post 18, Making a Saddle

Making a saddle. See also posts 3 and 12. In post 12 I told about acquiring the mustangs Maude and Cindy. Somebody trying to learn how to live as a hunter-gatherer in desert country would really benefit from having an animal to pack his belongings as he traversed the wide open spaces searching for food. A horse or burro might make the difference between survival and death. So part of learning that life was learning how to acquire and train the animal(s).

I didn't catch Maude and Cindy all by myself, but at least they were completely wild. I didn't feel up to trying to ride a wild horse bareback. I felt I needed a saddle for training the horses. I asked the ranch manager if I could borrow the old saddle that they used for breaking horses.
He explained to me that an unbroke horse could get violent and could easily destroy a saddle. (In a later post I'll describe a situation that amply verified his statement.) He added that a saddle, even an old saddle, was worth more than an unbroke mustang. He was right. At that time you could buy a mustang of your choice from the BLM Wild Horse Corral in Burns for $ 75. I've never seen a saddle, in good enough shape for breaking horses, for that price.

He wasn't being unhelpful. He was just explaining the facts of life, and I understood. Besides, where would a hunter-gatherer find a commercial saddle in the desert? If I wanted a saddle I should make one from natural materials. So I did--pretty much. The two forks for the horn and cantle were green wood from a large willow tree. The bars that rest against the horse's back came from a cedar fence post. Both willow and cedar are light weight but reasonable strong woods. Of course, in my pragmatic way, I did cheat some. I didn't have rawhide of my own handy, so I used part of an old nylon lariat fed through holes drilled in the horn and cantle to bind the whole works together strongly. The nylon was fastened to steel cinch rings. So it wasn't all natural materials, but it was close enough for me. I could have gotten by without the nylon and the steel rings if I had had enough good rawhide.

I had had some previous experience making the pack saddles for the burros--see post 3--so I knew how to carefully shape the bars to fit Maude's back. (Basically that just involves taking them out to the horse every little bit and testing the fit.) Then, with the saddle assembled, I mounted it on a sawhorse and carved away at the upper surface until it was a good fit for my bottom.

Of course I used my shrunken wool blanket saddle blankets under the saddle to protect the horses back, but I never used anything between the wooden saddle and me. There was no need. I've ridden that saddle all day herding cows down from the high country and never felt the least uncomfortable. I've roped calves and snubbed the rope to the saddle horn. I've used that saddle when riding an insane bucking horse that was genuine rodeo material. I rigged it for both a riding saddle and a pack saddle. I have several photos of it in use for later posts. To preserve the wood I soaked it in linseed oil and burned the oil in and that gave the saddle an attractive black finish.

post 17, INTEGRITY

Rolling INTEGRITY, 1981. See also post 03 and 09. Post 09 showed the hull upside down, and some people might have wondered how it got that way. There was no crane in Joe's backyard where I was working. I did everything by hand and by myself. The ropes are from a bunch of old three quarter inch hemp rope I found at a yard sale. On the left side of the boat they are tied low to stout wooden fence posts. On the right side they go to the front bumper of my old Chevy pickup. As I loosened the ropes at the bumper I would tighten them to the fence posts with my four foot Handyman bumper jack. I work slow and methodical, and eventually the job gets done.

At this stage of the rebuilding a steel strap has been added from stem to stern post, the hull has been completely re-calked, and I've coated the old mahogany planking with pine pitch except for the soiled white sheer strake. The sheer strake had picked up rot from the plywood deck and cabin a previous re-builder had added to the old lifeboat, so I now had to replace that top plank or two. I wasn't an experienced boat builder, and I didn't know what I was doing. But everything finally worked out okay. INTEGRITY eventually did make it to Hawaii, and I learned a great deal about surviving on the ocean during the trip--and about what you might encounter on the other side. Stay tuned to this channel and I'll tell you about it.

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THE LETHAL MUTATION
A short essay by
Andy Van't Hul

There is an important concept that must be realized in order to understand how life on earth is able to persist. When a mutation exists, and a brand new species takes form, the new species absolutely must be symbiotically compatible with the rest of conglomeration Earth Entity in order to live for long. The reason for this is that the new species can only exist at all, even for the short term, because the environment that it finds is favorable to it. The environment that the new species finds is the sum total of the lives, and the products of the lives, of the already existing conglomeration.

The environment that the new species finds is definitely not the same as the original environment of raw planet earth. The environment of raw planet earth was just noxious gas and a stagnant pond of foul smelling water with an occasional outcropping of rock. Only a few types of bacteria could thrive and reproduce in the environment of raw planet earth. The environment that the new species finds is the environment of Earth Entity, the conglomeration of symbiotic species that have gradually evolved on planet earth.

