High Tech/Low Pop: The Backward Enviro (Most Enviros) vs the Backward Enviro (Me)

Enviros often look backward . . . in more ways than one.

Most of them, to varying degrees, want us to give up cell phones and refrigerators and tvs for the sake the environment. They harken back to the days when we all rode horses and read by candle light. Yadda, yadda. What fucking nightmare.

Which, of course, makes them look backward--i.e. silly.

The backward enviro (most enviros) feels humankind has gone the wrong way and wishes to turn back. So do I, but not technologically.

Technologically, we haven't gone nearly far enough. We still don't have a jet packs or a personal robots. Nor have we cured cancer, taken the masses to outerspace and/or the deep seas.

This developing Internet thing really shows promise and applying genetics anthropologically is, for me at least, shedding some light on some basic questions the Catholic Church never really answered (Where do we come from? Why are we here? for example).

The other type of backward enviro (me) wants to go back too, but . . . population-wise. Back to sometime around the mid 1800s, let's say, when the earth's population of human being was less just than a billion.

Back before the word extinction was invented and there were still real explorers in the world, not the ones wearing REI jackets and paying $20,000 a piece to "climb," let's say, the biggest tourist trap in the Himalayas.

This type of backward enviro is very lonely and very crowded at the same time.

Lonely because no one, and I mean no one, shares his feelings on overpopulation. Crowded because the world is so full of people that . . . also don't share his feelings.

No one is talking about overpopulation. Which is a complete fucking mystery to me.

No one--including enviromentlists, politicians, clergy, journalist, etc, I don't know why--is talking about maybe cutting back a bit on the procreation thing. (Except the Chinese, actually, and everyone seems to villainize them for it.)

People worry and talk about everything else--every tornado, every car crash, every little argument about abortion, every little racial/religious/socio-economic tension . . .

I just finished an argument with a guy who thought I was morally wrong to spit gum on the street. (By the way, spitting gum in the street, while not attractive, is not polluting. The gum gets run over and mashed into the concrete/blacktop and made a part of the street.)

But no one is talking about the thing that is probably the most important thing to talk about: overpopulation. With so many people, you'd think someone would have started the discussion.

To get things rolling, let me start like this: Imagine, instead of 7 billion people, a planet with "only" 1 billion, or half a billion, where we continue to advance technologically.

In short, imagine a high tech/low pop future.

We all live like affluent Japanese, with every conceivable electronic gadget hanging from our necks. Our electric bills are not measured in kilowatt hours but megawatt hours. We fly personal aircraft. We swap genes to elevate IQs. And no one recycles. Wouldn't that be nice? Aren't you tired of recycling? I am.

And, yet, instead of enviro destruction, extinction and pollution, we have vast expansess of wilderness. Mega-fauna are allowed to evolve without the aid of zoos. Suburbs are turned into "re-virgined" forests. The water is clean.

Dams have been brought down. You can actually experience wilderness in the Lower 48. And global warming is remembered as a "near miss."

In short, there' plenty of everything: We have flat screens and we have spotted owls. We have jet packs and we have clean air. We have real wilderness and we have real high-tech cities.

What's more--and this should really make the backward enviros (most enviros) happy--the war machine and the capitalist systems will have been dismantled. Why?

One of the reasons we keep having so many kids is for military and economic reasons.

No military government is going to advocate a decrease in population, or even admit overpopulation.

No capitalist system is going to advocate a decrease in population, or even admit overpopulation.

Both benefit from ever-increasing numbers, and so both will have to be "dismantled."

So, whatever governments and economic systems will arise from the realization that the future is "high tech/low pop," they won't be friendly to conventional ideas of warfare or capitalism.

Which, to me, is neither good nor bad, but might be a selling point for the "backward" enviros (most enviros)--and for that matter, anti-government survivalists in Montana, Una-Bomber types, as well as Eugene's anarchists, punk rockers, cowboys, farmers, and most rednecks.

Basically anyone who thinks the current regime is corrupt, inefficient and/or silly wins.

What we will have to give up is the idea that we are all entitled to as many fucking kids as we want, whether or not we take care of them.

In the future, kids will be valued more--for the same reason that diamonds are valued more than dirt.

Today, kids are dirt. And that seems to be how a lot of people treat them, in my opinion, the majority of people. They're everywhere, so why not step on them, kids.

Tomorrow kids will be diamonds. Child Protective Services will not exist. The prevailing attitudes of society will deal harshly with those who do not value their children.

The few kids we do have will be taken care of by everybody. They will be like rare gems. Treasured.

No one will turn a blind eye to a parent who lets the kid watch tv all day while he/she does meth. It won't be tolerated. Someone will barge in and say, Hey, if you don't want them there's people that do, fuck-head.

