Wild Free and Happy Sample 64

 [Note: This is a new section from the rough draft of Wild, Free, & Happy. This is probably the end of the body text.  These samples start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE (if you happen to have some free time). 

Helter Skelter

Stephen Pyne has spent a lifetime thinking about fire.  Without the ability to use fire as a powerful tool, humans could have never migrated out of tropical Africa and colonized the outer world. 

When human pioneers eventually reached the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, they discovered plant and animal species that were especially ideal for domestication.  This region became known as the Cradle of Civilization.  Its development enabled us to accelerate our long and painful march to the staggering eco-horrors of today. 

Pyne is especially concerned about industrial fire.  Its combustion of fossil fuel results in carbon emission levels that are turbocharging an angry swarm of catastrophes.  “Our ecological effects have had the impact of a slow collision with an asteroid… together we have so reworked the planet that we now have remade biotas, begun melting most of the relic ice, turned the atmosphere into a crock pot, and the oceans into acid vats.”

Fire made us the unusual creatures we have become.  Our colonization of the world was like a spreading human wildfire that expanded across unspoiled wildernesses in search of fuel.  We enjoyed feasting on megafauna until they became scarce, at which point we advanced into new regions.  Over time, hungry humans ran out of unoccupied territory to expand into.  Oh-oh!

Groups had to revise their menus to include different food sources.  Aggressive groups could attempt to smash their way into territories inhabited by other groups.  As the millennia passed, and populations grew, friction between groups increased and spilled blood became more common. 

Weaker groups were more likely to be swept aside.  For example, of all the surviving wild cultures, the San people have the oldest DNA.  Their time-proven way of life was incredibly sustainable.  Their original homeland territory was vast, but over time, farmers and herders eventually snatched most of it away, forcing the San to retreat to the harsh Kalahari Desert.  By the 1970s, their traditional way of life had taken a serious beating.

Alfred Crosby summed up a bedrock lesson of history: “Winning streaks are rarely permanent.”  Like the traditional San people, most of the countless wild cultures that once existed sooner or later got blindsided by stuff like disease, colonization, capitalism, genocide, urbanization, and so on.  The wild cultures that still survive are not safe and secure.  Intruders from the outer world rarely enjoy a warm and fuzzy reputation for being kind and caring ladies and gentlemen. 

Meanwhile, in the fast lane, the human wildfire learned how to paddle down rivers, sail across oceans, roll on railways, drive across continents, fly through the clouds, zoom to the moon, vaporize cities, produce enough food to feed billions, blindside a stable climate, exterminate vast forests, and turn Earth into a loony bin for hordes of lost and confused primates.

Big History is a million-page catalog of countless bloody dog-eat-dog conflicts between tribes, nations, religions, and empires.  The strongest usually triumphed over the weakest, because the weak had no right to what they could not defend.  But those who remained in the fast lane were still vulnerable to getting blindsided by brutal surprises.

Sadly, glowing screens and motor vehicles are more precious than wooly mammoths or healthy planets.  The wizards of progress are guiding us toward a future of unimaginable prosperity, decarbonized energy, and tremendous achievements in family planning.  Everyone will eagerly cooperate.  Really?  Well, if you believe it, it’s true!

Animal in the Mirror

Pyne noted, “Without fire humanity sinks to a status of near helplessness, a plump chimp with a scraping stone and digging stick, hiding from the night’s terrors, crowding into minor biotic niches.”  In other words, an ordinary wild animal.

Since Neanderthals disappeared from the stage, our closest living relatives are now the chimps and bonobos, with whom we share up to 99 percent of our genes.  They have lived in the same forests, in the same way, for several million years, without degrading their ecosystem, starting a fire, or fooling around with tools fancier than sticks or stones.  They luckily benefit from their isolation, and the fact that their traditional habitat does not contain valuable resources that are tempting to greed monsters from outer space.

In his book Grandfather, Tom Brown shared a beautiful story he heard from his mentor Stalking Wolf, a traditional Apache from desert country, who traveled widely over the years, from the Amazon to Alaska, living off the land, and learning from it.  One time, while in Alaska as winter approached, he frantically had to stock up on food and firewood for the coming months. 

A bit later, when the snows arrived, he became fascinated by the ptarmigans, birds that survived in the frigid climate by their wits alone, sleeping in cozy snowdrifts.  They belonged in this arctic land, like the lizards belonged in Death Valley.  Lizards could not survive in Alaska, and ptarmigans could not survive on the desert. 

With the use of specialized tools, our species could survive almost anywhere.  But Grandfather felt uncomfortable because humans without fire and tools can only survive in special ecosystems.  He deeply wanted to genuinely belong somewhere, like the ptarmigans and lizards.  Over the passage of time, their way of life had become fine tuned for surviving in the ecosystems they inhabited.

Dear reader, this is a tremendously important point.  Animals that are wild, free, and happy are perfectly at home in the wild ecosystems they inhabit.  Like squirrels in an oak forest, they live where they belong, and remain intimately attuned to their habitat.

Our hominin ancestors fanned out across the planet, and eventually generated assorted impacts, including numerous extinctions.  Today, most of the mob of eight billion no longer lives and thinks like healthy wild animals.  A number of cultures have developed worldviews and lifestyles that are self destructively unclever, and ferociously brutal to the family of life.

Jay Griffiths wrote that humans evolved as highly alert nomadic hunters and foragers.  “We were made to walk through our lives wildly awake.”  Modern lifestyles are often mind-numbing routines — the opposite of the freedom we so deeply need.  When healthy wildness deteriorates into passive obedience, we become vulnerable to the burning pain of cage rage.  Very often, the daily news seems to be a barrage of batshit crazy cage rage stories from a wheezing world.

Timothy Scott Bennett concluded that we modern consumers were born and raised in captivity, something like zoo animals, the opposite of free, wildly awake, and at one with the land.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi biologist.  One of the spirits in their tribal traditions is Windigo, a monstrous demon cursed with a voracious appetite.  The more it eats, the hungrier it becomes.  In the old days, Windigo was notorious for hunting too hard, and not sharing with others, leading to hunger times.

Later, uninvited pale faced invaders from outer space smashed into tribal lands.  Native folks were stunned by their pathological foolishness.  Around the world, colonists have now created countless Windigo whirlwinds of mining, deforestation, industrial agriculture, overhunting, and insatiable shopping. 

Today, the hurricane of daily news from around the world shouts that the Windigo spirit has become a horrific global superpower.  Billions of folks everywhere eagerly dream of having more, more, more.  Even the superrich are maniacally grabbing and hoarding as much status glitter as possible.  This is not the path to a balanced and healthy future.

The Future?

In the preceding pages, I have explored my core question: how did things get to be this way?  Now what?  Humankind is deep in overshoot, and zooming down the path to a treacherously exciting future without brakes or safety nets.  My computer has a wonderful Undo function that can easily vaporize a sequence of mistakes.  Nature does not.  If you broke it, you bought it.