If the new species is not symbiotically compatible, if the new species is destructive to the already existing assortment of species, it will destroy the delicate machinery that created and that constitutes the environment of Earth Entity that the new species, itself, absolutely requires in order to live.

When Nature's experimental mutations create a new species, Nature tests the new species in two ways. First she tests the new species to see if it can thrive and reproduce in the environment that already exists in, and because of, conglomeration Earth Entity. If the new species passes the first test, Nature then tests to see if the new species is symbiotically compatible with the existing Earth Entity.

To illustrate the concept, let's assume a very simplified piece of Earth Entity. Imagine a small island that had only two large animal species. There was a species of dwarf deer that lived on brushy vegetation on the island, and there was a coyote species that preyed on the deer and kept the deer population down to what the vegetation could support. The two species were symbiotic. They helped each other. The deer provided food for the coyotes, and the coyotes kept the deer population genetically healthy and from becoming large enough to destroy the deer's vegetation food source. The swift deer reciprocated by keeping the coyote species genetically healthy. The typically faster deer outran any coyote that was not in the peak of health and physical fitness.

Now, assume a mutation of the coyote species that created a larger, longer legged, coyote that was considerably faster than the original coyote species. The new coyote species easily passed Nature's first test. It could catch any deer it wanted to. The deer species, confined to the island, had absolutely no refugium, no way to escape, from the very fast mutant coyotes. The super coyotes quickly ate all of the slow and weak deer that the original coyote species depended on. Because of all the food available to it, the new coyote species reproduced prolifically. Because it was a much more efficient hunter, it starved out and replaced the parent coyote species.
However, there was a big problem. No deer on the island was capable of outrunning the super coyote species. The super coyotes had all the food available that they could eat, and their population increased dramatically at an ever increasing, exponential, rate of growth while the deer population simultaneously plummeted in a mirror image rate of decline.

The super coyote population continued its extreme growth with almost no slackening until the last deer was hunted down and eaten. Because the super coyotes were such efficient hunters, they never knew hunger even though the deer became very few in numbers. After the last deer was eaten, the huge pack of coyotes then milled around for a week looking in vain for another deer to kill. Finally, their extreme hunger drove them to the inevitable. The stronger coyotes attacked the weaker ones. Super coyote preyed on super coyote. The super coyote population crashed in free fall. In a very short time there was only one coyote left, and he then died of starvation.

Nature had tested the super coyote mutation to see if it was symbiotically compatible with the segment of conglomeration Earth Entity that was its environment. The super coyote did not pass this second test. The super coyote did not help Earth Entity, the environment that it needed for its own survival, to survive. Both the deer species and the super coyote species became extinct.

What about Earth Entity on the island? Since she was Mother Nature, the assemblage of all biological life, you might say that she died with the death of the deer and coyote population, and then she was reincarnated in a very different form. No land animals could ever reach the island again, but after the coyotes were gone sea birds started to nest there.

Of course we humans are not the first super coyotes to arise in some environment of Earth Entity. Super coyotes are a wrong turn on the road of evolution. Since evolution is caused by random errors of reproduction and is purely trial and error such individuals must occur periodically. But we have certainly caused more drastic change to Earth Entity than any super coyote we know of that lived before us, and it looks like we have just begun our horrible rampage of destruction. Super coyotes have usually been confined to some local environment, either by geography (the island that they couldn't escape from) or by the prey species that they fed on. They committed suicide by exterminating their local prey before they had a drastic, world wide, effect on Earth Entity.

Our "long legs" that give us such an overpowering advantage over our prey species, both wild and domestic, is our unparalleled imagination, our inventiveness. I'm guessing that verbal language, which gave us the extreme advantage of storing and accumulating information from to generation, is a direct result of our inventiveness genes and not a separate trait. This inventiveness has allowed us to infiltrate practically every environment of Earth Entity and outrun every species there. We just became too clever for our own good. We are, right now, committing suicide with our own inventions.

I'm an optimist. I'm betting (hoping) that some representatives of our general species will survive--but I'm sure they can only do so in a drastically reduced population--and probably in the form of less clever, or maybe somewhat wiser, throwbacks or mutants not typical of the current population. There are probably enough of those abnormal types around right now--misfit souls lost amongst the current insane herd.

The end.
Comments are most welcome,
but they may not be posted or answered promptly.
If you feel a twinge of empathy, post a link on your site.

post 16, Army Ponchos

April on Steen's Mountain, Oregon, 1988. (Also see posts 01, 03, 06 and 10.) That isn't a statue in the background with the icicles on its sides. That's poor Tar Baby. He was born near Astoria on Oregon's coast and he never saw snow before. Burros are tough critters though, and the three brothers didn't seem at all distressed by the weather.

