An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

The seeds of famine

The more food production is accelerated, the more shortage prevails

Small bands roamed over earth a million years ago. Some became successful hunters of the plains, and followed wild herds up to the northern tundras. To those bands the ending of the Ice Age was a catastrophe. The tundras followed the retreating ice border, shifting further away from the fertile sun, and the herds that grazed on those tundras decreased and eventually disappeared. At first dense forests replaced the tundras, and later deserts replaced the forests. At that time, the whole human population was still below four million souls, nearly invisible in the landscape, and shrunk when game became scarce: bands adapted their population size to available resources as they had always done.

As long as all humans subsisted on hunting and gathering of food, the natural low calorie diet, combined with extended breast-feeding, kept population size in line with available resources. This low calorie diet was not the same as starvation. It was a consequence of eating wild animals and plants, all with low natural proportions of fat.

But at the end of the Ice Age the equilibrium between population and resources was destroyed.

It seems to be a simple rule that production of food is all what is needed to avoid famine. Labour brings about food and wealth, while idleness, its opposite, leads to shortage. There is however one important catch to this rule. I do not refer to the old saying that the labourer usually ends up in poverty and the idle one ends up in wealth. I refer to a more fundamental catch, in which production fails already before distribution of wealth comes to mind: the catch that if food production involves the production of workforce - of children - simultaneously, in the end the growing number of mouths can surpass the production of food. The more production is accelerated under such conditions, the more famine will prevail.

In the best case innovations might circumvent this pitfall by boosting the productivity of labourers. But such innovations will confront us even sooner with depletion of resources, and will eventually have to introduce new sorts of food.

All imaginable alternative foodstuff – wood, polymers, earth, cannibalism,... - have been tried somewhere by creative tribes, but has nowhere lead to a more enjoyable life. Cannibalism is not as exotic as it may seem. We have already introduced cannibalism in cow raising, and already recycle human organs on a massive scale. A back or a side is not so different from a heart or a kidney when it comes to saving lives, and in some cultures people might rather agree to donate their side than their heart. Of course our scientist must first find a vaccination for the hideous Creutzfeldt Jacob disease or Kuru. But if the food is carefully handled and stored, it is the least prone to depletion. In fact, the depletion rate would match with population growth, which seems fair. Anyhow, only if a population becomes really desperate such innovations would become attractive.

A population caught in forced labour will grow without end, and come in conflict with concurrent populations and with its environment. No matter how small in the beginning, in time such a population will have to fight rivals until it destroys itself by exhausting resources. A contest with our own environment can never be won in an acceptable way.

Forced labour made abundant offspring a blessing

In a few places, the end of the Ice Age imposed the diet of grazers - wild grasses – on the hunters. This kind of food was hardly fit for human consumption: hours of gathering, grinding and cooking were needed to make one meal, comparable to the damping substance found in stomachs of slaughtered ruminants – the only part of a prey that can be produced by craft, and that was still craved for by the last hunters of the African Kalahari and the American Prairies. The same rigidity that made grains so arduous to toil, made it also storable for the always faster returning periods of hunger, and allowed the population to survive on territories with uncertain yield.

At times the environment deteriorated severely before already born children became adults. Under such circumstances women and children might be forced to carry out the mindless, repetitive manipulation of grasses.77 If such a situation persisted for more generations, child labour could grow into routine, and it could become conceivable to breed children to carry out the labour that had become indispensable.

Where eating grasses was the last dreary alternative, food was no longer provided by skills and knowledge about the natural world, but by simple, recurring, mindless work. No forager would choose for such labour: children and women were forced into it by means of violence and forgery.

Grasses – corn, barley, millet and rye - are the exact opposite of the food procured by hunters. They are not difficult to trace, but grow like weed. You do not stalk them with thrilling vigilance, but endlessly step forth with your back bent. You do not capture them in one enchanted strike, but repeat the same reaping gesture from sunrise to sunset. And this is only the first part: grinding with a grinding stone takes more hours each day than the whole hunting and gathering craft before. Then water and firewood must be carried, and the bread kneaded. And the next day was like yesterday again, over and over until the last day of your life.

When Gilgamesh doubted that he had really slept for seven days, his hostess showed him seven breads, because it was impossible to make so many breads in a shorter time.

The British palaeontologist Theya Molleson studied the bones and teeth of 162 individuals gathered at excavations in Northern Syria. The deposits span three millennia and cover the beginning of agricultural labour. Where cereals were cultivated the skeletons showed signs of degeneration: excessive loads were carried by adolescents; long hours of grinding had caused gross arthritic big toes and injured and deformed backbones, legs and forearms. Molleson wrote:

It was the preparation of grain for eating that was the most demanding and labour-intensive activity of the settlement, as it still is in many places. The grain had to be pounded every day because the seeds would not keep once they were dehusked. The dehusking with mortar and pestle and the subsequent grinding in a saddle quern78 would have taken many hours. What we had found on the bones, then, were the tell-tale signs of long hours spent at such labour.79

The bones revealed also that this grinding had been the work of women. Molleson also discovered many marks of injuries, and wrote that using the saddle quern with too much enthusiasm or haste might have caused them. Surely enthusiasm was not as much the drive as was compulsion.

Marvin Harris writes that in the villages of Java, boys of twelve to fourteen years contribute thirty three hours of labour per week, and girls of nine to eleven almost forty hours, while the population of Java rises fast. A study shows that in Bangladesh boys compensate their cost of raising already after three years of child labour. Marvin Harris continues:

Contrary to the popular perception that people in less developed countries have large numbers of children simply because they do not know how to avoid conception, there is much evidence that more children and larger households mean a higher, not a lower, standard of living in the short run. In explaining why they did not want to join any family-planning programs, the men of Manupar village in the punjab explained: “Why pay 2,500 rupees for an extra hand? Why not have a son?”.80

Cambridge professor Partha S. Dasgupta writes that in poor countries ‘members of households may spend as much as five to six hours a day fetching water and fuel’. He stresses that in such countries

small households are simply not viable; each one needs many hands. In parts of India, children between 10 and 15 years have been observed to work as much as one and a half times the number of hours that adult males do. By the age of six, children in rural India tend domestic animals and care for younger siblings, fetch water and collect firewood, dung and fodder. It may well be that the usefulness of each extra hand increases with declining availability of resources, as measured by, say, the distance to sources of fuel and water. 81

Leaders in industrial societies, relying on children to bring in social funding, act in the same manner when they try to counter negative birth ratios by handing out breeding premiums. A German politician proposed to pay a monthly fee of a thousand euro per child. A society where life expectation grows with months every year, and where many play their weekly game of tennis twenty years after their retirement, still needs children to do the work. Equally perverse is selective immigration. For a long time uneducated workers have been sought in hinterlands of poor countries, which jeopardized the already difficult growth of modernity in Europe. Now the West, lead by Canada, starts to selectively import educated foreigners. This is the reverse of ‘development aid’: civil engineers, doctors and so on, trained at the expense of poor countries, are deployed in countries rich enough to buy them out. Only free migration regulates wealth beyond the short term in a stabilizing manner.

Growing violence is the inevitable result of the economic exploitation of children, because in this manner problems are multiplied and postponed each generation. If more inhabitants have less resources at their disposal, more coercion is inevitable. This can only lead to an exponentially growing judicial and repressive system, and to pitilessly fortified borders. If less resources are available to more inhabitants, crime, uproar, repression and wars will rise.

Emergence of forced labour is often presented as the glorious invention of agriculture or the agricultural revolution. It has often been written that thanks to the ‘invention’ of farming, humans ‘finally’ could build complex societies, and could spend more time at cultural developments. Jared Diamond wrote that rather the opposite is true:

the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism,that curse our existence.82

A more complex society is nothing people were ever waiting for, and the time spent at cultural developments was not the satisfaction of an ancient longing, but the response to a need for suppressive ideologies.

Birth control is older than civilizations, and childbirth is a cultural choice per sé. Primitive bands applied condoms made of fruits or bladder, used herbs or provoked abortions. But when forced labour turned children and women into battered workers, offspring became a valued asset to production, a blessing to the fathering master. Birth control became a sin, and far into the twentieth century CE Western states prosecuted the use of contraceptives as a sexual obscenity. Even before man knew how to breed animals, he learned how to breed humans for profit.

Until that moment forced labour had only existed in insect communities. Now this new way of living spread rapidly, driven by its own nature: more children were wanted because their labour provided survival, but once grown up, the new generation needed more grounds to grow food for more people - and more children to toil them. And when those children had grown up in their turn, the cycle started all over. The old population balance was broken and replaced by a human avalanche. Forced labour spread over the continents as a plague - as fire lit by an accidental spark. In this process existing foraging communities, who had escaped starvation by adapting their population size, where assimilated as labour force, or annihilated – a process started ten thousand years ago and going its last steps in the tropical forests on various continents today.

In the final part of the New Stone Age, four million humans had multiplied ten times. Workable grounds became sparse, and tribes stored the hard won harvest to defend it against rivals. Villages were walled in and war was invented.

When multiplied ten times more, to four hundred million, war became the sacred centre of civilization in Rome and elsewhere. Peace was no longer the normal state, it became a break between wars.

When humans once again had multiplied ten times, the planet was divided among nation states with armed borders, standing armies and patriotic ideologies. Such nation states focus on the production of expensive weaponry, and defend themselves heroically against famished families searching for a speck of living space.

