Surviving the 21st Century



In the old Three Stooges comedies, whenever Curly did something dumb, angry Moe gave him a dope slap (SMACK!).  With regard to humankind’s war on the future, a number of thinkers have been inspired to write passionate dope slap books, including Man and Nature (1864), Conservation of Natural Resources (1910), Checking the Waste (1911), Our Vanishing Wild Life (1913).  Dope slap books are a two-step: (1) describe the terrible growing harms, and (2) provide a motivating pep talk loaded with rational solutions — based on the assumption that the society is rational.

In the last 30 years, a tsunami of dope slap books have flooded the market.  The latest comes from Australian science writer Julian Cribb, Surviving the 21st Century.  He does a great job of providing a competent and sobering introduction to ecological reality in 2017 — vital knowledge that every 16-year old (and their teachers) should know (but don’t).  He’s good at explaining complex challenges in an understandable way.

The book has ten chapters, each discussing a category of serious risks.  (1) Dangerous overconfidence in human brilliance.  (2) Mass extinctions.  (3) Degrading the planet.  (4) Industrial warfare.  (5) Climate change.  (6) Pollution.  (7) Feeding an overgrown herd.  (8) Urban growth and disease.  (9) Moronic beliefs that trump scientific facts.  (10) It’s time for action — think like a species.

Humankind’s current mass hysteria has an oxymoronic name, Sustainable Growth™, and its destination is oblivion.  We are going to be slamming head-on, at high speed, into crucial limits — a magnificently irrational course of action.  Cribb prefers a mindful Plan B, a gradual, managed, and cooperative path to a slower, simpler, far less crowded future.

All humans have a hardcore addiction to food.  In his 2010 book, The Coming Famine (reviewed HERE), Cribb described the enormous degradation caused by feeding an ever growing population, and presented readers with many rational suggestions.  In the following seven years, the naughty world largely disregarded his recommendations.

In this new book, Cribb dreams of miraculously doubling food production, and feeding the growing mob until we hit Peak People, at ten or twelve billion, in 2060.  All nations will heroically cooperate in rapidly making many rational (and extremely radical) changes, we’ll avoid total catastrophe, and proceed with a bumpy but tolerable decline to a sustainable population of somewhere between two and four billion by 2100.  That’s a big dream.

Is it really possible to feed ten billion?  Readers learn that there are no new plant breeding miracles on the horizon.  In the 1960s, the Green Revolution research had noble intentions — temporarily boost food production, so humankind would have an extra ten years to resolve its embarrassing orgy of overbreeding.  It was a beautiful dream.  Food production actually doubled.  Unfortunately, the population problem was swept under the bed, and the human herd more than doubled, intensifying the original problem.

Hopium addicts have no doubt that the wizards of science will save the day.  GMO plants have been a stunning success at boosting the sales of toxic agrochemicals, but they have had minimal impact on harvest volumes.  The current rate at which we are depleting underground aquifers, and other freshwater resources, is going to crash into limits before 2030.  Destruction of the planet’s remaining topsoil continues at an impressive rate.  Food production trends are not encouraging.

“Outside of a nuclear war or asteroid collision, the biggest shock in store for the human population in the 21st Century will be the impact of climate change on the food supply.”  Luckily, readers discover a plan for doubling food production by solving big problems.  We’ll create a new form of agriculture that can survive in an unstable climate, produce lots of excellent food, and do so sustainably — without using a spoonful of fossil fuel!  We’ll make sustainable oil from algae.

The required inputs for algae farms are sunshine, salt water, and urban wastes.  “Algal oil… can be made into anything you can make from fossil petroleum — ‘green’ fuel, plastics, textiles, chemicals, drugs, food additives.  Furthermore, researchers have calculated, algae could supply the world’s entire transport fuel requirement from an area of 57 million hectares — which is a bit smaller than Switzerland — and can mostly be in the ocean in any case.”

Belief is the subject of the fascinating chapter nine, and something I’ve thought a lot about.  Belief may very well be the biggest threat to the survival of our species, worse than all the other threats combined.  Even the most ridiculous, insanely stupid, self-destructive beliefs can be highly contagious, readily passing from one generation to the next, fully resistant to reason, common sense, or factual reality.  Belief trumps reason.

Belief insists that human-caused climate change is impossible.  Humans do not share common ancestors with chimps and baboons.  Technology can solve any problem.  Perpetual growth is possible on a finite planet.  Good consumers must gain respect and honor by devoting their lives to working hard (at soul killing jobs), recklessly borrowing, impulsively spending, proudly hoarding trendy status trinkets, and promptly discarding trinkets the moment they cease being trendy.

