Accident, Touch, and Privacy

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Climate Change and the Unguided Evolution of Humanity

Niccolo Caldararo(Autor*in)

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Accident, Touch and Privacy:
Climate Change andthe Unguided Evolution of Humanity
Niccolo Caldararo
Accident, Touch and Privacy:
Climate Change andthe Unguided Evolution of Humanity
Niccolo Caldararo
Academica PressWashington~London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Caldararo, Niccolo (author)
Title: Accident, touch, and privacy : climate change and the unguided evolution of humanity | Caldararo, Niccolo.
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2025. | Includes references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024944058 | ISBN 9781680534160 (hardcover) | 9781680534177 (e-book)
I dedicate this book to Lunawho has given us so much joy and happiness for so many years.
Preface and Introductory Note
In his investigation of the nature of madness and civilization Foucault (1961), expresses the difficulty most historians have in addressing the points of confusion that lead a society into acts of self-destruction and chaos. He states that one problem is, "A realm, no doubt, where what is in question ·is the limits rather than the identity of a culture." The decision to continue as in the past as if no changes have occurred is a kind of madness, but the identity of normal people is associated wi
This is a brief outline of the chapters of this book, with a summary of the goals of the book. The title of the book includes both climate change and the words "accidental" and "evolution" for humanity's history. This is because while most cultures define their origin and purpose for existence, the evolution of humanity as a species has been subject to the vagaries of natural selection. Debate on what natural selection is or how it operates usual arrive at an agency of random survival amid a noi
To cover such a social history, one must include a culture history. To understand where we are it is necessary to understand how colonialism occurred and how it shaped our social and economic conditions today. This problem I have addressed in my book (Caldararo 2022) which traces the origins of institutions to Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China. To confront disaster, either natural or human-created, the structure and condition of the society affect must be known. As Toynbee (1946) argu
Otherwise, the world's non-western peoples were conquered quickly as they succumbed to surprise and culture shock, disease, superior weapons, and most of all, their inability to organize a sufficient response. This is both a problem of ideology and of indigenous institutions capable of acting as effective organizers to overcome disunity and leadership. Today we can see that the ideology (religious and economic) and institutional structures (both national and international) are not based on an id
Ideas of the future are still frozen in the Bronze Age concepts of the destruction of the world as a project of deities or the 19th century hubris of progressivism that posits a continuous creation of new technologies to provide future wealth, food and energy. See, for example, the essays by Utterstrom, Wilkinson and Cosby in (Worster, 1988). This hobbles any constructive actions that might be of the magnitude to make a difference in time.
The changes necessary are fundamental to human behavior, not only in consumption, but in the creation of families and the expense of children. A substantial change in behavior is needed. It also defines the main problems starting with how do we engage each others' bodies in a legitimate and yet sensual manner? Are there health issues involved, issues of social solidarity? Is contact necessary for health? Are there conditions that reflect a lack of contact, and though considered in some cases and
Most books on climate change describe what is happening to the environment due to assessments of human uses of fossil fuels. This book examines in detail aspects of human culture history that make it unlikely if not impossible for humans to adapt to climate change in the present vector, or to avoid it or stop it. This perspective is not unique or new, Tainter's (1988) view of human social collapse surveyed the archaeological and ethnohistorical record showing little success in dealing with such
The problems of human sexuality, of systems of prestige and dominance that rule human life are embedded so deeply in every aspect of motivations and decisions that human change is regulated to crisis and trauma. Assault on institutions is an element of human failure to adapt and is driven by irrational behavior, though with elements of messianic movements and not revitalization attempts as defined by Wallace (1956), today's populist movements are characterized by mass movements driven by media a
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Chart 1: Climate change in the past
The book outlines facets of human behavior that could be modified under certain conditions that might provide a foundation for human survival at least into the 21st century, it also describes why this is of limited possibility. Probabilities of reward systems existing today and with long evolutionary histories produce a rigid road map for the future. How we conceive of ourselves and the fantasies and illusions surrounding our image of how we believe we are conscious of ourselves and masters of t
A program of awareness needs to be constructed to guide a human realization of the futility of present social ideals that are constant hallucinations driving our destruction of the planet (Caldararo, 2023). We often hear that the idea of climate change is something natural and unavoidable, but many ecologists, for example Emmel (1977) have recognized the many ways humans create Earth disasters and facilitate natural process of destruction, as in both forest fires and flooding. We even see theori
References
Aldern, Clayton Page (2024) The Weight of Nature: How a chanimg Climate Chanes Our Brains, New York Dutton.
Caldararo, Niccolo (2004) "War, Mead and the nature of criticism in Anthropology," Anthropological Quarterly, Spring, v. 77, n, 2, 311-322.
Caldararo, Niccolo (2012) Psychic Unity of Mankind, Saarbrucken, Scholars' Press.
Caldararo, Niccolo (2022) Origins of White Supremacy and Colonialism: Impasct of History's Interpretation on the Present, Warsaw, Creator Publishing House.
Caldararo, Niccolo (2020) "Social complexity, pathogen adaptation and Covid-19: history of disease avoidance, social spacing and work/home matrix," Urbanities, v. 10, Supplement 4, 14-18.
Caldararo, Niccolo (2017) Big Brains and the Human Superorganism, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield.
Crosby, Alfred W. (1988) "Ecological imperialism: the overseas migration of western Europeans as a biological phenomenon," In Donald Worster, ed. The Ends of the Earth, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 103-117.
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Table of Contents
Preface and Introductory Note...................ix
This is an introduction to the problem of how human culture history has continued to produce fragile civilizations embodied in complex and inefficient superorganisms as society. These are similar to many kinds of animal societies, as of insects but do not appear as long-lived or effective.
Chapter One: Touching in the 21st Century...............15
This chapter provides a cross culture examination of the nature and significance of contact with other humans, both from the physiological perspective and that of personal space and respect. The problem of male ownership of the social milieu and patrifocal allowance to express dominance over females is engrained in most countries and cultures today. Few matrifocal societies have survived, most recently due to western colonialism. The nature of interactions of individuals, especially of different
Chapter Two: Hair in hominins and its evolution: Monocultures and Pandemics, Why Diversity Matters in Climate Change (Originally published in Evolutionary Anthropology (2005).............25
Views of physiological appearance have had a long history of expressing supremacist concepts. The nature of body hair, especially head hair is one major focus. The chapter looks at how different cultures see hair and how it is related to human adaptations and is affected in animals under domestication as a parallel to understanding different roles hair has socially. The essenialist ideas of race are embedded in our regard for how the body appears and how it can be varied and displayed. Different
Chapter Three: Gender variations and body negotiation by members of San Francisco gender rebels 1968-1974: The Cockettes, The Angels of Light, Sylvester and others in Ethnological Contrast..............39
These groups of young people in the 1960s and 1970s developed an approach to gender they called "gender fuck." They wanted to be free to display their sexual attitudes in any way possible, at any time and to change at will their appearance, gender and attitude. Such behavior caused a considerable problem in translating appearance (dresses, makeup and beards with long hair on men, bald heads and pants/skirts etc on women. The feeling of daily oppression by the patrifocal gaze which produced self-
Chapter Four: Why most Birds lack penises and what it means for being male and gender domination for individuals and society.........61
This is a poorly understood fact and one that is placed in evolutionary and social context. While most male birds lack a penis, or one might say, most all genders of birds, the condition varies with reptiles where we find in some species males have two. The lack of a penis seems associated with less gender violence and more long-term relationships as well as high social engagement and investment in offspring.
Chapter Five: Marriage variation and matriarchies as future realms..69
How do we fit marriages of various kinds, e.g., consenting consorts, bisexual open marriages or closed ones, marriages of cis and trans men and women, genderless or new gender marriages or arrangements into social institutions? We examine past examples and explore future possible consequences, like fertility and sustainable human populations. Marriage effects fertility so it is significant in the allocation of resources.
Chapter Six: Beyond Zero Population: Ethnohistory, Archaeology and the Khmer, Climate Change and the Collapse of Civilizations.........75
Considerable debate on the causes of climate change hinges on a number of political and religious motives and assumptions today. Past examples of the awareness of climate change and the failure to act can provide some background to these debates. Jennings (1974) gives a comprehensive analysis of the archaeological evidence for climate change and human responses. Bryson (1973) relates the human cause of the collapse of the Sahel. The example of the Khmer is one that gives us one path of response
Chapter Seven: Destroying Institutions.................97
Institutions have been described as essential patterns of behavior that come to support a society and be generally understood and agreed upon in their roles. They can include behaviors that individuals must participate in as in rites of passage in religion, or in the use of money or joining a military or providing labor for communal structures or means as in irrigation. When one segment of a society comes to disagree with the goals of institutions and withdraws support or actively attacks one or
Chapter 8: Climate Change,Economic Philosophy and The Policy Process.............119
The nature of public decision making and economic theory have a destructive effect on change. Stakeholders of various kinds can defend their interests with a number of philosophical premises often transparent and as often irrational. Here I give one example of housing, wildfire, flooding and failure to act in a logical direction.
Chapter 9 Garbage, Waste, Recycling and the "Toilet Mentality"...153
This chapter is an examination of why we have a garbage and landfill problem. Why flushing things down the toilet has become a metaphor for how humans live. Burying waste is not something all animals do, but is still primitive, as cats, for example inter their feces.
Chapter Ten: Conclusion, and Perhaps a Positive Vision of the Future....157
Here we cover some ideas for the future evolution of social institutions in human societies that are more sustainable as well as ones that are less so and perhaps only continuations of present ancient ideas of what it means to be human on Earth.
Appendix: The Minimum List of Goals for Human Survival......171
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Figure 1 Artificial snow keeps Swiss slopes running,humans adapt to challenge but do not change habits
"Climate change is personal.it is about what kind of hell your child will live in..."
Introduction
This is a book about being human, performing self and getting along in society. These seem simple ideas, yet they describe singly a complexity of being that has eluded social scientists and philosophers for over 2,600 years. I am not claiming this is a comprehensive assessment or history. It is a partial view from a unique perspective in the 21st century. One of the greatest threats to human existence and a sustainable world is human activity and population. The demand for resources to produce a
There are a number of components to fertility, one is the need for a society to reproduce itself. The survival of young in a hunter-gatherer Paleolithic society was a major task of adults, but survival of young in Neolithic society seems to have been more difficult (Bogin, 2001). It is generally not a difficult task for a woman to be impregnated, and it is a mark of adulthood in many cultures and a passage in status, but holds significant liabilities and limitations (Hrdy, 1999). While most cult
How humans interact, develop bonds, perform genders and engage in sexual life is the focus that drives population growth. In fact, the whole question of how gender is determined not only in humans, but in any species is a fascinating subject. Hrdy (1981) questioned some accepted ideas of dominance and gender that focused on size (in sexual dimorphism), large size meaning dominant and this was often extended to gender traits. Yet when we look at the basic nature of gender, of ova and sperm, ova a
Our gender patterns have come to shape the pattern of our exploitation of the environment. There is evidence that the loss of or reduction of reproductive organs in some insects is associated with the development of social complexity (Zhuang, et al., 2023). We celebrate the great hunter, the triumphant sports master, the takeover victor of the financial world. And while rewards of nurturing are recognized, they are defined as associated with the submissive gender in most of today's human culture
In most human cultures females are trained and expected to increase this attraction by gesture, make-up and dress. Thus even if a female does not desire male attention, she is sanctioned if she does not act so. The constant bombardment of male attention (male gaze included) has often been described in detail by feminists, but the general outcome is not just male dominance, but a reinforcement of an attitude of exploitation that is at the root of habitat destruction, climate change and species ex
Tainter (1988) in his survey of history, has argued that humans seldom respond to threats until it is too late. The fragility of civilization has been demonstrated by numerous examples (see Lamberg-Karlovsky, 1974) across time and cultures. Some, like Diamond (2004) have reclaimed the idea of environmental determinism proposed by the 19th century cultural geographers like Ratzel (1896-98), only unlike them have added a dark element of the human psyche. The self-destruction of humanity is often t
Our picture of human adaptation has been degraded due to the holocaust of colonialism which wiped off the face of the earth thousands of peoples and their cultures and records of earlier ones (Caldararo, 2003
2022). Anthropologists over the past 200 years have tried to characterize human diversity in culture from ethnographical analysis and ethnohistorical records. But such records that have survived since the invention of writing some 5,000 years ago only touch on the latest sample of this div
Leslie White (1949) points to the materialism of certain forms of Christianity as a magnifying element of environmental destruction, the type of energetic focus Weber 1958) described for Protestantism. However, Moncrief (1970) among others suggested that religion seemed a general motivator to human environmental exploitation which all animals participate in to survive. Emmel (1977) reviews this argument and it is certain that some cultures formed social organizations and values that resulted in
I propose here that we need a fundamental change in the social organization and institutions of present developed nations along with a new morality and focus on pleasure, curiosity and friendship with the Earth, life and our inner selves. Just as Malinowski (1927) wrote a monograph of the sexual habits of people he studied in Melanesia to contrast the stultified morality of sex and the oppression of a lack of birth control at the time, so Kenyatta (1938) critiqued European oppression of non-Euro
While some nations have produced parks for recreation that are now being overwhelmed by the overuse of visitor presence and poorly controlled recreation (Timmons, 2019), in others, like Japan where the population is declining, pressure is reduced on the natural flora and fauna allowing for both preservation of natural ecological conditions and visitor impacts. However, what is the future of this unequal condition? Where we have a confluence of preservation and declining human population in some
Anthropologists of the 19th and 20th centuries concentrated much of their attention on culture change, especially of the effects of colonialism and technology to the development patterns of individuals and of social interaction (Hsu, 1972
Mair, 1969). People are born and grow up. They learn a language and come to behave as members of a group. How does this happen? It has been argued in the past that a human mind is a blank slate, a tabla blanca, upon which is written the nature of the society i
In her 1997 article critique of the concept of culture, Regna Darnell argues that late 20th century processes of "globalisation, ethnonationalism and multiculturalism all seem to create new and unique circumstances which gainsay the traditional conceptual and geographic boundaries of what anthropologists have long called culture." To make any headway in agreeing with her one needs to understand what the concepts she calls on represent. Unfortunately, "globalization" as a concept differs markedly
She claims there has never been "a single homogeneous anthropological concept of culture." She seems to be making this statement as a negative point as if dogmatic positions in the social sciences were desired or expected, while disagreements, as in the physical sciences over the origin of the universe of life were embarrassments.
Darnell triumphantly claims that much of the supposed force in destroying the concept of culture has come from an "emergent discipline of Cultural Studies." It does not seem strange to her that such a discipline established to demolish a false concept, "culture" should name itself after this false god. Nevertheless, almost everything I have read which has claimed to find fault with the concept of culture as been ignorant of the concept, wrong, or has begun by constructing a straw man of culture
I will not here provide a detailed defense of the concept of culture, it has had numerous defenders better situated that I to write them (e.g. Boggs, 2004). However, since I am going to use the concept of culture in this book, I feel it is necessary to make a few comments about critiques of the concept.
