Wild Free and Happy Sample 57

 

[Note: This is the fifty-seventh 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.

[Continued from Climate Crisis 02 Sample 56]

Water and Climate

In The Great Acceleration, McNeill and Engelke described how a warming climate is disturbing the relationship between water and the family of life.  The precipitation patterns of the past are changing, creating new challenges for ecosystems, human societies, and life as we know it.

Extreme weather events are expected to occur more frequently.  When ocean surface temperatures get warmer, cyclones are more likely to be spawned.  Warmer air can hold more moisture.  In regions having a moist climate, clouds bloated with water are more likely to form.  More and more often, storms are dumping huge loads of rain, sudden deluges that cause destructive floods and landslides.  In regions having a dryer climate, warmer air will create fewer clouds, produce less rain, crank up the air temperature, intensify drought conditions, and encourage wildfires. 

With a warming climate, the glaciers of the world are melting and retreating more rapidly.  Winter precipitation is delivering more rain, less snow.  Winter rain tends to run off promptly.  Snowpack retains the moisture longer.  It melts later, closer to the growing season, when the water can be used to irrigate thirsty cropland. 

The water flowing out of the Himalayas feeds the Indus, Yangzi, Mekong, Ganges, Yellow, Brahmaputra, and Irrawaddy rivers.  Two billion people depend on this water arriving in adequate amounts, at the appropriate time.  In the coming years, more water shortages and major changes are expected.

Paul Ehrlich and John Harte wrote that a third of global crop production depends on irrigation.  Melting snow has been an essential source of irrigation water.  “The winter snowpack in mountainous regions such as the Himalayas, the Rockies, the Sierra, and the Andes is a most efficient reservoir, storing water through the cold months and releasing it gradually as snowmelt in warm months when farmers need it.”

“In response to severe and prolonged drought in many regions of the world, including China, India, Thailand, Italy, and California, loss of surface irrigation water has resulted in excessive pumping of groundwater, which in turn has led to land subsidence, groundwater depletion, and irreversible loss of aquifer volume.”  Food production is also challenged by droughts, deluges, super storms, heat waves, aggressive wildfires, declining insect pollinators, soil salinization, soil depletion, erosion, and so on.

Sahana Ghosh reported that the once mighty Ganges River is wheezing.  Over the years, river volume has been declining, because farmers have been diverting too much water via their irrigation canals.  The river got shallower.  Then, they switched to tube wells with motorized pumps.  Naturally, overpumping the groundwater has serious consequences.  In the dry months, the river now looks more like a mudflat.  Reduced flow also concentrates the load of pollutants.  Researcher Abhijit Mukherjee said, “Our prediction shows that about 115 million people can be impacted due to insufficient food availability in the next few decades.”

Jim Robbins wrote about the Colorado River blues.  The 1,450 mile (2,333 km) watershed starts in the Rocky Mountains and ends at the Pacific.  It used to empty into the Gulf of California, but not a single drop of water enters the Gulf today.  In 2018, river volume was just two-thirds of normal, tied for the record low.

The Colorado is one of the most heavily engineered waterways in the world — designed for the benefit of humans, not nature.  It is the source of much contention.  It serves 40 million people, and the number of users keeps growing.  A drought since 2000 has reduced its flow.  It is the most severe drought in 1,250 years.  The Lake Mead reservoir at Hoover Dam, and the Lake Powell reservoir at Glen Canyon Dam, are at all-time lows.

Some suspect that climate change is drying out the West.  This is not just a temporary drought, the West may actually be getting permanently dryer.  “Worst case, if the reservoirs ever hit ‘dead pool’ — when levels drop too low for water to be piped out — many people in the region could become climate refugees.”

Agriculture uses 80 percent of the Colorado’s water, cities use 10 percent.  As demand exceeds supply, some users will be cut off.  Dewatering agriculture would snuff out many farms and nearby towns.  Wildlife does not have a top priority. 

Frederick Pleitgen and team described an emerging water shortage crisis in the Middle East, caused by persistent drought and extreme heat.  Temperatures sometimes soar to life threatening levels.  Rainfall mostly evaporates.  Rivers, lakes, and wetlands are drying up.  As Iran’s once large and beautiful Lake Urmia shrinks, its water is getting too salty, so farmers are pumping groundwater for irrigation.  Aquifers are being overpumped, depleting the limited reserves.  If current trends continue, some regions will become uninhabitable.

Homes in Jordan receive some water once or twice a week.  Numerous upstream dams limit the amount of water that eventually arrives at the end of the watershed.  Israel has a huge water desalinization program that requires large amounts of fossil energy to operate, adding still more carbon into the atmosphere.

Agriculture and Climate

Every variety of plant and animal has different environmental requirements for optimal health.  They all have evolved to survive within a limited range of conditions.  Humans can’t survive extreme conditions, nor can the livestock and crops we depend on.  When reality is shifting into a new and unusual trend, the family of life will struggle, and some will blink out.  Evolution is not a speedy process. 

With regard to crop plants, important variables include temperature, sunlight hours, pH, available moisture, soil fertility, and so on.  As warming proceeds, the regions that have a tropical climate are expanding from their equatorial homeland toward the poles.  Regions that used to be temperate are getting hotter.  In the good old days, frigid winters used to provide beneficial pest control, by freezing lots of insects and other things that harmed crops and humans.  Winter precipitation was stored in ice and snow.

Brian Halweil emphasized how important a stable climate is to agriculture.  In 2003, for the first time, the potato blight fungus came to visit the town of Chacllabamba, Peru.  It almost totally destroyed their crop.  Located at an altitude of 13,000 feet (4,000 m), a cool climate had protected the potato fields for thousands of years.  No more.  Spuds had been their staple food.

Jerry Hatfield and John Prueger investigated how rising temperatures affected a variety of crop plants.  Extreme heat events may last a few days, and have a big impact.  When temperatures are outside of the ideal range, plant growth, pollination, and reproductive processes can be affected.  Pollination is especially sensitive to rising temperatures.  High temperatures during the reproductive phase of the life cycle can reduce corn yields by as much as 80 to 90 percent. 

When wheat is maturing, a frost can cause the grains to be sterile.  Too much heat can reduce the number of grains that form.  Rice is especially vulnerable to high heat during the pollination process.  For the major crops, yields are expected to decrease as global temperatures rise. 

Kimberly Cartier noted that growing conditions are getting less predictable than in the past.  Rainy seasons may be more intense than usual, or less.  Their arrival may be earlier than the ideal time, or later.  The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) pattern is associated with precipitation patterns, and it is a well-known troublemaker.  In 1983, an unusual ENSO coincided with the largest global failure of corn (maize) crops in modern records.  ENSO can also alter wheat and soybean production on a global scale.