Cribb believes that foresight is our ultimate skill, enabling us to perceive potential dangers, avoid them, and survive.  Wild humans, intimately attuned to the complex patterns of their ecosystem, excelled at foresight.  We don’t.  We are cursed to inhabit an industrial culture that mutates at a furious rate.  New technologies are often obsolete in five or ten years.  We can never become intimately attuned to something similar to a high-speed runaway train.

We’re trapped in a cycle of repeated mistakes, perpetually erecting new empires, watching them self-destruct, and never learning.  We’ve installed at least 440 nuclear power plants before we’ve built a single facility for safely storing the radioactive wastes that can remain highly toxic for a million years.  Nobody had the foresight to predict the staggering consequences of the Ford Model T, or the microchip, or metal smelting.  Hey, let’s colonize other planets!

Crusty old farts like myself, who have been reading dope slap books for 30 years, and observing how little they inspire society, no longer shout and cheer when the latest vision rolls by.  Cribb does an excellent job describing the challenges.  His grand vision requires humankind to undergo an amazing transformation, from the pathetic dullard Homo delusus (self-deceiving human) into the new, wise, and beautiful Homo sapiens (wise human).

Cribb has no doubt that “solutions to all of these challenges exist or can be developed.”  Today, essential information can be instantly shared with people everywhere in the world.  Scientific knowledge grows exponentially every decade.  Intelligent change is entirely possible!  Around the world, young women are having fewer children — voluntarily!  We are not obligated to commit mass suicide.

Understand that this is a textbook for college students.  Universities are monasteries that instruct the next generation in the management of Sustainable Growth™.  They require textbooks that reinforce the loony beliefs of the hopeless Homo delusus.  Cribb makes a heroic effort to tap-dance across a ballroom where the entire floor is covered with greased marbles.  It’s obvious that he is acutely aware of the growing challenges of reality (which are heretical nonsense at the monastery).  He knows that the young novices are likely to learn little or nothing about these challenges — unless he cleverly sneaks them into a gospel that appears to be orthodox.

Today’s novices are 100 times smarter than slobbering geezers over 30.  They are acutely aware that they have inherited a catastrophe.  They don’t need a dope slap.  They know that transforming all of nature into toxic landfill dreck is insane.  Hopefully, Cribb’s book will help the novices bombard the abbots with high-powered questions, and encourage our species to shift toward becoming Homo sapiens.  Good luck!

Cribb, Julian, Surviving the 21st Century: Humanity’s Ten Great Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them, Springer International Publishing, Switzerland, 2017.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Science is a painfully tight pair of shoes.  It perceives the family of life to be little more than a complex biochemical machine.  It has created powerful tools for ravaging the planet’s ecosystems, creating a hard path for our descendants.  It gives us knowing, but not caring.  It’s not about wisdom.  It’s about pursuing the wants and needs of humans, with less concern for the more-than-human world.

Robin Kimmerer is a biology professor.  After being trained in the rigid beliefs of science, she heard a Navajo woman talk about the realm of plants from the perspective of indigenous knowledge.  For that woman, plants were not subjects, but teachers.  In a flash, Kimmerer realized the shallowness of her scientific training.  It only provides a pinhole view of reality.  Science is not enough.

Her grandfather was Potawatomi.  When he was a boy, the government sent him away to the Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was trained to become an English-speaking wageworker.  He forgot his language and culture and drifted away from his people.  He never felt at home in either world.

Kimmerer has worked hard to reconnect with her Native American roots, because traditional indigenous cultures are blessed with a far more holistic relationship with the family of life.  All people on Earth have tribal ancestors who once lived close to the land, but so much has been lost with the passage of centuries.  Her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, is a collection of stories that focus on living with respect and reverence for the land.

She once asked a city lad where his sense of place felt strongest.  He immediately responded, “My car.”  Her book is especially important for the impoverished millions, who have grown up indoors, in a ghoulish netherworld of glowing screens.  She has a strong and respectful relationship with the land, and she describes it beautifully.  It’s a perspective that is almost absent in our culture, and without it, a long-term future for humans is impossible.  We must remember.

