Our human forebears everywhere did not just passively gather food and basketry materials but actively tended the plant and animal populations on which they relied. There was no clear-cut distinctions between hunter-gatherers and the more “advanced” agricultural peoples of the ancient world. Moreover, California Indians had likely completed the initial steps in the long process of domesticating wild species…
— Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild
In Agriculture: villain or boon companion, I argued that we sapiens have been cultivators since time immemorial, that a combination of foraging and cultivation is a sensible, durable way of life that has served us well, and that the “origin of agriculture” really is the intensification of cultivation that becomes visible in the archeological record.
I have since been stymied in my quest for clearer understanding by the ongoing insistence of some folks to paint agricultural cultivation into a corner as a disastrous turn for humans and the root of our present troubles. They point to foraging and horticulture as modes of food production that avoid the damage agriculture has brought about. I wanted to test this claim.
It became quickly apparent to me that one does not need agriculture to intensify and produce an increasing surplus. For example, the rich salmon-and-candlefish-based economy of the Kwakiutl provided plenty of surplus to support elites and even to motivate slavery. Foragers are said to live in harmony with their environment, to keep their populations low and their hierarchies flat (if any). Unfortunately, it ain’t necessarily so. There are compelling data showing that the Australian aborigines wreaked continent-wide devastation with their use of fire on a highly vulnerable landscape, degrading the vegetation, causing massive runoff and loss of soil during monsoons, and eventually precipitating a change in climate for the worse. While in North America the native tribes may have had but little to do with megafauna extinction, not so in Australia. The human-precipitated change of vegetation deprived the largest and most specialized browsers of adequate food, and they began to disappear not long after the arrival of humans, some 45,000 years ago, along with their marsupial predators. That should hardly be surprising, as the same story repeated many millennia later with the colonization of Far Oceania. For example, in New Zealand. the South Island Maori, former horticulturists who returned to foraging as more suited to that environment, slaughtered the moas and other vulnerable creatures in an orgy of gluttony, only to turn on each other when protein ran low. The populations of both aborigines and Maori fluctuated according to food availability. Some of the tribes lived in hierarchical societies.
It has also been claimed that horticulturists for the most part remain egalitarian and lack despots, armies, and centralized control hierarchies, and have built-in constraints against large populations and the hoarding of surplus. Nothing could be further from the truth. There have been, indeed, some horticulturists who remained egalitarian, chose to limit their population when it was getting out of hand, and whose gardens and edible forests leave the soil and ecosystem in a good shape. The small island of Tikopia comes to mind. But they seem no more common than those horticulturists (such as Easter Islanders and many others) who pillaged their new island home, wiping out much of the native flora and fauna, permanently degrading the living environment. The horticulturists who settled Far Oceania were generally rigidly ranked peoples whose chiefs extracted a goodly portion of the harvest, waged wars on neighbors, built fancy tombs and megaliths, and occasionally came close to a state formation. The puzzle of intensification cannot be sidestepped by a reference to a golden age of horticulture.
Still, it bears stressing that many — perhaps most? — ancient forager/cultivator societies coexisted very well with their landbase. For example, the Moriori, cousins of the Maori, also switched to settled foraging on Chatham Islands, and were such careful stewards of their environment that seal colonies flourished within a stone’s throw from their villages. They lived notably egalitarian lives and carefully controlled their population. Until they were wiped out by the Maori, they were an impressive example of cool temperate region people living in close symbiosis with their ecosystem.
The illuminating and well-researched book Tending the Wild documents various Indian tribes who were also, by and large, careful stewards of their coastal California homelands. “They were able to harvest the foods and basketry and construction materials they needed each year while conserving — and sometimes increasing — the plant populations from which these came. The rich knowledge of how nature works and how to judiciously harvest and steward its plants and animals without destroying them was hard-earned; it was the product of keen observation, patience, experimentation, and long-term relationships with plants and animals.” Living among a similarly abundant natural environment as the Kwakiutl further north, they did not succumb to ongoing intensification, and continued to share any accumulated seasonal surpluses. Why did Kwakiutl intensify, while their close neighbors to the south, the Coastal Yurok, did not?
I conclude that neither the foraging nor horticultural modes of food production are by themselves a guarantee against ongoing intensification and the eventual damage it brings. There is a streak of persistent idealization of the forager and simple horticulturist among primitivists and other uncivilization-minded people. Slavery might be reframed as “captivity,” environmental damage rationalized, potlatches celebrated as evidence for gift-economies rather than economic warfare, and discussion shut off. Surely it’s not necessary to ostracize people who point out the facts on the ground, and a need for a rethink? After all, egalitarian forager/cultivators do show us that this particular mode of existence — so successful and durable during most of our species’ history — functioned mostly within the ‘Law of limits’ that allows ecosystems to thrive.
Below is an artist’s portrait of the California flightless diving ducks. They were finally driven extinct by the Indians who could reach Catalina Island by boat. But… it took them 8,000 years to do it.
Leaving Babylon 
February 22, 2013 at 2:31 pm
“I conclude that neither the foraging nor horticultural modes of food production are by themselves a guarantee against ongoing intensification and the eventual damage it brings.”
Did you look at energy storage as a contributing factor?
It seems to me that the particular methods of food production are less important than the ability to hoard, which creates stratified civilizations, which in my opinion tends to overshoot and crash, while egalitarian civilizations tend toward stability.
February 22, 2013 at 3:20 pm
Given the evidence that different types of communities – hunting and foraging, horticulturists etc have all ended up trashing the place I agree that all idealistic illusions about these ways of life should be shattered. But it illustrates that the ingeniousness of humans in finding how to live in various environments, and that there are no guarantees. You just have too, together, find a way to make it work, which is really the melody for all the intentional communities around the world.
February 22, 2013 at 3:51 pm
It’s true. There are no guarantees and looking for them is pointless.
February 22, 2013 at 4:06 pm
Some references in this article would be useful. The stories you tell of the Australian Aborigines seem to be based on the work of Tim Flannery, whose thesis on the extermination of mega fauna by Aborigines is disputed by many.
Still you pose some interesting questions. One of the issues that needs to be addressed is the use of power (energy) technologies/sources. Slavery is an energy source. As is wood. So if fire, of course, with its ability to shape and transform landscapes. Modern agriculture is based on extreme energy usage (of course). The combination of foraging/horticulture seems to me to be the basis of a more peaceful, lower energy, ecoliterate society. Remember hortus is based on garden (roughly speaking) cf agri – designates field. It is the scale of the enterprise that distinguishes a horticultural society vs an agricultural one.
February 22, 2013 at 11:03 pm
I conclude that neither the foraging nor horticultural modes of food production are by themselves a guarantee against ongoing intensification and the eventual damage it brings
Vera,
You and I had an exchange on the Orion thread a few months back. It seemed to me then that you very much wanted to believe that horticulture, or small-scale agriculture, could be sustainable (meaning over many thousands of years) so long as it did not become what Daniel Quinn described as totalitarian agriculture. Likewise, it seemed to me, you were convinced that indigenous tribal hunter-gatherers were no less environmentally destructive than our own civilized ancestors. You and I have both done a little research since then, and have maybe shifted views just a little.
You mention the Yuroks in this piece. There was a five year stretch when I was working on a book project about the Klamath River, and ended spending a lot of time down in Yurok, Hupa, and Karuk territory, interviewing people, going to ceremonies, and doing background research. It disturbed me a little to find how stratified these groups were now, and had been in the past. Certain families had the best fishing holes, the best acorn gathering areas, or were “owners’ dances, songs, regalia, and ceremonial rights. The Karuks, whom I know best, lived in small settlements up and down the river, which made them essentially sedentary, but not completely. During the summer they had foraging camps in the mountains and hunting camps in the fall. Still, they had the ability to hoard and store food and build up treasures. Unlike some other Northwest tribes, they did not have potlatches, gifting ceremonies, or other institutions for social leveling. Like all the California tribes described by Kat Anderson, they used fire to enhance their natural landscapes: burning hazel to produce high quality basketry material; burning under their tanok trees to get rid of acorn pests; burning meadow areas to increase forage for deer and elk. The only seeds they planted were for ceremonial tobacco. It wasn’t ignorance that prevented them from further cultivation; it was a choice they made for a reason.
Right now I am reading a book called Moral Origins: the Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame, by Christopher Boehm, and what I am finding here is a very specific pattern as relates to egalitarian group dynamics. Nomadic groups who hunt for big game are invariably egalitarian and they share equally in the proceeds of the hunt. This seems to be the only social arrangement that works for a band of ten to twenty or so hunters. This lifeway is called immediate return hunting and gathering. In another book I am also in the middle of, After Eden: the Evolution of Human Domination, by Kirkpatrick Sale, we see another form of hunting and gathering called a “delayed return system.” Some cave dwellers back in the Ice Age had the ability to store food in cold pockets in their caves, and this seems to have changed the even distribution/egalitarian model followed by their more footloose cousins.
No guarantees, you say, but there are some principles that seem to hold up pretty well over time. More settled lifeways seem to lead to stratification. This is why I wonder about your sources when you speak of egalitarian horticulturists. How long will a social unit based on private property, or even rights of usufruct, continue to be based on social equality? I think where something like that has worked with any longevity at all, there have been leveling institutions, where those who have the most spread the wealth, and gain great prestige in the process.
One last point: horticulture (or agriculture) always requires the importation of fertility from somewhere else. Invariably. Now, while we are still inside the energy and resource bubble, while there is still stored energy at our disposal, horticulture (or permaculture) can be made to look somewhat sustainable. When humans have to rely solely on the daily solar budget, and their own two legs for getting around, the importation of fertility may not look like an attractive alternative—and even at that, might be considered as theft.
The way I see it (and I am ideologically rather committed to holarchy over hierarchy), the mobile hunter-gatherer looks like the most viable option for a distant future that can no longer steal from the future, the way we are doing now. That lifestyle might not appeal to you, or to very many at all who are living today, and by today’s standards. But if the human is to have a future, that just might be it.
February 23, 2013 at 6:23 am
Fascinating. You tend to pick exactly the foci I am most interested in, leavergirl–I think you should come visit us in West Virginia some time. I too want references, as I think these are critical questions.
February 23, 2013 at 9:53 am
Jan: I am intending to write about surplus soon. This post was originally longer… but if I try to cover several things at once, I get lost. So I chunked it down…
Stephen, well said!
Dave: so we agree. That’s good to know. I want to spin this out until I ferret out the root.
Peter: I am gonna tackle the definitions next. They make me a bit crazy… everyone argues differently because the definitions vary, and we get trapped in them. Use of power slaves… no, I have not tackled things from this end. Can you elaborate? Did Easter Islanders manage to collapse without energy slaves (apart from fire and chickens)?
References:
I first read several books:
Flannery, Tim (2002): The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People
Lourandos, Harry (1997): Continent of Hunter-Gatherers
Mulvaney and Kamminga (1999): The prehistory of Australia
Fascinating stuff, and when I was done, the fire argument made the most sense to me, so I looked around scholarly articles to corroborate it.
Here is the one (Clifford Miller). There was also one on the Diprotodon extinction, but now I can’t find it. So I am adding couple of what I saw yesterday on the web. I know that the issue is contested, but there is hardly anything on our species’ history that isn’t, and as a lay researcher, I had to make up my mind and run with it. If I see anything more convincing, I will post it here. Do you yourself lean another way?
Ecosystem Collapse in Pleistocene Australia and a Human Role in Megafaunal Extinction
Clifford H. Miller et al, Science, vol 309, 8 July 2005
The Aftermath of Megafaunal Extinction: Ecosystem Transformation in Pleistocene Australia
Susan Rule et al, Science 2012
Early humans wiped out Australia’s giants in Nature (on Diprotodon)
Mary, I would love to visit. Maybe I will come up your way later this year… Thank you for the invite, it would be such a pleasure, to talk face to face for once! 🙂
February 23, 2013 at 10:26 am
“… horticulture (or agriculture) always requires the importation of fertility from somewhere else. Invariably.”
I don’t understand. Do you mean solar energy?
Surely, that is true of modern sewage systems, but we are certainly capable of closing the nutrient cycle. I’m giving a workshop on it tomorrow!
February 23, 2013 at 10:54 am
Wildearthman: welcome! I remember that good discussion. It ended up forking into too many directions and I ran out of energy.
I do think that cultivation can be sustainable. I think we need to get away from framing it in terms of foragers vs horti vs agri, in order to understand it all better. You raise a ton of good questions, love your stuff on the Yurok, and I will answer later today as I gather my thoughts, to keep this great discussion going. I too am reading Boehm’s latest!
February 23, 2013 at 12:08 pm
Wildearthman: Well, here is what I read, and please tell how it fits in with your direct experience. I read that the Coastal Yurok remained egalitarian (despite storing some surplus) and the inland Yurok did not. I don’t even know if there are any Coastal Yurok left. I was not able to find much info on Coastal Yurok when I was looking into this more, a year or so ago. Did the Karuks share their stored treasure (and their fishing holes) or hoard it?
Potlatches, from what I have read, are competitive devices to impoverish and humiliate your rivals, not a way to distribute wealth (though they did that too). It was an ostentatious, aggrandizive display, and some of the wealth was destroyed, to create artificial scarcity. Not “nice” at all, overall. Of course, I don’t know how they are used nowadays, maybe they are more benign? Graeber (Debt, p.117) goes into it.
You describe well the drift of more settled peoples into hoarding. Yes, there is that. But then again, there are those who did not: Moriori, Tikapia. They were totally settled because they had no other place to go, being on remote islands. And yet… Both of these tribes did go through a crisis and turned around. (I have a book on the Moriori on request at the library, will be able to tell more later.)
References on egalitarian horticulturists:
We, the Tikopia by Raymond Firth
The art of not being governed, by James C. Scott
Political Systems of Highland Burma, by Edmund Leach
I think it’s pretty clear that many horticulturists quickly became ranked and then hierarchical. But there are enough of those who did not.
You say: “I think where something like that has worked with any longevity at all, there have been leveling institutions, where those who have the most spread the wealth, and gain great prestige in the process.”
Well, yes, but I have doubts about the “great prestige.” That part is too easily translated into power hoarding. The egalitarians went way out of their way to make sure their leaders stayed humble. They basically built leveling into their daily interactions, so that nobody was amassing great wealth that they could later redistribute with pomp and circumstance. On the other hand, the Tikopia combine a fairly level social structure with chiefs who are given much respect and even veneration, but not wealth, and whose power is modified by checks and balances.
I would love to hear more about holarchy. Can you tell us what it means in a nutshell? I tried looking into it but my brain froze. And I second Jan’s request on more re your claim that all cultivation requires importation of fertility.
February 23, 2013 at 11:01 pm
Holonomy Describes the Relationship between each and All
“All things come out of the One and the One out of all things”—Heraclitus
I believe the word holonomy was first coined by evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris in her book, EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution (2000), and is derived from the word holon, which was coined in 1967 by Arthur Koestler, In Ghost in the Machine. Koestler also used the word holarchy in this work, and these three neologisms represent what I regard as a huge conceptual breakthrough. I find that people tend to resist new words, and a great number of technical terms can cause anyone’s eyes to glaze over, but believe me, these words are worth getting to know.
The word holarchy refers to the nested nature of systems within systems within systems, or, holons within holons within holons. A holon is a whole which is also part of a larger whole. Thus the human body is made up of organ systems, which are made up of organs which are made up of cells which are made up of atoms which are made up of subatomic particles. The human is in turn embedded within a local ecosystem, a regional ecosystem, a continental ecosystem, a planetary ecosystem (the biosphere), a solar ecosystem, a galactic ecosystem, and so on. This is the structure of all living and all (so-called) non-living systems; everything is interconnected and mutually interdependent. Seen in this way, nothing stands alone, and the word autonomy has little or no meaning. Instead, the way to describe all these interdependent relationship is with the word holonomy. A cell in the human body contributes to the life of, say, the heart, which contributes to the life of the circulatory system, which contributes to the life of the entire organism. The cell, the heart, and the circulatory system cannot function or live out of the context of the entire organism. Nor can the organism live without the biosphere, which is made up of many other holonic levels (ecosystems, and other systems, at many scales). When mystics speak of All being One, this is what they mean—but there is nothing mystical or mysterious about all of these holonomous relationships. It is just the way things are. “All things come out of the One and the One out of all things.” In our hyper-individualistic culture we have this myth of the self-made man. This is a myth indeed, for such a creature has never lived in this world. Everything on planet Earth is in mutually interdependent, holonomous relationship. The most important thing about holonomy is how it helps us better understand our larger identity, our larger Self—our embeddedness in all the systems of the Earth.
