Sea of Slaughter



Farley Mowat (1921–2014) was a famous Canadian nature writer, a fire-breathing critic of modernity’s war on wildness.  He spent much of his life close to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, and was an avid outdoorsman.  By 1975, he and his wife were becoming acutely aware of the sharp decline of wildlife during their own lifetimes.

Mowat chatted with 90-year olds who confirmed his suspicions, and revealed even more tragedies.  Then he began researching historical documents, and his mind snapped.  Early European visitors were astonished by the abundance of wildlife in North America, something long gone in the Old World.  To them, the animals appeared to be infinite in number, impossible for humans to diminish, ever!

At this point, spirits of the ancestors gave him the heart-wrenching task of writing the mother of all horror stories.  His book, Sea of Slaughter, focused on the last 500 years in a coastal region spanning from Labrador to Cape Cod.  The book has five parts: birds, land mammals, fish, whales, and fin feet (seals, walrus).

For thousands of years, Native Americans hunted for subsistence, taking only what they needed to survive.  Europeans were strikingly different.  They suffered from brain worms that inflamed a maniacal obsession with wealth and status.  They were bewitched by an insatiable greed that was impossible to satisfy — they could never have enough.  Today, scientists refer to this devastating, highly contagious mental illness as get-rich-quick fever — the villain of this story.

In 1534, Jacques Cartier sailed by the Isle of Birds, a rookery for auks (northern penguins).  He wrote, “This island is so exceedingly full of birds that all the ships of France might load a cargo of them without anyone noticing that any had been removed.”  Auks were large, flightless, fat, and laid eggs in accessible locations (not cliff side nests).  Vast numbers were clobbered, salted, and loaded on ships.  Others were chopped into fish bait.  Many were boiled in large cauldrons to extract the oil from their body fat.  In Europe, it had taken over a thousand years to exterminate the auks; in the New World, advanced technology got the job done in just 300 years.  The last two died in 1844.

Prior to the emergence of the petroleum industry in the late nineteenth century, civilization acquired large amounts of oil from wildlife — seabirds, whales, walrus, seals, porpoises, and fish.  An adult polar bear killed in autumn provided lots of meat, a valuable pelt, and twelve gallons (45 l) of good oil.  Animal oil was used for lamp fuel, lubrication, cooking oil, soap, cosmetics, margarine, and leather processing.

There are a number of repeating patterns in the book.  The hunger for money was the heart of the monster.  Nothing else really mattered.  If there were just ten whales left in the world, and they were worth money, the hunters would not hesitate to kill them all.  God made animals for us to obliterate.  Whenever possible, wildlife massacres were done on an industrial scale — kill as many as possible, as fast as possible.

Conservation was an obscene, profit killing, four-letter word.  When there were fewer cod, whales, or seals, the value of each corpse increased.  So, the industry got more and bigger boats, used the latest technology, and raced to kill as many as possible, before competitors found them.  Rules, regulations, and prohibitions were always issued far too late to matter, and they usually included enough loopholes to make them meaningless.  The slaughter industry ignored them, and bureaucrats winked and looked the other way.

Five hundred years ago, cod grew to seven feet long (2.1 m), and weighed up to 200 pounds (91 kg).  An observer noted, “Cods are so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them.”  Today the average cod is 6 pounds.  For many years, they were killed in staggering numbers.  By 1968, the cod fishery was rubbished.  It has not recovered, because fish mining has also depleted small fish, the cod’s basic food.

Nobody ever confesses to overfishing or overhunting.  What happened to the cod?  Obviously, they moved somewhere else, we don’t know where.  Efforts are made to find them.  When searches failed, it was time to seek and destroy scapegoats: whales, porpoises, loons, otters, cormorants, and many others.

In 1850, loons lived in nearly every lake and large pond in the northeast, from Virginia to the high arctic.  Hunters rarely ate them, but they were excellent flying targets for gun geeks.  When folks noticed salmon and trout numbers declining, it was time to look for loon nests and smash their eggs.  Cormorants got the same treatment.  Their rookeries were invaded, and all eggs and chicks destroyed.  Sometimes they sprayed the eggs with kerosene, to kill the embryos.  Birds continued sitting on lifeless eggs, instead of laying new eggs.

