I am generally a very private person, but because I challenged many traditional social, political, religious, and economic dogmas and paradigms in Saving Civilization, readers have a right to know a little bit about me and what motivated me to write it. Honestly, I never wanted to write a book about saving civilization. I felt strongly that it needed to be written, and assumed that some well known, respected anthropologist would eventually write it, but none did. Then, because of four completely unrelated events, I decided to write it myself. · The first event was overhearing a conversation in which an adult was telling a teenager that it would be up to his generation to fix the problems created by previous generations. I realized that this was a prevalent attitude, and it angered and shamed me to be a member of a generation that was so irresponsible for its actions. · The second was receiving news of the impending birth of my granddaughter, Olive. The thought of her generation growing up in a world of diminishing prospects sickened me.· The third was realizing that the individuals who did receive formal training in these subjects were not able to address them objectively because they were limited by their orthodox training. And even if they could address them objectively, it is unlikely that they would, because of the subject's potential volatility.· And the forth, and most compelling reason, was that an unexpected heart attack diminished my life expectancy considerably. I could no longer afford to wait for someone else to write it or a more opportune time for me to write it. These reasons explain why I wrote Saving Civilization, but they do not address my qualifications. That will be more difficult, and it will necessitate addressing certain aspects of my life history. What is presented here is intended to help explain why someone with no orthodox qualifications for writing about civilization is actually qualified to do so. These qualifications rest primarily on an un usual background that has allowed and enabled me to perceive aspects of civilization objectively, and secondarily on my deep concern for the welfare of not only my own species but all species. Formative YearsI was born in New England in 1950, but my formative years were spent in Glenview, Illinois, where I lived from 1952 until 1962. There was nothing particularly remarkable about my early life. Like most boys my age at that time, I played sports, flew kites, built forts, and attended school. I have always had an insatiable appetite for learning but, remarkably, I was never a good student and hated attending school. This was primarily because I generally felt ill in classrooms. I had no idea why, but I discovered that if I sat near a window or an open door, I felt less ill. As it turned out, I suffered from a type of epilepsy that can be triggered by the flickering of fluorescent lights. Unfortunately, this condition was not medically recognized at that time, and I didn't recognize it myself until long after I graduated from high school. In any event, the 12 years I spent in classrooms were mostly devoted to trying not to feel ill, and seldom succeeding. Hardly conditions conducive to performing well there. Comments on my report cards almost always read something like "Jeb does not pay attention in class and is not working up to his full potential." My teachers must have recognized this greater potential in me from my extracurricular activities. I was passionately interested in natural history, for example, and by the time I was in 6th grade, I had taught myself enough about it that I was released from class once a week for an hour to teach it to the lower grades. My inability to do well in school was confusing to everyone. Unfortunately, my parents believed that performing well in school was tantamount to having a successful life. My father's stance regarding my lackluster performance was "I can't make you do good in school. All I can do is make you wish you did." I resolved to do better thousands of times. It is my nature to do everything as well as possible, and I would have loved to have pleased my parents. No matter how well intended my resolutions were, however, I was never able to do well in school. Consequently, I spent a lot of time "grounded." As I got older, my condition increasingly alienated me from school and society, and my parents' response to it alienated me from them. This trend was exacerbated when I became a teenager in 1963 and subjected to a number of relocations. Between 1962 and 1967 my family moved six times, which meant that I had to adjust to five new schools. Unfortunately, stress aggravates epilepsy, and there is probably nothing more stressful for teenagers than switching schools. As a result, attending classes became even more difficult for me. When I was 13, my family moved to Santa Barbara, California. By then, it had become abundantly clear to me that the dynamics of my situation were not going to improve. So I decided to leave home and stowaway on a ship to Australia. I told only three friends what my plans were and, surprisingly, one of them, a classmate named Chuck Becker, wanted to go with me. I can not recollect why, but I welcomed his company. I researched ship schedules and decided that our best chance of success was to board a British ship, the SS Chusan, when it was docked in San