Climate change, soy beans, and bacon

A vegetarian diet requires about one-fourth the energy of a regular red meat diet. That side of bacon is heating up the planet. How do we know? Some people have been paying attention.

In the 1950s, Dr. James Lovelock designed the electron capture device that allowed Rachel Carson to collect the data showing that DDT had contaminated bird’s eggs and mother’s milk. He uncovered the effects of CFCs and alerted the planet to the hole in the ozone. Not bad for a life’s work, but he pressed on. In the 1970s, he discovered the exponential CO2 build-up in the atmosphere and wrote the Gaia Hypothesis, changing the way biologists look at the natural world. Lovelock brought common decency, urgency, and good science to the discussion about our environmental future.

In his latest book, Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock suggests that the added heat absorption on earth due to melting ice and forest loss could spin the climate catastrophe out of control faster than we imagine. He points out that even if we do all the right things now, it would take the earth 1000 years to recover. He believes the northern boreal forests will dry and parish, inducing more climate warming. He suggests the equatorial zones will grow uninhabitable and surviving humans could be migrating toward the poles.

Paul Ehrlich and Thomas Malthus will eventually be proven correct in their fundamental calculations regarding the effects of exponential human population growth and consumption. The so-called “green revolution” – which was really a cheap-oil slam-dance on the planet’s soils – held off the worst of Malthus’ predictions of mass starvation, but the basic math was correct. We’re adding a billion people every dozen or so years on a fixed planet. Hmmm. We might well be reminded that this is not a disaster to come; it is a disaster that is here, now, for most of the world.

About 9 million people die each year from malnutrition and dehydration. That’s 25,000 per day starving to death, most of them children, all of them poor. That’s equivalent to 60-70 jumbo jets dropping out of the sky every day, killing everyone on board. Eight 9/11s. Every day. Those who claim Malthus was wrong, that there is no mass starvation, spin the story that industrial agriculture will defeat nature and mathematics. Excuse my poor English, but the chirpy industrialists are wrong and, with each passing day, getting wronger.

About the pigs

In 2005 I was invited to Argentina by the Wichi Indians and Greenpeace. I witnessed bulldozers moving like panzer divisions across the landscape, clearing and burning the forest with astounding efficiency, creating plantations for Monsanto and Cargill to grow soya feed for European and Chinese pigs. We watched night and day as the fires lit up the horizon, soil blew across the sky, and ash fell on our tortillas.

With the courage of the Wichi, standing up to protect their homeland, the daring of the Argentina Greenpeace team, and support from celebrities and politicians, we managed to save 18,000 hectares as a homeland for the Wichi people, the poorest of the poor by modern economic standards, but people who actually have a sustainable civilization as long as they have a forest to live in. However, every year, in Argentina alone, over 400,000 hectares of forest disappears under the blades of bulldozers. A million acres per year literally up in smoke. It’s worse in Brazil. This is the great plan of industrial agriculture. The share price of Monsanto is thriving.

While we waited for the dim-witted, frat-boy, cokehead U.S. president and his northern affairs staffer, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to notice that hydrocarbon civilization is baking the planet, our communities dutifully send their bright-eyed boys and girls to die in the deserts and keep the oil flowing in the right direction at the right price. Is this the apogee of the great democratic dream?

Still, I don’t get depressed when I read predictions such as those from Lovelock. I get energized. I thank Gaia that someone has the courage to speak up. To future generations I want to say, “I’m sorry,” but more precisely I want to say: “Not everyone bought the lie. A lot of us stood up. A lot of us dedicated our lives to averting these disasters perpetrated by greed, ignorance, and denial. Some of us passed on the first-class ride and stood our ground in the neighbourhoods, in the newsrooms, in the academic journals, in the forests, on the oceans.”

I want future generations to know this: Many from our generation never sold you out. We witnessed the truth, kept our eyes open, and did our best to warn our bumbling, myopic, spin-doctored civilization.

I don’t believe in technological miracles that will trick nature into submission, but I do believe in human-made miracles and ordinary heroes.

This was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Ecology . Feel free to respond, or trackback.