Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
ceremonial affirmation of the symbolic aspects of the hunt … All hunting will be done
only with hand weapons. There will be no machines, no guns carried even for emer-
gencies, no ambulances, cameras or meat trucks, no lackeys to set up camp, no dogs
or other domestic animals. It will be truly hazardous.
The hunting is a uniquely male activity, though women will spend as much time in the
wilderness as men, participating in gathering expeditions, carrying meat back to the city,
and butchering it (so perhaps there will be lackeys after all). Shepard's object is to:
confront the division between man and the rest of nature, between ourselves as an-
imals and humans, not by the destruction of nature or by a dream of some return to the
past, but by creating a new civilization … Nature would be separated from the works
but not the lives of men, for men would live in both worlds.
Shepard, in contrast to Lovelock, does not view humans as a pariah life form to be ban-
ished from Gaia; instead the society he depicts is a schizoid one, where mankind's con-
tact with animal nature is preserved by cleaving human nature into two spheres. The sep-
aration of 'work' and 'life', a rift that has appeared and widened as humanity has urban-
ized, becomes a geographical absolute. Shepard's enthusiasm for hunting is grounded in
almost pathological hatred for 'the barnyard' and all things connected with farming, which
he views as an 'ecological disease'. The 12,000 year history of co-evolution between man-
kind and the animal and vegetable kingdoms that created 1,000 breeds of cattle and 5,000
varieties of potato, he views as part of the process of 'industrialization of the earth's land
and sea surface' which now subjects nature to a programme of chemical warfare and genet-
ic manipulation. Better to let this 'debauched ecology' reach a confined apotheosis in the
factory farming of microscopic organisms, and fence off the rest of nature as a place where
humans (male ones) can exercise the vestiges of their prelapsarian hunting instincts.
Part of the instinctual legacy from our Pleistocene past that Shepard so values is our taste
for meat, and one suspects that his global game park would encounter the same problems
with poachers as its aristocratic and colonial predecessors - particularly since his educa-
tion system is focussed around teaching youngsters the skills of hunting. Shepard rejects
laboratory meat culture in favour of microbial stews only because he considers that it is not
technologically feasible 'because growth-control processes soon deteriorate when only part
of an organism is cultured'. But with recent advances in stem cell technology this seems
less likely to be a barrier. If the controllers of Shepard's high rise settlements want to keep
their part-time hunters satisfied they would be wise, like Lovelock, to include lab-cultured
flesh in the diet.
The idea of growing meat in laboratory conditions has been around for some time. In
1932, Winston Churchill remarked '50 years hence…[we] shall escape the absurdity of