During the roughly ten thousand years from the dawn of forced labour until mid twentieth century, population has grown exponentially from four million to four billion. During the twentieth century alone our number tripled, from less than two billion to over six billion.

Today, with a too large but still expanding earth population, the cruelty of wars for resources between nation states is being overtaken by nearly insolvable civil conflicts. Those conflicts range from urban gangs in overcrowded cities to ordinary genocides. Peace is no longer a break between wars, but an occasion to buy groceries.83

Simultaneously epidemic diseases spread among dense populations of plants, animals and humans; suitable land is ever faster declining because of exhaustion and salination; hazardous mountain slopes and river valleys were and are invaded; continuous deforestation causes floods, wind storms, mud- and landslides. Whenever scientists found remedies for the most recent catastrophe, the population flood accelerated and new, more dangerous plagues took shape.

Until the eighteenth century CE, only half the human population grew older than twenty, and only one out of ten reached a lifetime of forty years. Since life expectancy did not rise, the sudden population growth after the Ice Age can only be explained by a growing production of children.84 Population grew, not because agriculture bettered the living conditions – if this were the case people would have lived longer – but because children were labourers.

Once grown up child labourers become superfluous and even a burden: the surplus had to leave and reclaim land of their own. As a result forced labour spread rapidly, and after a few thousand years the remaining hunters and gatherers were either annihilated or forced back to the most hostile forests, deserts and wastelands. Once every suitable location on earth was taken by farmers, all further expansion, even continued existence, required more exertion. This accelerated again the capturing and submission of humans, either for meat, for sexual reward or to labour.

In all agricultural societies, youngsters are expected to leave the household and reclaim land of their own. In this manner boys of the Nyakyusa of Tanzania leave their paternal home and establish a new hamlet of their own, eventually marrying and taking their wives there. Today population density has left no more space for non-violent migration. European farmer sons were expected to leave for America in the eighteenth century CE, and by the twentieth century Europe had colonized most of the earth. Boys in Moroccan villages are expected to take the dangerous route for Europe, and Mexicans risk their lives along the iron curtain shielding the US.

Technical differences become a matter of life and death on the borderline. This provokes a never ending competition in metallurgy and engineering. New production techniques – consecutive application of animals, ploughs, wheels, metals, guns - allowed higher population densities, organized in more complex societies, at the cost of higher efforts and more coercion. While people from poor countries put everything at risk to escape to the promised land, rich countries boost hazardous production and develop new weapons to secure primary resources in the countries the poor try to escape.

The need for expansion can only be postponed by those innovations: after a short period of relaxation, it becomes clear that more intense labour processes demands more violence, and violence always has the last word.

When emigrants– such as the early European colonists arriving in America – encountered land with less intensive methods of subsistence, the new land seemed free while it was only used – completely - in a less intensive manner. The last five thousand years all land on earth was entirely occupied in various grades of intensity, depending on the accidental stage of violence. It is only because of lack of insight in exotic economic systems, that valleys, deserts and forests seemed vacant. With every new emigration the more archaic economy lost the confrontation, and new technologies lead rather to more people suffering more coercion, than to better living.

Not a single agricultural revolution, but a global demographic flood

Agriculture can not be regarded as one invention, nor as a revolution. The sum of all kinds of labour we now call farming, was not one industry; neither was there a burst of innovations at one moment in time. Agriculture evolved over millennia, and exploited different techniques at different times and places. What really made the difference in the long chain of innovations made by humans over millions of years, was not the invention of agriculture, but the demographic explosion caused by submission of women and children. This demographic explosion, and not the splendour of one magnificent innovation, has left its imprints in the archaeological records.

Long before the New Stone Age humans must have known enough about wildlife and plants to influence natural productivity. They cleared the wilderness when needed, facilitated the increase of useful plants, dammed waterways to catch fish, built traps and diverted animal tracks. The well-documented progress in equipment of ancient hunters and gatherers – gradual refinement of artefacts of stone, wood and antler – indicates a steady technological progress. This progress must have been accompanied by changes in the way people perceived and used their environment, even if time has wiped out the softer traces of their skills.

Foragers interact with their natural resources as anyone else, but lack reasons for intensive, damaging acts. This is the reason why foraging has nowhere been eliminated totally. In many societies the men despise labour and continue hunting, either as a necessity or as an amusement, and at times as an amusement disguised as a necessity. Such pretexts are uttered by villagers who disappear for ineffective tracking while women and children labour, but also among nobles and notables, who defend their time passing as the sustaining of a natural balance while game is raised and released before their feet. From Bantus to Carolingians and beyond, hunting remains an occupation for the lucky, while toiling the land is an occupation of women, children and slaves.

The Wichita and other American Indians did grow tobacco but stayed with gathering and hunting for most of their other needs. Many colonial missions, as today many development workers, educate the natives in the raising of crops of their own choice and call this 'development’, while local 'primitive' subsistence is abolished. The ensuing misery became a new argument for more import of ‘care' and ‘development’.

Agriculture appeared in the archaeological records in Asia, Africa and America whenever forced labour was established. It expanded on all continents for thousands of years, and this expanding is still going on. It is not a ten thousand years old invention: it is still being ‘invented’ today in fish farming of fish, deer etc.…. Agriculture is inflicting violence upon humans, animals and plants, applying force to long time known natural processes. It is the export of human overpopulation – including all its problems - to animals and plants. It is a reaction – yet not a remedy - to a deficient environment.

The recent emergence of fish farming positively demonstrates how deterioration of the environment causes the disappearance of gathering and the proliferation of labour, and at once allows a realistic glimpse at how the ‘invention of agriculture’ might have happened in the late Stone Age.

Although fish farming is presented in the media as a huge technological advancement, the ancient Egyptians knew already how to raise fish to enliven their garden ponds, but preferred to catch more flavoursome fish for consumption in the wild, a sport enjoyed by all classes; also Medieval convents farmed fish, and monks have been known to revolt against their daily salmon diet.

Still in eighteenth century Europe, anyone could make a living by casting nets in brooks and waterways and selling the surplus on the village market. Since that time, many sweet waters have become too polluted and river fish disappeared or diminished. Consequently fishing at sea was intensified until sea fish diminished in its turn. Towards the end of the twentieth century, sea fish became farmed for the first time at an industrial scale. Since it is undeniable that our ancestors knew how to farm fish, the only possible reason for this transition is that the human population explosion destroyed river life and emptied the seas.

Fish farms multiply along the coasts only because seas are polluted and exhausted, and contribute to more pollution and exhaustion. Intensified fishing followed by environmental catastrophes and plagues, made fish farming beneficial only in the twentieth century CE. At the beginning of a large scale fish farming project, industrialists engage in discussion sessions with unconfident local fishers, in the course of which they appease the fishermen and learn from them the best breeding spots. In those spots cages are installed and overcrowded with fish, swimming in a curtain of excrements and chemicals. Salmon, for example, is fed with artificial colours to keep its flesh red, but there is also a contest going on to develop new antibiotics – pots of gold - to counter the new plagues that emerge in the crowded containers and contaminate their environment. Even wild fish swimming near farming cages can no longer be regarded a natural product. In general, farmed fish is fed with waste, but also with fish brood, gathered in big scale plunder of poor countries with little environmental laws or control, to the extend that also those countries import the same detrimental chain of events.85

In the last thirty years game was ever more raised on farms in New Zealand, Europe and North America. The number of ‘wild’ game raised in captivity has doubled in ten years, and must amount to millions. In the USA industrialization has evolved to the point where ‘wild’ female deer have electronic devices implanted to preset ovulation ready for artificial insemination.

Pests

Neither pests nor epidemics existed before forced labour. Whenever labour intensified, more parasites – viruses, bacteria, insects – became dangerous competitors.

Before agriculture intervenes, plants and animals are scattered over the landscape, and parasites have to establish efficient methods for the difficult migration between dispersed hosts. But when plants and animals – including humans – are concentrated in limited areas, the distance between hosts no longer hamper this migration: parasites then propagate explosively and a new pest is created. Farming, by its own nature, turns trivial diseases into catastrophic plagues. Those plagues are no accidents as farmers tend to believe, but play an essential role in the necessary selection of genes suited for agriculture. Not human intelligence, but feared pests turned wild animals and plants into livestock and crops. Intensified farming is itself one complex catastrophe, a meta-pest.

Animals and plants living in high densities and uniform environments are not only prone to regular outbreaks of familiar pests, but also provide the ideal nursery for new, more virulent plagues: accelerated and manifold procreation exponentially boosts mutations. The most feared mutations are parasites resistant against pesticides, more efficient transmission paths, and adaptation to human hosts. Those mutations are selected when they survive exhaustion or pesticides, and wait, in an undetectable quantity, to hit again by surprise.

In societies based on intensified farming, worldwide traffic of farm products is the tail piece of the actual epidemiological menace. Industrial farms can only survive if their products are marketed in a wide field, and the last century has witnessed a fast increase in traffic of farm products, both slaughtered and living. While farms become better organized to nurse all kinds of plagues, transports help to propagate them between enterprises.

Wild animals can transfer infections between farms, while predators restrict those infections as long as they can remove infected animals in sufficient measures. When natural surroundings shrink below a certain limit predators first disappear, or are even purposely removed, from the natural environment. When this level is reached, infected animals – birds, rodents, game, fish - are no longer eliminated, and the transmission of a pest becomes unchecked, even up to where pests are allowed to evolve to a threat to the predators. Leisure hunting can only replace this selective predating if hunters run after their prey to catch it with hands and teeth.

