Wild Free and Happy Sample 36

[Note: This is the thirty-sixth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 203 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Aztec Erosion

M. Lourdes González-Arqueros and team studied soil erosion in the Teotihuacán Valley, northeast of Mexico City.  Mexico’s soils have taken a beating over the centuries, and the blame is commonly directed to the settlers from the Old World who arrived in the 1500s.  They imported many destructive practices, pathogens, and hooved locusts (goats and sheep).  Research done by the study concluded that the indigenous people were already reputable soil molesters when the white folks arrived.  They analyzed erosion patterns during three different periods of time:

(1) In the Teotihuacán period (A.D. 1-650), forests still grew on summits, hill slopes, and foot slopes.  This restricted some soil erosion.  Organic corn was grown by no-tillage methods (picks and spades) on the lower ground. 

(2) In the Aztec period (1325-1521), forest area in the valley was drastically reduced as population increased, and agriculture expanded up the hillsides.  During this period, much of the landscape was devoted to agriculture.  When sloped land is deforested, increased erosion is an expected consequence.  In the Aztec period, rates of soil loss were much higher, compared to rates in both the earlier Teotihuacán period, and the later modern period.

(3) In the modern period (after 1970), forest area has recovered a bit.  A large portion of cropland is now planted with prickly pear, a perennial plant that is fast growing, rapidly rooting, and usually has deep roots.  Soil destruction was lower than during the Aztec period, but the study did not give modern practices the Sustainable Agriculture™ seal of approval.  Too many people continue living too hard.

The team concluded that land use and soil management were prime factors in the erosion, more so than precipitation and topography.  I wish their study hadn’t skipped around the years between 1521 and 1970.  Anyway, before the Spaniards, the land was gradually being beaten to death.  Then, the colonists launched a full scale war on forests, while flocks of their imported sheep and goats prevented forest recovery, and their overgrazing accelerated erosion. 

Then, around the 1960s, the Green Revolution rolled in, with mechanization, water mining, synthetic fertilizers, hybrid seeds, and trainloads of chemical fertilizers, fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides.  Around the world, population continues soaring, while staggering amounts of soil run away from home.  In the modern mindset, unborn generations, ecosystems, and the atmosphere are seen as disposable — cosmic litter, like plastic water bottles or cigarette butts.  Our education system is completely lost in a soft, warm, foggy dream world of full blown dementia (perpetual growth, electric cars, voyages to Mars). 

Oh!  Speaking of Mars, he was the Roman god of war in his glory days.  Earlier in his career, he was a deity of virility, fertility, springtime, and a guardian of agriculture.  Farmers hated nature, because wildness refused to behave like an obedient servant.  It was hard work clearing forests, stripping away the wild vegetation, exterminating the wildlife, and pulverizing the soil.

Nature was a mortal enemy of the Roman Empire, because it was a persistent threat to their food supply.  Trees, brush, grass, and critters constantly invaded the wheat fields.  Every day, Big Mama Nature worked hard to restore health to badly injured ecosystems.  She used all her tricks to rubbish the hideous fields — droughts, deluges, hail storms, frosts, heat waves, howling winds, wildfires, locusts, blights, birds, deer, boars, and on and on.

She also used pandemics.  One of my ancestral homes was in Gran, Hadeland, Norway.  The Black Death hammered the population, many farms were abandoned, and joyful forests reclaimed their fields.  My kin told me that one day, many years ago, a lad was hunting in the woods.  He shot an arrow, and it struck a bell.  He was surprised to discover an old church concealed in the dense forest.  Nobody among the living knew anything about the mysterious church, or the community it had served before the plague.

Mixtec Erosion

The Mixtec culture of southern Mexico is ancient.  Their homeland is mostly located in the state of Oaxaca which, long ago, was one of the most advanced regions in the Americas.  The Mixtec people managed to avoid being absorbed by the Aztec empire, and their writings are much older than those of the Aztecs or Incas.  Some believe that the Mixtecs were the ones who originally conjured domesticated corn out of wild teosinte.

In the good old days, prior to agriculture, their homeland was largely forest.  Today, regions of the treeless highlands have become a desert that not even thorns can grow in.  Oaxaca is Mexico’s second poorest state, and a third of its people have moved away.  Photographer Matt Black happened to meet some Mixtecs in California, where they were accumulating vast fortunes by doing backbreaking farm labor for $40 a day.  They chose this path because their homeland had become a disaster area.  Many of them are illiterate, and most speak only their native language, Mixteco.

In 2011, Black got curious about them and decided to visit their homeland, Mixtecapan (the place of the Cloud People), one of the world’s oldest farming cultures.  Wow!  Some places have lost up to 16 feet (5 m) of topsoil.  A number of villages are half-deserted, and some of their fields have eroded to bare bedrock.  More than a million acres are so severely damaged that the U.N. now calls the region one of the most heavily eroded landscapes in the world.

Most stunning of all, Black described the disintegrating village of Santiago Mitlatongo.  One day, a cliff above town fell apart, dumping stones as large as houses on the village below.  Whole cornfields disappeared into sinkholes.  Homes sank into the ground and vanished.  Eventually, the whole village broke away from the surrounding land, like a calving iceberg — homes, fields, churches, stores — an area of about two square miles (5 km²) was in motion.  Writing in 2012, Black noted that it was still sliding, a few feet per day, a half mile (804 m) away from its original location. 

Corn Blight

H. Arnold Bruns wrote about a serious corn blight that hit the U.S. in 1970-71.  The southern corn leaf blight (SCLB) destroyed 15 percent of the corn crop.  It was enabled by innovative plant breeding that focused on maximizing yield ($$) by designing highly productive hybrid seeds that had very little genetic diversity.  These hybrids reliably generated big money for farmers, who eagerly bought the magic seeds.

On the downside, when conditions were optimal, up to 85 percent of the corn in a field was highly vulnerable to SCLB fungus.  The winter and spring of 1970 were wetter than usual, providing ideal conditions for disaster.  Some farmers lost 80 to 100 percent of their crop.  In the Corn Belt, some clusters of counties had average losses of 35 to 50 percent.  Across all of the state of Mississippi, losses were 30 to 40 percent.  This inspired big fear.  Would the entire U.S. crop be lost?  What would we use to feed livestock and poultry?  No more whiskey?  Gulp!

