Hello Hakan >Keith, > >Thank you for a very good piece on the food question. As usual, you >hit a lot of nails. I do want to add a couple of things and questions, > >- During the last 200 years, the average life span for the human > have gone from 35 years to around 80 years in the industrialized > countries and are still very much lower in other places.
I don't have any faith in that figure, and it causes a lot of confusion. The work of Weston Price and many other investigators show it is a very one-sided statistic at best. Note the "200 years" - what happened 200 years ago? The so-called Industrial Revolution (so-called because it wasn't really, mass-production long preceded it, it was an energy revolution, via steam). That's when population statistics started being recorded in earnest, and what was being measured were largely rural populations dislocated to extremely unhealthy mass-living conditions in ready-made urban slums, for use as factory fodder. And indeed they didn't live long. One thing that was totally disrupted was their diet. A lot of other things started happening round then and not long afterwards - steel-milling that denatured flour and the bread, canning and preserving, rising use of sugar and refined carbohydrates, the spread of "trade" foods. Looking at these same rural populations prior to their dislocation gives a quite different picture. In some instances it was not a pretty picture, mainly because of feudalism and induced poverty, but where traditional peoples were allowed to live on and off the land, people mostly lived a long time and had few ailments, and little or none of the degenerative diseases that have everywhere followed industrialization. So many times I've seen newspaper and journal articles saying something like an ancient crypt had been discovered somewhere, and researchers expected to find what you say: early deaths, poor diet, arthritic joints, bad teeth. If you take the trouble to follow them up, they find quite the opposite, to their surprise - long lives, no arthritis, full sets of healthy teeth. But the myth that we're healthier now and live longer now has such a firm grip that they're all just written off as "exceptions". I've had a doctor tell me angrily: "Of course we're healthier now, we have six times as many hospital beds!" LOL! I burst out laughing, and he got furious. But see Weston Price - please!! http://journeytoforever.org/text_price.html What you have now in the industrialized nations is quite long life-expectancy, but not much health, and it's very expensive! Treating the symptom only, not the causes. In the countries where life-expectancy is low, it's mostly due to imposed poverty, that was not there previously. This happened usually during the colonial era, then it generally improved somewhat in the post-colonial era, and has been going backwards again since the rise of corporate globalization 20+ years ago. Poverty and environmental degradation are closely inter-related, and neither necessarily has anything to do with overpopulation (mostly another myth). >Major contributors > to this, was potatoes and antibiotics. Potatoes because it is one > of the few food supplies that contains all what the body need and > antibiotics because of its solution to the common infection problems. > Potatoes are today covering up for much of the "food habits" in the > industrial societies and give a fair survival rate for others. But the > serious question is, if more than 35 years average life span is natural? > If it is not, it might be a reason for much of the current problems. > Personally, I find this to be a good development and if we work > hard on solving the side effects in a good way, it would be responsible. See above. >- Yes, it is enough food in the world, for everybody to eat. The > problem is the system of distribution. If we take away the > industrial food production and all the serious problems > around it, we might have a general food shortage. How do we find > a balance? Humanity is not known for its capacity to be balanced. Don't look at it from the top down, Hakan. Sustainable food production systems that actually feed people instead of just producing commodities for trade are making great headway in the Third World and elsewhere. It's not either-or, it's a steady, accelerating replacement. Probably most people in many Third World cities would not be fed anyway were it not for strictly local city-farming initiatives, the industrial stuff doesn't help much. Only a fraction of the potential of city-farming has yet been explored. In fact many local governments still put obstacles in its path. >- Potatoes was accompanied by syphilis and we could maybe make > a parallel with antibiotics and HIV. It is not a serious scientific >suggestion > from my side, only a side note. Nature might have its own ways of > trying to fight humanity and its un-natural growth, I don't agree that human growth is unnatural, or that humans are some sort of ecological cancer - we've simply lost control of some of our institutions, which are indeed unatural, and not at all human. >but even here nature > is loosing. But, on the other hand, it might be nature of things. > >- We are in a very good situation scientifically, to solve a lot of problems. > How do we make humanity to embrace them in a responsible way and > avoid the power and greed games? But who employs the scientists? More and more so? There's great concern among scientists that science has been hi-jacked by powerful business interests. At least one major journal has stopped requiring declarations of interest from scientific writers because they can't find any scientists without such interests. And studies have shown that the interests create consistent bias in the