WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This is not new, but I keep being reminded of it. Naïveté is a potentially fatal affliction for the FE pursuit. Everybody I respect in the FE field began their journeys naively, including me, and as I think about it, they were all Americans. My “peers” – white educated Americans – are incredibly naïve, and I wonder how much longer I can even interact with them. I definitely cannot do much “Wade’s World” talk with them, as it blows them out of the water, on many levels. Usually, they cannot even begin to comprehend my experiences in trying to make FE happen, and that often revolves around their TV version of how the USA’s legal system works. It works nothing at all like it is portrayed on TV and in the movies. I wish I had a dollar for every time I saw an attorney say, “They can’t do that!” as the judge says, with a smile, “Watch this!” The judge then does the unimaginable to that lawyer, and the judge follows it up with, “What are you going to do about it?” And those are the lawyers who got off easy in their lesson on how the real world works. In my journey in the California “justice” system, murders and murder attempts of cops, lawyers, judges, magistrates and the like were par for the course.

When they began to bring the sledgehammer down on us in Ventura:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#mr

I began waking up fast, and when I met Gary Wean:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/cover-up.htm#wean

there was not much that could still surprise me, and hearing tales of judges and lawyers being murdered because they bucked the system or got in the way no longer shocked me. When friends and relatives later told me of watching people disappear:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/cover-up.htm#whistleblower

and how Kangaroo Court prevailed in even rather mundane legal situations, and I further saw it in my corporate career, the evil of the system became mind-numbingly evident. If average Americans keep their heads down, punch the clock, and keep watching their favorite TV shows, they will never know any better, and will die in their semi-sentient, naïve state, unless it all unravels before they die, and then they may get a dose of reality.

You can see it on this thread and others, with people offering their bright ideas. I have never seen an FE “bright idea” from somebody without any experience on the high road that had any merit. They were variations on themes, almost always falling neatly into Levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6

That dynamic is also rampant in the FE field today, as naïve scientists, inventors, and assorted newbies tilt at windmills. If there is any good news there, it is that virtually none of them ever do anything productive, not productive enough to where Godzilla has to take much interest, so they will not get in too much Godzilla trouble. But they are easily devoured by lower-level predators, which abound in and around that milieu. Those naïve newbie efforts can still wreck their lives, but it will rarely be fatal at the enthusiast level that they play at.

I think that one of the hardest things about making a choir will be keeping people like that out of the choir, those equivalents of 18-year-old boys trying to prove their manhood on the battlefield:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#business

As I get toward the finish line with drafting this essay, that issue is arising with more frequency. I think that I am going to have to lean toward keeping out the naïve rather than letting them in. Again, I started out naively myself, and I wonder how the 27-year-old version of me would do in the choir, and I think the answer is that my 55-year-old-self, who knew what the 27-year-old was in for, would have said, “Come back in a few years, if you survive the experience.”

This is the primary conundrum that I am facing now, as I envision the choir. Few have survived a journey like mine, especially who is still at it, but I can’t expect that those in the choir will have any experiences like that. It kind of comes full circle to what I wrote about several years ago:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#developing

They had to have some kind of awakening experience, and they usually had to get wounded somehow for the lesson to “seat,” and if they can relinquish their scarcity-based conditioning:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#dominant

or be willing to, if they do the work, then that is probably what I am looking for. And they will be needles in haystacks, and probably only a few of them will be Americans. The brainwashing of Americans goes deep, especially in the “educated” classes, which is a fact that I have been keenly reminded of lately. Conspiracism is a naïve perspective, too, attributing our problems to a few bad apples, when almost all of the damage is done by the herd, to itself. That is why Godzilla chuckles, because his job is really an easy one, when the herd’s size is considered.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Nine]

Dearest Wade,

Did you get outside today for a hike in the woods?

It is most important to get outside for at least part of the day....

With much love and care for you....


Nine

[Ilie Pandia]

Hello Wade,

As you wrote in your essay about elephants creating their own habitat I've found this interesting video that gives a similar example about wolves:

Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q

This also talks about a dear population that without the wolves simply grazed everything in their path, leading to soil erosion and all kind of not negative feedback loops (again that so called "self-regulation" not existing).

- Ilie

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am working like a madman on the next chapter, and no, Nine, I am not hiking at the moment, but would like to.

Hi Ilie:

Yes, ecosystems coevolve, and when you remove a key aspect of it, such as a predator, the entire system will change. The concept is called trophic cascade, as mentioned in that video:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_cascade

But the idea is really that multiple energy levels of grazing/predation is unstable, and can collapse. For instance, before wolves were reintroduced, the browsers/grazers were on their way to a population collapse as they ate all of their food out of existence. Human civilizations have been similarly unstable, and it has usually been because of instability at the bottom, not the top. Humans either wiped out their energy supplies, or their civilizations were too susceptible to climate changes, and the climate change could be something that humans induced through deforestation, and a drought did in the civilization.

A major point in my work and upcoming essay is that with FE, no resource would ever become scarce again, especially energy resources, and with abundant energy, all other resources become abundant. But that is only one side of the equation, the human welfare side. The other side, the welfare of all other life forms, would also benefit, where humans can raise fruit and other crops in indoor environments practically anywhere in the solar system they want to, and the thin layer of Earth’s biosphere would not “need” to be exploited for human benefit.

Humans have been doing it so long that they think it is “natural” to devastate the ecosystems for human benefit like we have. There is really nothing “natural” about it. Fires, farms, pastures, and the like are artificial constructs by humans, not “natural.” When human welfare is not dependent on raping Earth and each other, ecosystem exploitation and wars should disappear. Or, they will quickly be seen as stupid and suicidal behaviors, and will go away, if humanity is really a sentient species, or nearly there.

Then humanity can raise its awareness, and worlds like this can come into view:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post672748

where animals are not exploited, there is a harmony between humans and nature that is presently unimaginable, that a Disney movie could not begin to do justice to, and the human standard of living would make today’s Bill Gates Earth’s poorest person, by far.

I know that can happen. Heck, the technologies for it are already here, but while humanity collectively sleeps, lives in fear, and plays kill or be killed, Godzilla has the game well in hand, and we don’t get any, as we rush toward the abyss.

I am trying to help change that game, and we will see how it goes.

I have written about early civilizations and how they wiped themselves out:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post554340

and I am in the middle of that part of the essay. The city-states of Sumer all plundered the forests up the river valleys that they lived in, the Tigris and Euphrates, and deforestation led to siltation and soil salination that did them in, and they were all buried in silt, with their soils salted, so they literally did themselves in. But that pattern was there from the very beginnings of urban life, such as at Çatal Höyük:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalhoyuk

where it was abandoned after about two thousand years due to “aridity,” which was likely self-induced, as they deforested the region. The earliest writings showed that the connection between deforestation and droughts was known back then, but humans just could not help themselves, so their civilizations always cut their legs out from under them as they plundered their resources to exhaustion and then collapsed.

The only reason why industrial civilization is not even more devastating is that it is using the first primary energy source that was not gained by plundering the ecosystem. But the methods are all poisonous, as we recently discussed:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post801462

I am currently plunking along on a new post, along with the essay, and the theme is “How I lost my naïveté,” (or, at least some of it ) as I keep stating what a killer it is. I have written plenty on my moments of awakening:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy.htm#why

but I am going to get into unprecedented detail on how it looked through my eyes. It should help readers understand the process. Again, I have been getting hit a lot by people’s naïveté lately, and I am going to get into the process of losing it. Dealing with psychopaths sicced onto our companies was one hell of a way to lose it. Maybe that is why I lost it as quickly and early as I did.

I will also relate how it went with fellow travelers. Some woke up as I did, while others were easily hoodwinked and manipulated. I will end with mentioning just one phenomenon: when you first bear the brunt of the psychopaths' actions, where they take off their masks and are sinking their daggers in you, your first reaction is disbelief. You stand there, watching them outright lie, or perform some gutter move, and your first reaction is thinking that you are not really seeing what you are seeing. Dennis’s attorneys went through that phase.

Mr. Big Time Attorney eventually became disgusted and sued the gangsters that run Ventura County:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#gutter1

to quickly discover that whoever was screwing us made the IRS look like children, and Mr. Big Time Attorney quickly got put in his place.

But a lot of the psychopathy we saw was “functional psychopathy,” where the “psychopaths” were simply doing their jobs. Lying and wrecking the lives of innocents was just what they did as their jobs, freely admitted by them:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#care

Once in a while, some had bouts of conscience, usually only when "helped":

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#hatchet

but they were few and far between.

When the Jewish Holocaust was studied, and how people could participate in it, most people just saw it as their jobs:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#browning

and men who ran death camps would go home at the end of the day and play with their children. Posterity has called such people “monsters,” but those “monsters” are around 85% of humanity today, who will gladly play the monster if it becomes their job to do so. We might try to limit that to men, and there is a validity in that, which is one reason why I keep saying that women need to step up. An FE effort comprised almost entirely of men is likely doomed. And for the effort I am about the mount, women will have to gain some scientific literacy, which relatively few ever pursue. I would not say that my effort is aimed at women, but I will need to attract more of them than have been attracted to FE so far. Making FE happen cannot be a boys’ game.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I think I will throw up part of the upcoming chapter here when I finish dealing with some highly important concepts for my essay, as I am now at the stage of the essay where the earliest civilizations collapsed. Understanding why civilizations collapse is important, and I will be dealing with the work of the authors linked below, Diamond and Tainter in particular. On one hand, it is kind of sad to see the battles in academia over the issue, but on the other, it can be illuminating to actually understand their arguments, and see what can really unify them. Diamond states that the collapses were due to environments collapsing, usually due to humans wrecking them. Tainter takes on Diamond, and Tainter’s work is generally considered the most sophisticated out there on the subject. Tainter surveyed the reasons for collapse given over the millennia and derived an economic rational called declining return on investment in complexity. When you really get into what Diamond and Tainter are saying, it amounts to civilizations running out of energy. It really is that simple. It is just that Diamond is saying that the environment stopped provided the needed resources (which are all energy, or made available by energy), and Tainter says that the return on investment (energy invested above all else) dipped low enough so that the society could no longer support itself. But Tainter is more focused on the moment of collapse, rather than the decline that brought it to the brink. The decline was always about falling EROI, and also reduced absolute energy acquired. The moment of collapse was when hungry urban professionals left town to look for greater food (energy) security.

The relationships are pretty simple. Energy powers all organisms, ecosystems, and civilizations, and more complex biology or civilizations need more energy to power their many moving parts. When the energy runs out, the organism, ecosystem, or civilization collapses. The concepts of efficiency and resilience can be seen in the first link below, by another author that I will deal with in my essay.

http://www.homerdixon.com/2010/05/05...public-policy/

http://www.theupsideofdown.com/pdf/2...l-response.pdf

http://www.compassionatespirit.com/Collapse.htm

http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/...s-physics.html

http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/...-collapse.html

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/co...mondcritic.pdf

Those are all highly intelligent academics and scientists, and look at how they all see doom, dead ahead. And free energy makes it all go away, almost overnight, and nobody wants to hear about free energy. That is one of the many surreal aspects of my journey, and those authors linked to above were exactly the kinds of people that Brian O tried to tell about free energy, to only wonder several years later if we were really a sentient species:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#sentience

and readers of this thread know the many doors I have banged my head against, as I sought open minds and allies. I have not totally given up on the “smart,” but while I might spend the time to write an email to some of those guys after I publish my essay, I won’t be spending much time on them. Academics and scientists are in straightjackets of a different sort, where they worship the “laws of physics,” where they dismiss evidence of organized suppression as a “conspiracy theory,” etc. Been there, done that:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level3

However, the arguments and evidence in those links above are important, as they show how the world works and the problems we face on that score, even if they fall short of suggesting any real solutions.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Some are following the process I am using, and below is what I have done so far on the next chapter. This is hot off the presses, not really edited or even organized all that well. Interested readers can see how it will differ from the chapter draft that I put up next week, I hope. This will likely be another monster chapter, as it covers the period until the Industrial Revolution. I have to telescope plenty into the chapter, obviously, and have to try to stay on the critical dynamics. So, here it is at the moment.

Humanity’s Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution

In the tropical rainforests where gorillas and chimpanzees live, there are dry and wet seasons, where they must seasonably change their diets to adapt to available foods. Beyond those rainforests, seasonal variation is more pronounced and, once the easy meat was gone, people survived by engaging in the hunter-gather lifestyle familiar to today’s humans. A sexual division of labor existed, where men hunted and women gathered. Men had the strength and speed required to hunt wary animals, particularly large game, while women were less mobile, partly due to caring for children.

Those Gravettian mammoth villages probably hosted humanity’s first semi-sedentary populations, but that short-lived situation ended when mammoths did. The primary necessity for a sedentary population’s survival was a local and stable energy supply. One energy supply tactic, as could be seen with those mammoth hunters, was storing food in permafrost “freezers.” Seasonal settlements existed where people subsisted on migrating animals or when certain plants had a harvestable and seasonal stage of development.

While eating roots has a long history in the human line, permanent sedentism began by harvesting seeds. In the Levant, in a swath of land that includes today’s Israel and Syria, about 13.5. kya the Kebaran people (c. 18 kya to 12.5 kya) made acorns and pistachios a major part of their diets. Mortars and pestles were in the Kebaran toolkit for processing acorns, which must be pounded into a paste and soaked to leach out tannins, and that work fell exclusively to women.

The Natufian culture (c. 15 kya to 11.8 kya) succeeded the Kebaran culture, and the Natufian village at Tell Abu Hureyra in today’s Syria was established about 13.5 kya, and was situated on a gazelle migration route. The residents of that village of a few hundred people also harvested “wild gardens” of wheat and rye. Those villagers became Earth’s first known farmers, and they had dogs. The original settlement was abandoned during the Younger Dryas and resettled after it ended. The effect of a harsher climate may have spurred the origin of agriculture, which began there about 11 kya. By seven kya, the settlement had reached several thousand people, and was then abandoned due to aridity. No evidence of warfare is associated with the settlement. A compelling recent hypotheses is that agriculture could not have developed in warfare’s presence, as farmers would have been too vulnerable to raids by hungry hunters. In the four places on Earth where agriculture seems to have independently developed: the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, no evidence of violent conflict exists before those civilizations fed by the first crops began growing into states. Those states are called “pristine” states, as no other states influenced their development. The peaceful agricultural villages that feminist authors have long written about, where women had it better than at any time before the Industrial Revolution, actually existed, if only for a relatively brief time, in only a few places.

Only when economic surpluses (primarily food) were redistributed, first by chiefs and then by early states, did men rise to dominance in those agricultural civilizations. Because the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent is the best studied and had the greatest influence on humanity, this chapter will tend to focus on it, although it will also survey similarities and differences with other regions where agriculture and civilization first appeared. Almost whenever agriculture appeared, cities eventually appeared, usually a few thousand years later. Agriculture’s chief virtue was that it extracted vast amounts of human-digestible energy from the land, where population densities a hundred times greater than that of hunter-gatherers became feasible. While the debates on the subject may never end, today it is widely thought that Malthusian population pressures led to the development of agriculture. The attractions of agricultural life over the hunter-gatherer lifestyle were not immediately evident. Early agriculture was a life of drudgery compared to the hunter-gatherer or horticultural lifestyle, and humans became shorter and less healthy when they transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farmers, but the land could also support many times the people. On the eve of the Domestication Revolution, Earth’s carrying capacity with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was around ten million people, with an actual population somewhat less, maybe as low as four million. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution in 1800, Earth’s human population was nearly a billion people. No matter how talented a hunter-gatherer warrior was, he was no match for a hundred peasants armed with hoes.

Darwin believed that natural selection only worked at the individual level, but the idea of group selection has become prominent in my lifetime, if controversial. Anthropologists and biologists see evidence of group selection, not only in social animals such as termites, but also in the ability of human societies to survive competition with their neighbors. Hunter-gatherer societies eliminated disruptive members by banishment or death, and has been argued to have been reflected genetically in eliminating uncooperative people from society. Those kinds of activities may have helped cull the human herd of “uncooperative” genes. Another aspect of biology that applies to human civilization is the idea of carrying capacity. Over history, the society with the higher carrying capacity prevailed, and the loser either adopted the winner’s practices or became enslaved, taxed, marginalized, or extinct. When Europe conquered the world, it had the highest energy usage, by far, of any peoples on Earth, which is why it always prevailed. When high-energy societies met low-energy societies, the results were almost always catastrophic for low-energy societies. Hunter-gatherer societies have no chance in a competition with societies that have domesticated plants and animals, much less industrialized societies.

Another early Fertile Crescent village, Çatal Höyük, in today’s Turkey, existed from 9.5 kya to 7.7 kya and was another peaceful agricultural settlement in which the inhabitants numbered several thousand people, in what is arguably Earth’s first city, but it was more like a large village, without the civic features normally associated with cities. The society seemed classless, and women and men had roughly equivalent status. The first domesticated sheep appear at Çatal Höyük, and the beginnings of cattle domestication appear there as well. Çatal Höyük’s residents raised wheat, barley, and peas. Pottery and obsidian mining and tool-making were major industries, and those people made the world’s first known map. Çatal Höyük did not have walls, there was no sign of warfare, and many “shrines” dotted the settlement, which probably supported a hunter-gatherer religion. Çatal Höyük was abandoned in a pattern that would repeat itself in the Fertile Crescent and Old World many times in succeeding millennia; it appears that deforestation and resultant desertification may have spelled the end of Çatal Höyük, as was probably also the case with Tell Abu Hureyra.

In an event that favors the hypotheses of climate-change advocates, there was a dip in global temperatures beginning about 8.2 kya, which lasted for a few centuries. It was likely caused by remnants of the North American ice sheets melting, and the resultant flush of freshwater into the North Atlantic. It was a less severe event than the Younger Dryas, but still caused epic droughts around the world. Some scientists think that the uncertainty caused by those cooling events helped spur agriculture, to enhance food security. Climate change from that event could be why Çatal Höyük was abandoned, and Tell Abu Hureyra survived the event, to only be abandoned several centuries later when another major dip in global temperatures happened. Those two early settlements may have been abandoned partly due to those climate events, but they would have also deforested their hinterlands, which desertified the region, with the settlements permanently abandoned. Environmentally harmful practices combined with droughts destroyed many civilizations in the millennia after those early abandonments, including the Mayan, Anasazi, and Harappan civilizations.

A contemporary of Çatal Höyük, Çayönü Tepesi, near Anatolia, had indicators of developing class systems, and male/female differences in diet. Cattle seem to have been first domesticated about 10.5 kya in the vicinity, which is also where pigs may have been first domesticated, and many progenitors of cereal crops still grow wild in the region. Early on, people also began to domesticate fiber-producing plants, with flax among the first domesticated fiber plants. Fiber crops have often competed with food crops for field space, especially when foreign conquerors reorient that subject population’s efforts, which can lead to starvation in the subject population. A recent example is when Britain forced Bengal to grow jute, indigo, and opium instead of food, and Bengal had a huge famine soon after Britain conquered it.

Goats were first domesticated in today’s Iran about 10 kya, and pigs were first semi-domesticated in the Fertile Crescent as long as 15 kya, and were independently domesticated in China about eight kya. Combining domesticated plants and animals appeared fairly early, where farmers realized that animal manure could fertilize crops, so the close association of pastures and cropland became a standard feature of Fertile Crescent civilizations. Early domestic animals were all herd animals, where humans replaced herd leadership. Since humans are herd animals, their understanding of herd behaviors likely made their efforts easier and more successful.

Just as growing large became a strategy for extinction for the world’s megafauna when a super-predator appeared that could kill them, forests are the greatest biological energy stores that Earth has ever seen. Trees were the plant world’s equivalent of megafauna, and they suffered the same fate wherever civilization appeared. When humans became sedentary, they razed local forests to gain building materials and fuel, and the freshly deforested land worked wonderfully for raising crops, at least until the soils were ruined from nutrient depletion and erosion. Domesticated cattle pulled the first plows, beginning more than seven kya. When humans began to smelt metal, beginning about 8 kya, deforestation was easier, so a dynamic arose in the Fertile Crescent where bronze axes easily deforested the land, which was then worked with draft animals pulling bronze plows, which increased crop yields but also increased erosion. That complex of deforestation, crops, draft animals, and smelted metals yielded great short-term benefits but was far from sustainable, as it devastated the ecosystems and soils and also impacted the hydrological cycle, and gradually turned forests to deserts. Another way that the Bronze Age helped deforest Earth is that smelting metal is enormously energy intensive. When the Mediterranean region had its Bronze Age, the standard unit of copper production was the oxhide ingot (because it was worth about one ox), which weighed between 20 and 30 kilograms. It took six tons of charcoal to smelt one ingot, which required 120 pine trees, or 1.6 hectares (four acres) of trees. Kilns for making pottery also required vast amounts of wood. Wood met many of the energy needs of early Old World civilizations, which were all voracious consumers of wood.

