Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

Tahca Ushte (Lame Deer) was a Lakota medicine man from a land now known as South Dakota (“Sioux” is a white name that insults the Lakota).  His government-issued name was John Fire.  He was born some time between 1895 and 1903, and died in 1976.  His parents were of the last generation to be born wild and free.  Two of his grandfathers had been at the battle of Little Big Horn, Custer’s last stand, and one of them survived the massacre at Wounded Knee.

Lame Deer’s early years were spent in a remote location, where they had no contact with the outside world.  He never saw a white man until he was five.  At 14, he was taken away to a boarding school, where he was prohibited from speaking his language or singing his songs.  The class work never went beyond the level of third grade, so Lame Deer spent six years in the third grade.  He eventually gained renown for being a rebellious troublemaker.  When he was 16, he went on a vision quest, and discovered that he was to become a medicine man.

Sons destined to become medicine men were often removed from school by their families, because schooling was harmful to the growth of someone walking a spiritual path.  One father drove away truancy officers with a shotgun.  For medicine men, the skills of reading and writing had absolutely no value.

When Lame Deer was 17, his mother died, and the family fell apart.  The white world was closing in, making it hard for his father to survive as a rancher.  He gave his children some livestock and wished them good luck.  By that time, the buffalo were dead, their land was gone, many lived on reservations, and the good old days for the Lakota were behind them. 

Lame Deer straddled two worlds, the sacred path of Lakota tradition, and the pure madness of the “frog-skinners,” — people who were driven by an insatiable hunger for green frog-skins (dollar bills).  The frog-skinners were bred to be consumers, not human beings, so they were not fun to be around.

Lame Deer spent maybe 20 years wandering.  He made money as a rodeo rider, clown, square dance caller, potato picker, shepherd, and so on.  He always avoided work in factories or offices, “because any human being is too good for that kind of no-life, even white people.”  He enjoyed many women, did more than a little drinking, stole a few cars, and shunned the conventional civilized life.

Between jobs he would return to his reservation and spend time with the elders.  During World War II, just before Normandy, he was thrown out of the Army when they discovered that he was 39, too old.  Soon after, he abandoned the frog-skin world and became a full time Indian, walking on the sacred path of a medicine man.

For the Lakota, the Black Hills were the most sacred place in their world.  To retain possession of them, they surrendered much of what became Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas.  The treaty declared that the Black Hills would remain Indian territory “for as long as the sun shined.”  Soon after, whites discovered gold in the Black Hills, and flooded into the holy lands with drills, dynamite, whiskey, and prostitutes.  The Lakota were horrified by the behavior of these civilized Christians.

The frog-skinners exterminated the buffalo, and replaced them with livestock.  Buffalo were beings of great power and intelligence.  They even had a sense of humor.  Lame Deer said that if buffalo were used in bullfighting, the cocky matadors would promptly be trampled and gored into extinction.  Cattle were dullards that had the power bred out of them.  Sheep and goats would stand calmly while you cut their throats. 

To provide additional vegetation for the dim-witted livestock, the prairie dogs had to go.  Ranchers launched an intensive poisoning campaign that also killed more than a few children and pets.  With the prairie dogs gone, there was far less prey for the wolves, coyotes, bobcats, foxes, badgers, hawks, and eagles.  A diverse, thriving prairie ecosystem was replaced with monocultures of destructive sub-intelligent exotic species.

Sheep were amazingly frail.  They often fell over, with their feet in the air, and couldn’t get back up again.  If the shepherd didn’t rescue them, they would bloat up and die.  Lambs often had to be hand-raised because their mothers didn’t recognize them or feed them.

“There was great power in a wolf, even in a coyote.  You have made him into a freak — a toy poodle, a Pekingese, a lap dog. … You have not only altered, declawed, and malformed your winged and four-legged cousins; you have done it to yourselves. … You live in prisons which you have built for yourselves, calling them homes, offices, factories.”

In the 1880s, the Indians of the west were in despair, and the Ghost Dance movement was spreading from tribe to tribe.  It was a grand magic act intended to bring a new world into existence via sacred song and dance.  The dead would come back to life, the buffalo herds would return, the whites would get sent back home, and the civilized world would be rolled up like a dirty old carpet — the cities, mines, farms, and factories.  This would reveal a healthy unspoiled land, with many teepees and animals, as it once had been.

Dancers were not allowed to possess things from the white world: liquor, guns, knives, kettles, or metal ornaments.  They would dance for four days.  Whites feared an armed uprising, so they attacked the dancers.  Hundreds of unarmed Indians were murdered at the Wounded Knee massacre. 

The magic dancing did not succeed, but today many can see that a great healing is badly needed.  Obviously, the madness cannot continue forever.  Lame Deer was clear: “The machine will stop.”  He said that a young man would one day come who would know how to turn it off.  “It won’t be bad, doing without many things you are now used to, things taken out of the earth and wasted foolishly.”  We will have to learn how to live more simply, and this will be good for one and all.

Lame Deer asked Richard Erdoes to help write his story, to pass along important information.  He included several chapters describing the sacred culture of the Lakota.  He wanted hold up a mirror for us, to give us a different perspective, to feed a sane voice into our lost and confused world.  “We must try to save the white man from himself.  This can be done if only all of us, Indians and non-Indians alike, can once again see ourselves as part of this earth.”

Lame Deer, John (Fire) and Erdoes, Richard, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, Washington Square Press, New York, 1994.

