Cadillac Desert

Marc Reisner’s classic, Cadillac Desert, takes us for a walk on the wet side, revealing far more than you ever wanted to know about dams, flood control, irrigation, and municipal water systems — and the serious long-term drawbacks that came along with building thousands of water projects in the frenzied pursuit of short-term wealth and power.  It’s a brilliant, funny, and annoying expose of government corruption.  It’s an ecological horror story.  It’s a collection of powerful lessons for our society, lessons on how not to live, warning signs.

The western regions of the U.S. tend to be dry.  Agriculture is risky where annual rainfall is less than 20 inches (50 cm).  Locations like Phoenix, Reno, or El Paso, which get less than seven inches (18 cm), are especially poor places to settle, let alone build cities.

Native Americans in the west were blessed with excellent educations, and they wisely lived in a manner that was well adapted to the ecosystem, for thousands of years, without trashing it.  Europeans suffered from dodgy educations that celebrated the magnificent civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, all of which transformed lush oases into moonscapes and went extinct.  Almost all of these dead cities were hard-core irrigation addicts. 

Around the world, most civilizations arose in arid regions.  Desert soils were often highly fertile, because the nutrients were not leached out by centuries of significant rainfall.  Desert farmers did not need to clear forests before planting.  All they needed to do was add water.  Irrigation turned their deserts green, but it also accelerated the growth and demise of their societies.

By the late nineteenth century, Los Angeles was growing rapidly, but it was doing this by mining the groundwater, a practice that had no long-term future.  The city finished the Owens Valley project in 1913, which brought in water from 223 miles away (359 km), and included 53 miles (85 km) of tunnels.  Drought hit in 1923, and the head of the water department frantically urged the city to stop the growth immediately, even if this required killing everyone in the Chamber of Commerce.  They ignored him, so he began pressing for an aqueduct from the Colorado River.

To make a long story short, America built a couple thousand major dams between 1915 and 1975.  Many were built during the Depression, to put the unemployed to work.  In congress, water projects became an extremely popular form of “pork.”  A great way for me to get your support for my bill would be to amend the bill to include a water project in your district.  This got out of control, to ridiculous proportions.

Many worthless projects were built at great expense to taxpayers and ecosystems.  Corporate America refused to invest in dams, because they were unlikely to pay for themselves, let alone generate reliable profits.  So, the west became a socialist utopia, dominated by militant free market conservatives who adored massive government spending in their region, and howled about it everywhere else.

By the time Jimmy Carter came into office in 1976, the national debt was close to a trillion dollars, and inflation was in double digits.  It was time to seriously cut spending, and Carter hated water projects, because they were so wasteful.  He attempted to terminate 19 water projects, and promptly became the most hated man on Earth.  He was a president with above average principles, a serious handicap.

Ronald Reagan took a different principled approach — no more free lunches.  He thought that those who benefitted from the welfare should fully repay the government for the generous help they received, both capital costs and operating expenses.  States should pay a third of the costs of reclamation projects, up front.  Pay?  Legions burst into tears.  The keg was empty, and the party ended.

I was amazed to learn that Carter was special because of his sense of history.  “He began to wonder what future generations would think of all the dams we had built.  What right did we have, in the span of his lifetime, to dam nearly all of the world’s rivers?  What would happen when the dams silted up?  What if the climate changed?” 

Well, of course, great questions!  As victims of dodgy educations, our graduates do not have a sense of history, a tragedy for which we pay dearly.  What right did we have to build 440 nuclear power plants that cannot be safely decommissioned?  What right did we have to destroy the climate?  What right did we have to leave a trashed planet for those coming after us?  A sense of history is powerful medicine, an essential component for an extended stay on this planet.

We know that any dam that doesn’t collapse will eventually fill with silt and turn into an extremely expensive waterfall — no more power generation, no more flood control, no more irrigation.  Every year millions of cubic yards of mud are accumulating in Lake Mead, the reservoir at Hoover Dam.  Many reservoirs will be filled in less than a century.  In China, the reservoir for the Sanmexia Dam was filled to the brim with silt in 1964, just four years after it was built. 

We know that irrigation commonly leads to salinization.  Salts build up in the soil, and eventually render it infertile, incapable of growing even weeds.  This often happens after a century of irrigation.  Salinization played a primary role in the demise of the ancient Fertile Crescent civilizations.  China’s Yellow River Basin is an exception, because of its low-salt soil.  It’s a serious problem in the Colorado River Basin, the San Joaquin Valley, and many other places.  It’s sure to increase in the coming decades, following a century-long explosion of irrigation around the world.

We know that the Ogallala aquifer will eventually become unprofitable for water mining.  This ocean of Ice Age water lies primarily beneath Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska.  Following World War II, diesel-powered centrifugal pumps enabled farmers to pump like there’s no tomorrow.  A 1982 study predicted problems after 2020.  When the irrigation ends, many will go bankrupt, many will depart, and some will return to less productive dryland farming, which could trigger another dust bowl.  Water mining has become a popular trend around the world, a short-term solution.

Stonehenge was built between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, and it was a durable design.  It had no moving parts, no electric-powered controls, and it was not required to prevent billions of gallons of water from normally flowing downstream to the sea.  How long will our dams last?  The Teton Dam did a spectacular blowout two days after it was filled.

