Global Warming in Perspective
by Jason GodeskyPeter Canby’s “Heat Wave” in The Nation is an excellent bit of perspective on global warming. Having seen An Inconvenient Truth this weekend for its Pittsburgh debut, Canby’s piece is an excellent counter-weight to remind us of what global warming actually entails: not annihilation, but adaptation.
A sense of apocalypse hangs low over Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe and Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, two important new books on global warming. Flannery, the director of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide and an accomplished science writer, warns: “If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable.” Kolbert, a writer at The New Yorker (where I also work), quotes a despairing New York University professor of physics, Marty Hoffert: “We’re going to just burn everything up; we’re going to heat the atmosphere to the temperature it was in the Cretaceous, when there were crocodiles at the poles. And then everything will collapse.”
But in many ways, the most striking thing that emerges from reading these two books and indeed from contemplating the larger phenomenon of global warming is that the earth has often been warmer than it’s likely to become in the next century—and not just for brief periods of time but for long swatches of its history. The question therefore becomes less one of apocalyptic endings—the biological world will no doubt survive global warming in some perhaps significantly altered form—than a political one of trying to parse just what kinds of changes we’ll have to make to adjust to what promises to be a brave new world.
In the first two paragraphs, Canby has already hit on the two main aspects of global warming, in my view: first, that it is a severe and sudden change, but not one that it beyond the limits of life on earth, and second, that it is not life on the planet that is threatened by this nearly so much as our fragile civilization. Canby sees the threat of global warming for humans primarily in disease, but I think this may be among the least of our problems. More important will be the end of the Holocene, and with it, the end of agriculture. Agriculture is very much a creature of the Holocene; it requires a very specific kind of climate, rainfall, and so forth that is only prevalent in an era like this. Whether climate change will mean the end of our already-prolonged interglacial, or a new Jurassic, the prospects for agriculture are veritably non-existent.
Canby is even brave enough to admit to the dirty little secret:
Part of the fascination of the debate over global warming is the contrast between the direness of such predictions and the underlying incompleteness of knowledge. This is not a point that either Kolbert or Flannery emphasize (although neither do they hide it). Because of the urgency of the situation and the well-known intransigence of the White House, industry groups and their political affiliates (Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma famously referred to global warming as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”), both authors tend to make the case for global warming—to emphasize what’s known at the expense of what’s not. This is entirely understandable—virtually everything that’s known about global warming is alarming, and each new incremental bit of knowledge seems to make it more so—but it raises an interesting question that is perhaps close to the heart of why Kolbert and Flannery seem to fear that the global warming phenomenon may, ultimately, be an impossible one for us to cope with.
We’ve already waited too long: thresholds have been crossed, points have been tipped, and global warming has taken on a life of its own. Siberia’s permafrost is melting. Canby talks about this non-linear progress of global warming:
The relationship between carbon dioxide buildup and the accelerating rise in the earth’s temperature is well established. It can seem almost binary—and therefore both predictable and controllable. It’s the kind of thing Americans have traditionally been good at: figure out the point at which the temperature rise becomes a problem, invent new technology, cut the levels of carbon emissions accordingly and presto, no more problem! But what renders the equation far more volatile are what Kolbert and Flannery refer to as “feedback loops,” a generic term for the many ways in which the simple carbon dioxide buildup tends to feed on itself within the larger, almost impossibly complex, climate system. These feedback loops include the fact that the Arctic ice sheet is melting and that the open water thus exposed absorbs more heat than the ice-covered ocean. The more the Arctic Ocean is exposed, therefore, the faster the heat rises. The resulting rise in Arctic temperatures has already begun to melt the Arctic permafrost, which is then likely to release enormously more carbon—frozen in place since the last ice age. An increasingly warmed atmosphere holds more water vapor (another greenhouse gas), and thus the cycle is further accelerated. As part of the general warming, the ocean too will warm, which will result in alterations to prevailing currents that are expected to cause regional droughts. One such drought is predicted for the Amazon, where, in some climate models, rainfall will decline by more than 60 percent, the temperature will rise ten degrees centigrade and the world’s largest rain forest will be transformed into an arid savannah. This in turn will release the carbon suspended in the forest into the atmosphere, further accelerating what seems like a distressingly unstoppable cycle. In other words, even if the relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature is well established, the ways in which it plays out over the entire climate system are not. …
What specifically worries global-warming specialists is that because the overall process is so inadequately understood, the effects of the change already set in motion may become irreversible before we’re even aware of it. The earth could soon reach a tipping point at which we might inadvertently bust our ways out of our 10,000-year cocoon of climate stability and into something else altogether. A scientist with whom Kolbert speaks likens the process to that of rocking a large boulder on the side of a hill: “So you start rocking it…and finally it starts moving. And then you realize, Maybe this wasn’t the best idea. That’s what we’re doing as a society. This climate, if it starts rolling, we don’t really know where it will stop.”
