Thread: Frugal Living
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Old 06-21-07, 04:08 PM
  #206  
CommuterRun
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Originally Posted by TimJ
The hunter/gatherer lifestyle is long dead.
Not entirely.

Some remote tribes still do a certain amount of subsistence hunting. For instance, the Inuit, right here in North America, still do whaling and sealing.

In addition to, and much the same as, me being car-lite, in this house we are also grocery store-lite. Years ago me going fishing began being refered to as me going to "Papa's Grocery Store." Now that term refers to any time I'm going in the woods, to the river or on the bay. In fact it has gotten to the point where if I come home with an empty cooler, the wife looks at me a little sideways. Like, "Where did you really go?"

But like I said, this only makes me grocery store-lite. In order to completely replace the grocery store and us live only on subsistence hunting and fishing, I would have to quit my job. Hunting and fishing would take up more than the 40 hours/week or more than I currently put in at work. Which is why I look a little askance at suggestions that hunter/gatherer societies have/had more leisure time than is currently enjoyed by most people.

However, to feed the entire world's population subsistence hunting/gathering would not be possible nor desirable. Everything would be wiped out in short order, leading to massive famine. Current farming and livestock production methods, which provide maximum yield for known technologies, is the only way to feed the maximum number of people, and even that does not and cannot reach eveybody.

Last edited by CommuterRun; 06-21-07 at 04:17 PM.
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