In the Fertile Crescent today, the ruins of hundreds of early cities are in their self-made deserts, usually buried under the silt of the erosion of exposed forest soils. As the Mediterranean Sea’s periphery became civilized, the same dynamic was repeated, where forests became semi-deserts and early cities were buried under silt. Before the rise of civilization, a forest ran from Morocco to Afghanistan, and only about 10% of the forest that still existed as late as 2000 BCE still remains. Everywhere that civilization exists today has been dramatically deforested. The only partial exceptions are places such as Japan, but they kept their forests intact by importing wood from foreign forests. North America and Asia have been supplying Japan with wood for generations. As civilizations wiped themselves out with their rapaciousness, some were aware enough to lament what was happening, but they were a minority. Usually lost in the anthropocentric view was the awesome devastation inflicted on other life forms. Killing off the megafauna was only a warm-up. Razing a forest to burn the wood and raise crops destroyed an entire ecosystem for short-term human benefit, leaving behind a lifeless desert when the last crops were wrenched from depleted soils. In the final accounting, the damage meted out to Earth’s other life forms, not other humans, may be humanity’s greatest crime. Humanity is the greatest destructive force on Earth since that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, and we may be far from finished in devastating Earth and her creatures.

Since humans began to make advanced tools and valuable goods, they exchanged them, beginning as early as 150 kya, and cities have always been situated on low-energy transportation lanes, which before the Industrial Revolution were almost always bodies of water. Before the Industrial Revolution, it took only about 1-2% of the energy to move goods across a body of water, such a lake or ocean, as it did overland. A peasant in Aztec civilization, for instance, could as easily and quickly bring more than forty times the weight of goods by canoe on a trip across the Valley of Mexico’s lakes to Tenochtitlán as he could by carrying a load on his back along the causeways. In 1800, it cost as much to ship a ton of goods more than 5,000 milometers to the USA from England as it did to transport it 50 kilometers overland in the USA.

The main reason for low-energy transportation lanes was so that energy supplies (primarily food and wood) could feed the cities, and that flow of energy was usually reciprocated with the flow of manufactured goods. The standard dynamic of early cities was energy supplies flowing to the cities and city-manufactured goods flowing outward, and cities became hubs of exchange. The so-called “tyranny of distance,” meaning how far goods could be effectively transported to cities, limited the size of their hinterland, which limited a city’s size. More energy-intensive and energy-efficient transportation enlarged the exploitable hinterland, allowing cities to grow. The introduction of the wheel could improve matters, but not always. In pre-industrial Islamic cultures, the camel was a more energy-efficient form of transportation than wheeled carts.

Sedentism was the primary outcome and benefit of agriculture. When people became sedentary, they could accumulate possessions, develop new skills, sleep under the same roof all year, and engage in daily communication with many others, and just as language was the first “Internet,” cities provided a quantum leap in the quick dissemination of information and ideas. The critical trait of a city is professionals living in it, as the development of professions is the most important feature of urban life.

The world’s first true city is widely considered to be Eridu, which was founded near the mouth of the Euphrates River about 7.4 kya, or about 5400 BCE (“Before Common Era,” also called BC, for “Before Christ”, but BCE is today’s convention, just as “CE” has replaced “AD”). Eridu was the first city of what became Sumer, which was an agglomeration of city-states. Sumer was established along and between the Tigris and Euphrates, and the ancient Greeks called the region Mesopotamia, which meant the land between the rivers. Çayönü Tepesi was in the Tigris’s watershed, and it and many settlements like it engaged in deforestation, agriculture, and raising domestic animals. Their practices were not sustainable, as the newly exposed soils washed away, and what remained was depleted of nutrients, although farmers began using manure, both of humans and domestic animals, to restore soil fertility, from the early days of agriculture. Eridu engaged in a practice that characterize cities to the present day, of harnessing gravity, where upstream water flows supplied cities with water and goods brought down rivers. But in what became Mesopotamia, it also brought silt and salt from upriver deforestation and erosion. Eridu was a seashore city, and today its ruins lie more than 200 kilometers inland, due to thousands of years of silt washed downstream by deforestation and agriculture. Siltation and soil salination turned all early cities of Sumer into buried ruins in the midst of a desert. But before silt and salt wrecked those civilizations, many seminal inventions appeared. The sailing ship appeared in early Sumer. Gravity took a ship downstream, and wind power helped it move back upstream.

About 3800 BCE, the Sumerian city of Ur was established at the new mouth of the Euphrates, as Eridu was already becoming an inland city, although more from a sea level decline than silt at that time. About 5000 BCE, the Sumerian city of Uruk was established, upriver on the Euphrates from Eridu, and Uruk became Sumeria’s first great city. About 5000 BCE, the first metal, copper, was smelted. The earliest evidence for copper smelting currently comes from a mountain in today’s Serbia. In the Fertile Crescent, inventions quickly spread, and by about 3300 BCE, smelters learned to add tin to copper and the Fertile Crescent’s Bronze Age began. Metal had obvious advantages over stone, and Bronze Age civilizations in river valleys quickly appeared, with the Harappan Civilization forming in the Indus river valley about 3300 BCE, and the first civilization in the Nile river valley forming about 3100 BCE. The wheel was invented around 3500 BCE and immediately spread. Whether it was invented in Sumer, the Indus river valley, or somewhere else in the region is still debated, but its advantages were instantly obvious, particularly where draft animals could pull them. When the Spanish conquered the Aztecs, they found that Mesoamerican peoples had independently invented wheels, but just had them on children’ toys, and the likely reason was that they had no draft animals, not after the megafauna holocaust of thousands of years earlier.

Warfare began in earnest in southern Mesopotamia about 4000 BCE, fighting over water and land. The city-states of Sumer began to intensely battle each other beginning about 3000 BCE, and the third millennium BCE was a time of constant Mesopotamian warfare. The sieges that city-states inflicted on each other were brutal. When one city conquered another, the men were killed or blinded and enslaved, and the women and children were enslaved. Making mounds from corpses of defeated soldiers was common in official accounts of battles during the third millennium BCE (2999 to 2000 BCE). About the first walled city was Uruk’s colonial settlement Habuba Kabira, founded around 3500 BCE along the Euphrates in today’s Syria, but it was abandoned after several generations. Those wars led to the first written treaties, which was largely concerned with citizens who found themselves on the wrong side the new border. Conscription was an early feature of civilization, closely akin to slavery, although the arrangement was temporary and conscripted soldiers were often promised land for their coerced services; draft-dodging became one of early civilization’s art forms.

Stratified urban populations and the agricultural hinterlands they exploit is civilization’s primary structure to this day. Soldiers, craftsmen, merchants, priests, and other professions appeared with urban civilization. Slaves only made economic sense among sedentary pre-industrial peoples, and forced servitude is the hallmark of early civilizations. The singing and dancing rituals of hunter-gatherer peoples were repressed by priesthoods of urban religions for thousands of years. On early Fertile Crescent pottery, scenes of dancing people proliferated, depicting a tradition that likely had lasted unbroken for more than 60,000 years. By about 3500 BCE, those dancing scenes began disappearing from pottery, as professional priesthoods conquered the ancestral religion, and Western religions have been stifling “ecstatic” religions ever since, and today’s Pentecostals and Shakers have rituals that hail back to religion before civilization. The professional urban priesthood became spiritual middlemen, and direct interactions with other dimensions and “ecstatic” states were discouraged or forbidden. Belief and “faith” replaced direct experience, and later, “sacred” texts recorded the alleged deeds and words of spiritual leaders, who were usually religious rebels themselves and did not leave any writings behind, with the priesthood not only monopolizing the texts but also their interpretation, again becoming well-paid middlemen between the divine source and the flock.

Early elites claimed divine status, with the priesthood abetting the fiction, and a universal practice among early civilizations was erecting monumental architecture, and the ziggurat was the first such structure. In Sumer, ziggurats were not only the center of the state religion, but also held precious metals such as gold, and the priesthood directed mass economic activity, such as organizing irrigation projects. In some ways, the priesthood was only adapting to urbanization, where their professional ancestors developed calendars and other methods of synchronizing vital activities such as plantings and harvests, with their attendant festivals, where mistimings by mere days could lead to famine. Sumerian temples had statues in their central place of worship, in human form and bedecked with jewels and other precious adornments. Offerings of food were presented to the statues, which temple personnel ate that night. In the third millennium BCE, temples owned land and had their own workforce; again a “voluntary” one that discharged religious obligations. While those temples performed valuable societal functions such as taking in orphans, the earliest urban religions were obviously businesses and could become rackets, in a pattern that continues to this day.

Later, palaces appeared, and Sumerian palaces and their related elites are seen today as more of an intrusive dynamic from rural societies, kind of an invasion and conquest rather than a natural outcome of Sumerian urban life. The elite arguably performed some kind of exchange function, but a common idea among anthropologists is that elites became elites because they could, not because they performed a necessary societal function. In early cities, elites usually arose from new professional classes that created and controlled markets. In early Mesopotamian states, palace activities were largely centered around elite lifestyles, not administering state functions. Sumer was the first pristine state, and when other pristine states arose, something like convergent evolution happened, with them all having similar features, which included: male domination, divinely-sanctioned heads of state with harems and other extravagances in their capital cities, including elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture, forced servitude, human sacrifice and/or public executions to terrorize the populace into submission, conscripted “cannon fodder” infantry led by elite officers, fortified cities, taxation, and so on. All pristine states went through similar development paths, with some features appearing earlier or later than others, with minor variation among their attributes, but they all had remarkable resemblances, which likely reflected human “nature,” where UP everywhere reacted to analogous economic conditions in comparable fashion.

After consolidating their ill-gotten positions, the elite can rule more gently. Sociologist Steven Spitzer stated:


“Pristine states, precisely because they lack legitimacy, must develop and impose harsh, crude, and highly visible forms of repressive sanctions; developed states, having successfully ‘re-invented’ consensus, can achieve social regulation through a combination of civil law and relatively mild forms of ‘calculated’ repression.”


The greatest threat to all ruling classes has almost always been those they rule. Only after their rule was secure, usually via bloodshed, did Sumer’s elites perform state duties to provide some superficial legitimacy for their status, and priesthoods attributing divine status or divine sanction to secular elites has always been an effective strategy. The close relationship of secular and religious authority is evident at the very beginnings of civilization. Even today, the British Queen rules the Church of England, which is a tradition in Europe that goes back to Roman Emperors. The laborers drafted to build cathedrals, palaces, and monuments to aggrandize the elite would always perform more efficiently if they were doing it from religious belief rather than coercion, and the world’s monumental architecture was primarily built with “free” labor, not slave labor, as a way of performing religious duties. Combining religious and secular ideologies can even be seen in supposedly secular civilizations, such as American schoolchildren being trained to worship flags, where the words “under God” are part of their daily recitations.

The human ability to think abstractly was exploited by social managers from civilization’s earliest days, and fixating people on irrational symbols, then manipulating those symbols for elite benefit, is arguably a universal trait of civilized peoples. Even today, a great deal of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols, where, as with the earliest religion, the neocortex is bypassed in favor of connecting with the limbic system, and people are easy prey to the cynical manipulation of emotionally-charged symbols, and the effects of childhood indoctrination and conditioning can last for the victim’s lifetime.

While there is evidence of writing existing about 5000 BCE, Sumeria became the first literate civilization about 3000 BCE, after their invention of cuneiform about 3300 BCE. Mesopotamian peoples had used clay tokens for accounting since about 8000 BCE, and the first writings in all civilizations were elite accounting. By the Third Dynasty of Ur, silver became the official unit of accounting, to be later supplanted by gold, probably due to Egyptian mines.

One of the earliest known works of literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh, dating to as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur, which began about 2150 BCE. A brief review of the epic highlights elite themes and dynamics of early civilization. Gilgamesh was a king of Uruk around 2500 BCE, and was one-third man and two-thirds god. In the epic’s first tablet, he used his kingly prerogative to sleep with Uruk’s young women the night before marriage, and his subjects entreated the gods for assistance. The gods responded by creating a “wild man” to distract Gilgamesh, and after Gilgamesh defeated him in battle they became friends. Gilgamesh then suggested that they travel to Lebanon’s cedar forest and kill the demigod guardian of the forest. They journeyed to the cedar forest, killed the demigod, prodigiously deforested the groves, and rafted back to Uruk with the demigod’s head and a particularly large tree to be used in a temple. After the wild man’s untimely death at the hands of the gods as punishment for killing the demigod, Gilgamesh then made otherworldly journeys to learn how to become immortal. After defeating stone giants and felling more than a hundred more trees, Gilgamesh built a boat to survive the coming flood, sent by the gods, and in a story that almost certainly inspired the Old Testament’s tale of Noah, Gilgamesh survived the flood along with the animals he saved, and gods gathered around the sweet smell of Gilgamesh’s sacrifice. After more adventures in an attempt to become immortal, Gilgamesh lamented his folly.

The writers of the Epic of Gilgamesh knew that deforestation led to droughts, and Gilgamesh’s war against the forest foreshadowed the fate of numerous Old World civilizations. The city-states of southern Mesopotamian made regular journeys to Lebanon’s cedar forest. The ruler of Lagash, not far from Uruk, had grand plans for aggrandizing his legacy and leveled cedar forests and rafted their logs downriver to Lagash to fulfil his grandiose schemes. The city-states of southern Mesopotamia deforested upstream river valleys, rafting logs to their downstream cities. Wars between the city-states, and wars of foreign conquest to secure forests and navigable rivers (particularly the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karun of today’s Iran), were common then. Wood became such a coveted commodity that it could approach the value of precious metals and stones, and Akkad’s rulers named mountains with what tree predominantly grew on each one.

What came with the logs, however, was silt and salt, and those civilizations were destroyed by their own rapacity. Southern Mesopotamia practiced irrigated farming, and salination and siltation eventually wrecked Sumer. By the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2100 BCE, the king Ur-Nammu made dredging silt from canals a high priority, and his dredging initiative temporarily revived agriculture and made Ur’s port navigable once again, as it had already been filled with silt. Wheat is more sensitive to saline soil than barley. In 3500 BCE, wheat and barley were grown in equal amounts, but salination began taking its toll. By 3000 BCE, Sumer became the world’s first literate society, and their tablets record Sumer’s decline. By 2500 BCE, wheat amounted to only 15% of the total crop. By 2100 BCE, wheat comprised only 2% of Sumer’s crops. Wheat was not the only casualty. Salt-tolerant barley did better, but crop yields began falling precipitously around 2400 BCE, with a steady decline that reached only a third of 2400 BCE yields by 1700 BCE. The Sumerian people began migrating upriver to lands that had not yet been devastated, and Sumer’s population declined by more than half, with famine a regular visitor as croplands became white with salt.

Upriver from Sumer the Akkadian Empire began forming, and Akkadians began defeating Sumer around 2300 BCE. Akkad’s first king was Sargon, who bloodily came to power and captured Uruk and dismantled its walls while conquering Sumer. That began a pattern of rising and falling empires in the Fertile Crescent that characterized the region for thousands of years. The Akkadian Empire collapsed after only 180 years of existence, and there was a resurgence of Ur under its Third Dynasty around 2100 BCE, and the oldest preserved laws were written then. The Code of Hammurabi, written when Babylonians ruled in their turn a few centuries later, reflected earlier Sumerian laws, and they are notable for documenting the barbarity of their times. Murder and robbery were capital crimes, but capital punishment was also meted out for offenses such as stealing a slave, deflowering a wife before the husband could (where the deflowerer is killed), or a wife is unfaithful (where the wife is killed). A boy striking his father would lose his fingers or hand. “Eye for an eye” came from the Code of Hammurabi.

Just as precipitation ran to the ocean in floods before plants colonized land, denuded lands and razed forests no longer held water like a sponge, and transpiration no longer contributed to the hydrological cycle, rampant deforestation contributed to flooded Mesopotamian rivers as the region also became drier. The flood that Gilgamesh survived, which is evident in the archeological record, was likely related to deforestation, although a great deal of speculation exists regarding the origins of flood myths. The Black Sea is one candidate for flood legends, where the rising interglacial global ocean flooded the lake to levels higher than during the glacial period. Another hypothesis has rising seas flooding the lower end of Mesopotamia. I have read arguments that the legend of Atlantis relates to a seashore civilization drowned under a rising interglacial ocean.

Just as with megafauna extinctions or the Neanderthal extinction, there are plenty of scientists and scholars who argue that human-agency is not responsible for the decline and collapse of civilizations, question whether they collapsed at all, assert that climate change did it, or invasion did it, and so on. While the battle of competing hypotheses is part of the process of science, all scientists whose hypotheses deflect responsibility from people have an inherent conflict of interest, and their work should be examined with that in mind. In the historical era, particularly when Europe conquered the world, the rapid deforestation and desertification of newly conquered lands was evident. Within a century of Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, a valley of verdant forests and fertile farmland was turned into a semi-desert by deforestation and sheep grazing. That valley is known as the Mezquital Valley today, because the desert-dwelling mesquite is the dominant tree in that semi-desert. British invaders of Australia did the same thing to New South Wales in fifty years, with deforestation and sheep grazing. Streams quickly dried up, but flooded when it rained, as the “sponge” of the forest ecosystem was removed, so flood and drought accompanied deforestation.

Since 2003, I have been a student of collapsed civilizations, and there are vigorous academic disputes on the subject. Jared Diamond see collapses as a result of environmental degradation, while Joseph Tainter perceives it as declining marginal returns on investment in complexity. Thomas Homer-Dixon views it as a decline in a civilization’s EROI. Other scientists propose climate explanations, particularly droughts. What they are all stating, in one fashion or another, is that the civilizations ran out of energy. All resources are either energy or energy makes them available, whether they are food, timber, water, metal, or today’s hydrocarbon deposits, where wars are once again fought in Mesopotamia to secure energy. Tainter’s idea of declining marginal returns in investment in complexity is perhaps the most prominent current explanation, but it also did not engage the dynamic’s physics, which others have done. Homer-Dixon has elucidated the dynamics perhaps the most clearly, with his concept of declining EROI, for which he writes articles and gives public speeches. Homer-Dixon’s ideas also incorporate C.S. Holling’s ecosystems theories. Whether climate change did it, humans wiped out their environments, or humanity has reached Peak Oil and a global collapse is just around the corner, it always meant a decline in energy-delivered resources, as well as energy itself. Tainter’s moment of a civilization’s collapse was when a hungry urban professional returned to rural life to gain greater energy (food) security, but a long, often slow decline usually led to that moment, as a society’s return on investment in complexity declined or, as Homer-Dixon stated it, the EROI declined to that disruptive level and civilization collapsed. Just as with wars, the ultimate cause was economic, but some kind of triggering event was the proximate cause, which was warfare often enough. But Rome was sacked three times in less than two centuries only after centuries of declining EROI.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

As I have written plenty, naïveté is a killer for the FE pursuit, mainly because it is like walking onto a battlefield where the salvos are coming at you from all sides, and you walk right into it and don’t even have the sense to duck. Naive people do not last long, as they try doomed strategies because they do not understand how the world really works.

This is a post on how I lost my naïveté.

There have been pieces of it on my site and on this thread, but never like this. So, here goes.

I was that Golden Boy from infancy, memorizing the books that my parents read to me not long after I learned to walk.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paths.htm#_edn4

I can’t remember it, but my memories begin not long afterward, and books have always been my friends.

I was raised to be an idealist, but was also raised rather incongruously with racism and bigotry, thanks to my family, and I did not realize how racist and bigoted my upbringing was until after I left home and my roommates began calling me on it. A few years later, I had put it in my rearview mirror, and then it could be like a time warp going home, riding into a time like the slavery or mission eras.

