post 14, Tin Tent

The tin tent, maybe 1982. What does a tin building have to do with an outdoor adventure blog? Well, it's a long story--but I'll tell it anyway.

In post 07 I mentioned my good friend, Joe Pindel, in whose backyard I converted an ancient lapstrake lifeboat into INTEGRITY, a sailing blue water live aboard (posts 03, 09). I also mentioned Bob Donovan, who owned the machine shop right next door and graciously let me use his facilities for doing the machining and welding INTEGRITY required. Joe and Bob were my best friends. Neither of them ever asked any remuneration for the help they gave me.

I was blissfully doing some carpentry work on INTEGRITY one day when Joe stalked up, very distraught, and said, "Andy, I need a foundry, a portable foundry, and I need it right now. Can you design one for me?" I didn't have any experience with foundries at that time (I did gain some experience, which I will describe in another post, shortly afterwards), but my good buddy needed help. I said, "Sure, how big, and what all does it have to do?" I never asked why. I had an inkling, and delicacy forbade questioning.

Joe was nominally a freelance mechanical engineer, and he occasionally did some work for Bob, but in his heart Joe was an artist, a sculptor in bronze. Just as a potter does not feel that he's a real potter until he has his own kiln, so must an artist in bronze have his own foundry. And Joe had some experience. When he was growing up his family had owned a commercial foundry business while his father was still alive.

But Joe had no facilities, only a small house with a tiny garden shed and a big back yard where I was working on INTEGRITY. Undeterred, Joe had designed a simple, but effective, gas furnace, compact but high output, which he had constructed in Bob's shop where Bob manufactured large hydraulically operated mold roll-over machines for large foundries. Joe's operation then quickly grew as he acquired big crucibles and started doing test firings of his jury rigged furnace. Then there came a pile of green sand and bags of bentonite on the floor for making molds.

But, evidently, Bob had never been properly consulted about the scope or intent of the operation. Bob was a wonderful, mellow, easy going Irishman that was always willing to lend a helping hand. But he was also a down-to-earth, practical, business man running a thriving, nationwide, business. And Bob's business involved assembling precision hydraulic components. This was not compatible with an environment of dust, grit, and airborne ash typical of a foundry. The morning Joe came to me, Bob had finally reached the limits of his helpful nature, and he had told Joe bluntly that the foundry had to go.

What made this so traumatic for Joe was that, by some connection, he had just secured a contract to design and cast quite a number of bronze benches for a park being constructed in Portland, Oregon, and there was a time clause in the contract. The benches had to be in place for the scheduled opening of the park. This was the big break for the artistic life Joe craved--but he was under tremendous pressure to produce.

We instantly went into high gear. Joe wanted a portable building because he had no building permit and also he had thoughts of moving. By the end of the day I had a plan sketched out with approximate dimensions that Joe agreed with. When the steel was delivered the next afternoon I had workable drawings with exact dimensions calculated. I cut, drilled, and welded the steel skeletons of the panels. Joe cut and fastened the metal roofing in place. In less then two weeks the building was operational. Joe and a helper had bolted the panels together in one morning. He said they didn't have to re-drill a single bolt hole. The green "onion" on top was Joe's later artistic addition. It housed a ventilating fan.

If my memory is correct, the tent was 25 feet in diameter with 15 foot high sides. The door was 10 feet wide so a truck could back right inside to allow the jib crane at the center of the building to unload bronze, sand, or etc. The central jib crane could reach any part of the building for handling crucibles, molds, or etc. The panels of the building were designed to be easy to unbolt and trailer, stacked on edge, to a new location if desired. I'll show an interior view of the tent in another post sometime.

Joe finished the park benches on schedule. After I had returned from sailing INTEGRITY to Hawaii some five or six years later and was then re-canvassing a canoe in Joe's backyard, Joe was still doing artistic sculpting in the tent, and he had an agent selling his work. One of his pieces was chosen for a movie set.

Joe and Bob had always gone out of their way to help me for no reasons other then empathy, vicarious enjoyment, and friendship. It gave me great pleasure to reciprocate to some extent and help smooth over their spate. We all like to feel that we're useful sometimes and not just total bums.

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Installment 14 of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul

We humans have caused the world environmental problem, the mass species extinctions that we see today, because of our verbal communication-inventing gene, our cancer gene. But I am never one to give up hope. There is record of cancers, even advanced and usually lethal cancers, of spontaneously going into remission and curing themselves.

There is probably no realistic hope of eliminating the verbal communication-inventing gene, the gene that allowed us to become a cancer, from the human species. And of course, we do not want to continue being a massively overpopulated species, a cancer, to poor Earth Entity. But just because we harbor a dangerous gene that is capable of causing cancer, that does not mean that the gene infallibly must cause a cancer. In the medical records there are many cases where a person was known to have inherited a genetic predisposition to a particular cancer, but that specific individual never actually developed the cancer.

Our verbal communication-inventing gene was not the actual cause of us becoming a cancer. It only gave us the ability to become a cancer. The cause of us becoming a cancer was when we used that gene to invent, and propagate from generation to generation, the practice of agriculture-civilization. There are many records of hunter-gatherer ethnic groups who certainly carried the same verbal communication-inventing gene--they had extensive verbal languages and clever tools--but those groups never adopted agriculture, and they even belligerently refused to accept agriculture when some encroaching government tried to force it on them.

A die-off of people is inevitable. We must accept that. But after the die-off I do not think it is at all inevitable for our species to again become grossly overpopulated. In order for us to regain a healthy position in Earth Entity's life, I think at least three conditions must be met. First, I think the die-off must be massive in order to thoroughly erase the culture of civilization-farming. If a surgeon operates on a cancer, he must remove every tiny bit of it so that it will not flare up again.

No one is going to go to the bother of plowing, planting, weeding, standing armed guard and then harvesting a crop if all they have to do is harvest some crop that is already growing wild in profusion. After only one or two generations of plentiful wild food, no one will have any desire to practice agriculture, and no one will even remember all the intricacies of how it was once done. But the die-off must be massive enough so that there is plenty of human food growing naturally in the wilderness to feed the few survivors. A mere 50 percent die-off would do us absolutely no good at all. Even an 80 or a 90 percent die-off would not reliably eliminate our agriculture problem. One million human survivors scattered over the globe is all we need to maintain our species. Ten million may be too many. How many wolves are left in the world? How many tigers? How many bears?

A die-off of humans is certain to occur fairly soon, but the great danger is that it will not be extensive enough to cure the problem. For ages, clerics and politicians have bolstered their parasitic control over the populace by the fiction that they are genuinely useful. They are supposed to be the shepherds, making decisions for their mindless sheep. People do not want to die or to see their loved ones die. It's a very emotional issue with immense PR value. The parasites are going to milk it for all its worth and try to gain points by doing everything in their power to delay the die-off for as long as they can. That's absolutely the worst thing we can do. We need a "successful" die-off and we need it now. We need a 99.9 percent die-off to eliminate that cancerous scourge of agriculture completely. Otherwise it will just flair back up with a vengeance and wipe out any wild environment remaining.

