Grok Headline matches for The devil's in the detail
devil's haircut
devil's haircut09/17/2004 10:06 AM I had a fantastic time in Las Vegas! I was there >24 hours, which is
the perfect amount of time for me to be there, I've discovered. I'm
working on my trip report, but I've got some real work to do today,
and I probably won't have time to finish it until the weekend.
Richard
Manning's book Against the Grain
is a
remarkable work -- succinct, well-researched, solution-oriented and
mind-altering. It's an absolute must-read. Please don't settle for the
synopsis below, and don't assume that because it's about the history
and economy of agriculture it's a dull read. It's riveting. The issues
that Manning describes in the book were first raised in his Harper's Magazine article last
winter called The Oil We
Eat. But the book
goes much further.
In
my earlier root-cause analysis of what 'caused' us to invent
civilization, to abandon our joyful hunter-gatherer cultures, the
cause-and-effect went like this:
Ice age OR Overhunting
Scarcity of food. After millennia of easy hunting of big,
slow game, man suddenly had to start really working for a
living...
Scarcity of
foodInvention of agriculture. ...So he invented agriculture; if there
wasn't enough food, he's 'make' his own...
AgricultureCivilization. ...But agriculture required division of
labour, instruction, hierarchies, and constant fighting with
'pests'...
CivilizationEnd of Virtuous Cycle (Fig. 1 above)
and Start of Vicious Cycle
(Fig. 2 below). ...And brought with
it all kinds of unintended consequences.
But Manning has a more intriguing theory of the first two
steps:
Fire, Floods &
IceGrain
monoculture. After natural
catastrophes, hardy grains are often the first plants to reappear
...
Grain
monocultureAgriculture.
...Man
in areas victimized by these natural catastrophes merely 'discovered'
this, and then by creating continuous 'catastrophes' (clearing land
with fire, flooding land through irrigation) exploited nature's own
regeneration mechanism, which we call
'agriculture'...
The third and fourth steps are the same under both theories.
Manning
therefore calls what we now practice 'catastrophic agriculture' to
differentiate it from the simple tending of 'wild' plants and animals
as a secondary source of food by hunter-gatherer cultures without
interference with natural cycles. The irony, he says, is that it
wasn't
scarcity of food that
compelled us to invent agriculture, but rather the discovery of over-abundance of food in areas of
natural catastrophe that seduced us into it. Figure 2
The 'discovery' of grain monoculture in areas of
recurring natural catastrophe (like floodplains) was only possible
where man was already settled, which only occurred in areas where fish
were plentiful, which is where all agricultural cultures began (the
birthplaces of civilization) before they expanded and merged into the
single civilization culture we know today. Sedentary life, and soft
grain gruels, also allowed a higher birth rate, since babies no longer
had to be carried for four years until they were weaned -- and the
population explosion began. The ability to store food also allowed the
provisioning of armies, and the need to keep people from going back to
their instinctive hunter-gatherer ways and abandon the farms required
the use of force, which required hierarchy and government. The
provisioned armies conquered the remaining hunter-gatherers (most
notably in Africa and the Americas) and made them slaves on the farms.
To keep unnatural hierarchy1 from crumbling, the governors
bribed subordinates with extra resources, larger homes, and their own
'private' land, as long as the subordinates kept the slaves and
peasants in line2. Wealth, and its inevitable partner
poverty, were born. Dependence on monoculture, which failed often,
gave
rise to the first famines. Average human heights plummeted due to
disease and poor, unvaried diet, bone deformities from constant
stooping became commonplace, and grain monoculture and crowded
villages
allowed previously rare diseases to flourish: anemia, arthritis,
malaria, syphilis, and tuberculosis, and, finally, plague, all of them
unknown before agriculture. And the high-carb diet of grain
monoculture
also brought with it other new and unnatural phenomena: tooth decay,
obesity, diabetes, lactose tolerance, and alcoholism, which devastated
many hunter-gatherer cultures when they were suddenly exposed to this
deadly and seductive diet. So agriculture was irresistible to man, the
ultimate devil's bargain.
