They are faced with throwing a lot of money at a technology that was already on emergency life support as it was. If they want to make themselves look good in the process of serving their own self interest, that's on with me as long as they help solve the problem from here on out.
If you've never read Marvin Harris I'd recommend it to you. The fundamental book to get is "Cultural Materialism" (available on Google books) but I'd recommend starting with "Cannibals and Kings" so that you can appreciate the product of the theory in Cultural Materialism. I recommend no books more highly than these.
Cannibals and Kings is what sparked by interest in energy. This is a letter to the New Yorker where Harris explained his work in response to a critic.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/jun/28/cannibals-and-kings-an-exchange/?pagination=false‘Cannibals and Kings’: An Exchange
June 28, 1979
Marvin Harris, reply by Marshall Sahlins
To the Editors:
According to Marshall Sahlins (NYR, November 23), the “overall view” of Cannibals and Kings is that “culture is business on the scale of history.” He derives this idea from the fact that cultural materialism finds explanations for sociocultural phenomena in the relative costs and benefits of alternative activities. Sahlins’s idée fixe is that costs and benefits are the same as “profit” and “loss” and that they therefore are applicable only to cultures which economize in conformity with the formal categories of capitalism. However the costs and benefits of cultural materialism refer to the more or less efficacious ways of satisfying the need for food, sex, rest, health, and approbation. Although these costs and benefits cannot be measured with precision, rough approximations can easily be obtained in terms of rising or declining death rates, calorie and protein intake, incidence of disease, ratio of labor input to output, energetic balances, amount of infanticide, casualties in war, and many other “etic” and behavioral indices.
These costs and benefits clearly constitute categories that are epistemologically distinct from price market and econometric notions of profit and loss measured in monetary terms. Moreover, they are relevant to much broader sets of concerns, namely the more or less efficient solution of biological, psychological, and ecological problems experienced by all human beings and all cultures. An interest in efficacious solutions to such universally experienced problems is scarcely a trait that is peculiar to members of the bourgeoisie. But anyone who has a lively concern with the basic material conditions of human welfare including Marx and Engels emerges from Sahlins’s analysis as a proponent of “western business mentality.” This is one monopoly that businessmen east or west neither merit nor enjoy.
“To Get Some Meat”
Sahlins does not stop at fantasizing the ideological implications of a science of culture rooted in the analysis of material costs and benefits. He renders an inaccurate account of the manner in which cultural materialists actually apply optimizing principles to the explanation of specific puzzles. From Sahlins’s account, one would suppose that cultural materialism treats the costs and benefits of alternative innovations as if they were timeless options open to any society at any moment in its history. But the corpus of cultural materialist theory is evolutionistic. In Cannibals and Kings I view specific optimizing alternatives as actionable only at a definite moment in a developmental process.
Neglect of this aspect of cultural materialism leads Sahlins to misrepresent the explanation of Aztec cannibalism (first proposed in Harner 1977). The point of my version of this theory according to Sahlins is that in effect the Aztec ate people “to get some meat.” What Sahlins omits is that both Harner and I insist that cannibalism was widely practiced in Mesoamerica before the Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico and that as part of the small-scale ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war it was probably almost universal among chiefdoms in both hemispheres. We contend further that as states developed, they usually reduced or eliminated human sacrifice, substituting animal for human victims, and that they invariably gave up the practice of eating prisoners of war. The explanation for this trend is that it was part of the general tendency for successful expansionist states to adopt ecumenical religions and to incorporate defeated populations into the victor’s political economy as peasants, serfs, or slaves.
However, in the Aztec case, and as far as we know only in the Aztec case, the state itself took over the earlier human sacrifice and cannibalism complex and made it the main focus of its ecclesiastical rituals. As the Aztecs ...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/jun/28/cannibals-and-kings-an-exchange/?pagination=false
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