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 29

[Note: This is the twenty-ninth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 202 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Goats

Cattle and sheep cannot thrive on depleted grazing land, but goats are especially capable of being hardcore survivalists.  They can live on barren lands, and keep them barren.  Simon Fairlie wrote that goats are popular in India, because they can survive on the same wastes that cattle consume.  While cows are sacred, goats are not, so it’s perfectly OK to eat them.  While a goat is being raised, it can devour ten acres (4 ha) of vegetation.  They do not gently nibble on the grass, they can hungrily rip it out by the roots.  They kill young trees.  Goats can be a disaster.

Paul Shepard wrote that goats are smarter than cattle or sheep, and they are blessed with interesting personalities.  They can learn to follow instructions from their master.  They are smaller than cattle, so losses to predators are less costly to the herder.  Goats get high grades in sex education classes, and are able to produce numerous offspring.  Rustlers love them because they are easier to steal than cattle.  Goats are known as the “poor man’s cow.”  A goat can produce more milk than a sheep.

Shepard imagined that in the coming years, when our reckless turbocharged joyride of decadence runs out of gas, and glides into the misty realm of embarrassing memories, our faithful companions amidst the ruins will be goats, the “avatars of poverty.”  They have given us a 5,000 year lesson in environmental catastrophe.  He was no fan of any type of domesticated livestock.  He called them “hooved locusts.”  A primary objective for many pastoralists is maximizing wealth (larger herds), not a loving, long-term, predator tolerant, ultraconservative relationship with their ecosystems.

The Earth Policy Institute (EPI) reported that ever growing numbers of livestock are working hard every day to diminish the health of world grasslands.  The EPI has been tracking livestock population trends, nation by nation.  They report that when goat numbers are rising faster than those for cattle or sheep, this is an indicator of deteriorating grassland. 

Not fussy eaters, goats are the livestock most associated with overgrazing.  As vegetation is gobbled up, less greenery survives to absorb periodic rainfall.  Consequently, more rain runs off the land, which can lead to destructive flooding.  In addition to depleting the forage, their sharp hooves also pulverize the soil surface, making soil particles more susceptible to erosion via wind or water.  Stripped landscapes led to massive floods in Pakistan in 2010.

The EPI noted that between 1970 and 2009, while the global cattle population increased by 28 percent, goat numbers more than doubled (100+ percent).  The goat trend line began rising quickly around 1980.  The Sahel region, south of the Sahara in Africa, is becoming a dustbowl.  Every year, 867,000 acres (350,862 ha) of rangeland and cropland are being lost to desertification.  Another dustbowl is rising in central Asia, western Mongolia, and western China.

John Livingston noted that only two animals create habitats: goats and humans.  Goats create deserts.  Humans create ecological train wrecks.  Sheep and goats don’t know any better but, in theory, there are some humans who are capable of making intelligent choices.  History is clear on one thing, we excel at repeating the same mistakes, century after century.  As long as they satisfy immediate needs, self-destructive habits are devilishly difficult to shake.

Daniel Hillel didn’t resent goats, because goats weren’t the problem.  The problem was pastoralists who allowed their herds to get too big.  When goats were herded on overgrazed rangeland, they ate whatever they could find, because they had no other choice.  They were far better survivalists than cattle.

Of course, stepping back even further, and using perfect hindsight, it’s not hard to see a pattern that associates animal domestication with deforestation, soil destruction, and desertification.  Wild and free animals do not have a reputation for being desert makers or forest exterminators. 

Back when all critters were wild, wolves were simply ordinary neighbors, not demonic enemies.  Their role in the ecosystem was to dine on herbivores, which helped limit the herd size, which helped keep the land healthy.  Wolves have never suffered from obnoxious beliefs about owning other animals, and gaining personal status by forcibly controlling as many as possible.  Unfortunately, herders have zero toleration for non-human predators.