And so eventually no one will do meth, because everyone child will have had loving adults in his/her life to begin with.

Kids will be elevated by rarity, finally valued in a way their fragility demands.

In short, the future IS backward, but not tech-wise. It's back to when there were "only" a billion or half billion us, which I believe was sometime in the 1800s.

Remember this phrase: High-tech and low-pop.

Let's go back and start again. Take care of the kids that are here. Stop fucking around and start talking about something that means something.

The Message of All Music: You Will Probably Kill Yourself (and Everything Around You)

You know how there those crazy people who thought there were messages in certain rock songs that told people to kill themselves?

They were almost right.

Except that the message isn't restricted to heavy metal. And it's not so much a message that says, Kill yourself. The message of music--all music--is: You probably will kill yourself.

Warning: This blog contains an almost illogically stretched inference. I stress "almost."

Here's the stretch: Music, the whole body of it, is hopelesslessly conventional. And by extension, so are you.

Once you accept that and apply what you've learned within an enviro framework, you'll see that we're all absolutely not going to survive.

Okay, here we go: So, I wrote this song called Earth Day and uploaded it to Garage Band. com http://www.garageband.com/song?|pe1|S8LTM0LdsaSjZlS3ZmA.

The transition from 5/4 time to 4/4 was my primary interest with this song. Earth Day's time changes are unusual. So are the medley of different musical styles--first jazz, then grunge rock, then pop-ish love ballad.

Garage Band asks you to classify your song before uploading. For lack of a better choice, I chose to classify Earth Day as "experimental." But this does not sit well with me.

Calling my song experimental is an insult to the two or three people out there--people who no one has ever heard of--who are truly experimental.

I know that my song is not experimental, it's just unusual. What I'm less sure of is if anyone else knows this.

Others will be fine with calling Earth Day experimental . . . but that's because, in my opinion, so little music is experimental. Most people will live and die without hearing anything that I would call truly experimental.

This probably rubs you as elitist, but hang with me on this.

Most people would call my song experimental for a number reasons: the lyrics, the time changes, the medley of styles. But none of those elements are experimental and here's why.

Lyrics

The original song name was Way of the Dodo. I planned on playing on the duality of the word "dodo," which is both a synonym for "stupid" and a figurative synonym for extinction.

I meant to write some lyric about how stupid people are and how they're killing all the animals and plants, etc. etc. and how we're now entering the 6th Great Extinction.

But then I realized that that is what books are for.

And that I was a pedantic a-hole and probably should just stop talking and/or writing lyrics altogether if that's all I could talk/write about. Which is what I did.

I didn't write lyrics. I just sang words.

The lyrics . . . or lack of lyrics, give Earth Day the sense of being "experimental." The words are trippy and refuse to make sense. I just sang the first words that came to me.

But here's the thing, that's pretty much what everyone on the radio does anyway.

When you get down to it, almost all song lyrics either a. don't make sense or b. suck.

So, not only do Earth Day's lyrics not make this song experimental, I'm not even sure they make the song unusual.

I personally am grateful when song lyrics don't make sense. Right now STP is playing and I'm listening and thinking this is a good song that's made even better by the fact that I can't understand the lyrics.

If I could, I'm sure I'd hate the song.

For this reason, when it comes to lyrics, I've taken David Byrne's advice and have "stopped making sense."

The only song I've written that actually has comprehensible lyrics is one called Save Us From the Christians, which has killer lyrics.

I'm not bragging, it's just that those are really good lyrics. Even Christians have begrudgingly said so, and they're the object of derision.

The lyrics to that song are probably better than 99.9% of all songs ever written.

Not surprisingly, everyone hates this song.

Even though it made me feel good to have written good lyrics and it proved that I could, I have since learned not to repeat the mistake.

The bar for pop song lyrics is comfortably low. Why fool with a blessing.

Back on track, at best, the lyrics to Earth Day don't make any sense. At worst, they kind of do. If there's anything that could be mistaken for experimental its the tone.

The lyrical tone suggests experimentation simply because the lyrics . . . or lack of lyrics . . . could be called "dark."

But "dark" is not really a characteristic of "experimental" either. It's just anti-social. With music, anti-social is usually what passes for experimental.

Musical Genres

Besides weird lyrics that really aren't that weird, this song plays with a number of musical genres. First it sounds like lounge-room jazz, then, no, it's Smashing Pumpkins, then it trots along as a kind of cloud-watching love song and finally it sounds like something from John Lenon's "number 9, number 9, number 9" pychosis.

Again, this is unusual, for a song to dress and re-dress so many times, but it's not really experimental. It's just excessive.

Sublime, for instance, likes to flit back and forth between a kind of rap and something more akin to guitar-driven rock.

Sublime's sound is new . . . or was. But not experimental.