Mike Davis wrote about a horrific era of ENSO related droughts and famines.  In the years 1876-79 and 1896-1902 between 12.2 and 29.3 million died of famine in India.  In the Madras Deccan, “the only well-fed part of the local population were the pariah dogs, ‘fat as sheep,’ that feasted on the bodies of dead children.”  In the same period, between 19.5 and 30 million died of famine in China, and 2 million in Brazil.  Famine hit these three nations the hardest, but many other nations were also affected.  In the U.S., churches organized to send relief to hungry farmers in the Dakotas and western Kansas.

Samuel Markings wrote about the relationship between photosynthesis and temperature.  In plants, photosynthesis is the process that uses sunlight to transform water and CO₂ into food (glucose) and oxygen.  Optimum temperatures range between 50 to 68°F (10 to 20°C).  Above this range, higher temperatures slow photosynthesis.  The process declines sharply when temps rise above 104°F (40°C).  When temps persist in this range, plant survival is endangered.

Abdul Wahid and team wrote an extensive report on heat tolerance in plants.  Each crop species has a threshold temperature.  If this temperature is exceeded too long, the result is heat stress — irreversible damage to plant growth and development.  Harm varies based on intensity (temperature in degrees), duration, and the rate at which the temperate rose.

Qunying Luo extensively described threshold temperatures for a number of major crop species.  At different stages of a plant’s life, they can be damaged by excess heat — leaf initiation, shoot growth, root growth, sowing to emergence, grain filling, etc.  For example, “Several studies found that temperatures of above 35°C (95°F) are lethal to maize pollen viability”

Tnau Agritech Portal published a report on the effects of high temperature on plant growth in India.  Each plant species has a thermal death point.  For many annual crops, 122°F (50°C) is fatal.  Excess heat can reduce yields, and inhibit the absorption and assimilation of nutrients.  It can cause pollen abortion, which reduces the grain set.  Even short exposure can affect the growth of shoots and roots. 

Evelyn Lamb wrote that rice provides 16 to 20 percent of the calories consumed by humankind.  Corn and wheat are similarly popular.  Thus, more than half of the calories consumed by humans are provided by rice, corn, and wheat.  Growing rice in flooded paddies produces more greenhouse gas emissions per calorie than corn or wheat, twice the emissions from wheat.

Santosh Koirala reported that most rice crops begin by transplanting young plants in flooded paddies (“puddling”).  “When rice is grown under puddled transplanted conditions, paddy soil becomes anoxic — depleted of dissolved oxygen — and then, in the absence of oxygen, microbes that break down plant matter produce methane.”  Puddling “is becoming less profitable because of the costs of labour, shortage of water, and high energy costs.”  It results in depletion of soil quality, and higher methane emissions.

 “Methane is the second major greenhouse gas, after carbon dioxide, and agriculture accounts for 40% of these greenhouse emissions.  Although farm animals are a major source, flooded rice paddies emit as much as 500 million tons, which is around 20% of total manmade emissions of this gas.”

Kritee Kritee and team noted that rice is a staple food for almost half of humankind, so it’s especially important to pay attention to its climate impacts.  Globally, one third of water used for irrigation goes to rice farming.  Rice receives one seventh of all fertilizer used.  “Methane from global rice cultivation currently accounts for one-half of all crop-related greenhouse gas emissions.”

Experts recommended that these methane emissions could be reduced by shifting from continuously flooded rice fields to intermittent flooding.  Unfortunately, the team was surprised to discover that this brilliant solution had an unintended consequence.  The emissions of nitrous oxide (N₂O) tripled — a greenhouse gas that persists in the atmosphere much longer than methane.  It is an unintended consequence of using nitrogen rich fertilizer.

Janet Ranganathan and team wrote a hefty and thorough report filled with recommendations for reducing the environmental harm caused by high impact diets and overpopulation.  Consumption of animal-based foods is growing, and these foods (especially beef), result in higher emissions of greenhouse gases. 

Meat and dairy foods are not necessary for adequate nutrition, so less is better.  “Plant-based foods can be readily combined to provide the full set of essential amino acids, as with rice and beans or peanut butter and bread.”  The only essential not provided by a vegetarian diet is vitamin B12, which supplements can provide. 

Obesity is a growing trend, even among low-income people.  “Globally, there are now two-and-a-half times more overweight than undernourished people.  More than one in three adults are overweight.”  Folks around the world are overdoing the consumption of calories and protein. 

The Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report is a spellbinding 878 page report on the carbon cycle in North America.  I learned a very important fact of life:  “Globally, soils contain more than three times as much carbon as the atmosphere, and four and a half times more carbon than the world’s biota [living things]; therefore, even small changes in soil carbon stocks could lead to large changes in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂).”

Carbon compounds are central to the existence of the entire family of life.  The CO₂ that plants extract from the atmosphere allows them to live and grow.  Plants exhale oxygen that animals need, and animals exhale CO₂ that plants need.  Soil is home to an amazing community of fantastic microbes.  Dead organic material contains carbon.  When it drops to the ground, soil microbes eagerly decompose it, and do so in a way that stabilizes the carbon, so it is more likely to be retained in the soil, rather than float away.  Soil microbes that encourage carbon retention do not enjoy unusual shifts in moisture or temperature.  They don’t enjoy deforestation, tilling, or being sprayed with farm chemicals. 

Livestock production is a significant source of greenhouse gases — CO₂, methane, and nitrous oxide.  Ruminants include cattle, sheep, goats, elk, deer, bison, etc.  The digestive system in ruminants includes a process called enteric fermentation, which produces methane emissions (3% farts, 97% belches).  Poultry, hogs, and horses emit greenhouse gases in smaller volumes via different processes.  Manure stored in large quantities generates large emissions of methane.  Pools of deep shit contain little or no oxygen, so they provide ideal conditions for producing methane.

“Soils in North America have lost, on average, 20% to 75% of their original topsoil carbon with historical conversion to agriculture.”  Most of this conversion took place in the last 200 years or so.  To add insult to injury, “On a per-person basis, food loss and waste in North America is 375 to 500 kilograms per year.” (826 to 1,102 pounds)

Arctic Fires

Zombie fires were the subject of a BBC story.  They are also called overwintering fires or peat fires.  They occur in Russia, Canada, and Alaska.  In recent years, temperatures in the Arctic have been soaring, and permafrost has been thawing.  When tundra and forest lands dry out, they become prone to wildfires.  These fires can ignite ancient peat deposits beneath the surface.  Toasty peat can smolder all winter, beneath the snow cover.  When spring arrives, the snow melts, oxygen reaches the embers, and the fire can reignite.  They “come back from the dead,” hence the zombie tag. 

Alexandra Witze reported that in the summer of 2020, there were many Siberian tundra fires, and they emitted 244 megatons of CO₂, a 35 percent increase over the intense 2019 fire season.  About half of the fires were burning on peat lands, the most carbon-dense ecosystems.  When shallow layers near the surface dry out, they are more susceptible to burning.  Warmer winters and springs mean the fire season starts sooner.  In the Arctic, the fire zone is moving northward, into lands that have traditionally been fire-resistant. 

