All I want is to be left alone to write my books.
Without any physical, chemical, and biological fundamentals, and with equally poor understanding of basic economic forces, it is no wonder that people will believe anything.
Harvesting the biosphere is still the most fundamental human activity. Without that, everybody's dead, really. We could do quite well without microchips, or the business site of 'Atlantic Monthly,' the gated communities, Guccis, and high-growth GDP. But we cannot do without harvesting the crops and cutting down the wood.
I'm the product of the classical, old-fashioned European education that is broad-based. You want to get your degree in the world, you have to study all sorts of things.
U.S. industries from steel-making to plastics synthesis are among the world's most energy-efficient; American agriculture is highly productive, as are America's railroads. But for decades, Americans themselves have been living beyond their means, wasting energy in their houses and cars and amassing energy-intensive throwaway products on credit.
There is no doubt that human evolution has been linked to meat in many fundamental ways. Our digestive tract is not one of obligatory herbivores; our enzymes evolved to digest meat, whose consumption aided higher encephalization and better physical growth.
Meat is undoubtedly an environmentally expensive food. Large animals have inherently low efficiency of converting feed to muscle, and only modern broilers can be produced with less than two units of feed per unit of meat.
A brilliant mind having a eureka moment could not create an Intel microprocessor containing a billion transistors any more than one person could dream up a Boeing 787 from scratch.
People shouldn't be living in certain places - on earthquake faults or on flood plains. But they do, and there are consequences.
Meat consumption is a part of our evolutionary heritage; meat production has been a major component of modern food systems. Carnivory should remain, within limits, an important component of a civilization that finally must learn how to maintain the integrity of its only biosphere.
