Rachele: Thanks for the response. I gave away all my Quinn books to others who I thought should read them, and thus have never been able to go back and re-read and re-assess. I imagine I would be much more critical at this point though, having come much further down the path of thought that I felt like he never took me far enough down. Do you have any book recommendations for me? It makes me really excited to meet (if you can call talking on a computer meeting) someone else for whom “The Dispossessed” was important. Hurray!

Ishmael was a good one too. Enchanting and thought-provoking for sure. But I reread it recently, and he keeps harping on about how feeding the hungry results in higher populations, and that is just patently untrue. Feed the hungry and people start realizing they no longer have the motivations to keep breeding too many children – to work and bring in income, to tend the land, to take care of them when they get old, and to overcompensate for the children that will not make it, which in some places is inevitable. So he makes a lot of great points, but in the end the gorilla skews the facts and comes off as deeply biased in his push for a return to nature. It has left me wondering where we fit into the ecosystem, when some of the laws that govern it seem to lose our hold on us when we reach a certain technological threshold and whether or not that is a positive thing.

I’ll have to check into some of those other authors; I’ve been dying for something I can sink my teeth into properly.