Portia Kentish reported that the climate crisis is well underway in Arctic regions, causing huge and spooky impacts — a powerful warning to the rest of the world, which is not leaping to action.  During a May 2020 heat wave, locations in Siberia that are normally close to freezing had temperatures hotter than Athens or Rome.  Some Arctic permafrost is up to 80,000 years old.  When permafrost thaws, methane emissions begin.  Heat waves encourage wildfires.  They are burning peat deposits that have been building up for 15,000 years.  About half of Russia’s Arctic fires are consuming peat soil. 

Forest Impacts

We could sequester lots of CO₂ by planting enormous numbers of trees.  That sounds wholesome.  Sadly, the current fad is deforestation — cutting enormous numbers of trees to grow soybeans, create livestock pastures, make charcoal, produce wood products, and clear the way for urban sprawl.

As the planet gets warmer, forests will become more vulnerable to pests and pathogens.  Droughts will become hotter, longer, and dryer.  This encourages wildfires.  Wikipedia is posting pages that, year by year, document wildfire activity in the world.  The report for the record breaking year of 2021 is [HERE].  As of August 19, fires had been reported in Algeria, South Africa, Cyprus, India, Israel, Russia, Turkey, France, Greece, Italy (10 regions), Canada, and United States (9 states), Argentina, and Australia.

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega reported that climate change is encouraging trees to grow fast and die young.  Research suggests that this may be universal, affecting almost all tree species and climates.  Based on tree ring analysis, this trend corresponds with the exponential growth of human caused CO₂ emissions, as well as rising temperatures — a combo that stimulates rapid growth.  This reduces their potential for maximum long term CO₂ absorption. 

Nate McDowell and team studied changing forests.  “Shifts in forest dynamics are already occurring, and the emerging pattern is that global forests are tending toward younger stands with faster turnover as old-growth forest with stable dynamics are dwindling.”  These shifts are occurring because of “anthropogenic-driven exacerbation of chronic drivers, such as rising temperature and CO₂, and increasing transient disturbances, including wildfire, drought, windthrow, biotic attack, and land-use change.”  Their findings indicate that it is “highly likely that tree mortality rates will continue to increase.” 

Robert Hunziker reported on new information linking rising temperatures with the increase in tree deaths.  In the U.S., giant sequoias are dying from the top down.  In the Southwest, drought has killed hundreds of millions of trees.  In Africa, 2,000 year old baobab trees are wheezing and dying.  In Germany, dead trees are everywhere.  Dead and dying trees are more vulnerable to insects and disease.  They provide abundant fuel for forest fires.  Siberia is burning up.  “New studies show drought and heat waves will cause massive die-offs, killing most trees alive today.” 

Dahr Jamail visited Glacier National Park, home to a formerly thriving boreal forest.  A warming climate has delighted millions of hungry pine bark beetles, some of whom can now have two life cycles per year.  In the last 20 years, beetles have killed 40 million acres (16 million ha) of trees.  They kill fewer pines now, because fewer pines remain alive.  The latest serial killer is white pine blister rust, which has infected almost 85 percent of the trees in the park.

Songlin Fei and team studied how insects and diseases are hammering U.S. forests, which are now home to more than 450 nonnative tree-feeding insects and tree pathogens.  The study focused on the 15 most destructive nonnative forest pests.  It found that “41.1% of the total live forest biomass in the conterminous United States is at risk of future loss from these 15 pests.  These results indicate that forest pest invasions, driven primarily by globalization, represent a huge risk to U.S. forests and have significant impacts on carbon dynamics.” 

Peter Wohlleben shared his intimate knowledge of the trees in his beloved German forest.  Trees can’t walk, but forests are always slowly wandering.  Since the end of the last ice age, a warming climate has enabled the trees of central Europe to gradually migrate northward.  Animals and winds move seeds away from their source.  Today, the climate is warming way too fast, which presents a mortal threat to temperature sensitive species.  Human tree huggers are working to relocate and transplant as many types of trees as possible.  Assisted migration is a heroic effort to “help forests walk.”

Climate and Disease

The climate crisis is not expected to promote miraculous advances in the health of humankind.  The huge herd is moving into an era of food insecurity, power shortages, water scarcity, poor sanitation, infectious diseases, deteriorating medical care systems, and so on.  A hotter climate and extreme weather events will add to these challenges.

The Lancet’s 2020 report presented a competent 42 page discussion on the climate change impacts on health.  Warming trends are increasing the frequency and intensity of floods, drought, storms, wildfire, temperature anomalies, and food scarcity.  These changes are killing more folks in the 65+ age range.  In 2018, heat waves killed about 296,000 people.

“The climate suitability for infectious disease transmission has been growing rapidly since the 1950s.”  The dengue virus is spreading across South America.  “From 1950 to 2018, the global climate suitability for the transmission of dengue increased by 8.9% for Aedes aegypti and 15% for Aedes albopictus.  In 2015 to 2019, suitability for malaria transmission in highland areas was 38.7% higher in the African region and 149.7% higher in the Western Pacific region compared with a 1950s baseline.”

David Wallace-Wells added that malaria also thrives in hotter regions because “for every degree increase in temperature, the parasite reproduces ten times faster.”  Consequently, by 2050, up to 5.2 billion people may be infected, according to World Bank estimates.  As tropical climates move northward, so will tropical pathogens.

Tipping Points

A tipping point in an ecosystem is a threshold that, when exceeded, can lead to large changes.  Sometimes an imbalance can reach a level of intensity that triggers an irreversible cascade of events, like a chain reaction of falling dominoes.  The climate crisis is a momentous tipping point in the human saga.  Melting Arctic ice has busted loose an avalanche of devastating changes.  Clever humans, with all their gee-whiz technology, are powerless to refreeze the Arctic, halt the avalanche, put the carbon back where it came from, and make everything nice again.

Over the millennia, high impact cultures have increasingly evolved into aggressive control freaks, radically manipulating ecosystems to satisfy their impulsive whims.  They are unencumbered by foresight, and display little respect for the family of life and the generations yet to come. 

For a very long time, their enthusiastic cleverness usually didn’t slam head-on into devastating limits.  They kept nature on a short leash, and brutally abused her.  The game is different now.  We’ve created changes that threaten our survival, changes we can’t undo.  We are no longer in the driver’s seat. 

Nature has put a tight leash around our necks, and we’re about to discover what it’s like to be powerless, kicked, and beaten.  Mistakes indeed have consequences (ouch!).  Our seat in the family of life is not a throne.  We are not the Crown of Creation.  We’re often more like hyperactive children who get completely lost, confused, and anxious.

