A properly socialized individual had a powerful sense that the wild world was feeding him, and he ought to be as grateful and as anxious to act decently as he would to any human who fed him out of sheer kindness.
– E.N. Anderson, Ecologies of the heart
People intuitively view agriculture as the root of domination because intensifying food economies made possible large surpluses which could then support elites and their servants. As indeed they did. But the link with agriculture is conditional.
Certain well-endowed economies (whether foraging, horti, field agriculture, or grazing) make large surpluses possible. But they do not make them inevitable. Food harvests– of any kind — do not lead to surplus unless the people in question decide to produce it. Given the fact that humans generally have better things to do with themselves than toil, they tend to work as little as necessary to cover their food needs and a little extra for the winter or an upcoming celebration. If they planted a field of rye, and it produced twice as much as they expected, they’d be likely to plant half next year, and spare themselves the extra work. If salmon or anchovies are particularly plentiful this year, why not kick back and enjoy the easy life?
And indeed, there is a great deal of evidence that “agriculture does not automatically create a food surplus. We know this because many agricultural people of the world produce no such surplus. Virtually all Amazonian Indians, for example, were agricultural, but in aboriginal times they did not produce a food surplus. That it was technically feasible for them to produce such a surplus is shown by the fact that, under the stimulus or European settlers’ desire for food, a number of tribes did raise manioc in amounts well above their own needs, for the purpose of trading.” These tribespeople went back to underproduction when their trading needs were satisfied.
Even the simplest foragers often produced some subsistence surplus. They were, however, not exercised much by planning ahead, and often blew through the entire cache at a midwinter feast, going hungry shortly thereafter, trusting that the world would provide. Many anthropologists noted that strictures against taking “more than you need” were extant in these societies.
Boreal Algonquians expected intermittent periods of hunger during the winter, and these fasts—and even the possible threat of death—were preferable to the planning and labor entailed by food storage. The definition of the resource situation was one in which animals were ordinarily available and hunger a predictable, endurable, and usually transient aspect of the winter round. It is precisely in this arbitrary weighting of risk aversion and optimism that the operation of the cultural logic of Cree labor is specifiable. The costs of the labor, always potentially superfluous, entailed in storage was reckoned disproportionate to the reliability ensured by the surplus. Before approximately 1900, boreal forest Algonquians often fasted and sometimes perished for lack of food. These tragedies would have occurred less frequently if more intensive food storage had been practiced. Experiencing long-term game shortages as though they were new instances of transient scarcity, the Algonquians continued, with some concessions, “to let tomorrow provide for itself.” The decision to store less and starve more (or, among Chipewyans, to store more and starve less) was not objectively determined by the Canadian Shield ecosystem, the limits of the technology, or caloric efficiency. The paradox of the starving Montagnais consuming all their preserved eels in autumn feasts is a particularly forceful example of the meaningful construction of utility, efficiency, and the entire structure of foraging labor and consumption. This skepticism toward advanced planning and reliability is not limited exclusively to foragers. Audrey Richards’s (1932) classic monograph on the Bemba is a detailed exposition of an agricultural society whose members preferred transient hunger to what they deemed excessive labor.
To broaden the areal focus, comparable practices existed even in a “delayed return” foraging society like the Alaskan Koyukons who occupied sedentary winter villages provisioned by preserved fish and caribou meat. According to Sullivan (1942), the Koyukons sometimes disposed of their stored foods during lavish feasts in late summer, midwinter, and early spring. The midwinter feasts, in particular, sometimes occasioned hardship if hunting was unsuccessful, but they continued into the present century. The Koyukon feasts pose the same paradox as the Montagnais: the surplus was accumulated and preserved but then consumed, precluding its use to level fluctuations in the long term. Murphy (1970:153) described among the Brazilian Munduruçu “the hunter’s glut, an abundance of meat that had to be consumed before it spoiled, and the men stayed at home because further hunting would have been a crime against the game and because they had to apply themselves steadily to the serious business of eating.”
These subsistence surpluses hedge the bets of survival a little; much of the time, though, simple (or “immediate return”) foragers only get enough to eat for the next several days. Surplus that goes beyond subsistence is a luxury good. Since it is above what the community needs, it can be traded, or given away, and no one is the worse off. It is not the little extra a community needs to weather a winter or to set aside seed for spring planting. That “little extra” is needed for survival and cannot be derailed toward optional undertakings. Luxury surplus is the kind that can support elites.
The extant records, like the ones quoted above, show that even the most basic subsistence surpluses were the result of choice. Only more so, then, can luxury surpluses be said to result from a choice (within either forager, horticultural, or agricultural economies). They cannot be the automatic result of the agricultural way of life. There will be no surplus, no matter how abundant the land, unless the people in question decide to override their culture’s disapproval, begin taking more than they need, and devote much more effort to storage techniques. And it appears that the first people who chose to produce luxury surpluses were very ancient complex (or “delayed-return“) foragers. Brian Hayden has this to say:
From all the indications that prehistorians have gathered, it appears that humans have existed for well over 2 million years in a state of relative equality. It is possible to perceive the glimmerings of some changes toward socioeconomic inequality around 50,000 years ago. These changes became more pronounced in some areas about 30,000 years ago, and then became especially dramatic and widespread after about 15,000 years ago.
The shift toward socioeconomic inequality is not tied to food production, but occurred well before agriculture emerged. At the end of the Pleistocene, these changes occurred independently in a number of different areas of the globe. Thus the emergence of significant inequality followed a pattern that is strikingly similar to the emergence of food production, but preceded it by many millennia. (Richman, Poorman, Beggarman, Chief, 2007)
There we have it. The root of domination lies in the Paleolithic, deep in forager world.
March 14, 2013 at 5:47 pm
Wow. I need to think about this.
I think the trick is to have enough of a surplus not to need to worry about starvation in difficult times, but not enough to have a ‘luxury surplus’ (that is, support a dominating class.
March 14, 2013 at 6:05 pm
I am needing time to think about this too, MoonRaven. I had no idea that tribal people were so adamant about not planning a steady surplus that they’d rather risk starvation…
March 15, 2013 at 10:26 am
Leavergirl: there is one crucial point in all this that remains insufficiently emphasized: these people who were living in the Gift, living in the hands of the gods, commonly held the belief that hoarding food showed disrespect to the gods (or to Nature) to provide for them—disrespect and lack of faith that would not go unnoticed. This was a bond based upon an intimate relationship with Nature, a compact between the human and the world around him, including the spirit world. Surely, as you suggest, this bond was broken by certain hunter-gatherer groups here and there over time, but not consistently or systematically. With the rise of agriculture and the storage of food surpluses, the break with Nature became systematic and systemic, it became living in the Theft, and led to where we live today, in Nazi Babylon. As a way of framing these issues, I find that “living in the Gift” and “living in the Theft” has great conceptual and explanatory power. Try it, as you pursue your researches, and see if you don’t agree.
It has been awhile since I read it, but I seem to remember that in Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladach, these high mountain people, subsisting on barley and the byproducts of yaks, lived an egalitarian, matrilineal, and joyous life, in their simple and spiritual way—at least until we came along, and forced change. At their Himalayan elevation, there was sufficiency, but only just. The smiles on these people’s faces, reminiscent of the Kalahari Bushman, could break your heart with its depth and innocence. Now, that is another world lost.
March 15, 2013 at 5:10 pm
Wildearthman… I am finding that I will have to do more study. For example, hoarding is privatization, I am told. Plain storage accessible to the whole community is… just storage. (?)
As the quotes show, there was considerable reluctance to store, except for feasts. People were motivated to restrain themselves if they had a feast to look forward to. As you say, they seemed to have felt uneasy going hunting (asking “the gods” to provide) if they still had food stashed away. On the other hand, it would have been very hard to survive the winter in the northern latitudes without stashing some provisions, if only for another feast, eh?
March 15, 2013 at 5:50 pm
The academic focus on how agriculture was an enabling factor for specialization, social stratification, monumental works, etc. isn’t totally wrong. I think it’s reasonable to suggest, though, that we turn that model around and take a look at how aggressive behavior by dominator groups would force food producers to engage in more intensive, surplus generating methods than they otherwise would.
Perhaps domination is actually the root of agriculture.
The story told to us is that people discovered that field monoculture of annuals (grains and pulses) allowed fewer people to produce more food and that these farmers said; “Wow, this is great! Now we can ask Joe over there to be our king and we can give him half the food we grow and still survive. That way he can feed a horde of us as slaves to build a huge stone fortress, maybe a temple and, of course monuments to his greatness. The food we grow can also free up the tough guys among us to be Joe’s gang of thugs, er, warriors, to keep us all in line. What a great idea!”
Somehow, I don’t think that’s quite the way it happened. I think the early “Big King Joes” wanted to eat well but didn’t like to work. They had the superior strength and skill in persuasive use of language to make it work. Another important characteristic these dominator personalities needed for success was a brutal disregard for the well-being of others. To me, this amounts to a psychopathic lack of empathy or connectedness with the world around them. Civilization evolved from groups in which a culture based on this kind of insanity had developed.
You are right: “humans generally have better things to do with themselves than toil” The use of violence or the threat of violence to extort goods and services from others who they force into greater toil is an age old practice. It can be thought of as a “subsistence strategy” on its own, whether the food obtained this way comes originally from foraging, horticulture/arboriculture, or agriculture.
March 16, 2013 at 7:40 am
Some interesting thoughts here:
http://alwestmeditates.blogspot.com/2013/02/sedentary-foragers-and-other-non.html#more
on how the shift to agriculture did not happen in as simple a manner as is commonly (fashionably?) thought.
Wildearthman; it always puzzles me when people talk about hunting and gathering as “living in the Gift” and suchlike romantic obfuscations. When humans act as predators they are taking… pure and simple. When a human hunter has a fat groundhog cornered in a hole and is poking her with a sharp stick, there is nothing noble about it! This is not “the Gods” giving him something to eat. Killing a bird, fish, animal is theft of it’s body and life. To me, it’s sheer narcissism to believe that some God judged the human’s life to be more valuable than that of the rodent.
In my younger days I spent a fair while living quite deep in the northern wilderness of British Columbia. I hunted, fished and gathered for subsistence and I soon learned that I was valuing my own survival over that of the animals, fish and birds that I was killing. I was destroying living beings perhaps more beautiful and valuable than myself which I had done nothing to nurture.
These days, in contrast, my wife and I use our energy to cultivate trees and other plants. Our relationship with other species is mutualistic rather than predatory or parasitic. The benefits we get from the plants are a result of our creative, rather than destructive efforts.
I think there is abundant evidence to show that hunter-gatherer slaughter often went beyond respectful limits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump
Also, it would seem that hunters who limited themselves to consuming only what they needed for the day and who carefully stored the excess for later days would be showing far more respect for the living world around them than those who gorged themselves on everything they had and then had to go out and kill more animals to stave off hunger later.
Just my way of thinking, I guess.
March 16, 2013 at 9:30 am
Vera – Yes, I am tired of “intellectual types” who talk endlessly about a problem without doing something about it. If you want a copy of my book, send me a postal address. My email is: wvhaugen@hotmail.com.
March 16, 2013 at 10:49 am
Walter, I already wrote you on gmail. Did I have the wrong address? And what’s the book?
March 16, 2013 at 11:25 am
The gmail email was just a confirmation of following the blog. I don’t check that address very often. Drop me an email at the hotmail address with your snail mail address. If you put F.A. Farm in the header I will notice it easier amidst all the junk mail I get. My book was just published and is called “The Laws of Physics Are On My Side” and is available on Amazon.com. It is about culture and energy. The basic thesis is that we have been cultural animals for 2 million years but in the last 150 years we have been replacing culture with cheap oil energy. Now we are sunk unless we can get back to using cultural behaviors. Since evolution doesn’t work backwards it will be more difficult than most pundits and even researchers can comprehend. The solution is to work with the laws of physics. This is very basic stuff and everyone has got to get their hands in the soil. In fact, the last sentence in my book is, “Start the paradigm shift with your hands.” Since the book has a decidedly anthropological basis I think you will like it. About one-third is analysis, two-thirds solutions.
March 16, 2013 at 12:32 pm
Wildearthman, I like your distinction of living in the Gift vs the Theft, but I am not sure how you distinguish. Is planting radishes living in the theft? As you see, I am confused!
Tamnaa:
“Perhaps domination is actually the root of agriculture.”
I think you hit the nail on the head, my friend! 🙂
“it would seem that hunters who limited themselves to consuming only what they needed for the day and who carefully stored the excess for later days would be showing far more respect for the living world around them than those who gorged themselves on everything they had and then had to go out and kill more animals to stave off hunger later.”
That’s important. The accounts of those Motagnais and other northern Canada tribes show tremendous wastage. The white people were always being indignant and shocked by not only their failure to sock away for the rainy day by eating through their supplies, but also in how much meat they wasted… after a kill, they would gorge themselves, and throw the rest away. (Of course, it was eaten by a dog or a passing wild carnivore, so no real waste, but still; haven’t we been taught that the tribals showed respect to the prey by using every last little bit of it?). — I am trying to look at these patterns via the tragedy of the commons… thinking of their very temporary stores as a commons.
March 16, 2013 at 9:55 pm
Choosing Gift or Theft
Vera: I have been working on a particular narrative for several years now, but it is only in the past few weeks and months that all the pieces have come together in a way that seems fully consistent and coherent. It begins with the exodus out of Africa of behaviorally modern man, some sixty to 40 thousand years ago. People left in successive waves, some going in one direction, some in another, spreading all over the globe. These were all hunter-gatherers, hunting and living cooperatively in small egalitarian bands, and sharing big game meat equitably.
Overall, these ancestors of ours were extremely successful: their Stone Age toolkit, their ability to imagine, plan, and cooperate, and their connection to the spirit world, all contributed to the growing numbers of this thriving top predator. Like all beings, and particularly adolescents, they had to test the limits of their world, and, like adolescents, many made mistakes, perhaps over-hunting one particular big game species to scarcity or extinction. Either they learned from their mistakes and matured into adulthood, as a social unit, or they disappeared along with their prey species. Whether or not we believe in a spirit world, there is ample evidence that our hunter-gatherer ancestors did, including evidence of their cosmology and worldview. The general pattern of belief went like this: the world is sacred, and all life is sacred. Every living being owes a debt to that which has given it Life. This is called the Law of Reciprocity, and it means that you give back as good, or better, than you have been given. This is what makes the system work, at every level of the holarchy, from the immediate and local, to the global scale, and beyond.
All life is sacred, but one life must be sacrificed in order for another to live. Within a mature hunter-gatherer culture, strict hunting protocols are followed, including the asking of permission to take a life, and the giving of thanks for a successful hunt. An attitude of respect for the life taken shows itself in the ritual butchering of meat and in the disposal of offal. Respect is also shown by wasting nothing and making good use of all that is taken (or given). (Many hunting groups [though not all] believed that the game animal acquiesced and gave itself to the hunter.) More general ceremonies and rituals developed around themes of abundance, prosperity, and gratitude, and these were meant to establish and maintain contact with the spirit world.
When a group’s population began to exceed the carrying capacity of their land base, or became socially unwieldy, splinter groups would hive off, and either settle in nearby territory, or head out to parts unknown. For tens of thousands of years there was plenty of open territory, and people found their way onto every continent, as well as many an island, and filled up the available niches. This period of Dispersal had gone on for thirty, forty, fifty thousand years, but finally there was no more empty territory—except Antarctica, which does not lend itself to good foraging.
All this while, the people had been living in the Gift, while at the same time growing their population. With wide open spaces of unclaimed territory it was possible to do both–but now people had to make a choice. They could go on living in the Gift, or they could continue to expand their population. They could do one or the other, but not both. As it turned out, this choice would have far-reaching consequences.
What does it mean to live in the Gift? It means to live within the Earth’s annual solar budget. It means to live off the interest of Nature’s capital. It also means, in Daniel Quinn’s eloquent phrase, to live in the hands of the gods–and as an integral member of the Community of Life, recognizing “all our relations” as kin, and soulful beings with their own right to be here.
Faced with this choice, the overwhelming majority of peoples chose to continue living in the Gift, and to limit their population in accordance with their hunter-gatherer land base. These chose the path of maturity. Only a very few peoples—in fact, exactly six, over a period of two millennia or so—chose to live in a new way, the way of pastoralism and agriculture. Their choice, no doubt made incrementally, surely did not appear to be such a break with their past as it turned out to be, but this was a place of bifurcation, a fork in the path, a turning point. It was the first step on the road to living in the Theft.
This New Way of life allowed more people to live on the land than the Old Way, and the advantages must have seemed to outweigh the disadvantages. There might even have been the thought that they could always go back to the Old Way, if they wanted to. But after a certain point that option became ever more problematic, in what may well have been one of the earliest examples of a progress trap. (See A Short History of Progress by anthropologist Ronald Wright for more such progress traps.) In any case, the die was cast and the path of Homo agriculturalis would take her /him further and further away from the old relationship with Nature, as cultivated plants stripped the natural fertility from the soil and changed its character.
What does it mean to live in the Theft? It means living not just on the interest of Nature’s economy, but on the principal. Using renewable resources at a rate which does not exceed the renewal rate of that resource is living on the interest—is living in the Gift. Taking more than that is mining the resource, whether that be a forest, a herd of elk, all the fish in the sea, or topsoil. Mining any non-renewable resource is by definition unsustainable–whether that be common metals, precious gems, or fossil fuels—it is mining a one-time resource, and is theft. What is beneath the Earth belongs to the Earth and to nobody else.
This is hard news for people who have been schooled to believe that anything we are able to wrest from the Earth is good for the taking, and is in fact here solely for our benefit. If it is within our reach, it’s ours. And this includes natural ecosystems, and all the creatures that go to make up the Community of Life within those ecosystems. If we want to convert a forest or savannah into cropland or grazing lands, we take it as our right to do that–without a second thought. But it is living in the theft. It is stealing lives and habitat, murdering all our relations, so that one out-of-balance species can overpopulate at the expense of all the others.
Understanding the nested holarchic structure of the Earth and the Universe, and the holonic relationship among all its holons, provides a vital insight. The Universe is moral at its heart, and depends on fairness, justice, and equity to function. The Law of Holonic Reciprocity provides that every creature and being that lives must give back to the system as good as they get, and a little bit more—for the high privilege of being alive. Reciprocity is what keeps the living systems of Earth going, thriving in a state of optimum well-being. A small lapse in reciprocity will not bring the system down; that is what redundancy and resilience are all about, accrued over four billion years of evolutionary history. Also that extra little bit of reciprocity that is asked for provides a cushion against free-riders. But when you have an out-of-control species, now seven billion strong, not only failing to reciprocate but actively mining every bit of that resilience, and all that sequestered ancient sunlight in fossil form, it should be no surprise that Earthly systems begin to falter, and even to break down.
I don’t expect this pattern to change until we have taken all we can take, or Mother Earth has taken all She can take, and activates her immune response. If there are any of us left then, there will be no choice but to live in the Gift again. With nothing left to mine, we will have the annual solar budget, Nature’s bounty, to live on. I believe it is in us to do that, because we have done it before. We’ll have the chance to reclaim the ancient bond we had with Nature, and with the Community of Life, and with each other. We won’t have a lot of toys or luxuries, but we won’t need them, because we will have reclaimed our true identity in the scheme of thing, and thereby reclaimed our humanity.
March 17, 2013 at 1:04 pm
Wildearthman, it’s a beautiful story… but… no eyeglasses?
March 17, 2013 at 5:29 pm
I like the story too. People tend to “buy” a story that pleases them (as D. Quinn and others well know).
Wildearthman, I think you are right to say that “many hunting groups believed that the game animal acquiesced and gave itself to the hunter”, ….but wasn’t that just a nice story they told themselves to stifle any feelings of empathy they might have had for the animals they killed? Obviously animals don’t like to be killed any more than we humans do.
When you say; “This is called the Law of Reciprocity, and it means that you give back as good, or better, than you have been given.” I have to ask how hunters do that. Is it just a ceremonial thing? What do they actually give back?
Hunters use every advantage at their command to overpower and kill animals but they also do everything they can to prevent animals from overpowering and eating them. Where is the reciprocity here? IMHO, No amount of ceremony could justify this.
So
It seems straightforward and clear, to me anyway, that hunting (incl. fishing) is a domination behavior. The predator and prey both need to go on living. It is a clash of wills: the hunter/fisher wants to eat and his prey wants to escape being eaten. We humans used our clever brains and wonderful hands to devise killing tools and strategies which improved our power and ability to succeed in these conflicts. The stone-tipped spears, barbed fish-hooks, the atlatl, the bow and arrow, nets, poisons, blow-pipes…. all show determination to improve our chances of imposing our will upon the world around us.
We can easily recognize a continuum of ever-increasing power and control right through from the first crudely modified stone tools and the use of fire to the complex technology of the present day. It was a remarkably effective response to the challenge of life as we understood it. Unfortunately, we did not understand the over-arching challenge that every species has to meet. Cockroaches(cretaceous period), sea turtles (110 M years), gingko trees (270 M years) and many other species have managed to pass the test but we clever apes, “homo sapiens sapiens” :-), are failing miserably! The real challenge facing us has nothing to do with increasing our power and domination over the natural world but to find a stable balance within it’s wonderful diversity. Perhaps, instead of working so diligently to destroy diversity, can learn to support it through developing a relationship of true mutualism with the whole of life.
The trick is, we will have to do this consciously and deliberately because blind natural selection, which has settled our fellow earthling species into long-term stable equilibrium, has neglected to do the same for us.
March 17, 2013 at 9:46 pm
Leavergirl,
I’m not so sure it is a beautiful story; it seems like one of tragic loss to me. But maybe there is beauty in truth, or believing that something like truth has been found amid all the deceptions and misdirections. Eyeglasses? Haven’t got a clue, but if you are following some of the same peak oil/climate chaos thinkers I am, eyeglasses would seem to be the least of our worries.
Yesterday I read a long article, actually a Tanner Lecture, by James Scott called “The Four Domestications: Fire, Plants, Animals…and Us.” I am pretty sure this is something you are going to want to read, if you haven’t already. Here is the heading for part two of the lecture:
The history of the peasantry is written by the townsman
The history of the nomads is written by the_settled
The history of hunter-gatherers is written by the_farmers
The history of nonstate peoples is written by the court_scribes
All may be found in the archives cataloged under “Barbarian Histories”
The first section of the lecture is all about the rise of agriculture.
http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/Scott_11.pdf
March 17, 2013 at 9:57 pm
Moment of Choice
Because the implications are so momentous and far-reaching, I want to focus here on the moment of choice between Gift and Theft, between limiting population and encouraging population growth. The choice couldn’t have happened in a single moment, of course, but was much more likely a one-thing-leads to-another, then leads-to-another, sort of situation, stretched out over time. But for conceptual ease, let’s simplify it down to a single stark choice. Those who chose to continue living in the Gift, and those who made the other choice, each came up against the Law of Limits once Dispersal had reached the point where all the good foraging and hunting territory had been taken up. Short of war for territory, human expansion had reached its limits, and something had to give. Those who chose to limit their population so that they could continue living in the Old Way–living in the Gift—made a mature adult decision, based on the acceptance of the Law of Limits. Those who chose to defy the Law of Limits made a choice typical of adolescents, and, as it turned out, defying one law led to defying several others, including the Law of Holonic Reciprocity.