The Nature of Methodand Theory in Anthropology
During the 1960s and into the 80s and 90s a fierce struggle over criticism and the value of Anthropology divided the discipline and undermined its image in the public estimation. While earlier criticism in Anthropology had focused on methods, for example, the use of materials collected by other people, missionaries, military staff and government agencies or just tourists, the post WWII period saw a much different approach, and often drawn as personal attacks, usually based on ideology and dogma
Ardener (1971
1985) entered this fray by remarking that some others had used this method as a means of aiding the colonial and racist program of othering and exoticizing non-European people. However, this also is a distortion of both the intent of Boas and Malinowski and the vast literature that was produced, one cannot control how a book is used or be responsible for crimes produced from knowledge. The structure of this work was designed to reduce or eliminate as much as possible bias
the bia
Such ideological subterfuge characterizes much of the literature critical of efforts to reduce climate change impacts. But as Friederike Otto and her colleagues (Otto, 2023) have shown, the violent nature of the consequences of climate change are difficult to communicate to the public in a way that can change national policies no matter what ideology that policy is based on, neoliberal, Marxist, corporate capitalist or religious-derived, capitalist libertarian views like the Wise Use movement. M
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Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, Blackwell.
Hira, Elizabeth (2021) "The Government has a long history of controlling women - one that never ended," Brennan Center for Justice, November 9th, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/government-has-long-history-controlling-women-one-never-ended.
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Chapter OneTouching in the 21st Century: Sexual Dimorphism, Politics and Power
Every day males and females dress for the day to perform their gender and social role. They reproduce signs and symbols of desire, sexuality and power. These elicit responses in other individuals and often, in the appropriate context and circumstances, other people respond in culturally defined and acceptable ways. Goffman (1959) described this process and the contexts in a limited fashion, but his work is still valuable to situate the process in other ways. In most patrifocal (male oriented) cu
For men, the expression of status is associated with power and dominance. Gestures and dress are as important as in female dress and gestures in maintaining personal zones, but also these are constantly tested in some cultures, especially our own. Hsu (1980) describes and contrasts many of these based on cultural values in comparing Chinese and American society, as Hall (1959) did for a number of societies. Obviously, these methods of display and interaction have evolved in the context of surviv
Such touching of a public nature can be focused by context. When people voluntarily attend public meetings of groups of which they are members, touching is often a means of reinforcing bonds by public demonstration of kissing (for example, in Europe) shaking hands or hugging. Until very recently men shook hands as a greeting and hugged females, but this has changed in recent years with more handshaking between men and women and men to men hugging. This could be interpreted as a more egalitarian
Montagu (1986) goes to great pains to summarize the literature on the need for touch to initiate patterns of growth and development in the normal organism. He grounds his approach in animal studies where macaque monkeys raised on model mothers, some with wire bodies and others with cloth are compared (Originally the experiments were designed and conducted by the Harlows). The monkeys raised only on wire monkeys show definite needs for more fur-like, softer tactile substrates to "cuddle." Montagu
Donald Trump, an American President, has made a career of touching women usually with explicit sexual overtones. This presents a conundrum, as compared with Franken it seems to be a contradiction to accepted ideas of volition and space as well as what is formally acceptable adult behavior as this behavior was not consistently sanctioned or deemed problematic by many Americans. The Access Hollywood tape where President Trump boasts of touching women against their desire violates ideas of moral co
These appeared in the media in reference to Eric Schneiderman, a piece of information or perhaps, in the currency of the 1980s, disinformation, has come to light. Opponents of the nuclear deal with Iran have accused an Obama aide, Benjamin Rhodes of fraudulently fashioning the deal to Congress. Michael Shear and Ronen Bergman in the New York Times (reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle, May 9th 2018) report that critics of the deal hired a private investigations firm (established by former Is
The Magic andLiminality of the Woman's Restroom
A major political discussion broke out in the USA over the sanctity of the woman's restroom. While the euphemisms concerning where we deposit our bodily wastes are an interesting reflection of how we consider out bodies, both in private and public, the nature of the public restroom has a certain magic about it. I discuss this in some detail later on in this book. The central point here is the political assault on privacy and the nature of identity with gender at its focus. Not only do we find th
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Zhou, Zhuang, Xiaogang Zhou, Gang Shen, Ahmad Zamri Khairani and Jamalsafri Saibon, (2023) Psychol. Res. Behav. Manag. V. 16: 5041-5051.
Chapter TwoHair, Editing the Body and the Identityof Membership in Human Evolution: Monocultures and Pandemics,Why Diversity Mattersin Climate Change
Now and then books and articles appear that treat certain features of humans as special, distinct from any other animal. Freakish is almost implied as if human existence was an abnormality on the planet. One such book was Jared Diamond's Why Sex is Fun (1997) that labored to demonstrate that human sex was so different from all other sex among animals that it was almost outrageous. This could only be accomplished by the tortured stereotyping of human sexuality, mainly that is, stereotyped ideas o
In recent years many of the old distinctions that seemed to separate humans from other animals have either fallen away or been severely limited by new research. Humans are no longer regarded as the only tool-users, many primates use tools routinely, capuchins with great dexterity. Nor is man the only toolmaker, chimpanzees, ravens and crows are known to produce tools. This complicates discussions of the changes in cognition and physiology which seemed to characterize human evolutionary success.
The more we learn about the natural world the less "freakish" Homo sapiens appears. The big brain is not that big compared to the dolphin in brain to body ratio and when we exercise the scale of brain size we find that there is a relationship in the animal world between increasing brain size, larger neurons and lower density and metabolism (Jerison, 1973
Aiello, & Wheeler, 1995). Thus the "big brain" seems even smaller than ever today as we become aware of many of its complexities (Striedter, 2
Hairiness, Membership and Civilization
The article by Arthur Neufeld and Glenn Conroy shocked me as I was familiar with Professor Conroy's work as a biological anthropologist. Neufeld and Conroy (2004) claim that human head hair is not fur. They separate the idea that humans lost their body hair from this discussion sparing themselves the embarrassment of Morris. Explanations of body hair reduction in humans are numerous as Neufeld and Conroy note, and research by Alan Rogers (Rogers, et al, 2004) that one of the genes affecting skin
Neufeld and Conroy believe that human head hair is characterized by long hair which grows continuously throughout life. Thick head hair would seem to argue against it being a thermo-regulating device (but see Falk, 1990). This would be especially true for dark hair, but then we know that hair on the head is infused with moisture from the scalp during activity or in hot temperatures and forms an insulation layer reducing the effects of heat gain. The rest of the body gives off heat by evaporation
The clearest problem with Neufeld and Conroy's theory is that most of humanity does not have one uniform hair type. Second, many hair types do not grow in straight, continuous fibers like the terminal hair of Europeans and many Asians. There are generally 4 types of hair, lanugo or infant hair, primary terminal (children's hair), secondary terminal (adult hair) and vellus hair. Hair fiber length and shape is governed by a number of factors (Ryder, 1958) including diet which affects both the seba
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Figure 2 Some Hair Variation Found in Human Populations
There are unusual examples of continuously growing hair to unusual lengths that is the result of peculiar conditions of diet and lifestyle (sedentism) and hormonal abnormality. Some normal population variations are shown in the illustration, figure 2 from my article on hair (Caldararo, 2005). If we were only to focus our attention on humans, however, we would be doing a disservice to the study of hair. Like any proliferating tissue, hair has a relationship to development, diet and maturation (Pr
We find in sheep continuous growth of hair (Ryder, 1958) in domesticated varieties and this growth varies from other members of the same genus. This is especially true with the Merino sheep that has developed persistently growing hair follicles (Norback, 1951). Horse mane and tail also seems to grow continuously (Roser, 2005). This is to be expected since we know that hair growth varies significantly in different areas of the body of a variety of animals, and among different human populations (H
Editing the Body
How do we recognize someone as friend or foe? In the past membership in a group depended on both appearance and behavior. We have evidence of tattoos, scarification and mutilation in the form of figurines, cave drawings and effigies from as early as 200,000 or 300,000 years before the present in the Venus of Berekhat Ram (Marshack, 1997), but at least as old as 40,000 B.P. (McDermott, 2021). In many cultures we find groups, even with histories of ancestry or mythological unity, wearing different
As in the case of the tribes of the Amazon, Otzi's people had adapted to certain conditions of life, plants and animals that could be used to make tools, shelter, clothing and as food. The specific adaptations of their culture had come about over a period of thousands of years and we could say they were sustainable, both for the Amazon and the Alps. Today's way of life is partly the product of a great disaster, the Black Plague appearing in1346. Life was beginning to be redefined at the time due
Yet our earliest written histories, supported by archaeology and genetics, place the beginning of the first experiment in civilization in new lands, created from the warming at the end of the last glacial period. Bottero (1992) after decades of study unwraps the origins of Sumerian life in the necessity to cooperate in controlling the changing rivers of Mesopotamia.
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Figure 3 Otzi's Prehistoric Tattoos
Many people in history have changed their bodies, some adding images, others removing hair or shaping it, while some have reduced or eliminated parts of the body. Covering the body is typical of Homo species as long ago as the appearance of the awl in the refuse of Homo erectus in the temperate zone of the Earth.
Species Recognition,Mate Competition in Gesture and Elaboration
While it would seem likely that body modifications as in tattoos, hair varieties and other forms we have mentioned should function as important attractors and discriminators of potential mates, the mate hunt is more often associated with species and culturally specific signals of males and females. As biological males and females (cis genders) may act as other genders for a variety of purposes (pleasure, wealth, celebrity, etc.), this cross gender performance is not unusual in nature and is foun
Some examples of this can be associated with a subordinate male or female gaining access to mates that they would otherwise be unable to forcefully compete for, while in other cases it seems a means of population control and has been identified with forms of altruism (Trivers,1985). While the fact of the use of this tactic to engage in a successful coitus can be seen as a process of increased diversity, the act of sexual altruism is often linked with increased fitness of relatives. A third possi
The Sacred Wonder of the Woman's Restroom
A current hysteria as gathered around two aspects of transsexual existence. One is the "Drag Show" which is often a performance done by a man in a dress that mimics the stereotype behavior of a women. Phyllis Diller once said she was a female drag queen. Generally many men who attended such show in the past, like strip tease performances in men's clubs, interpreted them as satires of women's roles or as sexually stimulating entertainment.
In the 1950s and 1960s such drag shows were considered by most gay people I knew as demeaning to gay men, as it was thought to be a caricature of all gay men, and to gay women and to many straight women they were seen as also demeaning for many of the same kinds of interpretation. "Drag shows" were called Female Impersonation shows in polite society in the pre-WWII period and such mimicking of women has taken a number of forms in traditional societies, from shaman to Halloween costuming to vario
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Chapter ThreeThe Cockettes and Gender Variation, Translation of Sex and Fun in the 1970s
Gilbert Herdt (1981) describes the manner in which the Sambia of Papua New Guinea engaged in initiation rites and purification that involve men and boys performing acts on male genitals that would, in America or in much of the world, be seen as homosexual or homoerotic. But it seems the Sambia have no concept of genital gratification or sexuality as would be considered elsewhere in these acts. This creates a dilemma, if an act does not result the end product as expected in most similar cultural
Usually we assign specific genders to social roles. Parenting and the provision of care and nourishment is generally identified as a female role in human societies. In non-human primates this is also a general distinction with the exception of some New World Monkeys, the Tamarins, especially. In some mammals and other animals, amphibians, insects and spiders, males may be the only care and protection provider (Trivers, 1985).
