Vegetarian News Article & A Shout Out

Yet another news article discussing the negative environmental and health consequences of excessive meat consumption.

This article was posted by a friend of mine from college. The lovely Ms. M, mechanical engineer, aspiring architect and all around impressive person, keeps a blog detailing her quest towards making her life more sustainable by setting herself monthly goals. The title of the blog is Virescent - meaning "tending towards green."

I especially enjoy Ms. M's postings on thrifting, as I have long used thrift stores to pacify my consumerist tendencies. (Or maybe I'm just cheap.) It's amazing how often frugality and sustainability overlap. I would argue that in the rare cases where they do not overlap - like with factory farming - either a) there are excessive government subsidies distorting the true cost, and/or b) the costs of resource consumption/environmental damage are not being factored into the cost.

Why the left coast is better. Reason #1

New Belgium Brewery

Not only does this employee-owned company make incredibly delicious beer and power their brewery with wind turbines, they also are the creators of TEAM WONDERBIKE **dramatic music***!!!!

Beautiful quotes shamelessly ripped from TEAMWONDERBIKE.com:

Why I ride...

to be reminded of all the wonderful things about where i live
to help keep Earth cool (in terms of temperature and style)
'cause ExxonMobil already has enough money
to justify shaving my legs
-Jay Richardson

I love high velocity and moments of absolute zen. Floating over rock fields and sticking tight corners. Becoming one with my bike, when the ride is all there is.
-Adrian Matthew

I ride because my troubles can't catch me when I'm on two wheels.
-Jeremy Walker

i ride so i don't forget what it feels like to be young and inspired
-Tanya Victor

One time a mother goose flew after me while I rode bike down by the river in the springtime. Now that's fun! I've never been chased by a mother goose while driving a car.
-Garth Bontrager

To fight war, bad government, global warming, corporate greed and monster trucks.
-Bryan Simpson

When civilization falls, global warming peaks, fossil fuels are gone, and you say "why didn't I just ride my bike?", you will be too out of shape and get eaten by wolves. Ride now to avoid the wolves later.
-Phil Mackey

i ride because... bikes are the answer
-Brian Callahan

The Great Thing About Global Warming

What’s the difference between a drowned American, a drowned Chinese person and a drowned Indian? Absolutely nothing.

This is how I feel about America’s refusal to engage on binding carbon-emission-reduction treaties like Kyoto. As America frets about losing her place as the economic prom queen, she’s ignoring the fact that the vast majority of her citizens, if held under water for an extended period of time, will die. New York is just waiting to fall off its rock. Los Angeles has been itching to go aquatic since God invented earthquakes. (Not that anybody will miss it much. Plus, everyone will have already left for want of drinking water). But this is why global warming is so brilliant. It doesn’t matter where the pollution is coming from. We’re all screwed. Everybody loses.

Always before pollution has been a localized problem. Indeed, the technical definition of pollution is an excessive concentration of any substance within a given volume. Normally, that “volume” is something fairly specific like the water downstream from a paper mill or the air under an overpass. People with choice move upstream or into the suburbs, and since it is the people with choice that make money from the pollution generators and write the laws that govern them, change happens slowly. Only when the people with choice can not reasonably escape is serious action taken.

The EPA’s immensely successful Acid Rain Program is an excellent example of this. East coast cities in the US were suffering because of NO_x and SO_x that were blowing their way from Midwestern and Appalachian cars and coal fired power plants. A regulatory scheme was concocted that sets a cap for acid-rain-causing emissions and requires industry to acquire pollution credits, which they can then trade. SO₂ levels will have dropped almost by half since 1980 and the program was significantly less expensive to operate than originally projected. Excellent indeed, but I doubt the EPA would jump so fast if the Midwest started catching the pollution of wealthy East Coasters.

What I glean from all this is that cap-and-trade trade treaties (like Kyoto) can be used to great effect if the rich parties involved think they have something to gain from signing on. Apparently, America still thinks that she will fare fine in the face of climate change, or at least fare better than other countries with fewer resources. But keeping up with the Joneses becomes a morbid game when the contest is over who will have fewer hundreds-of-thousands of deaths and climate refugees.