Agriculture requires the mining of topsoil, and the history of agricultural production can be measured in terms of topsoil loss. Indeed, all the original hubs of agriculture, such as the once-Fertile Crescent, are now barren desert. The disturbance of soil to plant annual crops leaves that soil open to wind and water erosion, while fertility is diminished with each successive crop. If irrigated, salts are introduced and eventually degrade the soil into sterility. Topsoil is a renewable resource, but the rate of renewal is geologic, whereas the rate of depletion happens in a few short years. This is, in part, why agriculture is living in the theft. Another piece of the story is that once agricultural land is depleted and degraded, the response has historically been to move on, and to convert non-agricultural lands, such as forests or grasslands, into croplands—which is stealing from the Community of Life, and is, again, living in the Theft.
People who came to cultural maturity living in the Gift identified with the Community of Life and experienced themselves as integral to that Community. Living at the sufferance of Nature, and on Nature’s bounty, tended to arouse feelings of humility, reverence, and gratitude among foraging peoples. With settled agriculture, the relationship with Nature began to change from one of connection to one of separation. By taking charge of their own food supply (though still Nature- and weather- dependent) people began to see themselves as autonomous, special beings—not an animal like all the others, and not beholden to the good graces of Nature. In fact, over the millennia, Nature lost all of its enchantment or association with Spirit, and became simply an insentient stockpile of “resources” for the exclusive use of humans, and something for humans to control, and subordinate to human desire.
Agriculture was also the birth of what we call civilization, and it is no coincidence that the culture of civilization is one of empire and domination: it goes right along with living in the Theft, and indeed it lends its support and authorization to all manner of violence and thievery—though of course using flowery, euphemistic, patriotic language to describe genocide, slavery, and land theft. To understand the world we live in today, it is necessary to be able to see through this culture and penetrate its deceptions; and see, too, how it has its roots in the distant past, and has continued the legacy of living in the Theft. Civilization would have you believe that what it is all about is libraries, symphony orchestras, and art galleries– high culture—but world domination is its deepest mission, and, with globalization, its hegemony is now almost complete. And to think, it all started with planting a few seeds and keeping a goat or two.
From the mining of topsoil, a progression of other thefts followed. All mining is theft, whether it is the over-exploitation of renewable resources or the raiding of below-ground non-renewables. Taking any treasure from underground, whether gold or coal or oil, always comes with hidden costs, often in the form of accompanying poisons, which enter the food chain and bring sickness and death in their wake. The Gulf oil spill is just one of the more obvious examples, but there are millions more, and they keep accumulating, in the human body and in the body of the biosphere. Most of us take such mining and polluting for granted, assuming it to be a normal and necessary human activity. But it isn’t; it is living in an ever more egregious, self-amplifying, Theft. Those of us who came of age in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties and ‘seventies can look back and see how the Theft has ramped up at an ever accelerating rate, becoming ever more frenzied, ever more willing to take desperate gambles, to keep the addiction going. And that is just what it is: a cultural addiction—to more and more stuff, high-tech and otherwise, but keep the novelty coming, so that we can have the very latest iteration of something we might not even actually need…but keep it coming anyway, faster and faster, more and more.
If certain groups of people had decided to make the mature choice, to continue living in the Gift, instead of choosing the path of overpopulation made possible by agriculture, it would be a different world today. You and I might not be in it, and we definitely wouldn’t be having this Internet conversation, but the world would most probably be thriving and whole, fairly overflowing with Life, in all its wondrous manifestations (including those driven to extinction by civilized humans). Much as we might like to, we can’t bring that world back. The choices that were made cannot be unmade, and the consequences of those choices cannot be put off much longer. It is kind of a tragic story, looked at in this light; one that could have gone on for a very long time, living in the Gift…if only. Yet, in spite of the sense of loss, and the sadness that loss engenders, I personally do not feel depressed as I come to see ever more clearly just exactly what went wrong. In fact, I feel a certain sense of elation, because what went wrong wasn’t determined from the start, either by the stars, the laws of physics, or our own flawed nature. Instead, it was a choice—a wrong choice, to be sure—but a human choice, a moral choice, and that means (if any of us survive what we have already set in motion) that we can make a different choice, if the opportunity should arise, having learned from our mistakes (horrendous mistakes!), and maybe get a second chance at Life on Earth.
Meanwhile, we have our gardens to tend, our trees to prune, and our soil to build. Maybe, while we are in this transition phase between worlds, some of will discover ways to make gardening truly sustainable in all its aspects. If so, gardening may yet have a place in the distant future. While I don’t expect to be there to enjoy it, it gives me pleasure to contemplate the possibility. Remember, though, when we have only the annual solar budget to work with, the word sustainable will be functioning within its true meaning. The Law of Limits will assert itself, and there will be no fudge factor to hide behind like there is today. And, just in case gardening doesn’t work out in that world, maybe tending the wild will. But what should cheer us all is our own deep history. The human being has been a top predator for a very long time, a hunter of game large and small. Pressed by necessity, something tells me our old instincts will come back to save the day. We’ll be at home in the world, and maybe we’ll have the wisdom to be content with that.
March 17, 2013 at 10:19 pm
Wildearthman: Since you were speaking philosophically, I asked you a philosophical question: are you willing to forgo such things as eyeglasses and sharp pointy metal tools the dentists wield for the purity of your vision? That’s where the rubber meets the road. Philosophically speaking, of course.
Will check out your links, sounds like a very clever take.
March 18, 2013 at 4:49 am
Masterful choice of leading quote;
“A properly socialized individual had a powerful sense that the wild world was feeding him, and he ought to be as grateful and as anxious to act decently as he would to any human who fed him out of sheer kindness.”
– E.N. Anderson, Ecologies of the heart
grateful, anxious, act decently & kindness. Prosaic words that matter.
It’s great you’re back writing Vera. I’m looking forward to having a good read and good think.
March 18, 2013 at 9:39 am
Leavergirl,
Let us be clear: I am not inventing rules for a utopian intentional community. Instead, I am trying to understand the true conditions of life, absent the disinformation and deceptions on that subject supplied by the dominant culture, which depends upon living in the Theft. I’d love it if conditions permitted eyeglasses, and books to read with them, too. But these things which are so important to us now are not essential to life. What is essential, and what we have lost, is right relationship to Nature. Get that right, and I believe everything else will take care of itself.
March 18, 2013 at 12:07 pm
I looked at the Scott lectures. The ideas presented are not new and mostly provide fodder for anthro grad students arguing over their pints at the pub. If you want an updated version of domestication of cereals, look at the genetic and chromosomal evidence for domestication of wheat. Wheat was already “pre-adapted” when wild einkorns were gathered and then selectively bred. The idea of random mutation + human agency is much more viable than Boserup’s population pressure model or any of a host of outdated models. Parsimony is key. If you want, you could read more in my book, “The Laws of Physics Are On My Side (2013), available on Amazon. There is a “Look Inside” feature, so you could check out the chromosomal changes in domestication of wheat on pages 47 ff.
Be wary of anthropologists who think they have the last word. As I used to put on the blackboard when I was teaching, “Question everything.”
March 18, 2013 at 12:49 pm
Tamana,
I can appreciate your hunting experience in British Columbia, your empathy for all living beings, and your reluctance to see blood spilled, but I almost think you are in rebellion against the conditions of life. It seems you just don’t want to accept the fact that some must die for others to live. I myself have never grown fully comfortable with these seemingly harsh and brutal conditions of existence, and yet I am not sure how nature could have come up with a better plan. There is a scene in a young adult novel I just finished, by Gary Paulsen, in which Brian, the survivor of a plane crash in northern Canada, witnesses four wolves take down a bull moose and tear away flesh even as the moose is still alive. This appalls and disgusts him, and just doesn’t seem right. In another scene, in the snows of December, he himself manages to take down a large buck with his homemade bow and arrow. He thinks he should feel elation at this triumph, because it means he will have food to last him for two or three weeks, but instead he feels almost despondent that he has taken this beautiful life. My point is, I believe your feelings on this subject are normal and natural, but I think you go a little astray when you see hunting and fishing as a matter of domination.
I hope you are a reader, because I have a number of books to suggest on both the subjects of domination and of hunting. See, for instance: An Unnatural Order: Uncovering the Roots of our Domination of Nature and each Other by Jim Mason. He believes that it was the domestication of wild animals, more than anything else, which led to our culture of domination. Then there is Kirkpatrick Sale’s book, After Eden: the Evolution of Human Domination, in which he goes after the big game hunters, and some brain changes that happened when Homo sapiens sapiens became behaviorally modern, some fifty thousand years back, as the beginnings of domination. I believe he has a point, but it is way too easy to generalize from specific cases onto all of humanity. Most hunter-gatherer groups consisted of from twenty to thirty individuals, including women and children. According to Christopher Boehm, in Moral Origins: the Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame, such groups, providing they were mobile and of the immediate return variety, were invariably egalitarian, and shared meat equitably among all. As these groups dispersed out of Africa and found their way to various landscapes all over the globe, cultural evolution was taking place—an evolution that resulted in more than 5,000 distinct languages, and at least as many different sets of cultural beliefs. I don’t for a minute doubt that there were some violent, aggressive, domineering types among the world’s cultural groups, and that there were rash individuals, and groups of dangerous individuals, that drove bison over cliffs, and the Wooly mammoth to extinction. Paleo-forensic evidence suggests that there clearly were such human gangs. But let’s not rush to judgment about all hunters for all time.
The work of Richard Nelson is highly valuable in this regard, as he spent his anthropological career among hunting peoples of the far north, and he went at the job with the right sort of attitude for an anthropologist. He regarded his informants as teachers, granting them the full dignity of their humanity. His Make Prayers to the Raven is a classic of the literature, and fascinating in its carefully noted detail, but I would especially recommend “Searching for the Lost Arrow: Physical and Spiritual Ecology in the Hunter’s World,” which appears in The Biophilia Hypothesis of Kellert and Wilson. Allow me to quote a little from this piece:
“For the Koyokon, animals, plants, and elements of the physical world possess qualities that are both natural and supernatural. The environment is inhabited by potent and watchful beings who feel, who can be offended, and who should be treated with respect…. Consider the Koyukon hunters I described earlier having taken a black bear in its den. From the beginning, they knew a great power had revealed itself to them. No one discovers a bear by skill and cleverness alone—or purely by accident—because in the Koyukon world animals GIVE or WITHOLD themselves. A hunter’s ‘luck’ with a particular species depends on the respect he has shown toward it, which keeps him in a state of harmony or grace. When Koyukon people talk about luck, they might say ‘something took care of him.’ This ‘something’ is the animal’s spiritual power.”(p. 212)
As I’ve suggested, there are variations and differences among different cultural groups, but there are also certain commonalities. Respect for the prey animal is a value shared by most indigenous hunting societies. What follows is from Sacred Ecology, 2nd ed., by Fikret Berkes: “Among the Chasasibi Cree, respect for the animal is shown in several ways:
–the hunter maintains an attitude of humility when going hunting;
–the animal is approached and killed with respect;
–the animal is carried respectfully to camp;
–offerings are made to the animal;
–the meat is butchered according to rules signifying respect; and
–the remains of the animal are disposed of properly” (p. 103)
Among some hunting groups this attitude of respect may not hold, but I have found the attitudes implied by these cultural strictures to be quite general among the groups I have studied.
Part of the problem, too, is that all the peoples who have been studied by anthropologists have come under the influence of Western culture, and their attitudes and values may show this influence upon tradition beliefs. I suspect that this is what might be behind the discrepancies and inconsistencies that anthropologist Robert Brightman found among the subjects of his research. In Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships, he records that most of the hunting groups he spent time with believed that the prey surrendered themselves to the hunter in a relationship based upon mutuality. They believed, as Nelson’s Koyukon believed, that the physical world and the spiritual world were not separate, but conjoined, and that “luck” in the hunt was less a matter of skill than being right with the world. But Brightman also found other Rock Cree hunters who saw the relationship between hunter and prey as adversarial, and when they took game in the hunt, they took full credit for the kill themselves, as a reflection of their own prowess as hunters. This seems more like your view of the hunter as dominator. Among people of Western culture this may well be the dominant attitude, but it does not seem to have been so among most Native hunters, who understand the mutuality involved in the predator prey relationship.
One last point. Have you seen the documentary “Earthlings?” In this painful to watch video we see not only the confined feeding operations where animals are held in overcrowded bondage, unable to escape even their own waste, but the film also shows in gruesome detail the killing and slaughtering of cattle and pigs, chickens and sheep—and it isn’t a pretty sight. If you eat meat, it probably comes from just such a place. Are you and I to be considered morally unaccountable for the conditions these creatures live under, because we didn’t draw blood with the ax ourselves? The film also showed brutalized humans brutalizing the animals they were driving to slaughter, and it reminded me that the slaveholder is also brutalized by the institution of slavery, and how he deals with those under his control. The Holonic Golden Rule states that: whatever you do to others you also do to yourself. Thus it is well to be circumspect, and respectful, in all that you do.
Between these two ways of getting meat, I know which one I find to be most ethical.
March 19, 2013 at 7:30 am
Wildearthman; back in the early seventies my mind was full of the justifying fantasies that you have read about. I went out there and did it. I killed, I ate and I learned through experience.
Reading what others say is fine but we tend to accept what others say uncritically if we cannot compare what we read with our own personal experiences with the issues being discussed. This results in a lack of critical thinking.
I have some questions for you:
Would you really be happy to give your body as food to a predator as long as respect was shown? Would you happily offer your kids in the same way? I sense you are too young to have any, but try to imagine such a situation.
How much hunting and killing have you done? Have you never felt empathy for your fellow living beings? Is Daniel Quinn a hunter-gatherer? From what I have found, he is an established resident of “Babylon” who has found ways to trade words and questionable ideas for a rather affluent conventional lifestyle. Writers don’t have to be correct in what they write, you know, to achieve success in their field. They just have to be popular. Popularity and fashion are about the same thing; transient and insubstantial.
If you don’t like what you have seen in “Earthlings” then you can:
1. stop eating the flesh of your fellow earthlings.
or,
2. go out and start killing your fellow earthlings yourself. That’s what I did in about 1969 and I learned a lot from the experience.
March 19, 2013 at 1:50 pm
Tamnaa
This predation as domination thing is confusing to me. Do you think that all predators are bad? Do you think that humans should not be predators for some reason, or just that predation with the use of tools is bad?
It seems like a cheap argument to simply say that no amount of respect or ceremony is enough to justify predation because our culture is totally devoid of the animism which connects many foraging humans with their ecosystems.
I’m very curious to know what staple foods you eat that do not impede on the will to live of other earthlings.
If it’s worth anything, I find it much easier to slaughter domestic animals I raise myself than wild animals, but I feel this is a cause of my cultural disconnect from the land. I’m avoiding any hunting on our site until I have the time and effort to improve game habitat (water catchment, propagating mast trees and improving access, etc.).
peace
March 19, 2013 at 6:13 pm
Osker; good questions. I’m not against predation, as such. I’m against this tendency to tell ourselves false stories to make killing seem noble. If prey species were voluntarily offering their bodies as nourishment for humans, all hunters would have to do is pray to the “spirits” or “gods” to bring animals into, let’s say a “magic circle” to be slaughtered. Instead, hunters have to go to great lengths to stalk and ambush and overpower their prey while the prey animals do all they can to escape.
We know that natural predators contribute to the well-being of prey species by culling the herd, keeping population within healthy bounds. I think it’s important to notice that predator species generally keep their own populations in balance. Now, are we humans naturally a predator species? Just looking at our bodies, it’s obvious that we lack the kinds of teeth, beaks, claws, etc. that natural predators are equipped with. With our unique combination of mental capacity and manual dexterity, however, we have been able to devise “prosthetic” hunting equipment which has allowed us to become artificial predators.
It seems to me that humans became predators artificially while lacking the self-limiting faculty which allows genuine predators to play a beneficial role in the ecology.
Now, you probably know that predation is one basic kind of symbiotic relationship between species. The others are parasitism and mutualism. Humans have entered into mutualistic symbiosis (through which both species benefit) with a huge variety of different species.
Plants bear fruit as part of their reproductive process. They are truly offering nourishment to animals and birds so that their seeds will be disbursed. Eating the fruit is not antagonistic to the plant’s drive to live and proliferate. Planting some of the seed and tending the young plants is cooperative and constructive behavior as opposed to the competitive and destructive character of the parasitic and predation relationships. Even if we eat the seeds (nuts and grains) or the leaves or roots, we are still helping the survival chances of the plant species by re-planting and cultivating them. This applies as well to our mutualism with animal species, micro-organisms etc.
I know that humans have abused mutualism, causing major problems. The intensive, industrial forms of agriculture/domestication prevalent today are atrocious. I think we humans have to work on improving our mutualistic associations with the biosphere rather than dumping them and attempting to go back to predation.
March 19, 2013 at 7:33 pm
Thank you for bringing some clarity to your perspective. With regards to the prey “offering themselves” to the predator, I feel that it is a lack of animistic perception that allows folks to experience hunting as a brutal act. The prayer and “magic circle” scenario only makes sense in a worldview that places spirits “somewhere else”. The chase is the sacred act. My understanding is that in a world where all animals are either predators or prey, our linear field of vision (eyes in the front of our heads) puts us in the predator category.
I would disagree that humans have an inherent lack of ability to limit their populations. I think really that’s the main point of the above post, that some cultures made a choice to limit their food production and population, while others did not.
I’m also still curious about what your staple foods are. In cultivating any crop for our own consumption we are inherently taking away resources and habitat from other beings. Rather than limiting deer populations through predation, they will be limited by loss of habitat, or they will eat your crops. So is guarding your crops more mutualistic than predation? Starving out prey species is more noble than interacting with them?
Any ideas on non-predatory remedies for feral hogs? Or deer that now lack the humans, mountain lions and wolves that kept them healthy and stable?
March 20, 2013 at 8:08 am
I don’t think there’s anything remarkable about our diet, Osker. We very seldom eat anything taken from the wild. The only examples I can think of are a few fish my father-in-law catches in the marsh near his place and the insects my wife likes to eat sometimes. We are trying to produce the food we eat ourselves and we’ve had moderate success but we’re very far from 100% yet. Recently the city has spread to engulf our area so we are in the process of moving farther out into the countryside where we will start all over again.
I suppose whole-grain organic rice is our staple food but last year we had success with some wonderfully vigorous and delicious yams which were a revelation to me. We plan to try them on our new place. We eat a wide variety of tropical fruit, legumes, green vegetables, coconuts, duck eggs, some fish and chicken.
Our approach might be labelled Tropical Subsistence Polyculture. Tropical because we live in Thailand, Subsistence because everything we produce is for our own use, not for commerce, Polyculture because we enjoy growing a great variety of things and producing a monoculture “cash crop” is of no interest to us.
I’m sure you’re right, I must lack animistic sensibilities. Oddly enough when I feel a a reverent sense of the sacredness of another living being I don’t feel any urge to attack and kill it. Just one of my little quirks, I guess. 🙂
You ask some good questions about guarding what we cultivate against opportunistic feeders. I haven’t yet encountered that problem with food trees. Trees actually provide habitat rather than destroying it. I’ve seen people scaring birds off their fields but we’ve never had to do that. Insects are the biggest problem (we need a few anteaters in our garden!) and they only seem to bother the more exotic garden vegetables. The best solution I’ve found is to eat the tasty and more nourishing weeds that thrive locally.
I actually agree with you that humans can stabilize their population size but I don’t think it’s an in-built genetic function in us as it seems to be in genuine predators. (By the way, forward eye placement in primates is thought to be an arboreal adaptation but, since many of them are insect-eating predators, your point is a good one.
http://www.biog1105-1106.org/demos/106/unit08/media/8a.primates.pdf
It’s evening here after a long hot day so I’m packing it in for the night.
March 20, 2013 at 10:50 am
Tamana,
In theory, anyone can hold whatever opinion they choose, whether well-founded, or not. I am sure that you feel you have earned your right to the opinions you hold about hunting, but your last missal directed toward me seemed to imply that my opinion was somehow inferior to yours because it came from reading books. I don’t apologize for reading books; I have been a motivated and disciplined reader for fifty years of my life, and I am a lover of books. But your assumption that I lack experience in hunting and fishing is unwarranted, and in fact it is those very experiences that most inform my own opinions on the subject. As I suggested in my last post, a whole range of ambiguities and paradoxes arise out the fact of life that for me (or you) to live, something, some being, must die. Because there are so many nuances to this biological and existential conundrum, which I believe is of general interest, I am going to share a brief view of certain telling experiences from my own life.
I was born in Santa Monica, California in 1942, and lived there for the first eight years of my life. In 1950 we moved to a cabin on a remote lake in northern California, where for three years I lived a Huck Finn life. I had the use of the rowboat, and paddled everywhere as the eight year old captain of my own ship. I got into fishing then, and I felt about my world the same way the Koyukon hunters felt about theirs—it was enchanted and full of spirits. If I wanted to catch fish, I knew I had to get on good terms with those spirits; and when I did catch fish, and especially the big ones, I never thought it was a reflection of my personal skill or prowess. Rather, the spirits recognized my sincerity and humility, and allowed me the gift of the fish for those attitudes and as a reward for faith and patience.
Last year, at the age of seventy, I went with my son (now 40) down to the lower Klamath River to fish for steelhead and salmon. It was a banner year for fish, but the problem was, they weren’t biting—not even for the very best anglers. (The Indians got loads of fish in their gillnets, but the only non-Indians who had fish were the snaggers, or those who bought fish from the Indians.) I had learned these waters over the last several years while I was down there researching a book on the people of the Klamath, and came to the enterprise with a lifetime of fishing experience. For the first couple days I was doing no better than anyone else. Then I went to my special place down in the gorge where few ever go, a place I have always loved for its wild beauty. And I caught fish, big ones, fair and square, and with the same attitudes and beliefs I held as an eight year old. I was humble, and appreciative, and respectful of the fish. I never figured it was skill or prowess that brought those fish to me; it was a connection I’d made with the spirit world. I’ve never been sure if there is a spirit specific to certain fish, or to certain places, or just what. Many Native people believe there is a master spirit for salmon, and a master spirit for steelhead, and for all creatures. Others believe it is a direct connection to the individual fish. City people, who haven’t immersed themselves in Nature, are sure it’s all sheer superstition. I, who have lived close to Nature for most of my life, am of a different opinion.
I did a lot of exploring around the lake in my rowboat, and I did a lot of fishing, too. Then, on my ninth birthday, I got my first .22 rifle and became a hunter. I shot lots of squirrels and rabbits and pheasants and quail, but I didn’t stop there. I got pretty good with that little rifle, and seemed to have to prove myself on everything that moved, including lizards, and chipmunks, and even bumblebees. I shot plenty of beer cans, too, but they didn’t bring as much satisfaction as living, moving targets. I especially liked tweety birds for target practice. Every time one fell from its branch to the ground, that was affirmation of my new power. I don’t know what a psychologist would say about the conscience of a nine year old. I seemed to have a pretty good conscience in other things, but was ruthless with my new .22. That would change on a certain day when I was sixteen, but as a nine year old I ended a lot of tiny lives.