By doing so, man threw in his lot with a host of life forms that
co-evolved with man and grain monoculture: this 'coalition' included
the rat, insect pests, weeds and parasites as well as the
aforementioned diseases and a handful of animals suited to
domestication, all of which thrive with monoculture. In fact much of
the 'conquering' of the hunter-gatherer world by 'civilized' man was
really accomplished by our coalition partners: it was our diseases, to
which hunter-gatherers had no exposure and hence no resistance, that
killed most of them, not our weapons or their years of subsequent
slave labour. The
introduction of our domestic animals likewise altered the New World's
terrain, since these animals had few natural predators and exploded in
population, literally eating the natural flora to extinction. Like us,
these domestic animals paid the price of civilization -- they are
smaller, sicker and poorer than their wild counterparts, but the
ultimate test of evolution is endurance, and our unholy coalition has
passed that test with flying colours. Humans, members of the six
domestic animal groups and the big five monoculture grains, and the
rodents, insects, weeds and disease parasites that come with them have
all flourished, at least in numbers, together, and together they now
constitute a huge and growing proportion of Earth's biomass, while the
millions of non-coalition creatures almost all face extinction.
Although our diseases did most of the dirty work, Manning argues that
our civilization culture committed systematic genocide against every
hunter-gatherer culture on the planet, from the Cro-Magnon man in
Eastern Europe (whose language, intriguingly lives on only in the tiny
Basque community whose culture is still under siege), to the First
Nations of the Americas and Oceania. The result was what
anthropologists have called "remarkable cultural homogeneity" and
"pathological conventionality". Its sustained hallmark has been
ever-increasing famines, the "very badge of civilization". The worst
famine ever, and one of the most recent, in Mao's China, killed 80 million
people. The second worst, in Russia, was also in the past century.
Famine, a sudden and severe shortage of vital resources, breeds
hunger,
and that always breeds imperialism in turn. The alternative, common
and legal in China for millennia until quite recently, is an invention
called "Swapping Children / Making Food" -- in times of famine you
exchange your children for your neighbour's, and then kill them and
eat
them and use their bones for fuel. Modern mythology would have us
believe that famine is a political
problem -- a consequence of bad distribution of food and bad
government
-- and while this is in part true, famine is ultimately an inevitable
consequence of our fragile monoculture and massive overpopulation.
This
quote, describing one such famine in Ireland, where potato blight in
one year eliminated 90% of the monoculture potato crop and hence 90%
of
the food, has given me nightmares:
In the first hovel, six famished
and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a
corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged
horsecloth, and their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the
knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning that they
were alive, they were in fever -- four children, a woman, and what had
once been a man. It is impossible to go through the details. Suffice
it
to say that, in a few minutes, I was surrounded by at least 200 of
such
phantoms, such frightful specters as no words can describe.
All of this because we threw ourselves out of the Garden of Eden,
seduced by the lure of uniform plenty. Why and how did we get into
this
mess, and who is to blame? Manning recaps: "A population explosion
generates the need to grow more food, but agriculture is the cause of
that population explosion, and agriculture creates the need for
government. The hierarchical, specialized societies that agriculture
builds are wholly dependent on the smooth operation of their
infrastructure, on transportation, on stability. Dams must be built,
canals must flow, roads must be maintained and government must be
established to order these tasks. Government leaders emerge from the
social hierarchy that agriculture's wealth makes possible. Failures
are
human and inevitable. To hold agriculture blameless and government
responsible for famine is like holding a lion blameless for a child's
death on the grounds that it was the lion's teeth that did the damage.
Poverty, government and famine are co-evolved species, every bit as
integral to catastrophic agriculture as wheat, bluegrass, smallpox and
rats."
Our solution, of course, was not to blame agriculture, but to try to
make it more efficient.
Although we now produce a massively excess amount of monoculture food,
famines, starvation and poverty remain commonplace. So lately we
developed the Green Revolution to increase efficiency of grain
production, to increase yields and edible mass per acre and per plant.
