Wild Free and Happy Sample 02

[Note: This is the second 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 196 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.] 

Our Tree Critter Ancestors

The dawn of life on Earth began maybe four billion years ago, with the emergence of single-celled beings, the common ancestors of all forms of life, including us.  Let’s fast forward to around 65 million years ago, when our first primate ancestors came into existence, not long after dinosaurs moved off the stage.  These critters were squirrel-sized, and lived high above the ground in the humid tropical rainforests of Mother Africa.  They were probably insectivores, furry little hunters that dined on the delicious flesh of bugs and grubs.

Arboreal (tree-dwelling) primates had little need for a powerful sense of smell like most terrestrial (ground-dwelling) animals have.  What they needed was excellent stereoscopic vision, via forward oriented eyes that provided accurate depth perception, so they could scamper and leap through the branches without mishap.  Being able to perceive colors made it easier to find ripe fruit, which was a primary food source.  Even today, bright red objects attract our attention.

Their hands and feet evolved into forms fine-tuned for grasping bark, vines, and branches, with toes and fingers tipped with nails, not claws.  Fingers were long and curved, wrists freely rotated, and shoulder joints were flexible.  An acute sense of touch and a sharp mind helped them excel at airborne acrobatics.  Humans retain a number of these arboreal traits.

Our ancestors were tree-dwellers for most of the 65 million year saga of primates.  A look in the mirror shows clear evidence of this heritage.  Most primate species today remain partly arboreal.  Humans are the only living primates that are fully terrestrial.  Large male gorillas do not sleep in the trees, but the other gorillas do.

In the rainforest, food was available year round, so our ancestors enjoyed an easy life.  Living amidst a cornucopia of organic fruit, nuts, insects, and assorted tree critters, they could live happily without tools, fire, cooking, cell phones, or psych meds.  The climate was comfortable, so there was no need for clothing.  A simple tree nest was all they needed.  It was a wonderful way of life, while it lasted.  They only used renewable resources, and they left no permanent scars on the forest.  Like all other animals at the time, they had a way of life that was genuinely sustainable.

Shift to the Savannah

Climate change is a trickster that takes great delight in periodically pulling the rug out from under stable ecosystems, and watching them scramble to survive.  It’s an exciting roller coaster of hot and cold, wet and dry, calm and stormy.  Species that can’t adapt to changing conditions go extinct, creating opportunities for other species to fill their ecological niche.  The show of life must go on.

Long, long ago, in Mother Africa, the climate was warm and moist, home to the magnificent rainforests in which primates evolved.  Later, around five million years ago, as glaciers grew in the Northern Hemisphere, the climate in African rainforests began to shift to cooler and dryer.  By two million years ago, lush rainforests were far smaller, largely replaced by expanding savannahs (grasslands with scattered trees).  If it wasn’t for climate change, you might be sitting naked on a branch today, wild, free, and happy in a lush rainforest paradise, nibbling on fruit with your friends and family, in a clean, healthy, sustainable world.

As the rainforests shrank, our tree-dwelling ancestors were something like tadpoles in a puddle that was drying up.  Many species of arboreal critters went extinct, but not all of them.  The ancestors of chimps, bonobos, gibbons, and orangutans were able to remain in the forest and avoid extinction, while baboons, gorillas, and our ancestors took a deep breath, moved to the ground, and tried to adapt to a new way of life.

On the savannah, our early ancestors were weird looking, funny smelling undocumented immigrants, attempting to survive in a habitat for which evolution had done little to assist them.  Their limited speed, size, and strength were serious drawbacks.  They were newcomers in a grassland neighborhood where most of the long-term residents had been coevolving for millions of years.  The new neighborhood included numerous large carnivores that were strong, fast, and equipped with sharp claws and fangs.  They specialized in weeding out the injured, sick, elderly, immature, and inattentive.  Many of our ancestors became organic cat food.

To survive, our ancestors used several defensive strategies.  They lived in groups, where many eyes were constantly paying attention to the surroundings.  When someone noticed a threat, loud calls were made to alert the gang, and the predator lost the advantage of surprise.  Sometimes they mobbed hungry predators, aggressively assaulting them.  Other times they quickly scattered in every direction.  The ancestors were careful to be as invisible as possible.  They chose sleeping places that offered the most security.  As a result of their cleverness, luck, and risky choices, an enormous number of ground-dwelling primates survive today.