For folks who have more than a dozen working brain cells, the growing number of climate change reports and news stories are overwhelming.  It’s not a fake news hoax (unless you pretend it is).  Indeed, folks who yank off their blinders can discover a nonstop firehose of heartbreaking stories about floods, furious storms, heat waves, droughts, crop failures, melting glaciers, massive wildfires, and on and on — week after week after week.

Our foolishly unclever culture, hobbled by limited understanding and foresight, has successfully conjured into existence a colossal whirlwind of bad juju.  Eight billion consumers, with their famously big brains, are stampeding down the fast lane to a turbulent blind date with the rough justice of overshoot.  How embarrassing!

Fare Thee Well!

Dearest reader, congratulations!  One way or another, you’ve arrived at the skanky rear end of this word dance.  Pressure is visibly rising around the world, rivets are popping on the Titanic, and the global circus has become a freakshow of wildfires, climate catastrophes, conspiracy theories, religious fanaticism, cocky neofascism, merciless dog-eat-dog greed, berserk cage rage, pathological status seeking, fire-breathing patriarchy, and all-purpose bad craziness.  Something seems to be out of balance.  Like the old Chinese proverb warns, we are living in interesting times.

OK!  I’ve said what I needed to say.  I hope you’ve had some kind of meaningful experience with my literary monsterpiece.  Good luck!  Do your best!

An Innocent Booboo?

Finally, a weird idea.  Kindling the first domestic fire by spinning a fire drill stick was not, in any way, an obvious thing for a wild African primate to do.  The uncomfortable possibility is that maybe just one individual ancestor (a kid?) discovered it purely by accident, and it consequently unleashed two million years of change and catastrophe, and created the global horror show outside your window.  Whoops!  Undo! Undo! Undo!  Shit!

Wild Free and Happy Sample 62

 [Note: This is a new section from the rough draft of Wild, Free, & Happy. It’s finally getting into the home stretch, maybe four more to go (or fewer).  These samples start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE (if you happen to have some free time). 

Electric Supply and Demand

There are two flavors of electricity.  Power plants generate alternating current (AC) electricity and feed it into the grid.  AC is impossible to store — use it or lose it.  But if AC is converted to direct current (DC) electricity, it can be stored in battery systems.  Then, when demand increases, the stored DC power can be converted to AC, and fed back into the grid. 

In a conventional power system, centralized plants generate the electricity and feed it into the grid for distribution — a hub and spoke design.  Throughout every day, demand for power rises and falls.  When demand rises, more power must quickly be fed to the grid.  To do this, secondary generators are kept running on standby, providing a “spinning reserve.”

Renewable energy systems are quite different.  There is no central production plant with a spinning reserve backup.  Generation is provided by a scattered network of solar panels and/or wind turbines.  They are installed at sites likely to generate the most power, and these are often not located close to existing grids and energy consumers.

In addition to the normal daily ups and downs of end-user demand, power generation cannot be carefully managed.  The challenge here is intermittency.  Solar panels do nothing at night, or when heavy clouds move in, or when their collectors are covered with snow, dust, bird droppings, etc.  Wind turbines take a nap when the breeze fades away, or when their blades are coated with ice.  The strength of sunbeams and breezes is variable, uncontrollable, and often unpredictable.

Mitch Rolling noted, “In Minnesota, wind farms produced electricity only 34.67 percent of the time in 2016.”  Vaclav Smil wrote, “The best offshore wind turbines produce electricity 45% of the time, and photovoltaic panels 25% in ideal locations — while Germany’s solar panels produce electricity only 12% of the time.”

Wind and solar systems don’t have a spinning reserve generator for backup.  So, to reliably respond to shifts in demand, surplus generation can be stored in batteries.  When demand increases, stored power can be released to the grid.

Imagine living on the 60^th floor of a skyscraper when the region’s renewable energy production has been hobbled by intermittency for days or weeks, and the batteries are drained.  No power, water, lights, elevators, etc.  This challenge will increase as the grid transitions from fossil energy to renewable.

Vaclav Smil noted that existing energy storage systems have far less capacity than needed to maintain reliable power delivery.  “It is still impossible to store electricity affordably in quantities sufficient to meet the demand of a medium-sized city (500,000) for only a week or two, or to supply a megacity (more than 10 million people) for just half a day.”

Opposition

As mentioned earlier, many fundamental components of industrial civilization can only be produced with the high temperatures made possible by fossil energy (steel, concrete, solar panels, wind turbines etc.).  Thus, current technology does not allow us to actually decarbonize the global economy, or even come close.

A number of U.S. counties and localities are creating rules to prohibit the construction of wind and/or solar installations.  In 2023, 411 U.S. counties had established some restrictions on renewable energy installations.  Rural folks don’t want their countrysides blemished with unsightly power towers and access roads.  Leave us alone!

In 2024, USA Today reported, “Local governments are banning new utility-scale wind and solar power faster than they’re building it.”  New wind turbine projects have been banned in 23 counties of North Carolina, in all 120 counties of Kentucky, in all 8 counties of Connecticut, in all 14 counties of Vermont, and in 91 of Tennessee’s 95 counties.

Poor nations can’t afford to make costly investments in renewable energy, and wealthy nations are not eager to generously provide them with enormous financial assistance.  Folks in wealthy nations aren’t interested in radically simplifying their lives.

There are 193 nations in the world.  At international meetings, they proudly announce their optimistic goals for transitioning to renewable energy within several decades.  Given that extended timeframe, it’s tempting to assume that technological miracles, yet to be invented, will somehow save the day.  Optimistic goals are easy to announce.  Fulfilling them is another story.

Vaclav Smil noted that China and India are still expanding coal extraction and coal-fired power generation plants.  In other regions, there is strong opposition to new rules that restrict the expansion of natural gas infrastructure.  Coal mining communities don’t want to shut down the mines.  The petroleum industry remains hard at work.

In Iowa, the term “climate change” can sound like an obscene demonic hoax.  Chris Gloninger, a TV weather forecaster, foolishly spoke those two words during a live broadcast.  Viewers exploded with rage.  He got death threats, quit his job, and moved out of the state. 

Overshoot

And now, dear reader, the plot of this word dance makes a sudden swerve into a dangerous lane.  The soundtrack gets speedy screechy loud and scary.  A vicious monster steps out of the shadows and into the spotlight.  The audience screams.  Alas, the actual planet smashing boogeyman is far more horrifying and powerful than climate change.  Its name is overshoot, and it cannot be easily swept away with clever gizmos, delusional optimism, or clueless indifference.

In an earlier chapter, I mentioned William Catton, the author of Overshoot.  He defined carrying capacity as “the maximum population of a given species which a particular habitat can support indefinitely.”  Overshoot is “the condition of having exceeded for the time being the permanent carrying capacity of the habitat.”  Today, humankind’s tremendous impacts on the entire planet far exceed the limits.  Way too many critters are living way too hard, we don’t understand what we’re doing, and we have no interest in stopping.

