Wild Free and Happy Sample 09

[Note: This is the ninth 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 199 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

The Dance of Hominin Evolution

Experts have endless lively disputes about many aspects of hominin evolution.  There were many predecessors to Homo sapiens, but an accurate lineage of the hominin family tree does not exist, and probably never will.  The physical evidence discovered so far is extremely incomplete.  It’s like a million piece jigsaw puzzle where more than 99 percent of the pieces are missing, and most of these have disintegrated over time.

Evolution does not resemble automobile assembly plants, where production of 2018 models completely ends on a fixed date, and the process of building new and improved 2019 models begins.  The transition from one species to the next is a blurry process that can take hundreds of thousands of years, and isolated groups of the same species can evolve in significantly different ways. 

In addition to arguments over the branches of the family tree, the dates assigned to specific events are also controversial and inconsistent.  Technology for dating specimens has advanced over the years, and different technologies often produce very different dates for the same bone or artifact.  Also, ongoing field work continues to make new discoveries.  So, did Homo sapiens emerge 190,000 years ago, or 300,000?  Did they arrive in Europe 50,000 years ago or 36,000?  And so on.  Numbers are slippery.

If we step back a bit, and disregard numeric dates, there is general agreement on a number of big picture trends.  Homo erectus is much older than Neanderthal, and both are older than Homo sapiens.  Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, and Neanderthals did not.  Erectus and Neanderthals are not associated with megafauna extinctions, but our species certainly is.  For the purposes of this book, the trajectory of trends is important — event A preceded event B.  All numeric dates presented here are controversial.

Although the Earth Crisis has roots much older than Homo sapiens, our species is playing a starring role in this catastrophic tragedy.  For this reason, the following chapters will primarily focus on humans, and the emergence and expansion of some highly destructive cultures.  But first, a few comments on two notable cousins.

Erectus and Neanderthal

Homo erectus emerged maybe 1.9 million years ago, and eventually spread across some of the warmer regions of Africa, Asia, and Europe.  They may have been an early ancestor of modern humans.  Erectus hunted, gathered, and used stone tools.  They were the first hominins to evolve a larger than average brain, and they may have been the first to domesticate fire.  Erectus maybe walked off the stage somewhere between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago.  Their long era of existence does not correspond to extinction spasms or serious ecological injuries.  Erectus apparently lived on Earth much longer than Neanderthals did.

Neanderthals probably evolved north of the Mediterranean, not in Africa.  Their remains have been found in Siberia, the Middle East, and Europe.  The earliest discoveries date to maybe 350,000 years ago.  We share up to 99.9 percent of our DNA with them.  Because they lived in non-tropical regions, they evolved thick bodies with large bones that provided greater strength and better cold tolerance.  Elizabeth Kolbert noted that modern humans have up to four percent Neanderthal DNA. 

Erectus, on average, had 1,000 cc brains.  Neanderthals were the brainiest hominins, at 1,600 cc.  Sapiens averages a modest 1,350 cc.  Could our smaller brains be the result of having access to cutting edge new technology (javelins, harpoons, bows and arrows, etc.)? 

Kathleen McAuliffe reported on research finding that human brains have shrunk about 10 percent in the last 20,000 years.  The Homo sapiens with the biggest brains lived in Europe 20,000 to 30,000 years ago.  They were the Cro-Magnons, who had to overcome the many new challenges of surviving in snowy ecosystems, while fending off hungry cave lions, cave hyenas, and saber-tooth cats.  The shrinking brain trend has been found in China, Europe, Africa, and even Australia, which remained Stone Age until 1788.  Why?  Perplexed experts propose some theories, but they don’t know for sure. 

One study found that brains get smaller as population density increases.  Tim Flannery suggests that modern consumers live like cattle on a feedlot, all our needs conveniently provided.  We no longer have the skills or knowledge to survive in the wild.  Thirty species of animals have been domesticated, and for every one of them their brain volume was 10 to 15 percent smaller than their wild ancestors.  Some think that humans domesticated themselves.

Anyway, the trademark Neanderthal weapon was a heavy thrusting lance.  Hunters had to slowly, silently, and very skillfully approach the prey undetected, then suddenly charge the animal, firmly gripping the spear with both hands, and ram it deep into its flesh.  Readers who have hunted hippos with wooden thrusting spears know that this can be very dangerous.  One site in Croatia contained the remains of 75 Neanderthals, and none were older than 35.  Many of their bones had healed fractures, suggesting painful accidents or encounters with fierce animals.  Dying of old age was unlikely.

The climate of the Neanderthal era was like a roller coaster.  In Europe, they were pounded by an era of extreme cold maybe 70,000 years ago.  From maybe 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, the climate was a spastic freak show.  Clive Finlayson noted that the climate often flip-flopped between warm periods and intensely frigid.  Radical shifts could arrive suddenly, and last hundreds or thousands of years, all across Eurasia.  Youngsters might grow up in a chilly steppe ecosystem that used to be a comfortable forest in the days of their grandparents.

Would Neanderthals have become the modern global primate if Homo sapiens had blinked out in Africa?  I sometimes wonder if real estate was a significant limiting factor.  Caves were luxurious addresses during glacial centuries, compared to hide-covered teepees or huts.  The primo caves were south (sun) facing, and ideally overlooked the seasonal migration routes of animal herds.  But there was a limited number of caves, and many were not vacant.  Neanderthals were always welcome dinner guests when they stumbled into caverns inhabited by hungry, jumbo-sized cave lions, cave hyenas, and cave bears.

In warmer and wetter periods, glaciers retreated, and tundra transformed into forest and grassland, habitat for critters like red deer, horses, and moose.  In colder and drier periods, glaciers advanced, forest retreated, and tundra returned, as did mammoths, woolly rhinos, and reindeer.  Neanderthals listened to their growling tummies, and went where the meat was.  They migrated northward in warmer eras, and retreated south when blast freezers returned.  The last Neanderthals died on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, in Gibraltar, maybe 40,000 to 28,000 years ago.  This was definitely after the arrival of humans in Western Europe, and before the spasm of megafauna extinctions on the continent.

Our human supremacist culture routinely preaches that Neanderthals were pathetic dullards.  During their long vacation in Europe, maybe 270,000 years, Neanderthal technology didn’t change much.  From the supremacist perspective, Neanderthals’ 350,000 year era of stable, low impact, ecological sustainability was indisputable proof of low intelligence. 

Elizabeth Kolbert absolutely disagreed.  Neanderthals lived in Europe for a very long time while affecting their ecosystem no more than any other large mammals.  Flannery noted that, for hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals coexisted with straight-tusked elephants, mammoths, and woodland rhinos — without driving them extinct.  If humans had never wandered in from the Middle East, Europe might still be a wild, free, and happy celebration of Neanderthals, Irish elk, saber-tooth cats, straight tusk elephants, and aurochs.  What’s wrong with that?

Everything!  The supremacists leap to their feet, jump up and down, spitting, shouting, smashing bottles.  Humans are blessed by incredible intelligence, brilliant innovation, complex hunting weapons, sophisticated language skills, artistic creativity, decorative ornaments, and the powerful ability to invent totally irrational beliefs, accept them as absolute truth, and exterminate large numbers of nonbelievers.  Ancient mystical stories invented by Homo sapiens proudly assert that Homo sapiens is the absolute Crown of Creation, and the rest of the family of life was provided for our sustenance, amusement, and assorted perversions.