As I keep mentioning (for the benefit of newcomers to this blog), my lifetime goal has always been to learn how to live in comfort as a Stone Age hunter-gatherer in symbiotic cooperation with all the other species of the wilderness. But as I also keep admitting, I am not at all a purist. It just is not practical in most areas of the globe right now. So let me give a plug here for genuine US army ponchos. Yes, some industrialist destroyed part of the natural environment while manufacturing them, and they are an artificial thing with no real counterpart in the wilderness, but they can sure make life more comfortable, or maybe just help keep you alive, while you're learning essential things like making fire without matches.

The ponchos started out as a substitute for a raincoat, a raincoat big enough and flexible enough to cover your pack as well as you. But the good feature of genuine army ponchos, besides their lightweight but tough waterproof material, is the snap design and arrangement. Each snap is male on one side and female on the other. You snap the sides together when you use it as a raincoat, or you can snap one poncho to another along the ridge to make a serviceable tent as shown in the photograph.

A neat trick is to lay the poncho on smooth ground; lay your sleeping bag (yes, I often carry one of those also) on one side of it; fold the poncho over the sleeping bag; and snap the poncho to itself. I did that on an elk hunting trip one time and woke up after a cozy good nights sleep with three inches of new snow on top of me. (When the weather looks questionable you keep your head inside, like a turtle.)

You do want to be careful how you snap the poncho together. Since each snap is both male and female, you have a choice. Ann's daughter Cheryl was trekking with me along the Snake River in Oregon one time when, at the end of a long hike, we had no time to make a decent camp and rain clouds were gathering overhead. I showed her how to make the poncho into a tube around her sleeping bag, as above.

It did rain, a real downpour. I was cozy warm and comfortable. I didn't feel at all guilty about using an artificial poncho. But then I heard a wail of misery from Cheryl. She had snapped her poncho together just backwards so that the rain falling on top of the poncho was all being funneled right inside onto her sleeping bag.

We quickly transferred her into my dry bag, and then I stumbled around in the rain and the dark making a camp under a huge rock that had a concave bottom forming a sort of low roofed cave. The rock had once rolled down from the canyon wall above. We spent the next several rainy days in the cave. The roof was cracked making me apprehensive of being buried alive (which was why we hadn't camped under it originally), but it was a snug and comfortable shelter. You couldn't stand--but who cares when it's raining outside.

I've often went on a backpacking trek with only one, or preferably two, army ponchos to make a shelter with, even in the dead of winter. I find them much preferable to the so-called "pop" tents. You can't put a real warm fire inside a pop tent. But you can build a fire immediately in front of a poncho lean-to adequate to help you survive any weather. The second poncho is often used under you to keep you off the wet ground.

As I reminisce right now about my long relationship with ponchos, I remember the first trip I really used them. The trip that so endeared them to me for life. Back around 1954 I went on a solo (except for my Brittany spaniel pup, Jake) float trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho's Primitive Area. Before I even reached the start of the Middle Fork, while still floating down the creek from Bear Valley, my war-surplus yellow air force life raft acquired an irreparable long rip in its bottom. (I later found out that other rafts of that model also had deteriorating fabric.)

I wasn't about to give up on the trip, so I cut the bottom completely out so it wouldn't trap water and be a hindrance. Then I lashed poles on top of the rectangular inner-tube kind of thing that was left so that I had a place to tie my gear. But bouncing around through rapids kept my gear continually wet, including my down sleeping bag and my pup tent with the sewed in floor. I never got any use out of either of them. The rubberized bags I stowed them in were not really waterproof. A down bag takes forever--days and days--to dry, and it is unusable while it's wet. That's something to remember--use synthetic "Hollow Fill" sleeping bags on boat trips. They dry much faster.

Fortunately, I had good wool clothes. You can wring the water out of wool, put it back on, and the damp clothes will still keep you warm. Several times I have gone to sleep under a poncho lean-to and in front of a roaring fire when I had damp wool clothes on. You wake up a few times during the night to rebuild the fire when it dies down, but in the morning your clothes are dry and warm again and you've managed to get a good night's sleep. You cannot do that with a pop tent.

On that float trip in 1954 I spent the entire month of August sleeping in only my wool clothes and under a poncho lean-to. August is a warm month, but I've slept the same way in the middle of winter and once during a memorable early spring freezing rain in the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness area.

During that Selway trek there was absolutely no dead wood available. The only flat place I found to camp that night was frequented by many elk hunters every fall, and they had scrounged up every scrap of dead wood for their fires. I found out that green wood burns fine as long as you keep your fire stoked up roaring hot. The green needles from fir or pine will help you start the larger wood on fire. That's also something to remember. In fact, I advise doing it sometime for practice just to give you confidence in case you might ever have to. And remember to carry a stout and sharp steel boy's axe for cutting the green tree down and into logs. I credit mine with saving my life on two similar occasions.