Before 1930, almost all corn was allowed to pollinate naturally, which resulted in high genetic diversity that reduced the possibility of catastrophic blights.  Then came the hybrids which, in theory, were more vulnerable to crop failure, but they almost always provided far higher yields and profits.  Today, in the major corn growing nations, 97 percent of the corn planted is hybrids.

The amount of food energy lost because of the SCLB blight was greater than the lost food due to the potato blight of Ireland in the 1840s, during which the Brits made little effort to feed the starving.  The message of both blights is that there is great danger in growing monocultures of extremely uniform crop plants.

Today, Brun worries that the new GMO fad is busy creating ideal conditions for bigger and better disasters — billions of herbicide resistant seeds having dangerous genetic uniformity.  What could possibly go wrong?  Right now, a blight is working hard to drive a stake into the heart of the banana industry — and winning.  The entire crop is genetically identical clones.

One-Straw Revolutionary

Long, long ago, hip folks in the Beatles era were jabbering about Masanobu Fukuoka’s book, The One-Straw Revolution.  It explained how he grew healthy food via natural farming, a low budget, low impact approach.  On his farm in Japan, Fukuoka was growing grain, fruit, and vegetables without plowing, cultivating, chemicals, compost, fertilizer, fossil energy, erosion, pruning, or regular weeding.  He farmed like this for more than 25 years, and his yields were comparable to those at conventional farms.

The Japanese edition of his book was published in 1975, at a time when oil shocks had spurred interest in energy efficiency.  When the English version was published in 1978, it was an international smash hit, and Fukuoka became a celebrity.  Larry Korn was the book’s translator.  He’s a California lad who worked on Fukuoka’s farm for more than two years.  Now, in 2015, Korn has published One-Straw Revolutionary, which is the subject of this review.  It describes Fukuoka the man, and his philosophy, with glowing praise.

Korn detests conventional industrial farming, because it has so many drawbacks.  A bit less troublesome is organic farming done on an industrial scale.  At the positive end of the spectrum, he sees Fukuoka’s natural farming as very close to the ideal, both environmentally and philosophically.  A bit less wonderful than natural farming are permaculture and old-fashioned small-scale organic farming.

The ideal is something like the California Indians that were fondly described in M. Kat Anderson’s book, Tending the Wild.  They were wild hunter-gatherers who included wild plant seeds in their diet.  They devoted special care to the wild plant species that were important to their way of life.  Most folks would consider this to be mindful foraging — tending, not farming.

These Indians did not till the soil, and were not warlike.  Nobody owned the land.  There were no masters or servants.  There was no market system or tax collectors.  They had a time-proven method for living, and this knowledge was carefully passed from generation to generation.  The Indians were wild, free, and living sustainably — in the original meaning of the word.  When the Spanish invaders arrived, they saw these Indians as lazy, because they worked so little.

Fukuoka, on the other hand, resided in a densely populated industrial civilization, which was eagerly adapting American style industrial agriculture.  While the Indians foraged in a healthy wild ecosystem, Fukuoka worked on an ecosystem that had been heavily altered by centuries of agriculture.  He raised domesticated plants and animals.  Fukuoka was experimenting with radically unconventional methods, and had no traditions or mentors to guide him.

He practiced natural farming on one acre (0.4 ha) of grain field, and ten acres (4 ha) devoted to a mix of fruit trees and vegetables.  When Korn arrived in 1974, Fukuoka was assisted by five apprentices, who were not at all lazy, and rarely had a day off.  Cash had to be generated to purchase necessities and pay taxes, so surplus food had to be produced.  Food shipped off to cities carried away phosphorus, potassium, and other minerals that never returned to the farm’s soil.  Thus, his natural farming was quite different from California tending.

On the plus side, Fukuoka’s experiment benefitted from rich soil and generous rainfall — especially during the growing season.  Vegetables could be grown year round in the mild climate, and two crops of grain could be harvested each year.  On the down side, few succeeded in duplicating his success, even in Japan.  It took years to get the operation working, requiring extra servings of intuition and good luck.  Korn warned, “In most parts of North America and the world the specific method Mr. Fukuoka uses would be impractical.” 

In the natural farming mindset, the strategy should not be guided by intellect; nature should run the show.  Fukuoka talked to plants, asking them for guidance.  When he planted the orchard, he added a mixture of 100 types of seeds to wet clay, made seed balls, and tossed the balls on the land.  Seeds included grains, vegetables, flowers, clover, shrubs, and trees.  Nature decided what thrived and what didn’t.  Within a few years, a jungle of dense growth sorted itself out.  But sometimes nature gave him a dope slap.  In the early days, Fukuoka allowed nature to manage an existing orchard, and he was horrified to watch 400 trees die from insects and disease.

My work focuses on ecological sustainability, at a time when the original meaning of sustainability has largely been abandoned, and replaced by sparkly marketing hype.  I go on full alert when I see “sustainable agriculture.”  In my book, What is Sustainable, I took a look at what Korn calls “indigenous agriculture,” which is often imagined to be sustainable.

California tending was far different from the intensive corn farming on the other side of the Rockies, which led to soil depletion, erosion, population growth, health problems, warfare, and temporary civilizations like Cahokia.  In his book Indians of North America, Harold E. Driver estimated that less than half of North America was inhabited by farmers, but 90 to 95 percent of Native Americans ate crop foods, indicating that farm country was densely populated.  In corn country, defensive palisades surrounded many villages.

In 2015, humankind is temporarily in extreme overshoot, as the cheap energy bubble glides toward its sunset years, and the climate change storms are moving in.  Obviously, feeding seven billion sustainably is impossible.  At the same time, highly unsustainable industrial farming cannot continue feeding billions indefinitely.  It’s essential that young folks have a good understanding of ecological sustainability, and our education system is doing a terrible job of informing them.

The California Indians provide an important example of a vital truth.  When voluntary self-restraint was used to keep population below carrying capacity, people could live sustainably in a wild ecosystem via nothing more complex than hunting and foraging.  They had no need for farming, with its many headaches, backaches, and heartaches.

Korn’s book got exciting near the end.  Farming was just one facet of Fukuoka’s dream.  As a young man, he attended an agriculture college, and then endured a dreary job as a plant inspector.  His mind overloaded, his health fell apart, and he nearly died.  In 1937, he had a beautiful vision, quit his job, and went back home to the farm. 

