Wild Free and Happy Sample 37

[Note: This is the thirty-seventh 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 203 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.] 

Potato

Two super foods were domesticated in the New World, potatoes and corn.  It’s possible to grow both without draft animals and plows.  Both plants produce more calories per acre than any Old World crop plant, except for rice, an Asian super food.  Super foods possess especially powerful juju for accelerating the growth and collapse of dense and self-destructive populations. 

Potatoes (affectionately nicknamed “spuds”) can be grown in a wide variety of soils and climates, at elevations ranging from sea level up to 14,000 feet (4,267 m).  Spuds originated in the Andes region of western South America.  They are now grown in at least 149 countries.  There are still many varieties of wild potatoes in the Andes, and they come in every size, shape, and color.  The tubers of some varieties contain bitter toxins, which encourage hungry critters to eat other stuff.  Spuds are smarter than they look.

It’s unclear when they were first domesticated, but it was certainly prior to 2000 B.C.  There are maybe 400 types of domesticated spuds.  Prudent farmers might plant 50 to 60 varieties in their fields, because something that kills one is less likely to kill all.  Spuds are awesome.  The plants mature rapidly, in just 90 to 120 days.  Per day, they produce more food energy per acre than any other crop plant.  An acre of potatoes produces up to four times more calories than an acre of grain.

John Reader noted that potatoes are an especially nutritious plant food.  Compared to cereal grains, spuds provide a better mix of carbs, protein, vitamins, and minerals.  The carbs are primarily starch, which is released into the body more gently than carbs from fats or sugars.  Spuds are a good source of B vitamins, and deliver lots of vitamin C.  Grains have more protein, but spuds provide protein of higher quality, including essential amino acids that the body must acquire readymade. 

Reader says that, of all foods, potatoes provide the “best all-round package of nutrition.”  In Ireland 200 years ago, adult males consumed an average of 10 pounds (4.5 kg) per day.  With a glass of milk with every meal, they would get 4,000 calories per day, and receive all the required nutrients.  At times of hard labor, lads would sometimes eat up to 20 pounds per day.  While Irish peasants were often dirt poor, dressed in rags, and living in mud huts, they had a healthier diet than most Europeans.  Unfortunately, being well nourished enabled higher birthrates.  Population soared almost 500 percent in 154 years (1687 to 1841).  Danger!

Inca Empire

Spuds are associated with the Inca (Inka) civilization, whose capital was Cuzco (Cusco), Peru.  The founders were the Quechua people, who were hunter-gatherers long before they became farmers.  Hunter-gatherer cultures were living in Andes by 12,000 years ago, and they were the ones who eventually domesticated potatoes. 

The Inca civilization was sort of a flash in the pan, existing from about 1438 to 1533, until snuffed out by Spaniards, and their diseases (smallpox, influenza, typhus, measles).  Preceding the Incas, there were a number of civilizations that rose and fell in the Andes region over the span of several thousand years.  The Inca Empire had a population of maybe 6 to 14 million, overseen by an elite class of 15 to 40 thousand.  The elites were not universally loved, and many folks celebrated the arrival of the tyrannical Spanish, which they saw as a great liberation from unbearable oppression. 

The Inca Empire was 2,200 miles long (3,540 km), and 190 miles (306 km) wide.  Prior to the tsunami of Europeans and their slaves, the Incas were the largest empire that ever existed in North and South America.  They were home to 40 percent of the combined population of both continents.  The range of the empire was essentially limited to habitat that was suitable for llamas and alpacas, extremely important animals that provided meat, manure, hides, and fiber.  The Incas had no wheels, no writing, no iron or steel, no riding animals, and no draft animals to pull carts or plows — but llamas were used to haul loads of stuff.

The Incas grew food on terraced plots, and built irrigation systems.  They built stone cities and temples, cut tunnels through mountains, crossed rivers with rope suspension bridges hung from stone towers.  They built causeways across wetlands, and cut pathways along the sides of steep slopes.  They had 14,300 miles (23,000 km) of paved roads, long enough to encircle the globe.  Teams of relay runners could carry messages 1,491 miles (2400 km) in five days.  Great roads also accelerated the spread of diseases, Spaniards, and missionaries.

The original staple food for folks in the high Andes was potatoes, which were often grown in rotation with quinoa and kañihua (cañihua) — two plants that produce high protein cereal-like seeds, but neither are technically cereals, because they aren’t card-carrying members of the grass family.  The seeds of both can germinate at or near freezing temperature. 

Plots of cropland were periodically fallowed, and herds of llamas and alpacas were moved in to drop steaming gifts of precious fertilizer all over the place.  In season, folks dined on fresh spuds.  Surplus spuds were freeze dried into chuño, a nutritious commodity that the tax collectors came to collect.  Chuño could be stored for years.  Archaeologists at one site found chuño created 2,200 years ago.

Chuño can be made at elevations above 13,000 feet (4,000 m) during the long dry season, when there are freezing temperatures at night, and bright sunlight in the daytime hours.  Chuño country is not far from the equator, but high elevations create an unusual combination of “tropical noon and arctic midnight,” which is perfect for freeze drying. 

The process for making chuño could take two months.  It involved freezing, soaking in cold water, freezing again, rubbing, squeezing, and drying in direct sunlight.  The complicated process removed the water, skins, and toxins.  The end product was light, firm, highly nutritious, and chalk-white.  Incas also freeze dried the flesh of birds, fish, alpacas, and llamas.  The word “jerky” came to us from the Andes.

Civilizations cannot exist for long if they don’t have effective systems for storing substantial quantities of food (usually grain) to keep folks fed during lean seasons, lean years, and wartime.  In the Old World, the emergence of agriculture and pottery-making were closely associated.  When dried grain was stored in sealed ceramic containers, it was not lost to rats and mice.

Incas stored chuño, jerky, and corn in thousands of frosty underground warehouses scattered throughout their empire.  Stored food provided abundant fuel for the rapid expansion of their empire — road building, urban construction, military adventures, and so on.  It also provided a social safety net.  Some say that Incas never starved.  Fifteen years after defeating the Incas, one Spaniard commented that food stored near Xauxa enabled him to feed 2,000 troops for seven weeks. 

At some point prior to the Inca era, corn from Mesoamerica arrived in the Andes.  Corn produced high yields, was suitable for long term storage, did not require labor-intense freeze drying, and was easy to transport (but nutritionally inferior to spuds).  Corn cannot be grown at elevations above 8,200 feet (2,500 m).  Where it could be grown, folks grew corn instead of spuds.  Inca leaders actively encouraged the intensified production of corn, and John Reader called this decision a “masterstroke.”  Folks had to build new terraces and irrigation systems to grow more corn.  Potatoes remained the most important crop, but the decision to deliberately maximize the output of super foods lit the fuse for the explosive growth of the Inca Empire.