It was around 1956 when I went on a cross-country ski camping expedition to the Owyhee Mountain ghost town of Silver City, Idaho, with two kids, high school seniors, to celebrate our newly acquired ability to stand up on skis. When we reached our departure area and started loading up packs, the boys realized they could not possibly carry their cumbersome winter bedrolls along with the heavy canned food they had brought. I suggested that we leave all our bedding in my Model A Ford and make our trip into a winter survival exercise. We took only my two ponchos for shelter.

We kept a fire going in front of our lean-to each night. Whoever woke up from the cold rebuilt the fire. The town kid was wearing a fancy nylon ski outfit, and he was the one that most often built up the fire and cuddled right next to it. By the end of the trip he looked like somebody had well seasoned him with a giant pepper shaker. Glowing coals spit out by the fire instantly melted black holes in the shiny blue nylon. The ranch kid and I were wearing heavy wool and we didn't have a visible mark. Wool will burn, but not instantly like nylon.

That was a great trip and those were great kids. I wish I still had a memory and could give their names.

Ponchos are great for backpacking light, but if you, like me, want to be really comfortable in any weather, then you want an enclosed tent with a fire right inside--like a teepee. Traditional teepees require a lot of poles which are a pain to pack around. I've spent some effort designing a similar tent affair which doesn't require nearly as much wood in the skeleton. I'll touch on that tent more in later posts.

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Installment 16 (the last one) of:

IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION

by Andy Van't Hul

I know that some concepts I have discussed in this essay will be difficult to accept by minds that have been brainwashed by the cult of civilization, and that is virtually every adult today. Brainwashing is a very real phenomenon. When some concept, such as "Thou shalt not kill" is hypnotically repeated over and over to a person, especially a young person, there is actual physical growth, enlargement, of the synapses of the involved neurons in the brain of the person hearing the message. In time the information, even if it is totally false, becomes embedded like bedrock in the brain and may be essentially impossible to uproot. There is no logic involved. It is a purely "cause and effect" physical phenomena. The repetitive words eventually cause a physical modification, submicroscopic but very real, of the brain.

Brainwashing is the systematic, repetitive, presentation of propaganda (which can be true or false) in a manner which hypnotizes the subject, the victim, into accepting that propaganda as fact. The person, who might accurately be labeled the hypnotist, doing the brainwashing may, or may not, have self-serving intentions and they may not even realize that they are brainwashing. The hypnotist may be convinced (they may have been brainwashed themselves) into genuinely believing that they are doing a great service for the subject--and they could actually be doing a good service in some cases. Parents habitually brainwash their children, and parents are nearly always just trying to help the kids.

Brainwashing is just another word for hypnotizing. The words are synonymous, they are exactly the same thing, and they are the most effective means of propagating all religions and all political systems. It is interesting that self-hypnotism is not only possible but may even be the predominate form of the phenomena. Most exceptional athletes are probably the result of self-hypnotism.

Religions are preeminent examples of well-organized and very effective brainwashing regimes. Individuals are recruited into them at a very young age and usually by their parents, whom they would instinctively trust and obey implicitly. The recruits are taught to memorize the "holy" words and chant them, usually in unison. By repetitively chanting the admonitions and listening to their own voices the recruits are self-hypnotizing themselves. The larger the group the better as it markedly reduces self-questioning and doubt. Brainwashing is most effective on the young and the key ingredient is repetition, repetition, repetition. Logic is not required at all and could be seriously detrimental to the process since it encourages the individual to think.

Political movements such as Nazism, Communism, and Democracy, and even business organizations, all try to get young recruits and get them chanting their self-hypnotic slogans, but religions have been exemplary in refining the system to its most basic and effective elements and rigorously, single-mindedly, pursuing those elements. This has come about primarily through thousands of years of trial and error driven by the irresistible cleric incentives of a very easy life and fawning followers.

Other animal species do not have the verbal ability to brainwash or be brainwashed. False information is not propagated from generation to generation in their species. Lucky for them. It is our Achilles' heel. It is the Pandora's Box of calamities we have opened upon ourselves with our stupid cleverness. I sincerely hope that some future mutation will give us the wisdom to sort out some of the most damaging falsehoods and kick them out of our verbally transmitted culture.

