Monday, June 20, 2016

Fire: A Brief History


We live in a perplexing era.  On one hand, we are the most brilliant critters that ever existed.  On the other hand, we are knowingly destroying the ecosystem upon which our survival depends, which sane folks might see as the opposite of brilliant.  You and I descend from ancestors who, once upon a time, lived in balance with the family of life.  What happened?

Obviously, the industrial era has supercharged our eco-impacts.  The stage for the industrial era was set maybe 8,000 years ago, by the transition to agriculture, animal domestication, and civilization — a sharp turn away from low-impact living.  Was this our turning point?  Some think that we began to drift away from original harmony much earlier, maybe 30,000 to 50,000 years ago, with a Great Leap Forward, which brought complex language, innovative new tools, cave painting, body decorations, rituals, etc.

A few scholars have suggested that if space aliens had visited Earth 100,000 years ago, our ancestors would have appeared to be nothing more than ordinary animals.  For a long time, I accepted that.  Now I don’t.  I’ve been reading the work of Stephen Pyne, a scholar who has written 25 books on fire history.  He provided an introduction to his knowledge in Fire: A Brief History.  Those visiting space aliens would have noticed that one species — and only one — maintained fires in their encampments.  This behavior was not the slightest bit ordinary.

By learning how to preserve and manipulate fire, our ancestors acquired great power, far more power than they acquired from wooden clubs or chipped flint spearheads.  Fire eventually enabled them to colonize the entire planet.  Pyne says, “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.”

My home, food, and belongings were created by machines that operated on domesticated firepower.  Without firepower, this city and civilization would not exist; the place I live would be a healthy forest in a vast wilderness.  If our ancestors had not acquired firepower, humans would still be living close to the tropics, and the Americas might be unknown continents.

Long, long ago, our early hominid ancestors frequently provided nice warm meals for the hungry leopards and hyenas that visited in the night.  Man-eating predators greatly benefitted our kin by helping them avoid embarrassing population explosions.  But on one quest for a yummy midnight snack, the hungry man-eaters were shocked when the ancestors began brandishing flaming torches and yelling discourteous suggestions.  Antelopes never did this!

Swartkrans Cave is near Johannesburg, South Africa.  It has been carefully excavated.  At the oldest lower layers, no charcoal is found.  It is an era before domesticated fire.  At this level, there are complete skeletons of big cats, and the scattered gnawed bones of the critters they ate, including hominids.  Higher up, charcoal is found in newer layers, the age of fire.  Here we find complete hominid skeletons, and the scattered bones of the critters they gnawed, including big cats.  With fire, hominids had taken over the cave, and the prey had become predators.

Fire requires three things: heat, oxygen, and fuel.  From very early times, maybe a billion years ago, heat was available in the form of lightning and volcanoes, but fuel and adequate oxygen were missing.  Modern levels of free oxygen emerged by 500 million years ago, but there was no fuel.  With the arrival of land plants by 400 million years ago, biomass was born, and fire became possible.

In the early days, our Homo erectus ancestors captured fire from lightning strikes, and very carefully preserved it.  If the fire ever went out, the unlucky brothers and sisters began to smell like cat food.  Later, some genius learned how to kindle fire, a revolutionary innovation.  There were three types of fire starters: the fire drill, the fire piston, and the fire striker.  The first friction match appeared in 1827.  Today, even slobbering tykes can easily burn down the house.

Every day, there are eight million lightning strikes.  When a bolt hits fuel that is not soggy, a fire can start.  Pyne refers to this wild natural fire as First Fire.  Second Fire is fire that has been domesticated by humans.  It blazes under our control.  Some regions have abundant biomass fuel, and other regions barely have any.  The amount of Second Fire that could exist at any time was always limited by the amount of biomass available.

Third Fire is the flame of industrial civilization, and it has given us the diabolical power to create countless catastrophes.  The fuel it consumes is fossil biomass.  Coal is rainforest vegetation that accumulated over the course of 60 million years.  Oil and natural gas come from dead phytoplankton that accumulated over 250 million years.  Of course, they are nonrenewable and finite.  We will rubbish the planet’s ecosystem before we can burn all of them (but we’ll try!).

There has never been more combustion on this planet than now.  We are burning enormous amounts of sequestered carbon as fast as humanly possible, and this is overloading the planetary ecosystem with staggering amounts of pollution — greenhouse gasses, acid rain, toxic ash, etc.  “Since the present is often unable to absorb it, the outflow spills into the future,” says Pyne.  “We have had the impact of a slow collision with an asteroid.”