I was brought up in a household fed by the military, which entailed a lot of cynicism, too. One might say that I had cognitive dissonance even then, and my idealism was probably a little over-the-top, as a naïve way to try to counterbalance the cynicism. But I was spared heavy religious and nationalistic indoctrination, which are ways to short-circuit sentience:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#dominant

and my mystical awakening at age 16:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#my

and two months in Europe the same year:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#europe

began to wake me up, but I also applied to the Air Force Academy when I was 17:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#business

So, I can see a lot of fuel for cognitive dissonance in those days. By 19, I was a committed pacifist, and the voice in my head spoke for the first time:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice

and then I focused my idealism on my spiritual and business studies. My girlfriend dumped me a week after we got to the university. I only went there because she did, but it turned out OK, as it was a very reputable school:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Pol...bispo#Rankings

Then I graduated during the worst recession in forty years, and had to crawl down to LA after a failed attempt to live in Seattle, where I was born. My idealistic naïveté was evident with my Easter Bunny question:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#believing

after my first few months at the firm. It turned out that nearly every friendly stranger in LA was trying to use me for something, to be their Amway down-line, their Boy Toy, and so on. That summer, I was thrust into Skid Row, and many hellish memories accompany those days:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post406928

When I began to get stress symptoms that would not go away, a physical collapse began:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#unhappy

And just as I got a seeming break, I got to see how hookers lived:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#hooker

and a month later the voice in my head spoke up again, when asked:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice2

and ten days later I was interviewing at Dennis’s company. I was on fire for three months there, working for free, reconstructing the books, thinking that I had finally found a home and could really pursue my life’s work. After a couple of months there, I took Dennis home from the office one evening, and he told me how Bill the BPA Hit Man was responsible for his employee’s death:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/hitman.htm#death

She worked directly for Mr. Engineer, and he confirmed Dennis’s version of events to me before I moved to Boston. Mr. Engineer lived with us in Boston.

After all I had seen on my journey so far, my first real moment of awakening was when my boss engineered the theft of Dennis’s company:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#theft

and when I saw those fellow “idealists” cheer as the theft became successful, I had my first big moment of awakening:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#salient1

There was a scene a few days earlier, when Dennis regained access to his facility and my boss tried to come into the building to retrieve incriminating evidence, and I will never forget the confrontation that happened in front of my desk.

I had another moment of awakening in a courtroom a month later:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#salient2

It was obvious to me what my boss had done, as he purposefully kept me from auditing the area where he engineered the theft. But I was still friendly with him, and even signed an affidavit for him on the accuracy of the financial records that I reconstructed. I would not do something like that again, but it reflected my naïveté. I would tell the truth to anybody, even if it helped those committing crimes against us. I cannot really fault my young self for behaviors like that, but I had a lot to learn. I still think that truth is the best antidote to lies, but I also found out that almost nobody really wants to hear the truth, not when believing lies keeps their belly full.

From four hundred employees that Dennis had to begin the year, I was the only person who chased him out to Boston to rebuild:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#chasing

When I raised the money to rescue us from the brink, and also begin our days of FE pursuit:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#ltpc

I had no idea what I was in for, and being attacked by my investors soon afterward:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post578559

was when I began waking up fast. Part of me could not believe it. I was thinking, “This is Wade here. You know I am going to do the right thing.” And as people began attacking me over the next few years, that was one of the most dismaying parts about it. People whom I had known for nearly my entire life treated me like a criminal. As I later discovered, it was usually a rationale so that they could commit crimes against me with a clear conscience (or relatively clear ). While that was happening, I probably recalled Jesus’s words from The Aquarian Gospel:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#aquarian

where he said that those who judge harshly have crime in their hearts. It is just another way of describing projection:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...ion#post696058

My spiritual studies are partly what saw me survive those days, and the reality of the lessons I digested could come crashing down on me like that.

Soon after I raised the money, somebody said that the USA was too “fascist” for our efforts to succeed:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post422926

I lived with Dennis at the time, who is an extremely influential personality, and his attitude was that the American people were inherently “good” but needed something to believe in. It was quite an idealistic statement, and I agreed with it, in my naïveté. The next few years rudely disabused me of that notion, and a decade later, Dennis agreed that people simply do not care for anything other than their little egocentric existences, but he kept sifting through the mine tailings of humanity, looking for gold nuggets. It takes the motivation of a saint to keep doing that, knowing that the very people you are trying to uplift will betray you at the first opportunity, and you have already forgiven them for what you know they will do. I could only look on in awe.

When we ended up in Ventura, to my dismay, as I had left Southern California twice already, vowing to never live there again, it was not long before I had seen about a dozen attempts to steal our company by Dennis’s associates, the first being when I saw my boss engineer the theft of the Seattle company. When I told Dennis one day how shocking it was to see, he told me to join the club:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#shocked

I was about to get a lot more shocked. When I stood in our parking lot as all of those cars drove up in a cloud of dust, when the raid began:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#raid

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post579023

I was kind of in shock. The next day, when we found out about their theft and espionage:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#espionage

I wanted to get some sheriff’s deputies alone in a room with a baseball bat. That I could even have thoughts like that was horrifying. Six weeks after the raid, as I tried operating with all of my records gone, I began going into a general physical collapse, and my days with Dennis were drawing to a close.

His arrest was not a big surprise:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#jail

and the million dollar bail did not shock me (I did not hear about the billion dollar offer to go away until I heard Dennis talk about it publicly in 1996, and then read it in his most popular book http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#offer, and when I heard it, I was not terribly surprised, and also was not surprised that Dennis rejected it: I would not have been tempted, either, I think ), but when I went to the first hearing after Dennis was arrested, I was shocked when I heard Ms. Prosecutor tell a string of lies while arguing for why the million dollar bail was justified. I suppose that weathering all the attacks, watching our associates try to steal our company, and the other mayhem, even being raided like we were, did not prepare me for the criminal behavior I would soon see perpetrated by the prosecution, Mr. Deputy, and the like. I still had a naïve notion that they were just doing their jobs, at least most of them, which is a façade that they tried to uphold, and Mr. Deputy held it up until I was on the witness stand, and then his mask came off. But as I look back at it, watching the prosecutor tell a string of lies in front of the judge was my warning of what was to come.

But my next big moment of awakening was when I pulled into the driveway of our offices, a few minutes after Mr. Texas successfully shut them down by threatening all of the employees. I had no idea what I was walking into, but within seconds I had sized up the situation, and I could smell Mr. Texas’s play from a mile off. But I was shocked that Mr. Engineer was going to go work for Mr. Texas:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#salient3

That part I refused to believe, especially the part where Mr. Researcher would also go to work for Mr. Texas. Those old men were going to get their throats slit, maybe literally, going to work for the thieves. I literally could not believe what I was hearing, and visited Mr. Researcher later that day, and heard him scoff at my warnings:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post400493

Mr. Engineer and Mr. Researcher were abandoning Dennis to go work for the cutthroats, and nothing I could say would dissuade them. I was stupefied. To Mr. Engineer’s credit, a few years later, when Dennis had (as usual) forgiven Mr. Engineer, Mr. Engineer told Mr. Researcher: “We are a couple of saps.”

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post580973

To give an idea of what I was living through in those days, going bankrupt was the least of my worries:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#bankrupt

When my mother attacked me on the day of the raid, when I called her to warn her to keep her head down at work and not defend me at the office when they printed what would likely be a libelous story, and I was later told that she made a scrapbook of those libelous articles and took it on tour to my friends, family, and investors, telling the story of her son the crook:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post300436

it did not even phase me. By then, I knew that it just came with the territory. But my day on the witness stand was when it all came together in my radicalizing moment:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#prelim

Mr. Deputy’s threats had already driven Mr. Researcher into hiding:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#witness

leaving me as the star witness:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#key

When Mr. Deputy began making faces at me while I was on the witness stand:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#faces

I initially did not know what to do. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. Up until that moment, he played the “I am just doing my job” act with me. He took his psychopath’s mask off when I was on the witness stand. The next month, I thought that getting a shotgun and “cleaning up” Ventura County might be a good idea. Having thoughts like that was the lowest moment of my life:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#it

In early 1989, I decided that I would do anything I could to get Dennis out of jail, and that was when I met Gary Wean, who gave me the best advice that I could get, which actually led to Dennis’s escape from jail:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#wean

as he told me that no government official in the entire USA would intercede in the evil acts in Ventura, and that I was on my own. That kept me from wasting my time, camping on a Senator’s doorstep, and I decided to sacrifice my life:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#mortgage

It worked, which is still the biggest miracle that I ever witnessed, and Dennis knew that the hand of God acted when Mr. Professor and I rode to the rescue. Dennis and I talked about those events last year, and he said that the lesson that he took from that was the power of love. Mr. Professor and I had our lives wrecked, and those days shortened Mr. Professor’s life:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#journey

and his death sent me into the darkest phase of my midlife crisis, but we could never regret what we did. We passed the “test,” at the cost of our lives.

After that day on the witness stand, nothing about human behavior could ever surprise me again, but it has been educational to see people lose their naïveté or try to. For instance, I was recently talking with somebody who witnessed some of Mr. Deputy’s evil deeds, as he was committing them, and the person was in denial that they even happened. I was kind of shocked when I saw that, but it is just another manifestation of cognitive dissonance:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#cognitive

where people deny what their eyes are telling them. When my legal fund secured Dennis’s lawyer, who was the one on the case when we sprung Dennis from jail, the attorney was a college professor and had never actually worked in a courtroom before. After one of the early hearings, he told Dennis, in shocked tones, that Ms. Prosecutor lied to him. Dennis told him to join the club.

When Mr. Big Time Attorney took the case, using up the last of my legal fund:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#bigtime

the saints at the courthouse tried to get his license to practice denied by lying to the state bar, saying that he was practicing without a license. Mr. Big Time Attorney had never worked at the county level before, as most or all of his cases had been at the federal level, even taking on the IRS in the USA’s Supreme Court and winning. His initial reaction was shock, and with each gutter maneuver by the prosecution, he became increasingly incensed. After the hearing where they tried to have Dennis rejailed because Dennis tried to revive the business, on his own initiative, Mr. Big Time Attorney prepared and filed a lawsuit in federal court:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#lawsuit

Many of the same crimes that Mr. Deputy and friends had committed were identical to crimes that the IRS had committed, and those IRS agents had their careers destroyed because of it (some may have gone to prison, as I recall). Mr. Big Time Attorney was looking forward to mopping up the slime in Ventura County. Then he had his moment of revelation on the federal courthouse's steps:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#disbar

and the light went out of his eyes. When he was threatened with disbarment for even bringing the lawsuit, it was only more icing on the cake. When I saw Dennis last year, we discussed Mr. Big Time Attorney’s awakening moment. Beating the IRS in the USA’s Supreme Court is no small beer, and Mr. Big Time Attorney had the swagger of a champion as he defended Dennis. To give Mr. Big Time Attorney some benefit here, he was not totally naïve, as he had received many death threats over the years because of the cases he took, to the point where he had to carry a gun with him. But the Ninth District Federal Court is the most corrupt in the USA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_..._Ninth_Circuit

as Gary found out the hard way:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/cover-up.htm#cohen

and as Dennis told me last year, the “champion” was informed in no uncertain terms that beating the IRS in the USA’s Supreme Court was nothing, and that the “system” in Southern California let Mr. Big Time Attorney know that he was something unpleasant that they stepped in, and they unceremoniously wiped him from the bottom of their shoes. Mr. Big Time Attorney was never the same after those events.

When I heard that Mr. Investigator told Mr. Researcher that he did not care if the defendants were innocent or guilty, and he told just as many lies as he needed in order to gain that conviction and keep his kill ratio high:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#care

it was an amusing anecdote to me by then. The system is evil, and everybody plays along, and that initial shock, of refusing to believe what your eyes are telling you, is a normal part of the awakening process and losing one’s naïveté.

My paradigm was shattered in Ventura, and it was similar to what soldiers in battle described, where their belief in basic human goodness died:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#goodness

After helping mount several Level 10 efforts:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level10

I realized that they were erected on naïve ideas about basic human goodness. Oh, there is divinity deep down in everything, but the predominant human emotion is fear, and all of those disgusting behaviors that I saw were all rooted in fear. The masses will be no help at all in making FE happen.

When I saw Dennis try the religion route, or the “Patriot” route, or the business route, I could tell that he was trying to use people’s selfish allegiance to the ideologies that fed them to deceive them into saving themselves. Dennis was taking the semi-sentience route:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#naive

I came to reject the approach not only for strategic reasons (you can’t out-herd the master shepherd, Godzilla), but also for spiritual/idealist reasons. As Seth said, the means become the ends:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/visions.htm#idealist

and people are not going to be deceived into enlightenment. I seek those awake and awakening needles in haystacks, and will be using the Internet to try to find them. I also realized, while performing my studies over the years, that all of the epochal events of the human journey were initiated by only a relative handful of people. When the new energy regime was established, only then did the masses get aboard and reach new levels of being and sentience. I doubt that it will happen any differently this time. As I have stated plenty, one thousand like Ilie, properly trained, and it is game over for Godzilla, and he knows it. His greatest triumph is making FE and what can come with it unimaginable:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/scarcity.htm#summary

and if enough people can only imagine it, it will be enough to catalyze its reality, and I do not mean that in some New Age way, but in real, practical ways. Until the conversation is raised far above naïve denial and their attendant "bright ideas," conspiracist paranoia, and those other unproductive and suicidal mindsets, Godzilla has the game well in hand.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am taking a little break today, but for those interested, I wanted to put up that chapter draft as it stands at the moment. It may become evident how the subject tends to spiral in many directions, and it is becoming challenging to keep it aligned with my intention. Below is fifteen pages of material, and I am going to try to cover the territory until the Industrial Revolution in the next fifteen pages, which is most of history. I don’t think it will be easy. I hope to get that chapter finished by next weekend. Heavy lifting. Because of its length, I have to bust it into two pieces.

Best,

Wade

Humanity’s Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution, Part 1

In the tropical rainforests where gorillas and chimpanzees live, there are dry and wet seasons, where they must seasonably change their diets to adapt to available foods. Beyond those rainforests, seasonal variation is more pronounced and, once the easy meat was gone, people survived by engaging in the hunter-gather lifestyle familiar to today’s humans. A sexual division of labor existed, where men hunted and women gathered. Men had the strength and speed required to hunt wary animals, particularly large game, while women were less mobile, partly due to caring for children.

Those Gravettian mammoth villages probably hosted humanity’s first semi-sedentary populations, but that short-lived situation ended when mammoths did. The primary necessity for a sedentary population’s survival was a local and stable energy supply. One energy supply tactic, as could be seen with those mammoth hunters, was storing food in permafrost “freezers.” Seasonal settlements existed where people subsisted on migrating animals or when certain plants had a harvestable and seasonal stage of development.

While eating roots has a long history in the human line, permanent sedentism began by harvesting seeds. In the Levant, in a swath of land that includes today’s Israel and Syria, about 13.5. kya the Kebaran people (c. 18 kya to 12.5 kya) made acorns and pistachios a major part of their diets. Mortars and pestles were in the Kebaran toolkit for processing acorns, which must be pounded into a paste and soaked to leach out tannins, and that work fell exclusively to women.

The Natufian culture (c. 15 kya to 11.8 kya) succeeded the Kebaran culture, and the Natufian village at Tell Abu Hureyra in today’s Syria was established about 13.5 kya, and was situated on a gazelle migration route. The residents of that village of a few hundred people also harvested “wild gardens” of wheat and rye. Those villagers became Earth’s first known farmers, and they had dogs. The original settlement was abandoned during the Younger Dryas and resettled after it ended. The effect of a harsher climate may have spurred the origin of agriculture, which began there about 11 kya. By seven kya, the settlement had reached several thousand people, and was then abandoned due to aridity. No evidence of warfare is associated with the settlement. A compelling recent hypotheses is that agriculture could not have developed in warfare’s presence, as farmers would have been too vulnerable to raids by hungry hunters. In the four places on Earth where agriculture seems to have independently developed: the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, no evidence of violent conflict exists before those civilizations fed by the first crops began growing into states. Those states are called “pristine” states, as no other states influenced their development. The peaceful agricultural villages that feminist authors have long written about, where women had it better than at any time before the Industrial Revolution, actually existed, if only for a relatively brief time, in only a few places.

Only when economic surpluses (primarily food) were redistributed, first by chiefs and then by early states, did men rise to dominance in those agricultural civilizations. Because the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent is the best studied and had the greatest influence on humanity, this chapter will tend to focus on it, although it will also survey similarities and differences with other regions where agriculture and civilization first appeared. Almost whenever agriculture appeared, cities eventually appeared, usually a few thousand years later. Agriculture’s chief virtue was that it extracted vast amounts of human-digestible energy from the land, where population densities a hundred times greater than that of hunter-gatherers became feasible. While the debates on the subject may never end, today it is widely thought that Malthusian population pressures led to the development of agriculture. The attractions of agricultural life over the hunter-gatherer lifestyle were not immediately evident. Early agriculture was a life of drudgery compared to the hunter-gatherer or horticultural lifestyle, and humans became shorter and less healthy when they transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farmers, but the land could also support many times the people. On the eve of the Domestication Revolution, Earth’s carrying capacity with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was around ten million people, with an actual population somewhat less, maybe as low as four million. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution in 1800, Earth’s human population was nearly a billion people. No matter how talented a hunter-gatherer warrior was, he was no match for a hundred peasants armed with hoes.

Darwin believed that natural selection only worked at the individual level, but the idea of group selection has become prominent in my lifetime, if controversial. Anthropologists and biologists see evidence of group selection, not only in social animals such as termites, but also in the ability of human societies to survive competition with their neighbors. Hunter-gatherer societies eliminated disruptive members by banishment or death, and has been argued to have been reflected genetically in eliminating uncooperative people from society. Those kinds of activities may have helped cull the human herd of “uncooperative” genes. Another aspect of biology that applies to human civilization is the idea of carrying capacity. Over history, the society with the higher carrying capacity prevailed, and the loser either adopted the winner’s practices or became enslaved, taxed, marginalized, or extinct. When Europe conquered the world, it had the highest energy usage, by far, of any peoples on Earth, which is why it always prevailed. When high-energy societies met low-energy societies, the results were almost always catastrophic for low-energy societies. Hunter-gatherer societies have no chance in a competition with societies that have domesticated plants and animals, much less industrialized societies.

Another early Fertile Crescent village, Çatal Höyük, in today’s Turkey, existed from 9.5 kya to 7.7 kya and was another peaceful agricultural settlement in which the inhabitants numbered several thousand people, in what is arguably Earth’s first city, but it was more like a large village, without the civic features normally associated with cities. The society seemed classless, and women and men had roughly equivalent status. The first domesticated sheep appear at Çatal Höyük, and the beginnings of cattle domestication appear there as well. Çatal Höyük’s residents raised wheat, barley, and peas. Pottery and obsidian mining and tool-making were major industries, and those people made the world’s first known map. Çatal Höyük did not have walls, there was no sign of warfare, and many “shrines” dotted the settlement, which probably supported a hunter-gatherer religion. Çatal Höyük was abandoned in a pattern that would repeat itself in the Fertile Crescent and Old World many times in succeeding millennia; it appears that deforestation and resultant desertification may have spelled the end of Çatal Höyük, as was probably also the case with Tell Abu Hureyra.

In an event that favors the hypotheses of climate-change advocates, there was a dip in global temperatures beginning about 8.2 kya, which lasted for a few centuries. It was likely caused by remnants of the North American ice sheets melting, and the resultant flush of freshwater into the North Atlantic. It was a less severe event than the Younger Dryas, but still caused epic droughts around the world. Some scientists think that the uncertainty caused by those cooling events helped spur agriculture, to enhance food security. Climate change from that event could be why Çatal Höyük was abandoned, and Tell Abu Hureyra survived the event, to only be abandoned several centuries later when another major dip in global temperatures happened. Those two early settlements may have been abandoned partly due to those climate events, but they would have also deforested their hinterlands, which desertified the region, with the settlements permanently abandoned. Environmentally harmful practices combined with droughts destroyed many civilizations in the millennia after those early abandonments, including the Mayan, Anasazi, and Harappan civilizations.

A contemporary of Çatal Höyük, Çayönü Tepesi, near Anatolia, had indicators of developing class systems, and male/female differences in diet. Cattle seem to have been first domesticated about 10.5 kya in the vicinity, which is also where pigs may have been first domesticated, and many progenitors of cereal crops still grow wild in the region. Early on, people also began to domesticate fiber-producing plants, with flax among the first domesticated fiber plants. Fiber crops have often competed with food crops for field space, especially when foreign conquerors reorient that subject population’s efforts, which can lead to starvation in the subject population. A recent example is when Britain forced Bengal to grow jute, indigo, and opium instead of food, and Bengal had a huge famine soon after Britain conquered it.