Rainforests have high biodiversity, they provide a pleasant home for huge numbers of species.  Savannahs support far less biodiversity but, unlike dense forests, they provide excellent habitat for many large animal species.  A square mile of rainforest contains tons of biomass in its trees, far more than a square mile of grassland, but grassland can produce more new biomass every year, primarily during the wet season.  This nutritious vegetation, which includes high-energy seeds, grows close to the ground, a convenient location for grazing animals. 

The biological productivity of grasslands (savannahs, prairies, and steppes) encouraged the emergence of large herds of herbivores and their predators.  When our ancestors moved to the ground, evolution had not equipped them for hunting large game, or escaping from speedy carnivores.  They had two options, adapt or go extinct.

Savages



One day in 1991, a strange letter arrived at the Rainforest Action Network in San Francisco, where Joe Kane was working.  It was from members of the Huaorani tribe of Ecuador, wild folks who have lived in the Amazon rainforest for thousands of years.  Their jungle home had fantastic biodiversity, including many species that live nowhere else on Earth.

The letter said that DuPont-Conoco was planning to destroy their ecosystem and culture.  The Indians were perfectly happy with their traditional way of life, and they had no interest in being destroyed.  They just wanted to be left alone.  Help!  Kane quit his job and moved to South America.  Several years later, he published Savages, which described his exciting, chaotic, and painful adventure.

Unlike our society, Huaorani men and women really have equal status.  It is never OK to give orders, or to raise a hand against a child or woman.  Family harmony is important.  A priest was amazed by them, “They are joyful in a way that is complete and without self-consciousness.”

The Huaorani strive to be in tune with the abundance of the forest, so they will always have enough to eat.  Sharing is essential.  “There is no higher manifestation of this ideal state than unqualified generosity, and no act more generous than to give away food.”  In the days prior to contact with outsiders, most natives never encountered more than seventy or eighty people during their entire lives, most of whom they knew by name.  Imagine that — a world without strangers or loneliness.

Hunting in a dense rainforest is not easy.  Their technology included spears and blowguns.  Poison darts would kill monkeys in the branches above, requiring the hunter to climb up and retrieve them.  Over time, the feet of men who spent a lot of time in the treetops changed shape, making it easier for them to climb (see image above).  Big toes bent outward, providing a tighter grip.

Until the 1950s, the Huaorani had almost no contact with the outer world.  Then, the missionaries arrived, to save the souls of the demon worshippers.  They believed that the Indians needed to live in permanent settlements, clear the jungle, become farmers, join the cash economy, and pay taxes.  Their children needed to learn Spanish, and get a proper civilized education, so they could abandon their backward culture and language.  Maidenform brassieres were distributed to the jungle camps, so women could conceal their shameful boobs.

The missionaries were walking disease bombs, and they knew that the natives had no immunity to the pathogens they brought into the rainforest, but they were on a mission from God.  Even ordinary influenza could wipe out uncontacted people.  It was vitally important to convert the savages to the one and only genuine interpretation of Christianity, before other missionaries arrived and introduced them to one of the many false interpretations (especially Catholic), condemning their souls to the eternal fires of Hell.

The missionaries held the natives in low regard and, likewise, the natives resented the freaky aliens.  The Huaorani word for outsiders was cowode (cannibals).  In their culture, sickness, misfortune, and death were never the result of mere bad luck, they were always caused by sorcery conjured by others.  When someone died, even an infant, justice required relatives to identify the culprit and kill him or her in revenge.  While this clashes with the virtuous morals our culture has invented, it kept their numbers stable.  Their ecological ethics were far superior to those of the aliens.

Kane became friends with Enqueri, a smart but unreliable Huaorani lad who could speak Spanish.  In 1956, his father and friends killed five missionaries, because soon after missionaries visited, many died from ghastly diseases.  It was easy to determine the source of this sorcery and deliver rough justice.

Clever missionaries realized that two could play this game.  After deaths, they would accuse the native shamans of demonic acts, and grieving families believed them.  By 1991, most shamans had been murdered.  Kane met a shaman named Mengatohue.  “He could enter an ayahuasca trance and become a jaguar.”  Missionaries told schoolchildren that he was an agent of the devil.  Kids mocked him.

Rachel Saint was the sister of one of the speared missionaries, and she continued to pursue his work.  One of her first native converts, Toña, became a preacher.  He attempted to convince the Huaorani that their traditional culture, everything they knew, was totally wrong.  Enqueri said that Toña “brought with him an evil so strong that it killed a child.”  To avenge this misfortune, he was killed with seven spears.

