Horizon

What a delightful rant! Plainly, Netz is an idiot, and if Luttwak's description of the book's content is accurate — easy to believe given the subtitle — it deserves a good thumping.

It's especially silly to identify ranchers/cowboys with "Euro-American men", given that fully one third of cowboys in the post-Civil War heyday were African Americans. I presume that their share of the market wasn't proportionate to their numbers, but since according to Netz the whole point is participation in "a human gain, and an animal deprivation," we can assume that the African-American over-representation was a function of sadistic glee at branding. No doubt any author able to solicit such a laudatory blurb from Noam Chomsky would figure out some way to weasel that back on its head, though.

Seriously, barbed wire is a wonderful thing. One of the main causes of deforestation in the Sahel is wooden fencing, which rots quickly and must be replaced around every three years. If coupled with a healthy supply of propane burners, a few boatloads of aid-subsidized barbed wire could help hold back the Sahara.

I had two complaints with the rant. It didn't make clear why barbed wire is necessary to contain cattle; I had to search to find out how cows don't behave like other animals when it comes to fences. And I can see that in the Amazon there is no practical alternative. Mainly, though, I thought the shoelace analogy was stupid. The whole point of barbed wire is that it hurts.

Generally, I'm fine with barbed wire. We've still got a lot of cows in Vermont, although here I would think electric fences are practical. But once the small family farm gives up the game, the barbed wire doesn't get removed. Where I live is thousands of acres of abandoned, reforested farmland, and there is barbed wire all over the place.

That's an interesting point about the Sahara. Can you explain how barbed wired and propane burners solve the problem?

Can you explain how barbed wired and propane burners solve the problem?

To the extent that the problem is deforestation — and in my uninformed opinion that's probably a major factor in desertification — it makes sense to analyze why forests are getting cut down in remote areas where logging is unprofitable. Most construction is either cinderblock or wattle-and-daub, neither one of which is wood-intensive.

Apparently, the culprits are charcoal for cooking fires and fencing to protect crops. Fencing in the area is incredibly wood-intensive, as solid, almost-woven fences are the only things that will keep livestock out. This is laid directly on the ground, and gets consumed by termites within about three years. One suggestion I've seen advanced is to attempt to convert the societies from fenced-fields/open-range to fenced-livestock. Barbed wire is, in my opinion, a better solution that doesn't require a society to change its land tenure system.

The propane burners (along with the propane) is as a replacement for charcoal. Any tree — including species with high commercial value or endangered species — is likely to be harvested for charcoal. Last year I made a pistol loading mallet out of Mpingu wood, which cost me $30 for a 2x2x12 length. Semi-rare Mpingu wood is also the material clarinet bells are made from, but its main commercial use is ... charcoal!

Of course, getting barbed wire shipped to the boondocks of the West African Sahel is a pipe dream, and the whole propane burner idea is even less feasible.

I searched the online article by Luttwak, and I am unable to find the "shoelace" analogy. I did find a lot of intelligent, ironic comments, based on actual experience in the business. (BTW, this is the same Luttwak who wrote a savage condemnation of feedlot practices a few years ago.)

I'm not sure what the quotation from Luttwak's article is supposed to prove, except that ENL is a nasty, evil man. It doesn't do a good job of proving it.

It makes an interesting sandwich: Stupid blog posting about an intelligent review of an incredibly ignorant book.