Goats were first domesticated in today’s Iran about 10 kya, and pigs were first semi-domesticated in the Fertile Crescent as long as 15 kya, and were independently domesticated in China about eight kya. Combining domesticated plants and animals appeared fairly early, where farmers realized that animal manure could fertilize crops, so the close association of pastures and cropland became a standard feature of Fertile Crescent civilizations. Early domestic animals were all herd animals, where humans replaced herd leadership. Since humans are herd animals, their understanding of herd behaviors likely made their efforts easier and more successful.

Just as growing large became a strategy for extinction for the world’s megafauna when a super-predator appeared that could kill them, forests are the greatest biological energy stores that Earth has ever seen. Trees were the plant world’s equivalent of megafauna, and they suffered the same fate wherever civilization appeared. When humans became sedentary, they razed local forests to gain building materials and fuel, and the freshly deforested land worked wonderfully for raising crops, at least until the soils were ruined from nutrient depletion and erosion. Domesticated cattle pulled the first plows, beginning more than seven kya. When humans began to smelt metal, beginning about 8 kya, deforestation was easier, so a dynamic arose in the Fertile Crescent where bronze axes easily deforested the land, which was then worked with draft animals pulling bronze plows, which increased crop yields but also increased erosion. That complex of deforestation, crops, draft animals, and smelted metals yielded great short-term benefits but was far from sustainable, as it devastated the ecosystems and soils and also impacted the hydrological cycle, and gradually turned forests to deserts. Another way that the Bronze Age helped deforest Earth is that smelting metal is enormously energy intensive. When the Mediterranean region had its Bronze Age, the standard unit of copper production was the oxhide ingot (because it was worth about one ox), which weighed between 20 and 30 kilograms. It took six tons of charcoal to smelt one ingot, which required 120 pine trees, or 1.6 hectares (four acres) of trees. Kilns for making pottery also required vast amounts of wood. Wood met many of the energy needs of early Old World civilizations, which were all voracious consumers of wood.

In the Fertile Crescent today, the ruins of hundreds of early cities are in their self-made deserts, usually buried under the silt of the erosion of exposed forest soils. As the Mediterranean Sea’s periphery became civilized, the same dynamic was repeated, where forests became semi-deserts and early cities were buried under silt. Before the rise of civilization, a forest ran from Morocco to Afghanistan, and only about 10% of the forest that still existed as late as 2000 BCE still remains. Everywhere that civilization exists today has been dramatically deforested. The only partial exceptions are places such as Japan, but they kept their forests intact by importing wood from foreign forests. North America and Asia have been supplying Japan with wood for generations. As civilizations wiped themselves out with their rapaciousness, some were aware enough to lament what was happening, but they were a minority. Usually lost in the anthropocentric view was the awesome devastation inflicted on other life forms. Killing off the megafauna was only a warm-up. Razing a forest to burn the wood and raise crops destroyed an entire ecosystem for short-term human benefit, leaving behind a lifeless desert when the last crops were wrenched from depleted soils. In the final accounting, the damage meted out to Earth’s other life forms, not other humans, may be humanity’s greatest crime. Humanity is the greatest destructive force on Earth since that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, and we may be far from finished in devastating Earth and her creatures.

Since humans began to make advanced tools and valuable goods, they exchanged them, beginning as early as 150 kya, and cities have always been situated on low-energy transportation lanes, which before the Industrial Revolution were almost always bodies of water. Before the Industrial Revolution, it took only about 1-2% of the energy to move goods across a body of water, such a lake or ocean, as it did overland. A peasant in Aztec civilization, for instance, could as easily and quickly bring more than forty times the weight of goods by canoe on a trip across the Valley of Mexico’s lakes to Tenochtitlán as he could by carrying a load on his back along the causeways. In 1800, it cost as much to ship a ton of goods more than 5,000 milometers to the USA from England as it did to transport it 50 kilometers overland in the USA.

The main reason for low-energy transportation lanes was so that energy supplies (primarily food and wood) could feed the cities, and that flow of energy was usually reciprocated with the flow of manufactured goods. The standard dynamic of early cities was energy supplies flowing to the cities and city-manufactured goods flowing outward, and cities became hubs of exchange. The so-called “tyranny of distance,” meaning how far goods could be effectively transported to cities, limited the size of their hinterland, which limited a city’s size. More energy-intensive and energy-efficient transportation enlarged the exploitable hinterland, allowing cities to grow. The introduction of the wheel could improve matters, but not always. In pre-industrial Islamic cultures, the camel was a more energy-efficient form of transportation than wheeled carts.

Sedentism was the primary outcome and benefit of agriculture. When people became sedentary, they could accumulate possessions, develop new skills, sleep under the same roof all year, and engage in daily communication with many others, and just as language was the first “Internet,” cities provided a quantum leap in the quick dissemination of information and ideas. The critical trait of a city is professionals living in it, as the development of professions is the most important feature of urban life.

The world’s first true city is widely considered to be Eridu, which was founded near the mouth of the Euphrates River about 7.4 kya, or about 5400 BCE (“Before Common Era,” also called BC, for “Before Christ”, but BCE is today’s convention, just as “CE” has replaced “AD”). Eridu was the first city of what became Sumer, which was an agglomeration of city-states. Sumer was established along and between the Tigris and Euphrates, and the ancient Greeks called the region Mesopotamia, which meant the land between the rivers. Çayönü Tepesi was in the Tigris’s watershed, and it and many settlements like it engaged in deforestation, agriculture, and raising domestic animals. Their practices were not sustainable, as the newly exposed soils washed away, and what remained was depleted of nutrients, although farmers began using manure, both of humans and domestic animals, to restore soil fertility, from the early days of agriculture. Eridu engaged in a practice that characterize cities to the present day, of harnessing gravity, where upstream water flows supplied cities with water and goods brought down rivers. But in what became Mesopotamia, it also brought silt and salt from upriver deforestation and erosion. Eridu was a seashore city, and today its ruins lie more than 200 kilometers inland, due to thousands of years of silt washed downstream by deforestation and agriculture. Siltation and soil salination turned all early cities of Sumer into buried ruins in the midst of a desert. But before silt and salt wrecked those civilizations, many seminal inventions appeared. The sailing ship appeared in early Sumer. Gravity took a ship downstream, and wind power helped it move back upstream.

About 3800 BCE, the Sumerian city of Ur was established at the new mouth of the Euphrates, as Eridu was already becoming an inland city, although more from a sea level decline than silt at that time. About 5000 BCE, the Sumerian city of Uruk was established, upriver on the Euphrates from Eridu, and Uruk became Sumeria’s first great city. About 5000 BCE, the first metal, copper, was smelted. The earliest evidence for copper smelting currently comes from a mountain in today’s Serbia. In the Fertile Crescent, inventions quickly spread, and by about 3300 BCE, smelters learned to add tin to copper and the Fertile Crescent’s Bronze Age began. Metal had obvious advantages over stone, and Bronze Age civilizations in river valleys quickly appeared, with the Harappan Civilization forming in the Indus river valley about 3300 BCE, and the first civilization in the Nile river valley forming about 3100 BCE. The wheel was invented around 3500 BCE and immediately spread. Whether it was invented in Sumer, the Indus river valley, or somewhere else in the region is still debated, but its advantages were instantly obvious, particularly where draft animals could pull them. When the Spanish conquered the Aztecs, they found that Mesoamerican peoples had independently invented wheels, but just had them on children’ toys, and the likely reason was that they had no draft animals, not after the megafauna holocaust of thousands of years earlier.

Warfare began in earnest in southern Mesopotamia about 4000 BCE, fighting over water and land. The city-states of Sumer began to intensely battle each other beginning about 3000 BCE, and the third millennium BCE was a time of constant Mesopotamian warfare. The sieges that city-states inflicted on each other were brutal. When one city conquered another, the men were killed or blinded and enslaved, and the women and children were enslaved. Making mounds from corpses of defeated soldiers was common in official accounts of battles during the third millennium BCE (2999 to 2000 BCE). About the first walled city was Uruk’s colonial settlement Habuba Kabira, founded around 3500 BCE along the Euphrates in today’s Syria, but it was abandoned after several generations. Those wars led to the first written treaties, which was largely concerned with citizens who found themselves on the wrong side the new border. Conscription was an early feature of civilization, closely akin to slavery, although the arrangement was temporary and conscripted soldiers were often promised land for their coerced services; draft-dodging became one of early civilization’s art forms.

Stratified urban populations and the agricultural hinterlands they exploit is civilization’s primary structure to this day. Soldiers, craftsmen, merchants, priests, and other professions appeared with urban civilization. Slaves only made economic sense among sedentary pre-industrial peoples, and forced servitude is the hallmark of early civilizations. The singing and dancing rituals of hunter-gatherer peoples were repressed by priesthoods of urban religions for thousands of years. On early Fertile Crescent pottery, scenes of dancing people proliferated, depicting a tradition that likely had lasted unbroken for more than 60,000 years. By about 3500 BCE, those dancing scenes began disappearing from pottery, as professional priesthoods conquered the ancestral religion, and Western religions have been stifling “ecstatic” religions ever since, and today’s Pentecostals and Shakers have rituals that hail back to religion before civilization. The professional urban priesthood became spiritual middlemen, and direct interactions with other dimensions and “ecstatic” states were discouraged or forbidden. Belief and “faith” replaced direct experience, and later, “sacred” texts recorded the alleged deeds and words of spiritual leaders, who were usually religious rebels themselves and did not leave any writings behind, with the priesthood not only monopolizing the texts but also their interpretation, again becoming well-paid middlemen between the divine source and the flock.

Early elites claimed divine status, with the priesthood abetting the fiction, and a universal practice among early civilizations was erecting monumental architecture, and the ziggurat was the first such structure. In Sumer, ziggurats were not only the center of the state religion, but also held precious metals such as gold, and the priesthood directed mass economic activity, such as organizing irrigation projects. In some ways, the priesthood was only adapting to urbanization, where their professional ancestors developed calendars and other methods of synchronizing vital activities such as plantings and harvests, with their attendant festivals, where mistimings by mere days could lead to famine. Sumerian temples had statues in their central place of worship, in human form and bedecked with jewels and other precious adornments. Offerings of food were presented to the statues, which temple personnel ate that night. In the third millennium BCE, temples owned land and had their own workforce; again a “voluntary” one that discharged religious obligations. While those temples performed valuable societal functions such as taking in orphans, the earliest urban religions were obviously businesses and could become rackets, in a pattern that continues to this day.

Later, palaces appeared, and Sumerian palaces and their related elites are seen today as more of an intrusive dynamic from rural societies, kind of an invasion and conquest rather than a natural outcome of Sumerian urban life. The elite arguably performed some kind of exchange function, but a common idea among anthropologists is that elites became elites because they could, not because they performed a necessary societal function. In early cities, elites usually arose from new professional classes that created and controlled markets. In early Mesopotamian states, palace activities were largely centered around elite lifestyles, not administering state functions. Sumer was the first pristine state, and when other pristine states arose, something like convergent evolution happened, with them all having similar features, which included: male domination, divinely-sanctioned heads of state with harems and other extravagances in their capital cities, including elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture, forced servitude, human sacrifice and/or public executions to terrorize the populace into submission, conscripted “cannon fodder” infantry led by elite officers, fortified cities, taxation, and so on. All pristine states went through similar development paths, with some features appearing earlier or later than others, with minor variation among their attributes, but they all had remarkable resemblances, which likely reflected human “nature,” where UP everywhere reacted to analogous economic conditions in comparable fashion.

After consolidating their ill-gotten positions, the elite can rule more gently. Sociologist Steven Spitzer stated:


“Pristine states, precisely because they lack legitimacy, must develop and impose harsh, crude, and highly visible forms of repressive sanctions; developed states, having successfully ‘re-invented’ consensus, can achieve social regulation through a combination of civil law and relatively mild forms of ‘calculated’ repression.”


The greatest threat to all ruling classes has almost always been those they rule. Only after their rule was secure, usually via bloodshed, did Sumer’s elites perform state duties to provide some superficial legitimacy for their status, and priesthoods attributing divine status or divine sanction to secular elites has always been an effective strategy. The close relationship of secular and religious authority is evident at the very beginnings of civilization. Even today, the British Queen rules the Church of England, which is a tradition in Europe that goes back to Roman Emperors. The laborers drafted to build cathedrals, palaces, and monuments to aggrandize the elite would always perform more efficiently if they were doing it from religious belief rather than coercion, and the world’s monumental architecture was primarily built with “free” labor, not slave labor, as a way of performing religious duties. Combining religious and secular ideologies can even be seen in supposedly secular civilizations, such as American schoolchildren being trained to worship flags, where the words “under God” are part of their daily recitations.

The human ability to think abstractly was exploited by social managers from civilization’s earliest days, and fixating people on irrational symbols, then manipulating those symbols for elite benefit, is arguably a universal trait of civilized peoples. Even today, a great deal of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols, where, as with the earliest religion, the neocortex is bypassed in favor of connecting with the limbic system, and people are easy prey to the cynical manipulation of emotionally-charged symbols, and the effects of childhood indoctrination and conditioning can last for the victim’s lifetime.

While there is evidence of writing existing about 5000 BCE, Sumeria became the first literate civilization about 3000 BCE, after their invention of cuneiform about 3300 BCE. Mesopotamian peoples had used clay tokens for accounting since about 8000 BCE, and the first writings in all civilizations were elite accounting. By the Third Dynasty of Ur, silver became the official unit of accounting, to be later supplanted by gold, probably due to Egyptian mines.

One of the earliest known works of literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh, dating to as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur, which began about 2150 BCE. A brief review of the epic highlights elite themes and dynamics of early civilization. Gilgamesh was a king of Uruk around 2500 BCE, and was one-third man and two-thirds god. In the epic’s first tablet, he used his kingly prerogative to sleep with Uruk’s young women the night before marriage, and his subjects entreated the gods for assistance. The gods responded by creating a “wild man” to distract Gilgamesh, and after Gilgamesh defeated him in battle they became friends. Gilgamesh then suggested that they travel to Lebanon’s cedar forest and kill the demigod guardian of the forest. They journeyed to the cedar forest, killed the demigod, deforested the groves, and rafted back to Uruk with the demigod’s head and a particularly large tree to be used in a temple. After the wild man’s untimely death at the hands of the gods as punishment for killing the demigod, Gilgamesh then made otherworldly journeys to learn how to become immortal. After defeating stone giants and felling more than a hundred more trees, Gilgamesh built a boat to survive the coming flood, sent by the gods, and in a story that almost certainly inspired the Old Testament’s tale of Noah, Gilgamesh survived the flood along with the animals he saved, and gods gathered around the sweet smell of Gilgamesh’s sacrifice. After more adventures in an attempt to become immortal, Gilgamesh lamented his folly.

The writers of the Epic of Gilgamesh knew that deforestation led to droughts, and Gilgamesh’s war against the forest foreshadowed the fate of numerous Old World civilizations. The city-states of southern Mesopotamian made regular journeys to Lebanon’s cedar forest. The ruler of Lagash, not far from Uruk, had grand plans for aggrandizing his legacy and leveled cedar forests and rafted their logs downriver to Lagash to fulfil his grandiose schemes. The city-states of southern Mesopotamia deforested upstream river valleys, rafting logs to their downstream cities. Wars between the city-states, and wars of foreign conquest to secure forests and navigable rivers (particularly the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karun of today’s Iran), were common then. Wood became such a coveted commodity that it could approach the value of precious metals and stones, and Akkad’s rulers named mountains with what tree predominantly grew on each one.

What came with the logs, however, was silt and salt, and those civilizations were destroyed by their own rapacity. Southern Mesopotamia practiced irrigated farming, and salination and siltation eventually wrecked Sumer. By the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2100 BCE, the king Ur-Nammu made dredging silt from canals a high priority, and his dredging initiative temporarily revived agriculture and made Ur’s port navigable once again, as it had already been filled with silt. Wheat is more sensitive to saline soil than barley. In 3500 BCE, wheat and barley were grown in equal amounts, but salination began taking its toll. By 3000 BCE, Sumer became the world’s first literate society, and their tablets record Sumer’s decline. By 2500 BCE, wheat amounted to only 15% of the total crop. By 2100 BCE, wheat comprised only 2% of Sumer’s crops. Wheat was not the only casualty. Salt-tolerant barley did better, but crop yields began falling precipitously around 2400 BCE, with a steady decline that reached only a third of 2400 BCE yields by 1700 BCE. The Sumerian people began migrating upriver to lands that had not yet been devastated, and Sumer’s population declined by more than half, with famine a regular visitor as croplands became white with salt.

Upriver from Sumer the Akkadian Empire began forming, and Akkadians began defeating Sumer around 2300 BCE. Akkad’s first king was Sargon, who bloodily came to power and captured Uruk and dismantled its walls while conquering Sumer. That began a pattern of rising and falling empires in the Fertile Crescent that characterized the region for thousands of years. The Akkadian Empire collapsed after only 180 years of existence, and there was a resurgence of Ur under its Third Dynasty around 2100 BCE, and the oldest preserved laws were written then. The Code of Hammurabi, written when Babylonians ruled in their turn a few centuries later, reflected earlier Sumerian laws, and they are notable for documenting the barbarity of their times. Murder and robbery were capital crimes, but capital punishment was also meted out for offenses such as stealing a slave, deflowering a wife before the husband could (where the deflowerer is killed), or a wife is unfaithful (where the wife is killed). A boy striking his father would lose his fingers or hand. “Eye for an eye” came from the Code of Hammurabi.

Just as precipitation ran to the ocean in floods before plants colonized land, denuded lands and razed forests no longer held water like a sponge, and transpiration no longer contributed to the hydrological cycle, rampant deforestation contributed to flooded Mesopotamian rivers as the region also became drier. The flood that Gilgamesh survived, which is evident in the archeological record, was likely related to deforestation, although a great deal of speculation exists regarding the origins of flood myths. The Black Sea is one candidate for flood legends, where the rising interglacial global ocean flooded the lake to levels higher than during the glacial period. Another hypothesis has rising seas flooding the lower end of Mesopotamia. I have read arguments that the legend of Atlantis relates to a seashore civilization drowned under a rising interglacial ocean.

Just as with megafauna extinctions or the Neanderthal extinction, there are plenty of scientists and scholars who argue that human-agency is not responsible for the decline and collapse of civilizations, question whether they collapsed at all, assert that climate change did it, or invasion did it, and so on. While the battle of competing hypotheses is part of the process of science, all scientists whose hypotheses deflect responsibility from people have an inherent conflict of interest, and their work should be examined with that in mind. In the historical era, particularly when Europe conquered the world, the rapid deforestation and desertification of newly conquered lands was evident. Within a century of Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, a valley of verdant forests and fertile farmland was turned into a semi-desert by deforestation and sheep grazing. That valley is known as the Mezquital Valley today, because the desert-dwelling mesquite is the dominant tree in that semi-desert. British invaders of Australia did the same thing to New South Wales in fifty years, with deforestation and sheep grazing. Streams quickly dried up, but flooded when it rained, as the “sponge” of the forest ecosystem was removed, so flood and drought accompanied deforestation.

Since 2003, I have been a student of collapsed civilizations, and there are vigorous academic disputes on the subject. Jared Diamond see collapses as a result of environmental degradation, while Joseph Tainter perceives it as declining marginal returns on investment in complexity. Thomas Homer-Dixon views it as a decline in a civilization’s EROI. Other scientists propose climate explanations, particularly droughts. What they are all stating, in one fashion or another, is that the civilizations ran out of energy. All resources are either energy or energy makes them available, whether they are food, timber, water, metal, or today’s hydrocarbon deposits, where wars are once again fought in Mesopotamia to secure energy. Tainter’s idea of declining marginal returns in investment in complexity is perhaps the most prominent current explanation, but it also did not engage the dynamic’s physics, which others have done. Homer-Dixon has elucidated the dynamics perhaps the most clearly, with his concept of declining EROI, for which he writes articles and gives public speeches. Homer-Dixon’s ideas also incorporate C.S. Holling’s ecosystems theories. Whether climate change did it, humans wiped out their environments, or humanity has reached Peak Oil and a global collapse is just around the corner, it always meant a decline in energy-delivered resources, as well as energy itself. Tainter’s moment of a civilization’s collapse was when a hungry urban professional returned to rural life to gain greater energy (food) security, but a long, often slow decline usually led to that moment, as a society’s return on investment in complexity declined or, as Homer-Dixon stated it, the EROI declined to that disruptive level and civilization collapsed. Just as with wars, the ultimate cause was economic, but some kind of triggering event was the proximate cause, which was warfare often enough. But Rome was sacked three times in less than two centuries only after centuries of declining EROI.