Cedars of Lebanon

Lebanon is located on the east shore of the Mediterranean, just north of Israel.  It has a narrow coastal plain, and a mountainous interior.  Big Mama Nature originally clothed Lebanon with grasslands and forests, and they absorbed precipitation and kept the springs flowing — a healthy ecosystem.  The cedars of Lebanon were described in older sources as a legendary forest, a sacred land (“the cedars of god”).  Originally, the forests covered almost 2,000 square miles (5,180 km²).  That was prior to the arrival of the Phoenicians.

Tom Dale wrote that, in the early days, the Phoenicians were likely nomads who herded goats.  This could have been a low impact mode of living, as long as the population of goats and humans had remained modest, via mindful self-restraint.  Agriculture required far more hard work than goat herding, so smart folks shunned it whenever possible.  As the human population grew, feeding the growing mob became more challenging.  Consequently, farming expanded across the coastal plains, and then began spreading up into the hills.

The agriculture practiced in early civilizations, like Egypt and Mesopotamia, was enabled by irrigation.  Folks at the east end of the Mediterranean, like the Phoenicians, were the first to attempt large scale rain fed agriculture on steeply sloped land (up to 34°).  They received heavy winter rains, followed by fairly dry summers, the pattern we call a Mediterranean climate (like California).

Over time, experiments in self-restraint (if any) eventually failed.  By 2500 B.C., a civilization emerged in Phoenicia.  It had an impressive merchant fleet, communities of skilled artisans, and good ports at Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut.  The biggest threat to their prosperity was insufficient food production (i.e., insufficient family planning).  As hillside agriculture intensified, stone terraces had to be built on the slopes to keep the soil from washing away.  Constructing and maintaining stepped terraces took lots and lots of hard work.  An increasingly pissed off Big Mama Nature sometimes conjured intense cloudbursts to suddenly wash them away. 

King Solomon sent 150,000 men to Lebanon to cut and haul lumber back to Palestine, where it would be used for building temples, palaces, and trophy homes for fat cats.  Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Egypt were also growing rapidly, and needed lots of lumber.  Wood was traded for food, but the food imports were not enough.  So, the Phoenicians created a number of colonies along the Mediterranean coast from which they could extract resources.  Their civilization peaked between 1200 and 800 B.C., and blinked out in 332 B.C., when Alexander the Great conquered them, and crucified 2,000 upper class folks in Tyre.

Dale wrote that by then, most of the forests were already history.  Over the next few centuries, Greeks and Romans finished off what remained, with a few exceptions (four small groves).  Topsoil had largely washed off the hillsides, and silted up the harbors.  Clogged river deltas became malarial marshlands.  The damage was so severe that the land could not recover and allow another thriving civilization to rise from the ruins.

Anyway, over time, almost all of the cedars of Lebanon got mowed down.  Green vegetation emerged amidst the stumps, and herds of goats hungrily chewed it up.  Lebanon’s cedars don’t produce their first cones (seeds) until they are about 40 years old.  There were almost no inaccessible rocky crags where goats could not eat new trees, as fast as they appeared.  Consequently, the forests were doomed.  Deforestation, hungry goats, and winter rains were the prime causes of massive erosion that turned Lebanon into “a well-rained-on desert.”  It will take many, many thousands of years for nature to replace the lost soil.

Trendy societies destroyed their ecosystems as fast as possible, in order to soar off into a giddy high called decadence (sort of like glue sniffing kids today).  For centuries, a series of Mediterranean civilizations took turns rising and falling, conquering and being conquered.  Raiders and pirates worked hard to snatch whatever they could, whenever possible, by any means necessary. 

Writing in 1955, Dale wrote that today, Lebanon, Crete, Turkey, Palestine, Tunisia, Algeria, Spain, Italy, Sicily, Yugoslavia, and Greece were far more torn and tattered than in the good old days.  All had lived way too hard, something like a long intense binge of oblivion drinking (…and then cometh the excruciating hammer blows of a merciless permanent hangover).  In the twenty-first century, we (the most “educated” generation ever) knowingly continue repeating the same stupid mistakes, all around the world, on a vastly more destructive scale, at a much faster rate.

