Wild New World

 

Dan Flores is a historian who has been studying the stormy relationship between humans and the family of life for many years.  He calls this subject Big History.  Wild New World is a fascinating and disturbing masterpiece.  It’s a thick book loaded with ideas gathered over a long career.  The core focus is on North America, which was once an Eden-like paradise of abundant wildlife.  What happened?

Our species emerged in beautiful Mother Africa maybe 300,000 years ago.  Maybe 60,000 years ago, adventurous folks began wandering off into the outer world.  Our exploration of the planet was underway.  Folks went east to Asia, and north to Europe.  By maybe 45,000 years ago, folks were in Siberia and northern Asia.  So far, the earliest evidence of humans in America dates to maybe 25,000 years ago.

Flores described two important discoveries in New Mexico.  At Folsom (1908), the bones of 32 extinct giant bison, 12,450 years old.  At Clovis (1914) the bones of extinct mammoths, 13,000 years old.  At both sites, flaked flint points were found with the bones, smoking gun evidence of human hunting.  A huge surprise!

Humans were team hunters skilled at killing delicious wild animals, preferably jumbo sized megafauna.  As bands of pioneers migrated into new frontiers, a number of megafauna species gradually went extinct, in one region after another, a sequence corresponding to the timeline of human arrival. 

Today, our culture celebrates human brilliance.  We’re simply too smart to disrupt the planet’s climate — global warming is a hoax!  We deny responsibility — not our fault.  Similarly, we’re too smart to cause mass extinctions — not our fault. 

It’s much more comfortable to blame prehistoric climate change.  But the wiped-out species in America had survived for millions of years, including numerous eras of unusual heat and cold.  They weren’t dainty weaklings.  Why did this killer climate shift only exterminate large animals, not small?  Why did it just affect America, but not other continents at the same time?  Hmmm…

In the 1960s, Paul Martin began using a new technology, radiocarbon dating, a better tool for dating prehistoric artifacts.  This enabled him to compare the dates of human presence in North America with the dates of extinctions.  He learned that human arrival came first, and extinctions came later — during a process that took maybe a thousand years. 

Stunned, he referred to this process as “blitzkrieg overkill,” because of its unusual speed.  To Native Americans, this implied that their venerable ancestors foolishly hunted too hard.  They’ve never been fond of the paleface settlers who foolishly obliterated their ancient homeland, and they especially disliked Martin.

We’ve now learned that as the human diaspora advanced around the world, the same pattern followed: arrival first, then extinction.  By 2006, Martin had learned more.  He wrote, “I argue that virtually all extinctions of wild animals in the last 50,000 years were anthropogenic.”  Yikes!  The indigenous white folks of Europe had done it too!

Evolution had fine-tuned us for living in tropical climates.  Many of the new lands we wandered into had uncomfortably chilly non-tropical climates.  We were forced to develop innovative solutions, like needles, awls, sewn clothing, and protective shelters. 

When we arrived in new regions, the wildlife was clueless.  Mysterious bipedal primates did not trigger danger alarms, because we didn’t fit the standard predator template.  “We were a brilliant new predator with sophisticated weapons, dogs, and fire.”  For a while, hunters enjoyed the pursuit of fearless prey, many of whom became victims of fatal tameness, like dodos.  During the Lewis & Clark expedition, Clark once bayoneted a wolf that calmly walked past.

Hunting focused on jumbo sized animals that didn’t breed like bunnies, or zoom like gazelles.  Small groups of humans roamed across vast roadless wilderness on foot, armed with Stone Age weapons.  Game was depleted over the course of centuries, and the process of decline could have been imperceptible to living generations.  As game got scarce, the diaspora advanced into new regions.

Everywhere we migrated, the megafauna had evolved large strong bodies, a traditional defense against fierce predators, like sabertooth cats.  Unfortunately, when the predators were bloodthirsty primates from outer space, jumbo size was a vulnerability, and high speed escape was not an option.  The big guys could be killed with primitive spears.

America was the last major stop of the human diaspora, which had begun maybe 35,000 years earlier.  During this long process, pioneers had become highly skilled survivalists.  When the Beringia land bridge emerged from the sea, they advanced from Siberia into the “American Serengeti.”

I was shocked to realize the very long time spans of evolutionary history prior to human arrival.  The camel family in North America blinked out 10,000 years ago, ending a 40 million year residence.  Horses went extinct 9,000 years ago, after enjoying four million years here.  Mammoths wandered in from the Old World 1.5 million years ago.  It’s heartbreaking to comprehend the impact of the blitzkrieg.