Europe was believed to be free from foot-and-mouth disease for thirty years, when in 2001CE it ran into the most terrible outbreak ever. It took a year to stop the epidemic: in that time span two thousand infected animals had been detected in Great Britain alone, and ten million sheep had been preventively slaughtered.86 The previous outbreak, in 1967 CE, was mostly transmitted by wind, birds and game, and never evolved to a national crisis. But in 2001 CE, nationwide transport of industrial farm products provoked a catastrophe of unseen dimensions. At this moment foot-and-mouth disease is rapidly spreading in Africa, of course with much less attention of the international media.

Avian influenza has attacked fowl farms in the USA for half a century. One outbreak in 1983 CE led to the preventive slaughter of almost twenty million turkeys, at a cost of nearly sixty-five million dollars.87 Outbreaks in Hong-Kong in 1997, 2001 and 2003 CE led to the killing of three million chickens and ducks – more than twice (literally) all the birds on the island. Disturbingly, in 1997 CE eighteen humans were infected also, six of which died. In 1999 CE two girls, aged one and four, recovered from the disease, but in 2003 CE a girl of eight died of avian influenza in the Fujian Province of China. While her one year older brother recovered, their father died of the same illness in a Hong-Kong hospital. In The Netherlands and Belgium in February 2003 CE, avian influenza lead to the death of twenty million birds, but also infected eighty-four humans. One veterinarian died of pneumonia after contracting the avian influenza virus during a slaughtering operation. It is inconceivable what will happen when the virus eventually crosses the species barrier with humans definitively.

Farmers constantly seize more of the remaining wild areas of Africa, forcing wildlife on ever smaller parcels. High concentration, stress and malnutrition provide the ideal climate for plagues. At the end of the nineteenth century CE, nine out of ten cows in Sub-Saharan Africa were wiped out by rinderpest that was imported with livestock.88 Rinderpest has not yet infected humans, but is highly contagious and fully destroys every herd it infects in less than two weeks. In 1982 CE, after ‘a very successful’ international vaccination campaign that took twenty years, a new African outbreak, of equal magnitude, caused a loss of two billion dollars. The reaction of the FAO was that ‘the lesson of these events is that near eradication is not good enough’, but never mistrusted the strategy or even the actual feasibility of eradicating the last of any virus from our planet. At about the same time rinderpest raged through Asia and reached the borders of Europe. Outbreaks occurred from Africa to Russia in during the last decade of the twentieth century. In 2002 CE the FAO expressed the fear that the virus may re-infect a part of the world free from the disease since the 1950s.

Hardly recovered from repeated rinderpest outbreaks, Africa was already confronted with an even more dramatic epidemic, bovine tuberculosis, which is contagious for humans and predator animals. As a consequence the 230.000 African lions, mostly feeding on ruminants, were reduced to a mere ten thousand in the course of the last decade of the twentieth century, and constantly new exhausted animals and cadavers are found. In safari parks and zoos of the USA, several lions died of bovine tuberculosis and the import of lions was blocked, which seriously damaged African economies.89 South Africa imported Cape buffaloes back from Singapore in an effort to breed disease-free animals. Lions might well disappear from the African wild parks altogether, which will give a tremendous blow to the crucial tourist industry. At least one cynical park director compensated the loss by having wealthy tourists to pay for shooting the sick animals.

Risks caused by farming are inevitably also imposed on the oldest farm animals, humans:

What makes [the Ebola] outbreak alarming is that it is not the only case of a recent epidemic of an infectious disease. There have been a number of newly identified infectious diseases within the past few decades, including the HIV virus that causes AIDS. Other examples include Lynn disease, the Kyasanur Forest Virus, the O’nyong-nyong virus, hepatitis C and E viruses, Legionnaire’s disease, toxic-shock syndrome, and cat-scratch fever, among others. There have also been new variants of old diseases, such as a new type of cholera bacterium and strains of tuberculosis that are antibiotic-resistant. 90

A swine flu mutation, the ‘Spanish flu’, of 1918 CE killed nearly 50 million people, despite all claims of progress a death toll comparable with medieval plagues, and with smallpox, yellow fever, malaria and polio. Completely new however was that so many people were killed by one epidemic in such a short time: the Spanish flu opened the era of global epidemics or pandemics. Numerous outbreaks of swine flu followed, and millions of animals have been destroyed to ward off the next human catastrophe. Two lethal pandemics have swept the world since the ‘Spanish flu’, one in 1957 CE and the other in 1968 CE. Each time the virus had altered its structure to trick human immunity. Influenza viruses recently found in pigs in the USA have genes from both human and bird viruses. This evolution is instigated by increased vaccination.91 During a recent crisis in The Netherlands, bird viruses were again detected in pigs,92 and it is only matter of time before the next human-killing virus turns up. Dr Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, comments:

Because the influenza virus constantly mutates, and because only a few changes can make a non-pathogenic virus highly pathogenic, we should assume that an outbreak of any new strain or subtype is potentially dangerous to humans. 93

The list is not conclusive and will keep growing . It is generally presumed that SARS recently crossed the species barrier, and a mutation of the ‘plain’ cold virus is suspected by many specialists to be the source of this lethal disease that rapidly penetrated the continents. BSE (mad cow disease) was first detected in Britain in 1986 CE, and seven years later the ten thousandth case was confirmed.94 CWD (chronic waste disease), a relative of BSE, was first found in deer in Colorado in 1970 CE, and has since spread among wild and captive deer and elks in the Northern states of the USA and in Canada. The human form, CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) is caused by eating infected meat.

No remedy

Scientists have long been captives of ideological paradigms created in the nineteenth century CE, saying that barriers between species and populations are firm, and that each species, nation or subculture has its private plagues. Today they are overwhelmed by reports on always mutating parasites, crossing borders of sexual preference, embarking on intercontinental flights and migrating from bovines to their predators (lions and humans), from pigs to birds, from birds to us.

Despite expensive research going on for more than a century (in the case of tuberculosis) or in recent years (in the case of mad cow disease), and despite the propaganda, none of the diseases mentioned above can be cured, or prevented by other means than test-and-burn. Vaccines are unavailable, impractical or indecisive – the distinction is academic.

It is not feasible to stop a virus, too small to be seen through a conventional microscope, by closing borders, forbidding travelling, or building huge walls. On the other hand we can not afford to continue and even fasten the already massive test-and-burn slaughters, or besiege society for ever. The quarantine methods conceived in nineteenth century labs are useless in the twenty first.

Official institutes do not stress the numbers of victims and, despite the absence of solutions during a whole century, prefer to communicate to the public that the end of an eradication campaign, or the design of a vaccine, is only a few years away, and sometimes a brave politician can be tempted to either firmly declare a plague wiped out – only to be contradicted too soon by reality: by combining mass reproduction of living organisms with repeated chemical and genetical inflictions, we constitute the most effective laboratory of pest evolution ever. We are not the terminators of pests, we are their sparring partners.

If we continue with intensified, industrial handling of plants and animals, in time preventive killing of humans will become inevitable, because it is only a matter of time before the threat of a too lethal pandemic is posed by a sudden mutation erupting in Toronto, Oran or Fuji. In a few hours the ignorant inhabitants of such a city can become a threat bigger than ever posed by the families living in Dresden or Hiroshima, and it is likely that governments will decide to an equal measure to save the rest of the world population – unfortunately only for the time being.

We can not defeat the menace of pandemics, and we don’t have to - we just need to stop causing it.

Genetic engineering

Genetic engineering is one step further in intensified farming, and therefore one step further towards an outbreak beyond the most terrifying nightmare possible.

It is a dangerous misconception that the variety of parasites is forever fixed and can be catalogued for once and forever. Pests evolve continuously: viruses only make themselves known by repeated attacks, and, once known and countered, change into other unknown parasites. Only a limited number of those transient viruses can ever be known to science, and then only when serious damage has already been inflicted. Of those known parasites, again only a part can be contained with the available range of remedies: massive preventive slaughter, therapy, vaccination and genetic engineering; yet, despite this broad arsenal, parasites are so small, and the earth so diverse, that no parasite can ever be eradicated definitely, unless the global environment is at the same time made nearly unfit for all other life forms as well.

Genetic engineers try to reduce the variation in livestock to ever lesser genotypes. One of the seeming benefits is that livestock becomes ever more resistant to life threatening pests, which number is growing because of our ever intensified meddling. Cloning will then be used to reproduce as many ‘mono-genetic specimen’ as possible, all programmed with one identical reaction to certain parasites. But unfortunately no genotype can ever be engineered that resists all possible parasites, no only because this is infeasible technically, but even more important because many are unknown. Even if we knew them all and could produce a plant or an animal resisting them all and yet still edible, new parasites will emerge: by making specimen resistant to the parasites that recently bothered us, we invite those parasites to mutate, and by doing so open the gates to a brood that will be more effective and therefore more disastrous.

When finally a parasite breaks through containment and finds access to the mono-genetic livestock, it enters an unlimited and unprotected target population, and will burst out as never before a parasite did. If this parasite can refrain from annihilating its prey immediately and completely – which will not be easy - , it will become the most successful creature that ever lived on our planet – and it will owe this to our huge investments, government spending and scientific effort.