In my last post I sort of pitted holarchy against hierarchy, and because hierarchy has worked so much mischief in the world, I want to here pursue the distinction between them. To illustrate the point: I live in the Oregon Cascades on Horse Creek, which is a tributary of the McKenzie River, which is a tributary of the Willamette River, which is a tributary of the Columbia River, which flows into the Pacific Ocean, some part of which evaporates and forms clouds which blow East and drop rain in Cascade Mountains, which feed Horse Creek, which helps feed the entire Columbia River system–along with every other little creek and stream within the entire Columbia River watershed. Some (Ken Wilber, for instance) would say there is a hierarchy here, and the largest and most inclusive entity was at the top of the hierarchy. I believe this to be a conceptual error and an arbitrary human projection upon a natural system. Part of the problem comes in how we think of a river as a linear channel with water running through it. For most human purposes it works to think of the McKenzie River as heading at Clear Lake and ending at its confluence with the Willamette River, at which point it loses its identity as its own river. This is the linear and reductionist view of a river. But try thinking holistically about this river system with its named tributaries as one thing, which takes in an entire watershed. The Columbia is not the Columbia without Horse Creek, or without the smallest seep and trickle anywhere within its vast watershed. The concept of hierarchy makes no sense in this context. Everything is part of a whole, and nothing exists, as itself, apart from that whole. Horse Creek, the McKenzie, the Willamette, the Columbia are all in holonomous relation to one another. Each is at a slightly different holonic level, but there is no above and below, superior or inferior, greater or lesser; each level just is, and is in holonic relationship to every other holon within the holarchy.
I’ve gone into more detail, and taken up more space, than I intended, and I haven’t even gotten to the Law of Holonic Reciprocity. If you think you might be interested, in another, shorter post. I will also attempt then to answer the question about horticulture and imported fertility.
WildEarthman
February 24, 2013 at 10:20 am
I knew it… I should have asked you to do a guest post! I have been meaning to write about nestedness, but haven’t researched it yet, and here it is… thank you for the clear examples, will be looking forward to more.
February 24, 2013 at 10:30 am
to WildEarthman–yes, please.
February 24, 2013 at 1:16 pm
With Holnomy comes Responsibility
In my last post I introduced the concept of holon, holarchy, and holonomy. Now I want to talk about their implications, and especially their moral implications. In a Universe where everything is interconnected and mutually interdependent, the smooth functioning of the whole (the holarchy) depends upon each component (or holon) doing its part—and this I call the Law of Holonic Reciprocity. The gift of Life comes with inherent responsibilities. For this precious gift, a return is required, and that is to give back as much as has been given, and just a little bit more. The Universe is moral at its heart, and depends upon fairness, justice, and equity for its own well-being. If every holon within the holarchy of the Universe gives back precisely as much as it receives from the system, the system will maintain itself. Giving back more than is given enhances system well-being and provides a buffer for any free-riders, who only take but never reciprocate. The Law does not specify exactly what the human might or must do to meet its obligations. That must be worked out at the local level, and will be reflected in how the human relates to the Community of Life within her own ecosystem.
Many indigenous groups have practiced an ethic which required them to take no more than they needed and to use all that they took. Their own ancestors might have made some large mistakes, perhaps driving certain species into extinction. But people are (sometimes) capable of learning from mistakes, and taking more than you need is always ultimately a mistake in the long term. For one thing, it is stealing from the human future. This is a conservation ethic which says, first, do no harm. But the Law of Holonic Reciprocity asks more than this. It seeks a positive contribution to the well-being of the system.
Sometimes there are physical things that can be done within one’s own local ecosystem that will enhance that system’s viability. The indigenous use of fire in what became California may be an example of optimizing one’s own landscape—not only for human needs, but for the Community of Life as a whole. If this is true, then the human in this instance is acting as a keystone species, and, like other keystone species, serves the entire Community. In addition to whatever might be done on the ground, what is done in the spiritual realm also counts. All, or almost all, tribal peoples have had traditional ceremonies and rituals that they perform to offer thanks for what has been given, and to seek favor with the Hidden Powers for a prosperous future. This seems to come naturally to people who “live in the hands of the gods,” and living thus, they cultivate attitudes of humility and gratitude.
When Native people speak of All Our Relations, they are recognizing their own kinship within the Community of Life and the interconnectedness of all things. They likewise tended to understand, and sought to practice, the Law of Reciprocity. Recognizing that all life is sacred, they sought permission to take a life in order that they themselves might live. Exceptions to all of these attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors among Native peoples can be found, but from my own years of studying indigenous people’s cultures, these seem to be standard practice—or were before their traditional lifeways were disrupted by foreign invaders.
Related to the Law of Holonic Reciprocity, but not identical to it, is the Holonic Golden Rule, which states that whatever I do to “others” (including other species and the Earth itself) I also do to myself. Therefore it is always best to behave with care and circumspection.
With holonomy comes responsibility. Recognizing both the holonomy and the responsibility, and behaving accordingly, offers a way to live in the world that works—and will go on working for a very long time. I’d say the people of our culture, or any people who survive the coming collapse, could do worse than to internalize, and practice, this new/old understanding of the conditions of Life.
February 24, 2013 at 3:10 pm
Importing Fertility
The best book I have found on the sustainability of agriculture or horticulture is What is Sustainable by Richard Adrian Reese. The only historical agriculture he found that could be sustained more or less indefinitely occurred on river bottom land where fresh fertility was imported each year from distant mountains. Most of these river bottoms are now under water thanks to big dam projects. Otherwise, the growing of crops depletes fertility, and even with composting, cover crops, and green manures, fertility continues to decline, and after just two or three seasons, crops can no longer be dependably grown.
The tilling of soil leads to topsoil depletion through wind and rain erosion. To grow many of the crops that have been grown in America over the past century or so has required the mining of vast quantities of topsoil, and in many cases also fossil water. Mining of topsoil, or oceans, or forests, or anything else, is by definition unsustainable. No-till agriculture is a bit better, but is best practiced with perennials, and even though Wes Jackson has been working on developing viable agricultural perennials, he has not yet had much success.
On a personal note, I live in the Oregon Cascades on two sunny acres, where I have planted about three dozen fruit trees, ninety blueberry bushes, and more than a hundred strawberry plants. I am in an early phase of trying to develop a tree-based permaculture garden spot. In addition I have quite a large garden (about sixteen hundred square feet) plus ten four by eight raised beds. All this keeps me very busy spring, summer, and fall. I love working with plants, including flowers, for their beauty and color. Gardening is a passion for me, partly because it allows me to be outdoors so much, and partly because it engages me in the miracle of Life. This two acre plot was once forest land, but was clear-cut and stripped of its topsoil. The sub-soil is good quality loam, but I have to import a lot of fertility in order to make things grow here. But I am afraid it is true that even if the topsoil were intact here, it would still be subject to erosion and fertility depletion.
As long as we are living in the bubble of cheap fossil fuel energy, and still have nonrenewable resources to exhaust, these two acres should prove highly productive—that is, as long as there is electricity to pump well water out of the ground. Such is not at all guaranteed in perpetuity. I am committed to horticulture for as long as I can practice it. My distant descendants (if any) are not going to have the luxuries I have today, and they may have to come up with a different plan in order to feed themselves.
February 24, 2013 at 4:40 pm
“… the growing of crops depletes fertility, and even with composting, cover crops, and green manures, fertility continues to decline, and after just two or three seasons, crops can no longer be dependably grown.”
I’m sorry, but this is just too general a statement to let pass. It is certainly possible to go more than just “two or three seasons” without importing fertility.
You make good points about erosion, loss of soil, electricity for pumps, etc. but none of those need be done.
February 24, 2013 at 4:55 pm
Slash and Burn
Okay, Jan, if you know something about soil fertility that I don’t know, I am eager to learn. Here is one thing I do know: in swidden agriculture, also known as slash and burn, two or three years worth of crops can be grown in the ashes of the old forest, and then this shifting agriculture moves on to someplace new to repeat the process. Does this model and time frame apply everywhere and under all conditions? Probably not; not with any great precision. But you tell me how you keep growing crops in the same old soil, drawing out nutrients with each crop, without at some point adding fertility from somewhere else. I believe your answer will be of great value to the world.
February 24, 2013 at 5:40 pm
I believe slash and burn was mostly practiced in the tropics, where the soil holds very little fertility.. My neighbors have had a garden in the same spot for decades; what about that book, Farmers of Forty Centuries, about Chinese farmers whose practices were so sustainable they lasted millennia? Yes, it’s necessary to replace the nutrients taken out by crops, mostly via manure, also dead bodies; I see nothing wrong with importing a little fertility from surrounding woods, either. Conventional agriculture fails because it concentrates nutrients and sends them into streams and rivers and lakes, where excess fertility causes eutrophication, at the same time the land is impoverished. But such practices, breaking nutrient cycles, are not inevitable. Is there something I’m overlooking here?
Incidentally, I import manure twenty miles–but that’s because A–my ridgetop clearing has been stripped of topsoil and is heavy clay in need of much added organic matter, especially for the first year; and B–it happens that there are convenient piles of horse manure in places that far away and we have a truck. I realize it won’t always be possible to do this. The other main ingredient of my compost piles is the tons of leaves I rake off our mile-long driveway each winter.
February 24, 2013 at 7:46 pm
wildearthman, I would hardly consider “slash and burn” to be the epitome of sustainable agriculture!
Have you looked into Permaculture?
The key to continued soil fertility is to close the nutrient cycle. What you describe sounds like you assume modern sewage systems, with a broken, or open-ended nutrient cycle.
The best source of information about this is Joe Jenkins, whom I believe still has a free download available of his book, The Humanure Handbook, A Guide to Composting Human Manure.
February 24, 2013 at 8:00 pm
All life requires importation of energy from the sun. Pristine life on Easter Island required, in addition, ongoing importation of water in the form of rain, gases from the atmosphere, and volcanic dust to enrich the soil. Could the humans who eventually settled it keep it going “indefinitely”? That’s a great question.
Someone ought to run specific experiments. I tend to think that if “nature” can go from lesser fertility to greater — as it obviously can and has — so theoretically could humans, provided everything is recycled in situ. All refuse, all dead bodies, all made artifacts. And we need to learn the art of growing the soil in place, rather than rushing out to steal someone else’s soil to build up your own, no?
February 24, 2013 at 8:10 pm
I really appreciate this discussion, I hope I can contribute coherently…
Regarding the importation of fertility, the statement made by wildearthman is far too general. Any living organism is based on importation, accumulation, and dispersal of energy. So while it’s true that growing enough food to feed a group of humans in one place will require “importing fertility”, that’s what plants do (along with their various bacterial, fungal, and animal associates). A sensible choice of plants and cultural methods (i.e. a correct use of permaculture) should minimize the required inputs to a few amendments in the initial establishment.
I had never heard of Wes Jackson, I looked him up, and on his “Land Institute” website I couldn’t find mention of any crop other than perennial grains. Are you familiar with Mark Shepard’s Restoration Agriculture model? It is a mimick of an Oak Savannah with Chestnuts and Hazels as the staple crops, along with apples, currants, grapes, and brambles. The alleys are wide to encourage grass growth for cattle, pigs, chickens, and turkeys. This is a replica of the self perpetuating model that American Indians maintained with fire for quite a long time. Besides the fact that these crops mine many of their own minerals while protecting and building soils, their yields contain far more valuable nutrition than any grain (zinc, magnesium, potassium, etc.).
I agree with the theme of this article, that no method of production is guaranteed to bring about unfailing human bliss, but I feel that agriculture (meaning the tillage of soil to grow annual crops) does inherently bring about desperation. I think that the references in the comments of the Cannibals and Kings post regarding spiritual rites being the turning point that forced outrageous intensification is right on. I won’t get into my spiritual views, but I feel that foraging and horticulture reinforce the reality that humans exist in a cooperative relationship with the organisms they cohabit with. It is my feeling that grains just do not make good cooperators.
Just to give some context to my view, I manage a farm where we forage acorns, walnuts, hickories, mushrooms, and a wide array of herbs and vegetables. We are currently establishing hazels, chestnuts, pawpaws, mulberries, and a few others. I’m not as well read as many here, and I really appreciate being able to glean some insights from y’all.
peace
February 24, 2013 at 9:55 pm
Time Frame and Values
This is getting to be a good discussion, and I feel like we could get some things sorted out if we continue this dialog. I am glad I got a chance to speak about the Holonic Golden Rule, the Law of Holonic Reciprocity, and the conceptual framework that supports this moral view of the Universe. I spent my teen years on a forty acre orchard and farm in Southern Oregon, and loved the life. I have been an organic gardener for a decade and a half, and have begun a long-term permaculture project based upon fruit and nut trees. At a personal and emotional level, I am committed to growing things, and to working with Nature and trying to do things in the same way She does. But there is part of me that is a philosopher and long thinker, and that part holds some doubts about domestication, cultivation, and the settled sedentary lifestyle, both in our history and in our future. Other than at the personal level, I am not that interested in, say, the next hundred or so years, and whatever systems humans might build as long as we remain in the energy and resource bubble. Anything we do in that bubble, other than destroy the habitability of the Earth, is pretty much irrelevant to a (distant) future human presence on planet Earth. I think I am in favor of that human presence, but only if by that time we humans can integrate ourselves into the Community of Life, and live here as good citizens. If we can’t do that, then the Earth and the Community of Life are better off without us. That is, in my opinion, the 3.8 billion year Experiment of Life, in all its complexity, diversity, and abundance, is far more important than any one species, including my own.
Following the thinking of Daniel Quinn and Jim Mason, I believe that the people who broke their ancient bond with Nature, and took life into their own hands, by cultivating and storing grain, and by enslaving wild animals, led ultimately to overpopulation, private property, social stratification, and all manner of violence, including endless war—and our culture of civilization. Quinn spoke of totalitarian agriculture as the culprit, but I’m not sure there is any other kind. I say this as a plant lover, an animal lover, and above all, a Nature lover—but as one who has studied these issues for two decades and more. That doesn’t mean that I have figured it all out, but I have looked at this from a lot of different perspectives over time—and I just don’t see animal husbandry as part of a viable future. And without animal husbandry, there goes those big concentrations of manure to bring fertility to our gardens. I know about Allan Savory and how he believes that livestock will save the world, if used according to his prescriptions. I just don’t buy it. It is true that bison in the Midwest kept those long grass and short grass prairies in fine fettle, but that is a natural, autopoetic system, and it worked because that ecosystem was then in balance.
If you believe, as I do, that fairness and justice are at the very heart of the Universe, and you believed in, and sought to practice, the Holonic Golden Rule, you would not wish to visit confinement and servitude upon one of your kin—horse, cow, sheep, or whatever. Slavery is slavery, and slavery is wrong. This is not what we have been taught, or what we have practiced and seen practiced in our own lives. We tell ourselves that we love our animals, and we care for them like they were our own children, maybe. But what free spirit wants anything but freedom for itself? And remember, too, how brutalizing it is to be a slaveholder. Whatever we do to others we also do to ourselves. That is a fact of life.
Just about any farm you might name once used to be something else: a forest, a meadow, even a wetland marsh. Whatever its shape and character, it was exactly what it wanted, and was perfectly suited, to be—itself. Its essence and identity was stolen from it, perhaps even its animating spirit, so that this piece a ground, claimed to be owned by a human being, could be cleared of trees, then gouged and plowed and left vulnerable to wind and rain. This is what the people of our culture do. First we did it in Europe; then we did it here in North America, as we advanced westward. But I ask you, leavergirl, and all you other plant and animal lovers, what if this is really not the way we are supposed to live here? It is totalitarian, is it not? It is committing violence upon the land. And it is stealing habitat from All Our Relations. It is taking for our own what is not our own, and there is a word for this. It is called theft.
Some would say that the human is by nature violent, and not altogether honorable in thought or deed; that our wild hunter-gatherer ancestors were in no way morally superior to us; that our way of life is superior to theirs, and to all others. As someone who was not quite fully acculturated and indoctrinated into all the stock beliefs and memes; and as someone who has made a conscious effort to question everything I’ve been taught, I question all of this.
For as long as we live in the energy bubble, and before things really fall apart, not very many people will be asking these kinds of questions or having these kinds of doubts. But afterwards, these questions will inevitably come up, and they will need to be answered definitively. Until such time as I no longer can, I will tend my garden, depending on outrageous subsidies from other systems, peoples, and places. I will try to be as ethical, respectful, and thoughtful, as I can be, but all the while I will know that it is really kind of a one-time-only pretend game I am playing, and I will just be grateful that I was alive at a time when such a charade could pass for reality. My distant descendants (if any) aren’t going to have it quite this easy—not when all they have is their daily solar budget, and, if we leave them that much, an ecosystem service or two.
What think you? Do you find this kind of long thinking irrelevant to your own concerns, or to the nature of this blog?
February 24, 2013 at 11:15 pm
Vera,
If Nature Can
I live near an old growth forest, and it is my best reference point of a natural system that tends toward greater fertility over time. Some trees were taken from this stand maybe fifty years ago, and some stumps remain, though they are rounded, partly rotted, and moss-covered. It is an uneven age stand, with great biodiversity. Douglas firs and western red cedar predominate, but there are also yew trees, big leaf maples, a few alders, the odd chinquapin, as well as vine maple, rhododendron, sword fern, Oregon grape, salal, and in summer, an array of woodland flowers. The soil hasn’t been disturbed here for fifty years, and this has allowed the intricate network of fungal mycorrhizae to attach themselves to root systems and to deliver nutrients from depths and distances not available to the roots alone. Lack of disturbance works in other beneficial ways. Because nothing has been taken away, as happens in logging operations, fertility is allowed to accrue. Harvest, in the forest or on the farm, is always a subtraction from the ecosystem. Harvest, of course, is what farms are all about.