Big game hunting was a profitable industry, catering to <bleepity-bleeps> who found killing to be thrilling.  It generated the shiny coins that make men crazy.  What could be more fun than cruising around shooting beluga whales?  In the old days, many beaches were jam-packed with walrus that could grow to 14 feet long (4.2 m), and weigh up to 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg).  Rich lads enjoyed walrus hunting competitions.  One guy, in three weeks, killed 84 bulls, 20 cows, and a number of youngsters, not counting those that died unseen after being wounded.

Mature whales and walrus had no natural predators, so they never evolved defensive aspects or strategies.  They didn’t need to be aggressive or speedy.  They were often curious and friendly.  Hunters preferred to kill black right whales.  Their bodies had a layer of blubber up to 20 inches (51 cm) thick, containing up to 3,500 gallons (12,250 l) of oil.  Abundant blubber meant that the dead ones floated.  Other species sank when killed, and were lost.  With regard to all whale species, it was common for the number of lost carcasses (sinkers) to exceed the number landed and butchered.  Extreme waste didn’t matter as long as the carcasses landed were profitable.

Anyway, Sea of Slaughter is over 400 pages of back-to-back horror stories with no rest stops.  The book is painful, disgusting, and illuminating — a mind-bending experience.  Reading it puts you into an altered state of consciousness, an otherworldly trance state.  Our brains aren’t designed to process flash floods of stupidity.

Many readers will be shocked to see the degree to which screw brained beliefs can turn ordinary people into mindless monsters — an important concept for folks trying to understand the world.  Some readers may be tempted to dismiss the foolish destruction as an aspect of the bad old days, when we didn’t know any better.  Readers having a larger collection of working brain cells will realize that the greed is still with us, in a multitude of new forms, and it’s destroying more than ever before — a vital idea to grasp.

It’s much easier for us to acknowledge horrors that happened in the past, rather than the horrors our shopping is causing today.  History can be powerful medicine when it is taught by competent elders, instead of the usual cheerleaders for wealth, empire, progress, and human supremacy.  Mowat was an excellent wordsmith, and a passionate storyteller.  You will never forget this one.

Postscript.  In 1985, following the publication of Sea of Slaughter, Mowat was scheduled to do a book tour in the U.S.  Shortly after boarding his plane in Toronto, customs officials escorted him back off.  He learned that he was forever forbidden to travel to the land of freedom — and they wouldn’t tell him why.  This was the Reagan era, and Mowat had pissed off many conservatives.  Banishment inspired him to write a smart-assed new book, My Discovery of America.

Mowat, Farley, Sea of Slaughter, 1984, Reprint, Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, British Columbia, 2012.

The Sea of Slaughter documentary, with Farley Mowat (1 hr, 45 min) is HERE.

The Falcon



For almost the entire human saga, our ancestors were hunter-gathers.  For most of us, these kinfolk are long forgotten in family memory.  Quite a bit has been written about wild societies by visiting outsiders from civilization, strangers who could not fully understand the cultures of their subjects.  The Falcon is the autobiography of John Tanner, a fascinating book that gives readers a ringside seat at a wild society, prior to conquest, from the viewpoint of an insider.

Tanner was a white lad born about 1780, in frontier Kentucky, not far from Cincinnati, Ohio.  At the age of 9, he was captured by the Shawnee and taken to Saginaw, Michigan, where he was treated harshly for two years.  Then, up at Mackinaw, an Ottawa woman, who had lost her son, bought him for 20 gallons of whiskey, blankets, tobacco, and other treasures.  He was given a name that meant “the falcon.”

Tanner was a rough, tough, honest man who endured an incredibly difficult life.  He lived among the Ottawa and Ojibwa people from roughly 1790 to 1820, and spent this period hunting, trapping, fishing, and defending himself from a variety of angry and violent folks.  He traveled thousands of miles by foot, canoe, and horseback through a vast wilderness.  His saga mentions visits to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan; Pembina, North Dakota; Lake of the Woods, Ontario; and Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba.

