Effluence about affluence.
I've been on a diet for just over two weeks. I didn't mention it from the start, as I didn't want this to become like Bridget Jones' Diary. But I am pleased to report that I have lost 10 pounds. I need to lose the same again. It's been fairly easy, as I have been at home preparing my meals most of the time.

The diet I am following could roughly be described as `Atkins'. I cannot be 100 per cent sure, as I have never read the Atkins book, but I know that its essence is the restriction of carbohydrate. This inevitably means an increase in the proportion of one's nutrition that is composed of protein and fat. This worries many people, as they have been conditioned to think that `fat makes you fat'. I'm not convinced. I have been reading a book called `Protein Power' and it advances ideas that are close to those of the late Dr Atkins. That is to say, that the gain in weight observed in western nations is caused by excess carbohydrate consumption, which leads to the body producing more insulin, the result of which is that the body switches its metabolic action to fat storage.

This appears to be borne out by the observation that people in industrialised nations are eating less fat now than 30 years ago, yet obesity has become a far bigger problem in the mean time. To the authors of Protein Power, this is not a surprise. They observe that mankind only invented agriculture relatively recently - about 8,000 years ago. Before that, humans lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and that is the one that our bodies are still conditioned to support; living on meat, fish, nuts and some small amount of fruit, like berries. What is not natural therefore, is the large-scale growing of fields of rice, corn and wheat. It takes some getting used to as an idea, as from the modern day perspective, it's an ancient practice.

So I'm supposed to be a hunter-gatherer? For most of my life, I've been a gatherer-gatherer-gatherer (try to visualise Cookie Monster from Sesame Street). According to some, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were `The Original Affluent Society'. At least that's the view of `Eco Action' (www.eco-action.org). It's a site devoted to `direct action' with a focus on woolly-minded `knit your own yoghurt' philosophies.

In this section of the site:

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

the old hunter-gatherer society is praised as being affluent because "all the people's material wants were easily satisfied". It goes on to say "There are two possible courses to affluence ... producing much or desiring little". The first method is the foundation of economics, the study of how man uses his limited resources to satisfy his unlimited wants. So far, so good, but then the author dives off the deep end into the sort of mystical nonsense that would make Shirley Maclaine proud by introducing the "Zen road to affluence". The latter tells us that "human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate".

It's a shock to learn that every child who convinces himself that he didn't really want the toy he didn't get for his birthday is actually a Zen philosopher in the making!

I suggest that you skim read the article and get a sense of the patronising `Eco tourist' view of the poorest in our world. It's all very well to suggest that such people can be happy by not pursuing material wealth, but there are two practical objections. The first is that a poor H-G society that never developed the wealth to create any self-defence force could in the past (and perhaps still now) fall victim to slavery. The second is that the generation of material wealth leads to a demand for better health-care to both extend the duration of life and improve its quality.

Beyond those practical points, I find the whole thing utterly condescending. "The Noble-Savage was living on renewable energy before we did. Isn't that splendid Tarquin? I must put that in my thesis."

Eco-warriors? ... Wankers.