Do Agriculture and Cities Impair Nature?

Cave Paintings from Chauvet Cave

I watched Werner Herzog's documentary on Chauvet Cave yesterday. The paintings in the cave depict a zoo of extinct animals: woolly mammoths, rhinos, cave lions. When ice covered much of Europe, the remaining forests and grasslands were able to feed a diversity of species of large mammals--including huge elephants and rhinos. That means the entire food chain had to be really productive.

Those animals were present in southern Europe during the last ice age, up until about 10,000 years ago. A few of them, like the Aurochs, straggled into the human era. (The last Aurochs died around 1600.)

The Aurochs went extinct because humans hunted it and destroyed its habitat. Nobody really knows what happened to the mammoths and the others. One theory is they died out as the climate warmed. Another is humans hunted them to extinction.

When humans introduced agriculture and cities, it's possible they severely curtailed the productivity of nature--totally the opposite of what we're taught in history classes. Rather than freeing themselves from want and deprivation, they starved everything else and ruined their own home.

Did Agriculture Wreck the Middle East and North Africa?

There is archaeological and geological evidence that the Middle East and North Africa were once green. There are two basic theories for why it's now a giant sand pit--one is that the climate changes periodically. The change might be driven by solar cycles or Earth's orbital mechanics. It could also be driven by other large scale phenomena, like geological changes that influence weather patterns. The other main theory is that agriculture wrecked it. Irrigation, tilling soil, and overgrazing might have been enough to destroy the landscape.

Once the groundcover was lost, the land became arid and dry. Without trees or grasses, there's nothing to catch and hold water and the cycle of rain and evaporation breaks.

Did all the carbon topsoil cover just blow away or turn to dust? It seems like that process would take longer than a few thousand years... but I don't really know.

Anyway, the answer to this question seems really fundamental. Is "Western" civilization really just completely untenable? Is the basis for western civilization fatally flawed? The West is a combination of things, but at its base are some ideas about agriculture and nature that might just be fatally incorrect.

Babylon just gets built again and again until it collapses into a shitshow of greed, death, and destruction.

Language and False Sense of Separation

A paradox laden theme that runs through this blog--since this is written--is symbolic thinking is a prison.

Symbolic thinking is the stuttering lame twin of the whole view of the world that you get by opening your eyes and having light pour into your retina.

This distorted, crippled view is like the accountant's gaze at an orchard in bloom. The accountant sees only future shekels per cherry blossom. Perhaps he even sees only "opportunity cost" of land that could be used for a casino or a mall that would bring in more shekels.

Language allows man to create a toy model representation of the world; maybe language arises from a toy representation that's in our heads. And from that toy model, perhaps, arises the idea that we're separate from it all. 

Another Permaculture Pioneer: Masanobu Fukuoka

I've been learning about Masanobu Fukuoka today.

Like Ruth Stout or Paul Gautschi, the idea of natural farming came to him in a flash of insight. In his case after a bought of pneumonia that almost killed him. He realized that agriculture was about not doing and he began experimenting with natural methods of planting and farming.

In an earlier post I wondered if these insights are really a side effect of brain duality and the actual weakness of our language/symbolic thinking.

The symbolic brain is deluded into thinking that our labor causes the plants to grow from soil that's been tilled into a simple geometric shape. It deletes the role of the soil and the unseen bacteria and fungi and the plants themselves.

Anyway, search YouTube for videos on him. He's an interesting guy. It's also interesting to compare and contrast him and the other permaculture, no till advocates.

The Barbarian Hoard: Superior Organizational Model?

In an old post I wondered if the modern world was the result of various tribes taking their turn at the helm. The systems we live in are an expression of the approach of one or two groups, and therefore don't make any fundamental sense to many of the people stuck in them. For example, if you sit through a meeting at a corporate job, you can see some of the people are completely bored and listless, maybe even pained, while others happily make spreadsheets of lists and lists of checklists. The Kafkaesque corporatocracy world is a joy for some and an existential crisis for others.

Maybe a good alternative to corporate organization is the barbarian hoard. The corporation is a perpetual ship's crew, a never ending "war", with a wartime organizational hierarchy that's created around making creamed corn, tires, or providing IT services, or whatever. Most of the people that spend the best part of their lives working in those places never intended to fine tune a creamed corn machine. It keeps running and doing the same thing because it has to, not because anyone cares if it does.

A different organization approach is the barbarian hoard--a group of people come together when they need to, or want to, to take care of some task and disband once it's complete. There might be a hierarchy, but one that only endures for the existence of the hoard. That type of organization might work for independent peoples.

It might be a good model to compete with corporate entities today, which are only capable of competing with other persistent corporate entities. We see the US military, for example, capable of wiping out another corporate nation's armed forces, but then incapable of stifling irregular troops.

We Know What Trump Is. Now What?

Trump's attack on Syria was Bubba Clinton style symbolism and posturing. It is indicative that it was pretty easy for the entrenched psychopaths in DC to push him around. If he ever had any intention of an "america first" presidency, it's obvious that was just relegated. Trump's the neocon's little bitch. Another president, yet another extension of the shitty wars of post 2001.

Now what?

Conan: Consciousness Rising Redux

I wrote another post about Conan The Barbarian (1982) a while ago. This one fleshes out more details.

The story draws on the seasonal, solar year myth that's at the heart of just about every movie or TV series. A recent example is Iron Fist on Netflix.

Conan represents the Sun man. In his first incarnation, he's spinning the Wheel of Pain. He wears that necklace through much of the movie. The wheel is the solar wheel--the 4 principle points of the solar journey--the equinoxes and the solstice, and the mid points.

The solar journey is a metaphor for the life of a man--the physical life and the more important spiritual life, when a man mentally ejects from the body and becomes a whole being, even as the body starts to crumble.

Thulsa Doom, the snake man (Seth in the Egyptian mythology) is time, limitation. The band of thieves--Conan, Subotai, and Valeria, seeks to overcome him, and only does so after Conan's crucifixion, side piercing, and resurrection.

Getting stabbed in the side is a common trope. Jesus on the cross, stabbed by the spear, Jon Snow stabbed and Conan sports similar wound on the tree of woe. I suppose this is along the same lines as the sun being bit by scorpio in November (Achilles heel)--stabbed in the side is some other constellation shooting the constellation Orion.

Anyway--Conan, like Iron Fist or other fictional depictions of the esoteric religion is a display of the perennial religion. It's shown again and again and again--really countless times. It seems sort of like a cult with severe OCD produces these stories. Maybe people don't tune into the significance of the imagery and themes unless they stumble into a good resource that explains it because, well, frankly it's not that significant.

It's a metaphorical language--the old science.

Man's a paradox--the animal that doesn't think he's an animal. The esoteric religion is maybe an immersion into a right brain world where symbols and numbers fall away and truth is felt.