The process of attraction is quite varied among mammals, while smell is of some significance, visual stimuli are prominent. In humans we find artificial modifications of the body including tattoos, clothes, colors and makeup. In some cultures face painting is done in a religious context as in rites of passage, in others it has a unique role in sexual attraction or sexual dimorphism (Magee, 2012). We find in our own culture that women have often worn makeup as a general form of social identity wi
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Figure 4 Wodaabe Men From BBC Film
Origins
Much has been written about the performance group the Cockettes. Much of it sensational, mainly because the Cockettes meant to be unique, outrageous and creative. Probably the most distorted rendition of who the Cockettes were is the film by David Weissman. But in my conversations with him he did seem conflicted concerning who and what the Cockettes were. Probably the term, "genderfuck" originated in reference to the group. This was partly due to the fact that some of the Cockettes were very pol
Perception is often described by magicians as 90% of any trick (to approximate the image in behavior and to create distractions at the same time), and among the transvestites and transsexuals of the 1960s who made up part of the community from which the Cockettes emerged, to act like a woman was often a skewed and confused performance, as if, on the one hand, they were attempting a homage and yet on the other, creating something that appeared as a satire. A small subset of cross-dressers/transse
Milieu of Social Performancesand Plasticity of Identities
One might argue that in any period of social experimentation, the Renaissance, Roaring Twenties, the 1960s or times of great change in conception of social order as in the origins of Buddhism, appearance of Confucius or Christ, there takes place an upheaval in the idea of what is expected of people. I would say that with the Cockettes, in the milieu of the time, a curtain had risen on what was possible and permitted. If you can imagine getting up in the morning and deciding to dress as a male or
It could be regarded as a mania, but a mania of discovery and invention. As everyday would be spent watching movies, TV serials, commercials, going to second hand stores for clothes, army surplus stores, or exploring the museums, parks, libraries and streets of the city for information and inspiration. All this added up to not only a constant journey in search of the stuff of theater, but of the mystery of life and meaning. Discussions around the breakfast table or dinner, in hallways or bedroom
These were often forays into the forbidden, not just drugs but into places and actions. For the Cockettes to go to a church or museum often caused some distinct reaction from those regulars to such cultural institutions and their caretakers. It was impossible to ignore a troupe of men and women dressed in various outfits from different times or roles and mixed gender signals. Danger was often present, though I cannot recall anytime when violence actually took place. A close call occurred when a
Hibiscus (George) would routinely say, "Just act like you are real, demand a presence and people will see what you want to be." I think the name, "George," often associated by Americans like "Edward" with kings had something to do with this attitude. But then there is an aspect of the name "George," that seems to assert both regal nature as well as transformation, as in Boy George the singer. At the time of the Cockettes, one friend of theirs, Miss George who was in the entourage of the actress,
Impressionists often argue that the ability to confuse an audience and produce belief, as in the case of faith healers, that their actions are genuine is dependent on two main factors: the degree they can attain to mimic reality and by approximation to the original and the creation of expectation (Goffman, 1959
Randi, 1993). Suggestion has been argued to be the foundation of hypnosis and Rivers (1920) drew a convincing evolutionary basis for how powerful suggestion could be. Lewis (1977) showed
Many a beautiful afternoon I sat with Link, one of the Cockettes who often produced the book, or story for the shows. He would discuss movies, novels, peoples' lives he had been told, dreams and hallucinations, and from them he would devise a script for a show. Usually these carved up and repurposed some 30s movie or novel with bizarre added features as I have recalled. As the afternoon progressed to night, over meals, marijuana, peyote or LSD, his bed would be covered with sheets of paper, some
I used to sleep in one of the window boxes of the storefront where merchants usually displayed their goods. Another person, a friend of Scrumbly's slept in the opposite one, each facing the street with big picture windows on either side of the front door. These windows were covered with either posters of shows, blank or colored paper or painted. It should have been noisy, but in retrospect it seemed both quiet and private. Several sheets of material that had once been scrims for showpieces, hung
People were not especially promiscuous or monogamous, heterosexual or homosexual, some were decidedly unisexual, some non-sexual (as much as could be discovered) others were what is often today called polyamorous. But they were still human. One night I came home after work, ate and went to bed around 11pm after studying, as I was working on my Master's Degree. Around 3 or 4 in the morning a group of people came home from the clubs and had brought a few stragglers who needed a place to sleep as t
Some time later I was dreaming of having a great deal of pleasure. I slowly woke up to see a stunningly beautiful young cis-woman with her mouth around my penis. The light was dim and her features were indistinct. I pushed the curtains slightly aside letting light from the street in. Thinking it was a dream I gazed at her without surprise, but said, "Who are you?" She answered, "What does it matter?" and sat up, striding my body with her hips she pushed my penis into her vagina and started to mo
Some hours later I awoke and in the afternoon light gazed at her. I got up and made coffee as no one else had come to from the night's stupor. Going back to my window box with two cups, I found her now awake. "Hi," she said. "Tea please." After we had something to drink, we began caressing and this led to another bout of sex. After this we got up and went to the kitchen area that was open to the studio, that is, there was no wall separating the kitchen stove, shelves, refrigerator, etc. from the
Karen (the name of the bed visitor) and I prepared a breakfast of eggs and toast and I introduced her to those who had not met her the night before. Karen filled in some background, telling me she was from Georgia. I remarked that my girlfriend at the time was from Georgia and Karen asked her name. "Melanie Mathias," I said and Karen looked a bit uncomfortable. "I know Melanie," she said slowly, "In fact, she was supposed to meet me today." I was now more than curious, "Like, you are friends wit
Later Karen called Melanie and arranged for her to come to Valencia street. Now I was uncomfortable. An hour or so later Melanie arrived, she flew in the front door and turned directly to my space, she was familiar with it as she had been there many times before. Karen and I were sitting in the window box and Melanie shrieked, "You fucking slut!" in our direction. It was obvious that Karen had over-estimated Mel's tolerance for sharing lovers. Then to Karen she said, "You always do this, my boyf
I relate this event as an example of how people's feelings about love, sex and relationships were not uniform even among gay, straight or bisexuals. Things were quite fluid, and relationships soured, grew and died as with most people no matter what people's philosophical intent. The same situation had existed even in the hippie and political communes in the 1960s and early 70s (See my ethnography, Caldararo, 2019 for detail). Unfortunately, you had the mastermind controllers like Manson who try
Cockette meetings to discuss a new play or finances could become quite funny, tragic or absurd. In the middle of one, Goldie Glitters, a main member, had an epileptic attack. The table around which some 10 or 15 people were seated and covered with food, drink, books and papers was overturned and several people ended up on the floor struggling to help Goldie. Once the fit was over, and Goldie had recovered, the meeting continued. Like many of the Haight-Ashbury communes where food was acquired fr
Weismann contacted me in the late 1980s or early 1990s about film of Cockette performances he had heard I had made. He came to my home and we had a long talk about the film he wanted to create. I had worked for the Cockettes as a stage hand, painter, script writer and editor (for Martin Worman, especially) and in the process had taken some 8mm film of performances from back stage. Other film existed, especially that by the promoters of the Cockette debut in New York, but most of these were lost,
One of the common distortions of who the Cockettes were is the impression that they were all gay, or all men. While Pam Tent (the Cockette, Sweet Pam) Fayette Hauser and others have produced lists in their books on this, my own experience is close to these but I kept no lists myself. It is generally recognized that the Cockettes were multi-racial, usually focus is on Sylvester (one of my great friends in the group and a tragic loss in his death) and Reggie (also a great friend), and Linden (a br
But "ambiguous" applied in other senses as well. Some members of the Cockettes were ambiguous in appearance and behavior. One, named Markel, looked much like a woman but always dressed as a man. Everyone responded to he/she as if she/he was a woman and her voice was that of a female. Markel performed usually as a woman and had what appeared to me to be a female body. I only saw her naked once at the Chelsea Hotel where we were limited in bathroom space given that we had, as I recall, 2 rooms for
In meetings Markel would generally ask questions and contributed in a rational fashion, but many people thought she was rather crazy. I was told by more than one person that she had been in a mental institution and had hallucinations of a bizarre kind. She once suggested an addition to a playbook where anarcho-syndicalists would aid aliens to save the characters in the narrative. She had listened to my discussion of the Civil War in Spain in the 1930s and guessed that I was sympathetic with the
In watching her behavior over the years, I came to think she was entirely sane. Like most women she was constantly being hit on or threatened by men and her response was to make herself plain and unobtrusive. When she dressed up for a play in the role of a woman she was often quite beautiful, and on stage she was confident and active. But once off stage she was obviously uncomfortable and if approached became incoherent or just silent. I was once stunned by how sexy she looked in one outfit, a t
With my psychology background, and at this time I had had some six months of work at a state psychiatric hospital and had completed my B.A., I came to the conclusion that her odd behavior was just a ruse to prevent confrontations, and especially those with men. Otherwise, she might be really shy, but clearly very smart. I describe Markel in detail in this way to make the point that among the Cockettes many people's stories and personas were a work in progress as both performers and as characters
I came into contact with the Cockettes late, as I used to go to movies at the Palace Theater in the early 1970s where mainly Chinese films were shown. I was initiated in this film genre by my girlfriend who was Asian American. Most of the films shown were fantastic legends of early China where people flew through the air and did remarkable feats. She thought they were funny, psychedelic and high camp. But one night we were leaving and a crowd was forming for a late show. This was a movie screeni
Membership, Who's Who and Hangers On
So later that night, after the "art movies," the Cockettes came on stage and did a rather bizarre, camp and DaDa rendition of some 30s movie or movies. I was hanging out waiting for my girlfriend who was in the toilet, and, one of them, Link came up to me. He had stripped himself of all the drag, glitter and makeup of the show and asked me for a drink of the Coke I was holding. We had a chat about the show and he invited me to the house he was living in at the time the next day. The next day, I
Transsexuals, Transvestites, Cross-Dressersand Bathrooms as Sacred Spaces
I came into the room and someone, I think it was John Flowers who was both an actor, writer and set designer with Fayette, said Link had just left. John then said, "You're Nicholas, right? We met." One of my girlfriends at the time was bisexual and I had often gone with her to lesbian and gay bars, usually dressed as a woman. I, like Miss George, had often been dressed as a girl as a child. My sister was older and her cast offs came to my use. I was not confused about my sexuality or gender but
The other part of this is the other's perception. Acting is the intention of the performer, how the actor is seen is another worldview. When I was a child, probably about 6 or 7 I had gone with my sister and her friends to the town's bowling alley wearing a dress and my "Prince Valiant" wig I had got as part of a Halloween costume. It was a place where my sister and her friends liked to visit and sometimes bowl. After a certain amount of time I needed to use the toilet and approaching the men's
Some years after, on Halloween, a girlfriend took me to a straight party one night before going to a club. I was in a dress as I often did with heels and full makeup. A man was there in a dress and obvious garish makeup and wig making a variety of comic acts stereotypic of how women are often mocked. When my girlfriend saw him she was not happy and, being a feminist, expressed her displeasure. Someone near by joked about it and the man came over. My girlfriend knew him and introduced us, when he
Yet the aroma of the time was creating a number of other critical responses to cross-dressing. Many feminists saw cross-dressing and transvestites as caricatures of women, that men acting as women was like white people putting on blackface. A few years later a girlfriend took me to a meeting of local feminists who had come to know that she, a prominent feminist, was dating a man who often wore dresses but also had a connection with the Cockettes who they considered to be stereotyping women. I wa
This kind of sexual political analysis was also paralleled by other political debates. At this time in the evolution of the Cockettes, there was a fissure growing among the members, one that was apparent across the Haight-Ashbury and the entire "counter culture" at the time of the early 1970s. Hibiscus was heavily influenced by the idea of leveling and communal living. Also, he rejected authorship and stardom as an individual status. It seemed to me when I listened to what others said of him, th
The "personal is political" view dipped into all aspects of life and the communes had effects beyond their number, note the considerable extent of the hippie movement and the Food Conspiracy-like enterprises, in various sectors of the American population. Because people in households participating in the Food Conspiracy had to send representatives to meetings and to the bagging and other tasks for the food distribution and financing, there were many opportunities for information and influence. S
It seems an exaggeration or confusion to say that a man entering a woman's restroom is a political act. Some have made this reference. Rothman (2016) describes how the territory and use of the woman's restroom, bathroom, powder room, etc. has become a major political issue in America linked to transsexual status and sports performance. The American Psychological Association (Anon, 2023) has made a determination on even "all gender" restrooms. But again we are faced with the same problem, what is
Nevertheless, in women's bathrooms there are only toilets. This requires more time to disrobe to allow for use of the toilet. Also, men seldom clean themselves after urinating in either a urinal or toilet. Thus the time involved for men or women's use of a restroom differs substantially. This brings up the point of the social function of the restroom or public bathroom. Many people, especially young women use such facilities as a platform for socializing. But such social activities have a long h
This does relate to custom and learning as some have complained. I was with a group of feminist women one night at an outdoor even in the 1970s. The promoters who put on the event had not provided sufficient rental toilets for the crowds of people attending. We were milling about like hundreds of others and one of the women pointed out that many men were simply urinating in public. She said, "Woman can't do that." I said, "Why not, just do it. Who cares." Another woman said, "women cannot urinat
A study by Formica (n.d.) found quite contrasting attitudes about bathrooms. While men and women both considered most public bathrooms dirty (72% of women, and 64% men), females desired more time to use facilities, to undress, wash and dress. 40% of women spent 1-2 minutes in a bathroom, 22% 3-4 minutes. Men were in and out with as little time possible with 41% of men were in an out in about 30 seconds. Surprisingly, the difference in hand washing between men and women is small, 35% of men and 2
Sex as a Means of Communicationand Celebrity and the Lack of It
Cockette parties were of two kinds in my experience. There were the after show parties that were attended by friends and mostly performers and staff. These began late, usually after 1 a.m. in the morning and could go on into daylight. They often relocated in restaurants for coffee and food. While there was some discussion of the performances that had taken place, they were usually oriented for alcohol, drugs, sex and just plain fun. I cannot recall any sex that I had that was not involved in dis
While there was plenty of mindless sex going on, especially among members away from the performances and parties, people were generally open to sex at any time, place or with whoever. But as I said above this varied considerably. Many people were brought into the enterprise through sex, people were met at bars, on the street, in restaurants, wherever, and would show up at meetings and, sometimes, on stage. There were no formal auditions as far as I could tell, though once I was asked to come to
The second kind of Cockette party was individually centered on the housing situation. As not all the Cockettes lived together there were several types of living arrangement and these presented different opportunities for parties. Often I would say a dinner could become a party and a rather small group of 8 or 10 people would eat, dance, sing and drink or take drugs together. Sometimes these parties would begin as a work meeting and then transition into a party. As I have said, the purpose of lif
References
Anon, (2023) "Universal design all-gender restrooms," American Psychological Association, https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/all-gender-restrooms.
Anonymous, (n.d.) "Washrooms: gender differences," https://www.formica.com/ en-gb/articles/commercial-interiors/washrooms-gender-differences.
Caldararo, N. (2022) A Mental Ethnography,: Conclusions From Research in LSD, Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave/ Macmillan.
Caldararo, N. (2019) An Ethnography of the Goodman Building, the Longest Rent Strike, Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave/Macmillan.
Caldararo, N.L., "Storage conditions and physical treatments relating to the dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls," Radiocarbon, v. 37, n. 1, 1994:21-32).
Caldararo, N., 1994a, "The lost libraries of the Americas," Library History, v. 10, pp. 9-18.
Crumrine, N. Ross and Marjorie Halpin (1983) The Power of Symbols: Masks and Masquerade in the Americas, Vancourver, University of British Columbia Press.
Daly, Judy (2010) "Public Handwashing," American Society for Microbiology, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100913111121.htm.
Fraley, M. (2016) "Gwen Araujo murder 14 years later: Transgender teen's killers face parole," East Bay Times, Oct 14.
Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York, Penguin Books.
Hauser, Fayette, (2020) The Cocettes: Acid Drag and Sexual Anarchy, 1969-1979, Process Books.
Herdt, Gilbert, (1987) "Selfhood and discourse in Sambia dream sharing," in Barbara Tedlock (ed.) Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 55-85.
Hoagland, Alison K. (2018) The Bathroom: A Social History of Cleanliness and the Body, Santa Barbara, Greenwood.
Kahle, T.B. & Caldararo, N.L., "State of preservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls," Nature, 8 May 1986, v. 321, n. 6066:121-2.
Leary, Timothy (1976) "Meeting Manson," Oui Magazine, August, 47-102.
Lewis, Gilbert (1977) "Fear of sorcery and the problem of death by suggestion," in The Anthropology of the Body, John Blacking, (ed) London, Academic Press, pp. 111-144.
Magee, Carol (2012) Africa in the American Imagination.
Marston, Wendy (1999) "Scientist at work: Charles Gerba
on germ patrol, at the kitchen sink," The New York Times, Feb. 23. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/ 23/health/scientist-at-work-charles-gerba-on-germ-patrol-at-the-kitchen-sink.html.
Randi, James (1993) Conjuring, St. Martin's Griffin.
Rivers, W.H.R. (1920) Instinct and the Unconscious, Cambridge, At the University Press.
Rothman, Joshua (2016) "The politics of bathrooms," The New Yorker, May 14.
Sacks, Oliver (2012) Hallucinations, New York, Vintage Books.
Tent, Pam, (2004) Midnight at the Palace: My Life as a Fabulous Cockette, Alyson Books.
Travers, Mark (2024) "3 Motivations behind 'cosplaying,' according to a psychologist," Forbes, March 25, https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/ 2024/03/25/3-motivations-behind-cosplaying-according-to-a-psychologist/.
Trivers, Robert (1985) Social Evolution, Menlo Parl. The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Co.