In 1967, oil was discovered in Huaorani country, an estimated 216 million barrels, enough to fuel American gas-guzzlers for about thirteen days.  In 1969, Saint created a protectorate (reservation) for the Huaorani, with a school and chapel.  Before long, all 104 Indian residents had polio, 16 died, and another 16 were crippled.

The Company (oil interests) helped Saint create and operate the protectorate.  They wanted to clear the Huaorani off their traditional lands, so they could build roads, do seismic testing, drill wells, and construct pipelines without bloody resistance.  Saint was thankful for their kind assistance, but regretted their dark side, the booze, prostitution, and violence that came with the full-scale capitalist blitzkrieg.  However, she never doubted that God was smiling on her holy ethnocide.

Ecuador’s government was impressively corrupt and incompetent.  They excelled at boosting debt, stashing stolen funds in Miami banks, and driving up food prices.  Seventy-nine percent of the people lived in poverty.  Officials were desperate for income from the oil industry, and they cooperated in every possible way.  Soldiers kept journalists and activists out of oil country, and the Company was free to pollute the land to the best of their abilities.  Toxic crud was dumped anywhere, and pipelines often leaked.  Rivers turned black, fish died, birds died, caimans died, bananas died, and natives got very sick.  For natives, middle age was 25.

Ecuador was also eager to rid their crowded cities of poor people.  The government promoted the colonization of the rainforest.  When roads were built, a four-mile strip (6.5 km) on each side was dedicated for settlement by colonists.  They flooded into the wilderness, erased jungle, built flimsy shacks, and attempted to produce coffee and cattle on low quality rainforest soil that was quickly depleted.  Many became laborers for the Company, where the work was hard, and the pay meager.  No effort was made to interfere with widespread illegal logging.

Colonization was a rapidly spreading cancer that wouldn’t stop until its ecosystem host was destroyed, including the tribal people.  There was fierce conflict between the Indians and colonists, many died, and many shacks were burned, but the cancer persisted.  A wise guy once noted that the words “road” and “raid” come from the same root.  No place is safer than a vast roadless forest.

The struggle against modernity continued, on and on, with little success.  Kane liked his Huaorani friends, but he wasn’t willing to dedicate his life to their struggle.  To the powerful, he was an annoying troublemaker, so he was unlikely to die from old age.  Kane returned to California and wrote his book.  By the last page, everything was worse, a saga of endless bullshit, craziness, and tragedy.  There are millions horror stories similar to Kane’s, for every commodity utilized by industrial civilization.

José Miguel Goldáraz was a Spanish priest who had spent 20 years in South America.  By and by, he lost interest in soul saving, and became an activist.  He had no doubt that the natives would kill oil workers in defense of their land.  “When the Huaorani kill, there is a spiritual discipline to it.  Americans kill without knowing they are doing it.  You don’t want to know you are doing it.  And yet you are going to destroy an entire way of life.  So you tell me: Who are the savages?”

Chevron vs. the Amazon is a 2016 documentary on YouTube.  Abby Martin visited oil country in Ecuador to observe the current state of affairs. 

Kane, Joe, Savages, Vintage Books, New York, 1996.

Photo: “Feet” by Phil Borges.

Deforesting the Earth

Michael Williams’ book, Deforesting the Earth, describes humankind’s 10,000 year raid on the planet’s forest cover.  Readers are taken on a world tour of deforestation through the ages.  Ports of call include Greece, Rome, China, India, the Amazon, and others.  We discover the regional variations of forest mining, from the first frontier clearings to the lumber guzzling industrial societies.

The saga of the forest molesters begins in the Stone Age, on an embryonic scale.  Many imagine that all Native Americans lived in perfect harmony from the dawn of time.  Compared to the white colonists, they indeed lived far lighter, but many tribes altered their ecosystems over time via periodic burning, which prevented forest regeneration.  They left some footprints on the land.

In the Old World, the experiment in agriculture had been thrashing soils and forests for centuries.  But in America, many imagine that similar slash-and-burn techniques somehow caused no injuries.  Williams disagreed.  He described extensive deforestation and soil depletion in corn country.  Note that large-scale agriculture in the eastern U.S. was just 500 years old in 1492, and they lacked metal axes, plows, and draft animals.  In Mexico, where large-scale farming existed since 2000 B.C., there was abundant evidence of serious damage — bigger footprints.

