Helter Skelter

Stephen Pyne has spent a lifetime thinking about fire. Without the ability to use fire as a powerful tool, humans could have never migrated out of tropical Africa and colonized the outer world.

When human pioneers eventually reached the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, they discovered plant and animal species that were especially ideal for domestication. This region became known as the Cradle of Civilization. Its development enabled us to accelerate our long and painful march to the staggering eco-horrors of today.

Pyne is especially concerned about industrial fire. Its combustion of fossil fuel results in carbon emission levels that are turbocharging an angry swarm of catastrophes. “Our ecological effects have had the impact of a slow collision with an asteroid… together we have so reworked the planet that we now have remade biotas, begun melting most of the relic ice, turned the atmosphere into a crock pot, and the oceans into acid vats.”

Fire made us the unusual creatures we have become. Our colonization of the world was like a spreading human wildfire that expanded across unspoiled wildernesses in search of fuel. We enjoyed feasting on megafauna until they became scarce, at which point we advanced into new regions. Over time, hungry humans ran out of unoccupied territory to expand into. Oh-oh!

Groups had to revise their menus to include different food sources. Aggressive groups could attempt to smash their way into territories inhabited by other groups. As the millennia passed, and populations grew, friction between groups increased and spilled blood became more common.

Weaker groups were more likely to be swept aside. For example, of all the surviving wild cultures, the San people have the oldest DNA. Their time-proven way of life was incredibly sustainable. Their original homeland territory was vast, but over time, farmers and herders eventually snatched most of it away, forcing the San to retreat to the harsh Kalahari Desert. By the 1970s, their traditional way of life had taken a serious beating.

Alfred Crosby summed up a bedrock lesson of history: “Winning streaks are rarely permanent.” Like the traditional San people, most of the countless wild cultures that once existed sooner or later got blindsided by stuff like disease, colonization, capitalism, genocide, urbanization, and so on. The wild cultures that still survive are not safe and secure. Intruders from the outer world rarely enjoy a warm and fuzzy reputation for being kind and caring ladies and gentlemen.

Meanwhile, in the fast lane, the human wildfire learned how to paddle down rivers, sail across oceans, roll on railways, drive across continents, fly through the clouds, zoom to the moon, vaporize cities, produce enough food to feed billions, blindside a stable climate, exterminate vast forests, and turn Earth into a loony bin for hordes of lost and confused primates.

Big History is a million-page catalog of countless bloody dog-eat-dog conflicts between tribes, nations, religions, and empires. The strongest usually triumphed over the weakest, because the weak had no right to what they could not defend. But those who remained in the fast lane were still vulnerable to getting blindsided by brutal surprises.

Sadly, glowing screens and motor vehicles are more precious than wooly mammoths or healthy planets. The wizards of progress are guiding us toward a future of unimaginable prosperity, decarbonized energy, and tremendous achievements in family planning. Everyone will eagerly cooperate. Really? Well, if you believe it, it’s true!

Animal in the Mirror

Pyne noted, “Without fire humanity sinks to a status of near helplessness, a plump chimp with a scraping stone and digging stick, hiding from the night’s terrors, crowding into minor biotic niches.” In other words, an ordinary wild animal.

Since Neanderthals disappeared from the stage, our closest living relatives are now the chimps and bonobos, with whom we share up to 99 percent of our genes. They have lived in the same forests, in the same way, for several million years, without degrading their ecosystem, starting a fire, or fooling around with tools fancier than sticks or stones. They luckily benefit from their isolation, and the fact that their traditional habitat does not contain valuable resources that are tempting to greed monsters from outer space.

In his book Grandfather, Tom Brown shared a beautiful story he heard from his mentor Stalking Wolf, a traditional Apache from desert country, who traveled widely over the years, from the Amazon to Alaska, living off the land, and learning from it. One time, while in Alaska as winter approached, he frantically had to stock up on food and firewood for the coming months.

A bit later, when the snows arrived, he became fascinated by the ptarmigans, birds that survived in the frigid climate by their wits alone, sleeping in cozy snowdrifts. They belonged in this arctic land, like the lizards belonged in Death Valley. Lizards could not survive in Alaska, and ptarmigans could not survive on the desert.

With the use of specialized tools, our species could survive almost anywhere. But Grandfather felt uncomfortable because humans without fire and tools can only survive in special ecosystems. He deeply wanted to genuinely belong somewhere, like the ptarmigans and lizards. Over the passage of time, their way of life had become fine tuned for surviving in the ecosystems they inhabited.

