Some Knowledge

It’s the Fourth of July.  From what I recall about American history, this is the day the Declaration of Independence was signed.  This day marks the start of the American Revolution.  I live in a country of revolutionaries who still celebrate this day with fireworks and explosions of all kinds.

The Fourth of July is one of my favorite holidays.  Perhaps this is because of the fireworks that go with it.  Maybe I have pyromaniacal tendencies that make me like fireworks.  Maybe it is just the colorful display.  I also like the backyard barbecue and all the celebrations that go along with this day.  The fact that this holiday is near the middle of summer means that the weather is usually pretty nice.

I’m trying to think of the causes of the American Revolution.  Taxes was one of the main causes.  England also would not allow the colonies to make a lot of their own goods.  Then there was the impressment of sailors and the garrisoning of British troops in households.  England was repressive and took advantage of the people in the colonies, so it was little wonder they broke away and started their own country.

America today is probably nothing like the founding fathers would have envisioned.  They had no idea how technology would advance in the two hundred years or so since the Revolution.  It’s hard to imagine life without automobiles and televisions and computers, but these things were not even thought of back in those days.  In many ways technology has made us more free, but in some ways it has enslaved us.  Look at all the people who buy useless products just because they see them advertised on TV.

It would be nice if the whole world could celebrate the Fourth of July.  Maybe if the whole world had a holiday where they barbecued and set off pyrotechnics they would be happier.  I know the countries of the world all have their own unique holidays, but it might be nice if they all fell on the same day so that people could have something in common to celebrate.  Maybe governments should look at how people live their lives and realize that oppressing the people will only lead to violence.

The tribe reportedly found in the Amazon has been known since 1910.  The reporter who broke the story wanted to draw attention to the danger from loggers to the tribe, so he reported that the tribe was unknown.  Yahoo today reports that the lost tribe was “discovered” so that people would pay attention to the plight of the rain forest.

This goes to show the dangers in believing anything you read in the news.  Stuff that gets reported may or may not be actually true.  It’s very easy to fool people if they do not have access to the records of discovered tribes or to some information that would refute or confirm some story.

This reminds me of the incident in the 1970’s about the Tassaday tribe in the Philipines.  It was reported that there was a village of people discovered in the jungle who did not wear clothes and who had an unknown language.  I think even National Geographic fell for that story and made a TV special about this group.  It turned out that the Tassaday were just villagers from a local town who would pretend to live in the jungle for visiting anthropologists.  The whole thing was a scheme to make money off tourism.

I have to admit that the lost tribe story has a good amount of appeal.  A lot of people have read the little story I wrote about them based on news reports.  Apart from actually going to an area and learning a new language and traveling into the jungle, there’s really no way to tell for sure if these reports are true or not.  Then again, if it was reported that a lost tribe of martians had been discovered by the mars lander, a lot of people would probably believe that too.

The new tribe located in the Amazon is called the Metyktire.  Last week, two members of this tribe walked to a Kayapo village nearby and made contact with these Indians.  They live on a part of the Kayapo reservation, which is 12.1 million acres of dense jungle.

This site has a description of the tribe.  The men go naked, except for a penis sheath, and the women shave the top of their heads.  They speak an archaic dialect of the Kayapo language.  Anthropologists no longer try to make contact with the unknown tribes of Indians in this region, but wait for the tribes to seek outside peoples.  Most contact with new tribes is made when they are discovered by loggers clearing the rainforest.

I’ve read a couple books about life in the South American rainforests.  In general, it is a short and brutal existance living off the land.  There are a lot of problems with living in the jungle.  There are poisonous plants and animals, and lots of insects.  These tribes tend to live a violent life and fight between groups.  When they get diseases or injuries they are without the benefits of modern medicine.  Life as a primitive tribe is nothing glorious or idyllic like some people try to paint it.

I don’t know what anthropologists will do about studying this tribe.  Probably, what will happen is that they will be left alone on the reservation.  This may not be in the best interest of the tribe, but there are about 700,000 indigenous people living in the Amazon region, so it is nothing out of the ordinary.  Even with the protection of a reservation, these tribes are losing some of their former areas, and given enough time, when the rainforest is finally cut down, they will have to adapt to modern society.

Yahoo News reported this morning that a new tribe has been found near the border of Peru and Brazil in the Amazon jungle.  This tribe has not been previously contacted and appears to be a new find.  It is estimated that there may be as many as 100 such tribes scattered around the world, most of them in the Amazon region.

The Yahoo site has pictures taken from the air of the tribe.  As yet, no expeditions to the region have been reported.  I imagine anthropologists will want to make contact with this tribe to study their culture.  It is feared that the first modern people to make contact with these tribes will be loggers, and there is the possibility that the new tribe will be wiped out before they can be contacted.

In this day and age with so many modern conveniences it is pretty amazing that there are still people living a stone age lifestyle.  I find it interesting that these people haven’t been found before this, even with all the satellites in orbit taking detailed pictures of the earth.  Perhaps people will learn from the mistakes of the past and treat these survivors from a different age with respect and learn from them.  It would be cool if somebody made a TV show about contacting these peoples.  It would also be cool if this tribe got a website and posted stories of their day to day lives.

There are a lot of people in the world.  Many of these people can not afford food.  Some 50,000 people die each day from malnutrition.  30,000 of these people are children.  The situation is deplorable.  What can be done to feed all these humans?

