Re: Re: uban Genetic Engineering(was Jesse Lemisch)

[Doug Henwood]

Michael Perelman wrote:

>I don't think that the issue is romanticizing agriculture.  When I came to
>Chico I began a food buying co-op -- the food conspiracy.  Eventually we
>started a number of community gardens around town.  I think you have found to
>be a pleasant activity.  Nobody had to pick strawberries eight hours a day.
>You would suggest ago and pick a small basket of strawberries.  It is no more
>backbreaking than getting something from the bottom shelf in a 
>kitchen cabinet.
>
>I would guess that while the work would not be that difficult for primitive
>people, their lives would entail periodic scarcities and forms of
>catastrophes.  I don't think anyone here is recommending that we go back and
>emulate primitive people.  Besides, most primitive societies -- China being an
>exception -- support a very low density of people.

First of all, you live in California, where the climate is temperate. 
Maine in January (will we still have January, or is the calendar a 
product of bourgeois alienation that has to be junked to be organic 
once again?) would be pretty tough.

And "a very low density of people" is evasive and coy. How do we go 
from 6 billion to...what? Some deep ecologists say no more than 100 
million, right? Where do the other 5.9 billion go?

Doug