Stretch for the Meaning of Life

This is a re-post with permission from the weekly column regarding global environmental sustainability posted at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ . See the AEHS web site for much more on environmental health and sciences!

Stretch for the Meaning of Life

Apr 23 2013 7:26AM Posted by David Ludwig, Ph.D.

You don’t have to travel to eat what many North Americans consider comestible oddments. Growing up in New Jersey on the Atlantic Coast, I regularly ate frogs, muskrats, and turtles. Since then, having been to Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Pacific Oceania, I’ve eaten things even the locals consider oddments in many places. Here’s a question—can we coin a term for the biodiversity of food consumption? Comestidiversity? Ingestiversity? Why pursue what is clearly a silly exercise? Because biodiversity might be linked more directly to sustainability than ecosystems theory presently holds, depending on what level of the system we explore. Jared Diamond’s indispensible Guns, Germs and Steel (1997, W.W. Norton & Company, NY) points out the pitiful few species successfully domesticated as a function of the total pool of potentially available biodiversity. Fourteen large mammal species domesticated worldwide of a pool of around 150 species. Similar ratios pertain to plants and small animals. Diamond believes inherent characteristics of the organism determine its potential for domestication. Successful domesticants share lifestyle parameters lacking in most species. Absent domestication, humans feed by hunting and gathering. Throughout the Caribbean region, a high diversity (well over 1 species per major island) of large rodents called hutia (see photo below) were eaten nearly to universal extinction—only a few species persist. Hunting and gathering is tough on both the humans who practice it and the organisms it is practiced on. It is hard to think of a more iconic domesticant than the cow, or a more difficult hunting target than its congener the African buffalo (see photo below). The word “sustainable”, from old French sustenir, “to hold”, incorporates the Indo-European root “-ten-“, “stretch”.  Diamond’s contention is that we’re constrained in our ability to domesticate, and therefore in our ability to derive sustenance by that route. He points out that modern attempts to domesticate more species continue, and with little success (ostriches, for example). It may be, however, that we’ve simply become too complacent and are not allocating the resources of time, effort, money and expertise that could overcome the inherent barriers to domestication that characterize much of the natural world. We’ll need multiple tools to deal with the growing human population of the biosphere. Tenidiversity—programs testing and developing further diversity of domesticated organisms—could be useful in that context. It certainly beats simply hounding the decreasing population of those creatures we favor for hunting and gathering. The lesson of the Hutia is clear. Better to domesticate than eradicate!