Wild Free and Happy Sample 52

 

[Note: This is the fifty-second sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

HUMAN WEBS

The culture we live in is fantastically irrational, burning every bridge it crosses, and then charging forward to rubbish what lies ahead.  Efforts to comprehend reality often result in throbbing headaches.  In the early pages of this book, I mentioned a fundamental question that William Cronon’s father gave him, to help his son navigate the path of life with greater wisdom, “How did things get to be this way?”  Both father and son were history professors.  His question has guided my process of writing this book.

William and John McNeill were another father and son team of historians, and their vision was to write a book that actually answered the question.  William’s 1963 experiment was written in a conventional history textbook style, and was a hefty 829 pages.  John thought a slimmer and slicker book was possible.  He envisioned an unconventional approach, and with a few years of effort the two of them got the job done in 350 pages, The Human Web.

Webs are relationships that link together groups of people that have come into contact with each other.  These meetings encourage exchanges of information.  In ancient times, hunter-gatherers were few in number, and widely dispersed.  Bow and arrow technology somehow spread around the wild and roadless planet, to every continent except Australia.  This was made possible, over the passage of millennia, by the first worldwide web, which remained a loose and informal network.  As wild folks migrated into unknown lands, and encountered new challenges, innovation increased the odds for survival.  Learning the skills used by others could be extremely beneficial.

Then came agriculture.  As farming and herding grew in importance, the human herd also grew.  More and more cities and civilizations mutilated once-healthy ecosystems, filling the land with more and more people.  Strangers from different webs bumped into each other, more and more often.  These random meetings exposed folks to more and more foreign technologies, crops, ideas, goods, and so on.  Over time, regional webs formed, and these often merged with others, forming larger webs.  Webs enabled a wide variety of information to travel to distant lands, where it accumulated, mutated, intermingled, and jumped on the next boat or caravan to elsewhere. 

Eventually, via this process of mergers and acquisitions, the most powerful web of all came into existence around A.D. 200, the Old World Web.  In its early phase, it spanned across North Africa and most of Eurasia.  By 1450, about 75 percent of humans lived within it.  After 1890 it grew explosively.  Today, it has essentially become a single worldwide web that includes most of humankind, from beggars to billionaires.

As professors, the McNeills had a sacred occupational obligation to gush with pride about the wonders of science, technology, progress, and human brilliance.  It’s mandatory that innocent young students be filled with a radicalized blind faith that we’re zooming up the path to a better tomorrow.  At the same time, the McNeills felt a moral obligation to make an embarrassing confession, regarding the dark shadow of brilliance — civilization’s chronic addiction to self-destructive habits.  The amazing consumer wonderland that we live in is only kept on life support by ever-growing complexity made possible by ever-increasing flows of rapidly diminishing non-renewable resources, especially fossil energy — a steep and slippery downhill path to a mangled tomorrow.

More and more, the inflow of strategic resources is getting dodgy.  We are moving at a brisk velocity toward rock solid limits.  Consequently, John regretfully sighed, “the chances of cataclysmic violence seem depressingly good.”  They were writing 20 years ago, back in the happy days when far less was known about methane plumes, melting permafrost, abrupt climate change, and the limits of modern technology to conjure miraculous solutions.

Deep Connection

In prehistoric times, webs were small and simple exchanges between neighboring tribes.  Like all other wild critters, our ancestors were absolutely integrated into the ecosystem around them, to a degree that we can barely imagine today — like your hand is connected to your arm.  The full attention of all their senses was tuned into the sights, sounds, and smells of the surrounding land.  Their world was sacred, spiritually alive, worthy of full respect.

Louis Liebenberg spent lots of time among hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, folks who lived like your ancestors once did.  Today, some experts believe that the ancestors of every living human trace back to their ancient gene pool.  Hunting on the hot, dry Kalahari was challenging.  Some hunters were more skilled than others.  In one group, up to half of the adult men did not kill even one large animal in a year.  Some barely killed any large game during their entire lives.  Reciprocity was the bedrock norm.  Meat was always equally shared with everyone.  Hunters were expected to be humble and gentle.  When a lad had a long lucky streak, he might take some time off — sometimes for weeks or months — to avoid inspiring envy and resentment.

Each band lived within a territory that they considered their hunting grounds.  The boundary lines were not marked, but all the neighboring hunting bands knew where they were, and respected them.  Boundaries reduced the likelihood of friction and conflict.  In drought years, when a hunting ground dried up, the band could shift to the hunting ground of an allied band.  This provided life insurance in a land where precipitation varied from place to place, and year to year.

It’s hard to imagine our ancestors’ extremely intimate connection to place.  Natalie Diaz described this relationship.  In the Mojave culture, there is no separation between me and the place that surrounds me, we are one.  Each person is entirely a living embodiment of the nearby water, air, soil, plants, and animals.  In the Mojave language, the same word is used to express both body and land, because they are the same.  People are buried in the land of their birth, the land of their ancient ancestors, the place where they belong, home sweet home.  Over time, the family of life recycles their corpses, and new beings arise.

You carry yourself much differently when you deeply experience your sacred connection to all that is, and are fully present in a healthy wild ecosystem.  This sense of oneness with life, experienced by our Homo ancestors for more than two million years, has had a substantial influence on the development of what we are as a species.  The mind and body of the amazing critter you see in the mirror was fine-tuned via a very, very long era of successfully living as happy, healthy, brown skinned, curly haired, bare naked, illiterate wild heathens in the tropics. 

We continue to squirt out of the womb with the genes of a Pleistocene tropical primate.  Today’s newborns still expect to open their eyes in a healthy wild world that is filled with abundant life.  They are ready to spend their life’s journey wandering, living in small bands of family and friends, singing under the stars, dining on a generous variety of wild foods.  We only become unstable oddballs when we are born into a dysfunctional society, and have no choice but to learn its ways.

For us, still today, it is comfortable and enjoyable to be among small groups of people that we love, respect, and trust.  Cooperation and sharing are what healthy humans naturally do.  We expect to be fondly treated like an equal. 

In modern society, most of us do not spend every day surrounded by an intimate circle of equals.  It is unpleasant being around folks who are self-centered, disrespectful, and exploitive.  We are constantly encouraged by our culture’s thundering jungle drums to live and think like individuals, not sisters and brothers.  The fundamental verb of life is compete.  A primary purpose in life is to climb as high as possible up the pyramid of wealth and power. 

For us, still today, it is comfortable and enjoyable to wander through a forest, gathering mushrooms, berries, and nuts.  It’s healing to watch moonlight rippling on the surface of a wild and isolated lake.  It’s inspiring to feast on the beauty of northern lights in a winter wonderland.

In modern society, eight lane highways filled with speeding motorized wheelchairs seem like horrific glimpses into the rumbling bowels of hell.  Nothing could be more unnatural and traumatizing than living amidst large numbers of strangers, day after day.  We are like zoo inmates surrounded by walls and fences.  John Livingston wrote that lions raised in zoos, under absolute human control, and isolated from wild habitat, go insane.  They are “overfed, graceless, apathetic, almost catatonic.”  No animal was meant to live like this.

Today, our lives are connected to the global economy, industrial civilization, numerous news and entertainment feeds, and necessities produced by perfect strangers in faraway places.  Many of us don’t feel at home in nature.  We live in climate controlled space stations, staring at glowing screens, lonely in a world of billions, clinging to our companion animals.  Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, “What can one expect from a man who has spent the last 20 years of his life putting heads on pins?”

Big Fork

John Gowdy put his spotlight on a massive shift in the human saga.  Humans emerged maybe 300,000 years ago, near the end of the Pleistocene epoch.  The Pleistocene was a 2.5 million year era of countless whipsaw climate swings.  Trends could sometimes shift from ice age to tropical in just two centuries.  The pattern changed around 9,700 B.C., with the arrival of the Holocene epoch, a highly unusual and long lasting era of climate stability and warmer temperatures. 

In several regions of the world, this change led to an abundance of wild grain.  For the first time, it became possible for agriculture to be practiced over the span of several thousand years without blast freezer interruptions.  Conditions became suitable for civilization.  Today, as temperature trends swerve toward hothouse, this moderate stable climate is beginning to experience sharp chest pains.  The sun is setting on the Holocene, and shadows are deepening on the future of industrial agriculture, and the billions who depend on it.  Climate change gave birth to our reckless joyride, and climate change will drive an iron stake through its heart.

James Scott focused his research on southern Mesopotamia because it was the birthplace of the earliest genuine states.  What are states?  They are hierarchical class-based societies, with rulers and tax collectors, built on a foundation of farming and herding.  Taxes were usually paid with grain, which was easier to transport and store than more perishable stuff.  States often had armies, defensive walls, palaces, ritual centers, and slaves.

In Mesopotamia (now Iraq and Kuwait), the transition from wild tribes to states took several thousand years.  By around 12,000 B.C., there is scattered evidence of hunter-gatherers who quit being nomads and settled down in regions having abundant wild foods.  The menu included wild grains and pulses, large herbivores, and wetland wildlife.  Plant and animal domestication began around 9,000 B.C.  Then, it took at least four thousand years (160 generations) before agricultural villages appeared, and then another two thousand years before the first states emerged, around 3,100 B.C. 

