Wild Free and Happy Sample 46

 

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

WHO ARE WE?

Life in the Wild Lane

Over a long span of time, our minds, bodies, emotions, and instincts were given form on tropical savannahs.  Like our savannah ancestors, you and I are social animals, and we do best in small groups, where we can maintain ongoing personal relationships with all the others.  Many wild folks likely spent their entire lives without seeing a stranger.  For them, exposure to dense crowds of odd-looking, odd-smelling, odd-sounding strangers would have been terrifying.

On the day of your birth, you did not squirt out of momma’s womb with credit cards, car keys, and a cell phone.  You were a wild animal that evolution had fine-tuned for a wholesome life of hunting, scavenging, and gathering in a tropical wilderness.  You were fully expecting to be welcomed into a kind and caring tribe — an egalitarian culture of anarchist singers, dancers, and nature lovers.  You were not expecting to squirt into the frightening bright lights of a totally insane planet-thrashing civilization, condemned to a life sentence without parole.

You were expecting to spend your entire life out of doors, in a thriving ecosystem where humans were a wee minority group in the family of critters.  You enjoyed frequently seeing, hearing, and smelling your wild non-human neighbors throughout every day.  Many of these neighbors were good to eat, and some of them would eagerly leap at any opportunity to tear you to bloody shreds and ravenously feast on your yummy flesh.  Survival required paying acute attention to reality at all times.

Paul Shepard wrote that for three million years, our wild hominin ancestors were “few in number, sensitive to the seasons and other life, humble in attitude toward the Earth, and comfortable as one species among many.”

It Takes a Village

Soon after birth, many animal species are capable of skills like walking, running, swimming, climbing, and feeding themselves.  This is not true for humans, because we are an experiment to see what might happen if tropical primates were allowed to evolve unusually swollen brains.  This project required some tweaks. 

The birth canal from mom’s uterus to her vagina passes through an opening in the pelvis, and this opening is too small to allow the passage of a fetus with a more fully developed brain.  Consequently, humans are born long before we are capable of functioning unassisted.  Because we are helpless for an extended period, we require a lot of attention from mommy, daddy, and the surrounding tribe.  Many observers have reported that wild people did an above average job of raising children.

Jean Liedloff spent two and a half years living with wild people in a Venezuelan jungle, while occasionally zipping back and forth to big city America, two cultures that could not possibly be more different.  The wild folks were generally a kind and cheerful bunch.  But every time she stepped off a plane in America, she would immediately be jolted by how strikingly unhappy people appeared.  Why?  This question eventually inspired her to become a therapist, and the author of an awesome book.

Our months in the womb were very safe and comfortable, the most peaceful period in our journey.  Liedloff described how tribal folks made the transition to life in the outer world as pleasant as possible.  From the moment of their birth, newborns were held and nursed and loved — and this warm, secure, continuous contact lasted until the infant indicated that it was ready to begin the creeping and crawling phase.  Raised in this manner, wild kids lived with a sense of wellbeing that might last throughout their entire lives.  They were well-adjusted and happy.  Life was good.

On the other hand, in the big city realm, the bright and noisy world outside the womb could be a rather unpleasant place, sometimes hellish.  Newborns were hustled away to a nursery, where they could cry by themselves until they ran out of tears.  The sense of wellbeing disintegrated, and some of the infants never again recovered it. 

Civilized folks, who spend their lives isolated in climate controlled cubicles, with state of the art entertainment systems, often have to buy books to learn how to raise a kid.  Liedloff detested these <spit!> horrid books.  She wrote that if parents followed the printed instructions, they would “produce children they cannot love, who grow up like themselves, anti-self, antisocial, incapable of giving, destined forever to go hungry.” 

Phases of Development

During our life journey, we pass through four developmental phases.  In any society, a child’s physical and emotional needs are different from those of an adolescent, adult, or elder.  In any region of the world, everyone’s body physically changes through these four phases.  No matter what culture we live in, our bodies will automatically proceed from one phase to the next as we meander through the years of our lives.

On the other hand, it’s very important to understand that our emotional development is never guaranteed to automatically proceed from one phase to the next.  You cannot smoothly advance into adolescence emotionally until you successfully acquire the emotional skills of childhood.  This is true for every transition through the four phases.  Each must be completed before moving up to the next — but this doesn’t always happen. 

Emotional development can get permanently stuck in one phase, even as the years and decades keep passing.  Thus, you can have infantile adults, gray haired adolescents, and other victims of arrested development.  Many may never develop a mature sense of social responsibility or emotional stability.  This is especially common in complex societies, which have a long reputation for being incubators of mental deformities.  Evolution didn’t prepare us for living in crowded, sprawling, synthetic habitats.

It takes about 20 years for a newborn to fully develop the body and brain of an adult.  We did not squirt out of mom’s womb with a comprehensive understanding of how to effortlessly glide through our joyride to the finish line.  Luckily, we are social animals, and if we had been lucky enough to be born into a healthy wild society, the community would have provided us with timely and competent mentoring.  Folks born into complex societies, like ours, are often not so lucky.

Especially critical are the transitions from one phase to the next.  For example, a child does not instinctively know how to gracefully move through the whirlwinds of puberty and then smoothly flow into a delightful adolescence.  Rites of initiation are ceremonies that explore the wisdom of cultural stories, and provide important instructions for social behavior, conflict avoidance, and other core issues.  When a safety net of support is provided, transitions can be much easier.  These communities are more likely to nurture the blossoming of sane, competent, well-adjusted people.  Modern communities do a far sloppier job of providing guidance and support.

