligent behavior would not have been good for the highly unintelligent lifestyle.  Tom Brown’s mentor, Stalking Wolf, lamented that our culture was “killing its grandchildren to feed its children.”

Marsh’s book has stood the test of time fairly well.  It presented a wealth of vital information, none of which I learned about during 16 years of education.  Forests keep the soil warmer in winter, and cooler in the summer.  Springtime arrives later in deforested regions, because the land takes longer to warm up.  Forests absorb far more moisture than cleared lands, so after a good rain, runoff is limited, and flash floods are less likely.

Deforestation dries out the land.  Lake levels drop, springs dry up, stream flows decline, and wetlands are baked.  Back in the fourth century, when there were more forests, the water volume flowing in the Seine River was about the same all year long.  When Marsh visited 14 centuries later, water levels could vary up to 30 feet (9 m) between dry spells and cloudbursts.  In 1841, not a drop of rain had fallen in three years on the island of Malta, after the forest had been replaced with cotton fields.  And on and on.  The book is a feast of essential knowledge. 

Walter Lowdermilk was deeply inspired by Marsh’s work.  In the 1920s and 1930s, he visited China, Western Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.  His mission was to study soil erosion, and write a report for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  They created a short booklet that was very readable and filled with stunning photographs.  Over a million copies of it were printed.  Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years is available as a free download. [Link]

Industrial Wood

Marsh generally discussed the environmental impacts of deforestation that he had observed at the sites of extinct or wheezing civilizations.  These catastrophes were usually the unintended consequences of clearing forest to expand cropland or grazing land.  Over the passage of centuries, clever people discovered many new ways that dead trees could be used to generate wealth and power. 

John Perlin wrote an outstanding history of deforestation.  It’s a modern book (1989), and much easier to read than Marsh.  It devotes more attention to the political, military, industrial, and commercial motivations for forest mining.  It visits locations including Mesopotamia, Crete, Greece, Cyprus, Rome, Venice, England, Brazil, and America. 

Dead trees were used to build houses, bridges, temples, and palaces.  Wood was made into fences, docks, wagons, furniture, tools, and barrels.  It heated homes and fueled industries that produced metal, glass, bricks, cement, pottery, lime, sugar, and salt.  Staggering quantities of wood were consumed by industry.  Very importantly, wood was used to build cargo, fishing, and war ships.  Navies sped the spread of colonies, empires, trade networks, and epidemics.

Cultures that mindfully limited their numbers, and continued living in a low impact manner, had no future.  Their thriving unmolested forests looked like mountains of golden treasure in the eyes of civilized sailors cruising by — and civilized people cannot tolerate the sight of unmolested forests; it drives them nuts.  In other words, if you didn’t destroy your forest, someone else would. 

Perlin described the copper industry on Cyprus in around 1300 B.C.  Copper was used to make bronze, which was in high demand during the Bronze Age.  For each 60 pound (27 kg) copper ingot produced, four acres of pine (120 trees) had to be reduced to six tons of charcoal.  Each year, the copper industry on Cyprus consumed four to five square miles (10-13 km²) of forest.  At the same time, the general society consumed an equal amount of forest for heating, cooking, pottery, lime kilns, and so on.  Can you guess what inevitably happened to the forests, soils, industry, and affluence of Cyprus?

Shortages also affected the use of firewood.  In chilly regions, a city of one square mile might depend on 50 square miles of forest to provide the firewood it consumed year after year.  In the good old days, this was often possible.  Later, as forest area decreased, and population grew, limits spoiled the party.

If Perlin’s work sounds interesting, but you can’t get his book, a similar book is available as a free download.  In 1955, Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter published Topsoil and Civilization.  Readers are taken on a neat journey, during which they discover how a number of ancient civilizations destroyed themselves.  The free PDF is HERE.  It is not available in some countries, for copyright reasons, but I once saw a pirate copy on Google.

New World Forest

Richard Lillard described how early European visitors experienced the ancient forests of North America.  When standing on mountaintops, they were overwhelmed by the fact that as far as they could see in any direction there was nothing but a wonderland of trees.  The intense experience of perfect super-healthy wildness was surreal, overwhelming, almost terrifying. 