IMPORTANT!  So, a number of species blinked out.  When the American megafauna extinction surge wound down, what came next was 10,000 years (100 centuries) of relative stability, according to Flores.  The human pioneers remained, and eventually coevolved with the species that survived.  This preserved the continent’s downsized wildlife community.  Humans learned ecosystem limits, established wise taboos to avoid overhunting, and nurtured a culture of profound respect and reverence for the entire family of life. 

Species that survived extinction now had less competition.  With the giant bison gone forever, the much smaller bison we know today exploded in number.  They reached reproductive age faster, and successfully coevolved with the remaining survivors.  

Sadly, the 100 centuries of stability zoomed off a cliff 500 years ago, when visitors from the Old World began washing up on the Atlantic coast — something like a bloody asteroid strike.  The aliens brought with them an assortment of deadly infectious diseases for which natives had zero immunity.  There were maybe four million natives in 1492.  Epidemics rapidly spread westward, killing about 90 percent of them within 100 years. 

This die-off sharply reduced hunting pressure on the wildlife, which was free to grow explosively.  In 1585, Thomas Hariot was astonished by the fantastic abundance of animals he saw in Virginia.  It was an Eden created by disease.  Settlers were free to hunt like crazy in a wilderness where there were no rules or regulations. 

In addition to diseases, colonists also imported their infectious worldview.  Their religion had roots in a herding society that treasured enslaved livestock, and detested predators.  Their Old World culture was built on a foundation of human supremacy, domestication, civilization, manufacturing, fanaticism, patriarchy, environmental devastation, and pathological self-interest. 

From time to time, Flores stopped to take a long hard piss on the notion of self-interest, a demonic quirk in the settler’s worldview.  I suspect it emerged with the rise of farming, herding, personal property, and individual salvation.  Its one all-consuming question has been “how can I get what I want?”  We suffer from an insatiable lifelong pursuit of social status, to the fullest extent possible, by any means necessary.  Nothing else matters.  Sorry kids!  Sorry wolves!

The traditional worldview of most tribal cultures majored in cooperation instead.  It nurtured mindfulness, and profound reverence for the family of life, the mother of their existence.  They were something like the folks who made the passionate cave paintings at Chauvet.  With few exceptions, the named gods of Native Americans were animals — coyote, raven, rabbit, etc. 

In the Old World religion, humans were very special critters, the other animals were not.  By and by, settlers from the Old World flooded into America.  They had domesticated animals and religions and economic ideas wherein “animals were not kin but resources.”  Their lives had no sacred significance.  So, the more hides, pelts, and furs you could take to market, the more cool stuff you could get.  Yippee!

Native folks thoroughly detested the monstrous colonists, but were fascinated by the unusual stuff they had.  Fifty deerskins could be traded for a metal pot.  Hatchets, axes, and knives were more expensive.  Whiskey was intoxicating.  The desire for this stuff was powerful, but it wasn’t free.

It was in the self-interest of the market, and the colonies, to leave nothing of monetary value unmolested.  Wild animals were pests that stood in the path of progress, and their extermination would continue until it was no longer profitable.  For natives, all options sucked.  They struggled to do their best.

In 1972, I was a roller coaster operator.  Riders slowly went up the steep hill, and then rapidly zoomed downhill screaming their brains out.  Flores provides readers a similar experience.  Most of his book describes the terrifying mass insanity that ravaged America in the last 500 years.  Readers will scream their brains out as they plunge deep into the cesspool of Big History, our horrifying monster closet.

Flores wrote that the invaders forced “a transformation of a hundred centuries of Native America into a re-creation of Old World civilization on a new continent.”  Five centuries ago, Old World folks and animals arrived, “and then, like some new contagion spreading inland from the coasts, proceeded to effect a widespread demolition of almost all that was here.”

In one year, 1743, the port at La Rochelle, France “took in 127,000 beaver pelts, 30,300 marten furs, 12,400 river otter furs, 110,000 raccoon pelts, along with its big haul for that year, the stripped skins of 16,500 American black bears.”

“In 1874 Bozeman market hunters were hip-deep in the big bonanza.  That year they shipped out 48 tons of elk skins, 42 tons of deerskins, 17 tons of pronghorn skins, and 760 pounds of bighorn skins.”

“Governments at all levels paid money for the heads or ears or scalps of a suite of animals — wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, grizzly and black bears, jaguars, bobcats, lynx — for the single purpose of promoting agricultural economies.”  Dead animals (or meat chunks) injected with strychnine were put everywhere to poison scavengers — wolves, coyotes, eagles, vultures, ravens, magpies, foxes, skunks.  It was sold in bulk in every store.

