Sorry for the exorbitant length of this post, but I needed this break from
my studies and Marilyn and Kath have raised two of my favorite subjects
(global population and Daniel Quinn's Ishmael). :-)
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Marilyn Harris" <[log in to unmask]>
>
> > The only way to solve this problem is to reduce the population to
> lower
> > than a billion (and bring back the family farm) - the earth cannot
> > sustain us for much longer.
Marilyn hit the nail on the head. The only long term solution to all the
problems of not enough cheap energy supplies, too much pollution, and not
enough Paleo foods to feed the global population is a massive population
reduction, which even in the most optimistic scenarios will take far longer
to achieve than our lifetimes. There is currently only enough Paleo food on
the entire planet to feed a fraction of the world's population--most
estimates are under 2%--and even a population of a billion (which was
exceeded even before the recognized start of the industrial revolution)
would be less than 15% of today's global population. Even massive wars
(which no reasonable person would advocate) on the scale of WWII would take
a long time to get the population down to 15% of today's level.
The carrying capacity of the planet for hunter-gatherers by some estimates
is about 1 person per square mile or 10 square km. The Earth's total land
area is 57,268,900 square miles (148,326,000 kmē), which equals 29% of the
total surface of the Earth. However, not all of that land area is suitable
for hunter-gatherer living. So, if these figures are valid, the carrying
capacity of the planet for hunter gatherers might be less than 50 million.
To make matters worse, Paleo foods are rapidly disappearing (some scientists
predict that the wild fish stocks like salmon will be decimated within a few
decades and around 200 plant and animal species reportedly go extinct every
day). Even expansion of production of Paleo foods via wild plant
horticulture, family-organic farming, expansion of wild game herds (such as
buffalo and deer) and near-wild domestic animal populations (pasture-fed and
free-range animals and domestication of wild animals), etc. would not come
close to meeting the food needs of the planet without modern agrarian foods.
Anti-environmentalist modernists say they don't care when species of plants,
small fish and other wild animals go extinct, because they don't consider
these wild ancestral foods to be food at all and instead consider the
farmed, processed and manufactured foods of the last 10,000 years to be the
"real" foods. They think that as long as there is enough wheat, corn, soy,
rice, and milk to go around, humans will be fine. They don't realize that
shortage of food is not the problem--shortage of nutrient-rich, wild,
ancestral foods that we are biologically adapted/designed to eat is.
I answered one curious person's questions about Paleolithic nutrition and
she quickly recognized that there are not enough Paleo foods to feed the
world's population. That recognition so discouraged her that she ceased
asking questions about the subject (or perhaps she just used it as an excuse
to not have to give up her favorite modern foods, or maybe it was a bit of
both). I think that a wiser course is to eat healthfully and try to come up
with approaches that will enable the world to gradually move back toward a
Paleo diet and lifestyle--the last fully renewable, biodegradable and
environmentally harmonious human lifestyle.
> I recently reordered at the following book; just wondering if any of my
> fellow cavemates remember it?
> Kath in NM
>
>
> Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn (Paperback
I do have Ishmael, along with My Ishmael (which is not as good) and have
discussed it in this forum in the past I think. Quinn's Ishmael (1991) and
Cordain's The Paleo Diet (2001) are the two most important books of the last
100 years, in my view. Not because either of them discovered the information
in their books, but because they did a better job of connecting the dots,
synthesizing the information, recognizing the crucial issues, explaining it
all, and publicizing it than anyone else so far. There are many questions
that had puzzled me over the years that were finally answered by these
authors (and by Ray Audette and S. Boyd Eaton).
S. Boyd Eaton's 1985 New England Journal of Medicine article, "Paleolithic
nutrition: a consideration of its nature and current implications" and his
book The Paleolithic Prescription (1988) deserve honorable mention for
predating those books, but he hasn't had as much of an impact or developed a
scientific or social movement to the degree that the other two authors have.
Eaton also apparently had to water down his book somewhat to make it more
acceptable to his publisher, but unfortunately also less accurate and
groundbreaking (though I haven't had a chance to read my copy in full yet).
Cordain has taken the lead on the scientific front, and in getting the word
out, though Eaton has worked with and supported Cordain and the other
scientists in the evolutionary nutrition field. Quinn did an excellent job
of synthesizing, summarizing and popularizing the findings from the
anthropological field. So, overall, Cordain and Quinn's work seems to have
eclipsed Eaton's. It's a little like Wallace and Darwin. Alfred Russel
Wallace published the theory of natural selection before Darwin, but Wallace
was less on target, and didn't explain it, publicize it, or follow it up as
well, and he didn't have a promoter like Thomas Huxley, so Darwin's work
eclipsed Wallace's.
Ray Audette's NeanderThin (1995) also deserves an honourable mention. Ray's
book is more personal, somewhat less scientifically- or anthropologically-
oriented, and sold fewer copies, so it will not have the same long-term
impact as Cordain and Quinn's books. However, because Ray is not in the
scientific or academic community he had the freedom to make some
controversial and interesting speculations that I think were on target and
may eventually be recognized as prescient.
Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007) has more details and more
thoroughly explains how so many scientists have recently gone so far wrong,
and the economic forces that helped push them in the wrong direction, but it
misses the big picture--the theory of biological discordance in diet and
lifestyle that Boyd Eaton first published prominently in scientific circles
and that will eventually revolutionize the world. Because Taubes is part of
the establishment (Science Editor of the New York Times), his views are
currently getting more notice than those of Cordain, Eaton, et al, but the
work of Paleo/evolutionary nutritionists and anthropologists will eventually
return to the fore, because it is closer to the truth and utilizes a
revolutionary and fundamental scientific theoretical model.
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