Wild Free and Happy Sample 25.5

 [Note: This is a new section in my rough draft of a far from finished book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  It will be inserted before sample 26.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

STUMBLING INTO DOMESTICATION

In his lecture, Four Domestications, James Scott described four turning points that radically changed the course of the human saga — the domestication of fire, plants, animals, and ourselves.  We domesticated ourselves by radically changing the way we lived, in order to protect and nurture the survival and growth of crops and herds.  We controlled their lives, and they controlled ours.  Many tasks had to be performed at specific times for optimal results — tilling, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, etc.  Herders also fine-tuned their ongoing schedules and activities for the benefit of their livestock. 

We’ve already looked at the domestication of fire, and how this superpower radically altered the human saga.  It enabled tropical humans to survive in chilly non-tropical regions (snow country), colonize the planet, and eventually become participants in monstrous fire-breathing industrial civilizations.  This chapter will focus on plant and animal domestication, which mostly began within the last 13,000 years, and fired up the turbochargers for our high-speed one-way rocket ride into the unknown.

Supply and Demand

Mother Africa was the homeland where hominins first evolved maybe six million years ago.  Experts do not agree on when humans first emerged.  Estimates range from maybe 250,000 to 400,000 years ago.  For almost the entire human saga, our ancestors were nomadic foragers — hunters and gatherers.  Around 60,000 years ago, some pioneers decided to see the world, and began exploring the tropics of southern Asia, on a path toward Australia. 

Around 42,000 years ago, humans were present up north in Europe, a region with a temperate climate.  It was a major shift, moving outside of the tropical climate for which evolution had fine-tuned us.  The curiosity of these explorers helped to accelerate our journey to a stormy future.  Long term survival in a non-tropical region required loads of radical innovations.

As mentioned earlier, William Rees proposed two fundament ecological concepts.  (1) Every species will expand to all locations that are accessible to them, where conditions might allow their survival.  (2) When they expand into new habitat, they will utilize all available resources, until limits restrain them. 

Humans regularly bumped into limits as they colonized the world, and cleverness often provided ways to bypass the obstacles.  As long as wild foods were abundant, there was no need to pursue farming or herding, which required far more time, difficulty, and risk.  Large game was our ancestors’ preferred food but, over time, hunting a bit too much could gradually deplete the delicious herds.  Efforts then had to shift to class B and class C foods — small game, forest animals, waterfowl, fish, shellfish, insects, and so on. 

Barry Cunliffe noted that as the last ice age weakened, the climate warmed, and the more comfortable Holocene era began.  The forests of Europe were able to migrate northward from the Mediterranean, displacing some tundra regions, and their megafauna residents.  These forests were home to more solitary game like aurochs, boars, elk, deer, and small animals.  The total biomass of these forest animals was only 20 to 30 percent of the biomass of the tundra herds they replaced.  Reduced access to easy meat motivated lifestyle changes.  Folks learned that it was easier to survive in locations close to coastlines, lakes, rivers, and wetlands, where a year round supply of foods might be gathered.  This new way of living apparently worked well enough for a while. 

Diana Muir wrote an environmental history of New England, from the ice age to today.  On the tundra, folks hunted mastodons, horses, bison, and four species of mammoths.  There were sabertooth cats, giant bears, giant beavers, and musk oxen.  As the climate warmed, forests spread northward.  When the tundra megafauna declined, folks hunted for deer, bear, beaver, moose, waterfowl, turkeys, and heath hens. 

Rivers had huge runs of salmon, shad, and alewives.  Stuff like acorns and shellfish were reserved for famine food.  As game got scarce, shellfish became a mainstay.  An adult male would need 100 oysters or quahogs each day.  Thousands were dug and smoked for winter consumption, a tedious job.  In the lower layers of huge shell dumps were oyster shells 10 to 20 inches across (25 to 50 cm) — oysters 40 years old.  In higher levels, the shells got smaller and smaller. 

Eventually, the seeds of domesticated corn (maize), squash, and beans reached New England.  Tribes that pursued the new experiment could produce more food, and feed more people.  When fields were first cleared, and the virgin soil was still highly fertile, agricultural land might sometimes produce a hundred times more food than an equal area of wild land used by foragers.  Of course, population pressure is a predictable cause of social friction and bloody conflict.  Because they had no livestock, they had no manure to help conserve soil fertility, which declines over time, shrinking the harvests.

The big picture here is an endless struggle for survival, in which limits periodically stomped on the brakes, and cleverness often found new ways to temporarily sneak around them.  Cleverness is not an all-powerful miracle-making magic wand.  It also has limits, as the folks on Easter Island discovered, when the last tree fell (whoops!).  It’s not easy to cleverly sneak around food scarcity.  Options often boiled down to starvation, mindful family planning, or a blind leap into the mysterious realm of food production.

