Tobacco often appears as a sacred power in Native American lore. It is given to spirits, and is believed to have medicinal properties. This seems jarring, given what we now know about smoking. How could these same Natives, who had such comprehensive command of the medicinal and edible plants around them, mistake the carcinogenic nature of tobacco? Of course, when we carefully examine the history of tobacco, we find something very curious. Cancer often leaves skeletal evidence, and old ethnographic accounts can often be used to piece together symptoms of diseases unknown to the original ethnographer, yet evidence of lung cancer among Native Americans before the 20th century remains rare.

…the bright light of all the world was put out, or, rather, when the Roman Empire was decapitated, and, to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city.

— St. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel

St. Jerome’s lament of Rome is often provided for context in discussions of Rome’s collapse; “the whole world perished in one city” is offered as an indication of how apocalyptic the collapse was. What followed was a period of time so despised even its name conjures up how terrible it was: the Dark Ages.

The Spell of the Sensuous
By David Abram

Summarizing Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous is a difficult task. Not since Ishmael have my thoughts been so turned upside-down by a book. Abram fully understands the powerful magic of language, and uses it to full effect in this volume, as he uses it to show us that magic itself. Along the way, Abram offers a stunning and authoritative answer to Zerzan’s critique of language by showing us that language is not an arbitrary abstraction at all, but firmly rooted in our ecology. To begin a summary of Abram’s book, it may be easiest to work backwards from the starting point of Western philosophy, for as Alfred Whitehead (we’ve discussed one of his pithy aphorisms before) put it, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

On 5 June 1945, the United Nations charter was signed in Muir Woods, near San Francisco. “Whoever picked the place had a wonderfully historic aesthetic. Muir Woods is one of the preserved remnants of the old growth redwood forest that once spread across California. It contains trees over a millennium old.”¹ On the 60th anniversary of that event, mayors from 60 of the world’s largest cities met in Muir Woods. The keynote address was delivered by David Abram, author of Spell of the Sensuous. This video mixes Abram’s speech with music and other footage from that event, arranged by the Earth Council Alliance.

“It’s the silly season,” as John Wells complained, and a Reuters-syndicated “off-beat” story is making the rounds. The story was incubated by Bray Leino Public Relations on behalf of West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers, suggesting that Fresian cows in the West Country “moo” with a Somerset drawl. Much of the article relies on the anecdotal testimony of local farmers: “I spend a lot of time with my Friesians and they definitely ‘moo’ with a Somerset drawl … I’ve spoken to the other farmers in the West Country group and they have noticed a similar development in their own herds. I think it works the same as with dogs—the closer a farmer’s bond is with his animals, the easier it is for them to pick up his accent.” When approached for comment, Wells said that since such dialects are well known among birds, it can’t be ruled out entirely, but that he “thought it was highly unlikely.”

The Colorado River carries some 38,000 MCM/year of water 2,330 kilometers, from the Rocky Mountains, just west of the Continental Divide, south into the Gulf of California. Along the way, it carves out the Grand Canyon, and one of its tributaries, the San Juan River, goes down into Chaco Canyon, once center of the Anasazi civilization. Today, Chaco Canyon is a national park and a world heritage site, “[r]emarkable for its monumental public and ceremonial buildings, engineering projects, astronomy, artistic achievements, and distinctive architecture, it served as a hub of ceremony, trade, and administration for the prehistoric Four Corners area for 400 years—unlike anything before or since.”¹ But, by the 1200s, Chaco Canyon was deserted, and the Anasazi civilization collapsed. The Pueblo people of today—including the Hopi, Zuni, Taos and Acoma—are the descendants of those Anasazi who created a more sustainable, less complex way of life. What was the crisis that brought down the Anasazi, though? There are, of course, many possibilites, and the ultimate cause is always the diminishing returns on complexity, but the proximate cause may very well have been water.

On Wednesday, Ran Prieur discussed Ted’s article, “Truly Wild,” from his blog, Free Range Organic Human.” Ted makes some excellent points, and he wants to know, “This concept of ‘rewilding’ is anyone really trying to achieve it?” Ran Prieur wants to know the same thing: “Indeed, why hasn’t a single primitivist yet walked the ideology? Why hasn’t a single wilderness survival master gone full-time?”

It can be hard for revolutionaries when the revolution doesn’t happen as quickly as we expect it to. We succumb to depression, even misanthropy, as Ted did in an entry he posted the very next day, “Misanthropic Thoughts.” Ran Prieur, too, begins to suspect that it’s simple human nature.

Southwest China is currently in the grips of a terrible drought. For the past month, the Sichuan province and Chongqing Municipality have withered in hot temperatures and no rain, with no end in sight. 18 million people have been affected; 665,000 hectares of cropland have been destroyed in just three months; the Yangtze River has dropped to 3.5 meters, the lowest in a century.¹ And yet, as dire as this situation is, it is only a local facet of a much deeper water crisis that the world’s most populous country currently faces.

In his classic 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Abraham Maslow proposed his famous “hierarchy of needs.” Maslow recognized that we never entirely escape needs and desires, but as we satisfy more basic needs, our desires become more ephemeral; thus, there is a difference between someone who wants food and someone who wants a new Porsche. Maslow’s hierarchy emerged from the recognition that until basic needs are met, “higher” needs are immaterial.

The bulk of the pyramid is made up of four levels of “deficiency needs”:

• Physiological needs, like sleep, food, water, air, regulation of body temperature, disposal of bodily wastes, and so forth.

The celebrated American novelist, adventurer and chauvanist, Ernest Hemingway, fictionalized his 1933 safari with a number of short stories, including “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” In that story, Hemingway describes the glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro as “wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white.” Because of global warming, those snows will be gone in 14 years.^{1, 2} The loss of an icon might be saddening, but for those that live under Kilimanjaro, the loss is far more than aesthetic: it is the loss of their drinking water, their irrigation water, and their livelihood.³