Third Fire powers the machinery that mines the ore, crushes it, smelts it, rolls it, delivers it, stamps it, welds it, and creates automobiles and countless other daffy mistakes.  The controlled fire in engines doesn’t care about the weather.  It can burn in the desert, the rainforest, the arctic, in planes, and at sea.  We simply turn the ignition key, and the engines fire up.  Third Fire enables the production of almost every manmade artifact in our lives.

I’ve just scratched the surface here.  Pyne has spent a lifetime writing about the subject that fascinates him.  Fire enabled cooking, which makes food easier to digest, neutralizes toxins, and kills bacteria and parasites.  Fire was used to drive wild game animals into confined locations where hunters waited.

Early agriculture began on treeless floodplains, where a digging stick and seeds were all that was needed.  As our numbers grew, we ran out of mudflats to thrash.  So, we invented slash-and-burn to transform vast regions of ancient forests into additional cropland and pasture.  Nobody knows more about the history of slash-and-burn than Pyne.

In eighteenth century North America, the eastern portion of the Great Plains was tallgrass prairie.  On average, Native Americans fired this region every three years, to eliminate brush, and maintain excellent grazing habitat for the bison herds.  The tallgrass prairie had soils and climate that were perfectly suitable for forest.  When the Indians were obliterated by the diseases of civilization, they quit burning, and the forest expanded.

Agriculture encourages population growth, and its shadow, conflict.  For thousands of years, demented nerds have invented countless new ways of using fire to kill people.  Both ships and settlements were flammable, and fire was an excellent weapon for turning them to ashes.  For several thousand years, there has been an accelerating nonstop arms race to discover new and improved ways for barbequing enemies and innocent bystanders.

In the old days, towns were often surrounded by defensive walls or palisades.  Inside, wooden structures were packed closely together, and each contained hearths with open flames.  Often, when one structure burned, many burned.  Russian villages typically burned every 20 to 30 years.  Cities have always been fireplaces.  After every immolation, the survivors built a new collection of highly flammable buildings.  Pyne suspected that the Christian concept of a fiery hell was originally inspired by the firestorms common in that era — horror!

It’s a short, well written, mind expanding, unforgettable book.

Pyne, Stephen J., Fire: A Brief History, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2001.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

How Did Things Get To Be This Way?


















Wednesday, June 1, 2016

The Myth of Human Supremacy


When an unlucky person has been swept away by the brainwashing of a wacko cult, concerned friends or family members sometimes seek the assistance of a skilled deprogrammer to exorcize the demons.  It’s a painful process.  The scrambled soul is blasted with a fire-hose of strong rational arguments, hour after hour, hammering away at the many contradictions in the cult’s beliefs.  Ideally, the shining power of truth blasts away the illusions, and opens the door to healing.

I was reminded of this while reading Derrick Jensen’s book, The Myth of Human Supremacy.  In his story, the wacko cult consists of human supremacists, zombies who have been indoctrinated to believe that humans are the miraculous conclusion of the long evolutionary journey.  Humans are the one and only species that is sentient, self-aware, intelligent, and able to make tools and communicate.

The cult of human supremacy has grown rapidly, and now includes a large portion of humankind.  The zombie mobs are mindlessly destroying the living planet that everything depends on for survival.  Jensen puts a spotlight on the demon: “Unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of any culture.”  We are bombarded with supremacist ideas from early childhood.  They define our understanding of normality, and encourage us to live like there’s no tomorrow.  Only humans matter, a living planet does not.

By definition, human supremacy is about hierarchy: the white male God, white kings, white men, white women, minorities, mammals, birds, plants, insects, bacteria, etc.  Most of the community of life is inferior to you, resources for you to exploit or destroy.  The supremacist worldview has no concern for ecological health.  Civilization is a space station where all of our needs are magically met.

Jensen devotes many pages to revealing the cult’s creepy narcissism.  Research is discovering that plants and nonhuman animals are sentient, self-aware, intelligent, and able to make tools and communicate.  Slime mold can learn and remember, displaying more intelligence than a number of world leaders.  Plants do react when damaged, disproving the cult’s belief that organisms without brains can feel no pain.  The cult believes that communication means making funny noises with human lips, but trees communicate using chemicals.

