Did magic mushrooms and moldy wheat give rise to the Vikings?
Is high tech pastoralism the ideal modern aesthetic?
If a cow moos in the mountains, but no one hears it, does it make better butter? (definitely, yes)
Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel, was dead wrong about one thing, though insightful about many others. Let’s start with the bad news. Diamond makes a rough estimate that would make any forager cringe: He claims around 99% of plants aren’t edible! Excuse me, good sir, but no. If we count nutritional and medicinal teas or broths, then it’s easily the majority of plants, if not the inverse of his claim. Knowledge about the countless useful plants and fungi all around us is written off as so useless by the mainstream that it’s not even worth looking into. It’s just 99% junk, trust us!
End rant. Other than that, the book is great overall. It gives us good lessons about different cultures and common patterns that tend to help a group of people overcome various calamities that inevitably happen throughout history. In short, a fertile landscape, a generational continuity of culture, and social cohesion are key to creating resilience in the face of chaos. The modern United States is on precarious ground compared to many other cultures based on these measures. This is stressful to think about sometimes, so I like to balance it by reminding myself of the dozens of models and strategies we have in the permaculture realm to cultivate these resilient values.
Another interesting concept he outlines is the idea that geography shapes culture. For example, a moderate climate, elevation changes, and seasonal rains make much of Asia ideal for growing rice. If this is the only staple crop, it requires a great deal of labor and collaboration or else everyone may starve. People regularly toiled for 50-60 hours a week on average to make this work. A culture developed that valued intense work ethic and conformity to ensure a harvest every year. Sloth and individualism carried heavy social consequences. Mythology and social structures emerged from this like a tadpole must emerge from the water. Compare this to peasant Europe where most of the work was seasonal and they average 20-30 hours of work per week. They have a completely different culture, mythology, and value system that arises from the difference in terrain. Countless examples of this pattern arise across the globe. Terrain makes a unique terroir for the tastes and sensory experience of a place… and it also shapes entire cultures, religions, and civilizations.
Terroir of Norway
My wife and I traveled to Norway this summer to spend three weeks in her mother’s ancestral home and to visit family. I say ancestral home because the foundation of the house was built approximately 400 years ago. Many generations have dwelled in this place. I couldn’t help but notice the myriad of ways that the geography has influenced the culture there. The mountains and rocky hillsides make much of the land unworkable by machines and dangerous for hand labor. Lush valleys accumulate nutrients from upland forest runoff during the frequent rains. Rocky coastlines and abundant rivers make diverse coastal niches for docking boats and fishing estuaries and fjords. These beautiful landscapes have given form to a unique culture that has grown with them over time.
The inland terrain is uniquely suited for smaller and more dexterous breeds of sheep and cattle. They truly free range in the mountains during the day, often with no restriction other than a bell around their neck to help find them if they get lost. The fertile lowlands are ideal for growing hay for winter feed. The fields are filled with rich, thick swords of grass, interspersed with sorrel, dock and dandelion. They were verdant and lush even after a first cut and a drier than normal June that would have left most hayfields in the Midwest sparse, dry, and weedy.
The meadows and forests offer a multitude of proverbial slaps in the face to those like Diamond who poo poo the abundance of edibility in untended ecosystems. Untended is a relative term here. They are currently untended, but how much of a seed bank could 20,000 years of hunter gatherers built up? Quite a bit I’d imagine. Enough to make carpets of wild blueberries under the fir and birch, miles of blooming yarrow, Angelica, and St. John’s Wort, thickets of raspberries and serviceberries springing up everywhere, and mountaintops covered in lingonberries. Evidence of the wild tending of indigenous people abound there. We can still find traces of that here in the Midwest, despite a few hundred years of clear cutting and neglect.
Sometimes looking into patterns of the distant past like this can also give us a glimpse into the future. In 10,000 years our iPhones may be gone without a trace, but our impacts on the seed banks and future ecosystems may reverberate for millennia. We are THE keystone species in this era, the Anthropocene. We are lucky to be alive in such a critical, interesting, and abundant juncture! The energy and technology we have today would have seemed like magic just a few generations ago. Will we use this magic to build a lasting infrastructure, social cohesion, fertile soil, and a dynamic seed bank (both literally and figuratively)? Let us use our godlike powers and the remains of our fossil energy to build a more just, beautiful, and sustainable culture. I digress. Off the soapbox and back to Norway.
Psychedelics: Intentional and Incidental
We can’t talk about the culture of Norway without mentioning the Vikings. The diverse coastlines offer many niches for fishing and sailing. These, along with some help from contaminated wheat, magic mushrooms, and a special type of bloodlust that only months of near total darkness from hardly seeing the sun can elicit, notoriously gave rise to the Vikings.
The moldy wheat refers to a contaminant on wheat that can cause hallucinations, paranoia, fits of rage, and much else besides. It is known as ergot and it has been used both intentionally and unintentionally throughout history. The ancient Greeks may have included it in psychedelic meads and wines. It has been associated with many of the earliest Christian monuments. Many of the Salem witch trials were likely related to an ergot outbreak at the time. There were centuries of witch trials in Norway as well that may be linked to the contaminant. It is a powerful thing, and one could easily imagine how it could be impactful on the Viking way of life.
