Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau had a mind that was intelligent, complex, and rigidly righteous.  He was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817, into a family of uppity Unitarian abolitionists.  After attending Harvard, he worked as a schoolteacher for a few years.  Later, he lived with Ralph Waldo Emerson, serving as a tutor, handyman, and editorial assistant.  Emerson took him under his wing, and encouraged his literary efforts.  Emerson owned land on Walden Pond, and he allowed the young man to build a cabin there.  Living by the pond led to experiences that inspired Thoreau’s classic, Walden. 

Thoreau built the cabin at age 27, and moved out at 30.  His thinking was not yet set in concrete, and it wandered to many regions in the world of ideas, tirelessly searching for eternal truth.  He read the ancient classics in Greek and Latin, and discovered that enlightened philosophers preferred paths of voluntary simplicity.  He adored Native Americans, because they thrived in wildness and enjoyed a simple life.  He worshipped nature, and loved spending time outdoors.

Unfortunately, he was born during a diabolical hurricane of what is now called Sustainable Growth™.  Concord was becoming discord, as the ancient forest was replaced with gristmills, sawmills, cotton mills, a lead pipe factory, and a steam powered metalworking shop.  It was rare to stroll by Walden Pond in daytime and not hear whacking axes.  Railroads were the latest fad for rich folks.  Countless trees were hacked to death to provide millions of railroad ties.  By 1850, just ten percent of the land around Concord was forest, and wild game was getting scarce.

Obviously, the residents of Concord were not philosophers aglow with timeless wisdom.  They were also not wild folks who had lived in the same place for thousands of years without destroying it.  These new people acted crazy!  They were possessed, out of their minds, infected with the highly contagious status fever.  They burned up their precious time on Earth in a furious struggle to appear as prosperous as possible — fancy houses, cool furniture, trendy clothes.  If a monkey in Paris put on a traveler’s cap, then every monkey in America must do likewise.

Thoreau was not impressed.  “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”  In 1845, he moved into his tiny new cabin.  He hired a farmer to plow two and a half acres (1 ha), and then planted a bean field.  Using a hoe to control the weeds proved to be far more challenging than his fantasy of humble simplicity.  The net income for a summer of sweat and blisters was $8.12, far less than envisioned.  He learned an important lesson, and this experiment was not repeated.

A low-budget life of simplicity required a low-budget diet.  Thoreau’s meals majored in water and unleavened bread made from rye and corn meal.  Over time, he lost interest in hunting and fishing.  “I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination.”

The second summer included a pilgrimage to Maine.  He had a gnawing hunger for genuine wilderness that Concord could not satisfy.  He also wanted to meet real live Indians, and be invigorated by their purity.  Alas, Mount Katahdin was a rugged wilderness without trails, and the philosopher from Harvard was shocked by how difficult it was. 

Big Mama Nature gave him a swift dope slap.  In The Maine Woods he recorded her harsh words.  “I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors.  Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother?”  This nasty wilderness “was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites — to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.”

His experience with the Indians also disappointed him.  After 200 years of colonization, their traditional culture had long been bludgeoned by smallpox, whiskey, missionaries, and civilization.  “Met face to face, these Indians in their native woods looked like the sinister and slouching fellows whom you meet picking up strings and paper in the streets of a city.  There is, in fact, a remarkable and unexpected resemblance between the degraded savage and the lowest classes of the great city.  The one is no more a child of nature than the other.”

Sadly, Thoreau never experienced a community that was fully wild, free, and at one with the land.  He returned to Walden, a tame and comfortable place, and buried some fantasies.  He wasn’t at home in wilderness, and he wasn’t at home in civilization.  Could he find peace somewhere in between?  He soon packed up his stuff, left the cabin, and returned to the Emerson home.  He had learned a lot from 26 months of solitude, but he was wary of getting stuck in a rut.

After eight years of work, and seven drafts, Walden was published in 1854.  It caught the world’s attention, and he finally had a steady stream of income.  Thoreau’s sister died of tuberculosis in 1849.  His father died of tuberculosis in 1859.  In 1862 it killed Henry, at the ripe old age of 44.

