-SM Stirling, The Given Sacrifice (New York, 2014), Chapter Fifteen, p. 309.
Far out! Even vegetarians, if there are any left, have to kill animals in order to eat! This is a logical consequence of the Change but I need an sf writer like SM Stirling to deduce and elaborate such consequences for me.
I understand that some Tibetan Buddhists eat yak meat because it is impossible to grow crops in the Himalayas. Prolonging human life is necessary because we need more time to meditate. Hopefully, this will lead to more peaceful lives for human beings and animals in future.
2 comments:
A lot of animals need "edge habitats" -- deer, for example, don't do well in climax forests.
When hunting pressure was lifted early in the 20th century, there were only a few tens of thousands of white-tailed deer left in the eastern US.
By the early 21st century there were tens of millions, mainly because marginal farmland was abandoned and provided lots of the edge-habitat browsing they like, while their principal historic predators (tribal hunters, wolves and cougars) are rare; there are more deer in the area now than there were in 1492.
Likewise, the swarms of grizzly bears that early European explorers saw in California were a recent phenomenon. Introduced diseases had killed off many of the Indians who'd been their main competitors for the acorns of the widespread oak-forests and who were the only creature capable of killing adult grizzlies; meanwhile, the Spanish ranches which had spread over the coastal prairies exported hides and tallow and left most of the cattle carcasses to rot, providing lots of high-energy food for bears.
Result: more grizzly bears than had been present since the end of the last ice age.
In the Emberverse novels, there are huge areas of abandoned farmland (and suburb) nearly everywhere. This provides unlimited forage for herbivores, which explode out of their refuges (in national parks, remote areas, and so forth) and undergo enormous, rapid population growth. And they slow the succession to the climax vegetation by browsing.
The predators also re-emerge, and since the herbivores breed faster they're also presented with an "open frontier" situation with lots of vacant, food-rich territory, and breed at their biological maximum. Wolves, cougars, bears (and feral tigers descended from escaped captive populations) sweep across the landscape, as do lions down south where it's warm enough.
The ecological swings go on for many generations.
Kaor, Paul!
And any vegetarians who survived the Change would almost be compelled to eat meat, both because the hard labor of post-Change life made it necessary to consume high energy food and because it would be so wasteful if they did not.
And I appreciate Mr. Stirling's interesting comments!
Sean
Post a Comment