This story takes place in an era of bloody helter-skelter, when the traditional way of life was seriously assaulted, and beginning to disintegrate.  Disease ridden, pale faced terrorists had landed on the east coast, and their infectious pathogens spread to distant regions of the interior, killing enormous numbers of natives.  Terrorists were beginning to settle on the frontier.  Tanner’s parents had moved west from Virginia, stupidly planning to acquire prime real estate in an extremely dangerous wilderness.

In that era, many New England tribes had become heavily dependent on agriculture.  Corn produced far more food per acre than forest, leading to increased population density and conflict.  Diana Muir described how corn quickly depleted the soil, requiring ongoing deforestation to clear new fields.  When the devastating epidemics arrived, tribes had been on an unsustainable trajectory to run out of forest that was suitable for cropland.  Corn helped the Iroquois become a dominant power, and their aggressive expansion forced other Algonquin tribes to flee westward.

At the same time, the fur trade was a booming, and there was intense competition for pelts.  Many traders were lying, cheating, racist creeps.  Industrial scale trapping drove the beavers close to extinction in eastern regions, so traders and trappers had to keep moving westward.

As eastern tribes were forced westward by warfare, settlers, and the quest for pelts, they put growing pressure on the fierce Sioux tribes of the prairies, who were not amused.  Tanner spent a lot of time in hot zones close to Sioux country, where he was in constant danger of losing his scalp.

The Sioux hated Tanner and his tribe for trespassing.  Because Tanner was the offspring of terrorists, many of his Indian companions and family were wary of him — terrorists were often whirlwinds of evil spirits.  Several times, they tried to kill him.  Finally, the terrorists hated him because he looked like a savage, thought like a savage, and spoke a savage tongue.  He once made an effort to return to his kinfolk in Christian society, but he didn’t belong in that bizarre world, and kept catching fevers.

Indians were tolerant of gender-benders.  On a visit to Leech Lake, Minnesota, Tanner met the son of a chief who was an A-go-kwa — “one of those who make themselves women, and are called women by the Indians.  There are several of this sort among most, if not all the Indian tribes.”  The A-go-kwa was about 50-years old, and had lived with many husbands.

The central theme of the book is the endless struggle to survive.  Starvation was a primary threat, and getting food was job #1.  Mike Culpepper wrote an essay on Tanner’s life, including a description of his diet:  “Tanner hunts bear, buffalo, moose, but also eats muskrat, rabbit, beaver, porcupine, otter and other animals trapped for their fur, and, when game is not available, his dogs, horses, and scraps of leather.  He eats ducks, geese, blackbirds, and swan.  He fishes for sturgeon, dory, and unnamed small fish that are eaten by the handful.  He consumes corn, wild rice, and berries.”  Yum!

Throughout the book, Tanner and those around him suffer from infections and fevers.  He lived in an era where diseases were common and largely incurable, for both wild folks and the civilized.  Howard Simpson described the situation after 1812, as settlement of the Midwest began:  “The most lethal dangers the pioneers had to face were neither savages nor wild animals.  They were typhoid, malaria, dysentery, malignant scarlet fever, pneumonia, erysipelas in epidemic form, spotted fever, or what would now be called meningococcal meningitis, and diphtheria.”

Homo sapiens is a bipedal species — we move on two legs, not four.  This evolutionary trait enabled long distance running, chasing game until they collapsed from exhaustion, a practice often mentioned in discussions of the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.  Tanner also mentioned this.  “There are among the Indians some, but not many, men who can run down an elk on the smooth prairie, when there is neither snow nor ice.  The moose and the buffalo surpass the elk in fleetness, and can rarely be taken by fair running by a man on foot.”

