Pandora's Seed and The Last of the Mohicans

Our book relationship takes some interesting turns at Woodbury Meeting. Sometimes we are all reading a chosen book at the same time, and sometimes one person brings a book and we pass it along. The most recent book was of the latter process, Pandora's Seed.The unforseen Cost of Civilization, by Spencer Wells. This fascinating wide ranging look at human civilizatinn begins with the hunter gatherers and the rise of agriculture, to ponder all the many consequences from the effects on our health of a less diverse diet and less active life, to the growth of population and the effect of these consequences on the environment, among many other considerations. Many of his strands of thought wove into philosophical roads I have traveled over my life, such as population control. From the 1960's, when birth control became more widely available, I have been a big believer in limited population growth for a couple of reasons: 1-Women who can control their onset of motherhood, can get an education, a career and become more capable of independent survival if they can put off childbearing past their late teens and early twenties, and 2-Our planet has been stressed to the breaking point to supply the resources needed to sustain unregulated population growth.

It has long been a visible process how population growth leads to deforestation for agriculture, and eventually desertification due to the loss of the forest component of moisture retention in the soil and in the air as well as the cover the canopy provides to protect the soil, especially during drought. As we speak, the amazon jungle, known as the "lungs of the planet" is being destroyed for mining and lumbering profiteering and the last of the hunter gatherers are being murdered by these exploitive forces.

Obviously we cannot go back. We can't return to Eden and become hunter gatherers again, too much has already been destroyed and we are not fit for that world any more, nor would we want to. My thoughts in regard to wilderness survival is always, "What happens when you have appendicities? Or a compound fracture from a fall?"

But there are things we can do to slow or halt the destruction, and to conserve what we have left and to use our great big brains to find a more sustainable way to live so there is a future for planet earth other than to leave it a dry, dead, dusty ball like the moon.

It ocurred to me recently when I was trying to find a way to watch my annual Thanksgiving film, The Last of the Mohickans, that it was only a couple hundred of years ago that the people who populated North America were living exactly that balanced hunter gatherer lifestyle that left a balance in the natural world. Thinking that way gives such a different slant to the arrival of the Mayflower to the continent.

I have been making some paintings in celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday, one of Chief Tamenand who make the disastrous land deal with William Penn's family, and one of a man and woman of the Wampanoag Tribe of the village of Patuxet who were wiped out by a smallpox plague brought by Dutch traders (it must be noted that for the most part this was accidental as in the 1600's no one really understood how diseases spread.) A fact I only recently discovered was that one of the items taken from the 'New World' by Dutch traders were kidnapped Native people who were sold into slavery back in Europe. They were lured onto the ships for trading purposes and became trade items themselves. A few of the Wampanoag were kidnapped and one, Tisquanto, known as Squanto, spent nine years in England and then returned to Patuxet to find his village a ghost town. He stayed on to help the pilgrims by showing them how to farm and how to harvest other edibles in order to survive. He was the 'Last of' his branch of the Wampanoag tribe.

A note on literature. An 'exotic' child for my time and place, I was raised on the dense forest of late 1800's and early 1900's classic popular literature. I was exotic because I was a devout and obsessive reader in a red brick row house neighborhood where you would have been hard pressed to find other children with such as strange predilection. My access to this literatue was via the basement of my grandmother's house where the left over library of some previous ancestors sat dusty and forlorn on bookshelves taken down to the basement to unclutter the living area. I was given free reign to these books, a treasure trove of Dickens, Twain, classic American literature such as Moby Dick and The Last of the Mohickans as well as European Literature that had been purchased as a set in a dark blue clothcovered hard back binding; Emile Zola, Guy dePaupassant, Bocaccio. I bravely beat my way through the jungle of the prose of that era like a possessed explorer hacking her way through an impenetrable tract of mysterious terrain.

When my daughter and I, on a girl scout trip many many decades after my childhood, visited Plymouth Plantation, I couldn't help but be struck by the dearth of reading material, not that there would have been time for such a luxury as reading, nor adequate lighting for reading in the time available after the work of food growing and production was complete. That time, anyhow, would have had to be given over to spinning and weaving and knitting and preserving.

Replacement Theory: One of the driving forces in the rise of the RightWing political movement is the fear of the European White Christian population being replaced by foreigners, brown and black skinned, uneducated masses. It isn't new, it is just newly invigorated. It existed when I was growing up in South Philadelphiad in the last five years of th 1940's and the decade of the Baby Boon 50's. The AngloSaxon and Irish remnants of early waves of immigration were fleeing the onslaught of the Sothern Meditteranean immigrants. Our neighborhood resonated with the sound of the Romance Language and the smells of Meditteranean cooking. The Irish pubs were slowly being replaced by pizzerias and Italian restaurants. There was an uneasy friction between these groups as slowly but surely, love precipitated an intermingling of these European groups, and the huybrid Italian/Irish families then prospered and moved to the suburbs or across the river to New Jersey. My family was the result of an earlier melding of the older German inhabitants of that area of Philadelphia, with the new Irish arrivals. Even amidst these disparate ethnic groups there were frictions and tribal factions. The Irish were riven into Protestant and Catholic factions, representated by my Episcopalian Irish-American Grandmother married to my Catholic Irish-American Grandfather. Her immigrant Irish-American mother had married into an earlier English settler family along the Timber Creek in New Jersey. And so the slow blending evolved. The children of the Irish-American grandparents married Italians. A friend recently bemoaned that educated white women weren't reproducing enough because they were pursuing education and careers and so the 'dumbing down' of the population was happening. But I reminded him that the majority of the great thinkers, writers and artist of the world came from humble origins and not from upper class educated white mothers, as for example Charles Dickens, born in a workhouse and raised in poverty. A whole list of such success stories could be provided, the old rags to riches tale. The intelligent and enquiring mind will arise, it doesn't require a hot-house. And I believe the world needs more and more educated women without the constraints of motherhood, to take over roles of leadership in this far too patriarchal world.

Well, that's it for today. It is time for me to get out and vote! Happy Trails my fellow mixed breeds! Hope you all have a happy and healthy Thanksgiving! Jo Ann