Kudos to Ecuador for their innovative plan to protect the rainforest and reduce greenhouse gas emission! Instead of giving in to greed and exploit the oil underneath the Amazon, Ecuador chooses to leave it alone. As reported in an article in the Science Daily:

An innovative proposal by the Ecuadorian government to protect an untouched, oil rich region of Amazon rainforest is a precedent-setting and potentially economically viable approach, says a team of environmental researchers from the University of Maryland, the World Resources Institute and Save America’s Forests.

The Ecuadorian proposal, known as the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, would protect a large area of pristine Amazon rainforest, by leaving untouched nearly one billion barrels of oil that lies beneath the Yasuní National Park in Ecuador.

To fund more eco-projects, the Ecuadorian government plans to sell certificates for the unreleased carbon. Their approach is applauded by scientists in the field.

“This is a really novel approach that could fund a lot of rainforest protection,” said Clinton Jenkins, a research scientist in the University of Maryland’s department of biology. “It’s also an innovative way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions.”

“Ecuador´s revolutionary initiative is the first major government-led effort to buck this disturbing trend,” Matt Finer of Save America’s Forests and Remi Moncel with the Climate and Energy Program of the World Resources Institute.

Way to go, Ecuador! Now, how do we get those certificates?

An interesting read by Steve Boyan, Ph.D. The original article can be found at EarthSave.org. Instead of me trying to paraphrase it and lose all the good stuff in between, the article is posted below for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.

How Our Food Choices can Help Save the Environment
by Steve Boyan, PhD

The Union of Concerned Scientists says there are two things people can do to most help the environment. The first is to drive a fuel-efficient automobile (that means, not an SUV or a truck) and live near where we work. The second is to not eat beef.

I’m going to go one step farther than UCS: I suggest that you refuse to eat any animal or animal product produced on a factory farm. And I’m going to tell you why.

In 1990, when I first read that 10 people could be fed with the grain that you would feed a cow that would be turned into food for one person, I was impressed. But I was not moved. The reason: If 10 people would be fed because I gave up meat, I’d give it up. But, I thought, if I give up meat, it won’t have that impact: it probably won’t have any impact on anything at all, except me.

I was wrong. If I had known that for every pound of beef I did not eat, I would save anywhere from 2,500 to 5,000 gallons of water, I would have been moved. It’s a good idea to save water; we are depleting our underground aquifers faster than we are replenishing them. The largest one, the Ogallala, which covers a vast part of the country from the Midwest to the mountain states, is being depleted by 13 trillion gallons a year. It is going to run out. Northwest Texas is already dry. They can’t get any water from their wells.

John Robbins points out that in the 1980s and 1990s, to conserve water, most of us went to low-flow showerheads. If you take a daily seven-minute shower, he says, and you have a 2-gallon-per-minute low-flow showerhead, you use about 100 gallons of water per week, or 5,200 gallons of water per year. If you had used the old-fashioned 3-gallon-per-minute showerhead, I calculate you would have used 7,644 gallons of water per year. So by going low flow, you saved almost 2,500 gallons of water per year. Wonderful. But by giving up one pound of beef that year, you’d save maybe double that. You’d save more water than you would by not showering at all for six months! And that’s just one of the environmental impacts you’d have.

The modern factory farming system is a prolific consumer of fossil fuel and a prolific producer of poisonous wastes. Up to 100,000 animals are herded together on huge feedlots. These animals do not graze on grass, as picture books tell us; they can’t graze at all. Feedlots are crowded, filthy, stinking places with open sewers, unpaved roads and choking air. The animals would not survive at all but for the fact that they are fed huge amounts of antibiotics. It is now conceded that the antibiotics fed to cattle are the main cause of antibiotic resistance in people, as the bacteria constantly in these environments evolve to survive them. The cattle are fed prodigious quantities of corn. At a feedlot of a mere 37,000 cows, 25 tons of corn are dumped every hour. It takes 1.2 gallons of oil to make the fertilizer used for each bushel of that corn. Before a cow is slaughtered, she will eat 25 pounds of corn a day; by the time she is slaughtered she will weigh more than 1,200 pounds. In her lifetime she will have consumed, in effect, 284 gallons of oil. Today’s factory-raised cow is not a solar-powered ruminant but another fossil fuel machine.

