Cake, have a slice. It is a BIRTHDAY PARTY!! (hour 2)

CAKE

So yeah, it’s the second hour of a birthday celebration episode of  Box of Chocolates. Enjoy.

CAKE

And back to this lengthy speech (imaginary) it’s actually 2 or 3 speeches but whatever, they’re all supposed to flow together as one.

CAKE

Of course, you understand that there’s nothing special about mice in this regard. The same will happen with crickets or trout or badgers or sparrows. But I fear that many people bridle at the idea that humans might be included in this list. Because as individuals we’re able to govern our reproductive capacities, they imagine our growth as a species should be unresponsive to the mere availability of food.

CAKE

Luckily for the point I’m trying to make here, I have considerable data showing that, as a species, we’re as responsive as any other to the availability of food—three million years of data, in fact. For all but the last ten thousand years of that period, the human species was a very minor member of the world ecosystem. Imagine it—three million years and the human race did not overrun the earth! There was some growth, of course, through simple migration from continent to continent, but this growth was proceeding at a glacial rate. It’s estimated that the human population at the beginning of the Neolithic was around ten million—TEN MILLION, if you can imagine that?! After three million years!

CAKE

Then, very suddenly, things began to change. And the change was that the people of one culture, in one corner of the world, developed a peculiar form of agriculture that made food available to people in unprecedented quantities. Following this, in this corner of the world, the population doubled in a scant three thousand years. It doubled again, this time in only two thousand years. In an eye blink of time one the geologic scale, the human population jumped from ten million to fifty million—probably eighty percent of them being practitioners of totalitarian agriculture: member of our culture, East and West.

The water in the cauldron was getting warm, and signs of distress were beginning to appear.

CAKE

 

 

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