He had spent his life trying to find a beautiful, healthy, and ethical way of living.  His education prepared him for a life in civilization instead, loading his mind with myths, hobbles, and blinders.  Thoreau was well aware that his society was on a dead end path.  Its citizens robotically submitted to the peer pressure of their culture.  They could imagine no other way to live.  The only thing they could change was their clothes.  Consequently and tragically, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

His core message was “explore thyself” — question authority, question everything, every day.  Never assume that you are crazy, and never assume that your society is normal and sane — it is not!  Stay away from status fever, and the living dead that suffer from it.  Go outdoors!  Live simply!  Live!  Live!  Live!

Thoreau’s world was deranged.  But viewed from the twenty-first century, it looks far less crazy than our nightmare.  He gathered chestnuts by the pond, a species that would later be wiped out by blight.  The skies were often filled with passenger pigeons, now extinct.  Millions of buffalo still thundered across the plains.  He drank water directly from the pond.  There were no cars or aircraft.  Most folks moved by foot or horse.  They did not live amidst hordes of strangers, they knew each other.  None spent their lives inside climate-controlled compartments, staring at glowing screens. 

Henry would have hated our world.  His mission was to live as mindfully as possible.  “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1854.  Download 

Thoreau, Henry David, The Maine Woods, Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1864.  Download 

Sims, Michael, The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, Bloomsbury, New York, 2014.

The Eye of the Crocodile

In February 1985, Val Plumwood was having a lovely time canoeing by herself in Australia’s Kakadu National Park.  The ranger had assured her that the saltwater crocodiles, notorious man-eaters, never attacked canoes.  It was a perfect day, gliding across the water in a beautiful land, no worries.

She was a scholar and writer who focused on feminism and environmental philosophy.  The Earth Crisis was pounding the planet, and it was obvious to eco-thinkers that this was caused by a severely dysfunctional philosophy.  Her book, The Eye of the Crocodile, is a fascinating voyage into the realm of ethics, values, and beliefs.

Plumwood understood that the ancient culture of the Aborigines was the opposite of insane, and she had tremendous respect for it.  It presented a time-proven example of an ethic that had enabled a healthy and stable way of life for more than 12,000 years.  Australia was blessed with a bipolar climate that often swung between drought and deluge, making low-tech agriculture impractical.  The land escaped the curse of cities until you-know-who washed up on shore.  (As her canoe gently drifted, a floating stick slowly moved closer.)

Plumwood grew up in a rural area.  She was home schooled, and enjoyed a fairy tale childhood outdoors, delighted by the “sensuous richness” of the forest.  She was unlike most of her generation, because “I acquired an unquenchable thirst for life, for the wisdom of the land.”  Thus, her appreciation of the Aboriginal culture was not merely intellectual — it was real and deep.  Unlike most of her generation, she enjoyed a spiritual connection to the land.  (The floating stick had two beautiful eyes.)

The stick with two eyes was a crocodile, nearly as big as the canoe, and it was five minutes to lunchtime.  Suddenly, the reptile began ramming her canoe.  She rushed toward shore, but the crocodile leaped and grabbed her between the legs.  Three times it pulled her underwater, trying to drown her.  Miraculously, she managed to escape, severely injured, and survived.

It was a mind-blowing life changing experience.  Intellectually, she had understood food chains, predators, and prey.  But this was the first time in her life that she was nothing more than a big juicy meatball — impossible!  She was far more than food!  The crocodile strongly disagreed.  Its sharp teeth drove home the message that she was not outside of nature.  She was a part of the ecosystem, an animal, and nourishing meat — no more significant than a moth or mouse.

She wrote, “In the vivid intensity of those last moments, when great, toothed jaws descend upon you, it can hit you like a thunderclap that you were completely wrong about it all — not only about what your own personal life meant, but about what life and death themselves actually mean.”

She was blindsided by the realization that an entire highly educated civilization could be wrong about subjects so basic — animality, food, and the dance of life and death.  The crocodile painfully drove home the point that the entire modern culture was living in a fantasy.  Our highly contagious culture was ravaging the planet, and we didn’t understand why.  Each new generation was trained to live and think like imperial space aliens.