To delight ranchers, Montana put out 3,567,000 poison baits to kill predators.  Between 1883 and 1928 Montana shelled out payments on 111,545 wolves and 886,367 coyotes.  In one year, a wolf killer earned enough to buy a ranch and livestock.

Passenger pigeons, had been in America for 15 million years.  My father was in diapers when the last one died in 1914.  “The largest nesting site ever reported, near Sparta, Wisconsin, in 1871, spread across 850 square miles (2,200 km²).”  One flock was estimated to have 3.7 billion birds. 

Life on Earth is powered by energy.  Sunbeams feed the plants, and plants feed the critters.  Agriculture and herding amplified the energy flow for humans.  More recently, the flow has been explosively accelerated by burning fossil hydrocarbons, which are not limitless or harmless.  We can now temporarily feed more than eight billion.  We’re heating the planet into a toasty concentration camp crematory.  The machine’s guiding force is insanely clever childish self-interest, which is dumber than dog shit, but far more powerful than foresight, wisdom, cooperation, and mindful self-control.  SCREAM!!!

Flores, Dan, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals & People in America, W. W. Norton, New York, 2022.

The Life and Adventures of William Buckley



William Buckley was born in Cheshire, England in 1780.  He was trained to be a bricklayer, but the monotonous work bored him.  He joined the militia and was a soldier for four years.  Then, he met some scruffy lads, and got busted for receiving stolen property.  In 1803, he was rewarded for his mischief with a one-way nine-month pleasure cruise to a luxurious resort for white trash in Middle of Nowhere, Australia.  He never saw his family again.

It was not a high security penal colony, because fleeing into the vast wilderness was essentially suicide.  In just three months the prison routine got unbearably boring, and Buckley joined three other lads in a great escape.  One was shot by a guard, and the two others soon lost their courage and gave up.  Buckley was a stubborn cuss, not an obedient bootlicker.  He refused to surrender, bid farewell to his cowardly mates, and abandoned the British Empire.  Good luck Willy!

A mile or two later, in an incredible act, he passed through a time warp, and entered a vast Stone Age wilderness inhabited by cannibals, venomous snakes, and vicious packs of dingo dogs.  He was free as can be, suddenly a clueless unarmed hunter-gatherer in a reality quite similar to 40,000 B.C.  For the next 32 years, he never saw a civilized person, forgot his mother tongue, ceased knowing what year it was, and continuously worked to improve his survival skills.  Fresh air, sunshine, and absolute freedom.  Imagine that!  His escape inspires pleasant fantasies for daydreaming corporate inmates trapped in cubicle farm workstations.

In the next several months, Buckley ate shellfish and occasionally observed a few passing natives.  One day he stumbled upon a grave with a spear sticking out of it — Lucky Willy’s salvation.  He took the spear, and used it for a walking stick.  Later, while having a pleasant nap, he was spotted by two native women, who returned to their camp with wondrous news of a white man.  Everyone came to see him, and he was given the name Murrangurk, the name of the corpse in the grave, previous owner of the spear.  They believe that after death, souls return as white men.  They were very happy to find him, and Willy now had relatives who held him in great awe.

Over time, he mastered their language.  He learned a great deal about hunting, fishing, and foraging.  He now dined on organic swans, emus, shellfish, shrimp, opossums, squirrels, large ants, roots, wombats, kangaroos, black snakes, grubs, lizards, toads, rats, and mice.  Yum!  Technology included long spears, short spears, spear throwers, boomerangs, tomahawks, shrimp nets, and fire-making sticks.  Their portable mansions were bark tents.  They weren’t too interested in clothing, fashionable folks wore a few strips of hide.

His saga often mentions seeing gatherings of 100, 200, and 300 natives, which surprised me.  My minimal knowledge of Aborigines, based on twentieth century commentaries, led me to believe that they lived in small groups in a harsh land where food was scarce.  Buckley indicated that they were intimately attuned to the cycles of the seasons, knowing when and where abundant food was likely to be found, for a temporary span of time.  They lived a wandering life, trying to move from one food banquet to the next, improvising along the way.

Buckley arrived in Australia in 1803, just one year after the first non-Australian arrived in the wilderness.  Willy spent 32 years with the Wathaurong Aborigines in the Port Phillip and Geelong districts (near Melbourne), and then made contact with sailors in 1835.  In about 1849, as he neared the end of his life, he told his story to impoverished journalist John Morgan.  Buckley could not read or write.  The saga he told was based entirely on memory, long after the events occurred.  He especially remembered the events that had made the deepest impressions on him — conflict and bloodshed.