research findings, not surprisingly. Who pays the piper? Power and greed games are not natural to society. Sure it's always happened, but I doubt a society has ever lionized greed and narrow self-interest the way ours has done in the last 20 years + of trickle-down, supply-side, Friedmanesque, Reagan-Thatcher type "market" economics. One thing that Adam Smith really did say was that it was impossible for two businessmen to sit down together without plotting against the public good. >- Education and information seems to be a part of the solution and > Internet might be a blessing for humanity. But, why is societies with > the highest education levels, the most wasteful and irresponsible? They > do not only pollute and change the climate, they also know that they are > doing it. Ignorance would at least be an understandable excuse. Spoilt brats? :-) Doesn't the wealthy class always behave like that? And are these so-called educated people really educated? A lot of people don't think so, they think they've been uneducated, miseducated, anti-educated, or simply programmed. There's surely something to that. They've certainly been deskilled and rendered more dependent, less capable as individuals. >Hakan I've just posted this below somewhere else, but I'll post it here again. Best Keith Prehistoric peoples could kill mammoths; how about corporations? by Roberto Verzola Most legal systems today recognize the registered business firm as a distinct legal person, separate from its stockholders, board of directors or employees. In fact, laws would often refer to "natural or legal persons". It should therefore be safe to conclude that such registered business firms or corporations are persons (ie, organisms), but NOT "natural persons", and therefore not humans. Other social institutions have been created by humans (State, Church, etc.), but they have never quite reached the state of life and reproductive capacity that corporations attained. It would be very useful to analyze corporations *as if* they were a different species, and then to extract ecological insights from the analysis. (By corporations here, I am basically referring to registered business firms, or for-profit corporations). Corporations are born; they grow; they might also die. They can reproduce and multiply, using different methods, both asexual and sexual. We have bacteria within our bodies as if they were part of us; corporations have humans within them. Their genetic programming - profit maximization - is much simpler than human genetic programming, humans being a bundle of mixed and often conflicting emotions and motives. Corporations' computational capabilities for such maximization easily exceed most natural persons' capabilities. Therefore they easily survive better in the economic competition. It is profit that keeps corporations alive. They are genetically programmed to maximize the flow of profits into their gut. To extract profit from their environment, corporations transform everything into commodities and then make profits by selling them or renting them out. Corporations can transform practically anything into a commodity, including corporations and profits themselves. Today, corporations are the dominant species on the planet. They have taken over most social institutions and other niches that humans have originally created for themselves. The physical reach of the biggest corporations span the entire globe. The term "globalization" can mean, without exaggeration, the global rule of corporations. The non-stop transformation of the natural world - the ecological base of human survival - into commodities for profit-making has, in fact, become a threat to the survival not only of human beings but of many other species. In the same way that we learned to domesticate plants and animals, corporations have learned to domesticate humans. Much of today's educational process is a process of corporate domestication, reinforced subsequently by corporate-controlled media. Corporations have perfected the art of training humans, using carrot-and-stick methods, to keep them tame and obedient. Of course, some humans have remained wild and undomesticated. But today, they are outside the mainstream. Corporations have trained domesticated humans to immobilize, maim, kill or otherwise "neutralize" those fellow-humans who have remained feral and uncontrolled by corporations. But there's a growing body of feral humans who are now trying to learn how to disable, maim or kill corporations. Prehistoric humans knew how to kill the largest beasts of their time; modern humans have not yet learned how to kill corporations. Individual humans have practically no hope of fighting off a determined corporate attack. Most confrontations between corporations and communities of humans end up in corporate victory, with humans ending up dead, maimed or subdued and domesticated, their human will broken. On those occasions when humans manage a victory, it almost never results in the death of the attacking corporation. When corporations lose a battle with feral humans, they can simply withdraw for a while, split into several persons, combine with another person, change their persona, or adopt other survival tricks which they have evolved over time. In fact, when entering new and presumably wild territory, a corporation would often clone itself and send its clone in. Even in the remote possibility that the clone dies from human attacks, the mother firm stays unharmed and as powerful as ever. In prehistoric ages, our ancestors learned how to repel, disable or kill an attacking mammoth; the challenge of our age is learning how to do the same with corporations. ------------------------ Yahoo! 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