So, once the Inca leaders were defeated and out of the way, the kind and loving Spaniards shape shifted into cruel, greedy, demonic monsters.  They snatched all the awesome gold and silver treasures in Cuzco, melted them down, and shipped eleven tons of it back home.  Then, they learned about the Potosí silver mine, assembled lots of forced labor, and created a boom town.  In the year 1592, Potosí produced more than 400 tons of refined silver.  By and by, back in Spain, this tsunami of wealth blindsided an already wobbly economy with soaring price inflation.  It also funded the creation of the Spanish Empire.  The royalty, giddy with enormous wealth, decided this was a good time to go on the warpath. 

In addition to gold and silver, lots of other stuff was sent back to the Old World, including turkeys, guinea pigs, cocoa, and tobacco.  A planet-rocking time bomb was also shipped back home — two super foods: spuds and corn.

Super Foods Supercharge Europe

Clive Ponting noted that until about 1800, most of the world’s great cities were outside of Europe.  In the year 600, Rome was home to 50,000, while 100,000 lived in Teotihuacán in Mexico.  Of the 100 towns and cities in Europe in 1000, half were in Italy.  In 1086, London had a population of just 10,000.  The staple foods in Europe were cereal grains, which produced far fewer calories per acre than spuds, were far less nutritious, and far more laborious to plant.  Corn and spuds could be planted with simple hand tools and human muscle power.  Wheat, rye, barley, and oats grew best in soil that was pulverized by harnessing a plow to oxen or horses — a far more resource-intensive process.

Spuds arrived in Spain by 1570, and gradually migrated across the continent, arriving in Scandinavia 100 years later.  The adaptation of corn also spread slowly.  Dirt poor subsistence farmers, who constantly felt the cold breath of starvation on their backs, were exceedingly conservative.  They were never eager to impulsively throw all caution to the wind, and bet their survival on weird exotic crops from outer space.

Alfred Crosby noted that skeptical farmers were eventually convinced that the exotics were better in many ways than the crops they traditionally grew.  Over time, corn became a staple in southern Europe.  Potatoes were widely adopted in northern Europe, where they produced far more nutrients per acre than traditional grain crops.  It took 5 acres (2 ha) of grain to feed a family of five, but just 1.5 acres of potatoes.  Farmers could raise potatoes on marginal soils, using only a spade.  Unlike grains, spuds needed no grinding or milling.  Like grains, potatoes were also vulnerable to molds, fungus, and weather that was too wet or cool.  Western Europe was best suited for growing healthy forests and wildlife, rather than spuds, cereals, livestock, and tropical primates.

Grain could be stored for years, but not spuds.  Europe’s climate was unsuitable for making freeze dried chuño.  Western Europe had mild winters during which the ground rarely froze.  Spuds could be left buried in the field for several months, unharmed by light frost, until springtime warmth returned. 

Spuds provided some extra security for farm families.  When grain is ripe, it has to be harvested and stored.  William McNeill noted that full granaries were treasure chests of essential nutrients, which made them primary targets for annoying visitors, like tax and rent collectors.  Collectors grabbed the grain, but left the spuds alone, because they were too much work to dig up, and they couldn’t be stored indefinitely.  Landlords and nobles wanted grain.

Passing troops were even more despised than the collectors.  In the old days, armies did not haul around caravans of food supplies.  Instead, they stopped at farms, confiscated their stored grain, and left the peasants to starve.  This was a common practice, and more than a little discourteous.  In wartime, while soldiers were dying on the battlefield, peasants were dying in their huts, which seriously disrupted the stability of food producing rural communities.  How smart was that?

During the War of Austrian Succession (1740-48), Fredrick the Great was astonished to discover that far more spud growing peasants survived, compared to those who grew grain, lost it, and starved.  Like the tax and rent collectors, passing troops didn’t have the time or desire to dig up fields of potatoes.  It was much faster and easier to empty the granaries and march on.  Fredrick realized that if folks planted more spuds, wartime would be less devastating to society.  It was wise to be nice to peasants.  So, he distributed free seed potatoes throughout his kingdom. 

McNeill noted that others soon joined the parade.  Leaders in Austria, Russia, and France recognized the strategic advantages of joining the spud cult.  Over time, the resistance of conservative peasants melted away.  More and more came to the conclusion that they preferred boiled potatoes to death by starvation. 

This inspired a wave of innovation in agricultural practices.  Traditional processes were fine-tuned for maximizing grain output.  New and improved processes were needed to accelerate spud production, and clever folks came up with some bright ideas.  In the traditional system, every year either a third or half of the cropland was left fallow, to suppress weeds.  In the new system, fallow land became potato fields.  Amazingly, the amount of grain harvested was not diminished, and spud harvests provided a mother lode of bonus calories. 

Before long, bonus bambinos were squirting out of wombs, at just the right time.  See, turning fallow land into potato fields required additional labor, because happy weeds now had to be mercilessly killed, in late spring and early summer, by workers with hoes and spades.  By utilizing this extra labor, farmers could now produce two to four times more calories per acre, and feed even more bambinos.

McNeill’s big idea was that potatoes radically changed world history during the era spanning from 1750 to 1950.  Spuds had become popular in Ireland and the Scottish highlands, but were especially important on the vast European plain, which spanned from northern France, Germany, Poland, and eastward into Russia. 

While spuds required more farm labor, skyrocketing population growth provided more workers than needed in the fields.  Surplus people provided a labor force for the Industrial Revolution, which developed rapidly in northern Europe.  Low wages and miserable working conditions were more desirable than starvation.  The transition to fossil energy turbocharged the boom years.  The era of 1750 to 1950 was also a time when Europe established colonies and built empires.  McNeill noted that the entire world was rapidly and radically transformed.  Then, around 1947, European empires began disintegrating, and a new era began.

He wrote that without potatoes, Germany would have never grown into a leading military and industrial power in Europe after 1848.  Russia would not have become a major threat to Germany after 1891.  Millions of Europeans would not have migrated to America and other regions.  And so, the humble dirty spud triggered an avalanche of chaotic bad craziness that blindsided societies all around the world.