At first all will be done to fight contamination: free roaming game, birds and all wild life will be exterminated as pests, because they might transport the disease between sealed off production units – and the chemical pollution of the environment, still feared in the twentieth century CE, will be begged for and purposely carried out in the next. The one time fear for a silent spring will turn into a desired relief. After the first outbreaks, farms will evolve to sterile cellars surrounded by armed guards, with intravenous administration of foods, hormones and drugs.

Farming serves no goal if matter is not in some way exchanged with the outside world, and some minor, yet inevitable and unforgiving error will lead to an unknown tragedy. Some political leader will solemnly proclaim the threat ended, and accordingly the expensive security burden will be relaxed. Since the entire livestock was programmed to react uniformly, the parasites will return unhindered, and almost immediately cause the global pandemic we dutifully prepared and facilitated by every scientific effort and with every technological means.

Worldwide preventive killings will lose the race with raging infections, and lead to a famine, and from there to a black market of contaminated food. Then it will only be a short time before the virus mutates and attacks humans, and make seem trivialities everything that happened before.

Economy and value

Farmed fish and game taste poorly, and are cheaper only for a short time because we destroyed the seas and forests where they roamed for free. Exactly in the most evolved societies, game and fish gathered in the wild are valued highly and paid the manifold of their elevated counterparts. If human population growth had been halted a few decennia ago, we would never have made this expensive pseudo-progress.

It would be reasonable to consider the cost and benefit of various modes of production, from foraging to industrial farming, before we voluntarily bankrupt the planet we live on. In order to broaden this choice our number must descent, not rise.

To substitute labour by the management of natural resources in a variety of cases, is not a return to the primitive state, but can be the application of modern insight and technology. It might comprise the use of radar or satellites to gather animal migration data, and computers to simulate vegetation development. It could broaden tremendously our choice of ways to live, redirect human migration streams for the better, and provide a variety of opportunities for people who before remained unsatisfied in their accidental culture. Prosperity is not proportionate to the industrialization level, on the contrary: the combination of acceptable investment and high product quality can provide incomes far above those provided by the miserable manufactories now appearing everywhere in poor countries.

In recent times we have already destroyed some valuable opportunities, mostly when extensive production in the perimeter countries was boosted by metropolitan agents. Ironically, the catastrophe always starts disguised as economic growth.

‘Savages’ had survived the crises in the remainders of European forests and moors, keeping off destructive market rages by primitive farming, poaching and selling wild products. Then their way of living was threatened by the ever-increasing demand for fuel by an industry burning up entire forests each year. To the industrialists and their Christian ideologists, poverty was God’s punishment for the sin of idleness, and wild, untilled nature was wasted, ‘waste’-land. European countries one by one decided that those remaining wastelands should be brought under cultivation to create labour and counter the growing poverty. During the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century CE, enclosure of fields ended the ancient institution of communal grounds.

Representatives from the most afforested provinces argued in vain that the number of arrested beggars in their regions was less than one fifth of other provinces, due to the wild products of uncultivated pastures and forests. But the destruction of natural resources had become a moral task.

The traces of the European ‘savages’ have been eradicated when racial ideology had to link civilization with their continent, and savagery with all others: even their names disappeared from the dictionaries. Yet there is no reason why one continent would have no ‘savages’ in their forests and moors, as long as they withstood population pressure. French speaking countries had their ‘Masuirs’, named after their huts (‘masures’). German speaking countries had their ‘Amborger’, named after the river bends they lived on (‘ham’, as in ‘hamlet’)), and Britain had its ‘hovellers’, a term only surviving as a synonym of ‘beachcomber’.

As a pinnacle of cynicism those savages, once uprooted by deforestation projects, were hired as day labourers to cut down and feed to the ovens of industry the very environment they had survived in, only to become beggars or deplorable industrial workers themselves. Those savages, rather than farmers, provided the proletarians.

In the nineteenth century CE, industrial society had impoverished its defenceless population on a scale never seen before. Workers, many with little children still sleeping in their arms, marched to hideous working places, hoping for nothing but enough food to live the other day: and even then wages dropped when the market failed and the next crisis arrived, always within a few years.

In the USA, cattle grazed freely in the North-Western Open Range, until the system destroyed itself by giving in to the growing demand for meat on the international markets. The cattle population had reached five million when the exceptional cold winter of 1886 CE reprimanded the too intensified production and wiped out the trade forever. Today cattle are still raised semi free in harsh climates and mountain ranges on various continents, but many affluent pastures in suitable river valleys and on loam soils have been turned into intensively cultivated fields, only to be occupied by dwellings when the population raised further: during the previous century numerous fertile winter beds changed into life-threatening traps for its inhabitants.

An equally dramatic example is the fate of African wildlife. Export of ivory has flourished for at least four millennia, and had an important part in the wealth of the continent. A thousand years ago Europe became its most important buyer. When the British abolished slave trade in the nineteenth century CE, their fleet extended the trade of African ivory on the European markets. Some Bantu tribes specialized in hunting elephants to provide the British with ivory, and were soon equipped with firearms. The African elephant was almost extinct at about 1880 CE, and a century later, in 1989 CE, when farming had destroyed most of their habitat, the six hundred thousand remaining animals were entered on the list of endangered species. Then the growing human population conflicts with scanty remaining territories, and elephants are purposely killed off by park officials or become constrained to too small natural reserves. The prohibition of ivory trade, once the richness of Africa, was illustrated by pyres in Kenya, where mounts of valuable tusks was set on fire by romantic Europeans and hailed by the world press, while an impoverished population looked at the spectacle. Now the last elephants are being enclosed in fences, and once abundant resources are turning into the next trivial, depressing tourist curiosity.

Other African victims of population pressure are the Pyramids of Giza, the last of the Seven Wonders of the World. The pyramids were erected in spacious plains, but as today Cairo’s roughly fifteen million inhabitants still expand year by year, and slums and tenement buildings start to wash over the valuable capital that those monuments are, and thus threat at once an already impoverished economy and a human heritage of the highest order is disappearing.

If humans had not been decimated at regular intervals by wars and plagues, earth would have become unsuited for agriculture a long time ago. Agriculture, war and plagues are all aspects of the same cultural system of forced labour, and persist together.

Today it is possible, and even necessary, to reduce human population and set up a relaxed economy, and the only way to attain this is to amend the dignity women and children. If the total world population would be at the average of 1900 CE (a too high number already), and would coexist with the technical instruments of today, impoverished societies could again found their economy on their own valuable resources; people, today condemned to slums or dullness, could discover a more rewarding life; individuals everywhere would regain the permanent liberty to chose and change a life varying from the solitude of unspoilt nature to the most dynamic metropolis.

When population pressure is stopped, subsistence on the individual, local, national and global level can be repaired. Therefore mass production of goods must be halted next to the mass production of people.

The Third World will be the most important beneficiary from this transformation. Production of valued goods with technological knowledge, extensive farming and gathering, and scientific and touristic exploration of unspoiled landscapes and monuments, will lead to the progress that never succeeded by means of industrial development designed for cheap mass production.95

Exhaustion, migration and the struggle for resources

Swamps and deserts hardly affected before, were invaded by societies based on forced labour. Where humans never went because the circumstances were too harsh, labourers were forced to face hardship.

This system worked in warfare also: labourers of different sides were forced into battlefields of unseen terror, by always more effective methods of coercion. Legends and chronicles recount about heroic bravery and brilliancy of generals, but the outcome of a confrontation is only the result of the accidental power balance - unfortunately, this power balance becomes only apparent after the confrontation, and is hardly ever as expected. Parties can find themselves in endless battles, uncertain alliances or ultimate integration, Or one of them is destroyed, submitted or escaped by further migration. If the victor wins many such battles, he builds a vast standing army, a growing administration and a pompous ideology. From those battles grow powerful cities and eventually civilizations. Then comes a moment when the expenses overtake the benefits. What seemed a glorious conclusion turns out to be just one random moment in the ugly, tedious and lingering course of the history of war. It was an ephemeral stage in the cycle of rebirth of civilizations.

Early myths testify of the population pressure caused by production of children as a workforce, and of the ensuing migrations. In forager myths, the maker of all things had left because his work was done, and from then on he and his creation ignored each other without remorse. In myths of early farmers, on the other hand, women are often belittled, while both women and children are scorned. The maker often retreats in disappointment. He is aware of his creation, and is not pleased at all.

In a myth of the South American Arawaks, the maker was imitated covertly by his wife, but all she obtained was women. A tale of the African Basuto goes that once upon a time humans, like other animals, discovered sex and bred unrestrained. The world became so noisy that their maker climbed the sky-hill to escape this commotion, and he is climbing ever since. The African Barotse have a myth saying their maker was badgered by his neighbours all the time, and in vain called for a tribal gathering to discuss his problem. Eventually he left earth and was never heard of again. Among the neighbouring Koko a myth says, on the contrary, that he left in regret because so many of his tribe had emigrated. An Egyptian myth has a similar ring where Ra is disappointed about the constant nagging of his creatures:

Then Ra spake unto Nu, saying: - “O thou first-born god from whom I came into being, O ye gods of ancient time, my ancestors, take ye heed to what men and women are doing; for behold, those who were created by my Eye are uttering words of complaint against me.”96

Many migrations went over sea. A Northern Australian myth goes that Mother-of-All and her companion walked out of the sea. Mother-Of-All was aching for sex, while her companion had a penis that was so long he had to carry it around his neck. Yet, they had no idea how to mate. Then the penis became stiff, searched its way to the vagina of Mother-Of-All and impregnated her. All beings streamed out of her womb. Afterwards both disappeared and were never seen again. In another Northern Australian legend, three children of the sun had to escape the land of death in a bark canoe, and arrived in uninhabited Arnhem land: two of them had a vagina and a penis, while the third had only a penis. All those organs were enormous, and wherever they arrived they copulated, each time fathering a new kind of beings. Then, one night, the undivided male took advantage of the dark, and hatched off the penises of his bisexual companions, and by his jealousy caused women into being. This legend reminds of the bible, where the maker first tried to resolve Adam’s solitude by creating all kinds of animals, and finally counterfeited Eve out of his side.97

Foragers expelled from open landscapes to dense forests remember the open sky of their past. A tale of the Warrau of Guyana says they were kept as slaves in heaven. When one of them heard the birds talk about how beautiful everything was in the world below, they escaped down on ropes through a hole in the floor. A fat woman held the rope, but when she wanted to leave, she got stuck and sealed the hole with her body. Later women discovered sex, and this disgusted the master so much that he never let them in again. Both he African Pygmies and the North American Cherokee have a legend telling that their maker lowered them from the sky on ropes, and then lifted the rope to leave them on their own forever.