Typhoon Nina blasted Asia in the summer of 1975.  Near China’s Banqiao Dam, a massive flood resulted from 64 inches (163 cm) of rain, half of which fell in just six hours.  The dam collapsed, and the outflow erased a number of smaller dams downstream.  Floods killed 171,000 people, and 11 million lost their homes.

In 1983, a sudden rush of melt water blasted into Glen Canyon Dam, damaging one of its spillways.  The dam did not fail that day.  It did not take out the Hoover Dam downstream with a huge wall of water.  It did not pull the plug on agriculture and civilization in southern California. 

As we move beyond Peak Oil, and energy production goes downhill, industrial civilization will wither.  It won’t be able to make replacement parts for dams, turbines, the power grid, and so on.  Will the nation of the United States go extinct some day?  The status quo in California is dependent on the operation of many pumping stations, which depend on the operation of hydro-power dams.  The Edmonston station pushes water uphill 1,926 feet (587 m), over the Tehachapi Mountains, using fourteen 80,000 horsepower pumps. 

As I write, the west coast is experiencing a serious drought.  Reservoirs in California are dangerously low.  Droughts can last for decades, or longer.  There is a good chance that climate change will increase the risks of living in extremely overpopulated western states.  So might earthquakes.

A wise man gave this advice to California governor Edmund Brown: “Don’t bring the water to the people, let the people go to the water.”

Reisner, Marc, Cadillac Desert — The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Penguin Books, New York, 1986.

Techno-Fix

Welcome to our all-you-can-eat buffet of eco-predicaments, a remarkable achievement brought to you by our old friend, technological innovation.  Our friend isn’t evil.  He’s a hilarious charismatic trickster who excels at making comical mistakes.  Every brilliant idea blows up in his face, flattens him with a boulder, or rockets him over a cliff.  He never gives up.  He never learns from his mistakes.  He never succeeds.

Like the trickster, Americans are famous for our manic techno-optimism.  Economic growth and material progress make us giddy with delight, and seventy-two percent of us believe that the benefits far outweigh the harms.  The planet doesn’t matter.  Technology will certainly enable the kids to have a somewhat life-like experience, riveted to their glowing screens.  A sane person can only conclude that we live in a world of illusions.

Techno-Fix, by Michael and Joyce Huesemann, takes us on a voyage through the hall of illusions.  It provides readers with magic x-ray glasses that allow us to see right through heavy layers of encrusted bull excrement and clearly observe our way of life in its bare-naked essence.  It delivers a super-sized serving of precious common sense that should be a central part of every youngster’s rite of passage, but isn’t. 

The human species invented techno-addiction, a dangerous habit that seems impossible to quit; we always need bigger doses.  This addiction has put quite a kink in our evolutionary journey, repeatedly blowing up in our face.  Science and technology are the mommy and daddy of most of our severe problems.  No other species has developed a fascination with endless growth.  The other critters have remained in balance for millions of years, limited by predators and food supply, nature’s brilliant time-proven design.

The Huesemanns note that we took a different path.  “Humans have used powerful technologies to escape these natural constraints, first by using weapons to eliminate large predators, then by inventing agriculture to increase food supplies, and finally by employing sanitation and medical technologies to increase their chances for survival.”

Our devious experiments at controlling and exploiting nature have created a thousand nightmares.  We’ve zoomed right past seven billion, giving the planet quite a fever.  Still, the mainstream mindset is convinced that life is always getting better and better, and that technology will overcome any challenges on our joyride to utopia.  We have no doubt economic growth can continue until the sun burns out, and nothing will ever slow us down.  According to Huesemann’s Law of Techno-Optimism, “Optimism is inversely proportional to knowledge.”

The mainstream mindset is so weird — it celebrates the benefits of technology, and steps around the stinky messes, pretending not to see them.  Innovation is never a free lunch.  Every benefit has costs, and it’s impossible to predict every unintended consequence.  When serious problems are discovered, we tend to resolve them with additional innovation, which generates additional unintended consequences.  We can delay paying the bills for our mistakes, but every debt must and will be paid.  It’s something like quicksand.

A century ago, the benefits of the automobile were immediately apparent, and the staggering unintended consequences were not.  This technology has caused huge damage to our health, our families and communities, the ecosystem, and the unborn.  Car problems are still growing, as billions of people in the developing world are eager to live as foolishly as Americans do.  The car and the television are our two biggest techno-bloopers, according to the Huesemanns.

Foolish fantasies are the deliberate consequence of the mass media and advertising, which are tremendously successful at persuading folks that the purpose of life is to transfer as much stuff as possible from nature to landfills.  “Needs” are what is necessary for survival and health, like food, shelter, and community.  “Wants” are things we have no need for, stuff we have sudden impulses to acquire.  They are infinite in number, constantly changing, generally frivolous, and often useless.

The path to consumer happiness and high status involves devoting a substantial portion of our lives to doing various sorts of work.  For many, the work is less than meaningful or satisfying.  The reward is trade tokens, which are used to acquire wants, and each purchase provides a brief consumer orgasm.  The thrill is soon gone, the gnawing returns, and we are compelled to go back to the mall and get another fix. 

