A Language Older Than Words

Derrick Jensen’s book, A Language Older Than Words, is a landmark in environmental writing.  A standard formula for eco-books is to describe the evolution of a problem, provide charts, tables, and illustrations to document the extent of the problem, and then present “solutions.”  Typically these are theoretical, politically impossible, pie-in-the-sky solutions based on the premise that humankind is fundamentally rational and reasonable — solutions that require minimal adjustments to the machinery of consumer society, will not significantly interfere with perpetual economic growth, and will let us keep our cell phones, lights, and cars.

Happily, Jensen is not stuck in these ruts.  Obviously, reason is not the guiding force in the journey of humankind.  Obviously, if a workable and intelligent win-win solution to the Earth Crisis existed, we would have already found it and implemented it.  Jung had a name for episodes of mass insanity, like Nazi Germany, or consumer society: psychic epidemics.  Psychic epidemics are far more devastating than natural catastrophes (earthquakes, hurricanes), and reason is powerless to resolve them, because reason does not communicate with the unconscious.

The “language older than words” refers the voice of the living planet — the wind, the burbling brook, the ravens, the howling wolves, the rattling leaves.  Everything is communicating, sharing, cooperating.  Unfortunately, civilized humans have isolated themselves from the rest of the family of life.  We no longer listen to the ancient language, which is always talking to us.  We have become space aliens in our own home.  Not coincidentally, we are racing toward catastrophe. 

Most eco-writers do not reveal a spiritual connection to life on Earth.  Jensen clearly does, and this adds much power to his work.  He is not a professional scholar who is systematically analyzing a sub-optimal process, he’s a man who radiates love for the wild natural world, and deeply cares about it.  This passion is a treasure, and it is slipping through our fingers as each generation lives in greater isolation from the sacred natural world.

Jensen’s father was a fundamentalist Christian and a wealthy businessman.  He was abused as a child, and he grew up to be a violent, controlling tyrant.  He physically and sexually abused his wife, sons, and daughters, including Derrick.  The family lived in fear of his rage, and all of them suffered permanent emotional damage.  Many years later, his father still refuses to acknowledge his violent past, and Derrick still has trouble sleeping.  Jensen says that if he had to do his childhood over again, he would kill his father.  He believes that it’s essentially impossible to rehabilitate an habitual abuser.

During the years of violent rage, the family members lived in a world of make believe, blocking out the fear and suffering.  In order to survive the terror, they had to shut down emotionally.  This family was not an unusual freak.  Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse are commonplace in our society. 

In many ways, on a larger scale, our global civilization resembles Jensen’s family.  It’s beating and raping our planet.  Similarly, we feel powerless to stop the senseless savagery.  We shut down emotionally.  We pretend that everything is OK.  We ignore vast amounts of information, and what we can’t ignore, we forget or dismiss.  Living behind a wall of fear, we become isolated from life, from our bodies, from our spirits.  Isolation is poisonous.

Humans are not essentially bad, but we have had the misfortune of being born into a culture that is speeding down the path of self-destruction.  Jensen says: “Within any culture that destroys the salmon, that commits genocide, that demands wage slavery, most of the individuals — myself included — are probably to a greater or lesser degree insane.”  The central question of our time is this: “What are the sane and appropriate responses to insanely destructive behavior?  In many ways, it is the only question of our time.”

One gift of Jensen’s traumatic childhood was that it knocked off his cultural blinders.  His father was a respected member of the community — and he was also an abusive monster.  Jensen came to the terrifying realization that our celebrated modern culture was as crazy and brutal as his dad.  The first step on the path to healing is to acknowledge the existence of problems, to recognize the truth.  Then, the process of awakening involves a series of deaths and rebirths, as useless things are tossed overboard, and replaced with healthier ones.  It’s about growth, and it’s not quick or easy.