And she will produce waste. Livestock now produces 130 times the amount of waste that people do. This waste is untreated and unsanitary. It bubbles with chemicals and diseasebearing organisms. It overpowers nature’s ability to clean it up. It’s poisoning rivers, killing fish and getting into human drinking water. 65% of California’s population is threatened by pollution in drinking water just from dairy cow manure. It isn’t just cows that produce this waste. Factory-raised hogs produce four times the waste in North Carolina as the 6.5 million people of that state do. Even the oceans are polluted: 7,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico are a dead zone.

There are more environmental impacts. Cattle don’t spend their entire lives in feedlots. When they are young, they graze. Where do they graze? Well, more than two-thirds of the land area of the mountain states are used for grazing. 70% of the lands in western national forests are grazed; 90% of Bureau of Land Management land is grazed. These are public lands, lands that President Clinton didn’t even try to save. These lands are trampled by the cattle, compacting the soil. When it rains, the land doesn’t absorb the water. Instead, it runs off, taking away topsoil, forming deep gullies and damaging streambeds. The government protects the cattle by killing off any creature that might threaten the livestock. They poison, trap, snare, den, shoot or gun down the wildlife. Denning, by the way, is the practice by federal agents of pouring kerosene into the dens of animals and setting them on fire, burning the young animals alive in their nests. According to Robbins, agents kill badgers, black bear, bobcats, coyotes, gray fox, red fox, mountain lions, opossums, raccoons, skunks, beavers, porcupines, prairie dogs, blackbirds, cattle egrets and starlings using these methods. These activities take place on public lands, which were created in large part to protect the environment! Your tax dollars subsidize these activities.

I’m not done yet. We in the United States do not get all of our beef from the West. We import more than 200 million pounds of beef from Central America alone. Every second of every day, one football field of tropical rainforest is destroyed in order to produce 257 hamburgers. Every time you destroy rainforest land, you destroy rich plant and animal life, varieties of life we don’t even understand, and forms of which may provide the medicines we need to cure disease. Rainforests supply us with oxygen. They moderate our climates. When rainforests are destroyed, it’s only a matter of time before the land becomes desertified. Rainforests absorb some of the carbon dioxide we are spewing into the atmosphere.

We humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 25% compared with any other period when humans were on this planet. Most of that has taken place in the last 50 years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consisting of some of the best scientists in the world, says global warming is a fact. If uncontrolled, we will have ecosystem collapses, crop failures, weather disasters, coastal flooding, the spreading of previously controlled diseases, the death of coral reefs and new insect pests. Some of these things are starting to happen already. Coral reefs are dying. Insect pests are spreading out of their range and killing off new kinds of trees. Weather patterns are changing. Some places have had extreme weather events, with billions of dollars of losses. Some island people have had to abandon their islands because rising seas have salinated their underground aquifers.

Carbon dioxide is largely produced by the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, and especially our use of inefficient vehicles for transportation. But not often mentioned is the fossil fuel used to raise farm animals. As I said earlier, a factory cow is a fossil fuel machine, not a solar-powered ruminant whose wastes fertilize the fields to produce more grass for the cow to eat. When you eat beans, for example, you use 1/27 the amount of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of energy as you do when you eat beef. You get the same food energy producing only 4% of the carbon dioxide that a person eating beef does. Another fact we don’t talk about: cattle produce almost one fifth of global methane emissions. Cattle fart. Big time. Their gas is methane. Methane is actually 24 times as potent as carbon dioxide in causing climate chaos.

