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!

Forest Rewrite

Greetings!  The following is a rewrite of samples 25 and 41.  They will be combined into one section and moved much later in the manuscript, before Sacred Energy.  One more step closer to the end!

 SACRED FOREST

As mentioned earlier, after the last Ice Age wound down, glaciers and ice sheets melted and retreated, eventually allowing the expansion of tundra, grassland, and forest.  Grassland spurred the momentum of the human experiment by boosting herds of game.  In wooded regions, hunting was more challenging, and forests interfered with the growth of trendy new fads like herding and farming.

This is why civilization emerged in the grassland regions of the Fertile Crescent, where wild wheat and barley grew in great abundance, as did herds of wild game.  Bountiful lands made living easier.  They also had a prickly habit of stimulating population increase.  The uncomfortable pressure of crowding and friction inspired some folks to envision escape.  Maybe they could create a more pleasant life in the forest frontier of Europe’s wild west.  Some of them packed up and left.

In Europe, Barry Cunliffe noted that as the climate warmed, wild folks migrated northward from the Mediterranean.  By 7000 B.C., they were present in a number of locations.  In lean regions they were nomadic, and in places of abundance they settled down.  At the same time, forests were also migrating northward, encouraged by the changing climate. 

By around 4000 B.C., forest expansion stopped, when it finally reached regions that were too chilly for happy trees.  By this time, folks were raising crops and herding livestock in a number of permanent settlements.  These communities were expanding their fields and pastures, which required murdering happy trees.

Over time, this increasingly abusive relationship between the two legs and the tree people led to tremendous destruction.  In the good old days, forests originally covered 95 percent of west and central Europe.  Jed Kaplan and team wrote a paper on the prehistoric deforestation of Europe.  It included stunning maps that illustrated the shrinkage of forests between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 1850. [Look]  Deforestation went into warp drive between 1500 and 1850, driven by the rise of colonization, industrialization, and other dark juju.  The voracious human swarm was swerving deeper and deeper into mass hysteria. 

Humankind’s war on forests has been intensifying for several thousand years.  It’s a huge and complex subject.  Forests have suffered from many impacts, including firestick farming, agriculture, herding, industry, warfare, construction, consumerism, climate change, and population growth.

In this chapter, I’ll share a few snapshots from the ripped and torn photo album of the relationship between two legs and the tree people. 

Humbaba’s Roar

The Fertile Crescent was where plant and animal domestication shifted into high gear.  It was in this region that the first civilizations began popping up all over, like a painful burning rash of deforestation, soil destruction, slavery, patriarchy, exploitation, aggression, self-destruction, etc. 

It’s interesting that the oldest known written story is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the saga of Gilgamesh, a lunatic king who ruled over the city of Uruk, located along the Euphrates River in Sumer (now Iraq).  By around 3100 B.C., Uruk was the biggest metropolis in the world.  Today, Uruk is a crude pile of brown rubble sitting amidst a desolate barren moonscape. [Look]  It has an important message for folks today: “Don’t live like we did.”  But humankind is a herd of sleep walkers, wandering lost in a foggy dream world.

The story was originally scratched into clay tablets in cuneiform script.  Over the course of 2,000 years, components of the story unified into a single narrative by around 1800 B.C.  In the story, King Gilgamesh was a lecherous slime ball who worked hard to expand low-tech, muscle powered, organic agriculture along the Euphrates River (a process now known as Sustainable Development™). 

Gilgamesh was probably a real king who lived somewhere between 2900 and 2350 B.C.  The growth of Uruk led to massive deforestation along the valley, which unleashed immense erosion and flooding.  In the story, 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 catastrophic destruction is referred to as “Humbaba’s roar.”  It’s the first sound I hear every morning.

Beyond Hunting and Gathering

Earlier, I jabbered about how some hunter-gatherer cultures used firestick farming to boost the availability of wild game and special plants.  This involved limiting forest, and encouraging the expansion of customized grasslands.  The tree people were never fond of this.  Over time, this expansion encouraged the intensification of farming, herding, civilization, industry, and aggressive deforestation. 

Other cultures used a different survival strategy, mindful self-control.  They understood the need to pay close attention to reality, to recognize the signs of approaching limits, and to avoid scarcity by adjusting current patterns.  Sometimes reproduction taboos were used to reduce the birth rate.  Mindfulness could avoid having an abusive relationship with the tree people, but modern society displays little interest in it.  It’s not good for jobs or the economy.

Let’s take a quick peek at the relationships that several cultures had with the tree people.  (Prehistoric dates are not certain, different sources cite different dates.)

Britain

When the glaciers of the last ice age began melting, sea levels were much lower than today.  England was connected by dry land to Ireland, Scandinavia, and continental Europe.  Barry Cunliffe noted that most of Western Europe essentially became a vast forest.  This expansion of forests displaced natural grazing land, which affected the abundance of large herbivores.

By 9000 B.C., hunter-gatherers had apparently made some small clearings in the forest to attract game.  By 6500 B.C., rising sea levels had made Britain an island, like it is today.  It was no longer connected by dry land to neighboring regions.  By 4500 B.C., when farmers and herders began to trickle in, Britain was largely a forest, except for the highlands.  Hunters dined on red deer, wild boar, aurochs, and so on.  By 3000 B.C., substantial clearances for cropland and pasture were increasing.  By A.D. 1100, just 15 percent of Britain was forest.  By 1919, it was five percent.  Britannia was essentially stripped naked, a ghastly painful open wound.