Throughout the short book, he describes numerous violent events.  Many folks were speared to death, and many of their corpses were eaten.  Very often, women were the cause of bloody disputes.  These conflicts were commonly resolved by spearing the woman, or the man who was with her, who was not her husband.  Whenever someone was speared, the family of the victim was obliged to seek revenge, immediately, or at a convenient opportunity in the future.  If the chief offender was not available, a member of his family would do.  Sometimes two tribes clashed in large rumbles, and several died in the process.

Buckley reported that all deaths were believed to be the result of human agency, never natural causes.  For example, when a man from an enemy tribe died from a snakebite, Buckley’s tribal brother-in-law was suspected of sorcery or something.  The enemies attacked and speared the family that had kindly adopted him.  Buckley became an orphan in a dangerous world, and he cried and cried for hours.

He felt safe and relaxed when living alone by a river or shore, but dangerous people could suddenly appear at any hour.  Any day he could become the main course at dinner.  One white man who met him later in life said he was of “a nervous and irritable disposition, and a little thing will annoy him much.”  Another noted that he “was always discontented and dissatisfied.”

His wild days ended when he met some sailors on the shore.  They were utterly surprised to see a dirty, nearly naked, six foot five inch (2 m) white man with long flowing hair, and a spear.  It took him some time to remember English.  He was greatly relieved to return to civilized society.  He worked as an interpreter for colonists.  Their mission was to meet native chiefs, and buy their land for a pile of trinkets.  The natives had no chiefs, and no concept of owning land or selling it, but they did have a fondness for blankets, knives, and stuff.  They did not understand what these transactions actually meant.

Buckley the bricklayer built the chimney for the first brick house in a primitive frontier settlement now known as Melbourne.  Before long, a steady stream of ships was unloading settlers.  Pissed off natives found exciting new opportunities in sheep rustling, looting, and spearing terrorists.  There were many conflicts, and the well-armed terrorists eventually conquered the Aborigines, and profitably began mining the soil, grassland, forests, and wildlife.  Buckley married the widow of a friend who had been speared.  Soon after, he got typhus.  In 1856, he died of injuries received from being run over by an ox cart in Hobart.  The end.

This is a short book, and Morgan was not a master wordsmith.  The book is a unique snapshot of a time, a place, and a life — a reminder of the era of low impact living.  It’s an effective antidote for those who suffer from the illusion that wild tribes of hunter-gatherers universally enjoyed idyllic lives of love, peace, and happiness.  It’s also sad. 

Today, two centuries later, the wild ecosystem of 1803 has been severely and permanently damaged.  This is not a path with a long future.  The Aboriginal path very closely resembled genuine sustainability.  All paths include some conflict and bloodshed, some coherence and happiness.  We live in interesting times.

Morgan, John, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, 1852, Reprint, William Heinemann Ltd, Melbourne, 1967.

The Old North Trail



In 1891, Walter McClintock graduated from Yale, with plans to join his father’s prosperous carpet making business in smog-choked Pittsburgh.  Luckily, he was spared from a dull job by getting very sick with typhoid fever.  To recover, he took a trip to North Dakota, where he fell deeply in love with the west.  He worked as a photographer for a forest survey project, and became friends with the team’s Blackfoot scout, Siksikakoan.  Later, Siksikakoan introduced him to the elderly chief Mad Wolf.

Once Mad Wolf came to trust McClintock, he adopted the young lad as his son.  Mad Wolf hoped that if his people had a white leader, they would receive better treatment from the incoming settlers, many of whom were not skilled at behaving with common decency.  McClintock spent lots of time with a number of elders, listened to many stories, and several years later wrote The Old North Trail.  He also took more than a thousand photographs, many of which illustrate the book.  Today, a century later, Amazon lists his book as a best seller.  It’s fascinating and easy to read.

The Blackfeet lived on the plains east of the Rocky Mountains, from Montana up into Alberta.  When the painter George Catlin met them in 1832, he said they were the happiest Indians or all.  The Old North Trail was an ancient footpath that passed through their territory.  In places, old ruts are still visible.  Today, some suspect that it may have been 2,000 to 3,000 miles long, linking Canada and Mexico.  Because many tribes used the trail, travel was dangerous.  It was a common place for ambushes and tribal wars.