Dear reader, this is a tremendously important point. Animals that are wild, free, and happy are perfectly at home in the wild ecosystems they inhabit. Like squirrels in an oak forest, they live where they belong, and remain intimately attuned to their habitat.

Our hominin ancestors fanned out across the planet, and eventually generated assorted impacts, including numerous extinctions. Today, most of the mob of eight billion no longer lives and thinks like healthy wild animals. A number of cultures have developed worldviews and lifestyles that are self destructively unclever, and ferociously brutal to the family of life.

Jay Griffiths wrote that humans evolved as highly alert nomadic hunters and foragers. “We were made to walk through our lives wildly awake.” Modern lifestyles are often mind-numbing routines — the opposite of the freedom we so deeply need. When healthy wildness deteriorates into passive obedience, we become vulnerable to the burning pain of cage rage. Very often, the daily news seems to be a barrage of batshit crazy cage rage stories from a wheezing world.

Timothy Scott Bennett concluded that we modern consumers were born and raised in captivity, something like zoo animals, the opposite of free, wildly awake, and at one with the land.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi biologist. One of the spirits in their tribal traditions is Windigo, a monstrous demon cursed with a voracious appetite. The more it eats, the hungrier it becomes. In the old days, Windigo was notorious for hunting too hard, and not sharing with others, leading to hunger times.

Later, uninvited pale faced invaders from outer space smashed into tribal lands. Native folks were stunned by their pathological foolishness. Around the world, colonists have now created countless Windigo whirlwinds of mining, deforestation, industrial agriculture, overhunting, and insatiable shopping. 

Today, the hurricane of daily news from around the world shouts that the Windigo spirit has become a horrific global superpower. Billions of folks everywhere eagerly dream of having more, more, more. Even the superrich are maniacally grabbing and hoarding as much status glitter as possible. This is not the path to a balanced and healthy future.

The Future?

In the preceding pages, I have explored my core question: how did things get to be this way? Now what? Humankind is deep in overshoot, and zooming down the path to a treacherously exciting future without brakes or safety nets. My computer has a wonderful Undo function that can easily vaporize a sequence of mistakes. Nature does not. If you broke it, you bought it.

For folks who have more than a dozen working brain cells, the growing number of climate change reports and news stories are overwhelming. It’s not a fake news hoax (unless you pretend it is). Indeed, folks who yank off their blinders can discover a nonstop firehose of heartbreaking stories about floods, furious storms, heat waves, droughts, crop failures, melting glaciers, massive wildfires, and on and on — week after week after week.

Our foolishly unclever culture, hobbled by limited understanding and foresight, has successfully conjured into existence a colossal whirlwind of bad juju. Eight billion consumers, with their famously big brains, are stampeding down the fast lane to a turbulent blind date with the rough justice of overshoot. How embarrassing!

Fare Thee Well!

Dearest reader, congratulations! One way or another, you’ve arrived at the skanky rear end of this word dance. Pressure is visibly rising around the world, rivets are popping on the Titanic, and the global circus has become a freakshow of wildfires, climate catastrophes, conspiracy theories, religious fanaticism, cocky neofascism, merciless dog-eat-dog greed, berserk cage rage, pathological status seeking, fire-breathing patriarchy, and all-purpose bad craziness. Something seems to be out of balance. Like the old Chinese proverb warns, we are living in interesting times.

OK! I’ve said what I needed to say. I hope you’ve had some kind of meaningful experience with my literary monsterpiece. Good luck! Do your best!

An Innocent Booboo?

Finally, a weird idea. Kindling the first domestic fire by spinning a fire drill stick was not, in any way, an obvious thing for a wild African primate to do. The uncomfortable possibility is that maybe just one individual ancestor (a kid?) discovered it purely by accident, and it consequently unleashed two million years of change and catastrophe, and created the global horror show outside your window. Whoops! Undo! Undo! Undo! Shit!

Author

Richard Reese lives in Eugene, Oregon. His primary interest is ecological sustainability, and helping others learn about it. He is the author of What Is Sustainable, Sustainable or Bust, and Understanding Sustainability and is currently working on a new book titled Wild, Free & Happy.  Reese' blog wildancestors.blogspot.com includes free access to reviews of more than 196 sustainability-related books by a variety of authors both contemporary and historical, plus a few dozen of his own rants.