Francisco. Timing was important, so we decided to use some of our limited funds to purchase bus tickets to San Francisco two days before the ship was scheduled to leave. When we got there and had time to assess the situation, we found that the Chusan was going to be difficult to access. We ended up having to scale fences, climb over warehouses and under docks to reach it. When we finally did reach it, we tied our bags to our waists and climbed up the mooring lines (which is a lot harder than it might seem) and boarded the ship. Our plans for getting on the ship were reasonably well thought out and executed. However, our plans for what we were going to do once we got on the ship were not. I am embarrassed to admit that they unrealistically included finding some cute girls who would help us out for the first part of the journey. The Chusan was scheduled to stop in Hawaii, and if we were discovered before it left there, we would almost certainly have been turned over to the port authorities in Honolulu. Once we had left Hawaii though, we assumed that we could probably come out of hiding and possibly even work on the ship to help pay our way to Australia. As it turned out, things went downhill very quickly once we got on board. We stashed our bags where we thought they would be safe so that we could explore the ship looking like passengers. However, when we returned to retrieve them several hours later, they were gone. Consequently, we found ourselves on a ship with no food, no supplies, no place to stay, and no cute girls to help us. To make matters worse, we overheard that the crew was searching the ship for two stowaways. As it turned out, the authorities knew we might be on board because one of the two individuals that knew our plans divulged them when pressured to do so by his father. This left us with no choice but to get off the ship. Still determined to leave the country, we traveled to Vancouver, Canada. But honestly, by the time we got there, we were tired, broke, dirty, and without any positive prospects. Nothing was working out the way we had planned. After spending only a short time in Vancouver, we decided to go back to the United States, but we were apprehended by officials at the border. We were then transported to Bellingham, Washington, and placed in custody until my father came to retrieve us several days later. When I returned home, nothing changed, except that my mother now pleaded with me to finish high school. She seemed so distraught over my leaving that I acquiesced. Consequently, I had four more years of school to endure before I could put that part of my life behind me. Because of my condition, I gravitated toward the periphery of civilization, even though it was not my nature to do so. My nature has always been to be involved and to contribute. Nevertheless, the periphery of civilization is an ideal place to observe it objectively. From there I was able to see aspects of it that were very disturbing to me. Accordingly, by the time I graduated from high school, I had become very disillusioned with civilization, in particular with how destructive it was to the environment. It also really bothered me that no one seemed especially concerned about it. I didn't know at that time where my life was headed, but I was determined to find a way to live that wasn't so destructive. Into the WildernessIn my mind, the most logical place to begin learning how to live in a balanced state was by studying and emulating aboriginal societies. Therefore, soon after graduating from high school, I hitchhiked to Alaska, where I hoped to spend time with Native Americans still living in wilderness conditions. My first summer there was spent getting acclimated, working for wages, saving money, and trying to meet people who possessed wilderness survival skills. In the far north, the most competent woodsmen are definitely trappers, so initially I spent time with them. One such individual, Bryan "Red" Johnson, owned land and a series of trapping cabins on the west and north forks of the Chena River, 60 miles east of Fairbanks. He agreed to let me use his cabins that winter in exchange for maintaining them. Some of this area is now pretty accessible, but in the late 1960s it was still wild country. I moved out there in September 1968 and remained there, except for one week around Christmas, until May of the following year. I saw very few people during that time and spent most of it developing basic wilderness survival skills such as hunting, trapping, fishing, etc. I became reasonably adept at them, but I realized that compared with traditional Native Americans, I was still, quite literally, a babe in the woods. As a result, I decided to devote the following summer to spending time with Native Americans in remote villages in the interior. After studying a map of Alaska, it became clear that the best place to do that was along the Yukon River.Toward the end of June, I began that journey with a friend from California named Dave Harbeson. Initially, he was planning on spending a few weeks with me, but we both soon realized that he wasn't cut out for wilderness travel, so we parted company at the little Indian village of Beaver, where he was able to catch a ride on a mail plane back to Fairbanks. The first villages I encountered were not at all what I was expecting or looking for. Certainly there