States were typically located close to the floodplains of large rivers, places having abundant fertile soil.  They could produce enough grain to feed a pool of laborers.  States had no interest in expanding into less productive lands that couldn’t generate enough wealth to pay the cost of governing them.  Scott noted that as late as A.D. 1600, most humans in the world were still not governed or taxed by any state. 

Over thousands of years, as many groups gradually shifted from wild and free toward a creepy new role as hardworking law-abiding taxpayers, housewives, or slaves, huge social changes took place.  On the other hand, wild humans in the tropics did not have a more-is-better mindset when acquiring plant and animal foods.  They simply took what they immediately needed, always being mindful to avoid overuse of scarce resources.  They lived and thought like a coherent group, not a motley crew of competitive self-centered individuals.  This very long tradition of mutual support strongly influenced the evolution of who we are today.

The important point here is that wild people were free, nobody gave or obeyed orders.  But with the transition to farming and herding, freedom got put on a short leash.  We began living under the firm control of a hierarchy of masters.  Small groups can readily and happily cooperate, but large dense groups tend to generate snarls and sparks.  Crowding overwhelms our Pleistocene minds, generating anxiety, paranoia, rage, depression, and so on.  Naturally, this undermines social tranquility. 

Masters fear disorder, because angry mobs can rip them to pieces.  To prevent this, crowds must be overseen by enforcers.  Rules must be strictly obeyed, and violators punished.  Growing up in civilization, folks have to obey numerous rules decreed by families, schools, religions, businesses, bureaucracies, and so on.  The god words for this way of life include compete, control, and obey.

Most of humankind is now compelled to spend much of their time wandering among mobs of strangers, folks who are not friends or kin.  Some crowded communities are ruled by violent gangs, ideological fanatics, or the chaotic whims of fate.  Others have law and order, tolerable rules, and sufficient enforcement — the preferred option for those who must live in Strangerland.

Livingston wrote that many endure the numbing conformity of Strangerland by choosing the safe and easy path of docility.  Rules are good tools for controlling people, but beliefs are sometimes even better.  When properly programmed by an ideology, our behavior can be largely manipulated by an autopilot of beliefs, like a self-driving robo-car.  Believers passively accept control from their superiors, and leap to their feet and when der Führer calls.

Because we excel at herd-like followership and self-deception, it’s easy to be swept away by trendy fads or bloody gangsters.  Leni Riefenstahl filmed Triumph of the Will, a haunting documentary on the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, which starred 700,000 Nazi supporters.  Scene after scene shows streets jammed with folks in crisp new uniforms, marching in orderly rows.  Today, with the benefit of highly advanced communication systems, charismatic hucksters, sorcerers, and lunatics can entrance large mobs of naive believers in many locations at the same time. 

Carl Jung lived through the whirlwinds of death and destruction during two world wars.  This was an ideal time to become a psychotherapist.  Mobs bring out the worst in us, creating ideal conditions for devastating psychic epidemics.  “The larger the number of people involved in an action, the greater the propensity towards mindlessness and barbarism.”  Huge growing crowds jammed together in big cities encouraged what Jung called the insectification of humankind.  People were at risk of “complete atomization into nothingness, or into meaninglessness.  Man cannot stand a meaningless life.” 

Mesopotamian Web

Sometime before 3,000 B.C., the first state-based civilization emerged in Sumer, located in southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers approach the Persian Gulf, and empty into it.  This civilization developed the cultural DNA for the Mesopotamian web, which eventually metastasized into the Old World Web by around A.D. 200.  Today, the Old World Web dominates the whole planet, providing the thundering drumbeat for the global economy and industrial civilization.  Sumer initially lit the fuse. 

Abdullah Öcalan is a Kurdish political scientist (and political prisoner).  He wrote about the history of Mesopotamia, his ancestral homeland.  Sumerian civilization established or advanced many unusual experiments, including agriculture, herding, patriarchy, slavery, irrigation, deforestation, metallurgy, etc.  The ability to produce surplus food enabled some folks to indulge in specialized pursuits — merchants, potters, smiths, miners, leather workers, fishermen, bricklayers, weavers, scribes, and so on. 

Sumer’s inventions include the calendar, writing, mathematics, astrology, and prostitution.  Women took a distant second place in the gender hierarchy.  The traditional animism of wild folks was displaced by new forms of religion, first pantheism (multiple gods and goddesses), and later monotheism (one male god).  Öcalan wrote that today’s mosques, churches, synagogues, and universities have their roots in Mesopotamian ziggurats (temples). 

The McNeills noted that these ziggurats, constructed with millions of mud bricks, were the most conspicuous buildings in cities (like many of our jumbo sized capitol buildings and worship centers).  At the time, they were the biggest manmade structures in the world.  Ziggurats were monuments built to pay honor to deities.  In the good old days, all gods were local, each city had one or more.  Religions were local too.  Gods were twitchy scary rascals who sometimes made believers fat and happy, and other times sent plagues, locusts, famines, floods, fires, and other assorted miseries to slap them down, or rub them out. 

In order to discourage divine fury, cities built super-duper temples to flatter their gods’ fragile egos.  Benefits, if any, were temporary.  The ziggurats are long gone, and their gods abandoned.  In Babylon, the legendary Tower of Babel was built as tall as possible, which oddly pissed off their temperamental god, who saw it as an outrageous act of blasphemy that required strong punishment.  Some think the Babel legend was inspired by the ziggurat of Marduk (Babylon’s god), which certainly existed.

Babel is the Hebrew word for Babylon, a city on the Euphrates in northern Mesopotamia.  Let’s take a quick side trip here.  In maybe 586 B.C., Babylon’s famous ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, captured Jerusalem, destroyed their temple, and led the Jews away to a less than pleasurable exile in Babylon.  The Jews brought with them their scrolls of sacred scriptures, and this sparked a historic event — the creation of the first portable religion.  They were living and worshipping in a place that was far from their holy land.  The portability enabled by written scriptures made multinational religions possible — believers could establish congregations anywhere in the world.

In Babylon, congregations of Jewish men and women gathered for weekly meetings to spend time with a rabbi who discussed the sacred scriptures.  This preserved their cultural identity, and allowed them to remain distinct.  They did not melt into Babylonian society.  Congregational religions were another innovation from this era.  The McNeills wrote that this put Jews on the path to monotheism.  If the deity of Jerusalem could be worshipped in Babylon, then he could also be worshipped in Egypt or Lebanon.  One god fits all… everywhere.

As centuries passed, cities, civilizations, and empires grew.  In them, numerous competing variations of congregational religions provided solace to the huddled masses of Strangerland.  They enabled city dwellers to be among like-minded people with familiar faces, to benefit from friendship and mutual support, and to righteously snort and sneer at local heretics and infidels.  Urban populations lacked the intimate sense of community found in village life, or tribal life.  Congregations provided some pain relief, a sense of meaning and belonging.

Patriarchy

Öcalan presented a different perspective on the birth of monotheism.  Long, long ago, Babylon was home to a minor league god named Marduk.  Eventually, he rose to prominence after mercilessly slaughtering the primordial sea-serpent goddess, Tiamat (the female principle), and creating the world with her body.  Marduk (the male principle) then created humans, to take care of the daily dirty work as servants and slaves, freeing the gods to enjoy a decadent life of leisure and debauchery.

Marduk could be helpful or brutal, depending on his mood.  Over time, he became the supreme deity, and gained the title Bel (Lord).  In Babylon, he was astrologically associated with the jumbo planet we now call Jupiter.  Over time, this Mesopotamian web spread into new regions.  In Greece, the top god Zeus was also associated with Jupiter.  When it eventually got to Rome, their highest god was actually named Jupiter. 

What was happening here was a huge revolutionary transition in the human saga, from the Stone Age to the Neolithic era (the new stone age), when folks shifted from hunting and foraging to farming and herding.  The Neolithic first arose in Mesopotamia.  Then, the highly contagious culture spread to North Africa, India, China, the Danube region, southwest Europe, and elsewhere.  It matured into a culture of civilization, food production, slavery, patriarchy, growth mania, and so on.

In wild webs, bands of hunter-gatherers lived via cooperation.  In the Mesopotamian web, workers, housewives, and slaves were obligated to submit to the control of their assorted masters.  Top level masters (kings, emperors, etc.) were mortal patriarchs who had an expiration date.  Upon death, a new master had to take his place.  Sometimes the transfer of power was smooth, and other times it sparked fury.

Monotheism’s deity, Big Daddy, was immortal, invisible, and divine — the supreme master, who endured the passage of centuries, and the rise and fall of mortal rulers.  His rules were the highest ones.  They were permanent, and disobedience was dangerous and stupid.  God must be feared.  The invisible Big Daddy watches everything you do, and knows your every thought.  We behave differently when someone is watching us, and we experience guilt, shame, and paranoia when our minds are being read.  This submission to multiple layers of masters and rules was the oxygen that kept civilization on life support. 

In his pro-feminist writing, Öcalan wrote, “The 5,000 year history of civilization is essentially the history of the enslavement of women.”  Prior to 2000 B.C., the woman-mother culture strongly influenced Sumerian civilization, and the two sexes were fairly equal (no shaming of women).  Over time, the warrior class encouraged a strongman cult that came to dominate religion.  The creator of heaven and Earth was male (Marduk).  “So radical was this sexual rupture, that it resulted in the most significant change in social life that history has ever seen.”

