A History of the Swedish People



Vilhelm Moberg was born in 1898, in a remote village where remnants of the peasant way of life persisted.  He wrote A History of the Swedish People, which spanned two volumes: (1) before the Renaissance, and (2) after.  Moberg’s writing has been translated into 20 languages, and Swedes have bought six million copies of his books.  Most histories focus on the big shots, the decision makers, the conquerors, the villains.  His work focuses on the nameless people that historians disregard: the common folks, the salt of the Earth.  I like that.

In this spirit, chapter one is a discussion of slavery, which existed for several thousand years.  Bondsmen (slaves) have been invisible in Swedish history, because textbooks are obligated to focus on the patriotic glories, and step around the embarrassing dreck.  Bondsmen could be bought, sold, given way, or killed.  Throughout his life, Moberg was devoted to the notion of freedom.  He estimated that in the eleventh century, twenty percent of the population was bondsmen.  The rest of the book is devoted to the commoners who were freeborn, the rugged peasantry who worked hard to survive in the forests of Sweden, and were the majority of the population.

In most other European nations, peasants were not free.  They suffered for centuries under the heavy fist of feudalism.  They inhabited lands crisscrossed with roads, which enabled the nobility to snatch the fruits of their toil and keep them under control.  The main exceptions were Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland, where the peasants escaped serfdom.  The Swiss, surrounded by powerful enemies, were protected by the Alps.  The Norse and Swedes were protected by their vast rugged forests.  As long as the forests survived and remained roadless, the people were much safer.

In several European languages, the words for “road” and “raid” evolved from a common root.  Romans built many roads for the expansion and management of their empire.  Later, those same roads made it easier for scruffy outsiders to rubbish their empire and loot their booty.  In Roman times, the wild German tribes were also fiercely warlike, but their goal was not conquest and expansion.  Their goal was to keep outsiders out, homeland security.  Caesar noted, “It is the greatest pride of the Germanic tribes to surround themselves with broad desolate frontier regions.”  Frontier forests were buffer zones that were kept untilled and uninhabited.

In the dense roadless forests of Sweden, invaders soon became perfectly lost.  It was terrifying.  Behind any bush might be a man with a crossbow.  The forest people knew every rock, hill, and cranny in the woods.  They could pick the ideal time and place to strike.  When attack was unwise, they vanished and waited patiently for fresh opportunities.

Over the centuries, Swedes adapted well to forest life.  In addition to fishing, foraging, and hunting, they farmed on a small scale.  Livestock was their primary resource, providing them with meat, milk, butter, cheese, hides, and wool.  The forest was common land owned by no one.  A Swedish proverb declares, “The forest grows as well for the poor as for the rich.”  It was the poor man’s garden.  Forest dwellers often lived in isolation, with few neighbors to rely on.

Moberg devoted an entire chapter to his love for the forest wonderland in which he grew up.  In his strict rural Lutheran village, good and bad were sharply defined.  Where others could see him, little Vilhelm had to behave properly, to avoid criticism.  In the forest, he was free.  He could hide where no one would see him, and behave any way he liked.  He was happier as a child in the forest than in any other place in his life.

In pagan times there were festivals in which stallions, bulls, billy-goats, cocks, and humans were sacrificed to the gods.  One observer recorded details about the annual ceremony at Uppsala.  Next to the temple was a sacred grove, where the corpses of up to 200 sacrificed men and beasts hung from the trees.  The sacrificial humans included criminals, infirm old men, foreigners, bondsmen, and prisoners.

The Vikings were possessed with an insatiable hunger for the valuables belonging to others.  They enjoyed cruising along coasts and rivers and raiding Christian towns and villages — peaceful settlements with which they had no disputes.  Vikings were extraordinarily cruel and inhuman, and they fought with pure fury.  Vikings ravaged Europe from 800 to 1050.

Sweden’s conversion to Christianity was slow and bloody.  The Asa people (pagans) were open minded, and they worshipped many gods and goddesses.  Deities that brought good harvests, weather, and health were honored, and bummer gods were tossed on the compost pile.  When foreign missionaries suggested worshipping a new one, they were willing to give him a try.  The pagans were open minded, but the missionaries were not.  Naturally, the Swedes were not delighted to be told that all their ancient beliefs were wrong and evil.  Commonly, after the missionaries had moved on to convert others, the newly baptized folks returned to the faith of their ancestors.