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond wrote about the Viking colonization of Iceland, which is now “the most heavily damaged country in Europe.”  Since settlement in A.D. 870, most of the original trees and vegetation have been destroyed.  Half of its soil has been moved into the ocean.  Large areas that were green when the Vikings first landed are now “a lifeless brown desert without buildings, roads, or any current signs of people.”  The Vikings were low-tech amateurs, and climate was not a primary factor in this disaster.

Today, the rapidly growing mob of 8+ billion hungry horny primates is mindlessly beating the living crap out of the planet in countless ways.  It’s very important to understand that climate change is merely one component of overshoot, the huge whoop-ass monster we have conjured into existence. 

William Rees explained that the impacts of overshoot include climate change, ocean acidification, freshwater depletion, mass extinctions, deforestation, plunging biodiversity, soil/land degradation, falling sperm counts, pollution of everything, etc.  “Climate change is the best-known symptom of overshoot, but mainstream ‘solutions’ will actually accelerate climate disruption and worsen overshoot.  The global economy will inevitably contract, and humanity will suffer a major population ‘correction’ in this century.” 

Seibert & Rees wrote, “Overshoot is a genuine existential threat.  Climate change alone is capable of making large patches of Earth irreversibly uninhabitable for humans in this century and ultimately jeopardizing global civilization.”

The safe and effective cure for overshoot is obvious, but the medicine is bitter.  “We argue that the only viable response to overshoot is a managed contraction of the human enterprise until we arrive within the safely stable territory defined by ecological limits.  This will entail many fewer people consuming far less energy and material resources than at present.”

Meanwhile, many talking heads are telling us exactly what we want to hear.  We can relax and comfortably continue working and shopping.  We just need to buy an electric car, become vegans, have one child or none, and enjoy a wonderful life.  The magic verb that speeds our pilgrimage to eco-utopia is “decarbonize.”  Clean green renewable energy will save the Earth.

William Rees disagrees.  The last thing we need to do is shift the mining industry into high gear, and produce 1.39 billion batteries for the world’s transport fleet.  We’ll also need a huge number of batteries to provide backup power for the electric grids around the world.  Producing huge numbers of solar panels and wind turbines will require even more mining, smelting, and manufacturing.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 53

 

[Note: This is the fifty-third 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 52]

ABRAHAMIC WEB

Mesopotamian cultures preserved many traditional stories from long, long ago.  The tales began as oral traditions, and quite a few were later inscribed on clay tablets, many of which are still readable.  These tablets date as far back as 3500 B.C.  Much later, around 586 B.C., Hebrew people were living in exile in Babylon.  Most scholars agree that the writing of the Torah began in Babylon, a project to create a lasting record of older traditions.  The Torah contains the five books of Moses.  In the Bible, these five books are called Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

In Genesis, a lad named Abraham appeared.  Abdullah Öcalan wrote that Abraham has been celebrated as the founding father of monotheistic religion in three scriptures, first in the Torah, then the Bible, and later the Qur’an.  Abraham was the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — which is why these three are known as Abrahamic religions.  All three provide a stage for characters including Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah, and Moses.  All three believe in angels, judgment day, heaven for the good folks, and hell for everyone else.  All of their prophets were male.

It’s interesting to note that some of the values, ideas, and themes in ancient Sumerian legends have left their fingerprints on stories in Abrahamic scriptures.  These seem to be an indication of the Mesopotamian web influencing the Abrahamic cultures, which then spread the ideas to distant realms.  Today, some of these traditions are known to more than a billion people.  Let’s take a quick peek at how they compare, and pay a few visits to other points of interest.

Creation

A few pages back, I mentioned a Babylonian creation myth, in which Marduk killed the goddess Tiamat, created the world with her body, and then created humans.  Over the span of several thousand years, numerous Mesopotamian societies created a wide variety of stories, and Marduk makes guest appearances in many.  Some say he was the son of Enki.

Older than the Babylonian story was a Sumerian creation story that starred the god Enki, and the goddess Ninmah.  Once upon a time, the gods and goddesses were feeling overworked, so they decided to invent servants.  While preparing to create humans, they got into the mood for spiritual work by drinking “overmuch” and becoming roaring drunk.  Consequently, because our creators were totally sloshed, every human has at least one serious defect.  (Now the world makes perfect sense!)

Over the years, reputable researchers have worked hard to decipher characters that were etched on clay tablets thousands of years ago, in a long extinct dialect.  Their translations present us with a sanitized version of this drunken creation story that was safe to share with innocent children.  They tell us that the gods created humans from “clay.”  Öcalan, writing in the comfort of his luxurious prison cell, enjoyed the freedom to sidestep a scholarly obligation to disguise embarrassing ancient raunchiness.  He wrote, “It does not take much interpretative skill to realize that the narrative suggests that these servants were created from the feces of the gods.”  Holy shit!  Walking turds!

Let us now turn our attention to the Abrahamic version of the creation story.  In Genesis, humans were created in the Garden of Eden, a wilderness paradise.  Adam was made first, and then Eve was made from his rib.  Humans were the creator’s masterpiece, made in his image.  The first two humans had everything they needed — food, water, clean air, a perfect ecosystem, and a hot date. 

They could remain in paradise as long as they obeyed just one simple rule — don’t eat apples from one forbidden tree, or you will be severely punished.  There were many other trees in the garden, and it was perfectly OK to eat as much of their fruit as you wished.  Of course, just 14 short verses after the stern warning, they chose to break the one and only rule. 

The creator was infuriated.  He tossed them some leather clothes, and threw them out of paradise.  Their punishment for disobeying divine instructions was to till the ground from which they came — condemned to spend the rest of their lives chained to the backbreaking drudgery of farming (Genesis 3:1-24).  Eve was gullible and dim, as was Adam.

The Qur’an also tells a version of creation that includes Adam, Eve, forbidden fruit, and nudity.  Humans may be the only animals that are embarrassed by their nakedness.  Like the Sumerian story, the first humans were created from clay (soil from the earth).

So, both the Sumerian and Abrahamic creation stories imply that humans are less than brilliant.  Both also introduce the existence of a cosmic hierarchy.  Deities are all-powerful, immortal, and often short tempered.  Gods are our masters, and good humans always obey our masters.  Complex societies can work more smoothly when obedience is believed to be virtuous, and the mobs behave in an orderly manner.  Wild, free, and happy societies had no masters or hierarchies. 

Flood

In the Sumerian story of the great flood, the booze-headed gods had become thoroughly sick of humans.  There were way too many of them, and they were now making so much noise that the gods couldn’t sleep at night.  So, the way to cleanse the land of these noxious primate pests was to unleash a great flood and drown them all. 

At this point, the god Enki told the king of Sumer, Ziusudra, to build a large barge, gather up his family, and specimens of the various animal species, and spare them from the coming floods.  So he did.  Then, it rained, and rained, and rained, generating a great flood that lasted seven days.  The world got much quieter, and the gods slept much better.  Ziusudra made an offering to Enki, and then his family got to work repopulating the Earth. 