I'm guessing that some of the biggest evils of civilization had their inception almost from the birth of agriculture. Most higher animal species have a mix of instincts that might be called the "alpha male syndrome" (AMS) whereby individuals are driven by a consuming lust for power and control. AMS is certainly a great benefit in obtaining a mate and reproducing and that is why it is so widespread in most animal species. AMS was common long before civilization came about, but it met a need of civilization perfectly. Civilization required a rigid set of rules and strict enforcement of those rules. Civilization required a ruler. AMS leaped forward to assume that role. The egotistical, power-mad, strongman loved to order people around and punish any "wrongdoer" that dared to object. That leader, or leaders, became variously known as cleric or politician but there is little or no difference between them and they've often been the same person.

A leader of civilization has enormous power and, as we all know, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Humans are natural born predators, and now that our wild prey has been essentially exterminated, we amuse ourselves by preying on each other. A leader does not necessarily have to enrich himself at the expense of his subjects, but they virtually all do. Leaders of civilization became shepherds, herding and especially milking their flocks of mindless sheep. A couple of scams became so surefire successful that they have become enshrined as expected institutions in our civilized culture.

All forms of life, even ants, have an instinctive aversion to dying. If some individual was born without this genetic aversion he would just lie down and die whenever the going became difficult or unpleasant, and his non-aversion genes would not be perpetuated. A long time ago some very clever charlatan hit upon a scheme for capitalizing on this death aversion instinct, and the ruse became so instantly and perpetually successful that it became the classic cleric scam.

The cleric is a typical con artist and he/she nearly always goes through elaborate rituals to con, to convince, the victim that the cleric has an inside track to some all-powerful supernatural being that can perform miracles such as prolonging life. The cleric scam is sort of an imaginary life assurance policy. If you pay the cleric (ten percent of your income is often subtly, or not so subtly, requested) during your lifetime here on earth, the cleric assures you that when you die here on earth some imaginary continuation of yourself will be transported to an indescribably wonderful place up in the clouds, far removed from the pollution and misery of civilized life on earth, for eternity. It is really hard to imagine anyone falling for such a racket, especially since the cleric is never able to produce a clear video showing your recently dead friends enjoying their new accommodations in Heaven, but the aversion to, and the denial of, death is so strong that the majority of people actually do fall for the scam, even with our scientific knowledge today, and thus there is tremendous competition, dog eat dog competition, in the cleric trade. Billions upon billions of dollars are involved. Wars are fought.

Now, I don't feel any compulsion to be a protector of the masses. The fact that they waste their money is no concern of mine--but just how they waste it often is. The cleric scam affects us all in a horrendous manner. Back when Ronald Reagan was president of the US he appointed James Watt as Secretary of the Interior. Watt pulled off a project that was definitely damaging to the environment and, of course, the environmentalists raised a howl of protest. Watt's reply was essentially, "Hey, its no problem. The second coming of Christ is going to happen any day now, and none of us will need this environment on earth anymore". That incident actually happened! Unfortunately, the various versions of the cleric scam have made that statement the opinion of the majority of people on earth, even of most world leaders, and thus there is no sense of real need to preserve the living environment that our great, great, grandkids so desperately require. Reagan and Watt were at the very highest echelons of the US government--and the men in those posts now, as I write this, have exactly the same attitude (they deny the existence of human caused global warming and they recently "edited"--and in the process reversed--a government scientific report on overgrazing of public lands). When the most powerful nation on earth doesn't see any need to protect the environment, we're in big trouble.

As a necessary step in pulling off his scam, the cleric must convince his followers that the "God" he speaks of is "all-powerful". If the God is all powerful, then of course, anything and everything that happens is God's will and design. The environmental mess we have on earth today thus isn't any person's fault. God willed it--and he will cart us all off to eternity in heaven where there isn't any human-caused stinking mess. Such thinking is absolutely insane! Planet earth and Earth Entity are the only heaven that we and our descendents will ever have. When we shit in our nest (and every one of us is contributing to our environmental disaster by buying fancy houses, cars and electronics) our granddaughter has to grow up in the filth. If we destroy the nest, she dies!

I don't know which came first, but the cleric scam soon formed an unholy alliance with the politician scam. The politician scam didn't require any creative con game to be pulled off, it was more like strong arm robbery, but resistance to it was muted by the cleric's concept of an eternal life far away from whatever mess was left on earth.

What the politician did was to survey the surface of planet earth into clearly delimited parcels and then offer to "sell" those plots to the highest bidder. The purchaser was given a legal title to the lot--but only for as long as he paid yearly taxes on it to the politician. Essentially any destruction, any rape and plunder, to those portions of planet earth and Earth Entity within the parcel was allowed as long as the required taxes were paid. The politician didn't care at all what the buyer did to it. He was a pimp, selling his mother, Mother Nature, as a prostitute. The politician even protected the purchaser from angry neighbors who got upset when they saw their neighborhood destroyed. Like James Watt, the politician figured he was going to be in Heaven before long and he wouldn't have to look at the mess or smell the stench.