Alfred Crosby wrote that, aided by potatoes and corn, both Europe and America were able to harvest far more food.  People were better nourished, so child mortality dropped.  The population of Europe leaped from 80 million in 1492, to 180 million in 1800, 390 million in 1900, and 556 million in 2019.  Europe was bursting with people, and many migrated to colonies — Australia, New Zealand, southern Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Canada, and the U.S.  Bottom line, world population leaped from 450 million in 1500 to 7.8 billion in 2020.  Crosby concluded, “Calories can make as much history as cannons — more in the long run.”

Monocultures Beg For Trouble

Jeffrey Lockwood studied locusts.  He described a swarm that visited Plattsmouth, Nebraska in June 1875.  It was 110 miles (177 km) long, up to a mile (1.6 km) high, and travelled at 15 miles per hour (24 km/h).  They visited for ten days, and covered maybe 198,000 square miles (512,817 km²).  This swarm may have included 3.5 trillion locusts, and there were many other hungry swarms.

Where the swarms touched down, they devoured the greenery.  They voraciously ate the clothing off of the clueless settlers, who had not majored in environmental history.  In a few hours, a field could be rubbished.  To express their deep gratitude to the settlers, for so generously providing such a wonderful banquet, the departing swarm might leave behind 940 million eggs per acre.

The ambitious American settlers suffered from get rich quick fever.  In an era of above average precipitation, they plowed up large regions of western plains and planted wheat.  Unmolested plains ecosystems are home to a highly diverse mix of species.  Big Mama Nature cherishes diversity, and detests manmade monocultures (spit!).  It turns out that wheat was a grass that locusts considered to be the most delicious food of all, and wheat was the primary crop on the western plains.  Locusts were far less interested in gobbling up grazing land or dairy pastures.

Wheat was first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, homeland of the Judeo-Christian culture.  Wheat thrived in the Mediterranean climate, which provided generous winter rains to germinate the thirsty seeds.  The Bible mentions locusts 28 times.  Richard Manning once said, “The domestication of wheat was humankind’s greatest mistake.”  (Or, was it corn, or potatoes, or rice, or…?)

As I bike around my town, I often see pennies lying on the street.  For most folks, the low value of a penny simply does not provide sufficient motivation to stop, bend over, pick it up, and take it to the bank.  This is something like a healthy diverse ecosystem — the things that critters value are widely scattered.  Now, compare that to a monoculture.  Let’s dump a sack of $100 bills on the street, a dense concentration of value.  This treasure promptly attracts a large excited swarm and is rapidly swept away.  Right?

Similarly, infectious diseases are far more likely to create epidemics in large, densely populated cities, with poor sanitation, and lots of malnourished people — especially societies that are interconnected with complex networks of long distance trade and travel.  This is a highly vulnerable combo — a dense monoculture of people, plus high mobility ($100 bills).  It’s much safer to live in small, remote, isolated villages that have clean water, adequate nutrition, and little or no contact with the outside world (pennies).

Like the wheat and locust duet, it’s a similar story with other crop plants.  Unnatural density is begs for trouble.  James Scott wrote that both humans and crops are vulnerable to viral, fungal, and bacterial diseases.  Crops can be damaged by snails, slugs, insects, birds, rodents, and other mammals.  Weeds can diminish their access to sunlight, water, nutrients, and space.  A serious vulnerability for civilizations is that their survival depends on a successful annual harvest of just one or two staple foods.  Over the centuries, many have gotten blindsided by droughts, deluges, floods, fires, pests, frosts, storms, crop diseases, and mean enemies.

Hunter-gatherers were more like the pennies scenario, low density people, in isolated groups, who obtained their nutrients from widely scattered local sources — healthy diversity, not goofy sprawling monocultures.  Wild folks could live perfectly well by looking for pennies, because they couldn’t imagine something as ridiculous and unbearable as living in mobs of weird smelly strangers and pursuing an obscenely wasteful $100 lifestyle.

And now, an important story.  John Reader was impressed by how nomadic foragers benefitted from their time-proven ultraconservative way of life.  Some plant and animal foods were regularly eaten.  Others were deliberately set aside to be famine food.  Some groups also reserved portions of their land as a safety net that was only used in lean periods.

In the 1960s, anthropologists in Botswana were astounded to observe how well the San people lived during the third year of an extreme drought in the Kalahari, one of the harshest ecosystems on Earth.  Neighboring Bantu farmers were hammered by three consecutive crop failures, and 250,000 of their cattle died.  United Nations famine relief kept 180,000 farming people on life support.  Some farmers who didn’t get food relief had to forage for wild food, putting further strain on food resources.  Still, the San were able to acquire their food with just 12 to 19 hours a week of effort.  They dwelt in a desolate “wasteland” that no civilized people could survive in, and they lived well and joyfully. 

And so, dear reader, please remember this snapshot of ultraconservative wild survival, because it is strikingly different from stuff on the following pages about crop failures, blights, famines, and so on — the life threatening vulnerabilities of being completely dependent on the ups and downs of a small number of domesticated food plants.

Clive Ponting wrote an incredible information packed book on environmental history.  Most readers have never felt the gnawing hunger of living during an extended food shortage.  We have no memories of the “good old days” of wholesome, low-impact, horse powered, organic agriculture.  Ponting summed it up like this: “Since the rise of settled societies some ten thousand years ago the overwhelming majority of the world’s population has lived in conditions of grinding poverty.”  He added, “Until about the last two centuries in every part of the world nearly everyone lived on the edge of starvation.” 

In the old days, “All but about five percent of the people in the world were peasants, directly dependent on the land and living a life characterized by high infant mortality, low life expectancy and chronic undernourishment, and with the ever-present threat of famine and the outbreak of virulent epidemics.”

Ponting’s perception of the past is very different our culture’s romanticized version, which presents us with stuff like the paintings of happy dancing peasants by Pieter Breughel.  Having read loads of environmental history, I know that Ponting was not a creep who invented fake history.  The era of muscle powered agriculture indeed gave the planet and its critters a painful beating.  Of course, today’s fossil fuel powered nightmare has enabled us to beat the planet even faster and harder, in ways never before believed to be possible.

Potato Blight

John Reader wrote that spuds first arrived in Ireland between 1586 and 1603.  At that time, its population was somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million.  By 1845, when the blight began, it had soared to 8.5 million, and the survival of about 90 percent of them depended almost entirely on potatoes.  Well-nourished peasants had higher birth rates, and stronger resistance to disease.  But when the blight nuked the spuds, a million peasants, weakened by hunger and disease, stood in long lines to take selfies with the Grim Reaper.