Walking beneath the canopy at midday, the forest floor was as dark as a cellar, few sunbeams penetrated through the dense foliage.  At certain times, some sections of the forest were absolutely silent, a spooky experience that bewildered the white folks.  They saw vast numbers of chestnut trees that were nearly as big as redwoods. 

British visitors to early settlements were stunned to see amazing luxury — wooden houses, sidewalks, fences, and covered bridges!  Commoners were free to hunt large game because the forest was not the exclusive private property of anyone.  In the old country, their diet majored in porridge.  Now it could major in wild grass-fed meat.  Commoners were free to cut as much firewood as they wished, and keep their cottages warmer than the castles of royalty.  Michael Williams mentioned one winter night when the king of France sat in his great hall.  He was shivering as he ate dinner, the wine in his glass was frozen. 

William Cronon noted that settlers with sharp axes went crazy on the forests, cutting them down as if they were limitless.  Lots of excellent wood was simply burned, to clear the way for progress.  They built large houses, and heated them with highly inefficient open fireplaces.  By 1638, Boston was having firewood shortages.

As clearing proceeded, summers got hotter, and winters colder.  As stream flows dropped in summer, water-powered mills had to shut down, sometimes permanently.  In winter, upper levels of the soil froze solid on cleared land, and snow piled up on top of it.  When springtime came, the frozen land could not absorb the melt, so the runoff water zoomed away, and severe flooding was common.

Stewart Holbrook wrote about the fantastically destructive obliteration of ancient forests in the U.S. upper Midwest.  On the same day as the great Chicago fire, October 8, 1871, a firestorm obliterated the backwoods community of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, killing five times as many people as in Chicago.  On this day, the new word “firestorm” was added to the English vocabulary. 

Holbrook interviewed John Cameron, an eyewitness to the Peshtigo fire.  Cameron noted that there had been little snow the previous winter, and just one rain between May and September.  Streams were shallow, and swamps were drying up.  Logging operations left large amounts of slash in the woods (piles of discarded limbs and branches).  Slash piles were eliminated by burning, even when it was very hot, dry, windy, and extraordinarily stupid. 

The morning of October 8 was hotter than anyone could remember, and the air was deadly still.  At noon, the sun disappeared.  By nightfall the horizon was red, and smoke was in the air, making their eyes run.  At 9 P.M., Cameron heard an unusual roaring sound.  The night sky was getting lighter by the minute.  A hurricane force wind howled through.  Suddenly, swirling slabs of flames were hurtling out of nowhere and hitting the bone dry sawdust streets.  In a flash, Peshtigo was blazing — maybe five minutes. 

Cameron saw horses, cattle, men, and women, stagger in the sawdust streets, then go down to burn brightly like so many flares of pitch-pine.  He winced when he spoke of watching pretty young Helga Rockstad running down a blazing sidewalk, when her long blond hair burst into flame.  The next day, he looked for her remains.  All he found was two nickel garter buckles and a little mound of white-gray ash.

The river was the safest place that night.  People kept their heads underwater as much as possible, so the great sheets of flame wouldn’t set their heads on fire.  Within an hour, the town was vaporized.  Big lumberjacks were reduced to streaks of ash, enough to fill a thimble.  In this village of 2,000, at least 1,150 died, and 1,280,000 acres (518,000 ha) went up in smoke.

Also on October 8, 1871, numerous big fires raged across the state of Michigan, where it had not rained in two months.  These fires destroyed 2.5 million acres (1 million ha) — three times more timberland than the Peshtigo blaze.  This was an era of countless huge fires.  For example, in just the state of Wisconsin, tremendous fires destroyed huge areas in 1871, 1880, 1891, 1894, 1897, 1908, 1910, 1923, 1931, 1936.