It seems to me that it is already too late. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore opines at one point, “I’ve been trying to tell this story for a long time, and I feel as if I’ve failed to get the message across.” The film goes on about how it isn’t too late and how we can change things, but I think that’s the old truth. We warned some 35 years ago that we had about 30 years to do something about these problems. We didn’t. Now, more and more, the sound is that it’s too late. The feedback loops have begun; we’ve rocked the boulder free. When I heard that line, my immediate thought was, “You did fail—your whole generation. Now it’s time for all of you to step aside, and let us deal with the consequences of your failure.”
Canby quotes Kolbert, quoting Marty Hoffert, for a conclusion:
I’m not sure we can solve the problem. I hope we can. I think we have a shot. I mean, it may be that we’re not going to solve global warming, the earth is going to become an ecological disaster, and, you know, somebody will visit in a few hundred million years and find there were some intelligent beings who lived here for a while, but they just couldn’t handle the transition from being hunter-gatherers to high technology.
Is there anyone that can handle that transition—at least, to “high technology” as we know it? There is great potential for powerful technology rooted in a sustainable society, I think, but we will need to worry about creating a sustainable society before we worry about one with impressive technology—our first task must be sankofa, because we lost something along the way, our knowledge of how to live. Until we go back to retrieve that, no technology can help us.
But Canby also writes about the migration of whole biotas at the end of the last ice age, wherein the forests around Montreal migrated there all the way from Miami. So, life will persevere, and where life survives, there’s always food and shelter for a forager. He worries if the changes this time will be too drastic to allow for adaptation, but ecologies can adapt very quickly. In less than 24 hours after the 2003 blackout, central Pennsylvania saw a 90% reduction in SO2 and O3. Ice ages come on and recede in as little as ten years. Life on earth is incredibly adaptable; my faith in its ability to cope with us is unshaken. As George Carlin put it:
The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic…asshole.
Global warming will lead to radical adaptations, but not necessarily to extinction. Global warming means the end of the age of agriculture, and with that, the collapse of civilization, but it will only mean the end of our species with it if we choose to die with our fatally flawed creation.
I spend some of my time in various thought exercises (fancy term for thinking, I guess) to consider different collapse scenarios and think about possible positive outcomes and ways to get through it. This has resulted in some skills aquisition (food preservation methods, plant propagation techniques, permaculture training). Honestly, due to personal circumstances I have to just do a lot of reading without the chance to practice, but that’s another story. My point is that I follow the discussion on agriculture/horticulture/permaculture/forage closely - and to the degree possible, dabble in a little of all of them. The issue that throws EVERY single one of those through a loop though, is global warming (even if it results in an ice age - maybe let’s just say global climate change). I could have spent the last 20 yrs planting trees of all sorts, from oaks to apples, reforesting or reclaiming hurt land - but watch the rain pattern change and drought occur and ALL can be wiped out (heck, look at Sudden Oak Death in northern california… so much for my acorn harvest).
This article, I think, makes that point really well - and I think the permaculture people (and paleo-skills folks etc) need to be thinking about this. Note that the forest types of Canada once extended to Florida. As much as we think we’ll try to depend on forage, if the locally evolved forage doesn’t exist or is in serious and severe decline, it can take years before something else comes in to fill the new niche. There will be no safe haven.
I don’t advocate NOT planting trees (or whole multi-stories of food forests), and I don’t advocate NOT learning what the local edibles are, but I think this is a really scary wrench to throw into the mix.
