Perfect Ape to Perfect Idiot?

About the Book

Neil, a 76 year old, grassroots wildlife biologist, put this book together over the last 10 years with his spouse Erica. It's central question is, how could Homo sapiens have managed to dominate every habitable space on earth, and now to have reached this moment of self-destructive wealth and power?

Many of us are in great confusion, as if lost in the woods. Where are we all going and why? The gap between rich and poor; growing global pollution; deteriorating ecosystems; increasing species extinctions; massive war machines ruining millions of lives; rapid global heating caused by human activities - the list goes on.

This book provides a biological understanding of what happened and why. Its biological orientation allows the reader to choose a more realistic, more honest re-evaluation of her or his life.

Part I details our rapid shift away from mainly rural lifestyles when most people lived and worked close to Nature, fully aware that it supported them. Today more than 80% of people live urbanely, isolated and ignorant of the global Nature-system supporting their lifestyles by the use of vast amounts of artificial energy.

Part II looks at our deep human origins and why we are the only species lacking a built-in Evolutionary Stable Strategy for sustainability.

Part III suggests how and why the mainly Celt-led wealthy nations are leading the rest of the world towards a tragically unsustainable Western lifestyle.

Part IV covers our health history from African origins through plagues, science's defeat of many germ-born diseases and the West's modern degenerative disease epidemic.

Part V alludes to the Global Commons destruction leading inevitably to a global crash, already evident in some crowded African nations today.

The author hopes the book will be a "seed" to motive people in the Western nations to cool their prodigal lifestyle, for the sake of both present and future generation's physical and mental well being and for the salvation of Earth's rapidly collapsing ecosystems.

About the Author

Neil van Nostrand has always loved domestic animals, and wildlife and Nature. Growing up on the family farm in southern Ontario during the Second World War, he had ample opportunity to study all three. Adult life took him to the Ontario Agriculture College, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture (agronomy), then a Master of Science in Wildlife Management. In 1958 he moved his small family to Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley. For 25 years he did management-research on the Province's wild furbearing animals for the then Department of Lands and Forests. Specializing in beavers, he learned valuable insights into population dynamics and the behaviour of mammals under stress in different habitats. These insights apply just as well to our increasingly crowded planet.

Following retirement in 1985, he and his present spouse, Erica Garrett, pursued biodynamic organic farming for nine years, raising livestock, winter storage vegetables and many fruits including apples. In 2006 the Atlantic Canadian Organic Network (ACORN) presented Neil with the Gerrit Loo Award "in recognition of his contribution to organic agriculture."

Neil is still attached to the land, and to his three sons and one daughter, and to their children. His days are filled with walking, running, hunting, fur-trapping, gardening and tending three bee hives. And a Little River Duck Tolling Retriever is the couple's constant companion.