From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: Re: M-I: Thorstein Veblen on the fur trade and American Indians
Date: Sat, 24 Jan 1998 14:56:19 -0600 (CST)


Lou,

All your posts on Indian history and conditions have been interesting in
themselves, but as you proceed along this line beware of a possibility
that I would image as follows: Getting from here (central Illinois) to New
York by hitchhiking along I55 to Los Angeles, then signing on to the crew
of a freighter to go to New York by the way of the Panama Canal.

Or to put it another way, most (perhaps all) of the conclusions you arrive
at re ecology, the present, and the future could be made had we no
knowledge whatever of Indian history or thought (or even if the western
hemisphere had had no native population when the Europeans arrived).

Just an example. It is fairly obvious (no need for discussion of the
buffalos, etc) that the Great Plains should not, for the most part, be
used to cultivate anything other than grasses. There are probably several
lines of argument which could lead to this conclusion.

But then there are some problems. The current population of the U.S. is
(what?) 250 million. Probably for the long run that is too many. Probably
around 100 million would be about right. But we are not radical ecologists
who seemingly want us (who "us"?) simply to let that surplus of 150
million die from starvation or whatever. In other words, it is going to
take a couple of centuries for that population to fall to its desirable
level, and in the mean time we have a lot of people to feed.

Now, it is or ought to be a truism that the U.S. diet contains too high a
proportion of meat, particularly red meat, and that much of the grain that
goes to cattle feed ought to be consumed as grain products. But a good
deal of that prime grain crop is produced on the great plains, on land
that ought not to be under cultivation.

In fact, a rather substantial proportion of the world's protein exists in
the form of grasses, but that protein can be accessed only by processing
it through cattle. (Incidentally, I'm bound to be making quite a few
empirical errors here, and I hope the list has enough experts on the
subjects involved to correct me; I think, however that those corrections
won't refute the general line of the argument.) And I presume that while
quite large herds can be supported by grazing, there would be some
reduction in efficiency in the production of meat. I don't know whether
that reduction would be an acceptable or unacceptable one given a shift in
dietary habits to greater consumption of grain. But I don't know either
where that greater supply of grain is going to come from if wheat and corn
growing on the Great Plains is stopped. I and I suspect most people could
shift fairly easily (if pressed a bit) to more grain, less red meat. I
don't think it would be so easy to shift from wheat to corn as the basis
of that grain diet.

All I'm trying to do here is open up questions, not offer any "plans," but
I think answers to those questions simply won't be available in the study
of practices suitable for a world with a population of only a billion or
so but not for a world of 6 billion and growing. And even "administrative
methods" short of Buchenwald will not put a stop to that growth or reverse
it in less than a century or so.

??????????????????????????????????????

Carrol



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