J. B. MacKinnon mentioned a story about Mark Fisher, a British scientist who visited the U.S.  From an overlook in the White Mountain National Forest, he could gaze down on 800,000 acres (323,748 ha) of woodland, an overwhelming experience.  He burst into tears and had a long, hard cry.  At Yellowstone, he saw wolves in the wild for the first time, and he dropped to his knees.  Fisher dreams of rewilding the U.K. — introducing long lost critters like beavers, lynx, wolves, and so on.

Ireland

The story in Ireland was similar to Britain in many ways, but Ireland got much more rainfall, annually receiving 50 to 200 inches (127-508 cm) of precipitation.  The wet climate encouraged the growth of lush temperate rainforests.  Frederick Aalen noted that early hunter-gatherers arrived about 8,000 years ago, when the isle was covered with a dense unbroken forest.  Folks lived along coastlines, lakes, and streams.  In the forest they created some openings to attract game, but these were apparently small in scale.

Then came a paradise-killing event of dark juju.  Farmers and herders began arriving around 3500 B.C., and the war on trees commenced.  By the end of the 1600s, the destruction of native forests was nearly complete.  When Aalen wrote in 1978, only three percent of the island was occupied by natural forest or tree farms. 

Deforestation had many unintended consequences.  William MacLeish noted that in the good old days, the rainforest wicked up a lot of moisture from the land, and then released it into the passing breezes, which carried it away.  When the trees were gone, this dispersal process wheezed.  Meanwhile, the Gulf Stream faithfully continued delivering warm rainy weather from the Caribbean.  So, the heavy rain continued, and the water remained where it landed.  Consequently, water tables rose, bogs spread, and the ground turned acid.

Deforestation blindsided the rainforest ecosystem.  The new manmade grassland ecosystem seemed to be a perfect place for raising enslaved livestock.  Winters were mild, the grass was green all year, and there was no need to grow, cut, and store hay for winter feed.  Barns were not needed to protect livestock from the cold.  Milk and meat were available all year round.  Herding worked well, but the very rainy climate made it rather risky to grow grain, despite the rich soils.

In A.D. 1185, King Henry II sent Giraldus Cambrensis to visit Ireland and produce a report.  He mentioned many beautiful lakes, where some of the fish were larger than any he had ever seen before.  Common freshwater fish included salmon, trout, eels, and oily shad.  Along the coast, saltwater fish were abundant.  The woods were home to “stags so fat that they lose their speed.”  There were numerous boars and wild pigs.  Wolves had not yet been fully exterminated.  He said it was common to see the remains of extinct Irish elks.  Their remains were usually found in bogs, often in groups.

The herding life allowed the Irish people to survive, sing, and dance.  They did not have the slightest interest in the dreary backbreaking work of agriculture, a stupid fad.  Cambrensis felt great pity for the uncivilized natives.  “Their greatest delight was to be exempt from toil, and their richest possession was the enjoyment of liberty.”

Maximum Security Forests

Rhineland

Julius Caesar roamed around Western Europe and wrote a report in 51 B.C.  He was the emperor of Rome, and his mission was to expand the Empire, collect tribute payments, acquire military conscripts, and vigorously spank uncooperative subjects.  During this campaign, he focused his attention on provinces of Celtic people in what is now France, Belgium, and England. 

He had also hoped to conquer the wild Germanic tribes that lived on the east side of the Rhine, but this fantasy promptly came to an end.  The Rhine was a large, treacherous, swift moving river.  No bridges.  It took a lot of effort and luck to get from one side to the other, and once you set foot on the German side, a super violent welcoming party was eager to immediately cut you to bloody bits.  

Each tribe preferred to keep their homelands surrounded with a barrier of uninhabited wilderness.  The Germans were primarily wandering herders who built no permanent settlements.  They had no granaries loaded with valuable food for raiders to swipe, and no roads to make invasions quick and easy.  When danger threatened, the people and their herds vanished into the deep forest mists.

For the German herders, nothing would have been dumber than to eliminate the vast ancient forests that provided this security system.  The Roman legions were fine-tuned for open battlefield combat, where heavily armored lads attacked in rigid formations.  Wild Germanic tribes excelled at hit-and-run guerilla warfare.

On the west side of the Rhine were the Celts of Gaul (France), who were subjects of the Empire.  Their forests were mostly gone, roads crisscrossed the land, and folks were forced to engage in the backbreaking misery of muscle powered organic agriculture.  Their granaries stored the result of months of hard work. 

Stored grain was treasure that villainous raiders found to be irresistibly tempting.  It was impossible for farmers to hide or quickly move their treasure.  Raiding was popular, because it was much easier than honest work.  Consequently, highly vulnerable farm communities required constant military protection, for which they had to pay dearly.  In several Western European languages, the words for “road” and “raid” evolved from a common root. 

So, the Celts that Caesar described did not reside in the primordial forest that their wild ancestors once enjoyed.  They were the opposite of wild and free.  Peasants were essentially wealth generating livestock controlled by local strong-arm elites.  On the east side of the Rhine, the Germanic tribes had not destroyed their forests.  They were alive and well, wild and free.

Tacitus was a Roman historian who wrote Germania in A.D. 98 (150 years after Caesar).  It described several fiercely independent tribes of that era.  They preferred the thrills and excitement of raiding to the drudgery of farming.  “They even think it base and spiritless to earn by sweat what they might purchase with blood.”  Perhaps they learned this effective and profitable strategy from the Romans. 

Tacitus wrote a fascinating description of the vast Hercynian forest.  From the Rhine, it spanned east, across modern Germany, to the Carpathians, and all the way to Dacia (Romania).  A quick traveler could cross the forest north to south in nine days, but it was very long, from east to west.  Caesar noted, “There is no man in the Germany we know who can say that he has reached the edge of that forest, though he may have gone forward sixty days’ journey, or who has learnt in what place it begins.” 