The difference between my song and Sublime's is that I vacillate between an immoderate number of styles, instead of just sticking with one or two.

So, Earth Day is immoderate. But immoderation is not experimentation either. It's just much more of what is otherwise the same.

Time Changes

Then there's the time changes. 5/4 to 4/4 then 3/4. Unusual. But these are the same time signatures that have been used time immemorial. I just use a lot of them.

In the end, my song is really just unintelligible, anti-social, unusual and immoderate more than anything, but because the back drop of music it's playing in front of is so utterly conservative, I can get away with calling it "experimental" by almost everyone--except the unheard of musicians out there who are truly experimental. And no one listens to them anyway.

Who are these truly experimental musicians? Truth is, I don't really know. No one does.

Somewhere out there, there's this guy who builds his own instruments and makes his own music. I read about him, but I've never heard his music. Nor have you, it's safe to say.

The only experimental song I've probably ever heard was actually two songs.

I was half asleep in the car and my wife was listening to the radio and this otherwise bland hard rock song suddenly changed keys, beat and tone--all at once in this tire-burning U turn and became seemingly miraculously melodious early Beatles-esque song.

I sat up. "Wow," I said to my wife, "These guys are genuises. Who are these guys?"

My wife couldn't figure out what I was talking about, but after a few minutes, she did. She explained well enough, but her subtextual message was You're kind of dumb, aren't you?

What'd I'd heard was not a single song, but two different songs that ran together as one in my sleepy mind.

By the way, this gave me the idea of creating a radio station where all I would do all day is switch back and forth between songs on other radio stations. Today, on the Intenet, I think they call such things "mash-ups."

The irony of heavy metal, hard rock and even punk is just how conventional these music forms are, despite their claims otherwise.

While the singers screech for us to drink, party, fight, fuck, do drugs, and look down on church-goers as hopelessly conformist--heavy metal, hard rock and even punk are unobservedly conformist.

Rule-following, submissive, pliant little vassals--to the core, to the hard, hard core.

The only thing that keeps these self-proclaimed "rebels" from slinking off stage in shame is the fact that most of them don't know enough about music to realize what little trained seals they are.

Remember that guy who makes his own instruments? Here's the reason he's experimental, while every other band you've ever heard and love in your life isn't.

That guy doesn't use the 12-tone system.

Big deal, you say? Well, it kind of is.

Every band in the world--even the most extreme, radical, whacked out, feces-throwing and drug addicted one--uses the 12-tone system. Guns and Roses uses the same notes that James Taylor uses. The Maggots use the same notes as John Denver . . . and Thomas the Tank Engine commercials, for that matter.

Every musician in the world, except this one guy--and maybe two or three others who no one, and I mean no one, has ever heard of--use the same 12 notes that have shown up on every fucking piano in the Western fucking world since pianos were fucking invented.

How fucking lame is that?

No one, and I mean no one, has bothered to make their own pianos with keys that play the in-between notes--except this guy. Or guitars that play the in-between notes--except this guy. For that matter, drums that play the in-between notes--except this guy.

If you're like most people, you probably have never even considered that you've never heard what's in between an augmented fourth and a fifth. In your whole life. Ever. And you probably never will--even after you read this--even really think about that, or the implication of that. What kind of person are you really?

It's there for you to see, you just have to look.

It's not that that in-between tone doesn't exist. It does. It completely does. It just never occurs to anyone, and I mean anyone, to wonder what it sounds like. Why? Deep down, you know why.

No one, and I mean no one, even seems in the slightest bit curious what that in-between note would sound like in a song? Or any of those other infinite number of notes that we might classify now as "in-between." This is totally fucking bizarre.

More so, if you consider that those so-called "in-between" notes I'm talking about outnumber those tired twelve you've been listening to your whole life by, like, infinite.

There's literally an infinite number of musical tones out there that you've never heard before and not even your favorite band, the guys responsible for teaching you about music, has even considered playing them.

Holy shit, right? Apparently, not. No one cares.

Instead of the 12 notes, why doesn't anybody play 13? Or how about 24? Or any of the numbers in between?

There's a whole world of music out there that's completely undiscovered, and no one, except for like a handful of people, is even trying to find it.

To a lesser extent, the same can be said for time signatures. Every song you hear in a honky-tonk bar is 4/4. If you want to get crazy, you can do 2/4. Some songs do one better and do 3/4.

But you don't really hear a lot of songs that are 9/16. Unless you listen to Indian sitar. The Indians are way ahead of the Western world in musical complexity and experimentation. George Harrison was right to go there.

Indians play what are un-playable rhythms to Westerners. If you want to take rhythm to the next level, India is where you go.

Tone, and for that matter rhythm, are continuums. You can divide them anyway you want. You can divide the octave in 5 ways or you can divide it 24 ways, or you can skip octaves all together.

