<Demand Destruction: Myths and Reality The Oil Drum Peak Moment TV: Independence Station>
<DrumBeat: December 31, 2007 DrumBeat DrumBeat: January 2, 2008>

258 comments on DrumBeat: January 1, 2008

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

Show without comments | PDF version

ransu on January 1, 2008 - 2:03pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Paul Shepard is also worth reading. He wrote 'The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game' back in 70's followed by 'Nature and Madness.'
You are doing it backwards :)
Usually people read Shepard -> Quinn -> Diamond

Or you could just bypass all that and go direct to the source and the original research: John Gaudy's 'Limited Wants, Unlimited Means' is a good summary and intro into HG stuff.

oh no! now ThatsItImout will probably come stomp on us for being nasty primitivist anarchits for just mentioning Quinn :P

PS: Ishmael was boring .. but The Story of B was good!

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Nate Hagens on January 1, 2008 - 3:10pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Gowdys book is great - he is supposedly on my dissertation committee, though its hard to get everyone together on different coasts.

I never read (or heard of) Shepard, but the 3 Quinn books (particularly The Story of B), made me quit the hedge fund life and go back to study human ethology/energy/environment. My dog is named Quinn...

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
ransu on January 1, 2008 - 4:16pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

It's one of my pet peeve's to remind Quinn-heads that people did write stuff before him. For most Silent Spring is the earliest they know of. And only a few have read Shepard. Browsing through the university libraries there are many dusty volumes full historical perspective long forgotten, but worth their weight in gold in insight for the situation we find ourselves today...

Some of the volumes found and stored in my bookshelf include:

Jay Williams - Fall of the Sparrow
(Oxford University Press 1951)

Jacks & Whyte - The Rape of the The Earth - A World Survey of Soil Erosion
(Faber, London 1939)

These are nicely bound volumes from an age when there was still a human hand involved in making a book.

I got my friend to buy a birthday present for me. He found my favourite book, Midworld by Alan Dean Foster from 1978, via Abebooks and purchased it. It arrived, hand packaged in some British newspapers, with a hand written complement slip apologising for the slight tear in the dust cover. Beats the plastic-cardboard wrapping robots at Amazon in human contact every day!

AD: Abebooks is a a worldwide network of small second-hand bookshops with every imaginable book ever published available through them. It's a very reliable and professional service.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
airdale on January 1, 2008 - 6:19pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I have a fair number of older USDA Yearbooks. These were put out by the government printing office each year. The subjects varied ..for instance one was mostly on water, another on food & fiber and so on.

If I look thru there books my father had from the mhhh 50's , and 60's they were stressing a lot of good conservation practices.

Somewhere in possibly the 70's an idiot named Earl Butz was Sec of Ag and make this sweeping stupid statement to American farmers. "Get big or get out!"...I can remember clearly my father repeating this many times to me..

So my father took out some Ag loans from those fronting those in a semi-governmental entity. What happened? He then got two more farms and went into row cropping and cattle.

He got crushed. He died a pauper on his last 10 acres. The advice for him was insane and well as many others when a huge shakeout came around the early 80s.

Those who survived brought up that distressed land and are now millionaire farmers. Few there are here but its easy to spot them for they constantly brag on themselves.

And now I no longer see those yearbooks but I can guess what they are filled with since I did used to go to many farm shows and hear all the bullshit propaganda that was being spewed forth.

Now comes the payback!!!

airdale-Rodale is the main one I now read or of his ilk. The USDA is full of shit.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Todd on January 1, 2008 - 9:10pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Airdale,

Ah, Ag Yearbooks. I have the 1936, 1940 and 1943-47 ones. Good information. I was probably the only one who thought they were neat at a little bookstore.

But, I'll tell you, my favorite old farm book is the reprint (Lyons Press) of Traditional American Farming Techniques published around 1917. And, for those interested, it's 1,085 pages of the "good" stuff. It's ISBN 1-58574-412-3.