Paul Shepard wrote, “Sacred groves did not exist when all trees were sacred.”  In 1990, I chatted on an internet bulletin board with a Shawnee man named Nick Trim.  He talked about a project 300+ years ago, along the Mississippi.  In a kindly gesture, some French soldiers were teaching the Shawnee how to build log cabins.  This required cutting trees.  The natives were very nervous about chopping down living trees, because they were often home to spirit beings, the little people.

To avoid spiritual retaliation, a respectful process was essential.  They knocked on each tree, described the situation, and explained why they wanted to take lives.  This was followed by a ceremony, prayers, and apologies to the trees.  Then they waited a day or so, to give any spirit residents adequate time to find a comfortable new home.  This took so long that the French lost their patience, and the project ended.

Peter Wohlleben, a German wood ranger, developed an extremely intimate relationship with the forest he cared for, and wrote a precious celebration of his love for it.  Modern folks who spend most of their lives in civilized space stations almost never get to know the tree people.  Some do not eat meat because they sense that animals have souls.  In an interview, Wohlleben conveyed a deeper understanding.  Killing an animal is the same as killing a tree.  He once oversaw a plantation of trees lined up in straight rows, evenly spaced.  It was a concentration camp for tree people.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 52

 

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

HUMAN WEBS

The culture we live in is fantastically irrational, burning every bridge it crosses, and then charging forward to rubbish what lies ahead.  Efforts to comprehend reality often result in throbbing headaches.  In the early pages of this book, I mentioned a fundamental question that William Cronon’s father gave him, to help his son navigate the path of life with greater wisdom, “How did things get to be this way?”  Both father and son were history professors.  His question has guided my process of writing this book.

William and John McNeill were another father and son team of historians, and their vision was to write a book that actually answered the question.  William’s 1963 experiment was written in a conventional history textbook style, and was a hefty 829 pages.  John thought a slimmer and slicker book was possible.  He envisioned an unconventional approach, and with a few years of effort the two of them got the job done in 350 pages, The Human Web.

Webs are relationships that link together groups of people that have come into contact with each other.  These meetings encourage exchanges of information.  In ancient times, hunter-gatherers were few in number, and widely dispersed.  Bow and arrow technology somehow spread around the wild and roadless planet, to every continent except Australia.  This was made possible, over the passage of millennia, by the first worldwide web, which remained a loose and informal network.  As wild folks migrated into unknown lands, and encountered new challenges, innovation increased the odds for survival.  Learning the skills used by others could be extremely beneficial.

Then came agriculture.  As farming and herding grew in importance, the human herd also grew.  More and more cities and civilizations mutilated once-healthy ecosystems, filling the land with more and more people.  Strangers from different webs bumped into each other, more and more often.  These random meetings exposed folks to more and more foreign technologies, crops, ideas, goods, and so on.  Over time, regional webs formed, and these often merged with others, forming larger webs.  Webs enabled a wide variety of information to travel to distant lands, where it accumulated, mutated, intermingled, and jumped on the next boat or caravan to elsewhere. 

Eventually, via this process of mergers and acquisitions, the most powerful web of all came into existence around A.D. 200, the Old World Web.  In its early phase, it spanned across North Africa and most of Eurasia.  By 1450, about 75 percent of humans lived within it.  After 1890 it grew explosively.  Today, it has essentially become a single worldwide web that includes most of humankind, from beggars to billionaires.

As professors, the McNeills had a sacred occupational obligation to gush with pride about the wonders of science, technology, progress, and human brilliance.  It’s mandatory that innocent young students be filled with a radicalized blind faith that we’re zooming up the path to a better tomorrow.  At the same time, the McNeills felt a moral obligation to make an embarrassing confession, regarding the dark shadow of brilliance — civilization’s chronic addiction to self-destructive habits.  The amazing consumer wonderland that we live in is only kept on life support by ever-growing complexity made possible by ever-increasing flows of rapidly diminishing non-renewable resources, especially fossil energy — a steep and slippery downhill path to a mangled tomorrow.

More and more, the inflow of strategic resources is getting dodgy.  We are moving at a brisk velocity toward rock solid limits.  Consequently, John regretfully sighed, “the chances of cataclysmic violence seem depressingly good.”  They were writing 20 years ago, back in the happy days when far less was known about methane plumes, melting permafrost, abrupt climate change, and the limits of modern technology to conjure miraculous solutions.