In 1938 and 1939, Walter Lowdermilk toured North Africa and the Middle East to learn about how ancient civilizations destroyed themselves.  He discovered that only four small groves of Lebanon cedars still survived.  The largest one was home to about 400 trees, of which 43 were old ones.  One grove was saved because a monastery was built in it, and it was surrounded by a fence to keep the goats out.  Lowdermilk took a photo of the walled grove — a modest group of trees surrounded by a vast barren mountainous moonscape.

Land of Milk and Honey

Palestine was just south of Phoenicia.  It was home of the Israelites.  Like the Phoenicians, the Israelis were pastoralists.  Both were Semitic people, and they likely had common ancestors.  “Goat” appears in the Bible 132 times, and “sheep” 188 times.  Moses helped his people escape slavery in Egypt.  They spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness.  Their destination was the Promised Land, located on the far shore of the River Jordan.  It was “a land that floweth with milk and honey,” a phrase that appears in the Bible 20 times.

Before they got there, they were blocked by the warriors of seven nations, the Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hittites, Girgashites, Hivites, and Jebusites.  All were slain in a single day, with miraculous divine assistance.  Their deity instructed the Israelites to burn the chariots of their exterminated opponents, and hough their horses.  Hough?  It means to slash the tendons of the hind legs, to cripple the animals.  Wading through the blood and guts, they finally crossed the Jordan.

Lowdermilk’s tour of the Middle East also made a stop in the Jordan Valley.  He snapped a photo of a heavily damaged hilly landscape, and wrote: “This is a present-day view of a part of the Promised Land to which Moses led the Israelites about 1200 B.C.  A few patches still have enough soil to raise a meager crop of barley.  But most of the land has lost practically all of its soil, as observed from the rock outcroppings.  The crude rock terrace in the foreground helps hold some of the remaining soil in place.”

“We found the soils of red earth washed off the slopes to bedrock over more than half the upland area.  These soils had lodged in the valleys where they are still being cultivated and are still being eroded by great gullies that cut through the alluvium with every heavy rain.”

“What is the cause of the decadence of this country that was once flowing with milk and honey?  As we ponder the tragic history of the Holy Lands, we are reminded of the struggle of Cain and Abel.  This struggle has been made realistic through the ages by the conflict that persists, even unto today, between the tent dweller and the house dweller, between the shepherd and the farmer.  The desert seems to have produced more people than it could feed.”

Mongolian Desertification

Kathleen McLaughlin described how grasslands in Mongolia are currently being degraded by climate change, and by overgrazing the variety of goats that produce cashmere wool.  Soft cashmere was formerly used to make expensive clothing.  Today, better technology for knitting in China, combined with the fast fashion trend, has moved cashmere products from the luxury class to the mass market.  Because herders make a decent income from raising goats, they are now more than half of Mongolia’s grazing livestock.  Unfortunately, goats are the most destructive grazers, because they not only eat the roots of plants, but also the flowers that produce seeds for new grasses.

The harsh winter of 2017–2018 killed hundreds of thousands of grazing animals.  The Mongolian steppe is twice the size of Texas, and it’s slowly turning into a desert.  About 70% of the grazing lands are degraded.  A number of lakes and rivers have dried up.  Overgrazing is a primary factor in grassland deterioration. 

In the 1990s, the former communist government set quotas on grazing animal numbers.  Quotas are gone now, and grazing livestock have increased from 20 million to 61.5 million.  Dead areas are growing, and soil erosion is rising.  Native grasses are being displaced by exotic species that are toxic.  Grassland degradation is also a growing threat to wildlife species.

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]

 

The Forgiveness of Nature



I grew up in the battered remains of a once vast hardwood forest in Michigan.  I was lucky to spend my childhood wandering in a small surviving remnant.  My forest was a sacred place.  To me, the western plains felt dry, empty, bleak.  But my oldest ancestors evolved on the arid savannahs of Mother Africa — grassland with scattered brush and trees.  Grassland was where the big game hung out, and they were good to eat.  Recently, I studied horse history, and learned a lot about the vast steppe grasslands of Eurasia.  They were also home to big game and nomadic hunters.