With the biggest historical carbon footprint by far, the most luxury emissions and the richest population in the world, America has the most room for improvement and the most power to change. In order to avoid the worst disasters associated with a rapidly warming planet, we need to make big changes and big sacrifices immediately. So I implore you America: keep stalling if you want. Keep bemoaning the inaction of India and China, whose per capita emissions are small fractions of ours. Carry on as you were; you will only be hurting everybody.

Note to Los Angeles

You are big. There is so much of you. I guess you knew that already. I want to hate you. I want you to embody everything I think is wrong with America. The cars. The eternal sprawl. The fuck you I've got mines. Is it the earthquakes that keep you from building up at all? London isn't that tall. The apartment building I'm looking at is as tall as London; it seems to be in one piece.

A beautifully Hollywood couple just walked by me. Maybe I just want a fancy car. Maybe I wouldn't complain at all if I had a Hummer and could afford the gas to power it from my house on the hill to my job that I hate. Maybe it would be worth it if I got to bang the beautiful faux hippie who's underwear I can sort of see.

What is the greatest good? Is human society the apex? Is it worth fighting for? Is it worth destroying our forests so that we can make science and movies? If god never really existed anyway... fuck that. Who really went about their business because of god? A few people, schon. Aber die meisten?

If I really just want to pass on my genetic material... If I can create an entire institution, my children and my brainchild will live on after me, and because my son is a Guggenheim, because my son's father spent four years throwing his mind at the walls and leaders of an institution that is somebody's brainchild, because I have a building, my great grandson is totally going to get laid. A lot.

And if we are social beings, if we gain status by aligning ourselves with a group of people and proving that we are the best at being that group, suddenly it doesn't matter what we believe - only that we believe. Thank goodness there are so many pursuits. Thank goodness I don't have to be nice to everyone.

(written during visit to L.A. - January, 2008)

To All the Coffee Drinkers

Eighty percent of the original forests on this planet have either been destroyed or degraded due to human activity. Twenty percent of the world’s ancient forests have been cleared in the last 50 years (Greenpeace, 2008). That is terrifying. How do we stop it?

In Guatemala, 56% of the population is below the poverty line. Roughly half of all Guatemalans work in the agriculture industry (CIA World Factbook). The minimum wage for agricultural workers in Guatemala is 30 Quetzales per day (As Green As It Gets, 2005). To buy two avocados, a can of black beans, a can of corn and a bottle of water today, I spent 30 Quetzales (My Receipt, 2008).

…Guatemala has one of the most extensive and diverse forest systems in Central America… Most rural Guatemalans have few employment options; they must live off the land that surrounds them making use of whatever resources they can find. Their poverty and relative lack of opportunity mean the country's forests are falling at one of the highest rates in Latin America… Between 1990 and 2005, Guatemala lost 17 percent of its total forest cover and deforestation rates have increased by nearly 13 percent since the close of the 1990s. (Mongabay, 2008)

So what does one do? People have to eat. This is a question that has lingered in the back of my mind throughout a lot of Greenpeace forest campaigns. Yes, it is excellent that McDonalds has stopped buying soybeans from recently deforested land in the Amazon, but what are those farmers doing now? My guess is they are still cutting down trees to plant soybeans.

This conundrum has million of permutations and will clearly require just as many solutions; here is one in the form of a non-profit called As Green As It Gets run by an expatriate, Franklin Vorhees. I listened to Franklin speak at the Rainbow Reading Room, a gringo hang out in Antigua that hosts leftward leaning speakers every Tuesday in order to attract the Chaco-wearing crowd. The following Sunday, I took the bus to nearby San Juan del Obispo to join Franklin, his two NYU grad student volunteers, and a handful of local farmers to plant trees. Fortunately for them, about 30 more farmers showed up than they had been expecting, and they showed up at the crack of dawn. So, when I rolled up at 9 o’clock, there were no more trees to be planted. Instead, I followed Franklin and his posse around to the abodes and workshops of a couple local artisans: a jade cutter (pictured), an iron worker and a furniture maker. I returned to the jade cutters house twice the following week to make a birthday present for Jen.

During his talk at the Reading Rainbow, Franklin explained his philosophy of development: teach a man to feed a man a fish. Basically, he helps sustenance farmers enter the cash economy by planting fewer food crops and more cash crops, like coffee. The more food you grow the more people you can grow. And while it’s relatively easy to plant enough food for people to eat, or at least reproduce, it’s very expensive and time consuming to increase infrastructure to deal with exponentially increasing human population. The idea is to increase the quality of life without increasing the quantity of life.