Chapter FourWhy most Birds lack penises andwhat it means for being male anddomination for most Vertebrates
While there has been considerable debate and theory production about why humans have such big brains (Caldararo, 2017), one simple answer some people produce in jest is that the big brain makes for rapid ecosystem destruction. Perhaps the human explosion of power has been so fast and so thorough that extinction may be our finest product. In bird species, whose males lack a penis, there is a necessity of cooperation to achieve coitus and successful impregnation. Obviously this is imperative for s
There is evidence to consider that some human societies were once more balanced in gender relations and power. This might have been true before the invention of urbanism and states, of perhaps 5,500 B.C.E. but according to Jaspers (1953) the spread of ideas was significant, though his argument is more convincing as the invention of ideology and its role in mass organization. A date around 2,500 BCE if we can use Malinowski's data on the Trobriand Islanders (Malinowski, 1929) as a point of refere
Darwin's idea of female selection is one idea applied to differences in physical appearance or morphology in animals. Often referred to as sexual dimorphism, it has been used to explain differences in size, color, and a variety of other differences or secondary sexual characteristics like human breasts. Though both males and females have structures that appear similar, e.g., nipples and can express milk, they usually vary in size between the sexes (though many females and males overlap in size a
What is its Origin and Why You can do Without it?
The penis has an ancient heritage and yet it has disappeared from some vertebrate lineages (Brennan, 2016). It was thought that all terrestrial amniotes had penises with the exception of the Tuatara, a lizard (Sphenodon punctatus), but recently it was noted that their embryos have genital swellings that indicate a uniform ancestry. The tuatara male lacks an intromittent penis (that is an external organ to deliver sperm). Definition of male and female often revolve around the possession of one ge
Of the nearly 10,000 species of birds only about 3% have penises (Yong, 2013). We have to wonder why, what is the selective advantage for a penis and for not having one, or, that is, in an evolutionary context, losing them? A pleiotropic theory has been proposed by Mayr (1963) and was modified to clear some objections by Arnold (1973). Here the variations between penis and vaginal structures and secretions results not directly from selection but from other factors where effects on the reproducti
The loss of the penis in male birds has been addressed by a number of theories, for example, the reduction in flight drag or the nature of sexually transmitted disease in birds due to the liability of bird species having a cloaca that is common to both the genital and gastrointestinal systems. Both appear to be weak as Briskie and Montgomerie (1997) argue. A female choice hypothesis is presented by them where males without a penis allow for greater female control over investment in offspring. Ye
Another theory is the "Genitalic Recognition" theory where the penis has evolved in the male to stimulate the female and thus maintain a species identity interaction. This is also related to a broader hypothesis of the "lock and key" theory that variations in penis and vagina evolution drive speciation and success in mating (e.g. Hammond, 1981). Most birds then, must bring their genital areas together in what bird behaviorists call, the "cloacal kiss." However, a most interesting fact of genital
It is obvious that the lack of penetration by the male penis likely reduces some forms of infection, but the sperm and related fluids and lubrication would still seem to be a source of infection and parasite transfer. An other clue might arise from the fact that birds and penises can generally be divided into two groups, Galliformes, land forms without a penis and Anseriformes, waterfowl with them, given also that many aquatic animals also have penises. Some mammals have a bone in the penis as m
So if we cannot rely on the possession of a penis to define maleness or femaleness, what about sex chromosomes? Most mammals have these and possession of two X chromosomes and one X and one Y chromosome usually indicate female and male gender. There are significant variations in number of chromosomes and gender status.
Mammals
XX female XY male
XY with
XO XXX female XYYY Male
XXY female appearing Klinefelter's Syndrome - hermaphrodite
Platypus
5 X and 5 Y
Birds (General)
ZW female ZZ male
Some Insects (e.g., Drosophila)
XXY female XO male
Sources: Moody, 1967
Veyrunes, et al., 2008)
Table 1 Some Variations in Chromosome Type and Gender
We might argue that the penis is not to blame for climate change, but rather the lack of restraint derived from child-rearing that leads not only to aggressive, and in many cases, destructive behaviors as well as spousal abuse. Margaret Mead (1928) attempted to create a paradigm to understand how child-rearing techniques molded behavior and resulted in specific types of social behavior. To change the trajectory of human society and ecological disaster will, I think take more than changes in chil
While we might characterize this attitude as a healthy approach to solving a threatening problem, it can also be seen as rooted in the psychology of denial that is structured in child-rearing where people are enveloped in a system of conditioned responses to contradictions of their training as their cultural cosmology was learned (Kardiner, 1963). In 21st century, post-industrial society with an internet and electronic devices that can determine identity in complex fashion as, perhaps never befo
References
Briskie, James V. and Robert Montgomerie, (1997) "Sexual selection and the intromittent organ of birds," J. of Avian Biology, v. 28, n. 1, March, 73-86.
Brennan, Patricia L.R., (2016) "Evolution: One Penis After All," Current Biology, v. 26, n. 1, R29-R31.
Bogin, Barry (1999) The Growth of Humanity, New York, John Wiley & Sons.
Cakdararo, Niccolo, (2014) The Anthropology of Complex Economic Systems: Inequality, Stability and Cyvles of Crisis, Lanham, Lexington books.
Hamilton, W.J. (1949) "The bacula of some North American vespertilionid bats," Journal of Mammalogy, v. 30, n. 2, May, pp. 97-102.
Hammond, P.M. (1981) "the origin and development of reproductive barriers," in The Evolving Biosphere, eds. P.H. Greenwood and P. L. Forey, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 37-48.
Herskovits, M.J. (1952) Economic Anthropology: A Study in Comparative Economics, New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Herrera, Ana M. Simon G. Shuster, Claire L. Perriton and Martin J. Cohn (2013) "Developmental basis of phallus reduction during bird evolution," Current Biology, V. 23, n. 12, June, 1065-1074.
Jasper, Karl (1953) The Origin and Goal of History, London, Routledge.
Kardiner, Abram (1963) The Psychological Frontiers of Society, New York, Columbia University Press.
Kennedy, D. (2009). The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World, Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England: Harvard University Press.
Leacock, Eleanor and June Nash, (1977) "Ideologies of sex: archetypes and stereotypes," Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences, v. 285, 618-645.
Mead, Margaret (1928) Coming of Age in Somoa, New York, William Morrow & Co.
Moody, Paul Amos (1967) Genetics of Man, New York, W.W. Norton.
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Schwagmeyer, P.L. (1980) "The Bruce Effect: an evaluation of male/female advantages," American Naturalist, v. 114, 932-938.
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Veyrunes, Frederic, Paul D. Waters, et al., "Bird-like chromosomes of platypus imply recent origin of mammal sex chromosomes," Genome Research, July, v. 18, n 6, 965-973.
Yong, Ed (2013) "How chickens lost their penises (and Ducks kept theirs)" Smithsonian Institution Magazine, June 6, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ science/article/how-chickens-lost-their-penises-ducks-kept-theirs?loggedin=true &rnd=1687905065659.
Yoshizawa, Kazunoiri, Rodrigo L. Ferreira, Yoshitaka Kamimura and Charles Lienhard, (2014) "Female penis, male vagina, and their correlated evolution in a cave insect," Current Biology, v. 24, 1005-1010.
Chapter FiveMarriage variationand matriarchies as future realms
This chapter is not a comprehensive analysis or history of marriage in humans. Often discussions of marriage types begin with a variety of history. Often something like this: "in the dim mists of the past. there was no law just brute force and submission to it.the primal ancient horde knew no marriage rules but was dominated by lust and promiscuity." Such fantasies were replaced in the 20th century with studies of primates, not that reference to animal societies had not been done before. In anti
Ideologies of Marriage
To use the term, "ideology" in a work of anthropology, brings to mind Geertz's (1973) extensive discussion of the term. A belief in how things work on an absolute scale and a faith in the authority of the belief, is I think an adequate definition. This then covers those ideologies of religion, modern philosophies and of political philosophies. Whether the authority is Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, Marx or Hitler, the belief is established as a certainty. The same can be said of the ideas of life int
We have considerable archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence that prior to the invention of agriculture human groups grew in population slowly if at all. While there is considerable debate over whether population control was a conscious adaptation to the carrying capacity of the environment, the explosion of population after the Neolithic is unmistakable (Cohen, 1977).
There are a number of religious influences to marriage as well as economic and military. As regards status in a community, who one marries can be very significant not just for the bride and groom, but for the status of the children. Usually we see children possess the status of parents, modified by whether the family is in a matrifocal for patrifocal society. Your relatives and duties as well as status are determined by the lineage of the parents. In some cases this information is secret, as whe
The influence of religion is complex and even in so well known a religion as Christianity, its attitude towards marriage has changed drastically in the past 2000 years. The policy of early Christians towards marriage, I must say, related to the 'specific end of times' ideology current and thus among the Essenes (Joseph, 2018
Josephus, 66-67 C.E.
see also Jonas, 1958 and Du Pin, 1692). Men and women lived apart and sex as well as children were forbidden. One has to remember that early Christian
The history of marriage among the early Christians is clouded in the lack of documents on this issue. Discovering the history of the role of marriage is in du Pin's text. The book (a different number of volumes are produced in the different editions both in French, Latin and English that I have seen. Mine is the original English translation of 1692 a text used by a family to record births and deaths from that date. It does have an index, but my reference to du Pin's work was not to provide a fin
Further questions can be found in McKnight, et al., The Synoptic Gospels or in Hans Jonas', The Gnostic Religion. The central point of discussion was how the production of children would hinder the return of Christ by dimming the "light" of the faithful and give power to the demiurge by the magnification of error. This debate is recorded in du Pin under the topics of the followers of Marcion and the Valentinians. On the other hand du Pin relates the condition of early Christians as living in a s
It should be noted that even in du Pin's time scholars spent a lifetime on a small section of documents to discover the meaning and intent of the scattered segments of the Church as it developed. This is enlightening as to the means by which people attempted to adapt a faith to changing conditions. While there is no lack of studies of the variety of human marriage or sexual arrangements (concubinage, prostitution, etc.) aspects of human sexual response may hold the key to stable and adaptable hu
Our central problem is the small amount of information we have about human bonding, whether for sexual purposes or reproduction. In the ethnographic record where it is less distorted by contact with the mass religions like the Judeo-Christian-Islamic and Buddhist modes, we have some interesting variations (Schneider & Gough, 1961
Radcliff-Brown & Forde, 1950
Goode, 1971). These are usually described and analyzed by anthropologists in the context of social structure and family/kinship relations
References
Du Pin, Lewis Ellies (1692) A New History of Ecclesiastical Writers., 1st English trans., London, Abril Staglle and Tim Shilbe.
Goody, Jack (1971) Kinship, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Joseph, Simon J. (2018) Jesus, the Essenes, and Christianity, Waco, Baylor University Press.
Jonas, Hans (1958) The Gnostic Religion, 2nd Ed., Boston, Beacon Press.
Josephus, (66-67) The Jewish War, Trans. By G.A. Williamson, revised by E. Mary Smallwood, London, Penguin Books.
Mcknight, Scott, John K. Riches and William Telfordand Christopher M. Tuckett (2001) The Synoptic Gospels, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. & Daryll Forde (1950) African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, London, Oxford University Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R (1922) The Andaman Islanders, New York, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964 edition.
Sand, Shlomo (2009) The Invention Of the Jewish People, London, Verso Books.
Schippers, Mimi (2017). Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities. New York, NYU Press.
Schneider, David & Kathleen Gough (1961) Matrilineal Kinship, Berkeley, University of California Press.
Stone, Linda (2006) Kinshiop and Gender, Boulder, Co. WesrView.
Chapter SixBeyond Zero Population: Ehnohistory, Archaeology and the Khmer, ClimateChange & the Collapse of Civilizations
A number of publications, both books and articles, have appeared in recent years attempting to prove that there is a correlation between global climate change and the collapse of complex human societies. Buckley, et al. (2010) is one example where emphasis is placed on climate over human activity. This chapter addresses a possible exception this emphasis of global effects. While societies under stress from weather changes may undergo significant economic and political change in response, Joseph
Like the Bronze Age collapse in the Mediterranean (Braudel, 2001), local accommodation was insufficient for continuation on existing patterns. Others like the Japanese modified population densities and social forms to weather stress. Implications for today concern continued population growth worldwide and rising consumption are continued stresses that must be considered in the context of climate change. Pre-Neolithic population densities and modern technology could be a means of adapting human s
Introduction: Climate Change Factors
The debate over contemporary factors and effects of climate change has created a search for evidence of climate change in the past and the effect of climate change on past civilizations. What can archaeology tell us about the end of human industrial society, and perhaps also human life? Will there be an Earth without humans, the end of life on Earth or a sustainable Earth with humans? Decades ago Rene Dubos (1973) pointed out that humans were capable of creating productive and continuously usefu
Most studies like that by Tainter (1988) focus on human detrimental effects on the environment, on climate change, pathogens or human inability to create resilient institutions. As the papers in Schwartz and Nichols (2006) describe, it is the nature of the society and the integration of its institutions and the exploitation of the environment that determine aspects of recovery from collapse. In this perspective, the ability or failure of institutions to provide for adaptations to stress that is
Environmental determinism has had a long history even if one only begins with the comprehensive treatments by Ratzel (1896-98). It was offered as a central agency in anthropology in America by Clark Wissler (1926) and developed by some of his students and associates (Dixon, 1928). Other theoretical questions concerning specific regions were addressed by researchers in the post World War II period as in that by Schwartz (1957). More recent efforts have attempted to utilize modern techniques to as
Information in archaeological reports has often been collected and interpreted as products of general theoretical propositions (Caldararo, 1984). Nevertheless, archaeological investigation can provide sources of interpretation on how people lived and responded to climate change in the past. Megger's 1971 study is a classic example. Scientific interest in the relationship between human ecology and changing patterns of the distribution of plants and animals has a long history (Thomas, Sauer, Bates
Reviews (e.g., Nature, 8 February 2007) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) first clearly reported that climate change is "Very likely" due to human agency and Crowley (2000) has shown that climate warming factors of pre-anthropogenic decadal-scale are unlikely to explain present warming. The 5th Assessment Report (AR5) strongly reinforces this view. In March of 2013 two articles appeared demonstrating considerable support for this conclusion. One study tracked the spread of
Ethnohistory and Climate Science
The role of societal collapse based on environmental degradation and anthropogenic driven climate change in the past has been proposed by a number of books in the last four decades and a recent review (Tainter, 2008) questioned the robust nature of these theories. Keeping in mind the paleoclimatological background (Hays, Imbrie & Shackleton, 1976) it seems obvious that human input to climate change has been considerable as population has increased and technological demands on carbon-based fuels
Combination of environmental factors and climate change have likewise contributed to the collapse of human civilizations, especially where human activities have made societies, as Caldararo notes (2004) less resilient and degraded the ecological resources, consistent with cycles of expansion and reduction of extent and complexity (Braudel, 2001
Algaze, 1989). Tainter (1988) argues a more complex combination of factors, but ultimately it is a systems theory where he sees complexity as expensive
With this scenario in mind we might consider the fact that studies of some ant societies have found they are able to ignore the environmental changes in their ecological systems due to their society complexity. Parr and Bishop (2022) have reported for one group, Hymenoptera formicidae, that it appears their eusocial adaptation and its attendant institutions, allows it to avoid the stresses of climate change. This fact may have important implications for human society, as we are highly structured
Results: The Khmer Context
Some analysis of climate data, for example, Yancheva, et al., (2006) have produced a useful record of climatic change in East Asia but their claim that these changes were sufficient to cause civilizations to collapse is premature. What is contradictory to their argument is the history of the Khmer whose architecture, and empire rises before the onset of their identified dry periods and ends long after the last dry period terminates (Higham, 2001
Mabbett & Chandler, 1995
Pym, 1960), from before
But recent archaeological work has placed this view in question, discounting the ethnohistorical record as associated with specific special interests of the states the writers were reporting for and privileged in their interpretations. A three part relationship is constructed from this new evidence creating an original state, Funan, a successor, Angkor and with its failure, a Khmer Empire (Stark, 2006).