One key feature of Mesopotamian life resulted from wars and migrations. In cities, social organization along family or clan lines became obsolete, and professional associations became prominent. Mesopotamian cities absorbed invader cultures while also adapting to them, and ancient Mesopotamian civilizations became multicultural. The first cities also had many problems to solve, such as sanitation, where the water supply and sewage system had to be separated. Also, in a pattern that continues to this day, upriver settlements usually flushed their sewage into the rivers, as they no longer had to concern themselves with it, but it obviously affected downstream civilizations. In many poor nations today, as major rivers enter the oceans they are virtually open sewers, becoming increasingly polluted as rivers pass settlements and cities. Also, the domestication of animals is generally considered to be the origin of many epidemic diseases, and the close quarters of urban living often meant epidemics that decimated urban populations, with the Plague of Athens in 430 BCE, during the Peloponnesian War, being one of the earliest recorded epidemics. Filth, pollution, and crowding were major problems for early cities, and life expectancy was always lower in the cities than in the hinterland. Life expectancy in the city did not rise to the hinterland’s until the 20th century. Surplus population from the hinterland repopulated all cities in history until the 20th century.

Fertile Crescent civilizations are universally regarded as humanity’s first. In China, the peoples began to domesticate millet around nine kya, about two thousand years after Fertile Crescent farming began. Some scientists are skeptical that Chinese domestication really developed without any Fertile Crescent influence, even if it was just the idea of domestication. Similarly, agriculture began in the Western Hemisphere in Mesoamerica, with people domesticating squash about 10-8 kya. The potato could have begun domestication in Peru at about the same time. At most, those are the two places where plants were domesticated independently in the Western Hemisphere, and the practice spread. Plants were independently domesticated in as few as five regions on Earth. Whether the idea of domestication passed between regions where it is thought to have appeared independently, where the pig, for instance, may have been domesticated independently in the Fertile Crescent and China, nearly all domesticated plants and animals were likely domesticated once, and the idea/technique/offspring spread. The horse is an instance where genetic evidence points to domestication happening once, with a limited number of stallions, and wild mares were subsequently incorporated into domestic herds. Once a herd animal was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent, the idea of domesticating herd animals certainly made subsequent domestication events less innovative. The Domestication Revolution, even if it happened in as many as nine places independently, as with the previous two epochal events (stone tools/controlling fire, and that found group that left Africa), the people who initiated the Third Epochal Event were relatively few. Probably only a few hundred people were beacons of innovation, or maybe even only a few dozen or less, when they are added together, and the domestication of animals in the Fertile Crescent may have had a lone inventor, or handful of them, who initiated the process, and the domestication of plants may have had similarly few inventors.

[Wade Frazier]

Humanity’s Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution – Part 2

As has been evident in this essay so far, and will become more evident, scientific orthodoxy and I do not agree on everything; far from it. Not only is mainstream science imprisoned by barriers erected by a faction of the global elite, where paradigm-shattering scientific findings and world-changing technologies are ruthlessly suppressed, but all of my fellow travelers were, to one extent or another, mystical in their orientation. Their mystical persuasion had nothing to do with beliefs, studying sacred texts, or other indoctrination, but their experiences. My astronaut and Ivy League professor colleague was a staunch advocate of scientific testing of “paranormal” phenomena. After I had dramatic events that initiated my mystical awakening, I also performed experiments and had many undeniable experiences that clearly demonstrated that the materialistic models of consciousness that dominate mainstream science rest on false foundations. My astronaut colleague nearly lost his life, courtesy of the USA’s military, when he looked into the UFO phenomenon, after being made an offer he could not refuse, and the attack shortened his life. There is far more happening than the TV news tells us.

The physical dimension is not the only one, and accomplished psychonauts can visit others, some of whom I know, and some have even brought back designs for inventions used in every Western home today. Scientists call flashes of inventive insight “the creative moment,” but there is often far more to it than novel and poorly understood brain activity.

When scientists attribute all “beliefs” in the “supernatural” to superstition, wishful thinking, reaching a delusionary “high” by stressing the body to exhaustion, similar to a substance-induced state, and other human foibles, they err. Instead of considering that accomplished mystics can visit other dimensions or gain perspectives regarding this one that could be called “magical,” scientists tend to see those “primitive” states that may provide windows to other dimensions as nothing more than “a distorting mirror.” There is something real at the root of religious behavior and belief, but just as with everything else in a world of scarcity, people corrupted it into a way of getting fed, men used it to gain sexual access to women, and the like. The same scandalous behaviors haunt the New Age community today. No worthy mystic is going to ask people to “believe,” have “faith,” memorize “sacred” texts, and the like. Those are the tools of religious racketeers. People can seek their own experiences, and there is a mountain of scientific data that supports the reality of “paranormal” phenomena. Even calling it “paranormal” is misleading. Those abilities of consciousness are normal, if only underdeveloped in the West and abused by charlatans and other opportunists. Many “mystics” fake such abilities, but relatively few in the milieu do. For all the many failings of organized religion and the rampant mystical hucksterism that abounds, materialism is a religion, not much different from the world’s religions, but its founding articles of faith are called “assumptions.” While I understand and can even appreciate the seductions of the rationalist-materialist paradigm, it rests on a false foundation. There are some highly sophisticated ways of viewing the cosmos and the human role in it that have little to do with dogma and the usual trappings of organized religion, and lot of it can be tested, even scientifically at times.

One enduring question about civilization is “Why?” Why would somebody leave a village for a shortened life-expectancy in a city? Ever since the ancient Greeks and Confucius, that question has been asked. There are two basic theoretical camps: one is integration theory, and the other is conflict theory. Integration theories have people moving to civilization because of the benefits gained, which are obviously many. Conflict theories, of which Karl Marx was a proponent, have elites exploiting civilizations in service to their greedy and vain motivations. Academics have written that integration theories account best for providing life’s necessities for the masses, which is why they migrate to civilizations, while conflict theories best explain elite appropriation of economic surpluses.

In Sumer in the third millennium BCE, about 80% of the population lived in cities so that they could sleep behind fortifications to protect against attack. However, about 80-90% of the population was engaged in agriculture. Before industrialization, the vast majority of civilized populations were involved in agriculture, as the surplus could only support a small non-agricultural population, which were professionals and the elite. All elites for all time have engaged in conspicuous economic consumption as the mark of their status. Until the Industrial Revolution, except for the brief Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer, the primary preoccupation of all people for all time has been food security, as hunger was a constant specter.

People on the edge of starvation will rarely if ever display enlightened activities in relationship to their environment or each other, as they battle for survival. While early farmers could see the effects of deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion, gentle, sustainable practices often took a backseat to market forces, imperial prerogatives, and warfare. What could be obvious to farmers was not evident to potentates sitting on distant urban thrones, merchants, or money-changers, and as the city conquered what became the hinterland, short-term economic plunder took precedence over long-term environmental management far too frequently.

Until the 20th century, people had no idea how their activities impacted a portion of their environment that may end up hastening humanity’s demise more than self-made deserts: the atmosphere. Agriculture and civilization meant deforestation, and there is strong evidence that the Domestication Revolution began altering the composition of Earth’s atmosphere from its earliest days. The natural trend of carbon dioxide decline was reversed beginning about 6000 BCE. Instead of declining from about 260 PPM at 6000 BCE to about 240 PPM today, which would have been the natural trend, it began to rise, reaching 275 PPM about 3000 BCE. By the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were about 40 PMM higher than the natural trend would suggest. When a forest is razed and the resultant wood is burned, which is usually wood’s ultimate fate in civilizations, it liberated carbon that the tree absorbed from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and human activities began measurably adding methane to the atmosphere by about 3000 BCE, which coincided with the rise of the rice paddy system in China. In nature, methane is primarily produced by decaying vegetation in wetlands, both in the tropics and the Arctic, and human activities have increased wetlands even as they made other regions arid. Domestic grazing animals and human digestive systems also contribute to methane production. While atmospheric alteration by human activities has only come to public awareness in my lifetime, human activities have had a measurable effect on greenhouse gases since the beginnings of civilization, even though the effects were modest compared to what has happened during the Industrial Revolution, as humans burn Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits with abandon.

All early cities were built in warm climates, to take advantage of their “energy subsidy.” Heating cool-climate buildings is extremely energy-intensive and growing seasons are shorter further from the equator, which explains why cool-climate civilizations developed much later than warm-climate civilizations. From its beginnings in the region that included Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and the Levant, agriculture made its inexorable march across the land masses, and spread to the furthest arable reaches of Europe before 3500 BCE. As agriculture spread, so did warring empires. What is called the Near East and Mediterranean region was slaked with blood early and often, as empires rose and fell. Sumer was conquered by Akkad, and when Akkad fell, Ur had a resurgence, to be supplanted by Babylon, which was supplanted by Assyria, which was supplanted by a neo-Babylonian civilization, which was supplanted by Persia, which was supplanted by Macedonians led by Alexander the Great, whose military methods were unsurpassed for the remainder of humanity’s pre-industrial times. Alexander’s forces could have arguably defeated Wellington’s forces at Waterloo in 1815. The wars over control of Mesopotamia have continued until this day, with history’s richest and most powerful nation recently invading the region to secure hydrocarbon energy while purveying blatantly fraudulent rationales which fooled nobody except for the imperial citizenry, and even they largely winked at the “noble” rationales given.

The rest of this chapter will trace many important pre-industrial developments which helped set the stage for the Industrial Revolution, which is humanity’s fourth and most recent epochal event, but until the last few centuries in Europe preceding the Industrial Revolution, the basics among all civilizations did not appreciably change. Cities situated on low-energy transportation lanes, which were almost always bodies of water, exploited forested and agricultural hinterlands, which was worked by peasants and slaves, while cities housed professionals and the elite. Forests and agriculture provided the primary energy supply of all pre-industrial civilizations, which was usually supplemented with the products and services of domestic animals. Food security was always an issue, and all pre-industrial civilizations were steeply-hierarchical - economically, socially, and politically - with the means of production providing small surpluses that supported a small elite and professional class. Fighting over resources and plunder has been the primary predilection of all civilizations for all time, except for a very brief interlude at the beginnings of the formation of pristine civilizations.

Those basics never really changed, and environmental destruction accompanied all civilizations, as razing forests and growing crops could never really be sustainable and certainly could not form the foundation for economically abundant societies. Economic scarcity, which is always rooted in energy scarcity, was as deeply ingrained into all ideologies as thoroughly as those early religions that accessed the limbic system to reinforce group cohesion. Economic scarcity was and is so pervasive that it is an assumption of all of today’s dominant ideologies. As with all assumptions, scarcity has become a barely visible framework to adherents of all dominant ideologies. If energy was abundant, scarcity-based realities and ideologies would quickly become obsolete, as well as many societal features that are scarcity’s side-effects, such as elites, greed, warfare, and environmental destruction.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Well, I sure am not going to get to the Industrial Revolution as fast as I had hoped, and another monster chapter is in the making. It will be a good one, but long. As with my posts that began a couple of years ago, as I got to the civilizations of the Mediterranean:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post602338

the going is slow with Rome and friends. Many important lessons there.
I just read this:

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed...adiation-myths

and it relates to posts here a while back:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post639659

Ionizing radiation is not good for life forms. Ever. It is not “creative destruction,” but just destruction.

The Snowden revelations keep getting uglier:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/a...uters-malware/

With “public servants” like them, who needs enemies?

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Limor Wolf]

The day before yesterday I was reading another one of the chapters of the essey's draft that Wade has posted here (I am a slow reader, only on page 165, post #3280-1) - 'The reign of Dinosaur's' , so my following random thoughts are in relations to that and not yet to any other later parts.

It all feels like a profound story telling, so far I noticed two things - there are always processes (nothing is fixated and there are always dynamics even if over milions of years) and what feels like either a priodicity of species appearing and disappearing or that of evolution if the species manage to survive (survive human beings that is). If the later, then the process begets thing which led to another thing and to another. Inference - life on this planet equals development.

What I find very fascinating is the sudden appearence of species with no understanding or ability to theorise where they appeared from (for example the crab), and the thoughts are wandering to far more philosophical realms (I know, I know, it should all be about energy of the ' here and now'), who and what has created the flowers with seeds and the animals with reproductive capacity..? what is this energy that creates universes? this life force that encourages continuity in such a highly inteligent way? For me, Wade's essey and writing evokes such unanswered questions for the fact that it touches the fundamentals of construction and creation processes as well as dismantling and extinction, but it's possibly best to concentrate on the less grandiose mysteries of life : )

If to continue these thoughts, the fact that many of the 'convictions' on which the hypotheses are built (as opposing to the things who can be measured or be concluded with a logical or measurable linkage ) are actually theorised, the dynamics then, are not always understood. (things appear and disappear with no explanation) and also can not be explained as energy related. So (understandably so..), any attempt to summerise life on this planet via scientific tools only is a logical attempt to examine what appears to us as the "mysteries" of our existance here.

Here's an exception I've encountered lately, I began to read a story of an Isareli guy who lives on Prana and without food, he was recently able to demonstrate it and was not eating/drinking for eight days infront of a TV camera while submitting himself to medical testings by a pre-scheduled team. I signed up for a workshop that he ran in order to learn how to get more prana energy into our body which unfortunately was canceled, I exchanged a few words with him. I have learned and read about breatharians before and am very interested on the use of free infinite energy as a mechanism that can propel our body, and if that, no doubt any other man made technology. We also have two declared woman members on Avalon who had breatherian experiences and without going into too much detail, I myself had an episode of existing without sleep for 14 days in a row in total and complete consciousness and awarness minute by minute. What type of mitochondria do breatharians have? How come it is so efficient (they normally don't need much sleep and their metabolism values are kept within the normal range and in general the 'consumption' of free energy of the pranic nature seems to be less eroding to the system ) There is going to be a complete breakage in scientific understandings when consciousness and energy (and the energy of consciousness) is going to be tied together and will be more visibly common, a component so strong in it's directive power that it's going to change the picture. Wade, you may have to leave room for more episodes in the energy saga of earth for future breakthrough. If for example we take breatharianism again, something in the equation of size, heart bit, metabolism and longevity known in mammals today and considered with all animals is going to be undermined in the future, as the metabolism and the longevity part (the last one not yet known, but very likely is affected) as reflected in a person (mammal) who does not need to consume food and drink as fueling energy for biologic processes to occur, will no doubt change some of the most prevalent basic premises in science.

Wade's work lights some very interesting points for me beyond the obvious, for example that territory choice is also influenced by energy considerations, such a point has not crossed my mind, but it makes perfect sense, territorial behaviour is a prime nature to any ' biologic component' (whether a plant, an animal or a human) to operate itself with as much convenience of attainment of energy sources and with less need to waste one's own energy to reach them ( a clear necessity in a world that consumes exhaustible energy resources), even technological devices are built with the same currently logical considerations.

Energy indeed rules the world

With regards to territory and energy, I was trying to think of an exception, I couldn't find any, even the Bedouins, the nomadic desert tribes, who live a relatively non sedentary life when it comes to teritorrial behaviour and are a lot more exposed to variable factors need to settle near water or take with them the energy sources when they migrate, as few as they may be in compared to modern society, but they can not avoid them.

The only one life changing transition that we can look forward to and is apparently beginning to happen is the transformation to free enrgy type of economy. Such a transition might be happening with the rise of breatharians. These are possibly the first harbingers announcing a change in the energy concept of the human race and this planet to something that will simply define life from the beginning. If this direction of development (which is organically enough) will be allowed to develop and not be overcome by all the genetic interventions and manipulations happening right now, than hopefully no 'bolide event' will have to come to change things once again (remember, life is much more inteligent than we may think..) but if some 'unnatural' hands will manage to take matters to their hands to the extent of 'no coming back' then sadly such an event may very well be a welcomed solution. The first option is much more appealing, so we must allow our developed consciousness to take us there.

Thank you very much Wade for your grand work that encourages and allows us with these kind of reflections, thoughts and perceptions. It may further lead us to the 'longed for' understandings of the role of energy in our life and how in it's purest form it is going to take us to a new and far more promising regions .


Blessings ~

Limor

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Limor:

What you call Breatharian, I call Level 19:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level19

but us all becoming Level 19s is in no way practical right now. I have tapped that source myself, but more modestly:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#hands1

I doubt that there were many, if any, Level 19s in this society:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post672748

Biologists see extinctions primarily in terms of energy, as do I, and speciation is an adaptive response to new environments, and the adaptations are generally energy-related. My finished essay will make that very clear. Energy not only forms that foundation, it also determines what can sit on that foundation.

I will likely be fairly quiet the next few days, but I will put up the latest, where I just spent a few days on Rome and friends. Again, I have to split it into parts because of Avalon’s space limits.

Best,

Wade

Humanity’s Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution – Part 3

In the waning days of early Mesopotamian civilizations, conservation became a concept. That dynamic played out innumerable times over the succeeding millennia, where an early Golden Age of civilization, with the lands blanketed in forests, gave way to increasingly desertified lands, and a conservation ethic began taking root. It was always too little and too late, however, and the civilization collapsed, leaving behind a wasteland that did not recover for centuries, to often be devastated once again when civilization could reappear. To those other universal aspects of pre-industrial civilizations, that dynamic should be added.

With southern Mesopotamia slowly becoming a wasteland, people began migrating away as environmental refugees, and perhaps the most famous is Abraham; the Old Testament’s founder of the Israelites. Abraham migrated from Ur around 2000 BCE, ultimately settling in Canaan. While I respect the inspiration likely behind a Jesus, who was a historical figure, modern archeologists and historians have not been able to establish much historical accuracy in the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. There is little or no evidence that Moses existed, or that the Exodus, conquest of Canaan (the evidence is that Israelites were Canaanites), and many other Old Testament events really happened. If there was any historical truth at all, the facts were inflated into fantastic stories designed to serve various agendas.

Many stories about Jesus, such as the virgin birth and resurrection, were already circulating in other religions of the day, and there is little evidence that Mohammed existed, and if he did, he likely lived around Jerusalem, not on the Arabian Peninsula. After a career of archeological investigation in the region where the Biblical Israel was founded, one anthropologist likened the Hebrew Bible to propaganda with tiny bits of historical truth in it, as some facts are needed to help people swallow fanciful stories. To modern observers not under the thrall of limbic conditioning, tales of people living to be nearly a thousand (Old Testament), or more than 40,000 years (Sumerian King List) are not taken seriously. But literalist interpretations of ancient texts abound, whether it is religious fundamentalists or scholars such as Velikovsky and Sitchin trying to explain mythical events as if ancient texts were literal truth.

The first five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch, are today considered by scholars to have been a political tract, written centuries after the alleged events occurred. It was similar to the fabrications in the American history taught to today’s schoolchildren, as a way to cultivate blind obedience to the state. Early Israel and Judah were tiny kingdoms in the hills, sandwiched between Assyria and Egypt, which were warring regional powers. Israel was destroyed about 722 BCE, after the Israeli king defied the Assyrian king, and ten of Israel’s tribes were forcibly relocated by Assyria and became lost to history. Those “lost tribes” became the focus of all manner of fantasy for millennia. Writing the Pentateuch was an understandable effort to help Israelites survive, as a kind of nationalistic parable. The New Testament and Koran were also written long after the alleged events, with huge political battles over what the official story would be. Whatever divine inspiration Jesus may have had access to, or other figures in Judeo-Christian or Islamic tales, what is certain is that priesthoods and rulers shamelessly distorted them to serve their agendas of amassing and maintaining wealth and power, in a dynamic that begins with the first civilization and lasts to this day.

The Nile valley made the rise of Egyptian civilization possible, and it had the Old World’s most reliable food supply. Even today, half of Egypt’s population lives on the Nile’s delta. The annual floods brought silt from deforestation and erosion from the highlands to the delta, which kept the fields fertile. Unlike the Mesopotamian disaster, salination was not a major problem for Egyptians, except at Faiyum and irrigated areas above the flood line. The Egyptian and Harappan civilizations were not pristine, being beneficiaries of Fertile Crescent innovations, and arose from hunter-gatherer societies that did not pass through the learning and evolutionary curve for domesticating their plants and animals. Those pristine civilizations may have been the only places on Earth where civilization could first appear. If not for those regions where people domesticated plants, humanity might all be still living like aboriginal Australians did for around 50,000 years.