Tanner, armed with a low tech, single shot musket, killed lots of animals.  One winter, he was hired by a fur company to provide meat for Scottish settlers.  In four months, he killed about 100 buffalo.  Another winter, he hunted with a buddy.  “O-ke-mah-we-ninne, as he was called, killed nineteen moose, one beaver, and one bear.  I killed seventeen moose, one hundred beavers, and seven bears, but he was considered the better hunter, moose being the most difficult of all animals to kill.”

Nomadic people found some trade goods useful: muskets, ammo, gunpowder, knives, axes, pots, blankets, corn, etc.  They gained no prestige by hoarding valuable trade goods, because it was dumb.  The stuff they owned had to be hauled along, every time they moved to a new camp.  So, one pot was enough.  Consequently, they trapped just enough to secure the necessities, and no more.  Traders learned a toxic secret — offering booze seriously motivated the trappers to produce far more pelts.

Oblivion drinking is a regular celebration in this saga.  After a long, harsh winter of trapping, pelts would be taken to the trading post.  Necessities would be acquired, and the leftover income would be invested in 10 gallon (38 l) kegs of booze.  Over the course of the book, at least 100 gallons of rum and whiskey were guzzled.  Multi-day drunks often resulted in impolite comments, bloody fights, and murders.  Their lives were harsh, and a lovely drunk provided a vacation from the daily routine, a spirit journey.  Booze destroyed many lives.

In Tanner’s day, in roadless woodlands, dogs were their beasts of burden.  On the wide-open prairie, there was a new beast of burden, the horse.  The Spanish had brought horses to America, and some escaped.  They rapidly grew in numbers.  By 1700 or 1750, plains Indians had horses — lots of horses.  Horses greatly increased their ability to hunt, feed more people, and zoom across the plains at superhuman velocity.

Each horse was the private property of an individual.  Only fools hoarded 100 iron pots, but owning 100 horses provided immense social status.  Horses fed themselves, moved themselves to new camps, and hauled people and stuff.  Stealing them from neighbors was an exciting way to demonstrate your bravery and get rich quick, or die trying.  Raiding was a popular pastime.  Naturally, it was a good way to make enemies, and ignite long-term feuds.  In the horse age, living in a remote location was no longer safe and secure.

Tanner described the bloody side of raiding:  “I had four horses, one of which was a very fleet and beautiful one, being considered the best out of one hundred and eighty which a war-party of Crees, Assinneboins, and Ojibbeways, had recently brought from the Fall Indians.  In this excursion they had been absent seven months.  They had fallen upon and destroyed one village, and taken one hundred and fifty scalps, besides prisoners.”

Tanner spent most of his life in the Great White North, a region known for long and extremely harsh winters.  On chilly nights, they huddled around fires inside drafty lodges.  Tanner mentioned several close calls with death.  Once, after breaking through the ice, “we were no sooner out of the water than our moccasins and clothes were frozen so stiff that we could not travel.  I began also to think that we must die.  But I was not like my Indian brother, willing to sit down and wait patiently for death to come.”

Homo sapiens evolved on the warm tropical savannahs of Africa, where a year round supply of organic food was generally available.  They didn’t need clothing or shelter.  Hypothermia was never a risk.  Life was so much easier in an ecosystem for which evolution had fine-tuned our bodies.  Remember that.  The status quo is zooming toward sharp limits, and our soft lifestyles are a temporary high-impact luxury.

Tanner, John, The Falcon, Penguin Books, New York, 1994.  Free PDF download.

Culpepper, Mike, John Tanner Between Two Worlds.  This 10-page essay fills in many helpful details missing in Tanner’s words, and better describes the big picture dramas that affected his life.  It discusses his controversial end.

Fierst, John T., Return to Civilization, Minnesota History, Minnesota Historical Society, 1986.  This 15-page essay describes Tanner’s troubled life in Sault Ste. Marie, in the years after his story had been published.

Dr. Edwin James transcribed Tanner’s story, in 1828, at Sault Ste. Marie.  He edited out lots of excessive details, to make the story more readable.  The 1830 edition, published by Baldwin & Craddock in London, includes an 18-page introduction by James (HERE).

