Wild Free and Happy Sample 61

 

[Note: This is a new section from the rough draft of Wild, Free, & Happy. It’s finally getting into the home stretch, maybe four more to go (or fewer).  These samples start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE (if you happen to have some free time).

Great Acceleration

Readers with gray hair are acutely aware that they have spent their entire lives in a hurricane of explosive change.  I was born in Michigan, and spent my first 18 years in West Bloomfield Township, a suburb of Detroit.  In 1950, it was home to 8,720 people.  In 2020, there were 65,888! 

When my grandparents were born in the late 1800s, there were 1.3 billion people on Earth.  When I was born in 1952, there were 2.6 billion humans.  Today, just during my lifetime, the mob has more than tripled, zooming past eight billion.  We continue growing like a voracious planet eating swarm.

In 2000, J. R. McNeill published Something New Under the Sun, a fascinating (and shocking) book on the environmental history of the twentieth century, when cultures blind drunk on gushers of cheap oil spurred a population explosion.  In his 2014 book, The Great Acceleration, McNeill narrowed his focus to the catastrophic changes that have occurred since 1945 — perhaps the most destructive era since the Chicxulub asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.

This explosion was propelled by a fossil fuel bonfire that enabled industrial civilization to sharply increase food production.  Look at this mind-blowing graph [Here].  The curve of energy consumption closely corresponds with the curve of population growth. 

William E. Rees, writing in 2023, noted a daunting factoid: “Half the fossil fuels ever consumed have been burned in just the past 30-35 years.”  (As much as 90% of it has been burned since the early 1940s). 

Fossil energy is not renewable, and the remaining reserves are shrinking every day.  Currently, this bonfire has propelled a turbulent joyride of titillating decadence.  Humankind has far exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity in countless ways.

Bill McGuire is a professor emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London.  He wrote Hothouse Earth, and was a contributor to the 2012 IPCC report.  McGuire warned that “there is now no chance of dodging a grim future of perilous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown.”  In today’s snowy regions, winters will be brief or go extinct, and summers will get toasty.  We’re gliding toward a world “that would be utterly alien to our grandparents.”

The other night was a full moon.  It stirred some powerful feelings.  Once upon a time, that same moon shined down on the woolly mammoths.  It made Neanderthals smile.  It glowed upon our ancient tree-dwelling ancestors, and on the age of dinosaurs.  It lit the night when there was no life on Earth.  The moon remembers so much.

Global Energy

It’s vital to comprehend the major limitations of renewable energy.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) is an organization that focuses on global energy consumption.  Their 524-page World Energy Outlook 2022 report revealed some daunting statistics.

First, a vocabulary lesson.  “Primary energy consumption” measures total energy demand.  “Final energy consumption” is a subset of primary — it’s just the amount of energy consumed by end users, such as households, industry, and agriculture.  It is the energy which reaches the final consumer’s door and excludes that which is used by the energy sector itself.

With regard to global final energy consumption, 80% of it is provided by fossil energy, and 20% is provided by electricity — and about 95% of this electricity is currently generated with nonrenewable fossil energy.  In addition to this, the GND plan also requires that the global fleet of cars, trucks, trains, etc., must be switched to “clean, green, carbon-free power.”  It can’t.

Vaclav Smil warned us.  “We are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.”

It’s absolutely impossible to radically decarbonize our current way of life because electricity can’t provide the power needed for many processes that are fundamental to life as we know it.  The concrete, steel, and other essential components of solar panels, wind turbines, hydro dams, and electric vehicles cannot be made with electricity.

Alice Friedemann discussed critical shortcomings of the renewable energy fantasy.  “All contraptions that produce electricity need high heat in their construction.  They all need cement made at 2600°F (1426°C).”  There is no known way to make cement with electricity.

Making steel for wind turbines requires 3100°F (1700°C).  “Solar panels require 2700° to 3600°F (1500° to 2000°C) of heat to transform silicon dioxide into metallurgical grade silicon.”  Nuke plants still on the drawing board, in theory, might be able to generate 1562°F (850°C), but this is not hot enough for making cement, steel, glass, and lots of other stuff.

Vaclav Smil agreed.  Sharply cutting back, or ending, the use of fossil energy, would blindside our party.  For example, he mentioned cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia.  He calls them “the four material pillars of modern civilization.”  The GND does not explain how the four could be produced solely with renewable electricity.  They also don’t explain how trucking, shipping, rail transport, and flying could largely be carbon-free in a decade or so, if ever.

Smil reminded us that the large-scale production of highly potent synthetic ammonia fertilizer led to a dramatic increase in agricultural yields.  More food could feed more mouths.  Of the eight billion people alive in 2022, he estimated that the existence of 40 to 50 percent of them was only made possible by the bigger harvests enabled by ammonia fertilizer, a product made from natural gas (fossil energy).

The steel industry is dependent on coking coal and natural gas, and its emissions contribute substantial amounts of greenhouse gases.  Smil wrote, “But steel is not the only major material responsible for a significant share of CO₂ emissions: cement is much less energy-intensive, but because its global output is nearly three times that of steel, its production is responsible for a very similar share of emitted carbon.”

Cement is made of limestone and clay.  Concrete is made of cement, water, sand, and rock.  Andrew Logan wrote, “After water, concrete is the most consumed material on Earth.”  Making high-performance concrete requires heating calcium carbonate, a process that releases CO₂.  Additional CO₂ is released by the kiln, which burns fossil fuel to generate a temperature of 2,700°F (1,482°C).  This intense heat cannot be generated by using electricity. 