Pliny also mentioned it:  “The vast trees of the Hercynian forest, untouched for ages, and as old as the world, by their almost immortal destiny exceed common wonders.”  In those days, there were still a number of primeval forests in the world. 

Scandinavia

In Sweden, forests also provided freedom and security for the common folks.  Vilhelm Moberg celebrated the fact that peasant society in Sweden had largely remained stable and functional for 5,000 years.  In most of the regions of Europe, peasants endured many centuries of misery under the heavy fist of feudalism.  Many Norse and Swede settlements were lucky to be protected by their vast, dense, rugged, roadless forests.  It’s simply impossible to kill or rob invisible folks who live in unknown wilderness settlements.  Moberg glowed with gratitude for his nation’s forests, which allowed the rustic peasants to preserve their freedom until the industrial era metastasized.

Aggressive invaders from elsewhere found no roads, and soon became perfectly lost.  Behind every bush might be a man with a crossbow.  The local folks knew every hill and rock in the woods.  They could pick the ideal time and place to strike.  When trouble was advancing, they gathered as many belongings as possible, and vanished into the greenery.

My Norse ancestors told the story of Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods.  Some creepy gods had temporarily subdued nature, but in this great battle, the forces of nature rubbished the gods, and cleansed the Earth with a great flood.  Peter Andreas Munch described the dawn of a new era: “Out of the sea there rises a new earth, green and fair, whose fields bear their increase without the sowing of seed.” 

A man and woman survived.  From them sprang a new race of people.  A few minor deities also survived.  One was Vidar, a son of Odin (Viðr means forest).  Vidar was known for being strong.  His home was in a vast and impenetrable forest.  Rasmus Björn Anderson wrote that Vidar was the god of wild primordial forests, where neither the sound of the ax, nor the voice of man, was ever heard.  He is silent, dwells far away from, and exercises no influence upon, the works of man, except as he inspires a profound awe and reverence.  This was a culture filled with a deep respect and reverence for creation, in its wild and unspoiled form.  Forests were holy places. 

Forest Mining

In the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding, forests had served as a limit to growth — grain, grass, and herds don’t thrive in shady places.  Deforestation cleared away the towering giants and let the sunbeams shine in.  When metal axes came into common use, lumberjacks could reduce vast tracts of primeval forest into rotting stumps and erosion gullies.  Early villages and cities were built with the mutilated carcasses of countless tree people.  The rise of civilizations would not have been possible without innovative advances in unsustainable forest mining and soil mining. 

George Perkins Marsh was a brilliant American hero that few modern folks have heard of.  He published Man and Nature in 1864.  This gentleman from Vermont served as the U.S. Minister to Italy.  While overseas, he visited the sites of many once thriving civilizations in the Fertile Crescent.  What he observed was terrifying and overwhelming.  Each of them had seriously damaged their ecosystems and self-destructed in similar ways.

Massive levels of soil erosion created surreal catastrophes.  He saw ancient seaports that were now 30 miles (48 km) from the sea.  He saw ancient places where the old streets were buried beneath 30 feet (9 m) of eroded soil.  He stood in mainland fields, 15 miles (24 km) from the sea, which were formerly located on offshore islands.  He saw the sites of ancient forests, formerly covered with three to six feet (1-2 m) of precious living soil, where nothing but exposed rock remained. 

Far worse, Marsh was acutely aware that every day, back home in America, millions were currently working like crazy to repeat the same mistakes, glowing with patriotic pride at the temporary prosperity they were creating on their one-way joyride to oblivion.  In a noble effort to cure blissful ignorance, he fetched pen, ink, and paper and wrote a book to enlighten his growing young nation.

Sales were respectable for a few decades, but America did not see the light and rapidly reverse course.  Folks thought that the cure was worse than the disease (like today’s climate emergency).  A radical shift to intelligent behavior would not have been good for the highly unintelligent lifestyle.  Tom Brown’s mentor, Stalking Wolf, lamented that our culture was “killing its grandchildren to feed its children.”

Marsh’s book has stood the test of time fairly well.  It presented a wealth of vital information, none of which I learned about during 16 years of education.  Forests keep the soil warmer in winter, and cooler in the summer.  Springtime arrives later in deforested regions, because the land takes longer to warm up.  Forests absorb far more moisture than cleared lands, so after a good rain, runoff is limited, and flash floods are less likely.

Deforestation dries out the land.  Lake levels drop, springs dry up, stream flows decline, and wetlands are baked.  Back in the fourth century, when there were more forests, the water volume flowing in the Seine River was about the same all year long.  When Marsh visited 14 centuries later, water levels could vary up to 30 feet (9 m) between dry spells and cloudbursts.  In 1841, not a drop of rain had fallen in three years on the island of Malta, after the forest had been replaced with cotton fields.  And on and on.  The book is a feast of essential knowledge. 

Walter Lowdermilk was deeply inspired by Marsh’s work.  In the 1920s and 1930s, he visited China, Western Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.  His mission was to study soil erosion, and write a report for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  They created a short booklet that was very readable and filled with stunning photographs.  Over a million copies of it were printed.  Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years is available as a free download. [Link]

Industrial Wood

Marsh generally discussed the environmental impacts of deforestation that he had observed at the sites of extinct or wheezing civilizations.  These catastrophes were usually the unintended consequences of clearing forest to expand cropland or grazing land.  Over the passage of centuries, clever people discovered many new ways that dead trees could be used to generate wealth and power. 