Cradle of Civilization

Jared Diamond seriously wondered why some cultures could remain rich and powerful for centuries, while many others rarely, if ever, had an opportunity to sniff prosperity’s butt.  He invested a massive number of brain cycles in a quest to find answers.  In 1987, he published his boat-rocking essay, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” [Link or Link]. 

He wrote, “Archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress.  In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.  With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism that curse our existence.”

Ten years later, in 1997, Diamond published his classic, Guns, Germs, and Steel, in which he presented a book length discussion of what he had learned.  Domestication emerged independently in maybe nine locations around the world, but one region in Eurasia played a starring role in influencing the chain of events that eventually led to the bruised, beaten, and bleeding world outside your window.

It began one day, thousands of years ago, when some intrepid pioneers happened to stumble into an amazing jackpot known as the Fertile Crescent, the Cradle of Civilization.  Gasp!  It was as if their wildest dreams had come true!  The place was home to a great abundance of wild game and plant foods — a heavenly paradise. 

Life was grand for a while, but as the mobs grew in number, they naturally smacked into more and more annoying limits.  Cleverness inspired behaviors and illusions that put folks on the treacherous path to farming and herding.  This generated a surge of temporary prosperity, while it permanently degraded the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, as centuries passed, the forests, soils, and wildlife got rubbished.  Paradise deteriorated into depleted cropland, deserts, ancient ruins, and persistent bloody conflicts.  The Fertile Crescent (like every other region), was not an ecosystem that could tolerate endless agriculture.  Diamond noted that farming is a slow motion act of ecological suicide.

In 2002, five years after Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond published a paper, “Evolution, consequences and future of plant and animal domestication.” [Link]  It presented some additional thoughts.  The emergence of domestication, maybe 10,500 years ago, inspired tremendous changes.  It commenced in Eurasia, primarily in the Fertile Crescent and parts of China, where the whims of “biogeographic luck” provided perfect conditions for seriously dangerous mischief. 

Not only were wild foods abundant, but an unusual number of the plant and animal species possessed characteristics that made them suitable for domestication.  Despite centuries of trial and error, clever humans have discovered that it’s impossible to domesticate the vast majority of plants and animals.  To be suitable for domestication, species must have specific collection of vulnerabilities.

For example, Diamond listed six obstacles that made it impossible to domesticate most large animal species.  Any one of these could prevent enslavement: (1) a diet not easily supplied by humans, (2) slow growth rate and long birth spacing, (3) nasty disposition, (4) reluctance to breed in captivity, (5) lack of follow-the-leader dominance hierarchies, and (6) a tendency to panic in enclosures or when faced with predators.  

Diamond wrote that there are maybe 200,000 wild plant species in the world, of which about 100 have been domesticated.  The Fertile Crescent was home several wild grasses that produced large cereal seeds (barley, einkorn, emmer, and spelt), a rich source of carbohydrates.  There were also several varieties of pulses (peas, beans, and lentils) that provided protein.  In the whole world, purely by random chance, the Fertile Crescent was the biggest treasure chest of future super foods, both plant and animal.  It was essentially ground zero for the birth of civilization.

Globally, there are 148 species of large land-dwelling mammalian herbivores and omnivores that weigh more than 100 pounds (45 kg).  Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 51 of these species, but none of them have been domesticated, because they luckily failed to meet all of the six criteria for enslavement.

Of the 148 species, just 14 have been domesticated.  Nine of the 14 only had regional significance, but five species eventually became multinational superstars.  The Fertile Crescent was home to four of the five: the goat, sheep, pig, and cow (horses are the fifth) — an amazing coincidence. 

Of the 14 domesticated species, 13 of them originated in Eurasia.  Consequently, it’s no coincidence that Eurasia played a primary role in the growth and spread of acute, highly infectious, epidemic crowd diseases.  Farming and herding created communities of humans that lived in unhealthy proximity to unnatural concentrations of livestock, poultry, rats, fleas, mosquitoes, etc. 

This encouraged a number of animal pathogens to adapt to human hosts, including influenza, smallpox, tuberculosis, plague, measles, and cholera.  Diamond noted, “Such diseases could not have existed before the origins of agriculture, because they can sustain themselves only in large dense populations that did not exist before agriculture, hence they are often termed crowd diseases.”

Nomadic foragers lived in small groups, enslaved no livestock or poultry, and periodically moved their camps — a brilliant strategy for avoiding diseases.  On the other hand, humans who lived in crowded villages and cities made tremendous advances in unsanitary living.  Crap and garbage was all over the place, all the time.  Rivers were the source of drinking water, and the dumping place for sewage and filth.  A later chapter will take a closer look at disease.

Diamond noted four developments that dimmed the future for hunter-gatherers, and encouraged the expansion of farming and herding.  (1) Over time, hunting gradually made large game less abundant.  (2) We learned new skills for collecting, processing, and storing foods.  (3) Societies competed, spurring innovations that improved our ability to survive.  (4) Growing populations required large-scale food production.