I’m sure you must have read One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, and are familiar with his natural farming. I recently read his last book, Sowing Seeds in the Desert, and continue to find his farming philosophy highly appealing. Not all of his practices translate from his native Japan to the crops and conditions of North America, but some do, and seem decidedly worth exploring. I want to try his New Zealand white clover, for instance, as a way to fix nitrogen and improve soil fertility. Fukuoka was a visionary, and in fact had a vision, which informed his 60 year career as a farmer and teacher. There may be a way, as your statement above implies, that humans can learn to feed themselves from the land without diminishing the land in the process. If so, there will be such a thing as sustainable farming (or horticulture), but we’re not there yet. And, even though permaculture has many promising aspects, it is not yet quite sustainable, either. I used Martin Crawford’s book, Creating a Forest Garden, to help me plan my own attempt at a forest garden. There is also an interesting video available online called “The Farm of the Future,” which features Martin’s forest garden as an example of what can be done.
I haven’t explored night soil as a soil amendment, because I haven’t had to. I’m sure pee would be beneficial, too. Carol Deppe, in her book The Resilient Gardener, recommends it, but, again, I have found other ways. As crops to sustain people, in good times and bad, she recommends these four: flint corn, for polenta; winter squash, such as Sweet Meat and delicata; dried beans, and; potatoes. I eat beans regularly, and grew a lot of them last summer, but found the quantity of the end product negatively disproportionate to the space and work involved to grow just a couple pounds of the dried product. So I won’t be doing dried beans again this year. But the homegrown polenta corn is the best I’ve ever tasted, and I’ll be growing plenty of that this year. I also grew a special black eyed pea she recommended, and it was superb—and I’ll be growing more of that again, too.
I love gardening. I’m just not sure it’s here to say.
February 24, 2013 at 11:21 pm
WildeEarthMan, I think you suffer from the same disorder as most all of humanity; you just express it 180 degrees out from the norm: you write as though nature is separate from humanity.
I cannot accept that as a major premise.
You cannot accept animal husbandry? Are you equally critical of ants, who have domesticated aphids, protecting them from predators and harvesting the nectar they secrete? How is it different when I protect my goats from predators and harvest their milk? Is it because ants are “natural” and humans are not?
Ever wonder why domestic animals tend to be brightly coloured? The mink industry tried to breed docile mink, so they could pack them closer together without their fighting marring their valuable fur. The only problem is, as they were bred to be domesticated, they started to develop white splotches on their fur, spoiling the eventual product as surely as tooth and claw marks would.
Domestication is a form of evolved mutualism. When it becomes more advantageous for an animal to be found by its keeper than is is to hide from its predators, bright fur patterns result. Is that “bad” because one of the co-evolved happens to be Homo sapiens?
(Many humans from areas with long dairy traditions have co-evolved with dairy ruminants by having a gene that allows them to process lactose as an adult.)
So what if every farm was once something else? Every “natural” biome was once something else, as well! Is the former bad and the latter good because the latter is “natural” and the former is man-made?
Although I go way beyond my share in trying to minimize my impact on the Earth, why is our impact necessarily “bad,” while the impact of yeast that consume all the resources in a jug of apple juice is “good?”
There was once no oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. Life was essentially anaerobic, and produced oxygen as a waste product of photosynthesis. They were so successful that most of them perished in their own waste product. Sound familiar? Was that “good” because it was “natural?” If it hadn’t happened, we would not exist — it triggered the most massive extinction ever, followed by the biggest evolutionary diversity even known on this planet. Is our current CO2 release “bad” because it is man-made? We could be triggering the second-biggest evolutionary diversity event ever!
Have you studied panarchy theory?
From “pan:” across all, and “archy:” ruler, this “ruler of everything” theory applies to everything from sub-atomic particles to galaxy clusters.
It says everything goes through certain states in an endless cycle: exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization, characterized by the amount of energy and the amount of connectedness in the system. It does not express this as “bad” or “good;” it just describes what is.
In summary, things change. We are a part of that change. One might argue that resisting change, seeking a stable-state instead, is what is “unnatural.”
February 25, 2013 at 8:08 am
To me, the main issue in domestication, as with any other activity, is not the act itself, but the spirit with which it is undertaken. As wildearthman stated the golden rule of “Anything you do to others you do unto yourself”, we are a culture of self-domesticated humans. I don’t see the animals being any more enslaved than we, as we are equally interdependent.
My own goal is to break out of this cycle, somewhat, by working with wild foods and semi-domesticated perennial crops. From both nutritional and spiritual perspectives, the grain confinement syndrome is only benefiting the grasses.
In response to the idea that harvest, as a subtraction from an ecosystem, is what farms do, it seems the limiting factor is the concept of ‘farm’. The model we are pursuing is to invite folks to our site to harvest the major nut crops, so that we may harvest their manure.
No matter what our ideologies tell us humans are the major keystone species in every instance I’m aware of. The only choices then become if we can accept that role, or squander it, and how we will proceed in it. Gardening is definitely here to stay, it’s just a question of scale and cultural practice.
February 25, 2013 at 8:23 am
Wildearthman:
I meant to add that I share your view of the long term, and that the eventual collapse will likely require more mobility among humans. For the sake of my children, my way of dealing with this is first to connect as much as possible with the whole ‘earth-skills’ movement and build interdependence with as many species as possible (i.e. reconnect with the web through foraging food and medicine, building, crafting, storytelling). Second is to establish as many long lived perennials as possible, chestnuts and hazels both have the potential to live and produce regular crops for over 1,000 years.
To me, the longest term negative impact done by the agro-militant-industrialists in my bio-region is the Chestnut blight, and the depletion of Hazel habitat through plowing and confined grazing. I’m trying to make a safe-haven for these most valuable friends.
peace
February 25, 2013 at 12:47 pm
Separate from Nature
Jan: You make some very interesting points, and I am happy to have the chance to think about them and respond. First, you seem to believe that I think human beings are separate from Nature, only in a different way from the majority. If you have considered my post about the Law of Holonic Reciprocity, then you know that philosophically I believe that everything is connected to everything else in a relationship of mutual interdependence, and I use the word holonomy (or holonomous) to describe this relationship. So in this sense, nothing is separate from anything else. As for the perceived separation between humans and Nature, that is a fiction perpetuated by our culture. (For a highly interesting discussion of this matter, I recommend The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein—which, from my perspective, is the most important book to appear in the last two decades, because it tells us how things got to be this way.) Our cultural myth tells us that we are not only separate from Nature, but it is subordinate to us—and so much of civilization is about the control, and exploitation, of Nature. To me, this notion is absurd on its face. Just as the human economy is a subset of the natural economy, so the human being is a subset of all Life. I sometimes use the term Life Force as being roughly equivalent to Nature, but that probably blurs an important distinction, because Nature is associated with everything that ever happened or will happen in the Universe, and Life itself is, as far as we know, confined to planet Earth.
And yet, you are correct in noting that I do not find Nature and the human being to be equivalent. Nature is much bigger than we are, and more enduring. I capitalize the word to suggest this very fact, just as some people capitalize the word god. I also capitalize the phrase Community of Life to suggest something that is also larger, and more important, than ourselves. We are part of Nature; we are the creatures of Nature. Nature is in us and we are in Nature. But we are not Nature itself, and it is not intellectually honest to say that we are Nature, and therefore anything we do is natural—and so it has to be okay. A lot of things we do are not okay, and that includes extincting species at an average rate of two hundred a day. Two hundred individual and distinct species go extinct every day because of us. How on Earth can you rationalize the rightness of that? How can anyone? But many people see this as simply the cost of doing business, and since the cost does not seem to be their own, they find it quite easy to live with, and ignore it. But if you agree with me that what you do to the world you do to yourself, because you and the world are One, while also being in holonomous relationship, then you begin to see this as a loss of Self.
You say “so what” if we transform natural landscapes and ecosystems into farms or cities or shopping malls? The “so what” to me is, every time we do this we create more imbalance within the biosphere. The culture of civilization teaches us to be human-centered or anthropocentric, and almost all of us are. Anything that furthers the human enterprise is A OK. But dismantling the processes and natural systems of Earth is not really in our long-term best interest. You can call a cancer successful as it eats a human being alive, but when it kills its host the game is over. This looks to me like the direction we are headed in now.
I want to make clear that while I find fault with the culture that informs and directs us to act as we do, I tend not to pass judgment upon individuals for following the commands of their conditioning. You, and all of us, grew up in a society in which animal husbandry was the norm. You have your goats, which you care for, and milk. Goat cheese is good. I like it a lot. When I was a teenager on the farm I milked Bessie the cow ever day. We also had a pig named Jethro, and when we ate him we talked about him around the table as an individual we’d gotten to know. That was a little weird. It is much easier to buy your bacon at the supermarket, and not give a second thought to where it came from, or from which particular individual pig it came from. There is a documentary out there called “Earthlings,” which is very tough to watch, because it is all about CAFOs and the slaughter of our meat. This is the industrial model, and certainly scale makes a difference, as does a person’s attitude toward “her critters.” My questioning about animal husbandry is not a judgment passed upon individuals living in the present day. But I have to wonder how durable this relationship is, and whether it accords with the Law of Holonic Reciprocity and the Holonic Golden Rule.
That is, after we have mined all the world’s stored resources and energy slaves, and future humans have to live by tougher rules than we do today, will the enslavement of our fellow Earthlings be a viable alternative? As for ants and their aphids: ants aren’t human beings. I am speaking about the human being as a moral agent. Chimpanzees, with whom we share 99% of our DNA, live in hierarchical groups where it is pretty much “might makes right,” and domination of subordinates is the norm. Do we want to take them for the model of how we human comport ourselves? I don’t. I’m not a big fan of hierarchy, and societies where power and privilege go to the few at the expense of the many—which very much characterizes our world today. I don’t believe this model will translate well into the future when human are few and resources are scarce.
February 25, 2013 at 2:05 pm
Osker says: “we are a culture of self-domesticated humans. I don’t see the animals being any more enslaved than we, as we are equally interdependent.”
Osker: I applaud the steps you are taking to break out of conventional thought and the vicious cycles and destructive practices of today’s agriculture. It is great that you have kids who will be learning skills, attitudes, and values that may well give them an edge in an uncertain future. For myself, I just turned 71, and I have already lived longer than I ever expected. My grown son is a doctor and can take care of himself, so I have the luxury of being able to philosophize and speculate about a future I will never see. But since I am still around, and take a curious person’s interest in the fate of the world, I am trying to understand what went wrong, and what it would take to make things go right so that humans could continue to live in the world. If I understand Jan correctly, nothing has really gone wrong. I guess that means that we are fulfilling our destiny even as the 3.8 billion year Experiment of Life seems to be going down all around us. Change is normal and this is change and that means everything is just as it should be. Well, I guess I suffer from too much attachment to the complexity, diversity, and abundance that I see as the handiwork of the Life Force—and I really don’t want to see all that go away. In other words, I would rather see the human change, and adapt to the real conditions of life, rather than see all or most of Life disappear so we could hold onto our cultural myths and misdirections.
In the statement above, you seem to find the domestication of the human as perfectly acceptable? Do you really? Would you feel that way if we had the real option to regain our former wild nature? It is really hard to say, even for me, who call myself WildEarthman, what it would be like to be wild. Our culture, which is the source of our domestication, tells us that wildness is not a good thing. But I think our culture is pathological, and has an agenda which is ultimately anti-Life. It is like a black hole that seeks hegemony, and turns everything into itself. It is using us human beings to devour the Earth, and we are doing a pretty good job of it.
I believe that all Life is sacred. We need to take life in order to survive, but the taking of a life should never be done lightly. As hunters, humans have had a special relationship with their prey species, whether that prey be salmon, bison, deer, elk, or whatever. Some will point to the Late Pleistocene overkill hypothesis, or to bison bones at the bottom of cliffs, in order to discredit this notion. But I have made a deep study of this issue, and I find it to be generally true that the human and its prey species are in a symbiotic relationship, in which it behooves the predator to cultivate rituals and practices that optimize the well-being of the prey species. Doing so is obviously in our long-term self-interest, and is also good for the prey species. The thing is, in this scenario, wild animals are allowed to be fully themselves—wild and free—right up until the moment of their becoming meat for us. This grants them their full dignity; and in granting them their dignity, we enhance our own.
I believe that we humans have lost a lot of our deepest essence and being through the process of domestication. We have become tamed and trained and programmed and lost the better part of ourselves. I’d like to see us regain our full stature as human beings. I believe that potential remains within us, awaiting liberation. But to liberate ourselves, I believe we’re going to have to first liberate our captives. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but eventually.
Peace to you, too.
February 26, 2013 at 10:01 am
Osker, welcome! I really loved it when you said: “The model we are pursuing is to invite folks to our site to harvest the major nut crops, so that we may harvest their manure.” Ha! Exactly. Are you inviting any livestock to your permafarm?
And I think your assumption that magic played a part in pushing intensification, is, I think, right on.
Maybe you are too hard on the grains. I see them useful in modest quantities. Chickens and pigs love them too.
I once talked to a friend who grew up farming about the old-fashioned harvesting of grains, putting them up in shocks and letting them dry that way… (as compared to drying it with propane in silos) and he was horrified at all the waste… animals that pilfer the shocks in the field. That is the mentality of “no sharing” with any animals out there. It’s like a mental illness…
Funny, ain’t it, to waste all that propane on what nature can do for free… he did not see that as waste, but sharing some of the harvest with the creatures of meadow and forest, that was waste. Sigh.
February 26, 2013 at 2:14 pm
wildearthman
Regarding domestication, I don’t think it is inherently bad. To me it is a process of co-evolution, as exists everywhere in “nature”. The problem is that humans and their partners are currently controlled by forces that don’t seem to have any moral imperative to the sanctity of Life. In our current form of domestication we are primarily associated with annual plants, which does not promote a connection with the web of life (which I feel is best represented in a mixed age mid-succession forest/savannah). I am working with “semi-domesticated” crops and animals because I believe there is a potential for great things to happen when we interact with other organisms on a genetic level. The plants I’m working with already have a place in our past, and I feel that the better quality nutrition they offer is indicative of the spiritual potential of our relationship. I’m fairly young, but I already have some experience with breeding annuals, and find it to be a deep experience, a bonding with another organism. On the other hand, foraging is also a profound and beautiful experience for me, a way of connecting with wonderful things that I am unable to fully understand (like acorn masting cycles). I think that this balance is important.
leavergirl,
Yes, we have some livestock, and we will slowly be adding more, but as with our plants we are choosing carefully (ponies for power, goats for dairy, heritage turkeys for meat, ducks for eggs, geese for many reasons).
I will confess that we are using some grains to feed animals, but I hope to phase them out quickly. I suspect there was some seriously foul spiritual mischief going on with the domestication of grain, and I feel that the Christian takeover of Pagan culture is a prime demonstration of that energy. I feel that the annual cultivation allows for too much loss of integrity, and not enough time to really relate to the organism, whereas nut crops take years to get a crop, which to me allows for a higher level of symbiosis. Chickens and hogs do like grains, but once you see chickens eat soldier fly larvae and hogs eat acorns/walnuts/chestnuts, their choice becomes clear. Also, the energy equation in annual cultivation just doesn’t work for me.
Regarding the drying process, I remember Bill Mollison in one of his video lectures available online talking about the fermentation that goes on with field dried grain and how it increases nutrient availability. But as you say, it’s blasphemy to farmers these days to let any grain feed anyone but themselves or feedlot animals, regardless of the nutritional consequence. You say it’s a mental illness, I would say it’s a spiritual infestation…same-same.
peace
February 27, 2013 at 1:45 pm
Jan; Osker; Vera; Mary Wildfire: It has not been my intent to rain on anybody’s picnic—at least not the picnic you are enjoying today. Each of you is doing good things on and with the land. You are living in the present, and that is a very sane place to live. I live in the present, too, sometimes, but I also visit the past and the future—the past as a story to learn from; the future as a thought experiment. In my wanderings, I have noticed that the word sustainable gets used a lot. I saw an eighteen wheeler on the Interstate the other day, and on its driver-side door were these words: “Service and Sustainability.” I think we all understand how sustainable an eighteen wheeler is, and what kind of enduring future it can expect in an age of peak oil and peak everything else. When the word sustainable is used in conjunction with the word development, sustainable becomes a marketing buzzword and is the product of magical thinking—or, at best, wishful thinking. My point is, we live in the present and we are invested in our present way of doing things. I am sure that each of you, and probably almost everyone who visits this blog, are emotionally invested in working the land and working closely with Nature in the process. I have mentioned my teen years on the farm, my fifteen years as an organic gardener, and my ongoing permaculture project. So I have this investment and commitment myself; and I believe that everything that all of us are trying to do is relevant to our own times and into some indeterminate future. What we are doing is a good transition strategy, but I deeply question that what we are doing now, with the resources we have available now, is going to have much relevance for our future descendents (if any), when these resources are not available to them.