But we stick with 12 tones, from the Beatles to Snoop Dog to Dog Chow jingles. Not because the 12-tone system is the best, but because that's what everyone does. Just like going to college, getting married and starting a 401K. That's just the way it's done.

Just like everyone drives a car and uses toilet paper. That's just the way it's done.

If it makes you feel better, you can call Jimi Hendrix a musical genius. And, yes, his hair was wild and the boas were eye-catching. His lifestyle was, as you say, sexy and dangerous. But he pretty much towed the line, musically speaking.

The 12-note system does make a lot of sense for a number of reasons, most of them rooted in physics and sound mechanics, but . . . well, if you're going to tout how renegade you are, why not truly shake things up?

Jimi didn't really shake anything up, musically speaking.

Except for that weird guy in his garage somewhere building his own, what must sound off-key, instruments, no one, and I mean no one, has.

To me, this says something about our chances for survival, if you concede that our future survival is probably predicated on humanity's ability to think of up innovative solutions to the problems we're creating.

What it says is, We probably won't.

Most people will live and die without ever hearing a song played with anything outside the 12-note system. The closest they will come is when they listen to someone tune a guitar.

So much for rebels, so much for thinking outside the box.

Yep, the Sex Pistols are so rad.

The truth is: The music world, on the whole--despite the controversy of early Rock-n-Roll hype and hysteria (see: Elvis' Pelvis and the Beatle's long hair, Nancy's murder by Sid, etc.) tends not to deviate too far from the norm.

It also says that what most people think of as radical or innovative is probably--considering the infinite number of actual possibilities, versus the number of possibilities that people actually perceive--not really that radical or innovative at all.

I say all this by way of excusing my bad lyrics in this song I wrote called Earth Day. But also of pointing out just how limited our collective imaginations truly are.

If you accept that I'm right about the state of music, that people are absolutely fooling themselves about how creative they are musically, then you can, if you so choose, make some inferences about humanity's ability to creatively handle our present environmental challenges in truly creative and innovative ways.

If people can't even conceive of music beyond 12 notes, how can you expect them conceive of true change, even in the ominous face of something like global warming or extinction?

I know, my analogy is a stretch. But then maybe you just think it's a stretch because of your god-given mental limitations. How can you trust yourself to do anything anymore? You're pathetic. You still like the Beatles, for god sakes.

Final thought. The next time you see one of those commercials from BP and Exxon, et al of people running through green fields and solar panels blazing and wind turbines spinning. Those commercials where the narrator talks up the company's green initiatives and makes you feel so good by talking about shit like "the human element" and how we're going to figure it all out--these companies seem to sincerely believe that they are innovative enough to dream up solutions to the enviro crisis--the next time you see one of these commercials, don't listen to the words, listen to the music.

Whatever that narrator tells you, the music will tell you otherwise, the music--the accepted limitations of those few notes playing--will tell you the truth: You will probably, they will probably, we will all probably kill ourselves.

Mother Nature-Child Relationship: You Have Become Your Parents

Lions and hyenas demanded good posture.

Hungry, we jumped down from the trees and onto the savanna. Those that stood upright, on the look out, made it back. But those that slouched, were slapped on the back of the neck and eaten.

To stand upright is to acknowledge you're out in the open and vulnerable. It is a defensive position. It is to raise yourself above the grass and look for danger. Something natural for us. Something school teachers taught by putting books on our heads.

Shortly after the lions made us stand up, we walked out of our home in Africa and slaughtered every big mammal in sight.

We call this the Overkill Theory. Why, anthropologists wonder, did we kill all those Giant Sloths and Mammoths?

All those thousands of years of our big cat fathers smacking us around and yelling, "Sit up at the dinner table!" That's why.

Likewise, trees created their own downfall.

They didn't hold us when we were young, like they should have. We had to struggle to stay attached. We had to create opposable thumbs. Those that didn't, fell.

And when we grew up, we used those branch-grabbing hands to make things, such as axes. The tree's indifference is now the woodcutter's.

And we are like little Lizzie Bordens.

I once cut down a tree when I was ten. For no other reason than the delight of doing it.

Faulkner said that the people who brought about wilderness's decline will be the same people who bring about the end of civilization.

The violence and indifference of nature are its demise.

The child grows up, having been raised a certain way, s/he returns home and inflicts what s/he's been taught back onto the household. You can call it revenge, but it's even meaner than that. It's actually a form of love. Obedience to that early value system.

Only deep ecologists and EarthFirst!er types are rebellious enough to question those early lessons. Ironically, environmentalists are in some ways the least loyal to nature. They do not emulate her.

It is their Republican-type counterparts who show the most fealty, or just lack the creativity to envision an alternative.