Jonathan Watts noted that the four biggest causes of CO₂ emissions are coal, oil, gas, and concrete.  He called concrete “the most destructive material on Earth.”  Its global production has increased 25-fold since 1950. 

Smil’s bottom line: “With current technologies, and for the foreseeable future, you simply cannot make cement, steel, plastic, or ammonia absent fossil fuels.”  Fossil energy is essential for making potent fertilizer, manufacturing farm equipment, and operating the machines.  It enables the processing, packaging, refrigeration, and distribution of the nutrients that keep countless folks on life support. 

Nonrenewable Mining

Fossil energy is essential for manufacturing wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, pavement, power transmission grids, and on and on.  All of them are made of materials extracted from the Earth.  The mining, crushing, hauling, and smelting of mineral resources are extremely dependent on fossil powered technology.

Walter Youngquist mentioned an old geologist saying, “If it can’t be grown, it must be mined.”  The GND dream seems to assume that the planet’s reserves of strategic minerals are essentially limitless — a cookie jar that never empties, no matter how fast we eat them, century after century. 

The dream involves an extensive redesign, replacement, and expansion of most of the global infrastructure used for power generation, distribution, and consumption.  The dream envisions that every nation on Earth, from the richest to poorest, will eagerly cooperate to complete the transition within 20 or 30 years.  Seriously?

Frik Els was thrilled by the GND optimism.  He is the editor of Mining.com, a news source for the mining industry.  He praised the efforts of frontline GND proponents Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg, calling them “mining’s unlikely heroines.”  Why?  Because the GND would be a multi-trillion-dollar godsend for mining and manufacturing corporations, and their lucky stockholders.

Vaclav Smil provided an illuminating example.  A typical lithium car battery weighs about 990 pounds (450 kg), and contains lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, graphite, steel, aluminum, and plastics.  To make just one battery, extracting those ingredients would require crushing and refining 40 tons of specific ores.  To access and fetch those 40 tons of ore-bearing rock, 225 tons of worthless rock would first have to be moved out of the way.  Folks, that’s one battery for one car! 

In 2021, Simon Michaux wrote a 1,000-page report for the Geological Survey of Finland, a government bureaucracy.  It documented the results of a study done to determine if it was possible to replace fossil energy with electricity generated by renewable methods, on a global scale. 

In 2019, the global transport fleet included about 1.41 billion cars, trucks, buses, and motorcycles, of which 1.39 billion used Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) technology.  To shift the fleet to Electric Vehicle (EV) technology would require 1.39 billion batteries to store their electricity.  Also, the world’s gas stations would need to be replaced with charging stations that can deliver renewable energy. 

As mentioned, making batteries requires enormous amounts of mineral resources.  The Geological Survey of Finland wondered if there were adequate mineral resources on Earth to make 1.39 billion batteries for vehicles (282.6 million tons of batteries).  Their study concluded: “No, not even close.” 

Batteries typically have a working lifespan of only 5 to 15 years.  Michaux warns that current mining production, and existing mineral reserves, are insufficient to manufacture even the first generation of renewable technology.  “What are the theoretical options for running industrial systems on renewable energy?  The geologists can’t think of any.”

Christopher Ketchum noted that a full-scale U.S. transition to renewable energy technology would require a massive surge in the production of critical metals.  Estimates predict that this could increase demand for them by 700% to 4,000%.

Alice Friedemann noted the heavy impacts associated with renewable energy.  “Mining consumes 10% of world energy.  Wind, solar, and all other electrical generating machines rely on fossil-fueled mining, manufacturing, and transportation every step of their life cycle.”

Jon Hurdle wrote about recycling solar panels.  “Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them.” 

Seibert & Rees noted that renewable energy devices have limited lifespans.  Solar panels and wind turbines last an average of 15 to 30 years, DC inverters last 5 to 8 years, batteries last 5 to 15 years.  Unfortunately, the materials used to create the highly complex physical infrastructure for the entire system are not made of magic fairy dust.  Nor are the bodies, motors, and batteries of electric vehicles.  They have their roots in strip mines, smelters, chemical plants, toxic waste dumps, oil refineries, and on and on. 

Many tons of steel and concrete are needed to manufacture and install each wind turbine.  To make a solar panel, you need stuff like cobalt, gallium, germanium, indium, manganese, tellu­rium, titanium, and zinc.  To create the computer hardware needed to operate the grids, you need to fetch stuff like platinum, rhenium, selenium, gold, strontium, tantalum, gallium, germanium, beryllium, yttrium, and pure silicon.

Another essential component of modern living in a world of eight billion is extensive networks of well-maintained roads.  Walter Youngquist noted that in the U.S., there are more than 2 million miles of paved roads and highways.  About 94% of these miles are asphalt — a material that is 90% crushed rock, and 10% bitumen (a sticky black byproduct of petroleum refining).  “Asphalt is easy to put in place, and far less expensive in terms of energy expended and cost of materials than concrete.” 

In 2007, the American Concrete Pavement Association reported that about 500 million tons of asphalt are placed in the U.S. each year.  Doing this consumed 1.45 billion gallons of diesel fuel (5.488 billion liters).  Asphalt typically needs resurfacing every 8 to 10 years. 

Concrete can last 30 to 40 years before resurfacing, and it’s strong enough to better carry the weight of heavy loads.  About 60% of U.S. interstate highway system pavement is concrete.  Fossil energy is absolutely required for the production of asphalt and concrete.  This energy is nonrenewable, and so is our way of life.