Daniel Quinn speaks of Takers and Leavers, and this is a valuable distinction to make. But I would like to frame the issue a little differently by stating that there are two distinct ways for humans to live on planet Earth. One might be described as living in the gift (Quinn speaks of living in the hands of the gods); the other I describe as living in the theft. Living in the gift means living within the daily solar budget; it means living on the interest of Nature’s bounty. Living in the theft means living off the principle of Nature’s bounty, and we do this by mining. All of the things that we gouge out of the flesh of the Earth—all the metals and minerals; elements and compounds and rare earths; fossil energy, such as coal, oil and natural gas–we call non-renewable resources. The people of our culture have assumed that all “buried resources” were there for our taking, and that taking them for our own use was our right. The Book of Genesis gives people explicit direction to go out and take dominion over the Earth, and also to go forth and multiply, and we have followed these marching orders ever since. But what if none of what is under the skin of the Earth belongs to us? What if it simply belongs to itself, and is part of the Earth’s subterranean ecosystem? What if disturbing that ecosystem carries with it all sorts of dire consequences? All the poisons that pollute the planet come from underground, and are often by-products of the particular treasures we seek. All of the uncontrolled chemical experiments to which every creature on Earth is now daily exposed all come from this same source—this Pandora’s box that should never have been opened. Give this proposition some thought, and consider also how fossil fuels have made our current methods of agriculture possible, and also our current (overshoot) population. Taking what belongs to the Earth, and not to us, is living in the theft.
There is another category of resources that we call renewable. When people use renewable resources and the draw down rate remains beneath the rate of renewal or recharge: that is sustainable. It is living off the interest of Nature’s capital; it is living in the gift. When people cut trees at a rate that exceeds renewal: that is mining. When people take more fish from the sea than can reproduce themselves: that is mining. And it is also living in the theft. It is to take more than our share; it is stealing from the future—of all species, including our own. This theft also sets in motion forces of imbalance that trigger trophic cascades, positive feedback loops, and the breakdown of natural systems. This is the way we are living now. We are living in the theft. Our distant descendents (if any) will have no opportunity to live in the theft. If we leave them a semi-habitable planet, with a few ecosystem services left intact, they may have the chance to live in the gift. That means living off the interest of nature’s capital: living within the daily solar budget, and mining nothing at all.
This is just my own thought experiment, and it seeks a way that humans can go on living here after collapse. I believe these future humans are going to have to have a different moral and spiritual orientation to the world than is practiced by most of us today. They are going to have to operate by a culture that is much different than our own. They really won’t have a choice about that. You can’t have a mining culture when there is nothing to mine. This is why I look back to hunter-gatherers—the ones who learned from their mistakes and matured into fully realized human beings, developing a moral code and moral behaviors that could endure for hundreds or even thousands of human generations. So many people say you can’t go back. And that’s right. It is also true that you can’t get there from here—not with seven billion people. But after all the imbalances have worked themselves out, and Nature arrives at the number of humans who can survive (or even thrive) under the new conditions of life—I think there is a good chance that animal husbandry and forest gardens will not be the best options open to these People of the Fresh Start. Or maybe they will; I’m only guessing.
February 27, 2013 at 2:18 pm
Interesting post and discussion – I’m happy to stymie if this is where it leads 😉 (though apologies to V if she wanted to talk about something else already…)
On the domestication subject (which we’re also getting into in the C&K post below) I’d like to make a distinction between it and co-evolution, but I don’t really know how or where to draw the line. Jan’s question about ants:
is one that has been bothering me for a while, since I used the same example to make a similar point not so long ago. The first difference I see is that the ants did not clear their habitat of all species except those necessary for the survival of them and the aphids. They seem happy to keep to their corner and allow other species to flourish around them, outside of their direct control. They’ll put up a fight if you come and try to squish the aphids on your apple tree, but they don’t go out of their way to hunt me, the birds or any other aphid predators for the sake of it. By contrast wolves, bears and lynx were hunted to extinction in my country, I assume primarily because of their tendency to occasionally hunt domesticated livestock. Is this behaviour ‘unnatural’? Like Jan I’m afraid the word doesn’t make much sense to me. But there’s something different in operation here IMO – something which attacks the basis of diverse life on this planet, leaving the place impoverished and less resilient as a result. I want to argue that domestication is an anti-evolutionary force, but the problem remains that it itself evolved in the first place!
Oh, and Osker & WEM: awesome. That is all.
cheers,
Ian
February 27, 2013 at 2:46 pm
There is something else to consider regarding the field drying of grains. Grains have antinutrients, which makes them hard to digest and robs your body of nutrients. These antinutrients are naturally disabled and give way to enzymatic processes in the presence of moisture. The reason for this is so that the seed does not sprout early. The enzymes break down the antinutrients and are helpful for digestion. The antinutrients protect the seed until the time is right for them to sprout in the spring. When sheaves of grain were left out in the field, although they did dry, they were also exposed to moisture and time, which decreased the antinutrients. When you quickly heat dry the grain, it creates digestive and nutritional deficiencies.
I find it interesting that people are having trouble digesting grains that did not used to cause so much trouble, and this may be one reason. It is certainly not the only reason. Modern forms of wheat have been altered in a few different ways, for example. A book about this is Wheat Belly.
Where I learned about the above regarding grains is a book called Enzyme Nutrition and it is really worth a read. He discusses the need for enzymatic processes in all forms of digestion in many different types of animals. It all hangs together and makes a sensible picture.
Oh and by the way, I had a look at the recent blog post, and I wonder if anyone has read Rebalancing the World by Carol Lee Flinders. I saw someone mention The Chalice and the Blade, and of course Quinn. I find this book as good as the above, similar to Quinn and yet different, more detailed and down to earth. I wrote to her and asked if she had read Quinn and she had not, but had since been made aware of his books. Very, very similar.
February 27, 2013 at 3:19 pm
And a mink will come into a chicken coop and bite the head off every chicken, even though it can eat no more than a portion of one chicken. And a cat will play with a mouse, terrifying it to death, instead of killing it cleanly and eating it.
I don’t want to defend human behaviour, I just question calling us anything but yet another natural species, doing what it does.
“Ah but we have a conscience, and are enlightened!” Sorry, I don’t buy it. We are different than other creatures only in degree, not by some absolute. It would have been nice if… but sadly, not gonna happen in time.
Perhaps if bonobos, canids, or cetaceans achieve our level of intelligence (and who says they haven’t?), they will find our artifacts, and decide to do things differently.
You mean like the great extinction event of some three billion years ago that I wrote about, when the new-fangled cyanobacteria polluted the pristine methane atmosphere with poisonous oxygen and killed about 90% of all living things, resulting in a void that was filled with the greatest diversity the planet has seen since?
Sorry, still not buying it. Perhaps what looks like a disaster will have a bright side. Perhaps a sentient bonobo will arise in a million years, find some bronze statuary, and decide that “Hey, I’m not the singularly important creature I thought I was just because I’m at the top of the heap at the moment.” Perhaps that sentient bonobo will then take much more care in being the top ape on the planet.
As for humans, I’m afraid it’s all over but the cryin’. And I’ve been getting a head start on that.
February 27, 2013 at 8:09 pm
Welcome, Anna! I did not know about the enzymatic effect of field drying of grain. Makes sense! And I wonder if drying food via propane maybe imparts some toxicity to it?
Lovely to see all those book recommends.
February 28, 2013 at 12:22 pm
You say you want to “test a claim,” but you pick and choose your evidence. Stinky cheese!
February 28, 2013 at 1:53 pm
I’ve found this discussion so valuable that I have just read it all over again. The main thing that pops out at me is the under-discussion of what seems to me a key element: population. It’s because grains enabled some human groups to multiply much more rapidly growing their numbers even if at the expense of the well-being of their members, that they took over surrounding land, developing the methods and mindset of aggression. It’s because of these numbers that farmers took the attitude that they couldn’t afford to share their crops with other creatures but must endlessly maximize them. It’s because of the excessive numbers of humans on the planet now that it’s so difficult to find sustainable ways to live–seven billion is not sustainable no matter what we do; inevitably we must detract from other creatures’ habitats and food supplies.
My fantasy is some method of changing us so that we must make an active choice to conceive, rather than making an active and usually technologically aided choice to avoid conception. My suspicion is that if all births were necessarily chosen, this alone would drop the birth rate a great deal. Then perhaps a one-child ethic could be brought into being. Realistically, of course, those things will not happen and our numbers will be adjusted in the usual way–by billions of deaths.
I see wildEarthMan’s approach as too extreme, as seeming to say that the only good human is a dead human, that is a ghost who flits about not touching the environment. A little animal husbandry, early mining (nowadays with the easy, shallow, concentrated reserves long gone, mining is violently destructive), cultivation of crops can be sustainable if done mindfully.
I question the statement that in the future humans will be better off mobile. Seems to me the most sustainable resources require a sedentary life: for example, osker’s chestnut’s and hazels, an energy-efficient house that allows one to get through cold winters with a minimum of firewood…though I suppose in the next century climate change will force an awful lot of migration even of well-prepared people.
Jan seems to go to the other extreme, apparently saying that since humans come from nature, everything we do is natural and benign, and if we wipe out most life on Earth, well in the past such wipeouts have allowed subsequent flourishing by clearing the decks–so let’s celebrate it. But some scientists claim it’s possible that climate change could get so out of hand that Earth goes the way of Venus and become sterile. Anyway, speaking for myself, the current flowering of diversity is so very groovy I’d rather keep it and let evolution proceed more slowly. Actually, I don’t think Jan is hostile to current life–I think he’s trying to feel better about what he sees coming. Somewhat like a poem I wrote ten or twelve years ago
Resignation
And so they marched,
those armies of God, so long ago
onto the plain of Armageddon they marched
commanded by generals but led, the men knew,
by God.
Allah.
Yahweh.
Krishna.
Just as the holy books predicted
the world ended in cataclysm and fire
and all the Gods died
with the race that created Them.
Now the oceans resound with the songs
of all the great whales, and sea turtles
bury their eggs in the sand of a thousand shores;
now salmon plunge over the remnants of dams
through crystalline waters;
now immense sequoias fill the clean sky.
Rainforests retake their ranges
while deserts walk backward.
Not one mind looks out through a pair of eyes
and sees this beauty…
but three billion years remain
before Sol swallows this sweet world
in the final cataclysm.
There is yet time for the rise
of another intelligent race…
perhaps one, next time,
that is also wise.
February 28, 2013 at 2:26 pm
You got it!
That’s not to say that one shouldn’t do their individual best to avoid such a thing — it’s just acknowledgement that none of us have control over anyone but ourselves, and there’s no significant sign that we’re having very much influence in any timely manner.
I have a sign on my desk that I have to remind myself about from time to time. It reads “You have to pick the little bit you can make better, rather than worry about the whole lot that’s gonna get worse.”
Wonderful poem, Mary! Some days I think our highest purpose is as a learning tool for future sentient species. Or as Catherine Aird put it, “If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”
February 28, 2013 at 2:45 pm
Leveling and Gifting Institutions
Vera: I think you are possibly a little hasty in writing off gifting and other leveling institutions as a way to reduce stratification within a social group. I’m not sure why among all the gifting cultures you choose to focus on one of the few that turned the potlatch into a highly competitive contest of status. By far, most gifting cultures are seeking to redress social and material imbalances within their small societies, and to encourage generosity and altruism among their members. The potlatch may be the most famous of gifting institutions among us non-Natives, but many Native cultures in South and North America, and elsewhere, practiced gift giving as a regular custom.
In the book Moral Ground, Robin W. Kimmerer, who is of Potawatomi heritage (New York), offers a moving portrait of gift giving among her own people. As she describes it: “The ceremonial giveaway is an echo of our oldest teachings. Generosity is simultaneously a moral and a material imperative, especially among people who live close to the land and know its waves of plenty and scarcity. The well-being of one is linked to the well-being of all. Wealth among traditional people is measured by the ability to have enough to give away. Hoarding the gift, we become constipated with wealth, bloated with possessions, too heavy to join the dance….In a culture of gratitude, everyone knows that gifts will follow the circle of reciprocity and flow back to you again.” In this short essay, Kimmerer goes on to describe a particular recent giveaway she attended among her people. She concludes as follows: “The moral covenant of reciprocity calls us to honor our responsibility for all we have been given, for all we have taken. It’s our turn now, long overdue. Let us hold a giveaway for Mother Earth….Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world– in return for the privilege of breath.”
Long before my friend, Tim, and I coined the term, the Law of Holonic Reciprocity, Native people in various places around the globe acknowledged their debt to Mother Earth, the Life Force and the Community of Life, and endeavored to repay the debt they owed. These people were living in the gift and participating in the circle of reciprocity, matching generosity with generosity. This seems to me to offer a good model to all of us, but how do we get there from here?
One possible transition strategy is offered by Charles Eisenstein in his book Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition. In his earlier book (highly recommended) The Ascent of Humanity, he shows how usury, credit, and interest on debt drive our relentless growth economy and the (not exactly sane) belief that continuous growth can go on indefinitely on a finite planet. In Sacred Economics he offers an alternative: the gift economy. Instead of interest on debt he proposes a negative interest, where hoarded money loses value by not circulating. Like all perishable foodstuffs and other goods with a limited shelf life, money (or other forms of wealth) loses value by not being used. Another name for this negative interest is demurrage, and it has many social values, including conservation of resources, reducing disparities in wealth, and community building. This book offers many great ideas about creating a better society, but scale is an issue. The gift economy works best in groups where people know one another. It works less well among large groups and among strangers, and there are sound sociological reasons for this. So the gift economy is not offered as a panacea for all that ails our bloated society today, but it does offer a direction to head toward. Its principles seem sound, and should work quite well even now within intentional communities.
You ask what I have learned about the Yurok from the time I have spent among them, especially as regard s sharing, gifting, and social stratification. You are correct to note a difference between the coastal Yurok and their inland cohorts. In all cases, dealings with the invader and the powers coming out of Washington DC have had a tremendous influence on their lives and their traditional ways. The coastal Yuroks have felt that influence most. The town of Klamath is where their Tribal headquarters is located, and this town, of course, is electrified. Most of the inland Yuroks live without electricity and tend to be more traditional in their ways. By necessity, these days, private property is the norm, and most of the common or collective property was sold off to timber companies, and the logging has been severe. There is a definite class system among the Yuroks, Karuks, and Hupas. The dance “owners” host ceremonies, such as World Renewal Ceremonies and provide most of the food, though others also chip in. It is by no stretch a giveaway, but rather a show of wealth and status among the elite. This stratification always bothered me, and seemed contrary to what I have learned about most tribal peoples I have studied over the years. Having done more research since my time with these three tribes, I now believe that the living in place over thousands of years in a place of great abundance (at least in the good years) has led to the class system that was in place before contact (invasion) and continues, with some modern variations, as they try to make their way as a colonized and marginalized people.
In this regard, I just read last night read in Moral Origins, Boehm’s take on the Navajo: “In the 1960s the isolated nonliterate Navajos I studied in the field had moved only a few generations from their foraging roots. They continued their egalitarian worldview very strongly, with an emphasis on generosity and a condemnation of stinginess that were striking.” (p214)
So, Vera, while I agree with your general conclusion that there are no guarantees attached to any particular lifeway as to durability, I tend very strongly to believe that living in the gift worked before, and will work again. Living in the theft has a limited shelf life.
February 28, 2013 at 3:52 pm
Hi Jan, thanks for that.
Not convinced that mink killing chickens or cats ‘playing’ with their food compares to people systematically wiping out competitor species. I’ve heard various explanations for so-called ‘surplus killing’, some focusing on the cache aspect (eat one, save the rest for later), some on the inherited ‘killer instinct’ (kill first, asks questions later) – here’s a decent overview of the same question related to foxes, for example. It seems to me to be a response to the high concentration of resources typical of domestication: wild prey species will typically be few & far between, so if the predator finds a glut all sitting in one place it would make sense for it to take full advantage and save on future hunting energy budgets. Dunno about the cats. That always seemed really messed up to me… Perhaps they’re trying to get the most out of an instinctual thrill of the hunt?
Would agree with you if there weren’t plentiful examples of other human cultures acting in totally different ways. Unfortunately they’re long extinct themselves over here, but the archaeological record shows that human cultures managed to live alongside numerous large predators – including those wolves, bears and lynx when the weather wasn’t too cold for them – since they first got to the British Isles at least 800,000 years ago (early humans. H.Sapiens got here around 25,000 y/a – wiki) without driving them extinct. With the exception of the wolverine for some reason, all the species on that list driven to extinction by human hunting were killed off after the Neolithic Revolution brought the first farmers a mere 6,000 years ago. I take this to show that the movement of hardcore plant & animal domestication doesn’t represent our entire species by any means, and could in fact be an evolutionary cul de sac.