Folks who inhabited a paradise of plant and animal super foods, learned lots of tricks for maximizing food production.  Population surged, spurring the emergence of cities and civilizations.  Civilization encouraged the development of stuff like metallurgy, industry, deforestation, soil destruction, warfare, overcrowding, patriarchy, and slavery.

So, let’s rephrase what William Rees said about species.  (1) “Every civilization will expand to all locations that are accessible to them, where conditions might allow their survival.”  As they expand, they will take along their livestock, crop seeds, weaponry, culture, technology, religions, and diseases.  (2) “When they colonize new habitat, they will utilize all available resources, until limits restrain them.”

Eurasia spans from Europe to China.  The earliest centers of domestication were the Fertile Crescent and parts of China.  State of the art food production provided both centers with powerful advantages over their more humble neighbors.  The two centers became hubs for territorial expansion, and their languages, genes, tools, and cultural influences have spread around the world. 

This is a spooky story.  From the two hubs, the realm of farming and herding spread in many directions.  In the sixteenth century, European travelers began noticing striking similarities in Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and European languages.  They appeared to have a common ancestor.  As the years flowed by, scholars noticed that lots of other languages also had similarities.  A category was created to name this large assortment.

Visit Wikipedia’s discussion of Indo-European Languages.  See the maps that show how this language family spread across the Old World over time.  Around 500 years ago, the age of global colonization exported them to the Americas, Australia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere.  Today, the native language of about 46 percent of humankind, is an Indo-European tongue.

Drop a pebble in a calm pool of water, and rings of ripples spread in every direction.  Diamond wrote that humankind’s long and stormy story of food production, population growth, civilization, and global domination, began in the Fertile Crescent.  The pebble is called domestication.

Diamond lamented, “If they had actually foreseen the consequences, they would surely have outlawed the first steps towards domestication, because the archaeological and ethnographic record throughout the world shows that the transition from hunting and gathering to farming eventually resulted in more work, lower adult stature, worse nutritional condition, and heavier disease burdens.”

Looking back from the twenty-first century, we can readily see the many unnecessary wrong turns that our ancestors made.  At the same time, we can observe the world around us today, and readily see the catastrophes that those wrong turns triggered.  It’s heartbreaking.  Cleverness without foresight is a deadly duo.  It sure is an interesting time to be alive!

Wild Free and Happy Sample 33

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

The Monster Mash

Mesopotamia was one section of an ancient region known as the Fertile Crescent.  The Fertile Crescent has misty borders, and no two maps agree, but it’s blob-shaped.  [MAP]  One finger pokes westward toward Turkey.  Another spreads down along the east coast of the Mediterranean and plunges deep into Egypt.  Another heads south toward the Persian Gulf.  The Fertile Crescent was a ground zero location for the emergence of plant and animal domestication.  Eventually, it became the birthplace of a ridiculously unsustainable culture known as Western Civilization. 

For uncertain reasons, domestication independently emerged in at least eight regions, following the end of the last ice age.  Population pressure (growing resource scarcity) must have been a primary factor.  Backbreaking farm labor was not something that folks indulged in for fun or kinky pleasure.  Domestication wasn’t a brilliant innovation, it was more like a graveyard headstone for the very long era of hominin wildness and freedom, a sharp turn for the worse.

As the last ice age gradually rode off into the sunset, the Fertile Crescent ecosystem inhaled a deep breath of fresh springtime breezes, opened its eyes, smiled, and felt the power of new life surging within it.  Generous winter rains nurtured abundant greenery.  Ancient myths describe a Garden of Eden.  Large areas were clothed with wild cereals, like wheat (emmer and spelt), and barley.  There were also fruit and nut trees.

Someone estimated that there are about 200,000 species of plants in the world.  Of those, only a bit more than 100 have been domesticated.  Preference has been given to plants that are easy to grow and produce lots of food — especially food that is storable and/or high in nutrients.  Jared Diamond pointed out that, of the twelve biggest crop plants today, five of them are cereals — wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum.  Cereals provide half of the calories that humans eat today.  Pulses (peas and beans) provide protein.  A diet based primarily cereals and pulses is not guaranteed to be nutritionally complete.

Diamond noted that only 14 large herbivore species have been domesticated, and that they were not evenly distributed around the world.  For example, North America had none, and Europe had one (reindeer).  Neither sub-Saharan Africa nor Australia were home to native plants or herbivores that were suitable for domestication.  In these regions, the Aborigines, San, Pygmies, and many others did just fine with wild plant and animal foods.  They lived lightly, built no cities, had no bosses or rulers, did not hoard personal belongings, and maintained a respectful and intimate relationship with their ecosystems.  Imagine that!

The Fertile Crescent, on the other hand, was very different.  It had wheat, barley, and pulses.  Also, in addition to huge herds of delicious wild gazelles, the Crescent was unique because it was home to four species of large herbivores that were suitable for domestication — goats, sheep, pigs, and cattle.  Obsidian was common too, an excellent stone for making cutting blades and sharp weapon points. 