In his vision, he suddenly realized that all life was one, and sacred.  Nature was whole, healthy, and perfect — and nothing our ambitious intellects imagined could improve this harmonious unity in any way.  Humans do not exist in a realm outside of nature, no matter what our teachers tell us.  Heaven is where your feet are standing.

The world of 1937 was a filthy, crazy, overpopulated train wreck, and this was largely thanks to science, dogmas, and philosophies.  Intellect alienated us from our “big life” home.  Civilization had created a dysfunctional world that was far too complex.  The lives of most people were no longer intimately connected to the natural world.

In agriculture, the herd of experts insisted that plowing, pruning, cultivating, chemicals, and weeding were mandatory for success.  One after another, Fukuoka abandoned these required tasks, made some needed adjustments, and didn’t crash.  His farm got simpler and healthier.

No other animals harm themselves by pursuing science.  Fukuoka realized that people should be like birds.  “Birds don’t run around carefully preparing fields, planting seeds, and harvesting food.  They don’t create anything… they just receive what is there for them with a humble and grateful heart.”  Bingo!

How can we reorient to nature?  “For most of us, that process begins by unlearning most of the things we were taught when we were young.”  The healing process requires abandoning many, many beliefs and behaviors that our culture encourages.  We need to waste less, spend less, and earn less, take only what we need, and nothing more.  “Wearing simple clothing, eating simple food, and living a humble, ordinary life elevates the human spirit by bringing us closer to the source of life.”

Korn, Larry, One-Straw Revolutionary, Chelsea Green, White River Junction, Vermont, 2015.

The Abstract Wild

In 1964, plans were being discussed for the creation of the Canyonlands National Park, near Moab, Utah.  Some wanted to include the Maze in the park.  The Maze is a stunning network of desert canyons, and it was extremely inaccessible at that time.  Few living people had ever seen it.

Jack Turner and his buddy were young rock-climbing adventure hogs.  Their plan was to fly into the Maze, land the plane on a long-abandoned bulldozer scrape, take some cool photos, and sell them to National Geographic.  Both survived the botched landing.  While wandering around in the Maze, they found ancient pictographs of life-sized human images.  The paintings had a striking presence, and the lads were mesmerized.  They had walked into a different dimension, a place alive with a strong aura of spirit power.

Today, the aura has faded.  The Maze is mapped and tamed.  Visitors can drive in and hike around on happy trails.  The pictographs have become photo opportunities for intrepid ecotourists.  The sacred wildness of the place has become banal, like a museum exhibit.  For the wild painters, who lived several thousand years ago, this place “was their home in a sense we can no longer imagine,” said Turner.  “Whoever they were, they knew how to express and present something we have lost.”

Later, Turner worked as a philosophy professor in Chicago, a soul-killing bad trip.  One day, he read a deep ecology essay by Arne Naess, and had a great awakening.  He suddenly realized that he was on the wrong path.  He escaped from the nightmare, and spent many years travelling around the world climbing mountains.  This included at least 16 years as a guide at Grand Teton National Park.

Deep ecology helped him understand the crucial difference between ecocentric thinking (the entire ecosystem is sacred) and anthropocentric thinking (only human desires matter).  This echoes the huge gap between the wild Maze painters and the civilized ecotourists.  It’s essentially the difference between sustainable and unsustainable cultures.

Wandering around the world taught him another vital lesson.  He visited cultures that were similar to the Maze painters, cultures with a profound spiritual connection to the past, the future, their community, and their sacred home.  All of their needs were provided by the place they inhabited.  Consequently, they lived with great care, striving to remain in balance with the land.

Today, the ecosystem is being hammered.  Typically, the designated villains include capitalism, greedy corporations, corrupt politicians, the evil enemy-of-the-day, and so on.  Turner rejected this.  The planet is being pummeled by a culture that is infested with absurd abstract ideas — more is better, get rich quick, grow or die.  This culture has reduced the natural world to an abstraction, a machine that must be controlled — a jumbo cookie jar for the amusement of infantile organisms.

So, Turner’s enemies are not the designated villains.  His enemies are abstractions, like the hallucinations that perceive a sacred old growth forest to be a calculable quantity of board feet, worth a calculable quantity of dollars.  Abstractions are the foundation of the madness, and they are formidable opponents.  They can make clear thinking impossible, and inspire remarkable achievements in foolishness.

In his book, The Abstract Wild, Turner describes why he has become a “belligerent ecological fundamentalist,” and why he stands on the side of the grizzly bears and mountain lions.  “Abstraction” is a word meaning mental separation, not a concrete object.  Wildness is “the relation of free, self-willed, and self-determinate ‘things’ with the harmonious order of the cosmos.”

There are eight essays in the book.  One examines wilderness management, a hotbed of professional control freaks.  This work is done under the banner of Science, a way of knowing that can understand processes and predict their activities.  What a joke!  We don’t understand friends or lovers.  We don’t understand ourselves.  Ecosystems are vastly more complex and chaotic.

Wildlife biologists have a history of making wildly incorrect predictions, often leading to embarrassing disasters.  Their clumsy conjuring is no more “science” than is astrology.  Humans should always avoid fooling around with DNA, atoms, or wilderness management.  “We are not that wise, nor can we be.”  Instead of trying to control nature by using a strategy based on hope, wishes, incomplete data, and misunderstanding, Turner recommends that we should get out of the way and leave the job to Big Mama Nature, who has a billion years of experience.  (The experts howl!)

Another essay snaps, snarls, and spits with rage.  Civilization has been brutally molesting the planet for 10,000 years, at an ever-increasing rate.  Over the centuries, we have responded to these assaults on wildness by forgiving and forgetting.  We’re now moving into the end game.  Despite being blasted by a fire hose of depressing news, we remain pathetically timid, helpless victims.  We accept a wrecked planet as normal, and refuse to utter a peep of protest.

Turner screams.  Enough forgiving and forgetting!  It’s time for some healthy rage.  It’s time to raise hell against the senseless destruction.  This is spiritual business, so it takes precedence over society’s laws.  Nature is sacred, and must be defended.  Destroying the planet is evil and unacceptable, even if it’s perfectly legal and great for the economy.