No matter how hard we thrash our credit cards, we never arrive at our destination — wholeness and contentment.  “We are chasing a mirage, thereby remaining forever dissatisfied and unhappy.”  In the last 50 years, rates of depression in the U.S. have increased tenfold, and continue to rise (rates among the Amish are far lower).

Depression is also a result of our mobility and isolation.  Until the industrial era, most people spent their entire lives in stable communities, and formed long-term social bonds with the people around them.  Before the hell of automobiles, daily life included pleasant face-to-face encounters with others.  Before the hell of glowing screens, people spent little time sitting alone.

Luckily, technology has a daffy response for any problem.  It’s far easier to develop techno solutions than social solutions.  Rather than attempting the social challenge of creating a way of life that isn’t so lonely and dreary, technology can simply chase away depression and anxiety with happy pills.  It’s easier to build new road systems than it is to convince people to give up their cars.  It’s easier to provide life-saving surgeries than it is to encourage people to vacate their couches and eat a healthy diet.

The Huesemanns harbor special loathing for the medical industry.  It’s extremely expensive, and remarkably ineffective.  Intelligent, low cost preventative care is not the focus.  New treatments are constantly being developed.  The dead generate no profits, so we keep very sick people alive on machines; we transplant organs.  Death must be delayed by any means necessary, regardless of cost.  “If it can be done, it should be done.”  We need to remember that old age and death are normal and natural.

The last section of the book provides the theoretical solutions to our predicaments.  This plan requires world leaders that will eagerly cooperate in rapidly and radically reconfiguring the way we live and think.  It requires a humankind that is spiritually connected to nature, people who abhor pollution and mindless consumption, folks willing to make enormous sacrifices in order to ensure the wellbeing of future generations of all species.  Energy will be renewable, non-renewable resources will be shunned, and all wastes will be safely biodegradable.  The Huesemanns warn us that the transition might not be easy. 

Huesemann, Michael and Huesemann, Joyce, Techno-Fix — Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada, 2011.

Locust

Early white settlers on the high plains of the western U.S. were always bummed out when colossal swarms of locusts dropped by for lunch.  The sky would darken, and the land would be filled with the roaring buzz of millions of fluttering wings.  Within an hour or so, everything was covered with them, including the settlers, who frantically tried to brush off the hundreds of hungry insects that were chewing apart their clothing.

They were Rocky Mountain locusts, a North American species that lived west of the Mississippi — and the stars of Jeffrey Lockwood’s book, Locust.  When swarming, these insects were a horror show.  A swarm could devour 50 tons of greenery in a day.  Trains couldn’t move because the tracks were too greasy.  Swarms were like tornadoes, wiping out one area while leaving other neighbors in the region untouched.

In June of 1875, folks in Nebraska observed a swarm that was 1,800 miles long (2,900 km), 110 miles wide (177 km), and between a quarter and a half mile deep (0.4 to 0.8 km).  It devoured 198,000 square miles (512,000 sq. km), an area almost as large as Colorado and Wyoming.  The swarm took five days to pass.  Lockwood estimated that it might have been 10 billion locusts — possibly the biggest assemblage of animals ever experienced by human beings.

Normally, maybe 80 percent of the time, locusts stayed in their home base, in the river valleys of the northern Rockies, a habitat that may have consisted of a mere 2,000 acres (809 ha).  They ate, reproduced, and enjoyed life.

Periodic droughts would reduce the available food supply, causing locusts to crowd into pockets of surviving greenery.  Dry weather eliminated the population control provided by fungal diseases.  Drought also concentrated the nutritional value of vegetation.  Warmer temperatures meant that locusts grew to maturity more quickly, so they spent less time in the nymph stage, when predators took a heavy toll on the helpless youngsters.  The swarming process was triggered by crowding.  They could either starve or see the world.

A hungry swarm of two million American settlers moved into the high plains in the 1870s, and ravaged the short grass prairie with cows and plows.  They planted lots of wheat, and then discovered that locusts preferred wheat to everything else on the menu. 

They exterminated the bison that were perfectly adapted to the ecosystem, and brought in cattle that were unsuited for the arid climate, did not fancy the native vegetation, and died like flies during frigid winters.  They exterminated the wolves, and other wild predators, because they enjoyed owning and exploiting helpless dimwitted domesticated herbivores.

Settlers attempted to import their Western European way of life to an ecosystem where it could not possibly thrive.  Instead of trying to adapt to the ecosystem, they expected the ecosystem to adapt to their exotic fantasies — a traditional recipe for failure.  In their dream world, locusts were pests, wolves were pests, bison were pests — death to all pests! 

The Indians perceived locusts, wolves, and bison as being sacred relatives, not pests.  The Indians enjoyed a time-proven culture that was well adapted to the ecosystem.  Can you guess who the Indians considered to be pests?

Long ago, in the wilderness of Judea, there was a holy roller named John.  One day, he baptized a lad called Jesus.  The heavens opened up, a spirit appeared, and led Jesus away to the wilderness for a life changing 40 day vision quest.  The Baptist had a wild diet: “And the same John had his raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.”  (Matthew 3:4)

To the Indians, locusts were not pests, they were a sacred source of nutritious food.  Their tasty flesh was rich with calories and 60 percent protein.  In an hour, they could forage 200 pounds (90 kg) of dried insects, storing away 273,000 calories.  It was faster, easier, and safer than hunting large, strong, speedy herbivores with sharp horns that took great pleasure in trampling and disemboweling hunters.

