“The same thing happened to us. As long as our own coyotes—war, famine, disease—kept us in line, things proceeded smoothly enough. But then we eliminated the coyotes without making compensations in our population or in our governmental and economic systems. We ate ourselves out of house and home, and now we’re paying the penalty.”
“But does it always have to be this way, going from feast to famine and back again?”
“Not if we learn from our mistakes. The trouble is that we seldom do. If we could learn to plan our future instead of just letting it happen to us we might be able to muddle through. That’s why the idea of the Monastery and the colony on Epsilon Eridani interest me—it sounds as though someone is trying hard to set up a planned society. I tried to get people to start one, before