So, now the trees once silent to our suffering, thunder down before us. The big hairies are shot for sport and we enter the sixth great extinction event. And we are nearly as indifferent as nature was once to us.

We follow a hard-won collection of memories that we call instincts, toward our own poetically just demise. Just like mom and dad.

Only Alternative

The end of nature is near (or even already here).

We leave the Holocene; enter the Anthropocene, where the earth is shaped not by nature but by humans.

Yet when I look around the DMV. I have to ask, Do I want to live a world created and controlled entirely by them? Entirely?

Unpleasant as nature was, it was our only alternative . . . from one another.

The Iliad Through the Eco-Lens Darkly: The Problem With Literature

Previous generations have venerated Homer. But his popularity over "lesser" poets of his times--namely the Cyclic Poets--demonstrates a fundamental problem with the entire body of literature. A problem so deep, I have to ask, Is literature even worth reading at all?

Ancient lit. gives us a kind of history lesson.

But the problem is that the history lesson is always the same: Nothing has changed. People are the same as they have always been. Literature is a timeless window in the never-changing human condition.

It sounds profound. Maybe that's why no one criticizes it.

We read the Iliad and we supposedly can see timeless truths of the human condition.

But if the Iliad seems timeless it's because human beings haven't changed much in the last 50,000 years, since the time of The Great Leap. The time when our brains figured out how to do a few tricks, such as use tools and . . . incidentally to use language.

That's the problem with being a climax species. You don't change much . . . because you don't have to.

But though we haven't changed, the world around us has. Largely because we've changed it. And what does literature have to say about this?

Not much.

Even with the rise in academia of so-called Eco-criticism, few really challenge the body of literature.

Taking a class on Annie Dillard is cute. You get a college credit. But have you changed anything?

The sad truth is the literature is timeless, but it's subject matter is not.

Another way of saying this is: Literature--as studied in academia--is obsolete.

That needs to change. A good place to start is at the beginning.

I have already talked about The Epic of Gilgamesh in a previous blog. Now I'd like to look at the Iliad . . . through the eco-lens darkly.

The literature of the Trojan War gives us a good example of the way the temporal vagaries of human drama have overshadowed the deeper story of humanity to its environment. How anthropocentric concerns trump the more important story of humanity to ecology.

The most popular work about the Trojan War is Homer's Iliad. Obviously.

According to the Iliad, the cause of the Trojan War is an anthropocentric matter. Bluntly, a bunch of men snatch various women and so put themselves in competition with a bunch of other men for the right to procreate with said women.

Words like valor, vengeance, and love are thrown around.

This guy is slain. That guy victorious. Etc.

This is what Homer offers us: A narrow anthropocentric view. Good guys versus bad guys for the hearts of beautiful women.

Like literature itself, the Iliad focuses on the individual character. Themes provided are those of every other Hollywood movie: romantic love, courage, etc.

The presumption is that we honored humans are at the center of every story. And that our romantic yearnings are the most important concerns of literature.

This a kind of Trojan Horse in itself. It lends a view of humanity's self-importance that is partly responsible for our present eco predicament.

But what was the Trojan War really about? Beautiful damsels. Valorous men?

As I tried to show in my previous blog, Why the Ancient Greeks Could Not Build a Parthenon Today the 13th and 12th centuries were a tumultuous time for the Greeks. They were entering a Dark Age.

By the 11th century--around the time of the Trojan War (mythological or real?)--urban areas on mainland Greece are being abandoned. Soil erosion caused by deforestation has led to a collapse so steep that even the ability of the Greeks to write is being lost.

The Bronze Age is giving way to the Iron Age because the forests have been felled (iron requires less wood to smelt than bronze).

The Greeks are fleeing in search of far-flung lands. Forested lands, such as Troy, for instance.

Does Homer mention any of this? No.

But a much less popular piece of literature does. The Cypria, written a generation or so after Homer by the Cyclic Poets gives a much different reason for the Trojan War:

Fragment #3 --
`There was a time when the countless tribes of men, though wide-
dispersed, oppressed the surface of the deep-bosomed earth, and
Zeus saw it and had pity and in his wise heart resolved to
relieve the all-nurturing earth of men by causing the great
struggle of the Ilian war, that the load of death might empty the
world. And so the heroes were slain in Troy, and the plan of
Zeus came to pass.'

You'll note that the quote above is a fragment. Most of the Cypria is lost.

While Homer's Iliad made the ancient best-seller list, the Cypria had one printing.

Why?

Unlike the Iliad, the Cypria represents the Trojan War not a romantic story of men and women fighting for the right to procreate, but it's opposite. The story of a people who had procreated too well.

According to the Cypria, the cause of the war is overpopulation and ensuing environmental degradation. Not valor, as Homer would have use believe.

