The Failure of Human Domestication
Humans were the first domesticated animal. Domestication developed parallel with our genetically precocious ability to talk, use our hands and solve problems. Discussion, hand waving and problem solving birthed technology. With tools and language we began to dominate the earth. Our language helped us define and label the other world...We called it wilderness. There became two domains: wild and domestic. Slowly, over a good deal of time, we pursued our mission; the elimination of the wild domain. We used technology and language to tame the other world and bring it shackled into our existence. Animals that could not be controlled were eradicated. Plants that would not bend to our will were labeled weeds and poisoned. With the tools and chemistry of technology we bred, whipped and fenced wildness from Nature. In a us-versus-them way we defined wilderness and by separated ourselves from it. We lost our ability to commune with nature, to understand the mechanism of a larger process, bigger than us. Instead we re-created ourselves bigger than life. It is the humanization of the globe.
Along the way we re-invented the Master in our own image, then usurped dominion over every life-form. With technology, and a wink from God, we ruled, subjugated and redefined our world in a whimsical and disheveled way. Farm communities became urbanized. Cities swelled with the yeast of human fecundity. Our fascination with the unnatural found fertile ground in these peopled places: the training sites for urban gorillas, drug Mafias; and grey flanneled wilderness tamers. Murder, mayhem, drugs and war became creations of domestication.
We bore a domesticated world of terrible dreary sameness. A homogenous environment of human confinement: ghettos; game rooms; television entertainment centers; McDonalds; Malls. Cultural diversity became 6 billion humans in blue jeans and a t-shirt. This ennui place paved over the wilderness became so boring that looking the same, being the same and killing our own kind are the stuff of entertainment. We are the wild ones. We are the new wilderness.
By separating ourselves from the wild we have over time removed from our memory banks the knowledge of self-care. We have delivered our health into the hands of others. We don't know how to fix ourselves. We have created a medical hierarchy of experts (created by law and fired in technology ) to whom the masses stand in line begging for pills: pills to calm their nerves; pills to domesticate their children; pills to alleviate-self inflicted pain; pills to save a fatted heart, or a hardened artery; pills to replace nature and nurture: Prosac, insulin, estrogen, thyroxin, bibliotoxin, vitamins, minerals, trace elements and on and on. Then the ultimate experiment in domestication: genetic engineering....We can now improve on God's work.
A spin-off of our slavery to technology is a domesticated food supply that is domestic. We bred the wild out of food. Domesticated foodstuffs are genetically inferior: lacking the wild nutrient profiles that we co-evolved with. Tame plants no longer breed. Grains and seeds must be purchased like commodities, year after year...And year after year they are further weakened through hybridization until they are so weakened that they can no longer compete with their wild cousins. To protect them from their own lack of vigor we spray them with poisons: herbicides, pesticides and incomplete nutrients. This is how food survives under our control by displacing the wild things they once were. Food has become a domesticated commodity, not a nutrient. Just follow the bouncing balls of the stock exchange: ADM, Dole and Libby... These companies are part of the problem, not the solution. They begat the demise of the small farmer, and have accelerated the subjugation of poor people who labor in distant fields flayed by the dollar green whip of fatted capitalists, fatted communists and fatted dictators. Think about it, in a typical urban setting, you can travel fifteen miles through a failed technological battleground, trapped in pollution belching auto--like a nucleus within a droid--running for a quart of milk and a pound of lettuce. Lettuce from across the continent delivered by Wall Street boardroom farmers. Milk from genetically engineered cows pumped full of hormones--milk making machine that are neither wild or domestic, unfortunately they are alive. We can't even bite the hand that feeds us, because we don't know who feeds us!
This is the cost of how-to-do-it technological domestication; bondage to a must fix-it mentality. Nature does not fix what is not broken....We unfortunately are bound to our tongues and our tongues spew legislation.. We create more laws in one hour, than God could create in seven days. In our search for a quick fix, we have inflicted human bondage across the planet. We have lost our Nature. We in turn are enslaved to technology and its mistress human law. Our mission is to domesticate the Universe. To control the waves; to quiet the volcanoes; to stop the rain; and still the wind. We want to domesticate the planet until we are bored into non-existence. We are dangerously close to achieving our goal. With every technological breakthrough we become more convinced that we can save ourselves. In our arrogance, we believe we can fix it or can learn how to fix it...Just in time. This myth allows our dangerous mission to continue: the domestication, de-humanization and subsequent demise of Homo sapien. After we are gone the shredded integuments of life will pull together, consolidate and continue. Evidence will suggest that we were once here, we ravaged and lost and were gone.
What can we do?
1. Take time to observe wild things. See how peaceful they are. Try to understand their world from a different perspective. Wonder at how a thousand birds can turn on a wing beat. Feel the remorse of blowing leaves heralding the call of Winter. There is no attempt here for control, only to be. Plants and animals connected. No hierarchy. We created that myth. Just exchanges, there a mouse becomes a coyote. A dragonfly eats a mosquito, the mosquito is a dragonfly. Think about those words we use to describe "wild" things: aggressive, dominant, competitive. Stop calling Nature names. Stop describing others in terms that describe us. We are the wild ones We are the rogues. We are the dangerous animals, the beasts that idolize: control, security and sameness.
2. Join a club that buys back wilderness or saves wilderness. A place you enter on a path, walking on your feet. The only vehicle allowed is a wheelchair.
3. Get your congressman to sponsor a bill that increases wilderness in your State. Shoot for 12% like they achieved in British Columbia.
4. Grow a garden of wild things and start eating them.
5. Join a garden club or a botanic garden. Help naturalists eliminate alien plants that are competing with our endemic flora. Support and participate in efforts of conservation and restoration.
6. Use your parks, beaches. Seek legislation that supports our National Parks, helps them expand, but does not pave them over and turn them into concession stands.
7. Buy your groceries from locals. Encourage them to practice organic gardening. Discourage the use of the term sustainable as in sustainable agriculture: at the present rate of human growth nothing is sustainable this is our deluding myth.
8. Cut your trips to the Mall in half. Shoot for only one trip a month.
9. Use your bike for short trips. Take walks everyday. Make your presence felt: those truly wild thugs, those rogue humans, those tyrants who sell drugs, rape and steal cannot withstand your presence.
10. Buy fine art and utilitarian tools and pots from local artisans. Reward those who simplify their lives and have a direct hand in what they do and who they are.
11. Buy whole foods, not manufactured foods...Stay away from energy rich (refined sugar, corn sugarts) snacks.
12. Don't cry wolf, grizzly or coyote. There is room for all us. If predators are a threat to us, it's because we have squeezed them out of the picture. They are terribly afraid of us, we can destroy them with a simple flick of a finger.
13. Stop trying to tame the wild, a domesticated world is a boring place.