Jason, you said, So, life will persevere, and where life survives, there’s always food and shelter for a forager. He worries if the changes this time will be too drastic to allow for adaptation, but ecologies can adapt very quickly. In less than 24 hours after the 2003 blackout, central Pennsylvania saw a 90% reduction in SO2 and O3. Ice ages come on and recede in as little as ten years. Life on earth is incredibly adaptable; my faith in its ability to cope with us is unshaken.
and I agree, on a macro level… but I still think it’s all a gamble, depending on where you live, what the weather does, if glaciers start making their way to your homestead, or the water rises and wipes out the nearby wetlands with all the cattails and crawdads you’d hoped to harvest, or the jet stream doesn’t bring the rains and all your multi-species orchard/garden trees die.
You seem pretty assured. I’m anxious.
I wish us all luck.
neighbor
Comment by neighbor — 21 June 2006 @ 12:15 PM
Au contraire. Unless you’re foraging one of the biotas that’s going to disappear (those being the extremes, like the tropics or the arctic—just ask the Inuit about that) foraging has a critical advantage over any type of cultivation for times of intense change: foragers can move. If the biota moves north, it doesn’t take too much effort for foragers to migrate with it. Foragers will have a much easier time adapting to those circumstances than, say, trees. This really plays to the advantages of a mobile omnivore, so I think our biggest problem comes if we root ourselves in one place and give up our mobility, or restrict our diet to just grown crops and give up our omnivorism.
If you take as an assumption that you’re going to remain rooted to where you are, then you should be anxious. My assurance rests firmly on the assumption that I’ll move with the other plants and animals I’ll be living with and depending upon. If we wind up along the sandy beaches of Hudson Bay, that’s OK, because we’ll have simply followed “home” as it treks towards the pole.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 June 2006 @ 12:30 PM
thanks for your input,
I don’t assume rootedness, but I don’t assume continuity of ecosystems transitioning into each other either. That’s one point of the article - fragmented ecosystems.
Maybe a streak of pessimism founded on utter speculation has me anxious :-)… That, plus the fact that I live in an area extraordinarily changed from its pre-conquest form.
We have heavy (mono)agriculture in a large valley (with a large population center), which is essentially a diversity desert now - whereas preconquest, it was rich in floral and faunal diversity. To the west of me there are serpentine-soil based ecological communities (relatively “poor” in terms of plant diversity, though major edibles include pine, oak and manzanita - with their very specific harvest times), and 60 miles beyond that, the very rich coast area (very privately owned, too); to the east (60 miles) are the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas (also traditionally “rich” in forage). I’d have to say, if things were to stay as they are now, those are good possibilities for places to locate a foraging range. My anxiety is probably somewhat unfounded (and general) - So I’m glad to hear why people feel assured that foraging will be more guaranteed… considering things won’t stay as they are now and we’re not sure which places will be affected in which ways.
I don’t have an escape map planned out. Here, sticking close to water really limits where you go (now that rivers/creeks are diverted and dammed, and wetlands drained etc.); the fact that there’s only rain half the year is of utmost importance… I can follow the nearest riparian zone up to those serpentine-scrub hills where there’s a reservoir (the dam of which will probably break when we have our next “big one”). Water will be the limiting factor here, especially when it’s scarce and landowners are guarding their onsite resources…
Perhaps, as I consider it, my anxiety is a sign of lack of preparedness. gotta work on that.
neighbor
Comment by neighbor — 21 June 2006 @ 2:57 PM
It’s not a transitioning so much as a migration, and it’s almost certain that many species will not be able to adapt quickly enough. It’s going to be a very different world. Plants can be difficult to learn and properly gather; that’s why foragers in new areas have historically relied more heavily on hunting and insects. These can sustain a forager even when there are very few known plants. This is how the ancestors of the Native Americans made the transition, too.
This is something I should’ve mentioned in the article. Canby talks about the large breaks of agricultural land, etc., but how would that hinder wildlife? That soil may be dead to cereal grains from overfarming, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not perfect to some other niche. I would think that in ecological terms, all of our farmland would basically be a wide, open, unexploited niche just begging to be colonized. Isn’t this precisely the problem farmers spend so much energy on, trying to fight back all the plant life that wants to take over that wide, empty space? We’ve already been kind enough to populate that space with a disaster species that helps the next state in succession.