Floods were serious bad juju in Sumer, because the normal season for flooding in the Tigris Euphrates watershed corresponded to the time when wheat and barley crops were normally ripe.  If the un-harvested grain was suddenly washed away, hunger times followed, and gravediggers would work overtime.  Myths provided an explanation for why the gods sometimes punished them (humans are annoying).

In the remarkably similar Abrahamic flood story, the god Yahweh instructed Noah to build an ark.  God was thoroughly sick of humans, and regretted creating them.  He saw humans as being thoroughly wicked — every thought that crossed their minds was evil.  They were hopeless, a mistake (Genesis 6:5-7).  God told Noah to build an ark and load it with critters.  Then it rained for forty days and forty nights, and the mountains were covered.  The flood lasted 150 days.  Every nonaquatic critter drowned.  The creator was happy again. 

Unfortunately, the small group of surviving humans who stepped off of the ark were the same inherently flawed critters who had boarded it, and would now proceed to repopulate the Earth.  God sighed, and then took pity on his imperfect evil-loving boo-boos.  “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more everything living, as I have done.”  (Genesis 8:21)  In Islam, Noah is also celebrated as a great prophet.  The Qur’an presents a similar version of the flood story, a tale of immoral unbelievers who were drowned for their wrongs.

Myths seem to indicate how ideas traveled via ancient webs.  In Greece, river floods were almost unknown, but their myths still included flood stories, likely reflecting a Mesopotamian influence.  In one tale, Zeus got furiously pissed off at the sins of humankind, and decided it was flood time.  Prometheus discovered the plan, and told his son Deucalion to build an ark or chest.  Floods arrived, and Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha (Pandora’s daughter) floated for nine days and nights, until they safely landed on Mount Othrys.  They recreate humans by throwing stones behind their back, from which people are born.

In the Norse story of Ragnarök, the humanlike gods subdued the four forces of nature.  Of course, nature violently broke loose, and gave the arrogant control freak gods their bloody just rewards.  The whole world burned, and was then was submerged by floods.  Earth was cleansed, healed, and renewed.  Greek myths also mention that, from time to time, fires destroyed the world.

When you toss a stone into still water, ripples fan out in expanding circles.  The apocalyptic culture of ancient Mesopotamia can seem to be a splash that rippled around the world, disturbing the very long era of kinder and gentler cultures that preceded it.

Herder vs. Farmer

Jared Diamond wrote that Mesopotamia was unusual because it was home to a number of plant and animal species that were suitable for domestication.  Early hunter-gatherers were delighted to discover abundant wild foods.  They ceased being nomads, eventually gobbled up too much of the abundance, and began fooling around with domestication. 

The friction between farmers and herders is very old.  Farmers clustered along the floodplains of waterways.  Crops were habitual heavy drinkers and, in lucky times, they could produce generous harvests of nutrient-rich grains and pulses (peas, lentils, etc.).  Farming was hard work.  It chained you to a piece of land, where the food stored in your granary could provide an irresistible temptation to nomadic raiders, violent parasites.

Floodplains were primo real estate for both farmers and herders.  Herders managed livestock that had a serious addiction to grass and water.  In the eyes of livestock, a lush field of wheat and barley was a paradise of yummy grass.  Was it the farmer’s job to protect his fields, or the herder’s job to keep his critters in the hills?  Herding was an attractive choice for people disinterested in backbreaking drudgery, folks who preferred the freedom of nomadic living.

Myths preserve the enduring friction between farmers and herders.  Sumerians told a story about the lovely goddess Inanna, who was courted by Dumuzid (a herder), and Enkimdu (a farmer).  She chose the herder, the more prudent choice. 

Much later, this story is echoed in the Abrahamic tradition, by the story Cain (farmer) and Abel (herder).  God did not favor Cain’s offering, but gladly accepted Abel’s.  This hurt Cain’s feelings, so he murdered his brother, which did not amuse God.  Cain was banished, wandered away, and built the city of Enoch.

In both stories, the farmer appears inferior.  The Sumerian and Abrahamic traditions were strongly influenced by the culture of nomadic pastoralism.  For example: “Neither shall ye build house, nor sow seed, nor plant vineyard, nor have any: but all your days ye shall dwell in tents; that ye may live many days in the land where ye be strangers.”  (Jeremiah 35:7)

Bruce Chatwin wrote, “The prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Hosea were nomadic revivalists who howled abuse at the decadence of civilization.  By sinking roots in the land, by laying house to house and field to field, by turning the Temple into a sculpture gallery, the people had turned from their God.”

Chatwin also mentioned that the name Cain means metal-smith, and that in several languages the words for “violence” and “subjugation” are linked to the discovery of metal, and the malevolent arts of technology.  Warfare became much bloodier.  The pages of the Old Testament document the violent deaths of up to several million people, and the destruction of many cities.  For example:

“And so it was, that in the seventh day the battle was joined: and the children of Israel slew of the Syrians an hundred thousand footmen in one day.” (Kings 1, 20:29)  “But the Syrians fled before Israel; and David slew of the Syrians seven thousand men which fought in chariots, and forty thousand footmen, and killed Shophach the captain of the host.” (Chronicles 1, 19:18)

Jared Diamond discussed God’s instructions to Hebrew warriors, regarding the proper treatment of heathens.  When an ordinary city you are attacking does not surrender, besiege it, kill every male, enslave the women, children, and cattle, and take what you want.  On the other hand, when attacking cities that worship false gods, like the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, “thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.” (Deuteronomy 20:10-18)  Diamond noted that Joshua faithfully slaughtered every person in over 400 cities. 

METAPHYSICAL WHIRLWINDS

Wild cultures were local and simple, and their notions of the cosmos, if any, were quite different from the religions of civilization.  With the emergence of farming and herding, populations grew, ecosystems got pounded, and bloody conflicts became more numerous and destructive.  Religions developed a number of new and unusual mutations.  Old fashioned traditions of respect and reverence for creation often got hurled overboard.  Civilization was focused on growth, wealth, status seeking, dominance, and other quirky kinks.

Multiply and Subdue

By the time that the Abrahamic scriptures had been written down, the notion of human supremacy was well established in the Fertile Crescent.  Indeed, the human saga is a long story of our cleverness, our tireless expansion into every land, and the tumultuous “progress” we unleashed. 

A classic example of this mindset appears in Genesis.  Immediately after creating Adam and Eve, the first instructions that God gave them were: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”  (Genesis 1:28) 

Humans were made in God’s image, the world was made for humans, and only humans matter (no mention of limits or foresight).  Our holy mission was to multiply, subdue, and dominate.  The descendants of Adam and Eve have displayed exceptional skill at achieving these objectives.  Unintended consequences now include the climate crisis, surging extinctions, soaring population, pollution, deforestation, and on and on. 

Biblical scholars have reported that Earth was created between 4000 B.C. and 3000 B.C., some calculating specifically 3137 B.C., but scientists have some doubts.  Scholars who study historic demographic trends estimate that in that era, humankind had a population between 7 to 14 million.  Almost all of the planet still looked a lot like an ecological paradise.  Water in the Mississippi, Rhine, and Thames was safe to drink.  The Irish rainforest was full of stags, wolves, and boars.