We are now about to take a quick peek at the phases of development.  Paul Shepard devoted a lot of attention to this subject in four of his books, especially Nature and Madness.  He wore a critic’s hat, and focused his flame thrower on how civilized cultures achieved great advances in self-destruction, producing hordes of obedient grunts to crank the wheels of the machine, and build the palaces, while rubbishing the ecosystem.  His writing emits a sharp aroma of extensive learning and intense brainpower, but it’s not a breeze to read.  His career didn’t include intimate long-term experiences in wild cultures.

Among my all-time favorite books is The Human Cycle, by Colin Turnbull, a gentle soul and careful writer.  This book focused on how different cultures guided their people through the transitions of life’s journey.  Turnbull was raised in a pathetically dysfunctional family and peer group (upper class Britain).  Later in life he deeply enjoyed spending lots of time with the Mbuti Pygmies, who celebrated life in the Ituri rainforest of Zaire.  For many thousands of years they were a happy and sustainable society — until paradise turned into a war zone and logging camp.  Turnbull shared fascinating descriptions of both wonderful and wonky cultures.  He gave us a delicious glimpse of how our ancestors may have lived in the good old days.

The following comments are a generic overview.  They do not describe universal practices that are exactly the same in all societies.  Humans have created countless unique cultures over many thousands of years.  Each attempted to guide folks through their life journey, in a wide variety of ways, with mixed results.

CHILDHOOD.  Childhood is the thrilling and confusing era of intense change that spans between birthday and puberty.  For their first three years, all Mbuti infants remained in constant contact with their mothers, which provided a heavenly bonding experience.  This prepared the infant for becoming a confident and competent social being during the rest of its life. 

On the other hand, in Turnbull’s upper class Britain (and throughout much of the civilized world), the mother-infant relationship was far less intimate and comforting.  Turnbull was raised by a long series of nannies.  Because of the terribly dangerous health risks of breastfeeding, his mother did not nurse him.  His brother had different nannies, and lived in the same house, but the two never met until Colin was 6, and they shared a hotel room.  With great excitement, they eagerly conversed, until mom discovered the mistake.  Rich people can sometimes be oddballs.  Colin begged gypsies to kidnap him, but they refused.

Carleton Coon wrote that the Andaman islanders nursed their young until the age of 3 or 4.  The hungry little milk lovers were passed around, and suckled by all lactating women.  Shepard noted that when the infant’s bond with mother was properly formed, it encouraged the potential for intellectual and emotional growth.  But if this bonding was dodgy, the damage done could sometimes have lifelong impact.

As the infant eventually learned to speak, crawl, and explore, it became less dependent on mother.  This began at around age three.  For the next nine years or so, until the onset of puberty at 12 or so, it was an amazing time of discovery.  In wild cultures, these nine years were a time window for the absolutely vital process of forming healthy bonds with nature, in all its diversity.  During this experience, kids absorbed the richness of the natural order — animals, insects, plants, storms, stars, aromas, colors, sounds — the sacred wonderland of creation, home sweet home!

Imagine a catfish that paid little attention to the other living things in the lake — a fish that was raised in a radicalized catfish supremacy cult, believed that the creator of the universe was a catfish, and the only thing that mattered was the prosperity of catfish.  How weird would that be?  Unfortunately, many modern folks, eyes riveted to glowing screens, or confined in speeding vehicles, never experience a full immersion baptism in wild nature (like a catfish without a lake).  For them, nature is merely static scenery along the highway.  Boring and meaningless.

Wild kids spent lots of time watching the “others” (non-human animals), learned their names, categorized them, imitated them, and studied their anatomy when butchered.  Kids knew the daily and seasonal patterns of the others, and watched them move through their life cycle, from youngsters to oldsters.  Kids developed a strong feeling of kinship with them.

Hunting was a core component of our wild ancestors’ lives.  Folks accumulated enormous amounts of knowledge about tracking and animal behavior.  Our brains evolved, over hundreds of thousands of years, in wild Stone Age cultures.  What you and I are today is a direct result of this very long, beautiful, and deeply intimate wild relationship, despite the fact that it is largely absent in the culture that currently suffocates us.

In an interview with Derrick Jensen, John Livingston shed more light on the process of bonding with nature.  A newborn human is an incredibly flexible animal, capable of fully adapting to the worldviews, religions, lifestyles, and languages of a vast spectrum of cultures, from “primitive” to “advanced,” anywhere in the world. 

Thus, a primary component of childhood is open-mindedness, a mindset in which they are free and eager to explore all possibilities.  So, for youngsters who have access to wild nature, and who have a tingling curiosity to explore big magic, it’s perfectly normal, healthy, and life enhancing to form emotional and spiritual bonds with the family of life.  If the bond with nature doesn’t form by age 12 or so, it’s likely that it never will, but not impossible.

In the ghoulish world of deepest, darkest couch potato suburbia, nature has been reduced to something that folks passively watch on gigantic flat screen TVs, while gobbling cheese doodles and guzzling fizzy sugar water.  The normal around-the-clock stimulation of wildness, that every animal needs, is absent.  Children are denied the vital education provided by the daily affairs of the family of life.  They are hobbled by what Richard Louv would diagnose as Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD).

