“Instead of pursuing a career as a plant eater, carnivore or generalist, [our ancestors] tried a strange, dual strategy: some would hunt, others would gather, and they’d share whatever they acquired.”

— Herman Pontzer, evolutionary anthropologist. Scientific American January 2023

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Every now and then, I’ll stumble upon a new list of [hu]mankind’s greatest inventions. Topping the list are usually such traditional favorites as fire, toolmaking, agriculture, the wheel, ships, the printing press, not to mention flush toilets and smartphones. I’ve long held that our greatest invention, one that necessarily had to precede all these and made them all possible, was something I think all those list-makers overlooked:

Baskets.

Until around three million years ago, our ancestors got their life-giving calories by foraging individually for food, the same as the living apes do today: eating fruits and leaves straight off the trees, garnished with the occasional ant or small rodent. Except the youngsters, who depend on their mothers for the first years of life—so they’re limited to just one or two offspring at a time, since more would beyond mom’s capacity to nurse. Unlike human children, young chimps, gorillas, orangutans and other primates are independent by the time they’re three or four years old. (I know humans still dependent on their folks into their twenties and thirties!)

What changed was sharing. At some point, individual meals became group meals, as our foremothers gathered and our forefathers hunted, bringing the food back to camp and divvying up the spoils. That switch, individual to communal, happened about 100,000 generations ago, say three million years, and it preceded everything else that made us human: toolmaking, fire, language, the whole set of skills that culminated in us. (Including the next big thing, agriculture, but that had to wait until about 10,000 years ago.)

So what made the switch possible, from solitary eating right where the food was, to communal noshing back at camp? The basket. Especially for foragers. Just how many roots or pieces of fruit can you carry in your hands? Not a lot. It takes some sort of container if you’re going to bring a worthwhile amount back to where the gang is hanging. Hence baskets. Easily made, of course—a folded up leaf, a hollow log, a few reeds or sticks woven together—but a basket increases your carrying capacity what, ten times? A hundred times?

(If you don’t believe me, try shopping at Winco without a basket or cart.)

According to Herman Pontzer (quoted above), the cooperative approach to food-gathering “placed a premium on intelligence, and over millennia brain size began to increase.” So the invention of the basket led to big brains which led to everything else that big brains figured out.

There was, however, a downside. (Isn’t there always?) Big brains have a cost in terms of calories—fully 20% of the food we eat goes to powering them, not to mention our big, hungry babies who need to be fed for a decade or more. We humans figured out how to be more efficient food gatherers than other apes, but then we blew it by creating a lifestyle that needs many more calories than they do. And that goes for even the least “civilized” of our species, the few human hunter-gatherers still alive today, the Hadza people of northern Tanzania. Turns out, our closest primate relatives spend half as much energy per day acquiring food as do the Hazda.

But then apes don’t have baskets.

Look what the cat dragged in! It’s Gregg Foster, executive director of the Redwood Region Economic Development Commission, here to drink our tea!

Seriously, though: The Outpost’s John Kennedy O’Connor was delighted to welcome this SoHum boy-made-good to Humboldt Tea Time, and to hear his tales from the trenches. Foster is ideally placed to take the broad view of the Humboldt County economy, not only from his childhood during the timber years and the beginnings of the first weed boom, not only from his previous work in the development of Humboldt County air service and redundant broadband, but from his day-to-day, finger-on-pulse work with local businesses as RREDC’s lead staffer.

How well is Humboldt recovering from COVID? Are we on the brink of big new things, and will our infrastructure be able to handle those things? He has thoughts.

Full disclosure: Foster is a (blessedly) former general manager of Lost Coast Communications, the parent company of the Lost Coast Outpost, which, we learn here to our astonishment, was actually his idea.

Today’s official tea-time snack is a Bananas Foster Tartlet — coincidentally, the very nickname Gregg’s UC Davis fraternity brothers assigned him during Pledge Week. Caramelize your Cavendishes, get your PG Tips a-steepin’, then press play to join us!

For offshore wind to be successful, there will need to be considerable investment in Humboldt County — big infrastructure, like new transmission lines and substations, but also investment in housing, healthcare, childcare and other “human infrastructure.” On this week’s show, we talk about how we can draw out community benefits from offshore wind development.

Erik Peckar of Vineyard Power joins the show to provide the experience and perspective of residents of Martha’s Vineyard, a community that has already negotiated community benefit agreements related to offshore wind. Eddie Ahn of Brightline Defense talks about his experience negotiating community benefit agreements for other non-wind projects. Katerina Oskarsson of the CORE Hub at the Humboldt Area Foundation discusses her organization’s work to develop community priorities for investments. 

What do you think needs to be developed for offshore wind to be successful?