There are thousands of eco-books, and most tend to focus their attention on symptoms — climate change, deforestation, mass extinction, overpopulation, and so on.  To control these symptoms, they suggest a variety of treatments, including new government policies, techno miracles, lifestyle changes, and rebellion.  Turner has lived much of his life out of doors, and he feels a profound reverence and respect for wildness.  His book is rare for presenting this perspective, which is getting dimmer with every decade.

This perspective can help us move toward healing.  “We only value what we know and love, and we no longer know and love the wild,” he says.  “What we need now is a culture that deeply loves the wild earth.”  But the inmates of modernity have little intimate experience with wild nature, and almost no comprehension of what has been lost.  Wildness is something seen on TV.

We must rejoin the natural world.  This is still possible.  Turner succeeded.  Cool books, nature documentaries, and ecotourism cannot provide us with all we need to recover our wildness.  What’s needed is direct experience with a place, over time, complete immersion — observing the bird migrations, animal mating, leafing of trees, climate patterns, and so on.  A week in the mountains is never enough.

In the end, Turner presents us with a tantalizing bittersweet enigma.  He reveals to us the one and only silver bullet solution that can actually heal us, and guide us back home to the family of life.  But this solution is impossible, as long as there are so many people, living so hard.  The shamans have much work to do, to redirect our hearts toward healthy paths.  It’s time for the clans of creative folks to seize their power, work to exorcise our culture’s terrible demons, and rekindle forgotten love.

Turner, Jack, The Abstract Wild, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1996.

The book’s first chapter, the Maze story, is online.  Click on “Read Excerpt” beneath the book cover HERE.

To view a 100-minute video of Turner, click HERE.

Desert Solitaire

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) was an eco-wordsmith whose work is often compared to the classics of Aldo Leopold and Henry Thoreau.  His book Desert Solitaire has been called “the Walden of the southwest.”  Abbey was born in Pennsylvania, and went to school in New Mexico.  In 1956 and 1957 he spent the summers as a ranger at the Arches National Park, near Moab, Utah.  It was a mind-altering experience.  The young ranger fell in love with the desert, and kept extensive diaries.

Like Leopold and Thoreau, he had profound reverence and respect for the natural world.  All three watched in agony as industrial civilization worked so hard to mindlessly destroy it.  While the other two were respectable gentlemen, Abbey was a funny, rude, rowdy, loose cannon.

In 1845, Thoreau diagnosed the problem as a deficiency of timeless wisdom and intellectual refinement.  In 1949, Leopold recommended establishing a set of common sense rules to discourage gung-ho American halfwits from obliterating the future.  By 1968, Abbey was furious about the absurdity of it all.  Our culture was insane.  It was time to mercilessly beat the monster to a bloody pulp, but the monster was winning, and it was shape shifting into an invincible mass extinction steamroller.

At the Arches, Abbey’s ranger station consisted of a picnic table, house trailer, generator, and pickup truck.  It was far from the main entrance, and the dirt road was dusty, primitive, and pocked with potholes.  He spent the six-month tourist seasons in a place of immense beauty, constantly in awe of the magnificence of this gorgeous desert paradise.  The multi-colored sandstone had been sculpted into astonishing forms by a million years of snow and rain.  “I am twenty miles from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness.  Loveliness and a quiet exultation.”

The only turd in the tranquility was the daffy tourists, determined to see every national park in two weeks.  They yowled and whined about the terrible road.  They were Americans, by God, and paved roads and vast parking lots were guaranteed in the Constitution.  Many of these “wheelchair explorers” never stepped out of their cars, except to take a few snapshots and contribute to the litter.  Where’s the Coke machine?

They were unable to comprehend the treasure that surrounded them.  Their spirits did not soar, overwhelmed with amazement at the power of this sacred land.  It was as if their souls had been anesthetized by living in an industrial nightmare.  They were like fish that no longer felt at home in the water, preferring to reside on dry land and devote their lives to flopping and shopping.

Worse, the vision of the Park Service was to update its scruffy old parks into gleaming Disneyland National Parks — modern, clean, and convenient.  In 1956, President Eisenhower signed a bill to create the interstate highway system.  America had sold its soul, and its future, to the automobile.  Abbey was bummed.  He knew that the Arches were doomed.  After two summers, he quit, not wishing to stick around and watch the inevitable wreckage of progress.

He was right.  Several years later, planners designed a new and improved infrastructure that would allow the Arches park to accommodate 75,000 visitors per year — a vast increase from Abbey’s frontier days.  In 2012, the park had over a million visitors.  Traffic jams, noise, and air pollution have become serious problems.

Anyway, the book contains a collection of stories and rants.  The most important story was Down the River, which described floating down the Colorado River as the Glen Canyon Dam was being built.  Abbey and his buddy Ralph were among the last humans to observe the incredible canyons before they were submerged beneath the new Lake Powell reservoir.  It reminded me of our generation, taking a final cruise through what remains of the natural world, before it is composted by the unintended consequences of our brilliant techno-miracles.

Oddly, the reservoir was named after John Wesley Powell, an early explorer who actually loved the beautiful river.  “Where he and his brave men once lined the rapids and glided through silent canyons two thousand feet deep the motorboats now smoke and whine, scumming the water with cigarette butts, beer cans and oil, dragging the water skiers on their endless rounds, clockwise.”

Abbey and Ralph were delighted to leave modernity behind, “…the stupid and useless and degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessmen, the tedious wars… the foul, diseased, and hideous cities and towns we live in…” and on and on.  They had sweet fantasies of spending the rest of their days floating downstream in canyon country.  They also had sweet fantasies of blowing up the dam — fantasies that Abbey later expanded in his smash hit, The Monkey Wrench Gang.

The U.S. built several thousand major dams in the twentieth century.  These projects created many jobs during the Depression, unleashed flash floods of political sleaze, and made mobs of fat cats richer.  Glen Canyon Dam was intended to be a “cash register dam,” generating big revenues from hydropower sales, which could then be used to pay for vast irrigation projects.  The dreams were far brighter than the subsequent realities.

Hoover Dam was finished in 1936, creating the Lake Mead reservoir.  Today, this reservoir is at 37 percent of capacity, its lowest level since the 1930s, when it was being filled.  Farther upstream, the Glen Canyon Dam was finished in 1963, creating the Lake Powell reservoir.  Today, this reservoir is at 54 percent of capacity.  The flow of the Colorado River has been below average since 1999.  In 2002, the flow plunged to 25 percent of normal and 2003 was a bit higher.