This book is a dizzying non-linear tilt-a-whirl ride that zooms round and round in the insanity of our culture.  It’s a slideshow of stories, describing various outbreaks of the disease that’s destroying the world — the Sand Creek massacre, Peruvian dictatorships, the sadism of animal testing, devastating clear cuts, the destruction of the salmon, and on and on and on.  He also includes stories about indigenous people who are eager to promote healing.  He tirelessly explores many paths in search of coherence and understanding.  It’s a messy business.  The results are not neat, clean, or consistent.  Jensen explodes with pain, love, intelligence, and a burning hunger for a brighter tomorrow.  He is a man you will never forget.

Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words, Context Books, New York, 2000.  Jensen has written a long series of books on our dysfunctional relationship with the living planet.  A number of essays and interviews are provided at: http://www.derrickjensen.org/.

One Round River

One Round River, by Richard Manning, is a book about the ecosystem of the Blackfoot River, which runs by his home near Missoula, Montana.  The title implies that everything is connected, and moves in circles.  Manning presents the history of the region in a number of acts.

We begin with geological history, and the vast lakes that formed and flooded at the end of the last Ice Age.  He describes the Salish tribe, who enjoyed a good life in the region, until the white man’s horses arrived, and intensified inter-tribal conflict.  But the horses did not cause as many problems as the white men, who came later, and went crazy on the land, with their grazing, logging, mining, ecocide, and genocide.

The grasslands and the buffalo had coevolved magnificently.  The original vegetation remained nutritious year-round, so the Indians did not have to haul in hay bales for winter feed.  Buffalo were fine-tuned for surviving in a semi-arid climate with severe winters.  Then the whites came with their northern European cattle, which had evolved to thrive in wetter climates with mild winters.  The whites planted many species of northern European vegetation, which led to many unintended negative consequences.  Cattle stayed close to the streams, where they removed the vegetation, and promoted erosion and flooding.  Cattle do not belong in the western United States. 

Damage to the streams was multiplied by logging, which accelerated water run-off and soil erosion.  The history of logging in the region is impressive from a robber baron point of view, but not from an ecological perspective.  In recent years, some logging companies have abandoned conservative forestry, and have shifted to asset liquidation — cut everything as soon as possible.  This popular method of forest management is known as rape and run.

The destruction caused by grazing and logging can sometimes be reversed, but the destruction caused by mining is often permanent and irreversible.  Manning takes us on a tour of Butte, a mining center upstream from Missoula.  It is a toxic catastrophe.  The open pit mine turned into a poison lake when mining ended, and the pumps were unplugged.  The lake is rising, and will eventually overflow, and poison everything downstream.  A treatment plant is planned.  Scientists are trying to invent technology for purifying large volumes of poison water.  If they succeed, the plant will run until it is disabled by rising energy costs and/or economic collapse.

Manning’s primary motivation for writing this book was the struggle to stop a proposed cyanide heap-leach gold mine on the Blackfoot River.  Gold mining is insane because it causes incredible ecological damage to produce a metal that is primarily used for hoarding, decoration, and status display.  Cyanide heap-leach mining is an especially insane mode of gold mining because of the toxic pollution it causes, and the ecologic devastation it leaves behind.

The basics are that a thick plastic sheet is laid on the ground.  Then a mountain of crushed ore is dumped on the sheet.  Then large quantities of toxic cyanide are poured on the heap, to absorb and carry away tiny pieces of gold to the bottom, where they are collected and processed.  Heap leach mining enables corporations to make a profit by extracting one ounce of gold from 60 tons of rock.  When the mining is over, the bars and bordellos disappear, the boomtown dies, the corporation moves on, and future generations are left with a permanent super-toxic nightmare.  I've come to understand that there is at least as much dark karma in a gold earring as in 10,000 full length mink coats.

I read a lot of books.  Many books, a year after reading them, have left no tracks on my memory.  Other books are burned into my DNA, and I will never forget their power — One Round River is one of these.  This book is a full-immersion baptism in highly concentrated madness.  The power of greed and ignorance can make humans behave in a manner that is spectacularly crazy.

Happily, the forceful burning truth in this book contributed to a magic act.  After the book was published, and people understood the foolishness, the mine project was killed.  The mining industry has long been a controlling force in Montana politics.  They almost always get what they want.  In 1998 Montana became the only state to ban cyanide heap-leach gold mining.  In 2008 the US Supreme Court shot down the last appeal by the mining industry.  So, the land will be safe from this madness, for a while, hopefully.  It’s enjoyable to find a rare story where the good guys win.