There’s another major environmental consequence of our factory system of animal raising: that’s the matter of species extinctions. It is true that species die off all the time. Normally, the Earth has lost 10 to 25 species per year. But in the billions of years of life on this Earth, we have had five periods of major extinctions; the last one was 67 million years ago, when, possibly because of a meteor colliding with the Earth, we lost the dinosaurs. But now there’s a sixth extinction, and it is not caused by a meteor, but by human beings. And this is a big one; we are losing several thousand species per year, and maybe tens of thousands. We think of mammals that are endangered, and 25% of mammalian species are endangered. But what’s much more endangered, or wiped out already, are the plants, including varieties of plankton, fungi, bacteria and insects, that are fundamental to all so-called higher forms of life. All life will unravel if these creatures are wiped out.

The driving force behind all these extinctions is the destruction of wildlife habitat, especially the rainforests. The driving force behind the destruction of the rainforests is livestock grazing. The leading cause of species in the United States being threatened or eliminated is livestock grazing. A 1997 study of endangered species in the southwestern United States by the Fish and Wildlife Service found that half the species studied were threatened by cattle ranching.

You and I cannot change all this. We are not going to be able to get a bill through Congress outlawing factory farming. Yet EarthSave as an organization believes we can still have a dramatic effect: We believe that you can protect your health and protect the environment one bite at a time.

Let’s review what I’ve said here: By not eating beef– and other farm animals as well–you:

• save massive amounts of water – 3,000 to 5,000 gallons of water for every pound of beef you avoid,
• avoid polluting our streams and rivers better than any other single recycling effort you do,
• avoid the destruction of topsoil,
• avoid the destruction of tropical forest,
• avoid the production of carbon dioxide. (Your average car produces 3 kg/day of CO2. To clear rainforest to produce beef for one hamburger produces 75 kg of CO2. Eating one pound of hamburger does the same damage as driving your car for more than three weeks);
• reduce the amount of methane gas produced. (I imagine the next bumper sticker: stop farts, don’t eat beef);
• reduce the destruction of wildlife habitat, and
• help to save endangered species.

That’s a pretty good day’s work, for just what you don’t put in your mouth.

Steve Boyan PhD recently retired from his post as a political science professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has published two books on environmental issues

I found this article on the Worldwatch Institute’s website . It’s too good not to share it.

Is Meat Sustainable?

by The Editors on June 15, 2004

M E A T

Now, It’s Not Personal!
But like it or not, meat-eating is becoming a problem for everyone on the planet.

Ask people where they’d rank meat-eating as an issue of concern to the general public, and most might be surprised to hear you suggest that it’s an issue at all. Whether you eat meat or not (or how much) is a private matter, they might say. Maybe it has some implications for your heart, especially if you’re overweight. But it’s not one of the high-profile public issues you’d expect presidential candidates or senators to be debating-not up there with terrorism, the economy, the war, or “the environment.”

Even if you’re one of the few who recognize meateating as having significant environmental implications, those implications may seem relatively small. Yes, there have been those reports of tropical forest being cut down to accommodate cattle ranchers, and native grassland being destroyed by grazing. But at least until recently, few environmentalists have suggested that meat-eating belongs on the same scale of importance as the kinds of issues that have energized Amazon Watch, or Conservation International, or Greenpeace. Yet, as environmental science has advanced, it has become apparent that the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future-deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities, and the spread of disease.

How did such a seemingly small matter of individual consumption move so rapidly from the margins of discussion about sustainability to the center? To begin with, per-capita meat consumption has more than doubled in the past half-century, even as global population has continued to increase. As a result, the overall demand for meat has increased five-fold. That, in turn, has put escalating pressure on the availability of water, land, feed, fertilizer, fuel, waste disposal capacity, and most of the other limited resources of the planet.

To provide an overview of just how central a challenge this once marginal issue has become, we decided to survey the relevance of meat-eating to each of the major categories of environmental impact that have conventionally been regarded as critical to the sustainability of civilization. A brief summary observation for each category is accompanied by quotes from a range of prominent observers, some of whom offer suggestions about how this difficult subject-not everyone who likes pork chops or ribs is going to switch to tofu without a fight-can be addressed.