At the Great Salt Lake, Mormons discovered that locusts couldn’t swim.  Millions would drown, and then the winds would push their bodies to the shore, in piles six feet high (1.8 m) and two miles long (3.2 km).  As the corpses rotted, memorable fragrances wafted on the air.  While a tremendous source of excellent food rotted away, the settlers complained about the stink.

White settlers loathed the locusts.  Comically, everything they tried to exterminate the swarms failed — flooding, rollers, dynamite, trawlers, poisons, flamethrowers.  During the swarming phase, resistance was futile, the insects were impossible to control.

Eventually, entomologists were summoned to combat the insects with science.  Several chapters shine spotlights on famous entomologists who strove to understand locusts, and render them harmless to the devastating swarms of white settlers.

As more settlers moved into the high plains, the locust numbers declined.  There were fewer swarms.  Attention shifted to other challenges.  Eventually, entomologists realized that nobody had seen a locust in a long time.  The last Rocky Mountain locust died in Manitoba in 1902.  They went extinct, but folks didn’t notice for quite a while.  It was unimaginable that critters that existed in such enormous numbers could completely disappear within a few decades.

A number of half-baked theories attempted to explain the spooky extinction, but Lockwood was the one who finally solved the mystery.  He visited several “grasshopper glaciers” where layers of dead locusts could be observed, and found locusts that died 800 years ago.  Swarming was not caused by settlers. 

One day, he had an insight.  Monarch butterflies are vulnerable to extinction because the forests where they spend the winter are being eliminated, and this is a bottleneck.  The bottleneck for the locusts was their home base along northern river valleys — arable lands, exactly where whites preferred to settle.  Irrigation, tilling, and cattle grazing hammered the locusts where they were most vulnerable, home sweet home.

Entomologists around the world work tirelessly to discover new methods for exterminating agricultural pest species, and the insects always succeed in outwitting the wizards.  The Rocky Mountain locust is the one and only major insect pest to be completely wiped out, and they were driven to extinction unintentionally.

They were only “pests” in the eyes of the civilized.  Prior to white settlement, there were no plowmen, ranchers, pests, or entomologists, just a wild ecosystem living in its traditional manner.  Maybe entomologists should help us exorcise the pests in our nightmare worldview, teach us how to live in balance, and call an end to the futile poisonous war on our insect relatives.

Lockwood mused that crowding also inspires bizarre behavior in humans.  We have powerful urges to escape from the neurotic mob, and fly away to places of refuge, to pure unspoiled suburban utopias.

He noted that while locust populations sometimes soared to enormous peaks, vast numbers did not guarantee long-term survival.  He noted that the human population is currently at an enormous peak.  Both humans and locusts are generalists that can migrate and adapt.  Locusts dined on at least 50 varieties of plants.  Humans, on the other hand, largely depend on three plants: rice, wheat, and corn.  Will climate change be our bottleneck?

Lockwood, Jeffrey A., Locust, Basic Books, New York, 2004.

A 2:22 minute video of a minor locust swarm in Madagascar is here.

Lockwood’s condensed version of his locust story is here.

Wild (republished as Savage Grace)

If you only have time for one sentence, hear this: Jay Griffiths’ book, Wild, is one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read.  Wild is a celebration of wildness and freedom.  It celebrates societies that work, societies that have complete respect for their ecosystems, societies that have survived for thousands of years without suffering destructive whirlwinds of mass hysteria.

Griffiths is a brilliant heretic and a proud one.  Her book shows us what happens when madness collides with wildness.  It helps us understand the dark injuries that destroyed our own freedom, and put us on the path to what we have become.  It is 350 pages of full-throttle outside-the-box thinking, written with passion and eloquence.  For outside-the-box thinkers, it’s just awesome.  For light sleepers, it might provide a life-changing wakeup call.

Griffiths was born in deepest, darkest England, a devastated island that was once a magnificent rainforest.  She was blessed with the precious curse and gift of having an active mind.  She excelled at asking penetrating questions that were not proper for young ladies (or lads) to ask.  The wardens were not amused.

During her teen years, she hung out with fundamentalist Christians, but what they were teaching could not survive rational scrutiny, and her mind was highly allergic to blind faith.  Painful clashes inspired her to run away.  She abandoned the normal life for which she had been trained.  “I lost a walled city but found a wildness and freedom.  I never regretted it.”

She wandered around the world, but life was not always easy.  “Following a passionate freedom can mean loneliness, penury, humiliation, for we live in a world where the caged hate the free.”  By and by, she floated away into a healthy dance with depression.  Depression is one of life’s valuable idiot lights, warning us that it’s time to pay attention and change paths.

One day, the phone rang, and a friend invited her to Peru, where she could hang out with shamans, use powerful medicine, and recover her lost soul.  So she did, and it worked.  The heavy black clouds soon dispersed.  She spent the next seven years working on her book, travelling from the Amazon to New Guinea, Australia, and Arctic Canada.

