God is Red



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YouTube offers a number of Deloria videos.

A History of the Swedish People



Vilhelm Moberg was born in 1898, in a remote village where remnants of the peasant way of life persisted.  He wrote A History of the Swedish People, which spanned two volumes: (1) before the Renaissance, and (2) after.  Moberg’s writing has been translated into 20 languages, and Swedes have bought six million copies of his books.  Most histories focus on the big shots, the decision makers, the conquerors, the villains.  His work focuses on the nameless people that historians disregard: the common folks, the salt of the Earth.  I like that.

In this spirit, chapter one is a discussion of slavery, which existed for several thousand years.  Bondsmen (slaves) have been invisible in Swedish history, because textbooks are obligated to focus on the patriotic glories, and step around the embarrassing dreck.  Bondsmen could be bought, sold, given way, or killed.  Throughout his life, Moberg was devoted to the notion of freedom.  He estimated that in the eleventh century, twenty percent of the population was bondsmen.  The rest of the book is devoted to the commoners who were freeborn, the rugged peasantry who worked hard to survive in the forests of Sweden, and were the majority of the population.

In most other European nations, peasants were not free.  They suffered for centuries under the heavy fist of feudalism.  They inhabited lands crisscrossed with roads, which enabled the nobility to snatch the fruits of their toil and keep them under control.  The main exceptions were Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland, where the peasants escaped serfdom.  The Swiss, surrounded by powerful enemies, were protected by the Alps.  The Norse and Swedes were protected by their vast rugged forests.  As long as the forests survived and remained roadless, the people were much safer.

In several European languages, the words for “road” and “raid” evolved from a common root.  Romans built many roads for the expansion and management of their empire.  Later, those same roads made it easier for scruffy outsiders to rubbish their empire and loot their booty.  In Roman times, the wild German tribes were also fiercely warlike, but their goal was not conquest and expansion.  Their goal was to keep outsiders out, homeland security.  Caesar noted, “It is the greatest pride of the Germanic tribes to surround themselves with broad desolate frontier regions.”  Frontier forests were buffer zones that were kept untilled and uninhabited.

In the dense roadless forests of Sweden, invaders soon became perfectly lost.  It was terrifying.  Behind any bush might be a man with a crossbow.  The forest people knew every rock, hill, and cranny in the woods.  They could pick the ideal time and place to strike.  When attack was unwise, they vanished and waited patiently for fresh opportunities.

Over the centuries, Swedes adapted well to forest life.  In addition to fishing, foraging, and hunting, they farmed on a small scale.  Livestock was their primary resource, providing them with meat, milk, butter, cheese, hides, and wool.  The forest was common land owned by no one.  A Swedish proverb declares, “The forest grows as well for the poor as for the rich.”  It was the poor man’s garden.  Forest dwellers often lived in isolation, with few neighbors to rely on.

Moberg devoted an entire chapter to his love for the forest wonderland in which he grew up.  In his strict rural Lutheran village, good and bad were sharply defined.  Where others could see him, little Vilhelm had to behave properly, to avoid criticism.  In the forest, he was free.  He could hide where no one would see him, and behave any way he liked.  He was happier as a child in the forest than in any other place in his life.

In pagan times there were festivals in which stallions, bulls, billy-goats, cocks, and humans were sacrificed to the gods.  One observer recorded details about the annual ceremony at Uppsala.  Next to the temple was a sacred grove, where the corpses of up to 200 sacrificed men and beasts hung from the trees.  The sacrificial humans included criminals, infirm old men, foreigners, bondsmen, and prisoners.

The Vikings were possessed with an insatiable hunger for the valuables belonging to others.  They enjoyed cruising along coasts and rivers and raiding Christian towns and villages — peaceful settlements with which they had no disputes.  Vikings were extraordinarily cruel and inhuman, and they fought with pure fury.  Vikings ravaged Europe from 800 to 1050.