This later Khmer empire's collapse is often attributed to disease (e.g., malaria, see Welch, 1998) but a study by a Chinese diplomat/social scientist, Chou Ta-Kuan in the 13th century reports on a society in orderly condition. Agriculture is observed to be continuing without special stress, social order is apparent and food stuffs are plenty. Other researchers than Yancheva, et al. 2006, cite the possibility of a failure of the irrigation system (Buckley, et al., 2010), but there is no evidence
Ghosh (1960) compared the early reports and his conclusions parallel those of Higham (2001) who decided that the decline may have been the result of a number of factors together weakening the state but that the final blow was the military threat from the Thai kingdoms that eventually sacked the city of Angkor in 1431. One could perhaps argue, as Bell (1971) did and Frank (1978) and Chew (2007) assert, that the climate change created regional instability and that while the Khmer were able to adju
Discussion: History of Collapse Studies
Some authors make reference to Jared Diamond's book Collapse (2005) which is a renewal of Ratzel's (1896-8) views, (derived from works like Vico's cycles (Vico, 1744) and those of Ibn Khaldun, Spengler, and Sima Qian in105 B.C.E. and others) along with a popularization of some more complex discussions. Joseph Tainter has taken these theories to task in his, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988). He has also questions regarding the focus on human activities as having significant role in the co
/
Chart 2 Adapted from Buckley, et al., 2010. The green line shows the period of greatest cultural development of Khmer culture according to Briggs (1951).
That the Australian Aborigines in 50,000 years do not produce an Einstein and a Theory of Relativity or build a machine because this might not be a necessary outcome of human life seems lost to him. To make up for what seems a deficiency compared to a progressive ideal of civilization, he returns to environmental determinism. That civilization is not necessarily a special achievement but rather a form of social complexity reached also by some social insects some hundred million years ago (Danfor
What Tainter (1988
2008) shows is that societies have numerous components that allow them to sustain substantial losses in various spheres, economic, political and climatic, and yet survive and even expand. On the other hand, if these components are lacking or degraded due to internal conflict, mismanagement of resources, etc. they will be less resilient and will collapse or contract. Tainter (1988) does not place as positive an emphasis on the allocation of energy in societies in the productio
Marcus (1989, 1992, 1993, 1998) has described a cyclical pattern of collapse and renewal for the Mesoamerican pre-Columbian states, termed the "dynamic model." Environmental degradation by overpopulation during a growth cycle which coincided with a climate challenge would accelerated collapse. This parallels other deterministic models.
Debate on a correlation of food supplies and population has varied as Hutchinson (1967) has shown. A key element is social discipline and the symbols that maintain social solidarity, a factor examined in detail by Blackman (1961). Nevertheless, the Khmer flourished when Buckley, et al. (2010) argue they should have been in decline. One has to note, however, that the period between the low points in 50 year intervals shows a considerable rebound in rainfall and though the authors interpret additi
Moundbuilder societies present a unique problem as Abrams (2009) notes:
"The archaeological expectations of a collapse do not appear for Hopewellian societies. Neither evidence of widespread diseases nor heightened death rates have been recovered (Dunnell and Greenlee, 1999). Similarly, the data for environmental decline are limited although the warming episode c. A.D. 400 of (Baerreis et al., 1976
Loehle, 2007) encourages a greater investigation of dynamic environmental ends."
In their paper Buckley, et al. (2010) argue that substantial droughts contributed to the Khmer collapse as they describe two periods, one in the early 13th century and another in the early 14th. However, Khmer methods of agriculture seem to have been less a part the failure to adapt in the region rather it may have been the depletion of resources to building prestige architecture and regional conflict. This may be an area of consonance between several of the theories, of Tainter, Chew, Marcus an
Conclusion
While climate must be seen to play a role in the development and demise of civilizations, no single factor usually stands out although single cause theories abound in the history of social science and history, the story is often more complex and frustrating. What is clear is that many societies note environmental stress when it takes place in unusual intensity or patterns, but are often unable to respond sufficiently to compensate within the context of their available resources or by modifying t
What is undeniable, however, as Professor Sing C. Chew has shown (2007) is that ". human induced changes to the ecology and the climate in turn form barriers to the reproduction" of the natural capital of the world system. One might go further in geological history and note that animal societies are adaptations to environmental changes not under the control of the species, whether cyclical like seasonality or periodic like changes in solar energy due to planetary tilt, reduced radiation or other
Teilhard de Chardin (1959) believed that there was an inherent trend in the evolution of life of intelligence and consciousness, and one might think so given the fossil record, especially since the Pre-Cambrian development of complex organisms. Yet it depends on how one defines the terms, fungi in the tens of thousands and millions seem to produce together kinds of intelligence and communication (Hathaway & Arevalo, 2023). Some species cover acres functioning as one individual, perhaps like a hu
Chew (2007) argues that collapse and "Dark Ages" have a renewal function given the degradation of the environment resulting from human accumulation of wealth in all its forms, both physical and symbolic. Caldararo has shown elsewhere (2004
2009), however, sustainability and stability are possible without collapse dependent on cultural proscriptions against certain levels of accumulation that would lead to degradation and collapse. The Khmer appear to be an example of this variation. The missing
Regeneration after collapse is often affected by climate, especially in some cases as in Mayan patterns (Marcus, 1998). Regeneration takes a variety of forms dependent on local environment, extent of collapse, intrusive peoples and type of complexity of the original society and its integration (Blanton, et al. 1996). Stark (2006) has emphasized the idea of regeneration and movement in the Khmer example with the idea the continuity of symbols and institutions and an Indic ideology allowed for suc
While it is obvious from the fossil record that climate change has occurred in the past, the factors involved, reduced solar radiation, Milankovitch cycles of axis variation in tilt, albedo effect and the influence of life processes, are many. It is clear, nevertheless, that life processes have an effect. The Great Oxidation Event that occurred about 2.3 billion years ago was the result of life processes. Cyanobacteria had been pumping out oxygen for more than a billion years and apparently this
Loss of diversity at the end of the Devonian has been explained by a reduction in speciation and invasions of cosmopolitan species, rather than any single event, but each extinction period is associated with anoxic sea conditions that may be the result of volcanic action or biological activity by certain species and their metabolites (Lyons, et al., 2009). While other factors may play more important roles in certain extinctions and changes in climate, for example possible asteroids in the Permia
The question for people today is one of consciousness and what it means to be human. We often pride ourselves by believing we are thinking animals, so one might expect that given past roles "dumb" animals and plants have played in climate change, should not we recognize our own role and behave accordingly? Will we create conditions that are toxic to our own survival as other life forms have done in the past? Sagan and Shklovskii (1966) thought that this was a likely outcome, but mainly due to th
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Chapter SevenDestroying Institutions: Attack on the EPA, Abandoning the Medical ProfessionDuring a Pandemic
Abstract
Institutions have been described as essential patterns of behavior that come to support a society and be generally understood and agreed upon in their roles. They can include behaviors that individuals must participate in as in rites of passage in religion, or in the use of money or joining a military or providing labor for communal structures or means as in irrigation. When one segment of a society comes to disagree with the goals of institutions and withdraws support or actively attacks one or
Key Words: Institutions, Covid-19, revolution, medicine, science, renewal, anti-science attitudes, news, elections
JEL Classification Codes: I0
I1
I2
I3
Z1
Introduction
History has shown that societies often reach points of disorganization where they are unable to maintain order and function (Tainter, 1988). Usually some failure in core institutions on which a people depend for essential services or reinforcement of basic trust in reciprocation of wealth and labor, leads to degradation of social credit and agreement in the social contract of daily life. Often degradation can continue over a long period of time depending on internal traditions and custom and if
Looking at social groups under stress and analyzing the function of institutions and changing attitudes of a population or segments of the society to them, is one way of understanding functional questions of integration. Geertz (1973) criticized the failure of social science to produce new, more useful theories of social action than those of the early 20th century. He argued that while Parsons (Parsons & Shils, 1951) had reinvigorated the useful ideas of Weber, he notes that Malinowski's (1948)
Geertz (1973) reviews many of the problems facing modernization and post-colonial economics, and he realizes that adaptations to Western economic and political systems will have consequences that are fundamental to new secure and stable nation systems. His review of political institutions from Bali to Morocco, provided a firm perspective of the crises to come. In this chapter I look at how the effects of globalization have affected not only economic and political systems, but medical response as
Examples of Stress
In 2007 the financial industry caused the world economy to implode. Governments around the world came to the rescue of banks and investors, hedge funds and insurance companies. All these entities had had some responsibility for the crisis. Over the past 60 years the legal profession has assaulted the medical industry with malpractice lawsuits that are claimed to improve the responsibility of medical professionals, pharmaceutical firms and medical corporations and device makers to provide more ef
While the financial crisis of 2007 did not place bankers in danger of losing their lives and a few did go to jail for fraud in the dotcom crash, as in the case of Enron's management, during the Covid-19 pandemic we are saw our medical professionals from doctors to orderlies risk their lives on a daily basis. People engage in jobs for a livelihood, often also for prestige, but unless they are in the military or police force they are seldom in harms way due to their work. It is strange in this reg
It should be obvious by now that our entire economic system rests on a number of fallacies. John Maynard Keynes (1930) wrote at the beginning of the 20th century that by the end of the century most Americans would hardly have to work at all given the vast improvements in technology that were made. However, our society was based on an agricultural society concept of needs with little production of the tremendous kinds of consumer products we have today. Since the March 2020 lockdowns in America a
This situation brings up a fundamental issue of the goal of society and economies. If we can simply print money and still eat and be comfortable, it seems Keynes was right, but why then do we have to work so much? If the value of goods and services has not increased (inflation seemed conquered or at least tamed before the pandemic and continues to be so) then is there some basic contradiction that needs to be addressed? While debts are piling up in the formal sense of government expenditures ove
Function of Institutions and Attacks
Societies create institutions to routinize and sanction provision for certain needs that are valued by the culture. Though there is some disagreement about what are specific institutional forms (Hodgen, 2006), there is a general understanding of their function and structure (Malinowski, 1945). When agreement in society is general and uniform expectations of the function of institutions and their cost to individuals is clear and accepted, they are successful, whether efficient or not by exogenous
Since the rise of Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich, the political dialogue has been purposely degraded, becoming more bellicose and aggressive (Coppins, 2018). Much of this has been organized from the media, mainly talk radio. This flow of speech has been aimed at destroying traditional forms of agreement, as in what are trusted sources of information, what are means of verifying facts and how are biases in reports balanced or corrected. Following the 2020 election there began a series of at
Attacks on institutions help divide the social narrative and create separate universes of knowledge about how events take place. One of the main vehicles of this process has been the production of conspiracy theories. As a genre of thinking and analysis, the idea of a conspiracy theory is not essentially different from any starting point in a theoretical engagement as in the scientific method. The essential difference is that the underlying motivation in the construction of a conspiracy theory d
The Attack on Medicine and Science
Today we are seeing a vast assault on medical science, undertaken in a comprehensive yet contradictory fashion where leaders deny disease and medical practice and advise their followers to also reject the idea of disease. Yet they take advantage of medical advances in curing Covid-19 as in the cases of President Trump and Rudy Giuliani. This attitude stands on a long history of anti-science that in America has created a movement against vaccination in general (Burki, 2020
Grimes, 2020).
While funding for medical research in the USA was minimal prior to WWII, funding ramped up substantially during the war and after. However, by 1990 a substantial portion of funding for medical search was from private sources, both non-profit foundations and corporations. Some concerns were raised about this trend regarding the influence of private sources on cost and availability of products as well as scientific independence of researchers (Bloom and Randolph, 1990). Medical education research,
Fear of the disease has also caused many people to avoid hospitals and clinics, that has resulted in a 40% rise in excess deaths due to deferred treatment (Birkmeyer, et a., 2020
Valerio, 2020). But the main consequence of underfunding is eclipsed by the inability and wanton disregard of the Federal government and some state governments to address the pandemic as real and plan for the emergencies it has caused (Meyer and Madrigal, 2020). One cost to the USA and to other countries of the death r
The main cause of this situation is the anti-science attitude of the Republican Party and its president Donald Trump (Pazzanese, 2020
Tollefson, 2020). A result of this attitude and resulting political action is delays in resources to treat, study and develop new vaccines (especially for the growing number of variants) and treatments (Wood and Schulman, 2021). By mid 2020 several noted journals were calling for and end to political intervention in both the practice of medicine related to Covid-
Crime, Incomes, Mental Health and Education
It is an unexpected consequence of the pandemic that with the loss of jobs and income there has been so little unrest, violence or disruption. The PEW Research Center charted the loss of jobs among Americans (Parker, et al., 2020) with about half reporting no new jobs. The survival of families and individuals seems to have depended on the first Congressional allocations and unemployment insurance and well as efforts of charities and self-employment.
Yet it is curious how in general most crime statistics showed a decrease in crimes with the exception of shootings and killings tp 2020 (Corley, 2020). Yet when stay at home orders were lifted, a racial disparity appeared with a rise in crime in black majority neighborhoods (Harden and Jouvenal, 2020). It is also obvious that there has been an increase in domestic violence (Evans, 2020). Though from 2021 to mid 2022 crime rates jumped substantially by over 4% in come locations (Lopez, 2022).
The pandemic is causing a deficit in training and education with the greatest loss in those in the lower income scales and in people of color (Garcia and Weiss, 2020). It has also had a significant effect on the mental health of health care practitioners, hospital staff and clinics (Jacobs, 2021).
With the election of President Biden this situation has experienced some turn around that is having positive results, though a large portion of the country that supported Trump still avoids vaccination and is making up most of the new cases of Covid-19 infections (Ivory, et al., 2021). Still, the lack of international cooperation, of resistance to a comprehensive quarantine on an international basis has allowed for the rise and spread of new variants. The most recent strains after Delta, Omicon
We should keep in mind the costs of lack of cooperation and consistent quarantine measures in the past. We might review the fact that with Polio, as Burnet (1966) outlined, knowledge of it as a distinct disease did not take place until early in the 19th century, the first epidemic was described in Sweden in 1887 and produced an understanding of its status as an infectious disease. However, it appeared irregularly through a number of countries (e.g. Sydney in 1913-1915) without significant recogn
The prospect of Covid-19 persisting for nearly 200 years as Polio appears to have, would be devastating for the global industrial society we live in and require drastic social adaptations to our institutions. Avoiding such a scenario requires significant global cooperation and sharing of resources so that developing nations do not suffer inordinately and do not become reservoirs of new Covid-19 variants.