OK.  Stop right here.  Reread the list of human blessings in the previous paragraph.  For the most part, these are not characteristics of species that managed to live sustainably for more than a million years, like the chimps, baboons, lions, horses, and on and on — “ordinary animals” in other words.  In the big picture, it’s not irrational to conclude that the unusual intelligence we have acquired is powerful, dangerously irrational and destructive, and has become the primary threat to our continued existence.

For 150+ years, it has been a normal and respectable tradition for scholars and theologians to line up and urinate on the stupid Neanderthals.  European intellectuals were quite sure that the Garden of Eden was located rather close to London.  They were stunned and bewildered by the growing evidence that the ancestors of all hominins trace back to Mother Africa.  All Homo sapiens living 50,000 years ago had beautiful dark skins.   Oh my God!  It can’t be true!  Horror!

In 2014, Paola Villa and Wil Roebroeks reexamined the traditional beliefs in Neanderthal inferiority, to see if the latest archaeological research still supported them.  They did not find compelling data.  They also pointed out that the traditional beliefs of human superiority in language, symbolic communication, cognitive abilities, and abstract thinking were impossible to prove via archaeological data.  These were the biased opinions of supremacist imaginations.  Science is not required to be rational, and very often isn’t.

Sustainability Doesn’t Suck

Anyway, Neanderthals demonstrated that bipedal primates with huge brains can live sustainably for several hundred thousand years, in extremely challenging conditions, without agriculture, metal making, animal enslavement, fish mining, deforestation, or writing.  In fact, stability is not a problem or flaw.  Stability sounds like a fun and healthy alternative to mindless perpetual growth, fanatical eco-destruction, and devastating hurricanes of irrational illusions.

Clive Finlayson reminded us that no animal species can foretell the future.  When life is comfortable, and the ecosystem is not being ravaged, the safe and intelligent option is to be conservative, and remain on the well-worn time-proven path.  But when the <bleep> hits the fan, and traditions totally fail, innovation might be a less dangerous option.  The path of innovation is risky, often leading to unintended consequences and bloody surprises.  In worst case scenarios, innovation can backfire spectacularly, as 7+ billion people are now painfully discovering.  Yikes!

Chris Stringer reminded us that the myth of progress is a new idea.  The notion of utopia-bound continuous improvement is a bit over 200 years old.  Civilization was imagined to be an upward spiral. 

But in earlier civilizations, mobs of loonies were furiously mowing down ancient forests, triggering landslides, flash floods, and harbors choked with silt.  Each new generation inherited an ecosystem that was obviously in worse condition.  The passage of time was seen as a downward spiral of decay and decline, an inevitable one-way descent into social and ecological Armageddon. 

Hesiod, an ancient Greek thinker, described the glorious days of his venerable ancestors as the Golden Age, when men were pure and lived like gods.  It was followed by a descent into the Silver Age, the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, and finally the Iron Age, when men were violent, foul-mouthed, and fascinated by every form of evil.

Stringer noted that the wizards of modern society are possessed by an overwhelming and irrational blind faith in progress and perpetual growth.  We are far more advanced than Neanderthals, and they were better than Erectus.  You and I are lucky to enjoy the amazing pinnacle of billions of years of evolution.  Stringer does not see this as proof of divine destiny.  He believes that the fact that Neanderthals blinked out, and we didn’t, was largely a result of chance.  We survivors were assisted by the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time.

For example, about 70,000 to 75,000 years ago, the Mount Toba super volcano erupted on the island of Sumatra, spreading enormous amounts of ash.  In some regions of India, up to 19 feet (6 m) of ash accumulated.  Much incoming sunlight was blocked, and global temperatures may have dropped by 3° to 5°C for several years.  Others imagine an intense thousand year instant ice age.  Still others suspect far less global impact.  One theory, presented by geneticists, asserts that the human population plunged to 5,000 to 10,000 individuals — implying that we nearly went extinct.  Others point out that there is no evidence of extinction spasms among mammals at this time.  It’s not easy being an expert on days long past.

Anyway, Stringer suggests that if a similar eruption had happened closer to Africa, instead of Sumatra, it could have been game over for our species, but maybe not Neanderthals, who resided north of Africa.  Or, today might look very different if the rollercoaster of ice ages had occurred in a slightly different pattern over the last 200,000 years.  The outcome could have easily been quite different.  Chance is powerful juju.  Stringer is not a member of the progress cult.  He believes that our long-term future is entirely unpredictable.   I agree.

Deep Adaptation



Jem Bendell, Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria, U.K., wrote a paper titled “Deep Adaptation.”  Previously, he had been involved in the standard corporate-oriented stuff — Sustainable Development™, Sustainable Growth™, and so on.  He eventually realized that these have little relationship to genuine ecological sustainability.  He also came to realize that climate change was going to cause a collapse of society during the lives of his students.

Corporate-oriented “sustainability” education teaches blind faith in technology and human genius — full strength hopium.  We can solve any problem!  For them, nothing is more inappropriate than honestly acknowledging reality.  Speaking honestly would scare students out of their wits, fill them with despair, destroy their sanity, and ruin their lives forever!

Bendell was tormented by his realization that “the evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war… in your own life.”  Why is it taboo to discuss this in academia?  He decided to break the taboo in his classes, and the result surprised him.  He wrote:

“In my work with mature students, I have found that inviting them to consider collapse as inevitable, catastrophe as probable, and extinction as possible, has not led to apathy or depression.  Instead, in a supportive environment, where we have enjoyed community with each other, celebrating ancestors and enjoying nature before, then looking at this information and possible framings for it, something positive happens.  I have witnessed a shedding of concern for conforming to the status quo, and a new creativity about what to focus on going forward.”

He wrote a 38-page scholarly paper that defied the taboo.  [HERE]

Drama and commentary on his paper.  [HERE]

He also created a 14 minute video.  [HERE]

His website is [HERE]

His blog is [HERE]

Kitchi-Gami



In the Ojibway language, Kitchi-Gami means Lake Superior.  Johann Georg Kohl (1808-1878) was a German travel writer, geographer, and ethnologist.  In 1855, he spent six months visiting trading posts and missions in Ojibway country near Kitchi-Gami, mostly at the Apostle Islands off the north coast of Wisconsin, and at the settlements at the base of Keweenaw Bay, in northern Michigan.

Kohl’s book, Kitchi-Gami, was published in 1860.  It presents a different perspective from John Tanner’s 1830 book, The Falcon.  Tanner was a white man, kidnapped as a boy, who spent 30 years among the Ojibway, had a hard life, and described his many struggles.  Kohl was a visitor from outer space who was fascinated by the Ojibway.  He interviewed many, learned a lot about their culture, and discussed numerous subjects not mentioned by Tanner.

Kohl was eager to record as much as possible about the Ojibway, because it looked like Native Americans were rapidly dying off, and would soon be gone.  At the same time, the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm were working to preserve remnants of the traditional culture of Germany, because the rustic folks who still remembered bits of it were also dying off.

Both the Ojibway and wild Germans were cultures that inhabited vast ancient forests, sacred places of magic, mystery, hungry wolves, and mystical little people (fairies).  Kohl noted that the folktales of both had similar themes and lessons.  Ojibway birch bark wigwams were of comparable quality to the huts of poor peasants in Lithuania, Ireland, or Polish Jews.  Like Scandinavians, the Ojibway fished at night using torches.  Germany had witches or sorcerers who could cause others harm by curses, charms, or spells.  The Ojibway had Windigos, men or women possessed by evil spirits who were terribly common.

