VANCE LEHMKUHL Posted: Tuesday, April 21, 2015, 12:16 AM
ON EARTH DAY, there are those who get into celebrating the planet and tweaking our lifestyle for the common good, and there are those who don't.
Those who don't sometimes make good points about home recycling bins as mere spit in the ocean of vast industrial pollution, and other times indulge in stubborn ear-plugging accompanied by magical and/or wishful thinking.
To all of us who recognize a scientifically credible threat, the head-in-sand position can be frustrating, and we might roll our eyes at its ridiculousness. Yet, even among the environmentally serious, there's a split between those who acknowledge scientific, quantifiable facts and those who go for, well, ear-plugging accompanied by magical and/or wishful thinking.
Let's talk about almonds! That's the consensus, after all, on California's epic drought and the measures recommended to combat it: Taking shorter showers is nothing compared to the almond industry's massive water use, consuming a full 10 percent of the state's water.
So, almonds are what we should really be talking about, right?
Well, they're a thirsty crop, but nothing like meat and dairy, which consume a full 47 percent of the state's water, according to a Pacific Institute report on California's "Water Footprint." Put another way: Per calorie, beef uses more than twice as much water as almonds. No matter how you slice it, meat is by far the bigger water-waster. How prominently have you seen this mentioned in water-crisis coverage?
It's not just almonds and water - the same skewed focus holds in many sectors. Quinoa production's good-news/bad-news for local economies made headlines, but not the analogous effect of animal agriculture - most starving children, after all, live in countries whose crops go to feed animals eaten by Westerners. And we hear a lot about palm-oil production resulting in the loss of rain forest, while five times as much rain forest is lost to animal agriculture.
Fracking is an eco-problem because it produces methane - almost exactly the same amount nationally as does animal agriculture - while both consuming and polluting water, as does livestock production, only more so. Climate-change discussions center on fossil-fuel alternatives - while animal agriculture is, at the least, a larger factor than all human transportation, and by some credible estimates is larger than all other factors combined.
In view of public-health concerns, parents refusing vaccines for their children are vilified by parents stuffing their children and themselves with meat and dairy. Yet, in addition to meat's proven individual health risks, factory farms' casual daily use of antibiotics is driving us toward a future when antibiotics will be useless - all as 23,000 people annually are dying from new "superbugs."
In almost any comparison of plant foods to animal foods, the latter are both more resource-heavy on the uptake and more Earth-unfriendly on the outflow. The only case-by-case question is whether they're just somewhat worse (as, say, cow's milk is vs. almond milk) or, more often, worse by orders of magnitude.
Thing is, most of us don't like looking at or talking about meat and dairy's origins, and opt for, well, ear-plugging accompanied by magical and/or wishful thinking ("humane slaughter," anyone?) rather than tackling some of the most germane problems.
It's true that Earth-friendly lifestyle changes are a challenge. As mentioned, individual actions seem small compared with the big picture. But eating vegan is one change that trades the least pain (read: inconvenience) for the most gain. And it's a change that can be implemented societywide cheaply and relatively quickly as compared with the schedule for altering our technological infrastructure.
Any of us who take science seriously, whether or not we're ready to drop animal foods right now, should be candidly evaluating and discussing this global polluter and leading climate-change factor.
There is, at least, a certain internal logic to pretending that "global warming" is a vast conspiracy and that we should keep everything as is. But acknowledging the urgency of the threat and then failing to take a clear look at the most efficient, cost-effective alternatives? That's just nuts.
Vance Lehmkuhl is a cartoonist,
writer, musician and 12-year vegan who writes the Daily News'
"V for Veg" column.
Source: http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20150421_Letters__On_Earth_Day_2015__consider_the_almond.html
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