Zeus starts the Trojan War as way to rid the drought stricken Greek World of people--"that the loade of death might empty the world." So that the earth can recuperate.

Which it actually does. Some four hundred years after the Trojan War, the more productive period of ancient Greece that we today call the Hellenistic Period begins. This is the Greece that we speak of today.

The Cypria tells us that in latter part of the Late Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greece (that is the Greece before the Dark Age) teemed with "countless tribes of men"--a clear reference to overpopulation and its adverse effects on the land.

Zeus noted the extent of this ecological plunder, so the legend goes, and took pity on the earth's enfeebled condition. Following "his wise heart," the great god decreed that the only way to the earth might heals was to rid it of humans, the perpetrators of such violence against the land. To accomplish this purge--the mass destruction of erring humanity--Zeus brought on the Trojan War.

The Cypria doesn't deal with good guy and bad guys as the Iliad does. The Cypria gives us only bad guys. Or just plain too many guys.

Why does Homer's Iliad survive while the Cypria can only be read in fragments? Well, the Cypria isn't as "literary." In the perverted sense that we think of the word today.

The Cyclic Poets, the writers of the Cypria, wrote shortly after Homer. Like Homer, they chose as their subject the Trojan War. But why don't we celebrate them today?
Aristotle in his Poetics criticizes the Cypria for the piecemeal character of its plots:
'But other poets compose a plot around one person, one time, and one plot with multiple parts; like the composer of the Cypria and the Little Iliad. As a result, only one tragedy is made out of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but many from the Cypria many, and from the Little Iliad more than eight.'


So, Aristotle found the Cypria a little unfocused.

Aristotle calls for an emphasis on individual characters and short spans of time. Which is what literature does today.

Lit. professors tell us that literature divulges timeless truths about the human condition. But they fail to say that it's beginnings it was pared down to show only certain truths: those that pertain to individuals and short time spans.

Truths that extend beyond individual characters, truths that deal with longer periods of time or with gradual processes--such as changes in landscape or weather--are ignored by literature.

So, it's not surprising how little literature has to say about such things as global warming. We may read "Tragedy of the Commons" or cite the Romantics texts about the beauty of nature. But, really, what does literature say about our current environmental crisis, species extinction, etc?

For that, we have only science fiction, which, frankly, often isn't very good.

This is a shame. Because the broader causes of the Trojan War--those causes not related to female abduction and Achille's valor--have a lot to tell us today, as modern-day civilization enters its own period of resource scarcity.

As the Mycenaean Greeks entered a Dark Age due in part due to deforestation and the subsequent loss of wood for fuel and human-induced drought, we today face the end of oil and global warming.

Will we too sail across the seas to fight for the last of a precious resource? If we do, will we even know why we're fighting, or will we tell a bullshit story about beautiful damsels in distress and valorous soldiers?


If the body of literature won't say it, another discipline should: The Trojan War was about overpopulation, deforestation, resultant soil erosion, agricultural collapse, and scarcity of fuel--all leading to war.

It is only incidentally and much less importantly a story of romantic love and mighty warriors.

In that sense, Homer's Iliad is the first grocery store tabloid. A publication dealing with the titillating news of fighting and fucking of the comely classes.

(Speaking of the fighting and fucking of the comely classes, Brad Pitt's recent blockbuster "Troy" has an interesting setting: In the movie, Troy is set in an endless desert. Which tells us how much the director thought the ecological causes of the war--they weren't even considered.

The idea of resource competition between the Greeks and Trojans is completely overlooked.

As well the idea that the west coast of present-day Turkey might have once been forested, instead of the sandy shrub that we see today. The whole eco element is completely missing from the movie.)

Is it any surprise that we find ourselves today facing eco-disaster. Our literature from the beginning has failed to instruct us in ecological prudence. All of those literature classes in public school asking me consider the timeless matters of the "human heart" and supposedly of the "human condition."

No lit. teacher I ever listened to ever talked about environment, ecology and how global warming might alter my human condition.

Like the goddesses Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite competing at the outset of the Trojan War to see who is the most beautiful and eye-catching, the various versions of what literature should be competed for the eye of the reader. And the version that favors the narrow vision of Homer's Iliad over a less arrogant sense of humanity's import--such as that seen in the Cypria--has won out.

So, I ask an irreverent question: How valuable is today's version of literature? If it offers so little instruction on the survival of our species?

If it doesn't instruct us in the most fundamentals ways on how to live should we even bother?

Why Ancient Greeks Could Not Build a Parthenon Today

This idea in this entry is a knock-off of the previous: "The First Environmental Disaster: How Gilgamesh Aided U.S. Troops." I want to talk about the way the ancient world altered its landscape. And how that alteration in turn affected human progress. I also want to point out our collective "landscape amnesia."