While explaining the culture of sharing, respect, and gratitude, she does not conceal her scientist badge.  So, readers are less tempted to automatically dismiss her stories as daffy rainbows of New Age woo-woo.  Science is not worthless.  In the centuries of restoration that lie ahead, it can offer some useful ideas, if we keep it on a short leash.  Nature will play a primary role in healing the land as much as possible — it knows what to do.  The far bigger challenge is dealing with the monsters that inhabit the goop between our ears.

In the native world, when a patch of ripe strawberries is discovered, the plants are warmly greeted.  The people ask permission to take some berries.  If the response is yes, they take only what they need, never more than half of the fruit.  The plants are thanked for their gift, and the pickers leave an offering of tobacco.

Gifts and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin.  The berry pickers now have an obligation to promote the wellbeing of the strawberry people, by depositing their seeds in good locations (not a toilet).  This is a relationship of reciprocity between berries and people.  The berry eaters need the plants, and the plants need the berry eaters.

On the other hand, the relationship between mainstream people and nonrenewable resources is not reciprocal.  The oil, coal, iron, and other minerals do not need the miners, nor is their wellbeing improved by the mining.  The planet’s atmosphere does not appreciate our toxic offerings of carbon emissions.  The ecosystem does not enjoy being treated like an open pit mine.

Cultures that enjoy a direct and intimate relationship with their ecosystem have far more respect for it than those that forage at malls and supermarkets.  Consumer culture receives enormous gifts from the land, but gives almost none in return.  Kimmerer’s students clearly understand that the relationship between consumers and nature is abusive.  It’s difficult for them to imagine what a healthy relationship would look like. 

Kimmerer lives in the Onondaga Nation.  At the school, the Haudenosaunee flag blows in the breeze, not the stars and stripes.  There is no pledge of allegiance to a political system that claims to provide “liberty and justice for all.”  Instead, each day begins with the Thanksgiving Address, in which the students express gratitude for all of creation.  It helps them remember that, “everything needed to sustain life is already here.”  We are wealthy.

I had one issue with the book.  Natives from corn-growing cultures see corn as sacred.  Corn was a recent arrival to the region of the eastern U.S.  Its expansion spurred population growth and conflict.  We know that hunter-gatherers could succeed in achieving genuine sustainability when they lived with the wisdom of voluntary self-restraint.  But environmental history has not documented a culture achieving sustainability via intensive agriculture.

Potawatomi legends describe a dangerous spirit called the Windigo.  It wanders across the land in the lean months of winter.  It is always hungry, and never stops hunting.  It’s a selfish spirit that is obsessed with its own survival, by any means necessary.  The Windigo is notorious for having an insatiable hunger.  The moral of the story is to share, to take care of one another.  Don’t be a greedy butthead.

Much to the horror of the natives, the colonists imported a diabolical spirit of incredible self-destructive overindulgence — Super Windigo.  In white society, mastering the madness of insatiable consumption was seen as an admirable mark of success!  Kimmerer winces.  “We spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy.  It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.”

After a lifetime of shopping and discarding, we don’t return our bodies to nature.  The dead are placed in heavy caskets and buried deep in the ground, where nature will struggle for centuries to retrieve the nutrients.  I’ve always hoped that my corpse would be eaten by mountain lions in a wild location, an offering to an ecosystem upon which I have lived far too hard.

From other books, I have learned about cultures that did something like this.  Carl Jung noted that the Maasai tribe did not bury their dead.  Corpses were left outdoors for the hyenas to eat.  John Gunther wrote that the Bakutu people of the Congo recycled corpses by laying them on a termite hill.  In sky burial, corpses are fed to the vultures.  This is done in Tibet, and in Zoroastrian communities in India.  Evan Pritchard noted that the Western Algonquin people also practiced it.

Over the years, Kimmerer has heard the Thanksgiving Address recited countless times.  It is so inspiring to listen to people express gratitude for all of creation.  She longs for the day “when we can hear the land give thanks for the people in return.”  So do I.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, 2013.

Questions for a Resilient Future is a 17-minute talk given by Kimmerer.

Returning the Gift is a brief essay.

Original Wisdom

Original Wisdom is an unforgettable book.  Like all humans, author Robert Wolff was born a wild animal, ready to enjoy a pleasant life, romping around in a tropical wilderness.  He grew up in Sumatra, the son of Dutch parents.  His father was a doctor.  The young lad suffered the misfortune of being educated by the dominant culture.  It trained him for an unnatural life of schedules, destinations, and anxiety.  His wildness was paved over, and his consciousness became disconnected from All-That-Is.