Stan Rowe called it EDD (Earth Deficiency Disease), a devastating disconnection from the meaning of life.  EDD children tend to form bonds with machines, not nature.  He estimated that consumers spend 95 percent of their lives indoors.  Children are often kept under house arrest, because parents fear that going outdoors is too dangerous.  The poor kids share some similarities with the homeless wild animals imprisoned in zoos.  Rowe wrote, “Our two best doctors are our legs.”  He hated cities.  “The city is an unhealthy place for those who want to come home at least once before they die.” 

In modern cultures, a major shift follows the open-minded curiosity of childhood.  It is the dawn of a long era of tedious work, responsibilities, challenges, and annoyances.  For this reason, Turnbull noted that we romanticize our childhood, a golden age of innocence and joy.  The Mbuti did not idolize childhood, “because, for them, the world has remained a place of wonder, and the older they get the greater the wonder.”  They bonded beautifully with nature, their forest home was sacred, and the source of all goodness.  When they moved through the forest, they sang to it.  They referred to it as mother, father, or both.  Life was good.

By the arrival of puberty, wild children were well rooted in place, feeling at-one with the flora and fauna that surrounded them.  They had developed a profoundly important spiritual connection to life.  Florence Shepard, Paul’s wife, said it like this: “At the heart of our identity is a fundamentally wild being, one who finds in the whole of wild nature all that is true and beautiful in this world.”

PUBERTY.  Oh-oh!  Somewhere around 12 or so, the path begins to get slippery, anxious, and exciting.  Welcome to puberty, girls and boys!  Puberty is the kickoff for adolescence, which is the bridge between childhood and maturity.  For females, adolescence is generally the years between 12 and 20; and for males, 14 to 25.  Puberty is time to say goodbye to the sweet and easy innocence of childhood, and undergo a transformation into sexual beings.

In Mbuti country, the all-knowing adult community was fully prepared to launch into the traditional rituals and ceremonies that are among the most important events in life, according to Turnbull.  These are the rites of initiation.  Shepard noted that in various cultures, initiations often provided “ceremonies that include separation from family, instruction by elders, tests of endurance and pain, trials of solitude, visions, dreams, and rituals of rebirth.”

For Mbuti girls, the puberty alarm clock rings with a dramatic event, the passing of their first blood.  It was time for initiation.  Often the community waited until more than one girl was ready.  The girls were then moved to the special elima house, where they changed their attire, announcing that they were no longer children.  Boys were allowed to visit, and there was sexual play, but it never led to pregnancy.  Girls and boys learned new songs and sang them together. 

At puberty, boys were not awakened by a bloody alarm.  Every two or three years, adults selected a group of boys between ages 9 and 11 for initiation.  For Mbuti kids, who sleep in small huts near mom and dad, the mechanics of sex were no mystery at all.  Initiation was the time to learn about lots of important stuff beyond the huffing and puffing, including the social responsibilities of adulthood.  The strategy here was that the boys would learn — in advance — the possible consequences of what mom and dad did in the dark.   

For the Mbuti, initiation led to the emergence of “a fully integrated self.”  Me and my classmates seem to have passed through puberty in a fairly dis-integrated manner.  For our ersatz initiation, we were more or less hurled off the end of the dock into deep water (note the high teen pregnancy rates).  For more than a few, emotional development got stuck in adolescence (note the numerous struggling adults in our society who are the opposite of well-adjusted and fully integrated).

If there was just one idea that Turnbull could send you away with, it would be this: no culture handles puberty and adolescence as poorly as ours.  “The consequences of our folly are to be seen all around us in the violence, neuroses, and loneliness of our youth, our adults, and aged.”  Some never come close to having a full or rich life. 

Shepard would be quick to add that this culture is also demented because of our disconnection from wildness and nature, our domestication of plants and animals, our conversion of ecosystems into cropland and crowded urban nightmares, the exploitive and oppressive hierarchies including patriarchy, and on and on.  This is not a good path.

ADOLESCENCE.  With the transition into adolescence, the time window for the free-flowing open-mindedness of childhood tends to draw closed.  It becomes time to put on cultural blinders, and become fully immersed in our tribal identity.  This is something like the process of how wet pourable concrete inevitably becomes rigid, strong, and permanent.  The worldview, beliefs, and values of your culture become deeply imprinted infallible truths, a mindset you carry to the end of your days (usually).

If you were a wild, free, and happy Mbuti, this transition was perfectly normal, healthy, and beneficial — an essential step on the path to maturity.  Throughout adolescence, the bonds with nature continued expanding and deepening — the Mbuti never outgrew their sacred relationship with the family of life.

If you are a citizen of industrial civilization, its ersatz initiation process leads to a far different outcome.  Compulsory education extends from childhood into the years of adolescence.  In my youth, busloads of kids my age were separated from society for seven or eight hours a day, so we could be rigorously trained in the myths of our culture, and the skills essential for full time employment.  We were trained to become aggressive, status-seeking, narrowly focused achievers.  Upon graduation, we were set free to join the voracious locust swarms of consumers.

Turnbull received his public education at Westminster, a prestigious school, where students had their brains filled with knowledge, in an efficient assembly line process.  Intellectual skills, like competency in critical thinking, were not part of the curriculum.  He had nothing nice to say about the abominable experience, only this: “It would have been good training for a life in prison.”

In Mbuti culture, following their initiation, the new adults did an excellent job of reintegrating with the community — almost all spent the rest of their days living among their friends and kinfolk.  They didn’t banish themselves to faraway places, never to return.  Notably, their community was stable, closely bonded, and highly supportive.