Kohl’s gift to us is a remembrance of the closing days of the wild frontier, when Ojibway country was relatively unmolested, except for its furbearing animals.  The St. Mary’s River was the eastern outlet for Kitchi-Gami.  Bears crossed it during seasonal migrations.  In 1811, the migration lasted all summer, and 6,000 bears were killed, as many as 100 per night.  Before Kohl arrived, the greedy fur mining industry in the region had peaked, sharply declined, and moved westward.

Near the St. Mary’s River was a settlement named Rivière au Désert, because it was a ghastly, hideous eyesore in the wilderness — scruffy patches of oats or barley planted amidst stumps.  “Nature is here, at the outset, a pleasing wild forest garden; but when civilized man breaks into it, his axe and his fire produce a desert of half-carbonized tree stumps and skeletons.”  French Canadians call these patches of cultivation “un désert.”

Kohl was fascinated by the spiritual life of the Ojibway.  In Germany, the black robes commonly taught that the world is a hellish nightmare of demons, wickedness, and abominations.  The Ojibway, on the other hand, loved their sacred land, and cared for it.  Their culture was not fixated on the soul’s path in the afterlife.  They had a vibrant spiritual connection to life in the here and now.

Unfortunately, the here and now was sharply different from the good old days.  Kohl chatted with an old woman whose name meant “dawn.”  He called her Aurora.  The blitzkrieg of civilization had pushed the Sioux out of their forest homeland, and westward onto the prairie.  Tribal warfare intensified.  People no longer felt safe.  Aurora had lost three brothers, and ten other close relatives.  She said that the Ojibway were far weaker since the Long-knives arrived.  They used to be healthier and stronger, able to go ten days without food and not complain.  Their traditional culture was withering.

He was amazed to learn about the Ojibway vision quests, which were part of their rites of passage into adulthood.  Nowhere in Europe did young boys or girls courageously “fast for days on behalf of a higher motive, retire to the most remote forests, defy all the claims of nature, and fix their minds so exclusively on celestial matters, that they fell into convulsions, and attained an increased power of perception, which they did not possess in ordinary life.”  Sometimes it took ten days of fasting to have important dreams.

In Germany, Christian preachers taught their flocks to give away their wealth, and live a life of unconditional love.  Native Americans were perplexed to observe that the teachings of the black robes often had no association with their behaviors.  The aliens seemed to be possessed with a frantic desire to seize and hoard as much wealth as possible.  They were arrogant, domineering, and impressively dishonest — the opposite of loving.

The Ojibway actually practiced what the Christians preached.  “As a universal rule, next to the liar, no one is so despised by the Indians as the narrow-hearted egotist and greedy miser.”  Voyageurs and traders regularly travelled through Indian country with valuable goods and full purses.  There were no police or soldiers in the wilderness, but it was very rare for a trader to be attacked for the sole purpose of robbery.  But the two big fur trading companies “often plundered each other’s posts, and employed the Indians for that purpose.”

Kohl was impressed by the charity of the Ojibway.  “There are no rich men among them.”  An Indian will not hesitate to share his last meal with a hungry stranger.  The principle is “that a man must first share with others and then think of himself.”  He was also impressed by their egalitarian society.  No man, not even a cripple, considered another Indian to be his superior.

Kohl was not a hunter-gatherer in Germany, and he was not raised in an egalitarian society.  He did not understand that hunting abilities varied greatly.  In The Art of Tracking, Louis Liebenberg noted that among the San hunters aged 15 to 38, “70 percent of all the kudu kills were made by only 17 percent of the hunters, while almost half the hunters made no kudu kills at all.”

The “communist” Ojibway annoyed him with their absolute commitment to generosity.  The poor hunter “is forced to give all his spoil away, industry is never rewarded, and the hard-working man toils for the lazy.  A man often has to support others, without complaining.  So, all are fed, and none ever get prosperous.”  The heathens were more Christian than the Christians.

Liebenberg wrote a lot about persistence hunting — running after game until they collapsed from exhaustion (a practice that led to our ancestors becoming bipedal).  Kohl noted that the Ojibway also did this.  Horses were not ideal for hunting in a forest.  Running down elk was easiest in the deep snows of winter, when the hunter travelled on snowshoes.  Sometimes bears were chased down.

One day, when Kohl was in the Apostle Islands, “A warlike maiden suddenly appeared, who boasted of having taken a Sioux scalp, and she was led in triumph from lodge to lodge.  I was told that a supernatural female had appeared to this girl, who was now nineteen, during the period of her great fasts and dreams of life, who prophesied to her that she would become the greatest runner of her tribe, and thus gain the mightiest warrior for husband.”

Women were healers, prophets, and enchanters.  “It may be easily supposed that these squaws, owing to their performing all the work of joiners, carpenters, and masons, have corned and blistered hands. In fact, their hands are much harder to the touch than those of the men; and, indeed, their entire muscular system is far more developed, and they are proportionately stronger in the arm, for the men do not do much to bring out the muscle.”

Raised in rigidly strict Germany, Kohl was amazed by how loving Ojibway parents were.  “Indians have an ape-like affection for their children.  Even fathers are very kind to their sons, and never treat them with severity.”  Europeans often exposed (abandoned) unwanted children, but the Ojibway never did.  But when the elderly could no longer keep up with the band, they were left behind.

In Kitchi-Gami country, there were numerous locations named Lac du Flambeau (Torch Lake).  In summer, when vast clouds of mosquitoes made life miserable, the deer waded into lakes and ponds, just keeping their heads above water.  Hunters in canoes quietly moved toward them from downwind, with birch bark torches burning.  The deer calmly stared at the light, and were easily killed.

So, dearest reader, there’s a sampler.  Kohl also described their wigwams, canoes, diet, food preservation, sugar making, fishing, clothing, revenge killing, warfare, spells and magic, medicine, vision quests, dreams, ceremonies, stories, reverence for copper, symbolic drawings on birch bark paper, and on and on.

Kohl, Johann Georg, Kitchi-Gami: Life Among the Lake Superior Ojibway, 1860, Reprint, Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul, 1985.

NOTE: Early editions of this book refer to the Ojibway as Ojibbeway.  These people are also known as the Chippewa and Anishinabe, in a variety of spellings.

The Last of the Nomads



Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to Yatungka and her husband Warri, the last two Mandildjara people to live in the traditional way on the Western Gibson Desert of Australia.  William Peasley wrote their saga in The Last of the Nomads.

Aborigines have one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth.  They have lived in Australia for at least 40,000 years, some say 60,000.  Nomads first inhabited the more fertile regions, leaving the deserts for later.  Folks have lived in the Gibson for maybe 20,000 years.  Most readers, if dropped off in the Gibson, naked, with a spear and boomerang, would be dead in a day or three.  Water is extremely scarce.  For the paleface colonizers, the desert is dangerous, miserable, a land of horrors.  For Aborigines, it was home sweet home, where they belonged, a sacred place.  They had an intimate understanding of the land, and learned how to live in balance with it.