Plumwood was educated by the space alien culture, but the crocodile was a powerful teacher from the real world, the ecosystem.  Darwin revealed that humans are animals, but this essential truth harmlessly bounced off a long tradition of human supremacist illusions.  It was easy to see that those who were demolishing the planet were radicalized space aliens who believed that human society was completely outside of nature, and far above it.

The Aboriginal people inhabited the real world.  They were wild two-legged animals who had learned the wisdom of voluntary self-restraint.  For them, the entire land was alive, intelligent, and sacred; even the plants, streams, and rocks — everything.  Nobody owned it.  Mindfully inhabiting a sacred place required a profound sense of respect.

Space aliens drove them crazy.  Colonists in spandex jogged mindlessly across sacred land, listening to electronic pop music.  Reverence was absent.  They did not belong to the land, and were unaware of its incredible power.  Some of the traditional folks wanted to ban these disrespectful intrusions.  The colonial era had been a disaster.

The colonial worldview had many layers of hierarchy.  At the summit were the elites.  Below them were women, peasants, slaves, and the colonized.  Beneath the humans were animals.  Some critters, like dogs, cats, and horses, had special status.  If they obediently submitted to human domination, they were not meat.  Below them were meat class animals that had no consciousness.  Especially despised were man-eating animals, and critters that molested human property.  They were mercilessly exterminated.  Beneath animals was the plant world, a far older realm.

The foundation of the dominant worldview was human supremacy, and this mode of thinking had been the driving force behind a growing tsunami of ecological devastation.  Plumwood saw two alternatives to supremacist thinking.

(1) Ecological animalism was the realm of crocodiles, Aborigines, our wild ancestors, and the rest of the natural world.  All life was food, including humans.  In an ecosystem, “we live the other’s death, die the other’s life.”  Our bodies belonged to the ecosystem, not to ourselves.  The spirits of animate and inanimate beings had equal significance.

(2) Ontological veganism did not believe in using animals or eating animal foods.  This ethic was an offshoot of human supremacy.  It did not condemn the dogma of human/nature dualism.  It denied that humans were meat, despite the fact that a number of large predators have been dining on us for countless centuries.  It believed that animals were worthy of moral consideration, but the plant people were not.

Ontological veganism was queasy about predation; it would prefer a predator-free world.  It believed that human hunting was cultural (animal abuse), while animal predation was natural (instinctive).  But every newborn human has a body carefully designed by evolution for a life of hunting.  We are capable of smoothly running for hours on two legs, and we have hands, arms, and shoulders that are fine-tuned for accurately throwing projectiles in a forceful manner.  What you see in the mirror is a hunter.

Plumwood was a vegetarian because she believed that the production of meat on factory farms was ethically wrong.  She had no problems with Aborigines hunting for dinner.  All of the world’s sustainable wild cultures consumed animal foods.  She was well aware that her plant food diet was not ecologically harmless.

Cultures rooted in human supremacy have achieved remarkable success at rubbishing entire ecosystems.  This is not about flawed genes.  It’s about a bunch of screwy ideas that we’ve been taught.  Sustainable cultures perceive reality in a radically different way.  Luckily, software is editable.  Plumwood recommended that creative communicators bring new ideas to our dying culture; stories that help us find our way home to the family of life.  This is an enormous challenge.

Plumwood also wrote an essay, Prey to a Crocodile, which is not in the book.  It provides a detailed discussion of the attack.  The rangers wanted to go back the next day, and kill the crocodile.  She strongly objected.  The crocodile had done nothing wrong.  Predation is normal and healthy.  She had been an intruder.

A free PDF of the entire contents of The Eye of the Crocodile is available online.  It’s just 111 pages.  A paperback edition is still in print.

Plumwood, Val, The Eye of the Crocodile, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2012, ed. Lorraine Shannon.

Straw Dogs

When the philosopher John Gray looks out over the world, he sees a bloody madhouse, a hell broth of deranged magical thinking.  In his bestselling book, Straw Dogs, he turns into a ruthless vigilante who tirelessly pounds the stuffing out of ridiculous ideas that condemn us to mindless self-destruction.  What might happen if we ever succeeded at clearing the decks of loony whims?  Would this make it easier to think clearly, and move onto a path with a future?