The theory was that these high-yield crops could be grown closer to
the
starving. But fifty years later this has not solved the problem, and
it
has in fact increased the fragility of the system. Plants are now
patented,
and GM now threatens existing plant species and diversity and their
utter homogeneity exposes them to new vulnerabilities as nature
evolves
new pests and diseases to try to bring back into balance this massive,
ecologically unsustainable and undifferentiated surplus. And these
higher yields come with a huge price tag. Whereas a calorie of your
home-grown carrots requires less than a calorie of non-photosynthetic
energy to produce, a
calorie of grain requires ten
calories of energy to produce3,
mostly in the form of Mideast-oil-based, highly processed nitrogen
fertilizers poured onto severely and evermore soil- and
nutrient-depleted land. Ironically, that fertilizer replaces animal
manure, which is no longer economical to truck from the new
concentration-camp factory farms (also developed to improve
'efficiency'). So most of the oil-based fertilizer runs off into the
water supply, along with massive amounts of pesticides, herbicides,
antibiotics and other by-products of 'efficient' agriculture and the
mountains of shit from the factory farms, which no longer has
commercial 'value'. And if the smell of that shit makes living in the
area unbearable, that's fine, too, because Archer Daniels Midland and
the other handful of companies that run this entire system can then
buy
up and concentrate the farms more cheaply. Besides, we don't want nosy
'eco-terrorists' and news media poking around and seeing what really
goes on in those factory farms anyway. The cost of this is so
phenomenally high that government subsidies now exceed the entire
'commercial value' of the food produced. It's a massive corporate
welfare scheme originally designed to keep families on farms and now
accruing primarily to the few corporations that control the industry.
Taxpayers pay for these corporations to produce and process an absurd
excess of bad food and to finance governments who pursue Middle
Eastern
wars to get the oil needed for fertilizer. And in return the taxpayers
get cheap, tasteless, unhealthy, polluted food, monstrous animal
cruelty, massive pollution of the air and water, heart disease,
obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, alcoholism, ruined land, and
unemployment. And still there
is famine.
So what are we to do? Manning starts by pointing out what not
to do -- try to get government to change the system. "The political
system cannot be counted on to reform agriculture because the
political
system is a creation of
agriculture, a co-evolved entity". Of course we should try to end agricultural subsidies,
but Manning says we are unlikely to succeed. Vegetarianism can help,
but not much: As long as the vegetables come from the same commodity
system, they're still causing massive environmental and social damage
and animal cruelty. And we couldn't go back to hunter-gatherer
culture,
at least not in our current numbers, even if we wanted to. But
reducing
human population is a necessary condition: "I do not take human
population as a given; if we accept six billion as inevitable, we are
doomed". Beyond that, Manning's solution is the same one that a rising
chorus of radicals and revolutionaries is calling for: A walking away
from this system and its products, and the creation of a new, healthy
culture and economy. To Manning, focused on the food economy, this
means:
Eating better: Selecting and eating a wide variety of exclusively
organic, fresh, local, delicious, unpolluted, quality, unprocessed,
non-factory foods.
Eating less: Since these good foods are unsubsidized
and
hence more expensive, eating less is economically advantageous, and,
for most of us, it is also healthier.
Preparing and cooking
your own: Not using processed or packaged foods even if they're
organic and/or vegetarian.
Natural gardening: Personally producing your own food
without use of any fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides or other
unnatural products. Nothing more invasive than a fence to keep out the
bunnies. On a larger scale this is called permaculture, and it's
growing in popularity.
Supporting small, local farms: Going to
farmers' markets, and
challenging the vendors and operators to allow only local,
unprocessed4,
organic, small-farm products and free-range, grass-fed
meats.
I am writing a book on Natural
Enterprise,
and its recipe is perfectly suited to small, local, responsible farms.
I think we all know that such foods are better for us, and better for
the environment and the society we live in. We need some pioneers to
start, and teach others to start, Natural Enterprises that can break
our deadly addiction to catastrophic agriculture. And the rest of us
need, in more ways than one, to go back to the (natural) garden.