We routinely teach our children that wild people are primitive, and that their way of life is inferior and undesirable.  In so doing, we erect a brick wall that prohibits fresh wild notions from flushing the crud out of our wheezing, slobbering imaginations.  Instead, we teach our children to live like there’s no tomorrow, to shop till you drop, to leave nothing behind for future generations.

Griffiths understands that the brick wall must be smashed, for the sake of all life.  Her mind is a sledgehammer.  She takes us on visits to wild ecosystems that stood in the path of the all-devouring global economy.  She listened to the wild people, in a caring and respectful manner, hearing their pain, rage, and despair.  They had a healthy way of life before the invasion.  They needed nothing from us.  They simply wanted to be left alone. 

She took long treks through the jungle with wild people who possessed immense knowledge of the plants and animals.  They perceived that all flora and fauna have spirits (except for domesticated plants).  They saw that all wild beings were animated by the same life force, but different species appeared in different forms.  We were all equal.  When humans lived like equals, rather than masters, they didn’t gang rape their ecosystem, because that would have been inconceivable.

After days of hiking through a perfectly healthy land, a treasure of abundant life, they stumbled upon the town of Maldonado, the cash economy, the modern world — electric lights, pop music, abundant booze and drugs, discarded syringes, splatters of puke, and overflowing outhouses.  Everyone seemed to be mad.  “To me, the forest had been wildly beautiful and the town was a hideous wasteland.”

One chapter was devoted to the vast wildness of the sea, the place where all life began.  The surface of Mars is better known to us than the floor of our oceans.  The underwater world is a realm of immense beauty, and diversity.  Cetaceans, like whales and dolphins, are incredibly intelligent, and they live in an incredibly intelligent manner, exactly as evolution prepared them to live, wild and free, without technology (a brilliant strategy for long-term success).

The ocean is a place where primates have little business, beyond the shoreline.  Civilized primates have become abusive, ravaging the sea life, and filling the waters with toxins, sewage, garbage, and noise.  Climate change is making the oceans so acidic that catastrophic harm now seems very likely.  Wild people didn’t do this — even when they lived too hard, the harm they caused was far, far less than the harm caused by our way of life.

Missionaries were high on the list of people that Griffiths most resented, because their mission was to destroy wild cultures, and convert wild people into literate, employed, Christian consumers.  In Peru, four different missionary groups, using helicopters and speed boats, competed to find uncontacted tribes.  They knew that they would import deadly diseases, but they didn’t care.  In some places, half of the people died within two years of their arrival.  The priests blamed female shamans for the illness, and the angry people killed the shamans.

Common gifts for the converts included axes, tobacco, clothing, and mirrors.  Mirrors enabled people to see their own faces, and become more aware of their individuality.  Jesus saved individuals, not communities.  God lived in heaven, and the Earth was a realm of wickedness, so it didn’t matter, it was worthless.  Missionaries built roads into the jungle, which were soon used by miners, loggers, and other destroyers.  Separated from the family of life, the modern heart gets hard.

Missionaries forced the natives to surrender their sacred objects, which they burned.  Within two generations, traditional knowledge becomes extinct, because it is no longer being passed down to the young, who spend their days in classrooms.  Cultural genocide is emotionally shattering.  In one Brazilian tribe, over 300 natives committed suicide.

In Australia, the invasion of civilization has been devastating for the Aborigines and their home, but the elders maintain a sense of patience, for the noxious cities are nothing more than ugly scabs.  Whites have never possessed the spirit of the land, which remains alive beneath the parking lots and shopping centers.  With time, the disease will pass; the land will heal and thrive once again, to the best of its ability.

Humans are not domesticated, we are genetically wild animals, but so many have been tamed.  “Tamed creatures are dolt-minded and dumb, insipid and bland,” Griffiths tells us.  “The tame are trained only to hear the voice of their tamer, having ears only for command.”  Our wild genes scream in despair, as we go berserk with cage rage.  “Sensible habits and good road safety skills will keep you alive till eighty.  So what?  If you didn’t know freedom, you never lived.”

The myth of human superiority has constructed an enormous ecocidal monstrosity, and its ongoing self-destruction will result in unimaginable harm.  If we cannot find a way to return to our humble place in the family of life, we will have no future.  That’s the message here.

Griffiths, Jay, Wild — An Elemental Journey, Jeremy P. Tarcher, New York, 2006.

Straw Dogs

When the philosopher John Gray looks out over the world, he sees a bloody madhouse, a hell broth of deranged magical thinking.  In his bestselling book, Straw Dogs, he turns into a ruthless vigilante who tirelessly pounds the stuffing out of ridiculous ideas that condemn us to mindless self-destruction.  What might happen if we ever succeeded at clearing the decks of loony whims?  Would this make it easier to think clearly, and move onto a path with a future?

By the time you get to the end of the book, not one sacred cow is left standing.  He rubbishes our entire belief system.  Readers who are thoroughbred critical thinkers may not find much to disagree with, but those who uncritically accept everything they are told by society will foam at the mouth and scream obscenities.  To some, he is an honorable and dignified iconoclast, and to others he is a super-pessimistic misanthrope.  Reader comments at Amazon are all over the place, and quite interesting.

