Lull

There's been one hell of a lull in much of the anti-civ blogging corner of the world that I inhabit. Ran's solid, and has regular material, and Marcy's also got lots of insights to share. Same for Sara. But Casey down by the river is gone, Free Range Ted is gone, none of the Anthropik folks have posted much in a long time. Jack Trace has been gone since before 2007, Devin's not had much to post recently, and Frank Black's had only a handful of posts since the new year. And Dan, too, has been transitioning and not posting much.

I'm no better. I guess it's just that sort of season, when those of us in wintertime want to hibernate and are generally less active. It could also just be that we're collectively moving through these ideas, and feeling our way toward other avenues of exploration.

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I read a book recently, Pig Perfect, which was pretty interesting. Food's been a important issue to me since before I began writing this thing, and I'm getting around to a lot of interesting material. This one's pretty good- the author writes mostly well, and always retains my attention. He covers a lot of topics, some with less élan than others. I felt he was a little clunky when he started talking anthropology, but he did pull out some good points. I guess Charles Mann makes similar points, but this guy, Peter Kaminsky discusses how much of what conquering Europeans saw as wild nature in the Americas was actually nature out of balance. Mann talks about the role the Amerindians played in shaping the physical environment here, but Kaminsky looks especially at the role of large mammals like buffalo. He cites a researcher who suggests that the vast forested canopy was not the 'climax community,' but the result of the decimation of ecosystem altering big game.

What I thought was kind of interesting was that, if this were true, maybe this culture isn't acting so terribly out of place. This is only a half-formed idea, but maybe the continued existence of more open grassland environments which were punctuated by thick forests in between, suggests that some guiding force is at work to make things not go terribly awry.

But then again, I don't even have my facts straight, and the grasslands might well be not the same regions as old forests, and in nay event, the buffalo are still gone, the indigenous humans are still gone, everything is poisoned and we're collectively miserable and violent. So whatever the guiding force is that may be helping us in some ways, it also is letting us work through the consequences of many of our other choices.

One other thing that I've noticed a lot in some food-oriented books that look at agriculture's emergence: the authors often talk about how domestication just came about naturally and was an extension of the relationship the farmer-to-be and domesticated animal-to-be already had. It's not always explicit, but it's often implied. It seems a convenient way to skirt the fact that 90% or more of human history (depending on who you define as human) was non-agricultural, and to thus recuperate agriculture as something that's part and parcel of being human.

I mean, fine, I eat domesticated animal foods, as well as domesticated plant foods, and some wild forms of each, so I'm not saying that it's necessarily bad for you or that there aren't ways to do it better. But let's be honest- most of our food traditions, if you take an honest and long look at it, didn't involved substantial dairy, unfertilized eggs, grains or beans, and had minimal to no processing, at least not of the sort we see today.

It's just so duplicitous when authors like Nina Planck criticize paleo diet advocates, and hoodwink the reader's sense of context by making 10,000 years seem like such a longe time. I mean, no doubt, it is, and it's probably hard for most of us to consider taht sort of era. But don't ignore the legitimate point that, next to 990,000 years, 10,000 actually doesn't look like so much.

Anyway, much love, y'all.