While Africa did not lose its megafauna like Australia and the Americas did, visitors to North Africa today from ten thousand years ago would have been amazed, and not just because of modern civilization, but all the megafauna that disappeared from North Africa and how desert-like the environment became. Before Egyptian civilization arose, the Nile valley hosted nearly the full complement of iconic African megafauna, with elephants, hippos, lions, rhinos, giraffes and many others, and a staggering abundance of waterfowl lived in the Nile valley and on its delta. That early graveyard of slaughtered humans, which was only discovered because the dammed Nile would soon sink it, was on the Nile’s banks, so humans had been fighting over the Nile’s resources for many millennia when civilization began there. Migrants from the Fertile Crescent began to settle the Nile valley beginning about 6000 BCE, not long before Çatal Höyük was abandoned. Around 3600 BCE, the Nile’s villages began their rise to civilization, and about 3100 BCE the first polity that controlled Upper and Lower Egypt appeared, and dynastic rule began. Gold was mined for the first time on Earth on an industrial scale, and Egypt set the standard for labor brutality in gold mining, not pyramid building. In one many juxtapositions of the “divine” and profane that would be seen in subsequent civilizations, gold was a sacred metal in Egypt, and pharaohs were literally sons of the solar deity Ra. A pharaoh’s primary “job” was interceding with the gods to ensure a proper annual Nile flood. When the floods failed, so did the peasantry’s faith in the nobility, and droughts brought an end to pharaonic dynasties, and subsequent rulers were more modest about their divine abilities to affect the Nile’s annual flood.

By the end of the Old Kingdom around 2200 BCE, elephants, rhinos, wild camels, and giraffes were locally extinct in the Nile valley or on the brink of it. Old Kingdom ships sailed to Lebanon to raze their trees by 2650 BCE, a century before the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. Slaves did not build the pyramids, but mainly agricultural workers working for a wage during the off-season. The entire Giza complex was built in about a century, and remains the ultimate elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture. Ancient Egypt reached the height of its power during the reign of Amenhotep III, around 1350 BCE. Amenhotep III claimed that he personally killed 102 lions; hunting lions was the ultimate sport of pharaohs, after playing with their harems. Tutankhamun, the pharaoh with the resplendent tomb, ruled a generation after Amenhotep III. The lives of thousands of slaves paid for the mask of Tutankhamun’s mummy. Nubian gold mines were filled with the skeletons of dead miners. Nobody survived mining for the pharaohs; they were uniformly worked to death, whether they were men, women, children, elderly, or disabled, with an endless supply of new slaves to replace the dead ones. The Incas would also have a sun god religion, and gold also became a sacred metal reserved for royalty (and silver was also sacred and represented the moon, which Incan royalty also claimed descent from), but they did not work people to death to obtain it. A great deal of Nubian gold ended up in royal tombs, to be looted after the New Kingdom collapsed after the Twentieth Dynasty about 1060 BCE.

While the relatively gentle river valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt saw long, slow declines in their environments, when civilization came to the more mountainous periphery of the Mediterranean Sea, environmental damage came much faster and more dramatically, particularly as the Stone Age gave way to the Bronze and Iron Ages. Before civilization arrived, the Mediterranean’s periphery was heavily forested and, as with Lebanon, cedars were plentiful. The Mediterranean islands had their own megafauna extinctions about 12 kya, with island-dwarfed hippos and elephants going extinct soon after humans arrived. Any place that can support hippos is blessed with an abundance of water, and islands such as Crete and Cyprus were blanketed with verdurous forests before the rise of civilization.

As people fled from the increasingly barren and devastated Fertile Crescent, Bronze Age settlements began growing on the Mediterranean’s east end. During the Babylonian reign of Hammurabi, wood was extremely scarce, and his agents were charged with finding more wood. Under Hammurabi, illegal woodcutting was a capital crime. The search for wood extended past deforested Lebanon to the Mediterranean’s periphery, and Crete’s inhabitants began to trade wood for luxury items with Near East civilizations. The nearly extinct Near East cedar had become reserved for palaces and temples in Mesopotamia, but on Crete, cedar was so abundant that it was used for tool handles and other mundane uses. Trade with the Near East quickly boosted Crete from a forested hinterland, isolated in the eastern Mediterranean, into a powerful state, at least while its forests lasted. In early Minoan civilization, wood was used lavishly. The Minoan success influenced the nearby Peloponnesian peninsula, and Mycenaean civilization began about 1600 BCE. Minoans developed the still-undeciphered Linear A script. The Mycenaean Greeks developed Linear B, and it has been largely decoded and was all elite accounting, and it is likely that Linear A also was only accounting. About 1700 BCE, the Minoan palaces were destroyed, probably by an earthquake, and the palaces were rebuilt on a grand scale, and settlements expanded in the Minoan Golden Age, which lasted about three centuries, and then a swift decline happened which saw the end of Minoan civilization by 1200 BCE, which was then annexed by Mycenaeans.

Many reasons were proffered to explain the Minoan decline and collapse, including the now-rejected idea that a volcanic eruption did it. What is increasingly being cited as the reason for the Minoan decline, and was likely the ultimate reason for its collapse, was that Minoans wiped out their energy supply, primarily via deforestation. Minoans, just as with many other collapsed civilizations, exceeded its carrying capacity. For organisms, carrying capacity always meant food and the ability to reproduce, but for civilizations, it also meant the energy needed to run the civilization’s moving parts, including transportation and the energy used to build structures and goods. If we revisit the “decision” that life faces, whether to use energy to fuel biological processes or build biological structures, civilizations faced the same choice. Humans commandeered the energy that a tree invested in its growth, and there were two basic ways to use it: liberate the energy in the structure by burning it, or use that structure for building human-usable tools or structures, which could include buildings and ships. As previously discussed, metal smelting used stupendous amounts of wood, as did pottery-making and fireplaces and furnaces to heating buildings. Minoans also built a tremendous fleet of ships for trade and military dominance. When rebuilding Minoan palaces, Crete’s inhabitants used wood exuberantly, but by 1500 BCE, the use of wood in palaces declined precipitously, and when Mycenaean Greece took over Crete, the forests were gone and the Greeks used Crete to pasture their sheep.

As discussed previously, in relatively recent history, deforestation and the introduction of sheep was an effective method of turning forests into deserts. Within a few centuries, Crete was turned from verdant forest to sheep pasture, and a civilization arose and vanished. In the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean periphery, introducing goats was another way to ensure that forests never reappeared. Goats easily climb into trees to eat them, but the primary damage that goats and sheep inflicted was that they ate any attempts by the forest to regenerate, and their hooves pounded the ground, flattening and compacting the soils, completing the process begun with deforestation of killing the soil’s role in the hydrological cycle.

As Minoan civilization collapsed and Mycenaean civilization expanded, the forests of Cyprus were the next to go. Beginning around 1300 BCE, Cyprus, with largely intact forests and rich copper deposits, became the center of bronze production, and a deforestation effort even more spectacular than Crete’s commenced. Again, Crete and Cyprus once hosted hippos, and in the pre-deforestation period on Cyprus, pigs roamed the forests. As the moist woodlands quickly began to disappear, pigs could no longer be raised, and goats and sheep were introduced to graze the denuded hillsides. On Mycenaean Greece, they were also rapidly deforesting the Peloponnesian peninsula, but they took steps to at least try to protect their urban areas from the flooding and erosion that deforestation caused, by building dams and dikes to prevent and redirect floods. The Cypriots took no such measures, and the torrents and silt washed down the exposed hillsides and quickly buried and washed away towns and filled harbors. By 1100 BCE, the harbor at Hala Sultan Tekke was completely filled with silt and its use a port ended. Similarly, Enkomi quickly silted up and changed from a coastal city to an inland one which was often flooded with mud and debris from the hillsides. In 1050 BCE, the town was abandoned, and 90% of the settlements on Cyprus had been abandoned by that time. In less than three centuries, Cyprus was turned from a heavily forested island into a deserted wasteland, and the collapse of Cyprus ushered in the Mediterranean’s Iron Age.

Mycenaean Greece arose from Minoan influence, and the Greeks quickly set about to reproduce the Minoan “success.” There was a seductive logic to deforestation and agriculture. The products of deforestation were the very stuff of civilization, with cities built from plundered wood and crops raised on exposed soils, and goats and sheep pastured on the former forest soils. It all made great sense, if only short-term, and as Mycenaean civilization quickly expanded via those dynamics, the people only saw it as “progress,” something to be celebrated, not viewed with alarm.

As the Peloponnesian plains near shore were shorn of their forests, settlements expanded into the hills. Pottery operations began relocating far from settlements so that they could have unchallenged access to the forests to fuel their kilns. The deforested hillsides of Mycenaean Greece unleashed torrents of mud during the rainy season, and the Mycenaean port of Pylos was surrounded by barren lands, with the pine forests long gone, and Mycenaean engineers built earthworks that rerouted the local river around Pylos. Today, the typical Mediterranean “soil” is either limestone bedrock or reddish “soils” which lay atop the limestone and remained after forests and brown topsoils were removed. The Mediterranean’s “soils,” climate, and biomes are not “natural,” but are the result of millennia of Mediterranean civilization. In its turn, Mycenaean civilization collapsed, for the same reasons as the others, as its energy practices were anything but sustainable.

In the late Mediterranean Bronze Age, Troy, situated on the waterway between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, became a coveted port, sitting near Scamander Bay. The Trojan War, made famous by Homer, was fought about 1200 BCE. It was long thought to be a fanciful tale, but archeologists doggedly searched for Troy and excavated it in the 19th century. Scamander Bay is long gone, filled with silt, and Troy was buried by nearly ten meters of silt. The wars that Mycenaean Greeks fought with their neighbors, as with all wars, were primarily resource-based, as the environmentally devastated homeland could no longer support the people in the style to which they had become accustomed.

By 1150 BCE, the civilizations of Mycenaean Greece, the Hittite Empire of Anatolia, the New Kingdom of Egypt’s in Syria and Canaan had all collapsed, and many causes have been considered, but the deforestation and desertification of the region must have had a major influence and was likely the ultimate cause. In Pylos, post-Mycenaean farmers began planting olive trees instead of farming grain, as olive trees could grow in the depleted soils and can even grow in the limestone bedrock. Olives became a famous Greek crop because of Greece’s lost soils. Contemporary observers noticed the environmental devastation that Mycenaean civilization inflicted, and the epic Greek tale Cypria clearly attributes the decline and collapse of Mycenaean civilization to overpopulation and related environmental ruination, and Zeus saved the land by getting rid of humans.

Greece entered a 300-year Dark Age as their forests began to recover, and there was a great migration of Greeks to the Anatolian peninsula, where the pattern of deforestation, siltation, and desertification was repeated. Myus was a port city founded by fleeing Mycenaean Greeks, and today that port sits more than twenty kilometers inland, buried beneath the silt of upriver deforestation and agriculture. Ephesus suffered an identical fate, and that dynamic was repeated all over the Mediterranean’s periphery, and reached its peak with Roman civilization.

As Mycenaean and other civilizations declined and fell, Phoenician civilization saw its civilization peak between 1200 BCE and 800 BCE, with their great fleets ruling the Mediterranean. As with the preceding powers, the Phoenicians established colonies on the Mediterranean’s periphery that had not yet been devastated, and established Carthage about 850-810 BCE.

After centuries of ecological recovery, Greek civilization began to rise again beginning about 700 BCE, and it was an Iron Age, not a Bronze Age, and those Greeks were humble farmers, able to use partially regenerated forests for a self-sufficient lifestyle that could later be seen in the Protestant work ethic and the pioneering spirit. The poet Hesiod hectored his farmer audience with homilies that could have been uttered by Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard. Athens was established before 1400 BCE and became an important Mycenaean city, and began its resurgence in the late years of Greece’s Dark Age, and between 900 BCE and 300 BCE it became one of the more remarkable experiments in the human journey. By 600, resurgent civilization had once more eroded the Greek countryside, and Peisistratus, also known as the Tyrant of Athens, offered a bounty to farmers to plant olive trees, as it was about the only crop that could grow on the badly eroded hills, and farming them did not increase erosion.

In 508 BCE, Athens entered its classical period, which lasted for nearly two centuries. In those two centuries, so much was invented by Greek philosophers and proto-scientists that it has been studied by scholars for thousands of years. One provocative question that scholars have posed is why the Industrial Revolution did not begin with the Greeks. The answer seems to be along the lines of Classic Greeks not having the social organization or sufficient history of technological innovation before wars and environmental destruction ended the Greek experiment. The achievements of Greece over the thousand-year period of their intellectual fecundity are far too many to explore in this essay, but briefly, the Greeks invented: democracy, Western philosophy, Western medicine, the watermill, a monetized economy, branches of mathematics such as geometry, while developing other branches to unprecedented sophistication, and heliocentric astronomy, including the idea that Earth was spherical in shape. Long after the Classic Greek period was over, Hellenic intellectuals and inventors kept making innovations that had major impacts on later civilizations, such as Heron of Alexandria inventing the windmill and steam engine.

For all the nascent enlightenment fermenting in Greece, it was still limited by its resource situation and was in regular warfare with its neighbors. Greek colonies along the Anatolian peninsula’s edge were conquered by Lydia, led by Croesus, who minted the first standardized coins, of electrum, which is a naturally occurring gold/silver alloy. Croesus was defeated in his turn by Persians led by Cyrus the Great. In 499 BCE, Anatolian Greeks waged a war that threw off Persian rule, but started a series of wars with Persia that lasted to 449 BCE. Building the fleets that defeated Persia began decimating Greece’s forests once again, and much of the diplomatic wrangling and outright battling was to deny the belligerents access to forests to build their fleets. Conquering and then destroying entire cities was a Persian tactic and common for the time, and the Persian extermination of Athenian forces at Thermopylae is one of history’s legendary battles. When Athens emerged victorious (after the Persians sacked and burned Athens), they likely had the world’s greatest navy. Building the Parthenon was one of many civic undertakings during Athens’s Golden Age, but it lasted only a generation, but few today would call it very golden. In the world’s first “democracy,” slaves outnumbered citizens and women were virtual prisoners in their homes.

Athens began a war with the Spartan-led Peloponnesian peoples lasting from 431 BCE to 404 BCE. The war was another largely naval one, and fighting over forest access was the prominent dynamic, with Spartans invading Attica and leveling its trees, turning it into a barren wasteland. In the aftermath of Attica’s destruction, a disease broke out and accompanied Attica’s refugees to an increasingly overcrowded Athens, and one of the world’s first recorded epidemics happened, today called the Plague of Athens, and historians and scientists have made many guesses as to the disease’s identity.

As the war continued, the Athenian hinterland was turned into a desert. Plato described the deforestation of Mount Hymettus, which remained barren until my lifetime, when the Greek government began to reforest it, but many trees could only be planted by blasting holes in the limestone bedrock. When residents of Attica returned home after the Spartan occupation, they built their homes with a southern orientation, to take advantage of sunlight, as wood was scarce. After five years of peace with Sparta subsequent to signing a treaty in 421 BCE, Athens took to the offensive again and pretended to intervene in a war in Sicily to protect Ionian colonists, but they really did it to conquer Sicily and plunder its forests and other resources, and thereby build a another naval fleet to conquer Sparta. The Sicilian Expedition was a catastrophe for Athens, and it lost most of its navy. There were other setbacks and victories, but a starving and besieged Athens finally surrendered to the Spartans in 404 BCE. The environment around Athens could feed nothing but “bees,” and where wolves once roamed, not a rabbit could be found. As Athens slowly became the center of a wasteland, the changing perceptions could be seen in contemporary writing. While forests were plentiful in 700 BCE, Greek authors wrote of trees in pragmatic fashion or as impediments to progress. As the forests disappeared along with the ecosystems they supported, an ecological consciousness began to appear. Plato and Aristotle placed forests at the root of a civilization’s health, and Plato gave trees a major role in his Utopia. Conservation only became an idea when the environment had already been ruined by “progress." Numerous commentators of the day wrote about the connections between forests and a healthy water supply, and many clearly saw the relationship between deforestation, erosion, and desertification, including Plato. Aristotle and his professional heir Theophrastus wrote about ecological ideas. Theophrastus could be considered the first ecological writer, and he had the beginnings of an ecosystems approach. He noted that when the region surrounding Philippi was deforested, it became dryer and warmer.

By 395, Athens joined in the Corinthian War against Sparta, and the diplomatic maneuvering included Persia and Egypt. Sparta prevailed with the treaty signed in 387 BCE, but Athens also began recovering and Persia had unchallenged rule over Ionia for more than fifty years, until Alexander the Great of Macedonia conquered them all. With a military prowess unsurpassed until the advent of industrialized warfare, Alexander conquered all early civilizations of note, including Greece, Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and all the way to the edge of India and the Himalayas. Alexander died in a Babylonian palace in 323 BCE, perhaps from poisoning, and his legacy created new connections between East and West, widely spread Greek culture, and helped inspire the next imperial aspirant, Rome.

Rome began as a settlement of shepherd’s huts, became a city around 750 BCE, and naturally fought with their neighbors. The northern Italian Peninsula was dominated by Etruscan civilization during Rome’s early years. But as with all civilizations previously reviewed, they only appeared where the essentials of a stable and relatively abundant energy supply could be exploited, which consisted of a navigable body of water, exploitable forests, and arable land which was usually exposed for agriculture after forests were removed. Etruscan culture was influenced by Greek colonies on the southern end of the Italian peninsula, which in turn influenced Rome. The Italian region was about the last place in Southern Europe that had timber suitable for shipbuilding, and forests near Rome boasted fir and silver fir, which were ideal for building naval ships. Some of Rome’s hills were named after trees that grew on them, such as oak, laurel, and willow. Thick forests grew near Rome in its early days, with a warring tribe able to elude the Roman army by disappearing into a forest near Antium (now called Anzio), and near today’s Naples were the “Avernian” woods, which meant “birdless,” because the trees were so thick that birds did not enter it. A little north of Rome sat the Ciminian forest, a deep and dark forest which no Roman dared enter before 310 BCE, when a Roman expedition explored the forest. The Senate forbade such a dangerous expedition into the unknown, but the intrepid party investigated the forest, with their findings avidly followed by the Roman public. Similar to early Crete, early Rome’s most important export was wood, sold to obtain finished goods from more developed eastern Mediterranean civilizations that had already lost their forests.

Between 540 BCE and 535 BCE, Carthage and Etruria combined to fight Greek colonies where today’s Marseille is, and on Corsica. The Greeks won, but it was a Cadmean “victory” that ended their Corsican settlement. Etruscans ruled Rome in its early days. Around 509 BCE, Rome overthrew its monarchy, established its independence from Etruria, and formed what today is called a republic, which held a tension between the aristocratic ruling class (patricians) versus the non-elite (plebeians). Centuries of interactions and wars with Etruria concluded with the final battle in 282 BCE, and Etruscans were absorbed into Roman culture, disappearing as a people. Etruscan cities became Roman cities, and Etruria’s fate was a preview of the polyglot empire that Rome would become, as it absorbed conquered peoples.

As with Spartans, Macedonians, and other contemporary cultures, military prowess was greatly honored, in that “might makes right” Roman world. Rome began battling with its neighbors early and often, in wars of both offense and defense. Its strategies and tactics ultimately hailed from the Greeks, and it expanded its control over the Italian Peninsula. Other than an invasion and sack of Rome around 390 BCE by Celts, Rome was usually on the winning side. The bountiful forests in the vicinity allowed Rome to rebuild after it was sacked and burned. Even when Rome lost, such as against the Greek Pyrrhus in 280 BCE, he remarked that he could not withstand another “victory” like that, and that comment immortalized him.