Gray’s thinking is an unusual swirl of intellect and animism, minus mysticism.  In his analysis of our current predicament, the two primary culprits are humanism and progress.

Humanism is the illusion that humans are apart from, and superior to, all other beings in the family of life.  We have no obligation to obey the laws of nature, because they don’t apply to us.  Our sacred species does not really belong in the natural world, because we are so much better than filthy wild animals.  Humanism is a notion that we picked up somewhere on the path to civilization.  It has been passed from the Platonists, to the Christians, to the Enlightenment, and to modern secular humanists.

Life never stops getting better and better.  As long as we can maintain a fervent blind faith in scientific progress, there is little need for us to exercise our thinkers.  Witness the fact that nearly all of those who graduate from the most prestigious institutions of higher learning — and most other people too — cling to a magical belief in perpetual economic growth, a nutjob superstition.

Darwin drove a stake through the heart of the humanist fantasy, demonstrating that humans were simply animals, like all the rest, and we have survived by luck alone.  The humanists were not amused.  They pulled out the stake, seized Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest, and proclaimed that our remarkable success was indisputable proof that we are, without a doubt, the greatest!

Gray looks outside his window, perceives thousands of serious problems, and concludes that catastrophes are on the way.  Humanists look out the window, disregard thousands of serious problems, and see reality as an unfinished masterpiece — our species will be saved once we are all fully illuminated by precious reason.

He acknowledges that there has been real progress in science and technology, but sees little progress in morals and ethics.  While progress does reduce human suffering in some ways, it is simultaneously inventing bigger and better weapons for killing people.

In 1543, Japan had more guns than any other nation.  In that year, they banned firearms, and the nation was gun-free until 1879, when Commodore Perry arrived from the modern world, and frightened Japan into a process of rapid industrialization.  Their era of isolation was over, and they understood the diabolical law of civilization:  “Any country that renounces technology will become the prey to those who do not.  There is no escape from a world of predatory states.”

The greatest atrocities in human history have been enabled by advances in modern technology.  Innovation is impossible to control.  Horrid inventions that are banned in many countries will be eagerly produced by others.  Some technology, like biological weapons or cyber warfare can be pursued in the shadow world, unknown to governments or corporate entities.

At the same time, the traditional concept of warfare as being nation versus nation is dissolving.  With the rise of movements like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, that exist entirely beyond government control, we’re seeing a revival of religious warfare, where there are no standing armies or front lines.  The woman standing beside you might be a bomb.

Humanists envision a secular world that is educated, rational, and ethical, but few societies are secular today.  In primitive countries, like the U.S., millions of educated people reject the notion of evolution.  Millions of fundamentalists, of every variety, insist that their specific interpretation of sacred texts and visions is the one and only correct way to live, and that the rest of humankind must be converted to their beliefs — or else!

With regard to the Earth Crisis, Gray does not assign all blame to agriculture and civilization.  He believes that our problems began far earlier.  “There was never a Golden Age of harmony with the Earth.  Most hunter-gatherers were fully as rapacious as later humans.  But they were few, and they lived better than most who came after them.”  Throughout our long journey, the cost of every “advance” has been ecological injury.

He acknowledges that some cultures did manage to live sustainably for long stretches of time.  An essential component of their success was restraint.  They used practices like infanticide, geronticide, and sexual abstinence to limit the size of their clans — no crowding, no scarcity, no conflict.  These brilliant hunters clearly understood that, in a world of finite food sources, perpetual growth was dumber than a box of rocks.

Unfortunately, farmers threw restraint out the window.  Growing population forced us to become deeply addicted to agriculture, and we burned our bridges behind us.  Today, a return to living in balance is obstructed by our enormous population.  We could greatly reduce our misery by reducing our numbers, but this will never be done voluntarily on a global scale.  We’ve entrusted the remedy to Big Mama Nature, who will effectively clean up the mess without mercy.  The human herd might shrink at a rate as rapid as its explosion.

Throughout the book, Gray is a tireless fire hose of criticism.  He tells us that consciousness, reason, and self-awareness are highly overrated; Homo rapiens bears a striking resemblance to cancer, and so on.  This does get tiresome.  Is he a dark man with an unhealthy mind, or is he a sane man who is clearly and competently describing a dark reality?  He encourages us to turn on our thinkers and reexamine our beliefs, a pastime that can often be quite profitable.  The book has been a best seller.  It’s short and easy to read.

Here’s a line that intrigued me:  “It is not of becoming the planet’s wise stewards that Earth-lovers dream, but of a time when humans have ceased to matter.”  Gray bets that humankind will succeed in our crusade of self-destruction, at which point the healing process can begin.  Earth will forget us, and life will move on.  On the other hand, modern folks spend their lives wearing their freaky Master of the Universe masks, which conceal their ordinary animal faces.  In theory, humans could “cease to matter” by taking off our masks, abandoning our achievements, humbly returning to the family of life, and disappearing into the crowd.

Gray, John, Straw Dogs — Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Granta Books, London, 2003.

What Is A Human Being?

Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a gorgeous tropical rainforest in Africa.  Among the many beings living there were three tribes of primates.  They were the ancestors of modern chimps, baboons, and humans.  All of them were tree dwellers.  Primates, who evolved whilst bounding from branch to branch in the forest, have highly developed senses of sight and touch.  On the other hand, mammals that evolved for life on the ground have highly developed senses of smell.