The magic mushroom mentioned and pictured above is known as the amanita muscaria, and it is the stereotypical image of a magic mushroom that you see on ornaments or use to level up in Super Mario Bros. It could be connected to the origins of the Christmas holiday. There is over a millennia of historic use of amanitas by Scandinavian shamans for winter solstice ceremonies that are eerily similar to the modern Christmas tradition. If that’s not weird enough for you, this feral fungi also may have been used by the Viking berserkers to induce a fearless rage before battle. How did they not teach us this stuff in school?!? Check out the linked articles above for more on this mystical mushroom of lore!
One of the mind altering substances is invisible to the naked eye. The other is an unmistakable, bright red Christmas ornament. They both have a deep, ancient, and mysterious connection with humans across the globe. Their effects may have been particularly acute in Norway’s history. While amanitas may occur completely autonomously, while the ergot required some human assistance in the form of grain agriculture.
History of Grains: Paleo to When?
Bread and butter is, well, their bread and butter. A typical breakfast is buttered bread with homemade jelly or cheese… followed by a lunch of buttered bread with jelly or cheese. How did this happen in a place that has abundant livestock, wild elk and moose, and a near endless supply of fish and shrimp? Didn’t they know about, like, the paleo diet, when they started growing grains as a staple crop 12,000 years ago? Archaeological records and a few examples of carved runes indicate that grains have been grown for at least that long in Norway. But why?
We can’t go back to the paleolithic area to put one of their dietitians’ advice on tiktok, but we can make a reasonable guess as to why this shift occurred. Before refrigeration, fish, beef, mutton, and dairy were difficult, unreliable, and labor intensive to preserve. If your regular work is out on the sea fishing, in the woods hunting, or chasing cows through the mountains, you need convenient, storable food at the ready year round. Grains filled that gap until the potatoes arrived from the Americas to really top of the storable calorie crop options. Now, in addition to bread and butter, Norway is still renowned for its fish and potatoes!
Another interesting explanation for the transition to grain crops in general comes from the brilliant philosopher Daniel Schmachtenburger. He shares a game theory based explanation. Let’s say a neighboring tribe makes the shift from primarily hunting and gathering to mostly grain based agriculture. They then create a surplus of calories that enables a growing population. The storable calories and settlement also enables specialization, which leads to new weapons development. The growing population demands growing land use, and therefore warfare. If your group did not adapt to farming grains, you would eventually be overtaken by a neighboring group who had done so. This creates a feedback loop that accelerates the adoption of a new way of life. There may have been a neighboring empire 15,000 years ago that forced grain farming on Scandinavia, but we may never know one way or the other how it started there.
High Tech Pastoralism – The Modern Aesthetic
Norway’s deep history reveals a culture that went from stone age cavemen, to polytheistic, adventurous, warlike Vikings, to impoverished, monotheistic farmers and fishermen scraping by on a diet that required a grueling lifestyle. All of that changed when they discovered troves of oil about 50 years ago. Since then, Norway’s wealth and social supports have boomed. It has become THE bastion of neoliberal socialism enabled by those boogoo oil bucks. Without that oil, they wouldn’t be the poster child for the modern socialist aesthetic.
Eric Hoel writes an interesting blog on a number of topics, and I feel like he hit the vibe on the head with his article on high tech pastoralism. In it, he writes:
…cultural changes, movements, subliminal messaging in what is attractive and found worth wanting—these things matter. They are the Aristotelian “final causes” of human behavior, the meanings and reasons. The kind of personalized and unique life enabled by remote work, and the desire for one’s own version of that, does seem fundamentally different from the commute-based suburban dreams of the 1950s. It has a different vibe, like some point of emphasis has shifted. A new set of images and feelings takes over.
For what is an aesthetic, anyways?
It is a fashion that asks a question.
And what question does high-tech pastoral ask?
What is the purpose of technology, if not to make life easier and more beautiful?
Most of southern Norway is living out the postmodern dream of high tech pastoralism… Teslas and idyllic traditional farmhouses, strip malls and free camping and hiking at every waterfront, petting sheep in the mountains with 5 bars of cell service, universal healthcare and universally free range cream and wild berries, and chain malls with burger kings on picturesque fjords. It’s a bit of a paradox. Ultimately, there are lessons for us to be learned from Norway.
First, a generational land-based culture creates a sense of place that leads to better environmental, farm, and building stewardship. Next, a priorities-based land use can diversify our yields and create more resilience against pests, disease, and extreme weather. Small farms and home gardens are concentrated and highly productive in the fertile valleys, while mountainsides provide grazing land and lumber, and forests and rivers are protected for hunting and wildlife. Finally, when we have an excess of resources and a high tech society, can we use that to make our lives easier and more beautiful? How can we make life easier and more beautiful for the next 7 generations?
The final photos below show a living example of generational thinking, planning, and living. That is my wife, standing in a forest planted by her great grandfather. He planted the entire side of a small mountain with pines for lumber. Four generations later, they are a living example of generational wealth. Cleaning the air and water, stabilizing and building the soil, sequestering CO2, giving a beautiful view, providing habitat for wildlife and foraging for humans, and offering abundant building materials when the time comes. Let us leave this type of legacy in our wake here in our homeland!