Writing is a fantastically powerful technology, for both illuminating and casting spells.  If there was a deep cave somewhere in which God was unable to read our every thought, some might be tempted to question whether divine instructions given to a world of 14 million are still wise and appropriate in a world zooming toward 8 billion.  In the twenty-first century, maybe contraceptives are not tools of the devil.  But that cave does not exist.  Never mind!  Just kidding!

Linear Time

Control freak societies can get obsessive-compulsive about time, measuring it in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries, millennia.  I am writing at 4:08 PM PST on Sunday, January 17, A.D. 2021.  This moment is unique in the life of the universe, like a fingerprint, or a DNA sequence.  Many were just born, many just died, and Big Mama Nature received more kicks.

Wild folks had a softer and gentler perception of time.  Time was the daily passage of the sun across the sky, and the monthly phases of the moon.  Time was the perpetual cycle of winter, spring, summer, and fall.  It was the zig and zag of wet seasons and dry seasons, of cold ones and hot ones, of serenity and frightening storms.  For these people, time was circular, a wheel that never stops turning.  It keeps spinning and spinning, and it is real and alive and good.

In a number of Neolithic societies, like those in Mesopotamia, something extremely weird happens — the notion of linear time emerges.  It is not circular.  Linear time is like a drag strip for tire-burning hot rods, a one-way sprint from the starting line (creation) to the finish line (apocalypse), from paradise to wasteland, from womb to worms.  It is a cosmic (comic?) soap opera in which the spotlights remain focused on the rise and fall of an odd and amusing species of primates — as if we are the one and only thing in the universe that matters.  Nothing came before us, and nothing shall follow us.  How weird!

Paul Shepard said that folks living in Neolithic societies couldn’t help but notice that their way of life was wobbly, sloppy, and turbulent.  He wrote, “Living amidst collapsing ecosystems, agrarians accept a religion of arbitrary gods, catastrophic punishments by flood, pestilence, famine, and drought in an apocalyptic theology.”  Folks could see that the surrounding region was dotted with the ruins of past glory, remnants of the eternal two-step of overshoot, and its faithful companion, collapse.

Populations sometimes grew faster than Big Mama Nature could limit the swarms.  When the flood plains reached full occupancy, settlement expanded into forests, and up hillsides.  Hungry herds of hooved locusts chewed away the vegetation, exposing the naked soil, which blew away and washed away.  Rainfall and snowmelt rapidly ran off of stripped slopes.  Consequently, catastrophic floods were common, as were landslides.  Irrigation systems eventually made the fields so salty that nothing can grow in them.  A satellite flying over Mesopotamia now sees THIS.

The McNeills commented on the expanding shoreline along the Persian Gulf, into which the Tigris and Euphrates emptied.  Sumerian cities that were once located on the coast, or close to it, are today up to 100 miles (161 km) inland from the shore.  Former islands are now mainland, far from the coast.  Massive erosion was a perfectly normal consequence of upstream deforestation, overgrazing, and agriculture. 

George Perkins Marsh, in his 1864 book, described his visits to the ruins of many classic civilizations, and (correctly) worried that America was on the same path.  He wrote that where the Roman Empire once reigned, more than half of their lands today (1860s) are either deserted, desolate, or at least greatly reduced in both productiveness and population.  Vast forests are gone, much soil has been lost, springs have dried up, famous rivers have shrunk to humble brooklets, smaller rivers have dried up or have become seasonal, entrances to navigable streams are blocked by sandbars, former harbors are now distant from the sea, and large areas of shallow sea and fertile lowland are now foul smelling unhealthy swamps.

The ancient Greeks saw history as a long and tragic saga of human decline.  Hesiod writes of the Golden Age: “They lived like gods, free from worry and fatigue; old age did not afflict them; they rejoiced in continual festivity.”  This was followed by the Silver Age, a matriarchal era of agriculture, when men obeyed their mothers.  This was followed by the Bronze Age, a patriarchal era of war.  “Their pitiless hearts were as hard as steel; their might was untamable, their arms invincible.”  This was followed by the Iron Age, a time “when men respect neither their vows, nor justice, nor virtue.”

Today, we live in the Overshoot Age, when billions of people spend their lives in the crazy lane, and nothing seems to really matter.  Do redwoods matter, or whales, or polar bears, or ravens, or children?  Is anything sacred?  Hello?  Is anybody home?

Holy Lands

Wild cultures felt a sense of sacred oneness with their ancestral homeland.  It was a relationship of profound reverence and respect.  Their creation stories do not include the notion of being forcibly evicted from paradise for naughty behavior.  Something like paradise was their birthplace and permanent address, the home of their ancestors, and the generations yet to be born.  A Karuk man once took me to a bluff, and pointed down to a bend in the Klamath River where the Karuk people were first brought into existence, long, long ago.

Modern Americans are two-legged tumbleweeds that have blown in from countless distant places.  We frequently move every few years.  Many tumbleweeds have little or no knowledge of their ancestral homelands.  Many never develop a spiritual connection to any place.  For them, nature is typically nothing more than a meaningless static backdrop along the highway, stuff they zoom past during their daily travels.

Paul Shepard noted that this was a big shift away from older cultures, in which folks felt a profound spiritual connection to the land where they lived.  His wife Florence Shepard said it like this, “At the heart of our identity is a fundamentally wild being, one who finds in the whole of wild nature all that is true and beautiful in this world.”  By the time wild children reach puberty, they have developed a healthy connection to place.  They have a profound sense of belonging that most modern tumbleweeds cannot begin to imagine, and will never experience.

Vine Deloria was a Yankton Sioux who had immense respect for their traditional culture, because it had deep roots in place, and a healthy sense of coherence.  Settlers were ridiculously incoherent.  A missionary would tell them they were devil worshippers, convert them to the one true faith, and then a year later the next missionary would inform them that the first one was a demonic fire hose of lies and deceptions.  All the black robes read the same book, but none agreed on what it meant.

In 1945, a farmer named Mohammed Ali found an ancient jar near Nag Hammadi in Egypt.  Among the contents of this jar was a book containing the Gospel of Thomas.  This gospel of Jesus’ life had never been edited, corrected, clarified, or blessed by the official Holy Roman Church.  In chapter 113 of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is talking about the nature of heaven — God’s kingdom.  He said that it was not an event that would occur in the future.  Here is what he said: “The kingdom of God is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.”  In other words, heaven is where your feet are standing.  Wherever you stand is sacred ground.

Moralizing Society

Harvey Whitehouse wrote about how deities changed with the rise of civilizations.  Complex societies tend to promote the rise of gods that are all-powerful, all-seeing, and tireless moralizers — deities that reward the virtuous, and spank the naughty.  Folks tend to be more motivated by the fear of punishment, rather than the desire for rewards.  Strict morals can also be useful for getting ethnically diverse groups to march to the same drum, without getting uppity.

