Wild Free and Happy Sample 36

[Note: This is the thirty-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 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.] 

Aztec Erosion

M. Lourdes González-Arqueros and team studied soil erosion in the Teotihuacán Valley, northeast of Mexico City.  Mexico’s soils have taken a beating over the centuries, and the blame is commonly directed to the settlers from the Old World who arrived in the 1500s.  They imported many destructive practices, pathogens, and hooved locusts (goats and sheep).  Research done by the study concluded that the indigenous people were already reputable soil molesters when the white folks arrived.  They analyzed erosion patterns during three different periods of time:

(1) In the Teotihuacán period (A.D. 1-650), forests still grew on summits, hill slopes, and foot slopes.  This restricted some soil erosion.  Organic corn was grown by no-tillage methods (picks and spades) on the lower ground. 

(2) In the Aztec period (1325-1521), forest area in the valley was drastically reduced as population increased, and agriculture expanded up the hillsides.  During this period, much of the landscape was devoted to agriculture.  When sloped land is deforested, increased erosion is an expected consequence.  In the Aztec period, rates of soil loss were much higher, compared to rates in both the earlier Teotihuacán period, and the later modern period.

(3) In the modern period (after 1970), forest area has recovered a bit.  A large portion of cropland is now planted with prickly pear, a perennial plant that is fast growing, rapidly rooting, and usually has deep roots.  Soil destruction was lower than during the Aztec period, but the study did not give modern practices the Sustainable Agriculture™ seal of approval.  Too many people continue living too hard.

The team concluded that land use and soil management were prime factors in the erosion, more so than precipitation and topography.  I wish their study hadn’t skipped around the years between 1521 and 1970.  Anyway, before the Spaniards, the land was gradually being beaten to death.  Then, the colonists launched a full scale war on forests, while flocks of their imported sheep and goats prevented forest recovery, and their overgrazing accelerated erosion. 

Then, around the 1960s, the Green Revolution rolled in, with mechanization, water mining, synthetic fertilizers, hybrid seeds, and trainloads of chemical fertilizers, fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides.  Around the world, population continues soaring, while staggering amounts of soil run away from home.  In the modern mindset, unborn generations, ecosystems, and the atmosphere are seen as disposable — cosmic litter, like plastic water bottles or cigarette butts.  Our education system is completely lost in a soft, warm, foggy dream world of full blown dementia (perpetual growth, electric cars, voyages to Mars). 

Oh!  Speaking of Mars, he was the Roman god of war in his glory days.  Earlier in his career, he was a deity of virility, fertility, springtime, and a guardian of agriculture.  Farmers hated nature, because wildness refused to behave like an obedient servant.  It was hard work clearing forests, stripping away the wild vegetation, exterminating the wildlife, and pulverizing the soil.

Nature was a mortal enemy of the Roman Empire, because it was a persistent threat to their food supply.  Trees, brush, grass, and critters constantly invaded the wheat fields.  Every day, Big Mama Nature worked hard to restore health to badly injured ecosystems.  She used all her tricks to rubbish the hideous fields — droughts, deluges, hail storms, frosts, heat waves, howling winds, wildfires, locusts, blights, birds, deer, boars, and on and on.

She also used pandemics.  One of my ancestral homes was in Gran, Hadeland, Norway.  The Black Death hammered the population, many farms were abandoned, and joyful forests reclaimed their fields.  My kin told me that one day, many years ago, a lad was hunting in the woods.  He shot an arrow, and it struck a bell.  He was surprised to discover an old church concealed in the dense forest.  Nobody among the living knew anything about the mysterious church, or the community it had served before the plague.

Mixtec Erosion

The Mixtec culture of southern Mexico is ancient.  Their homeland is mostly located in the state of Oaxaca which, long ago, was one of the most advanced regions in the Americas.  The Mixtec people managed to avoid being absorbed by the Aztec empire, and their writings are much older than those of the Aztecs or Incas.  Some believe that the Mixtecs were the ones who originally conjured domesticated corn out of wild teosinte.