No doubt. If you don’t have too much of a connection to any place yet, you might want to consider maximizing your chances by heading towards a more temperate climate.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 June 2006 @ 3:25 PM
I don’t know if I agree with you on this. Humans are adaptable, but not infinitely so. All we know is that we are very adaptable within certain climatic parameters. That’s all. Take those parameters away and maybe all bets are off. Humans did not evolve in the Jurassic, and there’s no reason to be hopeful that we could _necessarily_ cope with something similar.
Think of it this way: with other species we are quite comfortable with the idea that some, even many, will go extinct upon suitably drastic climate change. No one would say, confidently, ‘Hey, lions will do just great - they’ll just follow the prey!’ Once we are returned to our natural state as foragers, the same logic can be expected to apply to us. We might adapt. (So might lions). But we might not.
Another way to think of this is that many species of Homo have been extent on the Earth, but now all are gone. We are the only ones left. Many were similar in their ecology to that of archaic Homo Sapiens. They all died out (Yes, I know one objection to this - _we_ caused them to die out. But as far as I know this is not suggested for all cases, only for the Neandertals, and even there the argurment isn’t conceded. I suppose there could be some conjecture about Homo floresiensis (sp), but maybe it’s too early for that. Don’t know). Hell, Homo sapiens almost died out after the Toba Event. There is nothing particularly indestructible about the genus Homo.
Added to that is the uncertainty of what sort of climate change we are kicking off. If it proves to add the finishing touches to the Holocene extinction, our much vaunted ‘adaptability’ will matter little - there may not be very much suitable for forage left.
I only take issue with your confidence here. Life will go on, but it can certainly go on without us. And perhaps it will. On this aspect of the future, I think we can only declare ourselves agnostic.
Comment by Eric — 21 June 2006 @ 11:11 PM
Sure, the future’s never guaranteed. But humans have already proven themselves to be one of the most adaptable creatures on the planet, peers even to the mighty cockroach. I don’t hear much hand-wringing over whether or not the roaches will survive. Lions are carnivores; they only eat meat. Herbivores only eat plants. It’s the versatility of omnivorism that gives us our advantage here. We’re some of the most adaptable generalists in the animal kingdom. To starve out foragers takes nearly the extinction of all life on the planet, and there’s a lot more of us now than there was before the Toba Event. Maybe we won’t make it, but if we don’t, then I don’t hold much hope out for anything surviving, and that’s something I just don’t see happening. Radical climate changes don’t wipe species out at random; it wipes out the least adaptable. We’re among the most.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 June 2006 @ 9:47 AM
Jason, you said, “It’s going to be a very different world. Plants can be difficult to learn and properly gather; that’s why foragers in new areas have historically relied more heavily on hunting and insects. These can sustain a forager even when there are very few known plants. This is how the ancestors of the Native Americans made the transition, too.”
I had a lightbulb moment a couple of weeks ago - which, as indication of how dim I must be, didn’t exactly transfer over when I read “Heat Wave” or your article here. What you say above makes perfect sense. My original lightbulb was sparked by this quote here (from an organization called Prarie Wolf that teaches outdoor/traditional skills - http://www.prairiewolf.org/ )”
“We do not specialize in nor stress edible plants - they are not necessary for sustaining life - they are a great additive to the diet but you can have years of training on what can and cannot be eaten and still starve to death in a real long term survival situation. I can teach you a trap in 15 minutes that you can gather the materials for, build and set in another 15 minutes (or less) and the animal will take the plants that you can’t eat - and also take the elements from the plants that your body doesn’t require at the moment - and turn it all into what your body does need. It’s a lot easier to learn to to tell if an animal is safe to eat than it is to distinguish between certain close look-a-like plants where one is poisonous - and at what stages of growth - and at what times of the year - and on and on.”
I also was thinking about your question of “wasteland borders” (like agricultural remains) and how quickly they can revert to nature. My understanding of this would be in an immediate survival situation (how useful are miles of green wheat, fields of bell pepper seedlings, etc. if they’re what’s between you and your forage?). But in all likelihood, if you need to get through there and the chenopodium and chickweed haven’t cropped up yet, I guess there’ll still be jackrabbits and grounsquirrels. So, yeah, omnivorism…
Comment by neighbor — 22 June 2006 @ 2:20 PM
How many people do you think North America and the earth could reasonably support as hunter/gatherers? Just curious.