Sweden’s conversion to Christianity was slow and bloody.  The Asa people (pagans) were open minded, and they worshipped many gods and goddesses.  Deities that brought good harvests, weather, and health were honored, and bummer gods were tossed on the compost pile.  When foreign missionaries suggested worshipping a new one, they were willing to give him a try.  The pagans were open minded, but the missionaries were not.  Naturally, the Swedes were not delighted to be told that all their ancient beliefs were wrong and evil.  Commonly, after the missionaries had moved on to convert others, the newly baptized folks returned to the faith of their ancestors.

It took 300 years to convert the small population of Swedes.  In 1122, Småland was last region to be converted.  The chronicle reads: “King Sigurd set his course for a trading city called Kalmar, which he laid waste, and thereafter ravaged Småland, exacting from the Smålanders a tribute of fifteen hundred beasts; and the Smålanders accepted Christianity.”  This slaughter was called the Kalmar Raid.  Sigurd returned to Norway laden with loot.  In some regions, Swedes continued to secretly practice pagan rituals into the seventeenth century.

Later, Christian Swedes decided to teach the Finns about the Prince of Peace.  King Erik offered the Finns peace on condition they let themselves be baptized and adopt the Christian faith, but they turned down his offer.  So the Finns were massacred.  “After the struggle was over the king walked about the battlefield among the masses of the fallen heathen and was so deeply moved by the sight of their corpses that he wept.”

Moberg had deep appreciation for the 5,000-year era of Swedish peasants, which was approaching extinction by 1900, displaced by the hideous rise of industrialism and urbanization.  Ancient farms and villages were being abandoned, returning to forest.  Growing numbers of weird and spooky human-like beings, known as Consumers, were wandering into peasant country from Stockholm, and other insane asylums.

Rural peasants were the last full-blooded individualists; each one was personally unique, warts and all.  They were highly attuned to the ecosystem that had been their ancestors’ home for centuries, and they had little contact with outsiders, or their peculiar ideas.  The Consumers were rootless tumbleweeds who dressed alike, smelled alike, thought alike, and lived alike — the standardized outputs of a mass culture.

Peasants spent a lot of time with each other, gathered around the hearth fire.  Folks did handiwork — spinning, weaving, carving, and so on.  Elders shared stories and memories.  The daily lives of peasants were spent in intimate contact with the magic, mystery, and beauty of wild nature, which is essential for wellbeing.  Consumers would suffer panic attacks if forced to live in a medieval cottage — no lights, TV, radio, internet, books, running water, toilet.  Here’s Moberg’s punch line: “Instead of the things they lacked, medieval people had others, which we have lost.”  They enjoyed good old fashioned community.

The book goes on to discuss many other topics.  It interested me because my mother’s family has Norwegian roots.  The Norse and Swedes are closely related.  I’ve been reluctant to review this book, because it’s not about ecological sustainability.  But it does discuss subjects that are both interesting, and rarely mentioned.  So, I turned to a number of other sources to look for the missing eco-info.

Like the wild Irish, British, and Germanic tribes, Scandinavians shifted from hunting, fishing, and foraging, moving toward small scale pastoralism and farming in forest clearings.  This encouraged conflicts with wild critters, who were thrilled to feast on the delicious offerings of rye, oats, calves, poultry, sheep, and so on.  Nature became an enemy.  The peasant lads fetched their war paint.

By 1870, wild boars, aurochs (wild cattle), and beavers were extinct in Sweden, and red deer and moose were getting close.  By the mid-1900s, the wolf population was zero.  Later, some beavers (from Canada), boars, and wolves were reintroduced, or wandered in from elsewhere.  To this day, the eternal peasant’s war on wolves continues in Sweden, Norway, and Finland — three of the most “eco-progressive” societies in Christendom.