Muir, Diana, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond — Economy and Ecosystem in New England, University Press of New England, Hanover, New Hampshire, 2000.  Chapter one describes the ecological and social turbulence generated by the adaptation of agriculture by the Native Americans.

Simpson, Howard N., “The Impact of Disease on American History,” The New England Journal of Medicine CCL (1954):680.

Make Prayers to the Raven

In 1976 and 1977, anthropologist Richard Nelson lived with the Koyukon people of northwestern Alaska.  Their vast forested homeland is in the region where the Koyukuk River feeds into the Yukon River.  They are Athapaskan people, and they live inland from the Inupiaq Eskimos, who inhabit the coastal region to the west.

When Russian explorers found the Koyukon in 1838, they already had tobacco, iron pots, and other stuff, acquired via trade with Eskimos.  They had already been hammered by smallpox.  In 1898, they experienced a sudden infestation of gold prospectors; luckily, their streams were gold-free.  Unluckily, the gold rush ended their isolation from white society.  Swarms of missionaries and educators buzzed around the forest, determined to help the ignorant heathens rise out of barbarism, and experience the miracles of civilization and damnation.

When Nelson arrived in 1976, they were no longer nomadic.  About 2,000 Koyukon lived in eleven villages.  They travelled by snowmobile, hunted with rifles, and worshipped a Jewish guru.  Most of those under 30 spoke only English, and some were not fond of anthropologists.  Nelson spent a lot of time with the elders, who had been raised in the old ways.  Then he wrote an important book, Make Prayers to the Raven.  (In their stories, the creator was Raven.)

The Koyukon were the opposite of vegans.  About 90 percent of their diet was animal foods.  The bears, moose, geese, and salmon they ate came from the surrounding area, and were killed, butchered, and cooked by close friends and family.  Their survival depended on the wildlife.  They were extremely careful to take only what they needed, and to waste nothing.

Their wilderness was the opposite of big box grocery outlets that have an endless supply of fizzy sugar drinks, frozen pizza, and corn chips.  A year of abundant salmon might be followed by a meager year.  During Nelson’s visit, there were plenty moose and caribou, animals that had been scarce 30 years earlier.  The Koyukon had to pay close attention to the land, and continually fine-tune their relationship to it.  When times were lean, people starved — prior to the adaptation of rifles.  Now, they also had dependable access to the mysterious industrial substances that white folks referred to as “food.”

Traditional Koyukon society needed nothing from the outside world.  Their relationship to the ecosystem was one of absolute reverence and respect.  They were not masters or managers, they were simply members of the family of life.  The humble status of humans is evident in a frequently quoted phrase: “Every animal knows way more than you do.”

Nelson said it like this: “Traditional Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes.  A person moving through nature — however wild, remote, even desolate the place may be — is never truly alone.  The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified.  They feel.  They can be offended.  And they must, at every moment, be treated with proper respect.  All things in nature have a special kind of life, something unknown to contemporary Euro-Americans, something powerful.”

The Koyukon were not exotic freaks.  Their worldview and spirituality had much in common with all other cultures that thrived in the long era before the domestication fad.  They were perfectly wild and free — healthy, happy, intelligent, normal human beings.  Most modern people go to their graves without ever experiencing the magnificent beauty and power of the living world — the joy and wonder of the gift of life, the awe of being fully present in a sacred reality.  Most of them live and die in monotonous manmade habitats, having established no spiritual connection to life.

Nelson was born in Madison, Wisconsin.  His father was employed by the state.  Their middle class life provided food, clothing, and shelter.  A large portion of his childhood was spent in institutions of education — indoors — digesting, memorizing, and regurgitating words and numbers.  At that time, Madison was a disaster of concrete, traffic, and hordes of strangers.  Decades earlier, the forest and wildlife had been devoured by the metastasizing city.  So, as a young animal, Nelson was raised in devastating poverty, like most modern kids, isolated from wildness and freedom.