Rites of initiation are traditionally a three-step process: (1) separation from the community, (2) preparation for adulthood, and (3) reincorporation into society as an adult.  Industrial culture commonly omits the last step.  Many of our successful graduates are blasted out of a cannon into the outer world, to attend university, pursue a career, enlist in the military, or whatever.  Turnbull complained that many of our adolescents actually “expect and want a permanent separation” from the community they grew up in, because they seek “freedom.”  They scatter to the winds like tumbleweeds, and many are never seen again.

Like Turnbull, Shepard also loathed our culture’s assembly line for manufacturing adults, most of whom never formed close bonds with nature.  Most were likely to imprint that normality was largely non-living, and that humans were the only beings that were truly alive.  They internalize chaos, and when it’s time to master social relations, they are not prepared.  Shepard wrote, “The only society more fearful than one run by children might be one run by childish adults.”

[Continued in sample #47]

NOTE: Since the last post, this blog crossed a threshold.  As of this morning, it has now had 504,603 views!  Thank you!  I’m glad that my work is useful to some.  On to a million…

 

Coming Home to the Pleistocene

Paul Shepard (1925-1996) was a human ecologist and a turbocharged original thinker who spent his life trying to understand (a) how ordinary animals like us managed to evolve into a highly destructive swarm, and (b) how we could correct this.  Genetic evolution is the primary engine of change for all forms of life, except humans.  With humans, history and culture have changed us far more, and much faster.

Shepard’s research came to conclusions that did not thrill the stodgy professors of mainstream academia.  He was more or less dismissed as a nutjob.  Most of his fame came after he died, when a new generation of fresh minds discovered an underappreciated genius.  His masterpiece, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, summed up the scholarly pilgrimage of his life.  He wrote it as cancer was drawing the curtains on his life.

The Pleistocene epoch was the era of ice ages.  It began between 2.6 and 1.6 million years ago (definitions vary), and concluded about 11,700 years ago.  It was during this time that the hominid line slowly evolved into Homo sapiens.  The Upper (or Late) Pleistocene spanned from 126,000 to 11,700 years ago, and it was the zenith of humankind, Shepard concluded.  Then, the weather warmed up and stabilized, farmers and herders fell out of the sky, and all hell broke loose.

The frantic 10,000-year whirlwind that transformed healthy wild foragers into berserk consumers is a mere eye blink in the human journey.  Our genome is mostly unchanged from the Pleistocene, but the cultures of civilization have mutated into a catastrophic snowballing nightmare.  (Old Norse tales described berserkers, warriors who became so possessed with battle rage that they couldn’t turn it off.  They killed everyone in sight, including family and friends.)

Back in the Pleistocene, our wild ancestors lived in a sacred world where everything, both animate and inanimate, was spiritually alive.  They were healthy, strong, and had a nutritious diet.  They lived in small groups, and were skilled at cooperation, conflict resolution, and sharing.  Women were not second-class.  Folks spent their entire lives in Big Mama Nature’s magnificent cathedral.

Wild people were highly attuned to their ecosystem.  They paid acute attention to every scent, sound, and flicker.  Because they were both predators and prey, survival required them to pay complete attention to reality, all the time.  Unlike the human livestock in corporate cubicle farms, our wild ancestors were intensely alive, and they lived authentically, in the manner for which evolution had fine-tuned them.  Even today, all newborns are wild animals, expecting to spend their lives in a wild world.  Sadly, every critter in the cubicle farm has the time-proven genes of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, but not their time-proven culture — a profound deviation.

Shepard increasingly comprehended the tragedy of what had been lost: “Through writing and contemplation over the years, I have somehow bonded firmly to those ancient ancestors, their society and ecology, and this kinship has guided my writing and thinking.”  He spent his boyhood hunting and fishing in rural Missouri.  Later he spent two decades in Los Angeles, and residing in a super-nightmare undoubtedly sharpened his perceptions of modernity’s pathology.

With the arrival of agriculture, folks shifted from being nature, to controlling nature.  We became dependent on the products of domestication, and population clusters swelled and bloated.  Domestication created “a catastrophic biology of nutritional deficiencies, alternating feast and famine, health and epidemic, peace and social conflict, all set in millennial rhythms of slowly collapsing ecosystems.”

Most animals have numerous offspring that mature rapidly, with few surviving to adulthood.  Humans have few offspring, we mature slowly, and our lives pass through many phases.  Wild cultures guided people through these phases, so that they could smoothly move down the path, living in balance from birth to death.  Today, 8-year olds spend much of their time surrounded by other 8-year olds.  In wild communities, they normally lived amidst people of all ages.  Every day was lived in the presence of the extended family.  Grandma and grandpa were never far away, nor were aunties and uncles.

Shepard believed that modern cultures do an especially terrible job at guiding newborns through their first two years, and through the crucial transition from adolescence to adulthood.  When a phase is not successfully completed, this failure can permanently arrest the development process.  “We slide into adult infantility and its neurotic symptoms,” a widespread problem in the modern world.  Many never develop a mature sense of social responsibility or emotional stability.  Imagine jamming 14 million Pleistocene hunter-gatherers into the culture of twenty-first century Los Angeles.

Shepard’s tour visited a wide variety of other topics.  His analysis of pastoralism gave me quite a thump.  Domestication replaced intelligent and powerful elk and deer with “total potato-heads” like cattle and sheep.  Potato-heads were not sacred wild beings worthy of respect, they were just personal property — status tokens — the bedrock foundation of every insane society.  The more potato-heads you own, the bigger man you are.  Nothing was more important than status, and it was impossible to have too much.