In sub-Saharan Africa forced labour appeared first in South Cameroon. This caused the expansion of Bantu farmers over the whole continent, pushing back the Khoisan to the Kalahari Desert and the Pygmies to the heart of the tropical forests. Hutu and Tutsi, both Bantu people, arrived in Rwanda and Burundi separated by a few centuries. European colonialism and the succeeding ‘development aid’ again intensified the destruction and pillage of natural resources. At this moment, the Rwanda soil is completely exhausted by farming, except for a Mountain Gorilla Reserve, now destroyed by half in favour of a new, but already failed, agricultural project promoted and subsided by the European Community. The Bantu regards the remaining Bambuti and Batwa Pygmies as their vassals. The recent civil wars in Central Africa discharged into a gruesome genocide exemplifying the inevitable outcome of sustained forced labour. In this drama the Batwa pygmies are the silent victims.

In South-east Asia forced labour arose between Borneo and Australia on shrinking islands, when the ending of the Ice Age made sea levels rise by ten to twenty meters. The resulting population explosion took the direction of the Pacific. Canoes loaded with pigs, chickens, dogs and taro roots reached the Solomon Islands six thousand years ago. After one thousand years, farmers had occupied Fiji and headed for Tonga and Samoa. Three thousand years ago the Polynesian triangle was reached. Within a few centuries the Marquises islands and New Zealand where inhabited, the last grounds on earth attained by humans. By then the Polynesians had adapted a fatal culture of unlimited growth. There was always a new island behind the horizon, waiting for a canoe to be discovered, and to be colonized by brave youngsters when the motherland became too crowded. Easter Island was occupied as the last of Polynesia. Its famous statues were originally directed east, facing and endless ocean with no grounds left to be taken. When the first Europeans arrived the indigenous forests had already disappeared. The original population had multiplied to seven thousand inhabitants, but collapsed when the exhausted soil did not yield enough plant fibres any more to make or even repair fishing nets, nor wood to build boats to escape the dying island. Eventually cannibalism was adopted to fill the need for fat and proteins. The islanders divided themselves in fictional Short-Ears and Long-Ears, and started a civil war in which the large monuments were destroyed with the same zeal as they were once erected. Population was reduced to six hundred men and thirty women when Captain Cook visited the Island in 1772 CE. After a slave raid launched from Peru in 1862 CE, only a hundred and eleven remained. The last indigenous tree of Easter Island, of the Toromiro species, died in 1950 CE.

On Sri Lanka forced labour emerged at about 3000 BCE. The Veddah, the oldest inhabitants of the island, were still five thousand in 1911 CE, but were reduced to four hundred in 1963 CE, and have disappeared since.

On the 8th of May 1876 CE, Lalla Rookh, the last Tasmanian Aboriginal, passed away in Hobart at the age of seventy three. For one hundred years, her bones were exposed at the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart, until she was allowed the meagre dignity of cremation, and her ashes were scattered on the waters near Bruny Island.

Forced labour was established in the Middle East at nearly the same time as in Eastern Asia. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza has demonstrated that farmer villages invaded Europe at a pace of one kilometre per year, or about twenty-five kilometres per generation.98 Except for the ancestors of the Basks, the original hunters and gatherers were annihilated.

When forced labour reached the Northern steppe once abandoned by the old drive hunters, climate fluctuation acted as a pinball machine for a series of Southward expansions, assaulting civilizations from the Iron Age until the Middle Ages. Jordanes called Scandinavia ‘a hive of races or a womb of nations’, where from also his own nation, the Goths, came forth.99 In the last centuries BCE, Rome was under pressure of the savage Kimbren and Teutons. In the first centuries CE new tribes, originating in the Baltic and Scandinavian regions, destroyed those tribes and subsequently flooded the Roman territory. In the next centuries the Mongolian Huns, migrating from the Central-Asiatic steppes, swamped them in their turn. The Roman Empire was destroyed in 500 CE, causing famine followed by a plague killing half the population.

Between the eighth and twelfth century CE, Normans invaded the European coasts of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. During the eighteenth and nineteenth century CE 20 million Europeans migrated to America; during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century CE, some 14 million European Russians migrated voluntarily to Siberia. None of those emigrants were triumphant people: they did not go to underdeveloped continents to bring civilization, they were unemployed poor trying to escape the terrible slumps of industry, or exhausted mud and ramshackle farm sheds. After those poor followed merchants, clerks and soldiers. In the second half of the twentieth century CE, Asians and Africans fled their destitute homelands: 15 million made it to Europe, and 12 million to the USA.

In America forced labour, based on maize, spread from Mexico from about 3000 BCE on. Arriving farmers either supplanted hunter-gatherers, or created some kind of symbiosis in those spots where the environment was not yet suited for agriculture as it was at that time. Slavery, manhunt and cannibalism swamped both continents. From 200 BCE, farmers spread over the Eastern Plains. Around 700 CE others invaded the Mississippi valley. Pueblo farmers spread at the same time in the Northern regions of Arizona and New Mexico, but were destroyed by the Navajo and Apache, migrating south from Canada just before the Europeans arrived.

In South America, forced labour first appeared in the lower Amazon basin. Warfare became an important source of (human) meat, since no beef was available. The South American Mbaya were hunters who received tribute from Guana farmers, and in turn protected the Guana from tribes competing farmers.

While European governments punished anyone who just dared to name contraception with imprisonment or worse, earth was drowned by their masses: In 1875 CE, a band of Chono, a hunting tribe of the Chilean Archipelago, was encountered for the last time. Then they disappeared forever. Of the Alakaluf, of the same area, only fifty were counted in 1971 CE. The Yamana, hunters of Tierra del Fuego, were still three thousand in the nineteenth century CE, of which only forty were still counted in 1933 CE. The last Selk’nam, also of Tierra del Fuego, died in 1966 CE, at the age of eighty.

The inventive power of man and the limits of growth

In 1972 CE a study called The Limits of Growth: a Report for the Club of Rome stated that ‘the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next hundred years’. Once recovered from the first shock, most players in the economic field decided that they better hurried if they wanted to beat the competition, and the main impact of the report was not the search for a structural solution, but an intensified rush to lay hands on whatever resources were still available, and to gulp it down before anyone else. But energy sources are not used up like a bottle of ketchup: they slowly fade while prices increase over decades. Many things called ‘progress’ are nothing but finding ways to squeeze a bit more of the leftovers out of nature at an higher cost - perpetual motion and the goose that lays the golden eggs have often been promised, but are not expected anytime soon.

The Report for the Club of Rome is proven right by the grim rivalry for the available energy sources raging today all over earth in - both humanely and financially - disastrous wars: the violent confrontation between the Atlantic civilization and the Middle-East in recent decades, can only be understood in relation to the problems studied in the Report for the Club of Rome.

Wealth

The idea that wealth comes from labour is natural in a society where the pace of the human avalanche has reached the level at which the products of nature are no longer abundant, but need labour, slavery and warfare to acquire. Just like householders feel blessed by an abundant offspring, rulers are blessed if a large population is toiling for their benefit. One time a duke asked Confucius about the best way to govern his territory. The answer reflects this benefit:

The Master said, “Good government obtains when those who are near are made happy, and those who are far off are attracted.”100

Persian governors received about the same admonition from their scholars:

Good government is that which maintains and directs a province flourishing, the poor untroubled, and the law and custom true, and sets aside improper laws and customs. [..] It causes friendliness and pleading for the poor.101

Under conditions of modernity, when the inherent value of each individual requires that the needy should be given - at least some – relief, humans can become a cost instead of a benefit. If not for this cost imposed on labour by modernity, rulers can have their subjects controlled by epidemics and famines, and let them live for profit or die for free.