Anyway, something cool happened.  In 1973, Nelson hooked up with the University of Alaska and began spending time with Native Americans.  He arrived with his Euro-American cultural programming, and its wacky anthropocentric model of the natural world.  He had zero doubt that his perception of reality was correct and proper; it was absolute truth.

Then, he hung out with the Koyukon, and this blew his belief system completely out of the water.  They were intelligent people, and they saw the world in a very different way.  This made his Ph.D. mind whirl and spin.  “My Koyukon teachers had learned through their own traditions about dimensions in nature that I, as a Euro-American, had either not learned to perceive or had been explicitly taught do not exist.”

In less than 200 years, the white wizards of Wisconsin have transformed a healthy wilderness into a hideous nightmare called Madison.  It never occurred to them to adapt to the ecosystem, live with great respect and mindfulness, and preserve its health for future generations.  The Koyukon, on the other hand, have inhabited their forest for thousands of years, and it doesn’t look much different from how they found it.  They know every place in their forest as well as you know your kitchen.  Every location is rich with stories and spirits.

The Egyptians built huge pyramids, enduring monuments to their civilized megalomania, built by legions of miserable slaves.  The Koyukon have achieved something far more impressive.  “This legacy is the vast land itself, enduring and essentially unchanged despite having supported human life for countless centuries.”

Nelson’s book is a reflection of their culture.  He presents separate chapters to describe the physical realm and climate, insects and amphibians, fishes, birds, small mammals, predators, and large animals.  Eighteen pages are devoted to their relationship with bears, and birds get 43 pages.  The core of their culture is their relationships with the non-human relatives that share their land, and the need to nurture these relationships with absolute respect.  Nature always punishes acts of disrespect with bad luck, illness, or death — to the offender, or to a family member.

The good news here is that it’s not impossible for a highly educated adult to override their toxic cultural programming and experience the beauty and power of creation.  Most never do.  The important message of this book is that we are absolutely lost, but there are paths that are not lost, healthy paths.  Our cage is not locked, and it’s so much nicer outside.  It’s alive!

Nelson, Richard K., Make Prayers to the Raven — A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983.

Unlearn, Rewild

Are you glowing with inner peace?  Is your journey healthy, balanced, and joyful?  Do you believe that the world is close to perfection because of technological progress?  None of the above?

Miles Olson is a young man with an old soul.  He has never felt at home in modern society, even in childhood.  The only people who made sense to him were the Native Americans, because they lived with respect and reverence for all things.  When he was 17, he spent the summer living alone on a remote island.  Solitude in wildness is powerful medicine.  In a week or so, he could barely remember his name.

He struggled to find his life’s vision and calling.  There was no integrity in pursuing a career that injured the family of life.  There was no integrity in eating food produced in an atrocious manner.  There was no integrity in devoting his life to robotic consumption.  The “normal” mode was wacko. 

The proper way to live in industrial civilization was to plug into the system, obey the rules, and never ask questions.  But this was not a path with integrity, and Olson refused to submit to a dishonorable life.  So, he commenced thinking.  If the system was destroying the future, then the system was insane.  If the system was insane, then so were its rules.  Therefore, the virtuous choice was to disregard the rules, listen to his heart, and purse a life of integrity, by any means necessary.  He did just that.

He’s been squatting for almost a decade on the fringe of a large unnamed city in British Columbia.  He hunts, traps, forages, and gardens.  He gets profound satisfaction from reducing his dependence on the machine, and reducing the harm he causes.  He wrote Unlearn, Rewild to describe his life as an outlaw with high principles.  (Well, he’s an outlaw to the system, but consumers are outlaws to nature, and nature bats last.)

Unlearning is a process of throwing civilized illusions overboard, of cleaning our minds.  Rewilding means “to return to a more natural or wild state; the process of undoing domestication” — to become uncivilized, to reconnect to place.  The bottom line is that “without genuine, raw connection to wild nature we, as creatures, go insane.” 

All of us have hunter-gatherer genes.  When we were born, our souls expected to spend life as wild and free creatures in a sacred world.  What went wrong?  Olson sees domestication, agriculture, and civilization as being catastrophic mistakes in our journey.