Wolff was interested in healing, and hoped to become a doctor, but World War II interrupted his plans.  After the war, he became a social psychologist, and worked on a number of government projects.  Work included numerous visits to rural villages in Malaysia, where life was very laid back.  The people were “soft, gentle, polite.”  Villagers were the opposite of city people, who tended to be “crude, loud, insensitive.”

Oddly, the patients in Malaysian mental hospitals included whites, Indians, and many Chinese — but no Malays, who were half of the population.  Malay villages had a healthy sense of community.  They accepted the presence of people who were odd; there was never a thought of sending them away.  Everyone knew the village thief, and no one reported him to the police, because he belonged where he was.  Malays respected one another.

Wolff was grateful that he had learned to speak several languages, because this ability expanded his awareness.  Languages are unique products of the cultures in which they evolve.  Different cultures perceive reality in different ways, and many ideas cannot be accurately translated from one language to another.  Consequently, it was clear to him that the Western worldview was not the one and only way of interpreting reality.  Most Western people never learn this.  Insanity seems perfectly normal to the inmates of the loony bin.

His career began in the 1950s, the dawn of the most horrific era in human history.  Population grew explosively, as did the ecological blitzkrieg.  Traditional cultures were being exterminated by a plague of bulldozers.  Wolff worked hard to learn and record the knowledge of traditional healers.  He believed that their skills were the time-proven results of thousands of years of trial and error.  A tremendous treasure was on the verge of being lost forever.

He remembered the days before antibiotics, when Western doctors were little better than witch doctors.  He detested modern healthcare, where doctors practiced medicine, not healing.  They were highly skilled at temporarily postponing death via extremely expensive treatments — even if the additional weeks or months of existence were meaningless.  Not long ago, most of those with fading spirits would simply have been allowed to pass to the other side in peace.

In his crusade to preserve ancient knowledge, he met a number of healers who had not been the apprentices of venerable elders.  They acquired their skills via inner knowing.  Intuition told them what herbs to use, and the way to prepare them.  These healers told Wolff to relax; a treasure was not being lost.  The wisdom was always accessible.  When it was needed, someone would find it.  This notion gives Western folks cramps, because they process reality via thinking.

One day, Wolff learned about a tribe of hunter-gatherers who lived in a remote mountain forest — the Sng’oi (or Senoi or Sakai).  Meeting them opened the door to a series of life-changing experiences, a great healing.  They were masters of intuition and inner knowing.  They lived in a spiritual reality, “where things were known outside of thinking.”

Their camps were not close to the road.  Whenever Wolff arrived unannounced for a visit, one of the Sng’oi would be waiting for him in the forest.  The guide would stand up and, without a word, lead him to the village.  This baffled Wolff.  How did they know he was coming?  When asked, they told him that they had no premonition of his arrival.  They had experienced a feeling to go to a place and be there.  When Wolff appeared, they understood why they were there.

They knew each other’s unspoken thoughts, communicating telepathically.  Their shaman could sometimes foresee future events.  In the mornings, the Sng’oi discussed their dreams.  Once, Wolff described a dream.  Its message, they told him, was that he was needed at home.  He returned to his family, and learned that a child had had a medical emergency.

“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.  Each new day was a blank slate — no plans, no jobs, nothing that had to be done.  They floated, inspired by feelings.  Life in a tropical rainforest was not a tough job.

One evening, while sitting in a group, Wolff went into a trance, and spoke to the others, an experience he did not remember.  A Sng’oi shaman recognized that Wolff had shamanic powers, and offered to open spiritual doors for him.  His name was Ahmeed, and his job description was “to bring new knowledge to the People.”  Wolff accepted his offer.

The learning process involved long, silent walks in the forest, with no food or water.  Wolff was frustrated, because he was thinking like crazy.  It was impossible to still his furiously roaring mind.  He could not hear his inner voice.  At the end of the walks, he was exhausted; his mind fried.

Eventually, his thinker got more and more flaccid, and he learned to pay attention.  Some days, he could float away from his mind, and vividly experience the sounds and smells of the forest.  Everything changed.  The world became intensely alive.  He ceased being an observer, and became a living part of All-That-Is.

After months of practice, he gradually remembered how to be a human being.  “The all-ness was everywhere, and I was part of it.  I cannot explain what went on inside me, but I knew that I had learned something unbelievably wonderful.  I felt more alive than I had ever felt before.  All of me was filled with being.”  He felt great love for the people.  The trees and mosquitoes were his family.