In the old days, the Blackfeet used dogs as beasts of burden.  Sometime before 1750, they acquired horses, triggering radical change.  Horses greatly increased their ability to hunt, feed more people, wage war, haul trade goods, and zoom across the plains at superhuman velocity.  Corn farmers became highly vulnerable to horse-mounted raids by neighboring tribes, forcing many to abandon their fields and become nomadic.  After 1780, the Blackfeet were hammered by wave after wave of deadly diseases.  Their population dropped by maybe 90 percent.

By 1883, white folks had succeeded in nearly exterminating the buffalo, and this made the traditional Blackfoot life impossible.  The tribe was forced onto reservations, given ration tickets, treated like dogs, and were not allowed freedom of travel.  Missionaries introduced them to sin, hell, damnation, guilt, and submission.  Teachers taught youths the ABC’s of civilization, using the English language.

By the time McClintock arrived, many young Blackfeet were disoriented victims of cultural genocide, largely indifferent to their tribe’s customs, traditions, and religion.  During important ceremonies, many would be drinking, gambling, or horseracing.  Only the elders still remembered the traditional ways, and their days were numbered.  McClintock wanted to record the story of these people, before their culture ceased to exist.  The Blackfeet people fascinated McClintock, and he described them in a respectful manner.

His book is a magical 500-page voyage into another time and place.  Readers can soar away from the spooky nightmare world of automobiles and cell phone zombies, and imagine living in wildness and freedom.  The Blackfeet elders shared fond memories of a way of life that was far more in balance with the circle of life.  In the good old days, “the mountain slopes abounded in beaver, wapiti, moose, mountain sheep, and grizzly bears, while immense herds of antelope and buffalo roamed over the plains.”

One night, McClintock awoke to discover a huge grizzly bear stepping over him to finish off his dinner leftovers.  Grizzlies were still common.  Wolves and coyotes often howled passionate serenades under the stars.  Humans were not the dominant species; they were delicious two-legged meatballs.  Modern folks, obsessed with glowing screens, would not have lasted long in a reality where man-eating carnivores were never far away.  To survive, folks actually had to pay careful attention to reality, and behave in an intelligent manner.  Imagine that!

The people wore clothing of animal hides, and lived in tipis, in an ecosystem of scorching summers and long blast-freezer winters.  Powerful storms could race across the plains at astonishing speed.  On a pleasantly warm November day, McClintock noticed distant turbulent clouds that were rushing across the plains in his direction.  Danger!  The temperature sharply dropped, howling winds pounded him, and a whiteout blizzard commenced.  He lost all sense of direction, and freezing to death was a strong possibility.  He managed to return to camp.  The storm lasted ten days.

McClintock wrote, “The Blackfeet subsisted mainly upon buffalo meat, when it could be secured.  They also used sarvis berries, wild cherries, buffalo berries and vegetables such as camas, wild turnips, wild onions, wild potatoes, bitter root, and wild rhubarb.  They secured wild ducks and geese by striking them over the head with long sticks.  Beaver tails were considered a great delicacy.”

A vegetarian would soon starve on the plains.  The Blackfeet survived by killing and eating their animal relatives.  When natives died, their corpses were returned to the circle of life.  The dead were placed upon scaffolds built in trees, called death lodges (like THIS or THIS).  The Blackfeet did not arrogantly interrupt the circle dance of life with buried caskets or cremation.

McClintock was amazed by how well the Blackfeet lived without thrashing their ecosystem.  Whites did amazing things with science and industry, but the Blackfeet were superior in terms of their personal integrity.  In no Blackfoot community could you find the “depravity, misery, and consuming vice, which involve multitudes in the industrial centers of all the large cities of Christendom.”  By thriving in a lifestyle with few wants, they did not deteriorate into infantile consumers.

The last chapter in the book has pissed off many reviewers.  The preceding thirty-eight chapters did not provide, in any way, a flattering impression of settler society.  In 1910, respect for savages was politically incorrect, and publishers were not fond of risky projects.  The Blackfeet were hopelessly screwed.  Whites were here to stay.  Happy endings sold more books.

So, the story concludes with a jarring shift.  McClintock praised the integrity of the Blackfoot people, and was proud of their heroic advance toward Christian civilization.  “The industrious are rapidly becoming self-supporting.  Some of them live in well-made and comfortable houses, and own ranches, with large herds of cattle and horses.  They wear white men’s clothes, purchased from the trading stores, own high priced wagons and buggies and make use of modern farming implements.”  Hooray!