Manning, Richard, One Round River — The Curse of Gold and the Fight for the Big Blackfoot, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1997.

The Vegetarian Myth

The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith is an intense discussion about health, food, and ecosystems.  She spent 20 years of her life as a vegan.  It destroyed her body and damaged her mental health.  Her spine has irreparably degenerated, and is a source of chronic pain.  She can never have children.  Nobody warned her, not even her doctors.  Her chronic malnutrition made her incapable of clear thinking.

A primary objective of this book is to issue a loud and clear warning to current vegetarians, so that they might avoid learning important truths the hard way, before they suffer irreversible damage.  If you are a vegetarian, and your health isn't perfect — if you have joint pain, if you are often cold or tired, if you never feel full after eating, if you have memory problems, if you are depressed or anxious or angry, drop everything and read this book.  Keith critiques the fundamental vegetarian beliefs, many of which have developed a religious posture.  She believes that all life is equally sacred, not just animals that are similar to humans.  I agree.

At the same time, she is a sharp critic of the industrial manner in which animal foods are produced.  Most of the meat for sale today is not raised in a sustainable, low-cruelty, low-impact manner.  Grass-fed animals are the only ethical choice.  She writes: “It's ridiculous to the point of insanity to take that world-destroying grain and feed it to a ruminant who could have happily subsisted on those now extinct forests, grasslands, and wetlands of our planet, while building topsoil and species diversity.”

The Vegetarian Myth is a title that seems to be a bit too narrow.  The main objective of this book is to present an illuminating primer on what everyone should know about food, and how it affects our minds, bodies, and ecosystems.  This is super important information that they rarely teach in schools. 

Growing rice, wheat, and corn causes no less suffering and harm than meat.  When farmers first arrive, millions of wild animals die, and the land is skinned alive.  Corn-growing Indians caused substantial damage to soils and forests, like Old World farmers did.  Industrial farming is far worse.  It is rapidly converting wild land into cropland, cropland into wasteland, and aquatic ecosystems into dead zones.  When you eat brown rice, you’re eating dead fish and dead birds from a dying river.

Keith doesn’t discuss wild grains.  The Indians of California foraged for wild grains in a non-destructive manner that is described in M. Kat Anderson’s important book Tending the Wild.  The Anishinabe have been harvesting wild rice for centuries without harming their health or ecosystem (wild rice from California is not wild).

Eating meat in moderation provides essential nutrients and is good for your health.  Like the long-held belief in a flat Earth, the Lipid Hypothesis cult is stumbling in a rising tide conflicting evidence.  In fact, the French, Greeks, Swiss, east Africans, and Pacific islanders enjoy a diet rich in saturated fats, yet have a low incidence of heart disease.  Carbohydrates are killing our hearts, not cholesterol (be sure to read Weston Price’s masterpiece).

Our planet and its residents are being destroyed by agriculture, overpopulation, consumerism, and a lack of spiritual connection to the land.  The solution is to immediately and enthusiastically pursue revolutionary change in the way we eat, travel, think, live, and breed.  If we don’t remember how to live sustainably, we won’t have a bright future.  “These are our choices, as bare as that dead rock: accept our place as animals, a place both humble and wild, or impose ourselves and our food across our living home of land and sea and sky until the planet dies.”  Amen!

Keith, Lierre, The Vegetarian Myth — Food, Justice, and Sustainability, Flashpoint Press, Crescent City, California, 2009.

Gilgamesh — The Long Version

 In the 2009 version of my book, I devoted efforts to psychoanalyzing the culture that came to the New World and conquered the Native Americans.  That version contained a much longer discussion of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which follows.

Humbaba's Roar

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the world's oldest stories, a product of one of the oldest civilizations, and written in one of the oldest alphabets — cuneiform characters, inscribed on twelve clay tablets.  This story is from the birthplace of civilization, when the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent were still swelling like thriving tumors.  The Epic of Gilgamesh is the heroic (and dopey) saga of King Gilgamesh, who built the city of Uruk near the Euphrates River, in what is now Iraq.  He lived around 2700 BC — back when some of the vast ancient forests of the Middle East still survived (but not for much longer). 