Our dependence on wood makes Homo sapiens an unusual species.  Without the warmth provided by burning wood, our ancestors could have never left the tropics.  Deforestation was civilization’s shadow.  Until the temporary blip of fossil energy, wood was our oil.  Wood enabled the manufacture of metals, bricks, mortar, glass, and ceramics.  It enabled long-term survival in snow country.

The Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas developed big bloody empires without plows, iron tools, or domesticated herd animals — but deforestation kept them on life support.  Gold, silver, diamonds, and iron were not necessary for becoming victorious conquerors, but the march to domination required food, water, and wood.

In medieval Europe, the new religion had driven a wedge between humans and nature.  Earth was created for us.  We were partners with God, and our job was to put the finishing touches on creation.  “A wild landscape not hallowed by prayer and asceticism was said to be in a state of original sin, but once it has become fertile and purposeful, it was transformed.”  So, the forests had to go, along with the savages and outlaws that lurked within them.

In theory, wood is renewable.  Societies with light footprints didn’t kill trees; they gathered dead wood instead.  For rising civilizations, on the other hand, wood was more like pure crystal meth.  When you had access to it, life was a fantastic amazing rush.  You built ships, cities, fortresses, temples, trade networks.  But when the wood was gone, you were a burned out, toothless, walking dead tweaker.

Wood addiction was a vicious cycle.  Deforestation led to expanded cropland and pasture, which led to growing population, which led to further deforestation, and so on.  Eventually, the Ponzi scheme encountered limits.  Endless growth is impossible.  Simple societies that saw their forest as sacred were helpless sitting ducks for loony societies possessed by an insatiable addiction to wood and wealth.  Why practice enlightened self-restraint when you can grow like crazy?

Forests are finite.  Perpetual deforestation is impossible, as they discovered on Easter Island.  Today, it’s growing at an exponential rate.  Listen to this: we’ve cleared more forest since 1950 than in all previous time, and the extermination continues.  Consumers encourage rainforest destruction by buying pet food, fast food burgers, soy-based products, foods containing palm oil, and so on.

Williams mentioned the winter of 1695, when the king of France sat at his dinner table, bundled in furs, his glass filled with frozen wine.  Before iron stoves, heating was extremely inefficient.  The metropolis of Paris was importing firewood from up to 200 kilometers away (124 miles).  In the winter of 1709, wood was scarce, and “people died like flies.”

At about this time, folks began seriously fooling around with coal, a nonrenewable source of energy.  Before long, coal became the new meth.  It threw open the doors to the Industrial Revolution, and a new vicious cycle of exponential growth and resource depletion.  Two hundred years later, we slipped into the petroleum nightmare, civilization went viral, and we are now skyrocketing toward bad juju oblivion.

Previously, I thought that the biggest impact of riding the downslope from Peak Energy was the transition to muscle-powered agriculture, a massive shift that we are entirely unprepared for.  But what about heating?  In 1695, when the king’s wine froze, the planet’s population was just 600 million.  Today, there is far less forest and far more people.  Today, almost half of humankind uses wood for heating and cooking, and they are burning twice as much as 20 years ago.  Imagine the day when wood is the only source of heat for Boston or Chicago, and the chainsaws, trucks, and trains are rusting in the snow.

Williams’ book is a grand banquet of information.  Readers get to spend many hours studying charts, graphs, and tables of statistics, observing reality through the mind of a geographer.  He described how, why, and when the long process of deforestation has proceeded, but paid little attention to the ecological impacts of forest clearing.  He advocated conservation, based on wise management.  The rate of cutting should not exceed the rate at which new wood grows.  Therefore, efforts to preserve old growth ecosystems were dumb, because mature trees grow slower than young ones.

Williams disliked critics of deforestation.  Those youngsters were feeble-minded alarmists who spewed exaggerated hysteria — obnoxious eco-fascists determined to make our lives miserable.  For him, deforestation was a necessary evil, “In fact, the clearing of the forest… over much of western and central Europe was one of the most dramatic changes made to human landscapes anywhere and can be regarded as one of the great achievements of the medieval age.”

