Has anybody read any of Paul Shepard's books? I've just read "Coming Home to
the Pleistocene." (Island Press, 1998)

It's full of words of wisdom, and has a very extensive bibliography. The
prose is somewhat dense and excessively erudite, which makes for slow
reading, and I shall probably have to read it again, but it certainly
resonates with me regarding western civilization's break with the natural
world and how this causes so many of the ills we suffer from today. I do
recommend it to members of this list.

One thing it gives is what he calls "Aspects of a Pleistocene Paradigm". This
lists 71 attributes of this "paradigm." I'll just quote a few for amusement...

1.  Formal recognition of stages in the whole life cycle
3.  Earth-crawling freedom by 18 months.
5.  No reading before 12 years old.
6.  All-age access to butchering scenes.
7.  All-age access to birth, copulation, death scenes.
8.  Few toys.
15. Extended family or dense social structure.
21. No monoculture.
24. No land ownership.
26. No fossil fuel use.
28. No domestic animals or plants.
29. Prestige based on demonstrated integrity.
33. Limited exposure to strangers.
34. Hospitality to outsiders.
40. Participant politics vs. representational or authoritarian
44. Decentralized power.
47. Periodic mobility, no sedentism.
50. Dietary omnivory.
53. Participatory rather than audience focused music.
57. Extensive foot travel.
58. Only organic medicine.
65. No radical intervention on fetal genetic malformations.
67. Nonlinear time and space -- no history, progress or destiny. (I like this
one!)
71. Freedom - to come and go, to choose skills, to marry or not, etc.

Pretty interesting, uh?  It's a sort of model for an ideal society.

And Don - please don't tell me this is off topic because it's nothing to do
with food! (nos 21, 28 and 50 cover food!)


Charles
San Diego, CA