In a nutshell, this is a story about sleaze and selfishness.  Gilgamesh was a powerful king and an incredible jerk.  For example, he habitually deflowered every new bride in his kingdom, prior to her wedding. 

One day Gilgamesh decided that a cool way to increase his fame would be to kill Humbaba, the god of the forest who lived on Cedar Mountain.  But first, he had to overcome the fierce defender of the sacred forest, Enkidu, a hairy and powerful wild man.  With bribes of food, booze, and sex, Enkidu sold out, quit protecting the wild beings of the forest, and became Gilgamesh's drinking and whoring buddy.

By and by, Gilgamesh and Enkidu went to the Cedar Mountain and outwitted the forest god Humbaba, who unconditionally surrendered to them.  They cut off his head, and then cut down every tree in the sacred forest.  Not long after this, the whole region heard Humbaba's roar — the sound of the mighty rushing thundering flood.  A primary side effect of deforestation is flooding, and these forest-whacking early farmers certainly understood this — if you mess with the forest, Humbaba is going to mess with you! 

The destruction of the sacred forest angered the gods, who killed Enkidu the wild man in revenge.  At this point, the friendless Gilgamesh went on a search for eternal life.  He wasn't granted his wish, and he died alone, afraid, and humble, like any other man — concluding a life of debauchery, abuse, and pathological ecocide.  Gilgamesh's magnificent city of Uruk was completely abandoned by 700 A.D.  Today it is a crude pile of brown rubble sitting amidst a desolate barren moonscape.  The end.

*        *        *

What struck me about the Epic of Gilgamesh was that none of the characters were honorable role models — they were sleazy selfish opportunists, free of principles.  This made me curious, so I explored some other Sumerian tales.  In their creation story, the gods were sloshed to the gills when they created hominids, and for this reason every single person had at least one serious defect.  In other words, all hominids were deeply flawed from the day they were born, and the highest deities were sloppy incompetent drunks.  This was a culture with some serious self-esteem issues.

Then I read the Sumerian story of the great flood.  In this tale, the booze-headed gods had become thoroughly sick of hominids; because they had bred like crazy, and were now making so much noise that the gods couldn't sleep at night.  So, the way to cleanse the land of these noxious hominid pests was to unleash a great flood and drown them all.  At this point, Ziusudra (a mortal hominid) was instructed to build a large barge, gather up specimens of the various animal species, and spare them from the coming floods.

There literally were great floods in the ancient Fertile Crescent.  Archeologists have discovered a heavy layer of silt in the region, which dates to around 2900 BC.  Because the civilizations converted vast ancient forests into fields, flooding must have been frequent, and sometimes catastrophic.

After reading the Sumerian flood tale, I took a look at the remarkably similar Hebrew flood story in the book of Genesis, where the god Yahweh instructed Noah to build an ark.  Like the Sumerian gods, Yahweh was also thoroughly sick of hominids, and regretted that he had created them.  He saw hominids as being thoroughly wicked — every thought that crossed their minds was evil.  They were hopeless — a mistake. 

So, in the ancient Fertile Crescent, the myths tell tales of a hominid race that is degenerate, corrupt, and evil.  Their gods were totally misanthropic.  How does this affect people — to listen to stories on grandpa's knee, and learn that all hominids are essentially bad and stupid?  How does this guide the life of the culture?  Does it lower people's expectations and aspirations?  Does it sanction destructive living?  Aren't these stories poisonous? 

It's amazing how ideas endure.  Our modern industrial civilization literally runs on the heartbeat of Gilgamesh's world.  The ancient Sumerians used a base-6 counting system (6, 12, 18...), instead of a base-10 system (like the Arabic: 10, 20, 30...).  So, it was 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 360 degrees in a circle, and so on.  The clocks that we use today are based on Sumerian mathematics.  We see echoes of Gilgamesh's culture in our hierarchical and militaristic society, our disrespect for nature, our insatiable hunger for material wealth, and our powerful anthropocentricism.  And in the lands of fresh tree stumps you can still hear the mighty Humbaba's roar.  Some things never change.