Yatungka and Warri spent most of their adult lives as pariahs, because their relationship violated a tribal law that defined permitted and forbidden marriages.  Laws were taken very seriously.  If they returned to their people, they might be beaten, or even killed.  So, their family lived away from the tribe, wandering from waterhole to waterhole, hunting and foraging.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the government made efforts to move the Aborigines into settlements, where intense culture shock led many to lose their identity, become massively depressed alcoholics, and abandon their ancient traditions.  The sons and kinfolk who stayed with Yatungka and Warri eventually moved off to civilization, but the outlaw couple feared to join them.

Anyway, in 1977, it was the third year of an extreme drought, the worst in a century, maybe the worst in many centuries.  The kinfolk of the outlaw couple were worried about them.  Mudjon was a respected elder who had been raised on the desert in the traditional way.  He knew all the waterholes, and cared about Yatungka and Warri.  His dream was to take the Mandildjara people back to their desert paradise, return to the old ways, and preserve their traditions.  Few of the young were interested.

Mudjon asked a white friend to help him search for the couple, and he agreed.  Mudjon was joined by five white lads, including Peasley.  They loaded up three vehicles and took off across the vast roadless desert.  Mudjon knew that this was probably his last visit to the territory of his people, and the last time a traditional Aborigine would drink from each well, or leave footprints in the dirt.  Peasley noted, “It was very sad for him to move through the land where once his people hunted and laughed and sang around the campfires.”

The chapters describing the long search contain some fascinating passages about the old way of life.  Mudjon was a master at reading the land, noticing the countless slight details that provided strong and detailed messages to him, but were invisible to the whites.  Without a map for the 1,500 km (932 mi) journey, he guided the team from waterhole to waterhole, looking for signs of the couple.  It was a powerful experience for him, to see old campsites, windbreaks, caves, springs, rock paintings, and other artifacts — the remains of an ancient culture.

Eventually they found signs of the missing couple.  At several locations, Mudjon started a brushfire that sent smoke high into the sky, where it would have been visible from up to 160 km (99 mi) away.  Warri did not respond with a smoke signal.

It was an ancient custom of the desert people to routinely light brushfires as they journeyed from waterhole to waterhole.  This had three benefits.  (1) Fire flushed out hidden game.  (2) It signaled their progress to other groups.  (3) It regenerated the earth and stimulated plant growth.  Fresh green sprouts attracted game.  Wildlife became dependent on burning.  This was called firestick farming.  In recent decades, in regions no longer visited, the burning has ceased, the water holes are not kept cleared, and animal and bird life largely disappeared.

One happy day, they saw smoke from Warri, and drove to his campsite.  When Mudjon greeted him, there were no smiles, hugs, or handshakes.  Warri was about 150 cm (5 ft) tall, naked, extremely thin, and both eyes were inflamed.  He wasn’t strong enough to hunt, so they were living on quandongs (peach-like fruit).  Yatungka returned from foraging with several dingo dogs.  She displayed no signs of excitement.  She was about 165 cm (5’ 5”) tall, younger, naked, very thin, but in much better physical condition.

They would not survive much longer at the waterhole.  The rescue party knew that the nearest well that still had some water was 150 km (93 mi) away, an impossible journey on foot.  The couple agreed to return to the Wiluna settlement with Mudjon and company.  They wanted to see their sons again.  Mudjon assured them that there would be no drama about the taboo violated long ago.

In Wiluna, many folks came to look at the long-missing couple, and were stunned to see their emaciated condition.  “There were no greetings, no shouts of joy, in fact there was no sign of recognition on either side, and yet the sons of Warri and Yatungka were within a few meters of their parents.”  Tears streamed down the cheeks of Warri and many others.  A few months later, Mudjon got very sick, declined, and died.  A year after their return, Warri and Yatungka caught a disease.  He died in April 1979, and she died a few weeks later.

For me, this was a powerful book, not primarily for what it said, but for the silent message unperceived by the white heroes who came to the rescue.  Peasley spent his boyhood on a farm in Australia, and he sometimes discovered signs of prehistoric campsites.  He felt sad that, after more than 40,000 years on the land, the people had not been able to leave behind anything more significant than simple campsites, grinding stones, rock paintings, and so on.

For me, this low impact living was an amazing achievement.  They successfully adapted to a hot dry ecosystem, and it was a wonderful home for them.  What a terrible problem!  The Gibson Desert that the rescue party drove across looked nearly the same as it did 1,000 years ago, or 10,000.  The silent message screams “genuine sustainability, beautiful, healthy culture!”

Humans are also capable of adapting to godforsaken nightmares like Chicago, jammed together with millions of isolated, anxious, stressed out, depressed strangers… ah, the wonders of progress!  The rescue party was proud of their advanced technology, which gave them the ability to dominate, exploit, and rubbish the continent.  What significant artifacts will they leave behind to impress the youngsters of generations yet to be born?  Will the land be in no worse condition in another 1,000 or 10,000 years?  These questions are taboo, heresy in a culture whose god-word is Growth.

Peasley did confess to having some uncomfortable thoughts.  When the rescue party knew that the couple was alive and nearby, he realized, “We were about to intrude into the lives of the last nomadic people in the Western Gibson Desert, and in doing so, it was possible that we might be responsible for bringing to an end a way of life that had gone on for several thousand years.”

Peasley, William John, The Last of the Nomads, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, Australia, 1983.

The Last Nomads is a 45 minute Australian documentary of this story.

The Future Eaters provides an environmental history of wild Australia, the early human impacts, the mass extinctions, and the lessons painfully learned.

The Life and Adventures of William Buckley tells the story of an Englishman who abandoned civilization and spent 32 years as a hunter-gatherer in the early days of Australian colonization.

Safety Nets



Today, a few billion humans live in affluence.  Their unsustainable societies have social safety nets made possible by nonrenewable energy.  When they are disrupted by hurricanes, earthquakes, or famine, food relief is usually shipped in from other regions, preventing mass starvation.  For most of the human saga, each clan or community was on its own, far less likely to be rescued by outsiders.

The San people have the oldest DNA of any living culture.  Their DNA is the genetic foundation of nearly all modern humans.  Until recent decades, they had a sustainable safety net, but herders, farmers, and others have pushed them off most of their traditional territory.  The San now inhabit the Kalahari Desert.  On average, two of every five years are drought years, and severe droughts occur one in every four years. 

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lot of time with the San.  She wrote her first book about them in 1958, and her third book in 2006.  Like any intelligent culture, their safety net included careful family planning, to avoid the suffering caused by overpopulation, and its trusty companions: environmental degradation, hunger, and conflict.

Because of low body fat and hard work, San women began menstruating later.  Some did not have monthly periods.  Children were usually nursed for about four years, which further reduced mom’s fertility.  Most of the women had one to four offspring.  Nomads moved frequently, and belongings and infants had to be hauled long distances.  A woman could only carry one infant, so just one twin was kept.

When a child could not be kept, the woman gave birth alone, away from the camp, and buried the newborn before it drew breath.  In their culture, a newborn did not immediately become alive, so disposing it was OK.  Crippled or badly deformed infants were not kept, because they would be a drain on the wellbeing of the band.  To avoid unwanted pregnancies in harsh times, it was common for folks to abstain from intercourse. 

Richard Lee wrote about the San.  Their primary food was mongongo nuts, which dropped once a year, but could be gathered all year long.  Their secondary food was meat.  The Kalahari provided them with about 100 edible plant species, which they were careful not to overuse.  The San expected periodic times of scarcity, so they reserved some plant species for drought food.  Portions of their territory were set aside for lean times.