Anyway, the book provides readers with a wonderful peephole into a way of life that was not insane.  Children were raised in a land that was wild, free, and thriving — grizzly bears, not teddy bears.  The good power (Great Spirit) was everywhere, in everything — mountains, plains, winds, waters, trees, birds, and animals.  Everyone was on the same cultural channel, free from the friction of diversity and wealth inequality.  They grew up in coherent communities where it was rare to see a stranger.  [Cool excerpt]

McClintock’s book described how a healthy culture disintegrated into incoherence over the course of just one generation.  Beliefs got us into this mess, not genes.  I’m very optimistic that the coming decades of resource depletion, climate change, and the collapse of our economic system will provide a miraculous cure for consumer fever.  Survival will require paying careful attention to reality, and behaving in an intelligent manner.  Radical change in one generation is not totally impossible when the time is ripe.  Think positive!

McClintock, Walter, The Old North Trail, MacMillan and Co., London, 1910.

A free download of the book is HERE.  Over 1,400 of McClintock’s photos are HERE (click “View all images”).

Topography of Ireland



One grouchy grumpy day, Pope Adrian IV got honked off at Ireland.  The Irish were not paying their tithes, and they were Catholic in name only, living in abominable moral decay.  So, he ordered England’s Henry II to conquer the rowdy heathen barbarians.  Along with the invasion went a secretary, Giraldus Cambrensis (1146 – 1223), a Welsh priest and scholar.  (“Giraldus Cambrensis” was Latin for “Jerry of Wales.”)  Father Jerry arrived in Ireland in 1185, and wrote a description of the emerald isle, Topography of Ireland.  It captured a rare snapshot of what life was like more than eight centuries ago, when the Irish were still tribal people.

At that time, Ireland was a remote and isolated frontier, largely off the radar of civilization.  The landscape majored in forests, bogs, lakes, streams, and swamps.  Boats were the easiest mode of travel.  Stags feasted on the lavish banquet of foliage, becoming chubby and less speedy.  Wolves dined on the abundant boars and wild pigs.  The air and water were clean, and the rivers were loaded with fine salmon, trout, muddy eels, and oily shad.

The tribes of Ireland were wild chiefdoms, and the lads and lasses were primarily cowboys and cowgirls.  The climate was mild, rainfall was gentle and abundant, and the grass was green all year.  Snows were rare, and soon melted away.  It was a paradise for herbivores and herders.  Herders needed no structures to protect the livestock from the cold, and they had no need for cutting, drying, and storing hay.  Organic milk, grass-fed meat, wild fish, and little else, were on the menu every day of the year.

The wild folks had no interest in adapting the latest European fashions — dainty, frilly, colorful attire.  They refused to invest endless hours in the tedious drudgery of spinning and weaving fabric of flax or wool.  Sensible people are not trend junkies, and dressing up in silly duds made you look like a goofy geek from Liverpool.  It was simply too embarrassing.  Sensible people wore skins and furs, which were comfortable, durable, attractive, and suitable for all occasions.

There were veins of ores, including gold-bearing quartz, but the cowboys ignored them.  Mining was brutally hard work, and their cattle refused to eat gold.  Their lands were home to majestic forests, but the cowboys weren’t interested in forest mining.  They had no need for lumber or paper, and their finicky cattle would eat neither boards nor money.  A good deal of the countryside was potentially suitable for use as cropland, but very little was tilled and sown.  Cowboys knew that soil mining was miserable, backbreaking work, and their traditional way of life worked just fine.  Cattle were perfectly happy to eat the delicious grass.

Tribes had abundant leisure time for making a joyful noise.  Father Jerry had travelled as far as Rome, and he considered the Irish to be the finest musicians of all.  Irish music was lively and rapid, and the harmonies sweet and gay.  They mostly played the harp and tabor (a small drum).  In those days, music was still genuinely sustainable.  Musicians did not need huge tour buses, or dozens semis to haul speakers, amplifiers, lighting systems, stages, mega-screens, and dumpsters of cocaine and heroin.

The people were strong and healthy.  They did not waste years in lingering sickness and decline.  They preferred to leap directly from good health to their deathbeds, and promptly get it over with.  They did not know the days of the week, the names of the months, or what year it was.  They kept time by the sun, moon, and seasons.

The Irish have never been fond of Father Jerry’s writing, because he was an obnoxious gaseous sphincter.  For example, “The Irish are a rude people, subsisting on the produce of their cattle only, and living themselves like beasts.”  Or, “This people, then, is truly barbarous, being not only barbarous in their dress, but suffering their hair and beards to grow enormously in an uncouth manner… indeed, all of their habits are barbarisms.”