This led to the “housewifization” of women, a sharp demotion.  Their new role was to sit at home, and faithfully obey their husbands.  Chastity became mandatory, in order to guarantee the genuine paternity of daddy’s children, so that only his true sons would rightfully inherit his wealth.  It was vital that young women remain virgins prior to marrying their master.

[Continued in sample 53]

 

Wild Free and Happy Sample 50

 

[Note: This is the fiftieth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

PATHWAY TO DOMINATION

As discussed earlier, humans originated on the tropical savannahs of east Africa.  For most of the human saga, we were strong, healthy, nearly naked tropical critters with beautiful brown skin and curly hair.  In the tropics, winters were not cold, and food was available year round, so there was no need to preserve and store food.  There was no need to invent technology for staying warm, like protective clothing and shelter.

Because they were nomads, hoarding personal belongings would have made no sense.  Hauling stuff across roadless wilderness was hard work.  Because they lived simply, they didn’t need much stuff.  Instead, their survival largely depended on the knowledge stored in the glop between their ears.  For them, the keys to survival included cooperation and sharing, working well together.  Hunter-gatherers were egalitarian, everyone was equal.  Nobody gave orders, or took them.  No one went hungry unless everyone did.

The berry patch was freely open to all.  If a wandering forager picked some berries, they were hers to share and eat.  If I killed a kudu, the event was a perfectly normal and natural, like the sun rising at dawn.  Nobody owned the animal, no one got upset.  It would be carried back to camp, shared with the band, making everyone happy.  All was good.  If a lion ate my brother, nobody exploded with rage.  Lions ate many brothers and sisters, because they were good to eat.  We all feed each other.

In the tropics, some sort of food was generally available year round.  From week to week, folks knew the prime time for various munchies, and where to find them.  They regularly visited the wild buffet, and took what they needed from the daily specials.  Long term food storage was unnecessary and absurd. 

Big Mama Nature devoted a couple million years to fine tuning the evolution of tropical primates for survival in tropical climates, our home sweet home, where we belonged.  Compared to today, our ancient ancestors would seem to have been simple, stable, sane, and sustainable.  They were not two-legged category 5 hurricanes, like modern consumers.  Things were relatively cool for a very long time (sort of).  It wasn’t until much later that some sorcerers discovered the Fountain of Progress, guzzled its hallucinogenic fluids, and started smashing things.

Snow Country Colonization

As discussed earlier, maybe 100,000 years ago, some intrepid pioneers began migrating from Africa into Asia.  They wandered eastward through tropical lands, eventually reaching Australia.  The pioneers had a great time, and found many wonderful things to eat.  Quite a bit later, some of them wandered northward, into regions having a temperate climate, snow country. 

In portions of northern Eurasia, they discovered vast steppe and prairie grasslands that spanned from central Europe, east to the Pacific coast.  Temperate grasslands were ideal habitat for nurturing large herds of large herbivores, the food most cherished by hunter-gatherers.  It was as if they had stumbled into an unimaginable Serengeti-like heaven of limitless meat.  Joy!

Oddly, this was a bit like polar bears migrating into steaming hot Congo rainforests.  The notion of tropical primates colonizing snow country was equally silly.  The colonists were not born with fur coats.  They were not capable of hibernation.  They were too big to easily travel across deep snow, or thin ice.  Food was scarce during the winter months.  They knew little if anything about food preservation and long-term food storage.  But they were spellbound by the availability of so much meat!  Might there be some way that they could possibly make a home in this land?

The colonists proceeded to improve their skills at hunting, trapping, and surviving the long and frigid winters.  Over time, they got a bit too skilled.  As generations passed, the abundance of game gradually diminished.  Some species blinked out forever.  By and by, folks began fooling around with horticulture and herding, setting the stage for the dawn of plant and animal domestication.

I’ve already pointed out the obvious fact that the domestication of plants and animals was a sharp change of direction in the human saga.  It forced us into the express lane to a turbulent future.  I must emphasize that it’s also important to understand that the mere fact that hunter-gatherers successfully colonized snow country — thousands of years before domestication — was itself a crucial turning point, a necessary prerequisite.  Domestication originated in regions having a temperate climate, as did the first civilizations.  Colonization unlocked the gate to dangerous realms.

Energy Storage and Risks

In snow country, hunters faced more challenges than their ancestors had in Africa.  Back in the tropics there was no frigid season, so no need for the long-term storage of food energy.  If hyenas snatched the kudu you just killed, you may have lost one day’s effort, or less.  In snow country, the two options were store energy or starve.  Many weeks of hard work were invested in creating their winter food stash, lots of eggs in few baskets.  On any day, it could be raided by rodents, wolves, dogs, bears, or other hungry visitors.  A sudden hot spell could melt frozen meat and spoil it.

Of course, compared to snow country hunters, the farmers and herders faced more and bigger challenges.  From planting to harvest, a farmer’s crops were vulnerable to many potential risks (weather, fire, insects, disease, deer, bunnies, etc.).  Once the harvest was brought in, the granary was loaded with valuable energy for future use, something like a tank of oil.  It was a treasure chest that stored the concentrated results of countless hours of hard work — like a crisp new $100 bill, not a mere handful of pennies.  Carefully stored energy could be an irresistible temptation to folks who weren’t your best buddies. 

Likewise, herders invested loads of time and effort in creating impressive treasure chests of living flesh.  Herding was not risk free.  Late at night, your livestock could be quickly driven away by thieves.  Wild predators could pick them off.  During a long drought, or when anthrax or rinderpest came to visit, the herds in a region could be obliterated.  At any time, you could lose the stored treasure of a year’s hard work, or more.  Nothing was insured.

Livestock herds were overseen by masters who firmly controlled their movements, protected them from predators and raiders, and blocked their escape attempts.  Lifelong enslavement made it easy for masters to acquire their meat, milk, blood, hides, and wool whenever needed.  Imagine spending your entire life subservient to a dominator who eventually intended to cut your throat, strip off your hide, and eat you (and your kids). 

In snow country, when hunters, farmers, or herders enjoyed a lucky streak, it could lead to population growth, which could lead to increased tension and conflict.  More folks expected a piece of the pie, and some got wee slices.  Treasure chests, of course, have a long tradition of inspiring the belligerent behavior of aggressive parasites.  One successful day of raiding could snatch the rewards of months or years of toil, an outstanding profit.  Very clever!

More is Better

The colonization of snow country, and the necessity of food storage, inspired a new meme: more is better.  Having adequate energy storage was mandatory, but having even more was better still.  When good luck disappeared, it could be a blessed life saver. 

Folks painfully understood when they were dangerously hungry.  They also understood when life was kind to them.  Oddly, many humans seem to have a hard time perceiving the border line between enough and way too much.  In their brains, the idiot light that indicated [ENOUGH] never came on.  More was always better.  Too much was impossible.  Why do wobbly wrinkly 85 year old gits, with a billion dollars stashed away, still put on a suit and tie every morning and strive to hoard even more?

Herds of livestock were self-propelled warehouses of living meat that didn’t spoil.  Provided with grass and water, their bodies added more meat every month.  So, more is better was an intoxicating idea, until the land was stripped of vegetation, and herders experienced the painful revenge of merciless limits.  Farmers could farm like crazy, year after year, until their topsoil was drained of nutrients or ran away.  Limits spoil rowdy parties.

Of course, for our wild ancestors who remained in the tropics, the more is better concept was absolute nonsense.  It was impossible for nomadic folks to make use of more than enough (too much = waste).  They couldn’t haul surplus with them, and in the hot climate, it would spoil, or attract pests and scavengers.  It wasn’t until much later, when domesticated crops and livestock were imported into Africa, that tropical folks began suffering from serious more is better deliriums.  Prior to this, enough was enough, and they all lived happily ever after.

Control Freaks

Big Mama Nature is fully aware that unusual population outbursts in any species can destabilize healthy ecosystems.  She generally does what’s needed to restore balance.  The current human outburst has become a spectacularly destructive living asteroid.  It’s now traveling at maximum velocity toward an invincible fortress of merciless limits that will take great delight in splattering the juggernaut.  There will once again be peace on Earth (and a staggering mess).

Domestication triggered a shock wave in the human saga.  It radically altered the traditional core relationship between humans and the rest of the ecosystem.  For maybe two million years, hominins were participants in a family of life that joyfully danced to the ecstatic music of freedom.  Then, domestication gave birth to a monster child, a new and obscene verb named control.  Devilish anti-freedom.  The toxic juju of control has infected the relationship, rendering it dysfunctional and violently abusive.

During the hunter-gatherer era, folks foraged for wild plant foods, and took what they needed.  This wasn’t a labor intensive control-oriented process of clearing, tilling, planting, weeding, etc.  The shift to agriculture transformed healthy sustainable wild landscapes into unsustainable radically simplified manmade food production systems.  Wild and free are the opposite of controlled.

Hunting was the pursuit of wild game, which required a combination of skill and random chance.  Wild game is intelligent, alert, and driven by a powerful desire to avoid predators.  Being alive is precious.  Wild game is out of control.  They are not passive dimwitted sheep in the pasture, constantly overseen by shepherds and dogs.  Herding is the process of controlling enslaved animals, for every minute of their lives.  When the herder needs meat, he selects which animal dies.  Escape is impossible.