Back in the civilized world, Wolff was no longer the same person.  Inner knowing could be painful, and sometimes had to be turned off.  He could sense the feelings of the people around him, and this could be overwhelming.  “It was frightening to discover how many people think nothing at all, but feel waves of anger, resentment, and bitterness — although they act as if they are deaf and blind to their own feelings.”

As the years passed, Wolff became whole and confident, as his humanness recovered.  Being human was so much healthier than being civilized.  That’s his message.  Even adults can heal.  It’s never too late to try.  “Knowing inside is not something unusual; it is how we are.  All humans can have that connection with All-That-Is.  The connection is within us.”  Cultures without the connection are on a bleak path.

Wolff’s website is here, and many of the stories in his book are here.

Wolff, Robert, Original Wisdom — Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing, Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2001.

Wisdom Sits in Places

Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Shell, Safeway, the highway matrix — everyone knows these culturally significant features of our landscape.  Less well known are the natural features of the land: the hills, prairies, ponds, and streams.  Our landscape watched the mammoths roam, it watched the furious madness of civilization, and it will watch the manmade eyesores dissolve into ancient ruins.

Waking up in the civilized world each morning is a jolt — jets, sirens, the endless rumble of machines.  Most of us live amidst hordes of two-legged tumbleweeds, nameless strangers.  We are the people from nowhere, blown out of our ancestral homelands by the howling winds of ambition and misfortune.  Our wild ancestors never lived here.  Carson McCullers wrote, “To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.”

Pssst!  Over here!  I’ve found the entrance to another realm, a temporary place of refuge, an escape from the madness.  It’s called Wisdom Sits in Places, and it was written by Keith Basso (1940-2013), an ethnographer-linguist.  In 1959, he began spending time in the Apache village of Cibecue, in Arizona.  He discovered a culture that had deep roots in the land, and a way of living that was far from insane.

The Apache culture also had entrances to other realms.  Many places on their land had names, and many of these named places were associated with stories, and many of these stories had ancient roots.  Everyone in Cibecue knew the named places, and their stories.  The voices of the wild ancestors could be heard whenever the stories were told, and their words were always conveyed in the present tense.  “Now we are in for trouble!”  Past and present swirled together.

The stories were a treasure of time-proven wisdom.  They often provided moral messages that taught the virtues of honorable living, and the unpleasant rewards of poor choices.  When people wandered off the good path, stories reminded them of where this would lead.  They helped people to live well.  Because of the power in the stories, the natives said, “The land looks after the people.” 

Most scholars who spend time learning about other cultures were raised in the modern world of nowhere.  These experts would study languages, ceremonies, food production, clothing, spirituality, and so on — but they paid too little attention to the relationship between culture and place, because this notion was absent in their way of knowing.  Often, the reports they published were missing essential components.

From 1979 to 1984, Basso worked on a project that blew his mind.  The Anglo world had zero respect for sacred places when there was big money to be made.  But natives didn’t want their sacred places destroyed, so they hired experts to document their culturally significant sites.  Elders took Basso to see these places, and record their stories.  He created a map that covered 45 square miles, and had 296 locations with Apache place names.

Ruth Patterson told Basso about her childhood in the 1920s and 1930s.  In those days, families spent much time on the land, away from the village.  They herded cattle, tended crops, roasted agave, and hunted.  As they moved about, parents taught their children about the land.  They pointed out places, spoke their names, and told the stories of those places.  They wanted their children to be properly educated.

Apaches used historic stories for healing purposes.  Nothing could be more impolite than directly criticizing another person, expressing anger, or providing unrequested advice.  Instead, the elders used stories to “shoot” healing notions.  During a conversation, they would mention the names of places having stories that would be good for the wayward person to remember.  Then, hopefully, he or she would reflect on the stories, understand their relevance, and make the changes needed to return to balance.

One time, three wise women sat with a woman who was too sad.  The first wise woman spoke a sentence that mentioned a place name.  Then the second mentioned another place.  So did the third.  The sad woman recalled mental pictures of those places, and heard the ancestors’ voices speak the stories of those places.  She reflected on their meanings, and the clouds lifted.  She laughed.  This was a gentle, effective, and brilliant act of healing.  They called it “speaking with names.” 