At first, I wrote “the Fertile Crescent was cursed with riches,” a tantalizing booby trap of treasures that entranced naïve tropical primates.  The abundance triggered terrible hallucinations that inspired them to chop down forests, build ghastly cities, and develop impressive world-class wastelands.  But I realized my mistake and deleted those words. 

In fact, the original ecosystem itself was perfectly OK — wild, free, happy, healthy, and beautiful.  Its problems didn’t begin until tropical primate refugees wandered in.  They were homeless vagabonds who had strayed far from their ancestral roots in Mother Africa, and they were cursed with being a bit too smart for their britches — and quite a bit lacking in wisdom and foresight.

Peter Ungar wrote that our wild ancestors were a part of nature, but domestication drove them apart from it.  As the control freak hysteria bloomed, an abusive relationship was born, and over time became deeply rooted and dangerous.  Over time, the one-two punch of plant and animal domestication conjured a furious host of monsters into existence, an ever growing tsunami of ecological devastation. 

Like all other animals, tropical primates are mostly focused on the here and now.  We instantly pay acute attention to immediate risks like lions, tornados, or rattlesnakes.  Risks that take decades or generations to snowball into terrific destruction are of little or no concern to us.  They might seem like theoretical abstractions, farts in the bathtub.  Since few of us have a competent understanding of environmental history, we may not even recognize the presence of powerful trends, directly in front of our eyes, which will eventually hurl our civilization off the cliff.

Since I got up this morning, I have experienced no jarring evidence of the growing global climate catastrophe.  If I wasn’t devoted to regularly paying close attention to a narrow fringe of the info stream from the outer world, the climate crisis would seem insignificant, and easy to sweep under the rug.  Just another hoax.  La-de-dah!  In the mainstream mindset, ecological sustainability is simply not a matter for primary concern, or a proper subject for polite conversation.  If nice people on TV tell us that electric cars are sustainable, then… << SHAZAM! >> …they are!

Eco-History Heroes

“The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!”  Shut up Chicken Little!  You’re nothing but a messed up negativity bomb, a batshit crazy doom pervert.  What’s wrong with you?  Can’t you see that everything is beautiful, and the best is yet to come?  Get a life!  Jeez!  Well, in the old folk tale, Chicken Little had a long and annoying habit of screaming fake warnings of danger.  Then, one day, when genuine danger was actually rushing toward the village, nobody believed Chicken Little, and what happened next was not happy.

With regard to the ecological impacts of plant and animal domestication, a substantial portion of the Chicken Little warnings have not been hysterical false alarms.  They are very often accurate and serious.  Every farmer understands that tilling leads to erosion, that the precious topsoil is nonrenewable, and when it’s gone, game over.  When many irrigation pumps are working to empty an ancient fossil aquifer, everyone knows that this water is nonrenewable.  The aquifer will run dry in a predictable number of years, and the temporary flourish of prosperity will screech to a halt and disintegrate.  Everyone understands the irreparable damage caused by logging and overgrazing over time.  So what?  We will have a nice warm dinner tonight.  All is well.

Unfortunately, many catastrophes take decades or centuries for the hammer to finally drop — like how salinization transformed Mesopotamia’s prosperous agriculture into a lifeless brown wasteland.  If I can probably get away with unsustainable behavior that benefits me, I just might be tempted to do it.  All other animals have figured out how to live sustainably.  Humans are the only critters that ravage ecosystems, often unknowingly, and often selfishly.

(Sigh!)  The memorable meme of the week is, “common sense is a punishment.”  Making a commitment to being present in full dose reality is a mind altering experience.  It can overwhelm you with righteous rage, or reduce you to a flaccid puddle of despair.  It can make you quietly laugh at the absurdity of it all, the unbelievable comedy of errors, the fantastic power of ignorance.

Anyway, for me here at the keyboard, the task of presenting a thorough and well-organized analysis of the consequences of plant and animal domestication is challenging.  The impacts have been huge, complex, and all tangled together — not easy to sort into neat and tidy subject packets.  So I won’t.  My fuzzy plan here is to intuitively meander where the muse inspires, jabber about stuff that feels important to say, and let my dear readers fill in the blanks.  I don’t want this document to end up being 30,000 pages long, and neither do you.

And now, at last, I shall get to the point of this heading.  Throughout the centuries, wizards have appeared who had the amazing ability to perceive reality, to actually see big juju that was happening right in front of their eyes.  They had something like Superman’s x-ray vision, allowing them to see what others could not — the total insanity of their culture, the staggering irreparable damage to the ecosystem, the complete disregard for the generations yet to be born. 

Of the mountains of stuff that we acquire and discard in life, almost all of it is silly crap that no healthy animal needs — cars, TVs, cell phones, etc.  Food is different.  Food matters.  It’s a powerful addiction for which death is the only release.  Domestication has a lot to do with food.  Domestication has also created countless highly destructive unintended consequences.  Environmental history books are packed with these horror stories.  Who reads them?  Most folks seem to be floating on a comfortable cloud of blissful ignorance and childlike magical thinking.  Things will turn out OK.