Agriculture was a sedentary enterprise, the farmer was firmly bound to a specific piece of land.  When danger approached, the granary treasure chest could not be easily moved to a safe place, because it was not self-propelled, like livestock.  Depending on the threat, a farmer could defend it (and maybe die), or abandon it (and maybe starve).  High vulnerability, and a desire to survive, inspired farmers to reside in villages, and benefit from mutual defense.  Over time, as threats increased, villages became walled and fortified cities.  Over time, a warrior class emerged, to molest incoming attackers, and to attack and rob vulnerable outsiders.

Many farmers didn’t have the time, space, or desire to keep much livestock, but herders did.  Herders who had access to extensive open grasslands could pursue a very different way of life, and they did.  Indeed, the mindset of pastoralism eventually achieved great power.  It provided the foundation for the mindset of the world as we know it (stay tuned, more later).

Mother Africa Infected

Lyall Watson wrote a fascinating biography of Adrian Boshier (1939-1978), a young British man who went to South Africa and walked a path of power.  During his first six years in Africa, the lad spent most of his time in the bush, learning the ways of the land, rewilding.  He would head off into wild country with nothing but a pocketknife and a bag of salt (for trading), and live off the land for as long as he wanted. 

Boshier became highly skilled at catching and befriending dangerous snakes.  Walking into a village wrapped up in a 14-foot python (4.2 m), he terrified the natives, giving birth to his reputation as a powerful magician.  He would catch an eight-foot cobra, milk its venom, and drink it before a gasping wide-eyed crowd. 

Prehistoric cave painting in Europe gets a lot of attention.  African cave art gets less.  Boshier visited many caves, because the rock art in them had immense spirit power.  One day, he sat in a cave in Makgabeng, and had a chilling experience when his eyes focused on a horrific heartbreaking image.  The artists were likely San people, the original residents.

Mother Africa is where the human saga began, an evolutionary adventure spanning back maybe two million years, when early hominins came down from the trees.  There’s a good chance that the San people are the ancestors of most or all humans alive today.  Around 100,000 years ago, some Africans began migrating into the Eurasian landmass, where they eventually learned how to survive in a temperate climate, and then much later conjured plant and animal domestication into existence.

The images that had filled Boshier with horror were portraits of fat-tailed sheep, critters domesticated in the Middle East.  Sheep were not indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa.  They were brought to Africa by folks who were returning to Mother Africa, their ancestral homeland, with some new and creepy habits.  Some say the Bantus brought the sheep, others suspect the Khoi (Hottentots).  Whoever brought them, they were symbols of a dark transition.  The family of life in Africa was, for the first time ever, no longer entirely wild and free.  Hideous manmade freak show critters had arrived, along with a freak show culture of control and domination.  Trouble ahead.

Watson lamented, “The introduction of a pastoral economy, starting perhaps three or four thousand years ago, seems to have marked the beginning of a relentless destruction, now almost complete, of the earliest way of human life.  It was the end of a society that had discovered how to live in harmony with — rather than at the expense of — nature.”

 [Continued in sample #51]

Wild Free and Happy Sample 47

[Note: This is the forty-seventh sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT

[Continued from #46]

Adulthood

The point where adolescence ends and adulthood begins is sort of blurry.  Colin Turnbull noted that in Mbuti society, adulthood begins with marriage.  It was a phase during which disputes and conflicts were more common, so adults were involved less in decision making, and more in the routines of daily life.  Turnbull thought that adulthood was a time for doing, and elderhood was a time for being. 

Wild cultures and modern cultures take a very different approach to adulthood.  In our culture, doing implies working — activities that bring money into your life, so you can afford the basic necessities of survival.  For many, “work” does not rhyme with “fun” or “joy.”  Most consumers have peculiar illusions about the difference between needs (essentials) and wants (desires).  Their conception of needs is far more expansive than other cultures — stuff like televisions, cell phones, computers, automobiles, and all other impulsive cravings.  For several billion less affluent non-consumers, needs focus on today’s sustenance.

When I contemplate the amount of all the stuff I’ve thrown out in my life, it staggers me — many, many tons.  Every week, garbage trucks rumble down the alley, and it’s stunning to imagine how much crap this neighborhood discards, or this city.  It must end up in a landfill as high as the Alps, constantly growing taller.  Every other animal in the family of life leaves the world in no worse condition than they found it.  This is exactly what sustainability means.

Turnbull noted that in simpler cultures, “work” means no more than what you happen to be doing in your life (assuming that it’s socially acceptable).  So, a child’s play is work, and so is the adolescent’s exploration of sexuality.  Work is reading a book, or gazing at the stars, or making love, or singing and dancing.  The Mbuti have no need for money, because the forest provides all their needs.  For them, singing a honey song is seen as essential for survival.  For the factory worker, installing windshields is essential for survival, because it is rewarded with trade tokens. 

In essence, unlike child’s play, Mbuti adulthood is about playing a “constructive role in the furtherance of the social order,” and it is “done with a conscious sense of social responsibility.”  This is about cooperation, and consideration for others.  Importantly, the focus is on WE, not ME.  In their culture, being independent and self-centered is irresponsible, obnoxious, and pathological.

In our culture, individualism and competition are promoted “with a curious fanaticism,” and this results in a fiercely exploitive crazy-making planet-thrashing nightmare world.  In our culture, ME trumps WE.  To us, absolute individual freedom is the Holy Grail — no responsibilities, no bosses, no rules, no cops, no consequences.  I can do whatever I want.  Stay out of my way.  Shut up!  To wild folks, this is absolute insanity.

In our culture, adulthood takes different forms.  Turnbull wrote, “We have all met many adults in our lives who, without seeming to try, have shown us what a rich thing adulthood can be.  We have also met many who have shown us what an empty thing it can be, sometimes by trying too hard to be other than what they are.  We have also met all too many who neither try nor succeed, those who are frankly and openly concerned only with their own immediate welfare…”

Old Age

In Mbuti society, elders are honored in their golden years.  This phase of life is about being.  Elders shift toward other important roles in society — guarding the camp, playing with children, mediating conflicts, and passing wisdom on to younger generations.  They enjoy tremendous respect.  While body and mind may have been stronger in years past, they are more experienced than ever, and their heart and soul continue getting stronger.  They still have important things to do.

Elders are relieved of adult responsibilities, withdrawing from involvement in a future that is not theirs.  These obligations are left to folks for whom the future belongs.  So, their social horizons narrow, while their authority expands, as they approach their return “to the source of Spirit.”  Elderhood encourages three paths: saints, witches, and wise ones.  It’s common for elders to engage in more than one role.  

Saints are rare elders who are radiant with spirit energy, aglow with a warm presence.  They don’t need to preach, “they just have to be.”  Their goodness can be especially beneficial to adolescents who travel on a more slippery path. 

“Witch” refers to the African sense of the word, not to the unfortunate victims of the Christian Inquisition (“demonic” women who must be tortured and burned alive).  Mbuti witches (male and female) have acquired excessive power, which is not under control, and can be used for good or ill, deliberately or not.  Elderly recluses can provide an important service.  They know all the shady things happening in the village, and they enjoy the freedom to piss off whoever they wish, and say exactly what they think.  While this makes the offenders uncomfortable, it encourages increased integrity in the community.

Wise elders are living treasure chests of important knowledge and experience.  They are the greatest babysitters, because children trust them.  They can communicate in a special way, since kids are close to the beginning of life, and elders are close to the end.  Elders are outside of the parent-child relationship, and its frictions, so things can be relaxed and open.

Of course, elders in modern cultures are a very different story.  Elderhood is often associated with uselessness, decline, poor health, poverty, senility, death.  Treating them as diminished beings results in a serious loss to the community.  We send elders away to institutions for old folks, “a pre-death limbo” where they are isolated from family and younger generations, and denied the joys of old age.  They become an annoying obligation for their children, who cherish their freedom and independence.  For many, retirement can be painful and traumatic, because folks no longer feel valued.  It can be a sad time of loneliness.

COHERENT SOCIETIES

So, we’ve taken a peek at how wild and modern cultures attempt to guide their people through the phases of the life cycle, and the different outcomes they produce.  Wild cultures were far more likely to enjoy functional, coherent societies, because everyone was on the same channel.  Humankind has generated a multitude of groups that invent unique cultural abstractions that are fundamentally (sometimes violently) intolerant of the beliefs of outsiders.  No other animal species does this.  In The Mountain People, Turnbull noted that the Mbuti enjoyed a society that was harmonized by a common set of beliefs, values, lifestyles, and ethnicity.  A beauty!

Our modern society is a boisterous mob of different cultures, ethnicities, classes, crime gangs, hate groups, religious beliefs, and so on.  When jolted, it can explode into a swarm of furious hornets.  Indeed, Turnbull would not even call it a society.  “In larger-scale societies we are accustomed to diversity of belief, we even applaud ourselves for our tolerance, not recognizing that a society not bound together by a single powerful belief is not a society at all, but a political association of individuals held together only by the presence of law and force — the existence of which is a violence.”  It’s a strong, wobbly, dimwitted Frankenstein, a manmade monster that cannot be kept on a leash.

Turnbull wrote, “Hunters frequently display those characteristics that we find so admirable in man: kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity, and others.”  These traits not rare and noble virtues, they are fundamental to the survival of hunting cultures.  The Taliban people are also apparently united by a single powerful belief, but their culture is built on a different foundation.  They are civilized.