Somehow, it was a little different with the ducks and geese that periodically filled my sky by the thousands, and landed and fed in the lake that was my front yard. The part of me that was trying to be a young hunter thought I should go after them, too. But there was another part that just liked being in the middle of so much spectacle and activity, and I didn’t want to do anything to spoil it. The geese would gather in the fields across the lake and feed by the hundreds and thousands. One day when I was watching them feed and take off and land and feed some more, something happened to make all of them take off at once and fill the sky as a mass, and then break off into their own flocks and form their characteristic lopsided Vs as they headed to their next destination. When I looked back to where they had been feeding I noticed some movement. It was a goose trying to fly but unable to get off the ground. I told my mom I was going to go get that goose and bring it home, and she assented. I rowed across the lake as quickly as I could, jumped out of the boat, and ran that goose down, after much drama and noisy complaint. I stuffed it in a gunny sack, tied it off, and deposited the goose in the stern. By the time I got to our side of the lake, it had settled down a bit, and I got it to the house with only a bit of struggle. When I opened the sack in our living room, Mom looked the goose over and determined that it had been shot in the shoulder and broken its wing bone. “What should we do with it?” I asked. “What do you want to do with it?” She asked in return. I thought about how it would be good for at least a couple dinners, and how this would be my first goose, and how much the family would appreciate me for bringing fresh goose to table. Looking at the goose now, there was something in the way it held itself so upright, some quality I could discern in its eye. What would I do? Shoot it in the head with my .22? Take an axe to its neck? Looking at the goose without the excitement of the chase, I suddenly began to realize that this goose was its own being, just like I was my own being, and I just didn’t have it in me take this being’s life. Mom helped me get it back in the bag, and I rowed it back to where I had found it, and turned it loose. It occurred to me that a coyote might end up having goose dinner that night, but that was out of my control. I had gone to a bit of trouble to catch that goose and bring it home and bring it back again, but I now knew something I hadn’t known before. In just the same way that all dogs are the same, and yet each is an individual; and just as all people are the same, and yet each is an individual; so, too, are geese creatures that are all the same, and yet each has its own essence and will to live and even its own sense of dignity. I saw that in the living room of our cabin when I was nine when a wild creature had been brought into an alien enclosure and showed me something of itself.
As I observed the ducks and geese coming and going with the seasons, I began to see that there was a pattern here, a cycle, and some larger force at work behind the comings and goings of these magnificent birds. Everyone around me seemed to believe that human beings, and their human-built world, were the all-important thing in life. As a boy on that lake I began thinking otherwise. What was really important was what kept these ducks and geese moving and thriving, and, incidentally, brought them into my life.
I used to hunt the lava beds behind the cabin, and I spent a lot of time alone out there with my rifle. But I never felt alone. I always felt like I was in good company, and that I might have something like a spirit helper as my companion. This alone time did a lot to shape who I became, and though I could have gone back there unarmed (there were rattlesnakes, cougars and bear around) having that rifle, and the excuse of hunting, brought me to a kind of self-contained independence of spirit and mind that has informed all of my adult life. It wasn’t the hunting itself, but the excuse of hunting, that brought me something that (I grieve to consider) is denied to young people growing up today.
This is getting a bit long, but I have another little story to tell, and also some mortals to draw, from these experiences and from yours. That will have to wait for a separate post.
Best,
Gary
March 20, 2013 at 2:40 pm
Tamana,
Regretfully, we left the lake, and ended up in a rental house outside of Ashland, Oregon. From there I had easy access to a whole mountainside where, in summer, I went hunting almost every day. To get there I had to walk a ways along railroad tracks, where rattlesnakes sometimes lay coiled between ties. There is nothing like living in snake country to keep you alert to your immediate surroundings. I remember one time when I heard that unmistakable buzz; I jumped back and aimed and fired, and kept firing for twenty one times—which, with a single-shot .22 takes a little doing. Not at first, but toward the end, I was trembling with the thought of what might have been. I could see from my own irrational behavior that what appears to be aggression can actually be a manifestation of fear. Making that snake dead, dead, dead showed me that.
When I went up into the mountains with my rifle I might get a shot or two at a gray digger squirrel, but mostly it turned out to be hiking and exploring, often ten to fifteen miles in a day. On my way back down, I’d often be so fatigued that I’d carry the rifle across my shoulders, held in place by upraised hands in a posture of exhaustion. Those long hikes took a lot out of me, but also gave a lot back.
It was right about the time that we moved onto the forty acre orchard-farm that would be our home for many years (also outside Ashland) that I got my first shotgun—I think it was for my thirteenth birthday. It was a single-shot .410 gage, which is the smallest one going. It shoots quite a tight pattern, and doesn’t give you the leeway of the larger bores. At that time there were a lot of pheasants out there in that good farming country, and even though I also went after ducks and geese and quail, it was pheasants that I took as my main quarry. Pheasants have a way of bursting into the air from close beside you, and making a lot of noise in the process. I believe this is a defensive reaction meant to startle or panic any would-be predators—which is exactly how I reacted. But in time I trained myself to suppress that startle response, and also how to lead the birds from different angles, and we ended eating quite a few pheasant dinners in those years.
This was the mid- to later ‘fifties, and this is when they replaced old highway 99 with the I-5 Freeway, which ran right through prime pheasant habitat and ruined the hunting around where I lived. For several years afterward, that run of freeway between Ashland and Medford became littered with dead pheasants, like a linear butcher block. This was why, when I was sixteen, I had to drive to a field five or six miles away to hunt pheasants. This was prime habitat, with good cover in the fencerows, and the birds were here. I raised several that day, and got one really good shot, giving him just the right amount of lead, pulling the trigger with just the right pressure. The pheasant is beautiful in flight, a joy to behold, and that is part of what attracted me to the sport—the aesthetics of seeing a wild creature being itself. There was also a satisfaction in learning its ways. This particular bird tumbled in the air when the birdshot hit him and crashed to the ground with a splat. When I picked him up he was a mass of bloody feathers, that just a moment before had been a magnificent bird in flight. And now look at him, this ugly mess, brought about by me and my “sport.”
That was the moment I ceased being a hunter, and there were some losses involved with making that choice. One of them is, there aren’t that many things a sixteen year old can be good at, and that is an age when you are particularly hungry for feathers in your cap. There is also the loss of being outdoors in beautiful country, and—this is the part that non-hunters seldom understand—there was the loss of relationship between pheasants and me. After this day, I didn’t spend time in their habitats, finding the birds in their preferred domains, or flushing them and watching them fly. When I gave up hunting, I gave up those pleasures along with it, and that connection between predator and prey. The birds are now spared my killing them, but pheasants mean very little to me anymore, because I have no contact with them.
When I lived on the lake in 1950, the Pacific Flyway supported about six million migratory waterfowl; fifty years before that, it had been twelve million; today it is about one million. In his fine book, Owning it All, William Kittredge describes what he and his family did on their ranch in Warner Valley in south central Oregon. They raised cattle and, being good Americans, they sought to expand their spread. They did this by filling in natural wetlands and turning it into grazing land, and in the process destroyed hundreds of acres of prime waterfowl habitat, that had been a vital part of the Pacific Flyway.
So, Tamana, one question I have for you is: is this method of killing morally acceptable to you? In 1950 there were 150 million Americans; today there are near 320 million. All these people need somewhere to live, and also require a huge energy footprint, and food production footprint, to sustain them, all of which destroys the habitat of living beings. Is that okay, because we humans are so special, and these other creatures count for nothing? This is good, but hunters are bad?
One thing that strikes me about your anti-hunting conviction is how narrowly focused it is. We live in a hyper-individualistic society that makes the individual the primary unit of life, and it seems to me you are stuck in that perspective. What the Life Force cares about is the survival of groups, such as species, not so much the individual. That is part of what the Fecundity Principle is all about: the production of more of any given life form than is required for the maintenance of that species living in balance with other species. A surplus of individuals is built into the reproduction regime of about any species you can name, and these provide a legitimate source of food to other eaters. The predator-prey relationship in this context is living in the Gift, living off the interest of Nature’s capital, and is in no way a violation of the Law of Holonic Reciprocity. Stealing the habitat of other creatures, and stealing their lives in that way, is nothing other than living in the Theft.
For reasons that are not at all clear to me, you insist that the human is not a genuine predator. I find this almost laughable. Look at that nine year old boy with his .22. Certainly he went too far, and it now pains me to think of all the sacred life I destroyed on a whim, because I could, because technology allowed me to, and because I did not live in a culture that taught the sacredness of life, and the importance of limits. But did I have the inborn psychology of a predator? You bet I did. And that didn’t just come out of nowhere. Homo erectus was a hunter, as were any number of our ancestors. Meat was a critical part of their diet, and remains a vital constituent to human health. I say this as someone who is a semi-vegetarian, meaning I eat a lot of fruits and vegetable, and about two ounces of meat a day. I say this also as someone who long ago lost his taste for killing—well, except for fish. I will still catch and kill a fish, and bleed it good for the sake of the flesh. I don’t take pleasure in the blood and guts, but I do take pleasure in grilled salmon or steelhead, and my body is happy for the nutrition it provides.
The year after I quit killing pheasants, I joined the army, and learned in training the spirit of the bayonet. “What is the spirit of the bayonet?” the drill sergeant demanded. “To kill, sir,” we responded in chorus. The military is all about killing other human beings. I didn’t feel like this was something I wanted to do. I don’t think most people are wired to kill other human beings. But killing an animal to eat as food? You think we don’t come by that naturally? Are we herbivores, then, and not omnivores, after all? Is that what our physiology indicates? I don’t really think so. I think instead that you are a sensitive person who had his moment of truth, just as I had my moment of truth with the pheasant. In both cases, this was a personal choice, based upon a complex internal calculus. That is fine for you and it is fine for me, but I think you are way off the mark projecting these idiosyncratic turnings away from carnage as reflections on the species as a whole. We are a top predator and, like it or not, we are well-equipped to be good at it.
March 20, 2013 at 5:30 pm
Wildearthman; first, my apologies for assuming that you were a young kid, you are actually a few years older than I am. My error. I must have come across in an insulting manner and I’m sorry for that.
You raise many points and I don’t really have time to sit down to address them all this morning.
You gave up hunting at an earlier age than I was at when I started. Congratulations on that. In my boyhood I was generally unarmed and far from lethal. During those formative years I had experiences befriending injured animals as you did with the goose. I felt a lot of sympathetic respect for the individuality of animals back then.
You mystify me wth the idea that giving up hunting means giving up contact with nature. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years hiking, camping, rambling in the Rockies, canoeing the wilderness lakes and rivers just observing and being with it all. I always found this deeply satisfying and, apart from catching a few trout for dinner, never felt any urge to hunt.
I’ve been trying to avoid taking an anti-hunting stance (with notable lack of success!) because the question I find really fascinating is why hunters need to believe that animals give themselves willingly to humans.You speak eloquently about spirits in nature who allowed you to catch fish because they recognized your sincerity and humility. Fair enough, but I have to ask why commercial drag net fishing works at all. Surely the spirits must recognize the arrogant profiteering attitude behind such destructive kinds of fishing and the nets should come up empty, right? Instead they sweep up everything and destroy habitat in the process.
When, as a little boy, you took pot-shots at tweety birds, did the spirits approve? This is not a rhetorical question implying that what you did was wrong. I just can’t find any consistency in the stories of spirits favoring responsible hunters with success when irresponsible hunting is rewarded just as well. Hope you can help me understand it better.
In the meantime, the sun is up and I have a grass roof to finish.
Cheers
March 21, 2013 at 6:57 am
Osker; you said that this is “a world where all animals are either predators or prey..” and that is generally the case although we can think of exceptions (e.g. both salmon and seals are predatory but they are prey to bears. Crocodiles are occasionally prey to big cats etc. and the babiy crocs are often gobbled up by birds etc.)
As I worked, this morning I was mulling over the idea that humans are primates and primates are mostly prey species. Searching on Google for this idea, I came across the book: “Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators and Evolution” by Donna Hart and Robert Sussman.
Rather than introducing this idea in my own words I’ll take the lazy way. Here is the Amazon book description:
“Although “Man the Hunter” is a popular description of our ancestry, the central importance of hunting is firmly fixed only in the archeological record of relatively recent human history. Man the Hunted argues that primates, including the earliest members of the human family, have evolved not as hunters but as the prey of any number of predators, including wild cats and dogs, hyenas, snakes, crocodiles, and even birds of prey. Eyewitness accounts, data collected by the authors, and the published reports of naturalists establish the astonishing extent to which living monkeys, lemurs, apes, and even humans fall victim to a wide variety of predators, some of which even specialize in the consumption of primates. Additionally, the fossil record demonstrates that primates have been prey for millions of years, a fact that necessarily shaped the evolution of our earliest ancestors in body and behavior. Skillfully combining information from a number of lines of evidence, Man the Hunted casts an entirely new light on the natural history of primates and the evolution of fossil and modern humans.”
Now if our early ancestors were seen by predators as vulnerable, nutritious food items, they should have done what other prey species do, of course; voluntarily giving themselves to their hunters. If a hungry Leopard came around, as long as she was sincere and humble (and who has ever met a leopard that wasn’t?) then the nature spirits would have prompted one of us to allow the big cat to eat him.
For some reason, though, our ancestors started refusing to listen to the nature spirits. They tried to hide or escape as other prey species do but at some point they found that the ability to grasp and brandish a stick with their amazing hands and even to pick up stones and other objects with which to pelt the hungry marauders was sometimes an effective deterrent.
This tactic also worked to intimidate vultures and other scavengers away from carrion so the the omnivorous primates could enjoy getting some extra protein. Much later, fire was used to keep prowling predators at a distance and if it came to a fight, a burning stick was a powerful defensive weapon.
Over evolutionary stretches of time, our early ancestors used their ingenuity and dexterity to devise ever more powerful ways of dominating the hunter- hunted conflict. We actually succeeded in transforming ourselves from a prey species into an apex predator species.
As a prey species, though, we had to reproduce at a fairly high rate to ensure that enough of us survived to create a new generation. Having learned to defend against predation and having added hunting to our foraging habits more of us were able to survive long enough to reproduce. Maybe our reproductive habits remained those of a prey species without adjustment to our new role. Anyway, our populations tended to expand. As WEM said, when anatomically modern humans exited Africa, they were able to expand across the world as hunter-gatherers. Their population rate increased only slowly because they were still developing their dominance strategies but they went forth, they multiplied, filled the earth and subdued it… much of that without agriculture. Just what happened to the mega-fauna is a controversy. It’s hard for me to imagine that human hunters did that but who knows? As our techniques for control became more effective our numbers have soared.
So…I think our propensity for insatiable aggressive expansion is the essential problem we must solve. As of this morning, I feel that this behavioral pattern is deeply rooted in the fearful need to escape from feelings of powerless vulnerability which we experienced while in the position of prey species.
March 21, 2013 at 11:32 am
It’s been very interesting to follow the discussion of our predation. Let me throw in something from left field. There are people in our world who would rather spin pretty stories (and cash in on them) than find honest ways of dealing. I am referring to the likes of the self-appointed shamans like Castaneda, the well known liar and cheat, whose made up stories of prey who willingly give themselves to their hunter caught the imagination of many. Another such is Prechtel, who at least has the credentials of having lived among the Maya, raising a family there. He made his living by selling pretend-Mayan art to tourists. Then he found out he could make a better living by selling pretend-Mayan shamanism to Americans, while enjoying sticking it to the people who made his childhood miserable (he grew up on a rez, he says).
I think to express humble gratitude to the critters that feed us is only decent — we do it to our hosts when we visit someone for dinner, all the more so then to those who gave lives to make up that dinner. And there is a way to make it up to the critters we eat, but it’s not via wishful thinking and sleight of hand. It’s by making sure — like the Californian Indians of yore — that we leave space for them to live, and live well, and if we can’t enhance the land, at least not degrade it. Rituals could be useful in getting this done. So far, we are failing miserably.
March 21, 2013 at 11:37 am
I have a lot of respect for Scott, whose several books I’ve found very helpful. This ag lecture is full of outdated ideas that no longer make sense. I wonder why he wanted to wade into an area he obviously is not quite up on. Good catch, Walter.
March 21, 2013 at 5:15 pm
I’m pondering why it is that questioning the validity of stories which characterize hunting as noble and sacred is interpreted as a condemnation of hunting/fishing, predation in general, the killing of animals and even of eating meat.
Obviously I don’t like to kill animals myself, but that by no mean indicates that I judge it to be wrong or bad. I don’t like to play golf either but that doesn’t mean that I think it is evil…… well, okay, maybe golf is 🙂 Why does anybody need to feel that hunting is sacred? Perhaps people think that if it is not sacred, if it just plain killing animals because we are hungry and we want to eat their bodies, then that would make it wrong. Personally, I don’t see how it necessarily follows.
To me it’s not a question of right or wrong, good or bad. I don’t feel qualified to make judgments of that kind.
What I do object to though, is the uncritical acceptance of stories which glorify hunting as being in some way spiritual; and especially to the notion that the prey gives itself willingly to the hunter. To me it is an issue of truth vs falseness, not good vs bad.
The analogy that occurs to me is a distasteful one and I don’t expect anyone to like it, but it accurately expresses how I see the issue of “alleged consent”.
If I was on the jury in a trial for rape and the defendant admits on the stand; “Yes, she struggled to escape. Yes, she fought me. Yes, she shouted No, no, no! repeatedly. Yes, she screamed for help” … I would not disregard that evidence.
If he went on to say…. “but I knew that really she was giving herself willingly to me ” I would question that severely. If then he said “I love women, they are sacred to me. While I was waiting in the bushes I did a little prayerful ceremony and then, lo and behold she came jogging along the path through the park toward me. I knew then that the woman spirits were bringing me this gift….”
Eucchh! I feel disgusted even typing this. But evidently some men think in this distorted, out-of-touch way. Hearing testimony such as this, I would feel sure that we were dealing with a deluded personality.
In a court of law we should be able to ask the complainant “Did you consent?” and hear her verbal testimony. With animals that isn’t possible. We only hear testimony from the hunter’s side and we are asked to disregard other evidence.
Just now I read a Wiki entry saying that Quinn “explores the idea of animism as the first world-wide religion. Okay, he’s probably right about that. One of the jobs religions do is to concoct stories which promote inter-tribe, inter-cultural, and inter-species conflict and aggression. “We are the chosen people. Our god is better than your god. Our god says we should attack and destroy your community, steal everything and enslave you. Conquering you is our sacred duty so that we can save your souls”. And on and on.
Insofar as animism promotes human supremacy over other species, it is doing the same thing.
Sacred aggression.
March 21, 2013 at 9:18 pm
Heh. I think there is a difference between animism, and shamanism, though I am not particularly qualified to babble about it. Just a hunch. Animism sees the world as alive. Shamanism… well, it encompasses much from healing and trances all the way to sleight of hand, tricksterism and con games.
I too think that no animal gives itself willingly to the hunter. All life wants to live, and that drive is a powerful one.
March 22, 2013 at 10:28 am
On the predation thing I would offer that stories of wild animals who ‘acquiesced and gave itself to the hunter’ (as WEM put it) come from native peoples firmly embedded in the ecological web and with longstanding relationships with their prey species. White European hunters have no such background or tradition, so I would guess that any similar talk coming from them is dishonest or just wishful thinking. I think that, for us, this kind of relationship is out of the question for at least the next 100 years, even if a modern hunter were to step into a pure, interdependent predator/prey subsistence tomorrow and never turn back. As with any relationship it takes time to heal and build up the trust after long periods of acrimony & abuse. (No, I don’t agree that all forms of predation amount to abuse, or ‘domination’ as Tamnaa writes. IMO that comes from those who, through agriculture, have exempted themselves from the ecological web and thus have no immediate pressure punishing insane, extinction-causing behaviour towards the native member species.) Basically, I think this phenomenon of prey ‘acquiescence’ comes from a place of deep inter-species relationship which we can’t hope to fully understand on an experiential level until much further down the line.
Tamnaa said:
Er, don’t you have canines? Also, maybe you’re not aware of the ‘Expensive Tissue Hypothesis‘ which argues that brain size correlates inversely to the size of the digestive tract. Brain growth among early humans came as a result of eating meat which meant that not so much energy had to be spent on the digestion of plant material, which required the larger gut. (Presumably the larger brain also came in handy for the organisational skill that hunting requires of the smaller, unspeedy mammal.) As Lierre Keith comments in the ‘Nutritional Vegetarians’ chapter of her book, The Vegetarian Myth (recommended):
Ah, but you’re arguing that this was unfair play and a counter-evolutionary move on the part of our ancestors, yes? I love forest gardens or ‘perennial polycultures’ as much as the next man, but it seems that living in that way stopped being an option for early humans as Africa dried up and the trees disappeared. Luckily (for their descendants!) they were able to hunt around for different ways of living, and were blessed with a sufficiently flexible physiology to allow for such a drastic change. Domination? Nah, it’s evolution, baby 🙂
Btw I haven’t seen anyone deny that humans were prey as well as predators – as one book I read recently put it, our ecological place for most of our species’ history has been as cat food(!). But yes, it’s an interesting question as to what kind of relationship we had towards our predators. I wish you luck finding answers.
@Vera – did you get up on the wrong side of the bed yesterday morning or something? I can’t answer you on Castaneda, but that swipe against Prechtel was ugly and unwarranted IMO. Have you read his books? If they were a money-making scheme then he must have been incredibly stupid to spend nearly 20 years in penury before thinking to put them out there (Talking Jaguar came out in 1998; US-backed genocides burned through Guatemala in the late 70s and early 80s)…
all the best anyway,
Ian
March 22, 2013 at 10:35 am
Ian, have you actually looked into Prechtel? I have read two of his books, and it prompted me to look. I found a couple of comments from anthropologists for whom he was an informant when he still lived in that village. They said that initially he was a trustworthy informant, and helpful. But later, he began to peddle stories that were just not true. I would not say stuff like that without some background.
If you look, and find information contradicting what I had found, I will happily retract.
March 22, 2013 at 10:41 am
We had been cat food! Well. Now I feel like all my labors to bring vittles to my kitties appeases the Cat God so they might not eat ME. I had a hunch of it all along! 😀
March 22, 2013 at 11:04 am
Well no, I haven’t, just the books & a few interviews. Sorry, but I’m not seeing how alleged misinformation to outsider anthropologists justifies claims that he sold out with his art and his books. Can you provide any specific examples of dishonesty in what he’s written?
March 22, 2013 at 11:50 am
I got triggered by some things in his books, that’s why I looked to crosscheck. When it came to his art, he said that normally, his art would be considered stealing from the tradition, and not allowed (my words; I don’t remember his own exact words anymore). Then he said that the man who headed his clan told him that it would be ok for an outsider to do, as long as he followed three rules. Then he refuses to divulge what those rules might be. I am not the only person who got a dishonest, self-serving “ping” out of it.
March 22, 2013 at 2:58 pm
Tamnaa:
I feel that calling animism a religion is just ignorant. It certainly does not encourage human-supremacy. It’s simply a term, made up by anthropologists, to describe folks who retain a realistic view of their ecosystem (i.e. that everything is the embodiment of a spiritual entity with it’s own will and character). My assumption is that folks with this view would inevitably be more responsible participants in their ecosystem.