But instead of Mesopotamia, I want to look at Mycenaean Greece. And instead of the Epic of Gilgamesh, I want to look at Homer's Iliad.

In my previous blog, I pointed out the ironies of the Fertile Crescent. Despite the moniker, it's not a fertile place. Looking at S. Iraq today it's hard to believe that it was once the birthplace of agriculture . . . and of civilization.

Modern-day Greece holds similar ironies.

When tourists go to Greece it's because Greece want to see the place that created the timeless philosophies of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. That invented democracy and practically invented architecture. This is where it all began for Western civilization.

But even as we gaze upon the Parthenon, imagining what it must have looked like back then, we make a fundamental mistake.

We think the land of Greece is the same now as it was then. We don't see the current landscape for what it is: a consequence. This is not the land that gave rise to Western civilization. This landscape is the result of that civilization.

If the Greek landscape looked now back then as it does now, the Parthenon would not have been built. The great timbers needed to build the Parthenon no longer exist in Greece.

In 1550 B.C. Mycenaean Greece pine forests covered large portions of the Peloponnesian Peninsula.

As crude oil is the fuel of our civilization, wood was the fuel of the ancient world.

The Greeks develop writing and make several other technological advances. They seem to be on their way to becoming the great civilization that would create philosophy and higher math.

But then somewhere around 1100 B.C. Greece goes into a Dark Age. In some places up to 90% of the population disappears. The ability of the Greeks to write is lost.

Not so coincidentally, it's around this time that the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age occurs.

Many theories have been put forth for the cause Greek Dark Age, but the most compelling to me is deforestation and resultant soil erosion.

As forests were cleared from 1600-1200 B.C., the rainfall that would have fed these hills was lost as runoff, taking with them the topsoil. Drought conditions prevailed at least in the hillier regions not because weather conditions had changed at the end of the Late Bronze Age but because the soil could no longer retain most of the rain that came its way. What would appear to have been a change in climate was actually a major alteration in soil condition as a result of human action.

The bare rock slopes we see in present-day Greece are not the natural landscape. The original brown forest soil, rich in nutrients, are eroded, leaving either an underlying red subsoil or limestone bedrock, both of which are now ironically regarded as typical Mediterranean soil profiles.

The goats and sheep we think of are not natural either, but a result of deforestation.

Even the olive itself, the very symbol of Greece, is a result of this deforestation. The early Greeks originally grew cereals and grains, as we do here in America's Midwest states. The switch to olives was done out of necessity when the soil erosion made the growing of cereals and grains impossible. The olive could grow in the poor soils and was drought tolerant.

At the onset of the Dark Age, Greeks transitioned from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.

This is not a technological advance. This is a symptom of general decline and evidence of increasing timber scarcity.

Steel had yet to be discovered. So, the iron the Greeks were using was basically the heavy and fragile wrought iron we see today. Bronze had more appealing properties.

Bronze was so much more valued that early metallurgists simply discarded any iron they found, favoring the copper needed to make Bronze.

But when wood became scarce, the metallurgists scavenged their slag piles and used the iron they once discarded.

Why? To save precious fuel. Iron smelting requires less wood than copper--one of the main components of bronze.

This switch from bronze to iron also coincides with the onset of the Greek Dark Ages.

Around 1200 B.C. agricultural fertility declines. Urban centers are abandoned. Some areas lose as much as 90% of their population. Even the ability to write is lost.

Greece will not recover for 300 to 400 years--enough time for its forest to regroup.

Around 800 B.C. the highly productive Hellenistic period begins. Writing would be re-imported from Minoa. Populations would increase. And the wood needed to produce the Acropolis, as well to fire pottery, tiles and create glass will have regrown.

Though there are many theories, it's my belief that the Greeks rose and fell with their trees.

I'm out of time. I have to pick up my wife from work. But next I want to look a look at the Iliad and show that the Trojan War was not just about Greek tragedy romantic love and vengeance, but also a real-life symptom of the environmental tragedy that preceded and cause the Greek Dark Ages.

I also want to use this text to demonstrate how blind humanity has historically been to the causes of its own decline.

The First Environmental Disaster: How Gilgamesh Aided U.S. Troops

The first weeks of Gulf War I, U.S. troops wore the comforting olive fatigues we'd seen during the Vietnam War.

Then one day Stormin Norman (General H. Norman Schwarzkopf) appeared on tv in tan. The color of his new duds pointed out the obvious: Kuwait was devoid of the greenery we'd come to expect from a good war.

And yet, as every school boy knew, the new battlefield had once been the fabled "Fertile Crescent." The place the Greeks called the Mesopotamia--literally the "land between the two rivers."

The rich banks of Tigris and Euphrates had produced the fruit we now call civilization.