By the time you get to the end of the book, not one sacred cow is left standing.  He rubbishes our entire belief system.  Readers who are thoroughbred critical thinkers may not find much to disagree with, but those who uncritically accept everything they are told by society will foam at the mouth and scream obscenities.  To some, he is an honorable and dignified iconoclast, and to others he is a super-pessimistic misanthrope.  Reader comments at Amazon are all over the place, and quite interesting.

Gray’s thinking is an unusual swirl of intellect and animism, minus mysticism.  In his analysis of our current predicament, the two primary culprits are humanism and progress.

Humanism is the illusion that humans are apart from, and superior to, all other beings in the family of life.  We have no obligation to obey the laws of nature, because they don’t apply to us.  Our sacred species does not really belong in the natural world, because we are so much better than filthy wild animals.  Humanism is a notion that we picked up somewhere on the path to civilization.  It has been passed from the Platonists, to the Christians, to the Enlightenment, and to modern secular humanists.

Life never stops getting better and better.  As long as we can maintain a fervent blind faith in scientific progress, there is little need for us to exercise our thinkers.  Witness the fact that nearly all of those who graduate from the most prestigious institutions of higher learning — and most other people too — cling to a magical belief in perpetual economic growth, a nutjob superstition.

Darwin drove a stake through the heart of the humanist fantasy, demonstrating that humans were simply animals, like all the rest, and we have survived by luck alone.  The humanists were not amused.  They pulled out the stake, seized Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest, and proclaimed that our remarkable success was indisputable proof that we are, without a doubt, the greatest!

Gray looks outside his window, perceives thousands of serious problems, and concludes that catastrophes are on the way.  Humanists look out the window, disregard thousands of serious problems, and see reality as an unfinished masterpiece — our species will be saved once we are all fully illuminated by precious reason.

He acknowledges that there has been real progress in science and technology, but sees little progress in morals and ethics.  While progress does reduce human suffering in some ways, it is simultaneously inventing bigger and better weapons for killing people.

In 1543, Japan had more guns than any other nation.  In that year, they banned firearms, and the nation was gun-free until 1879, when Commodore Perry arrived from the modern world, and frightened Japan into a process of rapid industrialization.  Their era of isolation was over, and they understood the diabolical law of civilization:  “Any country that renounces technology will become the prey to those who do not.  There is no escape from a world of predatory states.”

The greatest atrocities in human history have been enabled by advances in modern technology.  Innovation is impossible to control.  Horrid inventions that are banned in many countries will be eagerly produced by others.  Some technology, like biological weapons or cyber warfare can be pursued in the shadow world, unknown to governments or corporate entities.

At the same time, the traditional concept of warfare as being nation versus nation is dissolving.  With the rise of movements like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, that exist entirely beyond government control, we’re seeing a revival of religious warfare, where there are no standing armies or front lines.  The woman standing beside you might be a bomb.

Humanists envision a secular world that is educated, rational, and ethical, but few societies are secular today.  In primitive countries, like the U.S., millions of educated people reject the notion of evolution.  Millions of fundamentalists, of every variety, insist that their specific interpretation of sacred texts and visions is the one and only correct way to live, and that the rest of humankind must be converted to their beliefs — or else!

With regard to the Earth Crisis, Gray does not assign all blame to agriculture and civilization.  He believes that our problems began far earlier.  “There was never a Golden Age of harmony with the Earth.  Most hunter-gatherers were fully as rapacious as later humans.  But they were few, and they lived better than most who came after them.”  Throughout our long journey, the cost of every “advance” has been ecological injury.

He acknowledges that some cultures did manage to live sustainably for long stretches of time.  An essential component of their success was restraint.  They used practices like infanticide, geronticide, and sexual abstinence to limit the size of their clans — no crowding, no scarcity, no conflict.  These brilliant hunters clearly understood that, in a world of finite food sources, perpetual growth was dumber than a box of rocks.

Unfortunately, farmers threw restraint out the window.  Growing population forced us to become deeply addicted to agriculture, and we burned our bridges behind us.  Today, a return to living in balance is obstructed by our enormous population.  We could greatly reduce our misery by reducing our numbers, but this will never be done voluntarily on a global scale.  We’ve entrusted the remedy to Big Mama Nature, who will effectively clean up the mess without mercy.  The human herd might shrink at a rate as rapid as its explosion.