Since you have managed to make it this far in my long and windy word dance, there’s a fair chance that you might be a bit interested in this realm of knowledge.  While I still have your attention, I’d like to recommend a few of my favorite sources of high quality brain food.  Most are free downloads (ask Google), and others require a visit to your friendly local library.  If you develop an intimate relationship with this knowledge, you may get up one morning, look in the mirror, and see that there is a brand new Chicken Little in the world.  Hooray!  Let’s take a quick stroll through a gallery of some important Chicken Little heroes.

Man and Nature

Twenty-five years ago, a wise guy recommended that I read Man and Nature, by George Perkins Marsh, published in 1864.  (The second edition in 1874 was titled The Earth as Modified by Human Action.)  He was a visionary who helped set the stage for the modern ecology movement, and the study of environmental history.  You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?  Probably not.  His book was not a bestseller, but it sold fairly well over time.  It did not succeed in derailing the self-destructive juggernaut of industrial civilization, but it was a noble effort, and its message is still valid and important.

Long ago at school, I learned all about the glories of Greek and Roman civilization.  Marsh was probably taught a similar load of pretentious doo-doo.  As the U.S. ambassador to Italy and Turkey, he had been able to actually visit regions that were once the realm of thriving civilizations.  What he observed gave him a powerful dope slap.  One way or another, each had been reduced to an ecological train wreck.

Ancient forest mining in the watersheds of Italy’s Po and Adige rivers resulted in devastating erosion over the centuries, and huge volumes of silt spread down the coastline of the Adriatic Sea.  Marsh wrote, “Ravenna, forty miles south of the principal mouth of the Po, was built like Venice, in a lagoon, and the Adriatic still washed its walls at the commencement of the Christian era.  The mud of the Po has filled up the lagoon, and Ravenna is now four miles from the sea.  The town of Adria, which lies between the Po and the Adige, at the distance of some four or five miles from each, was once a harbor famous enough to have given its name to the Adriatic sea, and it was still a seaport in the time of Augustus.  The combined action of the two rivers has so advanced the coast line that Adria is now about fourteen miles inland, and, in other places, the deposits made within the same period by these and other neighboring streams have a width of twenty miles.”

It’s a plump book loaded with fascinating revelations, but it is written in an obsolete academic style that some bookworms may find rather tedious and difficult.  Apparently, at the time of writing, there was a serious shortage of periods in the U.S., which forced Marsh to write sentences as long as 230+ words.  (My next recommendation is much easier to read, and equally important.)  There are several ways of downloading Man and Nature.

Free Kindle version from Amazon is HERE

Scanned PDF of book (giant file) is HERE

EPUB, MOBI, TXT, and HTML versions are HERE

Topsoil and Civilization

In 1955, Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter published Topsoil and Civilization.  Readers are taken on a neat journey, during which they discover how a number of ancient civilizations destroyed themselves.  Stops include the Nile, Mesopotamia, Crete, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Greece, North Africa, Italy, and more.  Attentive folks will discover that these ecological disaster areas had many factors in common — a long list of fatal mistakes that civilizations remain committed to repeating, up to today.

Tom and Vern were not ditzy cheerleaders for civilization.  They wrote, “The very achievements of civilized man have been the most important factors in the downfall of civilizations.”  Civilized man had the tools and intelligence needed “to domesticate or destroy a great part of the plant and animal life around him.”  Unfortunately, “His chief troubles came from his delusions that his temporary mastership was permanent.  He thought of himself as ‘master of the world,’ while failing to understand fully the laws of nature.”

When reputable scholars make great efforts to describe serious challenges, it is obligatory to provide a happy ending, where they reveal their brilliant silver bullet solutions.  Today, there are hordes of hucksters selling magic cures for every environmental malady, and most of their elixirs have a pungent aroma of hopium and bull excrement.  Tom and Vern’s cure was soil conservation, a fantasy of permanent agriculture that could feed a gradually growing crowd for the next 10,000 years.  Yeah, right.

At the same time, they were painfully aware that humankind was ravaging the land.  “The fact is that there has probably been more man-induced erosion over the world as a whole during the past century than during any preceding thousand-year period.  There are many reasons for the recent rapid acceleration of erosion, but the principal reasons are that the world has more people and the people are more civilized and hence are capable of destroying the land faster.”  The book is a bit bipolar, but most of it, the historical passages, are excellent.  Great stuff!

Free PDF is HERE.  It is not available in some countries, for copyright reasons, but I saw a pirate copy on Google yesterday.

Gilgamesh, Plato, and Ovid

It’s interesting but sad that the Chicken Little movement is very old.  Folks have been jumping up and down and shouting their pain for a very long time, but civilization is a merciless steam roller. 