Because Ireland had a wetter climate, it was not an ideal place to grow cereals.  Spuds could often tolerate dampness that would rot oats.  So, potatoes were less risky, produced lots of calories, and didn’t require a draft animal and a plow.  Ireland was the first nation in northern Europe to largely switch from cereal crops to spuds. 

Before long, the exotic tubers were popular everywhere, from the palace to the pigsty.  Brian Fagan noted that the population explosion had been fueled by several varieties of outstanding, gourmet spuds, like the Black, Apple, and Cups.  But the production of these types could not keep up with the growing numbers of spud addicts.  Feeding large families on small plots of land inspired a determined search for varieties of spuds that were even more productive.

By 1835, the Lumper, or horse potato, won the competition and became the dominant spud on the Emerald Isle.  It came from England, where it had been developed for use as livestock fodder.  The remarkably unexciting Lumper was coarse and watery, less nutritious, more vulnerable to disease, but indispensable life support for dirt poor peasants who had way too many kids.  On the plus side, Reader said that the Lumper was 20 to 30 percent more productive than the fancy upper class spuds it replaced.  On the downside, every single Lumper in every single field was an exact genetic clone (imagine a world with 7.8 billion Donald Trumps).  What could possibly go wrong?

The famous Irish famine of 1845 was, in some ways, no surprise to anyone.  Back in the good old days, crop failures, famines, and epidemics were commonplace.  For example, Clive Ponting wrote that between the tenth and eighteenth centuries, France had 89 famines that were widespread national disasters, of which 26 of them hit in just the eleventh century.  England suffered numerous local famines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Famine rocked all of Europe from 1594 to 1597.  Famine struck Belgium and Finland in 1867 and 1868.  Rinderpest zoomed into Europe from Russia, where it killed 1.5 million cattle from 1709 to 1714.  And so on.

Anyway, long before the late blight fungus arrived in Ireland, crop failures in 1740 and 1741 killed 400,000 Irish people.  The late blight didn’t arrive until 1845.  John Reader mentioned a theory that the late blight fungus originally emerged in the highlands of central Mexico.  By and by, it migrated to South America.  From there, in about 1841 or 1842, it hitched a ride with a shipment of potatoes to the United States.  In 1843 the first outbreak of blight appeared in New York and Pennsylvania, and then spread along the east coast.  Two years later, in 1845, it had spread west to the Mississippi, and north into Canada. 

Meanwhile, in 1843, farmers in Flanders and Belgium were suffering losses from viral diseases and dry rot.  To cure the problem, they ordered what they thought were healthy seed potatoes from the U.S. (where the blight was raging).  Oh-oh!  In the winter of 1843-44, the late blight fungus crossed the Atlantic in a load of spuds.  Transatlantic trade in potatoes was made possible by new and amazing high-speed steam ships, and by the use of ice to prevent spoilage.  Previously, sailing ships were too slow to deliver a load of spuds in good condition. 

It’s interesting to note that sailing ships were also too slow to deliver live cholera microbes to the New World.  But then, in 1832, a speedy new steamship from Britain was able to zoom across the ocean, and deliver cholera to a population in Montreal that had zero immunity.  Before long, many were surprised when they erupted with firehose diarrhea.  From there, the disease spread like lightning across the New World.  Once again, millions took selfies with the Grim Reaper.

I need to pause for a second here to emphasize an important notion: there’s no place like home.  During the maybe three million years when our wild ancestors lived in a low impact manner, they dined entirely on local wild foods.  They naturally spent their lives in the region where they were born, because they were not migratory critters like geese, storks, or butterflies.  They never forgot the creator’s instructions on how to live like tropical primates, which is why they lived very well for a very long time.  They didn’t invent cars, planes, and other goofy stuff.  Every day, they simply walked to work — perfectly sustainable transportation.

Spuds evolved in the Andes, where they adapted very well to a unique high elevation ecosystem, and enjoyed happy and fulfilling lives.  In recent centuries, travelling tropical primates, who were far from their homeland, discovered spuds, and eventually carried them to distant lands that were less ideal than the Andes.  When planted in Europe, they triggered a scenario similar to the “bull in a china shop” proverb.  Prior to farmers, about 95 percent of west and central Europe was a healthy happy paradise of primordial forests.  This harmonious situation was not in any way improved by deforestation, spud addiction, and huge swarms of tropical primates with voracious appetites.

Richard Manning noted that when spuds are planted in regions outside their Andes homeland, they can be far more vulnerable to insects, fungi, and viruses.  Apparently the late blight fungus is widely dispersed, and usually dormant.  Its wakeup alarm goes off when the weather gets too damp or chilly.  Writing in 2000, Manning noted that in upstate New York, a 100 pound sack of ordinary spuds could be bought for $6, but organic spuds would cost $30.  The difference is because no other food crop is blasted with so many pesticides, in order to zap insects and fungi. 

In Brazil, some regions get sprayed 30 times during the growing season.  Also, unlike cereal grains, potato seeds are living tissue that can transfer disease from this year’s crop to next year’s.  So seeds also get blasted.  (Potato seeds are chunks of tubers grown last year.  Each chunk must have an “eye” on its skin, a potential embryo for a new plant.)

Sorry!  Back to the blight.  The summer of 1845 was a cool and wet one.  Blight struck Ireland, and parts of Belgium, France, and the Netherlands.  Then it spread to Demark, Wales, Scotland, northern Italy, southern Norway and Sweden.  Four months later, 772,204 square miles (2 million km²) of fields were ruined.  It was a memorable and heartbreaking experience.

Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote about the Irish famine.  The 1841 census revealed that Ireland was probably the most densely populated region in Europe, thanks to spuds.  The census noted that half of the people resided in rather unpretentious affordable housing units — small, windowless, single room, mud cabins.  In 1845, the fields were looking fine and healthy — until three weeks of wet and cool weather spoiled the party.  The crop failure was partial.  Fields of cereal crops were not harmed.

In 1846, the blight was severe, and the harvest of both spuds and grain was a poor one.  They weren’t going to have enough seed potatoes to plant all the fields in the spring of 1847.  Across much of Europe, the 1846 harvest was a total or partial failure.  Black fields stretched for hundreds of miles, and the stench of rot was overwhelming.  By September, not even folks with money could acquire food.  They ate cabbage leaves and blackberries.

Across Europe, the winter of 1846-47 was extremely long and severe.  The Thames was jammed with floating ice.  By January, the Irish folks in county Mayo looked like skeletons.  The sheep, cattle, poultry, and dogs were gone.  The one remaining pig would not be long for this world.  The blight in 1847 was light, but the planted acreage was just 20 percent of normal, for lack of seeds.