PREVIOUSLY: Former Deputy County Council Calls Out ‘Hazing’ Culture, ‘Boyz Club’ in Humboldt Department of Public Works, Seeks $1.4 Million in Damages

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The County of Humboldt filed suit against former Deputy County Counsel Cathie Childs and her attorney Cyndy Day-Wilson in Humboldt County Superior Court this week for allegedly disclosing confidential and attorney-client privileged information to the public in a recent legal action against the county.

Specifically, the complaint, filed on behalf of the county by Sacramento-based law firm Libert Cassidy Whitmore, calls out a recent Lost Coast Outpost article written by this reporter which outlined the details of Childs’ claim for damages against the county.

“The Outpost article includes a link to a complete, unredacted, and downloadable copy of Childs’s Claim for Damages, including the details of legal advice that Childs provided at Humboldt County in the course of her employment as a Deputy County Counsel,” the complaint states. “Humboldt County did not provide an unredacted copy of Childs’s Claim for Damages to the Outpost, and it did not authorize Childs’s disclosures of privileged or confidential information.”

Childs’ unredacted Claim for Damages details eleven tumultuous months in which she was allegedly “hazed” and discriminated against by specific members of the Public Works Department who consistently undermined her legal authority. 

Childs complained to her immediate supervisor, County Counsel Scott Miles, on numerous occasions during her employment at the county, the claim states, but their relationship eventually became strained. She was told to file a formal complaint through the county’s Human Resources Department, which led Childs to seek her own legal counsel to advise her on whether that was an appropriate next step. She also contacted the California Bar to file an ethics complaint against her supervisors for allowing non-lawyers to practice law. She was fired the next day.

Shortly after she was fired, the county sent Childs a “Notice to Cease and Desist,” which ordered her to stop “disclosing confidential and/or attorney-client privileged information” as well as complaints, “whether they be criminal, administrative or disciplinary.”

Day-Wilson maintained that the county had misapplied the definition of attorney-client privilege, noting in the claim that it “protects only confidential communications made by a client seeking legal advice from their legal adviser. County staff are NOT [Childs’] clients. The Board of Supervisors is the client.”

The county, on the other hand, believes Childs and Day-Wilson “have, and are continuing to, act on a knowingly erroneous interpretation of the scope of the attorney-client privilege and duty of confidentiality … which presents an imminent threat in the form of further unauthorized disclosures of privileged or confidential information,” according to the complaint. 

The county also asserts that Childs violated attorney-client privilege by forwarding internal county emails to her personal email address, “or had included her personal email address as a blind copy ‘BCC’ recipient on internal emails between herself and Humboldt County staff.”

Childs intends to sue the county for wrongful termination and violation of her federal civil rights and freedom of speech. However, if it is proven that Childs violated attorney-client privilege, the county argues that a wrongful termination charge cannot move forward.

“The California Supreme Court in General Dynamics Corp. v. Superior Court (1994) … held that a former in-house counsel can maintain a wrongful termination charge only to the extent they can establish the claim without breaching the attorney-client privilege or unduly endangering the values lying at the heart of the professional relationship,” the complaint states. “[The] County … believes that Childs and Day-Wilson intentionally disclosed confidential and privileged information obtained during the course of Childs’s employment at [the] County to the Outpost, and perhaps others, notwithstanding Humboldt County’s repeated insistence that she refrain from disclosing privileged information.”

The county fears the continued release of attorney-client privileged information could cause “great irreparable injury” to Humboldt County. As such, the county is asking the court to prohibit further “unauthorized disclosures of attorney-client privileged information or information covered by Childs’s duty of confidentiality.” 

It is not totally clear what happens next or when this matter will be discussed in court. Reached for additional comment on the matter, county spokesperson Catarina Gallardo provided the following emailed statement: “This is an important matter to us; however, this is a legal matter, and the county must preserve the integrity of that process. As such, we will not be able to discuss this subject with the press further at this time.”

Childs maintains that the county discriminated against her because of her gender which, she says, resulted in her wrongful termination. She intends to move ahead with her lawsuit against the county.

“Because I am now taking legal action, the County is now attempting to create a distraction from their own wrongdoing with unfounded and untrue allegations,” she wrote in a text message to the Outpost on Friday afternoon.

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DOCUMENT: Complaint for Permanent and Preliminary Injunction

In the summer of 1941 our family left the hot Sacramento Valley and came to Humboldt County to make our home. On several occasions we had traveled to this part of the country, so we became familiar with it and learned to love the climate. My husband took a job at the old California Barrel Factory, which in spite of its name, was a lumber mill. His beginning wage was 50 cents an hour, which increased somewhat as he became more familiar with his job. This wage seems small to us today but things had not been near as “good” in a recent home. There he would sometimes make $1 a day, so if he should make as much as $5 a day, which he rarely did, we felt that that was very good!

In looking for a house to rent, we managed to find one on the Samoa Peninsula which asked a rent of $7 a month. It wasn’t too good a place but sufficient for our family at this time and was just two miles from the small town of Samoa.