Father Jerry was certain that the world was very old, close to its end.  He was stunned and perplexed by the Irish indifference to salvation and eternal life.  You see, Saint Patrick had successfully converted all the tribes before he died in 485.  Yet seven centuries later, most of the Irish savages had forgotten everything about sin, damnation, and guilt.  Many Irish remained unbaptized and unmarried — shameless, adulterous, incestuous, illegitimate bastards.  (Writer Michael Ventura heard of an Irish grandmother who, in the 1950s, still referred to Christianity as “the new religion.”)

Anyway, King Henry’s invasion of Ireland was the kickoff for centuries of bloodshed — similar in many ways to English colonization of New England or Australia.  The Irish were low-tech guerilla warriors, skilled at hit and run ambushes.  They used slings to hurl stones with skull-splitting accuracy.  They had spears, javelins, and axes.  The English were state-of-the-art warriors, having chain mail, armor, archers, and deadly swords.  For example, “He who had seen how John de Courcy wielded his sword, with one stroke lopping off heads, and with another arms, must needs have commended him for a most valiant soldier.”

Long after Jerry’s death, after more than 450 years of fighting, the conquest was complete.  The English victors seized the estates of Irish nobles, and gave them two options.  They could move to a reservation, or be executed.  Thousands of Irish women were sold to the owners of Caribbean sugar plantations.  Countless lads were hung.  One observer noted, “You may ride 20 miles and discern anything or fix your eye upon any object, but dead men hanging on trees and gibbets.”

History is clear that civilization trumps tribes.  It also trumps healthy wild ecosystems.  It trumps the wellbeing of generations yet to be born.  But even before Henry and Jerry washed up on shore, tribal Ireland was not a place of love, peace, and happiness.  Ireland was divided into many túatha, or petty kingdoms, the domains of chiefdoms.  The borders often fluctuated, as chiefs ambitiously pursued the glories of perpetual growth.

History is clear that the accumulation of property, including domesticated livestock, is a routine cause of wealth inequality, social friction, and war.  Before becoming cowboys, the Irish hunted and fished.  They could not capture and hoard wild stags or boars, so they avoided status-seeking mania, and the dark juju of bossy rich jerks.  Countless millions have perished in countless wars resulting from the insatiable obsession of insecure people for more, more, and more.  Today, many blame our woes on capitalism, but the roots of the monster are far deeper.

Father Jerry wrote with flamboyance.  The translation I read was clear and understandable.  However, he was not skilled at remaining focused on his subject, and frequently wandered away to jabber about whatever came into his head.  He wrote many books, including The History of the Conquest of Ireland.  The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis contains both of his books on Ireland, and his two books on Wales.  A free download is HERE.

Cambrensis, Giraldus, The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, George Bell & Sons, London, 1905.

Hegarty, Neil, The Story of Ireland, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2012.

Bonus link: Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland. 

Feral (Rewilding)

Beneath the pavement in London, archaeologists have found the bones of hippos, elephants, giant deer, giant aurochs, and lions.  The Thames watershed was once a gorgeous, thriving, wild paradise.  In the early Mesolithic, the western seaboard of Europe, from Scotland to Spain, was covered by a magnificent rainforest.  Europe was once a thriving wild paradise.

Evolution created utterly fantastic masterpieces.  The megafauna of the Americas grew to enormous size, in the absence of too-clever two-legged tool addicts.  Ground sloths weighed as much as elephants.  Beavers were the size of bears.  The Argentine roc had a 26-foot wingspan (8 m).  All of them vanished between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, about the time you-know-who arrived, with their state of the art hunting technology.

On a damp gray dawn, the English writer George Monbiot woke up screaming once again.  He suffers from a chronic spiritual disease that he calls ecological boredom.  Living amidst endless crowds of two-legged strangers can become unbearably unpleasant for sensitive people with minds.  Human souls can only thrive in unmolested wildness (the opposite of England).  He leaped out of bed, packed his things, and moved to the coast of Wales, where there was more grass than concrete.  He hoped that this would exorcise his demons.

They weren’t demons.  Obviously, ecological boredom is a healthy and intelligent response to the fierce madness of twenty-first century life, and it’s curable.  What’s needed to break this curse is a holy ceremony called rewilding.  During five years of country living in Wales, Monbiot wrote Feral, to explain his voyage and vision.  It’s a 500-decibel alarm clock.

Humans were wild animals for millions of years.  In the last few thousand years, we’ve declared war on wild ecosystems, in our whacked out crusade to domesticate everything everywhere, and lock Big Mama Nature in a maximum-security zoo.  Rewilding is about throwing this sick, suicidal process into reverse.