In the good old days, prior to agriculture, their homeland was largely forest.  Today, regions of the treeless highlands have become a desert that not even thorns can grow in.  Oaxaca is Mexico’s second poorest state, and a third of its people have moved away.  Photographer Matt Black happened to meet some Mixtecs in California, where they were accumulating vast fortunes by doing backbreaking farm labor for $40 a day.  They chose this path because their homeland had become a disaster area.  Many of them are illiterate, and most speak only their native language, Mixteco.

In 2011, Black got curious about them and decided to visit their homeland, Mixtecapan (the place of the Cloud People), one of the world’s oldest farming cultures.  Wow!  Some places have lost up to 16 feet (5 m) of topsoil.  A number of villages are half-deserted, and some of their fields have eroded to bare bedrock.  More than a million acres are so severely damaged that the U.N. now calls the region one of the most heavily eroded landscapes in the world.

Most stunning of all, Black described the disintegrating village of Santiago Mitlatongo.  One day, a cliff above town fell apart, dumping stones as large as houses on the village below.  Whole cornfields disappeared into sinkholes.  Homes sank into the ground and vanished.  Eventually, the whole village broke away from the surrounding land, like a calving iceberg — homes, fields, churches, stores — an area of about two square miles (5 km²) was in motion.  Writing in 2012, Black noted that it was still sliding, a few feet per day, a half mile (804 m) away from its original location. 

Corn Blight

H. Arnold Bruns wrote about a serious corn blight that hit the U.S. in 1970-71.  The southern corn leaf blight (SCLB) destroyed 15 percent of the corn crop.  It was enabled by innovative plant breeding that focused on maximizing yield ($$) by designing highly productive hybrid seeds that had very little genetic diversity.  These hybrids reliably generated big money for farmers, who eagerly bought the magic seeds.

On the downside, when conditions were optimal, up to 85 percent of the corn in a field was highly vulnerable to SCLB fungus.  The winter and spring of 1970 were wetter than usual, providing ideal conditions for disaster.  Some farmers lost 80 to 100 percent of their crop.  In the Corn Belt, some clusters of counties had average losses of 35 to 50 percent.  Across all of the state of Mississippi, losses were 30 to 40 percent.  This inspired big fear.  Would the entire U.S. crop be lost?  What would we use to feed livestock and poultry?  No more whiskey?  Gulp!

Before 1930, almost all corn was allowed to pollinate naturally, which resulted in high genetic diversity that reduced the possibility of catastrophic blights.  Then came the hybrids which, in theory, were more vulnerable to crop failure, but they almost always provided far higher yields and profits.  Today, in the major corn growing nations, 97 percent of the corn planted is hybrids.

The amount of food energy lost because of the SCLB blight was greater than the lost food due to the potato blight of Ireland in the 1840s, during which the Brits made little effort to feed the starving.  The message of both blights is that there is great danger in growing monocultures of extremely uniform crop plants.

Today, Brun worries that the new GMO fad is busy creating ideal conditions for bigger and better disasters — billions of herbicide resistant seeds having dangerous genetic uniformity.  What could possibly go wrong?  Right now, a blight is working hard to drive a stake into the heart of the banana industry — and winning.  The entire crop is genetically identical clones.

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations

Professor David Montgomery’s book Dirt provides a fascinating discussion about an extremely precious substance that we can’t live without, but treat like dirt.  He begins with an intimate explanation of what dirt is, how it’s formed, and how it’s destroyed — in plain, simple English. 

Then, he proceeds to lead us on an around-the-world tour, spanning many centuries, to examine the various methods that societies have devised for mining their soils, and diminishing their future via agriculture.

The book is impressively thorough, and it’s likely to blow more than a few minds, but the voice is a bit soft.  A neutral tone is mandatory for textbooks, and this may encourage casual readers to be less concerned about the future than they should be.  Connect the dots.

From a human perspective, soil is a non-renewable resource, because new soil is created very slowly, a process often measured on a geological timeframe.  For example, the soils of the Mediterranean basin were largely destroyed by 2,000 years ago, and they remain wrecked today.  They are quite likely to remain wrecked for many, many thousands of years.  Much of the region that once fed millions is a desert today.

If smoking a single pack of cigarettes reliably caused a painful death by cancer within weeks, nobody would smoke, because it’s clearly not smart.  But cancer normally takes decades to become apparent, and by the time you learn about the tumor, it’s too late to make smart decisions.  Life does not have an undo button.