It’s important to pay attention to the core differences between wild and modern cultures.  Hunting people lived in small groups, where everyone was family or friends, and all were on the same channel.  They had an extremely intimate relationship with the lands they lived in, and they fully understood the patterns of food availability.  They followed their stomachs, as they roamed across the land.  For hunter-gatherers, the wild menu was highly diverse.  They had many more dining options than the hungry dirty farmer with a cow and a wheat field.

Earlier, I mentioned how the San people in Botswana were able to survive in the Kalahari Desert through three years of extreme drought, because they possessed time-proven knowledge of how to live there.  The long drought killed 250,000 of the cattle owned by their Bantu neighbors, of whom 180,000 were kept on life support by U.N. famine relief projects. 

The domestication of plants and animals was a clever experiment.  When conditions were suitable, agriculture could feed a lot of people, and spawn civilizations.  But good luck was never a faithful companion.  Life was full of surprises.  It’s not a pleasant surprise to wake up every morning in a turbulent jam-packed world that is mercilessly pummeling the planet.  Alas, the clever experiment has turned out to be perfectly un-clever.

Turnbull emphasized that the bottom line here is that a farmer can lose a year’s work in one unfortunate day.  All of his eggs are stored in one basket.  A Mbuti hunter can only lose a day’s work when his luck takes a nap.  He has no need to hoard food, and constantly defend the stash.  If one food source becomes scarce, he eats something else.  They periodically move from place to place, as guided by their traditional wisdom, and shifting conditions.

Turnbull wrote, “The hunter and gatherer gives little thought for the morrow, getting his feed fresh, from day to day, with the ready assurance of someone who has come to terms with the world around him.  He knows the world he lives in as few others do, and he lives in sympathy with it, rather than trying to dominate it.  He is the best of conservationists, knowing exactly how much he can take from where at any given time.”

The farmer, on the other hand, is betting everything on a narrow mix of food resources, which exist in a fixed location (his field and pasture), and are entirely vulnerable to a wide variety of potential threats.  A ripe field could suddenly be reduced to ashes.  A swarm of locusts might discover his delicious wheat crop.  Passing soldiers, friends or foes, could confiscate his livestock and stored grain.  A fungus could turn his bumper crop of spuds into a field of stinky black slime overnight.  His livestock could all drop dead when an epidemic of rinderpest or anthrax paid a visit to his region.  Drought, deluge, flood, heat wave, early autumn frost, late springtime frost — farming was a risky business, not a pleasant stroll down Easy Street.

Modern consumers are vulnerable to all of the above risks, plus they are dependent on an extremely complex system of industrial agriculture, food processing, distribution, retailing, and a functional economic system.  If the money in their wallets becomes worthless during an economic meltdown, what’s for dinner?  Will they get evicted?  Will the bank foreclose on their mortgage?  The food system depends on the fossil fuel industry to keep stuff moving on the farms, highways, railways, and airlines.  Refrigeration requires energy to keep food from spoiling.  Stoves and ovens need power to cook meals.  Industrial civilization must remain on life support to keep all the gears of the machine moving.  An enormous house of cards.  What could possibly go wrong?

CONNECTION TO PLACE

Coherent societies can only survive in coherent places — healthy wild ecosystems.  Wild animals are a constant presence in the surrounding countryside, outnumbering the humans.  Free critters inspire contemplation and deep respect.  They provide the folks with food, and eventually compost them.  Throughout every day, wild people devote careful attention to the ongoing drama of sounds, movements, smells, turds, tracks, spirits, and other matters of utmost importance.  Being wild and free is a rich and fully engaging experience.  It requires far more mindfulness than living in a glowing screen zoo.

In Encounters With Nature, Paul Shepard wrote about how our lives can be shaped by animals and places.  For hundreds of thousands of years, wild kids enjoyed childhoods in healthy lands where everything around them, the entire landscape, was fully alive with their plant and animal relatives.  Animals were especially fascinating.  Three year olds take great delight in learning the names of different animals, because they are so amazing.  Children’s lives were warmly embraced by their mothers, their family and neighbors, and by the land that fed them and fascinated them.

In 1997, I was living in the remains of a once prosperous copper mining district near Lake Superior.  I was able to spend a bit of time with the Anishinabe activist Walter Bresette, a man who had a profound spiritual connection to life.  One day, after lunch, I showed him a beautiful piece of copper that had been smoothed by passing glaciers.  To the Anishinabe, all of Creation is alive, sacred, and related — everything in Creation is a being with spiritual power.  I learned that copper rocks are especially sacred to the Anishinabe, and they affectionately and respectfully refer to these ancient and powerful red metal spirit beings as the copper people.

Walter took the heavy green stone in his hands, and gasped with amazement and delight.  The two of them went off, into the next room, and sat down together by the wood stove.  Walter bowed his head, and he and the copper spirits spent a long time in deep and sacred communication.  It was an awesome and moving experience to observe.  I will never forget it.  He spent a night in my house, to feel the strong presence of so many copper spirits.

Shepard said that a child’s early homeland imprinted on its psyche, and remained a special and sacred place for the rest of its life.  Kids soak in all that surrounds them.  At puberty, rites of initiation further strengthened the spiritual bonds to place, via tests of endurance, vision quests, and so on.  The person and the land were one.  All beings on the land belonged there.  None were pests or weeds that had to be eliminated.

In the good old days, before the plague of glowing screens, and the fear of perverts hiding behind every bush, children were allowed to run free, unsupervised, explore their home range, and get their hands dirty.  I was one of these, and I was lucky to live close to forests, lakes, and wetlands.  My imprint of this homeland remains vivid.  I still remember that place in great detail.  It played an important role in shaping my identity.  Most of it has now been obliterated by sprawl.  I have no interest in returning, it’s too painful to see.

Jay Griffiths and her brothers also spent much of their youth playing outdoors.  Like me, they rarely watched television.  She fears that her 1960s generation may be the last to experience the remaining vestiges of a normal childhood.

John Livingston lamented how being raised in a manmade reality deforms us.  Like livestock, we become passive and obedient servants.  We learn to endure the stress of living in dense populations of strangers, and spending most of our time in enclosed climate controlled cubicles with artificial lighting.  Our cubicles are located inside vast concentration camps called cities.  We are likely to develop a high tolerance for abuse, filth, squalor, noise, and intense pollution.

Richard Louv told a touching story about a Girl Scout field trip.  Girls with AIDS from Los Angeles were taken to a camp in the mountains.  One night, a nine year old girl woke up, and had to go to the bathroom.  Stepping outside, she looked up and gasped.  Growing up in a sprawling megalopolis, she had never seen stars before.  “That night, I saw the power of nature on a child.  She was a changed person.  From that moment on, she saw everything.  She used her senses.  She was awake.” 

Natalie Diaz, a Mojave poet, noted that in her language, the same word is used to say both “body” and “land.”  The Mojave had no supermarkets, malls, cities, or online shopping.  So, throughout their lives, their air, water, and food came from the land, their home.  They were at one with the land, like a fetus in the womb. 

There is a profound difference between purchasing food-like substances at a shopping center, and gathering nourishment from the land.  When the land feeds you, an intimate and reverent relationship is born.  I fished a lot in my boyhood years.  Later in life, I took great pleasure in foraging in wild places, and on the recovering remains of abandoned farms and mining settlements.  Over the years, I’ve gathered apples, pears, cherries, plums, blueberries, thimbleberries, blackberries, strawberries, elderberries, grapes, figs, walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, acorns, mushrooms, asparagus, and so on.  Joy!

Tom Brown was eight years old when he met an elderly Indian in the woods.  Stalking Wolf was a tracker raised in a wild, free Apache community.  He possessed vast knowledge about the natural world, and how to survive in it.  He spent nine years teaching Tom and his buddy Rick.  Tom grew up to establish a school for trackers, and write 17 books. 

I was lucky to spend much of my childhood playing in the woods and swamps.  I felt very at home in nature.  Years later, a friend pointed me to Tom’s books, and it was a mind-blowing experience — an adult who had profound reverence and respect for the family of life.  Religion had given me years of painful headaches, because it was so incoherent.  Beliefs frequently seemed to have little or no influence on behavior.  I finally found something that made sense, holiness was all around me.  I could see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, respect it.

Jon Young happened to meet Tom Brown in 1971, when Tom was 18, and Jon was 10.  Tom spent eight years teaching his young friend.  When Jon later arrived at Rutgers University, he had extensive knowledge of wild ecosystems, which made him a total freak among his classmates, who seemed to be more than a little disconnected from life — suburban zoo animals.

Young soon discovered that he was the only person at Rutgers who understood bird language.  One day, on an outdoor field trip, he heard a bird call.  It was announcing the approach of a Cooper’s hawk, warning nearby critters that a predator was getting close.  Pay attention!  Jon mentioned this to the others.  The professors gazed at the sky, saw nothing.  They proceeded to exclaim that bird communication was impossible.  Then, the hawk came into view.  Wow!  Jon’s classmates were astonished that the professors, who were card-carrying bird experts, were clueless about bird language. 

Young clearly understood that connection to nature was precious, necessary, and vital.  Not forming that connection was a crippling injury, one suffered by most folks in modern society.  They have no hearts, because they are “dis-placed,” said Okanagan elder Jeanette Armstrong.  In Chief Seattle’s famous speech, he allegedly said, “To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground.  You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret.”