Throughout the book, Gray is a tireless fire hose of criticism.  He tells us that consciousness, reason, and self-awareness are highly overrated; Homo rapiens bears a striking resemblance to cancer, and so on.  This does get tiresome.  Is he a dark man with an unhealthy mind, or is he a sane man who is clearly and competently describing a dark reality?  He encourages us to turn on our thinkers and reexamine our beliefs, a pastime that can often be quite profitable.  The book has been a best seller.  It’s short and easy to read.

Here’s a line that intrigued me:  “It is not of becoming the planet’s wise stewards that Earth-lovers dream, but of a time when humans have ceased to matter.”  Gray bets that humankind will succeed in our crusade of self-destruction, at which point the healing process can begin.  Earth will forget us, and life will move on.  On the other hand, modern folks spend their lives wearing their freaky Master of the Universe masks, which conceal their ordinary animal faces.  In theory, humans could “cease to matter” by taking off our masks, abandoning our achievements, humbly returning to the family of life, and disappearing into the crowd.

Gray, John, Straw Dogs — Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Granta Books, London, 2003.

Meat — A Benign Extravagance

Is meat evil?  A vocal minority shouts “Yes!”  The British eco-journalist, George Monbiot, was an enthusiastic advocate for the vegan diet.  He did an abrupt U-turn after reading Simon Fairlie’s book, Meat — A Benign Extravagance.  Fairlie is a powerhouse thinker, a fire hose of ideas, and a tireless detective who hunts down those who ejaculate statistics that are ridiculously biased or fictitious.  This book will reduce your trust in all statistics by 71.8 percent.  He doesn’t take sides; he forces everyone to reconsider their beliefs.  I strongly recommend it to readers who have an addiction to food.

Fairlie is an ex-vegetarian, a hippie eco-journalist, and a jack-of-all-trades.  Once upon a time, he was living on a vegetarian commune in England, and contemplating their diet.  He suddenly realized that it made no sense.  The protein and oils that they consumed were imported from faraway lands where people were poor and hungry, whose cropland was being diverted from essential subsistence farming to produce commodities for export — nuts, soy, pulses, peanut butter, and vegetable oils.  Why didn’t his commune consume the protein and oils produced by their next-door neighbors — meat, eggs, and dairy foods?

One of his primary interests is livestock production.  His (impossible) sacred mission in life is to envision a sustainable way of feeding 60 million Brits.  He doesn’t gift wrap a perfect solution, but the process of his search is delightfully illuminating.  Three ideas provide the foundation of this book.  (1) Feeding grain to livestock (or automobiles) is not ethical.  (2) Humankind consumes too much food from animal sources, and people in the prosperity bubble should cut back.  (3) A diet that includes mindfully produced animal products can be ethical.

The book contains an enormous number of words and ideas, and it did not have space for some important issues.  Fairlie sincerely believes that caring and competent livestock husbandry does not involve cruelty.  Allowing animals to suffer from the painful maladies of old age is cruel.  In the good old days, merciful wild predators ethically put elderly critters out of their misery.

He acknowledges the arrival of peak cheap energy, but doesn’t vigorously explore the enormous consequences for agriculture and society.  Feeding 60 million Brits via muscle-powered agriculture is not possible, and it’s impossible to indefinitely continue mechanized farming using biofuels.

He proposes a radical redesign of the British way of life, whilst not addressing the Mother of All Problems — the extreme overpopulation of the UK, and its dependence on importing large amounts of food.  (Or is agriculture itself the Mother Problem?)  Obviously, it would be far easier to feed one million (or fewer) Brits in a sustainable way.  He sensibly omits a discussion of diet and health, in which a million experts can agree on nothing. 

If a fleet of predator drones destroyed every facility for the mass production of animal foods tonight, half of the world’s livestock and poultry would remain unharmed.  Ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats) can convert plant fiber that we cannot digest into meat and milk that we can digest.  Normally, they dine on lands that are unsuitable for raising crops.  Hogs are omnivores that, in traditional societies, excelled at converting garbage into bacon.  They cleaned up feces, kitchen trimmings, spoiled foods, butcher’s wastes, and many other delicacies, converted them into wealth, and stored it up — like a piggy bank.  Chickens played a similar role.