A good question is: "Is there any hope of achieving such a large scale reduction of humans before all other large species become extinct?" I, being ever the optimist, believe that there is. I base my belief on the fact, a fact which most people have maybe never considered, that a substantial food reservoir and also a substantial investment are required to perpetuate agriculture. If that reserve and investment are ever lost (eaten up during a global famine) agriculture will be dead. Without the reserve and investment it will be impossible to bring agriculture back to life as long as there are a significant number of hungry people desperately searching for food.

It first must be understood that farming does not produce instant food. Whatever is being grown, there is a definite and often lengthy period between harvests. During this waiting period the farm community (the entire nation) must have a stored reserve of food to eat, or they starve and never live to enjoy the next harvest. This is a matter of real and serious concern.

During the millennia when agriculture was becoming established around the globe, and right up until a hundred years ago in some areas, the required reserve of food could be obtained from the undomesticated species of the wilderness, including the ocean wilderness, if the domestic stocks from previous harvests fell short. The farmers (the entire populace) just grabbed their bows or guns and went up into the hills looking for supper. In England the lord of the manor was expected to be a good hunter and bring wild meat to his serfs. That condition no longer exists. The human population has grown so large, and the wild species have become so decimated, during just the last hundred years, that nowhere, not even in the ocean, is the wilderness any longer a significant reservoir of human food. Where there are ocean fish we are already harvesting them, just like a farm crop, right at and often beyond the rate of reproduction.

In rich, "developed", countries, like the US, Australia, and Canada, large highly mechanized farms are the rule and it is easy to visualize the large investment required for machinery, irrigation infrastructure, etc. However, when you take into account the prevailing extreme poverty in many highly populated areas of the globe, the investment just for the bare basics of seed stock (both animal and vegetable) and the fertilizer or feed for that stock is a major concern for small-scale farmers.

A middle class city dweller may have difficulty comprehending the concept that a farmer could ever be without seed or brood stock, but it is not a rare condition at all. In this country I have often, and still do, loan money to my farmer neighbors so that they can buy seed and fertilizer or young animals to raise. For me, this is not a business; it is only helping friends. But I am not wealthy and I also have a family to feed. If a farmer cannot pay his debts I cannot give him more money for next year. With this personal experience I have become intimately familiar with the situation that prevails in the poorer "developing" countries.

At harvest time, a farmer should put a sufficient portion of his crop in storage as a food reserve to provide for his family until the next harvest season, and he must also have his investment, the seed to plant or the brood stock, for the next growing season. But overpopulation has caused farms to become ever smaller as each new generation inherits from their parents and then divides between siblings. We are at the point now where a really large percentage of farmers are living on the edge. Their miserly little piece of land is just not big enough to adequately provide for their family. At harvest the creditors come to claim what is due them, and there is not enough left over for both the investment to plant another crop and the reserve to feed the farmers' families. In desperation, the farmers pay out the produce that should be their reserve food and they borrow again in the vain hope that the next harvest will be better. I don't have data for listing a percentage, but I do know that many farmers in many different areas of this country are caught in that vicious cycle.

And every year some of them give up in despair and resignation. They have been driven by hunger to use as food what should have been their investment for the next crop. That is the death knell for anyone dependent on agriculture. When a farmer is forced to eat his seed (or brood) stock, the game is over. They sell their tiny farm plot, converting it into higher value housing lots whenever possible in order to pay their accumulated debts, and they migrate to the big city in hopes of finding work as a laborer. The agricultural base continually shrinks at the same time that the population, and the need for agriculture, is rapidly expanding.

I am sure that the general process described above has happened often in local areas in the past and triggered regional agricultural collapses, such as in ancient Cambodia, the Mayan Peninsula, the American Southwest, etc. But the situation today is unprecedented in its world-wide scope and the extreme numbers of people who are living in large cities and totally dependent on the produce of agriculture. There is no hope for them today of obtaining any of the wilderness food that in ancient times was the salvation of their ancestors during famines.

In my discussion just above, I brought out the extreme importance to a farming people of maintaining an adequate reservoir of food. But, as near as I can tell from the information available to me, there is only a few months reserve supply of food available world-wide right now. We are living hand-to-mouth and totally dependent on the next harvest being better then the previous ones (to allow for the increase in population). I see that as insane. Biblical Egypt put seven years worth of food in storage in anticipation of possible hard times, and history says they needed that stored food, and now our extremely populated world has only a few months.

I'm guessing that the situation has already become so tenuous that a catastrophic condition could arise without even having a genuine and legitimate physical cause. People are driven much more by emotion then by logic. If, on a global scale, the masses heard some rumor, even a highly unlikely rumor, that food was going to become scarce in the near future, the ones with money would predictably hoard and the merchants would predictably raise their prices. (This may happen on both an individual and a national scale.) People too poor to buy food in advance for hording or to pay high prices would be the most affected by such a condition. They could easily become panic stricken to where they mobbed supermarkets (especially supermarkets owned by someone from a different ethnic group) and just took food to hoard. The "something for nothing" inclination to loot lurks just beneath the social veneer of many poor communities, and looting commonly occurs in some areas even now during our relatively well off situation when a disruption such as a hurricane caused blackout lends an opportunity. Wary storekeepers, stung by such an experience, might just lock their doors instead of instantly trying to restock. A nation with a theoretical three month supply of food on hand (the situation--artificially maintained via annual foreign purchases--in this country) could see that reserve disappear from view within a week if the populace was in panic. People who were driven to genuine hunger by this state of affairs, and who were angered by the observance that the rich (and probably also the police and military) still had plenty of food, might feel justified in arming themselves and creating a condition of total anarchy. This condition is especially likely to occur where ethnic groups in close proximity to each other feel alienated from each other due to differences in religious beliefs, social customs, wealth, etc.

What I have described is not just an improbably theoretical scenario. Read the history books. Read the newspapers about what's happening in various countries in Africa right now.
But the disturbances we have seen in the past were always confined to small, local, areas. Today we are in an era, totally unprecedented, of globalization and huge cities.

Just imagine being trapped in one of those immense cities with no food available from any store or restaurant and with everyone else hungry and searching for anything at all to eat. People aren't going to just sit around and starve or wait to be eaten.

Mormons, Latter Day Saints, are imagined to all have a two year's supply of food in storage in preparation for the apocalypse as recommended by their clerics. The irony is that that attempt at preparation will mark them to be the first to be sought out and tortured to reveal their storehouse and those of their fellows. Just being a known member of that faith will be a death sentence.

People of all categories are going to gather up family and friends and head out to the country in a desperate search for food. As farm after farm succumbs to the mobs and gives up their seed stock and reserves (with the farmer and his family then joining the mob--if the mob lets them live) the agriculture base will collapse in a free fall--and with no wild animals left to hunt, there will be absolutely no way to revive it!

There is a school of thought that advocates establishing a small subsistence farm as a personal hedge against a possible "doomsday". That would be worse than worthless. Your little spot of well-groomed greenery would just be a beacon to the mob, and your cow, chickens, and the veggies in your root cellar would only provide one meal for them before they marched on. In the later stages of the chaos you and your family might be the "long pigs" of the main course. A subsistence farm is a ball and chain anchoring you to one spot where you are easy prey. What is required for survival is mobility and versatility.