Once herders discovered the thrill of having enormous sweaty hairy horses between their legs, the age of warriors rose to great heights.  Mighty mounted warriors raided other camps to swipe their potato-heads, killing anyone who objected.  They also welcomed visiting raiders with spears, arrows, and impolite remarks.

When the Navajo acquired potato-heads from the Spanish, their traditional foraging culture was destroyed, according to James Mischke, a social scientist at Diné College.  Horses provided high mobility, and the raiding game led to an era of devastating tribal warfare.  “The rise at that time of the hero/warrior was far more disastrous for Navajo society than the advent of colonial militarism two centuries later.”

Eventually, the lords of the cavalry joined up with the lords of civilization to conquer vast empires of status tokens.  Captured people were penned and exploited.  No settlement was ever safe from the raids of mounted warriors.  Consequently, humans were reduced helpless flocks of sheep that required the protection of mighty vigilant shepherds. 

The Judeo-Christian culture was born in a pastoral world.  In my digital Bible, the words “flock” and “horse” each appear 100 times, and “shepherd” appears 83 times.  “As I live, saith the Lord GOD, surely because my flock became a prey, and my flock became meat to every beast of the field, because there was no shepherd…” (Ezekiel 34: 8). 

Our wild Pleistocene ancestors needed no shepherds, because their world was not roaring mad.  They were safe.  There were no hordes of mounted warriors to live in fear of, just assorted local predators.

This book is juicy because it presents us with ideas that are contrary to almost everything we believe — at a time when our crazy culture is ravaging the planet.  Shepard rips our worldview inside out, and the shocking result presents a reasonable imitation of coherence.  Is it possible that our modern consumer wonderland is not, in fact, paradise?  Could there really be better ways to live?  Are we mentally capable of wrapping our heads around other modes of perception?

Shepard clearly understood that it was impossible for us to march out of our freak show malls and promptly return to a Pleistocene way of life, but he did have powerful dreams that we could heal over time.  Right now, we could begin recovering forgotten social principles and spiritual insights.  Right now, we could begin weaning ourselves from addictions and illusions.

He knew that all humans share the same Pleistocene genome, and that our genetic memories all trace back to a common ancestral culture in Africa.  Long-term human survival requires that our cultures reintegrate with nature.  It’s important to understand how we got lost, and where we came from.  Shepard tosses us a lump of hopium: “We humans are instinctive culture makers; given the pieces, the culture will reshape itself.”  Will it?

Shepard, Paul, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Island Press, Covelo, California, 1998.

Beyond Zenith

From the zenith of the Upper Paleolithic, things began a downhill drift.  A number of species went extinct from climate change (ice ages) and/or over-hunting.  Every type of animal had effective survival strategies, like flying, fleeing, swimming, climbing trees, injecting venom, or counterattack.  These strategies were very old, and programmed into genes and instincts.  They worked.  They permitted a survival rate high enough to enable the continued existence of the species.

Clever humans invented ways of outwitting these defense mechanisms, and killing more and more animals.  Part of this was due to continuous improvement in hunting hardware — like spears, lances, nets, bows and arrows, traps, and snares.  We also improved our skills at exploiting enslaved animals. 

“The history of ecological catastrophe begins with the hound,” wrote Paul Shepard.  “The first domesticated wolves were not pets, guards, companions, or meals but fellow hunters.  With dogs, the first domesticated animals, the ‘conquering’ of nature started toward its final calamity.”  Super-sensitive canine noses were powerful assets for our hunting teams, and working in packs reduced the odds of prey escaping.

During my research, I was surprised to find that war dogs have long been used for killing human enemies — by the Romans, Britons, Greeks Babylonians, and others.  When two armies met, dozens of dogs, weighing up to 200 pounds (91 kg), deliberately underfed, would be set loose to attack, terrify, and kill both soldiers and horses.  War dogs were especially effective in the New World, where the Indians had darker skins, distinctive scents, and different attire than the incredibly sadistic Spaniards.  The dogs had an easier time identifying the designated prey, thus ripping to shreds far fewer white dudes by accident.

The trio of horses, dogs, and humans took hunting and warfare to a new and far more deadly dimension.  Marco Polo described Genghis Khan’s process for acquiring wild meat.  There were two flanks of hunters, each having 10,000 men and 5,000 great mastiff dogs.  The line of hunters would extend to the length of a full day’s journey, and no wild animal would escape their dragnet.  These hunts were like a bloody vacuum cleaner.

On the US plains, vast buffalo herds survived because these animals could run at speeds up to 35 miles per hour (56 km/h).  When Indians got horses, the buffalo lost their speed advantage, and became much easier to kill.  And then came the legions of white guys with rifles, on a sacred mission to eliminate all buffalo.

William T. Hornaday was born on the Indiana frontier in 1854, and he experienced the thunderous roar of millions of passenger pigeons passing overhead for hours.  He was of the last generation to know the incredible abundance of wildlife that once existed in the American west.  He witnessed the final conquest of all lands from coast to coast, and then he was horrified to observe a million bubbas with cheap rifles and shotguns blowing away every wild creature they could find, as fast as they could.  He wrote “that nowhere is Nature being destroyed so rapidly as in the United States.”