John Perlin wrote an outstanding history of deforestation.  It’s a modern book (1989), and much easier to read than Marsh.  It devotes more attention to the political, military, industrial, and commercial motivations for forest mining.  It visits locations including Mesopotamia, Crete, Greece, Cyprus, Rome, Venice, England, Brazil, and America. 

Dead trees were used to build houses, bridges, temples, and palaces.  Wood was made into fences, docks, wagons, furniture, tools, and barrels.  It heated homes and fueled industries that produced metal, glass, bricks, cement, pottery, lime, sugar, and salt.  Staggering quantities of wood were consumed by industry.  Very importantly, wood was used to build cargo, fishing, and war ships.  Navies sped the spread of colonies, empires, trade networks, and epidemics.

Cultures that mindfully limited their numbers, and continued living in a low impact manner, had no future.  Their thriving unmolested forests looked like mountains of golden treasure in the eyes of civilized sailors cruising by — and civilized people cannot tolerate the sight of unmolested forests; it drives them nuts.  In other words, if you didn’t destroy your forest, someone else would. 

Perlin described the copper industry on Cyprus in around 1300 B.C.  Copper was used to make bronze, which was in high demand during the Bronze Age.  For each 60 pound (27 kg) copper ingot produced, four acres of pine (120 trees) had to be reduced to six tons of charcoal.  Each year, the copper industry on Cyprus consumed four to five square miles (10-13 km²) of forest.  At the same time, the general society consumed an equal amount of forest for heating, cooking, pottery, lime kilns, and so on.  Can you guess what inevitably happened to the forests, soils, industry, and affluence of Cyprus?

Shortages also affected the use of firewood.  In chilly regions, a city of one square mile might depend on 50 square miles of forest to provide the firewood it consumed year after year.  In the good old days, this was often possible.  Later, as forest area decreased, and population grew, limits spoiled the party.

If Perlin’s work sounds interesting, but you can’t get his book, a similar book is available as a free download.  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.  The free PDF is HERE.  It is not available in some countries, for copyright reasons, but I once saw a pirate copy on Google.

New World Forest

Richard Lillard described how early European visitors experienced the ancient forests of North America.  When standing on mountaintops, they were overwhelmed by the fact that as far as they could see in any direction there was nothing but a wonderland of trees.  The intense experience of perfect super-healthy wildness was surreal, overwhelming, almost terrifying. 

Walking beneath the canopy at midday, the forest floor was as dark as a cellar, few sunbeams penetrated through the dense foliage.  At certain times, some sections of the forest were absolutely silent, a spooky experience that bewildered the white folks.  They saw vast numbers of chestnut trees that were nearly as big as redwoods. 

British visitors to early settlements were stunned to see amazing luxury — wooden houses, sidewalks, fences, and covered bridges!  Commoners were free to hunt large game because the forest was not the exclusive private property of anyone.  In the old country, their diet majored in porridge.  Now it could major in wild grass-fed meat.  Commoners were free to cut as much firewood as they wished, and keep their cottages warmer than the castles of royalty.  Michael Williams mentioned one winter night when the king of France sat in his great hall.  He was shivering as he ate dinner, the wine in his glass was frozen. 

William Cronon noted that settlers with sharp axes went crazy on the forests, cutting them down as if they were limitless.  Lots of excellent wood was simply burned, to clear the way for progress.  They built large houses, and heated them with highly inefficient open fireplaces.  By 1638, Boston was having firewood shortages.

As clearing proceeded, summers got hotter, and winters colder.  As stream flows dropped in summer, water-powered mills had to shut down, sometimes permanently.  In winter, upper levels of the soil froze solid on cleared land, and snow piled up on top of it.  When springtime came, the frozen land could not absorb the melt, so the runoff water zoomed away, and severe flooding was common.

Stewart Holbrook wrote about the fantastically destructive obliteration of ancient forests in the U.S. upper Midwest.  On the same day as the great Chicago fire, October 8, 1871, a firestorm obliterated the backwoods community of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, killing five times as many people as in Chicago.  On this day, the new word “firestorm” was added to the English vocabulary. 

Holbrook interviewed John Cameron, an eyewitness to the Peshtigo fire.  Cameron noted that there had been little snow the previous winter, and just one rain between May and September.  Streams were shallow, and swamps were drying up.  Logging operations left large amounts of slash in the woods (piles of discarded limbs and branches).  Slash piles were eliminated by burning, even when it was very hot, dry, windy, and extraordinarily stupid. 

The morning of October 8 was hotter than anyone could remember, and the air was deadly still.  At noon, the sun disappeared.  By nightfall the horizon was red, and smoke was in the air, making their eyes run.  At 9 P.M., Cameron heard an unusual roaring sound.  The night sky was getting lighter by the minute.  A hurricane force wind howled through.  Suddenly, swirling slabs of flames were hurtling out of nowhere and hitting the bone dry sawdust streets.  In a flash, Peshtigo was blazing — maybe five minutes. 

Cameron saw horses, cattle, men, and women, stagger in the sawdust streets, then go down to burn brightly like so many flares of pitch-pine.  He winced when he spoke of watching pretty young Helga Rockstad running down a blazing sidewalk, when her long blond hair burst into flame.  The next day, he looked for her remains.  All he found was two nickel garter buckles and a little mound of white-gray ash.

The river was the safest place that night.  People kept their heads underwater as much as possible, so the great sheets of flame wouldn’t set their heads on fire.  Within an hour, the town was vaporized.  Big lumberjacks were reduced to streaks of ash, enough to fill a thimble.  In this village of 2,000, at least 1,150 died, and 1,280,000 acres (518,000 ha) went up in smoke.