The Epic of Gilgamesh was written in about 2700 B.C.  It described the creation of the city of Uruk, along the Euphrates River.  The process involved massive deforestation along the valley, which unleashed immense erosion and flooding.  Humbaba was the sacred defender of the forest.  Gilgamesh whacked his head off, and proceeded to cut trees like there was no tomorrow.  Rains then washed the soil off the mountains, down to bedrock.  And so, whenever the floods blast down the river, the noise of destruction is referred to as “Humbaba’s roar.”

The Greek philosopher Plato wrote Critias in about 360 B.C.  In the dialog, the speaker laments how the land has deteriorated over time.  The forests were almost gone, and so was the rich soil on the mountains and plains.  Rains quickly run off the bare earth, and springs no longer flow.  The land is drying out.  Compared to the better days of years past, only a skeleton of the earlier land remained. 

Many years later, not long before the time of Jesus, the Roman poet Ovid wrote a similar poem in the third book of his Amores collection.  It also expressed sadness for the dark times of his day.  Long ago, wild crops were abundant.  The land was not divided into parcels, and no plows tore into the ground.  “Clever human nature, victim of your inventions, disastrously creative, why cordon cities with towered walls?  Why arm for war?”

Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years

In the 1940s, Walter Lowdermilk created the short, quick, and easy primer on the ravages of early civilizations.  In the 1920s, he visited the Yellow River (Hwang Ho) basin in China.  Floods and famines had been hammering the Yellow River for 4,000 years, sweeping away millions of lives.  The basin is covered with a deep blanket of yellowish, nutrient-rich loess soil, dumped there by winds during the ice age.  Prior to the expansion of agriculture and population, ancient forests held the upland loess in place.  After the forests were eliminated, rain runoff increased, erosion increased, and the long era of catastrophic floods was born.  The Yellow River has long had a fitting nickname: China’s Sorrow.  Lowdermilk discovered a surreal nightmare world of enormous erosion gullies up to 600 feet (183 m) deep.

In 1938 and 1939, he was sent to Western Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, to make observations, and report on his findings.  He visited many of the ancient sites mentioned by George Perkins Marsh — and he took a camera with him.  He saw many devastated wastelands, some reduced to bare bedrock, which had once been prosperous, densely populated regions.  This wasn’t about climate change.  Common causes included deforestation, overgrazing, soil salinization, planting on sloped land, and failure to maintain irrigation canals and hillside terraces.

Lowdermilk boiled the core story down to a booklet.  More than a million copies have been printed.  His photos are shocking testimonials to the unintended consequences of domestication and civilization.  The booklet can be read in one sitting.

The text bounces from disaster to disaster, providing a brief description of each.  In Tunisia, he observed the site of Cuicul, a magnificent city in Roman times, which had been entirely buried, except for three feet (1 m) of one column poking out of the soil.  It took 20 years of digging to expose the remarkable ruins.  Today, the land can support only a few inhabitants.  Likewise, the Minoan city of Jerash, a village of 3,000 people, was once home to 250,000.  In Syria, he observed a million acres (404,685 ha) of manmade desert, dotted with a hundred dead villages.

I don’t want to spoil the excitement of your reading experience by summarizing most of the subjects.  Keep in mind that the stories he tells are the result of good old-fashioned muscle-powered organic farming, and organic grass-fed herding.  The harms were the result of human actions inspired by ignorance or tradition, not the fickle whims of nature.  Compared to modern industrial agriculture, the early farmers and herders were childlike amateurs at ecocide.  We have, unfortunately, become champions.

Free PDF is HERE

Against the Grain

James C. Scott teaches political science and anthropology at Yale.  He’s a smooth writer and a deep thinker.  In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, he focused his discussion on southern Mesopotamia, because it was the birthplace of the earliest genuine states.  What are states?  They are hierarchical societies, with rulers and tax collectors, rooted in a mix of farming and herding.  The primary food of almost every early Old World state was wheat, barley, or rice.  Taxes were paid with grain, which was easier to harvest, transport, and store.  States often had armies, defensive walls, palaces or ritual centers, slaves, and maybe a king or queen.

The root of “domestication” is “domus” (the household).  In early Mesopotamia, “the domus was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields, seed and grain stores, people, and domestic animals, all coevolving with consequences no one could have possibly foreseen.”  As a result of living on the domus, animals (including humans) were changed, both physically and behaviorally.  Over time, some wild species became “fully domesticated” — genetically altered, entirely dependent on humans for their survival.  Domestication was also about deliberate control over reproduction, which “applied not only to fire, plants, and animals but also to slaves, state subjects, and women in the patriarchal family.”

Domesticated sheep have brains 24 percent smaller than their wild ancestors.  Pig brains are a third smaller.  Protected from predators, regularly fed, with restricted freedom of movement, the process of domestication made livestock less alert, less anxious, less aggressive — pudgy passive dimwit meatballs.  They reached reproductive age sooner, and produced far more offspring.

