There were always bits of things that just represented people's individual personal philosophies, like Leonardo da Vinci's vegetarianism. At a seemingly more substantive and systematic level, there were the practices of Native Americans, which kept in mind what we would now call ecological balance (honoring animals, not killing more than you needed, using every part of the animal, etc)
But the study of ecology got much more scientific and systematic over time. The book I happen to be reading now is Where the Wild Things Were by William Stolzenburg. The writing is a little torturous (and between the font and my glasses...), but Stolzenburg tracks ecologists certainly back to the 1960s and 1970s, and he even references observers and students of ecology from the 1800s. The discussions about ecologists from the mid XXth C, and toward the end of that century, make very clear that damage -- lots of damage -- is being done, because people who are not ecologists are unaware, and probably don't care, that they are throwing the balance of fauna and flora way off with activities that are directed at a single and usually narrow goal: grow certain types of food, make as much money as possible, or whatever else.
Several years ago, I read Michael Polan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, and one or two others of his books. He looks at the same problem, but from a different angle. Just before Stolzenburg's book, I read Philip Lymbery's Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were (yes, both titles are take-offs on Maurice Sendak's children's book Where the Wild Things Are), and his angle was much like Polan's. Polan is a writer, and he's now gone off the rails, writing about why ketamine or LSD or something is good treatment for depression. Stolzenburg is a journalist whose beat, about which he keeps himself extremely knowledgeable, is ecology. Lymbery is an actual ecologist. His first book, which I haven't yet read, is Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat. Lymbery and Polan, when the latter was sane, were telling the same story: agriculture is distorted in the interest of feeding animals, so people can eat the animals. And the result is backwards: this approach is less, not more, productive, setting aside the cruelty of it. Stolzenburg's angle, which is a recapitulation of the real scientific work of actual ecologists, is the critical importance of "superpredators" to keep ecological balance. The absence or loss of superpredators results in an overprofusion of their prey, which not only throws off balance, but it also drastically narrows ecological variety, leading to things like dramatically accelerated extinction of species.
If you look broadly at all the things these books communicate, you find extreme distortion of the land, what plants grow on it, what animals eat those plants or each other, loss of diversity and species through extinction that is essentially man-made, general ecological imbalance, and what we now call global warming and the other problems that result from it. (Helluva hurricane season this year, right?). Stolzenburg recapitulates the story of sea otters up around Alaska. There were always loads of them, until people started wiping them out to get their luxurious fur for fashion and warmth. But then, they were declared endangered, and they rebounded. Until suddenly, they started to disappear again. The question was why the sea otter population was suddenly crashing (late XXth C). It turned out that killer whales (orcas) were suddenly and unnaturally decimating them. But why had orcas suddenly decided to prey on sea otters, of which they would need many every day to support their metabolism? (Orcas are the most dominant superpredators on earth.) There were two prevailing theories. One was factory fishing, which was pulling way too many fish out of the (Pacific) ocean, causing orcas to have to find something less customary to eat. The other was that the whaling industry did the same thing, since orcas prey in schools, and can dispatch even a whale much larger than an orca, and get lots of nutrition out of it. So again, they had to find what was not their normal food.
And it's completely unnecessary. Lymbery points out that there are about four billion people on earth, and enough plant food right now to feed about seven billion people. We use most of the plant food to feed animals a diet which is abnormal for them (and we keep them in conditions that are convenient for us, but torturous for the animals -- which is why most antibiotics are used to try to suppress infection on feedlots, instead of treating infections in people), and which requires many more calories to feed the animals than the animal meat produces. There are lots of ways we waste food, and that's one of them. Polan and Lymbery come to one of the same conclusions: eat less meat, or eat meat less often. Ecologists and medical doctors know that a plant-based diet is healthier than a meat-based diet, and that many people eat too much of whatever they eat. My daughter, who is a fitness trainer with special concentration in the work of Paul Chek, talks about the "white devils:" sugar, salt, flour, and dairy. Maybe that's just Paul Chek's shtick, but parts of it are clearly unhealthy, especially when consumed other than sparingly.
In the meantime, while I was writing this post, I got one of my hundred or so e-mails today, asking me to sign a petition. This one was to complain to the Spanish government about bull-fighting. Yeah, I signed it. Have you ever been to a bull fight? I went to one in Mexico when I was a kid. That was enough for me. But I added a comment, as I commonly do when these petitions request it: "What's wrong with humans? They just like torment for the sake of torment. Bull fights, dog fights, cock fights, the availability of guns in civilian hands, leading to various levels of murder. [Of course, the same thing happens too often even when the guns are carried by supposedly trained law enforcers.]. We seem to be a failed species. We just don't know it, because we're powerful enough and crafty enough to go on being failures." But the question is the title of this post.
So, probably back to a mostly vegan diet for me. I go in and out of it. I don't like encouraging this kind of behavior, and (mis)management of the environment, not to mention torturing non-human animals.
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