Jack Forbes, of Powhatan and Delaware heritage, diagnosed disconnection as an epidemic of insanity, which he called wétiko psychosis, the cannibal disease.  It’s a spiritual illness that causes people to become predators, and to relentlessly consume the lives of others.  Wétiko was the essence of European culture, a nightmare world of bloodthirsty vampires and werewolves.  Their “religion” was something isolated from everyday life, practiced indoors, away from the perfection of Creation. 

Anyway, in 1979, Jon Young asked a core question.  Which people are the most fully connected to the family of life?  Why are some cultures deeply connected, and others not?  There are three components here: connection to self, connection to others, and connection to nature.  In Western societies, disconnection from self, others, and nature (separation sickness) is at pandemic levels.  Over time, Young learned that the San people (“Bushmen”) of the Kalahari were among the most connected cultures still in existence, so he spent time with them.

Being with the San, you always feel safe.  They are super intelligent, super happy, super vital, and great problem solvers.  You never feel competition.  People are in love with every aspect of the ecosystem around them, celebrating it with childlike wonder through all stages of their life.  Every person in that community is committed to the flowering of every other person.  They are incredibly aware of their surroundings at all times, because a brief lapse of attention can kill you in lion country.

When San children grow up with nature in this way, they’re well-adjusted, healthier, happier, smarter, spiritually grounded, and more creative.  By the time they are 12 to 15 years old, they have master tracker skills.  They are illiterate, but they fully understand the language of the Kalahari.  They are better scientists than civilized scientists.

The San are remarkably skilled at living like human beings.  They are wary of entering buildings, because folks who do this too often become damaged, no longer human.  They go crazy.  Today, using the techno-juju of DNA mapping, it’s looking like the San are the common ancestors of all humankind.  For two million years, our hominin ancestors lived like the San.  We have their genes and instincts, but our culture lost its connection centuries ago.

Louis Liebenberg wrote two fantastic books about the tracking skills of San hunters on the Kalahari.  He and Young became friends.  San women were as good as men, or better, at interpreting spoor.  Everyone in a band, even children, could observe human tracks, and accurately identify the individual person who made them.  One time, Liebenberg asked some trackers if they could actually recognize the spoor of an individual antelope.  “They found it very amusing that I should ask them such a stupid question.  To them it is difficult to understand that some people can not do it.”    

Lame Deer was a Lakota medicine man.  His parents were the last generation to be born wild and free.  His generation suffered from the relentless efforts of white people to destroy the Lakota people, and he fiercely resented this.  Whites had lost their connection to the family of life, and were desperately in need of a big healing.  Like their cattle, sheep, and lapdogs, their wild power had been bred out of them.  Lame Deer shared a powerful story, in the hope of helping white folks outgrow their bad trip, so their world-killing rampage would come to an end.

He told us that we needed to experience nature in a good way, and become part of it.  Let’s sit down and listen to the air.  Let’s talk to the butterflies, owls, rivers, and lakes.  They are our relatives.  Let’s become like stones, plants, and trees.  Let us be animals, and think and feel like animals.  Even rocks are holy.  Every man needs a stone to guide him.  His story was painful and beautiful, but it failed to inspire a miraculous healing among the palefaces.

Aldous Huxley wrote, “A man must do more than indulge in introspection.  If I would know myself I must know my environment.”  Prince Charles said it a bit differently:  “In so many ways we are what we are surrounded by, in the same way as we are what we eat.”  Carson McCullers said, “To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.”  Paul Shepard put it like this, “Knowing who you are is impossible without knowing where you are.”

Every five years, the average American moves to a different address in the same city, or another county, state, or nation.  We typically spend 95 percent of our lives indoors.  Someone once realized that prisoners in maximum security prisons typically spend more time outdoors than suburban kids do.  We have become space aliens, residents of no place, something like zoo animals.

CONNECTED PEOPLE

Many of us have been taught ideas that echo Thomas Hobbes, who declared that the lives of hunter-gatherers were “nasty, brutish, and short.”  Many folks who have had direct experience would disagree.  The wild cultures that were less than mellow tended to be engaged in herding or horticulture, situations in which it was more common to bump into neighbors in an unpleasant manner.

Peter Freuchen spent a lot of time with the Eskimos, and married into their culture.  In Book of the Eskimos, he wrote that “they always enjoy life with an enviable intensity, and they believe themselves to be the happiest people on earth, living in the most beautiful country there is.”

Colin Turnbull spent years with the Mbuti Pygmies, and described them in The Forest People.  He was amazed by their joyful way of living.  He said that they laugh until they can no longer stand, then they sit down and laugh.

In Original Wisdom, Robert Wolff described the Sng’oi people of Malaysia.  They knew each other’s unspoken thoughts, seeming to communicate telepathically.  “They had an immense inner dignity, were happy, and content, and did not want anything.”  They loved to laugh and joke.  They were often singing and smiling.  Angry voices were never heard.

In The People of the Polar North, Knud Rasmussen noted how the Eskimos pitied (and giggled at) the Danes, because they suffered from hurricane minds — they never stopped thinking.  Knud once observed an Eskimo who appeared to be deep in thought, and asked him what he was thinking about.  The man laughed.  “Oh!  It is only you white men who go in so much for thinking; up here we only think of our flesh-pits and of whether we have enough or not for the long Dark of the winter.  If we have meat enough, then there is no need to think.”  Their language included no tools for discussing abstractions.  Eskimos rarely made plans for tomorrow.  “An irresponsible happiness at merely being alive finds expression in their actions and conversation.”

In The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff described the natives she met in South America.  The Tauripan people of Venezuela were the happiest people she had ever met.  All of their children were relaxed, joyful, cooperative, and rarely cried — they were never bored, lonely, or argumentative.  The Yequana people seemed unreal to Liedloff, because of their lack of unhappiness.  As an expedition was moving up a challenging jungle stream, she noticed that the Italians would get completely enraged at the slightest mishap, while the Yequana just laughed the struggles away.  Their daily life had a party mood to it.

In his book, In Search of the Primitive, Lewis Cotlow visited Eskimos in arctic Canada.  One night, he spent several hours talking to local officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  They kept repeating one idea in different ways: “The Eskimos are the happiest people in the world.”

In 1832, the artist George Catlin visited Indian tribes in the Upper Missouri River region.  He wrote, “They live in a country well stocked with buffaloes and wild horses, which furnish them an excellent and easy living; their atmosphere is pure, which produces good health and long life, and they are the most independent and happiest race of Indians I have met with: they are all entirely in a state of primitive rudeness and wildness, and consequently are picturesque and handsome, almost beyond description.  …In my travels I have more than realized my former predictions that those Indians, who could be found almost entirely in a state of nature, with the least knowledge of civilized society, would be found the most cleanly in their persons, elegant in their dress and manners, and enjoying life to the greatest perfection.”

Daniel L. Everett was sent to the Amazon to translate the Bible into the language of the illiterate Pirahã hunter-gatherers.  He described his efforts in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.  He eventually realized that it was pointless “to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior.”  He became a devout atheist.  “I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.”

[Continued in sample #48]

Wild Free and Happy Sample 31

[Note: This is the thirty-first sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 202 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.]

Dogs

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time close to nature.  The deer, bears, skunks, bats, foxes, coons, wolves, beavers, coyotes, and weasels tolerated my passing as long as I behaved calmly and respectfully.  None of these wild beings had the slightest interest in becoming my friends, or my fur children.  None depended on me in any way.  None fully trusted me.

All were absolutely free to live as they wished, every minute of every day (unlike me).  They all had a perfectly healthy relationship to the land (unlike me).  None of them ever sent anything to a landfill, or caused permanent damage to the land, water, or air (unlike me).  All of them will celebrate when the lights go out, the last car dies, and the last bullet is shot.  Hooray!

Gray Wolves

Gray wolves are the wild ancestors of dogs.  Their history is a bit misty.  One source wrote that gray wolves emerged in Eurasia maybe a million years ago, and migrated into North America maybe 750,000 years ago.  Their range spanned across the northern hemisphere, from Europe and Asia to North America.  They didn’t fancy living in tropical forests or intensely arid regions.  Instead, they adapted to grasslands, forests, and artic regions.

Humans emerged in Mother Africa, south of the equator.  Over the course of maybe two million years, in various ways, our ancestors transitioned from foragers and scavengers, to persistence hunters, to innovative weapon users, and then teams of communal hunters.  Africa was wolf-free, but it had a home team of man-eating predators, like big cats, big snakes, big crocodiles, and packs of hyenas.  They did a good job of weeding out the weak, the sick, the injured, the inattentive, and the unlucky.  They kept our clans tidy, fit, and strong.

Wolves evolved in Eurasia, north of the equator.  Barry Lopez noted that wolves shared their food with others in the pack.  They educated their young.  They could hear clouds passing, and were able to smell prey from a couple miles away.  They were expert trackers, and hunted in a state of heightened concentration, paying relentless attention to details.  Wolves generally travelled in packs of 6 to 10 animals, and could sprint as fast as 37 miles per hour (60 km/h).  Like many man-eaters, they mostly moved and hunted at night (not a great time to be out alone).