There is growing concern that falling water levels will eliminate the thrust necessary to spin the power turbines at Glen Canyon.  While water levels fall, sediment levels are rapidly rising, as the river delivers 30,000 dump truck loads per day.  Eventually, sediment will permanently choke the power turbines.  While many wring their hands about the toll of ongoing drought, lots of water is also being lost due to evaporation and bank seepage (water soaking into porous sandstone).  Droughts can come and go, but rising temperatures seem to be here to stay for a long, long time — and some believe that this is the primary cause of falling water levels.

Up to 34 million people depend on water from the Colorado River basin.  The rapid development of Cheyenne, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, and San Diego was inspired by a cyclone of magical thinking.  Our well-educated nation suffers from a pandemic of ecological ignorance, and critical shortages of foresight.

Abbey had the ability to stand firm against the whirlwinds of magical thinking that constantly roar through our communities, making everyone sleepy and dreamy.  He understood that humans were not above and apart from the rest of nature, that anthropocentricism was a glaring symptom of lunacy.  It was obvious to him that new technology was best left in the box and promptly buried.  The culture that poisons our worldview is completely out of its mind.  Where’s the Coke machine?

Abbey, Edward, Desert Solitaire, Simon & Shuster, New York, 1990.  [1968]

Arches Trying to Cure 50 Years of Growing Pains

Lake Power Reservoir and Glen Canyon Dam in Crisis  

Why Denver Pays Farmers in Yampa Valley Not to Irrigate This Summer

Bathtub Ring on Hoover Dam Shows Level of Lake Mead Dropping Even Further

Cadillac Desert

Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau had a mind that was intelligent, complex, and rigidly righteous.  He was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817, into a family of uppity Unitarian abolitionists.  After attending Harvard, he worked as a schoolteacher for a few years.  Later, he lived with Ralph Waldo Emerson, serving as a tutor, handyman, and editorial assistant.  Emerson took him under his wing, and encouraged his literary efforts.  Emerson owned land on Walden Pond, and he allowed the young man to build a cabin there.  Living by the pond led to experiences that inspired Thoreau’s classic, Walden. 

Thoreau built the cabin at age 27, and moved out at 30.  His thinking was not yet set in concrete, and it wandered to many regions in the world of ideas, tirelessly searching for eternal truth.  He read the ancient classics in Greek and Latin, and discovered that enlightened philosophers preferred paths of voluntary simplicity.  He adored Native Americans, because they thrived in wildness and enjoyed a simple life.  He worshipped nature, and loved spending time outdoors.

Unfortunately, he was born during a diabolical hurricane of what is now called Sustainable Growth™.  Concord was becoming discord, as the ancient forest was replaced with gristmills, sawmills, cotton mills, a lead pipe factory, and a steam powered metalworking shop.  It was rare to stroll by Walden Pond in daytime and not hear whacking axes.  Railroads were the latest fad for rich folks.  Countless trees were hacked to death to provide millions of railroad ties.  By 1850, just ten percent of the land around Concord was forest, and wild game was getting scarce.

Obviously, the residents of Concord were not philosophers aglow with timeless wisdom.  They were also not wild folks who had lived in the same place for thousands of years without destroying it.  These new people acted crazy!  They were possessed, out of their minds, infected with the highly contagious status fever.  They burned up their precious time on Earth in a furious struggle to appear as prosperous as possible — fancy houses, cool furniture, trendy clothes.  If a monkey in Paris put on a traveler’s cap, then every monkey in America must do likewise.

Thoreau was not impressed.  “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”  In 1845, he moved into his tiny new cabin.  He hired a farmer to plow two and a half acres (1 ha), and then planted a bean field.  Using a hoe to control the weeds proved to be far more challenging than his fantasy of humble simplicity.  The net income for a summer of sweat and blisters was $8.12, far less than envisioned.  He learned an important lesson, and this experiment was not repeated.

A low-budget life of simplicity required a low-budget diet.  Thoreau’s meals majored in water and unleavened bread made from rye and corn meal.  Over time, he lost interest in hunting and fishing.  “I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination.”

The second summer included a pilgrimage to Maine.  He had a gnawing hunger for genuine wilderness that Concord could not satisfy.  He also wanted to meet real live Indians, and be invigorated by their purity.  Alas, Mount Katahdin was a rugged wilderness without trails, and the philosopher from Harvard was shocked by how difficult it was. 

Big Mama Nature gave him a swift dope slap.  In The Maine Woods he recorded her harsh words.  “I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors.  Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother?”  This nasty wilderness “was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites — to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.”

His experience with the Indians also disappointed him.  After 200 years of colonization, their traditional culture had long been bludgeoned by smallpox, whiskey, missionaries, and civilization.  “Met face to face, these Indians in their native woods looked like the sinister and slouching fellows whom you meet picking up strings and paper in the streets of a city.  There is, in fact, a remarkable and unexpected resemblance between the degraded savage and the lowest classes of the great city.  The one is no more a child of nature than the other.”

Sadly, Thoreau never experienced a community that was fully wild, free, and at one with the land.  He returned to Walden, a tame and comfortable place, and buried some fantasies.  He wasn’t at home in wilderness, and he wasn’t at home in civilization.  Could he find peace somewhere in between?  He soon packed up his stuff, left the cabin, and returned to the Emerson home.  He had learned a lot from 26 months of solitude, but he was wary of getting stuck in a rut.

After eight years of work, and seven drafts, Walden was published in 1854.  It caught the world’s attention, and he finally had a steady stream of income.  Thoreau’s sister died of tuberculosis in 1849.  His father died of tuberculosis in 1859.  In 1862 it killed Henry, at the ripe old age of 44.

He had spent his life trying to find a beautiful, healthy, and ethical way of living.  His education prepared him for a life in civilization instead, loading his mind with myths, hobbles, and blinders.  Thoreau was well aware that his society was on a dead end path.  Its citizens robotically submitted to the peer pressure of their culture.  They could imagine no other way to live.  The only thing they could change was their clothes.  Consequently and tragically, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

His core message was “explore thyself” — question authority, question everything, every day.  Never assume that you are crazy, and never assume that your society is normal and sane — it is not!  Stay away from status fever, and the living dead that suffer from it.  Go outdoors!  Live simply!  Live!  Live!  Live!