Man and Nature

In 1864, George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature, the book that was the granddaddy of the modern ecology movement.  Marsh was the U.S. Minister to Italy, and while overseas, he visited the sites of many ancient civilizations.  This was a troubling and mind-expanding experience for him.

Wandering through the realms of extinct civilizations, he realized 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 saw the sites of ancient forests, formerly covered with three to six feet (1-2 m) of soil, where nothing but exposed rock remained.  He learned that the removal of protective trees and vegetation led to the loss of topsoil.  He learned that irrigation often led to salinization — the soil became so salty that it was rendered infertile.

There wasn’t much left of the formerly healthy ecosystems of the Mediterranean basin or the Fertile Crescent — places that once supported large thriving cities.  With few exceptions, the modern population in these ravaged lands was far less than the population two thousand years ago.  Most of the big ancient cities were either abandoned ghost towns, or desolate shadows of their former grandeur.

In the realm of the former Roman Empire, more than half of the lands were deserted, desolate, or greatly reduced in productivity.  Forests were gone, much topsoil had been lost, springs had dried up, and rivers had shrunk into brooks.  Fertile lowlands had become malarial swamps.

One unforgettable section in the book described in rich detail the arrival of farmers and herders in the French Alps.  They had been driven into the mountains by population pressure.  They whacked down the trees and then turned their livestock loose.  The grazing animals stripped the land of all grass, and pulverized the scorched soil with their hooves.

Without forest or grass, the land could retain little water.  When the wet season came, the water promptly ran off, taking the soil with it.  Tiny creeks turned into roaring torrents, and entire fields and villages were suddenly washed away.  Some places were reduced to bare bedrock wastelands.

For example: “The land slip, which overwhelmed, and covered to the depth of seventy feet, the town of Plurs in the valley of the Maira, on the night of the 4th of September, 1618, sparing not a soul of a population of 2,430 inhabitants, is one of the most memorable of these catastrophes, and the fall of the Rossberg or Rufiberg, which destroyed the little town of Goldau in Switzerland, and 450 of its people, on the 2nd of September, 1806, is almost equally celebrated.”

Marsh summed it up: “It is, in general, true, that the intervention of man has hitherto seemed to insure the final exhaustion, ruin, and desolation of every province of nature which he has reduced to his dominion.  The instances are few, where a second civilization has flourished upon the ruins of an ancient culture, and lands once rendered uninhabitable by human acts or neglect have generally been forever abandoned as hopelessly irreclaimable.”

Marsh was from Vermont, where ambitious Americans were working furiously to replace forests with farms, and villages with industrial cities.  There were still vast numbers of passenger pigeons, “which migrated in flocks so numerous that they were whole days in passing a given point.”  He thought that farmers spurred their numbers by providing them with abundant grain to nibble on, and by waging genocide on their natural predators, the hawks.  Farmers hated hawks because they often snatched their chickens without paying for them.

He was also amazed by the abundance of salt-water fish.  “It does not seem probable that man, with all his rapacity and all his enginery, will succeed in totally extirpating any salt-water fish.”  He could not foresee the arrival of industrial fishing, because he could not imagine human foolishness growing to such magnitude.

In Europe, he could observe the ruins of many civilizations, and note that this was how most experiments in agriculture ended.  In America, he observed the same process in its infancy.  Marsh was painfully aware that all of the worst mistakes made in the Old World were being imported to America, with similar effects.

The destruction of Old World civilizations had taken centuries, but Americans had all the latest technology, and their ability to ruin the land was far more efficient.  Loggers were busy harvesting lumber in the mountains of New York.  Hunters were busy driving the passenger pigeons to extinction.  Farmers were destroying the vast healthy grasslands.  It was not difficult to accurately predict the consequences of this madness.

The Western world was out of its mind with Perpetual Growth Fever, and everyone cheered for skyrocketing prosperity — nothing was more wonderful!  The fever continues to rage today.  Marsh lamented, “The fact that, of all organic beings, man alone is to be regarded as essentially a destructive power….”  He realized that he was living in a world gone mad.  He could very clearly see a horror show that the rest of society denied and disregarded.