It’s a similar story with societies that take up the dirty habit of agriculture, which is almost always fatal.  Once you get started, it’s nearly impossible to quit, because it’s unbelievably addictive.  Yet we continue to act like it’s a cool thing to do, because it’s a clever way to acquire trade trinkets and status, and all the other cool societies are doing it, too.  The disease often advances so slowly, over the course of generations, that nobody realizes the mistake.  But once the soil is ruined, it’s too late to become smart.  There is no wonder cure.  Game over.

Eventually, Montgomery’s world tour brings us to the United States, where the white invaders imported their dirty habit.  In Europe, many farmers were quite careful to do what they could to slow erosion, and improve fertility, using time-proven techniques, because starvation was the alternative.  American settlers promptly threw these prudent practices overboard, because they were time-consuming, and because there was an unbelievable supply of fertile soil that was readily available.  In the New World, dirt was a disposable commodity.

Settlers could get rich quick by raising tobacco and cotton.  A field of rich virgin soil could support three or four crops of tobacco, and then it would be abandoned.  It was cheaper to pack up, move on, and clear new fields than it was to manure the fields they had already cleared.  This careless attitude fueled an explosion of erosion and deforestation.  One gully near Macon, Georgia was 50 feet deep, 200 feet across, and 300 yards long.  Soil exhaustion was a primary driving force behind the westward expansion of the colonists.  Rape and run agriculture seems to have set the mold for the emerging American mindset.

In the twentieth century, when farmers bought millions of big, powerful machines, the 10,000 year war on soils mutated into a new and horrifying form.  Erosion rates skyrocketed to levels never before believed to be possible, leading to catastrophes like the Dust Bowl.  Montgomery says it like this: “Continued for generations, till-based agriculture will strip soil right off the land as it did in ancient Europe and the Middle East.  With current agricultural technology though, we can do it a lot faster.”

Here’s a line that made me jump: “Everything else — culture, art, and science — depends upon adequate agricultural production.”  Like air and water, food is essential for our survival.  Without food, our entire techno-wonderland turns into fairy dust and blows away.  We can’t live without it, but at the same time we are rapidly destroying what makes food possible — because profits today are more important than existence tomorrow.  Sorry kids!

On a bright note, Montgomery gives us a quick tour of Tikopia, a society on a tiny island that is one of the few exceptions to the rule.  They seem to have devised a sustainable form of agriculture that majors in agroforestry (food-producing trees).  They combined this with a draconian method for maintaining a sustainable population, which was far less painful and destabilizing than the effects of over breeding. 

Looking toward the future, Montgomery foresees a large number of serious problems.  Explosive population growth continues.  We are moving beyond the era of cheap and abundant energy, and this will continuously drive the price of everything upward.  Climate change is likely to deliver unwanted surprises.  Widespread destruction of soils continues, and simply converting to organic farming will not fix this.  Nor will no-till technology, which will eventually be forced into extinction by rising energy costs, or herbicide-resistant weeds.  We are running out of tricks for increasing productivity.  The end of the chemical fertilizer game is inevitable, and it will largely be replaced with recycled sewage — a priceless treasure that we are now throwing away via expensive, energy-guzzling treatment plants.

Our current system is simply not up to the task of feeding the world in the coming decades, because it’s a design that self-destructs.  We try to force the ecosystem to adapt to our food production technology, and this doesn’t work.  Instead, we need to make farming adapt to the needs of the ecosystem.  In short, we need a serious revolution in the way we do agriculture — a new philosophy that gives top priority to the health of the land, not to maximizing income by any means necessary.  How likely is this?  Don’t hold your breath.

The subject of this book centers on soil erosion.  In the good old days of muscle-powered organic agriculture, soil destruction took a thousand years to ruin a civilization, on average.  Industrial agriculture is much quicker.  It now keeps seven billion people alive by using soil to convert fossil energy into food.  But the clock is running out on cheap energy, and industrial agriculture has an expiration date.  This will give birth to a new agricultural revolution — the return to muscle-powered farming, on severely depleted soils, fertilized once again by nutrient-rich sewage.  Farm productivity will plummet.  We are close to peak food production now.

Montgomery, David R., Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007.