In 1848, all the land got planted, and the people were giddy with hope that their troubles were over.  Things looked awesome, until the middle of June, when the wet weather would not stop.  The blight was severe.  In July, some fields would turn black overnight, and millions of ripe spuds rotted in the ground.  Even spuds stored away before the blight rotted.  Cereal crops were also damaged by heavy rains.  There was little to harvest.

In the end maybe a million emigrated, and a million died.  Woodham-Smith noted that mortality records were incomplete.  She estimated that for every person who died of starvation, ten died from disease.  The most popular pathogens were two types of “famine fever” — typhus and relapsing fever, both were spread by lice, and both were quite unpleasant.  A bit less popular was dysentery, which was caused by contact with fecal borne pathogens.

Farmers rarely if ever have a plan B when their crops fail, or their granary is swiped.  Their leaders may or may not come to their rescue.  The Irish didn’t get much help.  Earlier in this chapter, we looked at the San people of Botswana who easily survived a three year drought.  Not being chained to one piece of land, and not being heavily addicted to monoculture crops, allows more options for survival — and a healthier, more enjoyable life. 

Wild Free and Happy Sample 26

[Note: This is the twenty-sixth 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.] 

Animal Domestication

What is “domestication?”  With regard to animal domestication, there are two different meanings, and those who use the word don’t often reveal which one they mean.  James Scott distinguished between “domesticated,” meaning tamed (modified behavior), versus “fully domesticated,” meaning genetically different from their wild ancestors as a result of selective breeding (modified DNA), and dependent on humans for their survival.  Elephants in India have been tamed to do work for humans, but they remain genetically wild.  Poodles are obviously genetically different from their gray wolf ancestors.  The difference between wild humans and civilized ones seems to be far more cultural than genetic.

On the following pages, “domesticated” will refer to animals that have been held in captivity for many generations, selectively bred to encourage specific traits, and genetically different from their wild ancestors — manmade critters that had never existed before.  They look and behave differently.  Animals that have merely been tamed, like a friendly peanut loving squirrel, are not a matter for concern.  But the control and exploitation of domesticated critters has really rocked the ecological boat over the centuries.  The enslavement of animals enabled the growth of most civilizations, increased their environmental impacts, and frequently stimulated bloody conflicts.

Why Do It?

As we’ve learned, the success of hominins has been substantially boosted by our success at hunting and feasting on large wild herbivores — animals weighing more than 100 pounds (43 kg).  Herbivores did not compete with humans for the same wild foods.  They converted the solar energy that was stored in grass into a highly nutritious form that we could digest.  This enabled hominins to develop big brains (but not necessarily wise).

As we’ve learned, “the perfection of hunting” eventually moved our ancestors over a line.  We began taking some game a bit faster than they could replace their losses.  For a very long time, large game remained abundant in many lands, enabling local hominin tribes to live well, and grow in numbers.  As long as food was abundant and easy, there wouldn’t be much motivation to contemplate family planning strategies and wise taboos.  But growing numbers of mouths needed growing amounts of food in order to remain strong, healthy, and alive. 

While large game was abundant for a very long time, the delicious critters were not infinite in number.  Big Mama Nature was simply not in the mood to magically accelerate herbivore reproduction in order to keep the tropical primates fat, happy, and annoying.  It was long past time for the half-clever primates to learn some important lessons about life.  Because they lacked immaculate wisdom, acute foresight, or PhDs in wildlife management, they were forced to learn these lessons the hard way.  Big Mama fetched a paddle named scarcity.  Smack!  Ouch!  Stop it!  Smack!

As we’ve learned, climate change reconfigured the ecological playing field.  The last glacial period spanned from about 80,000 to 12,900 years ago.  The peak of this ice age was the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), which spanned from 26,500 to 19,000 years ago.  Barry Cunliffe said that at this time, much of Europe was buried under ice sheets up to one mile (1.6 km) thick (as was North America).  So much water was held frozen in glaciers that global sea levels were 410 feet (125 m) lower than today.  During the frigid LGM, forest country was pushed far to the south.  Trees survived along the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic coast of Portugal and Spain, and the south shore of the Black Sea.

Following the LGM, a warming trend began, which spanned from 19,000 to 12,900 years ago.  Then, the Younger Dryas cold snap chilled things down again for another 1,300 years, until 11,600 years ago.  Then began the warm climate period that we still enjoy today, which enabled the possibility of large scale agriculture, civilization, skyrocketing population, and the fantastic craziness of modernity.  This warm era has lasted an unusually long time.  Normally, we’d be overdue for a shift back to cold.  Instead, we’re sliding sideways at high speed into a much hotter era, and it seems likely to blindside life as we know it.  Clive Finlayson warns that the end of farming is just one climate change away.

The warm era that we’ve been living in for the last 11,600 years led to a sequence of big changes.  Glaciers shifted into retreat mode, and a tundra ecosystem eventually emerged on the newly exposed soil.  A bit later, steppe grasslands appeared, displacing some tundra.  Still later, increasing warmth enabled the expansion of forests.  As forests migrated northward, they began displacing the open tundra and grasslands that provided optimal habitat for the herds of large herbivores that our ancestors so deeply loved.  So, hunters had to devote more attention to forest critters, which were less abundant: elk, aurochs, red deer, roe deer, wild pigs, and small animals.

For centuries, the human diaspora enjoyed some freedom to roam and expand.  There were still frontiers, beyond which humans had never before set foot.  Eventually, uninhabited ecosystems became more and more scarce, and red neon No Vacancy lights became common.  Continued expansion ceased being free and easy.  The intrepid pioneers kept smacking into <bleeping> limits, which got very annoying (and sometimes bloody).

As we’ve learned, the increasing scarcity of large herbivores required that the menus at the diner had to be rewritten.  Expanding forest cover inspired folks to relocate to wetlands, or to the shorelines of seas, lakes, and streams.  A number of foods that used to be second class became regular mainstays — birds, small game, fish, shellfish, plant foods.  They had been second class because they were far more labor intensive than hunting large game.  Tedious hard work sucks.  Second class stuff had also provided a life insurance safety net, a reserve of food set aside for droughts, famine times, and so on.

Mark Nathan Cohen, Diana Muir, Craig Dilworth, James Scott, and others noted that there was a clear pattern in the archaeological record at many locations.  The older evidence indicated a diet in which large herbivores were core.  Above the old layers, evidence revealed the shift to labor intensive second class foods.  Above that, evidence of herding and horticulture begins to appear — food production that was even more labor intensive.  These shifts were motivated by a gradual process of growing scarcity. 

