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"Homo Ecophagus brings population back to the fore in the analysis of how the human world has been brought to a point where human extinction is foreseeable. Identifying a "malignant ecopathological process," Warren Hern documents a wide array of human systems activities that are subject to break down if current trends continue"--

Homo Ecophagus by Warren M. Hern is a wide-ranging look at the major problems for the survival of not just the human species, but all other species on Earth due to human activities over the past tens of thousands of years. The title of the book indicates Hern's new name for the human species: The man who devours the ecosystem. Over the course of its evolution, Hern observes, humans have evolved cultures and adaptations that have now become malignant and that the human species, at the global level, has all the major characteristics of a malignant neoplasm converting all plant, animal, organic, and inorganic material into human biomass or its adaptive adjuncts and support systems. Hern contends that this process is incompatible with continued survival of the human species and most other species on the planet, offering a diagnosis and prognosis of the current environmental impasse.

This book provides a comparative study of frontier cattle ranching in two societies on opposite ends of the globe. It is also an environmental history that at the same time centres on both the natural and frontier environments. There are many points at which the western Canadian and northern Australian cattle frontiers evoke comparisons. Most obviously they came to life at about the same time: late 1870s-early 1880s. In both cases corporations were heavy investors and utilized an open range system in which tens of thousands of cattle roamed over thousands of square acres. Ranchers shared similar problems such as predators, disease, and weather, as well as markets. Ultimately, a nearly indistinguishable "country" culture developed in these geographically disparate and distant lands, which is still apparent today. Many similarities were in one way or another a reflection of frontier environmental conditions that is, conditions associated with the very "newness" of society. They included a lack of infrastructure (ie. fences), institutions (ie. police), and population (ie. consumers). However, the ranching people in these two societies had their differences too. In the end, the natural environment pushed agricultural development in these two regions along very different paths. ; Government of Alberta, Alberta Media Fund ; Government of Canada, Canada Book Fund ; Canada Council for the Arts ; Yes

Once on a plane to New Orleans I chanced to half overhear a conversation between two passengers who shared the same row of seats with me. Somewhere between wakefulness and drowsiness, my ear caught a telltale accent that betrayed one of my seatmates as an Orleanian as they chatted animatedly about the Crescent City, Louisiana, and the ways that both diverged from the rest of the country. The native noted reverently the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, he remarked grandly on the extraordinary cuisine, he waxed pridefully about the city as the birthplace of jazz, and he spoke warmly about the manifold ethnic origins of his fellow Louisianians. Then, as if to fortify his contention that he hailed from a truly unusual place, he pointedly observed that Louisiana was the only state in the nation whose legal system rested upon the Napoleonic Code, even as he confessed to an uncertainty about why that difference existed or what it meant precisely.

As the population grows without restraint, human activities steadily destroy the global ecosystem. The human species, through the instrument of culture, has become the dominant force of planetary ecological change. Moreover, the human species now displays all four major characteristics of a malignant process: rapid, uncontrolled growth; invasion & destruction of adjacent normal tissues (ecosystems); metastasis (distant colonization); & dedifferentiation (loss of distinctiveness in individual components). The difference between humans & most forms of cancer is that humans think, & can decide not to be a cancer. 8 Figures, 153 References. Adapted from the source document.