Marsh was a brilliant outside-the-box thinker who was fully present in reality.  He cared more about the vitality of the ecosystem than for temporary bursts of prosperity.  He had a spiritual connection to life.  He radiated intense common sense.  He sincerely believed that it would be wise to learn from our mistakes, rather than endlessly repeat them.  He thought that it would be wrong to remain on a path that would inevitably transform America into a wasteland.

In 2007, friends in California’s redwood country were hammered by floods.  Loggers, who were working upstream, vigorously denied that the floods had anything whatsoever to do with their recent clear-cuts.  It was a pure coincidence.  Amazingly, the loggers were not seized by angry mobs and lynched for spewing such colossal lies.  They got away with their crime because the education system has utterly failed to provide society with a competent understanding of ecology and sustainability.

Marsh did a decent job of providing readers with the ABC’s of ecology.  Many years have passed since the first edition of Man and Nature was published.  For the most part, his book has survived the test of time, and remains valid and important.  But almost no high school (or university) graduates (or their instructors) would recognize Marsh’s name, or be able to intelligently discuss the history of logging, agriculture, topsoil destruction, and the fatal flaws of civilization — essential subjects that every citizen should understand in elementary school.

Marsh, George Perkins.  Man and Nature.  Charles Scribner, New York, 1864.  The full contents of this book are available online at:

http://books.google.com/

Marsh didn’t have a camera, but in 1938-39 Dr. W. C. Lowdermilk visited similar regions and came to similar conclusions — and he had a camera.  He created a booklet titled Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years.  It’s available at:

http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Lowd/Lowd2.html

 

 

Rewilding the West

Richard Manning is a visionary thinker and writer who lives in Montana, and I am especially fond of his work.  His book Rewilding the West contemplates the notion of removing the fences, cattle, and sheep from western ranching regions, and allowing the original wild ecosystem to recover — buffalo, wolves, prairie dogs, and every other wild critter native to the land.

Wild salmon used to feed many cultures around the world.  The seas produced abundant fish, with no human management whatsoever.  On the other hand, farmed salmon are a disaster.  Nature does an excellent job of raising fish, but aquaculture corporations do not.  In a similar vein, nature’s design for producing wild buffalo was brilliant.  But the imported and artificial system of raising domesticated cattle and sheep on the western plains is dysfunctional and destructive. 

Long ago, the artist George Catlin spent time among the buffalo-hunting Indian tribes.  He reported that they were very healthy, long-lived, and happy people.  He repeatedly commented on how tall they were.  The Indians enjoyed a way of life that was in balance with nature, until they acquired domesticated horses.  Mounted hunters were able to kill more buffalo, and they did, which brought an end to sustainable living — even before the robe trade business began, which greatly increased the slaughter. 

Once the buffalo were exterminated, in came the ranchers.  Cattle evolved to thrive in the milder and wetter ecosystems of Europe.  In the West, they did OK in moist years, but died like flies during droughts and extreme winters.  Cattle grazed more intensively than the native buffalo, causing serious damage to the grasslands.

Garrett Hardin is famous for his essay The Tragedy of the Commons, which argued that people take better care of privately-owned lands than they do of commons, because of rational self-interest, and the ability to control access.  But this was not true in buffalo country, where the grasses thrived under occasional grazing, but got thrashed under repetitive grazing, when the cattle and fences arrived. 

In the West, private property does not work.  Agriculture in Montana is heavily dependent on life support from government subsidies, whilst the political climate is tilted toward a flag-waving anti-government conservatism that cries for smaller government, lower taxes, and a never-ending stream of generous subsidy checks.  Manning concludes: “The American West is a welfare state.  We privatize profits and socialize risks.  We are parasites.”

In the good old days of sustainability, 30 million wild buffalo thrived on the grasslands in a state of relative balance.  Today, they have been replaced with 30 million cattle, which depend on huge subsidies of corn, grown on subsidized farms in the Midwest, which are destroying precious topsoil, and poisoning precious aquatic ecosystems with their chemical runoffs. 