Scott pointed out that our hungry ancestors were not merely domesticating plants and animals, they were also domesticating ecosystems to promote this new and laborious experiment in weird living.  Forests were being swept aside, and replaced by open cropland and pasture.  Wild animals that might harm crops or livestock were no longer welcome to exist in these new domesticated ecosystems.

Long ago, overspecialization contributed to the extinction of the saber-tooth cats, as hominin hunters competed more and more for their primary prey.  Our ancestors avoided a similar fate.  They were omnivores, so they could consume a huge variety of stuff that wasn’t meat.  Because they had fire, and knew how to cook, they had far more food options than species that were restricted to a raw food diet.  At the same time, successful efforts at eliminating man-eating predators sharply reduced the vital assistance they had provided for discouraging population growth.

Scott summed up the pluses and minuses of animal domestication.  Both a deer and a steer provided meat, bones, hides, and tendons, but the deer required zero human assistance to grow from doe to adult.  The steer could require corrals, winter feed and shelter, herd dogs, salt licks, and a source of water.  As long as deer and other game was plentiful, labor intensive herding and farming would have been moronic.

On the plus side, enslaved female livestock could be milked.  Milk could be made into cheese, yogurt, and butter, and stored for later.  Herders have milked cattle, zebu, water buffalo, yak, goat, sheep, reindeer, dromedary, camels, horse, and ass.  Dairy foods provide vitamin D, an essential nutrient.  In winter months, folks living in snow country often could not acquire sufficient vitamin D via exposure to direct sunlight, so dairy foods could provide a beneficial supplement.

All infants can digest lactose, the sugar in milk.  Before animal domestication, kids would normally become lactose intolerant a few years down the road.  They could no longer digest milk.  Lactose intolerant people are able to digest cheese, yogurt, and butter.  In cultures with a tradition of dairy consumption, evolution eventually modified the gene pool for lactose tolerance in adults.  This shift was not universal in all humans.  In cultures where milk is not consumed, most folks become lactose intolerant after infancy.

Poultry and waterfowl produced meat and eggs.  Folks rode on the backs of horses, donkeys, yaks, reindeer, and camels.  Mounted cavalry radically redefined the rules for warfare and raiding.  Beasts of burden were used to pull plows, carts, and sleds, and to haul loads of cargo on their backs.  Animal manure could be used for fertilizer or burned as fuel.  Hairy critters, especially sheep, provided fibers that could be spun and woven into many useful products.  An animal can give up its hide just once, but a sheep can provide wool every year. 

Herders could also tap some nutritious blood from living animals from time to time.  Up to 80 percent of a wild human’s diet was plant based food, but animal products provided nutrients that were beneficial for a strenuous outdoor way of life.  I have found no evidence of wild cultures that were vegetarian.

From Aurochs to Cattle

On many fine days in years past, I have taken walks in grasslands where cattle were grazing.  I always felt safe, because the animals were not the slightest bit anxious or aggressive.  I walked, they grazed, all was good.  Let’s take a peek at the cattle family tree.

Aurochs were the wild ancestors of today’s herd of 1.3 billion domesticated cattle.  They were huge, strong, and fierce — the opposite of the passive cud-chewing manure makers of today.  In regions having ideal conditions, bulls could grow up to 6 feet (180 cm) tall at the shoulder, and weigh up to 3,300 pounds (1,500 kg).  Their horns were much longer than cattle, and pointed forward, aggressively.

Some believe that the species originally emerged in India between 1.5 and 2 million years ago.  They survived in a world along with similarly large, strong, and fierce predators.  Eventually their range spanned from England to China.  Aurochs’ preferred habitat was dense ancient forests with lakes, rivers, bogs, and fens.  They didn’t hang out in frigid tundra regions with woolly mammoths and horses.

In 51 B.C., Caesar wrote that aurochs were animals “a little smaller than elephants, having the appearance, color, and shape of bulls.  They are very strong and swift, and attack every man and beast they catch sight of.  The natives sedulously trap them in pits and kill them.  Young men engage in the sport, hardening their muscles by the exercise; and those who kill the largest head of game exhibit the horns as a trophy, and thereby earn high honor.  These animals, even when caught young, cannot be domesticated and tamed.”

Charles the Great, also known as Charlemagne (A.D. 747 – 814), once had a painful encounter while on a hunting trip.  When an aurochs appeared in the forest, his hunting buddies fled in terror.  Charlemagne was less intelligent.  He rode up to one, drew his sword, and pissed off the monster, who gored his leg.  From that day forward, the humbled king walked with a limp.

The famous explorer Marco Polo (1254 – 1324) also described them.  “There are wild cattle in that country as big as elephants, splendid creatures, covered everywhere but on the back with shaggy hair a good four palms long.  They are partly black, partly white, and really wonderfully fine creatures.”

Anton Schneeberger (1530 – 1581) was a Swiss botanist and doctor based in Poland.  He wrote that aurochs had no fear of humans, and did not flee from their approach.  When they were teased or hunted, they got very hot-tempered and dangerous, sometimes hurling idiots high into the air.

Cis van Vuure wrote the book on aurochs.  He thought that domestication began about 9,000 years ago, in the Middle East and Pakistan.  Over time, the mighty aurochs was reduced to countless variations of dimwitted cattle, fine-tuned for specific climates and uses (meat, hides, milk, draft).

As agriculture expanded, Europe’s ancient forests and wetlands shrank.  Grain farmers detested aurochs molesting their crops, and herders resented them dining on prime forage.  Aurochs stood in the path of progress.  The last aurochs died in 1627, in the Jaktoróv forest, in Warsaw province of Poland.

It’s hard to imagine such notoriously fierce animals being forced into slavery.  Alasdair Wilkins wrote about recent DNA research on cattle.  The ancestors of every domesticated cow in the world trace back to a tiny herd in the Middle East, a herd as small as 80 animals.  The process of domestication may have taken a thousand years, and it was likely done by sedentary people.  It would have been impossible for nomadic herders to confine huge powerful animals with a tremendous love of wildness and freedom.

Nobody ever hitched a wagon or plow to an aurochs.  Nobody put a saddle on one.  Nobody milked them, and made aurochs cheese.  They were wild, free, strong, and extremely dangerous.  And so, they no longer belonged in the heavily managed manmade societies we were creating.  Today, thanks to centuries of selective breeding, we can now dine on hamburgers made from the bovine equivalent of a dimwitted yappy poodle.