I began to get curious about grass.  There are maybe 12,000 species of grass, and they inhabit climates between the arctic and equator.  More than half of the calories consumed by humankind come from three grasses: rice, wheat, and corn (maize).  Others include oats, barley, millet, sorghum, sugar cane, and bamboo.

Clive Ponting noted that in the last 300 years, the world’s grassland has increased 680 percent.  The forests of the U.S. Midwest were destroyed to grow corn, wheat, and livestock.  The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed to create cattle pasture.  So were the rainforests of Britain and Ireland.  The list is incredibly long.  I discovered that a British grass worshipper, Graham Harvey, had written a passionate book, The Forgiveness of Nature: The Story of Grass. 

Nature “forgives” humankind’s tireless vandalism — deserted roads, villages, and battlefields are eventually covered with a healthy carpet of greenery.  “Like the horse and hyena, Homo sapiens is first and foremost a creature of the grass,” wrote Harvey.  The Bible says “All flesh is grass,” because all flesh is mortal: green today, brown tomorrow; but God is eternal.  In 1872, John James Ingalls of Kansas offered a different interpretation.  “The primary form of food is grass.  Grass feeds the ox: the ox nourishes man: man dies and goes to grass again; and so the tide of life with everlasting repetition, in continuous circles, moves endlessly on and upward, and in more senses than one, all flesh is grass.”

Harvey described the heartbreaking story of the American prairies.  Farmers first arrived during an unusually rainy period.  They plowed under lots of turf, tapped the fantastic fertility of the rich black soil, and had fantastic harvests for a while, until drought returned, and the Dust Bowl blew away millions of tons of degraded soil.  Within 50 years, the party was over.  Farming continues today, with significant yields, but the heavily diminished soil is kept on life support by fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation, and fossil fuel.

Native Americans enjoyed the abundance of the prairie for free, hunting herds of 50 million bison.  Observers described one herd that was 50 miles (80 km) long and 25 miles (40 km) wide, maybe 480,000 animals.  American colonists now use the prairie to raise 45 million cattle, in a capital intensive, fossil fuel powered enterprise that degrades the grassland.  Bison evolved on the plains; they grazed and then moved on, allowing the grass to recover.  Cattle moved too little, and they were heavily overstocked.  Regions of the once-rich ancient turf were “grazed practically to dirt.”

Montana writer Richard Manning summed it up.  “Seventy per cent of the grain crop of American agriculture goes to the livestock that replaced the bison that ate no grain, and one wonders, what is agriculture for?”  Cattle don’t need grain, but farmers are subsidized to grow enormous surpluses.  Harvey lamented the rape of the prairie, “It was a biological powerhouse, rich in wildlife and with a productivity no modern farming system could match.  Yet Americans waged a ceaseless war on this priceless asset, and now it has all but disappeared, its life snatched by the quick cut of steel or slowly sapped by overgrazing.” 

Harvey carefully described the many ways in which evolution ingeniously created grasslands that could survive almost any challenge — except civilization.  They created soil-building humus, which retained moisture and accumulated nutrients.  Many plants have very deep roots, up to 32 feet (10 m), which bring up nutrients.  They can tolerate fire, drought, and grazing.  In fact, they need grazing, to nip off the first shoots of woody shrubs and trees that would compete for sunlight.

Back in the good old days, on the steppe and prairies, the bison and other grazers manicured the turf, and the wooly mammoths controlled the woody plants.  With the mammoths and mastodons gone, and elephants fading, humans in many regions around the world have adapted “firestick farming” to expand grassland area, control woody vegetation, improve the vitality of the forage, and attract game.  Burning off the dry grasses eliminates hiding places for game, and provides a banquet of roasted grasshoppers and other delicacies.