The living creatures, plant, animal, and microbe, on those plots were vital components, organs, of Earth Entity, the living environment that we are each a part of. They were part of our life! Who gives some politician the right to sell, and then collect taxes on, a part of our life? That is exactly like selling the Brooklyn Bridge to some naive bumpkin. And when the environment, the life on a plot, is destroyed, an essential part of our life is destroyed with it. That natural, self-maintaining, wild life that was destroyed should have been a legacy to our children to help provide for their existence. Some crook, some outright criminal, sold a part of our life so that he could collect the taxes and live in comfort while that part of us is destroyed. How can we be so naive and mindless as to let that happen? We should boil those clerics and politicians in oil for promoting their scams! Tar and feather the bastards!

Hate is very bad for your health. Don't do it. And don't chase the poor mayor with a baseball bat. The massive die-off will get rid of him soon enough. The cleric-politician system has been going on for thousands of years, and the guilty parties have built up so much pseudo-logical rationalization during that time, in an attempt to deflect criticism and to keep from feeling guilty, that a few of them today have brainwashed themselves into thinking that they're actually helping people. My motive with the inflammatory remarks above is not hate mongering. I just anticipate where the opposition to this essay will come from (when the clerics and politicians realize that the thrust of this writing is to eliminate their bread and butter livelihood), and I'm just launching a "preemptive strike". "Your best defense is a good offense."

Civilization does require a ruler, a government, to impose apparent harmony, but as I've constantly reminded, civilization is our only enemy. A natural hunter-gatherer lifestyle does not have a sheriff and jail. There is bound to be an occasional flair up of tempers during competition for resources, especially if those resources are in short supply, and maybe there will be an actual killing with a club, and that is exactly what the human species requires again in order to keep its population in proportion with all the other species. The human species does not require politicians or clerics of any sort. All the youngsters need is a father figure in their clan to demonstrate the use of the club.

I believe that it is entirely possible for humans, after a period of readjustment, to once again live a simple, happy, life as hunter-gatherers in symbiotic, mutually beneficial, cooperation with all the other wild species. That is the ultimate goal that we should all be striving to achieve for our descendents. I admit that the short-term outlook appears traumatic, to say the least, but I view it as an exciting challenge. I only wish that I could extend my life a hundred years or two and help guide and lead the struggle to regain a noble position as a respectable and useful component of Earth Entity's life instead of being a loathsome disease to her. I believe we can conquer this terrible cancerous disease called civilization and again become a happy, contented, beneficial, member of Mother Nature's life as hunter-gatherers following our well-proven inborn instincts. We lived that way for millions of years. We can do it for millions of years again.

I am sure that agriculture is going to collapse, and civilization with it. The refugium law of population biology guarantees it. Commercial fishing, arguably a form of farming now-a-days, is already in a tailspin from which it will probably never recover--a failure precisely because of a lack of refugium for the species involved--and many people of the world are dependent on that source of protein.

A factor exacerbating the world hunger situation is the declining production, and consequential rapidly escalating price, of petroleum. The US is a major exporter of grain to hungry countries. But the US, and also other exporters like Canada and Australia, produces this grain through the use of petroleum. Essentially, they are converting oil into food. But as the price of that oil sky rockets, the price of the grain exported must also increase--and poor people in the importing countries just do not have the money to buy.

Another major agricultural concern is the rapidly declining availability of water for irrigation. The huge underground reservoirs are being pumped dry. Rivers no longer run to the sea. Hydroelectric plants, city household water use and industry are in direct competition for water, and they are frequently given higher priority. This is an area where the wild card of global warming could suddenly have a big effect.

Of course, my crystal ball is clouded. I don't know how events are going to unfold. A new disease may play a big part. AIDS may even do the job eventually. It's the right sort of disease, biologically speaking, and it hasn't peaked yet. Experience in Africa shows that it can have a significant effect on agricultural output as many people become too weak to work but still require food. I am only certain that agriculture and civilization are going to crash.

One thing we really must be doing right now is work to change our verbal culture. Of course we are not going to change the mindset of the masses and rescue the environment that way. But the civilized masses are bound to die--all six billion of them--when some trigger starts a domino effect of nation after nation succumbing to agriculture collapse.

Among the surviving individuals will likely be those who prepared themselves for such an event, and part of that preparation should be a verbal culture oriented toward a long-term symbiotic existence with the natural wild species of earth. We must have enough guts to speak out now and contradict the self-serving politicians and clergy so that our kids and grandkids can learn a culture that is not damaging to the environment. We have to spread the word that the cult of civilization-farming that we've been seduced into following for the past ten thousand years was a terrible mistake and we must now change our ways to cure the cancer that is threatening the very life of the Mother Nature we have evolved with, the Mother Nature that we are each an infinitesimal component of.