It took 300 years to convert the small population of Swedes.  In 1122, Småland was last region to be converted.  The chronicle reads: “King Sigurd set his course for a trading city called Kalmar, which he laid waste, and thereafter ravaged Småland, exacting from the Smålanders a tribute of fifteen hundred beasts; and the Smålanders accepted Christianity.”  This slaughter was called the Kalmar Raid.  Sigurd returned to Norway laden with loot.  In some regions, Swedes continued to secretly practice pagan rituals into the seventeenth century.

Later, Christian Swedes decided to teach the Finns about the Prince of Peace.  King Erik offered the Finns peace on condition they let themselves be baptized and adopt the Christian faith, but they turned down his offer.  So the Finns were massacred.  “After the struggle was over the king walked about the battlefield among the masses of the fallen heathen and was so deeply moved by the sight of their corpses that he wept.”

Moberg had deep appreciation for the 5,000-year era of Swedish peasants, which was approaching extinction by 1900, displaced by the hideous rise of industrialism and urbanization.  Ancient farms and villages were being abandoned, returning to forest.  Growing numbers of weird and spooky human-like beings, known as Consumers, were wandering into peasant country from Stockholm, and other insane asylums.

Rural peasants were the last full-blooded individualists; each one was personally unique, warts and all.  They were highly attuned to the ecosystem that had been their ancestors’ home for centuries, and they had little contact with outsiders, or their peculiar ideas.  The Consumers were rootless tumbleweeds who dressed alike, smelled alike, thought alike, and lived alike — the standardized outputs of a mass culture.

Peasants spent a lot of time with each other, gathered around the hearth fire.  Folks did handiwork — spinning, weaving, carving, and so on.  Elders shared stories and memories.  The daily lives of peasants were spent in intimate contact with the magic, mystery, and beauty of wild nature, which is essential for wellbeing.  Consumers would suffer panic attacks if forced to live in a medieval cottage — no lights, TV, radio, internet, books, running water, toilet.  Here’s Moberg’s punch line: “Instead of the things they lacked, medieval people had others, which we have lost.”  They enjoyed good old fashioned community.

The book goes on to discuss many other topics.  It interested me because my mother’s family has Norwegian roots.  The Norse and Swedes are closely related.  I’ve been reluctant to review this book, because it’s not about ecological sustainability.  But it does discuss subjects that are both interesting, and rarely mentioned.  So, I turned to a number of other sources to look for the missing eco-info.

Like the wild Irish, British, and Germanic tribes, Scandinavians shifted from hunting, fishing, and foraging, moving toward small scale pastoralism and farming in forest clearings.  This encouraged conflicts with wild critters, who were thrilled to feast on the delicious offerings of rye, oats, calves, poultry, sheep, and so on.  Nature became an enemy.  The peasant lads fetched their war paint.

By 1870, wild boars, aurochs (wild cattle), and beavers were extinct in Sweden, and red deer and moose were getting close.  By the mid-1900s, the wolf population was zero.  Later, some beavers (from Canada), boars, and wolves were reintroduced, or wandered in from elsewhere.  To this day, the eternal peasant’s war on wolves continues in Sweden, Norway, and Finland — three of the most “eco-progressive” societies in Christendom.

Oddest of all, in Moberg’s celebration of the common folk of Sweden, he made no mention of the Sami people, the wild hunter-gatherers who have been harshly abused and exploited by the civilized racist settlers for several centuries.  New research is discovering that the Sami people inhabited large portions of Scandinavia long before the Nordic (Germanic) pastoralists arrived.  Sami lived as far south as Hadeland in Norway, not far from Oslo, one of my ancestral homelands.

Genetic data has linked the modern Sami to the first humans who wandered into Scandinavia more than 10,000 years ago.  They have been in Sweden much longer than the Swedes.  The Sami homeland is known as Sápmi, and it spans large areas of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.  Sami have another name, Lapp, which some do not like.

Moberg, Vilhelm, A History of the Swedish People, Pantheon Books, New York, 1973.

To learn more about Sami and reindeer, four nice essays are [HERE]

Lapps and Labyrinths, an excellent 2010 book on the Sami, by archaeologist Noel Broadbent, can be purchased from Amazon ($$$), or downloaded free [HERE]

 

Peak Horse



In the early 1900s, automobiles, trucks, buses, and tractors were becoming very trendy.  The human population was two billion and growing, while the horse population peaked and declined.  Model T Fords did not require five acres of good grassland to fuel them, an area that could feed six to eight people.  While grassland was, in theory, a renewable resource, there was not an infinite supply of it.  Pasture could be degraded or destroyed by overgrazing, drought, plowing, or urban sprawl.