One day, Dudley Patterson was talking about stories and wisdom.  Basso asked him, “What is wisdom?”  Patterson replied, “It’s in these places.  Wisdom sits in places.”  In a long and beautiful passage, he told Basso how his grandmother explained the pursuit of wisdom.  Everyone is different.  Some are smart, some are half-smart, but only a few achieve wisdom.  Wisdom is acquired via a long dedicated quest; no one is born with it.

When elders become wise, people can see them change.  They are calm and confident.  They are not fearful, selfish, or angry.  They keep promises.  They pay careful attention, always listening for the voices of the ancestors.  Patterson’s grandmother summed it up something like this:

“Wisdom sits in places.  It’s like water that never dries up.  You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you?  Well, you also need to drink from places.  You must remember everything about them.  You must learn their names.  You must remember what happened at them long ago.  You must think about it and keep on thinking about it.  Then your mind will become smoother and smoother.  Then you will see danger before it happens.  You will walk a long way and live a long time.  You will be wise.  People will respect you.”

Years later, when Basso sat down to write his book, Cibecue had changed.  The road to the village had been paved, and there was a school, supermarket, medical clinic, and many new houses.  Big screen televisions were a new source of stories, sent from the spirit world of corporations, not ancestors.  People were spending far less time wandering about, old trails had grown over, and the younger generations were losing their connection to the land and its old-fashioned stories.  They preferred the new and useful information provided at school.

So, the book invites us to contemplate a society far different from our own.  It calls up ancient memories.  Everyone’s wild ancestors once lived in a way something like the Apaches.  It’s inspiring to remember this.  Observing the world from a tribal perspective allows us to realize how far we’ve strayed.  The people from nowhere are paying a terrible price for the frivolous wonders of modernity, and the wreckage it leaves behind.

Basso wrote, “We are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine.”  Prince Charles said it a bit differently:  “In so many ways we are what we are surrounded by, in the same way as we are what we eat.”  In the traditional Apache world, the people were surrounded by a beautiful culture that encouraged respect, caring, and wisdom.  In the modern consumer world, we’re surrounded by a wisdom-free nightmare of hurricane-force infantile energy reminiscent of a Godzilla movie.  But all hurricanes die.  Our Dark Age will pass.  Think positive!

Basso, Keith H., Wisdom Sits in Places, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1996.

The Wayfinders

Long, long ago, Teutonic storytellers told tales by the fire.  Many of them mention a deity who was a wisdom seeker, singer, poet, and warrior.  Odin had two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, who daily flew out over the world, observed the events, and returned to report the news.  The names of his birds meant “thought” and “memory.”  Odin cherished these ravens.  He knew that the loss of thought would be terrible, but that the loss of memory would be far worse.  Thought is clever and useful, but memory is essential and indispensable.  When thought is disconnected from memory, the result is the world outside your window.

Wade Davis is very tuned into the high cost of forgetfulness.  Modern folks have not only forgotten who we are, and where we are from, but we are busy erasing the surviving remnants of much ancient knowledge.  There are about 7,000 languages in the world today, and half are approaching extinction.

When we wander amidst an endless herd of loud and smelly consumers, it’s easy to forget that our worldview is just one of many.  Our culture is a freak in human history, because of its blitzkrieg on future generations of all species.  Most perceive this to be perfectly normal; it’s all they know.  In his book, The Wayfinders, Davis takes us on a fascinating tour, visiting lucky people who have not been cut loose from their past.

We have been trained to perceive other cultures as inferior and primitive.  When the British washed up on the shore of Australia, they failed to recognize and respect the incredible genius of the Aborigines.  Through tens of thousands of years of trial and error, the natives learned how to live in balance with a damaged ecosystem that was hot, dry, and lean.  The white colonists have attempted to transplant a European way of life, which is starkly inappropriate, and can only exist temporarily.

The Aborigines have a network of travel routes that were sung into existence by the ancestors.  The songs describe the landmarks that travelers will find along the route.  If you know the song, you know the route.  Songs are maps.  The routes are called songlines.  The entire continent is spiritually alive, and the people have a remarkable awareness of place, and a profound reverence for it.

The Polynesian culture is found on thousands of islands scattered across a vast region of the Pacific.  The Spanish first encountered them in 1595, when they arrived in the Marquesas, a society of 300,000 people.  Within a month, eighty-five percent of the people died from European diseases.  For some reason, the islanders thought that the visitors were demons.

Polynesians were highly skilled at sea travel.  They built excellent catamarans, using Stone Age technology, that were fifty percent faster than the floating monstrosities from Spain.  Even with their state of the art sextants and charts, Europeans remained primitive navigators who got nervous when they drifted beyond sight of land.