Grasslands are arid, receiving just 10 to 30 inches (25-76 cm) of rain per year.  In wetter prairies, grass can grow tall enough to hide a horse.  Lands getting less than 10 inches are desert.  More than 30 enables forest.  Britain is wet, not arid.  Its grasslands are manmade.  The land was once largely a rainforest.  Over the centuries, nomadic pastoralists gradually cleared trees to expand meadows for their cattle, sheep, and pigs.

In Harvey’s mind, this was the golden age, an era of wonderful freedom and easy living — before the arrival of farming, drudgery, serfdom, and oppressive nobility.  It doesn’t occur to him that wild Britain was even freer, when the ancient forest thrived, home to red deer, wild boar, wolves, and aurochs, and the Thames was loaded with salmon.  Tragically, agriculture displaced the nomadic herders, “setting Britain on its momentous path to ownership and exclusion, enclosure and dispossession, industrialization and urban living, to factory farming and genetically modified foods.”  Harvey screams “Why?” 

Sheep sped the Brits down the road to ruin, a sheepwreck.  The climate was ideal for producing wool of exceptional quality, which became a major industry, and made many people very rich.  This led to the enclosure movement, during which peasant farmers were evicted from the land, so their fields could be converted into valuable sheep pasture.  The wool gold rush generated much of the capital needed to launch the industrial revolution. 

Many of the evicted farmers migrated into rapidly growing urban slums that were crowded, filthy, and disease ridden.  They were joined by hordes of desperate refugees from the Irish Famine.  This generated widespread discontent that could not by soothed in gin palaces.  The fat cats got nervous, fearing unrest and revolution.  Grass came to the rescue.  Liverpool, New York, and other cities began building parks, providing islands of green sanity amidst the industrial nightmare world.

Delirious from perpetual growth fever, Brits joined the Americans in racing down the dead-end road of industrial agriculture — synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, big machines, fossil fuel, monocultures, feedlots, mega-farms.  Maximum yields were the goal, <bleep> the topsoil, the ecosystem, the grandchildren.  This explosion of pure idiocy drove poor Harvey bonkers.  He goes to great lengths to enthusiastically educate readers on the magnificence of healthy topsoil, and the many ways that spectacularly stupid people foolishly destroy it.

His grand vision is a wise transition to organic mixed farming, a three-year rotation of winter grain, spring grain, and a fallow of grasses and red clover — combined with regular application of all available manure.  While this is better than the current norm, there are some important drawbacks.  Every trainload of wheat shipped away to London includes essential nonrenewable nutrients that will never be returned to the farm.  The soil nutrients sent to London stay in London, where they are mixed into toxic sludge.  Anything less than 100 percent nutrient recycling is an enterprise with an expiration date.

Britain usually has gentle rains, so less soil is washed away than in the U.S., where torrential downpours are common, and soil erosion is a huge problem.  Harvey asserts that mixed farming can heal the wrecked soil, rebuild the humus, and restore the millions of tiny creatures that thrive in healthy soil.  If people did this everywhere, enough carbon could be sequestered in the soil to snuff climate change.  Listen to this: “A return to sound husbandry in agriculture would end global warming without the need for motoring cuts.”  Oy!

 When my Norwegian ancestors settled in Iowa in 1879, folks were astonished by the coal black topsoil that could be up to 12 feet (3.6 m) deep.  This super-fertile soil was created by thousands of years of healthy tall grass prairie.  Today, this treasure is nearly gone.  Plows are turning up yellow patches of subsoil.  A wise elder once concluded that the plow has caused more harm to future generations than the sword.

Harvey explores many other subjects.  His book is easy to read, and out of print.  It will inspire you to psychoanalyze the suburbanites who spend thousands of dollars obsessively maintaining spooky freakshow lawns that look as natural as Astroturf.  They must spend their nights having sweet dreams of chasing antelopes across the endless prairies.

Harvey, Graham, The Forgiveness of Nature: The Story of Grass, Random House, London, 2001.