Of course, motor vehicles are dependent on a wide variety finite nonrenewable resources.  The global production of conventional oil peaked around 2005, and now we’re briskly advancing toward the peak of unconventional sources — tar sands, shale deposits, and deep-water — the fossil energy that’s far more difficult and expensive to extract.  When we pass Peak Oil, production will begin a continuous decline, and prices will rise.  Some estimate that this will begin around 2030.

Life is solar powered.  Plants have solar panels that use light to create carbohydrates.  Plant eating animals acquire these nutrients by feasting on the greenery.  Meat eating animals consume the flesh of plant eaters.  Legions of wee organisms extract the nutrients from biomass and build topsoil.  Solar energy is also embedded in coal, oil, and natural gas — carbon that was sequestered millions of years ago.

Throughout the three million year era of our ancestors, muscle power was the primary energy for moving people and things.  Muscle power is highly versatile, able to run on a variety of edible fuels — meat, eggs, fruit, nuts, roots, insects.  More versatile than horses, human muscles can move people and stuff through dense rainforests, up rugged mountains, and across deserts.  Horses are poorly adapted for hot climates and arctic regions.

Pita Kelekna noted that humans have a long history of acquiring stored solar energy via the consumption of horse flesh.  At the Roche de Solutré site, near Mâcon, France, archaeologists found a 2.5 acre (1 ha) bone bed, up to 29 feet (9 m) thick, containing the bones of up to 100,000 horses.  Neanderthals hunted horses there 50,000 years ago.  Later, humans hunted them from 37,000 to 10,000 years ago. 

Around 9,000 years ago, the last horse in the Americas died in Patagonia.  The once plentiful wild horses of Western and Central Europe’s river valleys were apparently eliminated by overhunting 8,000 years ago.  To the east, large numbers of horses managed to survive on the wide open Eurasian steppes, where trapping animals was less easy.

Horses were domesticated about 6,000 years ago.  Kelekna described how nomadic pastoralists became skillful horse parasites.  “The Mongols lived off the horse; as they traveled, they milked and slaughtered for food.  They consumed a steady diet of milk and yoghurt, drank the horse’s blood, and mixed dried milk paste with water, dried meat, and millet.”

Eventually, clever folks realized that horses were not just a tasty form of solar energy — they also had more muscle power than humans.  If properly enslaved, they could be used to pull stuff, haul stuff, and carry riders.  Four legged slaves enabled a tremendous expansion of soil mining, forest mining, mineral mining, bloody empire building, and economic growth.  They unlocked the gateway to industrial civilization.

Around 25,000 years ago, the mammoth hunters at the Dolní Věstonice site in the Czech Republic heated their mammoth bone huts by burning the solar energy embedded in two fuels: mammoth bones and black coal.  By the mid-1500s, English forest miners had nearly succeeded in eliminating the ancient rainforest.  This created an energy shortage that inspired a large scale transition to coal burning.  In the late 1800s, the oil industry emerged, and the war on the future became turbocharged.

As the age of mechanical horsepower accelerated, the long era of four legged horse power rode off into the sunset.  My grandparents witnessed the advent of Peak Horse, and my parents saw work horses largely disappear from farms and cities.  Physicist Albert Bartlett calculated that children born after 1966 will see the world consume most of its oil during their lifetime.  Industrial civilization has an expiration date.  So, we’ll just have to go back to horse power, right?  Well, umm, there are some challenges.

Eric Morris wrote a fascinating essay to help us remember life in the Peak Horse era.  By 1898, big city streets were jammed with horses, carriages, and wagons, squishing through a deep layer of manure and urine, past rotting horse carcasses, amidst dense clouds of flies and overpowering stench.  Cities were rapidly growing, as hordes immigrants moved in to enjoy miserable industrial jobs, while living in crowded, filthy, disease ridden slums. 