Deforestation was the first major type of environmental damage caused by the rise of civilization. Large swaths of forest were cleared for agriculture, which included domestication of both edible plants and animals. Farm animals take much more land than crops do to produce a given amount of food energy, but that didn’t really matter over the 10 thousand years or so when there was always more land to be found or seized. In 1990, however, the World Hunger Program at Brown University calculated that recent world harvests, if equitably distributed with no diversion of grain to feeding livestock, could provide a vegetarian diet to 6 billion people, whereas a meat-rich diet like that of people in the wealthier nations could support only 2.6 billion. In other words, with a present population over 6 billion, that would mean we are already into deficit consumption of land, with the deficit being made up by hauling more fish from the oceans, which are in turn being rapidly fished out. In the near term, the only way to feed all the world’s people, if we continue to eat meat at the same rate or if the population continues to grow as projected, is to clear more forest. From now on, the question of whether we get our protein from animals or plants has direct implications for how much more of the world’s remaining forest we have to raze.

In Central America, 40 percent of all the rainforests have been cleared or burned down in the last 40 years, mostly for cattle pasture to feed the export market-often for U.S. beef burgers…. Meat is too expensive for the poor in these beef-exporting countries, yet in some cases cattle have ousted highly productive traditional agriculture.
-John Revington in World Rainforest Report

The Center for International Forestry Research reports that rapid growth in the sales of Brazilian beef has led to accelerated destruction of the Amazon rainforest. “In a nutshell, cattle ranchers are making mincemeat out of Brazil’s Amazon rainforests,” says the Center’s director-general, David Kaimowitz.
-Environmental News Service

Grassland destruction followed, as herds of domesticated animals were expanded and the environments on which wild animals such as bison and antelope had thrived were trampled and replanted with monoculture grass for large-scale cattle grazing. In a review of Richard Manning’s 1995 book Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer James Risser observes: “Many experience anguish at the wreckage of clear-cut mixed-tree forest, destined to be replaced by a single-species tree farm. Few realize, says Manning, that a waving field of golden wheat is the same thing- a crop monoculture inhabiting what once was a rich and diverse but now ‘clear-cut’ grassland.”

Grassland covers more land area than any other ecosystem in North America; no other system has suffered such a massive loss of life.
-Richard Manning in Grassland

Another solution [to grassland depletion in Africa] would be a shift from cattle grazing toward game ranching. Antelopes, unlike cattle, are adapted to semi-arid lands. They do not need to trek daily to waterholes and so cause less trampling and soil compaction…. Antelope dung comes in the form of small, dry pellets, which retain their nitrogen and efficiently fertilize the soil. Cows, in contrast, produce large, flat, wet droppings, which heat up and quickly lose much of their nitrogen (in the form of ammonia) to the atmosphere…. An experimental game ranch in Kenya has been a great economic success while simultaneously restoring the range.
-Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and Gretchen C. Daily in The Stork & The Plow

Fresh water, like land, seemed inexhaustible for most of the first 10 millennia of civilization. So, it didn’t seem to matter how much a cow drank. But a few years ago, water experts calculated that we humans are now taking half the available fresh water on the planet-leaving the other half to be divided among a million or more species. Since we depend on many of those species for our own survival (they provide all the food we eat and oxygen we breathe, among other services), that hogging of water poses a dilemma. If we break it down, species by species, we find that the heaviest water use is by the animals we raise for meat. One of the easiest ways to reduce demand for water is to reduce the amount of meat we eat.

