Thursday, November 12, 2015
Rethinking
Our Diet to Transform the World
Not only does livestock play a major role in
global warming, it is also the leading cause of resource consumption and
environmental degradation destroying the planet today. The question is, why are
so many people and organizations ignoring this devastating reality?
(Image: Cowspiracy)
The following is an excerpt from
the forthcoming book, The
Sustainability Secret: Rethinking Our Diet to Transform the World (Earth
Aware Editions), written by Keegan Kuhn and Kip Andersen (with an
introduction by Chris Hedges) and based on many of the ideas and insights
contained in the 2014 documentary film, Cowspiracy, now available on Netflix.
My name’s Kip. I had a stereotypical U.S.
American childhood. My mom was a teacher. My dad was in the military, and I
have one sister. I played all the sports growing up, but I especially loved the
outdoors and camping. I remember the first time I visited the redwood groves in
northern California. I was about eight years old. I had to crane my neck as far
back as it would go to look up at the ancient, colossal trees stretching into
the sky, their enormous trunks like cliff faces made of wood. Around me grew
enormous ferns that came up to my shoulders. I didn’t have the words at the
time, but in the presence of those trees my eight-year-old self felt awe,
reverence, and an odd little ache in my belly that had to do with their
majestic beauty and the fact that I was standing next to a living being that
had already lived hundreds or thousands of years. I know now that that wonder
and awe wasn’t simply for the redwood trees, but for the astonishing planet
from which they grew. I left that redwood grove changed, and I never forgot the
realization that our planet is a miracle and a gift, to us and to all the
creatures who live on it. I became a young man who believed in the goodness all
around me. Life was simple. Not a care in the world.
And then Al Gore showed up. Like so many of
us, I saw the film An Inconvenient Truth, which is about the
impacts of global warming, and it scared the emojis out of me. In the film,
Gore describes how our Earth is in peril. Climate change stands to affect all
life on this planet. Monster storms, raging wildfires, record droughts, melting
ice caps, acidification of the oceans, even entire countries going
underwater—that could all be caused by the burden of human beings on the Earth.
Scientists are warning that unless we take drastic measures to correct our
environmental footprint, our time on this planet may be limited to only fifty
more years.
I wanted to do everything I could to help. I
made up my mind right then and there to change how I lived and to do whatever I
possibly could to find a way for all of us to live together, in balance with
the planet, sustainably, forever.
I started to do all the things Al told us to
do. I became an OCE: Obsessive Compulsive Environmentalist. I separated the
trash and recycling. I composted, changed all the incandescent light bulbs to
compact fluorescents, took short showers, turned the water off when I brushed
my teeth, turned off lights when leaving a room, and rode my bike instead of
driving everywhere. I was doing everything I thought I could to help the
planet. But as the years went by, it seemed as if things were getting worse. I
had to wonder—with all the continuing ecological crises facing the planet, even
if every single one of us adopted these conservation habits, was this really
going to be enough to save the world?
Then, with one friend’s Facebook post,
everything changed. The post sent me to a report online (pdf), published by the
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), stating that raising
livestock produces more greenhouse gases than the combined exhaust of the
entire transportation sector. This means that the meat and dairy industries
produce more greenhouse gases than all cars, trucks, trains, boats, and planes
combined. Worldwide. That’s 13 percent for the global transportation sector compared
to 18 percent for livestock. Cows and other animals produce a substantial
amount of methane from their digestive process. Methane gas from livestock has
a global warming potential eighty-six times greater than carbon dioxide from
vehicles. This makes it a vastly more destructive gas than carbon dioxide on a twenty-year
time frame.
Here I’d been riding my bike everywhere to
help reduce emissions! It turns out there’s a lot more to climate change than
just fossil fuels. I started doing more research. The UN, along with other
agencies, reported that not only does livestock play a major role in global
warming, it is also the leading cause of resource consumption and environmental
degradation destroying the planet today.
The more research I did, the more I found
that the situation is actually worse than I had thought.
In 2009, Robert Goodland and Jeff
Anhang, two environmental advisors to the World Bank Group, released an analysis on human-related greenhouse gases (pdf),
concluding that animal agriculture was responsible not for 18 percent as the
FAO stated, but was actually responsible for 51 percent of all greenhouse
gases. Fifty-one percent. Yet all we hear about is burning fossil fuels.
This difference in the figures is due to
factors that the FAO didn’t take into account, such as the massive loss of
carbon sinks from clear-cutting rainforests for grazing in addition to the
respiration and waste produced by animals. Goodland and Anhang used the
Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the global standard for measuring emissions set by the
World Resources Institute and World Business Council on Sustainable
Development, to reach the figure of 51 percent. According to their
calculations, animal agriculture is the number one contributor to human-caused
climate change.
How is it possible I wasn’t aware of this? I
prided myself on being up-to-date on environmental issues. I thought this
information would be plastered everywhere in the environmental community. Why
didn’t the world’s largest environmental groups, who are supposed to be saving
our planet, have this as their main focus? I went to the biggest organizations’
websites—350.org, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, the Climate Reality Project,
Rainforest Action Network, Amazon Watch—and was shocked to see they had
virtually nothing on animal agriculture. Why would they not have this
information on there? What was going on?
I had to find out. I teamed up with fellow
filmmaker Keegan Kuhn to see if we could get to the bottom of this.
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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