The objective here was to encourage beneficial behavior, because a disempowered, obedient, and orderly mob was a productive and profitable mob.  Elites do not enjoy the presence of rebels and rabble-rousers.  But in a big community, troublesome folks can often become invisible within the vast anonymous crowds.  In theory, all-seeing moralizing gods are personal deities.  They always know exactly what you (and everyone else) are doing and thinking.

In simple societies, the local spirits were less likely to become morality police.  There was no cultural diversity to generate friction, everyone shared the same worldview.  Folks in small groups lived in fishbowls — everyone was well aware of what everyone else was doing.  There were no secrets.  Folks were inclined to behave mindfully.  Misbehavior could lead to friendly nudges, a damaged reputation, an ass whooping, or ostracism. 

John Trudell, a Santee Sioux activist, bitterly detested the colonization of the Americas.  Traditionally, tribal people were raised in a culture of spiritual reality, which emphasized a profound respect and reverence for the family of life.  Their guiding star was responsibility.  Settlers, on the other hand, were far less interested in notions of responsibility.  Preachers blasted tribal folks with intensely toxic moralizing.  A primary objective was to make people feel powerless, to convince them that they’re bad, sinful, evil from birth — to paralyze them with guilt and shame, to strip away their self-respect.

Vine Deloria said that a tribal person “does not live in a tribe, the tribe lives in him.”  Their sense of identity was rooted in “we,” not “me.”  Self-centeredness was a spiritual abnormality.  Everyone had powerful bonds to the land, the clan, and their family.  I am an only child, and my good buddy Jim was one of seven children.  I envy their powerful lifelong bonds, and their ongoing mutual support.  This is the mode in which social primates evolved to live.

Robert Anton Wilson noted that living within a tribe, and benefitting from mutual support, was vital for survival.  Being punished by banishment or exile was like being thrown overboard in the high seas — an extremely brutal and terrifying punishment that was only chosen for hopelessly impossible buttheads.  Execution would have been more merciful.  The benefits of mutual support really encouraged conformity to time-proven tribal norms.

And this, dear reader, is why hierarchical societies, like industrial civilization, are wonderlands of craziness.  The air is constantly hissing with the voices of sorcerers.  Thou shalt compete (not cooperate).  Thou shalt hoard (not share).  Thou shalt always strive to become a heroic example of personal success and extravagant excess.  Fun fact: “Thou shalt” appears exactly 500 times in the King James Bible. 

Individual Salvation

A few pages back, we learned that the Sumerian gods could be sloppy drunks.  They created humans so flawed that the only solution was to exterminate them with a great flood.  The Genesis story echoes this.  When the flood subsided, Noah’s surviving kinfolk were still just as flawed as the countless humans who were deliberately drowned.  A rational person could wonder why all-knowing, all-powerful creators kept flubbing up when creating humans, but that might be heresy.  Let’s not go there.  Reason and religion usually sleep in separate beds.

It’s not heresy to perceive the obvious.  These Neolithic cultures clearly taught that the humans were inherently flawed.  In the Christian tradition, every newborn is evil until baptized.  Once baptized, living in strict obedience to divine instructions is not mandatory.  The world is filled with temptations, and we all have the freedom to be naughty or nice.  Nice folks are obedient, and their reward is salvation, the heavenly ticket to eternal paradise.  Death is when the good times begin.

With regard to salvation, everyone is equal, from billionaires to ditch diggers, women, and slaves.  Everyone has the option of seeking the path to a wonderful afterlife.  Nobody is worthless.  This is very cool, because if you were born a slave, that was God’s will, not a cruel misfortune.  So, with this understanding, you can happily shovel shit for a few decades, and then go to paradise for eternity.  Yippee!

Belief in salvation can be so powerful that it overrides survival instincts.  Michael Dowd wrote, “In group-to-group conflicts, any culture that offers the promise of an afterlife to those who heroically martyr themselves will likely triumph over an army of atheists who have the rational belief that death marks the absolute end of individual existence.”

Humans are social critters, not stray cats.  We are most comfortable when we are among small intimate groups of family and friends, where everyone is equal, and we care for each other.  With regard to individual salvation, the opposite is true.  When it’s time to meet the divine for your final exam, you are completely on your own.  I may achieve salvation, while everyone I love and respect does not (or vice versa).

Beyond flawed humans, the entire planet is flawed.  In the Christian sphere, they believe that the world is the realm of Satan, a place of evil.  For them, Earth is something like a cheap motel room where we get an opportunity to spend some time demonstrating our worthiness for salvation (or the toasty alternative).  It’s just an audition.  Of course, this implies that the living ecosystem does not deserve respect and reverence.  It’s just a funky roadside flophouse with stained sheets with cigarette burns, a cheap place for a short stay.  It’s OK to smash it up (or flood it).

[Continued on sample 54]

Wild Free and Happy Sample 49

 

[Note: This is the forty-ninth 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.

LIMITS

“Limit” is a power word, a gateway that can open or close, and influence the course of ecosystem trends.  When members of a species move into an ecosystem, and adapt to it, they make use of available resources, and expand until their growth is paused by limits — food, water, climate, predators, etc.  Herbivores are limited by the availability of digestible vegetation.  Predators are limited by the availability of prey.  The whims of climate can suddenly tighten limits, or relax them.  The dance of life is full of surprises.  Humans are unique in that we can sometimes blow away traditional limits via the wildcard of technological innovation. 

In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote a landmark book announcing that there were limits to growth, an idea that many still consider to be silly nonsense (we have no limits!).  At the time, Britain’s Industrial Revolution was rapidly eliminating the traditional cottage-based craft workers who spun yarn, knitted garments, and wove fabric. 

During this era, aristocrats were also busy enclosing (privatizing) the common lands, which forced many peasants from homes where their ancestors had lived for generations.  Enclosure freed up land that could be used to raise lots of sheep, which generated far more income than rents from hungry dirty peasants.

Many displaced peasants migrated to filthy crowded cities to work in textile factories.  Kirkpatrick Sale described folks working up to 18 hours per day (never less than 10), breathing air that was thick with dust.  Many were injured by the whirling and jerking machines.  Most of the workforce was women and children (as young as 4 or 5), because they worked for far less money than men.  While the poor folks lived in misery, the well to do were surfing on big waves of wealth.  Life was grand!

Steam powered textile factories were driving cottage enterprises extinct, at the same time that enclosures were forcing many to migrate to cities, where low-paying factory work was available.  Factories could make clothing that was far less expensive, and far lower in quality.  Shoddy hosiery sometimes decomposed after a single wearing.  Poor folks could only afford the cheap crap.  Cottage workers were too proud of their craft to lower their standards, or work for peanuts.

Let’s take a quick side trip.  In the 1851 census, my great-great-grandmother, Sarah Cleaton Rees was a handloom weaver in the parish of Llangurig, Wales, as was her mother, sister, four of her sisters-in-law, and many of their neighbors.  The wool produced in the Cambrian Mountains was rugged.  Flannel woven from it lasted nearly forever, but was a bit scratchy.