You keep making comments regarding the morality of hunting, and I think you’re missing the point that the stories told are the primary way of passing on the knowledge of how to act as a responsible predator. I very much doubt that the folks mentioned by Wildearthman were telling their children “the deer offered itself to us, so go on and kill as many as you like”. In your courtroom scenario, the testimony of the prey species would be a stable population size (as in the pre-colonial bison herds regardless of your dreaded “buffalo jumps”). I agree that any stories about spirituality need to be questioned, but I feel that such stories are absolutely essential to regaining the knowledge of how to act as a responsible keystone species. The current trend continues to be secular/scientific humanism, which I feel is a truncated view of reality that has no hope of building ethical cultures over multiple generations (it seems to be doing the opposite so far).
Ian:
“white europeans have no such background or tradition” I must point out that this is true because it was intentionally erased by the roman catholic church, and later by fanatic converted sociopaths. It is precisely the re-invention of these traditions that I feel is absolutely crucial for my ability to act as a keystone species. Also, the sad fact is that other top-predators are mostly gone, and the only realistic strategy for living alongside feral hogs, deer, etc, is to manage their populations.
March 22, 2013 at 6:54 pm
Only have time for a couple of replies: Ian M. Yes, I still have the teeth that dentists call canines but they don’t resemble those of my cat or a wolf. Actually, canines don’t prove anything. Most mammals including herbivores have them. Deer, pandas, horses (they sometimes have to be removed because they interfere with the bridle) and the impressive and (mostly) herbivorous primate, the gorilla.
Some people maintain that we are not even anatomically omnivores. They tend to advocate vegetarianism which is not my intension:
http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/natural.html
I’ve heard of the “Expensive Tissue Hypothesis” but I should look into it more deeply.
Osker; yes, calling Animism a religion may very well be ignorant. According to the Wiki entry that I was quoting, Daniel Quinn has written a book called “Tales of Adam” In which he says Animism is the first religion and that it is his own belief system. Wiki isn’t the best source, as we know. Perhaps you have read the book and can say that he doesn’t call it a religion?
March 22, 2013 at 9:21 pm
Larger Moral Issues
There are some larger moral issues we are ignoring in order to obsess on much smaller ones. Not that these larger moral issues are necessarily easy to deal with, especially as we all come at them from broken or fragmented worldviews. It may be that we cannot reach agreement on these issues, but I think they are worth exploring if only to try to reach some clarity. For starters, let’s stipulate that all living creatures like being alive better than the prospect of not being alive. And let’s further stipulate that one of the uncompromising conditions of Life on Earth is that some living beings must die for others to live. I believe these two propositions are pretty uncontroversial. But I want to add a third (provisional) stipulation, in order to get at these larger issues, and that is this: that all Life, and the Earth itself, are sacred. What I mean by sacred should clarify itself along the way, but for now let’s just say that all Life is dear and worthy, and to be cherished and highly valued. So now we have three propositions that, taken together, leave us with a paradox.
While I cannot presume to speak for all animists, I am going to come at this paradox from the animist point of view. I feel I can do this because I was born an animist, and developed my animistic sensibility as a young boy living very close to Nature, and spending a lot of time alone in the natural world. I spent three years in the military and a decade in university, which pulled me away some from my earlier experiences and revelations, but animism soon reasserted itself in my life shortly after that, and the seventeen years I spent as a Wilderness Ranger for the US Forest Service, hiking and camping in unspoiled backcountry, only confirmed my commitment to the animistic worldview.
My great grandfather was an Indian Agent for the Sac and Fox Tribe in Iowa near the end of the nineteenth century, and I inherited all his papers, photographs, and the book he wrote—and I had it in mind to write a book about him and his life. I realized at the time (this was the mid-‘eighties) that I needed to know more about Indians to put his life in context. I had read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (a document of devastating truth-telling about American Indian policy in action) but little else in that line. Once I started down that road, I found myself totally absorbed in the subject of indigenous lives and lifeways. For three years straight I read nothing but books by and about Indians. After that, I broadened my focus to include many different areas of inquiry, but I kept reading books about Indians as more became available, with a grand total, so far, of about three hundred books (as well as a few dozen journal articles). So, such as they are, these are my credentials to try to represent the animist and indigenous point of view.
The impression I get from this prolonged exposure to the indigenous mind is that, while individual cultures might exhibit great variety in outward trappings, nearly all shared certain core beliefs. Indeed, I believe there is enough uniformity in core beliefs to speak meaningfully of an indigenous worldview. Many tribal peoples speak of All Our Relations, for instance, by which they indicate their understanding that humans are biologically and spiritually related to all living creatures on Earth. Many speak of Mother Earth and Father Sun, indicating a subordinate and dependent relationship to these Life-giving Beings. A corollary to these two core convictions is that All Life is Sacred. Also, for them, the world is both physical and spiritual at the same time: both natural and supernatural.
All Life is Sacred, and yet…one must take life in order to live. How do you deal with this conundrum? If you are a people who are living in the Gift, then you are likely to see the life that gives you life as a gift. It is a physical gift, but is at the same time a gift from the spirit world. That is why you receive the gift with gratitude and treat the gift with respect. That is why all aspects of the hunt, as well as the butchering, the sharing equitably, and the eating of meat, are all invested with respect and ritual. You make good use of all that you kill—the bones, the hide, the internal organs—as a sign of respect for the sacredness of Life. Disrespect brings disfavor from the spirit world, and bad things can follow– quite possibly a lot of bad things. Therefore, when an individual shows disrespect or lack of gratitude, his fellows will not be happy about it, and will let him feel their displeasure. Attitudes of humility, respect, and gratitude are thus group norms among most indigenous peoples of the world.
Consider, too, the situation of the animal that is taken for human sustenance. In the case of the hunted animal, that creature lives wild and free right up until the time of its death. If an ungulate, it lives in a natural herd of its own kind, feeding as its kind do, on whatever wild meadow grasses it can find. It beds down in the forest, drinks from the stream, and has free run of a vast wild territory.
Then consider the condition of a steer that is pasture raised on grass—the very best condition we humans offer our incarcerated livestock. Genetically altered by human selection for passivity and minimal brain activity, these captives are confined to monotonous monocultures of grass and trampled mud, their foreshortened lives fore-doomed. If these animals are corn-fed in a feedlot (the standard practice of agribusiness today) their environment is one of mud and manure, no shade, and a trough of slobber water to drink, in a ghetto of hooved prisoners like themselves. These animals’ lives are not just taken at the end; their lives are stolen from the very beginning.
Then put an historical lens on where these animals are confined. What natural ecosystem was destroyed to create all these pastures and feedlots and hog wallows, and how many creatures belonging to those systems were displaced and killed, and how many generations of their kind were lost to this theft of their land?
Tamana, you descry a particular animist meme that supports the idea that a prey animal (or its master spirit) might willingly give the gift of life to its predator, the human. You say it is a sham and a delusion. I see it as the best story a person or culture can tell themselves to promote a sense of gratitude and respect toward their prey. Those who see the predator-prey relationship as adversarial rather than symbiotic are not as likely to feel (and show) a similar disposition toward the animals they take. You have your rationale for why this “story” can’t be true, but let me ask you about some of our civilized stories.
What do you think of the one we are living in now which says that our economy must continue to grow and grow and grow? Is that a true story we are living in?
What about the one that says that Nature is nothing but a stockpile of resources for the exclusive use of humans?
How about the one that says that the civilized human being is the apex of four billion years of biological evolution, and the world is ours for the taking? Or, alternatively, that god made the world just for us, to do with as we please?
What do you think of these fine stories, these cultural myths we live in, and use to destroy the world? Do these stories meet with your approval? And what kind of future do you think that we and these stories have to look forward to?
What we are looking at here is two distinctly different worldviews. One is about living in the Gift; the other about living in the Theft. Both have their supporting stories. As a lifelong animist, my choice, if I truly had one, would be to live in the Gift, and in the stories that support and inform a Gift culture. Instead, I live in the culture of civilization, which is based upon theft, deception, and deadly violence. The thing that isolates me from most others is that I see through this culture; I see it for exactly what it is. It took ten thousand years to become what it is today, and is not likely to change just because that would be best for every creature on Earth, including me. The one thing I can do in the face of our fateful trajectory is call the story out for the cruel deception it is. And try, as best I can, to live in the Gift, and not in the Theft. Try, as best I can.
Ian, you say something to the effect that identifying as an animist is probably wishful thinking for one of our European heritage–and you may or may not be correct in this. I saw a lone goose flying overhead today, and could identify with him. Animism, which I would call preligion rather than religion, is best practiced within a group of fellow animists, and as a natural part of that group’s culture. Believe me, I’d take that if I could authentically get it, and I’ve tried. But, since I have always been an animist at heart, and have made life choices that kept me close to Nature, I have managed to remain a practicing animist isolate for most of my life. I walk an hour in old growth forest every day and feel the spirit beings around me. I express my thanks for being alive and where I am, and find the attitude of gratitude rewarding in and of itself–and also appropriate for the Gift I’ve been given.
What we need are new stories, new explaining myths to live in, to make meaning of our lives. Some of those new stories might very well be quite old stories—the kind told around winter campfires, deep in enchanted Nature.
March 23, 2013 at 2:08 am
Ian M. I tried to find the hypothesis you spoke about with little luck. Most of the articles I saw were intent on refuting it. If our guts were as short as those of true predators we wouldn’t be able to digest vegetable matter, right?
Since we now have ways of obtaining meat other than hunting in the wild, I don’t see how it relates to questions about hunting today or in the future. I guess we could say that if humans had refrained from predatory ways they would never have become clever enough to reach such destructive levels of over-exploitation. Sounds good to me!
Wildearthman; since you ask me rhetorically what I think about the modern industrial way of life it seems that, to you, there can be only two alternatives. If I say that killing and eating one’s relatives doesn’t seem to be a “sacred” act to me, you seem to assume that I must therefor approve of commercial agriculture and industry. In this way of thinking, only two options, A and B can exist. If B is bad then A must be good. Anybody who’s not a Republican must be a Democrat!
I would just like to ask you to consider the possibility that both A and B might be bad (as in U.S. politics) and that other options might at least potentially exist.
I have to say again that you write very eloquently and movingly, yet so many of your statements provoke immediate questioning.
“… one of the uncompromising conditions of Life on Earth is that some living beings must die for others to live.” If you’re talking in general terms about how death is inevitable so that new generations can continue on, or about how it’s impossible for all the salmon’s eggs to hatch out and every one of the fingerlings survive and grow and make it back upstream to spawn, then of course it’s a valid statement. I feel, though, that you’re talking about eating. If so the term “others” is limited to physiologically specific predators. I can’t think of any herbivores that must kill to live. You know that the way ungulates feed does not kill the grass, but rather helps maintain it. Koalas don’t kill the eucalyptus trees. Pandas don’t kill the bamboo. Any species that eats fruit obtains nourishment and helps the tree species to disperse it’s seeds as well.
“All Life is Sacred, and yet…one must take life in order to live”… so, by “one” you must mean humans, right? (because so many animals don’t kill to eat) Do you really believe that humans will necessarily die if don’t eat meat ?
There’s a group of people who live mostly in India called the Jains. They, along with many people who are not Jains practice “ahimsa”, which means non-harming. Committed Jains don’t eat meat and they avoid all killing. If your statement were true they would all have died out by now, wouldn’t they? Instead, they have thrived, generation after generation going back (they say) long before Gautama Buddha’s time, 500 or so BCE .
Humans can live just fine without meat but nevertheless, we choose to eat it. That’s okay with me. I respect vegetarianism but I’m not a vegetarian, nor an advocate.
I just think that the way humans live has brought the world into deep peril and we must radically improve our behavior. Idealizing indigenous foragers as if their ways offer some hope for the future will get us nowhere. The troubling fact is, it gives us a convenient excuse for inertia.
Wildearthman, there seems to be some question among us about what animism really entails. You clearly have a close relationship with it so I’d like to ask you; when early hunter-gatherers performed any sort of ritual or prayer asking the spirits to give them success in a hunt, is that, along with the thankfulness, a part of true animism?
March 23, 2013 at 7:07 am
Ian M; “Australopithecines, our species’ forerunner, ate meat. ” Yes, some meat. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History shows the ones we know most about eating a predominantly plant based diet with the occasional addition of some small animals.
Afarensis: http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/australopithecus-afarensis
Africanus: http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/australopithecus-africanus
March 23, 2013 at 8:47 am
@Vera – you don’t trust him, okay fine. Maybe I’ve been too credulous by comparison (certainly wouldn’t be the first time). I still think if you’re going to throw around accusations about dishonesty – cashing in on pretty stories, pretend-art, pretend-shamanism as you put it – you’re going to need more than the word of outsider anthropologists (who wouldn’t have their own axes to grind?) or your ‘pings’ of self-service. Have you written off everything he wrote as a consequence of this? Sad if so, IMO – I see much of value in those books even if the author wasn’t quite the same in real life.
@Osker – sorry, yes I didn’t word that very well. I too see the importance of displaced, invasive peoples digging deep to find their own ancestral indigenous identities. Interestingly one of the best ways of uncovering those lost traditions over here is through old churches and christian propaganda tales of priests taking on the old folk gods. If you want to find the Green Man you have to go looking in churches! Re: other extinct predators – yes, I think when our culture extirpated them we took on the responsibility of doing all the jobs they used to do. While I don’t like the word ‘management’ (as if civilised peoples were in a position to sensibly manage anything, given their track record and ongoing abuses!) I’d agree that striking up new predator/prey relationships with the other feral animals is the only realistic way forward. Either that or bring the f*ing wolves back!
@Tamnaa – interesting about the canines in herbivores. Guess I’ll have to stop using that one… Here’s a link to the original Expensive Tissue paper which doesn’t require any registration: http://references.260mb.com/Paleontologia/Aiello1995.pdf I notice most of the purported debunkings on the internet come from vegan- or vegetarian-promoting sites. This one appeared to make some reasonable objections based on a paper published in Nature, but I could be missing something as I haven’t looked into this in detail. I don’t think anyone’s arguing that the human gut indicates we’re ‘true predators’ and incapable of digesting all kinds of plant matter. We can make use of the sugars and starches (although relying too heavily on these causes a host of problems), but can’t break down cellulose as the herbivores can through rumination & multiple stomachs.
Strange to see the table on the site you linked to arguing for human herbivory, as I’ve seen something very similar suggesting the entirely opposite conclusion! L.Keith provides it a few pages on from the above quote and it comes from Walter Voegtlin’s 1975 book, The Stone Age Diet, comparing the digestive operations of dogs, sheep and humans. Here it is in context so you can read his discussion: http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/carn_herb_comparison4.html#.UU21Hhnyyt8 The tables seem to disagree on stomach acidity, intestine/colon length and the manner of chewing. The guy at your link doesn’t talk about stomach bacteria which according to Voegtlin aren’t present in dogs or humans but are essential to the sheep. I’m not in a position to arbitrate, unfortunately. We’re not in agreement about the ‘destructive levels of over-exploitation’ if you’re talking about common predation. Domestication on the other hand… I’m glad you’re not trying to push vegetarianism/veganism on us 🙂
@WEM – ‘you say something to the effect that identifying as an animist is probably wishful thinking for one of our European heritage’ – not quite: I was referring to the deep predator/prey relationship wherein animals appear to ‘offer’ themselves to those hunting them (not any old opportunist, but one who has spent a lifetime apprenticing him/herself to the animal in question). I think animism is the default human condition and that civilised parenting and schooling are designed to destroy those values in children, with politicians, scientists, priests, the media etc. pouncing anywhere else they may resurface in society. It mirrors agriculture, as I see it: a constant war against the spontaneous will of the land, frustrating the inbuilt desire to rewild. Holding onto an animist viewpoint is very difficult & painful (not to say impossible) in a culture that operates on the notion that all physical matter is dead and machine-like – available to exploit as a ‘resource’ as disembodied business interests see fit. I speak from experience!
Oh, and @Tamnaa (again), ‘Tales of Adam’ is good in an allegorical kind of way. I’d recommend ‘The Story of B’ for a really explicit description of animism, as D.Quinn interprets it. I think he said once that he wrote the book as an attempt to explain animism. WEM seems to be doing a pretty good job in the above comments, though…
cheers,
Ian
March 23, 2013 at 9:55 am
Our Best Storytellers
I am puzzled by the attitudes that some of us are taking toward our best storytellers. In particular, Tamana lambastes Daniel Quinn for two things especially: being a successful author, and living a suburban lifestyle. He also seems to imply that Quinn is supporting himself on lies (or something like that). And then leavergirl disparages the work of Carlos Castaneda and Martin Prechtel for reasons that seem rather obscure to me. No one has mentioned Marlo Morgan, author of Mutant Message Down Under, but I am sure that she would come in for the same kind of criticism as Castaneda, namely that they both made liberal use of their imaginations. Personally, I take a different attitude toward all these storytellers, one that is not overly concerned with the scientific accuracy of every detail, but looks instead to the main thrust of their narratives.
I read all of Castaneda’s earlier books, eagerly, one after another. I did the same with Daniel Quinn, wanting to know everything he knew about the hidden world behind the false-front world that passes for our reality today. The value of these authors, it seems to me (and this includes Prechtel and Morgan) is that they all offer an alternative narrative to that of the dominant culture. I was hungry for such a narrative, as I believe were many others, especially those who began to see through the deceptions of our Earth-devouring culture, and wanted instead a story that promoted Life and Love and Community, instead of war and exploitation and death. As more and more people begin to see through civilization, and see what its agenda truly is, there will be hunger for more such storytellers—those with a compelling and coherent counter-narrative. I think we should encourage and support such storytellers, rather than pick them apart on technicalities.
About two decades ago I read three books that made me question what civilization was really all about. One was Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael: another was Jim Mason’s An Unnatural Order; the third was My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Civilization, by Chellis Glendenning. I recall writing to a former literature professor of mine (shortly after reading these books) that I no longer worshipped at the altar of civilization—which in my years as a literature major I certainly had done. I could now see that there was something deeply wrong with our culture, and that sense deepened through the years. But it wasn’t until I read Derrick Jensen’s Endgame: the Problem of Civilization that I got the full clear picture of what civilization really is. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has doubts about the present trajectory of Western civilization. I also recommend What is Sustainable by Richard Adrian Reese. And, if you are looking for a shorter version, and a counter narrative written by someone (a younger person) who has lived the life outside the dominant paradigm, I highly recommend Unlearn, Rewild, by Miles Olson.
My own belief is that civilization is poisoned all the way through, and is not worth saving, even if that could be done. After reading Jason Godesky’s thesis number 29, of this Thirty Theses, I now no longer worry too much about this poisonous culture surviving the coming meltdown. With nothing left to steal, the Culture of Theft will be more than irrelevant: it will be seen as the force of destruction that it is, and always has been, and shunned for the damage it’s done.
Abandoning all the old stories that brought it all down is going to leave a cultural vacuum, unless we can fill that void with new stories—stories that affirm Life; stories that integrate the human being into the Community of Life: stories that exemplify right relationship with Nature. The future will need its own storytellers, to be sure. But in the meantime, don’t you think we should be encouraging and supporting those storytellers living today who can see beyond the myopic present, and can offer a counter narrative of this Life-affirming kind— as voices of transition? I certainly do, and I hope others will join me in welcoming their imaginations as well as their truths.
March 23, 2013 at 12:04 pm
Lest I have conveyed the wrong meaning, let me try to be clearer. I have nothing against storytelling — in fact, we badly need more stories, and better ones. The problem I have with Castaneda is not regarding his stories — I myself have some friends who were very inspired — my problem is with his getting his graduate degree in the department of anthropology, not English. Does it matter when people lie and cheat their way ahead? It matters to me. You can tell pretty stories but if you behave like a scumbag, you’re no friend of mine.
Quinn’s an old guy who lives an urban lifestyle, and poking at him for it, seems a cheap shot. He did a lot of good, and I am not aware of any dishonesty on his part. He does not live the neo-tribal lifestyle; that’s for us younger folk to invent. That does not mean that he got everything right — for example, his contention that Cain was killing Abel all over the near east is upside down — Abel was the farmer. Oops… But so it goes, we all make mistakes. He was amazingly prescient about a whole lot of stuff; every time I read him I learn something new.
Chellis Glendinning too tells a straight story; she is not pretending to be a shaman or a UFOnaut or having access to some special secrets of the Ascended Masters to get it across. Very much recommended.
Ian, no, I have not written off everything he says. I just take people like him with a big grain of salt, and keep an eye on my wallet. 😉
March 23, 2013 at 4:41 pm
Ian M; The carnivore/omnivore/herbivore question has not been a priority issue for me but as I look into it, I am finding it more interesting. Rather than supplying the link to the vegetarian site I should have gone a step further and given the source:
I don’t know how authoritative this doctor’s info is but the observations about jaws and so on seem very reasonable to me and he explains it quite well, I think.
Primates are certainly not ruminants, ie they/we are not equipped to digest cellulose. Primates can and do live primarily on the softer tissues of plants occasionally supplemented by grubs, eggs, snails and small fish, etc. I have a hunch that molluscs were an important part of the diet of the primate who eventually evolved into homo (think shell middens and whacking clams with beach rocks to get the meat).
I always thought we were omnivores but it is obvious that our jaws and teeth don’t resemble those of bears and raccoons.
It’s clear that, as we learned to hunt, our diet and nutritional pattern changed. If this greater emphasis on meat eating brought about larger brain capacity and cleverness, it would seem that hunting behavior led directly to toolmaking, use of fire, and all the meddling with nature that result in the evils of industrial society.
Agree?
March 23, 2013 at 7:11 pm
Tamnaa:
“Idealizing indigenous foragers as if their ways offer some hope for the future will get us nowhere.”
I strongly disagree with this. I’m a little too tired to delve too deeply, but basically I feel that the only hope for a positive human future is through a renewal of foraging traditions. My current work is promoting the use and knowledge surrounding wild nuts as staple foods (acorns, hickories, black walnuts), as well as wild vegetables.
I would also disagree with your jump from toolmaking and use of fire to meddling with nature and industrial society.
peace
March 23, 2013 at 7:27 pm
Well, perhaps there is a difference between renewing certain traditions, and idealizing a way of life as the answer to all our problems? I vote for renewal.
March 23, 2013 at 9:29 pm
Tamana and Ian: I just finished reading After Eden: the Evolution of Human Domination by Kirkpatrick Sale, and according to him: “The evidence for hunting of any kind is particularly slim before seventy thousand years ago, and of large animals I would say non-existent.” This contradicts an earlier statement I made about Homo erectus being a hunter, and also calls into question the 400,000 year figure attributed to Liere Keith. There is evidence to suggest that Homo erectus was eating scavenged meat going way back—meat appropriated from other predators—but not hunted. It is Sale’s thesis that something vital changed in the human psyche somewhere between 70,000 and 45,000 years ago, something that made Homo sapiens sapiens not only more ruthless and violent than any hominid before, but also triggered a change in self-concept: something like a superiority complex, which made us think of ourselves as above, and apart from, the Community of Life. He speaks of narcissism born of trauma. I don’t know if he is correct in all these assertions, but it causes me to reconsider the human status as a top predator.