Davis went on a voyage with Polynesians who remembered the ancient knowledge.  The navigators always knew exactly where they were.  They paid careful attention to the wind, clouds, stars, wave patterns, sky colors.  They noted the water’s salinity, phosphorescence, plant debris, and temperature.  Sharks, dolphins, porpoises, and birds provided information.  For example, white terns indicated land within 200 kilometers (124 mi.), and boobies stayed within 40 kilometers (25 mi.) of land.

On the Sahara, the people who understand the desert do not get lost.  They can read the winds, the texture of the sand, and the forms of the dunes.  They can smell water.  In Canada, the vast province of Nunavut is home to the Inuit people.  They were geniuses for surviving in a harsh climate with Stone Age technology.  Travelling by dogsled in the long months of darkness, they never got lost, because they were experts at reading the snow.

These older cultures learned how to adapt to their ecosystems, because this encouraged stability and survival.  They were blessed to inhabit ecosystems that did not provide ideal conditions for the birth of industrial nightmares.  Unfortunately, they have been “discovered.”  They now live in the shadow of spooky people from industrial nightmares.  Many natives have been absorbed into the consumer monoculture, and have lost their identity.

All species routinely produce mutations.  The mutants that can smoothly blend into the ecosystem, and live in balance with it, have a decent chance at continuing in the dance of evolution.  Disruptive mutants eventually end up on the bus to Extinctionville.

Experts now believe that the San people of the Kalahari may be the oldest culture on Earth.  As humankind migrated out of Mother Africa, folks found themselves in ecosystems quite different from their tropical place of origin.  Different regions inspired different cultural mutations.  

Social Darwinists typically imagine a hierarchy of cultures, with industrial civilization at the gleaming pinnacle.  Every student in our culture has this dodgy notion repeatedly pounded into his or her brain.  It is a sacred myth that is commonly mistaken for truth.  Colonists felt a religious obligation to illuminate primitive people, invite them into the wondrous world of wage slavery, and provide them with brassieres and Bibles.

Well, Big Mama Nature is in a rather furious mood these days, and she’s in the process of pounding an unforgettable lesson into our cheesy civilized brains.  It’s called reality — reaping what you sow.  Our culture is a psychopathic mutant, an immaculate failure.  We could not be farther from the pinnacle of successful adaptation, or closer to the tar pits of Extinctionville (can you smell the methane?).

Davis takes us on many intriguing side trips.  In remote regions of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta we find cultures that escaped from the colonial invaders, and have not been severed from their roots.  They call themselves the Older Brothers, the guardians of the world.  We are the immature Younger Brothers, the zombie-like demolition crew.  They are sure that the Younger Brothers will eventually wake up — when Big Mama Nature pulls the rug out from under us.  They invite us to join them, and live with respect for life.

Our culture has created a monster that is a menace to all life on Earth.  A culture of perpetual growth is both insane and suicidal.  We need to stop destroying ancient cultures.  Every culture that goes extinct removes important knowledge for living on Earth.  Older cultures provide living proof that there are other ways of thinking and living, and they can inspire us to search for the long-forgotten wisdom that lies outside the walls.  Stable long-lasting cultures are far more interesting than flash-in-the-pan burnouts.  Imagination gets better mileage than despair or denial.

Davis, Wade, The Wayfinders — Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, Anansi Press, Toronto, 2009.

YouTube has several videos of Davis talking about The Wayfinders.

A Sideways Look at Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ojibway Heritage

What would it be like to wake up every day in a sane, healthy, life of wildness and freedom?  Imagine stepping outside at dawn, and observing a landscape that remained as the creator made it, undefiled by the catastrophe of industrial civilization — a gentle misty morning of peace, fresh air, and good energy.  You pause and offer a prayer of gratitude, giving thanks for the gift of another day to celebrate the perfection of creation. 

This is not easy to imagine, because we no longer live like human beings.  Our culture provides us with almost no information about living in harmony with the land, because that is not the nature of our culture.  Memories of our own wild ancestors have been erased by the passage of time, and by the sharp turn we made when we surrendered our freedom.  We have forgotten who we are, and how to live.  We are lost.  Our entire way of life is lost.

Basil Johnston’s book, Ojibway Heritage, pulls back the curtains, and allows us to explore a healthy way of life.  It’s disturbing to read this book, because it illuminates how far we have strayed from the path of balance and good life.  It carries us to a sacred mountain, far above the toxic smog of civilization, and helps us remember things of great importance.

