Misplacing Our Ancient Survival Toolkit
For most of your 200,000-year history, our hold on this planet had been tenuous. Although by most measures we Homo sapiens are now a spectacularly successful species, it still took us until the last century to reach the billion mark in population. Now, we are members of a runaway population of seven billion, and we are not husbanding our home world at all well. We are just beginning to struggle mightily with the unpleasantries of our excesses.
For 200,000 years, human beings managed to survive and thrive in a world that, on occasion, threw us a roundhouse knockdown punch. Regardless of the agents of death and hardship the world leveled against us, we were always able to get up off the ground and meet a new set of challenges. We had a remarkable tool kit at our disposal honed keen by life in the wild. It helped us face down the doomsdays of the past and move beyond them. In our toolkit was a comprehensive hands-on understanding of the natural world. The collective knowledge of hundreds and thousands of generations of humans was bundled into speech, behavior, and action and passed down through millennia.
Elder to parent, parent to child the knowledge of the wild and our place in it was passed along. Through 8,000 generations that body of information and the attendant skill sets necessary to forge a living directly from the forests, savannahs and deserts, from the lakes, rivers, and oceans was handed off, guarded and cultivated lovingly, and sent down the chain of days to the next generation and the next and the next.
Facing mile-high walls of glacial ice, volcanic fire, gases and ash, comet visitors, wild swings in temperature and ocean levels, and pandemic disease, our forbears simply turned to their ancestral toolkit and scratched out a living with their bare hands and simple stone tools, even in the bleakest hours.
Today, our ancient toolkit has been discarded. We think it useless, unnecessary, even backward, in our technological societies tied to the global mono-economic system. Gone with it is our ability to live on nature’s terms.
No matter what terrible force the natural world (and increasingly the human-made environment) musters against us, the most dangerous and positively lethal foe we will face in the future is our own inability to sustain ourselves in the wild. Until the advent of the industrial revolution three centuries ago, virtually all people on earth could wrest a living from the environment. Even as late as World War II, the great majority of humans on the planet fed themselves by dint of their own direct experience and labor. That is no longer even remotely possible. The chain of ancient knowledge has been broken and the broken links have vanished from everyday life. When the next great tribulation befalls us, we may very well perish because we no longer know where to turn for our next meal or drink of fresh water.