To be continued.
This is a work in progress.
Comments are welcome.
(But they may not be posted or answered promptly)

post 13 canoe trip

Survival training on the Columbia River, 1987. See posts 01, 04, and 07.

Actually, "survival training" is probably a misleading term for what I do, considering the popular interpretation of "survival". I never go out with just a loincloth on and no tools and try to stay alive for a week like some macho types might do. I just try to relearn a hunter-gatherer way of living in symbiotic cooperation with all the wild species like our ancestors did for millions of years.

The macho crowd likes to brag about how tough and rugged they are and how they can endure great discomfort and hardship. I don't have any desire to experience discomfort or hardship. I believe that living a natural life should be enjoyable--and I do my best to make it that way. I may be an idealist mentally, but in my day-to-day life, I'm pragmatic. I strike a compromise between my fantasies and the conditions that exist in the real world today.

When Darwin visited the Galapagos in the 1830s, he described how tame and defenseless some of the wildlife species were. People, who had established a colony there not much earlier, could go hunting, maybe armed with only a club, and gather enough giant tortoises in two days to feed them for a week. Such easy living would be the typical situation in any wilderness where humans had been absent for a long time and where large wild game were established in the ecology. Only a few months ago I read of a similar situation scientists came across in a remote spot of Indonesia where there had been no humans in recent memory. The men could just walk up to some critters and pick them up. Twice during my life I have come across a spot of wilderness somewhat similar where the wild food was plentiful and tame enough for a novice like me to hunt with Stone Age equipment. Such easy conditions in the past have allowed immigrant humans to become established in different areas around the globe. But as the human population expands, they kill off the tame animals and hunting conditions for the remaining wary animals become ever more difficult until the only way the humans can survive at their population level is by farming of some sort.

Consider the case of Ishi who, in the early 20th century, was one of the last Indians living a Stone Age existence in the US. US soldiers had slaughtered Ishi's tribe in California and Ishi and two or three of his family had survived for several years afterwards by being very secretive and inconspicuous in the hills.

But one day a survey party chanced upon the Indian's hidden hut and caught the Indians by surprise. The Indians dashed off without having time to gather up any of their belongings. The survey crew gathered up all of the neat genuine Stone Age artifacts and carted them home.
Some time later Ishi, nearly starved, was apprehended in a rancher's corral where he was trying to kill a calf with a club. Ishi was a grown man in the prime of life. He had been raised entirely to Stone Age technology. But without his normal complement of tools he could not survive in a wilderness decimated of game animals by excessive hunting. And he could not make a set of new tools in time to save himself. The other members of his family had already succumbed when Ishi was captured. (An intelligent sheriff introduced Ishi to anthropologists who, from previous research, had learned a language similar to his. Ishi then spent some years as Stone Age expert at a university museum before he finally died of a white man's disease.)

What I'm saying is that "living off the land" with instantly constructed Stone Age equipment is a fantasy today. A knowledgeable person with a rifle (bigger than a 22), ammunition, and a steel axe can still do okay in many areas, but only if he's the only one. If very many people try it they quickly kill off all the game animals in their area and then they must starve. A rifle is totally incompatible with a natural hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The animals have no defense against it (read about "refugium" in Installment 12, post 12 below). I try to be optimistic, but rifles are a poison, a plague from Pandora's box, that could easily drive the human species to extinction.

But I've gotten far off the track of describing what the above photo is all about. I was canoeing down the Columbia, from Portland to the Pacific, and camping out on islands, usually uninhabited islands, along the way. I wasn't "walking naked into the wilderness". I had a couple of five gallon jugs of water to drink. The Columbia, like almost all other rivers, is quite polluted. I also had a supply of supermarket bought food to make sure I wouldn't actually go hungry, and I had various equipment such as a sleeping bag and improvised tent so that I could be comfortable. At other times I've built shelters from wilderness materials, but you can't do everything at once. On this trip I was exploring the food situation.

I made the bow out of a green branch from a Hawthorne tree. You are supposed to air dry bow staves for seven years before you make them into a bow. Green wood is not springy at all and will just not work. But you can roast the wood--essentially kiln dry it--and that will make it springy enough for a quickie emergency bow. But roasting, or kiln drying, takes the life out of the wood and it won't last long.

I roasted the bow by burying it an inch or so in the dirt and building a fire over it. You can see the dark spots on the bow where I scorched it too much. I twisted up the string by hand out of sinew (I'll illustrate and discuss that in another post), but I did carry the pieces of dried leg sinew with me. You can't depend on quickly obtaining raw hide or sinew in the wilderness when you want it. You must always carry strategic materials like those with you.

That bow probably wasn't strong enough for deer hunting, but it did fine on the fish at close range. The long fish arrow was made from bamboo with a campfire forged spike for a point. Bamboo does grow wild in Oregon, but I never found any on the islands. I carried the bamboo with me. I did find the iron spikes in driftwood on an island.

When you bow hunt fish with store-bought equipment you use a special harpoon style point and you attach the arrow to your bow with a long nylon cord that you wind around a reel. But I didn't have the harpoon point, or the long cord, or the reel. My alternate procedure was to hunt the carp in shallow water (where you naturally find them) and shoot the long arrow through them and into the mud. With my two hands I would then quickly grasp the long arrow above and below the fish and haul it into the canoe. Just shooting short arrows without a harpoon cord attached would be futile. The injured, but still lively, fish would nearly all escape.

I also made a three pronged fish spear using only sharpened bamboo tied on with the inner bark of willow for the prongs. Even lethargic, stupid, carp are not easy to stalk with just a spear. I was successful--but the bow and long arrows was much more efficient.

Carp, an introduced species without any commercial demand at the present, are by far the most available food on the lower Columbia. A hungry family could easily get enough to stay alive. Carp have a lot of little bones, but they aren't bad. I've read that they're considered a delicacy in England. Some say they have a "muddy" taste, but that taste is in the dark strip of fat just under the skin along each side. It's easy to remove if you wish (but you would probably also be removing the essential calories--meat protein without any fat or carbohydrates is not a complete, healthy, food).

The only real drawback to the carp is that they muck around sucking food up from the river mud every day of their lives--and the mud of the lower Columbia River is very polluted. I ate carp, and if I was hungry enough I could use them as my major food. But I had store-bought food with me, and I worry about pollutants, so I didn't eat a whole lot of them.

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Installment 13 of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul

From hindsight, those cancer gene people, us people, were too clever for their own, our own, good. If they hadn't had any more imagination then chimpanzees when they got overpopulated and hungry they would have just killed any competition, brother or not, and their problem would have instantly been solved. All that was required to maintain an indefinite hunter-gatherer lifestyle was just to keep their own species reduced to a proper proportion to their prey species. Our human forebears, just like the cats, bears, wolves etc., did that with no problem for millions of years before we invented agriculture-civilization.