Each horse emitted 15 to 30 pounds (7 to 14 kg) of manure daily — 3 to 4 million pounds in New York City every day.  In 1800, farmers would pay haulers to bring manure to their fields.  By 1900, there was way too much poop, and it piled up on empty lots.  Some heaps were 60 feet high (18 m).  Clouds of flies picked up pathogenic microbes and brought them to your kitchen, spreading typhoid and other fecal-oral diseases.  In 1880, 41 horses died each day on the streets of New York.  The average horse weighed 1,300 pounds (590 kg).  Carcasses were often left to rot, making it easier to dismember them, so they could be hauled away.

Horses were jammed into filthy, poorly ventilated stables — excellent disease incubators.  In 1872, the Great Epizootic Epidemic struck, as huge numbers of horses were infected by the equine influenza virus.  Coughing spread it from one animal to the next.  Typically, they recovered in two to three weeks, but severe cases could immobilize an animal for six months.

During the epidemic, available horse power was drastically reduced.  Folks had to use wheelbarrows and handcarts to transport goods.  The postal service was hobbled.  Freight piled up.  Coal deliveries stopped.  Food distribution wheezed.  On farms, plows and other equipment fell idle.  Boats quit moving on the Erie Canal.  Horse-drawn fire engines and street cars did not move.  When a big fire roared in downtown Boston, firemen had to pull their heavy equipment from the station by hand.

Almost certainly, there are people alive today who will see the peak of motor vehicle production, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some (or many) will experience the extinction of motor vehicles, and the lights going out on civilization as we know it.  Bye-bye railroads, air travel, refrigerators, elevators, irrigation, mining, supermarkets, and so on.  Sewage treatment plants, municipal water systems, and digital technology will blink out.  Vast areas of cropland will cease being plowed, planted, and harvested.  The age of obesity and cell phone addiction will end, but we might see the screw-brained revival of wood-fueled motor vehicles.

Kelekna, Pita, The Horse in Human History, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2009.

Olsen, Sandra L., “Pleistocene Horse-hunting at Solutre,” Johnson, E., ed., Ancient Peoples and Landscapes, Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, 1995, pp. 65-75.

Dolní Věstonice webpage with awesome illustrations.  [LINK]

Morris, Eric, “From Horse Power to Horsepower,” Access, Number 30, Spring 2007.  [LINK]

Bartlett, Albert A., The Essential Exponential, Center for Science, Mathematics & Computer Education, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2004.   [LINK]

A New Green History of the World



A New Green History of the World (2007) is the new and improved version of A Green History of the World (1991), which was translated into 13 languages.  British historian Clive Ponting did a fantastic amount of research, and then refined it into a very readable, mind-altering 400-page book (a silver bullet cure for folks suffering from denial).  It spans the two million year saga of our hominid ancestors, devoting most attention to the last 12,000 years, the era of thunder footprints.

Ponting provides numerous charts displaying the skyrocketing growth of many unsustainable trends.  For example, world coal production was 10 million tons in 1800, 760 million tons in 1900, and 5 billion tons in 2000.  World oil production was 95 million tons in 1920, 294 million tons in 1940, 2.3 billion tons in 1970, and 3.8 billion tons in 2004.  Is it any wonder that the atmosphere is having convulsions?

For almost the entire human journey, wood was our fuel, a renewable resource.  With the shift to agriculture and civilization, we invented forest mining, which is unsustainable.  Industries making glass, ceramics, bricks, and metals rapidly obliterated forests.  By the 1550s, regional wood shortages began limiting growth.  The English were the first to begin the shift to coal.  Coal lit the turbo thrusters for the Industrial Revolution, which accelerated the process of urbanization, and ignited two centuries of pandemonium.

Until 1800, 95 percent of humans were paupers.  Ponting says, “Since the rise of settled societies some ten thousand years ago the overwhelming majority of the world’s population have lived in conditions of grinding poverty.  They have had few possessions, suffered from appalling living conditions, and have been forced to spend most of their very limited resources on finding enough food to stay alive.”  European commoners often lived in crude huts with dirt floors, and no windows or chimney.  Bed was a heap of straw.  No corpse was buried in usable garments.

Until 1800, most people travelled on foot.  Paupers couldn’t afford horses, or six acres (2.5 ha) of pasture to feed one.  Consequently, villages and towns remained small, close to their food supply.  Few places could afford even rudimentary sanitation services.  Village households dumped their night soil in the streets.  Almost any place was a restroom.  Fecal-oral diseases were popular, and bathing was not, especially in chilly months.  It was a wonderland for rats, fleas, flies, lice, and infectious diseases.