“The multispecies resettlement camp was, then, not only a historic assemblage of mammals in numbers and proximity never previously known, but it was also an assembly of all the bacteria, protozoa, helminthes, and viruses that fed on them.”  The domus was a magnet for uninvited guests: fleas, ticks, leeches, mosquitoes, lice, and mites.  Unnatural crowds of animals spent their lives walking around in poop, and drinking dirty water.  It was a devilishly brilliant incubator for infectious diseases.

Dense monocultures of plants also begged for trouble.  “Crops not only are threatened, as are humans, with bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases, but they face a host of predators large and small — snails, slugs, insects, birds, rodents, and other mammals, as well as a large variety of evolving weeds that compete with the cultivar for nutrition, water, light, and space.”  Once harvested and stored in the granary, grain could be lost to weevils, rodents, and fungi.  The biggest vulnerability of states was that they were almost entirely dependent on a single annual harvest of one or two staple grains.  Crops could be wiped out by drought, flood, pests, storm damage, or crop diseases.

Anyway, the book is fascinating.  Readers also learn about the tax game, the vital slave industry, trade networks, deforestation, erosion, soil salinization, irrigation, looting and raiding, mass escapes of workers, the challenges and benefits of being surrounded by large numbers of aggressive nomadic herders, and on and on.  It’s an outstanding book!

Free PDF is HERE

Great, But Not Free

A Forest Journey by John Perlin is a fabulous history of forest mining.  In the era of domestication, forests were cleared to create cropland and pastures.  Trees were cut to make lumber.  Wood was like the petroleum of earlier times, a source of both energy and wealth.  It was used for heating buildings, glassmaking, ceramics, smelting, casting, brickmaking, and so on.  Trees were a form of treasure, and treeless societies might be willing to take your trees by bloody force (and often did).

Against the Grain by Richard Manning presents a rigorous critique of agriculture in an easy to read format.  He slings snappy lines like: “There is no such thing as sustainable agriculture.  It does not exist.”  Or, “The domestication of wheat was humankind’s greatest mistake.”  Agriculture is one of humankind’s most troublesome experiments, and it is now hopelessly in debt.  It has borrowed soil, water, and energy that it can never repay, and never intended to repay — burning up tomorrow to feed today.  We know it, we keep doing it, and we have dark hallucinations about feeding billions more.  Agriculture has become civilization’s tar baby. 

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by geologist David Montgomery provides a fascinating discussion about an extremely precious substance that we can’t live without, but treat like dirt.  He begins with an intimate explanation of what dirt is, how it’s formed, and how it’s destroyed — in plain, simple English.  Then, he proceeds to lead us on an around-the-world tour, spanning many centuries, to examine the various methods that societies have devised for mining their soils, and sabotaging their future via agriculture.

He concludes, “Continued for generations, till-based agriculture will strip soil right off the land as it did in ancient Europe and the Middle East.  With current agricultural technology though, we can do it a lot faster.”  Nature is far smarter.  “Mother earth never attempts to farm without livestock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animals wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the process of growth and the process of decay balance one another.”

Europe Between the Oceans

I’ve long been interested in learning more about my wild ancestors, the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Europe, in order to better understand who I am.  Descriptions of them recorded by the ancient Greeks and Romans were too meager to satisfy my curiosity.  Recently, I came across Barry Cunliffe’s book, Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC – AD 1000.  Cunliffe is an archaeologist, and ongoing research is discovering many new pieces for the puzzle.  His book serves readers a staggering amount of information.

Cave paintings have preserved beautiful memories of the wild paradise of ice age Europe, and the lucky people who enjoyed the continent in the days of its undiminished vitality.  The party began breaking up around 9600 B.C., when a warmer climate returned.  Glaciers melted and forests expanded northward into tundra country.  Tundra critters like the reindeer and elk were forced to migrate further north.  Others, like the mammoth and wooly rhino, walked off the stage.

The recovering forests provided habitat for smaller animals, like deer, elk, boars, and aurochs.  Here’s a surprising notion: “This forest fauna amounted to only about 20-30 percent of the total biomass of herbivores that had roamed the tundra before them.”  In a land of trees, there was far less meat nibbling on the foliage.  Folks were forced to live in smaller and fewer settlements.  Their population “drastically declined.”  They preferred locations close to coastlines, lakes, rivers, and wetlands, where a year round supply of food could be gathered with little effort.

Meanwhile, over the border in Asia, dark juju was swirling in the Fertile Crescent.  Between 12,000 and 9600 B.C., the number of permanent settlements was growing, based on hunting and foraging the (temporarily) abundant wild foods.  Then came the ominous Aceramic Neolithic period (9600 – 6900 B.C.).  By its end, people were growing fully domesticated cereals, and dining on domesticated sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle.  Cunliffe blames population issues for this shift, which has yet to stop clobbering the planet via seven billion unintended consequences.