Many folks who deliberately pay acute attention to reality are totally spooked.  These hyper alert folks have developed a special ability to comprehend the obvious — we’re in the <bleeping> express lane to surprising changes.  Many of them seem to perceive tipping points to be elements of a remarkable cosmic drama.  Tipping points are fire-breathing dragons that we must heroically slay in order avert runaway warming, and a hellish ecological apocalypse called Hothouse Earth.  

The alert ones are jumping up and down and shouting about tipping points, in a desperate frantic effort to wake up the clueless billions.  Dudes!  It’s time for action!  We only have ten years to fix this mess!  It’s not too late!  The presumption is that the mess is a solvable problem.  We are heavily indoctrinated with the illusion that technology can overcome any challenge. 

At the same time, the titans of industry assure us that they are ready and eager to sell us the miracles we need: electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines — clean green energy, and a prosperous economy that will grow until the end of time!  We can simply shop our way to a better tomorrow.  Everything will be OK.  Think happy thoughts.  Hope will save the world.

Will electric cars will be so cool that the Arctic ice refreezes?  Will the glaciers rise and shine again?  Will green energy be so cool that the permafrost stops thawing, and the methane seeps go back to sleep?  Is learning how to walk as hard as they say?  To learn more about tipping points, check out Fred Pearce, Timothy Lenton, Katharyn Duffy, and Will Steffen. 

[Continued in Climate Crisis 04, Sample 58]

Wild Free and Happy Sample 51

 [Note: This is the fifty-first 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.

[Continued from sample 50]

Plan B

And now, dearest reader, it’s time for a brief message from your humble storyteller.  Hi!  I’m going nuts!  The plan here was to compress some super-significant trends of the last 10,000 years down to a lumpy chubby chapter.  It’s a journey that wanders from wild, free, and happy to the nightmarish whirlwinds of the twenty-first century.  It’s about unconditional surrender to those who control us, and to the beliefs we’re expected to profess.  It’s about wealth and obsession with status.  It’s about disconnection from nature, disintegration of traditional wild cultures, and a free-fall into self-destructive meaninglessness without a parachute.

I’m far more comfortable talking about logical and linear history — names, dates, places, descriptions, consequences.  But this chapter spends some time poking and squeezing a number of slippery and slithery mental inventions that smell like abstractions, mental fabrications — freedom, control, progress, success, etc.  I am not a philosopher.  Abstractions are not my forte, and I’ve burned up too many hours trying to envision a clever approach here.

I would love it if this rowdy mob of ideas would simply go to their assigned seats and, in an orderly manner, stand up and introduce themselves to you.  They aren’t interested.  They aren’t obedient robots.  So, Plan B is to flip through a series of snapshots, an exhibition of impressions, ideas, trends, and curiosities.  What follows is not logical and linear, it’s more random, intertwined, and meandering.  Let’s see what happens.  Do your best.  Here we go.

Wild Oneness

Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers, living in small nomadic groups.  Survival required cooperation, sharing, and the prompt resolution of conflicts.  They were egalitarian, everyone enjoyed equal worth — women, men, young, and old.  Nobody gave orders, or obeyed orders.  Nobody went hungry unless everyone did.  Folks who became infected with pride, and got big headed, were mocked and shunned until they recovered.  Healthy communities could not tolerate the disharmony generated by self-centered oddballs. 

Over the course of two million years, hominins fine-tuned the dance of small group survival in tropical grasslands.  This long and gentle path carefully guided the evolution of our bodies and minds.  Each band of hunter-gatherers operated with a conscious identity of “we.”  They thought like a group, not a bucketful of anxious, irritated, self-oriented individuals.

Similarly, the relationship between bands of hunter-gatherers and the surrounding family of life also consisted of a strong sense of “we,” of oneness.  Richard Nelson spent time with the Koyukon people of Alaska, who were the opposite of arrogant human supremacists.  They told him, “Every animal knows way more than you do,” which was true.  Wild critters perfectly understood the art of natural survival.  It was impossible for tropical primates to survive in Alaska without manmade technology that compensated for their numerous physiological limitations.

Nelson beautifully described their attitude of profound respect and reverence.  “Traditional Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes.  A person moving through nature — however wild, remote, even desolate the place may be — is never truly alone.  The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified.  They feel.  They can be offended.  And they must, at every moment, be treated with proper respect.  All things in nature have a special kind of life, something unknown to contemporary Euro-Americans, something powerful.”

Herds and Property

Among tropical wild people, personal property was minimal, usually no more than could be carried in both hands — spears, nets, pouches, feathers, baskets, bits of clothing, and so on.  Nobody coveted simple stuff like this.  It did not make people crazy, greedy, or homicidal.  There was no hoarding.  A hunter would get no benefit from owning 900 spears.  Spears were too quick and easy to replace.

For hunter-gatherers, status was not based on property, it was based on their special knowledge or abilities — healing, storytelling, tracking, hunting, conflict resolution, shamanic gifts, and so on.  Social status was about respect — not power, authority, competition, or control.  Everyone knew who was really good at certain stuff, and they received honor for their gifts.  This form of status was normal and healthy. 

Herding was a different game.  Managing livestock was a constant responsibility.  Animals had to be guided to water and fresh grass.  They had to be protected from predation.  Wild carnivores had to be exterminated at every opportunity.  Male animals not needed for breeding services were mellowed out via castration.  Some nomads regularly collected milk from lactating females.  Herders assisted when animals were birthing.  To avoid overgrazing, and to discourage losses from escape and predation, there were limits to herd size.  Thus, a relationship formed between herders and the group of critters they regularly oversaw.  Master and slave.  Controller and controlled. 

Hunting produced meat via skill and good luck.  Herding produced meat via totalitarian control.  The concept of personal property expanded to include valuable animal slaves, a source of nourishing life energy.  Each critter in my herd became a status symbol, and my social rank was based on the value of the status symbols I possessed.  You are what you own.  This was a new and radical shift in the human saga.  It inspired a sense of power and omnipotence, an amazingly brilliant smarty-pants, Superman.  For the first time in the human saga, Superman could have ongoing life and death control over tons of living meat.  Whoa! 

My ownership of an easily replaced spear or loincloth had trivial importance.  On the other hand, my ownership of 40 large herbivores was a matter of tremendous significance.  This set me apart from (and above) someone who merely owned two goats.  More is better could lead to notions that I am better.  Superman had no immunity to a highly contagious mania known as status fever, which reduces kind and decent people to obnoxiously ambitious nutjobs.

Status Fever

Over time, status fever spread to epidemic levels in some cultures, becoming a primary motivator for individuals and groups.  It led to the emergence of many powerful nomadic tribes and empires, motivated by swarms of screaming demons.  More is better, by any means necessary!  Grab as much as you can.