In 1652, the council of Boston banned residents from discarding the “entrails of beasts or fowls or garbage or dead dogs or cattle or any other dead beast or stinking thing” into the streets.  In the summer of 1858, the British House of Commons abandoned its sittings because of the unbearable “Great Stink” (all raw sewage went into the Thames).  The official residence for Britain’s prime ministers is 10 Downing Street, which didn’t have an indoor bathroom until 1908.  And so on.

With urbanization, the privileged class grew — folks who could afford horses, stables, carriages, and feed.  More horses were needed to haul more goods.  As cities grew, they got too big for foot travelers, so horse-drawn buses, trolleys, cabs, and coaches came into service.  Sprawling cities gobbled up nearby farms, increasing the distance between the inner city and their source of food.  More horses were needed to haul more food over more miles.  Eventually, farmers could no longer afford to have urban manure hauled to their distant fields, so it piled up in empty places.

By 1900, horses plopped 10 million tons of fragrant manure on British streets each year.  When it rained, the streets became yucky mucky smelly ponds.  In warm dry weather, the breezes carried manure dust for all to inhale.  The incredible filth attracted countless trillions of flies that took great delight in spreading typhoid.  New York City had to remove 15,000 dead horses annually.  Imagine the stench.

By the early twentieth century, Britain and France each had about 3.5 million horses.  The U.S. had 20 to 30 million, and feeding them required 88 million acres (36m ha) of farmland — about a quarter of the total.  These countries had little spare land to feed more urban horses; they were close to Peak Horses.  (Here’s an interesting stinky horse story.)

In 1900, London was the world’s biggest city, with 4.5 million.  New York City was second with 2.7 million.  Their streets were jammed with slow chaotic clippity-clop traffic, close to capacity, with little room for more.  The bubble of cheap and abundant horse feed was over.  Both cities had to switch from horse power to fossil power.  By 2000, Tokyo had 26.4 million, Mexico City had 18.4 million, and Mumbai had 18 million.  They cannot shift to horse power when motor vehicle extinction approaches.

Modern cities cannot function without nonrenewable fossil power.  It is needed to move folks from home to work, and from the ground floor to the thirtieth.  It moves water in, and sewage out.  It picks up the garbage and carries it to landfills.  It powers farms, ships, air travel, factories, mines, refineries, lighting, communication systems, and on and on.  The list includes everything essential for the energy-guzzling consumer lifestyle, and industrial society itself.

Our global civilization is completely addicted to ever-increasing quantities of finite nonrenewable resources.  Obviously, this can only be temporary.  We’ve had a high-speed joyride of insane growth, pollution, and ecological gang rape.  We’ve invented lots of fascinating gizmos, lived like crazy, and created a monster that has an expiration date.  It will disintegrate, sooner or later.  Ponting warns that we are approaching a major crossroads.

To make the coming decades even more exciting, climate change is knocking on the door, stopping by to collect our staggering karmic debts.  The Technology Fairy cannot give us the magic beans needed to remove the carbon from our emissions.  Ponting shrugs, “Global warming is the greatest threat that the world faces and finding a solution will be extremely difficult.”

The Technology Fairy also appears impotent to accelerate the crop yield gains necessary for feeding the projected mob in 50 years (see Cribb and Bourne).  Like the Green Revolution disaster, GMO crops require big inputs of fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation — large fields, expensive seeds, rich farmers, big machines, and lots of petrol.  Industrial agriculture is getting gray and wrinkled, its best days behind it.  Ponting has no faith in biotech miracles.

With the calm and objective voice of a venerable professor, Ponting lifts readers far above the intense roaring madness that we consider normal.  When we can observe the human journey from a perspective that spans thousands of years, it’s easy to see that our consumer lifestyle is an extreme deviation from the human journey.  Every student in every nation should take a class based on this book, every year.  The family of life is paying a terrible price for our ongoing ignorance of environmental history.  Few have a competent understanding of the path we have taken, or the predicaments that now threaten us.

I’ve only mentioned a few of the topics in Ponting’s book.  It’s a fascinating experience.  He did not include the obligatory chapter of brilliant solutions.  His conclusion: “The course of human history over the last two centuries has produced change at a rate never before experienced and brought together a series of interlinked problems that almost defy solution because of their complexity.”  Progress is wonderful, eh?

Ponting, Clive, A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, Penguin Books, New York, 2007.