Deep Connection

In prehistoric times, webs were small and simple exchanges between neighboring tribes.  Like all other wild critters, our ancestors were absolutely integrated into the ecosystem around them, to a degree that we can barely imagine today — like your hand is connected to your arm.  The full attention of all their senses was tuned into the sights, sounds, and smells of the surrounding land.  Their world was sacred, spiritually alive, worthy of full respect.

Louis Liebenberg spent lots of time among hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, folks who lived like your ancestors once did.  Today, some experts believe that the ancestors of every living human trace back to their ancient gene pool.  Hunting on the hot, dry Kalahari was challenging.  Some hunters were more skilled than others.  In one group, up to half of the adult men did not kill even one large animal in a year.  Some barely killed any large game during their entire lives.  Reciprocity was the bedrock norm.  Meat was always equally shared with everyone.  Hunters were expected to be humble and gentle.  When a lad had a long lucky streak, he might take some time off — sometimes for weeks or months — to avoid inspiring envy and resentment.

Each band lived within a territory that they considered their hunting grounds.  The boundary lines were not marked, but all the neighboring hunting bands knew where they were, and respected them.  Boundaries reduced the likelihood of friction and conflict.  In drought years, when a hunting ground dried up, the band could shift to the hunting ground of an allied band.  This provided life insurance in a land where precipitation varied from place to place, and year to year.

It’s hard to imagine our ancestors’ extremely intimate connection to place.  Natalie Diaz described this relationship.  In the Mojave culture, there is no separation between me and the place that surrounds me, we are one.  Each person is entirely a living embodiment of the nearby water, air, soil, plants, and animals.  In the Mojave language, the same word is used to express both body and land, because they are the same.  People are buried in the land of their birth, the land of their ancient ancestors, the place where they belong, home sweet home.  Over time, the family of life recycles their corpses, and new beings arise.

You carry yourself much differently when you deeply experience your sacred connection to all that is, and are fully present in a healthy wild ecosystem.  This sense of oneness with life, experienced by our Homo ancestors for more than two million years, has had a substantial influence on the development of what we are as a species.  The mind and body of the amazing critter you see in the mirror was fine-tuned via a very, very long era of successfully living as happy, healthy, brown skinned, curly haired, bare naked, illiterate wild heathens in the tropics. 

We continue to squirt out of the womb with the genes of a Pleistocene tropical primate.  Today’s newborns still expect to open their eyes in a healthy wild world that is filled with abundant life.  They are ready to spend their life’s journey wandering, living in small bands of family and friends, singing under the stars, dining on a generous variety of wild foods.  We only become unstable oddballs when we are born into a dysfunctional society, and have no choice but to learn its ways.

For us, still today, it is comfortable and enjoyable to be among small groups of people that we love, respect, and trust.  Cooperation and sharing are what healthy humans naturally do.  We expect to be fondly treated like an equal. 

In modern society, most of us do not spend every day surrounded by an intimate circle of equals.  It is unpleasant being around folks who are self-centered, disrespectful, and exploitive.  We are constantly encouraged by our culture’s thundering jungle drums to live and think like individuals, not sisters and brothers.  The fundamental verb of life is compete.  A primary purpose in life is to climb as high as possible up the pyramid of wealth and power. 

For us, still today, it is comfortable and enjoyable to wander through a forest, gathering mushrooms, berries, and nuts.  It’s healing to watch moonlight rippling on the surface of a wild and isolated lake.  It’s inspiring to feast on the beauty of northern lights in a winter wonderland.

In modern society, eight lane highways filled with speeding motorized wheelchairs seem like horrific glimpses into the rumbling bowels of hell.  Nothing could be more unnatural and traumatizing than living amidst large numbers of strangers, day after day.  We are like zoo inmates surrounded by walls and fences.  John Livingston wrote that lions raised in zoos, under absolute human control, and isolated from wild habitat, go insane.  They are “overfed, graceless, apathetic, almost catatonic.”  No animal was meant to live like this.