As Rome rose, it subdued its neighbors with a mix of diplomacy, alliances, and military superiority, and once it conquered and digested the Italian Peninsula, it played on a larger stage, with the first war with Carthage beginning in 264 BCE, which was initially fought over Sicily, but came to mean Mediterranean dominance. Rome built its first navy during that First Punic War, and local forests provided the wood. The First Punic War lasted to 241 BCE and ravaged both sides, but Rome prevailed. Rome’s success partly relied on its ability to attract private investment in building its navy. Once Carthage was dealt with, Rome began a series wars across the Adriatic that lasted for generations, and by 218 BCE, it was at war with Carthage again. The Second Punic War is the one where Hannibal led elephants through the Alps, and an axiom of warfare was born in that war, which is, “The only battle you have to win is the last one.” While Hannibal defeated the Roman armies in his battles, he had logistical problems and could not gather sufficient forces to conquer Rome. Rome simultaneously fought a war in Macedonia, which was a preview to the imperial troubles it would have centuries later when it became an empire. Carthage was a merchant power and hired mercenaries to fight its wars, which has rarely proven effective. The Second Punic War ended in 201 BCE with Carthage’s Mediterranean influence a shadow of its former glory, and a couple of generations later, Rome completely destroyed Carthage in a “war” that was essentially an extermination campaign. The Romans burned Carthage to the ground in 146 BCE and Carthage’s surviving 50,000 citizens lived short lives of slavery after that, and Carthage’s settlements became Roman settlements. The same year, the Greek city of Corinth suffered the identical fate at Rome’s hands, and Rome ruled the Mediterranean virtually unchallenged. Ancient warfare had always been savage, but the fate of Carthage and Corinth marked a change in how Rome conducted it wars, and helped set the stage for Rome’s transformation into an empire.

The lake that surrounded Tenochtitlán greatly increased its effective hinterland, as the lake was one big low-energy transportation lane. The Mediterranean Sea was essentially one huge lake that provided a low-energy transportation lane to all civilizations along its periphery. Rome was the only power to ever really control all of it for any length of time, and that was a key to its dominance.

In 112 BCE, Rome fought a war against the last resistance in Northern Africa, but the war displayed signs of internal corruption in the Roman Republic, where officials were for sale. Military conquest, with its resultant spoils of plunder, quickly became the Roman way. Rome eventually became a huge parasite, providing almost nothing of value to the world while sending its soldiers to distant lands to conquer and rape them, with plunder routes to Rome’s maw covering vast distances. During the height of the Roman Empire, about 50 million imperial subjects were exploited to essentially feed the capital city’s residents, of which hundreds of thousands received free food. As the Republic became more far-flung, dominating the Mediterranean’s periphery, soldiers began having more allegiance to their generals than the Republic, and that situation contributed to the civil wars that ended the Roman Republic and began its status as an empire.

Scholars have argued whether the civil wars began in the second or first century BCE, but political strife began with a proposal for land reform, tendered in 133 BCE. With Rome’s conquests, it was flush with slaves, and rich landowners began to create great plantations, and the farmers that had been the backbone of Rome were being pushed off the land and outcompeted by slave labor. The situation was a preview of today’s agribusiness conglomerates. The land reform measure tried to reverse that trend, which enraged rich landowners. Slaves also began rebelling, with the first slave revolt beginning in 135 BCE, and the third and last one led by Spartacus ending in 71 BCE. Those slave revolts cost about a million lives. Roman politics was a very bloody affair in those days, where the losers of political wrangling would be murdered, along with their entire families and supporters. The man who proposed the populist land reform law, Tiberius Gracchus, was murdered in the Senate in 133 BCE, along with more than 300 of his supporters. A decade later, his brother, Gaius Gracchus, was elected to office and pursued the same land reforms, and he was murdered, along with 3,000 of his followers. That was the beginning of the Roman Republic’s end.

In 63 BCE, a conspiracy to overthrow the Republic was exposed by Cicero, and in 60 BCE the First Triumvirate was formed, and the three members, including Julius Caesar, all came to violent ends and the Roman civil wars began in earnest. The Second Triumvirate was formed in 43 BCE, and included Augustus Caesar and Mark Antony, of Cleopatra fame. When Augustus defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet in the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, the Roman Republic ended and Rome became an empire; the greatest that humanity has known. At its height, it governed a quarter of humanity. From the beginnings of the Roman Republic in 509 BCE to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 CE, Rome as a republic or empire lasted for nearly two millennia, and its impact on Western Civilization and hence the world has been incalculable. There are far too many important lessons to be learned from the Roman experience than this essay can explore, but I will try to keep the lessons within this essay’s theme and purpose, which is humanity’s relationship to energy and our collective future.

To modern observers, Imperial Rome’s rapaciousness and brutality may be its most notable aspects. Rome’s favorite entertainment was watching people being forced to murder each other. Originally an Etruscan funerary rite, it began getting out of hand by 200 BCE, and by 100 BCE the “games” were state-sponsored, and by Rome’s imperial days, emperors tried to exceed their predecessors with gory spectacles. While the Coliseum, built at the height of the “Peace of Rome,” became the center of that imperial entertainment, arenas dotted the Empire. The Roman Empire’s gladiatorial games consumed at least a million lives. With such blatant disregard for their innumerable victims, Romans could not be expected to display much enlightenment in their relationship with their fellow species, and in fact, the Roman Empire was by far the most environmentally destructive polity of the ancient world. The environmental devastation that previous civilizations imposed on their environments was merely a warm-up. This litany will start with animals. While Egyptian civilization drove all megafauna and many other species to extinction in the Nile Valley, Rome initiated waves of wildlife extinctions that covered all of North Africa, and a great deal of it was for entertainment in the arenas.

Mock “hunts” were staged in the arenas, and a law forbade using African animals for that purpose, but in 170 BCE an official exemption was issued, and animals died in the arenas in mind-boggling numbers. Crocodiles and hippos from the Nile, elephants and lions from Africa, tigers from India, polar bears eating seals, leopards, bears, bulls, and other animals unfortunate enough to be caught ended up in the arenas. They were often used as instruments of execution of condemned people, including criminals, Christians, and other enemies of the state. Cicero mentioned one lion who executed 200 people in the arena. But there was also a professional class that “hunted” those animals, and the animals were also regularly pitted against each other. Augustus had 3,500 animals killed in 26 such events, 9,000 were killed to dedicate the Coliseum, and Trajan’s victory over Dacia was celebrated with 11,000 wild animals killed. Elephants, rhinos, and zebras went extinct in North Africa, but a few lions survived in the Atlas Mountains until the 20th century. Lions, leopards, and hyenas lived in Greece, and leopards lived in Anatolia as late as the first century BCE. The Roman arenas were primarily responsible for their extinction. Animals being hunted to extinction are rare events today; most animals go extinct due to human-caused habitat destruction, but the Roman arenas were a kind of continuation of the Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer, at least until the animals went extinct. But habitat destruction was also monstrous during Rome’s reign.

Livy, writing during the reign of Augustus (27 BCE to 14 CE), recorded the astonishment of his contemporaries when learning that the Ciminian forest was once as dense as those at the Empire’s edge, in today’s Germany. Augustus and Agrippa had just returned from the frontier in Germany, and the Roman public was amazed that such a forest existed, and nobody suspected that only a few centuries earlier, Italy had such forests. All over the Italian Peninsula, the forests quickly disappeared. When the deforested hillsides came down, they often formed marshes and swamps. Malaria is Italian for “bad air,” and by about 300 BCE, Greece got malaria from its deforestation and marshes, and Italy got it a couple of centuries later.

Compared to the Greeks, Romans were not very innovative; they largely copied the peoples they conquered, but the Romans did invent window glass in the first century CE. Just as with those earlier civilizations, as Rome began turning Italy into an arid land, shorn of its forests, Romans began to learn conservation, and they used the new glass panes and oriented their homes to the Sun, to reduce fuel use. Just like the Greeks, as the forests disappeared, the day’s writers developed a romantic view of forests as places for quiet contemplation and, as in Hammurabi’s time, wood rustling became a lucrative pastime of Italian Peninsula thieves.

Rome had an underdeveloped economy. It largely relied on military conquest and plunder, not developing its domestic economy. Nevertheless, on an absolute scale, Rome was unprecedented, and a lead spike in Greenland’s ice cores in the first century CE provides evidence of Rome’s level of industrial activity. The world’s lead mining did not reach Roman levels again until the 1700s. The arenas were only one place of many where slaves died. The mines in Spain were also charnel houses, consuming lives at an astonishing pace. Many Carthaginians ended up in the mines, and Spain was deforested just like Greece, Italy, Anatolia, and the like. Modern observers, similar to those first century Romans, would scarcely believe that those arid nations hosted lush forests not long ago. I spent two months in Europe when I was sixteen and traveled the length of Italy, Greece, and the former Yugoslavia, and sailed through the Greek isles. I vividly recall the tremendous olive groves of Delphi and starker scenes, where islands were nothing more than barren rock and the mountains could have an austere beauty like a moonscape, and had I been told that all of those places hosted thick, moist forests a few millennia ago, I might not have believed it, either.

The Italian Peninsula, during Rome’s Republic days, hosted ceramic and glass-making industries. Those industries died out in Etruria and moved to today’s France, in the Rhone river valley in particular, and by 300 CE, the industry died in France due to deforestation, and moved to today’s Germany before the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Rome invaded the British Isles, too, and leveled about a thousand square kilometers of Britain’s forest for its iron industry. In a century the region was deforested and mining collapsed. As with those earlier civilizations, silt filled ports. Ravenna was a coastal town before the Roman conquest, near the mouth of the Po River, and today it sits several kilometers inland. Ostia, Rome’s port at the Tiber’s mouth, was abandoned after numerous dredging and earthworks projects, filled with silt, becoming a malaria-infested marsh, and Claudius built an artificial harbor at Portus. Trajan enlarged it, but ultimately Trajan built the new port at Civitavecchia, 80 kilometers away, which proved a very costly move. Numerous Roman ports suffered similar fates.

[Wade Frazier]

Humanity’s Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution – Part 4

Cyprus’s inhabitants learned the lesson of the first forest holocaust, and for the next millennium they carefully managed their wood resources, but Rome arrived, and two centuries of Roman copper operations completely deforested Cyprus, and it was not the last time that Cyprus’s forests became the subject of imperial plunder, because after a couple of centuries of recovery from Rome, Islamic and Christian empires fought over its forests.

North Africa was treated the same way. The Carthaginian environs became one big plantation for Rome, and centuries of Roman farming and deforestation turned Carthage into today’s desert nation of Libya. Rome ruthlessly deforested North Africa, especially near Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. The lavish lifestyles in Rome, compared to the short lives of misery that those who supported it, has no greater contrast in the ancient world, and arguably in world history. The Romans loved their baths and bacchanalian delights, and a fleet of sixty ships sailed the Mediterranean to find wood to heat Rome’s baths. Most of their loads came from Africa’s forests. I believe that is the only time in world history when firewood was freight for seagoing ships, and it is likely that the “lake” of the Mediterranean made that enterprise feasible. The energy-density of wood and the energy costs of shipping it make firewood uneconomical for shipping by sea, except in the Roman Empire’s insane economy. Roman aristocrats developed a fetish for a type of sandarac tree, and within a century that species was driven to extinction.

After defeating Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet, Augustus and succeeding Roman Emperors made the Nile’s breadbasket their personal preserve. The arrival of the emperor’s wheat fleet from Egypt each year was a big event for Rome’s hungry mouths. It is somewhat fitting that the last remnant of the ocean that has provided humanity with most of its oil was also the low-energy transportation lane for the world’s greatest empire.

Economics is the study of humanity’s material wellbeing, but humans have rarely thought past their immediate economic self-interest, even when the long-term prospects were obviously suicidal, such as today’s global energy paradigm. Because environmental issues affect humanity’s material wellbeing, they are economic in nature. As can be seen so far in this essay, there was little awareness or seeming caring in early civilizations that they were destroying the very foundations of their civilizations. Even if they did not care how much other life forms suffered, they did not seem to realize that it also meant that those oppressed and exterminated organisms and wrecked environments would not provide much benefit to humanity in the future, especially energy, whether it was food or wood.

Far more oblivious, however, is when the predilection is not using yardsticks to measure economic reality, but manipulating the yardsticks. From the earliest days of using “precious” metals as a medium of exchange, humans have been obsessed with cheating the system. As Adam Smith once noted, so-called precious metals are only “precious” because they are scarce. Smith called gold rushes about the most counterproductive activity that humanity could engage in. He stopped short of calling it stupid, but others did not refrain from it. The obsession with gold does did not even rise to the level of economic short-sightedness; anybody questing after easy gold is a thief, trying to steal from their societies to get a free ride. When nations invade others to steal their gold, that is naked, aggressive theft. With the economic logic that had a fleet sailing around the Mediterranean seeking firewood for hot baths, Rome invading other peoples to steal their gold makes a certain absurd and evil sense, and Rome did it regularly. Their invasion of Dacia (today’s Romania) in 105 CE was one of those instances, and it was done by one of the “good emperors,” Trajan, during the Peace of Rome. After conquering Dacia to fill the coffers with gold, silver, and plunder, where they razed the capital city to the ground, Trajan’s troops brought fifty thousand prisoners to Rome be sold as slaves, and ten thousand captured Dacians were forced to fight to the death in gladiatorial combat in the ensuing celebration, when 11,000 animals also died, and a still-standing monument commemorates Trajan’s heroic deed. During the Peace of Rome, Jews had uprisings against Roman rule, and Rome brutally put down the final rebellion in 135 CE, in the final scattering of the Jewish people. What Assyria and Babylonia began, Rome finished.

After two centuries of “peace” and good times, the Empire began unravelling. The debate surrounding the Roman Empire’s collapse has been a far larger cottage industry than arguing why the megafauna went extinct, but I think that Thomas Homer-Dixon has it right that Rome ran out of energy, or stated more precisely, its EROI declined to a level where the Empire became vulnerable to disruptions. When Rome crashed, it crashed hard.

Energy is the master resource of all organisms, all ecosystems, and all economies, and when a civilization centralizes its energy consumption, food and wood in pre-industrial civilizations, to a central city, and it has to keep expanding further and further from that city to obtain that energy, the tyranny of distance is going to reduce the EROI of those increasingly distant energy resources. Also, the practices of deforestation and agriculture provide short-term agricultural yields, but the wood would be almost instantly used (about 90% of the wood imported to Rome was burned, which was the typical ratio for ancient cities ). The soils would erode and become depleted and often abandoned as the land could no longer support farming, partly because the entire process made the land more arid. If they could import water to irrigate (usually a rare situation), that could help ameliorate the process, but it took more time and effort, making it more difficult. There were no accountants, scientists, or engineers monitoring and measuring the process, but all of those dynamics would reduce the EROI of the energy system, making it less resilient and vulnerable to disruptive shocks.

In those dynamics, where the imperial logic was to devour ever-more territory and people, it was doomed to end, and the end began with the world’s first great epidemic, the Antonine Plague, which began in 165 CE and seems to have carried off one emperor in 169 CE and may have killed Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE. In a possible case of the chickens coming home to roost, the plague was carried to Rome by troops coming back from a “good emperor” campaign in Mesopotamia. Marcus Aurelius’s death marked the Peace of Rome’s end. Another epidemic appeared in 250 CE, claiming another emperor in 270 CE as it still raged. After Rome was no longer the Empire’s capital, in 541 CE the Plague of Justinian hit Constantinople, which may have been bubonic plague. Those are about the only known epidemics of ancient times, including the Plague of Athens. By 600 CE, Rome’s population collapsed to about 100,000 people from a million at 100 CE, and in 1084, during the peak of the Medieval Warming Period and a time of great city-building in Europe, Rome’s population was 15,000, with its residents living among the ruins of the greatest civilization that Earth had yet seen. After Rome collapsed, the entire Mediterranean periphery went moribund for centuries, slowly recovering from the environmental and human devastation of Rome’s reign.

As previously discussed, when scientists and scholars discuss megafauna extinctions, including Neanderthals, or the collapse of civilizations, some will always attribute such events to climate change, deflecting responsibility from humans. Climate change has probably never been the ultimate cause for those events. The ultimate cause was likely always humans and everything else is a proximate cause, at most. In the past several hundred years, there are clear instances where deforestation and sheep grazing quickly turned moist forests and/or fertile farmland into semi-deserts in less than a century, particularly in the kinds of temperate regions where the first civilizations arose. When scientists have investigated and reconstructed the dynamics that led to the collapse of Cahokia, the classic Maya, or the Anasazi, the story was always the same, where human civilizations altered the ecosystems, usually via deforestation and agriculture, which made them lose their resiliency and a drought did them in, and those urban areas were permanently abandoned. It is similar to the hypothesis for why mass extinctions have punctuated the eon of complex life: those multi-tiered energy systems are inherently unstable and susceptible to collapse.

The rise and fall of Rome is an iconic example of the trajectories of pre-industrial civilizations. Only so much energy surplus can be skimmed off economic systems based on the energy of wood, food, and muscle power. I wanted to cover some civilizations in detail to make the dynamics clear, and will largely only survey other pre-industrial civilizations, as the patterns were similar, with some important variations.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

After a two-day break, I am back at it. Again, the early drafts of essay sections that I have put up on this thread will look plenty different by the time the essay is published. For instance, I added this paragraph to my Roman Empire section:


"The EROI of elephant flesh easily explains the Cro-Magnon obsession with them, as well as why they disappeared so quickly along with the other megafauna, but the really big game were whales. Whales are an order of magnitude larger than elephants, with the blue whale about thirty times the size of today’s largest elephant. Claudius played “gladiator” with a trapped killer whale at the Roman port of Ostia, and by about 500 CE, whales had been hunted to extinction in the Mediterranean. Until humans achieved the social organization and technological prowess that allowed them to sail the seas and hunt whales, that energy source remained unexploited. After Rome collapsed, professional whaling did not resume for another millennium (other than Basques in the Bay of Biscay, beginning around 1050 CE), when Europeans learned to sail the oceans with history’s greatest energy technology to that time: sailing ships that could navigate the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans."


As I near the end of the essay, I keep being reminded that I am really hunting for needles in haystacks. I am continually besieged by naïve notions of how the world works, with plenty of denial at their foundation. The people I will be looking for have had some awakening event that gets them past those barriers to comprehension, and they will either have relinquished or be well on their way to relinquishing their scarcity-based conditioning:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#dominant

While there are conspiratorial aspects of what is happening, it is really minor, and conspiracism can be a rabbit hole that people disappear into and never emerge from. Also, most fringe stuff is invalid and swallows up many who travel off the beaten path. To get to the good stuff and productive understandings is like walking the razor’s edge, and the people I will be looking for will not settle for comforting fictions, but they want to know the truth, whatever it might be, because only that will set us free.

I know that that is going to be far less than 1% of the population, but the Internet can help me find them, or them find me.

I really need to resist the many Level 10—ish suggestions I keep getting:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level10

where I water down what I am doing for mass appeal. That is a path toward getting nothing at all done. Again, if somebody really understands my message, it is virtually guaranteed that nobody else in their daily life will. Those are just the numbers, sad as they are, but out of seven billion people, finding seven thousand I think is feasible, but we will see. That is far more than initiated any of the other epochal events in the human journey.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I’ll try to keep these to a minimum, but I cannot overemphasize the dynamic below, and the second paragraph I just wrote:


Energy is the master resource of all organisms, all ecosystems, and all economies, and when a civilization centralizes its energy consumption, food and wood in pre-industrial civilizations, to a central city, and it has to keep expanding further and further from that city to obtain that energy, the tyranny of distance is going to reduce the EROI of those increasingly distant energy resources. Also, the practices of deforestation and agriculture provide short-term agricultural yields, but the wood would be almost instantly used (about 90% of the wood imported to Rome was burned, which was the typical ratio for ancient cities ). The soils would erode and become depleted and often abandoned as the land could no longer support farming, partly because the entire process made the land more arid. If they could import water to irrigate (usually a rare situation), that could help ameliorate the process, but it took more time and effort, making it more difficult. There were no accountants, scientists, or engineers monitoring and measuring the process, but all of those dynamics would reduce the EROI of the energy system, making it less resilient and vulnerable to disruptive shocks.

After newly exposed forest soils have produced a few crops, the yield will decline due to nutrient depletion. When the croplands receive less precipitation due to desertification, yields drop. When soils wash downstream via erosion, crop yields in those eroded soils will decline. Those effects reduce the EROI of farming those lands. When cropland is abandoned due to aridity, nutrient depletion, and erosion, and lands further from Rome were conquered, deforested, and farmed, it took more energy to transport those crops to Rome than with farms closer to Rome. That also depressed the EROI. When harbors silted up and needed dredging, or were eventually abandoned and a port was built further away, that also reduced the EROI of Rome-bound food. When food was used to feed soldiers who traveled increasingly vast distances to conquer and plunder peoples and their lands, those would be lower-EROI ventures than conquests closer to Rome. That dynamic has also been called imperial overreach in academic parlance, but in scientific terms, it is really just sucking the dregs of low-EROI resources after high-EROI energy sources have been depleted. Rome’s decline was really just another resource-depletion story. Humanity’s first one was killing off the megafauna, and Rome only experienced what Sumerian, Minoan, Mycenaean and numerous other early civilizations already suffered. Rome just did it on an unprecedented scale.