Ancient records show that the Chinese population increased from some ten million, a thousand years BCE, to a hundred million, two millennia later. European population records date back to the sixteenth century CE. The oldest demographic theory in the West, the so-called ‘utopian model’, was elaborated by Marquis de Condorcet in the midst of French Enlightenment.102 Condorcet claimed that humans will always find new techniques to solve the problems caused by their growing number. The progressive Condorcet was a fierce opponent of the Catholic Church, but his theory has in time been recuperated by the latter as a suitable argument against the use of contraceptives. In the following upsetting quote from the Catholic Encyclopaedia the Church prefers population checks by means of war and environmental disasters rather than by horrendous family planning:

we can set no definite limits to the inventive power of man, nor to the potential fertility of nature. [..] subsistence will keep pace with population as long as men have standing room upon the earth. [..] The assurance that population, if unchecked, will inevitably press upon subsistence does not terrify us, when we realize that it always has been checked, by celibacy, late marriages, war, natural calamities, and other forces which are not due to scarcity of subsistence. The practical question for any people is whether these non-scarcity checks are likely to keep population within the limits of that people’s productive resources. So far as the nations of the Western world are concerned, this question may be answered in the affirmative.103

If the inventive power of man is unlimited, then it is sad that so many people have been slaughtered in the rush for space and resources going on as long as history. Where was this inventive power when young lives were sacrificed for land, for oil, for copper, for uranium and for a hundred other resources?

There is no reasonable ground to call the ‘inventive power of man’ unlimited, as Condorcet did and as traditionalists do today. Theologians would even call such a claim presumptuous and even a blasphemy, if they did not find it useful to deride contraceptives. And the implication in the quote above that sexual habits, conflicts and calamities are not influences by scarcity, is unfounded and even contradicted by observation.

It is true that humans have repeatedly intensified production by introducing new techniques, thereby often increasing costs, risks and depletion speed, but no law certifies that new inventions will always pop up in time to save our skin. On a micro-economic level it can be possible to increase crops by adding fertilizers. On a macro-economic level however, adding fertilizer to one spot is only possible if fertilizers are taken away somewhere else at a certain effort, cost and risk. The price of this fertilizer mounts when the range where it is taken grows, and when the process by which it is prepared progressively needs to be intensified. The same goes for emigration: it seems to solve the problem in the original place, but really exports it to the promised land. Emigration to America relieved pressure in Europe, but was fatal to the original Americans. Small scale interventions might be harmless, but as a rule miracles are expensive: the price can either be the ruin of populations or environments Even if we get fertilizers from Mars, we will have to pay for the transport. The price is not only economical, it is also political and social.

Extensive economics are represented, with an unwittingly racist undertone, as a consequence of ignorance, and the world is flooded by Western aid professionals, youngsters and misfits, all ready to ‘educate’ dumb natives. This results in cooking lessons for women in starving African villages, in puppet theatre for homeless children in Central America, and in splendid careers for Western people in poverty management, all around the globe. In this ‘development’, intensified agricultural techniques and the creation of industries are represented as scientific breakthroughs and magical cures of the free market. In reality they mean pillaging to feed the West at sell-out prices.

In this regard Western ideology cleverly represents the finest technological tweak as a major development. One sad example is advertised as the 'Green Revolution'. From 1962 CE on the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations financed the testing of thousands of varieties of rice gathered on all continents, and outbred plants yielding double weight. Despite the worldwide exalted praise in the media, it soon turned out that poor farmers were not able to procure the enormous amount of water, insecticides and chemical fertilizers needed to grow this new rice. Clearly the various old rice forms had been used because they were best adapted to local circumstances, not because the local farmers were hopelessly ignorant compared to Atlantic science. Eventually expensive industrial rice production pushed local farmers deeper into poverty. In 1972 CE a drought killed more than a million people in India and Bangladesh, and threw a manifold in the deepest misery. All what is left of the ‘Green Revolution’, once presented as the new horn of plenty, is a hollow drum beaten by deceitful ideologists. In reality it was just another escalation in our violent attack on natural resources.

This fiasco is the simple result of an economical law known as the ‘principle of diminishing returns’, which predicts that productivity increases ever slower as more efforts are spent. Curiously, this principle is common knowledge among economists for almost two centuries. It not only predicts the outcome of the Green Revolution, but also explains why foragers have a more relaxed life than labourers.104

Warnings for the outcome of the ‘Green Revolution' were seldom uttered and never heard, because we are accustomed to an ideological representation of science as a lucrative form of treasure hunting. Glossy science magazines keep us constantly ‘at the brink of’ the most amazing discoveries, and depict scientists as magicians who at the most dramatical moments are told by a lightning of insight under which tree exactly a pot of gold is buried. Of course, pots of gold buried under trees do exist, but their discovery can hardly be considered a law of economics. Daily science usually searches to intensify the effect of human activity, at rising costs and risks.

It is as Eve climbing ever higher in the Tree of Good and Evil, to gather more apples as more Adams get interest. For some time she will hit upon new apples, but each new apple will require more effort because it is more difficult to locate, and because the climb takes longer while the branches become thinner. As she discovers unexpected reserves or better climbing techniques, her optimism strengthens. And right when she starts to believe that the tree is infinite and that the law of diminishing returns is false, she will break a leg or worse. In our time we have added insecticides and genetic manipulations to boost up apple production, but the basic rule of rising costs and risks remains the same.

The energy deadlock

One of the many real life examples of the limits of growth and the role of innovations is found in the procurement of energy – a key element of western society.

For a long time humans, on all continents, gathered wood to cook, to harden pottery and to produce charcoal for the smithery. But wood becomes scarce when the population grows. An average bronze age family needed two square kilometres of forest to gather the necessary firewood without depletion. When population pressure is too high, the forests will become exhausted and will turn into grass- and shrub lands, and women and children have to search ever further. In our time many families in poor countries spend hours each day fetching fire wood.

In the nineteenth century CE, when the European industry had already exhausted animal power to the limit, furnaces of factories burned up whole forests. When almost all trees had disappeared from the continent, and numerous wild plants and animals had been extinct, the ‘inventive power of man’ turned to a commodity that was already known and moderately used by medieval villagers: fossil coal found at the earth surface.

Again this combustible was eliminated in a few decades, and the ‘inventive power of man’ started to dig always deeper. Open pits then evolved to hazardous shafts which gradually reached a depth of two thousand meters, while energy became ever more expensive. Today explosives are embedded at regular intervals to make shafts collapse on purpose, if necessary with everyone in it, thus avoiding propagation of accidental floods and fires. Each year hundreds of miners, of which many children and women who spent most of their lives in the dark, died in such disasters.

It is a misrepresentation to say that today ‘advances in technology make it possible to mine thinner beds at greater depths at reasonable cost’.105 In the long run the cost of energy never became reasonable by means of technological innovations, but rose continually. Technological innovations did not relieve the price of energy. Exactly the opposite is true: exhaustion boosted the cost of energy, and only the resulting high price made technological innovations worthwhile. Technological innovation is not some mysterious free-of-charge revelation that amazingly happens when it is the most needed. Innovations become economical when depletion has boosted prices beyond their costs.

Already after one century of intensifications presented as technological progress, coal became scarce, and the price rose to such a level that the ‘inventive power of man’ turned to a combustible already moderately utilized in ancient Persia: petroleum.

In less than one century, ever intensified exhaustion made petroleum reserves shrink. Consequently the price mounted until the dangers and expenses of nuclear energy became an economical alternative.

If this whole evolution would be a triumph of human intelligence, energy would today be cheaper, safer and more reliable than a few centuries ago. In reality it is a chronicle of intensified exhaustion of successive energy sources.

Today the even more expensive and more hazardous hydrogen cell technology is developed. It is hoped to commercialize hydrogen by 2015 CE, when gasoline, before taxes, will cost between two and three dollar per gallon.106 Then higher prices will be defended with the argument that everything must be done to save nature’s last oil reserves (they will be primarily saved for military purposes, because vast military equipment can not be replaced in a few years time.) Occasional catastrophes will lead to increasing security costs, and the ‘inventive power of man’ will once again dig a big hole to fill up a smaller one.

Energy consumption in the Atlantic civilization is a manifold of what is used in the rest of the world. Because of the growing cost of energy, this geographical split will eventually be matched by social differences.

Solutions

The question is not if we will be able to substitute depleted resources or (the most radical substitution) emigrate to other planets, the question is what such solutions will cost. To live on an unsuited planet will require to tackle its environment with an intensity never seen before, after we burst the exploitation of our own planet to provide transportation. The development of a suitable propulsion might require experience accumulated in many nuclear wars. The more bombs will have been exploded, the more we will be told that we need them bigger, and after each war distant planets will become more attractive. Survivors will always be asked to accept rising taxes to destroy this planet more and bring another closer. Eventually, to set foot on another planet will be something as the beginning of farming: it looks fantastic if you have destroyed everything you had, and if you brought enough poets to create a sense of wisdom.

As a rule of thumb every next planet will have to be exploited at a higher rate in order to be able to reach the next, and we will infect outer space with our violence just because we couldn’t stop breeding.107

To blindly count upon technological or scientific solutions of which nor the probability, nor the hazards can be foreseen, while the problem can be avoided without any damage or drawback, is a rare proof of unreasonable and irresponsible fanaticism. Western pseudo-scientific ideology deceives the public opinion by confusing intensified exploitation techniques, including the 'discovery' of more cumbersome base materials, with solutions to depletion. The first is regular economy, and abides by the ‘law of diminishing return’ without exception. To say that we do not need to use our intelligence because our intelligence allways comes up with a convenient solution, is the same as to throw out the brakes because the car always stops at crossroads.