There is at this time no shortage of food in the world.  Farmers produce a surplus every year.  What is in short supply is money for the poor.  It is a financial problem that causes people to starve to death.  It’s not that food is not available, it’s that people can not afford to buy this food.  The price of food has been going up recently.  This means that more people will not be able to afford this food.

There is only a limited amount of money available to people.  This is because there are only so many jobs.  A job does not create money.  A job apportions money from one person to another.  The fact is that there are a lot of rich people and corporations.  These people make money by selling stuff to workers.  The workers make their money by working for some factory or other operation.  It is a closed loop.  If you want money, you have to get in the loop.  This is where the system fails.  There are not enough jobs for all the people.  Some people are unemployed and can not afford to buy necessary things.

So, what can be done to end this mess?  If governments were responsible they would create work programs for people to earn money.  Governments print the money, so there should be no shortage.  In a worst case scenario, governments could even give away money to the poor.  This already happens in the welfare system.  The government isn’t losing anything but a bit of inflation on the value of their currency.  The alternative is that more people will die.

The world is basically run on a free market economy.  This means that the corporations rule the earth.  If you have money you control things, like commodities and companies and other resources.  The problem with this system is greed.  People are naturally inclined to amass large fortunes.  One person having a thousand times as much money as the average person means that a thousand average persons have nothing.  It is a simple equation.

Perhaps the solution is to supply free food.  Free food cuts into the profitability of local farmers, who then can not produce food to feed local people.  Still, if all food were free, it would solve the problem of starvation.  We do not live in a world where you can just go off into the forest and spear a deer.  We live in a world that has concentrated populations.  If you lose your job, you might die of hunger.  Maybe what is needed is a program that guarantees jobs to everyone.  It’s just an idea.

It’s disgraceful for children to be starving to death while corporations turn perfectly good corn into motor fuel.  There has to be a solution to this problem.  Perhaps the governments of the world could forget their paranoid militaries and spend that money on coming up with a plan to feed the hungry.  Even in the united states there are many homeless people who have no food.  Instead of relying on the darwinian forces of the free market economy to solve problems they have no incentive to solve, we should tell our governments to find a solution to the problems of poverty and hunger.  It makes no sense that so many people should have to die while there is so much food in the world to feed them, if they only had money.

Man lived the life of the hunter-gatherer for millions of years.  Human beings survived and spread over the earth even during such harsh climatic times as ice ages.  It has been argued that human society as a hunter-gatherer was far more beneficial to the individual than our modern life.  These hunting societies were so successful that they managed to drive many prey species to extinction using only stone spears as weapons.

When agriculture came on the scene, it allowed people to give up the nomadic life and settle in one location.  People often congregated around a reliable source of food, such as a river with spawning salmon.  These areas were some of the first that were cultivated.  It takes a lot of work to prepare the soil for planting and tend crops.  Along with the extra work comes a surplus of food that can provide for larger populations.  Cities developed which relied on the growing of various foods to supply them with energy.  Labor was done by hand, and there developed a class system with people stratifying into leaders and followers.

Hunter-gatherer societies still survive in isolated regions of the earth inhabited by tribal peoples.  These people often live in forest regions that are rich in game and forageable foods.  Hunter-gatherers do not live in high concentrations in these areas.  It takes a large area of land to support a human being.  Often, these people engage in tribal wars for territory or other necessities of life.  People lived this way for millions of years.  Language was developed in such societies.  Primitive peoples also engaged in artistic activities like cave painting and singing and dancing.

Agriculture allowed a ruling class to develop.  Agricultural societies were some of the first to employ slaves to do the backbreaking work of planting and harvesting.  These societies developed permanent structures, water distribution systems, governments, and armies.  Modern society is the result of ten thousand years of agriculture.  Farming is the bedrock on which our modern world is built.

Farmers did not just grow plants for sustenance.  Agricultural societies developed domesticated animals as a ready source of meat.  Land that was in grass could be used to grow sheep for wool and meat.  People were no longer reliant on an unsteady supply of game from disappearing wild stocks for high-quality food.  Animals also provided milk and eggs, good sources of protein.  The animal wastes from the farms were applied to the fields as fertilizer to increase yields long before people understood the scientific reasons behind the use of fertilizer.

Some people think it is the organization of people into states and the construction of cities that led to civilization.  None of this would have been possible without the farmers to feed all these people.  It is agriculture that allowed some people to lead lives of leisure and develop writing and science.  Society was built on the work of the poor people, often held in slavery.  Human beings developed a heirarchical society in which a privileged upper class controlled the lower classes that were doing the actual work.  Even animals were pressed into service as a source of mechanical energy for the plowing of fields and the threshing of grain.

Today, modern society does not rely on slave labor.  People have become intelligent enough to devise machines to do the hard labor of plowing and planting.  Our machines run on energy derived from petroleum, coal, nuclear, or hydro power.  The earth is home to over six billion people now.  We need the power of machines to plant and harvest our crops.  We live in buildings with water supplied by pumps and convenient toilet facilities.  Our words can be published for the world to read at the click of a virtual button.  There are many advantages to living in the modern world.  We have health care that goes far beyond what our ancestors could have imagined.  We can travel great distances in comfort.  All of this is made possible by agriculture, which supplies food for the billions of people on earth.