Firstly, that was a great post! Sorry to see it get lost in the void - the same has happened with many of my other posts. Perhaps you can repost it after a bit.

I'll surely check out the book. It's unrealistic for humans to go back our primitive origins entirely, but we can definitely cut back vastly on our voracious consumption of resources. Particularly the USA. Vaclav Smil's incredible book "Harvesting the Biosphere" estimates that if there were 1.5 billion (I could be wrong! just my recollection) Americans, the world ecosystem will shut shop. But this is another tangent entirely. :)