John Reader wrote about an extreme drought in Botswana that lasted three years, resulting in the deaths of 250,000 cattle and 180,000 people.  The San didn’t starve.  Each week they spent 12 to 19 hours foraging for their sustenance.  They knew how to live.

The outlook for our highly unsustainable society is daunting.  It depends on a stable climate, and ever-diminishing energy resources.  Our safety net is something like a time bomb — tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…

The San thrived by carefully adapting to their wild ecosystem.  Consumers thrive by eliminating wild ecosystems and replacing them with forest mines, soil mines, mineral mines, permanent settlements, and complex industrial systems.  Our way of life cannot survive a three year disconnect from fossil energy, or three years of abnormal weather.

In the far north, the Eskimos also had safety nets.  The super-frigid arctic was an immensely challenging habitat for hairless tropical primates.  Beyond seasonal eggs and berries, little foraging was possible.  Meat was the primary food, and hunting was never reliable.

Storing meat or eggs in a treeless land inhabited by hungry polar bears and wolves was not easy.  Their food preservation methods would gag suburban consumers.  In Greenland, Knud Rasmussen got salmonella after eating kivioq, a yummy delicacy made from dead auks sewn inside a seal gut and left to rot for two months.  This was before antibiotics.  He died.  

Life was hard.  Knud told the story of a man named Qumangâpik, who had four wives and 15 children.  The first wife froze to death, the second was buried by an avalanche, the third died of illness, and the fourth froze to death.  Of his 15 children, one starved, four were frozen, and five died of illness.  Qumangâpik froze to death, along with his wife and two little children.

Knud’s buddy, Peter Freuchen, went to Greenland in 1906, built a trading post, married a native woman, and wrote about wild Eskimos — before their traditional lifestyle had been destabilized by disease, guns, booze, bureaucrats, and missionaries.  In the 1920s, during a severe storm, his sled dogs refused to continue.  So he crawled under the sled and took a nap.  When he awoke, his left leg was frozen solid.  It thawed, rotted, and had to be amputated.

In the arctic, safety nets had to rely far more on population management.  Survival depended on the lads who brought the meat home.  Without hunters, everyone starved.  Second in importance was their wives, who could bear more children once the lean times had passed.  Least important were the elderly and children, especially female youngsters, who would not grow up to be hunters.  There were times when starving mothers strangled and ate their own children.

When hunting was bad, suicide was common.  Elders would take one-way walks into the frigid night.  Old women sometimes asked a son or daughter to stab them in the heart with a dagger.  Old men sometimes asked a son to hang them.  At the conclusion of a joyful farewell party, father and son would rub noses, and then dad would be hoisted up, to begin his journey to the other side, where game was always abundant. 

“There is absolutely no cruelty connected with this,” Freuchen emphasized.  “Fear of death is unknown among them, they know only love of life… they believe themselves to be the happiest people on earth living in the most beautiful country there is.”  There was no shame in eating the dead, or killing and eating children and dogs.  Survival required it.  It was OK.

Vilhelm Moberg described family planning in heathen Sweden.  When a child was born, the father decided its fate.  If he allowed it to live, it was sprinkled with water and given a name.  Sickly and deformed infants were exposed (abandoned outdoors).  In times of famine, even healthy newborns were exposed, especially girls.  The old and infirm were dispatched by pushing them off the ancestral cliff (ättestup) or by clobbering them with the ancestral club (ätteklubbor).

Anyway, contact with civilization has now succeeded in eliminating most sustainable cultures.  Infectious diseases have hammered wild people everywhere.  Outsiders introduced the San to dogs and horses, which made overhunting far easier.  They now live in permanent villages where alcoholism, individualism, and violence are common.  Their traditional way of life is essentially over.

Initially, Freuchen and Rasmussen were proud of their efforts to help the Eskimos enjoy the wonders of modernity.  Guns made it far easier to hunt (and overhunt).  Guns made so much noise that they scared caribou away — they abandoned their normal migration routes, and entire communities starved.  Loud gunfire scared seals away.  Seals shot with guns often sank, and were lost.  By 1908, Rasmussen had profound regrets.  The Eskimos appeared to be on the path to extinction.

Gretel Ehrlich visited Greenland several times between 1993 and 1999.  Unlike the Kalahari, Greenland had valuable resources to attract greed freaks — cod, seals, walrus, birds, minerals, and so on.  Natives became addicted to the money economy, and now enjoy year round access to edible food-like substances imported from elsewhere, fueling population growth.  By killing extra fish and wildlife, they earn the money needed for TVs, electricity, telephones, cigarettes, booze, snowmobiles, motorboats, guns, ammo…  Many were hunting and fishing as if they were the last generation.

Please note that the sustainable wild cultures mentioned above would perceive our obsession with perpetual growth, our insatiable hunger for status trinkets, and our weirdness about abortion to be absolutely insane.  An Eskimo gent once told a white foreigner, “Alas, you are a child in your thoughts.”  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…

Image: “Greenland Storyteller,” from Rasmussen’s book.

Ehrlich, Gretel, This Cold Heaven — Seven Seasons in Greenland, Pantheon Books, New York, 2001.

Freuchen, Peter, Book of the Eskimos, World Publishing Company, Cleveland, 1961.

Freuchen, Peter, Arctic Adventure — My Life in the Frozen North, 1935, Reprint. The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut, 2002.

Lee, Richard B., The Dobe !Kung, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1984.

Moberg, Vilhelm, A History of the Swedish People, Pantheon Books, New York, 1970.

Rasmussen, Knud, The People of the Polar North, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., London, 1908.

Reader, John, Man on Earth, Perennial Library, New York, 1990.

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, The Harmless People, Vintage Books, New York, 1989.  Second edition. 

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, The Old Way — A Story of the First People, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2006.

Extra credit homework:

Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England by Dorothy L. Haller

Sustainability Primer

I was recently interviewed via email by a group of ecologists in France.  I’m sharing it with English-speaking folks because it provides an easy map for learning, a basic introduction to environmental history and ecological sustainability.

My blog now contains reviews of 170+ sustainability-related books, and dozens of essays — stuff that would take more than a month to read.  Over the years, a number of important reviews have gotten buried in the pile, and get fewer views than recent work.  In the following interview, I have included links to my reviews of a number of important books.  Most reviews are less than three pages.  Bookworms may discover some neat books to add to their reading list.  Have fun!

1. How would you define the concept of sustainability?

There are two varieties of sustainability.

(1) The form you encounter many times every day is what I call ersatz (fake) sustainability — sustainable forest mining, sustainable fish mining, sustainable soil mining, sustainable development, sustainable growth, sustainable cities, and so on (even “sustainable mining!”).  Ersatz sustainability is oriented to the ongoing viability and profitability of business enterprises.  It’s a deceptive marketing buzzword intended to befuddle the clueless, and grease the wheels of destruction.

Recently, I watched a video of Derrick Jensen being interviewed.  He said, “Somewhere along the way, environmentalism stopped being about protecting the Earth, and it became about ‘sustainability,’ which is about continuing this culture that’s killing the planet.”

(2) The rare form is the essential one — ecological sustainability.  An ecologically sustainable way of life is one that can continue for millennia without causing permanent degradation to the ecosystem.  All (normal) animals have succeeded at living in this manner, and they have done so for millions of years.

For example, the San people of the Kalahari, in southern Africa, have been living in a very low-tech manner for maybe 100,000 years.  Until recent decades, they did not use nonrenewable resources, and they did not overuse renewable resources.  See The Art of Tracking, and Great Leaps.