Several tribes of aborigines who lived a hunter-gatherer life until very recently regularly went to war with their neighbors and kept their local natural environment functioning that way. I have recently read of a tribe of Amazon Indians and also a tribe from Papua New Guinea who both felt it was a cultural duty to go to war with their neighbors. And both tribes were satisfied and happy and proud of that tradition. They enjoyed a little occasional warfare.

I have personally lived two years with a people in this country who had the same history of perpetual, low-level, warfare with their neighbors (who were originally of the same ethnic group) only a hundred years ago, before American style colonialism intervened, and they fondly look back to that existence. The population in this country has increased by an amazing seven times during those hundred years of American influence and its aftermath. Colonialism has totally destroyed this country. The abject misery of poverty--a direct and inescapable consequence of extreme overpopulation--is so obvious it hurts. The whole ecology is in shambles. And the total cause of this overpopulation and environmental damage is that neighboring tribes were prevented from keeping each other's population in check by continuous low-level warfare. Warfare, if encouraged, can easily expand to eliminate any increase in population so that the food available in the region is always adequate for the survivors. Our hunter-gatherer forebears did that for literally millions of years before we became seduced by the impossible fantasy of a forever peaceful civilization. "Birth control" is an impossible, species destroying, instinctively abominable, fantasy. Low level continuous warfare is a well-tested and proven, instinctively acceptable, species strengthening, manner of population control.

Warfare is an absolutely necessary characteristic of all carnivore/omnivore predator species. We have an instinctive and strong fascination with it. Go to any video parlor today and watch the young boys compulsively and avidly shooting up the enemy and shouting with glee as the blood spurts on the video screen.

Agriculture cannot possibly continue to feed all of the people in the world as the population inexorably increases over the next several years. We are already so grossly overpopulated that each additional year we are causing great damage to the ability of earth's environment to support life. Our experiment with agriculture was a terrible mistake. We are already in crisis. Trying to keep the present system (or lack of system) functioning is hopeless. What absolutely must and will happen is that there will be a massive die-off of people. We should accept that fact in a calm and realistic manner and encourage the die-off to happen as soon as possible, before even more damage is done to our fragile environment. For our great grandkids to survive, they absolutely must have a living environment of natural wild species to maintain the life support capacity of earth. Our grandkids certainly do not need a large population of people. One million surviving people scattered worldwide would be plenty.

In predicting a die-off, I am not being a pessimist. I am a confirmed optimist. A massive die-off of people, if it happens soon enough, before many more wild species become extinct, is the only chance for our species to survive. The coming die-off should not be viewed as a tragedy. It is our only hope for the salvation, the continued existence, of our species. If it happened tomorrow it would be a great blessing.

I am sure that most people will be appalled at what I just wrote, and they will not be able to accept it. Our social culture has evolved around the concept that we must keep absolutely everyone alive--even if they're in a miserable vegetative state from some disablement. If one thousand people die in an earthquake, it's world news and we rush international aid to the survivors. The very idea that we should look forward to six billion people dying in the near future is horrible.

But those six billion people are right now actively engaged in indiscriminately extinguishing the wild species which are vitally essential to maintain our environment in a condition that we humans have evolved with and are able to survive in. And those six billion are absolutely certain to die no matter what scenario you envision. If they die today, while we still have a few wild species alive for seed stock, Mother Nature will rapidly heal herself and earth can again become a beautiful, bountiful, and self-maintaining heaven. If we persist in focusing on keeping our huge human population alive, the living environment, Earth Entity, that we have evolved with will collapse completely with the extinction of most of the large wilderness species along with the extinction of the nine or ten billion people that will be living in extreme pollution and misery by then.

We desperately need all the wild species that maintain the living environment of Mother Nature in a manner that we're accustomed to. Our body is a tiny component of Mother Nature and those wild species are the essential organs that keep Mother Nature--that keeps us--functioning. The wild species, the wolf and the deer, are our allies, our comrades in the struggle to keep Mother Nature alive. They are the source of our life. We need them. Civilized people are a dread disease, a cancer, that is killing our wild brothers that we are dependent on. Those civilized people will thus extinguish us also if they aren't stopped.

The reason cancers are so deadly to the human body is because the cancer cells are not foreign invaders like bacteria and viruses. The cancer cells are merely mutated versions of our own body cells, and our immune system cannot distinguish between the cancer cells and our healthy non-cancerous cells. Our immune system cannot recognize the enemy.

In my analogy of Earth Entity to a human body, exactly the same condition exists. The civilized people wracking havoc with earth's environment, with our source of survival, don't look like dangerous monsters or aliens from outer space that we would quickly take up arms against. Those civilized people look exactly like our banker or the used car salesman down the street. But they are far more dangerous to the survival of our species than any monster or extraterrestrial. We must recognize them for what they are. "We have met the enemy, and they are us", (Pogo).

Now that we are confronted with that knowledge, we can truly understand why cancers are so often fatal. Our body's immune system becomes paralyzed and unable to defend itself against the invading cancer cells because the immune system cannot comprehend the fact that those benign appearing things that look so normal are in reality a rapacious, virulent, enemy. We humans have exactly that same problem on our scale. What confounds the situation is that the benign appearing things are actually benign, and even friendly and lovable, when we encounter them individually. The only thing that makes them deadly is their massive numbers.

To be continued.
This is a work in progress.
Comments are welcome.
(But they may not be posted or answered promptly)

post 12, Mustangs

Maude (foreground) and Cindy, 1988. Just the day before they had been completely wild mustangs running free in the hills where they had been born. Just one hour before, they had never felt a rope in their lives.

I certainly have mixed feelings about goofing up another creature's life. But I'm also pragmatic. I eat other animals when I'm hungry. Pack animals can make the difference between survival and death on the desert. If I wanted to learn how to survive as a hunter-gatherer in such an environment, it made sense to learn how to acquire and train mustangs. I feel that burros are a better, or at least less dangerous, pack animal, but wild burros are not as readily available in southeast Oregon.

I did not catch Maude and Cindy myself. I picked them out of the milling herd in the trap corral only a half hour after they had been chased in by helicopter. I do know roughly how it is possible for a lone man to catch a wild horse. The old-timer homesteaders used to do it with a leg snare set on a trail or beside a water hole.

The general concept is to dig a hole for the horse to step into--but not so deep as to break his leg. On top of the hole you place a trap device designed to grasp the horse's hoof and cling to it. One design described to me used auto engine valve springs to power sliding bars when the horse's hoof stepped on, and pushed through, the square wooden trigger that had held the bars apart. A much simpler thing described by a different source was just a large plastic cover, like from a big Tupperware bowl, with an X cut in it that the horse could step through.

The soft snare rope was not attached to the cover at all. The noose of the snare was just carefully arranged on top of the cover so that when the horse lifted his foot with the cover clinging to it the noose would pull tight just above his hoof. The tail of the snare rope was fastened securely to a large rock or log that the horse would then drag around until it became exhausted. If the rope was tied to something solid like a tree, the horse would almost certainly break his leg while fighting to get free. Of course, to finish the trap, you have to carefully camouflage it.