William M. Tsutsui wrote an essay about environmental impacts in wartime Japan.  By the end of World War II, pigs, chickens, rabbits, and dogs had almost disappeared.  Zoo animals had been eaten.  Many millions of songbirds were netted and consumed.  When allied soldiers landed in Japan, it was extremely rare to see a bird anywhere.  In 1945, the Japanese were clear-cutting almost 50 square miles (129 sq. km) of forest each week to make fuel for the war machine.  It took many tons of pine roots to make a single gallon of oil.  Rapid deforestation created many eco-nightmares.  Could this be a preview of our future?

Humans evolved in a world filled with abundant wildlife.  Wild animals played an important role in shaping what we became, mentally and physically.  Shepard noted that hunters were spellbound when observing wild animals, and could watch them for an hour, in a state of absolute fascination.  But the children of tourists at Yellowstone are quickly bored by the sight of a herd of elk.  These kids suffer from an immense deprivation of healthy contact with the natural world, multiplied by the stresses of living amidst crowds of humans, mostly strangers — not to mention their obsession with techno-gadgetry.

With the explosive expansion of the domesticated world, our children have largely lost contact with the shrinking realm of the normal, healthy, unspoiled wild.  Shepard was a dog owner, and he understood that many owners experience genuine affection for their pets.  But pets can never be, in any way, replacements for regular contact with free wild animals.  “Something is profoundly wrong with the human/animal pet relationship at its most basic level.”  Pets were “compensations for something desperately missing, minimal replacements for friendship in all of its meanings.”

In our daily lives, we are bombarded with countless consumer fantasies, including many from the highly profitable pet industry.  In these fantasies, pets have become living toys, and living toy fantasies are starkly different from the real experience of bringing an animal into your life.  Real live pets have little in common with Disney fantasies, and every year millions of people realize that they no longer want a real live pet in their lives.

For each human born in the US, 8 to 15 dogs are born, and 20 to 30 cats.  In Inside Passage, Richard Manning wrote, “Six million to seven million dogs and cats are killed in animal shelters every year.  The city of Los Angeles alone sends 200 tons of dogs and cats to rendering plants each month.”  Should this bother us more than the chicken industry, or mass murdering cockroaches with toxic poisons?

The pet industry has convinced us that feeding human food to pets is unhealthy, and that commercial pet food is excellent.  Laura Sevier explored the ingredients used in commercial pet food (including road kill, euthanized pets, livestock with cancer, moldy grain, etc.).  “Surveys show that overall pet health is declining almost as rapidly as human health.  Cats and dogs are now developing a vast list of degenerative diseases, including autoimmune diseases, allergies, heart disease, diabetes, chronic digestive problems joint and arthritic problems, and cancer.”  Nearly one in three British dogs are overweight, but thankfully diet pills are available (Yarvitan, Slentrol, etc.). 

One in every three dogs gets cancer, and cancer is the leading cause of death in dogs.  Cancer kills between 60 and 70 percent of golden retrievers.  The average bulldog lives a bit longer than six years, and the breed typically suffers from an unusual number of health problems.  In Thinking With Animals, James Serpell, an animal specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that “if bulldogs were the product of genetic engineering by agripharmaceutical corporations, there would be protest demonstrations throughout the Western world, and rightly so.”

Imagine what the pet industry could do with your children if breeders were given the freedom to produce trendy, and profitable new forms of Homo sapiens — adorable little kewpie doll critters with big eyes, or heavily-muscled 800 pound security guards.  Whenever I see a miniature dog, I shudder at what humans have done to wolves.

A study by Dr. Claire Corriden of the British Small Animal Veterinary Association concluded that “eighty per cent of dogs have one or more behaviour problems,” including hyperactivity, phobic behavior, separation anxiety, sleeping problems, anxiety, anorexia, self-mutilation, stress, and depression.

Australian journalist, Ruth Ostrow, was fascinated by the growing use of psych meds for pets and zoo animals.  There was a growing pandemic of mental problems in domesticated animals, including humans.  “It has something to do with depression and captivity, or a sense of captivity.”  There was a connection between freedom and happiness.  Healthy wild animals don’t become mentally unbalanced.  “When the soul feels free, a natural sense of wellbeing follows.  The power of freedom cannot be put into a tablet for animals or humans.”  (I love that last sentence!)  Nothing beats freedom!

So anyway, we’ve been reduced from an amazing zenith of total wildness and freedom to a depressing manmade world of domesticated humans and dogs, many overweight, suffering from degenerative diseases, and widespread mental illness.  Luckily, the temporary bubble of cheap energy is almost over, which will force the status quo into a fundamental reboot.  Our grandchildren will not suffer from the same extreme zaniness that we do, but they are sure to have interesting challenges of their own.

OK, your homework assignment is to imagine new ways of living that might become possible after the temporary bubble of abundant cheap energy is over.  Can you imagine paths to genuine sustainability?

To be continued.

Hornaday, William T., Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1913.

Manning, Richard, Inside Passage — A Journey Beyond Borders, Island Press, Washington, D.C., 2001.

Ostrow, Ruth, “Freedom Heals the Soul,” The Australian, September 15, 2012, p. 20.

Paul Shepard, The Others — How Animals Made Us Human, Island Press, Washington, 1996.

Polo, Marco and Rustichello of Pisa, The Travels of Marco Polo, Project Gutenberg, 2004 (Henry Yule’s third edition, 1903).

Serpell, James A., "People in Disguise: Anthromorphism and the Human-Pet Relationship,” Thinking With Animals, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006.