Comment by Lisa — 22 June 2006 @ 4:17 PM
Previous discussion.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 June 2006 @ 4:29 PM
146 million years at least for the cockroach, and 300 000 for archaic Homo sapiens. We don’t have the roach’s demonstrated track record here. I don’t see us as peers with the roach (well… maybe on certain misanthropic bases that have nothing to do with adaptability!) And as mentioned, there have been other ‘adaptable’ species of humans (they appear to have been just as adaptable as us: big brains, same ecological basis), but we are all that’s left now.
Also, saying that climate change doesn’t wipe out ‘at random’ but only takes ‘the least adaptable’ is kind of problematic, because in this situation ‘adaptability’ is only established after the event: a particular species survived a particular set of circumstances and is therefore ‘adaptable’. The terminology is circular. But we do not know in advance, and cannot know, if climate change will bring something (or an entire suite of ’somethings’) to which we in fact do not adapt - which wipes us out. (By the way, I am not suggesting that selection _is_ random; I am just pointing out the problem of our notion of ‘adaptability’, which cannot be established in advance. Humans are adaptable _with respect to the past_. About a future where constraints are not know, we can say nothing. It’s ‘faith’, a word you’ve already used in this connection).
As regards the virtue of our omnivory, it may not be as flexible as you think. If the researchers on paleolithic diets are correct, humans require large amounts of large game (or fish) to survive (unless they switch to rubbishy cereal-based diets to which they are not even properly adapted, but as you rightly point out, those crops will almost certainly perish, so we can cross those off our post-climate change list). So it is not only our own adaptability that matters, but that of our prime large animal food sources. When cereals are gone, these must become an obligatory part of the human diet again. But they may not be there. (As I understand it, humans cannot get by on a diet of vegetables, fruits and small lean animals (e.g. guinea pigs), unless they’ve got an agricultural carbohydrate subsidy (people can survive on guinea pigs, but only if they also have corn). There are limits even to our omnivory.
Of course, it is also true that people can eat crap that their bodies can barely process, and the race stumbles on for thousands of years nonetheless (the story of cereal agriculture).
Of course, you may well be right about human survival. It’s just that I don’t think it’s something we can actually demonstrate or even place any kind of probability on. With respect to this future, we just don’t know _at all_.
Comment by Eric — 22 June 2006 @ 9:28 PM
Another problem I think about - which isn’t really discussed much - is that when the climate starts to knock us all on the head (which it’s already doing), massive amounts of people will leave areas that are in drought or going under water. These will mostly be third world countries as first world countries will “artificially” sustain their populations for as long as possible.
Unfortunately the world has become so alienated from the processes of survival that we simply won’t be able to handle it. Instead of creating self-sufficient communities and working co-operatively, I foresee populations swelling in small areas (cities and such) in the hopes that life will be better there - that someone else will look after them.
As the climate changes, and peak oil becomes concrete reality, infrastructure will collapse. Humanity will go mad trying to survive - think famine, disease, crime and poverty. What will happen to all these people? Will humans become wild and simply eliminate one another until none are left, or will they flee the cities and try to survive in the wilderness (whatever’s left of it)?
Maybe a bit of both. I think it will be a long process. I suppose the best hope is that the process of collapse takes so long, due to humans doing everything to resist it, that we might actually adapt during collapse. A slow transition into a new sustainable society?
Comment by poet — 22 June 2006 @ 11:52 PM
Let us remember that we don’t need to starve in order to go extinct. Someone (can’t remember the name now) said that the most likely fate of Homo sapiens is slow death by poisoning. I don’t know if this person was right, but given all the crap that we’ve poured into the environment, it definitely seems like an option… I mean, it’s bad enough as it is right now, but what happens once we abandon all of our lovely nuclear plants and weapons and let Mother Nature deal with them as she sees fit? I don’t know. (Oh, and plastics, anyone?) All I can say is, in the game of evolutionary roulette, my money is on the cockroach. As for Homo sapiens… I’ll let those more prone to risk taking bet on that one.
Comment by Hasha — 23 June 2006 @ 5:42 AM
Hey –
I just had a thought…. are there any plastics with exactly 42 bonds?
ah hhha!