Another one I’ve been wrestling with for ages… Am I right in thinking this was a global adjustment that took many millions of years to run its course? Last I heard the current extinction rate is faster than the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs. One appears as an evolutionary transformation, or ‘gear change’ if you like, allowing for higher levels of organism complexity; the other seems to be wiping out diversity indiscriminately and creating no new opportunities (unless the bacteria that can eat the ocean plastic have evolved already). I called it an ‘attack’ on biodiversity. I don’t think the cyanobacteria were rendering the planet uninhabitable for millions of species as a deliberate policy: it was an unintended consequence of the way they lived. Civilised cultures, on the other hand, routinely go out of their way to destroy those they perceive as being in their way, limiting their expansion etc. (though I suppose you could say that this is also an unintended consequence of their subsistence strategy) – again, wolves:
I’m thinking that perhaps this ‘going out of your way’ might be the crucial difference, that going beyond the point of diminishing returns commits you somehow to an ever-escalating sequence of insane, ultimately pointless actions. Can all this energy spent trying to kill wolves really have been recouped in slightly greater livestock populations?
Actually, maybe. Crap. Perils of thinking out loud…
Thanks for the thought-provocation 🙂
I
March 1, 2013 at 10:23 am
Walter, so finally we meet. Welcome to my blog! Limburger or Bavarian Hand Käse? 😉
I was looking to see if I could falsify the claim. I provided several “picked and chosen” examples. What do you object to in my methodology?
March 1, 2013 at 12:15 pm
Wildearthman, you read me wrong. I am all for leveling mechanisms. Competitive feasting is not one of them. It serves the world over (not just in America’s NW) to buttress the prestige and power of the Big Men who organize it. And in a few generations down the line, it is no surprise that their descendants now “own” choice fishing holes and other resources.
When looking at ceremonies that use the gift, one must always ask, cui bono? who benefits? I have seen too many naive people admiring the competitive giveaways without looking at the deeper picture.
Thank you for mentioning Farm for the Future — well worth watching. A young woman who left her parents’ farm for a career in film-making comes back to the farm she will one day inherit, and seeks out people who are at the forefront of another way of doing things. Very well done. (48 min)
March 1, 2013 at 1:05 pm
Ian:
I’m not well informed enough on historical detail to know for sure, but I would bet that, like the example you quoted, much of the “kill all the competition” coincides with hierarchical spirituality (i.e. Sky Gods).
So I think domestication is a fairly loose term, but I would say again that when practiced by folks who maintain an intimate connection with their surroundings (animism) there is nothing inherently wrong with it. I do believe, however, that the specific species involved in the process will greatly alter the outcome (duh). This is why I believe strongly that domesticating nut crops is potentially a beautiful thing, while domesticating grains is a bad thing (perennial ecosystems vs. disturbed annual ecosystems). I am trying to evaluate the effects of various species of domesticated livestock to find a balanced system, and really that’s how permaculture is supposed to work.
peace
March 1, 2013 at 1:18 pm
Osker, do you think that all annuals should be shunned? Not possible to enter into a relationship with an eggplant, or a radish?
Wildearthman: re your take on fertility… not all tilling damages the land (viz chisel plow, and keyline plow — these can help soil grow). In central Europe, once people tilled small fields surrounded by grassy margins where fruit trees and bushes or brambles grew, birds and insects flourished, and the margins contained runoff from the fields, as they were generally higher than the field itself. We kids often took the cow and the goat to pasture there. Sandhill Farm over in Missouri, they cover all their gardens and all their fields with the leftovers from sorghum harvest. There are so many permutations…
And successional/fallowing practices is another way to grow soil. Especially turning fields into pastures. Have you seen the wonderful material on growing soil?
March 1, 2013 at 2:05 pm
Leavergirl: Maybe I haven’t seen the wonderful material on growing soil, but I am interested. I have been operating mostly out of what I take to be common sense and common knowledge, along with my own experience. If there is new information out there, or suppressed old information, I am eager to be made aware of it. Such knowledge could prove invaluable to a possible human future.
Once you get to the Big Man stage of cultural development, it’s all downhill from there. In my view, getting to that stage is in no way inevitable, but is rather a failure to mature into cultural adulthood. Many indigenous groups in our long human pre-history have CHOSEN not to go that way. Nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer societies are invariably egalitarian. That is one of the things that makes them appealing to me. The settled life seems too often to devolve into hierarchy and social injustice. Living on Nature’s bounty (living in the gift) keeps human populations under control, just like any other animal population. Producing surpluses produces more people. More people leads, exponentially, to many more problems. The link you provide in your original post called the Law of Limits points to this very fact.
I don’t deny the possibility that a small settled group who grows a lot of their own food COULD control their own numbers and maintain an egalitarian and just social system. I just don’t see much evidence of such a community or society enduring for very long. If anyone reading this has good contradictory information, I’d be more than happy to consider it, and incorporate it into my own understanding. Until I become aware of such information, I will continue to regard such a future lifeway as not impossible but mostly wishful thinking.
March 1, 2013 at 2:44 pm
Well, the Tikopia did and have endured. See wiki.
But you are right… I think there are fewer egalitarian horticulturists than there are hierarchical ones. Still, I am encouraged that it can be done. And Big Men… well, they spell trouble.
As for how to grow soil (much much faster than mama Nature does on her own, ordinarily) start with my post here, and follow the links especially to Christine Jones. Magic! 🙂
Can humus save humans?
March 1, 2013 at 4:56 pm
So now I had to read another post and ninety some comments! And I have a question, which no one has adequately answered for me. People talk about planting trees to make up for their fat carbon footprint, to sequester carbon, to build soil. But I don’t see how that can be helpful, because it seems to me that either the land is inappropriate for trees because it’s too dry or for other reasons–or, if it’s good land for forests then it HAS forests, unless humans have cut them down. In which case, you could plant trees but aren’t the remaining trees doing it themselves as fast and more effectively than you could? Unless you’re talking enormous clearcuts and burned-earth destruction afterward, where I live–West Virginia, the trees are quite assiduously taking care of planting themselves, thank you kindly. The human contribution to reforestation is merely to refrain from cutting them down–and even there, one can take a fair amount for firewood or whatever, without having an impact because they seed much too thickly.
I also wonder about the various claims on carbon sequestration–I’ve come to suspect that biochar is this decade’s hydrogen economy/ethanol–something that’s mostly hype and turns out to have limited use. And I read that grass grazed by ruminants is the answer, that forests are much better–it’s like all the argument about the healthiest diet, who knows who to believe? I suspect leavergirl is right in her suggestion that the best kind of ecosystem varies–where she is it’s grassland or chaparral, where I live it’s woods. But I don’t apologize for keeping my one-acre clearing open for cultivation of various sorts–it creates edge, it allows a diversity of crops–is the orchard better for sequestration and soil building than the garden, the berry patches, the crop patches (which I do a winter cover crop of rye and vetch, seems to work very well, but I do have to rototill or arduously shovel the rye under in the spring) because it’s trees?. I think what really matters is probably to compost a lot, to refrain from using poisons, and to leave most of the land in woods. I also suspect it’s good to have all those things, and chickens and the goats I hope to get next–as long as I don’t try to take too much for the amount of land, more variety of crops is surely good. Residue of one often feeds another.
March 1, 2013 at 6:36 pm
Good question! Christine Jones gets much annoyed with all the hype about planting trees for carbon offset — not that it’s a bad idea, mind you, but the entire land carbon in vegetation, she says, is only about 17%, whereas the rest is in soil. So to make a big dent in carbon (and water) sequestration is to do it via soil growing. Especially in WV where growing trees is like bringing coal to Newcastle. But where ever there is open land, grow soil, help stable humus form. Soil covered by perennials and grazed intermittently is the best for sequestration.
The ruminants are key in drylands because unlike in WV, where there is not enough moisture, biomass does not rot, it slowly oxidizes into the air. So you need living stomachs to turn it into soil enrichment.
Biochar… as usual, too much hype. I think it can help with particularly acid soils, some people recommend priming it with manure and water (let sit for coupla days). I get it from my high efficiency wood stove, if I bank it low for the night, there is a bit of biochar on top of the ashes in the morning.
But the cockamamie schemes for huge carbon sequestration in vast holes in the ground, that is totally wacko, IMO. The engineering mentality. Building up topsoil and stable humus is what the planet needs.
Mary, you get a golden star for reading it all! That comment thread was for me like taking a university course!
March 1, 2013 at 6:47 pm
No, I don’t think all annuals should be shunned, but I think using them as staples is dangerous. As far as I know it invariably led to catastrophe for every culture that tried it.
It’s certainly possible to enter into a relationship with any organism, it’s just a question of both organisms meeting each others needs without deleterious effect on everyone around them. Meeting the needs of annual grains is harmful to just about everything that isn’t an annual grain. It may be possible to devise some intensive system of rotational production, or something like Fukuoka (although I don’t think anyone’s been able to repeat his results), but what’s the point? Are annual grains actually meeting the needs of humans?
There is one annual in particular that I believe is a long term companion of humans, which produces phytochemicals capable of replicating and altering our brain chemistry, high yields of essential fatty acids, and high quality fiber. I’m mentioning this merely as an example of an annual that actually does meet human needs, and because it provides fats/proteins rather than carbs/proteins, it seems less likely to encourage humans to clear vast areas for monoculture.
Just a thought…
peace
March 1, 2013 at 7:09 pm
This stuff about carbon just came up while I was typing…
Mary what you’re doing is great, and certainly the most efficient/effective way to grow fruits and vegetables. But the problems lie in the production of staples. Annual agriculture is pumping carbon out of the soil into the atmosphere at astonishing rates.
This is the beauty of Mark Shepard’s system: rotational grazing, trees protecting/shading the soils, and coppice cycles (basically rotational grazing of trees). So yes, planting trees to “offset” carbon use is stupid, but planting trees to produce staple foods is necessary, and has the dual effect of sequestering carbon and preventing the carbon loss from tillage.
Re: Biochar, I’ve used it with great success as a potting soil amendment (takes the place of perlite). I highly doubt I’m saving the world by doing so…
March 2, 2013 at 7:43 am
leavergirl said: But the cockamamie schemes for huge carbon sequestration in vast holes in the ground, that is totally wacko, IMO. The engineering mentality. Building up topsoil and stable humus is what the planet needs.
As a West Virginian, I need to respond to that one. Can I say this forcefully enough? CCS is pure, refined, high-grade bullshit. It is not a practical solution. It serves to justify the continued mining and burning of coal, and that is its sole purpose. First of all, it reduces the efficiency of the coal-burning by 20 to 30% so then you need to burn more to get the same amount of power. It’s also of course much more expensive, and coal plants are already having trouble competing with wind. But then there is the question of whether there are enough appropriate underground formations where you can safely store CO2–and what there is, is not necessarily conveniently located under the plants, so you need a massive new investment in pipelines. Which also creates another set of environmental hazards. There was a pilot project here in WV, where one plant was capturing and sequestering I think it was 3% of the CO2. But they terminated it when Congress didn’t pass any kind of carbon tax, because it was just too expensive. They have no intention of ever actually doing this–it’s just a bright flag they can wave to pretend their emissions aren’t an enormous problem. I won’t even mention the long list of other harms associated with coal mining, washing, transport, and burning.
There is one way to safely and cheaply sequester the CO2 AND other toxins in coal, guaranteed–just leave it in the fucking ground, where it’s been safely sequestered for eons.
March 2, 2013 at 8:08 am
osker, why do you say annual crops and staples in particular, are terrible emitters unlike perennials? Is it all because of plowing? Is rototilling any different? What if you mulch the crops? I have begun experimenting with grain, as near self-sufficiency is my aim. Corn is supposed to be the easiest, and I did well with it. My crop was small enough I was able to mulch between the rows with hay. This year my plan for that field is rye (not turning under the winter cover crop but letting it go to seed) and sunflowers. I thought about leaving the corn stumps, but that would have impeded planting the rye in November, so my husband tilled it up. The sunflowers will probably require tilling under the rye in their half. If we had left the corn stumps, I could have planted the sunflowers between them–but the winter rye crop seems to be a good thing–here we have variable winters, with little snow cover much of the time.
The chickens are great. Not only do they supply with me with steady eggs and (very) occasional (tough) meat, and hot shit (good for my composts) but they keep the grasshopper and tick populations in my clearing very low. They disturb the soil in both the clearing and woods, too, which that other thread said was a good thing, but it’s the reason my flower and herb bed and other gardens all have to be fenced–I feel compelled to mulch, they feel compelled to rip through mulch looking for bugs.
March 2, 2013 at 11:16 am
Osker, do you consider the way Eastern Indians grew corn, via the Three Sisters plantings, as harmful? They used hoes to make the hillock, often stuck a fish in it, then let the beans climb up the corn stalk and the squash to cover the ground and keep the weeds down. Brilliant. They seemed to have a very close relationship with these species. (Some places used 4 sisters but I can’t remember what the fourth one was.)
Grains too stimulate endorphins in the brain, and give us straw to build with and to bed animals with… and for mulch, nah? Hemp is great too… I think Colorado farmers will be able to grow it soon, I think some new regulation passed.
Also, there are farmers in Australia pioneering pasture/grain growing, no plow, just injecting the grain into the pasture when it’s going dormant in the fall. Buy the time you have the grasses growing again, the grains have a head start. No tilling, no bare ground.
Mary, yes, rototilling too destroys stable humus. So do fertilizers with rock phosphorus. Rototilling also damages the soil’s capillary structure. That’s why some people use those long tinned forks to aerate the soil without turning it over or churning it up. Maybe the three-sisters way is better because there is no need to till, just a bit of hoeing? Less corn that way, though. Or, till, but then let the land lie fallow for a few years while you use another plot? I think the virtues of fallowing have long been underestimated.
—
The other thing that occurs to me is that if, say, you convert half of your woods into a food forest, then you will be exporting a lot of the fertility out of those woods. How will you replace it?
March 2, 2013 at 12:29 pm
Lots of states, including WV have passed laws legalizing the farming of hemp. Still can’t do it until our lords and masters in Washington, or rather on Wall St, decide to permit it.
Seems to me the trouble with NOT tilling is that I need to improve the structure of my heavy clay soil, and just putting compost on top would leave it layered–better to work some in, though I tried only forking the subsoil, not inverting it. I hoped I’d only have to do this once, after which compost added to the surface would suffice. The trouble is, growing rye over the winter keeps the soil covered and seems to do very well toward adding humus–but I really can’t plant anything without tilling the rye in.
On the food forest, I have no intention of such a massive re-engineering. This land is a land trust with 72 acres–our leasehold is 10 or 12. My only plans for the woods at this point are to have a cultivated mushroom patch (already there) and to graft improved hickories and hickory/pecan hybrids onto seedling hickories on the edge of the clearing, because the hickories produce abundantly, you can hull and crack the nuts without too much trouble, the nuts are probably tasty and nutritious–but you can’t get the nutmeats out of the tight sinuses in the shells. I’d love to have hickory/pecan nuts. We also put some hybrid hazel/filberts in last year in the orchard, and my neighbors planted Chinese chestnuts thirty five years ago–there is some work we need to do (the marital we) clearing around those as they’re in the woods. Seems to me this question of robbing fertility from one place to feed another overlooks the reality of cycles in nature, conservation of mass. Unless the fertility is exported (truck garden sales, perhaps) seems like the most I’d be doing is moving it from the woods to the clearing. We do have a composting toilet–the proceeds, after a year in a bin, feed my fruit trees, berries and flowers.
March 2, 2013 at 3:06 pm
Mary, there is a center for folk skills in northern Georgia, right below the border, that teaches people the skill to make hickory nut milk. That’s the way to use hickories… I used to drive myself crazy getting the meats out, no good. Maybe there is a recipe on the web… that’s how the Indians used to do it. (And throw the leftovers to the chickens.)
As for clay soils, using a subsoil plow is often the way to go, either chisel or yeoman’s. They dig deep, aerate the soil, but will not churn up or turn over the soil and ruin the crumb. Some of them dig as far as 18″ under. But it make take several seasons if the soil is heavy. That kind of depth enables plants to sink their roots really deep, and the soil regenerates much quicker. Turning it into a pasture after that will get it growing soil right away, and the decomposing roots is what will add organic matter all the way down, saving you the work of having to churn manure in.
March 2, 2013 at 7:22 pm
We process hickories into milk…basically you want to crack the shells, then crush the pieces as small as you can. Boil twice the volume of water, add the nuts, let simmer for at least one hour, I usually do 3 hours, can go up to 6 and the flavor and oil content keeps improving. Let it cool. Most of the nutmeats will have floated, so you can scoop them off and eat them. Then strain out the rest and keep refrigerated. You can drink it straight up, or use it as broth. I like to mix it with cherry bark or elderberry syrup, and a splash of raw milk…delicious.