GeoDestinies 2022

 

Walter Youngquist (1921-2018) was a petroleum geologist, a University of Oregon professor, and my friend.  His life’s masterpiece is a 600 page book that’s now available to everyone as a free PDF download [HERE].  

Geologists study Earth resources, many of which are being degraded and depleted — aquifers, topsoil, hydrocarbons, minerals, etc.  These resources have limits.  Every drinker learns that the glass starts full, ends empty, and the faster you drink it, the quicker it’s gone.  Consumers pay little attention to resource limits, but they’re beginning to comprehend the impact of carbon emissions on the climate.  Mainstream experts repeatedly tell us not to worry.  They preach a fervent blind faith in miracles — a smooth and easy transition to a clean, green, renewable utopia.  Geologists wince. 

Youngquist didn’t believe in miracles or techno utopias.  Today, we’re living dangerously fast by destroying astonishing amounts of nonrenewable resources — a onetime binge that can never again be repeated.  Nonrenewable energy is finite.  We have been soaring in a beautiful dream world, where the air is perfumed with the intoxicating aroma of a nonrenewable prosperity.  The era of cheap energy is fading away in the rear view mirror. 

In 1973, the Eugene newspaper wrote a story about one of his lectures, “Dark Picture Painted by Youngquist.”  He gave many talks to Chamber of Commerce groups, trying to introduce them to the concept of limits.  He was almost never invited back.  America worships perpetual growth at any cost.  Growth is our god word.

In the mid-1990s, a number of the world’s petroleum geologists became alarmed that the volume of new oil discovered was declining, while the volume of consumption continued soaring.  This inspired the dawn of the Peak Oil movement, a wakeup call.  In 1997, Youngquist published GeoDestinies, which quickly sold out.  Folks begged him to print more, but Walt was reluctant.  He wanted to update the info first, but the story was moving faster than he could type. 

Finally, in 2012, he finished the update.  Unfortunately, the process hit some curves.  The book did not get to a printer, Walt died, the publisher went extinct, and the manuscript gathered dust.  In 2022, a small group of fans was able to get a digital copy, and make it available to the world.  Most of the content is still timely and very important.  For most readers, this book is largely going to be a banquet of new information, important stuff that’s rarely taught in school, if ever.

Today, many snicker at the Peak Oil dimwits.  Dudes, we didn’t run out!  We’ll always find more!  In the ’90s, the industry was primarily producing cheap and easy conventional oil (insert a straw and suck).  It appears that the global production of this oil peaked around 2005.  Unfortunately, mad scientists developed new technology for extracting oil, like hydro-fracking and horizontal drilling.  This enabled a sharp increase in the production of unconventional oil from sources including tar sands, heavy oil, shale oil (tight oil), and deep water wells.  This oil was far more challenging and expensive to extract (and the mother of many bankruptcies).

In addition to declining discoveries, a new boogeyman is EROEI (energy returned on energy invested).  It takes energy to extract fossil energy.  For example, a hundred years ago, the EROEI for conventional oil was very high.  Ram a drill into a huge pool of Texas oil, and a geyser of black gold often shot high in the sky.  Today, with the shift toward unconventional oil, the EROEI is far lower and declining.  As the energy needed for extraction approaches the energy content of the output, the industry moves closer to its expiration date.  A lot of fossil energy will be left in the ground forever. 

It took more than 500 million years for geologic forces to transform plant and animal residue into fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas.  It will take less than 500 years for humans to extract it and burn it.  We live during a brief blip in Earth history, an ecological hurricane.  Walt’s core message was a blunt warning.  “The momentum of population growth and resource consumption is so great that a collision course with disaster is inevitable.  Large problems lie not very far ahead.  …In some respects, the twenty-first century will be like the twentieth century in reverse.”

The public believes that adequate “renewable” substitutes will be available when needed.  Alternative energy is not clean, green, and free.  The hardware components have limited working lifespans.  Scaling up to replace nonrenewable energy would require vast land area, roads, power lines, and backup for when adequate wind or sunbeams are unavailable.  Manufacturing solar panels requires critical minerals like cobalt, gallium, germanium, indium, manganese, tellu­rium, titanium, and zinc.  Each wind turbine requires tons of concrete, steel, and other resources.

Walt described the alternative energy options, and their many limitations.  He concluded that renewable energy will not come close to replacing fossil energy.  In 2021, Alice Friedemann presented a far more thorough discussion in her book Life After Fossil Fuels.  A renewable utopia seems impossible. 

Oil is just one of many Earth resource topics in Walt’s book.  Plants and animals don’t need it.  Less than 200 years ago, oil was of no great importance to anyone anywhere.  For many thousands of years, nomads wandered across the Arabian Peninsula, under which laid oceans of ancient oil.  It never occurred to them to extract it, burn it, blindside the climate, and race down crowded highways in powerful motorized wheelchairs.  Naturally, in those days, the planet was in far healthier condition.  Then, in the twentieth century, Arabia became very rich, very fast.

Other resources are genuinely essential for the survival of the family of life — soil, water, air, and sunlight.  Of all minerals, soil is the most precious by far.  Fertile soil is created so slowly that, from a human perspective, it’s essentially nonrenewable.  In his book Dirt, geologist David Montgomery wrote, “Continued for generations, till-based agriculture will strip soil right off the land as it did in ancient Europe and the Middle East.  With current agricultural technology though, we can do it a lot faster.”  Peter Salonius studied soil for 44 years.  He concluded that all extractive agriculture, from ancient times to the present, was unsustainable. 