Today, of course, billions suffer from advanced stages of multi drug resistant status fever, and most of them are not livestock herders.  Countless things have now been reduced to silly status trinkets that delirious consumers find irresistible, including clothing, jewelry, shoes, cell phones, jumbo TVs, appliances.  It’s a never-ending lifelong treadmill of resource intensive acquisitions, upgraded at every opportunity — bigger houses, fancier cars, cooler boats, exotic vacations, and on and on.  More!  More!  More!

Our culture celebrates this status seeking mentality, and encourages youngsters to spend their lives striving to increase their status display to the highest degree possible.  We are expected to continuously strive to hoard more than our neighbors, more than our parents and siblings, and to own more stuff than we owned last year.  Obviously, this is a ridiculously unsustainable dead end way of life.  If we weren’t raised in consumer society, this game would appear to be utterly idiotic and insane (and it is).

Stan Rowe perceived that consumers are raging narcissists, spellbound by their own image, imprisoned in an introspective cage — too much time spent before the mirror.  Their culture has become disconnected from an ancient relationship with nature and the family of life.  Many devote their entire lives to acquiring and discarding unnecessary stuff, hoping to someday find inner peace.  They are trying to fill the vacuum created by their loss of wildness, freedom, and functional community.  It’s an ineffective attempt to suppress a gnawing hollowness in their lives.

William Cronon compared and contrasted Native American society with the culture of European colonists.  Indians enjoyed far greater affluence because they were in an intimate long-term relationship with their ecosystem, and the things they considered to be needs were minimal.  They didn’t need a luxurious post and beam trophy home with a stone fireplace and a four horse garage.  When you have few wants, the path to prosperity is short and easy.  Even the least industrious wanted nothing. 

Colonists, on the other hand, had an insatiable hunger for an infinite number of frivolous needs.  They had thick black smoke pouring out their ears from raging brain-fires of status fever.  Their culture had a demonic technology called money, which made it much easier to exchange commodities, make profits, accumulate durable wealth, and soar away to daffy mental orgasms of pride, achievement, success.

Back home in Europe, more than 1,500 years of forest clearing had eliminated large regions of ancient woodlands.  Wildlife was severely depleted.  Rivers formerly loaded with salmon had become sewage canals.  Cities were incubators of infectious diseases.  America blew their twisted little minds.  They could make so much <bleeping> money if they destroyed everything they could, as quickly as possible.  They imagined that the supply of valuable resources was beyond limitless.  Most of this astonishing wealth was free for the taking.  Whee!

Robin Wall Kimmerer noted that among the Anishinabe, howling winter winds are associated with the Windigo, a legendary monster with a heart of ice.  It is the primal survival instinct in that rises during the Hunger Moon, and then swerves out of control, from need to greed.  It eats until hunger fades, but doesn’t stop.  Windigo is a selfish spirit that doesn’t know when it has taken too much.  It is the insatiable hunger of the corporation, the greed freak, and the maniacal consumer.  It’s daunting to see that much of modern society has now become thoroughly entranced by the Windigo spirit.

Different cultures assigned different status value to different types of property.  For California Indians, gold was just an ordinary type of stone.  Raymond Dasmann noted that they would happily trade ordinary gold nuggets for glass beads.  Pale faced Americans, on the other hand, went absolutely delirious with status fever at the sight of gold.  There was nothing they would not do to stuff the shiny stones into their pouches.  They washed away many mountains with hydraulic mining.  The Gold Rush brought people from everywhere.  “The Indians were deliberately decimated.”  In 1765, there may have been 130,000 in California.  In 1850, maybe 85,000.  By 1852 just 31,000 were left.

John Tanner was born in Kentucky in 1780, and captured by Indians at age 9.  He spent the next 30 years living on the wild side.  In one of his yarns, he jabbered about his favorite horse.  It had been stolen from another tribe by an aggressive war party.  The successful raiders had returned with 180 horses.  “In this excursion they had been absent seven months.  They had fallen upon and destroyed one village, and taken one hundred and fifty scalps, besides prisoners.”

Sitting Bull was not the slightest bit fond of insane colonizers.  “The love of possessions is a disease with them.”  A century ago, Peter Fruechen mentioned a comment from a mystified Eskimo, “You white people don’t really know how to do without things and still be happy.”  On another occasion, an Eskimo snarled at Knud Rasmussen.  “You are so strange, you white men!  You collect things you will never require, and you cannot leave even the graves alone.”

An old hippy friend of mine, Hitch-hiker John, observed American society with a mix of horror and amazement.  “They are never distracted by ideas,” he said.  “Brainwashed people have no issues — they don't know how to think.  The sole focus of their lives is just one all-consuming question: how can I get what I want?”

Full Granaries

In the good old days, wild lands were like commons, freely open to hunters, foragers, and all other wildness.  Folks were welcome to wander, explore, and help themselves to whatever they fancied, because the wild buffet was free to all, usually.  In some locations, groups did establish limits that defined the boundaries of their hunting territory, and enforced them.  When these limits were respected, there was less irritation that could lead to hurt feelings, conflict, and injuries.

Like herders, farmers were also possessed by a burning desire for ownership, and the status it conveyed.  They performed backbreaking labor to reduce wild forests and grasslands to cropland and pasture, land that was no longer freely open to one and all (No Trespassing!).  The transformation from wild to private typically involved erasing much of the healthy wild ecosystem, and replacing it with a highly controlled unsustainable manmade soil mining operation. 

Paul Shepard noted that the concept of controlling pests, animals, plants, and predators was relatively new.  “If the farmer can destroy his competitors, be they beetles, fungi, birds, or deer, and the pastoralist-rancher can kill lions and wolves, they will be inclined to do so.  Wild things become adversaries; they take up space, sunlight, or water that the farmer can use for his crops, or they invade the crops, eating, trampling, or infecting them with disease.”  Nature became an opponent, something to conquer and subdue.  This land is my land.  My harvest is stored in my granary.  My livestock are grazing on my pasture.

Raiders and Defenders

Wild folks let wild meat critters run free and enjoy their happy lives.  Wild game didn’t need to be provided with food, water, protective shelter, and security guards.  There was no need to cut, dry, and store hay.  When meat was needed, hunters went to work.  Similarly, wild food-producing plants were allowed to grow however they wished.  There was no need to engage in tedious backbreaking work. 

In essence, the simple hunter-gatherer way of life was about going out and getting what you needed, when you needed it, and leaving the rest alone.  All they needed was enough, and nothing more.  In the days before status fever epidemics swept through their homeland, they were genuine, good old-fashioned conservatives.  Leave the world in no worse shape than the day you were born (and better, if possible).

Big Mama Nature had zero interest in regularly serving lavish all you can eat banquets for wild humans.  As with all other critters, it was their responsibility to invest modest amounts of time and effort every week, to acquire their nutrients.  This approach could have a future.  The ecosystem did not need to be obliterated.