About this time, after we had settled in our new home, school was about to begin so we enrolled the children in the only available grammar school around, which was in Arcata. This made it a long trip by bus each day for the children but there was no other way for them to attend school.

Samoa was a different environment than we had been accustomed to. It fascinated us to hear the boom of the ocean waves just over the sand hills. The waves sounded so close it was quite disturbing at first. It seemed like the noise filled the whole house! We soon learned that when this sound came from the North, it was the sign of fair weather; when we could hear it coming from the South, it was a sure sign that we were in for a storm.

We, as a family, loved to make frequent trips to the nearby beach where we spent our time wading in the cold waters of the surf. Somehow we never minded it a bit that it was so cold. We loved to look for unusual rocks and for shells left by creatures of the sea. We often tramped over the sand hills carrying the makings of a lunch that we planned to cook over a fire on the nearby beach. We cooked wieners over the fire and roasted potatoes in the hot coals. It all tasted extra delicious, much better than if it had been cooked at home.

The cool breeze was refreshing. We also relished the continual motion of the waves as they dashed wildly upon the seashore. Far away there was nothing but water and it set us to dreaming of other countries and of other places….

This place on the peninsula seemed so isolated. True, there was one small grocery store at Samoa but its stock of groceries was small and its prices were high. Our only other source was Arcata, which was a much further distance.

As a family, we soon began to attend church at Eureka. This meant a long trip by car, around the bay. Our car was an old one and was likely to break down most any time.

We had heard about another way to go to Eureka besides by car: A ferry boat called the Madaket. The boat plied the waters of the bay from the dock at Hammond’s Lumber Company in Samoa, to the foot of F Street in Eureka. If we weren’t afraid to travel by boat, this seemed like an ideal alternative to the car. At first I couldn’t help being a bit afraid for I had never in all of my life been on the water. When our friends pointed out its advantages, I decided it was probably safe after all. After that, we began to travel by water quite often and soon I began to enjoy the process. We made trips to Eureka to attend church and to shop, as well as visit our newly acquired friends.

Aboard the Madaket there were seats on the upper deck where one might ride if he or she so wished. We loved to sit out there so that we could watch the scenery. Often we would see porpoises and sea lions playing in the waters not far off. At night it was very special, as we could see the lights of the town. On a clear night, when there was no fog about, one could see the millions of stars in all their glory. Perhaps the moon would come riding across the sky. All of these things made riding on the top deck worthwhile.

There was always the hold down below and there, especially in foul weather, the passengers would congregate to await the end of our ride to the opposite side of the bay.

There were many kinds of people who made a practice of riding the ferry boat. Among them were housewives who, of course, loved to go on shopping trips and hunt for bargains in the stores of Eureka. Mill workers, who worked at the Hammond Lumber Mill, sometimes rode on the Madaket, though rarely, for there was a special boat just for their convenience. We sometimes saw an old, dirty boat drawn up to the dock at the lumber mill, unloading the workers who came from Eureka.

As we left the boat at F Street in Eureka, there was a little newsstand— the first thing that met our eyes. This stand was run by a Mrs. Green, a woman who sold newspapers, paperback books and all kinds of candy.

The next thing to come into view was Coggeshall Towing Company. It was much like a railroad waiting room, for it was here that we purchased our tickets for the return trip to Samoa and it was here that we often had to wait for the boat.

These were wonderful times and they hold a place in my memory and, I’m sure, in the memories of each of my children. I’ve often wished that those days might return but the advent of a bridge across the bay on May 22, 1971, marked the end of an era…

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The story above was originally printed in the Spring 1994 issue of The Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society, and is reprinted here with permission. The Humboldt County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to archiving, preserving and sharing Humboldt County’s rich history. You can become a member and receive a year’s worth of new issues of The Humboldt Historian at this link.

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From the City of Eureka:

The City of Eureka wants your continued input about the future of Eureka’s central waterfront!

Please visit www.waterfronteureka.com to check out and comment on the Public Review Draft of the Waterfront Eureka Plan (WEP), and catch up on where the project is at in the process.

The purpose of the WEP is to guide development and redevelopment of Eureka’s central waterfront by facilitating new mixed-use developments and increasing housing stock.

The WEP will serve as a template for land use, circulation, and infrastructure to be used by City leaders, residents, businesses, and developers. The WEP outlines community-led visions for the future of the Plan Area, and contains focused policies, programs, and regulations, which will govern and shape development in the Plan Area to achieve these visions.

Questions? Contact Development Services – Planning 707-441-4160. 
Planning@eurekaca.gov.

It’s Memorial Day weekend! Kinetics weekend! All that good stuff! Catch up with the news before you cut loose for three whole days.

Plus: If you’re gonna buy your Memorial Day BBQ, where are you buying it from? Please take the poll below.