Excerpt: BOFAW, Chap. 29, Wayne.
 Every time I find an arrowhead on our property, I pause to pay
homage to the people who lived here 12,000 years before me. They
lived at peace with nature and left no scars or evidence of their
existence except for a few arrowheads and an occasional mortar
and/or pestle. Â
 The pageant of human evolution is a drama on a grand scale. Shakespeare called the world a stage and all of us players. Even though we are theoretically capable of comprehending the past, most of us struggle with internalizing what life must have been like for a typical Native American family living here in the Napa Valley 12,000 years ago.
These people were primarily hunter/gatherers who were intimately connected to the land on a daily basis. They had great knowledge of the native plants and animals and used them for every facet of their culture. Obviously, there were no cars, hardware stores, lumber yards, grocery stores, pharmacies or doctor’s offices. A food “crisis†for most US teens occurs when the “fridge†is empty and mom or dad needs to go grocery shopping.
We are richly blessed to have a home on nearly 2 acres that have many oak trees representing four species: Quercus lobata (valley oak), Quercus douglasii (blue oak), Quercus wislizenii (Interior live oak), and Quercus garryana (White or Oregon oak).
Acorns were an extremely important part of the Indian diet and the quality of the annual crop played an important role in tribal survival. To complicate matters, many oaks typically bear acorns on a biennial basis.
Each fall we watch the acorns drop on the ground and imagine families eagerly gathering them to add to their cache of vitally essential provisions. This year was a bumper crop and we can imagine children with tummies filled with the various acorn concoctions. Other years however, there are practically no acorns and we wonder if children went to bed hungry.
Exact population numbers of California Indians are uncertain, but scholars generally agree that at one time at least 700,000 people were distributed around the state in about 50 tribes. That meant that the population density maxed out at about 4 people per square mile. California’s current population of 38 million people is nearly 60 times greater or 242 people per square mile.
 I recently had the privilege of watching Wendell Berry interviewed on PBS. He is a master story teller who weaves pastoral tapestries of people interrelating with their natural world. Throughout the interview his eyes sparkled and danced, especially when he arrived at one of many poignant moments. There was, however, something deeply troubling about his message. He opined that the only hope for America is that of people returning to the land and leading more simplistic, economical lives.
 The recent trend of small farms adopting “organic†practices is encouraging, however, their production costs are typically higher resulting in more expensive food. About 100 years ago, 95% of Americans lived on farms or rural areas and 5% lived in urban areas. Those numbers have reversed which means that 95% of Americans are city/town-dwellers with little interest or ability to provide food.
 The tragic reality is that 350 million Americans can not return to agrarian living. There is not enough arable land and costs would be prohibitive. Circa 1995, UC Davis’ college of agriculture estimated that the startup cost for a small family-owned and operated California farm would be a minimum of $1,000,000.
 Environmentalists like Berry deplore many of the practices of the mega-agribusiness, however, they have been highly successful at keeping the cost of food down so millions of Americans can afford to eat.
 Anthropologist Loren Eiseley warned us in, The Immense Journey:
 “… but just as instinct may fail an animal under some shift of
environmental conditions, so man’s cultural beliefs may prove
inadequate to meet a new situation…
 In this case, the “cultural beliefs†that Eiseley was referring to involve “agriculture†and, the harsh reality is that less than 5% of the American people are capable of surviving like the First-Nation people.
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