The problems associated with soil destruction are widely understood, and widely disregarded.  Nobody became a billionaire by promoting soil conservation.  Globally, billions of tons are lost every year.  Overall, one-third of the soil on U.S. cropland has been lost over the past 200 years.  Half of the excellent topsoil of Iowa is already gone.  The highest quality soil is close to the surface, and the first to erode.  Walt wrote, “Worldwide, the con­tinuing loss of soil and depletion of groundwater is leading humanity directly over the cliff.”   

All life needs water.  Water allows mineral nutrients in the soil to be absorbed by plants.  Your body is about 60 percent water.  In some regions, farms receive adequate water from precipitation.  Other regions require irrigation.  About 17 percent of cropland is irrigated, but it produces 40 percent of the world’s crops. 

Some underground aquifers are unable to recharge as fast as pumps are extracting the water — like the vast Ogallala aquifer in the U.S. midlands.  They are unsustainable water mines.  Several communities in Colorado are (temporarily) drinking from reservoirs of 10,000 year old water.  Forty percent of humankind now lives in regions with chronic water shortages, especially Africans, with their rapidly growing populations. 

When ancient aquifers are depleted, subsidence can occur — the ground sinks, filling the empty space where the water once was.  This makes it impossible for the aquifer to ever refill again.  In some portions of Mexico City, subsidence has lowered the ground surface up to 28 feet (8.5 m), causing much damage.  Irrigation can also lead to the accumulation of salt in the soil, which eventually creates a permanent wasteland.  In the cradle of civilization, the once thriving Tigris Euphrates floodplain is now “a glistening desert of salt.”

Earth resources have played a starring role in world history.  They enable the rise of civilizations, and their limited eras of prosperity.  It’s no coincidence that the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, because they had abundant deposits of coal, iron, and limestone in convenient locations.  The U.S. skyrocketed into a global superpower by exploiting huge deposits of a wide variety of Earth resources.  In World War II, Japan was short on iron, coal, and oil.  Hitler invaded southern Russia in an effort to seize the huge Baku oilfields.

In coming years, as fossil fuel fades out, agriculture will once again be muscle powered and low tech (if the climate crisis allows crop production to continue).  Industrial scale food processing and distribution will fizzle.  Potent synthetic fertilizers and other agrichemicals will no longer be available.  As harvests decline, population growth will shift into reverse. 

Finally, a few footnotes.  GeoDestinies was written on a tiny digital typewriter that allowed files to be saved on a floppy disk.  As Walt typed, the display presented a single line of text.  He never owned a computer, and never had direct access to the internet or email.  He had no spare time.  Finishing this manuscript was job one.

I gave him prints of interesting online stuff, and copies of my book reviews, including Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming, and The Little Ice Age.  The Fagan reviews reinforced his belief that climate always changed.  Back in 2012, the notion that human-caused emissions were disrupting the climate was still controversial in the mainstream mindset.

In his 96 years, Walt witnessed remarkable changes in the American standard of living.  These were only possible because of our maniacal binge of energy guzzling.  Modernity’s high standard of living, and fabulous healthcare was awesome.  But the long term environmental impact of these short term benefits was huge.

He lacked some sympathy for environmentalists who opposed energy development projects in America, whilst they were enjoying a comfortable consumer lifestyle.  High impact projects were often diverted to poor nations that had few regulations, if any.  In 2012, Walt was not fully aware of the serious long term hazards of nuclear energy, and the lack of permanent storage for high level radioactive wastes.

Walt was especially horrified by exponential population growth.  In his lifetime, the human mob skyrocketed from 1.9 billion to 7.6 billion.  He was deeply disappointed that overpopulation was a taboo subject for secular and spiritual leaders.  Large numbers of immigrants to the U.S. came from cultures where large families are the norm.  Their dream was to live a maximum impact consumer lifestyle.

Youngquist’s book pulls away cultural blindfolds, and provides a mind-expanding full immersion baptism in the actual facts of life.  “The confluence of factors soon at hand may make this century the most turbulent in human history.  There will be adjustment of population size.  There will be a new energy paradigm.  There will be lifestyle change.  There will be great economic change.  There will be environmental change.  Although change has always been the order of life, the particular confluence of major factors in each of these areas will make the twenty-first century a fundamental turning point for mankind.”

Walt completed the manuscript of the second edition in 2012.  Since then, he wrote four papers for the Negative Population Growth Forum.  Our Plundered Planet (2014), A Geomoment of Affluence (2015), The Scale of Things (2016), Framework of the Future (2016). 

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!

Life After Fossil Fuels

In 2020, Jeff Gibbs’ documentary Planet of the Humans fell out of the sky.  It aimed a spotlight on the many ways in which solar and wind power were neither green nor renewable — no free pony.  In response, many “green” activists explosively soiled their britches and demanded that the film be banned.  Millions watched it.  Similarly, in 2021, Derrick Jensen and team published Bright Green Lies, which was soon followed by a documentary based on the book.  

These two projects were righteous fire-breathing exposés of the deceptions regularly made by folks promoting “green” technologies.  Passionate preaching can often get some folks to listen.  Sometimes it inspires minds to change.  Other folks prefer to have deeper understanding before revising their views.  Alice Friedemann’s book, Life After Fossil Fuels, will appeal to them. 

Without rage and condemnation, she calmly and carefully described why she thinks we would be wise to end our addiction to fossil fuels as soon as possible.  She evaluated the alternatives, and concluded that most are not free ponies.  Importantly, she carefully explained the benefits, limits, and faults of the various options, and meticulously cited the sources of her information — literally hundreds of them. 