By and by, the climate cooled, the rainforest shrank, and grassland expanded.  The tree dwellers were not amused.  Living on the ground was dangerous, because there were many predators eager to invite them to lunch.  There came a time, some say between 4.2 and 3.5 million years ago, when the human ancestors became fed up with the hardships of life in the trees, and began walking on the ground.  Evolution had not fine-tuned them for surviving in the midst of large predators, and they were easy prey.  Unclever pioneers became cat food.

A bit later, between 1.5 and 2 million years ago, the human ancestors evolved into Homo erectus, a meat-eating, tool-using animal.  Around this time, many large carnivores in Africa went extinct.  Some believe that this was not a coincidence.  Later, when Homo sapiens emerged 250,000 years ago, we were tool-using hunters from day one.

Now, let’s fast forward to the twenty-first century.  The chimps, with whom we share 94 percent of our genes, have remained close to the trees, where they build nests.  They have both day nests and night nests.  The olive baboons have also remained in Africa, and they inhabit rainforests and deserts, but most of them live in grasslands near open woodland.  The humans abandoned tree dwelling, and have spread across the planet, spending much of their time in manufactured nests.

All three tribes eat meat.  All three use tools, but those used by chimps and baboons are still very simple and no-tech.  Chimps and baboons do not read or write.  They have not developed complex language or abstract thinking.  Neither have exploded in numbers or ravaged the global ecosystem.  Both do their hunting primarily with bare hands and teamwork, snatching small critters.  They have found no need to till the soil or enslave other species, because they live in accordance with natural law, and never had an urge to become unusual smarty-pants.

Both chimps and baboons have remained in tropical Africa, the ecosystem for which evolution had fine-tuned them, their home.  Thus, they have no need for clothing, fire, substantial shelters, cell phones, or psych meds.  They continue to enjoy a healthy, pleasant, and traditional wild life — in a genuinely sustainable manner that could not be more intelligent.  Their major challenge is the growing destruction caused by exploding numbers of you-know-who.

Baboons have lived on the savannahs for a very long time, without complex tools, in neighborhoods frequented by hungry large predators.  Hence, spears and javelins are not necessary for the survival of ground dwelling primates.  Thus, humans were not forced to choose between tool addiction and extinction.  Projectile weapons were a half-clever experiment that resulted in colossal unintended consequences that continue to multiply.

Evolution brilliantly encouraged a balance between predators and prey.  If the predators gradually became one percent faster, the prey gradually became one percent faster, not two.  Our development of complex tools blew this ancient balance out of the water, because tools gave us powers that far exceeded those provided by evolution.  They allowed us to kill megafauna.  As our hunting tools became more powerful, we killed more and more animals, while our own numbers grew.  Eventually, this expansion inspired humans to migrate out of Africa, in search of happy hunting grounds.

Leaping beyond our evolutionary boundaries was a risky move, and the unfortunate result is the world you see around you, and the growing storm that’s moving in on us.  At this point, a heretic who thinks outside the box must propose a core question.  Is it better to live simply and sustainably, or to have lots of amazing gizmos and live in a toxic, self-destructive manner that has no future?  The heretic is asking what does it mean to be human?

Imagine a world map that indicates where nonhuman primates live today.  They live in sub-Saharan Africa, southern Asia, Central America, and the warmer regions of South America — the tropics.  They do not inhabit Europe, most of North America, or most of Asia, because evolution has not prepared them for surviving in these cooler habitats.  The only reason that humans can inhabit non-tropical regions is because we developed complex technology — clothing, warm shelters, fire, food storage, stone-tipped spears, and so on.

I’ve been reading about shamans lately, old-fashioned healers who could communicate with the spirit world.  In the tribal mindset, all misfortune is caused by evil spirits sent by sorcerers via invisible projectiles, tiny darts.  This belief is common to many places, including Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Peru, Amazonia, and Australia.  In Ireland, the darts are fairy darts or bolts, and the victims are elf-shot.  The healer’s job was to locate the dart, and suck it out of the victim’s body. 

Is it possible that this widespread belief in evil projectiles reflects an archetypal truth?  Is there an understanding in the collective unconscious that our addiction to spears, javelins, and arrows threw us out of balance and put us on a bad path?  Many old cultures also perceived dark magic in reading, writing, and metal making.

It’s clear that there is an enormous gulf between the primitive mindset and the industrial mindset.  The shaman Martín Prechtel says that we all possess an original, natural, indigenous soul struggling to survive, but it has been largely suppressed by the modern mind, which we use to understand the world.  Healing requires us to rediscover our soul.

Carl Jung talked about the archaic or original mind, which thinks in images, like dreams.  It is the mind of young children.  The modern mind is very different, because it engages in directed thinking — thinking in words.  Jung believed that our minds had many layers, and the oldest layer was the unconscious.  Maybe at some level our minds are similar to those of chimps and baboons.

Our ancestors obviously perceived that humans were unique.  No other animals were killing mammoths with spears, or sitting around campfires in stylish fur coats.  Over the eons, we have been getting more and more clever, and more and more out of balance.  Somewhere in the process, humans developed consciousness, which greased the wheels of cleverness. 