Janene
Comment by Janene — 23 June 2006 @ 8:06 AM
Eric,
In terms of longevity, you’re absolutely right that cockroaches have been around far longer—but humans today inhabit areas that even cockroaches can’t handle. Humans live in the deepest jungles, the hottest deserts, the coldest wastes, and the highest mountains. There is scarcely a place on earth so inhospitable that some human hasn’t made his home there. For the earth to change so much that humans cannot survive, it would need to become so hot that even the coldest areas are hottest than the hottest places now, or so cold that even the hottest places are colder than the coldest places now—either much, much hotter, or much, much colder, than the earth has ever been before. We already established that global warming is within the boundaries of the earth’s previous experience, though, which means that while there’s going to be a lot of change, somewhere on the earth there will still be areas that humans know how to live in. Our range may no longer be the whole planet, limiting us the same way other animals’ ranges are limited, but so long as that range does not close to zero, the species will survive. And that is why I see our adaptability as a peer to the cockroach’s.
The wonder of omnivory, even one that pulls largely from meat (as humans do) is that where the meat comes from is largely interchangeable. You suggest that this could be a problem if our prey species die out, as if our prey species were limited or few in number. For that scenario to come to pass would require the collapse of the entire animal kingdom. In that case, yes, Homo sapiens—as an aimal—would be in dire straits, as well. But the changes we’re facing are changes that the animal kingdom has survived before, and are in fact changes that animals are better suited for than plants.
Poet,
I mentioned things like “water wars” in my original post. That speaks very much to the stresses that will ultimately bring down our civilization, and that is a process that will entail a great deal of suffering and death, but like a plague, it is largely incapable of wiping out a whole species. No matter how bloody the conflict, there are always survivors. But I disagree with your assessment—I think a longer collapse means more suffering, but a rapid collapse is the best we can hope for at this point. I also think that there are, even now, areas sufficiently remote from human communities that they can provide a space for those who want to escape civilization to also escape the horrors of collapse.
Hasha,
As mentioned above, Homo sapiens has proven in its short time at least as adaptable as the cockroach. It’s true we’ve done a great deal to poison the world, but even now at “peak poison,” the world endures. Without civilization pushing forward, the earth cleanses itself quickly. (see Marufu, et al, 2004 (PDF)) Nuclear power plants may be areas with long-lasting problems, but they are few and far between—and even in Chernobyl, life thrives. The problem with plastics isn’t that they contaminate anything, but that they don’t break down and animals get stuck in them. I think the cockroach is a riskier bet than Homo sapiens, though—as mentioned above, there are areas today where humans live their whole lives, that cockroaches don’t know how to handle.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 23 June 2006 @ 9:36 AM
Oh, wait, no, it was my previous article where I mentioned water wars, sorry.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 23 June 2006 @ 9:40 AM
Hmm, well, I’ve only recently been introduced to the idea of “rabbit starvation”, which I believe is what Eric was referring to when speaking about humans having a prey species. Here are some links that explain the concept:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0006632
http://www.medbio.info/Horn/Time%201-2/vilhjalmur_stefansson1.htm
Now, if you can speak to this Jason, I’d be grateful. As I said, this is a new concept to me, and one that makes _some_ sense, but doesn’t fully jibe with other data. For instance, I *know* that Native Americans ate rabbit. I’ve looked at the amino acid content and compared it with the amino acid content of beef, and there don’t *appear* to be significant shortages of amino acids in rabbit meat, granted, I did just eyeball it as opposed to normalizing based on protein content. The prime difference seems to be fat, and consequently calories. Anyway, as I said, if you have any further insight into this, I’d appreciate it.
links for rabbit and beef respectively:
http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-B00001-01c21Cw.html
http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-B00001-01c20wW.html
Comment by jhereg — 23 June 2006 @ 11:15 AM
well, I don’t have any links or anything, but it is a well known “fact” amongst outdoorsmen, survivalists and such that eating nothing but rabbit will kill humans. anectdotal evidence, I know.
All i have are stories from various survival manuals that talk about wintering trappers, and pioneers dying from it all the time in 1800s and early 1900s.
Comment by Rory — 23 June 2006 @ 11:26 AM
That wouldn’t make much sense, since rabbit starvation comes from eating too much meat and not getting enough of anything else, while Eric is talking about insufficient quantities of meat because our prey species may not be able to adapt. I think he’s working from an assumption that we have very few prety species, which is simply incorrect. One of the keys of forager adaptability is insectivorism, which is a fairly secure source of food.
