COMFORTABLY UNAWARE
Oh hey.
ORIGINALLY POSTED IN 2013
Last year Bill McKibben wrote an article for Rolling Stone, ”Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” and it was indeed a terrifying article full of scary statistics related to global warming. It was also widely discussed on Twitter and elsewhere. Many now agree that, as Chris Hayes wrote in Twilight of the Elites, climate change is “likely the single largest governing challenge that human beings have faced in the history of life on the planet.” Why isn’t everyone freaking out and why isn’t more happening right now to curb climate change? Do we feel powerless as individuals and assume it’s up to the government to stop big companies from doing all the damage? Are the problems just so big and scary that no one wants to think about them? Do people still assume carbon emissions from cars and trucks and other fuel are the main culprit, and so if they buy a hybrid car they can rest easy they’re doing their part? Except then there’s this fun fact:
“RAISING ANIMALS FOR FOOD GENERATES MORE GREENHOUSE GASES THAN ALL THE CARS AND TRUCKS IN THE WORLD COMBINED.” - United Nations, 2006.
This quote came from a United Nations report. Not from Greenpeace, not from PETA, and not from Mercy for Animals. The United Nations. And most people are surprised by that quote, or don’t really believe it. I repeat it often.
If asked, most (rational) people will agree that they’re concerned about climate change. They’re happy to spend a little more for the “green” products on the market. They/we feel good buying the bags made from recycled material, using energy efficient light bulbs, and even driving electric cars. If you were renovating your bathroom, you might feel good installing one of those water saving toilets. So, each time you flush, you use a gallon or so less of water. And you feel good about that gallon of water saved per flush. And then you go off to meet your friends at a bar for a few locally brewed beers, and order a burger. But what if on the menu next to the burger there was fine print stating, “FYI: 1,300 gallons of water were consumed to produce this quarter pound of beef, and on top of that a shit load of methane and CO2 was released into the atmosphere, and oh also fifty-five square feet of rainforest was used up for it too. Enjoy!”
I pulled the “1,300 gallons of water” statistic from a report in The Wall Street Journal, hardly a bastion of liberal progressivism. And everything else quoted hereinafter with a source not otherwise specified is from a book by Dr. Richard Oppenlander called Comfortably Unaware: What We Choose to Eat Is Killing Us and Our Planet. I can’t recommend this book more strongly. It’s concise, compelling, and critically important. And it’s also thoroughly footnoted with his sources. I also hope that since I’m recommending it so strongly, Dr. Oppenlander won’t mind my quoting so liberally from his work.
So. From his book, below are some things to consider.
“We collectively raise, feed, water, kill, and eat over 65 billion animals each year for food. That number again: 65 billion, which is ten times as many people as we have on the entire earth.”
That’s kind of staggering to think about. We already have a population density problem and here we’re adding ten times the number of farmed animals to the mix. So how is this related to climate change? The bullet points below (all taken from pages 11 and 12 of Dr. Oppenlander’s book) explain:
Global warming (“climate change”) is caused by the production of methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide, not by carbon dioxide alone.
Global warming is also caused by destroying trees and vegetation that regulate carbon dioxide and oxygen.
Global warming is just one small component of global depletion.
Methane is 23 times as powerful as carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide is 310 times as powerful as carbon dioxide for their global warming potential.
40 percent of methane and 65 percent of nitrous oxide produced by all human activities are from livestock.
Rainforests are the lungs of our planet, producing over 20 percent of the earth’s oxygen.
Rainforests take millions of tons of CO2 out of our atmosphere and store it in the soil.
Seventy percent of our rainforests have been slashed and burned in order to raise livestock.
Fifty-five percent of our fresh water is being given to livestock.
Over 70 percent of the grain the United States is fed to livestock.
It takes 10 to 20 gallons of water to produce one pound of vegetables, fruit, soybeans, or grain.
It takes over 5,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat.
One pound of vegetables, fruit, soybeans, or grain is healthier for you to eat than one pound of meat.
During every one second of time, just in the United States alone, 89,000 pounds of excrement is produced by the chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, and cows raised for us to kill and eat.
One acre of land, if used for vegetables, grain, and/or legumes, produces ten to fifteen times more protein than if devoted to meat production.
Over 30 percent of all usable total land mass on earth is used by livestock.