Thoreau’s world was deranged.  But viewed from the twenty-first century, it looks far less crazy than our nightmare.  He gathered chestnuts by the pond, a species that would later be wiped out by blight.  The skies were often filled with passenger pigeons, now extinct.  Millions of buffalo still thundered across the plains.  He drank water directly from the pond.  There were no cars or aircraft.  Most folks moved by foot or horse.  They did not live amidst hordes of strangers, they knew each other.  None spent their lives inside climate-controlled compartments, staring at glowing screens. 

Henry would have hated our world.  His mission was to live as mindfully as possible.  “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1854.  Download 

Thoreau, Henry David, The Maine Woods, Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1864.  Download 

Sims, Michael, The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, Bloomsbury, New York, 2014.

A Sand County Almanac

Aldo Leopold’s book, A Sand County Almanac, is near the top of many lists of environmental classics.  It was published in 1949, and has sold over two million copies.  He was born in Iowa in 1887, when Earth was inhabited by just 1.4 billion humans.  It was an era before radio, television, automobiles, airplanes, computers, DDT, nuclear fission, and antibiotics.  Most roads were dirt.  Vast ancient forests still thrived.  On the first page, Leopold informs us that this is a book for people who cannot live without wild things.

Part one is a series of twelve sketches, one for each month.  They describe how the land changes during the circle of the seasons — the return of the geese, the mating ritual of the woodcocks, the rutting of the deer, the bloody snow where predators snatched prey.  They describe what life was like in simpler times, before the sprawl, the malls, the highways, the tsunami of idiotic consumer crap.  People were more in touch with the life of the land, because it had not yet been deleted.

In 1935, Leopold bought a farm in Wisconsin.  The previous owner had tried and failed to make a living tilling the lean sandy soil.  The place was cheap, far from the highway, worthless to civilization, but a precious sanctuary for a nature-loving professor.  Luckily, the soil mining enterprise perished quickly, before it had time to exterminate the wildness.

Leopold loved the great outdoors.  He loved hiking and hunting.  Birds fascinated him.  He spent many years working for the U.S. Forest Service, and later became a professor of Game Management at the University of Wisconsin.  Sadly, he lived in a culture that was waging full-scale war on nature, and this drove him mad.  It was so senseless.  During his life, the population had grown from 1.5 to 2.4 billion, an era of staggering out of control disruption.

Part two presents observations, made in assorted times and places, about the damaged relationship between Americans and nature.  This relationship was often abusive, because it lacked love.  There often was no relationship at all.  Many folks had no sense of connection to the rest of the family of life.  For them, nature was nothing more than a treasure chest of resources that God created for the amusement of ambitious nutjobs.

Leopold was saddened by the trends.  He learned to never revisit places that had amazed him in his youth.  It was too painful to see the damage that commerce and tourism were tirelessly inflicting.  It was best not to turn sweet memories into heartbreaking nightmares.

He was raised in an era when it was perfectly normal to kill wolves, coyotes, and other predators at every opportunity.  These “vermin” killed too many game animals, depriving hunters of their rightful harvest.  The most famous essay in this book is Thinking Like a Mountain.  Having just shot a wolf, the gunman noticed a fierce green glow in its eyes.  With the wolves eliminated, the deer multiplied in numbers, stripping the vegetation off the mountain, and wrecking the ecosystem.  Deer lived in fear of wolves, and the mountain lived in fear of deer.

Part three is essays describing the need for a land ethic.  Cultures have ethics to define right and wrong.  Traditionally, these defined person-to-person interactions, or the interactions between individuals and society.  Leopold lamented that American culture lacked a land ethic, rules for living with the natural world, the family of life.  In our culture, as long as the land was not claimed and defended by someone else, you were free to do whatever you pleased.

Mainstream education was close to useless, because it was incapable of recognizing the glaring defects in the mainstream worldview.  It loaded young minds with the crash-prone software of infantile self-interest.  Generation after generation was being programmed to spend their lives as robotic servants to our economic system.  The education system and the economic system were the two primary threats to the health of the land.  Today, 65 years later, the lunacy has become a roaring hurricane.  Leopold would be horrified and furious.

Leopold was a pleasant lad, glowing with love for the natural world, and a gifted storyteller.  But this should not be the only ecology book you ever read.  Since 1949, there has been an explosion of research in anthropology, archaeology, ecology, and environmental history.  Many important discoveries have been made about hunter-gatherers, agriculture, deforestation, civilization, finite resources, climate change, and ecological sustainability.  Today’s deep ecologists will sneer at a few statements in the book, but in 1949, no one was more radical than Leopold.

At the time, he knew we were on a bad path, and we needed to pay serious attention to where it was taking us.  He clearly understood what we needed.  He wrote, “Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.”  He was sketching out a concept now known as ecological sustainability.  Here’s his land ethic in a nutshell: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.  It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”  Great!

Since the book was published, population has skyrocketed from 2.4 to 7.3 billion.  Our leaders, educators, and the vast human herd remain lost in a dream world where perpetual growth is the only channel on the glowing screens.  This story has paralyzed our culture, and condemned our descendants, but it’s running out of time.  Hopefully, in its aftermath, important lessons will be learned and never forgotten.

Leopold’s book was written “for people who cannot live without wild things.”  As the swelling mobs surge into vast cities, our disconnection from wild nature is almost complete.  We have forgotten who we are, and where we came from.  Well, we’re wild animals, and we came from wild nature, like every other critter.  Darwin revealed this embarrassing secret, but it still makes us uncomfortable, since it clashes with our deepest, darkest myths, our grandiose illusions of superiority.

These anthropocentric myths have ancient roots in every civilized culture, and they are like venomous brain worms that turn us into planet thrashing monsters.  In 1949, few expressed doubts about these myths, but Leopold did.  He was a flaming radical in his day.  He often dreamed that the progressive movement would eventually grow, flourish, and address the primary challenges of our time, but reality hasn’t cooperated.

His vision of a land ethic would have been a first step, but not a miraculous cure.  No other animal needs a formal system of rules and regulations to discourage self-destructive behavior.  Like our chimp and bonobo cousins, the others have never forgotten who they are, or how to live.  Thinking like an animal has worked perfectly for millions of years.  Thinking like a conqueror has been a disastrous failure.

Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989.  [1949]

Encounters With Nature

Paul Shepard was a pioneer in human ecology, a young field that studies the relationship between humans and their habitats.  The decades of his career were an exciting time.  New research was challenging myths about low impact (“primitive”) cultures, and scholars were starting to contemplate environmental ethics.  He hoped that growing awareness might end humankind’s war on the planet, but as his hair got grayer, his disillusionment grew.  Enlightenment takes time.

Encounters With Nature is a collection of Shepard’s essays, some of which reveal his thinking near the end of his days.  It was compiled, edited, and published by his wife, Florence, after he died.  She summed up the book in one sentence:  “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.”  The essays spin around two themes that shaped human development: animals and place. 

Our early pre-human ancestors lived in the trees of tropical rainforests.  Leaping quickly from limb to limb through the canopy required far more brainpower than herbivores needed to manufacture manure on the wide-open savannah.  Our time in the trees provided us with sharp minds, grasping hands, stereoscopic vision, and the ability to see in color.

Later, our ancestors moved to the ground, and became larger and stronger.  To defend themselves against predators, they became socially organized.  By and by, they came to walk erect.  They were hunters, but lacked speed, fangs, and claws.  Instead, they became long-distance runners.  Many herbivores were capable of amazing bursts of speed, but they couldn’t outrun hunters who doggedly pursued them for hours.  Some think that we lost our body hair to stay cooler while chasing lunch.  Our ancestors also evolved arms and shoulders that were well suited for throwing sticks and stones.

Our culture takes great pride in the Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution, but the most important revolution was the Hunting Revolution.  We moved onto the savannah, and learned how to hunt in packs.  Our ancestors were hunters long before Homo sapiens first appeared.  If you look in the mirror, you will observe the body of a tropical omnivore, fine-tuned for running and throwing — a hunter.  Imagine what you would look like if your ancestors had spent the last two million years on couches watching television.

When civilized folks look in the mirror, they don’t see a hunter; they see the crown of creation, God’s masterpiece.  We are taught that every other species is inferior and non-essential.  Only humans matter.  A chimp looking in the mirror sees a wild chimpanzee.  They have not lost their identity.  Coyotes have never forgotten how to be coyotes.

Shepard described three phases in the “identity formation” of each individual.  In the first phase, we bond to our mother.  In the second phase, between learning to speak and puberty, we have about a decade to bond with the living place we inhabit.  All of us are wild animals at birth, expecting to spend our lives in wild ecosystems.

Wild children are fascinated by other wild animals, which are far more interesting than rubber ducks and teddy bears.  Kids observe animals, learn their names, categorize them, imitate them, and study their anatomy when butchered.  They learn the daily and seasonal patterns of the others.  They watch the others transform from youngsters to oldsters, and a strong feeling of kinship develops.  “It is a family tie and carries responsibility.”

Shepard has little to say about the realm of plants, which is equally alive and fascinating.  Plants also play a major role in our bonding to nature.  By puberty, wild children are well rooted in place, feeling at-one with the flora and fauna of the family of life.  They have a profound sense of belonging that most modern tumbleweeds cannot begin to imagine, and will never experience.

Our bodies are those of hunters.  Likewise, our minds were formed and perfected by two million years of hunting and foraging.  We do not thrive in McMansions, malls, or cubicle farms.  We’re like zoo animals with rusty souls, enduring a dreary existence so far from home.  Condors are at home soaring with great joy above the mountains.  When imprisoned by humans, they become sad biological specimens.  A writer once concluded that condorness consisted of 10 percent condor and 90 percent place.  The same is true for us.

The third phase is initiation, the transition into adulthood.  “The youth is ushered into adult status by ceremonies that include separation from family, instruction by elders, tests of endurance and pain, trials of solitude, visions, dreams, and rituals of rebirth.”

What happens if the bond to mother is flawed?  In her book, The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff described how wild people raised happy children, and how civilized folks often fail to. 

What happens if we do not form a healthy bond to the family of life?  We become space aliens, and see the natural world as static scenery, or something to plunder.  Jay Griffiths described how wild children bond, and modern kids suffer, in her book, Kith.

What happens when adolescents aren’t initiated into adulthood?  They can remain immature and alienated, whirling in infantile anxieties, often for the rest of their lives.  The natural identity-forming process fails, and they assume a synthetic identity appropriate for the industrial culture.

For wild people, life was generous and giving.  Food was acquired without regular hard work.  The fruit, nuts, roots, and meat they got were gifts, for which they regularly expressed thanks and gratitude.  Meat was always shared.

For farmers, food was not a gift, but a wage received for months of backbreaking work.  If everything went well, there would be food to harvest at summer’s end.  Food could be stored and traded.  It became private property, and a source of wealth and power.  For modern consumers, food is not a gift, it’s a product sold at stores.  Many do not comprehend the link between pizza and the natural world.

The bottom line here is that we were normal and healthy at birth.  Evolution did not design us to be Earth-wrecking savages.  What turned us into freaks was our humanistic culture, which elevates us above all other animals, and celebrates our intelligence and technology.  This illusion is certain to take a beating as we move into the age of collapses, driven by peak energy, peak food, peak humans, and peak everything else.  Our crazy way of life is running out of time.

Our descendants are not going to hold humanistic culture in high regard, because its amazing bursts of cleverness could never outrun its tireless dark shadow.  It’s obviously a suicidal culture, and this will encourage its abandonment.  New and healthier modes of thinking are emerging, but have yet to go viral.  Mainstream academia seems determined to cling to the cult of perpetual growth as it swirls around the drain, lost in pipedreams of techno-utopia.

Shepard has sketched out suggestions of what needs to be nurtured, and what needs to be dumped.  This is precious information for people with imagination, who reject the orders to shop till they drop.  Creative minds understand that other cultures are possible, and that it’s time to envision them.  There is much to do before the lights go out.

Shepard, Paul, Encounters With Nature, Island Press, Washington, D. C., 1999.

A Sideways Look at Time

In the realm of wild nature, there are countless cycles of change.  Geese arrive at winter’s end, build nests, raise goslings, and depart in autumn.  Apple trees leaf, blossom, fruit, and drop their leaves.  The sunlight has daily cycles and annual cycles.  The moon and women flow through their monthly rituals.  This is circular time, round and round and round.  This is wild time.