A Background of Powers and Institutions:A USA Example
Today many people are concerned about the continuity and change in society and its institutions due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the tremendous change brought about by technology. Among others, Yuval Noah Harari (2020) has expressed some of these issues in a number of interviews. The nature and variety of societal and individual responses to disease, and how disease affects social adaptions in complex and small-scale societies over time has been a subject of investigation for over one hundred ye
Malinowski (1945) emphasized the importance of the concept of institutions within the functional analysis of societies, especially during culture change. His definition was quite complex, but describes the relationship people have to each other in both goals and material framework. Elsewhere in the social sciences researchers have had great difficulty in describing institutions and Foley (2001) complained of the difficulty to identify traces of institutions in the fossil record. The same lack of
America, Power and Oversight
In 1791 the American colonies had just won their independence from the United Kingdom, but faced continued threats from European powers including the French and Spanish. The United Kingdom also was still on friendly terms with many Native nations, including supplying these allies with war material. Attacks by Native people often combined with real or imagined unrest from African slaves in the former colonies (Aptheker, 1993).
During the Revolutionary War leading to American independence, the Native American Allies of the United Kingdom had developed considerable technical and organizational skill in fighting on the British side. After the War was over the inroads of settlers into their territories resulted in considerable loss of life (Hildreth, 1879
McMaster, 1883-1913). The main group was called the Western Confederacy of Native Americans by Europeans and united the Miamis, Shawnees, Delawares and Potawatomis. Whi
The young nation sent an army to suppress the Western Confederacy in 1791, which had successfully driven settlers and some small detachments of militia out or destroyed them. This army under General Arthur St. Clair was defeated in the worst loss in American history with only 24 men escaping without injury. They lost their equipment and camp and suffered the complete rout of the survivors. The Western Confederacy offered peace terms, which were refused, and several later battles took place befor
The defeat of the army left General St. Clair under President Washington's charge of incompetence. St. Clair blamed suppliers of his troops and officials he felt had mishandled the expedition in general. He desired a trial to clear his name. Has he had been the 15th president of the Continental Congress (Feb 1787 to Nov. 1787), one might imagine that his person could be regarded as having special status. But it is clear that this was an issue that the Congress felt was necessary to deny to all o
Here is the core problem. On what basis can the executive claim such protective powers and what is the "public good"? While a political examination of this conflict is of interest, what concerns us is the fact that the danger of failure of the government was the main reason for refusal. Washington was not just defending his action to send an army in defense of the decision by Congress and the Executive of the United States to seize Native lands. But the legal fabric of the nation had only been i
In the minds of the creators of the American republic that was in formation, the history of state formation in Greece and Rome was an essential reference. In most of these examples, the rule of individual cities could be managed by assemblies, often dominated by one group or another and sometimes called democracies or oligarchies. When alliances were formed between cities, they were usually temporary, yet some were intended to produce lasting peace administered by representatives of cities or gr
Sometimes these were defined by oaths or constitutions, limiting encroachment on the members or binding them in some specific way (Larsen, 1955). Often an executive group to government of a larger unit was formed and given powers to act under certain conditions. These executives, like the Roman consuls could, and often did, use their offices to undermine the independence of the individual cities, or in the case of Rome, to seize state power. The construction of the American Constitution was hope
Institutions and Power
Larson's (1955) examples show that the history American founders were attempting to use to balance powers was fraught with failure. The defeat of St. Clair was followed closely by the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion over taxation. There were considerable voices against the use of troops against citizens, yet the survival of the nation seemed threatened by its lack of authority. The creation of an institution, like that of the Office of the Presidency, and prerogatives of power against Congress and the co
Today, as in the time of Richard Nixon, the issue of Executive Privilege is foremost in many discussions of the American presidency. And, as in 1791, it cuts to the core of the issue of power, stability and the nature of the institution of the presidency. In 1791, the image of defeat brought about the imagined necessity for a strong executive, but even there had Washington given over the papers requested by Congress it is debatable what, if any, damage might have been done. Yet the power of the
Conclusion: Crisis and Opportunity
Just as there is a general view that the Black Death (Bubonic Plague) in the 14th century had a dramatic and formative effect on society where some saw the impetus for the opening of the Renaissance (Bowsky, 1971), so today we have an opportunity for change. Our current economy is based on consumer society which is unsustainable, not only in the continuous amount of wealth and labor that goes into the production of goods that often are only used once (as in fast fashion items, see e.g., Schlossb
Usually when disaster strikes people reorganize along customary lines and rebuild, often with some novel adaptations that have come about over time, as in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, or the hurricanes so common along the Gulf Coast. The "hum of the hive" of human social life kicks in and renewal seems a drive to the normal (Caldararo, 2020). But some disasters are so devastating and terrifying, as it seems was the eruption at Santorini or the Black Death, that either abandonment or
Today we are experiencing a vast transformation of how we do work, we are Zooming meetings, training and communication for distribution. Production is so automated that human labor has become less important in so many industries that was inconceivable half a century ago. Through online education our universities could provide new and stimulating learning experiences that could result in new jobs for people to produce virtual products of all kinds, replacing the costly and polluting types as in a
A new kind of consumer society with virtual products has already been in formation in the revolutionary dynamics provided by computers, games and communication. As in the case of the Black Plague, many historians have argued that the foundations of the Renaissance were set in the late Medieval period as mentioned above, the drop in population due to the Plague spurred wage growth, shattered Feudalism and unleashed opportunities for learning and new wealth (Bowsky, 1971). The idea of free time, o
Our institutions have been under assault in a way parallel to those attacks in the past, as mentioned above in Rome and elsewhere. Instead of a struggle for the old society of the Twentieth Century, it is a time to consider a new society of the Twenty-first Century. Just as government came to the rescue of the financial institutions in 2007, it should now support the medical community and the general public to create "free time" to readjust life, provide for new educational opportunities in our
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Chapter EightClimate Change,Economic Philosophy and Policy
As the chapter on the Khmer demonstrates, people do attempt to change their behavior as environments change. We lack the ethnohistorical documents that might explain how the Khmer came to make investments to avoid collapse, but one can assume that, as in the case of the people of Teotihuaco (Millon, 1988) environmental stress, even if largely human driven, can be mitigated to some degree if resources can be diverted and reward goal systems can be modified sufficiently. This is not entirely the p
Biesbroek, et al., (2013) attempt to enumerate the varied factors involved in blocking or complicating climate change adaptation. Vink, et al. (2013) describe the lack of comprehensive approach in the literature concerning knowledge and power to implement initiatives. A good example of this situation, regarding both policy and power, was the conflict between the United States Federal Reserve's Jay Powell rejecting any responsibility of the Fed to respond proactively to climate change initiatives
The recent wild fires in California, including that in Paradise and the very destructive fires in Portugal, Russia, Brazil, Greece and Indonesia have illustrated again the human toll and cost of wildfire. This chapter is not about Paradise, rather it is about because of existing policies and fire dogma, economic philosophies and policy, there will be more Paradises to come. Until there is a comprehensive reanalysis of these policies and dogma, which this paper is a brief outline, the crisis will
Much of the data used to justify logging, defensive space and prescribed burns is based on an unscientific methodology called "fire scars" which identify tissue trauma in trees as fire evidence. This concept is based on a subjective interpretation. Such trauma evidence can be caused by limbs striking trunks, disease, etc. Studies of ancient burns are not verified by carbon analysis as described by scientists such as Goldberg (1985). Fire (as industrial processes and recreational uses) as well as
A recent study (Stephens, Martin, & Clinton, 2007) argued that 1.8 million hectares burned annually in prehistoric California, a tremendous amount that would have made difficult the survival of wildlife to support Native Americans and the ability of new biomass to survive to feed wildlife until new growth could take place (see General Surveys in Heizer & Whipple, 1971). Other commercial changes were engineered by the advance of agriculture from the Colonial period. Our private forest lands been
Fire Suppression and Prescribed Burns
Another part of this dogma is the idea that the forest industry or the Forest Service has tried to keep fire out of our forests and that this is now responsible for the forest fires we now see. Paul Mellars in a 1976 article detailed how our forests have been fired yearly to increase the growth of forage for commercial herds and wild populations of game for hunters for over 100 years. Thus the idea that prescribed burns are new is simply false, and J.E. Keeley, et al., (1999) found in a study of
One would expect that if natural fire regimes were working they would burn off all the fire fuel and leave areas without return fire. Alternatively, if areas have not burned within established fire regime periods related to fire fuel build up then they would be expected to burn. Minnich, et al. (2000) competed a very thorough analysis of photographic images taken from the air over the past 60 years in the southern desert areas of California. Their maps indicate that neither expected result can b
The ethnohistorical data is also biased where Native American memories are affected by histories of contact and no longer "pristine records of past events." This can explain why studies that rely on fire scars and ethnohistorical data (e.g., Stephens, et al., 2007) often produce extreme fire histories where up to 88% of California is annually burning. Though more difficult to collect and assess (Goldberg, 1985), studies of fossil pollen and carbon in the soil produce less biased results though a
The S.F. Chronicle (e.g. Fimrite, 2007
Martin, 2007) and other newsmedia (e.g., New York Times, Johnson, 2006
Associated Press, Flaccus, 2006) in their coverage of these wild fires in the State of California, and interviews with the victims who lost homes, focus attention on another element of the dogma with the idea of clearing brush around structures to produce what is called "defensible space," and criticism of environmental pressure to limit logging. In both cases there is no scientific su
Fires do not burn one bush or tree at a time, they consume both organic materials in their path and available oxygen being also driven by wind and contours of the terrain. Studies published from the second La Mesa Fire Symposium by the United States Forest Service in 1994 detail these factors (Craig, 1996). To believe that a few hundred feet of cleared space (California law changed in 2005 required 100 feet of "fuel clearing" and 30 feet of a "clean and lean zone" with little flammable material
The present argument that the Forest Service has created disasters by years of fire suppression is also unfounded. The practice the Forest Service has followed is that of forest management established since the virgin forests of America were burned and logged off by settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries, as mentioned above. That practice was to fire the forest undergrowth to promote forage for wildlife that supported hunting, both commercial and recreational. The greatest increase in biomass o
The Forest Service has invested huge sums in fighting fires but it is questionable if these efforts contain fires more than natural burning limits would produce, given the samples of fire histories produced in recent years. Pyne (1982, 1991,&1995) has suggested this same conclusion from his research in terms of cost of fire fighting and the results. Rather the facts are that we have created fire adapted forests by commercial uses of the forests, prescribed burns and by a history of logging. In 1
Mike Davis (1995) summarized the fire frequency data for much of California finding that in the Malibu area, the rugged 22 miles coastline "is scourged, on average, by a large (1,000 + acre) fire every two years, and the entire western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three-times over this century." He lists the fires and dates with acres affected. James Sweeney noted a similar fire history of reburning areas in his 1956 summary. We must ask, then, what fire suppression? And what is the rel
The fire adapted nature of our forests and wildlands is the product of 50,000 years of human treatment of the natural environment. I documented this history in a paper on the human ecology of fire (Caldararo, 2002) and its cultural origins (Caldararo, 2004). The fire adapted nature of the forests and the lack of prevention by prescribed burns was demonstrated in the recent Los Alamos fires where a prescribed burn turned into a major forest fire. The same is true of the Grayline Fire that also st
World-wide, nearly 80% of all fires are the result of human behavior either by directly setting a blaze as arson, or by accident (Caldararo, 2004). In California, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection released figures in July 2007 showing that 13.2% of all fires in the State were arson, 29.1% from equipment use
campfires, smoking, playing with fire by adults and children accounted for 5.6%, debris burning 9%, vehicles caused 11.8%, miscellaneous human causes at 12.2% and und
For years environmentalists have been trying to get people to live with the land, to reduce the impact of roofs and energy use. Surrounding a home with greenery, especially using trees accomplishes this result. The "defensible space" concept undermines these efforts.
In post-fire studies of surviving vs burned structures from the 1961 Bel-Air fire and the 1990 Santa Barbara fire three factors affected survival, the most significant was a nonflammable roof, the second a defensible space and third someone home to fight the fire. The last factor accounted for 9% but the nonflammable roof vs defensible space were not separated as components, though a nonflammable roof was cited as the main factor associated with the pathway of embers causing fire.
When the Cleveland National Forest fire in 2003 in San Diego county was finally put out, over 2,800 homes had been destroyed. There was no statistical difference between those homes that had "defensible space" and those that did not. Data from one of the best studied fires, the Black Tiger Fire published by the National Fire Protection Association, produced tables of survivor qualities for houses in the fire. It was a human caused fire in 1989, covering 2100 acres and destroying 44 homes. Of tho
Housing and Developments in Wildlands
A related problem Martin (2007) brings up is low cost housing in the Sierra and other forested and wildland areas. The Sierra counties and cities had the opportunity to employ zoning restrictions and impact fees to provide for low cost housing decades ago. The tradition of anti-government property fanaticism defeated any potential for this and was supported by the poorest and most in need of such housing. The local newspapers attacked all proposals for regional planning to provide affordable hou
Bias and Random Factorsin Data on House Survival
I think the most significant handicap the public is faced with is the belief (or propensity to imply when speaking to the popular press) among forest science advocates that fires burn one tree or bush at a time. What we see instead, especially from temperature, wind and aerial analysis is a "storm." A fire storm proceeds along the contours of the land and is deflected or drawn by a number of factors. Frederick J. Swanson (1981) described this in great detail. Biomass consumption takes place base
1. The 1961 Belair-Brentwood fire is said to have had homes survive with non-flammable roofs and a clearance of 10- to 18 meters (30 to 60 ft.) (95% survival rate, Howard, et al, 1973).
2. The 1990 Painted Cave Fire found homes with wood roofs had a 20% survival rate, and those with non-wood materials a 70% survival rate, combined with a vegetation clearance of 10 meters or more the survival rate went up to 90%. Still homes with flammable roofs, no clearance and no defense still survived at a rate of 4% (Kirsch, n.d.).
3. The Black Tiger Fire, one of the best studied fires where fireline intensity (FI) was measured found that where FI was at least 500 Btu/feet per second 11.7% of the structures survived. Of these one had a clearance of 10 feet the other 75 feet. Both had non-flammable roofing materials, and were on slopes of 10 to 15%, considered good for survival. With an FI of less than 500 Btu/fs, 18% of the homes survived one with 5 feet of clearance and one with 10 feet. Of the homes that survived 25% had
What is needed is to define safety, but why also we see homes burn at 50 feet and not at 5 feet. Into this equation we must also figure fire fighter behavior.