The laborious new way of life worked for a while in Asia, but turned into a nightmare when supersized — large-scale irrigation-based agriculture, reckless forest mining, explosive population growth, bloody warfare, and full-blown civilizations run by power-crazy tyrants awash in testosterone.  Few civilizations, if any, have ever managed to reverse their mistake and deliberately return to low impact living.  Most self-destruct.  It’s easier.

Geography has played a starring role in European history.  The continent is a lumpy peninsula protruding from the posterior of Asia.  It is largely surrounded by navigable seas, and interlaced with navigable rivers.  Even in the days before roads, it was fairly easy to journey back and forth across it.  The continent had immense forests, fertile soils, a nurturing climate, plenty of water, thriving wildlife and marine life, and large deposits of industrial minerals and precious minerals. 

The Fertile Crescent, on the other hand, was an arid region that was poorly suited for supporting large complex societies.  But to the west was a vast unmolested paradise, and there were few guards at the border crossings to Europe.  Consequently, the wild hunter-gatherers of Europe were among the unluckiest people in the world, similar to the Native Americans in 1492.  Their valuable assets were irresistible to the growing mobs of hungry farmers.

Cunliffe euthanized the myth of the Neolithic Revolution, which purported that the Asian farmers swept across Europe in a blitzkrieg, nearly exterminating the indigenous folk, as the white folks did in America.  New evidence suggests that diffusion played a significant role in the spread of agriculture, similar to the spread of maize in the eastern U.S.  Whenever the folks down the river start growing lots of calories, and feeding swarms of bambinos, your options are: (1) exterminate them, (2) take up the dirty habit, (3) flee, or (4) be overrun.  Since farmers outbreed hunters, agriculture tends to spread like a steamroller.

Recent studies of mitochondrial DNA conclude that about 80 percent of European females are genetically indigenous, not related to Asian immigrants.  In France, Germany, and northeast Spain, only 15 to 30 percent of males have immigrant genes.

In a nutshell, Europe was essentially a continent of hunter-gatherers in 7000 B.C., and by 4000 B.C. it was reduced to a sad gulag of farmers and herders.  “The rapidity of the spread of the Neolithic way of life was remarkable.”  According to Cunliffe, wild Europe disintegrated in the face of increased mobility, connectivity, innovation, and imbalance.

Mobility was stimulated by factors such as growing population, depleted soils, overgrazing, and bloodthirsty invaders.  Connectivity was increased as trading networks expanded, often leading to tribal alliances led by cocky warlords.  Innovation was the clever process of devising new ways for living farther out of balance with nature, a tireless war on the future.  The Neolithic path was a devastating hurricane of countless forms of imbalance — population, hierarchy, warfare, technology, ecology, pathology.

Friendly traders who made it through the gauntlet of pirates and highwaymen delivered wine, weapons, jewelry, furs, smallpox, and the bubonic plague.  Diseases delighted in paying regular visits to the filthy, malnourished communities, and providing much needed assistance in resolving family planning imbalances.  Slave trading was a major industry.

In central Asia and southern Russia, ancestors of the Aryans hunted the fierce wild horses of the grassy steppes and ate them.  Over time, they succeeded in reducing them to submissive beasts, and used them for hunting, herding, trading, and raiding — another brilliant innovation!  Before long, Europeans on the plains were periodically being raped, pillaged, and slaughtered by scruffy hordes of horse-mounted Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, and Turks. 

Equally catastrophic was the dark art of metalworking, another diabolical gift from the Middle East.  The Bronze Age began around 3300 BC, and the Iron Age arrived around 1200 BC.  The awesome new technology resulted in the deaths of millions of trees and people, and the permanent destruction of many mining regions.

Conflict was the core of the story.  Every page I turned unleashed a thousand screams, as jets of hot blood squirted out of the book, forming a sticky puddle around my desk, page after page.  They never tired of killing each other.  This psychic epidemic — “grow or die” — has now driven us deep into the valley of the shadow of extinction.  It’s a game we can neither win nor deliberately abandon.  Everyone loses.

Native Americans have always been appalled by the immense craziness of the Europeans who washed up on their shores.  Ward Churchill says that we suffer from a profound sense of identity confusion, having lost all connection to our tribal roots.  John Trudell says we have become disconnected from spiritual reality.  We have lost our identity and need to remember who we are.  The cave paintings are the strongest medicine we have, along with our dreams.

Cunliffe’s 10,000-year tour tells us almost nothing about tribal Europeans living in relative harmony with the ecosystem, but it exhaustively describes the birth of disharmony, which is useful to understand.  Many of the important lessons in life are learned from goofy unclever teachers, who demonstrate the wrong way to do something, and the Neolithic Europeans excelled at this, as did their descendants around the world.

They weren’t stupid or evil.  It’s nearly impossible to intentionally stop or turn a complex society in motion.  They were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had little choice but to be swept away by the roaring currents of their era, as we have been.  But calmer waters lie downstream, and some folks may survive the journey.  May they learn well from our mistakes, let the planet heal, and remember who they are.

Cunliffe, Barry, Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC – AD 1000, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008.