Today, our lives are connected to the global economy, industrial civilization, numerous news and entertainment feeds, and necessities produced by perfect strangers in faraway places.  Many of us don’t feel at home in nature.  We live in climate controlled space stations, staring at glowing screens, lonely in a world of billions, clinging to our companion animals.  Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, “What can one expect from a man who has spent the last 20 years of his life putting heads on pins?”

Big Fork

John Gowdy put his spotlight on a massive shift in the human saga.  Humans emerged maybe 300,000 years ago, near the end of the Pleistocene epoch.  The Pleistocene was a 2.5 million year era of countless whipsaw climate swings.  Trends could sometimes shift from ice age to tropical in just two centuries.  The pattern changed around 9,700 B.C., with the arrival of the Holocene epoch, a highly unusual and long lasting era of climate stability and warmer temperatures. 

In several regions of the world, this change led to an abundance of wild grain.  For the first time, it became possible for agriculture to be practiced over the span of several thousand years without blast freezer interruptions.  Conditions became suitable for civilization.  Today, as temperature trends swerve toward hothouse, this moderate stable climate is beginning to experience sharp chest pains.  The sun is setting on the Holocene, and shadows are deepening on the future of industrial agriculture, and the billions who depend on it.  Climate change gave birth to our reckless joyride, and climate change will drive an iron stake through its heart.

James Scott focused his research on southern Mesopotamia because it was the birthplace of the earliest genuine states.  What are states?  They are hierarchical class-based societies, with rulers and tax collectors, built on a foundation of farming and herding.  Taxes were usually paid with grain, which was easier to transport and store than more perishable stuff.  States often had armies, defensive walls, palaces, ritual centers, and slaves.

In Mesopotamia (now Iraq and Kuwait), the transition from wild tribes to states took several thousand years.  By around 12,000 B.C., there is scattered evidence of hunter-gatherers who quit being nomads and settled down in regions having abundant wild foods.  The menu included wild grains and pulses, large herbivores, and wetland wildlife.  Plant and animal domestication began around 9,000 B.C.  Then, it took at least four thousand years (160 generations) before agricultural villages appeared, and then another two thousand years before the first states emerged, around 3,100 B.C. 

States were typically located close to the floodplains of large rivers, places having abundant fertile soil.  They could produce enough grain to feed a pool of laborers.  States had no interest in expanding into less productive lands that couldn’t generate enough wealth to pay the cost of governing them.  Scott noted that as late as A.D. 1600, most humans in the world were still not governed or taxed by any state. 

Over thousands of years, as many groups gradually shifted from wild and free toward a creepy new role as hardworking law-abiding taxpayers, housewives, or slaves, huge social changes took place.  On the other hand, wild humans in the tropics did not have a more-is-better mindset when acquiring plant and animal foods.  They simply took what they immediately needed, always being mindful to avoid overuse of scarce resources.  They lived and thought like a coherent group, not a motley crew of competitive self-centered individuals.  This very long tradition of mutual support strongly influenced the evolution of who we are today.

The important point here is that wild people were free, nobody gave or obeyed orders.  But with the transition to farming and herding, freedom got put on a short leash.  We began living under the firm control of a hierarchy of masters.  Small groups can readily and happily cooperate, but large dense groups tend to generate snarls and sparks.  Crowding overwhelms our Pleistocene minds, generating anxiety, paranoia, rage, depression, and so on.  Naturally, this undermines social tranquility. 

Masters fear disorder, because angry mobs can rip them to pieces.  To prevent this, crowds must be overseen by enforcers.  Rules must be strictly obeyed, and violators punished.  Growing up in civilization, folks have to obey numerous rules decreed by families, schools, religions, businesses, bureaucracies, and so on.  The god words for this way of life include compete, control, and obey.

Most of humankind is now compelled to spend much of their time wandering among mobs of strangers, folks who are not friends or kin.  Some crowded communities are ruled by violent gangs, ideological fanatics, or the chaotic whims of fate.  Others have law and order, tolerable rules, and sufficient enforcement — the preferred option for those who must live in Strangerland.