That dynamic also richly applies to today’s industrial economy, where the easy hydrocarbons are all gone, and the USA genocidally invades Hydrocarbon Country:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post652292

and where we have short-lived “booms” such as fracking, mining shale oil in North Dakota and tar sands in Canada. Those all have EROIs of less than 4, and even around 2, which is a far cry from EROIs of 100-to-1 that East Texas oil had nearly a century ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Texas_Oil_Field

That resource-depletion scenario, of steadily declining EROI, until the energy resource was gone or it was not worth mining anymore, extended to forests, whales, fur, and hydrocarbons. Of course, the end of the hydrocarbon era will make Rome’s collapse look like a picnic, unless we get to have FE.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The essay’s progress is fairly linear, but not always, as I end up revisiting earlier parts of the essay as I engage new material on various subjects that touch on the earlier chapters of the essay. I am seeing a seeming of lack of communication between various disciplines, where the data is “congealing” rather impressively, but even multidisciplinary efforts seem to be missing some connections, and one of them is how the disappearance of the world’s megafauna neatly coincides with what is now known about early human migrations. I’ll see sporadic acknowledgement of the connection, but it sure looks like that wherever behaviorally modern humans arrived on their global migration from that founder group of 60-50 thousand years ago, all other humans and all megafauna went extinct at about the same time. And we also have a great deal of evidence that they “interacted.” DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans is in the DNA of human descendants of the populations that encountered them. Proboscidean (elephant) hides have been found in South America, where humans made shelters out of them. The Australian megafauna that went extinct just when humans arrived seem to have butcher marks on their bones, and great fires in Australia and Indonesia coincide with the first signs of human habitation as well as the megafauna extinctions.

Again, the EROI of megafauna dwarfed every other food source, and those animals that never saw even a monkey before would have been east meat for those first human arrivals. I understand scientific and scholarly caution, but the pattern seems obvious, and I have not really seen anybody putting the puzzle together like that yet. I think that in the near future, many uncertain dates of early human arrival are going to be calibrated to when the megafauna and other humans disappeared. It is being done here and there, but nobody is really seeing it as a truly global phenomenon yet that I have seen, not incorporating the latest genetic and other findings. I won’t be so cautious in my essay. I have to believe that somebody else has done it, but I have not yet found it.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

As I survey the other pre-industrial civilizations (those early ones had similar dynamics to all the others), here are some warm-ups to industrial civilization and Peak Oil:

http://www.societalmetabolism.org/ae...esentation.pdf

http://www.advisorperspectives.com/n...of_Nations.pdf

Such authors may hear from me after I publish my essay, but I have found people like those to be among the most heavily-entrenched Level 3s:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level3

but they do understand, very well, how energy runs the show.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Robert J. Niewiadomski]

This NewScientist article on "reducing energy costs" might be of "some" interest to this thread spirit. Although not at all enlightening it gives an impression of general attitude to the so called "energy crisis".
Clean energy or cheap energy? We can have both

My reaction? Facepalm with a pinch of aargh

Sorry if you find this post to be a spam

PS
I am being kept away from this thread lately by my duties I wish i had more time...

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Robert:

No, not spam, but also the usual stuff. Scientists with a clue know how perilous our situation is. They understand quite well how energy runs everything, and that burning up our primary energy source million times as fast as it was made is crazy. The collapse of industrial civilization will make everything that went before it look like a warm-up.

Climate scientists and biologists are terrified. The sixth mass extinction is well underway, but it has been mostly “on the ground” as we hunted all the easy meat to extinction, have been working our way down the food chains ever since and are wiping out habitats at a surreal pace. Human-induced climate change is only getting started, and that one may scare scientists more than anything else, as epic crop failures and rising oceans can displace or starve billions of people, and they will not go quietly, and if World War III happens, it will likely happen because of fighting over Middle East oil, but it could also be fighting over food and water in the poorer nations, but they are usually not the ones with nukes.

I have called this situation a race of the catastrophes, and in that light, the denial that I see, and that Brian and other fellow travelers saw, is really kind of off-the-scale insanity, to not even be willing to consider FE as the permanent solution to all of those looming catastrophes, which is why Brian wondered if humanity is really a sentient species:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#sentience

I understand the point.

That Godzilla wants to terraform Mars as his ultimate survival enclave, while he has suppressed FE and a host of world-saving technologies, is only part of the insanity.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am doing some things to try to keep the chapter from becoming too monstrous, and here is what I produced since the last chapter post.

Best,

Wade

China’s was the second pristine civilization to rise, and although the Tibetan Plateau and Himalayas separated China from the Fertile Crescent and India, there was cultural and technological diffusion, and China was ahead of Fertile Crescent civilizations at times in technological and cultural innovation. By nine kya, agriculture was firmly established in China. China has had less investigation of its prehistory, but it seems clear that China’s deforestation began with agriculture, just like everyplace else, and by 1000 BCE, China was largely deforested. The rice paddy is the most sophisticated pre-industrial agricultural system ever created. It began adding to Earth’s methane concentration by 3000 BCE, and rice paddies bred malaria, to the extent that the paddy system in southern China was not successful until the local populace had partially adapted to malaria. As deforested lands alternately flood and desertify, managing water in China became the foundation of imperial practice like nowhere else in history. While pharaohs claimed divine control over the Nile’s flood, in practice they did nothing at all. Chinese emperors and the states they controlled, however, owed their legitimacy in their subjects’ eyes to how well they controlled flooding and drainage. The Yellow and Yangtze rivers carried more than thirty times the silt that the Nile did, and deforestation with the resulting flooding, siltation, and desertification have been major Chinese problems for thousands of years. While the idea has been challenged, the idea that China reached early political unity due to few geographic barriers has merit. China has been politically unified nearly continually for more than two millennia.

In northern China, dry farming was practiced, beginning with millet, and in southern China the rice paddy system dominated. China and East Asia never had the level of animal domestication that Fertile Crescent and European civilizations had, and human excrement was used to fertilize East Asian crops for millennia, up until industrialization. The lack of domestic animals in China meant that any kind of wild animal, including arthropods, became food.

Many important early innovations can be traced to China, with the earliest pottery yet discovered made there about 20 kya. The Chinese invented paper about 200 BCE, the fishing reel in the fourth century CE, toilet paper in the sixth century CE, paper money and porcelain in the seventh century CE, gunpowder in the ninth century CE, movable type and using a compass for navigation around 1040 CE, bombs and hand cannons in the 13th century CE, along with other weaponry such as land and water mines. Chinese innovations helped lead to Europe’s rise. Horses were not primarily used for plowing until the Chinese invention of the horse collar in the fifth century CE, which was used in Europe by 1000 CE. Horse-drawn plows could move 50% faster than ox-drawn plows, which increased Europe’s agricultural surplus. China mounted the largest oceanic naval excursions to their time, between 1405 CE and 1433 CE, but China soon became insular for reasons still debated. Europe then took the technological lead and soon conquered the world. China’s political unity was likely the ultimate reason for its change in direction, where controlling the throne controlled the empire’s direction.

China followed the developmental trajectory of other pristine states, where it was initially peaceful for thousands of years, until the chiefdom began giving way to early states, and potentates were men, they had harems, and so forth. Elites commandeering their disproportionate share of peasant-provided agricultural surplus is a universal aspect of all pre-industrial civilizations. China and Fertile Crescent civilizations both suffered from intrusions by pastoral societies from Eurasia’s grasslands. Marija Gimbutas presented her Kurgan Hypothesis in 1956 to explain the spread of Indo-European languages, and the hypothesis’s primary thrust was that male-dominated pastoral peoples, with their male, sky-god religions, conquered agricultural peoples with their Earth-based goddess religions. Her hypothesis was used by feminists ever since and created a firestorm of controversy. The Kurgan Hypothesis may not be as wrong as its detractors allege. However, as with many radical hypotheses, the initial one was found deficient during testing, but variants of the original hypothesis survive, which is the case today.

Nomadic pastoral societies did attack and invade settled agricultural ones, and the spread of the Indo-European language and pastoralism is probably a valid connection, but for different reasons than Gimbutas hypothesized. Human herder societies independently developed the ability to digest milk past infancy, which increased their carrying capacity five-fold versus raising animals for meat, and then they became a threat to sedentary civilizations. Not only was it a huge energy advantage for pastoral societies that could digest milk, but it made many marginal environments inhabitable by sedentary societies, and made already settled ones far more energy and nutrient secure. Also, when peoples began to rely more on cattle than crops, they could become more mobile. Pastoral societies of the steppe were patrilineal, which are the most violent societies, and they indeed invaded settled societies and often set themselves up as the new elite. Peoples who could digest milk not only came to dominate grasslands, but they also did well in marginal agricultural lands, such as Northern Europe. The allele that allows lactose digestion reaches nearly 100% in northern Europe, while those that evolved without milk-producing animals, such as Chinese and Native American peoples, cannot digest milk at all. Lactose tolerance appeared about 8 kya in pastoralists and spread with their migrations. In places such as Northern Europe, there were no vast grasslands to roam, pastoralists became sedentary, and the combination of farming and dairy cows was northern Europe’s staple for millennia.

Other genetic adaptations happened in the same region around the same time. Blue eyes are blue due to a lack of iris pigment, and first appeared between six kya and ten kya, and the region around the Baltic states is thought to be the home of blue eyes, as it has the highest blue-eye frequency on Earth. Blond hair first appeared in northern Europe about 11 kya, and first became prevalent around Lithuania about five kya. Those losses of pigment are related to light skin, which was an adaptation to reduced sunlight in regions further from the equator. Lighter skin evolved independently in Europe and East Asia, and may have evolved numerous times, and in Europe it seems to have evolved about six kya. Racism is a relatively recent phenomenon because race itself is recent on the evolutionary scale, as geographically isolated humans began the process of speciation.

It is generally accepted today that the original pristine states were based on agriculture and before those societies became states, when they were at the village level of social organization, they were largely classless and women had high status, likely related to women’s economic contribution. As agriculture became masculinized, probably due to the physical requirements of forest clearance and handling draft animals, men ascended in importance and women’s status declined. The general thrust of the Kurgan Hypothesis is likely accurate, in that pastoralists invaded agricultural societies, where violent patrilineal nomadic societies invaded sedentary societies and set themselves up as the elite and the religion of the conquerors became the religion of the conquered. The agriculturalists of Europe, however, were likely hunter-gatherers who adopted agriculture, not those from pristine states. They may have not been so peaceful, and a European mass grave from today’s Germany dates to about seven kya, about the time of the alleged Kurgan Invasion, and debate has raged whether that grave was due to endemic violence or invaders. Beginning about 3500 BCE, from archeological examinations of European graves, evidence of violent death, particularly for males, shows a dramatic increase. Between 3500 BCE and 2000 BCE, the rise of the professional warrior can be seen in Europe’s artifacts and grave goods. The Iceman died in the Alps about 3300 BCE, and he died violently. New Guinea’s highlanders lived in isolation for many millennia and adopted agriculture, but as with other relict populations of the founder group migrations, they were in continual warfare, and straying into another village’s territory was risking death. Anthropologists looking for an epoch in the human journey when neighboring peoples coexisted peacefully have always come away disappointed. There have been brief, non-violent phases of the human journey, in some situations, usually where there was relative economic abundance. When resources became scarce, and theft, coercion, and violence became profitable, then bloodshed usually attended the situation.

About 1000 BCE, one of the largest migrations in the human journey began, called the Bantu Expansion, which expanded because of their use of iron and agriculture, and they displaced or absorbed hunter-gatherers as they expanded across sub-Saharan Africa. In a dynamic too common in human history, invading men mated with the women of the invaded, which mitochondrial DNA provides evidence of.

Mesoamerica’s Domestication Revolution was one of two certainly pristine ones known, and the one around today’s Peru may have been another. The other two pristine states of the human journey arose there, and they followed the same general patterns as Sumer and China in that they began peacefully with no classes and, as they grew into states, men came to dominate, elites appeared with monumental architecture devoted to them, potentates had harems and divine sanction, and other features that seemingly evidenced universal human traits and/or reactions to similar environmental conditions. The development of religion in what became Mesoamerica’s pristine culture, the Zapotec state, has been documented by archeologists who traced a seven-thousand-year progression from hunter-gatherers to egalitarian early agriculturists to an elite-dominated society to a pristine state. It was similar to how Mesopotamian civilization developed, including the replacement of singing and dancing by priestly rituals. Highly controversial aspects of Mesoamerican societies have been human sacrifice and cannibalism. They definitely happened and on a pretty grand scale at times. The question of Western Hemispheric cannibalism has touched on the lack of domestic animals, so it may have had nutritional aspects, or what is called culinary cannibalism. But most seeming cannibalism is of the cultural cannibalism variety, where eating flesh has symbolic meaning, whether it is eating somebody to keep their spirit in the family/tribe or gain spiritual dominance over a fallen foe. Cannibalism was a common charge made against peoples that Europe conquered, but was usually a sensational allegation to remove their humanity and justify their bloody treatment by Europe. Columbus made his cannibalism accusations against Caribs from whole cloth.

It took about two millennia to domesticate maize (wheat may have only taken a couple of centuries or less to domesticate), for one of humanity’s greatest feats of domestication. Maize was a near-universal staple among the Western Hemisphere’s agrarian natives in 1492. Anthropologists have surmised that the Western Hemisphere was a few thousand years “behind” Old World civilizations in 1492. In South America, the Moche culture, which produced the Western Hemisphere’s other pristine state, began smelting bronze about a thousand years before Europeans arrived, as elite prestige goods. What kinds of civilizations might have emerged from the Western Hemisphere had Europe not intervened will always remain a tantalizing question.

Because the Western Hemisphere’s inhabitants were virtually all in their Stone Age, they did not ravage their environments like Old World civilizations did, and many societies were environmentally sustainable and provided seeming answers to questions that scientists have asked about Old World civilizations' development. The natives of coastal California were familiar with agriculture, as it was practiced by inland tribes, but they never adopted it. California was so bountiful, and its climate was so human-friendly, that they retained their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Similarly, northward on the Pacific Coast, natives created an economy where half of its calories derived from salmon runs, and those peoples were relatively sedentary without agriculture. Natives turned the Great Plains into a big pasture for bison, with the biome partly maintained by annually burning the grasslands. In Mesoamerica, milpa farming has been sustainable for thousands of years. In the Amazon, the natives transformed the rainforest, where a higher proportion of trees provided human-digestible foods than any other “wild” place on Earth, and they terraformed thin tropical soils with charcoals (intentional) and ceramics (maybe unintentional), making super-soils called terra mulata and terra preta. In summary, native practices in the Western Hemisphere were often sustainable if not quite abundant. But when civilizations arose, they had similar problems to their Old World counterparts, and not just the injustices of steeply-hierarchal societies, but environmentally.

The North American city of Cahokia, North America’s only pre-Columbian city, likely collapsed from environmental over-taxation. The Anasazi civilization also overtaxed its environment and collapsed in a drought, as did the Classic Maya. The lauding of Native American environmental conscience seems largely a romantic invention, similar to the “peaceful savage” fantasy. While Native Americans obviously had a far gentler tenure on the land than what happened in the Old World, it may have been only a matter of time before they “progressed” with metal smelting, rampant deforestation, and the like. Without draft animals (the bison was probably the only candidate for that, and turning it into a domesticated draft animal may not have been feasible), their civilizations might have taken very different paths than the Old World’s. But we will never know and speculation about it does not seem very profitable, but those civilizations did show different ways to do it, even if what the Spaniards stumbled into seemed familiar, with cities, markets, elites, monumental architecture, warriors, priests, peasants, slaves, and so on.

This essay’s purpose, regarding the human journey’s epochal phases, is to show how humans achieved each epochal event, which was always about tapping a new energy source, and how each event transformed the human journey. While the civilizations of India and Southeast Asia had unique qualities and achievements, and the Buddhist religion has a great deal to commend (founded in the name of another “rebel,” as Christianity was, as well as other world religions), the economic methods of all pre-industrial sedentary societies were essentially the same. Agriculture provided a local and stable energy supply that allowed for sedentism, forests were removed to make way for crops, and domestic animals were used to provide labor and/or flesh products, while their manure helped replenish soil nutrients depleted by agriculture. Everywhere that agriculture appeared, so did civilization, with varying levels of urbanity. Elites dominated all civilizations, and they almost always invoked either a divine nature or divine sanction to justify their status, and they always engaged in conspicuous economic consumption. Agricultural workers provided the food that sustained civilization, but the agricultural surplus of such systems were always modest, and the primary preoccupation of all peoples for all time before the Industrial Revolution was avoiding starvation, which industrialized peoples seem to have partly forgotten.

The methods of pre-industrial civilizations, with deforestation and agriculture, were never really sustainable, as they disrupted ecosystems and even affected local climates. The only way that the milpa system, for instance, was sustainable was that they let the land go fallow for eight years after two years of crops, to let the damage heal before farmers repeated the cycle. Only when practices were intermittent, to allow ecosystems to recover somewhat, could they be called sustainable, but even then the idea is somewhat misleading. It was an ecosystem commandeered for human benefit at the expense of the original ecosystem’s denizens, and the practice never approached true abundance. Those civilizations were all mired in scarcity, with only about one person in a thousand living to a ripe old age, and only about one-in-100,000 “making it” economically (the potentate). In such a world of scarcity, life was often cheap, and virtually every pre-industrial civilization had forced servitude, from forced marriages to debt bondage to chattel slavery to becoming a human sacrifice to other forms. Because of pre-industrial civilizations’ low economic productivity, economic freedom primarily resided with the elite, so the struggle for freedom characterizes all pre-industrial civilized peoples. However much peoples around the world seemed different, with different cultures, they were all still UP. With the contributions from China and other civilizations, much of it coerced, such as what the Western Hemisphere provided to the world (potatoes, cassava, maize, sweet potatoes, a functioning democracy, mountains of gold and silver, and many other benefits), Europe conquered the world, and along the way it tapped a new energy source.

To again compare people from different epochs, where that stone tool Tesla could not have imagined what his/her invention would lead to a half million years later, or how a member of the founding group could not have comprehended what their journey led to fifty thousand years later, imagine a hunter-gatherer of ten thousand years ago being dropped into Rome at 100 CE, much less London in 1600 CE. History has some relevant examples. When Ishi, the last of his people, came out of hiding in his dying world and strode into civilization, it caused a sensation. He soon died of tuberculosis, but his encounters with civilization were recorded. He attended an opera, and the popular account portrayed his rapport with the diva, but Ishi actually stared in amazement at the audience, as he had never before seen so many people in one place. When he saw an airplane in flight, he laughed in amazement. Imagine a hunter-gatherer of ten thousand years ago being dropped into imperial Rome. That hunter-gatherer had seen dogs, but horses, cows, sheep, and the like would have been astounding, and watching a horse or ox pull a cart would have been stunning. Crops would have been an amazing sight. Imagine that hunter-gatherer at the Coliseum. The building and crowd alone would have boggled his mind, even if the festivities might have been horrifically familiar. Metals and glass would have seemed magical. Writing had not yet been invented, so even the concept would have been difficult. There were no more singing and dancing religious rituals, and no wide-open spaces to hunt a meal. Imagine that hunter-gatherer visiting a Roman bath. Hot water alone would have been surreal, while the cavorting might have been delightful. What would his reaction have been to Rome’s markets? Rome was also loud and could be a hellish existence, so the hunter-gather might have longed to flee to the countryside before long, but the countryside would have little resembled the one he knew. He obviously would not have understood anything that anybody said, but they were also all members of UP, so he would have seen many behaviors and traits that he eventually understood, but how long would his shock have lasted? Could he have really ever adapted to Roman society (if he did not quickly end up in the arena as a novelty)? It was all made possible by the local and stable energy source that agriculture provided, which led to an epoch that changed very little until the next energy source was tapped: the hydrocarbon energy that powered the Industrial Revolution. The rest of this chapter will survey the developments that led to that momentous event.