I’m up in the air about the 3 sisters (the fourth one is sunflowers, by the way). I’ve heard second hand of some valleys near me being totally ruined by pre-colonial Cherokee corn production. I’m curious to know more about why those people adopted it in the first place when they already had chestnut, walnut, hickory, passenger pigeon, turkey, deer, bison, elk, etc. But I’d bet that level of historical detail is long gone. Probably it was just a level of redundancy to all these other sources? But I’d say that it’s certainly better than other cereals nutritionally and ecologically, especially with nixtamalization.
Also, just to clarify, grains do stimulate endorphins, so do narcotics. “Hemp” doesn’t stimulate endorphins, it contains a chemical analogue of a compound our brains produce in minute quantities (anandamide). It also produces around 500 terpenes that modulate our perceptions and recordings of reality. So my point is that through selective pressure this plant is capable of manifesting intimate relationships with the brain chemistry of it’s human, rather than simply triggering contentedness.
Mary I’d love to talk more, and hear how your hazels and hickories are doing (sounds like they may be from Badgersett?), but I’m exhausted. I think leavergirl covered the tilling thing, but mulching helps with moisture retention, but the actual act of tilling releases large amounts of carbon.
peace
March 2, 2013 at 7:59 pm
I re-energized with an aforementioned hickory-elder-milk and I wanted to add…
Mary:
My problem with annual staples is that they require the continued disturbance of ecosystems, which I feel to be inherently out of tune with the impulse of life. I am currently creating disturbance in forested areas, but the crops I will be planting will outlive me, and will not require further disturbance.
My solution for building humus in heavy clay would be…First, manage water with low impact earthworks (I do all my digging with shovels and infiltrate a lot of water), Next, plant ridiculous amounts of fast growing nitrogen fixers and accumulators (I’m working with black locust, honey locust, basswood, mulberry, pea shrub, false indigo, jersey tea, sunchoke, groundnut, southern pea, wild carrot, milkweed, sochan, and some others), Then cut them aggressively and interplant the nuts and nutrient dense fruits. You can do this in strips and continue growing grains, or rotating animals in the alleys. In this way, you are creating a controlled disturbance, then guiding the succession to produce balanced nutrition.
March 2, 2013 at 11:13 pm
Osker: A good source for this information, still available in paperback and in PDF, is Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden. It is a fascinating anthropological document that offers great gardening insights. Also, you said you checked out Wes Jackson online. I don’t know what you found there, but Jackson is a geneticist and the mission of his Land Institute is to develop perennial plants that can replace annuals. I’m not sure if his focus is strictly on grains, or not, but, like you, he sees the problem of annual crops and the soil loss (and also the loss of the soil’s integrity) that goes with regular disturbance. New Roots for Agriculture might be worth looking into for a discussion of these matters. Also, you gave quite a build-up for one annual plant that might be worth cultivating, but I don’t believe you ever named that plant. Can you let out the secret?
March 3, 2013 at 5:37 am
He’s obviously talking about hemp.
March 6, 2013 at 1:54 pm
Interesting discussion about domestication. Hmm… my cats can go anywhere they please, they do no work for me at all, and I have no designs on their pelt or meat. On the other hand, they demand I feed them and pet them, and often. Who has domesticated whom? 😉
As for critters waging war… well, army ants come close. They will swarm over an area and kill everything living, including humans if stuck in their path. Now of course they will eat what they kill… but still. Nature does all sorts of things, not all of them kind. And she does some of it through our hands.
http://www.cracked.com/article_15816_the-5-most-horrifying-bugs-in-world.html
Wildearthman, I am digesting your extensive info on holons. About time I learned this… I just had not made the connection before. When Elinor Ostrom talks about hierarchies, she really means holarchies… click!
March 6, 2013 at 2:37 pm
Wildearthman, you said:
“Following the thinking of Daniel Quinn and Jim Mason, I believe that the people who broke their ancient bond with Nature, and took life into their own hands, by cultivating and storing grain, and by enslaving wild animals, led ultimately to overpopulation, private property, social stratification, and all manner of violence, including endless war—and our culture of civilization.”
Actually, the more I study this, the more obvious it is becoming that all those problems were started by foragers in the Paleolithic and Mesolithic. They were the ones who began to store the grain, nuts and legumes, and dry meat, in extra plentiful areas, enabling the rise of Big Men. Don’t blame totalitarian agriculture for this (though it can be blamed for much else).
I think you make good points regarding enslaving animals. Not all peoples did that… some preferred to let them range freely, even if they developed relationships with them that eventually led to their killing. (e.g. Saami with the reindeer) I tend to think that as long as the relationship has reciprocity built in, and the animal is relatively free to range (as chickens hanging around an old fashioned homestead), then it seems a good deal for both sides. After all, it’s not like the chicken in the wild will die of old age…
I tend to agree with Jan… every creature alters the environment, and philosophical purism seems to me to end up in cul-de-sacs. I think we need to take much greater care, but avoiding impact altogether is not something I find reasonable or doable. If we got rid of all the domesticated chickens, would the chickens be happy about it? There are a few wild fowl I understand, but… the chickens’ chances for species survival would go from ample to almost nil. Sigh. It’s complicated. I myself like a world where certain animals live with us in symbiosis. My ambition is to convince people to treat them right… much better than what is the norm. But to let them go extinct? No.
Thank you for all the info on the Oregon native tribes. As I said before, I was making the distinction between a gifting economy, and one that is based on competitive feasting (which may look like a giveaway to an outsider, but it’s really not). Interesting the the Coastal Yurok have modernized, and the non-egalitarians remained more traditional…
Everyone, thank you for another great discussion!
March 6, 2013 at 4:06 pm
Leavergirl—Blurring Distinctions
I never like to see the blurring of meaningful distinctions. I see that happening here and it disturbs me. I think it is very important to preserve the integrity of language, because integrity of thought depends upon retaining all shades of meaning available to a word. Once integrity of thought is compromised, integrity of behavior is bound to follow. So, I want to speak to two blurrings that I see going on here. The quotation you include here from Kat Anderson’s book, Tending the Wild, gives what I take to be a false impression, and is not in keeping with the main thrust of her book. Very little breaking of the soil is involved among any of the California Natives she studied. Among the Karuk, as among some others, there was one exception to this rule. They planted seeds to grow tobacco–tobacco to be used for ceremonial purposes, not to feed personal addictions. Most of their tending involved the judicious use of fire: to prune hazel and willow to produce high quality basketry materials; to rid the areas around their tanoak trees of acorn pests; to blaze trails in the mountains, and to fell trees; to open up meadows for better deer and elk browse. The Karuk people, who lived in one place for at least 9,000 years, were in intimate relationship with their land base, and had intergenerational knowledge to help guide them, along with their own individual experience. They say that the land itself, and the plants and animals, talk to them, and inform them how to live there. (See, for instance, Spirits of the Earth by Bobby Lake-Thom.)
What I have seen, and what I believe, is that these people lived within a different worldview and ethical structure than the people of our culture. They knew how to plant seeds in the ground, they just chose not to, except for their tobacco. Why did they make that choice? Because they recognized the limits of the Earth. They chose to live in the gift: to live off the interest of Nature’s capital. The people of our culture chose to live in the theft: to live off Nature’s capital. The seven billion of us that are destroying the planet day by day, by mining Nature’s capital, could never have happened in the absence of agriculture. Agriculture itself is mining, and is living in the theft. I have mentioned that I am not so very interested in the next hundred years or so, because whatever we do in that time frame will be drawing down Nature’s capital, while still in the resource and energy bubble, and won’t have much relevance to future survivors (if any) when all that is left is the daily solar budget. When I use the word sustainable, I am talking about afterwards, after all the mining is over. My concern is with the fate of the species, not particularly with anyone living today, including my own family. The people of today are in wrong relationship to Nature. I don’t blame individuals for this; I blame our history and our culture, and all the cultural institutions that keep this juggernaut going. You, leavergirl, and others who have commented on this blog, are trying to live lives of integrity in a highly corrupted world, and I applaud you for it. But the trajectory that was set in motion with the domestication of plants and animals continues with accelerating velocity, and the faster it goes the quicker will come the crash. There is nothing we can do about that—not at the macro level. At the local level we can do our best to get into right relationship with Nature and to live integrously and integrally with the land. And that will be its own reward for as long as it lasts.
When you talk about storing nuts, levergirl, and you equate that to the life we are living today, you blur another meaningful distinction. I am just about done reading After Eden: the Evolution of Human Domination, where Kirkpatrick Sale tries to make a case for Homo sapiens’ inflated sense of self, our human exceptionalism, our separation from Nature and the Community of Life, as originating with the big game hunters of Europe—and not, as I have believed, with domestication. He seems to trace this trait to the Great Leap Forward when we became behaviorally modern some 45,000 years ago. Something in us changed, then, he would have us believe, that set us on the path we are on today. I don’t wholly discount this theory. I think it is possible. But what I see is this: some of these people made some big mistakes; some learned from their mistakes, and some didn’t. The Australian Aborigines may well have made some huge mistakes with fire, as you are fond of pointing out. But they matured into a people who came to live in good spiritual relationship with their chosen land. That they have been in that same place for 40,000+ years testifies to the fact that they shaped themselves to fit the land. That is adaptation. That is maturity. We, by way of contrast, shape the land as if we delighted in turning beauty into ugliness. Think of what North America looked like 500 years ago, after thousands of years of human tenancy. Then look at the country today. We are talking different worldviews, different values and morals. And I don’t like seeing those differences blurred into sameness by careless conflation.
As for the future, only one of these distinct worldviews has even the remotest chance of surviving into the future. I know which one I am betting on.
March 6, 2013 at 4:27 pm
I can see how it would seem like blurring boundaries to a person who wants to draw a sharp line between cultivators and foragers. I used to think that too. Now I am more and more convinced this is a false distinction. I try to present my case based on scholarly evidence. Kat Anderson makes a very strong point that the Indians she studied, practiced “sowing, tilling, transplanting, irrigating” — I am sorry I didn’t note the page number. She is not the only one who makes this sort of a claim for the early peoples. What I see is a continuum from mostly foraging, a bit of cultivating, on to less foraging and more cultivation, in varying proportion. Have you based your view on recent scholarly work on the topic, or are you going more on a gut sense of it, and philosophy? I am not unsympathetic, but I do not believe that is what the evidence on the ground shows.
Tim Flannery, the Australian paleontologist, notes the same: “Clearly, the definition of agriculturist merges insensibly into the definition of hunter-gatherer and it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins.” (Future Eaters, I believe.) Another good writer on this subject is Colin Tudge.
What I find most remarkable, however, is that Kat stresses how they did it, respecting their relations with the plants and animals. She notes cultural rules: leave some of what is gathered for other animals, do not waste what you have harvested, perform rituals that build relationships with plants and animals, and a kin-centric view of nature (the critters are relatives we get to know and treat right). As you say, over time they grew a relationship with the land they inhabited. What interests me is how come they could do that, and we have failed?
You say because they chose to live in the gift, and we live in the theft. And I quite agree. That is why I try to focus not on whether people cultivated or not, but whether they entered into ratcheting intensification or not. Once people get on the treadmill… principles go out the window. And some of the NW tribes show us very clearly that this treadmill can originate in foraging fish-based economies too. Do you see what I mean? You don’t need cultivation to ratchet into domination and slavery.
Kirkpatrick Sale is right, IMO. Something changed all those thousands of years ago. It is my intention to ferret it out; what exactly was it? It sure wasn’t agriculture or domestication… 45,000 years ago…
P.S. I don’t mean to be morbid, but one reason the Aborigines were able to adapt to the land is that up to 90% of them died out in the Ice Age Maximum. Maybe that’s what it will take for us? Sigh. I hope we can do it without a massive die-off. I don’t know.
March 6, 2013 at 5:07 pm
Leavergirl: I am glad you are taking an interest in holarchy and holonomy. I haven’t read much of Ostrom. I have here book, Governing the Commons: the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, but didn’t even make it to chapter two, so I can’t comment her use of hierarchy. To me, one of the most important revelation to come out of working with the concept of holarchy over the past three or four years is to see that the Universe is moral at its heart, and in fact fairness, justice, and equity are what make the system work at all. Of course there are physical Laws that also make the system work, and what I am working on now is the interface between those two seemingly separate aspects of the Universe. I say seemingly separate because they have to be united in some non-obvious way—because everything is connected to everything else, in mutually interdependent holonomous relationship. If you want to read a really good book that uses these concepts in a knowing way, I recommend EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution, by Elisabet Sahtouris. Ken Wilber also explores holons, but his jargon-riddled books are very tough reading, and he, too, seems to be hung up on hierarchy. Personally, I have found holons, holarchy, and holonomy to provide the most powerful conceptual framework for understanding the world that I have yet encountered. Best of luck with your exploration.
March 6, 2013 at 5:29 pm
I look forward to digging deeper into holarchy. It makes so much sense! Wilber… no. Can’t read his stuff, and what I know of his life does not make me think that he “gets it.” I’ve heard good things about Sahtouris.
March 6, 2013 at 6:24 pm
leavergirl wrote: “I can see how it would seem like blurring boundaries to a person who wants to draw a sharp line between cultivators and foragers…”
Don’t forget the pastoralists! In some areas, they probably took up several thousand years between the foragers and cultivators. In most cases, domestication of animals came before domestication of plants.
March 6, 2013 at 6:41 pm
Jan, check out this horse… is that a bridle we see? Madgalenian.
March 6, 2013 at 7:51 pm
Sure looks like a bridle! Down to the twisted fibre — can’t mistake that for markings on the animal!
That would put pastoralism no later than 11,000 years ago, and possibly as early as 17,000. Do you know when this particular piece dates to?
Whenever there’s a debate like “agriculture bad, hunter-gatherer good,” I try to point out there’s a third choice, but no one ever listens to me…
March 6, 2013 at 8:01 pm
Reversing global warming through pastoralism!
March 6, 2013 at 8:13 pm
Just can’t find it. But I found another one with markings, and it said 15,000. –
March 6, 2013 at 8:53 pm
15,000 is about when my research says dairy ruminant pastoralism started — a full five thousand years before agriculture became the dominant paradigm.
March 6, 2013 at 8:57 pm
Wow. And that only counts the Near East, and not too much later, China. Most places it’s more like 10,000 years later for ag. That’s another piece of the puzzle, Jan, new to me and thanks bunch!
March 6, 2013 at 10:15 pm
Jan: First, can you cite a source or two for the research you’ve done on the domestication of ruminants? I have not run into anything like this (15,000 number)in my own researches.
Second, I just watched the Allan Savory TED talk, which was a shorter version of an hour-long talk I watched a few months back. In both cases it is presumed that grazing domesticated livestock according to a certain regimen (many run through quickly) will save the world from desertification and climate change. I was more resistant to the idea the first time through, and I am trying to decide what makes it slightly more appealing this time. Allan used the word proxy this time to indicate that domesticated livestock would be used to approximate what large herds of wild ruminants used to do before we took over the planet for ourselves. I initially saw this as trying to replace an autopoeitic system with an allopeitic one, and, looking back over the human record of humans trying to outsmart Nature, or even mimic Nature, this was looking a little like snake oil. But we are in a devil of a predicament, and desperate measures may well be in order. If climate change could really be slowed in this way, why not give it a try? Not for the sake of seven billion humans, mind you, but for the sake of a livable planet for all Life, after the human population has been trimmed down to sustainable numbers—to maybe something like two million, in a few hundred years from now. A major human die-off is the only “solution” I see to controlling the plague of locusts we have become to this once biologically rich and abundant planet. Those desertifying landscapes Savory wants to turn around are the handiwork of this very same grasshopper gone mad.
So, Jan, I went to your profile page and found that you and I would seem to have a lot in common. You are an INTJ, for instance, and I am Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling, and Judging. And I read that about the soul of the hunter, and it sounded like me. The books you mention are not, for the most part, the books I read, but we are both readers, in any case. I did get interested in Panarchy about six years ago, and, because the book was so expensive, I went to the U of O science library and gave myself two hours with the book to try to figure out its essence, but I never quite did. After reading Sacred Ecology by Fikret Berkes, I looked into the Resilience Network and read several books on resilience science. Panarchy was part of that whole thrust. So, since you recommended it, maybe you can tell me what it means to you, and why you regard it as important.
I think where maybe you and I might most disagree would be in the area of Nature and nurture. I tend to see “human nature” as a sackfull of potentials, either activated or repressed by culture. I see the culture of civilization as deeply pathological, and way beyond fixing. On the other hand, after more than twenty five years of studying other cultures, I see instances of human beings living in small groups in ways that seem long-term durable. If there is to be a human future here on Planet Earth, one that is built to endure, I don’t think it is going to be based on theft, deception, and deadly violence, as our culture is. I believe we live in a moral Universe, and the only way we can go on here is to live within the moral strictures of our life support system. I believe you have given these issues some thought, and I wonder where you come down on our human prospects.
