I generally consider myself an optimist (a cynical, realistic, pragmatic optimist) but there is one subject that I’m a pessimist about. That subject is the environment. I’m not sure which of the multiple environmental disasters is going to strike first and I’m pessimistic about our ability to address them before it’s too late, if it’s not too late already. Will it be peak oil, peak coal or peak metals? Will it be collapse of the fisheries? How about rainforest deforestation? What about plain old global warming? I think it’s a race to see which environmental disaster will strike first.
The reason I think that the big environmental issues won’t be addressed is because of human nature. People generally tend to focus on the short-term rather than the long-term, the personal rather than the political, the concrete over the abstract and the simple over the complex. Environmental issues tend to fall into the long-term, abstract, complex category. It’s not that there isn’t a lot of people that care about the environment – there are, but it is definitely difficult to have much of a personal impact when the problem is so widespread and the society is configured in a way to encourage consumption and waste. It means you’re swimming upstream most of the time. However, I do think that our lifestyle will have to change – it’s not sustainable. As other countries with large populations develop rapidly, there’s going to be more and more competition for natural resource like oil. I think it’s going to take a crisis to get these issues addressed.
Is everything hopeless? Well, it isn’t but it’s frustrating when you feel that there’s not much you can do and whatever you do is just a drop in the bucket. But I don’t think that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. So here’s the challenge to myself – my husband and I are going to go completely vegetarian (not vegan) for at least two days each week. Our decision is being heavily influenced by reading a lot recently about our disfunctional food system, like Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. (For a sample of Michael Pollan’s work, you can read this New York Times magazine piece from last month.) Pollan’s thesis is that Americans are eating less and less real food and this is responsible for a lot of problems, not only the epidemic of obesity but also environmental damage.
The American diet is starting to become a bigger topic of conversation lately, but usually not in the context of global warming. However, our diet is a big contributor. Here’s Ezra Klein on the subject:
According to a 2006 United Nations report, livestock accounts for 18 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Some of meat’s contribution to climate change is intuitive. It’s more energy efficient to grow grain and feed it to people than it is to grow grain and turn it into feed that we give to calves until they become adults that we then slaughter to feed to people. Some of the contribution is gross. “Manure lagoons,” for instance, is the oddly evocative name for the acres of animal excrement that sit in the sun steaming nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. And some of it would make Bart Simpson chuckle. Cow gas — interestingly, it’s mainly burps, not farts — is a real player.
But the result isn’t funny at all: Two researchers at the University of Chicago estimated that switching to a vegan diet would have a bigger impact than trading in your gas guzzler for a Prius (PDF). A study out of Carnegie Mellon University found that the average American would do less for the planet by switching to a totally local diet than by going vegetarian one day a week. That prompted Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to recommend that people give up meat one day a week to take pressure off the atmosphere. The response was quick and vicious. “How convenient for him,” was the inexplicable reply from a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. “He’s a vegetarian.”
Scientific American has also written on the subject. Here’s the bottom line:
Pound for pound, beef production generates greenhouse gases that contribute more than 13 times as much to global warming as do the gases emitted from producing chicken. For potatoes, the multiplier is 57. Beef consumption is rising rapidly, both as population increases and as people eat more meat. Producing the annual beef diet of the average American emits as much greenhouse gas as a car driven more than 1,800 miles.
I like meat as much as everyone else, but I feel I have to do something. My contribution will be small and I hope to discover great new recipes. My challenge begins this week. I’ll let everyone know how it’s going.