Sarah had been a widow since 1844, when her husband died from “decline” at 23.  She had three sons.  Unlike factory rats, handloom weavers generally earned a living income.  Sarah did not marry again for 11 years, but she did leave Llangurig.  In about 1853, Sarah and her sons moved south to Merthyr Tydfil, an ironworking district.  Was she forced out by enclosure, or did her source of income go belly up?

In the 1861 census, she was working as a beer house keeper at the Green Dragon, and her sons were iron miners.  In the region, dense coal smoke made the air black, and the rivers too.  It was a miserable life — hard work, wee wages, filthy air, raw sewage everywhere, and tainted water that killed thousands.  Cholera was common.  Legends tell of families being alive and well in the morning, and all dead by sunset.  In 1863, Sarah, her sons, and new husband, packed up and moved to the U.S., where they found coal mining work in Ohio.

When Malthus wrote in 1798 there were about 8.8 million English.  By 1861, the number had soared to 20.1 million.  Sarah and Malthus spent their lives in a population explosion, an era of intense social turbulence.  In 1798, like today, the wizards in the center stage spotlights were radicalized utopians, like Marx, Engels, and Malthus’s crazy daddy, who enthusiastically celebrated the wonders of progress, and the limitless rosy future that laid ahead.

For 200+ years, legions of critics have been denouncing the legacy of Malthus, because he predicted that rapid population growth would soon lead to catastrophe.  Actually, he never made that prediction, although he was right to be wary of growth.  Few critics have actually read his book.  Over the years, Malthus penned six editions.  Garrett Hardin sat down and read them all, comparing the additions and deletions.  In Living Within Limits, Hardin concluded that 95 percent of his ideas were correct.  Not bad!

Carrying Capacity

William Catton put his finger on Malthus’ core misunderstanding.  Malthus simply could not imagine that it was possible for humankind to ever exceed Earth’s carrying capacity.  At the time, the global population was just approaching one billion.  Much of the U.S. Midwest was still a vast ancient forest.  He clearly underestimated the destructive potential of technological innovation, and what it would do to the planet.

Catton wrote a masterpiece on carrying capacity, and how it impacts humans and everything else.  On the book cover, his five word definition of carrying capacity was “the maximum permanently supportable load.”  His use of “permanent” doesn’t mean for all eternity, because all living systems never stop changing.  It sort of meant living in a manner that was not at the expense of the next generation(s), or the vitality of the ecosystem — something that could operate indefinitely, because it was not a belligerent enemy of the family of life.

Around 300,000 years ago, the planet’s carrying capacity for humans was limited by the resources available within their original homeland in east Africa.  They lived lightly, because that was their only option.  Later, as the ancestors migrated into Asia, Europe, and Australia, the planet’s carrying capacity for humans expanded, because they inhabited more territory, and had access to more resources.  Their expansion did not leave behind a wake of ecological wreckage, at first.  As discussed earlier, a number of large game species were gradually driven to extinction when the intrepid pioneers lived a bit too hard.

Over the passage of millennia, some ancestors gradually swerved farther and farther across the yellow line of limits.  Eventually, with the domestication of plants and animals, some clever ones closed their eyes and stomped on the accelerator.  Bye-bye forests, wetlands, topsoil, and animal life.  Bye-bye healthy wild ecosystems.  Hello growing mobs, civilizations, tyrants, slavery, patriarchy, and a wake of irreparable wreckage.  Whoops!

For any species, the carrying capacity limits for a region, or the planet, can be altered in two ways.  (1) Takeover is expansion into new habitat, which provides access to additional resources.  This is not inherently naughty.  For example, long, long ago horses and camels migrated from America to the Old World.  Mammoths and saber-tooth cats migrated in the opposite direction.  So, takeover can genuinely enlarge carrying capacity for a species. 

(2) Drawdown enables carrying capacity limits to be temporarily overridden by diminishing exhaustible resources — forests, topsoil, minerals, oil reservoirs, and so on.  For example, when an ancient forest is displaced to create farms and pastures, more food can be produced, and the mob can grow — at the cost of degrading exhaustible resources, and overthrowing traditional balances in the ecosystem.  Drawdown can include horses being replaced with tractors, manure replaced with synthetic fertilizer, and rainfall supplemented with water extracted from ancient aquifers.

Catton wrote that drawdown did not actually elevate carrying capacity.  Instead, it created “phantom carrying capacity,” because the expansion was unsustainable and temporary.  Writing in 1980, he said that the ongoing survival of 90 percent of humankind (including Americans) was dependent on phantom carrying capacity, far in excess of traditional limits.  Today, that percentage is certainly higher, because it is enabled by ever-growing dependence on fossil energy and other strategic nonrenewable resources.

Drawdown leads to overshoot — growth beyond an area’s carrying capacity, eventually leading to crash and die-off.  Blissfully ignorant consumers, as well as world leaders, often mistake overshoot for progress.  Today, humankind has advanced deeply into overshoot, impacting the entire planet.  Consequently, as the still soaring population works harder and harder to ravage the natural world, the global carrying capacity for humans is deteriorating, while phantom carrying capacity soars ever higher.

Overshoot doesn’t <bleep> around.  It is beginning a messy and merciless process of herding the enormous human mob into a narrow bottleneck, through which only a limited number can pass.  The tight squeeze will continue until the human mob is reduced to a number that can live in peace with a severely damaged Earth (if we don’t simply get pushed off the stage forever).

Energy and Growth

In this long and lumpy comedy of errors, the transition to fossil energy shifted the monster into warp drive.  In the famous story, Dr. Frankenstein’s creepy monster spoke these words to him, “You are my maker, but I am your master.”  Today’s globalized industrial civilization is living like there’s no tomorrow, and behaving as if we were the last generation.  This story will have a crappy ending.  Consumer society has zoomed far beyond the border, deep into the bowels of Crazyland, where folks soar away in beautiful hallucinations of limitlessness — a magical realm of progress, abundance, perpetual growth, maniacal shopping, and 500 channels of nonstop entertainment with no commercials.

J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke wrote about the planet shaking explosion of eco-destruction that has occurred since 1945.  They noted that energy is the guiding force, the trail blazer, of humankind’s long meandering saga.  We can’t photosynthesize sunlight, so we survive by eating plants and animals.  In the days before hominins learned how to kindle fire, their sole source of life energy was a raw food diet.  Fire led to cooking, which enabled the ancestors to transform indigestible stuff into an additional sources of life energy.  Increased access to edible energy enabled the survival of more food eaters. 

Tragically, with the emergence of plant and animal domestication, traditional limits to growth could be radically exceeded, temporarily, by rubbishing wild ecosystems, and replacing them with manmade ecosystems capable of producing far more edible energy, when conditions were favorable.  Cereal grains are energy dense, and suitable for long term storage.  Today, our food is produced by mechanized, irrigated, chemical drenched, industrial agriculture, which further accelerates overpopulation.