Also on October 8, 1871, numerous big fires raged across the state of Michigan, where it had not rained in two months.  These fires destroyed 2.5 million acres (1 million ha) — three times more timberland than the Peshtigo blaze.  This was an era of countless huge fires.  For example, in just the state of Wisconsin, tremendous fires destroyed huge areas in 1871, 1880, 1891, 1894, 1897, 1908, 1910, 1923, 1931, 1936.

Paul Shepard wrote, “Sacred groves did not exist when all trees were sacred.”  In 1990, I chatted on an internet bulletin board with a Shawnee man named Nick Trim.  He talked about a project 300+ years ago, along the Mississippi.  In a kindly gesture, some French soldiers were teaching the Shawnee how to build log cabins.  This required cutting trees.  The natives were very nervous about chopping down living trees, because they were often home to spirit beings, the little people.

To avoid spiritual retaliation, a respectful process was essential.  They knocked on each tree, described the situation, and explained why they wanted to take lives.  This was followed by a ceremony, prayers, and apologies to the trees.  Then they waited a day or so, to give any spirit residents adequate time to find a comfortable new home.  This took so long that the French lost their patience, and the project ended.

Peter Wohlleben, a German wood ranger, developed an extremely intimate relationship with the forest he cared for, and wrote a precious celebration of his love for it.  Modern folks who spend most of their lives in civilized space stations almost never get to know the tree people.  Some do not eat meat because they sense that animals have souls.  In an interview, Wohlleben conveyed a deeper understanding.  Killing an animal is the same as killing a tree.  He once oversaw a plantation of trees lined up in straight rows, evenly spaced.  It was a concentration camp for tree people.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 51

 [Note: This is the fifty-first 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.

[Continued from sample 50]

Plan B

And now, dearest reader, it’s time for a brief message from your humble storyteller.  Hi!  I’m going nuts!  The plan here was to compress some super-significant trends of the last 10,000 years down to a lumpy chubby chapter.  It’s a journey that wanders from wild, free, and happy to the nightmarish whirlwinds of the twenty-first century.  It’s about unconditional surrender to those who control us, and to the beliefs we’re expected to profess.  It’s about wealth and obsession with status.  It’s about disconnection from nature, disintegration of traditional wild cultures, and a free-fall into self-destructive meaninglessness without a parachute.

I’m far more comfortable talking about logical and linear history — names, dates, places, descriptions, consequences.  But this chapter spends some time poking and squeezing a number of slippery and slithery mental inventions that smell like abstractions, mental fabrications — freedom, control, progress, success, etc.  I am not a philosopher.  Abstractions are not my forte, and I’ve burned up too many hours trying to envision a clever approach here.

I would love it if this rowdy mob of ideas would simply go to their assigned seats and, in an orderly manner, stand up and introduce themselves to you.  They aren’t interested.  They aren’t obedient robots.  So, Plan B is to flip through a series of snapshots, an exhibition of impressions, ideas, trends, and curiosities.  What follows is not logical and linear, it’s more random, intertwined, and meandering.  Let’s see what happens.  Do your best.  Here we go.

Wild Oneness

Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers, living in small nomadic groups.  Survival required cooperation, sharing, and the prompt resolution of conflicts.  They were egalitarian, everyone enjoyed equal worth — women, men, young, and old.  Nobody gave orders, or obeyed orders.  Nobody went hungry unless everyone did.  Folks who became infected with pride, and got big headed, were mocked and shunned until they recovered.  Healthy communities could not tolerate the disharmony generated by self-centered oddballs. 

Over the course of two million years, hominins fine-tuned the dance of small group survival in tropical grasslands.  This long and gentle path carefully guided the evolution of our bodies and minds.  Each band of hunter-gatherers operated with a conscious identity of “we.”  They thought like a group, not a bucketful of anxious, irritated, self-oriented individuals.

Similarly, the relationship between bands of hunter-gatherers and the surrounding family of life also consisted of a strong sense of “we,” of oneness.  Richard Nelson spent time with the Koyukon people of Alaska, who were the opposite of arrogant human supremacists.  They told him, “Every animal knows way more than you do,” which was true.  Wild critters perfectly understood the art of natural survival.  It was impossible for tropical primates to survive in Alaska without manmade technology that compensated for their numerous physiological limitations.

Nelson beautifully described their attitude of profound respect and reverence.  “Traditional Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes.  A person moving through nature — however wild, remote, even desolate the place may be — is never truly alone.  The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified.  They feel.  They can be offended.  And they must, at every moment, be treated with proper respect.  All things in nature have a special kind of life, something unknown to contemporary Euro-Americans, something powerful.”

Herds and Property

Among tropical wild people, personal property was minimal, usually no more than could be carried in both hands — spears, nets, pouches, feathers, baskets, bits of clothing, and so on.  Nobody coveted simple stuff like this.  It did not make people crazy, greedy, or homicidal.  There was no hoarding.  A hunter would get no benefit from owning 900 spears.  Spears were too quick and easy to replace.

For hunter-gatherers, status was not based on property, it was based on their special knowledge or abilities — healing, storytelling, tracking, hunting, conflict resolution, shamanic gifts, and so on.  Social status was about respect — not power, authority, competition, or control.  Everyone knew who was really good at certain stuff, and they received honor for their gifts.  This form of status was normal and healthy. 

Herding was a different game.  Managing livestock was a constant responsibility.  Animals had to be guided to water and fresh grass.  They had to be protected from predation.  Wild carnivores had to be exterminated at every opportunity.  Male animals not needed for breeding services were mellowed out via castration.  Some nomads regularly collected milk from lactating females.  Herders assisted when animals were birthing.  To avoid overgrazing, and to discourage losses from escape and predation, there were limits to herd size.  Thus, a relationship formed between herders and the group of critters they regularly oversaw.  Master and slave.  Controller and controlled. 