Wolves and humans likely never met one another until some human pioneers eventually wandered north out of Africa, across the equator, and into wolf country.  History is clear that wolves had no taboos against feasting on yummy tropical primates.  In many cultures, big bad wolves enjoyed starring roles in their myths, because they had to be taken very seriously in real life.  One source noted that wolves and Eskimos were equals — prior to the arrival of firearms.  For them, wolves were valuable teachers.  I have never seen a wolf in the wild, and I hope I never see one in lockdown

The Dynamic Duo

Everyone agrees that dogs were the first domesticated critters, but exactly when and where remains highly controversial.  Wolves and humans maybe began their cautious relationship while scavenging snacks from animal carcasses.  Wolves were certainly attracted to the garbage piles at human camps.  They can chew up bones that humans can’t.  Humans were also magical critters who had the fantastic ability to regularly emit indescribably delicious turds that canines cannot resist.

We’re not sure how, but canines (wolves or dogs) and humans gradually became hunting buddies.  Eventually, via a long process of selective breeding, wolves were reduced to dogs, critters less likely to rip out your throat, and kill your friends and family.  Dogs were four-legged garbage disposals that helped keep camps tidy.  Compared to a wolf of the same size, a dog’s skull is 20 percent smaller, and its brain is 10 percent smaller.  Dogs have smaller teeth and jaw muscles, after thousands of years of dining on human refuse and other soft foods.

Anyway, the hunting buddies had complementary skills.  Dogs had superb senses of smell and hearing, excelled at team hunting, and were far speedier than humans.  Humans had the advantage of weaponry.  They had the spooky ability to hurl projectiles (sticks and stones) with remarkable accuracy, often with lethal results.

So, sniffing dogs could discover the presence of coons, and chase them up a tree, where humans could then kill them.  Thus, dogs ate better, and humans ate better, while coons (and other prey) became more vulnerable to predation.  Previously, the coon’s ability to quickly climb trees was their primary defense tactic, for maybe a million years or three.  It now became less safe to be a coon.  By gaining access to more food resources, the number of both dogs and humans could grow.

Actually, “buddies” exaggerates the intimacy of the relationship.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas spent lots of time with the San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari.  Writing in the 1950s, she noted that the dogs in their camp were skeletal and weak from starvation.  The dogs were owned and named, but folks never fed them anything except shit.  When a mongrel made a move on the humans’ food, it was stoned or whipped.  At night, they chased away visiting hyenas, jackals, and leopards.

Louis Liebenberg also wrote about the San.  By the late 1960s, hunters were using dogs, which radically changed the game.  On their own, dogs were not top class hunters.  Sometimes they could run down small animals.  When they teamed up with humans, both could eat more meat.  And so, ancient food chain balancing acts were disrupted, and life became less safe for some.

With dogs, it became far easier for the San to kill gemsbok, because when pursued, they will eventually stop, turn around, and confront the dogs, at which point it was much easier for hunters to kill them (deer also eventually stop and surrender).  Gemsbok was a prime prey for hunters, because they were fairly large, and fairly numerous.  Despite the assistance of dogs, hunters still had to possess exceptional knowledge of tracking, animal behavior, and the ecosystem.  This traditional knowledge was vital for mindfully directing the dogs toward the most promising locations to find a hot lunch.

Wireless Voice-Activated Herding Robots

At some point in the game, clever shepherds, with abundant free time on their hands, taught dogs to quickly and accurately obey their exact instructions for controlling the herd.  With a well-trained dog, a herder on foot could manage 150 to 200 sheep.  With this great advance, humankind was well on the path to the wondrous realm of modernity.

Writing in 1902, Irishman W. G. Wood-Martin wrote: “The dog is the greatest conquest ever made by man, for the taming of the dog is the first element in human progress.  Without the dog, man would have been condemned to vegetate eternally in the swaddling clothes of savagery.  It was the dog which effected the passage of human society from the savage to the patriarchal state, in making possible the guardianship of the flock.  Without the dog there would be no flock and herds; no roast beef, no wool, no blanket, no time to spare; and, consequently, no astronomical observations, no science, no industry.  It is to the dog man owes his hours of leisure.”

The Deadly Trio

Liebenberg noted that following the introduction of dogs to hunting, some folks also added horses to the Kalahari team of hunters and dogs.  Consequently, the traditional method of persistence hunting — tirelessly chasing game for hours during the heat of the day until they collapsed — was no longer necessary.  Speedy horses made it far easier for the team to hunt speedy antelopes.  Dogs will chase anything that moves, and horses excel at high-speed pursuits.

As a result of this great advance, the hunting game got too easy.  Hunters no longer needed to possess exceptional knowledge.  At the same time, the San lost access to much of their former hunting territory.  Now, as the elders die, large portions of a two million year old knowledgebase are going extinct, including much of the original hominin software.  The San live in permanent villages.  Game over.

Around A.D. 1300, Marco Polo described how Genghis Khan used the deadly trio for an industrial scale approach for acquiring wild meat.  It included two flanks of mounted hunters, each having 10,000 men and 5,000 great mastiff dogs.  The line of hunters would extend to the length of a full day’s journey, and no wild animal would escape their dragnet.  These hunts were like a bloody vacuum cleaner.

Later, with the adoption of firearms, the deadly trio become a bloody foursome.  Guns made it much easier to kill large animals with the squeeze of a trigger.  Pita Kelekna wrote that when the breech-loading rifle arrived on the U.S. west, the buffalo herd was reduced from 60 million to 1,000.  Back east, there was high demand for buffalo robes and tongues, and new railroads delivered the profitable merchandise.  At the same time, the U.S. government was eager to clear the troublesome heathen savages from the west, and repopulate the region with respectable tax-paying, God-fearing settlers.

Here’s the issue.  All members of the family of life, in all types of ecosystems, continuously coevolve at a gradual pace.  Species at the foundation of the food chain, like insects, evolve the ability to produce massive numbers of offspring.  On the other hand, large, long-lived species that experience minimal losses to predators, like elephants and hippos, do not breed like roaches.  Hunter-gatherers were very interested in pursuing large game, rather than mayflies.  The more they came to depend on the use of the dynamic duo, the deadly trio, and the bloody foursome, the more success they could have at overhunting, and causing extinctions.  This was not a slow and gradual process of coevolution, it was more like a technological asteroid strike.

Big Juju Transition

Paul Shepard was an original thinker who could soar far above the concrete walls of consensus reality.  He perceived the Pleistocene to be the zenith of the human journey, and the high-water mark for the health of life on Earth (the Pleistocene ended 11,700 years ago).  Many professors can’t do this.  In the creative minds of wizards, an imaginative interpretation of deep history can conjure provocative visions, and sometimes blow large holes in deeply rooted cultural myths.

For nearly the entire saga of life on Earth — a 4.5 billion year pilgrimage — all critters everywhere were perfectly wild and free, as they should be.  No species anywhere owned, controlled, and selectively bred others.  Shepard perceived the emergence of domesticated dogs as something like a horrific cosmic tear in the universe.  A new and turbulent epoch was born.  He wrote, “The history of ecological catastrophe begins with the hound.”  To the conventional mindset, that sounds like a ridiculously stoopid idea.  But today the family of life is being massacred by the conventional mindset, a ridiculously stoopid rampage.

The act of gradually transforming a vicious, wild, man-eating predator into a tolerable shit-eating hunting buddy was super-big juju.  Mischievous folks discovered that the spirit of wildness was something that could be suffocated.  If you faithfully drowned the wildest pups in the litter, and allowed the wimps and dimwits to breed, over many generations you could produce genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that were the opposite of wild — mutant canines who would obey commands from domineering tropical primates.  These oddballs were highly vulnerable to wolves, coyotes, big cats, and other wild predators.  They were unlikely to survive outside the human sphere.

Over time, this understanding of control inspired some diabolical impulses.  Why should we spend so much <bleeping> time chasing wild animals all over the place?  Why don’t we just rip out their normal wild spirit and turn them into passive critters that we can keep in dense confinement near camp?  Wow!  Cool idea!

After many centuries of trial and error, the demented efforts of obsessive-compulsive control freaks succeeded in breaking wild aurochs, sheep, goats, and pigs.  For thousands of years, humans had perceived these wild animals to be sacred beings.  We painted magnificent portraits of them in caves.  Now, reduced to freakish GMOs, they were forcibly bred, castrated, branded, sheared, bobbed, hobbled, milked, slaughtered, butchered, and eaten.  Urp!

During this era, a number of groups were also fooling around with plant domestication.  By and by, territories most suitable for intensive exploitation were able to sharply increase their food production.  More and more fields were cleared on the soft floodplain soils along rivers.  Grasslands for herds were expanded by exterminating primordial forests.  Naturally, this led to growing numbers of bambinos, more tents in the camps, and increased social tensions.

Many centuries later, the last major GMO mammal emerged from the madhouse.  The domesticated horse was a critter with a far more disruptive destiny than the dog.  Shepard wrote that horses and hounds can be seen “as destroyers of nature and humankind.”  As noted, the deadly trio of hunter, dog, and steed enabled stunning advancements in wildlife extermination.  Horse power was used to accelerate soil mining, forest mining, and ore mining.  Horse power pulled wagons, plows, and war chariots.  Horse power revolutionized raiding, warfare, and empire building.  The Mongol empire was enormous [MAP].

Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus was born around A.D. 1050.  He shared many snapshots of the testosterone powered mega violence that came into full bloom during the era of domestication.  “Now the warriors, who were always pillaging the neighborhood, used often to commit great slaughters.  Plundering houses, cutting down cattle, sacking everything, making great hauls of booty, rifling houses, then burning them, massacring male and female promiscuously — these, and not honest dealings, were their occupations.”