The Unlucky Losers

The vast majority of living plant and animal species have luckily remained wild and free.  Jared Diamond wrote a lot about domestication.  Of the world’s 148 species of large land-dwelling herbivores and omnivores, only 14 had been domesticated prior to the twentieth century.  Nine of the 14 only had regional significance, but five species soared to become multinational superstars — the cow, sheep, pig, goat, and horse.  All five were domesticated in Eurasia, before 4000 B.C.

Most of the unlucky 14 were native to Eurasia.  In the Americas, only the llama and alpaca were domesticated, and they lived in small herds.  People didn’t drink their milk.  They never spread to cultures beyond the Andes, so the Indian civilizations of Central and North America did not have pack animals beyond dogs.  In North and South America, the heavy toll of megafauna extinctions may have eliminated a number of potential domesticates.  In Australia, zero large animals were enslaved.  In Africa, no large mammals were domesticated south of the Sahara — in this region only the turkey-like guinea fowl was domesticated.

Diamond wrote that the large herbivores most vulnerable to enslavement were species that were easy to feed, rapid growing, disease resistant, and could be bred in captivity.  They did not panic in confinement, nor were they dangerously violent.  These unlucky species were herd animals that had follow-the-leader dominance hierarchies.

James Scott wrote that over the passage of generations, selective breeding produces slaves that are more passive, less alert, less intelligent, and more dependent on human care.  They reach reproductive age sooner, preserve some juvenile aspects, and produce more offspring.  The brains of domesticated sheep are 24 percent smaller than their wild ancestors, and pig brains are one third smaller.  Because they were dullards, Paul Shepard referred to domesticated livestock as “goofies.”

Domesticated animals are born in captivity, and many never experience wildness and freedom during their entire lives.  One perk of their enslavement is that their lives are, in some ways, luxurious.  They are provided with food, water, and salt licks.  Many are provided with shelter from the hot sun, and frigid weather.  They enjoy an unnatural level of personal security because predator eradication programs ensure they will usually be safe from deadly attacks, month after month, until their luck runs out, and their masters send them for a visit to the butcher.  Enjoying such an easy life, they don’t need energy guzzling big brains.  (As previously noted, human brains have shrunk about 10 percent in the last 20,000 years.)

Too Smart For Our Own Good

According to humans, the human brain is a miraculous organ.  No other species is even half as intelligent as we think we are.  But we’re seriously beating the planet, we’re not having fun, and everything is getting worse.  This is called progress.  Circle what is wrong with this picture.

Craig Dilworth circled humans.  Modern society drove him nuts, because it was so self-destructive.  It simply made no sense.  But the dominant worldview worshipped the amazing progress made possible by the most incredible organism in the entire universe.  How could a creature so brilliant act like this?

Dilworth, a very clever lad, eventually discovered a perspective from which our freaky behavior actually made perfect sense.  He called it the “ecological worldview,” and he thoroughly described it in his book Too Smart For Our Own Good. 

There was a time, long ago, when everyone’s ancestors lived with the ecological worldview, and some tribal people still do.  In the last 40 years or so, a few civilized people have been rediscovering it.  New ideas emerging from anthropology, archaeology, and economics have revealed that “primitive” living was awesome in many ways.  Life was not “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Our wild ancestors were well nourished, very healthy, and enjoyed a leisurely way of life in an endless unspoiled wilderness.  The air was clean, the water was pure, the rivers were filled with salmon, and there were countless mastodons and mammoths.  The Upper Paleolithic era (40,000 – 25,000 BP) may have been the high point of the human journey.  In many ways, it’s been downhill since then.

Unfortunately, the billions of people who now live with the mainstream worldview would be insulted by Dilworth’s theory, because it perceives civilized people in a most unflattering manner.  Fortunately, people who are capable of thinking outside the box are starting to tune in to the new ideas and gasp with excitement — coherence at last!

Anyway, in the beginning, when our ancient ancestors still lived in trees, everything was just great.  Then the climate got cooler and dryer, forests disappeared, and many of our tree-dwelling relatives went extinct.  Our ancestors’ bodies were perfect for living in trees, but comically unsuitable for life on the ground.  We were an easy lunch for hungry predators.  We couldn’t outrun them, but we could stand up and shower them with rocks.  Our new career had begun.

Our hands, eyes, and brains co-evolved.  Branches became throwing sticks and spears.  Rocks became projectiles, hammers, and cutters.  We kept inventing more and more tools, and accumulating them.  Eventually we became dependent on tools for our survival — a dangerous tendency, magnified by our limited powers of foresight.  Mistakes are often our best teachers.

Hunter-gatherers were able to thrive for vast periods of time without trashing the land because they lived sustainably.  Infanticide was moral because it prevented the misery of overpopulation.  It would have been immoral and antisocial to keep a newborn when the No Vacancy light was on (chimps and gorillas also kill newborns).  It wasn’t murder because a newborn did not become a person until the family decided to accept it.

Dilworth hammers on the obvious benefits of voluntarily limiting population, because it’s such an important idea.  The mainstream worldview disagrees, of course.  Living in a temporary bubble of abundant food and energy can make big throbbing brains forget many things.  But when the dark ages return, the notion that every human life is sacred will promptly walk off the stage.

Using terrible weapons of mass destruction — the lance and the javelin — we hunted our way to every corner of the planet, eliminating most of the large animals.  Then we switched to bows and arrows and chased the smaller stuff.  Then we moved to shorelines and lived on aquatic critters.  Up against the wall, because of population pressure, we made the fateful decision to till the soil and enslave plants and animals.  This brought an end to a long era of relative stability (slow-motion growth).

There was a pattern here, and it went all the way back to when we first became tool addicts — necessity was the mother of invention.  Dilworth called it the vicious circle principle (VCP):  “Humankind’s development consists in an accelerating movement from situations of scarcity, to technological innovation, to increased resource availability, to increased consumption, to population growth, to resource depletion, to scarcity once again, and so on.”  It was a merry-go-round that kept spinning faster and faster.  We created a monster that never stopped eating and growing.

With the arrival of agriculture, voluntary population control faded, and our numbers rose sharply.  Farmers were into growth, because there was safety in numbers.  Warfare was becoming an extermination game, and small conservative communities were sure to be erased and replaced by big, dynamic, pro-growth societies.  It was like an arms race, where villages were absorbed into chiefdoms, which were absorbed into kingdoms, which were absorbed into empires.  Grow or die!

As societies grew, they became more complex, and more socially stratified — a small group of well-fed elites, and a large group of serfs and slaves that lived near starvation on a meager diet of bread or potatoes.  Women lost status.  Contagious diseases became very popular.

