Taker or Leaver?

I warned you that I wasn't done talking about my relationship with Ishmael, but after coming to the end of it, I'm almost hesitant to think about it anymore for a while. Almost.
According to the book, Man has lost touch with the natural world and the Natural Law. He has decided not to follow it -- to simply ignore it. Man has come to the conclusion that He is the epitome of evolution (well, that only goes for the ones who believe in that wacky concept of evolution). All agree that Man is the Lord and Master of all he surveys, and all the plants, rocks and creatures are our humble subjects (Bow down to us!) and that he can really do ANY thing to the world that he wants.
Ishmael purports a position that the fossils show that our ancestors boned it by settling down and letting that oversized head sponge really get to absorbing. About 10K years ago, JoMoe Sapien and his brothers and sisters sat on a rock that would one day be in Baghdad, and voted to become Takers (of everything they could get their hands on, and in astounding quantities), and the few poor souls who have since escaped enslavement by the resulting Europeans continued their three million year journey as Leavers. The Leavers have been traditionally recognizable by way of their scandalous grass and leaf wardrobe in innumerable, legendary National Geographic photo spreads, and their ability to live outside for over TWO days in a row.
For the last week, I have been trying to escape the inescapable depression that sits at the middle of the premise of Ishmael like a swirling vortex. The thought that we are simply "doing it wrong" -- an all-star cast of 7 billion Mr. Mom's trying to drop off the kids at school in the wrong direction -- terrifies me. That we are on a collision course with mass extinction, and that that would be the standard option for Maw Nature to exercise, is less than heartwarming bedtime reading. And the end of the book does little to ease the conscience. "Teach 10 people about what you have learned." That's all you got Danny Quinn? The best I've seen for this is a guy on youtube that's getting stoned people to read the book three pages at a time into the camera.
Anyway, no one is going to switch back to being a Leaver at this point, so what is there to do about this Taker Extraordinaire culture that we are camped out in the middle of? Since I am far too lazy to take up arms in violent revolution, and because the only thing I could do worse than farming is soldiering, I've ended up stumblin' and bumblin' right into the 'Teach 10' brier patch.
I get up in the morning and I teach a whole bunch of kids the best I can. Well, probably not the 'best.' if I was working on a powerpoint, or reading a little ahead, or figuring out how the associative property works, instead of blawgin' -- columning -- here, I could likely cram another couple of Great Lessons in each day. But at least we've moved on to the next stage after Ishmael, a book by a smartypants professor named Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Don't worry, I'm not going to spoonfeed y'all every book we read, so don't look for another book report next time, but luckily for the Lazies, the National Geographic Channel has your spoon if you just don't have time for the book. You can put the G,G,&S DVD series in your Netflix queue, and get all smarted up without having to lift your butt up off the couch.
Instead, I think it's time to get back into the South -- come to think of it, my class is also starting To Kill a Mockingbird -- Maybe I can slip back into some downhome columnizing next time. Hopefully, I can open with a joke about the trouncing of Alabama by the Georgia Bulldogs.

Call me, Ishmael.

School started again. I'm in a situation I have been working toward for quite a while. I have the school humming along nicely and I get to spend my mornings, and many afternoons, teaching again. Since I took over the administration, New Year's of '07, I've had to concentrate on so many different distractions, I haven't been able to put much effort into the classroom side. Now, I have a 'class' of two adolescents.
They are both super smart and motivated, but it is the content of the class that I want to talk about (type about?).
We are reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Yeah, I read it about a hundred years ago too. If you haven't gotten around to it, let me give you the quick rundown...
The student finds a teacher who is an expert on captivity. The student is walked through a basic concept of humans being divided into two groups: Takers and Leavers. Basically, everyone was a Leaver until about 10,000 years ago. Somewhere around that time, Joe-Mo Sapien said (grunted?) "Things fall off plant, go in ground, grow back again, make more food." Or something to that effect, we haven't recovered the audio of that yet.
So, the Agricultural Revolution begins. This new race of people starts growing food. They settle down, they start to specialize in different areas. Their knowledge increases. The better nutrition increases brain capacity, and the species starts to be wildly successful. The freedom generated by agriculture gives us a sense of control over this world. For three billion years, we had been living in balance with nature as it worked. Our numbers were controlled by the same laws that governed the entire rest of the world, but we got too smart for that.
We built walls and better spears to better kill anything that threatened our safety. Which is, of course, a perfectly rational response to being attacked. However, after we stopped having to worry about anything being higher on the food chain than us, we had to start preying upon, and protecting ourselves from, one another. The huge food surplus had generated another effect to add to this advancement in thought and control. The population of Homo Sapiens started to multiply at an unprecedented rate.
Everywhere this race went, it wreaked havoc on the established nature, and it continued to increase its power over that nature. And they learned how to grow even more food. And that made more people.
And when the number of people got too big, they killed each other off. And on, and on. Except that in the process of this cycle of surplus to scarcity to surplus again, Man decided that he was put here to use the Earth in any way He liked. He decided that God had put him here, and given him all these resources to plow through and throw away. It became an adversarial relationship.
The whole reason for the mess we've made is because we stopped living by the Laws of Nature. We decided we could 'Take' as much as we wanted, not needed, wanted. The few 'Leavers' that still exist in the world are far enough into the jungle to still understand the Law, but we'll get us a mission'ry in there to stamp that out soon enough.
What's funny about reading Ishmael again after all these years is that I had forgotten that someone told me this stuff once. The book is such a part of the way I think, I couldn't even separate the story from my worldview.
Anyway, I'm about halfway through it with my class, so when we meet again, I'll probably need to say a little more about it.
In the meantime, see if you see any examples of Man being at war with the Earth.