Compared to tropical regions, living in colder lands was more challenging.  There were lean periods every year, so food preservation and storage increased the odds for survival.  As discussed earlier, the domestication of plants (farming) and animals (herding) was essentially developed and intensified north of the tropics.  Domestication encouraged deforestation, soil erosion, overgrazing, wildlife destruction, population growth, tension, conflict, infectious disease, and so on.

Both farmers and herders invested immense amounts of time and effort accumulating stashes of essential life energy — edible nutrients made by domesticated plants and animals.  In a sense, their stashes were like treasure chests, collections of precious valuables.  The emergence of these new and unusual treasure chests triggered a huge turning point in the tropical primate saga.  On one dark and stormy night, a demon whispered an evil idea into the ear of a demented nutjob: stealing treasure chests required far less effort than creating them.  Oh my goodness!  Why didn’t I think of that?

Laborious drudgery was for scroungers, dolts, and slaves.  Clever exploitation trumps hard work.  A Berber proverb proclaimed, “Raiding is our agriculture.”  So, raiding became a respectable and manly profession.  Its frequent success created a need for the treasure makers to invent the warrior profession, in order to protect their stored wealth.  The raiding game led to centuries of conflict, which spilled rivers of blood.  It persists to this day, as a furious unlimited full-scale war on the family of life.

Sedentary communities were chained to a location.  They could not rapidly grab their treasure and flee.  So, they had to protect their towns and villages with palisades, walls, fortresses, moats.  Walled cities protected vast amounts of wealth.  Raiders kept inventing new and improved ways of overcoming physical barriers and exterminating city defenders.  At the same time, cities tirelessly invented new and better ways of protecting themselves and exterminating raiders.  Alfred Crosby wrote a fascinating book about the endless spiraling arms race in deadly technology, from thrown stones a hydrogen bombs.

Nomadic pastoralists owned treasure chests that were highly mobile — herds of precious four-legged food lockers.  Their nutritious flesh did not spoil whilst they remained alive, it increased — and they produced offspring too.  Many raids also acquired slaves, two-legged, muscle-powered busybodies that generously provided baby slaves.  Slaves and livestock were valuable commodities that could be sold to agrarian states, in exchange for city made goods.

The raiders’ highly mobile way of life gave them a strategic advantage over the immobile city dwellers, whose access to food could be cut off by an extended siege (when dogs became “siege mutton”), while flaming arrows landed on their wooden roofs, and corpses of plague victims were hurled in via catapult.  Barbarian hordes, like the Mongols, loved raiding farm country, because cities were fat, juicy sitting ducks.  It was often very easy to swipe the fruits of years of sweat and toil via a lightning raid.

James Scott noted that, as long as cities were weakly defended, barbarians could enjoy a far better life than farmers.  Mongols perceived agrarian communities to be ra’aya (herds) — irresistible get-rich-quick opportunities for merciless, bloodthirsty, mobs of looters.  Mounted on speedy horses, hundreds of nomads could suddenly appear out of nowhere, thunder into town without a polite invitation, and enjoy an exciting day of slaughter, rape, pillaging, and demolition. 

Horses played a starring role here.  For many thousands of years, they were simply wild game, a source of meat and hides.  Following domestication, they were also used as beasts of burden, carrying loads, and pulling them.  Eventually, folks developed saddles, stirrups, and bridles, which transformed horses into awesomely powerful high velocity assault missiles. 

This revolutionary innovation provided humans with mind-blowing godlike powers.  For two million years, hominins had moved across the land by foot, slower than an elderly squirrel.  Now, an astonishing new era had begun, and its destination was not love, peace, and happiness.  Mounted warriors turbocharged civilization’s expansion.  Cavalry enabled mass culture, mass control, and mass murder.

Status fever is an equal opportunity pathology.  Some cities began contemplating other cities in the region, calculating the amount of treasure they controlled, and the weaknesses in their defenses.  Naturally, strong cities overwhelmed weaker cities, and empires metastasized.  Conquering neighbors was an exciting way to fill treasure chests, and increase their herds of livestock, warriors, serfs, women, and slaves. 

Similarly, nomads were not honorable gentlemen having the highest moral principles.  It was not beneath their dignity to attack, kill, and rob other pastoralists, if they were believed to possess interesting treasure.  There was no reason why strangers should remain the owners of livestock that could become my property with a modest investment of belligerence and terrorism.  Social status was very important to testosterone powered egos, and macho lads took every opportunity for elevating it.

Throughout the centuries nomads have enjoyed being parasites on hard working farmers.  In A.D. 98, the Roman historian Tacitus said this about the tribal Germans: “They will much easier be persuaded to attack and reap wounds from an enemy, than to till the ground and wait the produce.  They consider it as an indication of effeminacy and want of courage to gain by the sweat of the brow, what they may acquire at the price of their blood.”

Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish historian, was born around A.D. 1150, and had more of a ringside seat at the bloody horror show.  “Now the warriors, who were always pillaging the neighborhood, used often to commit great slaughters.  Plundering houses, cutting down cattle, sacking everything, making great hauls of booty, rifling houses, then burning them, massacring male and female promiscuously — these, and not honest dealings, were their occupations.”  War dogs were popular too.  “Biorn had also a dog of extraordinary fierceness, a terribly vicious brute, dangerous for people to live with, which had often singly destroyed twelve men.”

Saxo also mentioned berserkers (bear shirts), warriors who wore bear skins into battle, and became ferociously violent, completely out of control, and fought in a trance-like wild fury.  Ralph Metzner called it a holy rage that they could not turn off.  They killed everyone in sight, even friends.  In Ireland, Cu Chulainn was so overheated with battle rage that a group of naked women was sent out to calm him. He was put in vats of cold water, which boiled and evaporated.

Giraldus Cambrensis (Jerry of Wales) visited Ireland, and wrote a report in A.D. 1185, when the rivers were full of salmon, the rainforest was full of wolves and boars, and indigenous chiefdoms were constantly fighting amongst themselves.  England’s King Henry was beginning the process of conquering Ireland.  The Irish were low-tech guerilla warriors, skilled at hit and run ambushes.  They used slings to hurl stones with skull-splitting accuracy.  They had spears, javelins, and axes.  The English were state-of-the-art warriors, having chain mail, armor, archers, and deadly swords.  For example, “He who had seen how John de Courcy wielded his sword, with one stroke lopping off heads, and with another arms, must needs have commended him for a most valiant soldier.”

Paul Henri Mallet wrote about the customs of pagan Scandinavia.  The scribes who penned the ancient sagas were associated with the nobility who were often highly engaged in the raiding industry.  Sagas devoted much attention to documenting the triumphs and defeats of warriors and warfare.  Mallet wrote one sentence that hit the nail on the head, “The weak had no right to what they could not defend.” 