Certainly, as Tamana points out, we were a prey species for a very long time. And then, at some point in our (fairly recent) evolutionary history, we turned the tables on our predators, and became a very dangerous species in our own right. If all this is accurate then “hunter” and “predator” has not been imprinted on the human brain for all that long—and could be, in some ways, a mismatch for who we more deeply are, or at least who we were not that long ago. Sale doesn’t say exactly this, but he very much idealizes Homo erectus, who, in his eyes, compares very favorably to Homo sapiens, and what we have become. He says:
“So the bones speak: Homo erectus, marvelously adapted for life on the African savanna, tall and immensely strong, walking upright, traveling far, with large brains, rich diets, cooking hearths, pair-bonding bands, simple and efficient technology—and nearly two million years of success.” (p. 112)
He later adds:”As scavengers they could live intimately in nature, as animals and birds do, as hunters necessarily can’t once their killing habits are known.”(p. 120)
Sale seems nostalgic for a lost Eden and an earlier innocence of the human condition, but beyond that he appears to believe Homo erectus could serve as a model for a future human. I am not sure about any of this, but I think that is my point: none of this is exactly settled fact, and so it might be a little early for settled opinions.
March 23, 2013 at 10:59 pm
Wildearthman, Sale is completely wrong about that. That is laughable. There are fire-hardened spears from 400,000 years ago, and the evidence for hunting is being pushed father and father back. Our evolving brains required meat, and plenty of it. And I don’t think they hunted squirrels with those spears…
People who want to fish for trauma can go back to the Toba explosion that wiped out most of the sapiens, they say only about 5-10,000 survived. That was about 70,000 years ago.
And by the way, we were never “marvelously adapted for the savannah”. The savannah theory bit the dust a while back. Any naked biped running around the savannah would soon be 1) scorched to a crisp, and 2) easily caught by the four leggeds who can outrun us hands down. — Fun stuff, eh? 🙂
March 24, 2013 at 6:19 am
Wildearthman; I’ve never read anything by Sale but “narcissism born of trauma” expresses the big click that happened in my mind a few days ago. Now there’s another book I will have to try to get although obtaining books in English here (Thailand) involves a lot of effort. I agree with you completely that we just don’t know what happened so long ago and should keep our minds open. Vera’s objection about the timing is not particularly relevant to the actual significance of this interpretation, I think. The mammalian and reptilian parts of the brain go back a long way. Intuitively I feel that this “superiority complex, which made us think of ourselves as above, and apart from, the Community of Life” is passed along in genetic memory, ancient reflexes retained in the nervous system.
I’m leery about looking back with nostalgia but, to find our way forward, we need clarity and the more we can understand about our own background, the clearer the way ahead will be.
Today I was thinking about the North American indigenous peoples and wondering if there is any good example of pure nomadic, immediate-return hunter-gatherers among them. So many were agricultural that the field is narrowed down a lot. In the northern taiga the tribes were not at all agricultural (although Zerzan would say they were because they had domesticated dogs) but they hunkered down over the long cold winters and so were only semi-nomadic and they probably stored dried or frozen meat, fish and berries (who wouldn’t?).
I’m more familiar with tribes on the Pacific North Coast. There you find sedentary, non-agricultural people settled in permanent villages with relatively dense populations. They were highly socially-stratified, aggressively warlike, a lot of trade went on and they accumulated surplus and wealth including slaves.
We know about Mexico city when Cortez arrived. Enough said.
Any good candidates for tribes whose way of life resembled the !Kung San? There must be some.
I was thinking about the Hopi people and wondering if their agricultural practices made them necessarily non-animistic. Is true animism restricted to hunting culture? Is it possible to have animistic sensibilities with regard to cultivation of plants or domestication of animals?
March 24, 2013 at 6:33 am
Vera, obviously Einstein’s brain functioned well enough without meat, Pythagarus did alright as well. Tolstoy, Gandhi, G.B. Shaw were considered fairly bright, I’d say.
Can you point me toward substantiating evidence for the statement; “Our evolving brains required meat, and plenty of it” ? How is it that brain tissue requires animal protein during the period in which it evolves and then does not require it to function well later down the road?
Given what this big-brained primate species has done and is continuing to do to the world, what do you think about it’s remarkable increase in brain capacity? Has it been a good thing, overall?
March 24, 2013 at 11:44 am
As for the large brain capacity being a good thing, the jury is still out. If we go extinct, that will be a clear answer.
Our evolving brains have required plenty of fatty acids (like omega-3) that (mostly) only meat and fish supply. They also say that in our evolution, access to plenty of meat (a concentrated food source) allowed our gut to shorten and our brains to grow larger. There are also other nutrients like vitamin B12 and carnitine that only meat provides.
I think the evidence for meat eating is also this: bonobos and chimps all hunt for meat. Even the veg gorilla sometimes eats meat. Chances are we hominins also hunted for meat. No indigenous culture was ever fully vegetarian (though some were close to being carnivorous).
As for individuals, some people tolerate veg diets (with proper supplementation) and others don’t. Yet others sicken on it.
My comment of course had nothing to do with the intelligence of any particular vegetarian. Nor do we know if the historical ones supplemented with fish, shellfish, or insects.
http://www.fi.edu/learn/brain/fats.html
News to me that Tolstoy was a veg. He grew pigs, though he did such a poor job he eventually abandoned the effort. He may have been in some parts of his life, but mostly not, would be my guess. Certainly not when he was young. Tolstoy was, I am afraid, a real hypocrite, and it is hard to say what he actually did and what he just exhorted should be done.
And I assume that all the people you quote had some meat during their childhoods when children are most vulnerable to deficiencies.
March 24, 2013 at 12:03 pm
North American Nomads
Tamana: The question you raise about nomadic immediate return hunters in North America goes immediately into complications of history. Most hunting tribes in the lower forty eight weren’t anthropologized until long after (several generations, in most cases) they had been forcibly removed from their traditional territories and lifeways, so getting reliable information from traumatized, partially westernized informants, is in doubt. In any case, I can’t think of any anthropological studies that exactly meet your criteria. In Canada, history was a little kinder to the First Nations, allowing most of them to remain in their home territories, and a little closer to their traditional ways—up to a point. Canadian Indian policy tended to mirror American Indian policy (with boarding schools and whatnot) but in a slightly gentler vein. Because of climatic and topographical conditions in the far North, some tribal peoples escaped the worst, just by their isolation. One such tribe is the Rock Cree of northern Manitoba, who meet your criteria in all ways but one: I believe they hunkered down in one place in winter, but, if I recall correctly, they did not put up great stores of food to tide them over the winter, but went out and hunted and fished instead. I wish I had the book here to refer to, but it seems to me they had the belief that storing food dishonored and disrespected the spirits that provided for them, and showed a lack of faith that they would be provided for. This is truly living in the Gift, and in the hands of the gods. The anthropologist Robert Brightman spent many years among these people, and wrote a very engaging and readable book about it, called Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships. No longer in print, this book is available used through Amazon.
The other book I would recommend is Make Prayers to the Raven: a Koyukon View of the Northern Forest by Richard K Nelson. If you want to understand animism, this is a very good place to start. In their view, all of the animals that they know so well are invested with spirit, and each with its own particular spirit and power. And what they know about the plant world around them is absolutely amazing—and yet comes naturally to a people who have lived in their home territory for many generations, and whose daily lives depend upon knowing who they are in relation to everything else. You don’t often get to experience human beings living lives perfectly integrated into the Community of Life around them—but in this book you do. It too is available through Amazon.
You ask if animism applies strictly to hunters, and to that I would say not at all. Certainly the Koyukon women who do the foraging are animists, because they believe that plants have spirits, too, and they cultivate particular relationships with particular plants, with attitudes of gratitude and humility, often seeing plants as their teachers. Living in their traditional ways, the Koyukon are living in the Gift, as are the Rock Cree.
When it comes to those of us of European heritage, with our gardens and farm animals, I think it begins to look like not the real thing, no matter how benign our intentions. And that is because we are not living in the Gift; we are living in the Theft. I tend to many hundreds of individual plants in the course of a year or season, and I try to be respectful of their individual being. Indeed, I feel like I have a way with plants; we get on well together, but I can’t stretch my understanding of animism to believe that that is what I am practicing. I like what Ian had to say in this matter: “ I think animism is the default human condition and that civilised parenting and schooling are designed to destroy those values in children, with politicians, scientists, priests, the media etc. pouncing anywhere else they may resurface in society. It mirrors agriculture, as I see it: a constant war against the spontaneous will of the land, frustrating the inbuilt desire to rewild. Holding onto an animist viewpoint is very difficult & painful (not to say impossible) in a culture that operates on the notion that all physical matter is dead and machine-like – available to exploit as a ‘resource’ as disembodied business interests see fit. I speak from experience!”
I especially like the understanding implied by the phrase “spontaneous will of the land.” Respecting the spontaneous will of the land, and altering that as little as possible consistent with living in close relationship to the land, would, in my view, be the animistic way. What I do in my raised beds, for instance, is not particularly respectful of the spontaneous will of the land—even though I am trying to work with Nature, and be sensitive to the plants as individuals.
So, for now, that is the best I can do to answer your questions. And I am in full agreement with you that understanding who we are and how we got to be this way is vital to making a better human (and planetary) future.
March 24, 2013 at 12:31 pm
The extensive quotes in my post are from Grateful Prey. Available free here:
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft0f59n6tb;brand=ucpress
March 25, 2013 at 7:54 am
Wildearthman; many if not most of the indigenous tribes of North America were well established in agriculture when Europeans first made contact with them. Squanto didn’t teach the pilgrims to hunt moose or deer and, although he may have showed them local fish they could catch, he famously taught them to grow corn.
Are those Native American tribal peoples who practiced indigenous agriculture completely disqualified from membership in the circle of true Animist societies?
Can their spiritual connection with nature exist only through hunting/foraging?
March 25, 2013 at 10:28 am
For those who (like Osker) take an active interest in matters spiritual, I offer the following alternative historical perspective:
Before the Agricultural Revolution, before the domestication of plants and animals and of human beings, the world was enchanted and inhabited by spirit beings, as well as by people. Anatomically modern humans began to appear in Africa about 200,000 years ago. With the eruption of super-volcano Mt. Toba, some 75,000 years ago on the island of Sumatra, the number of our common ancestors was reduced to just a few thousand, due to six years of volcanic-winter conditions all over the planet. In this time period, something happened to the human brain to change anatomically modern humans into behaviorally modern humans. What that something was, and how it affected our evolution, is open to speculation. But in any case, following this population bottleneck, and in the context of harsh climatic conditions in Africa, a succession of migrations out of Africa followed over a period of twenty or so thousand years. It is from this dispersal of humans that the continents, and many islands, got peopled.
We cannot know the precise conditions of the living systems into which our distant ancestors journeyed and settled, but I think it is fair to suppose that many ecosystems were behaving at near-optimum performance levels. Or, put another way, 3.8 billion years of evolutionary history had created complexity, diversity, and deep resilience against stochastic events, and though there had been such events, like the fallout from the super-volcano and intermittent rapid changes in climate, there was no one species (like us, for instance) that managed to throw ecosystems severely out of balance. When suitable human habitats were found, I imagine them to be in rather pristine condition, some even resembling the Garden of Eden.
What I am trying to get at here is something ephemeral and subtle, and it has to do with the relationship between the human and the natural world—a relationship that requires that Nature be what it is, and not be transformed into something else, in order for this vital relationship to prosper.
Before monotheism there was place-based spirituality. And just as the world of humans managed to develop more than five thousand distinct languages, there were probably, at one time or another, that many and more spiritual traditions or bodies of spiritual practice. I take it that every one of these was influenced by interactions between a particular group of people and their immediate physical surroundings. Our Western scientific worldview would deny these people the spirit world they (collectively, and pretty much unanimously) believed animated, or was somehow associated with, those same individuated physical surroundings—dells and glens, rivers and mountains, groves of trees and individual trees, rocks and caves and enchanted grottos. Many indigenous peoples are on record as stating that the plants, the animals, the rocks and trees, interact with them and let the people know how to live in their particular place. If the people pay attention to these voices, and cultivate the appropriate attitudes of humility and respect, and if they perform all of the prescribed rituals, and live by local and Universal Laws, then they get to go on living in that place.
Spiritual practice in this context is at once an individual and a group affair. The group holds a body of moral strictures, rituals, and stories in common, and ceremony is undertaken as a group, informed by shared beliefs. The individual participates in the common mythos, but also has his own relationship to the world of spirit. This, I would say, is the archetype of the spiritual life of humans, and it endured through the millennia. For that reason, it became embedded in our collective unconscious. This is the kind of spiritual experience we are hard-wired to expect, and in which those before us likely found deep and full satisfaction. But since our particular culture came on the scene, and with it the rise of monotheism, this is not the spiritual experience that is open to us.
It is not open to us for many reasons, not least of which is the systematic erasure of the particularities of place as the civilized peoples of the world displaced the indigenous aboriginals, overrunning their territory and transforming it into something else. When a cathedral-like dell in the woods is felled and bulldozed, it would seem that the spirits who once inhabited that place would be driven off. The culture of civilization tells us that no such spirits exist, or ever have existed. According to one major civilized tradition, there is only one spirit being, except that that one is actually three. Wherever this particular proselytizing religion has gone in the world to convert all to its One True Truth, it has been intolerant of the Natives’ beliefs in the many spirits of their place, and has taken violent measures to suppress both the beliefs and the believers.
When science came to rule the world (its roots in physics, chemistry, and mathematics) it came with a prejudicial disposition against anything that couldn’t be weighed, measured, or computed. Science’s divorce from religion became final about the time of the Newtonian-Cartesian synthesis. From then on any mention of invisible realms or anything smacking of mysticism or spirituality became categorically taboo. Along with the taboo came an attitude of scorn and disdain that is routinely passed on from generation to generation of the scientifically inclined. This attitude, and the ideology that feeds it, pretty much precludes arriving at new knowledge about invisible Earthly realms through scientific inquiry, as all who try are labeled as quacks and not authentic scientists.
In such a climate as this, mention of spirits residing in particular places is, at the very least, suspect. How do I know that spirits inhabit places, and that attentive humans can converse with those spirits? In truth, I don’t know that as pure provable fact. I have spent a lot of time in wild Nature, and I have had any number of good feelings arise from that contact—feelings of appreciation, joy, exhilaration, awe, and others less easy to name. I have also had two visionary experiences in Nature when I was nine: one that told me what I would do with my life, and one that told me where I would live. Told me, I say, but not like a voice whispering in my ear. In the case of my life’s work it was more a feeling-sense and Gestalt than anything else. In the case of where I would live, it was a clear picture of a river, with no injunctions attached. Later I would see that river and recognize it; later still I would make it my home.
What I do know for sure is that many an indigenous person has gone on record as declaring the place where he and his people live is inhabited by spirits that “speak” to individuals within the tribe, and convey all kinds of information useful to the individual, or to the group as a whole. Often the information received will pertain to how the people should relate to their chosen place. Black Elk Speaks and Lame Deer Seeker of Visions are only the most prominent of hundreds of narratives wherein people attached to place tell of their communion with spirit beings in their place.
What the juggernaut of civilization has visited upon these peoples and their lands is complete or partial erasure. In the process, this destructive force has removed not only for them, but for all the rest of us, a vital human connection to Nature. Where in this world can a human now go that hasn’t been transformed from its original enchanted, spirit-animated physical perfection (as accrued over millennia of geomorphology and biological evolution) into something not itself? When you pave paradise and put up a parking lot, something gets lost in translation, not lost just in terms of beauty to ugliness, but lost in terms of human development and potential. The human being cannot be wholly herself without an ongoing connection to, and conversation with, the natural world. And in a world where there is not much Nature left– to be itself, as itself–there are not many human beings who can be themselves, and all they could or should be.
For several years now I have been trying to come to terms with what has been lost to the human condition as a result of our aberrant culture. I call this phenomenon the fall within the rise of civilization. There are so many powers once fully available to humans that have withered within us and atrophied, including acute sensitivities to our physical world (and also to the invisible dimensions) that are now all but denied to us. In a world made over by humans–for humans–our humanity diminishes, and so does the joy of life that once was our birthright. We have become as spiritual orphans, because spirit has been taken out of our world. Without spirit, and the means of renewing our connection to this world and to the Cosmos at large, we lose ourselves in a world robbed of its meaning. For this I blame civilization, whose goal and purpose seems be the destruction of all that is valuable and good in this world. If you doubt this, just look at our history, and where it has brought us. And consider also where it is taking us—right off the edge and into the void—and by us I mean the entire Community of Life, our Larger Self.
March 27, 2013 at 7:32 am
WildEarthMan; yes, the spirits you speak of allowed us and perhaps taught us how to abandon our ecological niche as ordinary primates and to move out, ever expanding in population numbers and in territorial domination. They transformed us from essentially a prey species, into the apex predator species in every habitat on this planet. We humans have no “environmental niche”. We kill and devour everything!
We learned to make and use tools. We began to use fire. We devised language to enhance social organization. Using these massively powerful innovations, we invaded nearly every available habitat and found ways to dominate and exploit them all. We learned how to tend and propagate advantageous plants and to use animals in advantageous ways long before the “agricultural revolution”. The spirits you talk about taught us how to implement the industrial revolution in just the same way. Power and domination are what they bring to us.
These spirits teach us how to increase our power so that we can take whatever we want as if we own everything; every living being. Animists supplicate themselves before these spirits asking for help… “please give us success in the hunt… the power to do unto others (kill them) what we don’t want to experience ourselves (being killed).”
Evidently these spirits always give permission and help so that humans can kill and dominate at will increasingly as time goes on. I remember long ago I visited a hunting camp of the Tahltan people about 15 miles farther out in the bush from my home. When I say hunting, I mean big game guiding and outfitting. Yes, this was trophy hunting. I spent the night at the Tahltan camp and then rode with them the next day as they took pack horses to meet a float plane at a not-so-nearby lake. When the floatplane landed we got our first sight of the hunters who were arriving: two rather porky oil executives from Texas festooned with semi-automatic rifles, bandoleers of ammo, expensive sheath knives, compasses and a lot of other stuff. As I remember it, one of them slipped into the water as he disembarked from the plane (suppressed giggles from the Tahltan guides and wranglers). We laboriously unloaded all the stuff they had brought for their two weeks foray into the boreal wilderness.. Spotting scopes were a big item, as I remember, second only to whiskey. Our intrepid hunters couldn’t ride and were totally beat by the time they arrived in camp. I left soon after that. I heard later that my Tahltan friends had succeeded in manipulating these “aliens” into position to actually kill a couple of sheep and perhaps a bear. Photos are what it is all about, and taxidermy. Ego embellishment. The “nature spirits” gave them what they wanted.
I leave you with a typical link:
http://www.snowwowl.com/swolfeaglefeathers.html
Great respect for the “sacred” eagle, right?
but: What does that really mean?:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/14/wyoming-native-american-tribe-gets-rare-permit-to-kill-bald-eagles/
Is it animism? Is it religion? Is Daniel Q in favor of this?
These indigenous people really, really want to kill bald eagles. They need the feathers, you see, to display their personal status in the tribe. Government hired environmentalists say that we shouldn’t be killing eagles but “indigenous hunter gatherers” say that it is an important part of their religion to kill these lovely birds and to use their body parts for ceremonial purposes.
I say, let’s pull our heads out of the ground and take a look at reality.
March 27, 2013 at 9:56 am
Tamana says:” let’s pull our heads out of the ground and take a look at reality.”
WildEarthMan says: “Let us remove the cultural lenses that act as blinders and begin to see the world that is really out there—not the one that has been invented for us by our culture of civilization.”
“The current extinction is being caused by human action within a cultural tradition shaped in a biblical-Christian and classical-humanist matrix. The tragic flaw in both traditions seems to be an anthropocentrism that has turned into a profound cultural pathology.” –Thomas Berry
“By multiplying till we reach our maximum possible numbers, even as we take out much of the planet, we are fulfilling our destiny.”– Charles Mann
When I first read these words of Charles Mann in his Orion essay, “State of the Species,” I felt their wrongness but couldn’t quite articulate what that wrongness was. Now I think I get it. In Charles Mann’s world, it’s all about humans and human agency, as if humans existed in a vacuum, and had no relationship whatever with Nature, Gaia, or the Life Force, and as if these had no agency of their own. In thinking over the piece as a whole it became clear to me that Mann was such a captive of our narcissistic culture that he didn’t even realize that all of his thinking had fallen under its anthropocentric spell. It seems never to have occurred to him that Nature might have a destiny of Her own—one that may, or may not, include us.
To be fair, all of us are captives of culture, to some degree or other. That’s normal and natural. We’re cultural animals, after all, and when one’s culture is whole and healthy it is appropriate to be fully invested in it. Such a culture is a positive adaptation for group survival. But our culture is not whole and healthy; it is pathological in the extreme. It is an imperial culture with an agenda of total domination. It has colonized each of us with its daily indoctrinations, from cradle to grave—and it means to colonize every last corner of the globe. The culture of civilization is nothing if not a self-promoting, self-aggrandizing propaganda machine. Its mission and method is to turn everything into itself, and to destroy all that resist its hegemony. Even a casual reading of Western civilization’s history will corroborate this proposition, and a close reading seals the deal. I know there will be resistance to what I’m trying to say here. Our individual identities have been so infiltrated by our culture that questioning it in any way makes us uncomfortable. We have taken culture into ourselves, and so identified with its stories and memes, that we’re not sure where it leaves off and we begin. I know this because I’ve been through the acculturation process, too. But I’ve also been through another process, one that some Native Americans refer to as decolonization, and that is what allows me to see through culture at all.
In this regard I can identify with Neo in the film, Matrix. When Neo and Morpheus first meet, Morpheus lays it out like this: “Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life; that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s like a splinter in your mind. It is this feeling that has brought you to me.” Maybe you, too, have felt that splinter in your mind.
What we have to realize is that we also live in the Matrix, but it’s not some faux world created for us by machine intelligence. Our Matrix is our culture. And until we learn to resist it, it will make us see the world the way it wants us to see it. Our Matrix programs our values, our perceptions, the way we live our lives. And this is why I don’t entirely agree with those who say, “Uncovering the origins of our dysfunction may not really be that useful in extricating us from our present predicament.” To take right action toward a viable future, you must first understand the nature of the world you are living in. Equally important is discovering your own (wild) nature. Who is the deeper you, who hasn’t been tamed by culture? My guess is, that’s a better you than the one that’s been colonized and made compliant to the culture’s larger agenda. To those who ask, “What can one lone individual do in the face of this cultural juggernaut?” I would say this: Maybe a good place to start would be with deprogramming our own colonized selves and learning to reclaim our more authentic, wild selves. (Unlearn, Rewild, in the parlance of a recent book title.) We might then cease acting as if Nature were something separate from, and subordinate to, ourselves.
Seeing through this culture is not as easy as taking the red pill instead of the blue. It’s an ongoing lifelong process that separates us from the comfort zone of being in the majority. But unless more of us do this hard work, we’re going to be getting more of the same, until civilization has consumed the world.
March 27, 2013 at 6:23 pm
WEM: strawman argument. Why do you assume that anyone who criticizes the back-to-hunting-and-gathering doctrine must be in favor of modern industrial civilization? Do you really believe that there are only two possible options?
March 27, 2013 at 8:58 pm
Tamana:
It seems to me that this is a forum where people could actually be learning from each other. That is why I am here, and I am sure others are here for the same reason: to teach and learn–to share information. I’m not sure why you are here, since you seem to already have all the answer, or at least very settled, if obscure, opinions.
You are snidely scornful of Native Americans and their traditional ways, smug in your disparagement of animism and spirituality. You seem to be against a lot of things, but what are you in favor of? What positive vision do you have to contribute to the conversation? How do you believe people should live, and what makes you think so?
I believe I am offering a consistent and coherent counter-narrative to the mainstream narrative of civilization. I say that we live in a moral Universe that depends upon reciprocity to prosper. Its structure is a nested holarchy in which all holons are in mutually interdependent holonic relationship. The Law of Holonic Reciprocity indicates that we owe a spiritual debt to that which gives us life, and it is our responsibility to give back as good, or better, than we have been given. The Holonic Golden rules states that whatever we do to others we also do to ourselves, so behave accordingly. Before settled agriculture, all humans lived in the Gift: they didn’t mine topsoil, or underground treasures, or the habitats of other species. And they lived within the annual solar budget. Life lived in this way had gone on for hundreds of thousands of years, and likely could have gone on for hundreds of thousands of years into the future—which is what the word sustainable means. Our distant ancestors lived sustainably, and in accordance with Universal Law.
Then along came the culture of Theft, the culture of civilization. It mined topsoil in order to grow crops and increase its population, which drove the need for more land to grow more crops and increase its population, and expand its influence over the Earth, pretending that it could “own” some part of Mother Earth, and impose its will upon the land. I call this living in the Theft, and it depends upon mining that which belongs to the Earth and to the Community of Life, and taking it, by force, for its own. Whatever is taken beyond what can be renewed within the annual solar budget is mining, and is theft.
I believe that is a pretty clear narrative, and accords with the facts as we know them. Now, I am waiting for you to offer something in kind, if you can. Or even a coherent critique would be welcome (but please discard your smug attitudes of snide superiority in the trash heap where they belong) if you can!
March 29, 2013 at 7:44 am
WEM; I’ve been pretty clear about my beliefs. We humans need to reduce our destructive impact on the natural world…. what can I say… hugely, radically, beyond what most people can imagine. The hunting primates who eventually became “us” broke out of Africa and expanded (some writers call it an “explosion”) throughout the world. They expanded in population and in territorial domination by constant innovation in tool making and in strategy. I understand that this was a slow process, but in terms of evolutionary time it was a sharp and shocking impact.
We humans are very clever, but generally speaking, we are not wise. We don’t like to think that the bonobo chimpanzee, our closest evolutionary relative might be wiser than we are. After all, we style ourselves “Homo sapiens sapiens”
We think that acquisition of power over the living world around us indicates wisdom. I think that, given our destructive power over all life on the planet, we are wrong to assume that. We are far from wise.
Osker said that he thought every species was either a predator species or a prey species. It’s true that many are predominantly predatorial and that many are mostly prey. Many species, if not most, however, are both and, if you factor in the human predator, then no species on this planet is not a prey species.
Not long ago I went out on my back porch and I saw something unidentifiable hanging from a shelf on the wall. A long hanging yellow-green strip with arms and hands sticking out from the bottom. It turned out to be a golden tree snake hanging there, but it’s head was completely hidden inside the body of a tree frog that it was eating. There’s no doubt that the snake is a predator, but the frog too, is a predator because it eats insects. The snake, in turn, falls prey to kraits and cobras. Humans here in our village, are also happy to eat snakes.
Our early ancestors were often prey to leopards, snakes and other predators. We didn’t like that and, at some point, we embarked on a long struggle to resist and even reverse that uncomfortable position. We transformed ourselves from a prey species into the dominant predator species on this planet.
For ideas to become popular, there is no need for them to be true. (e.g. earth is the stationary center of the universe around which everything else revolves, a popular idea for many centuries), they just need to be pleasing to our egos. Richard Dawkins likes to think that we humans are “the universe observing itself”. Since he believes that science is the proper way to observe anything, that puts him, a scientist, in a very eminent position in the universe; a very pleasing idea for Richard, no doubt.
The notion that agriculture is the demon that caused all the evils of civilization has become very popular. Unfortunately, those who expound upon this idea are unclear about what they mean by “agriculture”. Archaeologists found evidence of stone tools used to cut grains and they found remnants of grains and legumes in pots. They defined “agriculture” as intensive field cultivation of annual grains and pulses”.
I agree that that was the start of something which enabled the severe problems that we are beginning to recognize today. Any responsible archaeologist/anthropologist/botanist would tell us, though, that humans had been tending and propagating the plants they found useful to them for many thousands of years before what we know as the “neolithic revolution”. Agriculture represents the need of a society to free up people from food production so that they can specialize in conflict over territory and resources. Agriculture is a result (not a cause) of conflict and oppression.
Is agriculture, the cultivation of plants, really the demon? No, in my opinion, the demon is behavior which seeks ever-expanding control and domination over the living world that surrounds us. Somewhat deeper than that, I would say that the demon is the artificial mental distinction which separates “us” from the surrounding world. Those long-ago ancestors of ours who began to aggressively dominate their own habitat until they overgrew it and needed to move out in an ever expanding domination of most of the terrestrial planet were driven by the “demon” to devise ever more complex weapons and strategies to capture and devour their fellow earthlings. The demon gave them advantages which allowed them/us to become the apex predator species on this planet.
This is nothing to be proud of. Human triumphalism is not wisdom. Hunting and gathering is not qualitatively different from modern industry and commerce. Both seek power and domination.
So, what should we do? We should reduce our population drastically. (Surely you don’t envision seven billion people going out into what remains of the wilderness and living by predation, do you?) How we might actually reduce our numbers is an enormous problem which may be solved in time by events. After a transition phase which might take a century or so, dismantling nuclear power plants, petroleum refineries etc., humans should sequester themselves from the wild. I would say that at least 99.5% of the planet’s surface area should be left for nature, while roughly .5% may be occupied by humans. These surviving humans must agree to produce everything they need within their defined habitats. It’s the opposite of a wildlife park, really. It’s a designated territory for small groups of humans to devise ways of living without taking from the wild.
To demonize agriculture is profoundly ignorant. Plants have always utilized strategies which use the mobility of animals in their reproductive efforts. Human cultivation of plants is not the problem. Human population growth and escalation of territorial/resource domination is the problem. Let’s deal with the problem rather than buying in to the preachers who tell us that hunter-gatherer domination is okay.
To dominate is a value based in fear. It is an adolescent value which falls short of mature wisdom. We should know by now that our own well-being depends on the overall well-being of the whole.
Hunting and gathering was all about domination and expansion. They (hunter-gatherers) were comparatively slow, sure, but that was only because they were slowly developing ever more powerful strategies towards achieving the inordinate dominance over the world that humans have today. Agriculture was simply one of the more powerful strategies that we humans devised in order to dominate. Specialization and trade were others. The distinction (foraging vs agriculture) is artificial and it’s popularity is only an indication of how unprepared modern people are to truly think..
March 29, 2013 at 9:56 am
Tamnaa, are you still riding on your intuition from a few days ago or do you have some evidence to back up your assertions? For instance you write:
Which ancestors are you referring to here? As far as I’m aware the early human migrations were not caused by any kind of ‘outgrowth’ of their habitat, but because climate and other factors opened up the possibility of expanding their native ranges, just as any other species would do. Hunter-gathering didn’t make Africa unsuitable for human habitation, as evidenced by the fact that there are still people there millions of years later. I don’t believe the saying that ‘forests lie before us and deserts dog our heels’ applies to H/Gers, but rather to agricultural peoples who exhaust the soils before having to move onwards.
You use a lot of ‘we’s in your above comments, which indicates that you think these are universal values, common to all in our species. I would challenge you, however, to find a quote like this coming from any indigenous, noncivilised people: ‘We think that acquisition of power over the living world around us indicates wisdom.’ I think the majority would find such a viewpoint laughable, hubristic, insane. It has nothing to do with ‘power over’ or ‘domination’ or any other delusional rubbish, but rather has to do with learning to be a good neighbour, to fit in, make a contribution, find your place among the other plant and animal species. Plenty of humans have been ‘wise’ in that way. It sounds like you’re in a good place to find some if you step out your front door.
Riiight… How about:
‘Photosynthesis was all about domination and expansion. They (photosynthesising plants) were comparatively slow, sure, but that was only because they were slowly developing ever more powerful strategies towards achieving the inordinate dominance over the world that green-leaved plants have today.’
I’d say what you wrote was racist if it made any sense…
cheers all the same,
Ian
March 29, 2013 at 10:10 pm
Tamana,
Well, we are not in complete disagreement about absolutely everything. I agree that: “For ideas to be popular there is no need for them to be true.” And if you have anything bad to say about Richard Dawkins, I’ll be there to back you up. He starts from a faulty intellectual base and builds a house of cards on top of it. I certainly agree that there are far too many people. I don’t see the Earth supporting any more than a million people, distributed widely in small groups, after we have paid our karmic debt—and even that number seems high to me. In any case, Mother Nature is going to sort this out for us, and will arrive at a viable number of humans in Her own way. I don’t see us reducing our numbers on our own—and there are about seven billion reasons for that. Your idea of a Human Domestication Zone, covering no more than .5% of the terrestrial globe is not without merit, and leaving the rest wild is a wonderful idea. But I favor self-organized systems and this one sounds like it might be a top-down decision, in which case I don’t think it would work. In a general way, I think you and I agree that the human being—or rather, mainstream global culture—is in wrong relationship to Nature. I am sure we have other points of agreement, as well, but also some major points of disagreement. And let me just say that in pointing these out my intention is not to attack you personally, or to discredit the sincerity in which your beliefs are held. I do think that some of your passionately held beliefs are wrong-headed and do not accord with the facts as we know them.
Respectfully, why in hell do you equate hunting with domination? And why do you find the systematic cultivation of plants to be so benign?
You say:
I agree that [agriculture] was the start of something which enabled the severe problems that we are beginning to recognize today. Any responsible archaeologist/anthropologist/botanist would tell us, though, that humans had been tending and propagating the plants they found useful to them for many thousands of years before what we know as the “neolithic revolution”. Agriculture represents the need of a society to free up people from food production so that they can specialize in conflict over territory and resources. Agriculture is a result (not a cause) of conflict and oppression.
For me, any plant-tending humans might have done before the Neolithic revolution is irrelevant. What I find highly relevant is the point at which we ceased living in the Gift and started living in the Theft. When did we start stealing the habitat of our fellow beings in the Community of Life in order to support the population growth of people mining topsoil?
Why would a hunting society (whose average size was from twenty to thirty individuals) need to free up people from food production so they could specialize in conflict over territory? Talk about basackwards!
You ask:
“Is agriculture, the cultivation of plants, really the demon? No, in my opinion, the demon is behavior which seeks ever-expanding control and domination over the living world that surrounds us. Somewhat deeper than that, I would say that the demon is the artificial mental distinction which separates “us” from the surrounding world. Those long-ago ancestors of ours who began to aggressively dominate their own habitat until they overgrew it and needed to move out in an ever expanding domination of most of the terrestrial planet were driven by the “demon” to devise ever more complex weapons and strategies to capture and devour their fellow earthlings. The demon gave them advantages which allowed them/us to become the apex predator species on this planet.
Ah, here we have a point of agreement: “the demon is the artificial mental distinction which separates ’us’ from the surrounding world.” This is crucial to what went wrong—our self-alienation from Nature. This is what holonomy is all about: recognizing our connection to, and interdependent relationship with, everything else. We, as a culture, have rejected a sense of Self that includes the entire Community of Life, and the living Earth that supports that Community, in order to set ourselves up as exceptional beings, and above all others. This sleight of hand maneuver, dishonest to its core, made it conceptually possible to raid the Earth and carelessly destroy ecosystems and the lives that depended on those systems, with no pangs of conscience whatever. Animals don’t have souls or personalities; the Earth is inert matter—and, anyway, it is all here for the exclusive use of humans, who do have souls, which proves they (we) aren’t animals. Pretty slick move there, at least until it all blows up in your face.
For ten thousand years we have mined the resilience of Mother Earth. Instead of living off the interest of Nature’s economy (living in the Gift), we have partied off the principal and the interest (living in the Theft). We could never have done all this damage without agriculture, and we could never have overpopulated to the tune of seven billion without agriculture and fossil fuels—both of which require living in the Theft.
“Hunting and gathering was all about domination and expansion.”
I’ll give you part of part of this. As long as we were in the Dispersal phase of filling up available habitats as we spread out of Africa, we were definitely into expansion. We went forth and we multiplied—and for a time we were able to do that and live in the Gift. Then we hit a wall, a moment of Truth, when we had to chose to go on living in the Gift but control our population, or, continue expanding our population, but on different terms than ever before—by living in the theft.
It is not the hunter-gatherers who are the dominators, as you seem to so ardently believe: these are the fully mature adults who took on the responsibility of living within the limits of the Gift. It is those planters and animal slaveholders who refused to grow up, to stay stuck in self-indulgent adolescence, who became the dominators. They dominated the land; they dominated their captive animals; and then they began dominating each other, thanks to the stratification brought on by privilege, accumulation, and private property. Mobile hunter gatherers, living in groups of twenty to thirty, were uniformly egalitarian, and shared meat equitably. Domination has no place in their lives. They kill to eat; they eat to survive. They are grateful for the Gift of Life. It’s really pretty straightforward.
“Human triumphalism is not wisdom.” I totally agree!
“Hunting and gathering is not qualitatively different from modern industry and commerce.”
What you are saying here is that living in the Gift is no different from living in the Theft; that humility, gratitude, and reverence for all Life is identical to theft, deception, and deadly violence. This blind spot of yours deprives you of the ability to make meaningful discriminations.
It has been my experience that a certain percentage of people find it impossible to believe that primitive savages could possibly have lived in a way that is superior to the lifeway of civilized whites. In the thrall of the culture of civilization (whose mission is to turn everything not itself into itself, or else obliterate it) these fully acculturated credulous people totally buy into the disinformation campaign sponsored by said culture of civilization. Those tribal people were starving and miserable; their lives were nasty, brutish, and short; their way of life vastly inferior to ours, and so on. To judge by some of your other views, which show some sophistication of thought (that is, you appear not to put civilization up on a pedestal) I am guessing this may not be your particular hangup, but you clearly do have a hangup of some kind, which amounts almost to obsession. Hunters are dominators; hunters are dominators. Problem is, that is not at all what the record shows. Well, let’s change the record, then, because hunters are dominators. (Okay, I am starting to sound a little derisive my own self, but I get that way when I see stubborn obduracy in the face of facts.)
Anyway, I know you have a hard time getting books in English there in Tahiland, but I have another title to offer, anyway. It is Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence by Gregory Cajete. The book is nominally about Native science, but more importantly it is one of the best sources I know for showing in a detailed and knowledgeable way the very real differences between the indigenous worldview and that of our own dominant (and domineering) culture.
Assuming that you are earnestly open to learning, I offer this immediate look into a world different from our own, by a Native gone academic. It is called “Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship,” by Enrique Salmon. Try to look at the world from a kincentric point of view and see if that really accords with domination. I believe the two are mutually exclusive, or nearly so.
http://www.fws.gov/nativeamerican/graphics/TEK_Salmon_2000.pdf
March 30, 2013 at 7:28 am
WEM and Ian
Unfortunately I don’t have the time or the energy this evening to answer your points.
Maybe early in the morning I can give it a try.
Ian, I like your idea of wisdom: ” …but rather has to do with learning to be a good neighbour, to fit in, make a contribution, find your place among the other plant and animal species. Plenty of humans have been ‘wise’ in that way.” Good. Has Homo sapiens sapiens generally behaved in that way? I’m very curious as to how you reconcile that kind of wisdom with killing and eating one’s neighbors.
WEM; It seems similar to what you mentioned about the “relatives”. I’m astonished that people (and I know there are many who feel the same as you do) equate respect and humility and sacredness with hunting. To me it would be a simple matter of desiring to eat meat and judging an animal’s life less important than the hunter’s desire. Of course in the case of mesolithic hunters I know that it was probably a matter of raw survival for self and tribe. They had not yet found any other way to obtain adequate nutrition, especially in northern climes. We are certainly not in that position today.
I don’t think you’ve answered my question about how it can possibly be respectful to kill and eat our “relatives”, especially when we have struggled so hard to prevent our relatives from killing and eating us. It’s such a one way street, and that’s what makes me suspect rationalization of human supremacy.
Anyway. At some point long ago our ancestors were prey to crocs and leopards and maybe even big eagles. Then over a long period we developed a culture of hunting so that we became dominant predators. I wonder if perhaps this duality or polarization might be resolved by working out a new role for ourselves in the biosphere; neither predator nor prey. I don’t know what to call it; something like “caregiver species” perhaps. That’s what I feel my role is, working around my home (not that I’m good at it!)
March 30, 2013 at 7:53 pm
Ian; let me try to explain why I see hunting as domination behavior. Predators, including human hunters of course, aggressively attack prey with the purpose of over-powering them, and gaining total control over them ie killing and eating) When a group of Hadza hunters goes out before dawn with a hankering for baboon meat, their plan is to overpower their quarry by stealth, surprise and the use of weaponry. One of them knows a tree where a family of baboons is sleeping. The hunters approach quietly. Baboons sleep in high places like this tree as a defense against predators. Before humans invented the bow and arrow this defensive strategy was pretty effective against human hunters. The development of more advanced weaponry gives humans greater power to win the predator-prey conflict. Still, it would be unlikely that that the hunters will achieve total domination. Some of the baboons will escape the attack. Hunters feel free to take and use whatever they want from the world around them… if they have the power to do so. They have constantly devised more and more powerful strategies so that they achieve dominance over more and more species and ever greater territories. The Hadzas have a poison for arrow tips with which they can bring down a giraffe but is not powerful enough for elephant hunting. If they found a stronger poison, don’t you think they would use it?
I must emphasize, I do not judge it wrong or bad for hunters to overpower prey. I’m just suggesting that it is certainly aggression; it is domination behavior, that’s all.
Here’s a look at reality (keep scrolling down to the end):
http://www.lbah.com/word/hadzabe-2011/
It would be strange indeed if growing populations waited until their territory was entirely destroyed before they all move out leaving devastation in their wake. I think as populations increase it becomes gradually harder to “make a living”, perhaps some groups encountering greater difficulty than others. When a group feels it would be more advantageous to move out in search of new territory, it splits away, leaving the core population behind. That’s the way human dispersal happened, I think so yes, there are still people in Africa.
March 31, 2013 at 7:17 am
WildEarthMan; you raised an excellent point when you asked; “Why would a hunting society (whose average size was from twenty to thirty individuals) need to free up people from food production so they could specialize in conflict over territory? Talk about basackwards!” and I’m glad you put it just the way you did. I think it illustrates the impression most people have of what they have been told about “hunter-gatherers”.
We feel that this label refers not just to pre-agricultural people but that it carries with it a number of characteristics:
H-Gs lived in small groups
H-Gs were nomadic
H-Gs were egalitarian, non-stratified, sharing resources fairly
H-Gs were generally healthy, well-fed and enjoyed abundant leisure
H-Gs did not store resources or accumulate wealth
H-Gs were not warlike
So we are led to believe that, before the advent of agriculture, every member of the human species fit this profile.
Then, something very strange happened. One of these happy carefree groups started to clear a field and hoe the ground. They scattered seeds of grain in the hope that they would grow. By doing this, they invented something never before known. Agriculture!
Agriculture involved a lot of effort and patient waiting for uncertain returns. The people had to cease their nomadic ways and they had far less time and energy to devote to hunting which had given them much richer nutrition for less effort, but they persevered. They may not of known that agriculture would bring poor health and inferior stature when they started but even when these results began to be seen they persevered. Other groups could see the increased toil for inferior return that this first group was experiencing but for some reason, they too joined in, abandoning the wonderful H-G culture that had sustained them since time immemorial.
WEM, does this story make sense to you? I have to admit, I’m having trouble accepting it. Why would happy healthy, free people abandon their ancient way of life for such abject toil? Is it possible that there could be some flaws in the narrative?
Maybe some nomadic groups came upon habitat rich enough that they could actually settle and thrive in one area. (lakeshores, river valleys and estuaries?)
Maybe the populations of such rich territories would tend to grow until sub-groups split off looking for similar amenities.
Maybe groups of humans eventually came into conflict with other groups over territory and resources.
Maybe the small, egalitarian, peaceful groups tended to lose out in these conflicts to larger, more aggressive and specialized/stratified groups.
Maybe Schmookler was right and that groups facing conflict could either be thoroughly defeated, could retreat into undesirable territory, or could increase their numbers and develop a war culture themselves.
Maybe the culture of conflict required a non-productive warrior class and a more intensely productive peasant class to support it.
Maybe those who engaged in the labor of field agriculture were forced to provide storable, transportable sustenance for warriors (bread and beer? :-)).
But wait. Sedentary warlike stratified tribes-people couldn’t have been hunters and gatherers could they?
Well, I once spent a winter in the main community of the Nisga’a people on the Nass river in B.C. They were an entirely pre-agricultural people at the time of European contact; numerous and sedentary, settled in permanent villages. They were a profoundly stratified society with aristocratic families, commoners and slave families. They had to be fairly warlike because raiding and battles with other tribes over resources were a normal part of life.
From the Canadian Encyclopedia: Real property, combined with skilful management of family labour and individually owned capital equipment, enabled kin groups and their chiefs to achieve high productivity and accumulate tangible wealth. Property was the basis and vehicle of the Northwest Coast system of rank and class. In some communities there was precise status with internal ranking; in others, flexible categories. An upper-lower distinction of some form was universal, as was the institution of SLAVERY. Slaves were acquired in war or by purchase and, although they lived in owners’ houses, lacked full civil rights and were required to perform menial chores.
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/native-people-northwest-coast
Interminable hours spent in all-night ceremonies with lots of “potlach” activities and oratory going on showed me that I was witnessing a “proto-feudal” society. The important “Naming Ceremony” changed one tribe member from ordinary “Joe Herring” to “Chief Joe Cedar Hills”. What is “Cedar Hills”? It is a territory. He became something equivalent to the Earl of Shropshire, so to speak. He had ownership and authority over a tract of habitat and people who needed to forage for anything in his area should get his permission and give him a share.
Natufian hunter-gatherers of the Levant who are suspected of starting the Neolithic revolution were not nomadic (I guess those semi-underground houses were hard to lug around). their territory was rich but we don’t know whether they had to defend it.
Here’s a straight-forward rendering of how problematic the popular H-G profile is:
http://web.mesacc.edu/dept/d10/asb/lifeways/hg_myth.html
From the above link: “Another central issue is why some, but apparently not all, such societies developed elites. Brian Hayden of Simon Fraser University has argued forcefully that permanent social inequality will inevitably arise in any society where humans have the opportunity to wheel and deal for personal advantage. This will happen first where food is abundant, so complex hunter-gatherers develop either where the environment is rich enough or when subsistence systems produce enough to allow it. Herbert Maschner of Idaho State University argues equally forcefully that warfare and other forms of direct competition lead to inequality; warfare was endemic, for example, on the Northwest Coast. Others, including Jeanne Arnold of the University of California, Los Angeles, argue that these complex hunter-gatherer societies evolve when conditions, such as environmental stress, allow certain people to gain control over the labor of others.
March 31, 2013 at 8:50 am
Excellent exposition, Tamnaa. The story goes something like this:
And then, something happened and turned the direct return, egalitarian foragers from their insistence on no surplus. They began to hog this, and hog that, and ranking arose, along with Big Men. And their feasts got more and more competitive, until they were enough to ruin a neighbor group. And they began to trap people in debt… all this long before any hoes were invented, long before agriculture showed up on the scene. Weird, huh?
March 31, 2013 at 9:33 am
Leavergirl,
You seem to have acces to information I am unaware of, but highly interested in. Can you share yur sources?
March 31, 2013 at 9:40 am
Well, the article Tamnaa linked to speaks of it. But I am busily at work going through Brian Hayden’s writing, trying to piece together a picture that is slowly emerging among anthropologists and those who follow the agriculture puzzle.
Brian Hayden has written quite a bit, but right now I am looking at The Proof is in the Pudding, and Richman, Poorman, Beggarman, Chief. Not available online for free, your library can get them.
Those tribes that you were spending time in Oregon were complex foragers, and had all those privatizing patterns already ingrained… isn’t that true?
March 31, 2013 at 10:43 am
Leavergirl,
The three tribes I spent time with were the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk tribes of (extremely) northern California. The Yuroks are at the mouth of the Klamath River and their territory extends forty miles inland to the confluence with the lower Trinity River. The lower Trinity is Hupa territory. The people I spent most time with were the Karuks, whose territory begins just above this confluence and borders the Klamath River for seventy miles. Their aboriginal territory encompassed about a million acres, which was taken from them without compensation in the decades after the gold rush. A treaty was made in the late 1860s, which they signed, but the U.S. senate never ratified it. Turns out it’s easier and less costly to just take the land without compensation. They weren’t even recognized as a tribe until 1987, even though they are the second most populous tribe in California, behind the Yuroks. Yes, they were complex foragers, and yes, they were stratified (even before contact) and practiced a form of privatization—that is, they practiced the rights of usufruct: certain families claiming fishing rights to this particular hole, claiming acorn rights in this particular stand of tanoaks. Their aboriginal territory was still a commons, and not owned by anyone, but you’d better stay off my mushroom patch, and go collect your huckleberries somewhere else—or else! And there was another form of privatization as well, in that ceremonial leaders could “own” certain songs and ceremonies, as well as regalia, and this ‘ownership” conferred special statues to these individuals and families.
I am currently reading Walter Haugen’s, The Laws of Physics are on my Side, which has proved quite interesting so far. Also, I agree that Tamana has done a masterful job of setting up the problem, which amounts to a conundrum—which I will respond to in time.
In my own case, I am fascinated by prehistory as a subject of inquiry for its own sake, but there is also a practical side to this interest. I want to know how people might be able to go on living on Earth after our overshot population has been shot down by the same laws that govern all other populations. Down to a million, or fewer, on a ravaged and depleted planet, how might our descendents be able to live lives worth living? In one sense, this is just an idle intellectual exercise, and yet it is hard for me to think of anything of more importance—unless it might be how all of Life can go on!
I live (and garden) on two acres in Oregon near the beautiful McKenzie River, and it is true that the Klamath River does head in Oregon, near Klamath Falls (home to the Klamath Tribe, which I have also spent time with), and this may account for the mistaken impression that the three tribes mentioned above are Oregon tribes.
I will look into the work of Brian Hayden. Thanks for the tip.
March 31, 2013 at 1:56 pm
Ah. Confusion errupted, as I know the Oregon side, Klamath Lake.
I wanted to ask you… you mentioned once that these tribes sold off the logging rights (or even forests?) to logging companies. Doesn’t tribal ownership of commons prevent this sort of thing? How did that happen?
March 31, 2013 at 2:56 pm
Leavergirl,
That was the Yurok Tribe who sold logging rights to Simpson Brothers, now called Green Diamond Resources. I am not positive about the legal status of the land. Within tribal bureaucratic structure (until very recently under the control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs) there are, I think, at least four technical land designations. The history of the Yurok “reservation” is complicated; for awhile it was one of those ‘now you have it, now you don’t’ situations. Today it is a little of both. Among a people with 50%+ unemployment, along with the usual drug and alcohol abuse, high suicide rates, triple the obesity, diabetes, and heart disease rates as the national average, and no particular prospects of getting in on the American Dream, finding ways to stay alive is a serious pastime. Into this rez way of life enters a handy little thing called per capita payments, which means that once a year a check goes out to every qualifying tribal member based upon inflow of tribal monies in the preceding year. If you lease land for timber harvest, and the resource company sends the tribe a check–that gets disbursed to tribal members. Each part of the rez is represented by its own member on the Tribal Council, and a lot of land use decisions get made on that basis. Sometimes there is even a popular vote, as there was recently when the Yurok Tribe won a big settlement from the government. One of the proposals for what to do with the money was to buy former tribal lands back from Green Diamond, and accept lower per capita payments. That option lost to full per capita payments of about $15,000 per qualifying tribal member. People seem to go for a bird in the hand every time, especially when it is a matter of getting that little bit extra to help you scrape by.
The Boldt Decision gave the Yuroks access to estuary and river salmon formerly denied them under law. Using gill nets, you will see tribal members sometimes bringing in large catches of salmon, during a certain brief window in the season. These are their subsistence rights, and the salmon they sell to white buyers are their subsistence fish. Some complain about abuses of this legal right, and certainly abuses go on, but compared to what goes on in the Goldman Sachs boardroom, they are pretty minor.
The Karuk Tribe has no reservation, and no per capita payments. The Hupa Tribe has its own intact reservation, which is heavily timbered. They run their own logging operation, and they do send out per capita payments, based on logging revenues. It is very tricky for the person in the position of determining how much gets cut in any given year. There is always pressure to cut more, employ more, and bring those per capita payments up—but go too far and you are compromising the future. I interviewed the guy who did this job, and he was remarkably open about this issue.
When that vote came up for land buy back for the Yuroks, I very much favored their making an investment in the future, but seeing the lives they live, I wasn’t too surprised the way it went.
April 1, 2013 at 6:03 am
The Columbia River empties into the Pacific in the state of Oregon. The indigenous people of that rich habitat were referred to as the “Chinooks”. They were a highly complex pre-ag tribal confederacy.
Here is an incredibly long Google books link to give you a taste of their culture:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=HuCjdhf_hMIC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=chinook+indians+oregon+slavery+wealth&source=bl&ots=46Fyabvraf&sig=TBTJYn57M1AZ7r4AQrWpMUOPFHE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lnVZUb-6D8L7rAex-4HgCA&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=chinook%20indians%20oregon%20slavery%20wealth&f=false
Hope it works. We have an ominous orange sky here this evening with thunder growling on the horizon. Internet may be a problem. Talk later.
April 1, 2013 at 5:05 pm
Hey Tamnaa and others. Thanks for continuing the conversation. I was starting to think we were at an impasse with irreconcilable points of view, but filling in the blanks and explaining where you were coming from in more detail helped make your words more relatable. I hope you don’t mind if I bring back a few of the loose ends from the above discussion with my usual apologies about delayed response etc. (I think I have an especially slow intellectual metabolism!)
1) On meat-eating and jaws etc. – yes, that guy’s paper provided an interesting discussion, and I’m now looking at carnivorous and herbivorous animals around me in a whole new way. I wasn’t persuaded by his case against human omnivory though. Maybe they were scavengers rather than active hunters (at least to start with), but the evidence for meat-eating among early human ancestors seems pretty strong. L.Keith points to the work of anthropologists Sponheimer and Lee-Thorp who found traces of carbon-13 on the teeth of 3-million-year-old skeletons that were consistent with tropical grasses, but without the scratch marks to indicate that these had been consumed directly, thus providing ‘strong evidence that grass-eating animals were a major part of the australopithecine diet’ (Veg Myth, p.140). Also,I read in ‘Homo Britannicus’ that Homo Erectus, Neanderthals and other early humans to visit northern Europe generally had much stronger jaws and teeth than us Sapiens – it’s thought that their style of eating involved clamping large pieces of meat in their mouths and slashing it into smaller pieces with a flint before chewing and swallowing (they have the cut marks on the teeth to prove it – ouch!). I think the general thinking is that fire and cooking led to weaker jaws and teeth because mushed-up food is a lot less demanding in that way.
2) You asked ‘Has Homo sapiens sapiens generally behaved in that way? I’m very curious as to how you reconcile that kind of wisdom with killing and eating one’s neighbors.’ referring to my ‘good neighbour’ wisdom spiel. The first part seems simple to answer: Yes, they evolved – came into being as a species – that way, like any other species. There was a niche to fill, a living to be made in a certain way (or a number of different ways, as it turned out), a new possibility for life to reinvent itself in a way that benefited the totality of the community it had created up to that point, and humans came along to play that role (or roles). So far so good…
The second part’s a tricky one. My first thought was to put it in the context of another species again: How do lions reconcile that kind of wisdom [being a good neighbour, fitting in, making a contribution, finding your place..] with killing and eating their neighbours? Clearly they have found a beneficial balance to strike with the other species – they keep the herbivore populations in check and genetically strong (by selectively hunting the weak, old and diseased individuals); they bunch the same animals up and keep them on the move, thereby keeping the grasslands healthy and preventing overgrazing as Mr. Savory points out; [I can’t think of a 3rd thing but I’m sure there’s more, you get the picture]. Individual gazelles, zebra, wildebeest etc. might not be glad to get hunted down and eaten by lions, but they sure as hell are glad as a species to have the lions around otherwise things would go to hell in very short order. Ditto for the elk in Yellowstone park being glad for the presence of wolves. Ditto too, I think, for all the deer culled in the British Isles because their predators were killed off by the (farming) humans who now refuse to enter into a proper relationship with them and just kill them when their numbers start to impact on capitalist economic activity. It’s Derrick Jensen’s point about long-term sustainability:
I think there are many beneficial activities that humans have got up to historically and prehistorically which made the land glad to play host to us. The setting of many small fires to prevent large, much more destructive conflagrations appears as a strong candidate. Arguably woodland management techniques like coppicing make a lot of species happy for the ‘edge’ habitat they create. And there would have been a place for humans in the drama of predation too – whether as hunters or prey or even just scavengers. Many ways to justify the air we breathe and the animal & plant others we eat.
Another answer to the reconciliation question might be: That’s what shamans are for. Here are some relevant bits I dug up from Graham Harvey’s book, Animism:
I’ll type up a few more bits on the role of the shaman tomorrow if you like (it’s getting late). For now…
3) On domination, I think maybe we were talking past eachother. You wrote: ‘Predators, including human hunters of course, aggressively attack prey with the purpose of over-powering them, and gaining total control over them ie killing and eating)’ Well yes, that’s the case for the animal’s last moments, but it has been free for all of it’s life up until that final encounter. I’d reserve words like ‘domination’ and ‘total control’ for what happens to animals (and plants, for that matter) under the yoke of domestication, most often from the day they are born.
cheers for now,
Ian
April 2, 2013 at 6:57 am
Ian; there’s a lot in what you’ve written and I can’t possibly answer every point. When I looked into the E.T.H. I questioned whether the human gut was really shortened from what it may have been or significantly shorter (less volume) than other primates. I found that questionable. From what I could gather it is proportionally about the same as that of the capuchin monkey and doesn’t remotely approach the gut morphology of the dedicated predator/carnivore e.g., the tiger.
The modern human gut is that of a frugivore leaning significantly toward faunivory. In support of the E.T.H. is the interesting fact that the encephalization in capuchin monkeys is remarkably developed and that they display tool-using and delayed return behavior. A further observation though, doesn’t support the E.T.H. These monkeys don’t eat a lot of animal food.
As I tried to research these questions, I came into inadvertent contact with an ongoing ideological dispute about human dietary needs between two strident extremist factions I would call the “Veggies” and the “Paleos”. Both sides quote out of context and distort research findings to advance their doctrinal views, making it hard to find reliable information.
Obviously, our long-ago ancestors did start to get more and more animal derived nutrients, and I agree that that scavenging probably was an important early strategy. It is also clear that humans eventually became a fearsome predator capable of killing any and all other animals.
I think it’s important to remember that lions and their prey (along with other predator prey relationships) co-evolved biologically. This accounts for the balanced and, on the whole, beneficial ecological effects of their subsistence behavior. Humans, on the other hand, have evolved their subsistence behavior culturally, meaning that we can devise powerful innovations in our strategies and tools much faster than prey species can evolve physically to cope with us. We have gained enormous artificial advantage in what should be a natural competition, and we wield this advantage destructively, without restraint. I don’t think this is wise.
Where do we look for wisdom in modern society?
Conventionally, we might think that universities provide the highest quality knowledge and values for young minds.
The agricultural practices W.E.M. rightly calls “soil mining” are taught to budding farmers in our agricultural colleges. Our schools of economics teach that perpetual growth of the GDP is not only possible, but it is something we should strive for. Our faculties of science and engineering turn out experts equipped to design nuclear power stations, create genetically modified life-forms, dam great rivers and to extract, from petroleum and other sources, chemicals that never before existed on this planet.
Look at our schools of business administration, allopathic medicine, or even in the arts where literature, cinema etc. has become wed to business.
I think you will recognize in all this an ethic of unrestrained aggression and exploitation which is presented in our modern culture as something admirable and desirable.
I don’t agree that the human species has, to this point, demonstrated “a new possibility for life to reinvent itself in a way that benefited the totality of the community it had created up to that point” As I see it, our behavior has not been of benefit to the community of life as a whole. We see the appalling results of our destructive behavior everywhere we might look. I do think, however, that the potential exists within us to develop a new and deeper understanding of what a truly beneficial role for ourselves in nature might mean. However unlikely the acquisition of that wisdom might seem, it is not impossible.
Ian, do you think that indigenous people who practice some form of agriculture, such as the Hopi, forfeit that connection with the nature spirits that can be experienced through animism?
April 2, 2013 at 8:13 am
Tamnaa, the dietary wars are a quagmire, as you say. I don’t go there anymore… it’s like religion, people don’t even listen to one another. I don’ think we can “save the world” by a war of words about what we should be eating. Or by following some quasi-religious dietary practice.
But I was struck by these following words of yours: “an ethic of unrestrained aggression and exploitation which is presented in our modern culture as something admirable and desirable”. It does indeed permeate this culture, but that is only a recent development, only several thousand years. Before that, restraints on such behaviors were in place, and those who refused to heed them, were ostracized or assassinated… which kept them out of the gene pool. Only a minority people have this orientation…. but many more have been seduced into adulating such people, or such behaviors.
This is our challenge.
April 2, 2013 at 1:36 pm
Tamana,
This is an excellent question, to which I know of no definitive answer, though I have been looking for one for awhile. I have already presented my theory on this, but I will outline it again.
First of all, the question is framed as an ahistorical abstraction. My theory provides an historical context, and happens to coincide with known timing of events. During fifty thousand years of dispersal out of Africa, there was a big world out there full of unexploited (or minimally exploited) habitats. This brave new world wasn’t without its challenges, including serious climatic mood swings, and large toothy human predators, but conditions allowed for the global expansion of the human population—that is, right up until the time that it began to get crowded. The hunter-gatherer lifeway requires a large territory, if it is to be practiced on a sustainable basis. For a period of about fifty thousand years, when a band of hunters grew too large for their chosen land base, splinter groups could hive off and set out for open territory—but then, at some point (about ten thousand years ago) that was no longer an option. The Law of Limits had always been in place, but as long as there was open territory, it could be deferred—but now it couldn’t; it had to be dealt with.
I find it conceptually powerful to differentiate between living in the Gift and living in the Theft. Living in the Gift is living off the interest of Nature’s economy, and that means living within the annual solar budget. Mining of any kind, whether of renewable or non-renewable resources, is living off the principle of Nature’s economy, as well as the interest, and is therefore living in the Theft. It is stealing from the Earth; it is stealing from other species, and; it is stealing from future human generations. I find this way of looking at things works at all scales and penetrates many an obfuscation.
So, our ancestors came up against the Law of Limits when hunter-gatherer territory was more or less filled up and claimed by other humans. Population expansion had become a habit and a way of life. For scores or hundreds of generations it had been possible to live in the Gift and expand the human population. Now, suddenly, something had to give. They had to choose whether to go on living in the Gift and limit their populations, or, continue to expand their populations by living in this new, settled, agricultural way. This proved to be a departure from living off the interest of Nature’s bounty, because it required the mining of topsoil and the appropriation of naturally diverse ecosystems (home to many creatures) and transforming them into biologically impoverished monocultural farmscapes. This was the beginning of living in the Theft. We can speculate about the variables that pushed one group of people in this direction while the majority of our ancestors chose to limit their populations and continue living in the Gift. Maybe, among a small minority, the usual egalitarian social structure had already been supplanted by some intra-group stratification. Maybe a single power-intoxicated individual within such a group could see a way to even more power by increasing population through the intensification of resource exploitation by means of animal husbandry and the planting and harvesting of grains. It is impossible to know for sure what variables came into play, but the end result was choosing the mining of resources, and that was the beginning of living in the Theft.
Living in that first Theft led to many successive thefts, and to an ideology that rationalizes theft as a way of life. This was the beginning of our imperial culture of civilization, which, as I have said before, is based on theft, deception and deadly violence. We steal from the Earth; we steal from other species, and; we steal from other people. This is what cultures of empire do, and all cultures of empire are based upon agriculture and intensive mining of resources, not on hunting and gathering. I find there is a lot of resistance to seeing civilization in this light, because for so many of us our identities are intertwined with civilization, and its program of disinformation which tells us that civilization is really all about high culture: libraries, and art galleries, and symphony orchestras–and many are taken in by this deception. Derrick Jensen has a very clear understanding of what civilization really is, and I would urge those who haven’t already read Endgame: the Problem of Civilization to open themselves to his deep insights.
From my perspective, your fixed idea about hunting being domination, and as somehow the source of all that has gone wrong, is missing the point. Domination is not irrelevant, but it is not the key, or the underlying cause. Violent theft is– and basing a whole way of life on violent theft is in the process of bringing the world down around us. I think we are both interested in humans getting a second chance at life on planet Earth, and seeing what went wrong in the first place might provide some clues about how we might accomplish this, once we are down to sustainable numbers. From my vantage point, living in the Gift, again, as our distant ancestors did, seems like the only choice we’ll have once the thievery of civilization is complete–and the fall that must ensue. In this regard I agree with what Ian has to say about animism and shamanism, or at least what I think he implies. For me, that is a worldview that worked before and will work again. Civilization and domestication have stolen the enchantment of a spirit-filled world. My fervent hope is that after civilization falls, those spirits will return to the Earth and find their way back into human life. You don’t have to believe in the spirits (as you evidently do not), but I think the world will function much better if our (wild) descendents embrace a spirit-filled world, and their responsibilities within that world—and that includes abiding by the Law of Holonic Reciprocity.
April 2, 2013 at 5:39 pm
Vera, it’s not so new if you include aggression against other species. The successful hunter was lauded because he provided meat for the group. Sexual selection probably kicked in too, so that skillful hunters had more kids. I saw it mentioned somewhere that a Hadza male couldn’t marry until he had killed 6 (?) baboons.
Later, as increasing population brought about clashes between groups of humans, the “mighty warrior” became a praised and glorified cultural icon. Victory steles such as that of Naram-Sin boasted of their domination over their enemies.
Now McDonald’s or Walmart or Microsoft, all of which started very small and grew to dominate the markets they compete in, are envied and emulated.
For me, it’s important to disconnect the concept of “aggression” from the shadow of condemnation that ordinarily darkens it. Hunting for food is very natural and understandable and, at the same time, it is aggression.
Humans are far too clever and powerful to behave aggressively without restraint. It’s time we understood that human domination of the world is not a triumph. It is a fatal error.
April 2, 2013 at 6:01 pm
Mmmm… All predatory species are aggressive. But… I don’t think of killing other species as domination, because the predator/prey relationship is part of the cycle of service that the planet runs on. The grasshopper eats the leaf, the chicken eats the grasshopper, I eat the chicken, and someone will some day eat me, whether a worm or a scavenger. In death, we all serve life. (Except those who sit in marble urns somewhere! :-))
There is another kind of aggression, though. This is the aggression of a bully. Getting mine regardless. At the expense of my community, or the community of life. This aggression cannot be allowed to run rampant. In the days of the egalitarian bands, it was closely watched, and curtailed. But at some point not so long ago, things changed. (Do you see the pattern differently?)
April 2, 2013 at 6:30 pm
Wildearthman, isn’t violent theft but one subspecies of domination?
April 2, 2013 at 7:04 pm
Tamana,
Okay, let’s say that violent theft is a subspecies of domination—then what? How does this affect our attempt to understand where things went wrong?
April 2, 2013 at 8:15 pm
Just clarifying.
The part I don’t understand is… why do you object to taking things from the earth? Is digging for flint or obsidian theft? How about pipe stone? Or sifting for placer gold? I just don’t see that as either theft, or violent, and I wonder where you draw the line.
April 2, 2013 at 9:32 pm
Maybe some nomadic groups came upon habitat rich enough that they could actually settle and thrive in one area. (lakeshores, river valleys and estuaries?)
Maybe the populations of such rich territories would tend to grow until sub-groups split off looking for similar amenities.
Maybe groups of humans eventually came into conflict with other groups over territory and resources.
Maybe the small, egalitarian, peaceful groups tended to lose out in these conflicts to larger, more aggressive and specialized/stratified groups.
Maybe Schmookler was right and that groups facing conflict could either be thoroughly defeated, could retreat into undesirable territory, or could increase their numbers and develop a war culture themselves.
Maybe the culture of conflict required a non-productive warrior class and a more intensely productive peasant class to support it.
Maybe those who engaged in the labor of field agriculture were forced to provide storable, transportable sustenance for warriors (bread and beer? :-)).
Both the Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin), and The Parable of the Tribes (Schmookler), are attempts to get at principles of human ecology by means of thought experiment. The principles thusly derived are theory and not based on actual experience or fact. They are highly sophisticated surmises, based upon reasonable assumptions, but they do not stand as laws of human behavior. This is important to understand when we get down to the basics of human life.
I haven’t looked at Hardin’s work lately so I can’t comment in specific detail about his argument, but I suspect it is based upon the same mistaken assumptions as Schmookler’s work. After reading Parable a decade ago, I was in a subdued state of mind for two or three years, because in his scenario the bad guys always win—which also means the good guys always lose. I hated that; it was wrong that the world should be like that, just as it is wrong that a commons cannot be shared by a closed group without degrading it. It felt wrong, but yet, both their arguments seemed so very powerful, so undeniable, so overwhelming. But then I looked again at Schmookler’s methods and assumptions and finally figured out what we was doing. He was noting patterns of behavior over several thousand years of the history of Western Civilization, and extrapolating that pattern back onto tribal peoples. He was never looking at the record of tribal peoples themselves. He was making the assumption of equivalence between indigenous cultures and our own, but what if they are not exactly equivalent, and that differences in culture can produce differences in outcome? Within the culture of civilization it is a given that our people are going go forth and multiply, almost without limit. As we do this we are going to need more land, to expand along with our expanding population. How many wars in Europe were fought over land and resources? One whole hell of a bunch. But let’s imagine, if we can, a different group of people –or let’s say three groups of people, living in contiguous territories, and these three groups of people have made the internal decision to keep their population in check, so that they don’t overrun their resource base, and they don’t have to overrun their neighbors, and in this way they can go on living in the same place they call home for hundreds of human generations. Is the parable of the tribes going to prevent them from doing this? Well, as it turned out for the Yurok, Hupa, and Karuk people of northern California, no, for several millennia—they live as neighbors and at peace. But then the parable kicked in when white treasure seekers showed up in their territory in the days of the gold rush, and overran them all.