The Earth Has a Soul

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was born in Kesswil, Switzerland, a wee lakeside hamlet that had changed little since the Middle Ages.  His rustic upbringing gave him the gift of intimate contact with the natural world, a profound source of meaning for him: “Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous.”  Like his mother, Jung had the ability to access his archaic mind.  He had an old soul that was intimately connected with all living creatures, and to the world of dreams.  This gave him the unusual ability to observe people and events with extreme clarity, as they truly were.

From the sweet pinnacle of a tranquil, wholesome childhood, the rest of his life was a stunning downhill plunge, as the civilized world fell into ever-growing chaos and catastrophe — rapid industrialization, urbanization, population explosion, two world wars, mustard gas, atomic bombs, holocaust, the rise and fall of Hitler and Stalin.  It was an excellent time to become a famous psychiatrist, because this new reality was a steaming cauldron of intense insanity.

Jung provided the world with a new model for understanding the mind.  For almost the entire human journey, we had obeyed the laws of nature, like all other animals did.  But with the emergence of domestication and civilization, we began violating the laws of life, snatching away some of nature’s power — power that did not belong to us.  This cosmic offense created a break that shifted us onto a path of suffering.  The gods are now punishing us for our immature and disrespectful impulses.

Jung left behind a huge body of writings, most of which are of little interest to general readers.  Meredith Sabini heroically combed through the mountain of words, extracted passages about our relationship with nature, and published them as The Earth Has a Soul.  It stitched together snippets from many sources, from different phases of his life, so it’s not as flowing and focused as a discourse written from scratch, but it’s an important collection of provocative ideas.

In recent decades, thinkers have tried to explain why the roots of the Earth Crisis emerged several thousand years ago.  Most have diagnosed the root of today’s problems as rapid, out-of-control cultural evolution — our skills at learning, communication, and tool making evolved far more quickly than our genes did, and this pushed us dangerously out of balance. 

Jung would agree with this theory, but his perception of the problem was far more complex.  For almost our entire journey, humankind was guided by instinct, a form of intelligence that was magnificently refined by millions of years of continuous improvement.  Like other animals, we lacked self-awareness, or consciousness.  Like other animals, we could think and strategize, but we remained unconscious, and perfectly functional.

Jung thought that consciousness became apparent in civilized cultures maybe 4,000 years ago, and it has been increasing ever since.  The expansion of consciousness went into warp drive when the era of modern scientific thinking arrived, and we plunged into an industrial way of life.

In remote, isolated locations, there are still a few “primitive” cultures which remain largely unconscious, guided by their normal instinctive intelligence.  They do not engage in abstract thinking.  They do not destroy their ecosystem.  They continue to obey nature’s laws.  But they are being driven into extinction by you-know-who. 

Our conscious mind was new, infantile, incomplete, unstable, and easily injured.  Jung saw it as a tiny boat floating in a vast ocean of unconscious knowledge.  Like a fish out of water, we were separated from our ancient oceanic home, an unpleasant traumatic shock.  In the good old days, we lived in an enchanted world where everything was sacred.  But science and technology have dragged us away into a miserable manmade world where nothing is holy, and everyone is restless, anxious, and neurotic.

Consciousness was an extremely powerful two-edged sword, equal parts blessing and curse: “Unfortunately, there is in this world no good thing that does not have to be paid for by an evil at least equally great.  People still do not know that the greatest step forward is balanced by an equally great step back.”

On the shore of Lake Zurich, Jung built a summer retreat out of rugged cut stones, a sacred refuge for solitude and contemplation.  He cooked on a wood fire, raised food in his garden, and drew water from a well.  There was no phone or electricity, because the technology of modernity was certain to frighten away the souls of his ancestors.

Primitive people were “hellishly afraid of anything new” because they feared “unknown powers and indefinite dangers.”  This was just as true for modern folks, even if we pretended otherwise.  “Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with even wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots.”  In 1912 he wrote that America “does not understand that it is facing its most tragic moment: a moment in which it must make a choice to master its machines or to be devoured by them.”

Jung had an intense dislike for modernity.  A city dweller was reduced to a tiny, insignificant ant.  Humankind was moving toward insectification.  Overpopulation was destroying everything.  Growing crowds multiplied the stupidity level, whilst sharply decreasing our intelligence and morality.  Crowds were incubators for psychic epidemics, which were far more destructive than natural disasters.  Excited mobs often created explosions of madness that nothing could stop.  “The most dangerous things in the world are immense accumulations of human beings who are manipulated by only a few heads.” 

In his psychiatric work, Jung helped patients heal by encouraging them to seek guidance from their dreams.  Our unconscious has all the answers we need, but we usually avoid looking there, because we are afraid of it.  We overload our lives with distractions to discourage reflection, and to hide from our darkness.  We live at a rapid pace, and never leave a moment for looking inward.

Tragically, Jung never came to know a real live hunter-gatherer.  He never spent a year or three with the Pygmies or Bushmen, people who lived in the traditional human manner, and lived quite well.  If he had, his thinking would certainly have taken quite a different path — and very likely a far more powerful one.

He did take several brief expeditions to New Mexico, Africa, and India, to spend a little time with people who were neither Christian nor European.  Contact with these miserable “primitive” people gave him feelings of superiority, because they seemed to be neurotic, “tormented by superstitions, fears, and compulsions.”  But they also scared him.  He once left Africa because of a powerful dream.  He worried that he was in danger of “going black under the skin.”  Did he come frighteningly close to breaking free from his civilized cage?