Hunting produced meat via skill and good luck.  Herding produced meat via totalitarian control.  The concept of personal property expanded to include valuable animal slaves, a source of nourishing life energy.  Each critter in my herd became a status symbol, and my social rank was based on the value of the status symbols I possessed.  You are what you own.  This was a new and radical shift in the human saga.  It inspired a sense of power and omnipotence, an amazingly brilliant smarty-pants, Superman.  For the first time in the human saga, Superman could have ongoing life and death control over tons of living meat.  Whoa! 

My ownership of an easily replaced spear or loincloth had trivial importance.  On the other hand, my ownership of 40 large herbivores was a matter of tremendous significance.  This set me apart from (and above) someone who merely owned two goats.  More is better could lead to notions that I am better.  Superman had no immunity to a highly contagious mania known as status fever, which reduces kind and decent people to obnoxiously ambitious nutjobs.

Status Fever

Over time, status fever spread to epidemic levels in some cultures, becoming a primary motivator for individuals and groups.  It led to the emergence of many powerful nomadic tribes and empires, motivated by swarms of screaming demons.  More is better, by any means necessary!  Grab as much as you can.

Today, of course, billions suffer from advanced stages of multi drug resistant status fever, and most of them are not livestock herders.  Countless things have now been reduced to silly status trinkets that delirious consumers find irresistible, including clothing, jewelry, shoes, cell phones, jumbo TVs, appliances.  It’s a never-ending lifelong treadmill of resource intensive acquisitions, upgraded at every opportunity — bigger houses, fancier cars, cooler boats, exotic vacations, and on and on.  More!  More!  More!

Our culture celebrates this status seeking mentality, and encourages youngsters to spend their lives striving to increase their status display to the highest degree possible.  We are expected to continuously strive to hoard more than our neighbors, more than our parents and siblings, and to own more stuff than we owned last year.  Obviously, this is a ridiculously unsustainable dead end way of life.  If we weren’t raised in consumer society, this game would appear to be utterly idiotic and insane (and it is).

Stan Rowe perceived that consumers are raging narcissists, spellbound by their own image, imprisoned in an introspective cage — too much time spent before the mirror.  Their culture has become disconnected from an ancient relationship with nature and the family of life.  Many devote their entire lives to acquiring and discarding unnecessary stuff, hoping to someday find inner peace.  They are trying to fill the vacuum created by their loss of wildness, freedom, and functional community.  It’s an ineffective attempt to suppress a gnawing hollowness in their lives.

William Cronon compared and contrasted Native American society with the culture of European colonists.  Indians enjoyed far greater affluence because they were in an intimate long-term relationship with their ecosystem, and the things they considered to be needs were minimal.  They didn’t need a luxurious post and beam trophy home with a stone fireplace and a four horse garage.  When you have few wants, the path to prosperity is short and easy.  Even the least industrious wanted nothing. 

Colonists, on the other hand, had an insatiable hunger for an infinite number of frivolous needs.  They had thick black smoke pouring out their ears from raging brain-fires of status fever.  Their culture had a demonic technology called money, which made it much easier to exchange commodities, make profits, accumulate durable wealth, and soar away to daffy mental orgasms of pride, achievement, success.

Back home in Europe, more than 1,500 years of forest clearing had eliminated large regions of ancient woodlands.  Wildlife was severely depleted.  Rivers formerly loaded with salmon had become sewage canals.  Cities were incubators of infectious diseases.  America blew their twisted little minds.  They could make so much <bleeping> money if they destroyed everything they could, as quickly as possible.  They imagined that the supply of valuable resources was beyond limitless.  Most of this astonishing wealth was free for the taking.  Whee!

Robin Wall Kimmerer noted that among the Anishinabe, howling winter winds are associated with the Windigo, a legendary monster with a heart of ice.  It is the primal survival instinct in that rises during the Hunger Moon, and then swerves out of control, from need to greed.  It eats until hunger fades, but doesn’t stop.  Windigo is a selfish spirit that doesn’t know when it has taken too much.  It is the insatiable hunger of the corporation, the greed freak, and the maniacal consumer.  It’s daunting to see that much of modern society has now become thoroughly entranced by the Windigo spirit.

Different cultures assigned different status value to different types of property.  For California Indians, gold was just an ordinary type of stone.  Raymond Dasmann noted that they would happily trade ordinary gold nuggets for glass beads.  Pale faced Americans, on the other hand, went absolutely delirious with status fever at the sight of gold.  There was nothing they would not do to stuff the shiny stones into their pouches.  They washed away many mountains with hydraulic mining.  The Gold Rush brought people from everywhere.  “The Indians were deliberately decimated.”  In 1765, there may have been 130,000 in California.  In 1850, maybe 85,000.  By 1852 just 31,000 were left.

John Tanner was born in Kentucky in 1780, and captured by Indians at age 9.  He spent the next 30 years living on the wild side.  In one of his yarns, he jabbered about his favorite horse.  It had been stolen from another tribe by an aggressive war party.  The successful raiders had returned with 180 horses.  “In this excursion they had been absent seven months.  They had fallen upon and destroyed one village, and taken one hundred and fifty scalps, besides prisoners.”

Sitting Bull was not the slightest bit fond of insane colonizers.  “The love of possessions is a disease with them.”  A century ago, Peter Fruechen mentioned a comment from a mystified Eskimo, “You white people don’t really know how to do without things and still be happy.”  On another occasion, an Eskimo snarled at Knud Rasmussen.  “You are so strange, you white men!  You collect things you will never require, and you cannot leave even the graves alone.”