I also have mixed feelings about giving out some directions, such as the above. They are bound to get someone in big trouble, and any rancher reading this is sure to cuss me out. There is no longer any true wilderness in the US. Wherever you set the snare, the animal you are most likely to catch is a prize bull or a rancher's saddle horse, possibly with the rancher in the saddle. The snare will probably break the animal's leg, and you will be hailed into court and charged with the very serious crime (in some states) of rustling. That is, if the rancher doesn't just hog tie you and bury you alive next to a large ant hill.

I occasionally do very foolish things just like everybody else. The cover materials described above are not available in a wilderness. I wanted to learn how to construct an effective cover from only natural materials, and of course, that required experimentation. I was well aware of the possibility, just mentioned, of arousing a rancher's ire, and I waited until I was in a remote area of Steen's Mountain where I saw no evidence of domestic stock. When I came across a small herd of wild horses I carefully set my snare. A horse did step into the trap, but the experiment failed and the cover did not cling tight enough to the hoof to set the noose. Lucky for me!

Later, while visiting with the crew at the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) wild horse corral in Burns, Oregon, I became aware that the herd of horses I had stalked were very special horses that the BLM had originally caught. The BLM is trying to re-establish (for tourist attraction purposes) a herd of horses with genetic traits, such as zebra striped legs, they think are typical of the early Spanish horses first brought to America. When the BLM catches such a horse during their periodic trapping sessions, they release it again to this nucleus herd. If I had snared one of those prized and rare animals, I would have been in big trouble.

Don't be as stupid as I was and take such a chance. If you want a genuine, completely unbroke, wild mustang for experience at training, just pick one out at a BLM wild horse corral such as the one in Burns (if you happen to be in the US). The horses are quite cheap and you get your pick--which you would not get if you trapped one. Those horses have never felt a rope. They run them through a squeeze chute to freeze brand and vaccinate them.

If, on the other hand, you just want experience at snaring a herbivore (which may be the most effective way to hunt some) then go to the nearest livestock auction and buy a goat or sheep that you can lead through your snare sets until you learn the tricky details of making the snares work. The purchased animal can also be very valuable in acquiring other knowledge. If you have a moccasin clad accomplice lead it around you can get excellent practice in tracking the hard hoofed animal.

If you buy a ranch-raised yearling lamb that has never been worked with it will be wild enough to give you some valuable practice in the various horse training procedures that I will discuss with later photos.

Buy an ugly obnoxious animal that you'll never get attached to--but maybe a young enough one to be tender--and when you think you have learned enough of the previously mentioned skills, you can kill it with bow and arrows made from natural materials and learn to gut, skin, butcher (with stone tools), and preserve (as jerky or pemmican) the meat. You can also learn to tan the hide, make hide glue, and make sinew cordage and sewing thread.

We brought Maude and Cindy to the ranch where I was working (working without money wages--but for perks like this) in a covered stock trailer (they would have climbed out of a topless one) and turned them loose in the small, high fenced, breaking corral shown in the photo. Then there was the problem of getting halters on them. The cowboys at that ranch did such an operation (I've watched them work with their ranch-raised, but still wild, animals) with two cowboys (one was a cowgirl--see post 02) on horseback. One roped the wild horse by the neck, the other roped it by both hind legs, and their stock horses then stretched the animal out on the ground so that a third cowboy could put a halter on the immobilized animal. But I wanted conditions more like I might experience if I was alone and without a stock horse out on the desert.

I took my lariat (a gift from the cowboy father of the ten year old boy in post 02) and tied a 30 foot extension to the tail of it. I then roped Maude and took a couple of turns around a corral post with the extension. I already had a jury rigged rope halter (see post 01) ready with an extension tied to the tail of its lead rope.

Maude, by later teeth inspection, was a six year old mare with probably thoroughbred ancestry (there was record of escaped thoroughbreds in the area). She was the largest mare on the ranch. Such a mature mare, born to the wild, can be quite difficult to work with. When I started cinching up on the rope to draw Maude closer, of course she fought violently. She finally reared back in a prolonged struggle and then fell to the ground, choked unconscious. This is typical. I was waiting for it. I let the rope loose (so it wouldn't keep choking and kill her) and I dashed to her with the rope halter. I no sooner had it on her head then she surged to her feet again. But I now had a halter on her and I was in control. If you have a way of enlarging the photo you can see the marks on her head and neck from her desperate struggle. Cindy was a yearling filly and much easier to deal with.

I did make a serious mistake with Maude. With the halter on her I took a couple of turns of its tail rope around a corral post and then worked her up right close to the post. I'm always a worry-wart. Maude was a big and strong horse. I remember being afraid to tie her too high up on the post for fear that that might give her enough leverage to break it. So I tied her maybe waist high. That could have been disastrous. She did the typical wild horse thing of bracing her powerful front legs and straining back in an effort to pull free. In the process, she obviously strained her neck, and I was worried and distraught thinking that she might have permanently injured herself. Later, the cowboys told me that they had seen horses kill themselves (possibly by rupturing a blood vessel) that way. If you think that you have to tie a horse solid to something, at least tie the rope well above the height of the horse's withers. That way, when it rears back, its front feet get lifted off the ground and it can't put quite as much strain on its neck. Fortunately, Maude's kinked neck straightened out after a week or so, and the tender neck might have even made her more tractable during early training.

Of course, putting a halter on a wild horse out on the desert would have been more challenging then in the corral, but I think I could have managed somehow. But I had previous experience training horses that had various degrees of wildness. Let me assure you that a horse like Maude can kill you or put you in a wheelchair for life. The 22 year old horsebreaking cowboy at the ranch had already spent a several week session in a hospital getting a leg pinned back together. (I'll tell my injury story in another post.) I feel guilty about writing a post such as this which might arouse fantasies in some one and get them in trouble. But then, my philosophy says that there must be natural adversities in life--severe adversities capable of actually extinguishing an individual's life--to do a little genetic selection and keep the population thinned down.

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Installment 12 of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul

There is a subject, the matter of refugium, which I will touch on briefly for the benefit of any readers with population biology backgrounds. To population biologists, a refugium is any means which a prey species has of eluding its predator. A refugium sounds like, and could be, a hole for a rabbit to hide in. However, it could also be the ability of a bird to fly away from a fox or the ability of a baby antelope to outrun a coyote. Every prey species absolutely must have some refugium by which the stronger and smarter individuals can escape, or else the species will certainly all be eaten by its predator species and become extinct--a fate which has certainly happened often throughout the eons of evolution (especially recently as our various technologies, such as gunpowder, have overpowered refugiums). Of course, if the predator has no other prey it must then also become extinct after the last of its prey are eaten, an event which also must have happened on occasion.

The reason I discuss this refugium phenomenon is because civilization, in a broad sense, is a predator, and realistically, the only prey of civilization today is the produce of agriculture. Commercial fishing has become so efficient that it can now be considered as just a form of farming. The hunting of land animals fell into that category long ago with a purchased license now being required to "harvest" one or two game animals. But agriculture, by its very domestic nature, has absolutely no refugium. We can, without any effort, kill every cow in the pasture and pick every ear of corn in the field, and our nets are drastically reducing the stocks of fish in the ocean.