In Manning’s opinion, “agriculture is by far our most destructive activity, because agriculture is fundamentally unsustainable.”  Hunting and fishing can be absolutely sustainable if it is restricted by a system of rules and regulations (or rational self-control).  But no rules can make agriculture sustainable.

Having set the stage, Manning now directs us to contemplate a far more intelligent alternative.  “So what would happen if you gave those ranchers the right to sell that wild protein, first by charging sport hunters, but second by market hunting to cull the does and smaller deer the sport hunters don't take?  What if wildlife became more lucrative than cows?  What if ranching had every financial incentive to restore habitat, remove cows, and live among wildlife?”

The vision is to create a prairie preserve larger than Yellowstone Park, a home where wild bison, elk, bears, and wolves can run free — the American Prairie Reserve, located in north central Montana, in the region of the Missouri Breaks, beside the Missouri River ("Breaks” means the edge of the plains).  The project was launched in 2005, on a small scale, with big dreams for the future.

Mannning, Richard, Rewilding the West — Restoration in a Prairie Landscape, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2009.  I would also recommend two other Manning books: Against the Grain and Grassland.

Farmers of Forty Centuries

In 1909, F. H. King visited farm country in China, Japan, and Korea.  He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and the Chief of Soil Management at the U. S. Department of Agriculture.  The purpose of his visit was to learn how the farmers of Asia produced so much food per acre, and the techniques that allowed some regions to be farmed continuously for 4,000 years.  He published Farmers of Forty Centuries in 1911, which documented his findings.

The book provides a fascinating glimpse into a world of low-tech organic farming that was performed with maximum efficiency.  Almost all of the work was performed by human muscle power, and all of the fertilizer came from nutrient recycling — no guano or mineral fertilizers were used.  King observed long daily caravans of peasants pulling handcarts from town to farms, each loaded with 60 gallons of fresh sewage.  Manure and crop residues were carefully gathered and composted.  Weeds and bugs were picked by hand.

Because food production was extremely labor-intensive, most of the population was rural.  The labor was back-breaking, seven days a week.  Following many generations of population growth, the farms were postage stamp sized.  It was not uncommon for ten people and a few animals to be fed from a two or three acre farm.  In lucky times, everyone had something to eat.  In bad years, people starved.  There were no safety nets.  Everyone lived on the razor’s edge.  The surrounding region was stripped clean of everything wild.  The land was under the total domination of agriculture, and every year its health declined.

King, the agriculture wonk, was fascinated by how hard the people worked, and how much grain per acre they produced.  He was not an advocate of workers’ rights.  He reported that the farm folks seemed to be happy and content.  He was eager to bring this system home to America, to provide a significant boost to farm productivity.

King was not an ecologist.  He did not mourn the loss of what these lands had once been — the forests, the grasslands, the wetlands, the fish, the birds, the deer.  He was observing a system that was completely maxed out, approaching the brink of collapse.  Long-lived farming systems have a pattern.  They practice an unsustainable mode of farming until chronic problems emerge, or a new technology becomes available, and then change their ways — to another unsustainable mode of farming, and then another, and then another, until the land is permanently ruined.

Today, the land is worked with machinery and chemotherapy: herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, chemical fertilizers.  Many of the rural folks have moved to town to make cell phones and running shoes.  Much of the former cropland in China has been abandoned, because of serious erosion problems and urban sprawl.  And now, the end of the era of cheap and abundant energy is approaching, and it’s time to start building shit wagons again.

The way of life that King observed is very likely similar to how we will be living in the coming decades, and the rest of the world, too.  He presents us with a time-proven model of how to live when fossil fuels, farm chemicals, and traction animals are not available.  This is not a model of sustainable agriculture.  Yes, it’s absolutely organic, but organic agriculture is almost never sustainable, in the genuine sense of that term.  On the plus side, it’s far less wasteful, polluting, and destructive than organic agriculture practiced on an industrial scale.

King, Franklin Hiram, Farmers of Forty Centuries — Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan, Jonathan Cape Limited, London, 1911.  The full contents of this book can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg.