Back to Eden

 I do not see where agricultural based civilization (historically) is truly sustainable, healthy for us, or one that promotes egalitarian behavior in our species. Anthropological and archeological research on how hunter gatherer's live, their overall physical health (if they lived past 5 years of age), and their sustainability supports this (existed a 100 times longer than agricultural man and still exist). I see our culture today largely as a form of human domestication where our individual independence has been stripped, our bodies weakened, diseased (90% of diseases have their origin with animal domestication, city life, pollution, field toil, etc), and gone soft by too much food and lack of physical challenges that are true to our instinctive natures. We have a culture that does not fit our form and function as an animal. Land enclosure, property, and all the rest of crop growing requirements to meet the needs of civilization and the inevitable growth in population will always necessitate the formation of a managed organization that we call government, eventually causes wealth accrual and selfishness, and there is always the issue of land dominance over natural ecosystems and other groups of humans. For every acre of cropland we use is an acre taken away from the wild and every other creature that needs it to live. It also necessitates animal husbandry which is a known vector and reservoir for diseases that modern medicine must then seek vaccines and cures for. It's a fact that only a small amount of healthcare is actually necessary for illness and injury (trauma, environmental opportunistic infection, and the complications of child birth) outside the confines of civilization based on agriculture and human exploitation. I can think of no case where it did not go patriarchal either, instead of a egalitarian community where sexes are considered equal. In fact, some HG's were matriarchal because the woman was seen as the creator, something to be respected. Furthermore, agricultural civilization fosters rampant population growth and greater land exploitation to meet the needs for inevitable growth arising out of surplus yield and storage. Agriculture requires great labor without fossil fuels and necessitates for more offspring than is justified by a HG culture. The Kung for example, a hunter gatherer group in the Kalahari, generally have one child every 4 years vs. 1 every year with pre-fossil fuel agriculture. They achieve this by a system of shared breast-feeding beyond what is typical in agricultural culture. A farming woman does not have the time to feed her infant exactly every two hours with the frequency to maintain infertility with any degree of success. Numerous studies have shown this to be true even if modern women breast feed exclusively. It's about frequency and duration that count towards amenorrhea and subsequent infertility. Modern industrialization may in fact be reducing the need for more children as evidence by the number of average offspring in first world nations but the population is still growing because of this cultures need to extend lifespans well past their prime years, years that could have been spent loving, sharing, and socializing with each other instead of working at some cubicle or soulless occupation, to maintain the suffering convalescent through another decade of decrepidity. It also shifts true population needs onto developing nations where population is soaring, and nearly every baby survives today whether it really should or not. Either we all adopt a one child policy, a pipe dream and a oppressive government to try and enforce it, or tragic things just have to happen naturally. Nature is indifferent about such loss and moves on without shedding any tears. Also, exploitation has gone global in order to unequally distribute the planets wealth, resources, and food to a fraction that see's itself as superior to the rest.

I'm not saying HG is a utopia because utopia does not exist, and I'm not romanicitizing their way of life either - it's sometimes very hard and short, but if humans are going to survive in the long term, thrive with a higher quality of life (on average HG's work 2-3 hrs a day getting food), and maintain a living ecosystem here on this planet it is one we must learn to hybridize (using the knowledge that stems from western civilization and science) and re-establish hunting/gathering in the years ahead. Their way of life is better for our natural form and function, it is better than a agricultural way of life - this is just my opinion having studied history and done the "grow your own food" thing, and I'm fully aware I'm a hypocrite. Even a hypocrite can say what is true. Growing food necessitates control, the exclusion of wild living things - or at least most of them, unequal distribution of food (some fields are going to do better), the need to protect property, requires great toil without fossil fuels, is patriarchal,  requires government, surplus and efficiency creates the need for a unit of exchange that eventually becomes money, prisons are needed once laws are created to manage the unhealthy population densities, and then eventually it all leads to wars between covetous agricultural city states. The malignant efficiency and dominance over nature is absent with hunter-gatherers, and that's why I argue they are singularly sustainable and good for mother nature even if that means they lose more babies and necessitate life without a/c and deodorant. I believe there might be a way to take modern knowledge and improve on hunter-gatherers without philosophically altering their way of life or their methods of sustainability.