Of course our academies will come forward with adjustments and even solutions whenever suffering becomes too high. But the most important novelty will be a price no one wanted to pay before. We will have no choice but to accept the destruction of nature and to live with more risky energy sources and irreversible pollution – all problems that in their turn will raise new problems for the ‘inventive power of man’ to deal with. And we can not fear unforeseen consequences: just as traditionalists count on yet unknown scientific solutions, we can not dismiss yet unknown dangerous effects. All we know today is that in the past those effects raised exponentially: a few hundred coal workers die when a mine collapses, but the failure of a nuclear installation destroys, in the best case, vast natural surroundings, and in the worst case populations of whole cities and regions. The public is fooled when it is claimed that nuclear catastrophes are impossible. Security systems depend on human checks, and humans are no guaranteed constants. They can become understaffed, distracted, frustrated etc...

At the occasion of the International Conference on Population and Development at Cairo in 1994 CE, the Catholic Church declared that the earth can easily feed forty billion people. This was clearly an arbitrary number to ward off criticism on the absurd position taken previously, that the only limit is ‘standing room’. But the new number was gambled without considering how poverty and violence, in various forms, already is boosting in function of our number today, and without pointing out the new techniques they thrust will come to rescue. Governments and academies participate in developing synthetic hormones, in genetic engineering, in precarious drugs and mass destruction devices. Cynically, the same governments that finance this research and inherently anticipates their introduction at the right moment, also finance police actions to keep the resulting chemicals out of circulation for reasons of public health.

To count on unknown scientific solutions is dishonest, because it provokes upsetting but inevitable choices to come up in the future. At a certain moment we will have to choose to either let people live in misery or dismantle natural landscapes, deploy more military force, and engage in precarious industries. Chances are that the public opinion then will not turn against those who have willingly provoked the situation in which this sinister choice became inevitable, but against the last few who – out of hopeless nostalgia, without possible success - try to defend the last remains of a decent society and a sound environment.

In this entire discussion human needs are limited to food, and humans are reduced to food ducts ignorant of space, landscapes, health or enjoyment. The emerging technology of resource surrogates will try to degrade humans to genetical pigs crammed in dreary shacks, their excrements cleverly recycled into abundant porridge with artificial taste and colour. Those techniques exist and are already applied in fodder: mad cow disease is a well-known consequence. Unless the population explosion is halted, the same ‘technological advances’, will in the near future be applied to human food, as another instance of the ‘inventive power of man’. By that time laws against suicide, stemming from slave societies, will gain importance again, because each life that is made possible by means of such an ‘inventive power’ will lack a reason to stay alive.

The Reverend Thomas Malthus became famous with an attack – at first anonymous - on the utopianism of Condorcet and on Enlightenment in general.108 His pamphlet tried to demonstrate mathematically that any society without sexual repression was heading to disaster, since a ‘morally unchecked’ population doubles every twenty-five years while food production only increases steadily.109 The Jesuit Father Pesch, celebrated as a prominent challenger of Malthusianism, unwittingly expressed the same old moralistic vision as the despised Malthus when he summarized his own viewpoint:

Where [the sexual morality of] a people is safeguarded, there need be no fear for its quantity. 110

Just like the progressive Condorcet has been recuperated by conservationist churches, the conservative Malthus has only followers left among progressive authors. Those authors maintain the fear for growing poverty caused by overpopulation, but replace the sexual coercion proposed by Malthus with techniques of family planning.

Demographic transition

Many late twentieth century demographers adhere to a third model, known as the ‘demographic transition theory’. This model holds that a population stabilizes when it reaches the level of wealth at which the cost-benefit balance of children reaches a break-even. The important contribution made by this theory is that it acknowledges that human childbirth is always a human decision based on economic factors, and was never a plain biological necessity.

Many demographic transition theorists expect that our number will stabilize around ten billion. To perceive a weak glimpse of the nightmare that will arrive when we approach this number, it is sufficient to look at the massive suffering going on today: at the relentless killing of hunger refugees, at the proliferation of increasingly cynical genocides, at poisonous agriculture, at environmental devastation, at social detriment, at always new plagues spreading among plants, animals and humans, at resource wars, at urban aggression. All those issues are mortgaged by the population number of six million attained already in the twentieth century CE, and will steadily become worse as the earth population grows: more poisoned food will be distributed by aid organizations to fight famine; more peace treaties will be broken and more furious wars will break out between countries no one suspects today: in time the resource wars for energy will be followed by wars for clean water and even for toxic disposal or other pollution licenses: in an intercontinental mud fight, special forces will assault distant coasts, empty their waste containers under a spray of gunfire and retreat before dawn, disinfecting on the way their vessels from parasites and stowaways;111 pandemics of always faster mutating viruses will urge military control of society and devastate economy; drifters, hunger refugees and back street gangs will get well armed and organized; brutal plunder and callous security will escalate to the verge of civil war, and turn residential areas in fortified encampments; seemingly pointless urban suicidal bombings and shoot outs will grow in number of victims and number of locations, and will grow in fury and in madness; gruesome genocides by suddenly dazed masses of common neighbourhood people will proliferate until no continent, no country and no town remains secure.

The demographic transition theory is based on observations made in prosperous societies. We can not foretell if childbirth will also drop under other circumstances. Even if population should stop growing, there is no possible reason why this should lead to the optimal density, as long as child birth is politically and morally pressed and socially rewarded. In a growing violent and perilous milieu new generations might well chose again to win by numbers, and despite, or because of, disgrace and misery, chose for more offspring instead of fewer.

The demographic transition depends on the cost-benefit balance of offspring, and any reaction to a change in benefits becomes effective only after the average time needed for a newborn to become a reproductive adult. This was the case in hunting societies as well as in labouring societies – but the cost-benefit balance was different, and therefore the population of hunters was stable while the population of labourers grew exponentially. If people live well without the economic input from children, children are only born for their love – their bottom-line benefit and the only acceptable reason for having a child.

It follows that the forbidding catastrophe can be avoided without compulsion – the remedy lies even in removing the moral compulsion today exerted on women and children, and in radically raising the efforts spent on children’s and women’s dignity, including a minimum standard of living and human rights, qualitative education, lively leisure, travel and natural surrounding. Governments or other central institutes must either provide those rights, or just remove the obstacles that are maintained now. Only under those conditions the cost-benefit of children will lead to the needed population decrease and eventually to a relaxed ecological optimum, and open the path to an enjoyable life for humanity.

Standard of living

While it is asserted by various religious authorities that there is still room for more people, most economists agree that already the actual world population can not possibly reach the standard of living held up in the West today. Unfortunately nobody stresses the possibility to reinstate the natural relation between population and carrying capacity by amending the dignity of women and children. The ecologist-minded Worldwatch Institute regrettably follows the austerity dogma of religions who at the same time defile birth control. The Institute is wrong to say that criticism towards excessive consumption is the last taboo. This criticism is as old as monotheism:

Part of the answer is for consumers in the wealthy nations to greatly reduce their consumption burden to make way for the billions of poor around the world to improve their quality of life. Of course, the wealthy nations need to lead the way in consumption reform, but our message to the developed and developing world was not that they should not consume, but that there are opportunities to consume differently [..] We think that excessive consumption is the last environmental taboo, in the sense that no one—environmental groups, governments, consumer groups—wants to discuss it, and that its neglect has allowed it to spiral out of control.112

Most free market economists will refute this statements in the open, but do imply all the same that there will be less wealth available. David Landes expresses their mainstream opinion when he writes:

The present tendency to global industrial diffusion will entail, for the richer countries, a levelling down of wages, increased inequality of incomes, and/or higher levels of (transitional?) unemployment. No one has abrogated the law of supply and demand.113

In 2003 CE the Chinese government announced its ambition to provide a Western standard of living for its population within a decade. The most important question then seems today: what will happen if the available resources – environment, fuel,… - fall short? Will the Atlantic society be persuaded to voluntarily abandon for their offspring the good life they enjoyed themselves? Will the impoverished continents follow new ideologists of sobriety, when they preach to abandon the longing for health, well-being and comfort?

It is better to take a sharp look at the real world today before pondering too long over hollow speculations. Although the Atlantic civilization is prepared to take necessary measures of good housekeeping in order to improve the own life quality, like filtering effluent water and recycling garbage, it is clear that the West will never voluntarily give up benefits like transport and energy consumption. Atlantic society seals already today its borders for hunger refugees and competing goods, and fights a growing number of uncompromising wars for deteriorating resources, of which oil is now the most prominent.

Neither Europe nor the US do conceal their readiness to send armies to any place in the world where their national interests are menaced. If such a viewpoint is morally acceptable, there is no reason for people on other continents to take up the same stance when the occasion inevitably will arise.

Civilizations never give in by themselves: they naturally fight on until ruined. Impoverished continents on the other hand are already frustrated to the edge of insanity: everyday they sacrifice lifers while trespassing borders, only to get hold of a spot in the Atlantic world most dogs would refuse, or retaliate with ferocious terror and desperate suicides. Their flaming anger grows while the anxious Atlantic civilization takes an eye for an eye, and spills blood of revenge over blood of despair.

Since available resources are inadequate to allow an enjoyable life for all people that rightfully desire it, we must either chose to continue the ongoing world-scale civil war, and finally be dragged into the worst – and probably last – century of bloodshed ever seen, or politicians on all continents must urgently elaborate a policy of concern for all individuals, starting with women and children. Such a policy has no room for birth promotion.

Breeding bonuses

Population explosion was set off by a seemingly minor coincidence. It lead however to ideologies as devices needed to participate in violent confrontations. Now we are trapped in the population explosion by the same ideologies it created.