NOTE: If you find this subject interesting, the first edition of Topsoil and Civilization (1955) is available for free online as a PDF download.  It follows a parallel course, but provides a different banquet of information, while coming to similar conclusions:

http://www.soilandhealth.org/copyform.aspx?bookcode=010113

New Roots for Agriculture

Wes Jackson was born in Kansas farm country, in a place where his grandfather homesteaded.  The land of his birth was being destroyed by agriculture, and this drove him crazy.  Wes and his wife Dana created The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.  Their mission was to create sustainable agriculture, a noble 100-year project that he describes in New Roots for Agriculture.  This book is a great primer on farming — short, smart, and easy to read.

Our education system excels at graduating scholars who are blissfully ignorant about the food they eat.  Opponents of our truly horrid system for the mass production of meat, milk, and eggs often fail to recognize that our system for producing tofu, bean sprouts, and spinach is seriously defective as well.  Almost everything we eat has ecological costs far in excess of the price we are charged, and blissful ignorance keeps us marching down the wrong path.

Jackson has profound admiration for the Amish and Mennonites — America’s finest farmers — because they are religious about farming with exceptional care.  But their soil is not safe from normal hard rains, it washes away, too.  It’s heartbreaking.  No matter how hard you try, it fails.  It’s impossible to win when your primary tool is a plow (and no-till has its own serious drawbacks).

Jackson doesn’t restrict his scorn to modern stuff — agribusiness, pesticides, GM crops, the Green Revolution.  He condemns agriculture in its entirety.  It was a disaster 10,000 years ago, and it’s far, far worse today.  He has referred to it as an “accident,” but one that can be repaired.  We would be in far better shape today if we had continued dining on healthy wild foods, instead of shifting to growing crops on tilled fields.  He sees till agriculture as “a global disease” that is especially severe in the US, and “unless this disease is checked, the human race will wilt like any crop.”

Agriculture is a huge monster with a thousand heads, but it’s most terrible offense may be soil destruction, because it is largely irreparable.  Terrestrial life requires soil, and agriculture is tirelessly sending our finest soils to the bottom of the ocean.  It’s bad, and every farmer knows this.  Unfortunately, the system is designed to reward productivity, not ecosystem health.  Soil worshippers quickly go bankrupt.  Jackson is telling us nothing new, but he is shining a bright light on things that everyone should be thinking about at every mealtime.

There are a few exceptions to the rule.  In Japan and portions of northern Europe, agriculture has been relatively benign, because of unusual combinations of soil types, topography, and climate patterns — not superior farming techniques.  But almost everywhere else, it is a destructive process.  Note that neither of the two exceptions comes close to feeding their own populations.

Looking out his office window, Jackson can observe both heaven and hell — prairie and wheat field.  The prairie is beautifully adapted to the ecosystem, and suffers no erosion problems.  It actually builds healthy new soil.  The wheat field produces more calories per acre, but it is a soil mining operation, an extractive enterprise with no long term future.  Jackson’s core principle is that “no interest or value should be put above the health of the land.”  Let’s make that our planetary motto.

He believes that truly sustainable agriculture is possible.  Annual plants, like corn, wheat, and soy, need to be started from seed each year, which requires annual tilling, and results in significant soil erosion.  Perennial plants survive for a number of years.  Jackson recommends that we switch to perennials for grain production, because this would more closely resemble a prairie, and cause less erosion. 

In his plan, fields would contain a blend of different species of seed-bearing plants, not a monoculture of genetically identical plants.  The system would improve soil quality, maintain its own fertility, conserve water, have few problems with pests and diseases, require lower energy inputs, be more drought tolerant, and produce as much grain as conventional agriculture.  Because yields are highest in the first year, and then taper off, the prairie would have to be plowed and replanted periodically.  He estimates a five to ten year replant cycle.

It’s a radical idea that is much easier said than done.  To enable mechanical harvesting, the mix of species would have to ripen at the same time.  The mix would have to be fine-tuned for every microclimate and soil scenario.  The Land Institute is decades away from having a finished product, and there are no guarantees that it will ever reliably work as intended.  The Soviets had a similar idea back in the 1920’s.  They did decades of research, and then abandoned the project.  They claimed tremendous successes, but refused to show them to outsiders.