Readers are introduced to the notion that alternative energy is not the magic key to a sustainable utopian wonderland.  The status quo is a high speed, ridiculously luxurious, one-way path into dark and treacherous realms.  We’ve been living like scruffy back alley gods on drugs.  The good news here is that no “green” solution can permanently keep the massively destructive status quo on life support — it’s going to end up where it’s headed.  “We are nearing the end of a one-time binge.”  Indeed!

So, my eyes began tap-dancing across page 1, and I was soon scrolling through a thrilling 86-page joyride.  Friedemann presented an informative and embarrassing birds-and-bees discussion of the horrific unintended consequences of our childlike obsession with living like crazy dysfunctional grownups.  I cheered with excitement with each new chapter.  It was so refreshing to experience such a sumptuous feast of clear and coherent bullshit free information. 

Readers are introduced to the important notion of EROI (energy returned on energy invested).  Each year it’s taking more and more energy to find, extract, process, and distribute fossil energy.  Imagine having a job that paid $100 per day, but the bridge toll for getting to work was $99.  For this reason, enormous amounts of fossil energy will remain in the ground forever, thank goodness!  About 65 percent of buried oil is technically or economically unrecoverable. 

The fracking industry is drilling like crazy, while more and more unlucky tycoons land with a splat in the tar pits of bankruptcy.  The richest discoveries were drilled and drained first.  “Globally, new oil discoveries have fallen for 6 years, with consumption of oil six times greater than discoveries from 2013 through 2019.”  Trouble ahead. 

In manufacturing, would it be possible to eliminate fossil energy by switching to wood-based fuel?  Take a wild guess.  Can we continue producing mountains of food when energy-guzzling synthetic fertilizers have become fond memories of the good old days?  Can industrial agriculture continue when energy-guzzling farm equipment runs out of affordable fossil energy to guzzle?  Will high speed horse carts haul fresh California veggies to Minnesota?

Can industrial civilization exist without energy-guzzling fleets of ships, planes, trains, and trucks?  “In the U.S., trucks deliver 80% of goods over 4.1 million miles of roads, with 80% of towns completely dependent on trucks.”  Can transportation systems shift to electric power?  “A truck with a driving range of 600 miles needs a battery pack weighing 35,275 pounds and can carry just 10,000 pounds.”  Oh, and cold weather reduces driving range by 35%.

“All contraptions that produce electricity need high heat in their construction.  They all need cement made at 2600°F.”  There is no known way to make concrete with electricity.  Making steel for wind turbines requires 3100°F (1700°C).  “Solar panels require 2700° to 3600°F (1500° to 2000°C) of heat to transform silicon dioxide into metallurgical grade silicon.”  Nuke plants still on the drawing board, in theory, might be able to generate 1562°F (850°C), but this is not hot enough for making cement, steel, glass, and lots of other stuff.

Friedemann’s key question is: could life as we know it continue in an alternative energy future?  By chapter 13, all contestants for powering a happy sustainable future were rejected, except one — biomass.  Prior to the fossil fuel era, heavy industry was powered by charcoal made from dead trees.  Brazil is still making steel with rainforest charcoal. 

“Biomass is the only renewable energy source that can generate the high heat needed by industry to make cement, iron, steel, aluminum, trucks, computers, electronic equipment, ceramics, bricks, and machinery.  Biodiesel is the only renewable drop-in fuel that can keep heavy-duty trucks, locomotives, and ships running.  Biomass, with a little help from hydropower, is the only renewable way to keep the electric grid up.”

Yikes!  This spooky paragraph sent a cold chill through my body.  Weird chapters followed.  I began to wonder if I had just wasted two entire days of the only life I may ever live.  But, by this point, I was aware that Friedemann had a whimsical side, so I kept reading, hoping for a sharp turn.  It came later.  Act two of the book was focused on contemplating how we could produce enough biomass to power industrial civilization, and prepare to feed the 3 billion additional folks expected for dinner in 2050.  Hope fiends will have a good cry.

Bummers obstructing the rise of a biomass utopia include climate change, freshwater scarcity, brutalized topsoil, and our addiction to countless fossil powered processes.  Turning biomass into a liquid fuel known as ethanol is idiotic.  Trucks can’t guzzle it, and it refuses to be pumped through pipelines.  It takes about as much energy to make a gallon as the finished gallon contains.  (Ethanol is a monster child fathered by gold plated government subsidies to Big Ag.) 

The bummer parade is long and unusual.  Make biodiesel with algae?  Make ethanol with seaweed, sorghum, or corn stalks?  Biodiesel could indeed replace oil-based diesel, if we were able to produce it in high volume.  This would require enormous amounts of cropland, and it would pummel the land as much as other types of agriculture.  If climate shifts blindside farm country, game over.

Bottom line: “The electric grid can not stay up without natural gas due to a lack of energy storage.  Transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing can not be electrified.  If transportation can not be electrified or run on Something Else, civilization as we know it ends.  Agriculture goes back to horses and human labor.”  When readers finally reach chapter 33 and slither across the finish line, their brains have been reduced to a bucketful of steaming glop.  It doesn’t look like we’re on the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City.  The sky is full of flying monkeys.  What a book!

The pisser here is that this very important book is sold by a textbook publisher, and it’s very expensive.  It won’t be able to catch much of a ride on the wave of interest generated by Gibbs, Jensen, and others.  Its modest collegiate audience is mostly the well-dressed offspring of the idle rich, and desperate students who are massively in debt.  Non-billionaires may need to rob a gas station, or get a library card.