For someone like me, looking into the distant future, I see life where the parable doesn’t apply, as long as the people can live within the Law of Limits, and choose to live in the Gift. With a ravaged and plundered Earth to work with, and no real prospects for living in the Theft, I think our distant descendents might just pull it off. And then, too, they will have learned the expensive lessons of where that Theft ultimately leads to, as they will have seen the utter catastrophe of it all.
So, Tamana, in the case you cite above, considering our distant past, I believe the parable may well have applied, because we are talking about proto-empires going up against bands of hunters, and the proto-empires are almost always going to win that fight. Or as Schmookler puts it: “The selection for power is not certain at any time, but over the long haul it is irresistible.” Power is a big deal when the Earth is a storehouse of treasures, and the competition is on to get as much as you can; but when all the shiny trinkets have been absconded with, and all that is left is rubble, I believe people are going to have a little different orientation to life—one that is actually Life-affirming.
Call me Polyanna, but I do believe that people are highly influenced by incentives, and how they understand those incentives. Having seen what they’ve seen, or heard about it all in story, I believe our People of the Fresh Start are going to feel grateful just to be alive. If they resume their place as an integral member within the Community of Life, I think they will find their treasures, and their power, embedded within that Community, animated by a world filled with Spirits.
Of course there is a little bit of hell to go through between now and then.
April 3, 2013 at 6:04 pm
Wildearthman: my version of what went wrong is not original at all. It is very plain and simple; no “Gift”, no “Theft” no nature spirits involved. We have been far too clever and not at all wise. I know it’s a cliche of sorts but I’ll go with that anyway.
Foraging is just taking from the wild. Birds do it, fish do it, animals including humans do that. I hope the word “take” can be understood in a value-neutral way. A rabbit nibbling on greens in the bush is taking what it wants and needs to survive and reproduce successfully. It’s perfectly natural.
As you know, rabbits come to maturity and breed quite rapidly. Their population numbers are kept in balance by external constraints like cold weather, food scarcity and, of course, predators.
At one time long ago, our primate ancestors were faced with similar external constraints which kept their population relatively stable.
You know about the rabbit infestation that happened in Australia; 24 rabbits released in 1824 were the beginning of a population explosion so that by 1920 (according to one estimate) there were 10 billion of them. Australia provided the rabbits with habitat nearly free of external constraints. With warm weather, plentiful vegetation and no natural predators, the rabbits could happily feed and breed all year long.
Of course this was an ecological disaster with species loss and soil erosion. It was not good for Australia and not good, in the long run, for the rabbits.
Human expansion has been slower, of course, but it has now reached a point of overgrowth; an infestation, if you will. Unlike the rabbits in Australia, humans have been challenged by external constraints along the way that might have halted our expansion and kept us in check. This is where the “too clever” part comes in. Using the innovative, problem solving abilities of our extraordinarily complex brains we have been able to overcome every challenge.
We were to clever to remain a prey species. We became a predator species but we were too clever to be limited to beneficial, population balancing relationship with a few prey species. Humans are the only predator that can kill everything. We were too clever to remain constrained to one kind of habitat. We devised clothing and shelter, the use fire and many other strategies to invade nearly every part of the earth. As hunter-gatherers we were (with rare exceptions) too clever to remain in balance with nature. We settled in areas of rich habitat and increased our numbers to defend these territories from outsiders. We developed agriculture.
So, if our intelligence has been such a problem, can’t we get rid of it somehow and go back to being simple animals again? I don’t think so. Our only hope is in the “wisdom” part. Humans have not been wise enough to see that ever-expanding domination, which feels good to us, is not good for the planetary biosphere and, therefor, not good for us.
We are just beginning to understand that now.
We must use our intelligence in better way; wisely placing severe constraints on our own activities, on human population numbers, territorial occupation, environmental impact.
I agree that wisdom can’t be imposed from the top down. Every human alive will have to be consciously and willingly committed to a much more sapient way of life.
April 4, 2013 at 9:50 am
Tamana,
Conspicuous by its absence in your last post is a word I use a lot, because it seems to me the key to so much of human behavior, and that word is culture. I begin now to wonder if the differences in our perspectives don’t in some way relate to this issue of culture, and its importance in human life. Human nature, in my view, is a whole array of potentials, which are activated or suppressed by culture. If the culture is wholesome, vibrant, and Life-affirming, the people who are informed and directed by that culture tend to reflect those qualities in the way they live their lives. When, as in our case, you have a ten thousand year old culture of empire, based upon theft, deception, and deadly violence, the people influenced and directed by that culture tend to reflect those qualities in their lives. The domination that you find so troublesome (and I find it troublesome, too) is not, in my view, genetically determined, but a culturally activated human potential. In another culture that domination can be, and has been, suppressed or downplayed. In fact, I think that is exactly what happens in animistic cultures where the predator-prey relationship is elevated to the spiritual realm and is experienced as a sacred cooperative relationship to be practiced with the greatest of circumspection and respect.
For me, this is the optimum accommodation to these two seemingly self-contradictory facts of life: All life in sacred, and yet we must take life in order to live.
Charred monkey headshots, gruesome and disturbing though they are, can be perceived and understood in more than one way. If you are living in the 21st century, and your natural habitat has been stolen from you by white invaders and their government proxies, and you are reduced to taking rich foreigners out on van-supported mini-safaris, it is all about money and survival. The sacredness of the hunt is turned into mockery. A thousand years ago, that same hunt might have looked much the same, but with its spiritual elements intact—spiritual elements supported and engendered by culture—that hunt would have had a wholly different meaning. Deprive it of that element, as I believe you are wont to do, and it is just a dead monkey smoking on the fire, and one with a face that looks rather human.
Spirituality mediates between necessity and the sacredness of Life. Take it away, as our culture has, and all you have is domination and death.
April 5, 2013 at 5:58 am
Wildearthman: The kind of cultural evolution I’m talking about is the slow development of the tools and strategies with which we humans have acquired ever increasing power over the world around us. You are talking about the stories we tell ourselves to make it all seem “good” and admirable.
In modern civilization similar stories are still told about the glories of “progress” and technological salvation. I’m still puzzled by the question of why we feel these stories are needed.
April 5, 2013 at 10:40 am
Leavergirl,
You ask: How much can humans take from the Earth before it becomes theft? Before getting down to small things, like obsidian, let’s look at large things. Humans have been mining the crust of the Earth for centuries, in a small way, and for the last century and a half in a big way. First it was iron, gold, silver, copper, nickel; then it was coal; then it was oil; then we started finding uses for all kinds of things buried underground, to the point that mining is now totally integrated into our way of life. These are all non-renewable, one-time-only resources, and our global economy, filled with seven billion eager resource users, is based upon the notion of growth—perpetual, endless, ever-accelerating growth. Naturally and inevitably, we took all the easiest stuff first, using mostly human and hand-tool labor. Fossil fuels made possible technological innovation that would mostly replace hand labor and hand tools, and speed up the whole process. Technology made available deeper, harder-to-get-at underground resources, and kept those resources coming. Now we are having to rely on ever more extreme techniques to get at the last of what is left: deepwater ocean drilling for oil; mountain top removal for coal; fracking for natural gas; and low-quality, energy-intensive tar sands for a shot at more oil. All of these techniques carry with them special environmental and health dangers, but, oh well, I guess that is just the cost of doing business.
I found the timing quite interesting that your query entered my inbox while I was listening to a talk given by Sandra Steingraber. A downwinder of toxic industry, she was told at the age of twenty that she had colon cancer. A lot of others in her community and family also got similar news. Just the cost of doing business: and in terms of Gross Domestic Product all these cancers were a win for the economy: the hospitals, the labs, the doctors, the insurance companies all improved their bottom line, so what’s the problem? Well, nothing at all if life is all about GDP, and numbers, and growth. But if it was your life that was shortened, or disrupted, or brought to an end, thanks to these chemicals that came from under the ground, where maybe they should have stayed, then different questions start getting asked.
After many life-altering events, thanks to the cancer, Steingraber has started a family and moved to upstate New York in an area that happens to sit atop the natural gas-rich Marcellus shale deposits, which the industry very much wants to frack. For some reason, Steingraber is not in favor of this. I’m sure that most of us, having seen Gasland, know what fracking can do to drinking water, as in make it flammable. Also, the 500+ chemical cocktail they blast down into the Earth under enormous pressure is riddled with poisons of various kinds, including benzene and even insecticides, and people in the neighborhoods of these projects are showing signs of ill health– surprise, surprise. The insecticide is there to kill underground fauna that can interfere with the smooth workings of the process, so they’ve got to go. But this raises an interesting question that almost no one ever asks. First of all, if there is life down there that means the biosphere runs much deeper than we normally conceive of it. And what if all this underground territory, which is part of the biosphere, is its own ecosystem—or rather, a network of ecosystems? And what if these ecosystems actually serve a purpose—one which we know nothing about, because we haven’t had the incentive to ask that question—and what if that purpose were directly pertinent to the life of the biosphere as a whole? What if all our lives depended upon the integrity of the deep biosphere? I think it’s a question worth asking.
Almost no treasure that we extract from the Earth’s core comes up pristinely pure all by itself. It comes up with what we call overburden, or spoils, and it comes up with an amazing number of toxins. The overburden gets pushed around and left as piles of rubble. The toxins leach out into air and water, and enter the bodies of all life forms they come in contact with—in some cases, in beings (including human beings) thousands of miles distant from the source. If space invaders came to our planet and spread poisons around in exactly the same way our mining operations do, we’d know they were trying to kill us, and we’d do our best to kill them instead. But, thanks to the archaic mining law of 1872, we actually subsidize people to poison us.
You mention gold placer mining. When I was researching my book on the Klamath I got a gig as a camp host on the (Cal-) Salmon River, which flows into the Klamath about 60 miles above its mouth. It was a lovely campsite, and strategically located for me to learn a lot about the area. What I discovered was a river that had been utterly transformed by hydraulic mining for gold. The hills surrounding my camp had ditches at five different elevations that had once diverted water out of natural creeks and directed the flow downhill under great pressure through piping that ended in a hose with a special blast nozzle. With this tool, the natural river bank was blasted away down to bedrock, all up and down both sides of the river, a hundred feet on either side. If you explore, you’ll find piles of rounded rocks, bowling ball size and bigger, at various places up and down the river. This is the spoils left behind; the dirt was washed down the river, while specks of gold were collected in troughs or pans. Only a few people really got rich, while a lot of other people worked really hard for not very much. (Think of the coolie labor up there building those ditches in the summer heat.) Most of this was done from the 1860s to the 1930s, and the process became ever more industrialized, and ownership ever more concentrated. Individuals still look for color up in that country, but there isn’t much left after that much activity.
Historically, the Salmon River was the pre-eminent home, within the Klamath system, of the spring Chinook salmon. That is because it is a cold, fast, highly oxygenated river with good deep holes that provide cover and habitat even in late summer low water. The life cycle of the spring Chinook requires over-summering in rivers and spawning in October. When there was topsoil on both sides of the river, the river had trees to shade it and keep it cool. Bedrock doesn’t grow trees very well, and the river banks are now mostly barren. So, too, is the river. From a river teeming with fish in all months of the year, the Salmon has become a ghost of its former self. In four or five hundred years topsoil may rebuild along its banks and the river regain some of its former viability as habitat. Unfortunately, the number of spring Chinook returning to the Salmon is now so low (in one recent year it was fewer than a hundred individuals) that a rebound doesn’t seem real likely. This was all done for a shiny metal that makes men mad.
At one point in the movie Avatar, the Sigourney Weaver character says something to the effect that we don’t recognize what is the treasure and what is of real value here. We will destroy a world for unobtanium (or gold, or coal, or oil, or iron, or just about anything) never having appreciated what is truly of value, the treasure of Nature left wild and complete. Granted that all our lives are implicated in the mining of these “resources” under the Earth—but the shiny trinkets we now regard as so important have no meaning at all in the larger scheme of things, and to get these novel playthings we dismantle the world. How much can you take before it is theft? Good question. Where would you draw the line?
April 5, 2013 at 12:51 pm
Wildearthman, you are preaching to the converted here. Nobody here wants the crap that goes on. But some of your writings show an unrealistic purism that I feel compelled to challenge. I don’t think there will ever be another human society that lives according to taking nothing from the earth under the surface, and what I am looking for is a pattern that takes, sure, like all creatures, but does not plunder.
Taking some oil? Sure. Plundering the planet so the oil can be wasted on gazillion throwaway gadgets and ridiculous, obscene luxuries, no. But IMO, this is not going to get fixed by branding every bit of taking as Theft. It will get fixed by switching the economy to sharing, however. A sharing economy is a sparing economy. (I just made that up.) 🙂
April 5, 2013 at 1:11 pm
Leavergirl,
I look at animism and shamanism as an accommodation to life that worked for humans and also worked for the entire Community of Life. I don’t think it is essential for those of us who have been programmed by the culture of civilization to necessarily believe in those spirits ourselves in order to see the utility of that approach to life. Human beings live by story, and that was a story that worked. The story we are living in today does not work. Looking at it in this light, I would invite you to re-read a piece I posted awhile back on the subject of spiritual debt. Again, you don’t have to buy the particular worldview behind this story in order to see how well it functions as a story to live in. Personally, I find the worldview it exemplifies to be quite credible, and quite possibly the way things really are.
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 are worth a second thought.
April 5, 2013 at 2:29 pm
Wildearthman: I believe you already know what I think of Prechtel. And whatever he is (he says half Pueblo Indian, half white, if I remember correctly) he is certainly not Mayan.
And I don’t find “debt” a useful metaphor of what is needed, though using a different language, you and I would probably agree. I am just saying that the way you style your thoughts sounds unreasonable to me, purist and black & white. If you want people to hear better what you have to say, maybe listening to their concerns would be a useful step?
April 5, 2013 at 3:29 pm
Leavergirl,
In terms of this discussion, I don’t see why it matters what you think of Prechtel, or how genuine or otherwise you think he might be. I believe what he offers is a very good guideline about how to “borrow” from the Earth something of its finite stores.
So, it seems you are a lumper and I am a sorter. I think you blur meaningful categories, and you think I deal in stark blacks and whites. It is clear we are looking at the world through different eyes. Being an old guy, I am not so much concerned about how to navigate whatever there is to navigate inside the energy and resource bubble. Everything that goes on in that zone is by definition unsustainable. I am looking at the prospects for humans on the other side of that bubble, when all there is to work with is the annual solar budget. How will people live then? You are younger, probably by quite a lot, and are looking to how you might live out your own years, and with as much integrity as can be managed. That is fine for the age you live in, but there is no way your life is going to be a model for those on the other side of the bubble. So, in this regard there are very different definitions of sustainability: one that applies inside the bubble, and one that applies on the other side. What I have to say about the kind of sustainability that can be sustained may not apply to you directly, but I don’t think you should so quickly dismiss it as too puristic. We live in a time of relative ease (though certainly there is plenty of dis-ease too) because we are living off the principle of Nature’s economy. Those people coming afterward (if any) are going to have a whole lot of challenges that we don’t face right now. You may not consider these hypothetical future strangers as worthy of your attention, but I do consider them worthy of mine, because in my mind they represent the human race and its future. They are going to have to be tougher and smarter and more in tune than we have to be in our highly mediated world. The requirements of that world are my own special focus. If you find that focus inappropriate to your blog spot I can take my concerns elsewhere. My garden is calling out to me, so I’ve got to go now.
Maybe we’ll talk again, or maybe we won’t.
April 5, 2013 at 5:40 pm
You are right, Wildearthman; because I suspect Prechtel of peddling embellished indigenous traditions for personal gain does not mean that the ideas themselves are not worthy of consideration.
I am sorry, too, for speaking more sharply than I had intended. I felt irritated when you responded to my comments by a minilecture… I would much rather we engage in a conversation. And the conversation I was hoping for was a discussion whether all and any taking from the mineral part of the earth should be considered a Theft, and whether our long-hence descendants would be better off living that way, or whether there are other good options.
April 5, 2013 at 8:22 pm
Leavergirl,
Sorry about the mini-lectures; I’m not a big fan of those myself.
I’m not sure what kind of minerals you have in mind, but maybe the specifics aren’t that important. What is important, I think, is attitude, and recognizing what belongs to whom. I’ll give you an example from my own experience. I have built three arbors here on the property, using six –inch yew wood poles for uprights for one, and similar sized juniper poles for the other two. In keeping with the rustic motif, I wanted to span the cross pieces with some long straight poles out of the woods. I could probably have gotten a permit from the Forest Service to make it all legal, if I had wanted to play that game—which I didn’t. So this is to let you know that I don’t always play by human rules if I find them stupid in one particular case, and I think I can get away with breaking them. Well, over time, I found and removed the particular poles that I felt I needed for my project. And every time I cut down a vine maple, or a dogwood, I asked for permission to take the tree. I spoke to the sky, or to the woods, or to a tree spirit—I could never be sure, but the point was I was subtracting something from the forest, and I felt I needed to acknowledge that I was taking something that wasn’t mine (and it wasn’t the damn Forest Service’s either), and asking that permission seemed to me to put me in right relationship with the forest and the skinny little tree I took. I tried to select trees that were out of the visual corridor, and that wouldn’t be missed, and I tried not to take trees from the same area. In other words, I was trying to be conscientious about my “borrowing”—which might or might not be Theft. I didn’t feel like it was, and partly so because everything was done on a personal, human scale. It was more a thinning operation than anything, I rationalized, and I was causing no harm to the forest. Over a period of several months I took more than a dozen poles. I tried to take no more than I needed, and to use all that I took. Tamana will say that I am just telling myself stories, and he can see clear through those stories of mine, just like he can see through hunters’ stories that they tell themselves when they take down a deer with an arrow. For me, the attitude of respect and a disposition toward restraint are both important ingredients in this transaction. I happen to know these two stretches of forest where I did my harvesting from daily close contact, because I hike in one or the other of these old growth groves every day, and I feel qualified to assess the overall wellness and wholeness of these two fragments of forest. When I say I did them no harm, I think I know what I’m talking about. I think the same is true of that hunter who knows his herds and knows his territory. He is qualified to assess what his taking of that particular animal will mean to the herd’s general health. And if he is a smart hunter who wants to go on living and hunting in his chosen territory, he’d better be paying attention to the effects he is having.
So, I hope this came off as conversation and not lecture, but I think you can see the principles I am getting at. If I had gone out and cut down a hundred trees, just because I could, and maybe sold some of them, I would be abusing a privilege, and, in my book, I’d be living in the Theft. The way it was, in my book, I was living in the Gift.
April 6, 2013 at 11:42 am
Wildearthman, thank you.
I think I am understanding better what you are saying, and I feel the same way. I daily thank all those critters, both animal and vegetal, for giving life so that I might live. What they give me is a Gift. Just like you got a gift from the forest. I like your attitude. By being mindful like that, I think natural restraint kicks in. A lot of the damage we see everywhere happens through mindless taking without acknowledging the Gift. And without acknowledging the Gift, we fall into the darkness of Entitlement.
I think I side with Tamnaa though when it comes to assuming that the animal or vegetable gives life willingly, the way “don Juan” described it. I suspect it being a rationalization.
And how do you feel about taking stuff from the debris of civilization? Our descendants will be surrounded by scavengeable salvage for thousands of years… Much of it was taken as Theft, but perhaps reuse is not disrespectful?
April 6, 2013 at 8:22 pm
Leavergirl,
I can’t prove that my crystal ball is any better than John Michael Greer’s. I’ve read his Eco-Technic Future, wherein he prognosticates a salvage society that might last a hundred years, or two. I find this projection highly optimistic, partly because he seems to assume a well-behaved Nature humming along at a steady, homeostatic pace, and I doubt this scenario very much. Instead, I believe that we are going to see cascades of system failures and runaway feedback loops. This is not my preferred scenario, mind you, only the one that is looking ever more likely, based on limited and selective information. And of course I hope I am wrong as can be. I know you have read some Jason Godesky, because you have referred to his take on horticulture as contrasted with agriculture—which I personally didn’t find particularly definitive. But he has influenced my thinking about a salvage society and also on the “impossibility” of civilization’s having a long term future. I haven’t read all of his Thirty Theses, but I have read Thesis #29, and this is the one that pertains to the present discussion. http://rewild.info/anthropik/thirty/
Am I against salvage and reuse? No, I’m not. I think people living in the brave new world of the human future are going to need all the help they can get. The one thing I used to worry about quite a bit, before this 29th Thesis helped put my mind at ease, is the way in which any technology, or any of its physical manifestations, are carriers of culture. I was worried that our descendents would feel compelled to reproduce civilization, and start the whole vicious cycle all over again. Now I don’t think that can happen, given what they’ll have to work with.
I know, it seems so cold-blooded to speak about such things as planetary systems collapse and societal breakdowns, and the resultant massive die-offs, but that seems to be what is shaping up, and I think seeing it coming is somehow better than not seeing it coming. Like Candide, I am going to keep tending (and taking pleasure in) my garden for as long as I possibly can. That, and trying to come up with a counter-narrative to the one we’re living in today, is the best I can think to do in the face of something so large and overwhelming.
Peace!
WildEarthMan
April 7, 2013 at 2:41 pm
[Sorry, been meaning to reply to Tamnaa in comment 77 and beneath but just no time lately and probably not for another week 😦 Nice to see V and WEM come to an understanding. I]
April 7, 2013 at 6:22 pm
Wildearthman, you could be right about the runaway loops. So far it’s shaping the way JMG said, kinda bump bump bump down a slow staircase. I tend to have a lot of faith in Gaia… she’ll do what’s necessary to keep homeostasis. It may not be the kind that keeps humans in business, though…
Candide is my favorite philosopher too! 🙂
As for civ unable to rise… I am not convinced. Civs rose on the backs of slaves and oxen, they don’t need more than that. Of course there was a lot of good land then… And before that proto-civs rose simply on human labor (Catal Huyuk, for example). I’ll go reread Jason again.
Happy gardening! I just found out that in Colorado, in order for the lasagna method to work, you gotta cover your garden in stone tile over the cardboard. Else it all dries out and just sits there, all that good horse manure. Wish someone had told me… I am not sure what a person would need to do for a large garden though. That would be lots of tile… Run around with a water hose in wintertime? That does not make sense either.
April 9, 2013 at 6:23 am
Proof that food storage leads to (gasp!) agriculture!
http://www.trinitygreenconsultancy.com/rain-forests/box-41-seedcaching-birds.html
Stratified society? Well, maybe not so much.