An old hippy friend of mine, Hitch-hiker John, observed American society with a mix of horror and amazement.  “They are never distracted by ideas,” he said.  “Brainwashed people have no issues — they don't know how to think.  The sole focus of their lives is just one all-consuming question: how can I get what I want?”

Full Granaries

In the good old days, wild lands were like commons, freely open to hunters, foragers, and all other wildness.  Folks were welcome to wander, explore, and help themselves to whatever they fancied, because the wild buffet was free to all, usually.  In some locations, groups did establish limits that defined the boundaries of their hunting territory, and enforced them.  When these limits were respected, there was less irritation that could lead to hurt feelings, conflict, and injuries.

Like herders, farmers were also possessed by a burning desire for ownership, and the status it conveyed.  They performed backbreaking labor to reduce wild forests and grasslands to cropland and pasture, land that was no longer freely open to one and all (No Trespassing!).  The transformation from wild to private typically involved erasing much of the healthy wild ecosystem, and replacing it with a highly controlled unsustainable manmade soil mining operation. 

Paul Shepard noted that the concept of controlling pests, animals, plants, and predators was relatively new.  “If the farmer can destroy his competitors, be they beetles, fungi, birds, or deer, and the pastoralist-rancher can kill lions and wolves, they will be inclined to do so.  Wild things become adversaries; they take up space, sunlight, or water that the farmer can use for his crops, or they invade the crops, eating, trampling, or infecting them with disease.”  Nature became an opponent, something to conquer and subdue.  This land is my land.  My harvest is stored in my granary.  My livestock are grazing on my pasture.

Raiders and Defenders

Wild folks let wild meat critters run free and enjoy their happy lives.  Wild game didn’t need to be provided with food, water, protective shelter, and security guards.  There was no need to cut, dry, and store hay.  When meat was needed, hunters went to work.  Similarly, wild food-producing plants were allowed to grow however they wished.  There was no need to engage in tedious backbreaking work. 

In essence, the simple hunter-gatherer way of life was about going out and getting what you needed, when you needed it, and leaving the rest alone.  All they needed was enough, and nothing more.  In the days before status fever epidemics swept through their homeland, they were genuine, good old-fashioned conservatives.  Leave the world in no worse shape than the day you were born (and better, if possible).

Big Mama Nature had zero interest in regularly serving lavish all you can eat banquets for wild humans.  As with all other critters, it was their responsibility to invest modest amounts of time and effort every week, to acquire their nutrients.  This approach could have a future.  The ecosystem did not need to be obliterated.

Compared to tropical regions, living in colder lands was more challenging.  There were lean periods every year, so food preservation and storage increased the odds for survival.  As discussed earlier, the domestication of plants (farming) and animals (herding) was essentially developed and intensified north of the tropics.  Domestication encouraged deforestation, soil erosion, overgrazing, wildlife destruction, population growth, tension, conflict, infectious disease, and so on.

Both farmers and herders invested immense amounts of time and effort accumulating stashes of essential life energy — edible nutrients made by domesticated plants and animals.  In a sense, their stashes were like treasure chests, collections of precious valuables.  The emergence of these new and unusual treasure chests triggered a huge turning point in the tropical primate saga.  On one dark and stormy night, a demon whispered an evil idea into the ear of a demented nutjob: stealing treasure chests required far less effort than creating them.  Oh my goodness!  Why didn’t I think of that?

Laborious drudgery was for scroungers, dolts, and slaves.  Clever exploitation trumps hard work.  A Berber proverb proclaimed, “Raiding is our agriculture.”  So, raiding became a respectable and manly profession.  Its frequent success created a need for the treasure makers to invent the warrior profession, in order to protect their stored wealth.  The raiding game led to centuries of conflict, which spilled rivers of blood.  It persists to this day, as a furious unlimited full-scale war on the family of life.

Sedentary communities were chained to a location.  They could not rapidly grab their treasure and flee.  So, they had to protect their towns and villages with palisades, walls, fortresses, moats.  Walled cities protected vast amounts of wealth.  Raiders kept inventing new and improved ways of overcoming physical barriers and exterminating city defenders.  At the same time, cities tirelessly invented new and better ways of protecting themselves and exterminating raiders.  Alfred Crosby wrote a fascinating book about the endless spiraling arms race in deadly technology, from thrown stones a hydrogen bombs.

Nomadic pastoralists owned treasure chests that were highly mobile — herds of precious four-legged food lockers.  Their nutritious flesh did not spoil whilst they remained alive, it increased — and they produced offspring too.  Many raids also acquired slaves, two-legged, muscle-powered busybodies that generously provided baby slaves.  Slaves and livestock were valuable commodities that could be sold to agrarian states, in exchange for city made goods.

The raiders’ highly mobile way of life gave them a strategic advantage over the immobile city dwellers, whose access to food could be cut off by an extended siege (when dogs became “siege mutton”), while flaming arrows landed on their wooden roofs, and corpses of plague victims were hurled in via catapult.  Barbarian hordes, like the Mongols, loved raiding farm country, because cities were fat, juicy sitting ducks.  It was often very easy to swipe the fruits of years of sweat and toil via a lightning raid.

James Scott noted that, as long as cities were weakly defended, barbarians could enjoy a far better life than farmers.  Mongols perceived agrarian communities to be ra’aya (herds) — irresistible get-rich-quick opportunities for merciless, bloodthirsty, mobs of looters.  Mounted on speedy horses, hundreds of nomads could suddenly appear out of nowhere, thunder into town without a polite invitation, and enjoy an exciting day of slaughter, rape, pillaging, and demolition. 

