Ken writes: >Keith writes: > > >A very industrialised post-modern view, Ken - ie, naively > >pessimistic. :-) Your "REAL" hasn't applied to most humans > >who've lived, and still doesn't to most now alive, who're > >neither industrialised nor post-modern, for the most part. > >Maybe they'll succeed in skipping this little blip in history > >altogether, eh? Along with its pessimisms. > >If by people who're "neither industrialised nor post-modern" >you're thinking of the Yanomamo, you MAY be right, but I >think it's just the absence of a written history that allows us >to romanticize them and attribute great ethical standards to >them. The Native Americans, commonly praised for their >ecological sensitivity, could also be very brutal, and were >probably spared from decimating their environment only >by their low and sparse populations.
No, I didn't particularly mean any of those. I'm not attributing great ethical standards to anyone really, I wasn't saying the opposite of what you said, just disagreeing with what you said, different thing. By the way, it's pretty well established now that an oral history can be much more accurate and reliable than a written one. And it seems those populations weren't low and sparse, according to this, and other stuff I've encountered, though I don't know very much about it: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/03/mann.htm 1491 >And if you mean anyone more modern, like say, in developing >African nations, or in central or southern Asia, well..... >enough said. No, not at all enough said. Who of those people do you have a view of? Their urban elites? Or via their urban elites? Just a twisted mirror, obscuring the reality you want us to get real about. But no, not only them. No use trying to narrow it down, you have to broaden it out. Take away the cities and what's left? Most people. And indeed, many people in the cities too. >Mind you, I'm not saying people are all wretched, just that >they've never had a reputation for choosing the reasonable, >prudent, or RIGHT course, and I wouldn't expect them to >start now. Clearly you don't. I disagree, only I wouldn't see it as "starting". But then you belong to an industrialised society, and I don't. History is perhaps largely a series of interruptions, maybe not very relevant. Traditional societies continued nonetheless as they may, as they still do, and will do. Have you eaten a cabbage recently? Or broccoli, cauliflower, brussels spouts, kohlrabi? All developed from the same wild original, not very appetising. Eaten bread? Potatoes? Beans? An apple? Beef? The fact that you weren't left with a poor choice of their original ancestors, if you could even find them, is due to patient work by entire societies through scores or hundreds of generations. Keeping the best seed each year is an incredibly far-sighted thing to do. What kind of food would you be eating today if humans habitually chose the unreasonable, imprudent, wrong course? If pessimism were wise? Would you even be here at all? The fact that we inherited a viable environment for Industrial Man to ruin, or try to, is due to the same thing, no accident, not by default. Sure, there were failures - see Lowdermilk, for instance: http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Lowd/Lowd1.html Famous book - but Lowdermilk was primed to see failure, he went looking for it. F.H. King wasn't so primed: http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010122king/ffc.html And neither am I. Progress, eh? Very relative thing. MM said this here the other day: "I'm thankful to live in a civilization making its growing pain efforts to become modern, and that to some extent food in general is dramatically easier for me to work for and acquire than for some of my ancestors." In fact, as with all of us, he spends more time earning money to pay for his food than a hunter-gatherer spends hunting and gathering it, and guess who has the healthier diet? The healthier life? If you think pre-industrial traditional people died at an early age riddled with disease, well, sorry, that's wrong too: http://journeytoforever.org/text_price.html The Darwin of nutrition - Weston A. Price I think what you say might apply to industrialised society, parts of it, maybe, not the rule at all. And what exactly does that amount to? Extraction, brief utilisation, and waste, plus widespread damage and destruction. As against which you'll set what? Do without it? Sure, any time - me and most people. And you? But, to get back to the original post, there's no need - it's perfectly possible to have it both ways, the two things can easily co-exist, quite sustainably, and indeed thrive together. As indeed they will have to. And will do. But it's the cities that will have to do the changing. Isn't that why we're all making biodiesel? Regards Keith Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send "unsubscribe" messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