Johnston is an outstanding storyteller.  His book describes Ojibway culture to those who are not close to it, in a manner that outsiders can easily comprehend and appreciate.  We learn about wild freedom — a way of life similar to how our wild ancestors once lived.  It’s a world of sharing and cooperation, honor and morality, a world of overwhelming reverence and respect for the natural world and the family of life.

The Ojibway people inhabit a vast region in the middle of North America, on both sides of the US-Canadian border.  They have always avoided the political unification of all Ojibways because they cherish independence.  Nothing was more abhorrent to them than the notion of submitting to control.  They were free people who enjoyed living in free communities.

Community had greater importance than the desires of the individual.  Each individual was entitled to food, clothing, shelter, personal inner growth, and freedom.  For all other matters, the permission of the community was sought.  The people were consulted for guidance, so that the custom and will of the community was respected.

Each community had chiefs for various purposes, and they became chiefs based solely on their merits.  If anyone lost respect for a chief’s abilities, they could ignore him.  His influence was based on persuasion, not authority.  Those who followed his lead did so voluntarily.

Stories were powerful cultural tools.  They encoded the moral principles of the society.  Always tell the truth.  Respect your elders.  Always be thankful for food, for life, and for your powers.  Seek wisdom and peace. 

Stories provided guidance on hunger, courage, generosity, fidelity, creation, death, transformation, history, and all matters that related to life and being.  On a simple level, a child could find meaning in them, but they could also be understood on deeper levels by adults and elders.

Males were expected to quest for a vision.  “No man begins to be until he has seen his vision.”  Every person had different gifts and powers, and the self-discovery of vision provided purpose and meaning for their existence.  Women fulfilled their existence by bringing life into the world, so a vision was optional for them.

Boys were ready to begin questing for their vision by the age of 12 to 14.  They would be ceremonially purified, and then spend four days alone in a remote quest lodge, with no food.  Rarely was the first attempt a success.  Sometimes nothing happened, and sometimes the vision was incomplete.  Quests were made every year, until a complete vision was finally received.  A man was not considered to be an adult until he received his vision.  One fellow didn’t receive his vision until he was 50.  This was not a cause for shame.

Your vision was personal and private, not to be shared.  You had a sacred obligation to pursue and complete your vision.  Straying from your path was not unusual, but it was seen as betraying your vision, and “such a state was tantamount to non-living in which acts and conduct had no quality.”  To avoid this, men and women went on annual retreats to review their lives, and verify that they were still on their true path.  The Ojibway were big on living with integrity.  I like that.

They were also big about personal independence.  “The individual and his individuality were inviolable; his vision was equally inviolable.  No person was to surrender to another; no person was to seek dominion over another man or woman.”  They weren’t into playing master and servants.  Likewise, no person could own the land. 

Johnston talked at length about healers.  There were both medicine men and medicine women.  A few boys and girls displayed special gifts of curative power, and they were trained in the art of healing.  Part of the training process was observing what animals ate when ill, because they possessed knowledge of medicinal plants.  Some of the trainees became herbalists, and others advanced to become philosophers.  Illness was seen to be a punishment for a failure to live a good life, so healers attempted to guide patients back to upright living.  They analyzed dreams, and provided advice.

Every year, healers gathered for the Midewewin ceremony, by invitation only.  The initiation process took at least four years, before a healer earned the full rights and privileges of membership.  An important component of the healer’s initiation was learning the history of the Ojibway people, so that they had a solid understanding of the path of life, and the gifts received from the grandfathers and grandmothers.  People couldn’t enjoy good health and good life if they were disconnected from their history.

This book reminds us of who we once were, in the days of our wild ancestors.  It allows us to gaze into a mirror and observe the wounded beings that we have become.  It presents us with a portrait of a coherent culture, living intimately in harmony with nature.  We see a beautiful picture of what life could be like, following the collapse of industrial civilization, several generations down the road.  It’s precious information for people who are in contact with reality, and seeking dreams for a better tomorrow.

A better tomorrow will not come to our descendants automatically.  It must be envisioned, and then the vision must be fulfilled.  “A man or woman begins to learn when he seeks out knowledge and wisdom; wisdom will not seek him.”

This is a small book, but it’s loaded with fascinating information.  I have just scratched the surface here.  It’s an important message.

Johnston, Basil, Ojibway Heritage, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1990.  [Originally published in 1976.]