Livingston wrote that many endure the numbing conformity of Strangerland by choosing the safe and easy path of docility.  Rules are good tools for controlling people, but beliefs are sometimes even better.  When properly programmed by an ideology, our behavior can be largely manipulated by an autopilot of beliefs, like a self-driving robo-car.  Believers passively accept control from their superiors, and leap to their feet and when der Führer calls.

Because we excel at herd-like followership and self-deception, it’s easy to be swept away by trendy fads or bloody gangsters.  Leni Riefenstahl filmed Triumph of the Will, a haunting documentary on the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, which starred 700,000 Nazi supporters.  Scene after scene shows streets jammed with folks in crisp new uniforms, marching in orderly rows.  Today, with the benefit of highly advanced communication systems, charismatic hucksters, sorcerers, and lunatics can entrance large mobs of naive believers in many locations at the same time. 

Carl Jung lived through the whirlwinds of death and destruction during two world wars.  This was an ideal time to become a psychotherapist.  Mobs bring out the worst in us, creating ideal conditions for devastating psychic epidemics.  “The larger the number of people involved in an action, the greater the propensity towards mindlessness and barbarism.”  Huge growing crowds jammed together in big cities encouraged what Jung called the insectification of humankind.  People were at risk of “complete atomization into nothingness, or into meaninglessness.  Man cannot stand a meaningless life.” 

Mesopotamian Web

Sometime before 3,000 B.C., the first state-based civilization emerged in Sumer, located in southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers approach the Persian Gulf, and empty into it.  This civilization developed the cultural DNA for the Mesopotamian web, which eventually metastasized into the Old World Web by around A.D. 200.  Today, the Old World Web dominates the whole planet, providing the thundering drumbeat for the global economy and industrial civilization.  Sumer initially lit the fuse. 

Abdullah Öcalan is a Kurdish political scientist (and political prisoner).  He wrote about the history of Mesopotamia, his ancestral homeland.  Sumerian civilization established or advanced many unusual experiments, including agriculture, herding, patriarchy, slavery, irrigation, deforestation, metallurgy, etc.  The ability to produce surplus food enabled some folks to indulge in specialized pursuits — merchants, potters, smiths, miners, leather workers, fishermen, bricklayers, weavers, scribes, and so on. 

Sumer’s inventions include the calendar, writing, mathematics, astrology, and prostitution.  Women took a distant second place in the gender hierarchy.  The traditional animism of wild folks was displaced by new forms of religion, first pantheism (multiple gods and goddesses), and later monotheism (one male god).  Öcalan wrote that today’s mosques, churches, synagogues, and universities have their roots in Mesopotamian ziggurats (temples). 

The McNeills noted that these ziggurats, constructed with millions of mud bricks, were the most conspicuous buildings in cities (like many of our jumbo sized capitol buildings and worship centers).  At the time, they were the biggest manmade structures in the world.  Ziggurats were monuments built to pay honor to deities.  In the good old days, all gods were local, each city had one or more.  Religions were local too.  Gods were twitchy scary rascals who sometimes made believers fat and happy, and other times sent plagues, locusts, famines, floods, fires, and other assorted miseries to slap them down, or rub them out. 

In order to discourage divine fury, cities built super-duper temples to flatter their gods’ fragile egos.  Benefits, if any, were temporary.  The ziggurats are long gone, and their gods abandoned.  In Babylon, the legendary Tower of Babel was built as tall as possible, which oddly pissed off their temperamental god, who saw it as an outrageous act of blasphemy that required strong punishment.  Some think the Babel legend was inspired by the ziggurat of Marduk (Babylon’s god), which certainly existed.

Babel is the Hebrew word for Babylon, a city on the Euphrates in northern Mesopotamia.  Let’s take a quick side trip here.  In maybe 586 B.C., Babylon’s famous ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, captured Jerusalem, destroyed their temple, and led the Jews away to a less than pleasurable exile in Babylon.  The Jews brought with them their scrolls of sacred scriptures, and this sparked a historic event — the creation of the first portable religion.  They were living and worshipping in a place that was far from their holy land.  The portability enabled by written scriptures made multinational religions possible — believers could establish congregations anywhere in the world.