In nature there are pecking orders and
specialized
roles to organize and reduce conflict in communities, but no hierarchy
that allows the alpha male, the 'queen' bee, or the bull moose to hog
a
disproportionate amount of the resources of the
community.
Manning hypothesizes there is more
reason to believe
the Great Wall of China was built to keep the stooped slaves in the
rice paddies in, than to keep
the hunter-gatherer 'Mongol hordes' out.
A calorie of beef requires
over 100 calories of energy
to produce, despite the 'efficiencies' of factory
farms.
Exception: labour-intensive processed
foods are OK
if they use only local and organic ingredients e.g. artisanal
bakeries,
microbreweries
Had this not been a National Weather Service alert for an area
currently drowning in rain, I might not have cared. But since I do
care, this kind of cut-and-paste weather alert is ... beyond
annoying.
A RIVER FLOOD WARNING REMAINS
IS NO LONGER IN EFFECT
FOR THE CO RIVER NWS
I'm guessing since the last alert was "REMAINS" that "IS NO LONGER" is the new text. Guys, please, slow down
a little?
Does everything start with one detail
Does everything start with one detail03/06/2004 01:55 AM I'm tired of everything, and everyone. A choice never seems to be the
right one. Jen and I played the...
Analysis: Devil in the detail07/15/2004 03:47 AM The Butler report on Iraq says that British intelligence sources were
unreliable and the government should have been more cautious about
them, says Paul Reynolds
Unreal 3's amazing detail
Unreal 3's amazing detail04/14/2004 05:02 PM Here's a 12 MG Windows Medis video clip of Unreal's fantastically
detailed world. Link
No lurid detail spared
No lurid detail spared04/18/2005 11:15 AM The prosecution has fired most of its guns, and Michael Jackson is
still standing. Now money is emerging as the key to his defense.
MS to detail protocol licensing changes
MS to detail protocol licensing changes01/22/2004 11:36 AM Microsoft Corp. on Friday plans to announce changes to a licensing
program for software communications protocols it created as part of
its landmark antitrust settlement with the U.S. government, the
company said Wednesday. The changes include a much shorter license
agreement and removing royalties it currently charges for about two
dozen protocols, Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler said. Microsoft will
also modify the evaluation program, making it easier for prospective
licensees to review samples of the technical documentation, he said.
Mars seen in unprecedented detail
Mars seen in unprecedented detail01/23/2004 02:19 PM The European Space Agency releases the early results from its Mars
Express probe now orbiting the Red Planet.
In Detail: How bin Laden Set Plan in Motion in '99
In Detail: How bin Laden Set Plan in Motion in '9906/17/2004 11:35 AM Described in detail by two captured Qaeda operatives who helped plan
the Sept. 11 attacks, the plot was more improvisational than had been
previously understood.
Sun, Microsoft to detail interoperability in October
Sun, Microsoft to detail interoperability in October09/13/2004 10:02 PM Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. next month plan to provide
more details on work they are doing to make their products
interoperable, a Sun executive said Monday.
Sun and Microsoft to detail interoperability plans
A Little Detail in the Sale of About.com to the New York Times
A Little Detail in the Sale of About.com to the New York Times03/14/2005 04:35 PM I couldn't tell you if this page has the proper meta-data-- or any.
My method of search engine optimization is to get a lot of links by
writing something original and useful that people will elect to
recommend at their own sites. It works. But only because links to
PressThink don't expire.
Sun, Microsoft to detail interoperability next month
Sun, Microsoft to detail interoperability next month09/14/2004 04:40 PM Sun Microsystems and Microsoft next month plan to reveal the work they
have been doing to make their products interoperable, a Sun executive
said yesterday.
Two Letters in Reply to "A Little Detail in the Sale of About.com"
Two Letters in Reply to "A Little Detail in the Sale of About.com"03/14/2005 04:35 PM Mike Phillips, editorial development director at Scripps-Howard:
"Many of our own newsrooms are in the early stages of the
transformation. And at the New York Times? It's never gonna happen.
They know it, too." Plus: Daily Peg Doubts About's Worth.