In a November 2007 OpEd piece in the Marin Independent Journal Scott Alber and Kent Julin, representatives of Marin County's open space and fire management agencies, answered my earlier discussion in the same paper of the flaws in the concept of "defensible space." This is an issue that requires more public discussion. It was also gratifying to find that they did not refute any of the scientific evidence or studies I used to criticize it. The massive destruction of trees and plant life that resu
The main flaw in the defensible space idea is that its proponents claim that clearing space around a home protects it from wildfire. This is simply not supported by the scientific evidence. As I cited the Black Tiger Fire (though others show the same result), some homes with cleared areas burned and some with no cleared areas (less than 10 feet) did not. Other factors like combustible roofing materials, slope, decks, open eaves, are more significant.
Since Alber and Julin bring up the Oakland Hills fire in 1991, reference to its causes should be examined. First, the fire was started by workers who imprudently operated machinery. Had they followed proper procedures no fire would have occurred. Second, the fire department response team did not put the fire out properly and left before embers were totally dead. Third, when residents called in the revived fire their calls were ignored because the fire department believed they had already put it
Following this exchange, Mr. Tim Thompson, battalion chief with the Marin County Fire Dept. made a remarkable admission in the November 11th 2007 the Marin Independent Journal newspaper about the decisions made on the ground by firefighters. In the face of concerns of property owners about which homes were chosen to defend and those allowed to burn his statement is revealing. He asserts that the primary factor he and his colleagues used to determine which houses to defend was defensive space. On
A recent review of fires in California by Syphard and Keeley (2019) came to the conclusion about defensible space:
"The relative importance of defensible space, as quantified by deviance explained in the regression models, was virtually nil statewide...,"
In a later restudy (Syphard, et al., 2021) they concluded,
"Generally, the pattern of housing relative to vegetation better explained structure loss than local-scale vegetation amount, but the results varied regionally."
Scarce resources that the public has available for fighting fires should be efficiently utilized, and while we should defer to the expertise of the professionals it is appalling to find their decision-making based on a narrow view. Espousing the defensive space philosophy also simply encourages building in the most fire-vulnerable landscapes and discourages the use of biomass as a means of reducing the impact of existing human built space, providing some coverage for wildlife as well as reducing
Vicious Cycle: Logging, fire-adaptedecosystems and Fire-Fighting
Reporter Mark Prado (12/20/07) reported on the discovery that a fungus causing brown cubicle heart rot was attacking the redwoods in Muir Woods, the implication was that a lack of fire was the culprit. While this is a disturbing finding, the response is both typical and wrongheaded. The idea that fire is the answer to all the forestry and wildland problems we have has become dogma. It is evident that human activities have upset the natural world, but there is no archaeological evidence to prove
From an anthropological perspective this is a rather primitive way of going about to solve problems. The attitude that we must fight this fungus with fire, like the approach that we must muster our forces against wildfires as if we were fighting an enemy is part of a long cultural tradition that we must tame nature. The enemy is out there, and we need to circle the wagons and spray it with pesticides or bomb it with fire retardant, bulldoze fire breaks, and deny it fuel as a defensive measure li
In this instance regarding brown cubicle heart rot, the scientific literature tells us that this fungus is spread by human activity as well as Sudden Oak Death Disease (http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn 74151.html). Professor Garbelotto at UC Berkeley in 2004 wrote that the fungus is propagated on the stumps of newly cut down trees and transmitted by infection to the roots of nearby trees. Therefore, across our State, and perhaps the country, loggers are spreading the disease. Further, this
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National Park Service, Cerro Grande Prescribed Fire, Board of Inquiry Final Report, February, 26,2001.
Olshansky, S. Jay, Bradley J. Wilcox, L. Demetrius and Hiram Beltran-Sanchez, (2024) "Implausibility of radical life extension in humans in the 21st century," Nature Aging, 7 Oct., doi.org/10.1038/s43587-024-00702-3.
Olshansky, S. Jay, Bruce A. Carnes and Christine K. Cassel (1993) *The aging of the human species, Scientific American, April, 46-52.
Riggen, P., Goode, S., Jacks, P., Lockwood, R., (1988) "Interaction of fire and community development in chaparral of southern California," Ecological Monographs, v. 58,155-176.
Schele, Linda and David Freidel, (1990) A Forest of Kings, the Untold Story of the Ancient Maya, New York, William Morrow & co.
Stephens, Scott L., Martin, Robert E., & Clinton, Nicholas E., "Prehistoric fire area and emissions from California's forests, woodlands, shrublands and grasslands," Forest Ecology and Management, doi:10.1016/j.foeco, 2007.06.005.
Stocks, B. and Kauffman,J.B., "Biomass consumption and behavior of wildland fires in boreal, temperate, and tropical ecosystems: perameters necessary to interpret historic fire regimes and future fire scenarios," in J.S. Clark, H. Cachier, J.G. Goldammer, B.Stocks, editors, Sediment Records of Biomass Burning and Global Change, NATO ASI Series, v. 151, Berlin: Swpringer-Verlag, 1997:169-188.
Swanson, Frederick J. "Fire and geomorphic processes" in Proceedings, Fire Regimes and Ecosystems Conference, 1979 Dec. 11-15 Honolulu, USDA June 1981.
Swetnam, T.W., (, 1993) "Fire history and climate change in giant Sequoia groves," Science, v. 262:885-889.
Vink, Martinus J., Art Dewulf and Catrien Termeer (2013) "The role of knowledge and power in climate change adaptation governance: a systematic literature review," Ecology and Society, Dec. v. 18, n. 4, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/26269416.
Weisberg, Lori, Showley, Roger & Pierce, Emmet, (2007) "Exclusive homes emerge unscathed as fire protection concept is tested," Union-Tribune, San Diego, Ca., Oct, 25.
Yoffee, Norman, (1988) "The collapse of Ancient Mesopotamian states and civilization," In The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, (eds) Tucson, The University of Arizona Press: 44-68.
Part Two:Wildfire and Fire-adapted Ecology:How People Created the Current Fire Disasters
Introduction
The Waldo Canyon fire in the foothills of Colorado Springs, Colorado in 2012 is a prime example of the nature of wildfire today (Randall, 2014). Viewing the now iconic image of the fire destroying homes and cars across the suburban development gives a perfect picture of the problem. Most people think of wildfire taking place in forests or in rural areas where it is a natural environment that burns. The problem here is that there is no natural environment any more, humans are everywhere and all l
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Figure 7: Waldo Canyon Fire June 26, 2012
Methods
The methods used in this part of this paper included walking the Mount Vision fire area in Marin County, California as well as the recent Valley Fire surrounding Middletown, analyzing reports of fire agencies of the fire response, interviews with fire fighters and home owners. Some soil samples were taken to verify reports in the case of the Vision fire. Comparing data on fire frequency and intensity from various agencies was utilized as a means of understanding historic trends in fire burns in
The Problem
In the mid 1960s I began a program of research into forest management after having visited a number of lumber camps and lumber mills in the Humboldt County area of California. The camps were squalid affairs where living conditions for workers and their families seemed to be a holdover from the 1930s. The mills were just as disturbing, not just the constant noise, but the ever present danger of serious injury and death. About this time the lumber mill in the Ferndale area had an explosion and spe
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Map 1 Map of Wild Fires in California 2015
Today fires rage across the western United States taking human lives and destroying billions of dollars of property as well as the lives of untold thousands of animals. Yet this disaster is human created. My research since the 1960s has shown that since the arrival of humans in the Americas fire has been a tool to shape and tame the natural environment to human uses. With the arrival of Europeans this process accelerated dramatically. I made a number of core samples to find evidence of carbon fr
This seemed strange given as a student at Humboldt State College in the 1960s I was told by professors in "fire science" that forest fires were natural and had always been happening as long as there were forests. But studies of carbon in the geological record did not support this argument, and a major work in the study of ancient carbon by Edward Golderg (1985) failed to support the assertion. What's more, it is illogical since the only way we could have huge seams of economically useful coal is
Causes of Forest and Wildland Fire
So if wildfire is not natural then why does it happen? It is true that there are lenses of carbon in the fossil and archaeological record that indicate short term, low intensity fire, but not the massive wild fires that we see today. If this is true, then how do we understand the difference. The exceptions are major asteroid hits and volcanic eruptions. I found that data collected around the world for causes of wild fire show that almost 90% of all wild fire is human caused. This means both peop
Data from a number of sources, including state park services and the federal government cited in my 2002 paper show that where there is human activity we have the greatest concentration of fire and fire frequency as well as intensity. It is true that about 10% of fires are set by lightning and some few by spontaneous combustion, but the grand total can be blamed on humans. However, we hear from the forest industry and most "fire science" researchers that the history of fighting fires has created
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Figure 5: Distribution of Wildland fires over time on US Forest Service Land
Are wild fires now due to global warming? Well we have had global warming episodes in the past before humans existed, both during the early Cenozoic and before, yet no frequency of wild land fires like today. Some argue that climate change (Climate Central, 2012) alone can explain the increase in fires in the past 50 years, but this seems unlikely given the tremendous impact humans have had on the land.
Solutions to the Problem
How can we stop wild fires? Obviously this is a complex problem, we have a number of industries that have a more than 300 year history of setting fires as part of their routine. This includes farming and the stock industry. Farmers and livestock operations can do without the use of fire. This has been shown in California were typical end of the harvest burning of rice fields had largely ended as new products were identified in the waste plant stocks, including pet litter and this has extended to
Fires on rangeland must stop as well. The use of fire prevents the growth of trees and shrubs and promotes new growth of plants useful for grazing animals. However, it simply creates a fire-adapted ecology promoting a landscape that is formed by fire. However, much of the rangeland that is fired is public lands that are leased by farmers for very little public benefit. The degradation of the land is only a process of erosion and loss of habitat that should be stopped. Dr. Thomas L. Fleischner ha
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A stock pond is just one of many alterations ranchers make to the landscape to better accommodate their cattle, to the detriment of native wildlife.
Figure 6: Example of degradation of land by over grazingand farming practices, from Thomas L. Fleischner, 2002
Logging related fires to clear debris and to reduce certain types of plants noxious to forest growth should be ended as well as pesticides in forests that destroy insects and small vertebrates that feed on undergrowth. But logging in general creates conditions for intense and widespread fires as it promotes "fields" of tree "crops" all planted at the same time so that they grow as a canopy creating crown fires that rage for miles. Logging adapts forests for fire and post-logging fire catastrophe
Hunting has a negative effect on reduction of fire burden. As hunters kill browsers the biomass increases year by year. It is no surprise to people that the prairies supported some 30,000,000 to 50,000,000 bison in pre-Columbian times (Isenberg,2000), but that moose, elk and deer existed in huge herds across America. In forested areas there was the wood bison, but the central point here is that the reduction of herds leaves masses of plant life that can become fuel for fire. Eliminating or reduc
Building in rural areas new housing is a major problem. Cutting new roads in wild areas for new developments divides native species of animals from their ranges and causes toxic runoff and heat "stripes" across vast areas. Developments set housing into wild adapted ecologies where overextended fire services then are forced to protect homes. Amenities like gardens and trees, usually non-native are introduced. What is usually unknown to most people is that many grasses and brush (like Scotch Broom
Yet, just the presence of more people who routinely use a grassland area will result in more human-set fire, either intentional or accidental, thousands of structures in the USA are lost every year due to the increasing movement of housing into wild lands and forests (Stein, et al. 2013). This should be stopped or severely limited as the costs of protecting these homes and related commercial developments are unsustainable.
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Map 2: Structures lost to wildfire from Stein, et al., 2013
Probably the biggest problem concerning reducing wild fire and its costs involves recreational use of public lands. Since we know that people are associated with the greatest number of fires, the presence of people is a factor that cannot be ignored. Yet people want to use the "wild" as a place to enjoy themselves, but they do not want real "wild" animals occupying these areas like wolves, bears, mountain lions or coyotes as someone might get hurt. The fact that our rural areas can hardly be cal
Everyone from the Sierra Club to CSAA are boosters for getting out in nature, yet the idea of hordes of people stamping over the last wild space and crushing its natural inhabitants in good healthy exercise is lost to them. The general idea in environmental groups like the Sierra Club is that if people go into nature they will want to protect it. The fact that the more people who do that and the more facilities we build to allow access and overnight accommodations, etc. the less nature there is
Perhaps the development of indoor recreation is the answer, and support of this trend could be a means of taking pressure off rural and "wild" or once natural areas. Already there are very significant investments being made in experiences like indoor skiing. Another growing recreational opportunity that many young people seem to be attracted to is the virtual experience. Whatever replacement we can create to divert human impact on the open spaces in the future, either to prevent the further dest
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Figure 7: Indoor skiing TheSnowCenter.com London
Conclusion
From this review of the fire history of the past decade it seems clear that current policy is inadequate to deal with increasing fires, fire intensity, costs of fighting fires and loss of property. The central problem in the past decade is the expansion of homes, roads and recreation into wild areas without planning or cost analysis of how to pay for fires or avoid them. Hunting and grazing should be limited and money should be allocated to educate people to reduce fire potential and loss of lif
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Figure 8: Burning man event Nevada Desert
References For Part II
Belsoy, Josphat, Korir, Jacqueline & Yego, Jacob, "Environmental Impacts of Tourism in Protected Areas." Journal of Environment and Earth Science, Vol 2, No.10, 2012:64-73.
Caldararo N., Human ecological intervention and the role of forest fires in human ecology. Sci Total Environ
2002 Jun 26
292(3):141-65.
Caldararo, Niccolo "Dominant Paradigm of Fire Control: Solution or Problem?" Forest Research, v. 1, n. 1, 2012:1-5.
Climate Central, Age of Western Wild Fires, 2012: http://culter.colorado.edu /~tims/Wildfires2012.pdf.
Conedera, Marco, Willy Tinner, Christophe Neff, Manfred Meurer, Patrik Krebs (2009) "reconstructing past fire regimes: methods, applications, and relevance to fire management and conservation," Quaternary Science reviews, v. 28, 435-456.
Fleischner, Thomas L., "Land Held Hostage: A History of Livestock and Politics," Pages 33-38 in G. Wuerthner and M. Matteson, eds. Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West. Island Press, Washington, D.C. [http://www.publiclandsranching.org/htmlres/wr_history_politics.htm].
Goldberg, Edward D., Black Carbon in the Environment, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1985.
Isenberg, Andrew C. The Destruction of the American Bison, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Mathieson, A., and Wall, G. (1982). Tourism: Economic, Social and Physical Impacts. London: Longman.
Randall, Brianna (2021) "Invasive grasses are taking over the American West's sea of sagebrush," Science News, December 6.
Randall, Christina, "Two Years after Waldo Canyon Fire, Colorado Springs Wildfire Mitigation Program in Full Force," FEMA Report: http://www.fema. gov/blog/2014-06-27/two-years-after-waldo-canyon-fire-colorado-springs-wildfire-mitigation-program-full.
Stein, S.M.
Menakis, J.
Carr, M.A.
Comas, S.J.
Stewart, S.I.
Cleveland, H.
Bramwell, L.
Radeloff, V.C. 2013. Wildfire, wildlands, and people: understanding and preparing for wildfire in the wildland-urban interface-a Forests on the Edge report. Gen.Tech. Rep. RMRS-GTR-299. Fort Collins, CO. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. 36 p.