Oddest of all, in Moberg’s celebration of the common folk of Sweden, he made no mention of the Sami people, the wild hunter-gatherers who have been harshly abused and exploited by the civilized racist settlers for several centuries.  New research is discovering that the Sami people inhabited large portions of Scandinavia long before the Nordic (Germanic) pastoralists arrived.  Sami lived as far south as Hadeland in Norway, not far from Oslo, one of my ancestral homelands.

Genetic data has linked the modern Sami to the first humans who wandered into Scandinavia more than 10,000 years ago.  They have been in Sweden much longer than the Swedes.  The Sami homeland is known as Sápmi, and it spans large areas of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.  Sami have another name, Lapp, which some do not like.

Moberg, Vilhelm, A History of the Swedish People, Pantheon Books, New York, 1973.

To learn more about Sami and reindeer, four nice essays are [HERE]

Lapps and Labyrinths, an excellent 2010 book on the Sami, by archaeologist Noel Broadbent, can be purchased from Amazon ($$$), or downloaded free [HERE]

 

Tikopia



Tikopia (tik-o-PEE-a) is a wee island in the Pacific, quite close to the middle of nowhere, the remains of an ancient volcano.  Its area is 1.8 square miles (4.6 km²), much of it steep rugged hillside.  The closest neighbors live on Anuta, 85 miles away (137 km), a long and dangerous voyage in a dugout canoe.  Tiny Tikopia is eleven times larger than Anuta. 

Humans arrived in Tikopia maybe 3,000 years ago, and brought along pigs, dogs, fowl, rats, and the seeds of Polynesian foods.  For a while, folks ate well, dining on the abundant birds, fish, and shellfish.  As abundance faded, slash and burn agriculture gained momentum.  Deforestation crept up the slopes, and eroded soils washed down, accumulating near the shore.  Efforts were made to stabilize and expand the shoreline.  As a result, Tikopia’s land area is now 40 percent larger, and the reef area is 41 percent smaller.  There is much more land suitable for raising food.

The crater of Tikopia’s volcano used to be a saltwater bay linked to the sea, home to plentiful fish and shellfish.  Soil deposits have now blocked the connection to the sea, turning the bay into a lake.  This sharply reduced the marine life that formerly thrived in the bay.  The villages that depended on this food were screwed.  Around 1700, they exterminated a village having fertile land.  Another village fled in fear, paddling into the ocean, almost certainly drowning.  Conflict is hunger’s shadow.

The lake water is too salty to drink, as is the ocean.  Drinking water is obtained from springs flowing out of the hillsides, coming from sources above the villages and latrines.  Ashes, excrement, and kitchen wastes are used to return nutrients to the gardens and orchards.

Over time, folks planted more food-producing trees.  Eventually, they developed a clever three-story system of arboriculture, mixing tall, medium, and short tree species.  These included bananas, papaya, coconuts, sago, chestnuts, and almonds.  On the ground, they grew root crops, like taro, sweet potatoes, yams, and manioc.  This system maximized food production, reduced erosion, enriched the soil, was less vulnerable to cyclone damage, and did not require endless toil.  Pigs swiped too much human food, and were eliminated before 1800, as were the dogs.

Nature kept life interesting by sending drought years and frequent cyclones.  These could hammer the food supply.  Because Tikopia was so far from anywhere, importing food from elsewhere was not an option.  Folks preserved calories for famine years in two ways.  (1) They dug pits and fermented taro, breadfruit, and manioc into glop called masi, which could be stored for several years.  (2) The pith of the sago palm was dried and ground into storable flour.

Each house was assigned specific garden plots and orchards that comprised their primary source of nutrition.  If you ran short, you starved.  Carrying capacity expanded and declined in synch with food production.  When conditions got tight, older males in the household would set limits on reproduction.  The families complied, because everyone understood the painful consequences of having too many mouths to feed.