For Jung, returning to simple, primitive, sustainable living was not a possible solution.  “The wheel of time cannot be turned back.  Things can, however, be destroyed and renewed.  This is extremely dangerous, but the signs of our time are dangerous too.  If there was ever a truly apocalyptic era, it is ours.”  He believed that salvation could be found by training the conscious mind to receive guidance from the unconscious realm, the world of dreams.

His recommendations for healing included: getting closer to nature, living in small communities (not cities), working less, engaging in reflection in quiet solitude, reconnecting with our past, avoiding distractions (newspapers, television, radio, gramophones), paying serious attention to our dreams, and simplifying our lifestyles.

In 1961, the year he died, Jung wrote: “Civilization is a most expensive process and its acquisitions have been paid for by enormous losses, the extent of which we have largely forgotten or have never appreciated.”  In his final days in 1961, Jung had visions of massive catastrophes striking in 50 years.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Earth Has a Soul, Edited by Meredith Sabini, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 2008.

The End of Growth

Richard Heinberg has been a pundit on the Peak Oil beat for more than ten years.  With each passing year, his understanding of diminishing resources has grown.  In 2007 he redefined the problem as Peak Everything.  He came to see that industrial civilization was gobbling up non-renewable resources at a rate that spelled serious problems for the generation currently alive, which included himself.  Yikes!

This mind-expanding learning process provided a miraculous cure for blissful ignorance, and replaced it with a healthy awareness of an unhealthy reality.  Heinberg has been jumping up and down and shouting warnings for a long time, but the world has largely ignored him.  The world perceived our incredibly unhealthy reality to be perfectly normal, because we were all born into it, as were our parents and grandparents.  Normal means normal.  Stop jumping up and down, already!  Get a life!

Heinberg avoided suffering from normal thinking because, late at night, he secretly explored the magic and mysteries of history, which gave him special powers of vision.  He could see that the twentieth century was simply a calamitous freak in human history, powered by recklessly binging on cheap and abundant energy, a nightmare that can never again be repeated, thank goodness.  Hence, normal was insane.  Normal was in big danger.  He kept shouting at us.

In July 2008, the price of oil skyrocketed to $150.  In September, the financial system went sideways.  Was this The Big One?  Had the luxurious unsinkable Titanic fatally impaled itself on an iceberg of powerful reality?  Was the pleasure cruise about to become a life-threatening struggle for survival?  The shadows suddenly became much darker, cold winds howled, thunder rumbled, and the Earth shook. 

This big shift inspired Heinberg to write a new book, The End of Growth.  His thesis was that time is running out on the era of perpetual economic growth (i.e., “normal” living).  Obviously, never-ending expansion was impossible on a finite planet.  Heinberg foresaw that growth might continue for a while in a few places, but growth for the overall global economy was essentially finished.  There were three reasons for this.

First, the days of cheap oil were behind us.  Global oil production peaked in 2005, and this level of production could not be indefinitely maintained.  Eventually production would shift into its decline phase — less oil for sale, and more expensive.  No combination of alternative energy sources could replace the role of oil in industrial society, or even come close.  The supply of oil was finite, and the cheap and easy oil had already been reduced to noxious clouds of carbon emissions.

Second, economic growth was getting more resistance from environmental challenges.  Fresh water was getting scarce in many places.  Climate change was creating costly problems.  Food production could barely keep pace with rising population.  The health of cropland, range land, and forests was declining.  Oceanic fisheries were depleted.  The prices for important minerals and metals were rising. 

Third, on 15 September 2008, the financial system experienced a terrifying near death experience.  Much of what had appeared to be a growing economy was actually a colossal bubble of growing debt, like a Ponzi scheme.  Borrowed money had turbocharged the global economy for almost 30 years.  It was a merry party of intoxicated gaiety and foolish excess, but now it was time for the dry heaves and roaring hangover.  The party was over, and the place was a mess.

Peak cheap energy, by itself, was enough to bring an end to perpetual growth.  But combined with a wheezing planet and a terminally ill financial system, the result was like a perfect storm, hastening the inevitable demise of industrial civilization.  We had crossed a watershed, moving from a time of growth to a time of contraction.  We had begun a long journey back toward traditional normality — a muscle-powered way of life, because muscle power will once again be cheaper than doing work with machines.

Heinberg does an impressive job of describing the crash of ’08 in way that is easy to understand.  It’s not a pretty picture.  Legions of greed-crazed speculators did whatever they could to seize as much wealth as possible, by any means necessary, legal or not.  By 2003, banks were giving mortgages to people with no money and no source of income.  Then they quickly offloaded these toxic assets onto clueless investors, who believed that they were top quality investments.  In this manner, many trillions of dollars were vaporized. 

In the absence of a growing economy, it will be impossible to service today’s stratospheric debts.  The banking system still holds vast quantities of absolutely worthless “assets,” creating a temporary illusion of viability.  We can expect to see continued bank failures, corporate bankruptcies, and home foreclosures.  “At some point in the next few years, stock and real estate values will plunge, banks will close, and businesses will shutter their doors,” warned Heinberg.

If the objective is recovery — returning to the idiocy of unlimited pathological borrowing — there simply is no solution, at any price.  Instead, we would be wise to adapt to the new conditions, and direct our attention to reducing the turbulence and suffering of the contraction process.  We’re not looking at the end of the world here, just an uncomfortable return to stability.  The healing process is likely to take generations, but the final result may actually be quite pleasant.  A tolerable collapse is theoretically possible.  No matter how it unfolds, the end result is that our economic system and lifestyles will be far simpler. 