2. The “dominant” society or culture, based on the ideology of unlimited growth that now proposes (because it needs evermore primary resources) to mine meteorites, the moon or the ocean floor isn’t very sustainable, would you agree?

I agree!  Understand that we don’t “need” more nonrenewable resources; we “want” more.  What all living things “need” is simple, stuff like food, water, air.  What modern consumers “want” is everything in the world.

Other important words include finite, carrying capacity, drawdown, renewable, nonrenewable, bottleneck, and overshoot.  To understand these, Overshoot by William Catton is outstanding.  The Essential Exponential by Albert Bartlett does a superb job of debunking the idiotic fantasies of perpetual growth.

Afterburn, Snake Oil, and The End of Growth, by Richard Heinberg, introduce readers to Peak Oil, and the dangers of creating a super-complex civilization that is fatally dependent on finite nonrenewable resources.  Scarcity by Christopher Clugston discusses the current consumption and remaining reserves of other nonrenewable resources that are essential to industrial civilization.

Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society by Ted Trainer explains why alternative energy cannot replace the current levels of energy consumption provided by sequestered carbon (fossil fuels).  Too Hot to Touch by William and Rosemarie Alley reveals a super-important challenge that gets far too little attention — the failure of industrial civilization to figure out how to safely store nuclear waste, which remains highly toxic for a million years or so.

Limits to Growth by Meadows and Randers was a classic, warning humankind of troubles ahead.  Living Within Limits by Garrett Hardin contributed to this discussion.  Foolishly disregarding limits led to a growing human mob.  The Population Bomb and The Population Explosion by Paul and Anne Ehrlich sounded alarms.  The Ostrich Factor by Garrett Hardin, and The Rapid Growth of Human Populations by William Stanton, provided additional insights.  In Old Fashioned Family Planning I commented on approaches used in different civilizations.

3. What do you think of the fact that most people believe in “progress” despite the growing social unrest and the unraveling of numerous ecological crises?

Do fish believe in water?  No, fish spend their lives in water.  When youngsters learn the meanings of words, they begin to absorb the beliefs of their culture, and imprint its worldview, which almost everyone will carry throughout their lives.  The worldview’s memes are constantly reinforced by education, religion, government, mass media, advertising, and everyone around them.  They tell us that our way of life is excellent, and the best is yet to come.  There is no challenge that technology cannot remedy.  Acceptance of this worldview makes you appear to be sane and normal.  To question it is heresy, lunacy, or stupidity.  In The Myth of Human Supremacy Derrick Jensen vigorously questions it.

Too Smart For Our Own Good by Craig Dilworth introduced the Vicious Circle Principle.  “Humankind’s development consists in an accelerating movement from situations of scarcity, to technological innovation, to increased resource availability, to increased consumption, to population growth, to resource depletion, to scarcity once again, and so on.”  It was a merry-go-round that kept spinning faster and faster.

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright was a best-selling critique of the myth of progress.  We have fallen into a “progress trap.”  The benefits of innovation often encourage society to live in a new way, while burning the bridges behind them as they advance.  Society can find itself trapped in an unsustainable way of living, and it’s no longer possible to just turn around and painlessly return to a simpler mode.

The Earth Has a Soul by Carl Jung examined how modern urbanization packs humans together in stressful density — insectification.  “The most dangerous things in the world are immense accumulations of human beings who are manipulated by only a few heads.”  Growing crowds multiply the stupidity level, and create psychic epidemics.  “We have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with even wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots.”

4. What would you say to those who believe that happiness is a recent phenomenon?

Many observers who have spent time in uncivilized cultures were often surprised by the happiness of wild people.

In The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff described the natives she met in South America.  The Tauripan people of Venezuela were the happiest people she had ever met.  All of their children were relaxed, joyful, cooperative, and rarely cried — they were never bored, lonely, or argumentative.  The Yequana people seemed unreal to Liedloff, because of their lack of unhappiness.  As an expedition was moving up a challenging jungle stream, she noticed that the Italians would get completely enraged at the slightest mishap, while the Yequana just laughed the struggles away.  Their daily life had a party mood to it.

Peter Freuchen spent a lot of time with the Eskimos, and married into their culture.  In Book of the Eskimos, he wrote that “they always enjoy life with an enviable intensity, and they believe themselves to be the happiest people on earth living in the most beautiful country there is.”

In his book, In Search of the Primitive, Lewis Cotlow visited Eskimos in arctic Canada.  One night, he spent several hours talking to local officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  They kept repeating one idea in different ways: “The Eskimos are the happiest people in the world.”

Colin Turnbull spent years with the Mbuti Pygmies, and described them in The Forest People.  He was amazed by their joyful way of living — he said that Pygmies laugh until they can no longer stand, then they sit down and laugh.

In The Human Cycle, Turnbull compared how Pygmies and Westerners move through the phases of life.  Pygmies do it beautifully, but Western culture damaged its occupants.  We tend to regard our childhood as a golden age of innocence and joy — before we’re shipped off to dreary schools, jobs, and nursing homes.  The Pygmies did not idolize childhood, “because, for them, the world has remained a place of wonder, and the older they get the greater the wonder.”

In Original Wisdom, Robert Wolff described the Sng’oi people of Malaysia.  They knew each other’s unspoken thoughts, communicating telepathically.  “They had an immense inner dignity, were happy, and content, and did not want anything.”  They loved to laugh and joke.  They were often singing and smiling.  Angry voices were never heard.

Daniel L. Everett was sent to the Amazon to translate the Bible into the language of the illiterate Pirahã hunter-gatherers.  He described his efforts in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.  He eventually realized that it was pointless “to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior.”  He became an atheist.  “I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.”

IMPORTANT:  In the above, I am asserting that happiness is not new.  I am not suggesting that wild people were angelic beings, flawlessly wise, and always lived in perfect harmony.

5. What would you say to those who think that human beings in the distant past led sad and painful lives?

Misfortune is a normal part of every life.  Wild people got sick.  They got injured.  They starved.  They had conflicts.  In The Falcon, John Tanner described the 30 years he lived with the Ottawa and Ojibwa Indians, from about 1790 to 1820.  He was kidnapped at nine years old, fully integrated into their culture, became an excellent hunter, and forgot his first language.  Whites resented his Indian aspects, and Indians resented his white heritage.  His life was a harsh one.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) believed that without the beneficial protection of government, primitive folks lived in “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  Hobbes was not a hungry, dirty peasant, but most people in his society were, and their quality of life really sucked, despite the presence of government.  Twentieth century anthropologists, who actually spent time in wild societies, reject Hobbes’ belief.

A New Green History of the World by Clive Ponting is an amazing 400-page summary of environmental history.  He concluded that life in civilization was often nasty, brutish, and short.  He wrote, “Since the rise of settled societies some ten thousand years ago the overwhelming majority of the world’s population has lived in conditions of grinding poverty.  They have had few possessions, suffered from appalling living conditions, and have been forced to spend most of their very limited resources on finding enough food to stay alive.”

We’re living in a bizarre era, soaring on a joyride of extreme waste, a temporary onetime-only explosion of mindless consumption, made possible by a reckless binge of energy guzzling.  We’re hammering the planet in ways never before possible.  When the fuel gauge approaches empty, the floor will drop out from under seven-point-something billion people.  Life will get exciting.