Todd

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Gypsyfarmer on January 1, 2008 - 9:54pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The 37 Yearbook is possibly the best of all, a basic text on soils. Also anything from the publisher Orange, Judd, mid 1800's to 1960, especially the series written by the Watts, father and son, on vegetables, one titled "Forcing Vegetables", has the greatest picture illustrating how badly we have gone off track in the past century. It's an electric freight trolley loading at a greenhouse range to go directly into the city...and a happy New Year.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
bruce from chicago on January 2, 2008 - 10:13am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Todd, thanx for that cite on the book. I'm going to see if anyone offers it online. Fat chance of finding it or ordering it from my small town (pop. 1,200)library - but you never know.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
ET on January 1, 2008 - 4:45pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I think Quinn is a great storyteller, but not a real good writer and even shakier on his anthropology. I think it is somewhere in 'Story of B' where he makes the assertion that the buffalo kills done by plains Indians were a necessary 'overkill' because the hunters needed the extra fat. Basically an apology for overkill and a denial that the Indians would engage in such a wasteful practice. Nonsense, IMO.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
ransu on January 1, 2008 - 5:24pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

p.170

"Excuse me," I said, "and again I hope this won't sound inquisitorial. It seems to me I've read about archaeological finds of vast kills of bison that apparently were mostly left to rot by human hunters. They killed them, picked out the parts they wanted, and abandoned the rest."

"Improbable as it seems on the basis of the facts you're just mentioned, these were not gratuitous or wasteful slaughters. Hunters in the Old West - I mean hunters of our own culture - could have explained it. They knew from experience that you could literally starve to death surrounded by bison, if they were lean animals such as you'd find late in the winter. In the absence of other food, the only way to survive in the midst of lean bison is to kill vast numbers of them and take what little fat there is. I'm not going to get into the biochemistry of it here, but if you like I can lend you a book about it."

I told her I'd take her word for it.

I woundn't - especially as Quinn's novels have no references to the sources he used. So I stand by my point - go to the source - all the way back to Marshall Sahlins...

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Nate Hagens on January 1, 2008 - 6:15pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I eventually tired of the rhetoric in Quinns books -there was almost a smug undertone like talking to a kindergartener.

However, in all respects that matter, 5 years ago I WAS a kindergartener, so his easy, repetitive, non-referenced prose about who we have become and for what reasons was what it took for my childhood to end. Its an amazing shock to recognize this is not the foreordained path for humans - its just one energizer-bunny decision tree that has kept going and going and..... (of course, eventually, there WOULD almost have to have been one decision tree that erupted like this: high population, resource depletion, etc. All the other human tribal/societal decisions leading up to that one circa 8000 years ago, would up circling back to the core 'tree' that thousands of generations of hominids before.)

So while I outgrew Daniel Quinn, reading his books was a personal watershed for me. (Note: I had started Ishmael 10 years ago and put it down, thinking it stupid...talking gorilla, etc.)

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Leanan on January 1, 2008 - 7:00pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Not that it justifies overkill, but rabbit starvation was a legitimate concern. And not just with Native Americans.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Oilrig medic on January 2, 2008 - 4:11am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Sure.....if you dont believe it go on the Adkins diet for a few weeks....you go crazy craving carbs and fat.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Leanan on January 2, 2008 - 7:30am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Atkins allows fat. Encourages it, even. It's the Stillman diet that allows only lean protein.

However, it's not a method I would recommend. "Rabbit starvation" is nasty.

Rabbit starvation is particularly well known in the Far North according to Bradford Angier. In his book, How To Stay Alive In The Woods, Bradford states, "An exclusive diet of any lean meat, of which rabbit is a practical example, will cause digestive upset and diarrhea. Eating more and more rabbit, as one is impelled to do because of the increasing uneasiness of hunger, will only worsen the condition. The diarrhea and the general discomfort will not be relieved unless fat is added to the diet. Death will follow, otherwise, within a few days. One would probably be better off on just water than on rabbit and water."

Note that this is not likely if you eat today's farm-produced meat. On average, wild game has something like 3% fat, while factory-farmed meat is more like 30%.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

258 comments on DrumBeat: January 1, 2008

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

Show without comments | PDF version