Horses played a starring role here.  For many thousands of years, they were simply wild game, a source of meat and hides.  Following domestication, they were also used as beasts of burden, carrying loads, and pulling them.  Eventually, folks developed saddles, stirrups, and bridles, which transformed horses into awesomely powerful high velocity assault missiles. 

This revolutionary innovation provided humans with mind-blowing godlike powers.  For two million years, hominins had moved across the land by foot, slower than an elderly squirrel.  Now, an astonishing new era had begun, and its destination was not love, peace, and happiness.  Mounted warriors turbocharged civilization’s expansion.  Cavalry enabled mass culture, mass control, and mass murder.

Status fever is an equal opportunity pathology.  Some cities began contemplating other cities in the region, calculating the amount of treasure they controlled, and the weaknesses in their defenses.  Naturally, strong cities overwhelmed weaker cities, and empires metastasized.  Conquering neighbors was an exciting way to fill treasure chests, and increase their herds of livestock, warriors, serfs, women, and slaves. 

Similarly, nomads were not honorable gentlemen having the highest moral principles.  It was not beneath their dignity to attack, kill, and rob other pastoralists, if they were believed to possess interesting treasure.  There was no reason why strangers should remain the owners of livestock that could become my property with a modest investment of belligerence and terrorism.  Social status was very important to testosterone powered egos, and macho lads took every opportunity for elevating it.

Throughout the centuries nomads have enjoyed being parasites on hard working farmers.  In A.D. 98, the Roman historian Tacitus said this about the tribal Germans: “They will much easier be persuaded to attack and reap wounds from an enemy, than to till the ground and wait the produce.  They consider it as an indication of effeminacy and want of courage to gain by the sweat of the brow, what they may acquire at the price of their blood.”

Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish historian, was born around A.D. 1150, and had more of a ringside seat at the bloody horror show.  “Now the warriors, who were always pillaging the neighborhood, used often to commit great slaughters.  Plundering houses, cutting down cattle, sacking everything, making great hauls of booty, rifling houses, then burning them, massacring male and female promiscuously — these, and not honest dealings, were their occupations.”  War dogs were popular too.  “Biorn had also a dog of extraordinary fierceness, a terribly vicious brute, dangerous for people to live with, which had often singly destroyed twelve men.”

Saxo also mentioned berserkers (bear shirts), warriors who wore bear skins into battle, and became ferociously violent, completely out of control, and fought in a trance-like wild fury.  Ralph Metzner called it a holy rage that they could not turn off.  They killed everyone in sight, even friends.  In Ireland, Cu Chulainn was so overheated with battle rage that a group of naked women was sent out to calm him. He was put in vats of cold water, which boiled and evaporated.

Giraldus Cambrensis (Jerry of Wales) visited Ireland, and wrote a report in A.D. 1185, when the rivers were full of salmon, the rainforest was full of wolves and boars, and indigenous chiefdoms were constantly fighting amongst themselves.  England’s King Henry was beginning the process of conquering Ireland.  The Irish were low-tech guerilla warriors, skilled at hit and run ambushes.  They used slings to hurl stones with skull-splitting accuracy.  They had spears, javelins, and axes.  The English were state-of-the-art warriors, having chain mail, armor, archers, and deadly swords.  For example, “He who had seen how John de Courcy wielded his sword, with one stroke lopping off heads, and with another arms, must needs have commended him for a most valiant soldier.”

Paul Henri Mallet wrote about the customs of pagan Scandinavia.  The scribes who penned the ancient sagas were associated with the nobility who were often highly engaged in the raiding industry.  Sagas devoted much attention to documenting the triumphs and defeats of warriors and warfare.  Mallet wrote one sentence that hit the nail on the head, “The weak had no right to what they could not defend.” 

In that culture, war was their source of honor, riches, and security.  Courage was the highest virtue, death was not feared.  The honorable way to die was violently, weapon in hand, ideally laughing with their final breath.  This was rewarded by a premier afterlife in Valhalla, where they would spend eternity in bloody battle.  Every day, they would delight in cutting each other to pieces, and then magically recover, mount their horses, and ride back to the hall of Odin for a night of feasting and oblivion drinking. Yippee!

The shameful way to die was bed death.  Folks who died of disease or old age were sent to a low class afterlife in Niflheim.  To avoid this fate, Mallet wrote, warriors would plunge off an ancestral cliff (ättestup) to a violent death, in order to end their lives honorably.  Those too weak to jump were sent to Valhalla by a caring friend smashing their skull with an ancestral club (ätteklubbor).  Stafva Hall in Sweden had annual festivals, with singing and dancing, after which the wobbly geezers, beyond their expiration dates, leaped into the lake far below.

With every century that followed, raiding continued spreading into new regions around the world, grabbing as much treasure as possible, often utilizing staggering amounts of destructive force.  The twentieth century saw tremendous advances in fossil-powered mechanized warfare, on land, on sea, and in the skies above.  Large cities could be reduced to ash trays with the push of a button.

Today, technological innovation has enabled many more options for raiders, few of which require “coming to grips” with their opponent, and getting splattered with their blood, sweat, and spit.  Millions of dollars can now be robbed with a mouse click, from a cozy cubicle in nowhere land.  We are living in the Golden Age of status fever.  In many communities, the infection rate among adults approaches 100 percent.  “More” is the god word of modern society.  Imagine what life would be like if humankind had remained wild and free.

Big Mama Nature is not amused.  She will still be standing — scarred and wounded but defiant — when the lights go out, and industrial civilization runs out of treasure, and finally slips beneath the waves.  Let the healing begin.