And yet back in 1990, a peak over Stormin' Norman's shoulder revealed a landscape about as likely to invent agriculture as Antarctica the bikini.

The irony of the Fertile Crescent is that it isn't very fertile.

What happened isn't a mystery. But it isn't common knowledge either. Which is strange considering the obvious irony of the name: the Fertile Crescent.

Around 5000 B.C. the people of the area, called Sumerians, took a bit of the forbidden fruit of agriculture.

Along with civilization itself, they had a number of good ideas.

Farmers took those circular stones off of their grain mills and attached them to wagons. Voila, the wheel.

They also etched symbols in clay they used to keep track of grain yields and barters. This practice eventually evolved into the written word.

Because the Sumerians gave us the written word, it makes sense that some of the oldest tales known to humankind are Sumerian. One of which is the "Epic of Gilgamesh."

Some 4700 years before Jared Diamond's bestseller "Collapse," there was the "Epic of Gilgamesh," our first environmental treatise.

The fifth tablet of this story tells how Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king of Uruk, felled the lush forests of what is today Southern Iraq/Kuwait--the fabled Fertile Crescent.

Like most tales handed down from the oral tradition, the story cannot be taken literally. But pollen counts can. And what the pollen counts say jibes with the story. Southern Iraq was once lushly forested with pines and cedars.

Why did Gilgamesh cut down the forests of S. Iraq? For the same reason the U.S. fought the Gulf War: Fuel.

In ancient times, what we today call "crude oil" they used to call "wood." Wood was the fuel of the ancient world. They used it to warm kilns for pottery, to make glass, to make bricks.

But most importantly for a king such as Gilgamesh, wood was used to smelt metals. Shields, axes and helmets, swords all required large amounts of wood to make.

By most estimates, around 90% of the wood cut in the ancient world was used as fuel.

Incidentally, Sumerians invented no less than six new weapons.

To gauge wood's importance back then, remember that the Bronze Age gave way to Iron Age not because of the superior properties of iron, but because of a decreasing supply of wood. (Smelting iron requires less wood than bronze.)

Gilgamesh wanted to build and protect his city. The story says that the great king was in pursuit of a great kingdom and a "mighty name" that would be known for generations.

So, with his half-wild friend, Enkidu and host of lumberjacks with their wood-fired adzes, Gilgamesh sets out to fell the ancient forests. His city fears for him. The forests are unknown and largely unpenetrated.

When Gilgamesh reaches the edge of the forest, he trembles with fear. Other texts describe this forest as being so dense that birds could not enter.

That such vast forests of cedar so thick birds could penetrate grew near southern Mesopotamia might seem a flight of fancy considering the present barren condition of the land, but pollen counts confirm: Before the intrusion of civilization an almost unbroken forest flourished in the hills and mountains surrounding the fertile crescent.

This ancient Paul Bunyan though soon overcomes his fears. He leads his crew into the forest and does what any 17th century Romantic would do. He admires the forest's beauty. He calls the forest an "abode for the gods."

Gilgamesh falls into a reverie. And for a moment it seems the forest will be spared. But then Enkidu wakes his friend, Gilgamesh, and urges him to hurry, before Humbaba, the forest protector, comes.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu cut down the cedar forest and in particular the tallest of the cedars to make for the city of Uruk a great cedar gate. The story says that, "For two miles you could hear the sad song of the cedars."

Gilgamesh and his lumberjacks build a raft and float down the Euphrates River to their city.

When Enlil--the chief deity of Sumerians--hears what has happened, he sends upon the land a curse. What is the curse? Drought.

As we know, drought naturally follows deforestation.

The once great forest is stripped bare to the rocks, and so it remains to this day. The sorry present day state of Southern Mesopotamia is the ecological curse sent upon it by Enlil for Gilgamesh's sin.

So, among their other inventions, the ancient Sumerians should be known as the creators of the first eco-disaster.

And this is why Stormin Norman wore not the olive greens we saw during the Vietnam War, but the tans of a wide open desert.

And it is in part--I stress the phrase "in part"--why the outcome of these two wars was so different. The Vietcong had tree cover. The Iraqis? Not so much.

While Gilgamesh meant to protect his people with a wooden gate, in doing so he ironically made it easier for the tan-fatigued Stormin' Norman to conquer the descendents of his people, the Iraqis.

Why I didn't question my school teacher about the so-called "Fertile Crescent," I cannot explain. But in an age of increasing environmental delicacy, the Crescent's environmental story should be part of the curriculum.

Footnote: The land of Mesopotamia did not recover from its first deforestation the way it later would in Mycenaean Greece. This was due to the incursion of salt.

Deforestation led to soil erosion. Soil erosion would lead to agricultural collapse. Yes. But it was the salt that came from soil erosion that made the change permanent.