Williams was born in 1935, and grew up during the zenith of the British Empire, the petroleum blip, the high tech revolution, and the population explosion — an era of staggering chaos.  Yes, deforestation was a bummer, but it was a sacrifice required for our joyride to wonderland.  Like the worldview of the dominant culture in which he was raised, the book vibrates with cognitive dissonance.  Our advanced standard of living must be preserved, at any cost, for as long as possible, by any means necessary.

Reading the book with ecology-tinted glasses is most illuminating.  It describes a chain reaction of catastrophic mistakes, made with good intentions, spanning thousands of years — mistakes that continue to multiply at a head spinning rate.  We are given a detailed map of the path we took to disaster, including the wrong turns.  We can never comprehend genuine sustainability until we identify and understand the mistakes.  We must discover our history.

Immense imagination is needed to elevate our consciousness far above the reeking cesspool of pathological illusions.  There may come a day, after the storms, when we have a chance to start over again.  How could we do it differently — and wisely — next time around?  It’s time for good people with hearts and creative gifts to contemplate these issues.  It’s time for new lessons, stories, songs, and paintings.  It’s time to remember who we are, and come home.

Williams provided a vital clue.  “If sustainable societies existed, then they depended on very low population densities, abundance of land, and little or no involvement in a market economy, local or regional, all of which were rare.”  I agree.

P.S., I also recommend John Perlin’s book, A Forest Journey.

Williams, Michael, Deforesting the Earth — From Prehistory to Global Crisis, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006.

Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape

In the family of life, humankind’s two closest living relatives are bonobos and chimpanzees, two apes with strikingly different approaches to living.  Ninety-eight percent of our DNA is the same as theirs.  These three intelligent cousins share a common ancestor that lived five to seven million years ago.  In his book, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape, primatologist Frans de Waal does a superb job of comparing the three cousins, and the photos of Frans Lanting are fantastic.

In Africa, chimps far outnumber bonobos, and inhabit a larger territory.  The two never meet in the wild, because apes cannot swim, and the Zaire River keeps them apart.  Both reside in dense tropical rainforests, and both sleep in the trees.  They are similar in appearance, and it wasn’t until 1929 that scientists realized that bonobos and chimps were different species.

Bonobos are lucky to live in a dense and rugged rainforest that is difficult for humans to get to, explore, and destroy.  Researchers can spend many days thrashing around in the foliage, completely unaware that a group of bonobos is silently looking down at them from the thick canopy above.  Bonobos were not studied in the wild until the mid-1970s, and research was interrupted from 1994 to 2003, by a civil war that claimed three million lives.  Chimps, on the other hand, had been known and studied for a long time.

During the twentieth century, industrial warfare brutally exterminated millions of humans.  For some reason, it became trendy to perceive humans as inherently violent.  Chimps were seen in a similar light, because of their resemblance to industrial humans.  Once, when two chimp groups came into contact, researchers observed the brutal massacre of the weaker group.

De Waal offered this insight on male chimps:  “Their cooperative, action-packed existence resembles that of the human males who, in modern society, team up with other males in corporations within which they compete while collectively fighting other corporations.”

Chimps and civilized humans typically live in groups dominated by alpha males who actively subdue their rivals.  Females are second-class.  When an alpha male chimp reaches retirement age, and is clobbered by a vigorous young upstart, the new alpha often kills the old fellow’s young offspring, so their mothers can promptly begin producing offspring with his genes.  Because of this, females with young tend to go off and forage alone, avoiding contact with the bloody stud and his buddies.

Bonobos look a lot like chimps, but live very differently.  Bonobo groups are matriarchal, and males are second-class.  Females determine how food is shared, and they eat while the males wait.  Chimps have sex only when a female is fertile.  Bonobos have sex almost anytime, several times a day, with anyone interested, young or old, in every imaginable way.

The genitals of female bonobos become enormously swollen when they are receptive to sexual delights.  They are receptive almost half of the time, whilst being fertile for just a few days.  Non-reproductive sex is an excellent way to defuse conflicts, keep everyone relaxed, and have a pleasant day.  Because everyone has sex with everyone, paternity is impossible to determine.  Therefore, male bonobos do not kill infants, because any infant might be their offspring.

Hominids have taken a third path, the nuclear family.  Long ago, with the arrival of the chilly glacial era, the rainforests we evolved in came close to disappearing.  Our ancestors shifted outside the forest.  The nuclear family was an adaptation for surviving on the open savannah.  Hominid offspring benefitted when their mothers and fathers lived together and cooperated.  Tightly knit groups of aggressive hominids could successfully kill game and fend off predators.  The strongest, fiercest males were more likely to survive and reproduce, so natural selection favored these traits.