King Gram boasted, “Singly against eight at once I drove the darts of death, and smote nine with back-swung sword, when I slew Swarin, who wrongfully assumed his honors and tried to win fame unmerited; wherefore I have oft dyed in foreign blood my blade red with death and reeking with slaughter, and have never blenched at the clash of dagger or the sheen of helmet.”

Stable, long lasting egalitarian cultures like the San, were based on sharing, cooperation, and simple sticks and stones technology.  Cultures of domestication are based on self-interest, competition, domination, and technological innovation.  The horse powered expansion of herding and farming turbocharged food production, population growth, and the size and number of horrendous bloody conflicts.  These aggressive cultures sort of behave like wildfires — as long as they can find resources to consume, and conditions remain favorable, they grow and spread.

In wild times, when wolves killed a deer, it was a perfectly normal act, and nobody soiled their britches.  When domestication arrived, and herds of my animals were grazing, wild predators immediately shape-shifted into demonic enemies that had to be exterminated — every single one of them, if possible.

In wild times, it was perfectly normal and natural for wild herbivores to munch on the greenery.  When domestication arrived, wild grasses shifted into being my grass needed by my herd to increase my wealth.  Wild critters that helped themselves to my grass were thieves that could not be tolerated.  They had no right to exist.

In wild times, there were zero fields planted with crops.  The countryside was a free all-you-can-eat buffet.  Help yourself, take what you can find.  Have a nice day!  When domestication arrived, all the birds, bunnies, coons, deer, and bears that were tempted to sample the fruits of my hard work, in my fields could not be tolerated.  Kill them all!

In normal wild ecosystems, Big Mama Nature encourages long term health.  A forest roasted by a wildfire can usually heal and recover.  In ecosystems ravaged by Big Daddy Dominator, the damage is often irreparable.  The vegetation is stripped off, wildlife erased, the land dries out, flowing springs disappear, the climate gets hotter and dryer, persistent toxins soak in, precious soil is blown away, washed away, or rendered infertile by salt buildup, and so on.  When a Big Daddy settlement is eventually reduced to wasteland, the survivors migrate elsewhere and promptly begin repeating the same cycle of mistakes.

Big Mama is sustainable and durable.  Big Daddy is a one-way death march that burns every bridge behind it.  The ecosystems he rubbishes can never fully heal, and return to their original condition.  He’ll strive to expand his domain, by any means necessary, as far as possible, but Earth is finite.  You can’t destroy more than everything (but he’ll try).  Big Daddy is well on his way to what is known as a Pyrrhic victory.  His heroic efforts for glorious conquest are terribly successful, but the losses he suffers in the process are so enormous that the final victory is meaningless.

In countless city parks and squares, it’s common to see huge bronze statues of male conquerors, holding deadly weapons, riding their snorting steeds.  They are proud monuments of the fanatical Big Daddy cult.  The message of each is “I courageously destroyed the despicable opponent that threatened our glorious way of life.”

Big Daddy is a huffing, puffing, smashing, killing, whirlwind of self-destruction, burning up the fossil energy, moving the topsoil into the sea, causing mass extinctions, poisoning the waters, and on and on.  He is the proud father of an accelerating, out of control climate disaster — a massive challenge against which the brightest nerds in the world are impotent, reduced to delivering happy rainbows of magical thinking (hopium).  On the bright side, the economy continues growing!  Hooray!  Let’s go shopping!

OK, well what would a monument celebrating Big Mama look like?  It would not be bronze.  She detests animal slavery.  She has no cannons.  What she has is the power of persistence, the power of life, the power of regeneration and healing.  Her monument would look like a wild planet.  She will someday watch Big Daddy wheeze, stumble, collapse, take his final breath, and dissolve into the ecosystem.  Then, for many thousands and thousands of years, the surviving species will strive to restore some form of ecological balance once again.

Oh!  A hand is raised in the audience, a question.  Hey, in the New World, substantial civilizations emerged that seemed to have Big Daddy DNA, but they had no horses, cattle, sheep, goats, almost no metal tools or weapons — essentially Stone Age.

Good point!  In fact, several big bloody civilizations did emerge in the horse free Americas, develop productive agriculture, and feed growing mobs.  In South America, they were making a few bronze tools, and ornaments of silver and gold.  When Cortes first arrived, the Valley of Mexico had two million residents, and Tenochtitlan was a city of 200,000 — twice the size of Paris at that time.

In 1492, compared to the Old World, the Americas still had far more wild lands, ancient forests, and abundant wildlife.  Without large herds of livestock, there was not abundant manure to optimize soil fertility and crop production.  Luckily, the lack of horses, plows, wheels, and roads limited their trade, travel, expansion, industry, and agriculture.  Like Australia, the Americas enjoyed a lack of contagious infectious diseases, because they did not have large concentrations of domesticated animals from which to acquire exotic pathogens.

In 1492, Native Americans did not discover Spain, it was the other way around.  Because Europe had horses, they had long distance trade networks which linked a variety of cultures and civilizations.  Networks enabled the spread of devious ideas, kooky religions, domesticated plants and animals, dangerous technological innovations, and deadly epidemics.

Kelekna noted that both people and ideas moved slowly in a horseless world, if they moved at all.  The brilliant mathematical achievement of the Mayans was the invention of the zero — 500 years before the Hindus.  In the Old World, the extremely useful idea of zero spread fast and far, while the Mayan zero never left home.  The voyage of Columbus depended on the existence of countless tools, resources, and skills, none of which were invented in Spain.  Some came from as far away as China, like gunpowder, forged steel, paper, and printing.  Imagine what today would look like if the concept of gunpowder had never left China, and was still only used for glittering fireworks.

Ronald Wright pointed out that in 1492, after at least 15,000 years of separation, the cultures of the Old World and New World directly met each other.  In Mexico, the invaders found “roads, canals, cities, palaces, schools, law courts, markets, irrigation works, kings, priests, temples, peasants, artisans, armies, astronomers, merchants, sports, theater, art, music, and books.”  Agriculture enables dense populations, hierarchy, and complexity.

Wright also talked about “progress traps,” beneficial innovations that were also severely addictive, like horse domestication, agriculture, metallurgy, autos, or computers.  Once you got hooked on the habit, good luck quitting.  Over time, the impacts of their unintended consequences kept ratcheting up.  The dodgy solution for problematic progress was to introduce more and bigger progress — snowballing lunacy.  Progress traps had no safe and easy Undo button.

Large predators used to provide an important check on our numbers, but many went extinct.  We got too good at killing them.  We got too good at killing large game.  We got too good at confining herds of livestock.  We got too good at producing and storing huge harvests of calorie dense grain.  We got too good at coercing dense populations of humans to obey orders and perform tedious, difficult, dangerous, soul killing work.  We got too good at perfecting insanely unsustainable technology.  Now what?  [UNDO] [UNDO] [UNDO]  Shit!

Makgabeng Cave

Mother Africa was the land where hominins first evolved two million years ago.  The human line emerged maybe 300,000 years ago.  Hominins coevolved with the ecosystems they inhabited.  Africa was blessed with good luck.  Jared Diamond noted that no crop plants were domesticated south of the equator in Africa, and there were no large herbivores that were suitable for domestication — only the guinea fowl was enslaved in this region.

Thus, the official way of life remained nomadic hunting and gathering.  Traditional wild Africans caused much less disturbance than folks who emigrated out of Africa, into exotic ecosystems, where old survival strategies met many new challenges.  Those who wandered into Eurasia discovered wild cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and horses.  These animals were domesticated and, along with agriculture, they ignited radical change in the human saga.

Lyall Watson wrote a biography of Adrian Boshier (1939-1978), an English boy who arrived in Africa at the age of 16.  He learned to venture into the bush alone, taking just a knife and a bag of salt, in search of old Africa.  Boshier slept in caves and dined on stuff including bats and lizards.  He collected the venom of snakes and scorpions to earn some money.

At a cave in the mountains of Makgabeng, Boshier discovered ancient paintings, and some of these were terribly disturbing and depressing.  The images included sheep — peculiar critters from outer space.  Some folks had migrated back into Africa, and they imported a number of destructive habits and beliefs.

By three or four thousand years ago, this exotic invasive culture had metastasized into a widespread pastoral economy that often led to conflict and overgrazing.  This unsustainable way of life caused ever-increasing destruction.  It has now almost completely eliminated the earliest human culture — the culture of our oldest, wildest, and freest ancestors — the folks whose genes we all carry.

Extra Credit Reading

Out of courtesy to loyal readers, I’ve tried to avoid recycling earlier writing here.  My second book, Sustainable or Bust (2013), discussed dogs in three essays.  These essays are also on my blog.

Before Dogs Became Pets looked at the wolf-to-dog transition, and the shift from scavenger to hunting companion, to herding aid, to pet.  For tribal people, dogs were not beloved “fur children.”

 Stray Dog Blues talked about the soaring global dog population (900 million in 2018), of which 75 percent are strays.  Vicious dog packs are a growing problem.  Dogs eat humans, and humans eat dogs.  The pet industry makes huge profits.

 Beyond Zenith described how dogs helped hunters kill more game.  War dogs were trained to kill foes on the battlefield.  Dogs have now become pets, living toys.  Health issues with dogs are increasing.