It’s about allowing long extinct woodlands to become healthy thriving forests once again.  It’s about reintroducing the wild beings that have been driven off the land — bear, bison, beavers — a sacred homecoming.  It’s about creating marine reserves so aquatic species have places of refuge from the insane gang rape of industrial fishing.  Importantly, it’s about introducing our children to the living planet of their birth.

Wales was a land of lush forests 2,100 years ago.  Today, it’s largely a mix of sheep pasture and other assorted wastelands.  One day, Monbiot climbed to a hilltop in the Cambrian Mountains, where he could see for miles.  He noted a few distant Sitka spruce tree farms, and a bit of scrubby brush, but otherwise, “across that whole, huge view, there were no trees.  The land had been flayed.  The fur had been peeled off, and every contoured muscle and nub of bone was exposed.”

Some folks now call it the Cambrian Desert, whilst shameless tourism hucksters refer to it as one of the largest wilderness areas in the U.K.  To Monbiot, rural Wales is a heartbreaking sheepwreck, reduced to ecological ruins by the white plague — countless dimwitted furry freaks from Mesopotamia that gobble the vegetation down to the roots, and prevent forest recovery.

One day, Monbiot met a brilliant young sheep rancher, Dafydd Morris-Jones, who had no sympathy for rewilding at all.  His family had been raising sheep on this land for ages.  Every rock in the valley had a name, and his uncle remembered all of them.  Allowing the forest to return would amount to cultural genocide, snuffing out the traditional indigenous way of life, and erasing it forever.

I had great sympathy for Dafydd’s view.  In 1843, my great-grandfather, Richard E. Rees, was born in the parish of Llangurig, Wales — deep in the heart of sheep country.  His mother was a handloom weaver.  They lived down the road from the wool mill in Cwmbelan.  My ancestors survived for many generations by preventing the return of the forest, deer, and boars, by preventing an injured land from healing.  Of course, for the last several thousand years, none of my ancestors had been wild people — they suffered from the tremendous misfortune of having been born in captivity.

Every generation perceives the world of their childhood as the normal state, the ideal.  Many don’t comprehend that the ecosystem was badly damaged long before they were born.  What they accept as normal might give their grandparents nightmares.  Monbiot refers to this shortsightedness as Shifting Baseline Syndrome.  The past is erased by mental blinders.  Each generation adapts to an ongoing pattern of decline.  Humans have an amazing tolerance for crowding, filth, and stress.  The result is the wounded wheezing world you see around you.

Monbiot gushes with excitement when describing the amazing changes that followed the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone Park.  They promptly corrected deer overpopulation, which led to forest regeneration, which led to healthier streams, which led to more fish.  When they reduced the coyotes, the result was more rabbits, mice, hawks, weasels, boxes, badgers, eagles, and ravens.  Here is Monbiot enthusiastically discussing this process in a 15 minute TED talk. 

A number of European organizations are promoting rewilding.  Pan Parks has protected 240,000 hectares (593,000 acres), and is working on a million more.  Wild Europe is working to create wildlife corridors across the continent.  Rewilding Europe promotes the reintroduction of missing species (here is a brief video trailer).  Pleistocene Park in Siberia is reintroducing many species in a 160 sq. km. park (62 sq. mi.), which it plans to expand to 600 sq. km. (232 sq. mi.).

In continental Europe, the rewilding movement is building momentum.  Wolves, bears, bison, and beavers have begun the path to recovery.  Not every effort succeeds — Italy reintroduced two male lynx, and the cute couple mysteriously failed to produce offspring.  Britain and Ireland remain out to lunch.  Most of the land is owned by wealthy elites who are obsessed with preserving a “tidy” looking countryside — treeless and profoundly dreary.  They enjoy recreational hunting, and wolves would spoil their fun.

Monbiot delights in goosing every sacred cow along his path, and readers of many varieties are sure to foam at the mouth and mutter naughty obscenities.  For me, Feral had a few zits, but they don’t sink the book.  He leads us to the mountaintop and allows us to view the world from above the haze of assumptions, illusions, and fantasies.  Who are we?  Where is our home?  Where are we going? 

He rubs our noses in the foul messes we’ve made, hoping we’ll learn from our accidents and grow.  He confronts us with big important issues that we’ve avoided for far too long — the yucky stoopid stuff we’re doing for no good reason.  I like that.  This is important.  He recommends intriguing alternatives to stoopid.  It’s about time.

Monbiot, George, Feral — Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding, Allen Lane, London, 2013.