Over 80 percent of all arable (agricultural) land in the United States is used for or by livestock.
Six million children in the world will die from starvation this year.
1.1 billion people in the world are considered malnourished or suffering from hunger.
There you go. Information like the above is, I think, probably what led James Cameron (that guy who produced the movie Titanic) to say in a video online, “You can’t be an environmentalist, you can’t be an ocean steward without truly walking the walk and you can’t walk the walk in the world of the future, the world ahead of us, the world of our children, not eating a plant-based diet.”
I think he’s right. And I know that the idea of going “vegan” is totally scary to a lot of people, or offensive to people who eat out a lot or are in the restaurant business, and it can also be extra challenging depending on where you live and your resources. That’s why I like that James Cameron used the words “plant based” and it’s why I use those words a lot myself. Eat mostly plants. Ideally, eat all plants. But if that’s too scary of difficult, just work on eating less meat and animal products. Then even less. And still less. It’s good for your health too. And fish? Yes maybe cut way back on that too. When I see people I know instagramming giant platters of sushi they’re about to eat, I want to put the following in the comments section:
“An ongoing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study found that an alarming 100 percent of freshwater fish samples from the United States contain mercury, and a large percentage of certain fish caught from the ocean contain heavy metals and/or polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are highly toxic cancer-causing chemicals.”
Add to that the general over-fishing and ocean depletion issue, which is a whole other story. Those Red Lobster commercials on TV promoting the all-you-can-eat shrimp deals really upset me because, “for every one pound of shrimp sold and consumed, more than twenty pounds of other sea creatures are caught and killed in the process.” If only they’d add that to the menu in fine (or not so fine) print. What then? Would people still eat all they can?
I’ve always thought: if only people knew. Since I’m writing this on Earth Day, I’m making no (or little) mention of the health consequences of so much animal consumption, and about the totally false information being put out by the meat and dairy industries to make people think beef is “what’s for dinner” or we should drink milk because “it does a body good.” Dr. Oppenlander’s book addresses some of these issues as well. Most striking is the part where he quotes Marion Nestle from her book Food Politics in which she discusses her time working for the U.S. Public Health Service in Washington D.C. managing the editorial production of “The Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health.” She states, “My first day on the job, I was given the rules: No matter what the research indicated, the report could not recommend ‘eat less meat’ … or the report will never be published.” So yeah, there you go. Translation: fuck all government funded research and reports because they’re all influenced by the industry lobbyists. Or, you know, maybe just think twice about any and all reports, and consider who is really behind them, and from where they receive their funding.
Keeping this environment-focused means I’m also not elaborating on the atrocities of factory farming from the perspective of its victims. Again, if only more people knew. If kids in school knew what happened to those cows before they turned into that burger, or how the cute pigs lived and died to become pork in their hotdogs, I don’t think they would want to eat them. If you’ve ever implored people you care about (or anyone at all) to eat less meat, you may have heard things like “but we’ve been eating meat for centuries!” Ugh. Yes, we have. That doesn’t make it right.
“Whether it’s the structure of the solar system or the morality of slavery, entire societies can achieve unanimity around deeply flawed beliefs.” - Chris Hayes Twilight of the Elites
Yes, they can.
p.s. I know I’ll get an earful from people advocating the “small farm” way of eating meat (vs. factory farm) and insisting that it’s totally cool to go to the local Brooklyn “farm-to-table” restaurant with only “sustainable” meat and fish on the menu. While I think that’s certainly preferable, and I really love and support the whole “farm-to-table” movement, I still wish there weren’t so many animals on that table.
p.p.s. That being said, I do buy things for my dog at the greenmarket, like bones from those small farmers. So if you see me there, please don’t yell at me. Dogs and cats have different systems than we do, they’re hunters with appropriate digestion systems for consuming raw meat. (If you’re curious what I feed my dog and cat, see this post.)
p.p.p.s. If you have ten minutes, please watch this speech. You don’t even have to watch, you can just listen. You can floss your teeth, file your nails, clean your desk, whatever, at the same time. It’s a man named Philip Wollen, and he’s speaking at a debate about whether animals should be on or off the table. It’s short, it’s moving, and I hope, inspiring.
Happy Earth Day.
“Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.” - Albert Einstein