Promiscuity was discouraged, because males did not want to spend their lives raising a rival’s offspring.  Thus, the nuclear family reduced the reproductive freedom of females, via moral constraints.  Hominid societies have probably been male-dominated from the start.  Male control further increased with the shift to sedentary living, and the accumulation of property.  Males wanted their life savings to be inherited by their own offspring.  This led to an obsession with virginity and chastity, and the prickly patriarchal mindset.

Civilized societies have developed patriarchal cultures.  “With a few notable exceptions, such as spotted hyenas and the lemurs of Madagascar, male dominance is the standard mammalian pattern.”  Chimps follow this pattern but, to the great delight of feminists, the discovery of female-dominant bonobo society has presented a less macho alternative.  So, who are humans?  De Waal says that humans are in the middle, between the two poles — both aggressive and empathetic.

Why are chimps and bonobos so different?  Both have low birth rates, and nurse their young for four or five years.  Bonobos live in a habitat with abundant food, and no serious competitors in their ecological niche, an ideal situation.  Chimps live in leaner lands, and compete for food with gorillas and baboons.  They feel the squeeze of crowding, and they reduce this pressure by infanticide, and by killing competitors.  Infanticide is common in many species, including lions, prairie dogs, mice, chimps, and gorillas.

We live in an era of extinctions, and the numbers of chimps and bonobos are in sharp decline, as their human cousins relentlessly expand.  Diamond miners, loggers, bush meat hunters, and war refugees continue pushing into their habitat.

De Waal appeared in a fascinating documentary, The Last Great Ape.  It includes many scenes of bonobos living in the wild.  We see them enjoying a pleasant life — eating fruit, having sex, climbing trees, playing, having sex, grooming each other, nursing.  In one scene, viewers look down from a plane zooming over the jungle, and the narrator says, “This part of the forest is like a time capsule; bonobos may have existed here in much the same way for two million years.”  Wow!

Viewers see animals that look like our ancestors, live like our ancestors, and still inhabit the region where our species originated.  The bonobos have obviously remained far more stable over two million years than humans have, because they enjoy good luck and just enough intelligence to live well in their niche.  When I contemplate the era of my 62-year life, and the skyrocketing destruction caused by humankind, it breaks my heart — and mindlessly killing the planet doesn’t even make us happy.  Big brains do not guarantee long-term stability and ecological sustainability.

Patriarchal chimps have also succeeded in living for two million years, in the same region, in a stable manner.  While they rudely offend our humanist and feminist sensibilities, they have evolved a way of living that is thousand times less destructive than that of the humanists and feminists in our insane society.

This raises an embarrassing question.  Exactly how did we benefit from complex language, literacy, technology, domestication, agriculture, civilization, and industrialization?

Waal, Frans de, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997.

 

The Last Great Ape, WGBH, 2007 (the BBC version is titled Bonobo: Missing in Action, 2006).  The transcript is here.  Copyright holders periodically block YouTube access to this program, so it keeps changing names.  Search for “bonobo” videos that are 51 minutes long.

The Baka Pygmies are our relatives who have lived in the African rainforest close to forever.  In this video (2 min), they make an incredibly joyful noise.  The aura they radiate is that of wild people with deep roots in their ancestral home.  Sadly, their teeth indicate that their diet has been civilized.

This video (5 min) includes beautiful portraits of Baka Pygmies, along with their music.  The faces of the children radiate a glowing sense of joy and contentment.

 

The Forest People

Colin Turnbull’s book The Forest People takes us on a fascinating voyage into the world of the Mbuti Pygmies, who live in the Ituri rainforest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Turnbull (1924-1994) was an anthropologist who spent several years with the Pygmies, beginning in 1951.  He came from a wealthy English family, but he found life among the Pygmies to be so satisfying that he had to resist strong urges to remain with them.

Instead of using the standard scholarly format for anthropology books, Turnbull described these people in a series of stories.  These stories included descriptions of the important cultural components of the Pygmy way of life, and introduced us to the personalities of various individuals in the band. 

They were hunter-gatherers, and they enjoyed an exceedingly low tech way of life in their tropical rainforest home.  They had little need for clothing, blankets, or warm shelters.  They hunted with nets, spears, and bows and arrows.  They did not garden or herd animals.  Consequently, they had an abundance of leisure time.  They loved singing, dancing, storytelling, and visiting kinfolk.  They would laugh until they were too weak to stand, then sit down and laugh.