Sevier, Laura, “Should My Dog Eat Dog Food?” Ecologist, March 2009.

Tsutsui, William, “Landscapes in the Dark Valley: Toward an Environmental History of Wartime Japan,” Natural Enemy — Toward an Environmental History of War, Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2004, pp. 195-216.

The Others

Paul Shepard (1925-1996) was an original thinker who could soar far from the realm of mainstream thinking and view modern society from a perspective that saw the Pleistocene as the zenith of the human journey, and the high-water mark for the health of life on Earth.  Many professors can’t do this.

Why were we furiously destroying the planet?  Why was our society a crazy freak show?  The Myth of Progress had no sensible answers.  Shepard’s unconventional viewpoint actually provided a rational, but uncomfortable, explanation.  He documented his thinking in a series of books.  The Others: How Animals Made Us Human explored the many ways in which our development was influenced by evolving in a wild ecosystem, and how our growing isolation from wildness was harming us. 

Animals taught us hunting skills like tracking, stalking, and ambush.  They taught us how to sing and dance.  We wore their skins and feathers, and made tools with their bones and horns.  We ate them, and they ate us.  They were central archetypes in our spiritual world.  Our mental powers were largely shaped by paying intense attention to wild animals — their sounds, smells, colors, footprints, droppings.  Hunting made us the highly intelligent beings that we are.  We can’t be fully human if we do not live in wildness. 

The domestication of plants and animals dealt a devastating blow to the ancient harmony, and things have been going downhill ever since.  As the tamed world expanded, the wild world diminished, and the human world drifted farther from health and wholeness.  Hundreds of millions of children now have almost no contact with wildness, or even livestock.  When observing a herd of wild deer grazing in a park, they quickly become bored, and return to their electronic gadgets.

Wild people lived in a realm rich with spiritual beauty and mystery, and they spent their entire lives in paradise.  Tamed people created new religions that focused on salvation and escape.  Death was the ticket to heaven.  Creation was no longer sacred.  Animals became demons, machines without souls.  The world became a filthy and horrid realm of evil.  Tamed people perceived humans to be above and apart from all other life on Earth.  They devoted their lives to destroying forests, wildlife, fisheries, and soils.  They became masters of warfare, enslavement, and exploitation.

Shepard confessed to having been a dog owner, and he wrote almost two sentences about the positive qualities of dogs.  But more than 100 pages were devoted to explaining the negative aspects of dogs and other domesticated animals — they were deficient animals, monsters, biological slaves, and so on.

Evolution was a slow motion game.  Normally, if lions gradually became two percent faster, then gazelles would also become two percent faster.  Ecosystems collapse if predators can easily kill anything, or if prey can escape from any attack.  Shepard came to the surprising conclusion that the domestication of dogs was the crucial turning point: “The history of ecological catastrophe begins with the hound.” 

“Wolves didn’t decide to become dogs and don’t want to be dogs.”  In the early days, wild humans and wild wolves hunted together as informal partners.  Their cooperation benefitted both, so it became a habit.  Then the habit deteriorated into a master and slave relationship.  With this new alliance, the predator team suddenly made a big strategic advance, unsettling the ancient equilibrium with the prey team.  Since then, the disequilibrium has been snowballing, leading to our era of mass extinctions.

The domestication of dogs taught humans a dark lesson.  By utilizing confinement and coercion, wild animals could be transformed into dim, neurotic, submissive slaves.  By and by, we eventually proceeded to domesticate a number of other species.

Huge, powerful, and intelligent wild aurochs were domesticated into fat, stupid cattle.  Shepard had no compliments: “If the auroch was the most magnificent animal in the lives of our Pleistocene ancestors, in captivity it became the most destructive creature of all.”  “More than axe or fire, cattle-keeping is the means by which people have broken natural climaxes, converted forest into coarse herbage, denuded the slopes, and turned grasslands into sand.”

Shepard was especially horrified by the taming of horses.  The trio of horses, humans, and hounds turned into a powerful killing team, greatly increasing the effectiveness of hunting.  They also revolutionized warfare, enabled the creation of sprawling empires, and fueled sizzling growth in the casket making and grave digging sectors.  Horses stimulated big advances in soil mining.  They helped farmers eliminate forests, expand cropland, and feed an exploding population.  Thus, enslaved horses and dogs “became weapons against the earth.”

Throughout most of history, dogs have not enjoyed a good reputation.  “Over most of the planet the dog is a cur and mongrel scavenger, feral, half-starved, the target of the kick and thrown rock, often cruelly exploited as a slave.”  But the Industrial Revolution expanded the middle class, which took great interest in keeping pets as status symbols.  Disney has done much to alter our perception of animals by presenting them in an infantilized and humanized form — living toys.  In recent decades, pets have become a huge and profitable industry.  High priced four-legged fashion accessories are the latest thing.  When we bring animals into our world, we destroy them.

Shepard was disgusted by ever-growing cruelty to animals, but he had little respect for the animal rights movement.  It would be wiser to aim higher and focus on ecosystem rights.  “The ridiculous code of medicine that prolongs human life at any cost and advocates death control without birth control has damaged life on earth far more than all the fox hunters and cosmetic laboratories could ever do — perhaps beyond recovery — and leads us toward disasters that loom like monsters from hell.”