Donkey Does Security Detail at R.I. Farm (AP)
Donkey Does Security Detail at R.I. Farm (AP)04/21/2004 02:20 PM AP - Bonnie, the newest employee at the University of Rhode Island's
Peckham Farm, is a four-foot-tall fuzzy brown donkey, and she appears
to be taking her livestock-guarding responsibilities seriously.
Donkey Does Security Detail on Farm (AP)
Donkey Does Security Detail on Farm (AP)04/20/2004 08:49 PM AP - No one messes with Bonnie. The newest employee at the University
of Rhode Island's Peckham Farm is a four-foot-tall fuzzy brown donkey,
and she appears to be taking her livestock-guarding responsibilities
seriously.
More Detail on Illinois School Lawsuit
More Detail on Illinois School Lawsuit11/11/2003 12:58 PM Illinois lawsuit against school district for using wireless explained
a little further: This is the first article I've seen which contained
any reference to the studies that a group of parents in Oak Park have
been citing as demonstrating that there is a correlative risk because
specific exposure to Wi-Fi microwave radiation and human health.
Unfortunately, the study that's the only one linked to in the article,
one conducted by Leif Salford, doesn't lead to the conclusion the
parents say it does. The Salford study shows that exposure to uniform
radiation over a period of time in the GSM band can produce some ill
effects in rats' brains. While this study should certainly disturb
those in the cell industry, it's applicability to Wi-Fi is very very
low. First, the band used in Wi-Fi is much higher than GSM and will
have different characteristics. The researchers don't state the band
in their study, for some reason, but mention that they have been
working in the 900 MHz band for some time. Second, the study shows
that exposure over periods of time to uniform radiation cause the
outcome. For cell phones, this is an issue, but for Wi-Fi, it is not.
Wi-Fi is not only a bursty technology, in which there is not a
constant transmission of peak signal power, but it's also a technology
in which the brain is usually from a few feet to dozens of feet away
from the radiation point source. Because signal strength varies by the
inverse square of the distance from the source, comparing an enclosed
uniform radiation field in the study with brains located even 18
inches away from a similarly powered Wi-Fi transmitter is meaningless.
The study that needs to be performed would have rats in a laboratory
at a variety of distances from both bursty and continuously
transmitting Wi-Fi transceivers using standard equipment that produces
from 30 mW to 200 mW of power, and commercial omnidirectional and
sectorized antennas. Frankly, this study makes me glad that I don't
stick my GSM cell phone up against my head. I use a Bluetooth headset,
which produces a fraction of the signal strength that a GSM does in
normal usage and in a different band....
Microsoft to detail protocol licensing changes01/22/2004 10:19 AM Microsoft Friday plans to announce changes to a licensing program for
software communications protocols it created as part of its landmark
antitrust settlement with the U.S. government, the company said
Wednesday.
WINHEC - MS to further detail Web services for devices
WINHEC - MS to further detail Web services for devices04/29/2004 02:57 PM Microsoft next week plans to detail the next steps it is taking to
extend Web services to devices such as printers, digital cameras and
consumer electronics.
Soldiers' War Blogs Detail Life in Iraq (AP)09/26/2004 08:46 AM AP - Iraq war blogs are as varied as the soldiers who write them. Some
sites feature practical news, war pictures and advice. Some are
overtly political, with more slanting to the right than to the left.
Some question the war, some cheer it. While some military bloggers (or
milbloggers) say their commanders have encouraged their online
literary ventures, a few say their commanders have shut them down.
Correcting the Record on Sept. 11, in Great Detail
Halo update adds graphics detail, more05/20/2004 08:28 AM Destineer subsidiary MacSoft continues to tweak its hit game Halo:
Combat Evolved with a new v1.05
release. The update adds the ability to display reflective
surfaces on Macs equipped with some Nvidia hardware, adds a new Model
Reflections option to the Halo Graphics Settings window, corrects a
but that prevented eMacs and other high refresh-rate displays from
syncing properly at 640x480 resolution, and addresses issues with
hardware fogging. Grok Description matches for The devil's in the detail GrokA matches for The devil's in the detail
The devil's in the detail
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