“Sustainability” has become a meaningless word, hijacked and disemboweled by greedheads, nutters, universities, and shameless marketing hucksters.  Nothing is unsustainable anymore.  Our world is totally awesome.  We just need to burn a bit less fossil fuel, make a few minor tweaks, and our way of life will become utopia.  Olson disagrees.  He’s become a revivalist who preaches a fiery message about “radical sustainability” — good old-fashioned fundamentalist sustainability, the genuine article, the most important word in our language today.

One of his sermons illuminated the grave misconceptions that torment vegans and vegetarians, and lead them down a dark path into the valley of malnutrition, impaired health, and prickly self-righteousness.  He was once a vegan, until he saw the light, and returned to the normal omnivorous diet that everyone’s ancestors had enjoyed for a million years.

Yes, of course industrial meat production was abominable, cruel, and ecologically foolish.  The dim-witted domesticated livestock and poultry certainly suffer for it.  But why does no one grieve for the thousands of wild creatures murdered by every pass of the plow and combine?  Why do we ignore the blood gushing from our tofu stir fry?  “There are precious few humans that hear the screams of the Earth….”

Olson recommended that we stop feeding grain to animals, and use it to feed hungry folks.  But this would require continued soil mining to produce the grain.  Instead, in the spirit of big dreaming, I would suggest that we cease growing grain for animal feed, and convert that cropland back to grassland, restore the soil to good health, and give it back to the indigenous wild life — let it heal.

He wondered if hunting with firearms was ethical.  How much technology is too much?  When the Cree replaced bows with guns, they killed more caribou.  But “…the ones truly being victimized by this technology were not the caribou.  The caribou were still free, the people had entered a trap.”  This chapter began with a Ran Prieur quote: “Every technology begins as a key and ends as a cage.”  Well said.

Obviously, the turd in the swimming pool is the way we think — our insane culture.  If our civilization burned to the ground today, we’d start rebuilding it at dawn tomorrow.  “If humans had clean minds, like grasses and thistles, we would return to a state of balance when the forces of domestication ceased.” 

It is at this point that the two sacred verbs “unlearn” and “rewild” summon immense power.  Are we capable of firing up our brains and envisioning humankind living in balance with the rest of life?  Yes, if we try.  Are we capable of escaping from our cage?  Yes, with patience and determination.  Is it possible that sanity is contagious?  Let’s find out!  Olson concludes that we would be wise to make some effort to evolve.  It will take generations to create cultures that win the Radical Sustainability seal of approval, but all we have to lose is an insane way of life.

The book has two parts: ideas and endangered skills.  The ideas section describes his philosophy of life.  The skills section is a sampler of essential knowledge for squatters: making traps and snares, skinning and gutting game, medicinal plants, food preservation, sex without pregnancy, tips for cooking earthworms, slugs, and maggots, and so on. 

I learned some new tricks here, but this is not the last book you’ll need to read.  Chestnuts are good food, but horse chestnuts are toxic.  How do you tell the difference?  Camas is good food, but death camas, which looks the same at harvest time, is not mentioned.  Why is it called death camas?

Olson doesn’t write like a dusty scholar surrounded by piles of musty books.  He writes like a cheerful outlaw who has created a rewarding career in harvesting roadkill, foraging for nuts, roasting grasshoppers, and feasting on dandelions.  It’s a loose and feisty tome with strong opinions and a strong sense of hope and enthusiasm.  It’s not flawless and polished — it has some squeaks, leaks, and rattles — but it still works.

Olson has not given us “The Solution” here.  Obviously, this week is an inconvenient time for seven-point-something billion to become squatters.  But the rising cost and scarcity of energy may turn us all into squatters before long, ready or not.  Nevertheless, he is fully engaged in the most important work of our era — finding the path to genuine sustainability.  Truly, every week is a perfect opportunity for unlearning, rewilding, thinking, and living with greater integrity.

Olson, Miles, Unlearn, Rewild, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada, 2012.