The standard diet of a person in the United States requires 4,200 gallons of water per day (for animals’ drinking water, irrigation of crops, processing, washing, cooking, etc.). A person on a vegan diet requires only 300 gallons a day.
-Richard H. Schwartz in Judaism and Vegetarianism

A report from the International Water Management Institute, noting that 840 million of the world’s people remain undernourished, recommends finding ways to produce more food using less water. The report notes that it takes 550 liters of water to produce enough flour for one loaf of bread in developing countries…but up to 7,000 liters of water to produce 100 grams of beef.
-UN Commission on Sustainable Development, “Water-More Nutrition Per Drop,” 2004

Let’s say you take a shower every day…and your showers average seven minutes…and the flow rate through your shower head is 2 gallons per minute…. You would use, at that rate, [5,110] gallons of water to shower every day for a year. When you compare that figure, [5,110] gallons of water, to the amount the Water Education Foundation calculates is used in the production of every pound of California beef (2,464 gallons),you realize something extraordinary. In California today, you may save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you would by not showering for six entire months.
-John Robbins in The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and the World

Waste disposal, like water supply, seemed to have no practical limitations. There were always new places to dump, and for centuries most of what was dumped either conveniently decomposed or disappeared from sight. Just as you didn’t worry about how much water a cow drank, you didn’t worry about how much it excreted. But today, the waste from our gargantuan factory farms overwhelms the absorptive capacity of the planet. Rivers carrying livestock waste are dumping so much excess nitrogen into bays and gulfs that large areas of the marine world are dying (see Environmental Intelligence, “Ocean Dead Zones Multiplying,” p. 10). The easiest way to reduce the amount of excrement flowing down the Mississippi and killing the Gulf of Mexico is to eat less meat, thereby reducing the size of the herds upstream in Iowa or Missouri.

Giant livestock farms, which can house hundreds of thousands of pigs, chickens, or cows, produce vast amounts of waste. In fact, in the United States, these “factory farms” generate more than 130 times the amount of waste that people do.
-Natural Resources Defense Council

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, livestock waste has polluted more than 27,000 miles of rivers and contaminated groundwater in dozens of states.
-Natural Resources Defense Council

Nutrients in animal waste cause algal blooms, which use up oxygen in the water, contributing to a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico where there’s not enough oxygen to support aquatic life. The dead zone stretched over 7,700 square miles during the summer of 1999.
-Natural Resources Defense Council

Energy consumption, until very recently, may have seemed to most of us to be an issue for refrigerators, but not for the meat and milk inside. But as we give more attention to life-cycle analysis of the things we buy, it becomes apparent that the journey that steak made to get to your refrigerator consumed staggering amounts of energy along the way. We can begin the cycle with growing the grain to feed the cattle, which requires a heavy input of petroleum- based agricultural chemicals. There’s the fuel required to transport the cattle to slaughter, and thence to market. Today, much of the world’s meat is hauled thousands of miles. And then, after being refrigerated, it has to be cooked.

It takes the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of grain-fed beef in the United States. Some of the energy was used in the feedlot, or in transportation and cold storage, but most of it went to fertilizing the feed grain used to grow the modern steer or cow…. To provide the yearly average beef consumption of an American family of four requires over 260 gallons of fossil fuel.
-”Meat Equals War,” web-site of Earth Save, Humboldt, California

It takes, on average, 28 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of meat protein for human consumption, [whereas] it takes only 3.3 calories of fossil- fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of protein from grain for human consumption.
-David Pimentel, Cornell University

The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grain represents a new form of human evil, with consequences possibly far greater and longer lasting than any past wrongdoing inflicted by men against their fellow human beings. Today, more than 70 percent of the grain produced in the United States is fed to livestock, much of it to cattle.
-Jeremy Rifkin, Los Angeles Times, 27 May 2002

Feeding grain to animals is highly inefficient, and an absurd use of resources.
-Vaclav Smil, University of Manitoba

Global warming is driven by energy consumption, to the extent that the principal energy sources are carbon-rich fuels that, when burned, emit carbon dioxide or other planet-blanketing gases. As noted above, the production and delivery of meat helps drive up the use of such fuels. But livestock also emit global-warming gases directly, as a by- product of digestion. Cattle send a significant amount of methane, a potent global-warming gas, into the air. The environmental group Earth Save recommends a major reduction in the world’s cattle population, which currently numbers about 1.3 billion.