For most of the book, Heinberg thoroughly discusses why the growth economy is ending.  Near the end, he presents “solutions.”  Like many, he dreams of a future in which the benefits of industrial civilization are preserved, while the myriad problems of industrial civilization are wished away.  He asks, “Can we surrender cars, highways, and supermarkets, but still keep cultural exchange, tolerance, and diversity, along with our hard-won scientific knowledge, advanced healthcare, and instant access to information?”  Well, yes we can, for a while, but this would require disregarding long-term sustainability.  We can't have the benefits without the problems.  Can't we live without Facebook and cell phones?

Heinberg, Richard, The End of Growth — Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, New Society, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada, 2011.

NOTE: Chapter Seven, Life After Growth, discusses what we should do now.  Heinberg has created an online supplement to this chapter that will be updated as new ideas emerge.  Go to www.theendofgrowth.com and select The End of Growth – Exclusive Supplemental Materials.

Late Victorian Holocausts

In the years 1876-1879 and 1896-1902 between 12.2 and 29.3 million died of famine in India.  In the years 1876-1879 and 1896-1900 between 19.5 and 30 million died of famine in China.  In the same period, an estimated 2 million died in Brazil.  Famine hit these three nations the hardest, but many other nations were also affected.  In the US, churches organized to send relief to hungry farmers in the Dakotas and western Kansas.

Mike Davis wrote about these famines in his book Late Victorian Holocausts.  The famines occurred in regions slammed by severe drought.  The droughts have been linked to the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a major factor in global weather patterns. 

Droughts have been common throughout history, and agricultural societies have commonly prepared for them by creating emergency reserves of stored grain.  Because of political shifts in many regions, these safety nets were in poor condition during the late Victorian droughts.  In the wake of the Industrial Revolution came a new mode of economic thinking that frowned on setting aside significant wealth for insurance against disaster.  It was more profitable to sell the grain today, pocket the cash, and worry about tomorrow’s problems tomorrow.  Peasants were expendable.

The Qing dynasty in China believed that subsistence was a human right, and it had relief management systems in place to reduce the toll of famines during drought years or floods.  By the late Victorian era, conflicts with colonial powers had drained the wealth of the Qing government, so it was incapable of effectively responding to the catastrophic droughts.

Prior to the British colonization of India, the Moguls had a similar system for responding to famine.  The British, on the other hand, were cruel masters (as they had been during the 1845 famine in Ireland).  Food was widely available, but few could afford the inflated prices.  While millions were starving, they exported Indian wheat.  They outlawed donations of private relief.  They forbid the Pariahs from foraging for forest foods, leading to 155,000 deaths.  They created relief camps where the starving received inadequate rations, and 94 percent died.  Very civilized chaps, eh?

The hungry hordes in Brazil were the victims of their own corrupt government, which had disposed of grain reserves.  Brazil was not a colony of Britain, but English investors and creditors played a powerful role in the economy, turning Brazil into an “informal colony” that was kept permanently in debt.

Davis argued that the millions of deaths were largely a deliberate “holocaust” rather than a spell of bad luck, because political actions were a primary factor behind the high mortality rates.  He also argued that this holocaust played a role in the creation of the Third World.  In the eighteenth century, Europe did not have the highest standard of living.  The biggest manufacturing districts were in India and China.  Their workers ate better, had lower unemployment, and often earned more than workers in Europe.  Literacy rates were higher, including women.

One of Davis’s primary objectives was to spank capitalism, colonialism, and the hideous overseers of the British Empire.  There has been lively discussion in the reader feedback at Amazon, and a number of critics have questioned the way in which Davis assigned blame for the massive famines.  For me, the book had important messages:  (1) Droughts happen.  (2) Agricultural societies are highly vulnerable to droughts.  (3) Famines commonly follow droughts.  (4) Famines can be horrific. 

When rains ended an Indian drought in 1878, the mosquito population exploded, and hundreds of thousands of malnourished survivors died of malaria.  Meanwhile, locusts gobbled up the growing young plants.  Hungry peasants murdered many creditors who threatened foreclosure.  Then came gangs of armed tax collectors.  Hungry wild animals became very aggressive, dragging away the weak, screaming.  In the Madras Deccan, “the only well-fed part of the local population were the pariah dogs, ‘fat as sheep,’ that feasted on the bodies of dead children.”

In China, the flesh of the starved was sold at markets for four cents a pound.  People sold their children to buy food.  Husbands ate their wives.  Parents ate their children.  Children ate their parents.  Thousands of thieves were executed.  At refugee camps, many perished from disease.  If too many refugees accumulated, they were simply massacred.  In some regions, relief took more than a year to arrive.

Davis’s vivid and extensive descriptions of famine times remind an increasingly obese society that we are living in a temporary and abnormal bubble of cheap and abundant calories.  Importantly, he puts a human face on the consequences of climate change, a subject usually presented in purely abstract form: parts per million, degrees Celsius, and colorful computer-generated charts, graphs, and maps.

Near the end of the book, Davis gives us a big, fat, juicy discussion on the history of agriculture and ecological catastrophe in China.  People who remain in denial about the inherent destructiveness of agriculture typically point to China as a glowing example of 4,000 years of happy sustainable low-impact organic farming.  Wrong, wrong, wrong!  This chapter provides a powerful cure for those who suffer from such embarrassing naughty fantasies.