In that culture, war was their source of honor, riches, and security.  Courage was the highest virtue, death was not feared.  The honorable way to die was violently, weapon in hand, ideally laughing with their final breath.  This was rewarded by a premier afterlife in Valhalla, where they would spend eternity in bloody battle.  Every day, they would delight in cutting each other to pieces, and then magically recover, mount their horses, and ride back to the hall of Odin for a night of feasting and oblivion drinking. Yippee!

The shameful way to die was bed death.  Folks who died of disease or old age were sent to a low class afterlife in Niflheim.  To avoid this fate, Mallet wrote, warriors would plunge off an ancestral cliff (ättestup) to a violent death, in order to end their lives honorably.  Those too weak to jump were sent to Valhalla by a caring friend smashing their skull with an ancestral club (ätteklubbor).  Stafva Hall in Sweden had annual festivals, with singing and dancing, after which the wobbly geezers, beyond their expiration dates, leaped into the lake far below.

With every century that followed, raiding continued spreading into new regions around the world, grabbing as much treasure as possible, often utilizing staggering amounts of destructive force.  The twentieth century saw tremendous advances in fossil-powered mechanized warfare, on land, on sea, and in the skies above.  Large cities could be reduced to ash trays with the push of a button.

Today, technological innovation has enabled many more options for raiders, few of which require “coming to grips” with their opponent, and getting splattered with their blood, sweat, and spit.  Millions of dollars can now be robbed with a mouse click, from a cozy cubicle in nowhere land.  We are living in the Golden Age of status fever.  In many communities, the infection rate among adults approaches 100 percent.  “More” is the god word of modern society.  Imagine what life would be like if humankind had remained wild and free.

Big Mama Nature is not amused.  She will still be standing — scarred and wounded but defiant — when the lights go out, and industrial civilization runs out of treasure, and finally slips beneath the waves.  Let the healing begin.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 50

 

[Note: This is the fiftieth 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.

PATHWAY TO DOMINATION

As discussed earlier, humans originated on the tropical savannahs of east Africa.  For most of the human saga, we were strong, healthy, nearly naked tropical critters with beautiful brown skin and curly hair.  In the tropics, winters were not cold, and food was available year round, so there was no need to preserve and store food.  There was no need to invent technology for staying warm, like protective clothing and shelter.

Because they were nomads, hoarding personal belongings would have made no sense.  Hauling stuff across roadless wilderness was hard work.  Because they lived simply, they didn’t need much stuff.  Instead, their survival largely depended on the knowledge stored in the glop between their ears.  For them, the keys to survival included cooperation and sharing, working well together.  Hunter-gatherers were egalitarian, everyone was equal.  Nobody gave orders, or took them.  No one went hungry unless everyone did.

The berry patch was freely open to all.  If a wandering forager picked some berries, they were hers to share and eat.  If I killed a kudu, the event was a perfectly normal and natural, like the sun rising at dawn.  Nobody owned the animal, no one got upset.  It would be carried back to camp, shared with the band, making everyone happy.  All was good.  If a lion ate my brother, nobody exploded with rage.  Lions ate many brothers and sisters, because they were good to eat.  We all feed each other.

In the tropics, some sort of food was generally available year round.  From week to week, folks knew the prime time for various munchies, and where to find them.  They regularly visited the wild buffet, and took what they needed from the daily specials.  Long term food storage was unnecessary and absurd. 

Big Mama Nature devoted a couple million years to fine tuning the evolution of tropical primates for survival in tropical climates, our home sweet home, where we belonged.  Compared to today, our ancient ancestors would seem to have been simple, stable, sane, and sustainable.  They were not two-legged category 5 hurricanes, like modern consumers.  Things were relatively cool for a very long time (sort of).  It wasn’t until much later that some sorcerers discovered the Fountain of Progress, guzzled its hallucinogenic fluids, and started smashing things.

Snow Country Colonization

As discussed earlier, maybe 100,000 years ago, some intrepid pioneers began migrating from Africa into Asia.  They wandered eastward through tropical lands, eventually reaching Australia.  The pioneers had a great time, and found many wonderful things to eat.  Quite a bit later, some of them wandered northward, into regions having a temperate climate, snow country. 

In portions of northern Eurasia, they discovered vast steppe and prairie grasslands that spanned from central Europe, east to the Pacific coast.  Temperate grasslands were ideal habitat for nurturing large herds of large herbivores, the food most cherished by hunter-gatherers.  It was as if they had stumbled into an unimaginable Serengeti-like heaven of limitless meat.  Joy!

Oddly, this was a bit like polar bears migrating into steaming hot Congo rainforests.  The notion of tropical primates colonizing snow country was equally silly.  The colonists were not born with fur coats.  They were not capable of hibernation.  They were too big to easily travel across deep snow, or thin ice.  Food was scarce during the winter months.  They knew little if anything about food preservation and long-term food storage.  But they were spellbound by the availability of so much meat!  Might there be some way that they could possibly make a home in this land?

The colonists proceeded to improve their skills at hunting, trapping, and surviving the long and frigid winters.  Over time, they got a bit too skilled.  As generations passed, the abundance of game gradually diminished.  Some species blinked out forever.  By and by, folks began fooling around with horticulture and herding, setting the stage for the dawn of plant and animal domestication.

I’ve already pointed out the obvious fact that the domestication of plants and animals was a sharp change of direction in the human saga.  It forced us into the express lane to a turbulent future.  I must emphasize that it’s also important to understand that the mere fact that hunter-gatherers successfully colonized snow country — thousands of years before domestication — was itself a crucial turning point, a necessary prerequisite.  Domestication originated in regions having a temperate climate, as did the first civilizations.  Colonization unlocked the gate to dangerous realms.

Energy Storage and Risks

In snow country, hunters faced more challenges than their ancestors had in Africa.  Back in the tropics there was no frigid season, so no need for the long-term storage of food energy.  If hyenas snatched the kudu you just killed, you may have lost one day’s effort, or less.  In snow country, the two options were store energy or starve.  Many weeks of hard work were invested in creating their winter food stash, lots of eggs in few baskets.  On any day, it could be raided by rodents, wolves, dogs, bears, or other hungry visitors.  A sudden hot spell could melt frozen meat and spoil it.

Of course, compared to snow country hunters, the farmers and herders faced more and bigger challenges.  From planting to harvest, a farmer’s crops were vulnerable to many potential risks (weather, fire, insects, disease, deer, bunnies, etc.).  Once the harvest was brought in, the granary was loaded with valuable energy for future use, something like a tank of oil.  It was a treasure chest that stored the concentrated results of countless hours of hard work — like a crisp new $100 bill, not a mere handful of pennies.  Carefully stored energy could be an irresistible temptation to folks who weren’t your best buddies. 

Likewise, herders invested loads of time and effort in creating impressive treasure chests of living flesh.  Herding was not risk free.  Late at night, your livestock could be quickly driven away by thieves.  Wild predators could pick them off.  During a long drought, or when anthrax or rinderpest came to visit, the herds in a region could be obliterated.  At any time, you could lose the stored treasure of a year’s hard work, or more.  Nothing was insured.

