[jedrider]

I picked up this book about 9 months ago and finally started reading it as it is a daunting bit of book in it's encyclopedic summary of man's ecological predicament. I don't expect to finish it for quite some time as it appears to read like a wine cellar can be drunk -- one sip, one bottle, one chapter at a time, and let it rest a bit. It's quite good, even though it starts out incredibly pedantic and textbook like.

His main POV is summarized by his Vicious Circle Principle, which I've nicknamed as the 'Can't have one's cake and eat it, too, principle'. Makes me long to also read 'Overshoot' by Catton, which I never got around to even opening. However, all the new data that Dilworth presents is thoroughly fascinating in it's own right, which dissolves away the pedantry easily enough.

http://www.amazon.com/Too-Smart-our-Goo ... B004EHZY4W

The paperback edition is quite well made if the hardcover edition is financially out of reach of many.

[rollin]

I much prefer Patrick F. McManus's "Sequential Vortex" rule. If you want to go fishing but have projects to do, the project will snowball and other things will get added until there is no time to go fishing. So you go fishing instead, forget the project.
If humanity had followed that rule, we would not be in the fix we are in today.

[joewp]

Jed, read Overshoot ASAP. It really opens your mind to a new paradigm.

[jedrider]

Jed, read Overshoot ASAP. It really opens your mind to a new paradigm.

You mean "Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change by William R. Catton (Jun 1, 1982)"

Yes, that is the best summary, but Dilworth gives one the drawn-out ecological analysis so that you know that no stone was left unturned. Basically, mankind has been eating/destroying species/habitat from the beginning and some things never change. [Edit. I guess we're an 'invasive species'.]

[joewp]

[I guess we're an 'invasive species'.]

We can be any part of an ecosystem. For millennium we were members of climax communities, but our current dominate culture seems to have been modeled after yeast.