The bigger pisser is that 12 year olds don't already know this stuff.  Maybe it would be polite to inform youngsters about the challenging future they have inherited.  I hope that Friedemann is busy working on something like a Dick and Jane primer for school kids — an affordable, competent, un-redacted, easy to read, mind-expanding introduction to actual reality, warts and all.  Imagine that.

Friedemann, Alice, Life After Fossil Fuels, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, 2021.

NOTE TO ALL: Alice Friedemann has made THIS ENTIRE BOOK AVAILABLE ONLINE FOR FREE on her website:
https://energyskeptic.com

Jeff Gibbs interview

 

Wild Free and Happy Sample 48

 

[Note: This is the forty-eighth 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.

 

WILD FAMILY PLANNING

Colin Turnbull wrote about tribal life in Africa.  Hunting people paid careful attention to the large game animals in their ecosystem, noting their migratory trends, and comparing these to historic patterns.  There were periods of abundant game, and times of scarcity.  While some species were rising, others declined.  Through long experience, they roughly understood how many humans their territory could conservatively support — it’s carrying capacity.  They clearly understood the difficult consequences of having too many mouths to feed when meat was scarce.  It was important to avoid this.

The value of human life did not trump the value of maintaining a healthy relationship with their ecosystem.  Newborns were not automatically accepted into the band.  They might not be perceived as being fully born before they opened their eyes for the first time, or while their umbilical cord was still wet.  When folks agreed that a child had “come to stay,” it was given a name, and only then became a proper person.  If it died before naming, it was as if it had never been born.  Deformed newborns were always promptly buried or smothered. 

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas spent a lot of time with the San people of the Kalahari, and noted their methods of family planning.  Most of the women had one to four offspring.  In lean times, intercourse was avoided.  When a child could not be kept, the woman gave birth alone, away from the camp, and buried the newborn before it drew breath.  In their culture, a newborn did not immediately become alive, so disposing it was OK.

Because of low body fat and hard work, San women began menstruating later.  Some did not have regular monthly periods.  Nursing further drained their bodies.  Children were usually nursed for about four years, which reduced mom’s fertility.  In a drought year, underfed women lost their milk, and some babies died.  Infant mortality was not uncommon.  Wild carnivores also took their share.  Nomads moved frequently, and belongings and infants had to be hauled to new sites.  A woman could only carry one infant, so just one twin was kept.

Peter Freuchen wrote about the Inuit people of the Arctic.  During long months of winter darkness, stashes of frozen meat got smaller with every passing week, like a fuel gauge getting closer to empty.  Infanticide was common and normal.  When hunting was bad, children were killed to spare the group from the misery of starvation.  One woman survived a spell of bad hunting by eating her husband and three children. 

Folks who could no longer keep up with the hunting party were abandoned.  In lean times, those who were too old to contribute to the wellbeing of the community committed suicide (a one-way walk into the frozen darkness), or asked their children to hang them or stab them — and these requests were honored without hysteria or drama, often during a party when everyone was in high spirits.

CIVILIZED FAMILY PLANING

Infanticide and Abandonment

Like today, early civilizations were also hierarchical.  The lucky few on top controlled and exploited the less than lucky masses.  This game could work as long as the masses were not too numerous, and not too pissed at the elites.  Working folks got pissed when they were unable to adequately feed their families.  Unfortunately, the elites were often folks who did not enjoy a reputation for being generous and benevolent.  The lower rungs of society were disposable.

The other problem here was that folks did not have easy access to effective contraceptives, or to clinically safe methods for ending unwelcome pregnancies.  When families were struggling to feed the kids they already had, adding more would only worsen their crisis.  So, many took a path that had an ancient tradition.

William Lecky wrote that the Greeks were devoted to the greatest happiness principle.  “Regarding the community as a whole, they clearly saw that it is in the highest degree for the interests of society that the increase of population should be very jealously restricted.”  Infanticide was considered to be perfectly normal in most ancient Greek civilizations.  Keeping more than one daughter was rare.

Infanticide was also common in Rome, during its Empire phase.  Lecky wrote that an ancient law required “the father to bring up all his male children, and at least his eldest female child, forbidding him to destroy any well-formed child till it had completed its third year, when the affections of the parent might be supposed to be developed, but permitting the exposition of deformed or maimed children with the consent of their five nearest relations.”

“Infanticide” means actively killing a child less than one year old, via burying, drowning, suffocating, refusal to nurse, etc.  Killing older offspring was child murder.  “Exposition” (abandonment) means setting the infant down somewhere, and then walking away.  In Rome, exposition “was certainly not punished by law; it was practiced on a gigantic scale and with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with the most frigid indifference, and at least, in the case of destitute parents, considered a very venial offence.”  Lecky added, that the abandoned infants were often taken in by speculators “who educated them as slaves, or very frequently as prostitutes.”

William Langer made one statement that I will never forget.  He said, “In the seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries to China were horrified to find that in Peking alone several thousand babes (almost exclusively female) were thrown on the streets like refuse, to be collected each morning by carriers who dumped them into a huge pit outside the city.”  This practice remained common into the 1830s.

Langer also noted that in 1860s Britain, dead babies were frequently found under bridges, in parks, in culverts and ditches, and even in cesspools.  He quoted Dr. Lankester, the coroner of Middlesex, England: “The police seemed to think no more of finding a dead child than of finding a dead dog or cat.”

Barbara Kellum pointed out that unbaptized children were beings of immense dark juju.  They were evil, a “captive in the devil’s power.”  A mother who died in childbirth had to have the unbaptized child removed from her corpse before she could be buried.  Dead unbaptized children could not be buried in the churchyard.  They were buried in a secret place, which was thereafter avoided.  Sometimes a stake was driven through their heart when buried, to prevent spooky mischief. 