We are very proud of the wonders of consciousness, but Jung thought that it was also our worst devil.  He saw the modern mind as unstable, infantile, and a dangerous loose cannon.  Near the end of his life, in 1963, he had a vision of global catastrophe, maybe 50 years away.

The domestication of plants and animals profoundly altered our relationship to the family of life.  We developed the ability to redesign and dominate entire ecosystems.  Chimps and baboons, on the other hand, are perfectly happy to remain wild, free, and simple.  It’s easy.

In his book, The Parable of the Tribes, Andrew Bard Schmookler discussed the problem of power.  It meant forcing your will against the will of another.  Power was a new form of energy on the planet, and it led to conquest and exploitation.  Once a belligerent bully arrives, the party is over.  Power can only be neutralized by greater power. 

Many, many tribal people around the world developed mindful ways of living in balance with their ecosystem.  The tribes of the Pacific Northwest lived in a relatively sustainable manner, and would still be living like that, if they hadn’t been overrun by bad craziness that metastasized in the Fertile Crescent — on the other side of the world!  Power trumps mindfulness.

As we move beyond peak energy, peak food, peak people, and a stable climate, much of our knowledgebase will become obsolete.  Our glowing screens will go dark, our world will shrink to the nearby locality, and survival will involve spending much of our time outdoors.  How badly will ecosystems be damaged?  Will gardening be possible?  Will humankind survive?

As we work to envision the path forward, it would be wise to be wary of the dangers of tool addiction.  A century or two down the road, we might return to a life of pure jungle simplicity, like Tarzancíto.  If we did, I suspect that our complex and chaotic modern minds will become much calmer and quieter.  If farming and herding become impossible, or if we abandon the habit, and outgrow our obsession with wealth and status, maybe bully power, like patriarchy, will go extinct, too. 

Importantly, we will no longer be able to live in a manmade world, in isolation from the family of life.  We will once again become acquainted with our relatives in the family of life, and learn to live with them.  I don’t think we’re genetically flawed; we just tried a new path, had a bad trip, and made a big mess.

Annual Report of the Red Mountain Pilgrimage

Well, I’ve survived yet another trip around the sun, and I hope you have, too.  It’s been an interesting year, and a good one.  I’m busy doing the work I was meant to do, and it’s finding an audience that appreciates it, and respects me.  It’s a bit sad that I spent so many years hauling stone blocks up the latest pyramid, but I was always learning, too.  It takes time to make sense of this world.  I never imagined that, at this point in my life, there would still be so many fascinating new things to learn.

I’ve been living in the hermitage for four and a half years now, on a wee budget, exploring the myriad ways of preparing bean soup and oatmeal.  I did suffer a brief relapse of consumer fever, and bought a one-speed bicycle.  My elderly high-tech bike was becoming a persistent headache.  This year, I rode my scooter 1,050 miles (1690 km), which was 50 percent less than the year before.  This burned up 20 gallons (76 l) of gas, the smallest amount since I got my drivers license in 1968.

On a whim, I rented a car to take a much-needed vacation.  I haven’t driven a car since 2009.  The karma of it all immediately gave me a swift boot in the posterior — every campground was jam-packed with people, dogs, skateboards, mountain bikes, and loud music.  Horror! 

On previous trips, I had apparently been lucky to visit during off-peak times.  There had been no crowds, it was easy to find blissful tranquility, and enjoy a quiet campfire with the spirits of the ancestors.  But this time, it was mid-August, the weekend, perfect weather, and everyone had the same idea.  In sadness and amusement, I turned around and took the car back to Hertz, an expensive seven-hour misadventure.  Sigh!

This year, I read and reviewed a number of important books.  I enjoy exploring the work of inspiring minds, and sharing my discoveries with others.  The reviews are posted on my blog, where pilgrims on the path of learning can easily find them via Google searches.  At the beginning of 2013, my blog had 11,000 page views in total.  Today, it’s over 41,000.  This is satisfying.  My devious plan is working!

Social networking has provided a broad gateway into a fascinating realm of stories, opinions, and discussions that the mainstream world never sees, unfortunately.  It pulls back the McNews curtain, revealing many behind the scenes issues.  I now have connections with allies in Belize, Ireland, Scotland, Netherlands, Germany, France, Hungary, Canada, Poland, Australia, Croatia, Sweden, Belgium, Brazil, Indonesia, and America.

The big highlight for the year was that I published my second book, Sustainable or Bust.  It’s a collection of 64 book reviews and 16 rants — a toolbox for seekers who want to learn more about human ecology and genuine sustainability.

After I send this letter, my next project is a months-long marketing process.  Writing is less than half of the job.  The plan is to visit university websites, find their course catalogs, and identify instructors who teach ecology, environmental ethics, or sustainability.  Then, I’ll find their email addresses, and send them a nice note.

I think that a fair number of students would find my work to be interesting, since many of them are starting to grasp the dire state of the ecosystem they’re inheriting, and the perplexing indifference of the elders.  Deep ecology has never been a mainstream subject, and I’m not sure how many professors are interested in it now.  It’s not where the money and prestige are these days.  All I can do is try.  If you have any suggestions for contacts, let me know.