So, if the consumption of animal foods were limited to animals raised in these traditional ways, it would cause far less harm.  Never forget that the production of grains and vegetables is also a source of immense harm.  Plowing and reaping a grain field destroys many animals in a cruel and unethical manner, and it gradually ruins the soil, too.

Fairlie devoted considerable effort to exposing the sources of ridiculous statistics cited by the anti-meat crowd.  For example, “each kilogram of beef requires the consumption of 100,000 liters of water.”  This was traced to David Pimentel, a respected scientist.  His calculation included rain that fell on the grassland — rain that would fall whether or not livestock were present.  Fairlie’s grass-fed cattle consume about 50 liters of water per day, and soon piss most of it right back out.  At the very most, his grass-fed beef required 400 liters per kilogram of meat.  Oddly, Pimentel’s calculations implied that less water was needed to produce grain-fed beef.

Fairlie also butted heads with those who blame climate change on livestock, the alleged source of 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.  Cattle are worse than cars!  He plunged into a long and comical hunt for the source, which turned out to be the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).  The statistic was blessed by the reputable International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), went viral, and was repeated by major media outlets, with no fact checking whatsoever — an instant imaginary catastrophe. 

Transportation probably produces about 52 percent of greenhouse gases.  Ruminants probably produce from 5 to 9.6 percent of emissions.  If all cattle were exterminated tonight, they would soon be replaced by wild ruminants, which also fart and belch.  The Great Plains of the US were formerly home to 60 million bison (not a problem), but they have been replaced by 60 million climate killing cattle (oh my God!). 

The ecologically worst foods come from exterminated rainforests.  We must avoid rainforest products like soy, beef, and palm oil.  Was your tofu, vegetable oil, or soy burger born in a former jungle?  Seventy percent of vegetable oil comes from soy.  Soybeans are processed into vegetable oil and high-protein soy meal.  About three percent of the meal is eaten by humans.  Most of the meal becomes high-potency feed for the industrial meat-production facilities that we all love to hate.

What would the UK look like if it became 100% vegan?  There would be no livestock, and no manure, so soil fertility would have to be maintained by devoting a third of the cropland to growing green manures, instead of food.  If the land were to be worked with biofuel powered machines, then more land would be needed to grow the fuel.  Maintaining and replacing the machines would require the existence of an industrial society, which is not sustainable.  If horses were used for traction, producing their feed would require between a quarter and a third of the farm (for oats, grass, and hay).

On the bright side, land formerly used for grazing could be returned to woodland and wildlife.  On the downside, expanded woodland would provide habitat for expanded numbers of wild animals, which vegan communities could not ethically kill.  Bunnies, boars, and deer frequently confuse large thriving gardens with a delicious paradise, and they routinely disregard stern instructions from agitated gardeners.

No farmer, meat-eater or vegan, can tolerate the presence of uncontrolled wildlife.  One solution is defoliation — surround the community with a wide vegetation-free buffer.  Animal rights advocate, Peter Singer, recommended capturing and sterilizing the wildlife.  The other option is an impermeable fence, tall enough to block deer, and deep enough to block burrowers.  Do you enclose the garden, or do you enclose nature?  What about mice, rats, and pigeons? 

These are just a few of the notions served at Fairlie’s banquet of ideas.  After observing the world through the mind of a livestock husbandman, I was impressed by how much effort, complexity, suffering, and damage was required to keep way too many people alive. 

The original indigenous inhabitants of the land simply adapted to living with the ecosystem that surrounded them.  They ate salmon, bison, and aurochs that thrived without human owners and managers.  Their way of life had no objections whatsoever to the existence of lions, wolves, and bears.  They had little need to molest the living forest.  They never had to think about soil depletion, erosion, or pollution.  They enjoyed a far healthier diet.  They could drink out of any lake or stream.  They lived well, without rocking the boat, for quite a while. 

Fairlie, Simon, Meat — A Benign Extravagance, Chelsea Green, White River Junction, Vermont, 2010.