The REAL 1% versus 99% debate....

Michael Marshall

Move aside, 'OCCUPY MOVEMENT'.

The rich 1% versus the poorer 99% isn't as critical a debate as this simple biological fact:

Without agriculture (& aquaculture/commercial fishing) , the world ,in the best of climate conditions, can only feed 1% of the current humans upon it.

Hunter-gatherers we might have to become again, in the event of some Man-Made-Disaster like a full nuclear winter.

In a place like Nova Scotia with about a million people, one percent is about 10,000 hunter-gatherers eking out just enough food to  survive at sustenance level.

To confirm this, ask yourself how many aboriginals lived in all of Nova Scotia when white Europeans arrived 500 years ago ?

Ten thousand residents seems about right - even optimistic - but the climate then was harsher than it is now, and many animals and plants hadn't yet returned to the almost-an-island after the last Ice Age.

Nuclear Winter's harsh coldness in summer/lack of sunshine/drought -- all could cripple photosynthesis on land and in the sea, even if it just lasted one season.

(Need we add the post-nuclear-war effects of acid rain, radiation and extreme high loads of deadly UV rays to this disaster for green plants?)

Humans store so little food normally, that during that year without a harvest we would eat what little seed crop we have to merely survive and then be even worse off when the sun arrived back to greet us cheerfully next season.

We know this to be a fact as certain as that sun rising in the morning, because that is the way thousands of local and regional famines have worked, or rather not worked, throughout history.

That is the delicate and fragile foundation that our whole great human urban high tech civilization actually rests upon.

Remind me again who is commensal and who is host, down here on planet earth ......