In Babylon, congregations of Jewish men and women gathered for weekly meetings to spend time with a rabbi who discussed the sacred scriptures.  This preserved their cultural identity, and allowed them to remain distinct.  They did not melt into Babylonian society.  Congregational religions were another innovation from this era.  The McNeills wrote that this put Jews on the path to monotheism.  If the deity of Jerusalem could be worshipped in Babylon, then he could also be worshipped in Egypt or Lebanon.  One god fits all… everywhere.

As centuries passed, cities, civilizations, and empires grew.  In them, numerous competing variations of congregational religions provided solace to the huddled masses of Strangerland.  They enabled city dwellers to be among like-minded people with familiar faces, to benefit from friendship and mutual support, and to righteously snort and sneer at local heretics and infidels.  Urban populations lacked the intimate sense of community found in village life, or tribal life.  Congregations provided some pain relief, a sense of meaning and belonging.

Patriarchy

Öcalan presented a different perspective on the birth of monotheism.  Long, long ago, Babylon was home to a minor league god named Marduk.  Eventually, he rose to prominence after mercilessly slaughtering the primordial sea-serpent goddess, Tiamat (the female principle), and creating the world with her body.  Marduk (the male principle) then created humans, to take care of the daily dirty work as servants and slaves, freeing the gods to enjoy a decadent life of leisure and debauchery.

Marduk could be helpful or brutal, depending on his mood.  Over time, he became the supreme deity, and gained the title Bel (Lord).  In Babylon, he was astrologically associated with the jumbo planet we now call Jupiter.  Over time, this Mesopotamian web spread into new regions.  In Greece, the top god Zeus was also associated with Jupiter.  When it eventually got to Rome, their highest god was actually named Jupiter. 

What was happening here was a huge revolutionary transition in the human saga, from the Stone Age to the Neolithic era (the new stone age), when folks shifted from hunting and foraging to farming and herding.  The Neolithic first arose in Mesopotamia.  Then, the highly contagious culture spread to North Africa, India, China, the Danube region, southwest Europe, and elsewhere.  It matured into a culture of civilization, food production, slavery, patriarchy, growth mania, and so on.

In wild webs, bands of hunter-gatherers lived via cooperation.  In the Mesopotamian web, workers, housewives, and slaves were obligated to submit to the control of their assorted masters.  Top level masters (kings, emperors, etc.) were mortal patriarchs who had an expiration date.  Upon death, a new master had to take his place.  Sometimes the transfer of power was smooth, and other times it sparked fury.

Monotheism’s deity, Big Daddy, was immortal, invisible, and divine — the supreme master, who endured the passage of centuries, and the rise and fall of mortal rulers.  His rules were the highest ones.  They were permanent, and disobedience was dangerous and stupid.  God must be feared.  The invisible Big Daddy watches everything you do, and knows your every thought.  We behave differently when someone is watching us, and we experience guilt, shame, and paranoia when our minds are being read.  This submission to multiple layers of masters and rules was the oxygen that kept civilization on life support. 

In his pro-feminist writing, Öcalan wrote, “The 5,000 year history of civilization is essentially the history of the enslavement of women.”  Prior to 2000 B.C., the woman-mother culture strongly influenced Sumerian civilization, and the two sexes were fairly equal (no shaming of women).  Over time, the warrior class encouraged a strongman cult that came to dominate religion.  The creator of heaven and Earth was male (Marduk).  “So radical was this sexual rupture, that it resulted in the most significant change in social life that history has ever seen.”

This led to the “housewifization” of women, a sharp demotion.  Their new role was to sit at home, and faithfully obey their husbands.  Chastity became mandatory, in order to guarantee the genuine paternity of daddy’s children, so that only his true sons would rightfully inherit his wealth.  It was vital that young women remain virgins prior to marrying their master.

[Continued in sample 53]