The late Victorian droughts happened at a time when the world population was less than 1.4 billion.  Today, it’s over 7 billion, and growing by 70 million per year.  Cropland area per capita is shrinking, and soil health is diminishing.  Energy prices are rising, and water usage for irrigation is foolishly unsustainable.  We’re getting close to Peak Food.  World grain production per capita peaked in 1984, at 342 kilograms per person.  World grain stocks (stored grain) peaked in 1986, and have been declining since then.

On 24 July 2012, the venerable Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute published a warning in The Guardian.  “The world is in serious trouble on the food front.”  World grain stocks are currently “dangerously low.”  “Time is running out.  The world may be much closer to an unmanageable food shortage — replete with soaring food prices, spreading food unrest, and ultimately political instability — than most people realize.” 

For me, the main message of this book was a powerful warning about the huge risks of agriculture, and its insanely destructive companion, overpopulation.  The famines discussed in this book were not a freak event in history.  Famine has been a common, normal, periodic occurrence in virtually all agricultural societies, from the Cradle of Civilization to today. 

As the collapse of industrial civilization proceeds and life slows down, opportunities to live more in balance with nature will emerge.  Clever societies will carefully limit population size, and phase out their dependence on farming.  Un-clever societies will continue to breed like there’s no tomorrow, beat their ecosystems to death, and hippity-hop down the Dinosaur Trail.

Davis, Mike, Late Victorian Holocausts, Verso, New York, 2001.

Bird Flu

Dr. Michael Greger’s book, Bird Flu, is both fascinating and spooky.  Many people are aware of the Black Death, which hit in 1347.  Far fewer know anything about the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed more people in one year than the bubonic plague killed in 100 years.  For some reason, our culture has suppressed the memory of this recent horror.

Back in 1918, millions of humans, mostly between the ages of 20 and 40, experienced muscle aches and pains for a few days.  Then their lungs filled with blood, they turned purple, bled from the ears, nose, and/or eyes, and died a few hours later.  It was hard to tell whites from Negroes.  Some called it the Purple Death. 

Within a year, up to 100 million died.  The virus ran out of targets.  You were either resistant or dead.  This was the H1N1 virus, and it infected half of humankind.  It was highly contagious, but only five percent of those infected died.  The only place that the pandemic missed was the island of American Samoa, a US Navy base, which cut all contact with the outside world for 18 months, into 1920. 

For millions of years, the influenza virus existed only in wild ducks, and it didn’t make them sick.  When humans domesticated ducks, the birds were raised in farmyards in close company with other domesticated animals.  These unnatural living conditions made it easier for pathogens to spread from species to species, and they did just that.  It was almost inevitable that humans would become vulnerable to them.

A number of epidemic diseases emerged in species that tend to herd or flock together, and some of these were domesticated by humans.  Goats and cattle gave us tuberculosis, which kills millions of people each year.  Measles and smallpox came from cows.  Typhoid is from chickens.  Whooping cough is from pigs.  There are too many to list here.  “Entire ancient civilizations fell prey to diseases birthed in the barnyard.”

Imagine what life would be like if we had never enslaved our animal relatives.  When Columbus arrived in the New World, the Native Americans had few domesticated herd animals.  They had no resistance to Old World diseases, and up to 95 percent of them died.  “Why didn’t Native American diseases wipe out the landing Europeans?  Because there essentially weren’t any epidemic diseases.”  We often blame disease on the filth and crowding of city living, but Mexico City was one of the biggest cities in the world in 1492.  Epidemic diseases were largely an unintended consequence of enslaving animals.

In 1997, the new H5N1 virus appeared in Hong Kong, and it was far more deadly than the H1N1 of 1918.  It killed an astonishing 50 percent of those it infected, but it was not highly contagious — yet.  Health experts had a panic attack, because flu viruses constantly mutate.  When/if the super-catastrophic mutant eventually appears, it will take six to eight months to create a vaccine.  By the time the vaccine is mass-produced, the pandemic will be over. 

The avian flu outbreak in Hong Kong was quashed by exterminating every chicken in the region.  But four years later, it moved from ducks to chickens once again.  It also spread into migratory waterfowl.  It kills humans and chickens, but it is harmless to the wild birds that move from continent to continent.  The cat is out of the bag.  Ducks crap in a pond, chickens drink the water and die, the dead chickens are fed to pigs, and the swine get the flu.  Pet cats, and tigers and leopards in zoos die when fed infected chicken.

We were able to wipe out smallpox because it existed only in humans.  The flu virus now exists in a number of species, and the guts of highly mobile waterfowl provide a widely dispersed reservoir of H5N1.  It is now “virtually impossible to eradicate.”  All it takes to wipe out thousands of confined chickens is a virus brought in by a mouse that has stepped in duck poop.

In 1928, the average American only consumed a half pound of chicken per year, because it was expensive.  Today, it’s cheap, and we eat 90 pounds a year.  Nine billion chickens are slaughtered in the US each year (45 billion in the world).  If we deliberately set out to greatly encourage the possibility of a catastrophic influenza pandemic, we would raise of billions of chickens in high-density confinement, like we are now.