Jackson has some concerns about his vision.  The accident of agriculture began when we believed that we could cleverly control and manipulate nature.  And now, he’s attempting to correct the problem by using the same approach — controlling and manipulating nature.  That bothers him.  Sustainable agriculture must live in peace with the ecosystem, not replace the natural ecosystem with a chemical-soaked, soil-mining food factory.

This book was written over 30 years ago, when gas was 30 cents a gallon, and people thinking about Peak Oil numbered in the dozens.  In that era of innocence, you could still dream about plowing up the whole farm every five to ten years, and harvesting prairie-like grain fields with gas guzzling farm equipment.  Because Jackson’s plan requires the use of industrial machinery, it isn’t genuinely sustainable.  It can’t be harmlessly performed for the next 2,000 years, because it is dependent upon the existence of industrial civilization.

If you’re going to dream huge, magnificent, revolutionary dreams for a 100 year project, why not throw in radical population reduction, too?  An unsustainable population is, of course, completely unsustainable.  A much smaller herd would cause much less harm, and nothing is impossible when you’re dreaming. 

And why not dream of a cuisine where grains are not the foundation of the diet?  In another book, Jackson wrote that grains are core to the human evolutionary heritage.  Are they?  Many cultures throughout human history have done just fine with no grain foods at all.  Indeed, cultures that major in domesticated grains have a strong tendency to be over-crowded, belligerent, and suicidal.  Please help yourself to the nuts, berries, and grasshoppers. 

As I was reading, I kept thinking about Richard Manning’s vision of returning corn country to tall grass prairie, ripping out the fences, moving in the buffalos, elk, and wolves, and turning our bakeries into steak houses.  God was in fine form when she created prairie ecosystems, they were an absolutely brilliant design.  Ripping these perfect ecosystems to pieces with moldboard plows, planting grain fields, and exterminating the thriving community of wildness was the opposite of intelligent.

In his 1987 book, Altars of Unhewn Stone, Jackson described a 6,400 acre prairie ranch in the Flint Hills of Kansas that had never been plowed.  It supported 1,700 cattle during the grazing season, and it was mostly managed by a single cowboy.  Fertilizer was never used.  The use of fossil fuel was tiny.  Overgrazing was carefully avoided, and soil erosion was at normal levels for a healthy prairie.  If we replaced the cattle with buffalo, and gave them free range, would this be better for the land than perennial grains?  Could buffalo hunting be harmlessly performed for the next 2,000 years?

Jackson, Wes, New Roots for Agriculture, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1985. 

Man and Nature

In 1864, George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature, the book that was the granddaddy of the modern ecology movement.  Marsh was the U.S. Minister to Italy, and while overseas, he visited the sites of many ancient civilizations.  This was a troubling and mind-expanding experience for him.

Wandering through the realms of extinct civilizations, he realized that they were all victims of self-destruction.  Marsh saw ancient seaports that were now 30 miles (48 km) from the sea.  He saw ancient places where the old streets were buried beneath 30 feet (9 m) of eroded soil.  He stood in mainland fields, 15 miles (24 km) from the sea, which used to be islands.

He saw the sites of ancient forests, formerly covered with three to six feet (1-2 m) of soil, where nothing but exposed rock remained.  He learned that the removal of protective trees and vegetation led to the loss of topsoil.  He learned that irrigation often led to salinization — the soil became so salty that it was rendered infertile.

There wasn’t much left of the formerly healthy ecosystems of the Mediterranean basin or the Fertile Crescent — places that once supported large thriving cities.  With few exceptions, the modern population in these ravaged lands was far less than the population two thousand years ago.  Most of the big ancient cities were either abandoned ghost towns, or desolate shadows of their former grandeur.

In the realm of the former Roman Empire, more than half of the lands were deserted, desolate, or greatly reduced in productivity.  Forests were gone, much topsoil had been lost, springs had dried up, and rivers had shrunk into brooks.  Fertile lowlands had become malarial swamps.

One unforgettable section in the book described in rich detail the arrival of farmers and herders in the French Alps.  They had been driven into the mountains by population pressure.  They whacked down the trees and then turned their livestock loose.  The grazing animals stripped the land of all grass, and pulverized the scorched soil with their hooves.