Because it encouraged social stability, population management was intelligent and ethical.  It was done in several ways.  Junior members of the family might be expected to remain bachelors or spinsters.  Everyone practiced coitus interruptus.  Efforts were made to induce miscarriages to end unwanted pregnancies.  Newborns were promptly suffocated.  It was usually OK to have two sons, but subsequent male offspring were strangled, to avoid conflicts over land inheritance.  Unmarried males sometimes jumped into a canoe and never returned.  Others swam out into the open sea and fed the sharks.  When all options failed, it was time to fetch clubs and go on the warpath.

I invite you to watch The Island of Tikopia, a pleasant 53-minute video.  It shows us cool people living in a tropical paradise.  Tikopia is blessed by being tiny, isolated, unsuitable for industrial agriculture, and having no valuable resources.  Hence, they have not been obliterated by modernity.  They will never suffer from automobiles or cell phones.  Even today, Tikopians live in functional communities, and enjoy an easygoing way of life that is unimaginable to frantic consumers thrashing through life in Crazyland.

The video does not focus on how contact with civilization has impacted their society.  On a different island, the Sentineli welcome all visitors with a shower of arrows.  They have learned from painful experience that outsiders can be bad juju.  Tikopians had no fear of visitors, because anyone who paddled in was a mellow islander like themselves.  Whites were different; following a visit in 1828, a quarter of the population died from disease.

Missionaries began to wash ashore in 1857, occasionally visiting the island.  Within 50 years, they had made a few converts.  Half were baptized by 1928, and by 1955, most were nominally Christian.  Chiefs who agreed to be baptized were rewarded with metal axes, knives, adzes, and other amazing stuff.  Heathens who preferred the ancient path were rewarded with self-righteous intolerance.

More destructive than dysentery, pneumonia, measles, and influenza was the deliberate introduction of European morality.  Much of the traditional culture managed to survive, but Christians were especially uptight about sex, family planning, and which deity to worship.  Naturally, the stern prohibition of premarital sex was disregarded by almost all youths, including horny young Christians.

Naturally, the mission’s opposition to population control had negative results.  Population soared 37 percent from 1,288 in 1928 (too many), to 1,753 in 1952 (way too many) — just in time for a devastating cyclone, and a bloody plunge into helter-skelter.  This drove anthropologist Raymond Firth crazy.  Christian culture was obsessed with compulsory conformity, but disinterested in the predictable results.  Tikopians had evolved a remarkably competent culture that adapted to the ecosystem and mindfully lived within limits.  Leave it alone, he shouted.

Anyone who has studied European history knows that this irrational morality of unrestrained growth has, over the centuries, led to the death of hundreds of millions via wars, famines, and epidemics.  Is this truly more ethical than intelligent family planning?  The principles of carrying capacity and overshoot apply to both tiny islands and the entire planet, as we are now in the process of discovering.

When the first humans arrived in Tikopia, there were no mammals.  There were no wild herbivores to freeload on their food supply.  The only man-eating predators were sharks, which swam outside the reefs.  In the absence of large predators, humans were the dominant animal.  There were no lions, jaguars, or hyenas to provide essential population control services.  Thus, a culture of mindful restraint was the preferred path to sustainability.

Today, Tikopia is one of 900+ islands in the nation of Solomon Islands, which is 95 percent Christian.  The Tikopian population crisis has been addressed by sending folks to establish colonies on other islands — islands that have been depopulated via exposure to the diseases of civilization.  Other Tikopians enjoy rewarding careers in manual labor at coconut plantations on larger islands.  How much longer can the consequences of European morality be sidestepped?  Sea levels are rising, cyclones are intensifying, and low-lying islands in the Solomons are vanishing.  Good luck islanders!

Firth, Raymond, We, The Tikopia, American Book Company, New York, 1936.

Firth, Raymond, Tikopia Ritual and Belief, Beacon Press, Boston, 1967.

Kirch, Patrick Vinton and Douglas E. Yen, Tikopia — The Prehistory and Ecology of a Polynesian Outlier, Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu, 1982.

Wild (republished as Savage Grace)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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