By the laws of population biology, agriculture must inevitably eventually become extinct. As Malthus pointed out two hundred years ago, agriculture cannot possible continue to multiply faster then the human population. Since civilization has no other prey, civilization must inevitably become extinct also after it consumes the last produce of agriculture. (All humans would not necessarily become extinct--only "civilized" humans dependent on agriculture.)
This is not just a vague, haywire, theory. Agriculture and civilization have collapsed often in the past in local areas; in ancient Cambodia, in the Mayan peninsula, in the American Southwest. As recently as around 1960 some 20 million people starved in China in a local collapse of agriculture. But today, our bulk shipping capability, our instant worldwide communication system and our efforts to create a "global community" with international mutual assistance agreements have turned our whole world into an intertwined "local" area vulnerable to catastrophic agriculture collapse.

As our exploding population requires ever more and more food, the ability of the land, of flowerpot earth, to produce that food is being degraded ever faster precisely by the presence of the burgeoning population. The infrastructure and pollution of civilization are rapidly entombing and poisoning or eroding the soil. We are coming very, very, close to crunch time. In fact we are already there. Many of my neighbors here in the Philippines just do not have enough money to buy food, and their children are malnourished.

There will always be plenty of food available for the rich to buy until the very end when the stench of death is heavy in the air. The first sign of agriculture collapse is when the poor become seriously hungry--and we're already well past that point. A supermarket crammed full of food does no good to a woman with no money in her purse.

But in spite of the obvious failure of agriculture and civilization, the huge store of information--information woefully in error--in our libraries still lauds civilization and agriculture as the greatest accomplishments the human race has ever achieved. Our accumulated, library-stored, culture misinformation is not a valuable resource but rather it is a misleading trap to confuse and confound us.

On this matter of misleading information, I have time and again read some passage implying that Stone Age hunter-gatherers led a miserable, brutish, existence. That's an outright lie dreamed up by some civilization-bound egotist who had absolutely no personal knowledge. Maybe the writer was a racist European explorer who actually saw a Stone Age person--but the explorer never lived the life. I have lived many years of my life trying to re-learn that hunter-gatherer technology, and for me it was a beautiful, wonderful, experience.

Implying that a person in civilization is happier than a hunter-gatherer person in the wilderness is like claiming a chimp in a zoo is happier then a chimp in the wild. Sure, the zoo chimp has food brought to him without any effort on his part, and he's carefully protected from being mauled by a lion or another chimp, but the pitiful creature is so bored stiff that he just sits in a corner playing with himself. If his parents would only give him an allowance, he'd spend it all on drugs and porn movies. And if his keeper ever stops bringing him food, he's dead!

Another entrenched fallacy of our civilized misinformation is the fiction that the wilderness is some sort of feared enemy that must be conquered and subdued. It is not uncommon to read a news account of someone--often a once-a-year big game hunter--who becomes lost in the woods and succumbs to mindless panic. (I have personally encountered one of those hunters in the midst of panic, and I've heard firsthand accounts of another. Just last week I read a news account of yet another.) When they decide that they are lost, they typically start walking faster and faster trying to find some sign of their precious civilization until, totally panic stricken and without realizing it, they are running blindly through the woods--often dropping their rifle and coat--until they fall from sheer exhaustion. If winter has already set in they might die of hypothermia right there. Such behavior is insane, but it is typical instinctive behavior, it has happened time and again.

The wilderness is not our enemy. What the wilderness really is is a self-reliant, beneficent, all-providing, Mother Nature. She is green leaves, trillions of green leaves, capturing the photons of energy from the sun and converting that kinetic energy into the stored chemical energy of sugars, starches, and other carbohydrates that we animals can utilize. She is a carpet, a spongy blotter, of dead leaves on the ground to soak up sudden rains and conserve their nourishing moisture. She is a rich topsoil of decaying remnants of leaves being fed upon by trillions of microscopic creatures, each one very much alive and actively fertilizing and aerating that soil for the sprouting of seeds and the nourishment of another generation of vegetation; vegetation that will convert the carbon dioxide waste product of us animals into the oxygen we must breath. Vegetation that will feed the many varieties of wild, self-sufficient, herbivores who don't require any barns or fences or slaves to feed them hay; herbivores that will, in turn, feed us carnivores and omnivores. The wilderness is not our enemy. She is the source of life, our life. The enemy is the ugly dead scabs of civilization concrete entombing the soil and killing the microscopic life, concrete preventing the sprouting of seeds and the growth of the leaves that we so desperately need to manufacture oxygen and carbohydrates and, incidentally, act as an air conditioner to make our surroundings cool and pleasant. Our cities are often a hot hell precisely because we have eliminated Mother Nature's umbrella of green, heat absorbing, leaves.

To be continued.
This is a work in progress.
Comments are welcome.
(But they may not be posted or answered promptly)

post 11 COMPROMISE

Installing vertical side planking on COMPROMISE, 1992. (See posts 01, 02, and 05.) The planks were full-size two by six spruce fastened with five inch galvanized spikes in drilled and recessed holes. Instead of oakum between planks I grooved the planks and put in a cedar spline (you can see them all sticking up) bedded in ordinary roofing mastic, just like I had done with the bottom planks. The planks were seated firmly with a heavy sledge.

Two inch thick side planking on a 30 foot boat is massive overkill, but I designed COMPROMISE for rough usage river gunk holing and beaching on island shores during high tide, and she did her job superbly. On one occasion the terrific tidal current at the mouth of the Columbia swept us into a buoy with enough force to hole a conventional boat, but it only dug a one inch deep gouge in the side of COMPROMISE. It was just a minor cosmetic blemish with no structural damage. (The only engine on COMPROMISE was a seldom used 10 horse Seagull outboard.)

I am one of those who feel that we are in the midst of causing catastrophic collapse to our environment (which must then inevitably cause catastrophic collapse to our civilization which is totally dependent on the environment) and I have spent my life accumulating (and trying to pass on) information that might be of value during the traumatic period immediately after supermarkets and hardware stores cease operation.

COMPROMISE was a great boat, but she did have an Achilles heel, and the spruce side planks were it. The four by eight bottom planks and the heavy timber skeleton were well seasoned doug fir salvaged from an old warehouse. I bought the fir as a lot, but there was not enough of it for the side planks. I found the two by six spruce at a tiny, one man, sawmill on Oregon's coast. The man specialized in logging single huge trees that had been fire killed some 40 years before but were still standing. The two by six lumber had been stickered in his lot, unprotected, for two years, but it all looked great, and I bought enough for the sides of the boat.

If you're into wooden boat building, don't ever, ever, buy lumber from old fire killed trees left standing! I planed the inside surface of the planks with a hand plane before installing them, and in the process I discovered a couple of tiny spots of rot where the lumber had been resting on stickers for two years. I was horrified--as if the poor embryonic boat had just been diagnosed "HIV positive". I immediately went back to the sawmill and told the man I couldn't accept wood like that. He offered to replace any piece of lumber I could show had a spot of rot, but he adamantly refused to refund my money or replace any wood that didn't have obvious rot--and he already had my money. I didn't have any more money to buy other lumber. I was trapped. But the spots were tiny, and there were actually only a few pieces that I could find any rot on at all.