Europe has one of the highest population densities of the world. Yet the use or propagation of contraceptives remained punished by law until the second half of the twentieth century CE. Until 1965 CE jail sentence was the punishment for just mentioning birth control in the USA, and in Ireland the use of contraceptives remained persecuted until 1973 CE.114

The mind-bogging practice of punishing women for not bearing continues to exist in almost all countries. In 2006 CE the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology revealed that the Morning-after pill could prevent one out of every ten teenage pregnancies, if it was free for sale. Since the drug needs to be taken within three days, the required doctor’s authorization is rather a delaying manoeuvre and even an obstruction than a medical advantage - if the remedy is not bluntly refused on moral grounds by a religious-minded practitioner.

Most European countries today still encourage childbirth while hunger refugees are expelled and left to die with the message that ‘Europe is full’. Countries like Spain and Italy largely rely on religious pressure, while other countries like France, Belgium, East-Germany and Sweden vulgarly hand out bonuses in order to incite their inhabitants to breeding.

The religious and other motivations are varying, but have in common that the love of children is superseded by greed for economical profits, social security, military advantage and so on.

One often heard irrational argument is that every death should be matched by one birth: this ‘replacement level’ assumes without reason that a shrinking population is dreadful – even if this population, as in Europe, is amongst the highest of the world.

The most upsetting argument is the appeal to breed children for the national war machineries, or the assertion that the world would be better off if ‘lesser races’ refrain from reproduction while the own ‘superior race' continues to propagate. The Catholic Encyclopaedia for example asserts that the Western world is confronted by a problem, ‘not of excessive fecundity, but of race suicide.’115

Landscapes are the only transcendent experience we will ever have

When I had reached te age at which people are supposed to have learned everything required for their adult life, I still was puzzled by the massiveness of human violence. Reading on the subject I got the idea that nature might well hold ways of coexistence humans forgot or had never known.116

While travelling Europe and abroad, I searched natural landscapes for a hidden code, but was constantly disappointed. Then by coincidence I caught a Mozart divertimento on the car stereo. The constantly surprising forms, colours and movements, the breathtaking moments of silence, now broken by a tender violin, and then by a weighty cello, the sudden chaos rising and dissipating in a variance of themes – it felt exactly as what I had been looking for all this time. Mozart has experienced and described what I had never been able to discover first hand.

An ancient Indian verse says that ‘as there is that sun in heaven, there is this eye in the head’,117 and Goethe wrote that ‘If the eye were not sun-like, the sun’s light it would not see.’ I realized that I had finally found the hidden code: as all things dead and living, we are the continuous reflection of the environment that created us, and surrounds us every moment of our existence.

In order to experience a landscape, one must remain quiet for at least an hour. Then natural surroundings give way to the sounds of insects, birds and leafs, and animals of various sizes begin to pursue their daily business at a dreamlike pace. To sit in silence however is hard when only a few small remnants of natural spots are left in a crowded world.

Once I was looking down a little valley hidden in the remainder of an old beech-and-orchid forest, when I had to jump off a steep hill to escape a bunch of motor riders, of which the last one politely waved at me. I also learned that cultivated dogs interpret landscapes in such manner that whoever walks off the prearranged paths is alien and must be attacked without warning. Another time I found a perfect place with no drawback but the remote sound of a highway. Ferns trembled, and it seemed that a roe was nibbling the leaves. When the animal crossed a clearing, I hurriedly took a photograph, but later was horrified to see how it had been malformed by repeated traffic hits. I destroyed the negative, hoping to forget the image. I noted down interesting places in order to return in other seasons, but often found everything destroyed by bulldozers before I had the chance of a second look, and once a bulldozer nearly buried me alive with a rare snakeroot I tried to save from its iron fangs. Another time I found a small, unspoiled bush with mosses, oaks and birches near a graveyard, but in midsummer was suddenly covered with snow - it turned out that the wind had blown away the scattered ashes of a deceased.

Obviously, the most dangerous places were the least disturbed. A warning for poisonous snakes became an invitation. An army plot, forbidden because of unexploded mines, was a wonderful place to experience silence in the mean time.

I was deeply moved by a little spot in the Ardennes that was reachable by no other means than a railway bridge, followed by a dark tunnel. At the end of this tunnel gleamed a warm radiation of green and yellow light, inviting to an astounding scenery. In some rare spots your whole being fits so well that it makes you feel like the last missing fragment inserted into a jig-saw puzzle, a piece that never understood its awry design before, and the experience hurts your entrails. Occasionally music bears a similar experience, and religious ecstasy might resemble it, but only immersion in an unspoiled landscape can bring about the original thrill of splendid, deep, complete existence. In a world without such landscapes, poets will be rid of as jabbering fools. No Mozart will grow up again, and the sonatas he left behind will slowly turn into soundless scrawl. At the time it felt just that to reach this place, one had to risk a train blow.

When the forest is down, Pygmies adjourn all other activities and dance and make music to cheer it up, and will not stop until their environment revives. Only when this is accomplished it makes sense to build a cabin, go hunting or cook a meal. In Peru and Central America sacred places like fountains, lakes and forest spots were called huaca, and worshipped like gods. The ancient Greeks called a feeling of enchantment raised by an unusual landscape thambos, a word older than their own language. Here certainly a god was dwelling, invisible but distinct, reposing at the border of a crystal-clear well, while sunlight filtered by shades of gently whispering foliage, with flowers and rocks in astonishing agreement, and the sky gleaming blue as never seen before. The witness alerted his community at once, and plans were set up to sacredly devote a tree, a cave or a rock, or build an altar to the god unseen, but felt so real.

Our maker is an open landscape, with scattered trees and tinged light, a valley where a river lingers, with dispersed groups of grazers, and flocks of birds. Here we are shaped, cell by cell, nerve by nerve, limb by limb, until after ages we crawled up in the grass, and still shivering shook off the last membrane of birth. This landscape is our outer half. It is the mirror of our essence, and the only real transcendent experience we will ever have. It connects stars and insects and all other things, and presents the universe to our senses as if it were in harmony, even with ourselves.

To destroy this landscape is to disfigure our face.

The essence of reality is not the thing, nor its beholder: the only real substance is the encounter of both, and beauty is the most blessed kind of encounter. It is a token of relief and a sparkle of hope.

The beauty of landscapes is the trunk from which all other beauty shoots. It was only after human beings discovered the tokens dormant in the essence of landscapes, that they learned the skills of the arts and of enjoyment. If we would accept that the beauty of a landscape is just a useless fancy, something wanted by a few singular people but superfluous to those who have no time or no money for nonsense, we would in the end degrade ourselves to rusted springs in a pointless clockwork. If we discard the beauty upon which our being is established, we will in the end loose our ability to joy, desire and affection; we will hate our loved ones as if they were chains tying us to ruins of distorted concrete; we will start to hate our kin, then our neighbours, then humanity and then the universe. Tired and disappointed, hating ever being born, we will continue to toil in silent anger while our faces turn grey as the walls of our cities. No matter what our past has become by then, it will only rouse our irony and mockery, and a deep, hopeless craving for the times before we were cursed with existence.

Maybe we can go on without natural landscapes. Maybe some day we will have no other choice. But in our deepest, colourless boredom we will not know what for, or whereto. We might live on, but only in a universe devoid of light.

Wasted land

The rise of the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia involved the decay of woodland and steppe and the expansion of deserts, all because of overgrazing, wood burning and irrigation.

Solomon once ordered trees from the legendary Lebanon forests to build the temple of Jerusalem. A few centuries later, rocks and dust was all what was left of the vast reserve of building materials. By that time the evergreen forests bordering the Mediterranean had disappeared, and the eroded soil was invaded by barren garrigue. Already in Plato’s days, Athens had witnessed the deforestation of the surrounding hills in only a few generations. Once Carthage had been settled by Phoenician colonists to serve as a granary for Tyre, and the name of Agadir descends from the Phoenician word for ‘granary’. Today, the Mahgreb is mostly desert land.

During the last half of the twentieth century CE, a period full of scientific optimism, one fifth of all fertile soil on earth became affected by exhaustion, salination caused by irrigation, inhabitance and construction.

Agriculture is by definition extraction from the natural environment: it is impoverishment of the environment per sé. And to impoverish the environment is also, on a longer term, the impoverishment of whoever lives in it, in all mental and economical aspects.

Something like ‘sustainable farming’ can be desired, preached and even approached, but as long as we want to get something from toiling, sustainability means only a more gentle way of deterioration. On the other side of the spectrum, scientists are developing techniques to intensify agriculture and feed growing populations. They try to get more out of the same reserve, and thus speed up exhaustion while claiming the opposite. The difference between extensive and intensive agriculture lies in nothing but the pace of exhaustion.

If not just the wealthy need to experience unspoiled landscapes and to be secured from epidemics, violence, catastrophes and hunger, while a majority lives on minimum space and energy, human population has grown far beyond its limit.

How many humans the earth can support is a useless question. A telephone boot can hold twelve people, but, apart from a few silly youngsters trying to break a record, nobody thinks of using it that way.118

Too many people believe we must reach our maximum number on earth, and present dumb procreation as a way of caring, and the misfortune of poverty as a virtue. We produce too many humans too fast, like a meat factory pushing production far over red alert, regardless risk or damage. The result is destruction of space, rising violence, growing demand and declining supply.

The necessity of an enjoyable life needs no theoretical defence. Sometimes scorned as weakening, materialistic selfishness, it is self-evident to all living beings, and a legitimate desire of unindoctrinated humans. Every person should be able to enjoy a good life most of the time.