We would also slaughter and process the chickens the way we are now.  Super-efficient mechanized systems frequently puncture intestines, causing fecal contamination of the meat.  Then, the contamination is spread to uncontaminated carcasses in the soaking bath, where they absorb water (“fecal soup”) for an hour to make the meat heavier ($).  “At the end of the line, the birds are no cleaner than if they had been dipped in a toilet.”  Greger says, “As long as there is poultry, there will be pandemics.  It may be us or them.”  Our massive appetite for cheap chicken could trigger a pandemic that sweeps away a billion people. 

Some believe that raising chickens outdoors is safe, but there were no factory farms in 1918.  Any day the H5N1 virus could mutate into a highly-lethal form that excels at human-to-human transmission.  It could occur in someone’s backyard, but it is far more likely to happen in a poultry confinement facility.

Poultry corporations are concerned about disease because it’s a threat to profits.  Exterminating infected flocks is bad for business.  China and Thailand have a reputation for keeping disease outbreaks secret.  When H5N1 hit Turkey, and the government ordered the destruction all turkeys, the farmers opposed the authorities with pitchforks and axes.  The editor of a poultry industry journal clearly stated his priorities: “I'm not as worried about the U.S. human population dying from bird flu as I am that there will be no chicken to eat.”  Who could disagree?

Greger provides 19 pages of tips for surviving a flu pandemic.  Wear goggles, gloves, and a facemask (masks offer minimal protection).  Stay away from crowds.  Don’t breathe near coughers and sneezers.  Avoid contact with commonly touched surfaces like doorknobs, handrails, and so on.  Don’t shake hands.  Stay home.  If you don’t have antiviral drugs, the primary treatments are fluids, rest, prayer, and good luck.  Maintain a several week supply of water, non-perishable food, cash, and ammunition.  Do not trust officials and experts who proclaim that everything is OK.  Be prepared for civil unrest. 

Greger is not a wacko.  He is the Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the US, and an MD.  Virology magazine reviewed his book favorably.  His views are shared with world leaders in public health.  By 2005, the experts were very worried that a colossal flu pandemic was just weeks or months away.  The sky was falling, and humankind was essentially a helpless deer in the headlights.  Greger’s 2006 book was written with a mixture of urgency and paranoia.  For a long discussion on public health, it’s exciting and unforgettable.

As I write, it’s six years later, and the anticipated disaster has yet to arrive.  The H5N1 threat is not gone.  A catastrophic mutation may have happened five minutes ago.  Or it might happen in 30 years.  Or brilliant gene-splicers might succeed in creating 500-pound transgenic chickens that nothing can kill.

I just checked the website of the World Health Organization (WHO).  The first H1N1 pandemic in this century ran from April 2009 to January 2010, and spread to 19 nations.  About 70,000 were hospitalized, and 2,500 died.  On 7 June 2012, WHO issued a global alert on an H5N1 outbreak in Egypt, with 168 cases and 60 deaths.  On 6 July 2012 a global alert was issued on an H5N1 outbreak in Indonesia, with 190 cases and 158 deaths.

Greger, Michael, MD, Bird Flu — A Virus of Our Own Hatching, Lantern Books, New York, 2006.

The Roots of Dependency

In the 1970s, there was a trendy movement in academia to romanticize Native Americans into pure, innocent, saint-like beings.  Richard White wrote The Roots of Dependency to butt heads with the romantics, while at the same time presenting the European invaders in a manner that was anything but flattering.  He sought to pursue an approach to history having greater balance and accuracy.  White examined the history of three tribes, the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos.  He described how their traditional subsistence way of life collapsed, and how they eventually became dependent on white society for their survival. 

The traditional home of the Choctaws is now the state of Mississippi.  Before the whites arrived, they had become addicted to a dangerous habit, agriculture, which had harmful side effects, like population growth and ecological destruction.  When the chaotic dance of climate delivered drought seasons, the food supply was threatened.  All tribes in the scorched regions intensified their hunting, which inevitably lead to conflicts.  There was not enough wild game to feed excessive numbers of corn eaters.  Famine helped to restore balance.

In the sixteenth century, disease-ridden Spanish tourists trekked through the southeast.  Before long, 80 percent of the natives had dropped dead.  In the absence of significant hunting, the numbers of deer and buffalo exploded.  Abundant game allowed the Choctaws the luxury of depending less on farming, a dirty and toilsome occupation.  Things were fairly cool for a while, until French and English traders moved in and trashed the neighborhood.

In the early days, business activity at the trading posts was modest.  The Choctaws brought in some deerskins from time to time.  Once a hunter owned a decent knife, he saw no point in acquiring ten more knives.  Their frugality mystified the Europeans, because the woods remained crowded with deer — exploitable wealth.  The whites believed that the “love of gain” was a universal human trait: work more, get more stuff.  They suffered from a soul-killing mental illness that came to be known as the Puritan work ethic.

Around 1740, trading posts in Creek country were handling 100,000 deerskins per year, while Choctaw country produced a mere 15,000 skins.  In order to boost Choctaw business, the traders decided to break two laws: they started carrying liquor, and they offered credit to the hunters: drink now, pay later.

Unfortunately, many Choctaws found rum to be irresistible, and they tumbled into an era of drunken brawls, murders, and social breakdown.  The proceeds from months of hunting could be guzzled overnight in a whirlwind of oblivion drinking.  The hunters had little understanding of numbers or interest rates, and they essentially became slaves.  Before long, rum constituted 80 percent of the trading.