Once upon a time, the whole world was wilderness, and every creature was free.  The planet danced in wild time, and all was well.  Wild people caught salmon when the fish came home.  They killed reindeer when the herds passed through.  They ate blackberries when the fruit was ripe, and gathered nuts as they fell.

Wild people clustered in flourishing nutrient-rich ecosystems that were scattered here and there across the planetary wilderness.  All was well… until the accidents.  In a few of these clusters, clever smarty-pants, with wonderful intentions, devised strategies for forcing their land to produce more food.  Why be content with paradise?  Let’s fix it.

We are finally starting to realize that some incredibly brilliant ideas should be flushed down the loo immediately (probably all of them).  Here we are in the twenty-first century, and the world is the opposite of a vast wilderness.  It has been reduced to a bruised and beaten landscape by an ever-growing swarm of hungry two-legs.  Wildness struggles to survive in scattered shrinking pockets.  Wild tribes are nearly extinct.

As civilization became rooted, clock time gradually pushed wild time into the background.  Clock time is linear, not circular — a straight path with a starting line (paradise) and a finish line (apocalypse).  This throbbing straight line has phallic vibes, the same frequency used by patriarchal empire builders awash in raging torrents of testosterone.  It’s a furious dance of endless growth, and it inevitably jitterbugs into a minefield of bleached skeletons.

The incredibly brilliant notion of endless growth should have been flushed down the loo immediately.  Endless growth is insane, fantastically irrational, and always ends in tragedy.  But it’s a lot of fun at first.  Take a deep toke.  The endless growth jitterbug is a soaring mania with no off switch.  It stops when it dies.  Any society that mindfully chooses to quit jitterbugging becomes a helpless sitting duck for its jitterbugging neighbors, who are always hungry for more and more and more.

Jay Griffiths wrote A Sideways Look at Time, which discusses the mutation of time that followed in the wake of domestication, and rapidly accelerated with the emergence of the industrial era.  She thinks very highly of wild time, because it is normal, natural, and good.  With regard to linear time, she offers this sensible recommendation: “Drown your watch.”

The big three multinational, patriarchal, monotheistic religions run on linear time.  Their myths begin in a golden age of innocence and harmony, and go downhill from there, on a dead end road.  Griffiths was raised in a Christian home, but she lacked the gift of blind faith.  The church taught that God’s creation was a place of evil.  The kinky male clergy denounced lust, joyful sex, and women of power.  Their icon was a dying man nailed to a dead tree.  Wild time, wild people, and wild places were the realm of the devil.

As civilizations grew, years were assigned ID numbers.  In Rome, year #1 was the date of the city’s founding.  Numbering enabled better record keeping, and provided time markers for historians.  Calendars enclosed days and years, and sundials enclosed hours.  Later came mechanical clocks, and clanging church bells, factory bells, and school bells.  The sweet freedom of childhood was enclosed by rigid schedules, as kids were herded into education factories to have their minds filled.

To keep large restless mobs under control, law and order is essential — police and clocks.  Industrial civilization is impossible without synchronizing the mob to march in lockstep to the steady beat of the time machines.  All around the world now, the current hour will conclude at the same moment.

Today, the wristwatch people are isolated from nature.  They spend their lives in rectangular climate-controlled compartments with artificial lighting.  Blackberries, nuts, and salmon are available every day of the year.  Clocks and wristwatches were fabulous ideas, if the objective was to elevate stress and anxiety.  The Lakota have no word for “late,” and the Micmac have no word for “time.”  Native Americans were astonished by the wacky behavior of the colonists, who robotically obeyed the demands of ridiculous schedules.

In stable wild societies, older people became respected elders, folks with long memories who provided wise counsel.  They could foresee problems, and recommend solutions.  But in the lands of the wristwatch people, speed is of the essence, and the rate of change is dizzying.  In modern times, much of the knowledge that older people possess is obsolete and useless.  So, the elder’s role is waning, at the same time that people are living longer.  Progress has left them behind.

In a culture obsessed with youth, women with gray hair become invisible.  Cosmetic surgery is very expensive, and its results are temporary.  Tightly stretched facial skin is spooky looking, like “linoleum with lipstick.”  Hormone treatments promise the appearance of perpetual springtime.  Griffiths laments that many women avoid the elder’s path of wisdom and power.  The era of patriarchy has not been kind to the ladies.

In the minds of the wristwatch people, the notion of progress is as real as the Grand Canyon.  They have no doubt that the world is always getting better and better, because experts are tireless in their pursuit of continuous improvement.  We are so lucky to live in an age of endless miracles.

Actually, progress is a smiley-face mask that disguises a parasite.  Progress doesn’t shine on the salt of the Earth.  The lands of the U’wa people of Colombia are being destroyed to extract the precious oil needed to fuel the insatiable excesses of the world’s elite.  Chinese women are dying from the solvents used to make cell phones, and women in Bangladesh are crushed when their garment factory collapses.

The parasite devours anything in its path, and never rests.  The single thought on its mind is more now, more now, more now.  Only the present matters, a mindset that Griffiths calls “chronocentric.”  Bleep the future.  The grandchildren will simply have to adapt to living with radioactive wastes that remain highly toxic for 100,000 years.  It’s not our problem.

Of course, it’s heresy to voice doubts about progress.  Doing so transforms you into a knuckle-dragging mouth-breathing dolt.  The sacrifices needed to radically reduce the harm we cause are just too great.  It is our God-given right to indulge in every imaginable excess to the best of our ability.  It says so in the constitution.  Well, it’s time for gifted shamans to perform a magic act on our worldview — swap the dunce cap to progress, and the halo to sustainability.  It’s OK to be respectful to unborn generations of all species.  It’s normal.

So, that’s a little peek into where this fascinating book takes us.  Griffiths helps us remember what has been lost.  Unlike the predicaments of peak cheap energy, peak food, and climate change, our time problems are nothing but ideas, and ideas can be flushed down the loo.  A healthy life does not require seconds, minutes, and hours.  We can do just fine with sunrise and sunset, full moon and new moon, solstice and equinox, wildness and freedom.

Hark!  The bell has rung.  This review is over.  It’s a cool book.

Griffiths, Jay, A Sideways Look at Time, Jeremy P. Tarcher, New York, 1999.