Adopting a minimalistic diet for quality and longevity of life or the earth appropriating minimalistic dieting for us as population control, the minimalistic diet may be a solution to more than personal longevity.

The body is highly efficient about its own sustainability if given half a chance. Cannibalization of malignant or aged tissues in the body happens at a much greater rate when core resources are not being expended on the costly task of digestion. It takes a lot of energy to cultivate qi from food.

Ecologically sustainable development studies indicate that a decrease in available food or an increase in population results in higher infant mortality rates, lower fertility and shorter average life spans.

Several ecologically sustainable development studies performed with insects and mammals clearly show a marked relationship between density-dependant competition and the life history traits exhibited by members of the population.

What this means is that small changes to the amount of available food in a population tends to decrease over population both quickly and relatively painlessly. Evenly enacted reductions in food supply do not result in great famines. That only happens when one tenth of the world uses a vast majority of the world’s viable food sources.

In practice, decreased population through reduced food supply manifests rather quickly as a decrease in fertility, as well as increases in infant mortality and decreases in the longevity of weaker members of a population.

Basically, those that are ‘less fit’ in the Darwinian sense are the ones that drop off. Where the immediate population control of decreased fertility and the rate of live births leaves off survival of the fittest picks up, as food supply reduction increases.

In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael one is lead through the relating of humanity’s more modern preoccupation with consuming at the rate of self- and planet-desctrution. As related telepathically by an ape, the volunteer student learns how these desires to control nature and using environmentally unsustainable practices have come from a modern turn of events where a new culture rose up with the agricultural revolution that began about 10,000 years ago.

In Ishmael, culture is defined as ‘people who are enacting a story’, and the ‘taker culture’ is the first human culture blind to the advantages of any and all forms of diversity. The takers got rolling when modern agriculture began. Immediately humans were thrilled about the possibility of affecting increased yields. They became so enamored with this control and easy living that they made themselves the gods in their culture story.

In this type of culture story we are the special and central figures of the earth stage; the earth is made just to suit our needs and comfort. The worst part of this failing and viral culture is that they believed their culture and its take on humankind’s position on the earth that we’ve become captives to an ever diminishing return on our unsustainable methods and treatment of the environment.

The taker culture and modern agriculture produced a boom in human population density that has yet to slow. We’ve amped up the earth’s organic food production in unsustainable ways, from the high meat content of our diets when the same organic material that’s fed to cattle could feed several times many people as the resulting burger, to pesticides and the lack of biodiversity, to feed a swelling population that resulted from the greedy ‘taker culture’.

The tragic thing is that humans feel captive now within this padded supply and demand problem, when if we simply took stock of our daily interactions with our environments and took back the reigns from corporations we’d have an entirely different cultural story singing of renewal, harmony and cultivation of energy enough for every member of the earth’s community.

will not be able to support if culture –the story of what we tell ourselves is our relationship with our environment– doesn’t change.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact, in which they are the lords of the world, they will act as the lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.