The take-home message of rabbit starvation is that fat is not a bad thing, and you should make some effort to get enough fat in your diet. That can come from animals, or from plants, particularly with nuts.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 23 June 2006 @ 11:27 AM
Too much protein or not enough fat?
I’ll assume not enough fat.
So, if, hypothetically, our “primary prey species” (all the assorted varieties of them) went extinct during the collapse, and we had to get our protein from small game (with low fat content) and insects (many with quite good fat content, but with seasonal availibility), we would have to find a reliable source of “plant” fat (also has seasonal availibility).
Does that seem accurate?
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to belabor the point, just want to make certain I understand.
Comment by jhereg — 23 June 2006 @ 11:49 AM
The ratio between them, so you could take it from either end.
I would say so. There’s a lot of different places to get protein and fat. Rabbit starvation occurs when people (a) don’t know any better, and/or (b) really like their rabbit (making it a relative of, say, overeating, with negative health effects associated with unhealthy food choices driven by psychological factors).
Comment by Jason Godesky — 23 June 2006 @ 12:33 PM
Well, but it’s not just rabbit, is it? It’s really going to be just about _any_ small game, no? Although, squirrel has additional problems as a lone protein source, but that’s a different discussion….
At any rate, thanks for the clarification, rationally, I could kinda see where the paleo diet “rules” were going, but, intuitively, it just didn’t seem right.
Course, part of that’s probably from being a vegetarian for the last 8 years….
Comment by jhereg — 23 June 2006 @ 12:46 PM
No, not necessarily. Beaver’s small game, but you’d be hard pressed to find a finer quarry if you’re looking for good quality animal fat. It’s any game that has too much lean and not enough fat.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 23 June 2006 @ 1:31 PM
Seems to me, as was already pointed out indirectly, that rabbit starvation is mostly the result of relying almost exclusively on one food source. We are after all omnivores. We do best when meeting our nutritional needs from a variety of sources. No single food source of which I am aware can meet ALL of our nutritional needs. I don’t think that large animals are necessary for human survival. Their chief benefit being that they pack a LOT of calories into a relatively dense package. But a deer is likely to have proportionally as little fat on its frame as a rabbit, so size of the game doesn’t appear to be the determining factor in that matter.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 23 June 2006 @ 2:33 PM
I think this will give rise to the institute of food-tasting slaves. Tribes with slaves compelled to taste new plants in order to decide which ones are edible will adapt faster.
Comment by _Gi — 28 June 2006 @ 3:03 PM
That never happened in the past. How would you possibly compel someone to do that? What, if they don’t you’ll kill them? Well, golly gee, damned if you do, damned if you don’t, huh? There are ways to safely test whether or not a plant is poisonous, y’know. That’s probably the most important thing to learn: not the facts themselves, but how to learn new facts.
Hierarchy is going to fall not because it’s evil, but because it’s horribly inefficient. The fact that it’s evil is simply the reason we shouldn’t lose much sleep over its imminent fall, not the reason for the fall itself. So any of these dark visions of feudal power and slavery first need to explain where they’re getting all the energy needed to justify such a hideously inefficient system as hierarchy.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 June 2006 @ 3:10 PM
Gi,
How do you compel the slaves? I think it is more likely that adulthood rituals might require the candidate to perform a service to the tribe before becoming a fully adult member. Finding a new food might be considered such a service.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 28 June 2006 @ 3:13 PM
You go to war, you take some prisoners, you make them taste strange plants, and you promise them freedom. If they survive, you let them go or adapt them into your tribe whichever seems expedient.
Meanwhile, your tribe’s risks of tasting new foods is minimized. It is not too difficult, and it can be easily ritualized.
Comment by _Gi — 28 June 2006 @ 3:29 PM
Ah, I see. Yes, that’s the usual tribal mode of “slavery,” though it rarely involves anything so dangerous as taste-testing new plants, but it’s usually a consequence of war, ritualized, and temporary, quite different from civilized ideas of slavery. I suppose that could happen, but I still think the safer methods of testing will be far more prevalent.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 June 2006 @ 3:34 PM