March 7, 2013 at 12:16 am
WildEarthMan, the premise about grazing animals is about the elimination of top predators, who used to move the animals about in tight packs. Since top predators have been decimated, the idea is that humans can fill their role in keeping savannah healthy.
Another fine example is Yellowstone National Park. Riparian areas had been degrading for some tens of years, and no one could figure out why. Banks were eroding and fish stocks were declining as gravel stream beds filled with eroded silt.
Then the wolf was re-introduced, and the riparian areas bounced back! It turns out that, lacking a top predator, ungulates would just stand by the water and mow the vegetation to the ground, but as long as they were nervously looking over their shoulder for a wolf, they kept moving and didn’t degrade the stream banks.
Sometimes, I think the best thing that could happen to humans would be if we were subject to predation… 🙂
As to “human prospects,” I’m all over the map, depending on day of week, phase of the moon, latest world news — who knows?
But I have a little hand-written sign on my desk that I have to keep reading. It says, “You have to pick the little bit you can make better, rather than worry about the whole lot that’s gonna get worse.”
One thing I’m fairly certain of: good things aren’t going to happen through individual action.
Individualism is a fairly recent trend in humans, having lived in clans, tribes, villages, etc. for 99.9% of human history. Problem is, I can’t seem to get more than a few people to cooperate. I think we’re still to energy-fat to give up our independence. I hope we can before its too late, because the only hope for humans to avoid extinction is a return to small, tightly-focused social units.
March 7, 2013 at 8:43 am
To me it seems like the focus on technologies ignores two factors that might be more important in terms of root causes. One is population. Any creature makes extra babies to account for high losses; at some point humans developed methods to reduce losses to the point where this left us with a growing population in favorable places and times. Leavergirl dismisses this with a list of ways primitives had for population control; but all of them are awful! Infanticide, abstinence, castration of boys (which as others noted would be fairly useless as well as unpleasant) abortion which would endanger the life of the mother (who would usually have older, still-dependent children)–no wonder finding ways to support larger numbers seemed the best choice.
The other factor is an explanation for why, as some cultures developed with destructive mores and methods, but most still had sustainable patterns, humanity evolved toward a greater and greater percentage of the most destructive cultures–or more honestly, the one culture that controls virtually the entire planet today. My thesis is that the destructive ones had the same attitude of domination toward women and children and outsiders as they had toward animals and plants, and since their numbers were growing–the population issue–they kept coveting their neighbors’ land. Each time this happened, the neighbors had a choice between fighting to defend that land, attempting to merge and coexist, or fleeing. But the aggressive tribes would be better armed and better trained for warfare, and have lots of young men even if they were less healthy. So the threatened tribe could succeed in defending its land only if it learned enough of the art of war to essentially become the enemy. Amalgamation probably generally meant that the aggressive tribe killed all the men, perhaps allowing young women and girls to survive. The blended tribe would get genes and some cultural tidbits like words and recipes from these women, but not the attitudes of respect for the natural world or other people. Fleeing was probably the best choice, for a long time. But note that in all three cases, when it was over an aggressive tribe held that land–and soon the growing city wanted MORE land, and another tribe faced that choice. Fast forward to today, when the aggressive culture holds all but a smattering of places where the last holdouts fight a desperate battle to protect their land against mining and drilling and deforestation. Now the negative consequences of this all-too-successful worldview are coming into focus as the conquerors gain the whole world but lose their—soul? No…what we’re about to lose is the whole world, as the charges all come due in a landslide of ecological debt.
As we move into the endgame, I couldn’t disagree with wildearthman more about the importance of the next century. He wants to draw a curtain over it and focus on the presumably prettier twenty-second century…but what we do now may have enormous repercussion for the 22nd century. For example, how many nuclear power plants, weapons, and other nuclear facilities are there in the world, and what programs and plans are there for safely mothballing them in the event of a crash? Another key is whether somehow the fossil fuel burning is stopped before the greenhouse gases push the climate past certain critical thresholds, or after. Whether the crash comes before the extinction of various species or not. These things will matter for many millennia.
Jan says people don’t cooperate well in large groups and need to return to clans/tribes. I think this is true. The nation state can never work well. Democracy is a good idea but unlikely to ever work well on a large scale, because the most selfish and self-aggrandizing–meaning the least wise–tend to reach for power and our culture hands it to them. Small clans at least sometimes do a better job of saying no to the sociopaths in their midst–it’s easier to know who they are, for one thing. I fantasize about a peaceful world where there is a certain amount of global cooperation–but any hope of this working depends on most decisions being made on the local level, only a few rare issues coming to international attention.
March 7, 2013 at 9:55 am
Mary, I did not mean to say that population is not one of the factors leading to… um, to today. What you say is the same as Marvin Harris says, and again, it does make sense, but somewhere along the line, not as the root. More food, more people. Why more food? By the way, I am reading up on the Moriori, and their primary pop limit was Mother Nature. They mostly died in young adulthood of tooth/gum infections that got out of hand — on account of all the gritty foods they were eating. There are Jan’s human predators — the microscopic ones.
I was rereading a paper Brian Hayden wrote a while back, and he mentions a few other reasons why he does not believe the population-pressure model is the right one. (Richman, poorman, beggarman, chief.)
“At the most basic level, the mechanics of population pressure are not realistic. On the one hand, there was a fully contained population in Africa for 2 million years with no possibility of escape other than via the Suez Isthmus. Yet the emergence of transegalitarian [Big Man] social hierarchies, sedentism, and domestication actually appeared later in Africa than on other continents, including the Americas.” Then he mentions that domesticates appeared there quite late in the chronology. Also, that in the Americas it took only maybe 30,000 years for domestication and social inequity to appear. “To maintain that population growth is a constant irrepressible factor to content with is simply not tenable given the empirical record of prehistory.”
Then he goes on to talk about the theory that war is caused by population pressure. “In these cases, [Gulf War, Trojan War, WWI etc] no credible arguments can be made for population pressure leading to war, but good arguments can be made for elite attempts to increase their control over trade resources and land.” Then he mentions that among the NW tribes, warfare actually increased after the introduction of European diseases and depopulation. (He also says he talks more about these issues in Hayden 2000, but I haven’t got the name of the article or chapter.)
What you describe in your second para is the Parable of the Tribes — do you know Andy Schmookler’s work? The logic is pretty inexorable. The problem of power. But there must be a solution in there somewhere… I keep thinking. (?)
I agree with Jan too about the small human units. That is why I am so excited to learn about holons and holarchy because that is what humans need to return to. Just aggregating bigger and bigger human units does not work… except, of course, to overwhelm others. It just does not work in building social lifeforms that endure.
March 7, 2013 at 10:26 am
Parable of the Tribes
Mary Wildfire: I agree with everything you said in your last post, including where you disagree with me. It is a conceptual error on my part to just pull a curtain down on the twenty first century, and exactly for the reasons you name. And I want to join the chorus about humans living in small groups. That worked before and it can work again. But here I want mainly to address the problem raised by Andrew Bard Schmookler in his disturbing book, The Parable of the Tribes: the Problem of Power in Social Evolution (1984). It is disturbing because it suggests that the bad guys always win, or, in his words: “The selection for power is not certain at any given time, but over the long haul it is irresistible.”
He sets the equation up this way: “Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another….What are the possible outcomes for those tribes threatened by a potent and ambitious neighbor?” He asserts that there are really only four options: withdrawal; destruction; transformation, and; imitation. If a threatened tribe leaves its own tribal territory, the dominant tribe’s paradigm of power and domination wins that territory. The threatened tribe could refuse to fight, and thereby let itself get wiped out, with the domination paradigm winning again. If instead of widespread destruction the power-crazed culture were simply to colonize its neighbor and enforce its priorities and values on its neighbors, it wins again. In the case of imitation, a peaceful tribe may turn itself into a war-like tribe in order to resist its war-like neighbor. In that case, too, the paradigm of power and domination wins the day, and peace has no chance.
For at least a couple years after reading this book I was quite depressed about the ultimate human prospect. A world of peace, justice, and right-living seemed impossible under this overwhelmingly negative scenario. Even now, some ten years later, I’m not absolutely sure he’s wrong—at least within the context of his chosen purview. But then I began to notice what it was he actually did here, and this leaves me a sliver of hope. What he has done is look, with a very keen eye, at the history of Western civilization, and seen a recurrent pattern of oppression, domination, and bloodletting. Well, that’s there for all to see in the record itself– unless that record has been sanitized, and transformed into a patriotic propaganda piece. (This is exactly the brand of “history” we teach in our schools, in order to promote our own people as heroes and carriers of our sacred, superior culture in a battle against the Infidel. Imagine that murdering slave-trader, Christopher Columbus, as a hero, and extrapolate from there.) In any case, Schmookler, working as a graduate student in history, and privy to original, unmediated documents, did some extrapolation of his own. He set up a thought experiment in which he used conjectural, but presumably prehistoric, tribes as proxies for city-states, nation-states, and other self-interested entities of contention. He calls his reading of history a parable, and in using tribes as a metaphor for the warring populations of Europe and elsewhere he simplifies, and also clarifies, the patterns of domination, colonization, and seemingly endless cycles of war, within our own history. I’ll give him that he has brought fresh insights into the patterns of history. What he has not done is address the patterns of pre-agricultural, tribal, pre-history.
As a conditional template, the parable of the tribes has merit. Under the influence of the culture of civilization, the outcome may be almost as deterministically determined as the parable predicts. People under the spell of power and violence will (almost) always win out over those who are less contentious and aggressive. It really could be (almost) that bad. But I must insist that the parable does not represent an unqualified human Truth or Universal Law. A life of peace and justice is not necessarily out of the reach of all humans for all time. Why? Well, two reasons: scale and culture.
If there is enough to go around for everybody, there is not much incentive for neighbors to attack, enslave, supplant, or eradicate one another. With relatively low population densities, and a world as rich in diversity and abundance as this world has been known to be, there is just no motive force to devolve into “savagery”. Some would say that human beings are violent by nature, and I readily grant that we have that potential. We are a top predator, after all, and predation requires violence—but violence within constraints and limits, not all out mayhem. Certainly there were intertribal conflicts in pre-history, but the damage they did to one another was limited, for the most part, to a few truculent young braves from one group contending with their counterparts in a neighboring group. It was rougher than a high school football game, but it was far from total war.
I have made a study of the three tribes that inhabit the lower reaches of the Klamath River in extreme northern California. The Yuroks “own” the mouth and estuary of the river and about forty miles upstream, to the village of Weitchpec. The Karuk territory begins just above here and extends some seventy miles upriver to just beyond Happy Camp. The Hupa Tribe controls the lower thirty miles of the Trinity River, which flows into the Klamath at Weitchpec. Their territories are contiguous; they are neighbors, and have been for thousands of years. (The Karuk Tribe’s tenure in their territory has been documented at more than 9,000 years.) Each tribe has its own distinct language (coming from widely disparate language groups) but they nevertheless have come to share the same cultural traditions. One of the most important of these is the World Renewal Ceremony, which is meant to set right whatever wrongnesses have marred the recent past, in the hopes of assuring a regained spiritual balance in the present and near-future. Intermarriage is also a longstanding tradition among the three neighbors, so group identity is somewhat mixed, both genetically and socially, and this fact tends to moderate an Us- versus-Them mentality.
Salmon and acorns is the traditional mainstay of all three peoples, supplemented, of course, by whatever else they might find. And here is the pertinent point: They did not overrun their resource base and they did not overrun each other. For thousands of years they just got along. Got along in the sense that any family gets along— not without tensions and squabbles, but without rupture. They didn’t overrun their resource base because they did not allow themselves to overpopulate. The women and children slept together, apart from the men. That was one of several strategies used to enforce discipline upon themselves, but the incentives were strong. They lived in a good place, and they wanted to go on living in that same good place for countless generations to come.
So, these people lived within the means provided them by Nature. They lived in scale with their ecosystem. And they continued to do this over hundreds of generations because their culture informed them of what they must do to live sustainably. That is what I call a viable culture; one that is built to last. It is one that does not degrade and destroy its own future, or that of the entire Community of Life. For myself, I like the parable of these three tribes. I believe this is a parable humans could live by. But for that to happen, the other parable has to disappear.
March 7, 2013 at 11:53 am
I had not before heard of this Schmookler–will have to try to get ahold of that book. But it sounds like he is using it as some kind of parable for modern cultural units, whereas I was being literal and supposing that this is the source of the problem. Whether population has anything to do with it or not [and now leavergirl and wildearthman throw us two more methods of primitive population control, dying young of rotten teeth, arrgh!–and sleeping with the kids instead of your honey, which doesn’t appeal to me much either.]
it’s an explanation for how a destructive cultural imperative took over the Earth. Actually an interesting take is that of Paul Lawrence in Driven to Lead: good, bad and misguided leadership. He sees it all in terms of neodarwinian selection and four drives he thinks humans have, a theory in which he is excessively in love, but it is still worth reading. I have thought with leavergirl, there must be a solution–but as wildearthman points out not quite directly, obviously this has only partial explanatory power because there are also good cultures even now, good elements of our own culture, even the environmental destruction is not complete. For me the big question is, how important in this are sociopaths; to what degree are they distinct from the rest of us?
March 7, 2013 at 12:36 pm
Mary Wildfire: As for sociopaths: it all depends on scale. With this many of us crowding the planet, they tend to gravitate to positions of power and control. Think Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs or the world created by Dick Cheney and friends. In Moral Origins: the Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame, Christopher Boehm describes what happens to sociopaths within small hunter-gatherer groups. They get taken out, either by the group as a whole, or by a relative appointed by the group after group council. He shows how this affects both the phenotype and the genotype within the group and how this selects against a proliferation of bullies and murderers. It’s a fascinating book altogether, and partly for the way he arrives at many of his conclusions—using fifty present-day tribal groups that continue to live in the Old Way (he calls them Late Pleistocene Appropriate) who have been carefully anthropologized. By noting how they deal with social issues within the group, he extrapolates principles of problem solving and speculates on the behaviors of our deep ancestors.
As far as the pleasures of cuddling and cohabitation go, in relation to population control, I have two responses. The easy one is: I have the notion that there are wild herbs that can be used for birth control. If this is true, that would be my first choice. Failing that, and rejecting any of the other techniques as too unsavory, I would conclude this: Survival trumps comfort and pleasure. Living morally, and according to Natural Law, trumps having everything our own way. As pampered Americans, we think we can have it all. This delusion is supported by our breaking of Natural Law, and specifically the Law of Holonic Reciprocity. A small group of people whose numbers exactly match their resource base have good reason (a strong incentive) to control their population—so they and their descendents can go on living in place far into the distant future. Whatever it takes to control that population, that is what they have to do, whether they like it or not. It has to be a group decision and it has to be enforced by the group. That is how I see it as having worked in the past, and I see no reason why it couldn’t work like that again in the future. Like so much else, it all depends upon living at the optimum human scale.
March 7, 2013 at 1:04 pm
Re pop control, let’s not forget marriage customs (the Tikopia only let first born sons marry and reproduce), economic devices (each clan must supply enough land to each new human for a garden that will support him or her), a culture that did not stress “safety” über alles but rather lived amidst significant levels of risk and adventure, and well, yes, there is the women’s houses thing. I have been thinking about how different life must have been when women hung out with women most of the time, out gathering, or in the women’s longhouses… women had power then because they were an alliance to contend with. Isolate each woman into a family, and that power is nearly gone. Btw, I kinda find it appealing to meet with my honey surreptitiously in the bush. 😀
March 7, 2013 at 7:16 pm
Wow, thank y’all for this really provoking conversation.
Just wanted to share, my partner uses wild carrot seed tincture for contraception, our oldest child is 4, so far so good. On two occasions she used blue cohosh to bring on a late menstruation. We now offer wild carrot for sale from our farm, as it grows abundantly, we’re working on establishing blue cohosh. I would bet that many such things in my European heritage were erased by christianity.
Wildearthman, I’d be curious to hear any info about the spirituality of the folks you studied.
peace
March 8, 2013 at 3:35 pm
I think we’re still to energy-fat to give up our independence. I hope we can before its too late, because the only hope for humans to avoid extinction is a return to small, tightly-focused social units.
Jan: I am in full agreement with the above statement. My best hope is for a really good plague, along with a few system failures, because I don’t see us coming to our collective senses in time to prevent Arctic methane release and runaway climate chaos, resulting in an uninhabitable planet. The breakdown of mining and industry is crucial, and of course the sooner the better for future prospects. This is easy for me to say at the age of 71, with a fair share of my life already lived. But I value my life as much as I ever have, and I hope to live to see the day when it all shuts down—for the sake of the future.