Through community cooperatives, micro-loans, volunteer work and direct trade networks in the U.S. As Green As It Gets provides the initial capital, knowledge and material resources needed to “encourage environmentally responsible agriculture in Guatemala.” Furthermore, they have helped a number of small businesses grow out of agricultural waste products. For example, there is a woman who makes beauty products out of cocoa butter, beeswax and macadamia oil and a team of women that make purses out of burlap sacks used for coffee beans. Additionally, farmers are encouraged, and provided with seeds, to replant deforested area with trees that can help them provide shade for under story crops, food, and firewood, as well as make a profit and fix nitrogen in the soil.

What about the coffee? By roasting some of it themselves and selling the coffee directly to consumers in the US, As Green As It Gets farmers get more money per pound than big coffee would have paid and more even than Fair Trade requires. ( Read why they opted not to pursue the Fair Trade certificate.) The following season, the farmers are able to pass the wealth on to their neighbors by buying some of their beans from them at higher prices and employing them during the harvesting and sorting process. How much does the coffee cost? $8/lb. plus shipping ($9.80/lb. for 5 lbs shipped to D.C.) which cleanly beats Starbucks' Guatemala Antigua blend at $10.65/lb.

Also check out Franklin's opinion articles: Where's your spare planet? On CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) and Glorifying the Poor.

Spanish homework turns philosophical

...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet

Las Palabras Interrogativas

¿Por qué no es posible cerrar mi cerebro?
Why is it not possible to turn off my brain?

¿Cómo podemos cambiar la infraestructura de la energía?
How can we change the energy infrastructure?

¿A quién necesitamos matar?
Who do we need to kill?

¿Quién es responsable?
Who is responsible?

¿De quien es el mundo? ¿De quien es el agua?
Who's earth is it? Who's water is it?

¿Cuánto cuesta nuestra inacción?
How much does our inaction cost?

¿Cual es el problema de los Estados Unidos?
What is the problem with the United States?

¿Qué hace que nosotros pensamos que vamos a poder vivir así por siempre?
What makes us think that we are going to be able to live like this forever?

¿Dónde esta mi juicio?
Where is my mind/sanity?

Todo depende de a dónde vamos en los próximos diez años.
Everything depends on where we go in the next ten years. (NASA's lead climatologist gives us 10 years to curb emissions at their current level before we reach a tipping point.)

¿Cómo no soy yo mismo?
How am I not myself?

¿De dónde vino la idea que podemos crecer sin fin?
From whence came the idea that we can grow without end?

¿Cuál es la diferencia entre uno Americano, que se ahogó, y uno Chino, que se ahogó? Nada.
What is the difference between a drowned American and a drowned Chinese person? Nothing.

¿Cuándo es aceptable castrar a los hombres?
When is it acceptable to castrate men? (My Spanish teacher, Carolina, came up with two situations 1) too many people 2) violence towards women.)

¿Qué es necesario para una vida buena?
What is necessary for a good life?

¿Para que tenemos los niños?
For what do have children?

¿Cuántas personas son demasiadas personas?
How many people are too many people?

Carolina thinks that the last three questions are inherently related: What is necessary for a good life is to propagate the species and pass on our knowledge to the next generation, but people should stop after 2 or 3 babies. We agreed that all men should have mandatory vasectomies after the second or third child. Or alternatively, since vasectomies are minimally invasive and reversible, all boys should be given vasectomies as soon as they hit puberty and should continue shooting blanks until they turn 26. This would eliminate teenage pregnancy, reduce the number of children by shrinking the window of fertility, and insure that people having babies were older and better educated. And there is a strong correlation between education and lower birth rates. Everybody wins! (My Spanish teacher clearly rocks.)

Basic Update

As of the beginning of June, I am no longer working at Greenpeace. I very much love what Greenpeace is all about, but my grassroots burn-out job had left me feeling a bit... burnt out.