Lecky added that killing an infant was terrible, but even worse was the fact that it died unbaptized, because its immortal soul was forever damned, and would suffer for all eternity in the burning flames of hell.  Married mothers were often given penance for infanticide.  Sometimes, unwed girls got off by pleading insanity.  Others got a death sentence, “in the most diabolical imaginable manner” (especially for violent murder).  They were buried alive, drowned, or decapitated.  Hanging was rare. 

He also mentioned a strange law passed in 1803 that declared infanticide to be murder — but only if the baby had passed entirely out of the mother.  Thus, if the feet were still in the womb, and you smashed the baby’s head, or cut its throat, no crime occurred.  Juries would not convict mothers, because there was no compelling proof of wrongdoing without the testimony of eyewitnesses.  This enabled private family matters to remain private.

Foundling Hospitals

With the emergence of Christianity, the deliberate elimination of unwanted babies was strongly denounced, but abandonment remained a common practice among all social classes, especially the poor.  In response to this preventable loss of life, some churches were inspired to engage in social charity.  They often found babies laying on their front steps.  Caring for foundlings was a painful, tedious, and never-ending challenge.

In the thirteenth century, the first foundling hospitals appeared.  Their objective was to anonymously receive unwanted infants, care for them, discourage murder, and encourage the community to adopt them.  Unfortunately, many mothers worried about being recognized at the hospitals, so they chose more discrete modes of disposal.  Gradually, over the following centuries, more cities built hospitals, including London, Paris, and St. Petersburg.  On the downside, according to Lecky, under their care 30 to 40 percent of the infants died in the first six weeks.  Many were already sickly or half dead.  Caretakers were often overwhelmed by large caseloads and emotional strain.

London built Christ’s Hospital in 1552, to help foundlings and legitimate orphans, but in 1676 they stopped caring for illegitimate children.  In 1741, the London Foundling Hospital was opened.  By 1760, it was buried in abandoned babies, far more than they could properly care for.  Langer wrote that the hospitals were terrible at saving lives, but they were so popular that they became too expensive to operate, forcing many to shut down.  New York City opened their hospital in 1869, and 123 infants arrived on the first day. 

Lecky mentioned that in 1811, Napoleon created foundling hospitals in every department of France.  These had “tours,” a rotating table that allowed mothers outside the building to put the baby on the table, ring the bell, disappear into the night, and remain anonymous.  Nurses then spun the baby indoors, where its chances of survival were dubious.  This reduced child murders, but the hospitals were quickly swamped.  In 1883, 164,319 babies were left at the French hospitals.  Tours were a mistake.  They made it too easy to discard the unwanted, and were therefore accused of encouraging immorality. 

Foundling hospitals were not located in every big city.  In some places, they operated for many years, in other places they didn’t last long.  The journal Pediatrics noted that foundling hospitals did not solve the problem of abandoned infants.  “A majority of the children died within a few years of admission in most areas of Europe …in some times and places the mortality rate exceeded ninety percent.”

So, far fewer babies died illegally, but the mortality rates in foundling hospitals were extremely high.  Some have called this “legalized infanticide,” because the hospitals were provided by religious organizations.  Most infants perished from neglect, and many were mercifully put out of their misery by wet nurses.

Baby Farms

Dorothy Haller noted that the English traditionally sneered at young bastards (illegitimate children).  Baby farming, a cottage industry that provided illegal infanticide services, received a major boost when the Poor Law of Britain was reformed in 1834.  It revised earlier legislation that required the fathers of bastards to be responsible for them.  The new regulation shifted all responsibility to the mothers, whose low moral standards were at the root of the problem.  They had to support themselves, and their kids, until they reached age 16.  Good luck!

Infanticide, abandonment, and abortion were illegal.  Communities did not provide effective social safety nets.  Churches typically declared pregnancy out of wedlock to be a mortal sin, and said that the women were “fallen.”  The offender was often ostracized by her neighbors and family, and forced to leave in disgrace.  She had to relocate to a place where she was not known, where alone and friendless, she gave birth to an unwanted child.  Mom and her infant might not be welcome back home.

She might find work in the new place, but would promptly be fired as soon as her condition became visible.  Joni Johnson noted that it was often impossible for an unskilled unmarried woman to both have a job and take care of her child.  A number of orphanages refused to accept illegitimate children, because they were the disgusting offspring of immoral people.  The mother of a bastard was not at all appealing to gentlemen looking for a wholesome wife.  For many, a baby farmer offered the possibility of a second chance.  It was easy to find them, because they printed ads in newspapers.  A journalist ran an ad in a paper seeking a nurse for an unwanted child.  He promptly received 333 responses.

Baby farmers were women who offered to care for, or adopt, illegitimate children — for a price.  Sometimes the mother made regular payments so the caretaker would serve as a foster parent.  Other times, the mother paid a fee, allowing the caretaker to adopt the child, or find a family willing to adopt it.  The mother would never see the child alive again.  Mothers asked few questions, baby farmers kept no records, and doctors didn’t get nosey when infants died because their high mortality rate was the norm.

When a mother paid a fixed sum for the caretaker to adopt her child, the sooner the child died, the more profitable it was.  Long-term care could not be expected when the fee paid was modest.  Some infants died from opiate overdoses.  For some reason, baby farmers had two nicknames, “killer nurses” and “angel makers.” 

Haller mentioned Mrs. Winsor who, for a weekly fee, agreed to take in the four-month old son of Mary Jane Harris.  When Mary couldn’t keep up the payments, she watched Winsor smother her son, and wrap his body in a newspaper.  He was dumped on the side of a road.  Winsor enjoyed a steady business. 