The traders were aggressive about collecting debts, and they sometimes got land cessions for payment.  Crushing debt and rum fever sparked intensive overhunting.  Using his new musket, a hunter could kill 20 times more deer than his bow-hunting father.  In 1770, a visitor to Choctaw country commented, “Almost half of the men had never killed either a deer or a turkey in their entire lives.”  They were forced to become full-time farmers, making them helpless sitting ducks for the crop-roasting droughts of 1777, 1778, 1782, and 1792. 

The trading economy blindsided traditional Choctaw society, making a few rich, and more poor.  The traditional culture of sharing and cooperation was seriously damaged.  Murders became a daily affair.  In 1830, the whites seized their land, and sent the tribe off to Indian Territory.

Credit has a powerful crazy-making juju.  Once upon a time, the major multinational religions banned usury — Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity.  It was virtuous to help others, but charging interest on loans was a devilish enterprise (making money whilst doing no work).  In the words of the venerable wise guy Benjamin Franklin: “Who goeth a borrowing goeth a sorrowing.”  It’s vitally important to remember that.  Borrowing has destroyed countless lives, and brought many large economic systems to their knees.

*        *        *

The Pawnees lived in western Nebraska and Kansas.  They weren’t very interested in trading, and they largely refused liquor.  Neighboring tribes were more eager to trade, which led to sharp reductions in the numbers of beaver, otters, elk, and deer.  Diseases arrived in the 1750s, and a smallpox epidemic in 1831 killed half of the tribe.  Droughts periodically dried up the bliss.

The arrival of horses around 1700 created many serious problems.  They were seen as being private property, leading to wealth disparity, and the consequent social strains.  Prior to horses, the only animals you owned were the ones you killed.  Nobody owned the vast roaming herds, and this belief was a mainstay of all happy and sustainable societies.

The horses raided the crops, which infuriated the women, and led to the breakup of many marriages.  The ecosystem was poorly suited for keeping large numbers of horses year round, and the Pawnees did not cut and store hay.  Tall grasses lost their nutritional value when they dried up, and many horses perished during harsh winters. 

Horses made it much easier to hunt buffalo, but they also made it easier for enemies to visit, and the spread of firearms increased the level of violence.  Living in a remote location was no longer safe and secure.  In this era, horse-mounted slave raiders snatched Indians from many tribes.

The Pawnee’s problems became serious when the whites decided to hunt buffalo on an industrial scale.  Competition for food became intense.  It was not uncommon for hunters returning home to find their women, children, and elders dead, their horses missing, their fields burned, their lodges destroyed, and their stored food gone.  The Sioux and their allies were powerful enemies, and they eventually defeated the Pawnees.  Three years later, the Americans conquered the Sioux.  The Pawnees moved to Indian Territory in the 1870s.  By 1900 the tribe had dwindled to 1,000. 

*        *        *

The Navajo or Diné remain on their own land.  Their reservation covers portions of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.  They were farmers when the Spanish colonists arrived with their livestock.  Eventually the Navaho acquired livestock and became ranchers, raising horses, goats, and especially sheep.  The Navajo were able to thrive on land that the whites thought to be nearly worthless.  In 1869 they owned 15,000 to 20,000 sheep, and fifteen years later they had almost a million sheep and goats.  Periodic droughts and severe winters killed hundreds of thousands of animals, but the herds were back to a million or more by 1930. 

Overgrazing contributed to increased erosion and land degradation, and this made the whites nervous.  The expensive new Boulder Dam (later called Hoover Dam) was collecting a lot of silt, much of it running off Navajo land.  Experts recommended exterminating the vegetation-gobbling prairie dogs, and sharply reducing the size of Navajo herds.  Hundreds of thousands of sheep and goats were killed or removed, and countless prairie dogs were poisoned.

This did not make the natives happy.  They agreed that the range was in poor condition, but believed that the cause of this was drought, not overgrazing.  The government aggressively took measures to reduce herds, at the same time that drought made farming nearly impossible.  The drought ended in 1941, and the reservation exploded with lush green vegetation.  After World War II it became clear that stock reduction had not healed the range, and that the livestock business had a limited future. 

The tribe became dependent on American society in the 1950s, as wage work and welfare expanded.  “The Navajo reservation today remains overgrazed, but on the reservation strip-mining, radioactive rivers, and mines which cause cancer dwarf overgrazing as an environmental problem.”

*        *        *

In the end, the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajo became dependent on white society.  All three had enjoyed greater stability and freedom prior to 1492.  All three were slammed by contagious disease, and by the disease of the market economy — both were weapons of mass destruction. 

White focused his attention on the notion of dependency, but another component of this process was disintegration.  In traditional Indian society, nobody went hungry unless everybody did.  Cooperation and sharing were essential components of every functional culture.  The introduction of private property (personal wealth) inspired endless conflicts and roaring craziness.  It always does.  Harmony in the human sphere disintegrated.  On a larger scale, traditional harmony with the ecosystem also disintegrated, as human society increasingly fell out of balance with the family of life.

All three tribes practiced primitive agriculture.  Prior to 1492, they had no livestock to produce manure for maintaining soil fertility, a serious shortcoming that contributed to rapid depletion of the land.  History informs us that agriculture is almost never sustainable in the long run.  It creates more problems than it solves.  It’s vitally important to remember that.

All three tribes were seriously affected by normal climate variations.  Today, in our temporary energy wonderland, food is promptly shipped in to regions suffering from crop failures, and famine is avoided.  Almost all societies in human history lacked this safety net.  Instead, intelligent societies created a safety net based on deliberately maintaining a population that was well below the carrying capacity of their wild and healthy ecosystem.  Remember that.