But I have since discovered that wood from old fire-killed trees left standing is exceptionally prone to rot--regardless of the species. I heard of exactly the same problem with doug fir lumber later. The wood from the huge old trees looks perfect at the sawmill. You can't find a spot of rot anywhere. But it very soon will have rot. I guarantee it. I should have just postponed the work on Compromise till I had money to buy new lumber. (But postponing a boat building, or re-building, project is often fatal. Once you lose your momentum, you rarely get back to it again.)

But I did get some years of good, live aboard, use out of COMPROMISE, and most of that time was anchored on the river or tied to derelict docks in the backwaters with no money at all spent for rent or property taxes. And I learned a lot from her. And I had built her entirely by myself and for cheap. I figure she paid for herself.

Salt will kill ordinary rot. An ocean going, salt water, boat will not rot below the waterline. The rot in them--like the boat that became INTEGRITY (see post 03 and 09)--is above the waterline and caused by fresh, rain, water. If I had had my present knowledge, I would have launched COMPROMISE directly in salt water in an ocean front harbor (or as close as I could get) and kept her there for several months to "pickle" her good. That could have eliminated the problem completely. But in my ignorance, I launched her in a fresh water slough and lived in her there and on the river for some time.

I had sailed her from the Columbia down to the river in front of Newport when I decided I should haul her out and repaint her bottom. During the haul out, I happened to notice a suspicious spot on a side plank and I tapped it with a hammer. I was horrified at the spongy response confirming rot. I immediately replaced that piece of plank, but in the process my mind caught up to my actions and I systematically checked all the side planking. I found massive rot. I put her back in the water, rot and all, and continued living in her on the river while I started a new boat project, SUFFICIENT, in the Port of Newport's Terminal warehouse.

Years later I heard that a man I had met at Newport had rescued COMPROMISE from the burn pile and put her back in the water. Since the side planks were two inches thick, and only one half inch would be adequate for most usage, maybe the boat is still in service. She was in saltwater in Newport, which is right on the ocean, so maybe the old rot had become pickled and killed. The boat never had leaked. The reason I gave up on her was because, at that time, I thought I wanted a live aboard boat good for another 30 years, and I had lost faith in COMPROMISE.

I have no regrets. Life is all a learning experience. We just do the best we can with the knowledge we think we have at the moment. And I think most of us are born with an instinct to try to pass on the knowledge we think we have to anyone who will listen.

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Installment 11 of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul

All of us who can read this were born to a civilized life where our very existence is dependent upon agriculture, so it is difficult for us to recognize anything morally wrong with farming. This is especially so because of our normal, instinctive, trait of egotism which causes us to believe that we are the only species (and personally the only individual of that species) that is really important. We are the only ones that matter, and farming is keeping us fed, so what can possibly be wrong with farming?

Like all the other animals, we got along fine with that egotism instinct as long as we learned our culture information by actually observing the actions of our elders--back when the inherent nature of that system insured that our culture information was essentially all correct and beneficial for the long term.

Now that we have mutated and acquired an inventing/verbal communication gene that enables us to invent all sorts of novel technology (which is usually detrimental over the long term) and, via words, store and compound and transmit that technology to future generations, it has become imperative that we also gain the wisdom to evaluate that technology and understand what it is really doing to our world. We must recognize that a great deal of that technology is actually, and rapidly, destroying those features of our world which we and our descendants require for our survival.

The basic, root, technology culprit is agriculture. It has led to virtually all of the "high technology" we have today. Without agriculture people would never have settled in large stationary communities where many individuals could spare the time from gathering food to do research and specialize in manufacturing.

The previously mentioned analogies comparing the interacting sum of all wild creatures, Earth Entity, to a human body and comparing human individuals to cancer cells in Earth Entity are compellingly accurate and those analogies make it easy to visualize the destructive effect of agriculture.

All living things require food for growth and maintenance, and Earth Entity is a living thing (or at least certainly a living system if you have trouble accepting the analogies literally). The first few living organisms on earth must have gotten their energy, their food, from chemical reactions between elements on earth, but a long time ago a mutation made photosynthesis possible and now the green leaves of vegetation can absorb the photons of energy from the sun and use that photon energy to convert carbon dioxide from the air (absorbed into the leaves) and water from the ground (sucked up to the leaf factories through the roots and trunk) into carbohydrates such as sugar and starch. I compare photons of kinetic energy from the sun to electric energy arriving through transmission lines and I compare the long term storage of chemical energy in carbohydrates to storage batteries which are charged up or created by the active kinetic energy.
Photons of energy from the sun are the food that keeps the vast bulk of Earth Entity alive and functioning. Plants, via photosynthesis, convert this raw photon energy into sugars (the basic energy food of individual cells) and starch (which they can convert back into sugar later). Animals without chlorophyll cannot manufacture their own food that way, but animals and plants had the same ancient ancestor, and individual animal cells still live on sugar just like plant cells do. Most animal digestive systems (or the bacteria resident in those systems) can convert starch, the long term storage food of plants, back into sugar to feed the individual animal cells. All animals are parasites that cannot function by themselves; they must steal their food from plants or from other animals who have stolen from plants.

Earlier I described how Earth Entity was comprised of many different wild species each of which had a different function, comparable to the function of an organ of our body, to maintain the whole of Earth Entity, of Mother Nature, in a strong, self reliant and self repairing manner. With the knowledge, just above, of how those species receive their nutrition, we can easily visualize the cancerous nature of agriculture.

Agriculture is the procedure of clearing, killing, all wild creatures on a plot of land and replacing those wild creatures with a crop that will aid only the propagation of the human species. The photons of energy from the sun that used to provide the nourishment for those essential wild creatures are thereafter reserved only for the short term benefit of humans without any regard for the needs of Mother Nature. By always plowing more land, by stealing ever more food out of the mouth of Mother Nature, we have been able to feed an exponentially exploding population of people who then require an exponentially exploding increase in agricultural production. This situation has spiraled dramatically out of control and is headed for a certain, and soon, grand climax. The great danger is that the interwoven system that has evolved over billions of years to create a self-repairing, resilient, symbiotic community of wild species will collapse with such massive extinction of species that the environment becomes seriously altered and nearly all large species become extinct. The only way to avoid that is to somehow eliminate the cancerous civilized (agricultural) human species that is hogging all the food and thus causing the current destruction.

Early on in this essay I emphasized that all species required natural adversities, especially predators, to eliminate genetic misfits and keep the population in proper proportion to all the other wild species. If there was no other predator species big and strong enough to do the job then the individuals of a species had to go to war and turn on each other to thin down their population when they became overpopulated. I brought out the fact that even humans have strong instincts for this essential warfare within a species.

But if that is so, then why haven't we been doing it properly? Why have we let our population get out of hand?

I tend to search for simplicity in understanding philosophical matters, and I believe that our excessive human population and consequent destruction of our environment was totally caused by our adoption of agriculture. I do not believe there has been any genetic change endowing us with greater "love of our fellow man". "Civilized" humans are not innately more "humane" then hunter-gatherer people, they just have usually had a more consistent food supply.