Mrs. Martin boasted that, in a ten month period, she discarded 555 fetuses and infants.  In Tottenham, Mrs. Jagger had taken in 40 to 60 infants over three years.  Most perished from starvation.  The “baby butcher” Amelia Dyer was suspected of murdering at least 400 infants over 20 years.  Her career ended at the gallows.

It wasn’t until the 1860s that doctors began investigating baby farmers, and demanding reforms.  Laws were eventually passed to regulate or prohibit baby farming (decades after animal protection laws were passed).  The capital of baby farming was Britain, but it also occurred in Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., Scandinavia, and elsewhere.

Reproductive Rights

For the first 69 years of the United States, there were no laws against surgical abortion.  Massachusetts passed the first regulation in 1845.  By 1900, just about every state banned most forms of abortion.  As their options diminished, many women felt compelled to choose the risky option of do-it-yourself abortion.  Many attempts succeeded, but more than a few died from the unintended consequences, back in the days before antibiotics and reproductive freedom.

Dayna Troisi wrote that the methods women attempted included swallowing gunpowder, drinking turpentine, spending a night in the snow, throwing themselves down the stairs, harshly punching their stomach, pennyroyal, opium, or using a scraping instrument, like the notorious metal coat hanger.  In many locations, illegal abortions were provided by underground enterprises, sometimes by real doctors, sometimes by folks having varying levels of experience.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Roe v. Wade case, and in a 7 to 2 decision decided that a woman could have an abortion without excessive government restriction.  This struck down many state and federal laws.  Since then, a number of states have worked to reduce the inherent freedom of female American citizens to make important life changing decisions about their own bodies.  Oddly, a number of religious folks are obsessed with returning to the traditional situation of dead babies laying all over the place.  No effort has been made to harshly punish what horny boys do with their frisky throbbing weenies.  I am overwhelmed by the powerful stench of patriarchy and injustice.

As I write today, there are 7.8 billion humans on Earth, and growing.  We’ve managed to temporarily send the planet’s carrying capacity into the stratosphere by becoming extremely innovative in food production and health care, a rocket ride enabled by a one-time-only binge on fantastic quantities of nonrenewable fossil hydrocarbons.

We live in ridiculous decadence, directly at the expense of our children, grandchildren, and the entire family of life.  This seems rather daffy.  Coming generations are not going to inherit cool stuff like healthy soils, forests, fisheries, wildlife, clean water, and a stable climate.  They missed the riotous home wrecking party, and will inherit the toxic smoldering ruins.

In a subway system, you must never, ever step on the third rail, to avoid instant death by electrocution.  In modern society, the notion of setting guidelines on reproduction is a third rail subject, and a 100% effective method of political suicide (except in totalitarian states).  In the good old days, hungry carnivores, wars, famines, and pestilence helped to reduce the possibility of population outbursts, sparing folks from having to contemplate touchy issues.

Garrett Hardin was often criticized for ranting about overpopulation without also revealing some brilliant solutions.  He confessed that he had been intimidated by the ostrich factor — never touch 800-volt issues that are surrounded by large piles of scorched skeletons.  You can’t win, so bury your head in the sand, and have a nice day!  The world was not interested in contemplating the foolishness of perpetual growth.  Mass stupidity got the green light.

He lamented that the U.N. decreed two rights simultaneously.  (1) Every man, woman, and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition.  (2) Every woman has the right — perhaps with the agreement of her mate(s) — to determine how many children she shall produce.  He countered that, in a finite world, unrestricted freedom is intolerable, a loose cannon having great destructive potential.  We cherish sacred rights, but have zero interest in <spit!> sacred responsibilities.

John Livingston lamented that human fetuses have a right to life, but nature does not.  Rights are one half of a dynamic duo, and they are typically amputated from their sacred partner, wise responsibilities.  Rights are human inventions.  Limits are not, they are absolutely real.  In theory, a woman may have the right to bear a thousand children, but limits trump rights.  Limits matter, rights are dreams induced by hopium.  In our culture, limits are demonic bastards.

William Langer, writing in 1974, celebrated the fact that, since the end of World War Two, the wonders of progress have provided humankind with the contraceptive pill, intrauterine device, and legalized abortion.  At long last, in theory, there was no longer any excuse for unwanted pregnancy, infanticide, abandonment, or baby farmers.  Oddly, now in the twenty-first century, there are still folks who oppose all forms of family planning except the heavenly pleasures of celibacy.

I shall now reveal both good news and an effective solution.  The good news is that ecological sustainability is, by definition, inevitable.  Unsustainable foolishness can only be a temporary deviation (industrial civilization for example).  Whether or not bipedal primates will survive to see the restoration of sustainability is another matter.  Time will tell.

I cannot imagine that civilized humans will ever mindfully summon their wisdom and foresight, and then proceed to intelligently resolve the issue of extreme overpopulation.  Luckily, overpopulation is merely a problem, not a predicament.  Problems have solutions, predicaments do not (i.e., climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinctions, etc.). 

The one and only guaranteed solution to the problem of overpopulation is time.  In the coming years, countless hordes of turbulent problems and predicaments will tirelessly work to reduce the planet’s carrying capacity for humans — from the stratosphere of furious decadence, to the humble ground floor of utter simplicity (and hopefully sustainability).  When Big Mama Nature pulls the plug on the mega-mob, one way or another the population issue will be resolved, like magic!  We won’t even have to do anything, like think, or get off the couch.