So now I'm busy being a vagabond student of sorts in Guatemala. My sister is living in Guatemala City on a Fullbright scholarship doing forensic anthropology at the FAFG. In 1954 the CIA staged a coup, ousting the communist-leaning, popular and democratically elected president of Guatemala Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. This ended a period of relative stability and plunged the country into 30 years of internal conflict and genocide against the majority, indigenous Mayan population. Jen is helping to excavate mass graves, identify the bodies and return the remains to surviving family members for reburial. Check out her blog: Digging for Truth.

I've been taking one-on-one Spanish classes for four hours a day and living with a host family in Antigua for the past couple weeks. Antigua is considerably safer and considerably more gringoey than Guatemala City, but a close chicken-bus ride away. Antigua was once the capital of Latin America, known for its Spanish colonial architecture. After this I'll hopefully be moving on to Quetzaltenango (The Place of the Quetzal Bird) also known as Xelajú (Under Ten Mountains) or just Xela (pronounced "Shay-la"). Xela is the second biggest city in Guatemala and has a 50% indigenous population. There I will be doing an internship with a non-profit travel agency. Basically, I recruit gringos to go hike volcanoes, and the money is used to build libraries in rural communities.

The goal is to stay here as long as possible (money being the limiting reagent) in order to 1) learn Spanish 2) get a taste for a developing country 3) contemplate things big and small as I figure out the next step in life.

(Fun fact: The long, green tail feathers of the quetzal were once used by Mayan rulers in their head dresses. The feathers were traded almost like currency, and this is where the Guatemalan Quetzal gets its name.)

veganism and environmental justice

Lets all think back to Mr. Keener's AP biology class. Any given ecosystem can support significantly more herbavores than carnivores. That's because 90% of the energy is lost at each tropic level. The majority of the food that an animal eats is used to keep it warm and kicking. Only 10% goes to making flesh. Meaning if you were to eat the grain, rather than eating the cow fed by the grain, you would only need to grow 1/10th of the grain, which would require 1/10th the amount of land. Furthermore, the processing of animal products is extremely energy intensive, requiring refrigeration, rapid transportation, and a shit ton of water to clean slaughter houses.

Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, reports the FAO. This includes 9 percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide. Altogether, that's more than the emissions caused by transportation.
csmonitor

That statistic is a little misleading, because many more people eat meat in the world than drive cars (so you're not off the hook for driving everywhere). In terms of cutting down on your GHGs researches concluded that dietary changes could make more difference than trading in a standard sedan for a more efficient hybrid car, which reduces annual CO2 emissions by roughly one ton a year.
(from Diet, Energy & Climate Change by Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin)

So when the U.N. added it all up, what they found is that eating chickens, pigs, and other animals contributes to "problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity," and that meat-eating is "one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.

And on the issue of global warming, the issue the New York Times deems critical enough to demand that we "change [our] lifestyles" and for which Al Gore and the IPCC received the Nobel peace prize, the United Nations' scientists conclude that eating animals causes 40 percent more global warming than all planes, cars, trucks, and other forms of transport combined, which is why the Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook says that "refusing meat" is "the single most effective thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint" [emphasis in original].

There is a lot of important attention paid to population, and that's a critical issue too, but if we're consuming 11 times as much as people in China and 32 times as much as people in the third world, then it's not just about population; it's also about consumption.
www.alternet.org

From a human rights perspective, it is important to keep in mind that forest loss and land reposition contribute to sometimes violent removal of indigenous populations from their land. Cattle grazing and soy production (something like 80% of which is used to feed livestock) are two of the biggest factors contributing to deforestation in the Amazon. It is also worth pointing out that something like 60% of soy production in the Amazon is funded by three American agrigiants (Cargill, ADM, and I forget the third).

Here's an article about indigenous murders & suicides linked to land shortage and agriculture in Brazil. The main crop they're planting is sugarcane to make Ethanol (Brazil gets most of their fuel from ethanol) but the secondary crop is soy.
ipsnews.net

Livestock now use 30 per cent of the earth's entire land surface, mostly permanent pasture but also including 33 per cent of the global arable land used to producing feed for livestock, the report notes. As forests are cleared to create new pastures, it is a major driver of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 per cent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.

At the same time herds cause wide-scale land degradation, with about 20 per cent of pastures considered degraded through overgrazing, compaction and erosion. This figure is even higher in the drylands where inappropriate policies and inadequate livestock management contribute to advancing desertification.

The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth's increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other things to water pollution from animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray feed crops.
www.un.org