Sweeney, James R., Responses of Vegetation to Fire, A Study of the Herbaceous Vegetation Following Chaparral Fires, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1956.
Syphard, Alexandra and Jon E. Keeley, (2019) "Factors associated with structure 2013-2018 California wildfires," Fire, volume 2: doi:10.3390/fire2030049.
Syphard, Alexandra, Heather Rustigian-Romsos, Jon E. Keeley (2021) "Multiple-Scale Relationships between Vegetation, the Wildland-Urban Interface, and Structure Loss to Wildfire in California," Fire, v. 4 (1) 12
https://doi.org/ 10.3390/fire4010012.
Widick, Richard, Trouble in the Forest California's Redwood Timber Wars, University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Chapter NineGarbage, Waste, Recyclingand the "Toilet Mentality"
An article in Global Change Biology in 2018 by scientists at the University of Queensland found that most sea turtles have eaten plastic (Duncan, et al., 2018). The contamination of our food is spreading. The problem is garbage and the residues of our behavior, both of which are encased in irrational and illogical thinking. Over 50 years ago George W. Irving, Jr. (1970) published an article demonstrating how the use of pesticides to control for both food production and to established comforts fo
Yale's Center for Industrial Ecology reports in an issue of Nature Climate Change that estimates of garbage going to landfills was underestimated, twice as much is being dumped. One might say that to save ourselves humans should make and use fewer things. The fact that we are toolusers and toolmakers is destroying the earth and burying it in trash.
The report from the Pacific trash "patch" is even worse than people feared given the voyage to the "patch" by Boyan Slat (Jaxon Van Derbeken, "Pacific Trash Patch worse than believed entrepreneur says" S.F. Chronicle, Aug. 24th 2015) With all the boasting about recycling perhaps it is time to make some hard looks at garbage and make some hard decisions about the future.
As Cverenkarova, et al., show in their 2021 study, plastic waste is now entering our food chain because more plastic is being deposited in the oceans and waterways. This process is clarified by work published by Saeedi (2023), A new study by environmental engineer Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia published in Science, found that recycling plastic is failing and more than 8.8 million metric tons of plastic are dumped into the oceans each year.
Fraud in recycling is rampant (see reported in the L.A. Times on October 8, 2012 (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/10/ recycling-fraud-drains-californias-cash.html). Recent studies by MIT's SENSEable City Lab found that the energy involved in transporting recycled materials has not been included in estimates of cost factors in treating garbage. Cost factors and carbon emissions due to transport outweighed the expected benefit of recycling. Amsterdam converts 99% of its domestic and com
A detailed study of the actual problems and costs in garbage are found in Edward Humes book, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, presents evidence from several university studies in America and studies by governmental agencies in the European Union that remove the illusion concerning recycling. Reading through Garbology you find that greenhouse gases from landfills are now a greater source of pollution than burning garbage. However, new technology has made garbage burning plants clean e
The Basel Group in Europe argues that garbage is dumped at sea. Reports by the United
Nations, Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Pollution, have found since their data gathering began in 1990 that more garbage is found in the sea than ever before. Elisabeth Royte's book (Garbage Land, 2005) documents this. A report on the world's oceans' health by Markus Eriksen, in PLOS ONE and reported in the Marin IJ on December 11th 2014, found 270,000 tons of plastic in the oceans and this is degrading into as much as 5 trillion pieces being ingested by fish and aquatic ma
Landfills can be mined for future fuel. Archaeologist W.L. Rathje found that most garbage does not degrade, especially paper (see his book, Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage, 2001).
The most comprehensive article on burning garbage is by Bruce Piasecki, David Rainey and Kevin Fletcher, published in 1998. Innovations since 1998 have made these plants even cleaner (Chaowiang, et al., 2022).
Building co-generation plants can be amortized by fees collected for garbage disposal residents are already paying. Due to cheap oil renewable energy is no longer economically feasible.
Burning garbage can end expansion of existing dumps. Dumps are expanding all over the country and abroad, impacting ground water by increasing pollution in runoff, producing more greenhouse gases: methane and CO2 production. New York transports over 10,000 tons of garbage to landfills each day, other major cities follow closely. Europe is building more garbage to energy plants each year (Elisabeth Rosental, New York Times, April 12, 2010). In the USA in 2001 only 14% of solid waste is burned, 33
References
Cverenkarova, Klara, Martina Valachovicova, Tornas Mackulak, Lukas Zernicka, and Lucia Birsova, "Microplastics in the food chain," Life (Basel) Dec. V. 11, n. 12, 1349: doi: 10.3390/life11121349.
Duncan, Emily M., Annette C. Broderick, Wayne J. Fuller, Tamara S Galloway, Matthew H. Godfrey, et al., (2018) "Microplastic ingestion ubiquitous in marine turtles," Global Change Biology, v. 25, n. 2, https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14519.
Chaowiang, Suntaree, Vishakha Sing, Pornthep Chiraprawattrakun and Sumet Tangprasert, (2022) "Key points and best practices for successful municipal solid wast incineration," The 6th International Conference on Energy and Environmental Science, IOP Publishing, doi:10.1088/1755-1315/1008/1/012020.
Irving, Jr. George W. (1970) "Agricultural pest control and the environment," Science, v. 168, 1419-1424.
Jambeck, Jenna R., Roland Geyer, Chris Wilcox, Theordore R. Siegler, Miriam Perryman, et al., (2015) "Plasti waste inputs from land into the ocean," Science, Feb 13, v. 347, n.6223, 768-771.
Piasecki, Bruce, David Rainey and Kevin Fletcher, (1998) "Is the combustion of plastics desirable?," American Scientist, v. 86, n. 4, DOI: 10.1511/1998.31. 364.
Saeedi, Meysam, (2023) "How microplastics interact with food chain: a short overview of fate and impacts," Journal of Food Science and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13197-023-05720-4.
Chapter TenConclusion and Perhapsa Positive Vision of the Future
Most visions of the future are dystopian. The ruins are given as the result of human failure to control greed, or to extraterrestrial intervention either by asteroid or aliens. The one provided here begins in that manner as it is a simile of factors now functioning to bring about disaster, both climate change and thermonuclear war and perhaps even human created pandemics. The purpose of this exercise in creative history is to outline in more brilliant colors the frame of the future. This is a fu
We need more positive visions of the future. It seems they are more difficult to conceive and write than those fashioned in terror. Some are quite interesting like the Golden Compass. The imagining of future ways humans might live is necessary to provide people with alternative ways of constructing their realities and their identities. I call the one that follows, Past-Future-Perfect. It considers the use of past ways people have lived successfully, modified by present technology and desires, th
Reference
Khanna, Parag (2023) Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Climate, New York, Random House.
THERE ARE NO KINGSIN BASQUE COUNTRY
By
Nelson Ogalala Chan
a fragment from his autobiography:"Reverse 1492: The Re-Indigenation of the World"Edited by Niccolo Leo Caldararo
A note from the editor.
I met Nelson Chan In 1975 in a village south of Cuernavaca. My girlfriend and I had been ejected from a bus because the ticket we had was not properly stamped according to the bus driver. Nelson was sitting in the plaza near where the bus stopped to drop us off and heard our complaints. As the bus left without us, he waved us over and tried to comfort us with an explanation of what had happened: The bus driver operated as an independent agent and would not be paid for tickets the ticket agent ha
As we waited for the next bus, Nelson told us his life story, or stories, since he had so many adventures. His physical appearance seemed to place him in his thirties, but he had a certain world-wise nature that made him appear much older, his ready wit and vivacity gave him a younger mien. He had been a sailor, a student in chemistry, a travel agent and writer for travel magazines, railway worker, all jobs in countries across the world in numerous countries. He asked us what we did, and when I
The reason I am publishing the story now is because someone sent me an outline of it two years ago. I had heard from Nelson earlier, in 1978 I think when he sent me a story he had written about changing into a Jaguar. It was from the Jaguar's point of view, like the Roman book, The Golden Ass. I do not recall giving him my address when we met, but we did tell him about the Goodman Building where we were living, and since it was somewhat famous among artists at the time (it was a live/work squat
I say, "someone" sent me the outline as the envelope it came in was without return address or name. It might have been the girl I was traveling with when I met Nelson. She passed away about the time the envelope arrived.
Niccolo Caldararo
There are no Kings in Basque Country
1
Once when I was a child my grandfather, took me to Gernika to see Gernikako Arbola, the tree of the Basque people. It was at the time when chaos had engulfed the world, before the Orchard had come. He had said that in each person's life things seemed normal, even war, as all things become normal in time and people come to adjust to how they are. The Tree, he had said, represented the people, the branches and the leaves, the families, the trunk, the history and the roots were the past of generati
From time to time I came across books about the Basque, like Mark Kurlansky's the History of the World According to the Basque, where the Basque fierce independence and democracy are central to their story. Other books, like Roger Collins' The Basque, describe the mists that cover the obscure origins of this people. Then there was the Movie, To Die In Madrid, which depicts the fight of the Basques against fascism. It seemed horrific when the Nazis purposely bombed the Gernikako Arbola and the to
Things changed when my grandfather was a child, from a time when there were nations and those nations made of people who traded and fought as groups. My great grandfather was Chinese, born in Buenos Aires, but raised in Chicago. His mother was a Native American woman in New Orleans. He came to France with the American army in WWII and stayed in Bayonne as a civilian. He married a woman from Carcassone whose mother was a Tuareg from Mali and her father a man of Langue d'oc. My grandfather had bee
But when my grandfather became a man, the world became the prisoner of sects and fanatics who joined to destroy borders of nations and differences in beliefs. They set fire to all things that displeased them and murdered those with whom they disagreed. Yet this caused war and destruction so that weapons of all kinds were used, including nuclear ones and violent swarms of fanatics covered the earth until there were no farms or factories. The earth became a wasteland.
Globalization - the civilization of the modern era - had brought us to this place, where the contributions of millions of minds had opened great vistas of possibilities, but with it came a terror of certainty so unrelenting that the light of the world faded and the way of being human was lost.
In this wasteland of violence rose one group who enslaved all others and swept the continents of disorder until there was only one nation, the Orchard. The Basque did not succumb to this terror or the fundamentalism that drove it, but remained within their countries. My grandfather had come there with his sister and wife, and he told of travelling across the Orchard's roads where people did not live as in cities, but where the buildings had been destroyed and the roads and highways were now plac
There were refugees, always at all times, even before the Romans came. These were people who came to Basque country, searching for aid and peace, to learn Basque and be. But when the Orchard was victorious, the flood of wounded and hungry became a desperate mass. Unlike in the past where some could stay and be productive and Basque country grew. Now there was no where to go. Some tried to go into what had once been the lands of Gascogne after the fall of the Roman Empire, and to Catalonia and th
The Basque never had kings, were perhaps matriarchal and are said to never have conquered others. They tended their garden, though were often forced to fight for others to survive, in the Roman Armies, and in the service of the Visigoths and Franks. There were no mountains among them, no leaders who dominated the landscape of a nation, not in the pass where Roland fell or in the blood soaked fields of the Ring of Iron before the fall of Bilbao in the Civil War. "It goes," said the woman who sold
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2
To the rulers of the Orchard the existence of Basque country was, at first, an opportunity. They bought food and manufactured goods. But the Basque would not sell them weapons, vehicles, ships or airplanes. Those that existed outside Basque country were breaking down as there was no education or training in the chaos of the Orchard. Teaching and learning were forbidden to them, there was only subjection and taking, knowledge was evil to them. Eventually the Orchard sent its armies against the Ba
As the days passed unease set in after the initial relief as there was no understanding of what force had set upon the Orchard and if it would be a danger to the Basque. Planes were seen flying over the countryside that had once been battlefields. The Orchard had no planes so the new force was a mystery. One sunny day radar picked up a number of planes heading for Bilbao. Broadcast to the Basque media came a message from the Japanese, that an emissary was on the way. The Basque air force moved t
The Mayor of the town and a mass of Basque came to meet this person. Out of the plane came a woman in a kimono followed by a number of men in traditional Japanese dress. The woman came to the Mayor and said in Basque:
"We suffered the first horror of nuclear war decades ago. Modernity produced weapons of mass destruction and death-worshiping dogmas. All the ideologies of the world are dead. All religions false. We endeavor to destroy man and bring peace. Do not expand, be Basque." She turned and they returned to the plane and left. It seemed obvious the Japanese were also immune to the music of the sects.
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3
When I was a child we often heard that the Japanese had pursued the fanatics across the globe killing all humans they encountered. They pursued the fully globalized, those lost to technology who like zombies walked the streets staring at glowing screens, locked into the message of the Orchard still broadcast from robot servers hidden in the depths of ruins. Purifying the land as they went, one might say, following the signals of the living dead. Where no "modern people" were only traditional peo
A quiet grew as time passed.
Basque fishermen and women had for thousands of years before the Romans arrived, fished across the Atlantic without contaminating other peoples. Now they brought reports of huge schools of fish, of great groups of whales and of forests in the Americas and Europe. The world was healing. This meant little to the Basque who just lived their lives as they had for thousands of years before. No more people came asking for sanctuary. The Japanese did not come again. The land was quiet except for the sk
Radio messages from Ainu Ham Radio operators in Japan told of terrible riots by fanatics and it appeared that the Japanese were also not immune to the disease. Decades went by with no more broadcasts until a Basque ship landed in Hokkaido. The country had returned to nature and the Ainu had returned to the old ways, like the Andamanese, they desired no contact and turned their backs on the visitors.
Some people continued to go into the lands outside Basque country to hunt or fish. Some went to the ocean outside Catalonia, but none stayed. My wife and I lived in the village of Ainhoa with a house full of cats on the top of the mountains. Buried beneath the house are the bones of people who lived before us, some known, some unknown, for all people are our ancestors. We read their lives and learn how to live so there will always be enough and peace can reign not men. As the Japanese had reques
"But father," asked one of Nelson's children during his telling of this tale, "Was it instinct or genetics that saved the Basque?"
"No," Nelson responded, "It was the culture of the indigenous people that was like a protective bubble against the madness of the Orchard."
"We, and all people who survived, are a coat of many colors. That is the only way the peoples like the Basque and Ainu could have taken in so many refugees and resisted the madness together."
/
References
Pullman, Philip (1995) Northern Lights, London, Scholastic UK. (Made into a movie titled, The Golden Compass.
Appendix
List of initiatives people & governments could take to produce a more sustainable Earth.
1. Stop having babies, if the fertility could be reduced to 1 child per 10 women that would make a health world more likely. 1 in 100 better. There are too many people now for humans to ever attain sustainability without sacrifice. Women who do not have children should be treated like the heroes they are.
2. Reduce living units in developed rich countries to 500 sq ft per person that would reduce heating and cooling and lighting.
3. Move humanity from hot, humid, and cold areas to the temperate zones that will save energy in cooling and heating.
4. Burn garbage increase recycling today too much plastic and toxic materials go into the ocean, seas and lakes.
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