Similarly, the domestication of livestock and poultry generated even more food energy, especially when wild predators (competitors) were systematically exterminated.  Enslaved horses could convert the solar energy stored by vegetation into mechanical energy useful for carrying riders and cargo, or for pulling plows, carts, and carriages.  Prior to this time, for almost 300,000 years, the primary source of mechanical energy used by our ancestors was human muscle power.

Catton wrote that agriculture provided phantom carrying capacity.  Another phantom was the exploitation of “ghost acreage.”  The hungry mobs in places like Britain could be fed by importing lots of food produced on faraway acres in other lands.  Many nations are now depend on imported food.  Another phantom was industrial fish mining, depleting wild fisheries to feed hungry urban populations.  All wild animals have limits too.  The global food system can seem like a shaky house of cards.

The planet-eating monster is primarily powered by nonrenewable fossil energy, a form of stored sunshine that accumulated over the course of 500 million years.  Every day we move closer to the post-fossil era, and to the funeral wake for today’s global food industry, and the overshoot it conjured into existence.

In 2019, ecological economist William E. Rees wrote a stunning sentence: “It is a quirk of exponential growth that half the fossil energy ever used (and half the fossil CO₂ ever produced), has been burned (emitted) in just the past 35 years!”  Rees has come to the conclusion that humans are not “primarily a rational species.”  It’s hard to disagree.

Growth Soars Away

Eventually, our food production surpluses rose to the point where a portion of the mob was no longer needed in the fields and pastures.  It became possible to feed people who could indulge in specialized activities, like metallurgy, woodworking, ceramics, construction, warfare, religion, government, and on and on.  We swerved into the express lane, and commenced our joyride of turbocharged cleverness with no brakes, no roads, and no foresight — full speed ahead into the powerful nightmare world of unintended consequences.  Yippee!

Growing numbers of folks accumulated in villages, towns, and cities.  Poor sanitation, malnutrition, and high density living laid out the welcome mat to a wide variety of herd diseases.  William McNeill noted that for 8,000 years, cities were demographic black holes, because of their high death rates.  Their ongoing existence depended on the constant inflow of surplus people from the countryside, commonly bachelors, spinsters, orphans, and refugees who were not among the lucky winners in the land inheritance lottery.

William Stanton pointed out that around 1750, population trends shifted into a new mode, accelerating growth.  Food production was booming.  Colonies in Africa, Australia, and the Americas greatly expanded the area of land used for growing crops and raising livestock.  It became possible to import abundant amounts of food.  New World crop plants were sent back to the Old World, including two extremely productive super foods — potatoes and corn (maize).  Old World livestock was sent to the colonies, where they could explode into the millions. 

Our skills at soil mining improved.  The area of land that could support ten people in 1700, could support 50 by 1900.  New types of potent fertilizers became available, further boosting productivity.  Crop breeding research launched the Green Revolution, which enabled a dramatic increase in productivity. 

Stanton wrote that when agriculture became dependent on oil, the need for human labor was reduced by a factor of 40 to 1.  Using the latest mega-technology, the factor might be close to 100 to 1.  New farm machinery promoted higher crop yields.  New dams enabled deserts to become lush croplands.  New irrigation pumps enabled water miners to drain ancient aquifers.  New petrochemicals reduced crop losses by insects, diseases, and weeds. 

Birth control is intended to prevent unwelcome pregnancies.  Stanton talked a lot about its opposite, death control, which was intended to delay unwelcome deaths.  Prior to 1750, high mortality rates provided a reliable restraint on growth.  Then, from 1750 to now, stunning advances in death control kicked open the gateway to a horrific population explosion.  He decreed that this was an era of weak restraints on growth (WROG).  Naturally, when death rates drop below birth rates, population rises.  Growth happens.

In prehistoric times, there were periods of WROG that began when wild humans first set foot on uninhabited continents and islands, and discovered an abundance of delicious resources.  Five centuries ago, civilized folks from the Old World washed ashore in the New World.  The infectious diseases they carried with them rapidly spread, killing most of the inhabitants on two continents.  The massive die-off then cleared the stage for a 500 year WROG rocket ride.

In the current WROG surge, while birth rates chug along, death rates have been dramatically driven down by technological innovations.  Food production is booming.  Mortality from infectious diseases has been reduced by new vaccines, antibiotics, wonder drugs, antiseptic surgery, and other health care advances.  Public health has been improved by energy-guzzling systems for garbage disposal, safe drinking water, and sewage treatment.  What this one-time binge on fossil energy is doing to the climate will eventually drive a stake through the heart of the WROG era.

Growth Nears Retirement

As the old proverb says, what goes up, must come down.  During the current WROG nightmare, technological cleverness has made it possible to maximize drawdown, and foolishly override carrying capacity limits.  We’re rocketing into the future, at maximum velocity, blindfolded, out of control, lost in a dream world of vivid hallucinations — a joyride into the roaring flames of overshoot.  This is what is known as progress, sustainable growth, a high standard of living, and other oxymoronic gibberish.

When you spend every minute of your life pounded by a hurricane of conflicting, nonsensical, fabricated information, it can sometimes be difficult to see and think clearly.  Most folks unconsciously assume that the decadent lifestyles of the WROG era (including our entire lifetime) are perfectly normal.  Wrong! 

When I was born in 1952, there were 2.6 billion humans.  Today in 2020, it has tripled to 7.8 billion, and is still growing — a massive explosion resulting in catastrophic irreversible damage.  Oddly, most folks in the land of glowing screens consider the status quo to be not only normal, but the pinnacle of the entire human experience.  We have great powers of imagination.

We’ve gotten way too clever at exceeding limits — by sneaking around them, leaping over them, tunneling under them, or exterminating them.  Consumer society has soared away into a state of limitless debauchery.  No previous generation has ever lived in such a destructive manner.  This way of life has an expiration date, and there are folks alive today who will experience its arrival.

In the absence of wisdom, foresight, radical birth control, and enthusiastic worldwide cooperation, food will become increasingly expensive and/or scarce.  No matter how hard we wish, it is not possible to conjure megatons of food out of thin air via hope, prayers, voting, or positive thinking.  When overshoot finally slams into the stone wall of carrying capacity, carrying capacity giggles, overshoot splatters, and the obesity epidemic sings its death song.

Sooner or later, as the WROG circus rides off into the sunset, the most vulnerable regions will eventually reach what Stanton calls the violent cutback level (VCL).  When this happens, violence becomes inevitable, he says, because the surefire medicines that effectively cure acute overpopulation are bitter.  He noted that a number of regions began approaching VCL levels in the late 1970s, Rwanda for example.  The number of hotspots continues growing.  Stanton noted that folks having low social status, or high bad luck, will be among those affected first.  Political correctness will go extinct, as will sympathy for underdogs, scapegoats, heretics, and (fill in the blank). 

Societies that are ethnically and culturally homogenous, like Iceland, have not shattered into aggressively competing factions, so the possibility of reaching their VCL is not a constant danger.  On the other hand, in dysfunctional, oppressive, intolerant, multi-cultural societies — flaming hotbeds of merciless, power crazy, pathological selfishness — like the U.S., the Middle East, and many other regions, VCL is always just one spark away.