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.