Back to nature: Massive die-off edition.

I guess this is food week on the old blog, although maybe not always an appetizing one. 

Off and on over the last few years, I've seen articles suggesting that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is a lot healthier than the modern agriculture-based lifestyle, and better for the environment as well. Articles on CNN, Psychology Today, the Portland Press-Herald, and many others tout those taut and hearty bands of fishin', huntin', foragin' man- and womanhood, compared to our fat, sedentary Olive Garden-suckin' selves. Even snooty science journals give the thumbs-up to the H-G lifestyle, although admitting that the high childhood mortality, illness, and deaths by accident are a bummer. 

Hunting-gathering does seem to have its advantages. No mortgage, no taxes, nothing to weigh you down. Just go and live off the land. Away from civilization. King of the non-road! You might say,

No phone, no lights, no motor car,

Not a single luxury,

Like Robinson Crusoe,

It's primitive as can be.

I don't think it's for me. I'd hate to leave all my books behind, but that's part of bidding farewell to civilization. As George Carlin put it so memorably, "That's all your house is--a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it."

There's just one other little problem with us all going ultra-Paleo. 

Hunter-gatherers need a lot of room. Since they don't herd and they don't plant, they can only get what they need from nature. Thus, as at least one study estimated that the world could only support about 10 million hunter-gatherer humans. Nature, in her goodness, would probably see to it that our numbers stayed in that range -- we'd eat ourselves into famine, or just beat one another's brains in when things got scarce. 

So if we're going to adopt that healthy hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we'd better get started dying off, and in a hurry. There's more than 7 billion of us now, so we have to drop about that many humans; 10 million is a rounding error with numbers like that. 

Personally, I've always felt that those who hate civilization ought to go right ahead and leave it; that should cut down on a few right out of the gates. For the rest of us, I guess we'll just have to sit here all fat & lazy, surrounded by our stuff. Dang it.