Dilworth wished that non-renewable resources never existed.  Life would be dramatically better today if we had never had access to metals and fossil carbon.  He believed that we passed the point of no return when folks started pounding on metal.  This sparked a perfect storm of industrial insanity.  I’m inclined to think that the point of no return had more to do with the domestication of plants and animals, which radically changed our relationship with the family of life.

Dilworth does not believe that radical changes in philosophy and worldview will happen in time.  “Consequently human civilization — primarily Western techno-industrial urban society — will self-destruct, producing massive environmental damage, social chaos and megadeath.  We are entering a new dark age, with great dieback.”  Will we survive?

I’ve only scratched the surface here.  This book is a big cornucopia of ideas.  It’s time we took off our blinders.  It's time we quit pretending that the huge oncoming super-storm does not exist.  It's good to be present in reality, thinking clearly, and teaching our huge brains the amazing magical juju of foresight. 

Dilworth, Craig, Too Smart For Our Own Good, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2010.

The Rapid Growth of Human Populations 1750-2000

It’s heartbreaking being an older person during a population explosion, witnessing the effects of catastrophic progress, while remembering the lost goodness.  William Stanton (1930-2010) grew up on a lovely English countryside.  He became a geologist and wandered the world in search of metal-bearing ores.  When he returned to Somerset in 1970, the healthy land of his childhood was in ecological ruins.  England was suffering from a baby boom, growing by 300,000 each year.  This inspired Stanton to embark on a voyage of learning, and in 2003 he published The Rapid Growth of Human Populations 1750-2000. 

Explosive population growth was new to history, beginning roughly around 1750, driven by new advances in “death control.”  While birth rates remained very high, death rates were dramatically driven down by the introduction of sanitary sewers, municipal water, vaccines, and a sharp increase in the food supply, lubricated by the emergence of cheap and abundant fossil energy.

Prior to 1750, England was at carrying capacity, with five million people.  The birth rate matched the death rate, and the lack of extra food made further growth impossible.  Many lived on the edge of starvation, and were expected to die whenever harvests were below average, as they often were.

Then, extra food became available, first a trickle, and then a torrent.  Colonial forests were being converted to cropland.  European farmers began planting highly productive maize and potatoes from the New World.  Soil fertility was sharply boosted by potent new fertilizers.  New technology made farmers more productive.  By decreasing the risks of starvation, the flood of additional food provided a huge advance in death control.  This was not balanced by similar advances in birth control, so the population shot upward.

Prior to 1750, there were strong restraints on population growth: disease, war, starvation.  But then we entered the WROG era (weak restraints on growth), which is almost over now.  As the era of cheap and abundant energy concludes, we can expect sharp declines in agricultural productivity, and sharp increases in food prices — presenting a terminal restraint on growth.  Climate change is a wild card that is likely to create additional restraints. 

Population missionaries are pariahs who are shunned by most, because ignoring them has no immediate consequences, and ignoring them avoids the need for uncomfortable contemplation.  They have a depressing occupation — delivering one of the most important stories of our era to an auditorium of empty chairs.  Who cares?

Religions don’t care, babies are divine gifts.  The business community doesn’t care, because a growing herd keeps wages low and profits high.  Governments don’t care, because overpopulation is only a problem for other countries, and taking it seriously is a fast path to early retirement.  Even environmentalists don’t care, because population is an issue that rapidly drives away large numbers of contributors.  So, the herd in prosperous regions pretends that their comfortable way of life is not directly threatened.

Prior to WROG, life was cheap.  Human rights were unknown.  There were few prisons, because criminals were not rewarded with free room and board — most were hung or brutally flogged.  Imbeciles, heretics, rabble-rousers, cripples, and the mentally ill were not carefully protected by the ruling nobility.  Many died on the streets.  Infanticide was common, and the church looked the other way — there was no extra food, and there were many, many unwanted newborns.

Much to Stanton’s intense dismay, the WROG era ushered in a new mindset of sentimentality — the nanny state.  Since food was now cheap and abundant, it became possible to rescue the unwanted children, feed the poor, and care for the dregs of society.  A “politically correct” value system emerged, which advocated for human rights, but failed to balance these human rights with equal levels of human responsibilities, a fatal defect.

Decade after decade, we’ve spent millions and millions on food aid, and sent it to regions with high birth rates, having populations far in excess of the local carrying capacity — Ethiopia, for example.  As long as their birth rate remains high, they can never be rescued from poverty by any amount of food aid.  Political correctness insists that family planning decisions are a private matter.  Reproductive rights, without reproductive responsibilities, lead to an ever-increasing population of poor and hungry people.  Yet few charities promote family planning, so the problem proceeds briskly toward the cliff.

PC strategists argue that we don’t need to stop growth, the smart solution is to simply end poverty.  If we rape the Earth more, expand the economy more, and make everyone prosperous, then the whole world will be happy well-fed car owners — but this will destroy the planet (and it’s impossible, too).  Stanton shouts the obvious: sustainable development is an oxymoron.

He insisted that there was absolutely nothing immoral about Draconian birth control, like China’s one child policy.  Yes, it ruffled some feathers, but it was a dramatic success — between 300 and 400 million births were prevented.  Consequently, over the long run, the Chinese people, and their ecosystem will suffer far less.  The choices were intense birth control, or intense social misery, or aggression and conquest.  The PC faith absolutely opposes the notion of intense birth control, in every country, starting yesterday.  By default, collective inaction is a unanimous vote for catastrophe.

Stanton had no kind words for the PC faith.  Despite their good intentions, he believed that over the long run they were inadvertently increasing human misery and ecological destruction.  He was sure that PC was bound for extinction as the collapse proceeds, prosperity withers, and life once again becomes cheap.  PC believers denounced his book with great vigor (cruel, evil, racist, xenophobic infidel!). 

Here’s the bottom line: every genuinely sustainable culture that I have studied deliberately and actively practiced population management, in a wide variety of forms, many of which were extremely non-PC.  This was not cruel or immoral.  It was necessary to maintain the harmony of the community, the continuity of the culture, and the vitality of the ecosystem.  They had a different value system, and it worked well (unlike ours).  This was the norm for most of human history.

In our society, the values of political correctness are widely regarded as being normal.  But blind faith in any belief system is risky.  In an insane world, every core belief must be questioned, every right must be balanced by responsibilities, and every population must shift into reverse.

Stanton, William, The Rapid Growth of Human Populations 1750-2000, Multi-Science Publishing Company, Brentwood, United Kingdom, 2003.