He believed that humans have not yet been domesticated, because our genes are nearly identical to the genes of our wild Pleistocene ancestors.  Thus, the genes that enabled our grand adventure in tool-making and world domination were forged by hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering.  Imagine what humans might become if we were able to spend the next 200,000 years sitting indoors on couches, engorging on calorie-dense food-like substances, suffering from anxiety and depression, whilst feasting on entertainment services.

Paul Shepard, The Others — How Animals Made Us Human, Island Press, Washington, 1996.

Nature and Madness

Paul Shepard wrote Nature and Madness to explore a perplexing question: “Why do men persist in destroying their habitat?”  Shepard came to the conclusion that modern European-American culture was the damaged offspring of a long process of psychological deterioration.

Obviously, modern consumers live and think in a manner that is radically different from our wild ancestors who lived relatively sustainably.  This change wasn’t the result of freaky genetic mutations or the normal process of evolution.  We still have Pleistocene genes.  Newborns are still wild animals who are ready and anxious to enjoy a good life among a clan of buffalo hunters. 

It wasn’t genes that changed us, it was culture.  Culture is a tribe’s software, and cultural evolution can happen a million times faster than genetic evolution — and that’s exactly what happened.  Few, if any, newborns are now born into wild, free, salmon eating cultures.  Alas, most are condemned to spend their days in the most destructive culture yet devised.  Poor babies! 

The process that leads to the development of healthy, happy, well-adjusted wild humans is a spiral stairway, based on a calendar.  There are time windows in which certain steps in the process can be completed.  If you’ve ever read the story of Amala and Kamala, the wolf-girls of India, you know that they missed developmental windows for learning how to speak, and walking upright.  Missed windows lead to incomplete development. 

Shepard thought that modern consumers were the offspring of an incomplete developmental process.  We were immature, infantile, psychologically crippled.  By Paleolithic standards, we were childish adults, suffering from arrested development.  He discussed our downward spiral by presenting us with four snapshots.

First, the domestication of plants and animals blindsided the human journey.  We no longer lived in a wild land.  We lived in farm country, an artificial human-controlled ecosystem.  Regular contact with wild animals had been an essential part of our psychological development process.  But farmers erased our wild teachers and replaced them with what Shepard referred to as a horde of goofies — passive, submissive, dim-witted domesticated animals.  We ceased venerating the sacred totemic spirits of the land, and replaced them with a human-like Earth Mother, who sometimes fed us generously, and sometimes didn’t.  We abandoned the leisurely lifestyle of nomadic foraging, and replaced it with miserable backbreaking toil that destroyed the health of both the farmer and the land.

Next came the desert fathers, patriarchal nomadic herders who pushed Earth Mother out of the temple, and replaced her with a powerful, aggressive, authoritarian Sky Father.  He sired three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Monotheism was a fountain of world-rejecting asceticism which “tore up the human psyche by its most ancient roots,” according to Shepard.  “The ‘cradle of civilization’ is also the cradle of fanatic ideology — witness the interminable desert wars…”

Next came the Reformation.  The Protestant fathers were fascinated, obsessed, and disgusted by sex, filth, corruption, sensuality, the natural world — life itself.  The puritan path led to estrangement from the body and the world.  It increased the attention paid to sin and evil.

Finally, he discussed the mechanists of industrial society.  They mostly spent their lives indoors in vast manmade urban environments that were densely populated by huge numbers of strangers.  Cities were breeding grounds for myriads of psychological problems.  The city was “the wilderness in disarray, a kind of pandemonium,” a realm of “menacing disintegration.”

Many of us are coming to comprehend that it is remarkably unclever to continue destroying our habitat.  Shepard spent years constructing his controversial explanation.  Whether or not you buy every argument, the primary thrust of the book is the rather obvious notion that our civilization has lost its marbles.  This realization is a mandatory step for any pilgrimage in search of healing, happiness, and sustainability.  We must abandon the belief that we are enjoying the zenith of the amazing human journey, because it locks us into a cage — there is no problem to fix, everything is always getting better.

Human beings thrived as salmon eaters and buffalo hunters.  We were healthy, whole, and happy when we lived in wild tribes in wild ecosystems.  Prince Charles wrote a line I will never forget: “In so many ways we are what we are surrounded by, in the same way as we are what we eat.”  It’s heartbreaking to watch insane zoo lions endlessly pacing back and forth in their concrete prison.  Long ago I read an article about condors.  It said that a wild and free condor soaring above the mountains was sacred, majestic, perfect.  But a condor held captive in a zoo was less — far less.  The essay concluded that condor-ness consisted of 10% condor and 90% place. 

After a thorough examination of the process of our decline, Shepard served us a solution that barely covers more than a page.  In terms of our human-ness, we still have the 10% human component — our genes.  What we’re missing is the 90% place.  Therefore, Shepard says, the solution is to raise our children in a manner similar to Neolithic society, in a wild ecosystem, so that they can fully experience a complete, normal, and healthy development process.  I was shocked when I first read this ridiculous and naïve idea.  But later, I realized that he was exactly correct.  It’s a perfect and brilliant solution, but it requires huge change.  Shepard pointed to the destination.  It’s up to us to find the route.

 

Shepard, Paul, Nature and Madness, University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, 1998.  Nature and Madness was originally published in 1982 by Sierra Club Books, but they dropped it because it was controversial.

Warning!  This book is written for gray-haired professors, not a general audience.  Nature and Madness is the opposite of easy to read.  Two beautiful and easy-to-read books that explore psychological development are The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, and The Human Cycle by Colin Turnbull.