Livestock herds were overseen by masters who firmly controlled their movements, protected them from predators and raiders, and blocked their escape attempts.  Lifelong enslavement made it easy for masters to acquire their meat, milk, blood, hides, and wool whenever needed.  Imagine spending your entire life subservient to a dominator who eventually intended to cut your throat, strip off your hide, and eat you (and your kids). 

In snow country, when hunters, farmers, or herders enjoyed a lucky streak, it could lead to population growth, which could lead to increased tension and conflict.  More folks expected a piece of the pie, and some got wee slices.  Treasure chests, of course, have a long tradition of inspiring the belligerent behavior of aggressive parasites.  One successful day of raiding could snatch the rewards of months or years of toil, an outstanding profit.  Very clever!

More is Better

The colonization of snow country, and the necessity of food storage, inspired a new meme: more is better.  Having adequate energy storage was mandatory, but having even more was better still.  When good luck disappeared, it could be a blessed life saver. 

Folks painfully understood when they were dangerously hungry.  They also understood when life was kind to them.  Oddly, many humans seem to have a hard time perceiving the border line between enough and way too much.  In their brains, the idiot light that indicated [ENOUGH] never came on.  More was always better.  Too much was impossible.  Why do wobbly wrinkly 85 year old gits, with a billion dollars stashed away, still put on a suit and tie every morning and strive to hoard even more?

Herds of livestock were self-propelled warehouses of living meat that didn’t spoil.  Provided with grass and water, their bodies added more meat every month.  So, more is better was an intoxicating idea, until the land was stripped of vegetation, and herders experienced the painful revenge of merciless limits.  Farmers could farm like crazy, year after year, until their topsoil was drained of nutrients or ran away.  Limits spoil rowdy parties.

Of course, for our wild ancestors who remained in the tropics, the more is better concept was absolute nonsense.  It was impossible for nomadic folks to make use of more than enough (too much = waste).  They couldn’t haul surplus with them, and in the hot climate, it would spoil, or attract pests and scavengers.  It wasn’t until much later, when domesticated crops and livestock were imported into Africa, that tropical folks began suffering from serious more is better deliriums.  Prior to this, enough was enough, and they all lived happily ever after.

Control Freaks

Big Mama Nature is fully aware that unusual population outbursts in any species can destabilize healthy ecosystems.  She generally does what’s needed to restore balance.  The current human outburst has become a spectacularly destructive living asteroid.  It’s now traveling at maximum velocity toward an invincible fortress of merciless limits that will take great delight in splattering the juggernaut.  There will once again be peace on Earth (and a staggering mess).

Domestication triggered a shock wave in the human saga.  It radically altered the traditional core relationship between humans and the rest of the ecosystem.  For maybe two million years, hominins were participants in a family of life that joyfully danced to the ecstatic music of freedom.  Then, domestication gave birth to a monster child, a new and obscene verb named control.  Devilish anti-freedom.  The toxic juju of control has infected the relationship, rendering it dysfunctional and violently abusive.

During the hunter-gatherer era, folks foraged for wild plant foods, and took what they needed.  This wasn’t a labor intensive control-oriented process of clearing, tilling, planting, weeding, etc.  The shift to agriculture transformed healthy sustainable wild landscapes into unsustainable radically simplified manmade food production systems.  Wild and free are the opposite of controlled.

Hunting was the pursuit of wild game, which required a combination of skill and random chance.  Wild game is intelligent, alert, and driven by a powerful desire to avoid predators.  Being alive is precious.  Wild game is out of control.  They are not passive dimwitted sheep in the pasture, constantly overseen by shepherds and dogs.  Herding is the process of controlling enslaved animals, for every minute of their lives.  When the herder needs meat, he selects which animal dies.  Escape is impossible.

Agriculture was a sedentary enterprise, the farmer was firmly bound to a specific piece of land.  When danger approached, the granary treasure chest could not be easily moved to a safe place, because it was not self-propelled, like livestock.  Depending on the threat, a farmer could defend it (and maybe die), or abandon it (and maybe starve).  High vulnerability, and a desire to survive, inspired farmers to reside in villages, and benefit from mutual defense.  Over time, as threats increased, villages became walled and fortified cities.  Over time, a warrior class emerged, to molest incoming attackers, and to attack and rob vulnerable outsiders.

Many farmers didn’t have the time, space, or desire to keep much livestock, but herders did.  Herders who had access to extensive open grasslands could pursue a very different way of life, and they did.  Indeed, the mindset of pastoralism eventually achieved great power.  It provided the foundation for the mindset of the world as we know it (stay tuned, more later).

Mother Africa Infected

Lyall Watson wrote a fascinating biography of Adrian Boshier (1939-1978), a young British man who went to South Africa and walked a path of power.  During his first six years in Africa, the lad spent most of his time in the bush, learning the ways of the land, rewilding.  He would head off into wild country with nothing but a pocketknife and a bag of salt (for trading), and live off the land for as long as he wanted. 

Boshier became highly skilled at catching and befriending dangerous snakes.  Walking into a village wrapped up in a 14-foot python (4.2 m), he terrified the natives, giving birth to his reputation as a powerful magician.  He would catch an eight-foot cobra, milk its venom, and drink it before a gasping wide-eyed crowd. 

Prehistoric cave painting in Europe gets a lot of attention.  African cave art gets less.  Boshier visited many caves, because the rock art in them had immense spirit power.  One day, he sat in a cave in Makgabeng, and had a chilling experience when his eyes focused on a horrific heartbreaking image.  The artists were likely San people, the original residents.

Mother Africa is where the human saga began, an evolutionary adventure spanning back maybe two million years, when early hominins came down from the trees.  There’s a good chance that the San people are the ancestors of most or all humans alive today.  Around 100,000 years ago, some Africans began migrating into the Eurasian landmass, where they eventually learned how to survive in a temperate climate, and then much later conjured plant and animal domestication into existence.

The images that had filled Boshier with horror were portraits of fat-tailed sheep, critters domesticated in the Middle East.  Sheep were not indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa.  They were brought to Africa by folks who were returning to Mother Africa, their ancestral homeland, with some new and creepy habits.  Some say the Bantus brought the sheep, others suspect the Khoi (Hottentots).  Whoever brought them, they were symbols of a dark transition.  The family of life in Africa was, for the first time ever, no longer entirely wild and free.  Hideous manmade freak show critters had arrived, along with a freak show culture of control and domination.  Trouble ahead.

Watson lamented, “The introduction of a pastoral economy, starting perhaps three or four thousand years ago, seems to have marked the beginning of a relentless destruction, now almost complete, of the earliest way of human life.  It was the end of a society that had discovered how to live in harmony with — rather than at the expense of — nature.”

 [Continued in sample #51]