Mother Nature is your life also. Will you help? You can start just by making this essay available to others who might be interested in reading it. Put a link on your web site and mention the essay starting at the first post.

This is the last installment of:

In Opposition to Civilization.

Comments are welcome.

(But they may not be posted or answered promptly)

Other essays will follow.

post 15, Glass Buttes Knap-In

Glass Buttes Knap-In, I think the second one in 1987. (See also the first post that started this blog.) The gang is sitting around the community campfire knapping arrowheads or such from the local obsidian the area is famous for. Jim Riggs, a host of the Knap-In, is looking at a minor injury he's just done to his hand. You always protect your hand with a piece of soft leather under the obsidian, but you have to use considerable force during pressure flaking--that looks like a big spear point he's working on--and accidents are part of life.

I notice only one guy in the photo is wearing glasses. I've done a lot of knapping without goggles or glasses myself--but it's foolish when they're so readily available and cheap today. If the aboriginal knappers had had goggles available, the smart ones would have worn them. Glass in the eye is much more serious than glass in the hand. If you mess around with knapping, be especially wary of little kids or curious bystanders. They like to get up close to see what you're doing, and little invisible, but extremely sharp, flakes of glass can jump quite far. If you do very much knapping, maybe you should have an extra pair of cheap goggles around just to loan such people. It's good PR for them to really see what you're doing as long as their eyes are protected. Also, it's a good idea to always sit in one place when you do your knapping so that there will only be a small area of glass chips to endanger barefoot people and small kids.

Jim taught a class in aboriginal technology at the Eastern Oregon State College in La Grande, Oregon, and as part of that work he did a lot of research reading and watching movies. He told us about seeing a movie of a native Amerindian flaking arrowheads. He said the movie was well done and seamless, but he couldn't help noticing how Band-Aids kept magically sprouting on the fellow's hand as he worked.

Take note of the guy sitting cross legged at the right side of the photo. My senile old brain can't remember names (never could) but I'm guessing at Brian. He was a co-host of the Knap-In and one of the more artistic knappers. I couldn't have posed a clearer or better example of a knapper at work. There is a piece of leather under the work. It's just the same color as his hand and hard to see. His tool is a small piece of deer antler (if you don't have antler available you can substitute copper, like a boat nail) firmly embedded in a wooden handle that extends back to his elbow or body to give him leverage for the force required.

You do not just push down at right angles to the work. In order to produce a thin arrowhead or knife with a sharp cutting edge you must push straight in toward the center of the work with very strong but controlled force and then just add a little downward force. Hopefully, you will pry off a long thin flake that is about two thirds the width of the work. Before you do that operation you first have to crush and dull the fragile edge where you are positioning your tool so the material there will be thick enough to absorb the force required to remove a big flake. You want big flakes--not little ones.

If you can't make it to a Glass Buttes Knap-In just break the bottom out of an ordinary beer bottle to practice on. It's virtually the same material as obsidian. You first take a goose egg sized and shape rock (with kind of a sand paper texture--not glass smooth) and chip away at the bottle bottom with it to get the work roughly in shape before you start the pressure flaking. When chipping with the rock you also strike in, mostly toward the center of the work, and only a little bit down.

A cutting edge is an important tool for survival. It's comforting to be confident that you can quickly produce one wherever you can find smooth, shiny, rocks. Even dense basalt, which is dark black but not really shiny, will make a good, serviceable, tool. It won't be as razor sharp as obsidian or flint but it will be tougher and more useful as a knife or axe than obsidian. And it will do for arrowheads.

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Installment 15 of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul

The second condition we must meet is that we must adopt a strictly hunter-gatherer subsistence life. Immediately after the die-off there will no longer be grocery or hardware stores open on Main Street, or any factories functioning, but there will be plenty of tools scattered around for the few survivors. After a century or two of rust and mold and a nomadic lifestyle we will be back to using tools hand made from whatever materials we find about us. We will have steel readily available for tens of thousands of years in the form of reinforcing bars preserved in concrete, but our tools will be hand worked steel. ("Stone Age" aborigines worked metal when they found it available--such as natural copper or iron alloy from a meteorite.) Factories will forever be a thing of the past if there is no agriculture-civilization structure to support them.

At first glance a hunter-gatherer life might seem easiest for those few ethnic groups who have most recently been uprooted from such an existence. But I don't believe that that is the case. Those people who were recently aborigines still have the genetic instincts, such as quick reflexes and keen observation, but if they've been civilized for even one generation their vital hunter-gatherer culture has already been lost. The second generation will say that they know how to start a fire without a match--they saw their father do it once--but when they try to demonstrate the method they will nearly always fail.