In 2500 BC, Egyptian explorers discovered the Pygmies.  Their report to the Pharaoh described “a people of the trees, a tiny people who sing and dance to their god, a dance such as had never been seen before.”  When Turnbull arrived 4,500 years later, he found a similar scenario.  They had a way of life that worked, and it was quite enjoyable.  Yes, daily life included normal personality conflicts, but their society did not suffer from chiefs, priests, thieves, chauvinists, inequality, or individualism.

The hunting way of life required cooperation, so the Pygmies were highly skilled at conflict resolution.  One of their proverbs proclaimed that “a noisy camp is a hungry camp.”  Disputes promptly led to active discussion by the group.  Shunning and ridicule were common tools, and annoying offenders were sometimes beaten.

Everything about the forest was sacred to the Pygmies.  “They were a people who had found in the forest something that made their life more than just worth living, something that made it, with all its hardships and problems and tragedies, a wonderful thing full of joy and happiness and free of care.”  

In another book, Turnbull mentioned Father Longo, a Catholic missionary who refused to preach to the Pygmies, because they had no word for evil.  “In order to convert them, then, he would first have to teach them the concept of evil, and that he was not prepared to do.”

Moke, a wise elder, said: “The forest is a father and mother to us, and like a father or mother it gives us everything we need — food, clothing, shelter, warmth, and affection.  Normally everything goes well, because the forest is good to its children, but when things go wrong, there must be a reason.”

Alas, sometimes the forest fell asleep, and failed to take care of the Pygmies, leading to illness, death, or bad hunting.  Army ants might move in, or a leopard might snatch a child.  When these problems occurred, the Pygmies would sing to the forest, to wake it up and make it happy.  They sometimes performed the molimo ceremony, during which animal noises were made using a long hollow wooden instrument.

And when the forest was happy, they would sing and dance to share their happiness with it.  They lived in a heavenly place, in constant direct contact with everything they held to be sacred.  They had absolute reverence for the forest, their ancient home, and they were some of its many children.

The Pygmies enjoyed at least 4,500 years of relative stability, and this was made possible by their primitive technology.  If they had become farmers or herders, their journey would have been far more destructive and turbulent.  They would have seriously damaged themselves and their sacred forest.

Change has been increasing in Pygmy country, requiring them to adjust the way they live.  Maybe 400 years ago, Bantu people moved into the forest and began slash-and-burn farming.  They had been herders from the grasslands of East Africa, but they were driven off their home by other tribes.  Their cattle died in the jungle, so they traded food with the Pygmies for meat. 

In the 1880’s, the Congo became a colony of Belgium.  Since then efforts have been made to “liberate” the unfortunate Pygmies and convert them into hard-working tax-paying farmers.  This plan has not enjoyed great success.  At one farm, 29 Pygmies died of sunstroke in a single day.  They thrive in the cool shade of their ancient forest, and they harbor an intense hatred of miserable backbreaking field work — what could be more idiotic?

In the twentieth century, the Ituri has been ravaged by road-builders, loggers, miners, ivory poachers, bushmeat hunters, missionaries, and a bloody parade of trigger-happy rebels, terrorists, goon squads, psychopaths, and freedom fighters.  There have been numerous armed conflicts.  The Second Congo War began in 1998, and resulted in 5.4 million deaths, mostly from disease and starvation.  Many displaced people were driven into the Ituri Forest.  Pygmies were hunted down and eaten like game animals. 

Much deforestation has been caused by the continuous expansion of slash-and-burn farming.  Jungle soils are rapidly depleted by agriculture, and the Congo’s birthrate is one of the worlds highest.  Almost half of the population is younger than 15.

When The Forest People was published, it soon became popular.  Turnbull thought that the book had impact “because the near-Utopia described rang true, and showed that certain voids in the lives of many of us could indeed be filled.”

Ah yes, the voids in our lives.  How often do we sing and dance to keep our forest happy?  Turnbull has given us a precious gift — a taste of what a healthy and joyful life could be like, living in harmony with the land, singing and dancing in a balanced ecosystem, century after century after century.  His book offers us a brief enchanting escape from our world of madness, and a beautiful vision of what life could be like for our descendants.

Turnbull, Colin M., The Forest People, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1961.