6. What would you say to those who believe that human existence has recently become cooler, and indeed has become bearable thanks to the washing machine, the refrigerator, the car and industrial medicine?

My path to becoming a wordsmith began with fat black pencils, followed by ballpoint pens, huge manual typewriters, the highly unstable word processing software of the late 1980s, and my current laptop, which has miraculous, incredibly amazing functionality.  Now we have the internet.  My writing is available to several billion, a quarter million have viewed my blog, and I have friends in dozens of nations.  In one sense, this is very cool; in another sense, a costly mistake.

Five days ago, I had surgery on my right eye, which removed a cataract-clouded lens.  Today, the world is strikingly clear.  I can see like an eagle.  I’m astounded by the improvement.

When I was born in 1952, there were no personal computers, color TVs, nuclear power plants, satellites, cell phones, shopping malls, or birth control pills.

When my father was born in 1913, there were no antibiotics, plastics, air conditioners, chainsaws, televisions, radios, missiles, or jet planes.  Almost all agriculture was organic.

When my grandfather was born in 1885, there were no airplanes, automobiles, refrigerators, or aluminum products.

When my great-grandfather was born in 1843, there were no oil wells, metal boats, tractors, telephones, electric lights, sewing machines, repeating rifles, or dynamite.

When my great-great grandfather was born in 1818, there were no railroads, cameras, bicycles, wooden matches, or telegraph systems.  Detroit and Chicago were trading posts in the wilderness.

When my great-great-great grandfather was born in 1798, there were 900 million people on Earth, and Los Angeles had 300 residents.

Note that none of the benefits cited above were sustainable.  All had enormous ecological costs and numerous unintended consequences.  Humans lived sustainably for tens of thousands of years without any of these amazing things.  In my 64 years, I have sent a mountain of trash to landfills, and I am not proud of this.

Carl Jung summed it up nicely: “Unfortunately, there is in this world no good thing that does not have to be paid for by an evil at least equally great.”  The Earth Crisis is a planet-wrecking disaster created by the unintended consequences of countless clever innovations.  There is no “free lunch,” everything has a cost.

Civilization would be impossible without the clever discovery of how to kindle and control fire, a technology that all other species have avoided.  Fire: A Brief History by Stephen J. Pyne is fascinating.  He wrote, “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.”

Techno-Fix by Michael and Joyce Huesemann does a good job of analyzing our toxic obsession with technology.  Huesemann’s Law of Techno-Optimism states, “Optimism is inversely proportional to knowledge.”

Health & the Rise of Civilization by Mark Nathan Cohen describes how domestication and civilization ushered in the era of deadly infectious diseases.  Bird Flu by Michael Greger reveals how current methods for raising livestock and poultry encourage the emergence of deadly new strains of influenza viruses that could zoom around the planet in days, killing hundreds of millions.  The Antibiotic Paradox by Stuart Levy tells readers why we’re moving into the post-antibiotic era, when our wonder drugs will quit working.  Once again, bubonic plague will be incurable, and infections caused by tiny paper cuts could be fatal.

The history and harms of soil mining are discussed in Topsoil and Civilization by Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter, Against the Grain by Richard Manning, and Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David Montgomery.  A Forest Journey by John Perlin is a great book on the history of forest mining.  Water mining is the subject of Pillar of Sand by Sandra Postel, and Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.

Fish mining is the subject of The End of the Line by Charles Clover, The Mortal Sea by Jeffrey Bolster, and Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat.  Swimming in Circles by Paul Molyneaux reveals the dark side of fish farming (aquaculture).

A number of factors indicate that we are not too far from Peak Food.  There are enormous obstacles to producing enough food to feed the expected mob of 11 billion.  Today, feeding a mere 7.4 billion is intensely unsustainable and destructive.  Three books on the subject include The End of Plenty by Joel Bourne, The Coming Famine by Julian Cribb, and Who Will Feed China? by Lester Brown.

7. What would you say to those who imagine that freedom and democracy are recent inventions?

My focus has been on sustainability, not philosophy or politics.  I would think that freedom is not an invention, but the normal state for wild organisms.  Abstractions drive me crazy.  Are the chimps who are subordinate to the alpha male not free?  I don’t know.

Hunter-gatherer clans require teamwork, so it’s important for them to avoid conflicts, and to be good at conflict resolution.  Some tribes made decisions by consensus, all agreed.  Was this democracy?  Other tribes allowed dissent — lads who didn’t want to join a war party were not forced to.  John Tanner mentioned this in The Falcon.

I was taught that democracy was invented in Greece.  The democracy of Athens in the fifth century B.C. allowed 30,000 to 40,000 people to participate, but excluded 80,000 to 100,000 slaves.

8. What would you say to those who have difficulty imagining a world where life couldn’t be enjoyable living generation after generation within a society, culture, which doesn’t feel the need to innovate frantically just for the sake of innovation?

This is complicated.  In Cradle of Humankind, I discussed our ancestors’ shaky beginnings as bipedal apes on the savannah.  We were slow, weak, and highly vulnerable to large predators.  Innovations like spears and fire increased our odds for survival, and this was a shift away from the traditional lifestyles of all other primates.

In Great Leaps I discussed how moving out of tropical Africa, into colder climates, presented us with new challenges — preserving and storing food, and surviving cold winters.  Hunters living in tropical savannahs needed no tools for killing fish, seals, or seabirds, but the pioneers did, and innovation provided them.

The Food Crisis in Prehistory by Mark Nathan Cohen described how growing population and diminishing wildlife eventually led to the domestication of plants and animals.  Growing crowds also led to growing conflicts between groups.  Innovation provided ongoing technological improvements for both offense and defense.  This led to a nonstop, continuously accelerating arms race, brilliantly described in Throwing Fire by Alfred W. Crosby — our journey from throwing stones to throwing nuclear weapons.

Today, in a consumer economy, innovation boosts survival in a different way.  The objective is no longer getting meat, but a maniacal pursuit of wealth and status, via inventing, manufacturing, and selling stuff like smart phones, self-driving cars, big screen TVs, and a million other varieties of silly nonsense.

9. What would you say to those who believe that, throughout time, all human cultures have destroyed their environments?

Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich described a trip to Hudson Bay, Canada, where he spent time with Inuit hunter-gatherers.  He was astonished to realize that every person in the group knew the tribe’s cultural information in its entirety.  They all knew how to tan hides, clean fish, weave baskets, and so on.  Yet, in our advanced civilization, nobody knows even a millionth of our cultural information.

Few in modern America receive a competent education in environmental history and ecological sustainability.  I’ve taken two online sustainability courses from reputable universities, and both were very low quality.  Universities train the teachers who will educate the school kids, so grand myths of magical thinking cascade from one generation to the next.  Thus, almost the whole population is largely ignorant, handicapped by dodgy beliefs.  The belief that humans are inherently stupid and destructive is false, but many use the belief as an excuse for our current consumer savagery.  “Hey, we can’t help it, we’re humans!”

I’ve communicated with a number of professors, and the impression I get is that most pursue a “don’t scare the students” approach.  If we tell them the truth, they will be overwhelmed with despair, and give up (as if they are currently trying).  Most people don’t smoke because we’ve taught them the truth about smoking and cancer — fear inspires intelligent life decisions.  Why wouldn’t teaching the truth about the Earth Crisis have similar benefits?  Unfortunately, the global economy and perpetual economic growth are more important than a living planet, or the generations that come after us.  So, the truth would be inconvenient, therefore we sweep it under the bed.  Let’s go shopping!