An individual's instinctive response is not the same in every situation. Some instincts get turned on and others off. The overall response can vary widely dependent on the circumstances. Humans are a strongly social animal. As long as we have plenty of food, and don't feel threatened, we are not usually aggressive. We tend to live and let live. In fact, if we have a surplus of food, we're inclined to invite strangers in and have a party. This often results in swapping individuals from group to group with the beneficial end result of reducing inbreeding.

It is only when we are under stress, such as being very hungry, that our tempers become short and we kill at the slightest provocation--or just imagined provocation. With the constant artificial supply of farm raised food (photon energy stolen from the wild species of Mother Nature) we have just not been hungry enough to trigger our war instincts sufficiently to keep our population in check. Eventually, of course, agriculture will just not be able to keep the masses fed (the situation is on the verge right now), and then there must be war. But instead of just a dozen or so people at a time getting clubbed, like when we were sparsely populated hunter-gatherers having our healthy little periodic war when food cyclically became scarce, there will be billions of people involved, and it is bound to be a holy mess.

Agriculture is a dread disease, a cancer, a terrible enemy, and we must wake up to recognize that fact. Agriculture is the only real problem we have today. We must eliminate the concept totally from our verbal culture if we want our species to continue in existence. There is no possible way that agriculture can be modified so as to be viable for the long term. It is inherently antagonistic, lethal, to the symbiotic conglomeration of all wild species that collectively constitutes Mother Nature. If that symbiotic system disintegrates, then we are all dead.

To be continued.
This is a work in progress.
Comments are welcome.
(But they may not be posted or answered promptly)

post 10 Burros

Tar Baby and Charlie Brown taking a rest, 1988. Tar Baby has the black muzzle, possible because of his inbred status. They are not confined in any way--and we're in the middle of nowhere in the southeast corner of Oregon's High Desert. If your wellbeing is dependent on others, animals or people, it is wise to have a good relationship with those others--and to understand the limits of that relationship.

Gentle Ben, the oldest of the three brothers, is not in the photo--and he does have a rope on him. Whenever Ben was not confined he would methodically start walking toward "home" with his two siblings trailing right behind. Where Ben considered home was diagonally clear across the state in the northwest corner. The one time Ben got loose I had to track them for a couple of miles before I caught up with them. But they were not trying to escape from me. If they had been I never could have caught them.

As you can see in the photo, grass is scarce in the desert, and it's a very big advantage if you can let your animals roam free to find their own. Then to catch them again, it helps if you have a little treat to give them. I like to have everything I carry serve multiple purposes. Instead of carrying oats for the burros, I just carried flour for making ash bread that both the burros and I liked.

To make ash bread, you open your flour sack and make a little depression, like a cup, in the flour. You pour a little water in that depression and then stir the water and adjacent flour into a thick dough. You then work that dough (coating it with dry flour if it's sticky) into a disc maybe a quarter of an inch thick and four or five inches in diameter. You scrape the burning wood of your campfire to one side and lay the disc on the hot ashes where the fire just was. You then scrape some more hot ashes, with a few live coals, onto the top of the disc. If you started with a small "Indian" fire, like I often use, you may want to repeat the cooking procedure, moving the burning wood again and turning the disc over in the process.

The only ingredients are flour and water. You do not add any grease or shortening. That would make dirt stick to the bread. The dry bread is remarkable clean after cooking and shaking the ashes off. A few ashes won't hurt you at all. The bread is kind of a hard cracker, but it's good and it keeps forever.

If you don't have store-bought flour several starchy food plants of the wilderness can be dried thoroughly and pounded with rocks as mortar and pestle into suitable flour. Experiment to minimize adding rock dust to the flour. Biscuitroot was the most available and suitable plant in the High Desert, but the starchy root is only easy to find during the few wet weeks in early spring when carrot type leaves and yellow umbel flowers reveal its location. The rest of the year you have to have sharp eyes and hunt for the tiny and inconspicuous withered seed stalk which will be the only visible remnant of the plant. (Caution--some relatives of this plant are deadly poisonous.)

The ash bread did not form a significant amount of the burro's food at all. I just gave them a little bite, maybe an inch square, and not every day. But that bite made them feel that I loved them--and I did. And I never had any trouble walking right up to them, wherever they were, and putting their halters on.

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Installment ten of:
In Opposition to Civilization.
by Andy Van't Hul

When examined from a species extinction point of view, the invention of gunpowder was certainly one of the most damaging and dreadful innovations ever conceived of. The very first time an application of fire caused a mix of chemicals to explode forcefully, the experimenter should have instantly received a sustained shock from a cattle prod to let him know that he had committed a boo-boo and he'd better not play with that stuff anymore. But instead, the exact opposite happened. His buddies all crowded around in fascination at the feat and begged for the recipe. Instead of being punished for the great crime of causing the future extinction of many species, the inventor received a massive pleasure hit of happybrain that most certainly encouraged him to try to invent ever more powerful explosive mixtures.

First, we decimated all of our prey species with our hi-tech weapons. Even Stone Age bows and arrows exterminated many species. Then we switched to farming with the clear cutting of vast forests and the building of huge dams that disrupted river ecologies. Our agriculture system is a total disaster now with extreme soil erosion, trace element deletion, chemical poisoning, desertification etc. I could write another thick book just on that subject. In order to really comprehend how seriously in trouble civilized humans are today, it is important to realize the damage agriculture has caused and is continuing to cause every day to the total life support capacity of earth.

In my analogy comparing Earth Entity to a human body I say that humans are wildly proliferating cancer cells sickening EE. A cancer in a human body does not cause damage only by the sheer number of cancer cells. The cancer also causes tissue breakdown and toxins to develop. Agriculture, the cancer affecting EE, is massively doing the same thing to EE, to Mother Nature.

The erosion of topsoil is obvious and atrocious, but the trace element deletion may be just as bad, and it is not visible--until you see the end effects such as the mindless cretins and the women with huge goiters on their necks. Those symptoms, common in China and the Philippines, are the result of farming-caused iodine deficiency in the soil. Crops suck trace elements out of the soil, and those trace elements, locked in the grain kernels or etc. are then shipped great distances to a city or an animal feedlot where the grain is fed to a hog or a person. Nearly all of those transported trace elements end up in feces which then never leave the locality of that city or feedlot. Those trace elements are no longer available to the food chain--but they are tremendously important for good health--and they took literally millions of years to accumulate, by gradual decomposition of minerals, in the soil. Back during the millions of years we lived as hunter-gatherers we never displaced those trace elements. They were always carefully hoarded by Mother Nature and recycled from life to life right in their original locality. We have no way of measuring the damage we are now doing to the soil, to flowerpot earth, with agriculture--we just know that it is immense. In previous writings I have spent some space and time on the damage agriculture is causing to the environment--but like I said above, the subject is so extensive that it demands its own book, or several volumes, and those books are already published and available in any extensive library. To keep this essay from becoming too rambling I will not try to reproduce the bulk of that material here.

To be continued.
This is a work in progress.
Comments are welcome.(But they are not always posted or answered promptly.)