I Was Wrong About Cows

There's a handful of people who keep cows in their backyard here in northeast ohio. It doesn't work that well. The cows turn their pasture into a mudhole. It's a pretty depressing scene to witness. It's too wet here to keep certain breeds of cows confined in a small area--they're too heavy.

It turns out though that cows are actually pretty hardy, resilient creatures that are capable of living in the wild and foraging for themselves. In fact, in certain areas they become a "problem" because they breed out of "control". There are woodland cows, too. So obviously the forest and cows can coexist.

The idea that cows are a significant polluter and cause global warming is fucking retarded. There used to be millions of bison on the prairies in the US and millions of other mega-fauna herbivores in Europe.

The conundrum I've wrestled with for the past 10 years or so is: would nature, just left to her own devices, produce more food for people? I have the nagging suspicion that it would. That immediately leads to the question "what the fuck are we doing?" Our civilization seems insane and retarded, especially now with the corona bullshit. Even without the 'rona there's always some stupid con or lie to keep people running on the hamster wheel and pissing their life away on nonsense projects or to keep them trapped in a box of lies.

Anyway, if you start to think through how that "nature let go" would work, you can really see very basic elements of how our current system really works, and why it is the way it is.

People are afraid to starve to death so they want to hoard food and over time, people learned to preserve food in various ways. Other animals hoard food too. Some birds, like chickadees cache food all over in the woods so they can more readily survive winter. If you have a very productive system of agriculture where food is always available "from the tap" so to speak, then food storage becomes less and less important. If you had 10 cows milling around on your property all the time, you wouldn't really need a freezer full of steaks.

The thing that the food storage system, and the controlled agricultural system gives people is information and apparent predictability. It allows people to fit their needs to a toy model representation of reality, like a number. "I have 4 barrels of wheat." The unit of "1 acre" of land approximates the amount of wheat that's required to make bread for a year or so for a family.

People can't see the overall productivity of nature--because they're kind of stupid, now, compared to the way humans were thousands of years ago. If they could see the overall productivity of nature and knew how it would produce over the winter, they wouldn't need the agricultural system so much.

The other problem is people would cheat and hoard food anyway, even if it made no sense, and they'd undermine the nature-agriculture system. We're all sort of prisoners in a kind of hellish system because of the worst people.