But there is a spontaneous resurgence of that culture in even the most civilized people. I have been truly amazed at the wide spread interest that has developed in the US during just the past 30 years in Stone Age type, hunter-gatherer, survival. Search the Internet for key words such as: Outdoor (wilderness) survival skills; Abo (aboriginal) technology; and hunter-gatherer technology. When I first, well over 50 years ago, became involved with the subject as a young man, I was all alone and had a hard time finding sources of information. Now, thousands of people are involved, and there are a multitude of books and schools concerning the subject. I believe the "hundredth monkey" or the "tipping point" syndrome has taken hold. Those thousands of people don't need to read this essay I'm writing. They've already received the information via mental telepathy.

A third condition is that we must overhaul our social culture, the mores, the sense of "right" and "wrong", that we deliberately teach to the next generation. As children, we were trained to believe that "moral" and "ethical" were synonymous with "good", and so we dutifully pass on that concept to our own youngsters. But then what we define and label as morals and ethics are not universal truths that are consistent from social culture to social culture. They are merely arbitrary rules designed to insure the survival of our particular community. Since virtually all communities are agriculture based today, the current concepts of morals and ethics are essentially all designed strictly to enforce civilization, not to strengthen or benefit the human species. There is a world of difference between those two objectives. This is one of those many situations we have now where fiction has become hopelessly scrambled in amongst the truth in our verbally transmitted social culture and has drastically corrupted our libraries of stored information.

All higher animals are born with instincts that dictate how they respond to different situations, and human babies do have some instincts to recognize "right" and "wrong" behavior, behavior both of themselves and of others. The instinctive "right" behavior is that behavior of either self or associate that tends to insure the survival of self, and the instinctive "right" behavior can be totally different under different circumstances.

But culture, learned behavior, can modify or supercede instincts. The practice of agriculture (the great sin that cast us out of the Garden of Eden, metaphorically speaking) required the learned culture of civilization and civilization absolutely required enforced artificial harmony within the local community so that the community would be able to present a strong, united, defense against invading enemies that have always perpetually tried to appropriate the produce of agriculture.

To enforce harmony, civilization leaders established rigid rules such as The Ten Commandments and they declared that their rules were "morally" and "ethically" right and must be obeyed. With constant brainwashing starting as soon as a child could understand words, the leaders convinced their community that their set of rules was the only correct set of rules.
But it was tacitly understood that the rules only applied to dealings with other members of the local community (with other people who were "really human"). Killing or robbing someone of your own community was strictly outlawed and severely punished--but it was perfectly okay, and even often nationally mandatory, to kill or rob someone from a different ethnic group. Just read any objective history ever since history began being recorded and right up until today. The carnage now in Iraq started solely as a blatant attempt (with absolutely no regard for the welfare of individuals) to impose a puppet government there (somewhat like the externally manipulated and protected governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) to help control the world price of oil--something which would certainly never benefit the majority of the citizens of Iraq.

In order to clearly visualize our human condition and our relation with the world about us we must fully understand that what is good for the artificial practice of civilization is not at all good for the human species or for the environment that we and all other species depend on.

Civilization and agriculture are two names for the same social culture. Agriculture requires the largest army possible to protect it and armies require strict discipline to enforce internal harmony. Therefore, communities, nations, require strict laws against killing or harming anyone else in the community. In fact, civilization has evolved to require that everyone in the local community must be kept alive by whatever extreme means is necessary, regardless of genetic defects involved. Civilization touts those laws as ethically and morally correct.

But Nature, Earth Entity, evolved by trial and error over millions and millions of years before civilization was ever heard of. Civilization is a very recent (only 10,000 year's duration) experiment that has resulted in catastrophic destruction of Nature and thus is in the process of rapidly destroying itself. Nature absolutely requires adversities, predators; and confrontations, individual combat, to eliminate inappropriate gene combinations and keep a species genetically healthy while ensuring that its population remains in proper proportion to the other species of Earth Entity. The biological laws of Nature say that individuals with poor gene combinations should die before they are old enough to reproduce those poor gene combinations. The laws of Nature say that there must be sufficient death so that a species population does not become so great as to damage its environment. By the code of Nature, it is morally, ethically, wrong to artificially keep someone alive if that might contribute to the propagation of poor genes or contribute to unnatural overpopulation that might damage the environment.

There is absolute opposition, contradiction, between civilization and Nature as to what is morally and ethically correct. Nature is the law of the world that has endured for millions upon millions of years. Civilization is the mere 10,000 year old experiment that is obviously self-destructing before our eyes and causing great distress to nearly all large species. Nature is certain to prevail--but whether our species survives to see this is indeed questionable.

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