Without forest or grass, the land could retain little water.  When the wet season came, the water promptly ran off, taking the soil with it.  Tiny creeks turned into roaring torrents, and entire fields and villages were suddenly washed away.  Some places were reduced to bare bedrock wastelands.

For example: “The land slip, which overwhelmed, and covered to the depth of seventy feet, the town of Plurs in the valley of the Maira, on the night of the 4th of September, 1618, sparing not a soul of a population of 2,430 inhabitants, is one of the most memorable of these catastrophes, and the fall of the Rossberg or Rufiberg, which destroyed the little town of Goldau in Switzerland, and 450 of its people, on the 2nd of September, 1806, is almost equally celebrated.”

Marsh summed it up: “It is, in general, true, that the intervention of man has hitherto seemed to insure the final exhaustion, ruin, and desolation of every province of nature which he has reduced to his dominion.  The instances are few, where a second civilization has flourished upon the ruins of an ancient culture, and lands once rendered uninhabitable by human acts or neglect have generally been forever abandoned as hopelessly irreclaimable.”

Marsh was from Vermont, where ambitious Americans were working furiously to replace forests with farms, and villages with industrial cities.  There were still vast numbers of passenger pigeons, “which migrated in flocks so numerous that they were whole days in passing a given point.”  He thought that farmers spurred their numbers by providing them with abundant grain to nibble on, and by waging genocide on their natural predators, the hawks.  Farmers hated hawks because they often snatched their chickens without paying for them.

He was also amazed by the abundance of salt-water fish.  “It does not seem probable that man, with all his rapacity and all his enginery, will succeed in totally extirpating any salt-water fish.”  He could not foresee the arrival of industrial fishing, because he could not imagine human foolishness growing to such magnitude.

In Europe, he could observe the ruins of many civilizations, and note that this was how most experiments in agriculture ended.  In America, he observed the same process in its infancy.  Marsh was painfully aware that all of the worst mistakes made in the Old World were being imported to America, with similar effects.

The destruction of Old World civilizations had taken centuries, but Americans had all the latest technology, and their ability to ruin the land was far more efficient.  Loggers were busy harvesting lumber in the mountains of New York.  Hunters were busy driving the passenger pigeons to extinction.  Farmers were destroying the vast healthy grasslands.  It was not difficult to accurately predict the consequences of this madness.

The Western world was out of its mind with Perpetual Growth Fever, and everyone cheered for skyrocketing prosperity — nothing was more wonderful!  The fever continues to rage today.  Marsh lamented, “The fact that, of all organic beings, man alone is to be regarded as essentially a destructive power….”  He realized that he was living in a world gone mad.  He could very clearly see a horror show that the rest of society denied and disregarded.

Marsh was a brilliant outside-the-box thinker who was fully present in reality.  He cared more about the vitality of the ecosystem than for temporary bursts of prosperity.  He had a spiritual connection to life.  He radiated intense common sense.  He sincerely believed that it would be wise to learn from our mistakes, rather than endlessly repeat them.  He thought that it would be wrong to remain on a path that would inevitably transform America into a wasteland.

In 2007, friends in California’s redwood country were hammered by floods.  Loggers, who were working upstream, vigorously denied that the floods had anything whatsoever to do with their recent clear-cuts.  It was a pure coincidence.  Amazingly, the loggers were not seized by angry mobs and lynched for spewing such colossal lies.  They got away with their crime because the education system has utterly failed to provide society with a competent understanding of ecology and sustainability.

Marsh did a decent job of providing readers with the ABC’s of ecology.  Many years have passed since the first edition of Man and Nature was published.  For the most part, his book has survived the test of time, and remains valid and important.  But almost no high school (or university) graduates (or their instructors) would recognize Marsh’s name, or be able to intelligently discuss the history of logging, agriculture, topsoil destruction, and the fatal flaws of civilization — essential subjects that every citizen should understand in elementary school.

Marsh, George Perkins.  Man and Nature.  Charles Scribner, New York, 1864.  The full contents of this book are available online at:

http://books.google.com/

Marsh didn’t have a camera, but in 1938-39 Dr. W. C. Lowdermilk visited similar regions and came to similar conclusions — and he had a camera.  He created a booklet titled Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years.  It’s available at:

http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Lowd/Lowd2.html