The Fall We Keep Repeating

Two billion years ago, there was an organism on Earth that figured out how to harvest the power of the sun. But in the process of doing that, it released a toxin. And that toxin was oxygen.

At first the toxin would build up in the water, and then the organism would die back. And then it would rebound. And they went back and forth like that—their own waste kept them in balance.

Until one day, a cosmic ray probably came in and mutated just one gene in one single cyanobacterium. That mutation allowed it to survive in its own exhaust. And that new species replaced them all, because it could grow without limit.

Eventually so much oxygen accumulated in the ocean that it bubbled up into the atmosphere. Once it was in the atmosphere, all the rocks became oxidized. All of them. And because there was so much oxygen now, the CO2 got eaten up. The sun was shining but there was no more greenhouse effect. And so the whole Earth went straight into an ice age. The whole planet froze.

As far as I can tell, this was the first instance of an organism reshaping the Earth so much that they almost caused their own extinction. And it took hundreds of millions of years, life just hanging on in the ice, before things recovered.

And here we are now, remaking new materials from the planet. Things that just accumulate without being part of any cycle.

So I've been thinking about Genesis lately. I always saw it as just fairy tales in the Bible. But then I started reading more about geology and floods and ice ages, and I thought—what else in Genesis might have had some historical basis?

The story of Eden and the tree and all that. If you trace that story back, it's clearly a much older story. Way before the Bible. It comes from the Sumerians. And when you read the ancient version, it becomes a little more clear what the story really was.

It's basically humanity remembering leaving the forest. Leaving the sustainable way of living in balance with the land. That was the fall—into agriculture. Very specifically. And then they had to toil the earth. They had to work hard for their food. Whereas previously, they helped nature produce food and nature helped them live.

It's fascinating that this nostalgia for that earlier stage got recorded in these stories, taken into Sumerian myth, eventually taken into the Bible. And there it is. That nostalgia still exists even now.

So I went further. I was like, okay, where did that story come from originally? And this is where it gets hard because there's not a lot of written records.

But then I found the Dogon people in West Africa. They're among the oldest continuous cultures on Earth. And they have this origin story where the Sky Father tells the first man and the first woman to never take too much from the field. But then through dreams, one man figures out how to produce so much more. And eventually he's able to produce enough to feed a whole lot more people. And then the Sky Father seeing that, he withdraws his blessing. They broke their agreement with God.

And then there's the San people of southern Africa. Their genetic lineage goes back maybe 30,000 years. And their origin story is about living inside the Earth in the dark. All the people and all the animals lived there together. And God invites them up into the world. And at first the animals and people are all friends—they understand each other, they speak the same language.

But one day it's very cold and dark, and the people make fire so they can see each other and stay warm. And upon seeing the fire, the animals flee. They stop speaking the same language. They stop understanding each other.

So it's a similar pattern—fire instead of agriculture. The technology that separated us.

In my thinking, the fall is really about the birth of property. Before agriculture there's no concept of property. That's what kicked it off. Marriage was an exchange of property—a fourteen-year-old girl for cattle. It's all about property.

And then you have mine instead of ours. And you have all these things happening. Which are inevitable in a way, because the most core human motivation is more. A full belly. And then a fuller one.

One of my biggest objections when people talk about sustainability solutions is nobody mentions desire. You can't have deep consumption and have sustainability. There's always going to be that difference.

But there were places where it worked differently. In California, before the Europeans came, there was this whole system with the oaks.

The acorns, without any human intervention, would just fall on the ground. Normally there's a lot of leaves and the weevils and beetles eat the acorns. The squirrels get some. But a lot of it just rots away.

So what the people started to do was controlled burns under the trees. Small fires, regular enough that they stayed small. That would burn down all the brush. So when the acorns fell at the right season, they would just lay on the clean ground. And now there were tons of acorns for the rabbits, the bears, the deer, the people.

When there's more food for the animals, the animals multiply. More food for the people too.

And for the oak tree—to keep the population stable, you only need one acorn from one tree to grow into a replacement. An oak lives 400 years, so you just need one acorn in 400 years to become a new tree. So there's all this surplus that can feed everyone.

The oaks win. The animals win. The people win. Reciprocity.

One of my favorite places in the world is up in Marin County. And in Amador County near the volcanic area, there's the largest bedrock mortar site ever discovered—these grinding stones where generations of people processed acorns. Everybody would come from everywhere. You can just see it in your mind—the rhythm of grinding, all the people gathered. And nearby is the largest obsidian quarry, still beautiful today.

This is what California could be again. A model of restoration based on reciprocity instead of extraction.

But here's the thing about property and rent. And I don't just mean rent like paying your landlord. In economic terms, rent is the ability to extract revenue just by owning something. I have this, you need it, the profit from that exchange is rent.

It ties into that whole human thing of wanting more. It's so deeply embedded now. Initially it wasn't there in human society, but it emerged. And now it's everything.

It's like—this land is my land, now I'm incentivized to improve it. At the expense of all the land around it. And for thousands of years that seemed like a good idea until suddenly it was like, oh, we're using up a lot of the Earth now. We polluted all that good land to improve this land. And now that land is polluted too.

But here's how I prefer to think about it.

Everything we make is natural. Because we are nature. We came from nature. What we create is intense, maybe too intense, but it's still part of the story.

Everything we put out into the world—it's an offering to the Earth. Not a very good one maybe, but it's an offering. We as a life form have created something that's now part of the story.

I prefer to think of things that way because just by saying it, it makes you aware that you are always offering things to the Earth whether you know it or not. It integrates you instead of creating this schism where you can cop out and say, well, I'm operating in some separate system. Like a permission slip.

No. Plastic is an offering. Carbon is an offering. It's not separate. There's nothing truly artificial.

The cyanobacteria didn't mean to freeze the Earth. They were just doing what worked. They had no capacity to foresee or choose.

We do. That's the difference, if there is one.

The people with the oaks and the fire and the grinding stones—they were also just doing what worked. But what worked was reciprocity. And it worked for thousands of years.

Rocks are the Earth's story. We wouldn't know anything about two billion years ago without them.

Somewhere in the future, rocks will tell the story of us. What we offered. What we took. Whether we learned to survive in our own exhaust or froze the world trying.

The fall keeps happening. The question is whether we recognize it while there's still time to choose something else.

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