Your mention of the predator-prey relationship reminds me of a piece I wrote recently where that begins as my focus. It turns into kind of a rant, but I feel like I am trying to make an important point about the relationship between competition and cooperation. Anyway, here it is:
Competition within Cooperation
From a certain vantage point, the predator-prey relationship appears to support the idea that we live in a world of violent Darwinian competition, bloody in tooth and claw. From the point of view of the elk that is being taken down by a pack of wolves, it is just such a world. As he is being run down by the pack, the elk’s heart is beating fast and he is shot through with adrenalin, which gives him extra strength and stamina. As they close in and attack, there is a moment of panic and an instant of pain, and then, for the elk, it’s over. From the wolves’ point of view, as they chase and surround this calf they have isolated from the herd, the wolves are in competition to determine if the elk will lose its life and provide them with sustenance, or go free this day and the wolves go hungry. From the viewpoint of the mother who has lost her calf, there is the sadness of loss—and this is something humans can identify with. But when we focus on the individual, and then extrapolate large generalizations from this single point of view, and say that all of life is like this, we fall into the cognitive error of reductionism. That is because the viewpoint of the individual is not the only perspective there is. At the holonic level of the herd, their group is made stronger by the loss of its weakest member. That is true in the immediate present, but its gene pool has also been selected for more adaptive attributes. That is Darwinian, too, with its own evolutionary and adaptive implications. So, really, the predator-prey relationship is a symbiotic one in which both predator and prey species gain by their interaction. It looks like a simple case of competition, but it is not. It is competition within a larger frame of cooperation.
There are still other points of view, corresponding to other holonic levels. From the point of view of the ecosystem, its requirements for complexity, diversity, and abundance, are all satisfied when the predator-prey relationship is in dynamic balance: not too many wolves, not too many elk. As the Yellowstone wildlife managers discovered, removing the wolves not only allowed the elk population to burgeon, not having wolves also affected their behavior. They browsed the river bottom willows down to nubs, thus removing the keystone species of the beaver, and that loss was soon followed by trophic cascade. Complexity, diversity, and abundance all suffered when one top predator was removed from the ecosystem. Balance is everything at the ecosystem level, and here again competition exists within a larger frame of cooperation. Symbiosis among species is cooperation. Interdependence of species is cooperation, even where that cooperation manifests as competition. And then there is something else about a fully functional ecosystem. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With wholeness comes a non-linear synergy. Materialist reductionist thinking cannot quite account for synergy, but synergy exhibits itself just the same.
From the point of view of the biome, or the regional ecosystem, or that of an entire continent, the pattern is the same. At the planetary level of Gaia itself, competition exists within a larger context of cooperation. Logically, it must be the same at the holonic level of the solar system, and at that of the galaxy as well. Why? Because unfettered competition is violent. The taking of life is violent. Whatever degrades ecosystems, including the geologic ecosystems under the skin of the Earth, damages the whole. Some violence can be tolerated, and in fact serves the well-being of each and every holonic level within the holarchy. But too much violence tears systems apart, and negatively affects the well-being of whatever holonic level that out-of-control violence exists. And whatever affects one holonic level affects all. That is how holarchy works. Ultimately, nothing is really separate from anything else, good times or bad.
We who live in the condition called civilization, and who are daily informed by its culture, have come to take violence for granted. Violence has always been part of our history, and as our numbers have grown so too has the level of violence. We take this as normal. Mistaking our culture for humanity at large, we attribute our culture-directed responses and behaviors to something we call “human nature.” If we, and others like us, are our only point of reference, of course we have no reason to believe otherwise. But there are reasons to believe that violence within human societies is not a constant, but a variable, depending upon cultural conditioning, cultural norms, and taboos. Culture molds and directs Nature. That is what culture is all about. It creates incentives to behave in certain ways and not behave in others. If the behavior of the individual does not fall within the group’s accepted norm, peer pressure will be exerted to enforce compliance. If that doesn’t work, there will be other penalties to pay. It is true that individual humans are not always predictable, or easily reined in. We are not as simple as B.F Skinner and his operant conditioning assumed; we are not the equivalent of rats in a Skinner box. But we are social beings, and how our peer group regards us is predictably relevant to almost all of us. So I am not saying that culture absolutely DETERMINES attitudes, values, and behaviors—but it does strongly influence what we think, what we believe to be important and right, and also what we do. What I am suggesting is this: our culture condones and incentivizes violence, and one of our great rationalizations for being a violent people is that all of Nature is violent, ala Charles Darwin. It’s all competition, bloody in tooth and claw. Except that it really isn’t. This is a very selective frame to put on the world, which emphasizes competition and ignores the context of cooperation within which that competition takes place. It is not science at all; it is ideology.
That said, factors other than culture also figure in, such as population size. When the planet was fairly sparsely populated, and there was plenty of everything to go around, there wasn’t much incentive for inter-tribal conflict. When people lived in small groups, peer pressure pretty much held sway, and incentivized cooperation within the band or tribe. The goal of small group interactions is harmony. Given that Humans can be rather contrary creatures, pure harmony seems unlikely on any scale. But always the group functions best when everyone is getting along—that is, cooperating. Indeed, at every holonic level cooperation tends toward greater well-being and stability than runaway competition. Beyond a certain permissible point, competition becomes a pathogen destructive of stability and well-being at all holonic levels. Rat studies have shown that overcrowding can trigger all sorts of dysfunctional and aggressive behaviors, and maybe we’re no different. When a mass global society like ours, informed and directed by a hyper-competitive and violence-encouraging culture, is loosed upon the world, you get the kind of destruction and break-down we are witnessing today.
My point is, we are not seeing human nature at its inevitable worst. We are not seeing competition running its natural course. We are witness to one super-sized pathological culture, informed by a sick ideology, dismantling a four billion years’-long, creative, emergent, life-loving, evolutionary work of art. In the process we are destroying our own life-support system in a project of omnicide. Just be clear: it wasn’t the way of the world; it wasn’t a flawed human nature that brought it all down. It was one narcissistic immature pathological culture that refused to grow up and become fully human.
March 9, 2013 at 10:39 am
Osker: I am working on your request for my understanding of Karuk spirituality. Meanwhile, here is another short piece on Native spirituality that I am sure will interest you.
Conventional thinking is easy—too easy–and may not be up to the challenges we face. I want to present a worldview quite different from our own, as something to think about and consider as a possibility.
I was first introduced to the thinking of Martin Prechtel a year or two ago when I read Derrick Jensen’s Dreams, where he interviews the Mayan shaman. For me, that interview was the most significant part of the book, because Prechtel brings up an issue never considered in our society, that of spiritual debt. Leading up to their conversation, Jensen says that we are “ignoring the spiritual debt that we create just by living” and our careless obliviousness “will come back to bite us, hard.” I believe that. I could even say I know that to be true. But what Prechtel gives us is a peek into a worldview different from our own, and a people whose lives and actions are animated by their knowledge of this spiritual debt. Prechtel says:“A knife, for instance, is a very minimal, almost primitive tool to people in modern industrial society. But for the Mayan people, the spiritual debt that must be paid for the creation of such a tool is great. To start with, the person who is going to make the knife has to build a fire hot enough to produce coals. To pay for that he’s got to give a sacrificial gift to give to the fuel, to the fire.”
Jensen asks, “Like what?”
“Ideally, the gift should be something made by hand, which is the one thing humans have that spirits don’t.”
He continues: “Once the fire is hot enough, the knife maker must smelt the iron ore out of the rock. The part that’s left over, which gets thrown away in Western culture, is the most holy part in shamanic rituals. What’s left over represents the debt, the hollowness that’s been carved out of the universe by human ingenuity, and so must be refilled with human ingenuity. A ritual gift equal to the amount that was removed from the other world has to be put back to make up for the wound caused to the divine. Human ingenuity is a wonderful thing but only so long as it’s used to feed the deities that give us the ability to perform such extravagant feats in the first place.
“So just to get the iron, the shaman has to pay for the ore, the fire, the wind and so on—not in dollars and cents but in ritual activity equal to what’s been given.”
“All these ritual gifts make the knife enormously ‘expensive,’ and make the process quite involved and time-consuming. The need for ritual makes some things too spiritually expensive to bother with. That’s why the Mayans didn’t invent space shuttles or shopping malls or backhoes. They live the way they do not because it’s a romantic way to live—it’s not; it’s enormously hard—but because it works.”
Because it works—now that counts for something in my books. I think a lot of us are beginning to recognize that our way of living seemed to work for awhile, and now is failing to work—and has no prospect whatever of working into the distant, or even the near to middle, future. Can it be that the people of our culture have mistaken the nature of the Universe so badly that we have failed utterly in our spiritual obligations? I think that is what Prechtel believes.
Coming from quite a different mindset than our own, he says: “The universe is in a state of starvation and emotional grief because it has not been given what it needs in the form of ritual food and actual physical gifts. We think we’re getting away with something by stealing from the other side, but it all leads to violence. The Greek oracle at Delphi saw this a long time ago and said, ‘Woe to humans, the invention of steel.’”
We think we’ve had a free ride for quite awhile now, but are probably wrong about that.”When the knife is finished, it is called the ‘tooth of earth.’ It will cut wood, meat, and plants. But if the necessary sacrifices have been ignored in the name of rationalism, literalism, and human superiority, it will cut humans instead.”
I believe Prechtel’s words give us much to ponder on.
March 10, 2013 at 12:57 pm
About Karuk Spirituality
Osker: What I know about Karuk spirituality falls into two distinct categories: what I have read and what I have experienced. These two bodies of knowledge in turn represent two distinct periods in Karuk life: life before contact; and life afterwards.
The standard text to consult about Karuk spiritual beliefs is Karok Myths by A.L Kroeber and E.W. Gifford. Kroeber began his work among the Karuk in 1901, half a century after initial (devastating) contact. He, and later Gifford (from 1939 to 1942), had established a number of “informants,” who told these anthropologists the tribe’s stories, and revealed some of the cosmology (creation myths) behind them. The information below comes mostly from this source.
There are many coyote stories among the Karuk, and it is interesting to note the complex character traits of this hero/anti-hero and what this reveals about the worldview of these people. Like the raven, who plays such a dominant role in the stories of many Northwest Coastal tribes, Coyote is regarded (by anthropologists) as a trickster figure. Unlike the “heroes” of Western culture, who tend to be portrayed as, well, heroic, and more or less flawless, Coyote runs the gamut from scoundrel, cheater, and thief, to the bringer of great gifts to the people, such as salmon and fire, which of course he had to steal. Coyote is an extremely horny hero, and several of the Karuk stories have to do with his sexual exploits, and how he tricks beautiful young maidens into his bed. In many ways, Coyote represents raw appetite, and one not quite counterbalanced by a weak, intermittent, or nonexistent, conscience. Yet, the Coyote stories are ultimately moral tales. In my view, that has always been the purpose of story: to tell the people how best to live. Make it lively and entertaining, and the people will be back for more.
There are other stories with different animals as their main character, and, as with Coyote, these characters are larger than life. And here is where it gets tricky, to know exactly what is the metaphysical status of some of these characters, because of a particular belief these people hold about a before-world. The traditional Karuk belief is that before animals and humans arrived in this world, they were preceded by spirit beings called Ixkareya. The Ixkareya were not gods exactly, but they came into the world to learn how to live in it and to then serve as models to people and the other animals as to how they themselves should live. (This is a white man’s interpretation, and I’m sure does not do justice to a complex and nuanced belief system, but this at least provides some kind of outline about the Karuk vision of the world.) The Ixkaraya figures, like Coyote, can cause trouble and make mistakes—and yet they revered these beings for their status as teaching models, and the lessons for life they might teach.
During the five years I intermittently spent with the Karuk (as part of a book project), I got to know many of the tribe’s most influential players. The (then) Tribal Vice-Chair was especially encouraging and helpful, and he is also one of the main spiritual leaders. It was through him that I was able to attend tribal ceremonies that are not generally open to outsiders. One important traditional ceremony is the First Salmon Ceremony, which used to be performed at a particular place above Ike’s Falls on the Klamath River, called Amaikiaram, but is now no longer practiced, due to the sorry condition of the river and the Spring salmon run—thanks to dams and upriver agriculture. It might seem odd to us, but certain families were the “owners” of particular ceremonies and songs, and the ceremonies associated with a particular family are always practiced in one particular traditional place. The ceremonies I first attended took place at a site called Tishannik, and was sponsored or hosted by the Hillman family, and, most particularly, by the Vice-Chair, Leaf. He was the Song Leader, and stood at the center of seven dancers in a line. All the barefoot dancers wore regalia–furs and dentalium necklaces and the like, over their jeans—and the regalia itself was owned by Leaf, which is a form of status. People gathered in this camp- and dance-site to observe the annual World Renewal Ceremonies, of which this was part one of four for the year, with this one lasting five to seven days. Food was provided mostly by the host, along with some voluntary contributions from others. The number of dances in a day could vary, as could their timing, except for the one at dusk. That was the one that generally happened “on time.” (People here speak of River Time, meaning that things happen when they are ready to happen.) The dances themselves are of two kinds: the War Dance and the White Deer Skin Dance. The war dance is really a peace-making dance, and eventually I was invited to join in on this, on two separate occasions. That is a story in itself. The other, more spiritually sacred dance is the White Deerskin Dance.
The White Deerskin Dance is performed as part of the World Renewal Ceremony in order to restore balance and rightness to the world. Any individual or collective moral or spiritual improprieties, any wrong attitudes or behaviors, are here danced and sung away. The focus is both local and global. By setting things right with the spirit world, the hope is that fish and acorns will be abundant this year, and the people will prosper. But the Karuk understand that their small world, with a river running through it, is nested within a larger world, and their ceremonies are also directed to the well-being of that larger world.
These people had their land and their culture stolen from them, and the survivors have been forced to live in the white man’s world and assume the white man’s ways. None of the Karuk I ever met could be considered as whole and healthy humans, precisely because their world and their identity had been wrenched away from them. What I was witnessing was an attempt at cultural renewal among a devastated people. The jeans under their traditional regalia were, for me, highly symbolic of how compromised their ancient traditions had become. But they were there and they were trying, and they meant it in their hearts. There are stories I could I could tell around all of this, if anyone were really interested. But I think you begin to get the idea about Karuk spirituality, and if you want to know more, just ask.
March 10, 2013 at 6:48 pm
It’s interesting to me how Raven and Coyote span so many cultures on this continent. Thanks for sharing this, the description of the dances reminds me of my partners memories of her grandmother dancing (she is Tlingit-Haida from SE Alaska/Western BC).
I’d be curious to hear any stories specifically about the Karuk spiritual view of their food sources. Do you know more about the First Salmon ceremony? Do they have stories or rituals surrounding the harvest or processing of acorns?
Thanks again
peace
March 12, 2013 at 12:11 pm
Oaks and Acorns
“The white oak had her cap all finished nicely. The Live Oak had her cap all finished too. Black Oak had a very long cap. Tanbark Oak was making an Indian basket cap, and hers wasn’t finished, but she put it on, and that’s why tanbark acorns look so rough. The White Oak and Live Oak laughed at Tanbark Oak and Black Oak, but they retorted: ‘As long as people live, they will always have us first, and you—they won’t think much about you.’ And this is why, when people are together, they always have tanbark acorn soup, and the next they use is Black Oak.”– Mary Ike (1939), in Karok Myths (p.261).
There is another story about how Tanoaks got distributed along the Karuk reach of the Klamath River, as told by Georgia Orcutt in 1940. Coyote is traveling upriver from Panamenik (now Orleans) all the way to Happy Camp, and then up Indian Creek. He makes several stops along the way to eat some acorn bread. There are always some crumbs left over, and these he brushes away. The crumbs grow into stands of Tanoaks, and each has its own Native name. These stories don’t say so, but each of these Tanoak stands were claimed, as a right of usufruct, by particular families or villages. They did the harvesting, but also the cleanup work afterwards, with the controlled use of fire.
If memory serves, the last acorn ceremonies had been performed on the lower mid-Klamath in the 1930s. When I was there, a Hupa Dance Leader named Merve George, Sr. was intending to revive the ceremony. I’m not sure if he did, or not.
An article about the First Salmon ceremony, written by Helen H. Roberts in 1932, is available online here. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1932.34.3.02a00070/abstract. One of the reasons for discontinuing this annual spring ritual was the water quality of the river, in which the medicine man was required to bathe five times each day for ten days. The ceremony began in late March or early April after the first Spring Chinook had appeared. No one was allowed to fish (traditionally with dipnet) until the ceremonies had concluded. This practice permitted enough escapement for this run of fish to reproduce itself, and also allow fish to anyone upriver. Spring Chinook live in the river all through summer and early fall. Irrigation withdrawals upriver, and toxic algae blooms in impoundments behind dams, have rendered water quality and water quantity unsuitable to the life cycle of this fish—which isn’t officially considered “endangered” on a technicality, even though it is. (The official stance is that there is no genetic difference between spring and fall Chinook, and the fall Chinook are doing okay—so, no problem.) I hope I have satisfactorily answered your questions. Now, please answer one of mine: where do you live that you have both oaks and chestnuts?
March 12, 2013 at 7:27 pm
I live in southern appalachia (also called Katuah). I only have chestnuts in my dreams. Sorry if I gave the wrong impression. I’m planting lots of seed of various chestnut hybrids, but I’m most interested in getting some of the American Chestnut Foundation stuff once it becomes affordable.
Thank you for sharing these stories.
peace