What do Witchetty Grubs and Traffic Lights have in Common?

I’ve just been watching Ray Mears' wonderful new programme Wild Food. While I was watching it, I was reminded of a train of thought I was working through yesterday whilst driving.

I was travelling along an urban street having spent much of the day with lovely open rural scenery, and I was mulling over how different the available information was in the two environments.

For instance, in the countryside you have to be aware of the winding roads, the condition of the road surface and any standing water, animals on the road etc, all this while enjoying the scenery and judging how fast you can go without coming off the road or bumping into other vehicles.

In the town, there are roadsigns requiring instant understanding of languages, more road markings giving other signals, dazzling signs and traffic lights with yet more messages, and many other distractions all whilst trying of course not to bump into anything. Both situations demand using the flashing, flexible and analytical brain processes that modern humans possess, and I had concluded that compared to walking in open fields this was very confusing, and how calm a life our ancestors had before moving at speed became the norm.

Then in Wild Food, he visited a group of Australian aboriginal people who showed him and his companion how to spot the signs given all around them to find food. For instance, the leaves at the top of a vine give and indication of the tubers below ground; the cracks in the soil lead you to another root crop; if you know what a witchetty tree looks like you can find the grubs hiding inside the wood underneath.

Their eyes never stopped moving and flitting from one clue to another; they spotted a lizard swimming in the river and immediately swung into action preparing a fire and searching for vegetables to accompany their meat. Meanwhile they had probably identified the plant that provides the fibre that makes the bag that stores their harvest.

The skills that humans have developed over millions of years and used to find everything we need to survive, has been reduced to an abstract greed for speed and gathering of goods we don’t need.

When that big solar flare comes and blows our electronic systems to nothing but electrons; or when access to cheap energy ceases, who is going to remember how to survive while we are fighting to find our feet?

Answers of a piece bark please…