were capable native hunters, fishermen, and trappers there, but they were not practicing a traditional material culture or anything even remotely worth emulating. So I continued on down the river hoping to find more traditional settlements. That didn't happen.When I reached Tanana, I had to make a decision. From there, I could get back to Fairbanks because there was a road most of the way, or I could continue traveling down the Yukon. If I ended my journey in Tanana, I would not have accomplished what I had set out to do, but if I continued on, I would eventually have to abandon my canoe somewhere and try to scrounge enough money to pay for a flight back to Fairbanks. Fortunately, a third option presented itself to me. In Fort Yukon, I met a group of four individuals who were sponsored by National Geographic to document the entire Yukon River. While there, I was told that two of their crewmembers wanted to leave when they got to Tanana. As it turned out, we met again there, and the leaders, Clark Gruening (who later became a senator of Alaska) and Willie Osborn, asked me to paddle their second canoe and gear to Alakanuk on the Bering Sea. In exchange for this, they would supply me with food, fly me back to Fairbanks at the end of the trip, and pay me $1,100 when their article was published (it never was). It was much harder paddling their larger, heavier canoe than mine, but the arrangement allowed me finish the trip. It was a fascinating journey, but I never encountered a single Indian village that practiced a traditional subsistence strategy, even though I traveled through some of the wildest areas left in North America. This meant that I probably wasn't going to find one anywhere on the continent. This realization prompted me to begin learning aboriginal survival skills on my own. Today, there are many books and videos on how to knap arrowheads, brain tan hides, start fires with friction, and so on, but in the early 1970s that was not the case. Learning aboriginal skills was mostly a matter of trial and error. Through the years, I became reasonably accomplished with many aboriginal skills and still practice some of them today. Accomplishing tasks using primitive technologies in modern societies can feel like quite an achievement, but attempting to incorporate them into modern subsistence strategies is very impractical. In order to test them objectively, it is necessary to do so in wilderness situations devoid of modern influences, and that is impossible. Even in wilderness locations, there are laws regarding hunting, fishing, trapping, harvesting, etc. that prohibit practicing aboriginal subsistence strategies. However, they can be tested in limited ways. For example, in the late 1970s I spent a portion of one summer living in a rock shelter in Joseph Canyon in northeastern Oregon. The Nez Perce name for this area, an-an-a-soc-um, means long rough canyon[1] and it was appropriately named. It is also quite beautiful and an ideal place to practice aboriginal survival skills. With the exception of a couple of Navajo blankets, every other item in my possession that summer was made by me with stone tools. Surviving there was not difficult. I was able to easily kill, catch, and harvest everything I needed to sustain myself, and I could have fared much better if had shot or trapped larger animals such as deer or elk. The only drawback with the area was that there were lots of aggressive rattlesnakes. By the way, contrary to popular belief, rattlesnakes do not taste like chicken.I left Joseph Canyon toward the end of summer expecting to return there in the early fall. Consequently, I cached some items there that I would need when I came back. For reasons that I no longer recall, I never did go back. Unfortunately, however, someone discovered the cached items and took them to an archaeologist thinking they might have archaeological significance were archaeologically valuable. These items were studied and reported in Tebiwa (Volume 20, 1983), an archaeological journal published by the Idaho Museum of Natural History. The article was titled Aboriginal-Style Pottery from Joseph Canyon, Oregon: Is it Ancient or Modern? Fortunately, an aboriginal skills instructor from northeastern Oregon named Jim Riggs heard that someone named Jeb had been living in Joseph Canyon and informed the investigator, that the artifacts, although aboriginal in appearance, were not ancient. TechnologyAs time passed, I began to realize that although aboriginal subsistence strategies were generally less destructive than modern ones, it was not necessarily because those strategies were more enlightened or conscientious. The technologies of aboriginal populations were not particularly advanced, so their population numbers always remained low. As a result, the damage they imparted on the environment was minor. However, when these populations adopted agriculture, they began to have very negative impacts on the environment. This meant that attempting to reincorporate aboriginal subsistence strategies and/or attitudes into modern societies would not work. Additionally, it became abundantly clear that although civilization may suffer setbacks, it does not voluntarily move backward. Adopting a sustainable subsistence strategy would have to entail the wise use of new technologies, not the reestablishment of successful aboriginal ones.