White, Richard, The Roots of Dependency, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1983. 

Ojibway Heritage

What would it be like to wake up every day in a sane, healthy, life of wildness and freedom?  Imagine stepping outside at dawn, and observing a landscape that remained as the creator made it, undefiled by the catastrophe of industrial civilization — a gentle misty morning of peace, fresh air, and good energy.  You pause and offer a prayer of gratitude, giving thanks for the gift of another day to celebrate the perfection of creation. 

This is not easy to imagine, because we no longer live like human beings.  Our culture provides us with almost no information about living in harmony with the land, because that is not the nature of our culture.  Memories of our own wild ancestors have been erased by the passage of time, and by the sharp turn we made when we surrendered our freedom.  We have forgotten who we are, and how to live.  We are lost.  Our entire way of life is lost.

Basil Johnston’s book, Ojibway Heritage, pulls back the curtains, and allows us to explore a healthy way of life.  It’s disturbing to read this book, because it illuminates how far we have strayed from the path of balance and good life.  It carries us to a sacred mountain, far above the toxic smog of civilization, and helps us remember things of great importance.

Johnston is an outstanding storyteller.  His book describes Ojibway culture to those who are not close to it, in a manner that outsiders can easily comprehend and appreciate.  We learn about wild freedom — a way of life similar to how our wild ancestors once lived.  It’s a world of sharing and cooperation, honor and morality, a world of overwhelming reverence and respect for the natural world and the family of life.

The Ojibway people inhabit a vast region in the middle of North America, on both sides of the US-Canadian border.  They have always avoided the political unification of all Ojibways because they cherish independence.  Nothing was more abhorrent to them than the notion of submitting to control.  They were free people who enjoyed living in free communities.

Community had greater importance than the desires of the individual.  Each individual was entitled to food, clothing, shelter, personal inner growth, and freedom.  For all other matters, the permission of the community was sought.  The people were consulted for guidance, so that the custom and will of the community was respected.

Each community had chiefs for various purposes, and they became chiefs based solely on their merits.  If anyone lost respect for a chief’s abilities, they could ignore him.  His influence was based on persuasion, not authority.  Those who followed his lead did so voluntarily.

Stories were powerful cultural tools.  They encoded the moral principles of the society.  Always tell the truth.  Respect your elders.  Always be thankful for food, for life, and for your powers.  Seek wisdom and peace. 

Stories provided guidance on hunger, courage, generosity, fidelity, creation, death, transformation, history, and all matters that related to life and being.  On a simple level, a child could find meaning in them, but they could also be understood on deeper levels by adults and elders.

Males were expected to quest for a vision.  “No man begins to be until he has seen his vision.”  Every person had different gifts and powers, and the self-discovery of vision provided purpose and meaning for their existence.  Women fulfilled their existence by bringing life into the world, so a vision was optional for them.

Boys were ready to begin questing for their vision by the age of 12 to 14.  They would be ceremonially purified, and then spend four days alone in a remote quest lodge, with no food.  Rarely was the first attempt a success.  Sometimes nothing happened, and sometimes the vision was incomplete.  Quests were made every year, until a complete vision was finally received.  A man was not considered to be an adult until he received his vision.  One fellow didn’t receive his vision until he was 50.  This was not a cause for shame.

Your vision was personal and private, not to be shared.  You had a sacred obligation to pursue and complete your vision.  Straying from your path was not unusual, but it was seen as betraying your vision, and “such a state was tantamount to non-living in which acts and conduct had no quality.”  To avoid this, men and women went on annual retreats to review their lives, and verify that they were still on their true path.  The Ojibway were big on living with integrity.  I like that.

They were also big about personal independence.  “The individual and his individuality were inviolable; his vision was equally inviolable.  No person was to surrender to another; no person was to seek dominion over another man or woman.”  They weren’t into playing master and servants.  Likewise, no person could own the land. 

Johnston talked at length about healers.  There were both medicine men and medicine women.  A few boys and girls displayed special gifts of curative power, and they were trained in the art of healing.  Part of the training process was observing what animals ate when ill, because they possessed knowledge of medicinal plants.  Some of the trainees became herbalists, and others advanced to become philosophers.  Illness was seen to be a punishment for a failure to live a good life, so healers attempted to guide patients back to upright living.  They analyzed dreams, and provided advice.

Every year, healers gathered for the Midewewin ceremony, by invitation only.  The initiation process took at least four years, before a healer earned the full rights and privileges of membership.  An important component of the healer’s initiation was learning the history of the Ojibway people, so that they had a solid understanding of the path of life, and the gifts received from the grandfathers and grandmothers.  People couldn’t enjoy good health and good life if they were disconnected from their history.

This book reminds us of who we once were, in the days of our wild ancestors.  It allows us to gaze into a mirror and observe the wounded beings that we have become.  It presents us with a portrait of a coherent culture, living intimately in harmony with nature.  We see a beautiful picture of what life could be like, following the collapse of industrial civilization, several generations down the road.  It’s precious information for people who are in contact with reality, and seeking dreams for a better tomorrow.

A better tomorrow will not come to our descendants automatically.  It must be envisioned, and then the vision must be fulfilled.  “A man or woman begins to learn when he seeks out knowledge and wisdom; wisdom will not seek him.”

This is a small book, but it’s loaded with fascinating information.  I have just scratched the surface here.  It’s an important message.

Johnston, Basil, Ojibway Heritage, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1990.  [Originally published in 1976.]