I'm a domestic modern human, born and raised in this malignant culture, and I have few skills, physical adaptations, or knowledge to fully return to a hunter gatherer way of life. Not to mention we have largely exploited and destroyed most, if not all, of the great hunter/gatherer resources that once existed, a world that when looking at the diversity and abundance of the past anyone would equate with a Eden. Proof enough we ate the wrong proverbial fruit. Forbidden knowledge indeed!

I'm not naïve, I see no way around a great dieoff in our species, quite possibly our extinction and 90% of all life on the planet, or any serious consideration by anyone with the power to do so in changing our culture of dominance, government, wealth, pathetic physical weakness, and war. We need civilization to collapse, be destroyed, whatever, and the wild Eden of the ancient world to return. Instead, what I see is a world full of domesticated humans steadfastly clinging to a way of life that is wholly not sustainable and horribly exploitive of each other and the planet. We understand or know nothing else. So be it, and may hell beckon.

 (New blog being created to record my quest to adopt a hunter-gather lifestyle and a return to being human even if totally futile)

Dancing in our Cage

I'm at work listening to 80's music. I'm looking at video's on ancient home building and wild living while munching on my wife's dehydrated apples dipped in local MS honey, honey that I bought from a local farmer trying to make ends meet at a roadside market in Popularville, MS. We didn't plant our watermelon in time for the 4th, but in another 2 weeks they'll be ready. Plenty of Zucchini's and squash though. They're good but my vision is a huge berry harvest, fruit tree's, and time to fish as I watch the world implode. Such wishful thinking inside my modernity cage. 

Meanwhile, my saltwater fishing grounds is now inundated with coastal tourists who are out celebrating on the beaches. Probably sticking sparklers in dead Redfish that litter the beach. Some kid, not knowing any better, is using a tar ball as part of his sand castle. The scavenging birds circle and strangely avoid the dead pickings, and the bloated corpses have but a few flies buzzing at the gills. Dead Crab, of all stages, float in the shallow tidal flats, while kids wearing arm inflatables wage war with their siblings using wet noodles bought at Walmart. The smell of sun tan lotion fills the air as the outer sheath of a tampon floats riding a incoming wave. Every now and then some whiff of degraded oil comes from somewhere unknown, and the momma's complain when their kids come running with a smelly festering fish they think is neat. A brown mucous that looks like a milkshake floats in stagnant low tide pools caught between the MS alluvial sand bars and the open Gulf. It stinks and is slimy. People report this and are told by public authorities, "oh, it's just sea foam, it's just a Summer time fish kill, just normal...." Please shop at our stores, wave a flag, support the troops!

People are talking about a person that died after swimming off Grande Isle's beaches and sickened a few others with flesh eating bacteria. http://www.fox8live.com/story/22747257/one-dies-three-other-louisiana-residents-afflicted-with-flesh-eating-virus  I have seen this, a HORRIBLE way to die. You rot and dissolve until your heart skips and quivers from so much toxemia and then stops, antibiotics do nothing. It has people's attention, some, and let's hope a few skip the whole "let's play in the water" thing. I perfectly natural thing to do, but not so much now, this age of freedoms and comfort - "isn't that what they told us?"