Humans spray neurotoxins on their food, while boasting that we are the only ones who possess intelligence.  “Intelligence” is a slippery word.  From the supremacist perspective, it’s intelligent to create an industrial society that blindsides the planet’s climate.  Thanks to this intelligence, 98% of old growth forests are gone, 99% of prairies, 99% of wetlands, 90% of large oceanic fish.  “When others besides human supremacists look at us, they see the worst thing that has ever happened to this planet,” says Jensen.  “If animals could conceive of the devil, his image would be man’s.”

For thousands of years, agriculture has had a well-documented history of transforming healthy ecosystems into wastelands via deforestation, soil mining, wetland destruction, and water mining — a process that still continues.  Agriculture can never be sustainable.  “Plows are probably the single most destructive human invention ever, and agriculture was the single biggest — and least intelligent — mistake any creature has ever made.”  Humankind is in extreme overshoot right now, as the population skyrocket keeps zooming upward.

There are two flavors of technology: authoritarian and democratic.  Authoritarian technology is produced by complex, hierarchical civilizations.  This technology tends to control the society.  We must have electricity, electronics, sequestered carbon, and transportation devices to participate in modernity.  Consumers are hardcore electricity addicts.  Jensen screams!  Lack of imagination is a primary cause of the Earth Crisis.  We can’t imagine living without electricity, but we can imagine a world without rhinos or tigers.  Oy!

It takes imagination to challenge the unquestioned beliefs that inspire insane behavior.  Jensen’s doctor says that there can be no cure without a proper diagnosis.  Unquestioned beliefs often make an accurate diagnosis impossible.  They tell us that renewable energy, nuclear power, and geoengineering are brilliant solutions.  So, every unquestioned belief must be mercilessly questioned, and the dodgy ones sent to the shredder.

Democratic technology, on the other hand, is stuff that anyone can make, like a basket or bow and arrow.  Chimps use sticks to fish for yummy termites.  Vultures throw stones to crack ostrich eggs.  This is sustainable.  It doesn’t rock the boat.  But authoritarian technology is big juju.  Too often, even green activists have vivid fantasies of a sustainable future, whilst keeping many of the unsustainable goodies of civilization.  The line between naughty and nice can be blurry.

Lately, I’ve been reading about the Aztecs.  In 1492, Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) was one of the biggest cities in the world, with a population of about 200,000, five times larger than London.  They had no horses, oxen, plows, or metals.  The fields were tilled with digging sticks, and fertilized with human poop.  It was a highly sophisticated and authoritarian Stone Age civilization famous for cutting the beating hearts out of thousands of prisoners at a time.

Words can be slippery.  Throughout the book, Jensen frequently uses “stupid” when discussing the quirks of civilized humans.  Stupid means unintelligent, having a limited ability to learn and understand, an incurable handicap.  Maybe "ignorant" would have been more precise.  It means a lack of knowledge — a somewhat curable shortcoming.  Methinks that ignorance plays a major role in the bad choices we make.  In many ways our education system remains lost in a dream world of yesteryear.

Anyway, Jensen tackles and paddles many unquestioned beliefs.  We all suffer from them, to some degree, he says.  It’s hard not to, living in this culture.  Questioning is a powerful medicine that should be used daily.  When it comes to innovation, we are terribly clever.  At the same time, we are tropical primates, engaged in a phenomenally ignorant adventure in violating as many of the laws of nature as humanly possible, for no good reason.

The myth of human supremacy asserts that we are rational, moral, and ethical.  Wild animals have no interest in reason, morals, or ethics because they have no need for them.  They live sustainably by simply remaining in balance with the community of life.  They have no need for powerful 20-20 foresight, because they stay on a stable time-proven path.  Supremacists are ravaging Earth, but they look awesome in their smiling selfies.

Jensen's book reminds me of a defibrillator, the gizmo used when someone's heart stops beating.  Its two paddles are placed on the chest, and then a powerful electric shock is blasted into the victim, in an effort to restart the heart.  He doubts that his book will convince many of the living dead supremacists to question their beliefs.  Its main purpose is to encourage the pilgrims who understand that civilization is killing the planet.  We need to save as many species as we can.

The book is also something like a hearing aid.  It heightens readers’ ability to hear the supremacist voices that barrage us every day.  It’s helpful to better recognize the tireless jabber from the lunatic asylum.  And so, Jensen waves and rides off into the sunset.  “The more I learn about the real world, the more wonderful I think it is, and the more honored I am to be here.”

Jensen, Derrick, The Myth of Human Supremacy, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2016.