“I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant’s brilliant non-fiction about humankind’s tragically ambivalent relationship with the natural world. Now he brings his abundant literary gifts to a debut novel set in a very real borderland in which human beings are themselves treated like animals. The Jaguar’s Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it.” WorldShouldHumansChildrenLongRealCultureNaturalHuman BeingsAnimalFictionMoralNovelBraveBrilliantTreatedStorytellingPreservesComplexityHumankindNatural WorldNon FictionLamentVisceralDebutAmbivalentJaguars Author:John Burnham Schwartz
“Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono-cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain.” WayDoeEndsReasonProblemCultureAnimalTechnologyGrowingConflictDiversityEatingPlantEnvironmentalVariousChainsComplexityGreat MenEfficiencyFeedingCropsIngenuityFood ChainProdigiousEnvironmental ProblemsMono Book:The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World
“When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity"-to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to-he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.” NeedsLittlesHas BeensDifferentProblemAnimalResultsPracticeWillingDiseaseTreatedBehaveComplexityFarmsChemicalsFarmersEfficiencyFeedingMachineryCrowdedFertilizerSanitationLivestockSymbiosisDifferent AnimalsMonoculture Author:Michael Pollan
“Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals.” MenAbleLanguageImaginationAbilityAnimalCommunicationCapacityOrganizationSizeAbstractComplexityLives Of Others Author:Kenneth E. Boulding
“A second possible approach to general systems theory is through the arrangement of theoretical systems and constructs in a hierarchy of complexity, roughly corresponding to the complexity of the "individuals" of the various empirical fields... leading towards a "system of systems." [...] I suggest below a possible arrangement of "levels" of theoretical discourse...(vi) [...] the "animal" level, characterized by increased mobility, teleological behavior and self-awareness...” SelfIndividualAnimalLevelsAwarenessFieldsTheoryBehaviorApproachSelf AwarenessVariousComplexityArrangementsDiscourseConstructsHierarchyTheoreticalCorrespondingMobilitySystems Theory Author:Kenneth E. Boulding
“Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.” HumansEnoughSocialAnimalBrainGroupsHandleComplexityArrangementsPrimates Author:Malcolm Gladwell