10. What would you say to those fatalistic people who believe that humanity is vowed to this path of destruction no matter what?

What is the alternative?  Is humankind likely to suddenly wake up and unite in revolutionary change?  Are we eager to see coercive birth prevention programs?  Are we ready to stop soil mining, forest mining, and fish mining?  Will we voluntarily cease burning sequestered carbon?  What will happen when the cooling ponds evaporate, and many tons of nuclear fuel are exposed to the air, and begin burning?  Guy McPherson wrote, “Civilization is responsible for life-destroying, abrupt climate change.  Turning off civilization kills us all faster.”

Our present way of life is extremely unsustainable, and therefore temporary.  A sustainable future is inevitable, because only the sustainable can endure.  We are zooming toward a solid wall of resource limits and other surprises.  Many agriculture-based civilizations collapsed, regrouped, and resumed, in several cycles, until their land base was reduced to a wasteland.

Like every civilization, our industrial civilization will also collapse, but depleted resources (energy, minerals, groundwater, topsoil, etc.) ensure that our super-intensive way of life will be a onetime catastrophe.  We’ll try like crazy to keep it on life support, but it will never again be so complex, because the planet has been pounded so hard.  Muscle power will eventually become humankind’s primary energy source once again.

So, we’re on the path to a bottleneck, in which the carrying capacity for humankind will be lowered to levels suitable for the new, much simpler, way of life.  Humans are both clever and remarkably adaptable to a wide variety of living conditions.  But, in addition to resource depletion and ecological devastation, another enormous predicament is emerging at the same time, climate change.

There is compelling evidence that humans are able to survive without smart phones, automobiles, and nuclear reactors.  Food, on the other hand, is an absolute necessity.  All food-producing plants and trees can only survive within a range of conditions — temperature, moisture, soil nutrients.  One source suggested the threshold temperatures for the three primary grains: wheat 26°C (78.8°F), corn (maize) 38°C (100.4°F), and rice 34°C (93.2°F).  Too much heat or aridity affects plant growth, pollination, and reproductive processes.  When crop yields decline, famines increase, and the herd downsizes.

Near Term Extinction is, by far, the most visited post on my blog.  This community is also known as Near Term Human Extinction (NTHE).  They are certain that the final generation of our species is alive today.  A prominent NTHE spokesperson is Dr. Guy McPherson.  They have a support group on Facebook.  I have no doubt that this will be a tumultuous century, but I have not been convinced that some humans won’t make it through the post-industrial bottleneck.

11. And finally, what do all of the sustainable cultures you have studied have in common?

They don’t utilize nonrenewable resources, like metallic minerals or sequestered carbon (coal, oil).  They don’t overuse renewables, like wood, freshwater, or wildlife.  They comprehend the carrying capacity of their ecosystem, and they mindfully strive to limit their numbers, when needed.  Most are nomadic, which discourages the accumulation of belongings, competition for status, and the bloody conflicts it generates.

The safest approach is adapting to your ecosystem, rather than attempting to control it.  Growing annual or perennial food crops, in dense concentrations or monocultures, creates ideal conditions for pests and plant diseases (like Ireland before the blight).  Agriculture based on tilling is a destructive process — soil mining.  Agroforestry seems to work in Tikopia, but the island is extremely isolated, and less likely to be visited by exotic pests and diseases.  It is vulnerable to rising seas, super storms, and an unstable climate.

I don’t recall reading about sustainable cultures that possessed domesticated livestock.  Tribal Ireland might have been ideal for mindful low impact herding (once they eliminated the wolves).  Topography of Ireland by Giraldus Cambrensis (1146 – 1223) was written when the island was still mostly rainforest, and the tribes raised cattle.  Wildlife was still abundant.  Fish, flesh, and milk were all they ate, and they wore nothing but animal skins.

The Irish climate was mild, rainfall was gentle and abundant, and the grass was green all year.  Snows were rare, and soon melted away.  It was a paradise for herbivores and herders.  Herders needed no structures to protect the livestock from the cold, and they had no need for cutting, drying, and storing hay.  When Cambrensis wrote, population pressure was growing, and tribes had mutated into warrior cultures.  A few centuries earlier, it might have been a happier story.

Germania by Tacitus described tribal Germany in A.D. 98.  They were also herders, and very warlike.  They kept the Roman Empire from spreading to their side of the Rhine.  In general, around the world, nobody owned wild grazers, but domesticated livestock were someone’s private property.  The more animals you owned, the richer you were, and the higher your social status.

Richard Manning once noted that telling a Samburu herder he is overgrazing is telling him he has too many cattle, which in his terms is like saying he’s too rich.  Telling him to protect wildlife is telling him to harbor the enemy.

There was no benefit in capturing and slaughtering 100 wild cattle at once, because most of the meat would be wasted.  But the lad that owned and confined 100 domesticated cattle or horses could exploit his livestock more efficiently.  He was wealthy, respected, and envied, but grazing enslaved animals was likely to degrade the grassland over time.  A Plague of Sheep by Elinor Melville discusses overgrazing in Mexico.  The Roots of Dependency by Richard White talks about Navaho country.  Grassland by Richard Manning examines the damages caused by the grazing industry in the American west.

Paul Shepard had a lot to say about our relationship with wild animals.  In his brilliant book, The Others, he described the importance of having daily exposure to wild animals, and how their presence is essential for our normal psychological development.  Shepard was not at all fond of domesticated animals.  In Where We Belong, he raged against the “total potato-heads,” the “hoofed locusts” (sheep, goats, asses, horses, cows, mules, yaks, camels) that scalped the slopes.  “Their dexterous tooth work and footwork buried cities” (with eroded soils).

“The magnificent forests of the Mediterranean rim and islands were progressively demolished and their seedlings and root-shoots chewed and trampled by livestock.”  The Minoan city of Jerash, a village of 3,000, was once home to 250,000, before the soil was trashed.  “Like the dinosaurs, which are known mainly for their vanishing, the ancestors we know best, and from whom we take our style, are those who seem to have lived mainly to call down calamity upon themselves.”

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest written story ever discovered.  King Gilgamesh was the madman who built the city of Uruk in the Fertile Crescent.  He destroyed the ancient forest, which led to catastrophic erosion and flooding.  Today, Uruk is a crude pile of brown rubble sitting amidst a desolate barren moonscape.

Man and Nature, by George Perkins Marsh, was published in 1864.  It was an early masterpiece of environmental history.  He visited the sites of many ancient civilizations, and was shocked to realize that they were all victims of self-destruction.  Marsh saw ancient seaports that were now 30 miles (48 km) from the sea.  He saw ancient places where the old streets were buried beneath 30 feet (9 m) of eroded soil.  He stood in mainland fields, 15 miles (24 km) from the sea, which used to be islands.  He tried to warn America that they were following the same doomed path.  America ignored him.

Finally, what (almost) all sustainable cultures have in common is that they have gone extinct — absorbed or destroyed by the unsustainable cultures that overwhelmed them.  Throughout history, civilization has trumped wild cultures.  Folks with jets and missiles will not be massacred by folks with spears and bows.  One exception is the Sentineli who fiercely resist colonization (and are extremely lucky to inhabit a place worthless for colonization and resource mining).  I will offer no magical solutions today.

All the best!