Tuesday, when I was free from my job's demands, demands of the sickly "comfortable" people, my wife and I went scavenging for oyster shells along the beach between Long Beach and Pass Christian. We were talking about native american basket weaving and how to learn to do it, and we were collecting mother of pearl covered shells to craft some jewelry made of native materials. The day was not uncomfortably hot as a Summer thunderstorm moved over the bay and cast a high shadow on the selected beach to scavenge. There was only a few people laid out with towel or chair watching their kids play. A sign with a list of 20 different things forbidden by the local law boards greeted us at the boardwalk where we parked. No dogs, no bikes, no bottles, yada, yada, yada. All legal back in my youth, and I can still remember taking my dogs there to watch them dive into the surf or share a path of footprints leading to no where. Their companionship was a heavy rapid breath as I mourned the memory. The loose dry sand was a nice challenge that got our hearts beating a little faster as we made our way to the waters edge. The Gulf waters swirled around my feet and were warm and at times surprisingly cool as I milled from pool to pool looking at dead fish, dead crab, dead bait fish, and scummy stuff. Then of course, feeling revulsed, I retreated to the shoreline to continue my conversation about hunter-gatherers with my wife. Doing our best to fantasize while the great sea rolled in its dead. I came upon a strange shell that I correctly surmised was part of a sea turtle...then another, and another, until just a empty skull and beak half buried in the sand laid strewn far from all the other bits and pieces. I had four turtle shell pieces, like bony shoulder blades with a joint for rib or arm. A pair of middle aged locals, looking as if they had spent too much time smoking and drinking, came strolling towards us fast. "Hey, did you guys see a turtle anywhere?" I showed him the shell pieces, asked if this was part of a turtle, I wasn't sure 100% since I had never dissected a sea turtle. "Yep, those are shell pieces." He said, "don't post any pic's of them online, you might get into a lot of trouble because they're endangered." We then got to talking, and he suggested I report our findngs of the tar ball patches, the dead turtle, and brown scum to the NRC. He said he was a local that was involved in the BP spill cleanup, and is now sick, and is part of a class action lawsuit. Showed me his flaky scale covered arms while talking about headaches and frequent illness. I told him that I too worked the spill, and we swapped stories of that horrible year. I've had more headaches than I once did, but I have always figured it was related to my age, sleep patterns from work, weight, the food I was eating, etc, all which could be the real reason for complaints totally unconnected with this huge spill. No scaly skin or breathing trouble, although I can honestly say that I get sick now twice a year instead of one, usually starting out as a sore throat or fever. BP related, who knows, but he encouraged me to go Waveland and have my blood tested. I knew about this local initiative being funded by some attorney in FL who was testing the blood of cleanup workers, but here's the thing, we live in a world of chemicals and everyone's blood and tissues is contaminated with synthetic chemicals from our soaps, makeup, food, drinks, air we breathe, pillows we sleep on, and the stuff we touch....it's a toxic soup that possibly leads to all sorts of bad effects which we further treat with more pharmaceuticals later in life. Making specific connections to any one chemical is near impossible. None of that matters to the locals who are rightfully angry with a company that still leaves oil on the beaches, who has fought paying money out at every opportunity, and essentially bribed the local politico stretching all the way back to Washington to essentially white wash the effect and move on to even more drilling. We know something's wrong with the waters....we can see it. In time there will be more spills, maybe one that's even worse, and no amount of government safety oversight can prevent it from happening. It's a known statistical risk that results in repeated small spills, leaks, and environmental assaults that are widely accepted as the price to pay for our modern civilization which continues to breed dependent, sick, and addled humans that pace the cages industrial civilization has built for them. We can complain and protest, but we can't get out.

Born and raised in them, we know and understand little else, because none were alive in a time when the waters were clean, the air free of pollutants, and the animals were in abundance. We grew up watching movies that show monkeys attacking each other with stones until a big obelisk makes them smarter. They then turn bone to club and go rampaging across the globe until we're wearing all white linen floating in space. You dare declare it wasn't like that, and people will say you're the one living in a fantasy world. If we can't keep our planet clean and alive, why even bother to go out into space? These memes and ideas seem floated everywhere caught in the collective consciousness of a race of man suffering from a shrinking neocortex (http://phys.org/news/2011-06-farming-blame-size-brains.html) and one that is assaulted by a million virtual images a day by the same system that is destroying everything. The bars are visible, the jailers with their guns, tazers, and pepper spray pacing our cages, and the cell TV's flashing mind numbing ideas (America, America, America, how great though are, for liberty...)at us unending. They're putting up camera's every where, and searching your cell for contraband. You're only reprieve is some outside time that is allowed between making something for the prison or servicing it, where you get but a small taste of what once was. There are rules though, and the outside is looking worse and worse with each visit. Riots are breaking out, shanks are being made, and the lights of your cell block are flickering. Cracks are forming everywhere and the outside Sun grows hotter. Will you live to breathe free air once more like your ancient ancestors, however polluted it may be? Independence day should mean something beyond what our prison TV says it means.