One ton of methane, the chief agricultural greenhouse gas, has the global warming potential of 23 tons of carbon dioxide. A dairy cow produces about 75 kilograms of methane a year, equivalent to over 1.5 [metric] tons of carbon dioxide. The cow, of course, is only doing what comes naturally. But people are inclined to forget, it seems, that farming is an industry. We cleared the land, sowed the pasture, bred the stock, and so on. It’s a human business, not a natural one. We’re pretty good at it, which is why atmospheric concentrations of methane increased by 150 percent over the past 250 years, while carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 30 percent.
-Pete Hodgson, New Zealand Minister for Energy, Science, and Fisheries

There is a strong link between human diet and methane emissions from livestock…. As beef consumption rises or falls, the number of livestock will, in general, also rise or fall, as will the related methane emissions. Latin America has the highest regional emissions per capita, due primarily to large cattle populations in the beefexporting countries (notably Brazil and Argentina).
-United Nations Environment Programme, Unit on Climate Change

Belching, flatulent livestock emit 16 percent of the world’s annual production of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
-Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg in State of the World 2004

Fight Global Warming With Your Knife and Fork
-Article by Elysa Hammond in Sustainablebusiness.com

Food productivity of farmland, as noted above, is gradually falling behind population growth. When Paul Ehrlich warned three decades ago that “hundreds of millions” of people would starve, he turned out to have overstated the case-for now. (Only tens of millions starved.) The green revolution, an infusion of fertilizers and mass-production techniques, increased crop yields and bought us time. That, combined with more complete utilization of arable land through intensified irrigation and fertilization, enabled us to more or less keep pace with population growth for another generation. A little additional gain-but only a little-may come from genetic engineering. Short of stabilizing population (which will take another halfcentury), only one major option remains: to cut back sharply on meat consumption, because conversion of grazing land to food crops will increase the amount of food produced. (Some argue that grazing can use land that is useless for crops, and in these areas live- stock may continue to have a role, but large areas of arable land are now given to cattle to roam and ruin.)

Let’s say we have 20,000 kcal [kilocalories] of corn. Assume that we feed it to cattle (as we do with about 70 percent of the grain produced in the U.S.)…. The cow will produce about 2,000 kcal of usable energy from that 20,000 kcal of corn (assuming 10 percent efficiency; the efficiency is actually somewhat higher than that, but 10 percent is easy to work with and illustrates the point reasonably). That 2,000 kcal of beef would support one person for a day, assuming a 2,000 kcal per day diet, which is common in the U.S. If instead people ate the 20,000 kcal of corn directly, instead of passing it through the cow, we would be able to support more people for that given unit of land being farmed; not necessarily 10 times more, because people are not as efficient as cattle at using corn energy, but considerably more than the one that could be supported if the corn were passed through the cow first!
[So], we could support more people on Earth for a given area of land farmed if we ate lower on the food chain-if we ate primary producers instead of eating herbivores (corn instead of beef). Or, we could support the same number of people as at present, but with less land degradation because we wouldn’t need to have so much land in production….
-Patricia Muir, Oregon State University

While 56 million acres of U.S. land are producing hay for livestock, only 4 million acres are producing vegetables for human consumption.
-U.S. Department of Commerce, Census of Agriculture

Communicable Disease doesn’t travel from one place to another all by itself; it has to hitchhike-whether in dirty water, the infected blood of rats or insects, or contaminated meat. Globalization has vastly increased the mobility of all of these media, and one consequence is that outbreaks which in past centuries might have been contained within a single village or country until they died out are now quickly spread around the globe. When a case of mad cow disease was detected in the United States in 2004, it was discovered that parts of that single cow had been distributed to about a dozen different states. The problem of containing outbreaks in a system of global distribution is exacerbated by the use of mass-production facilities that rely on antibiotics rather than more costly cleaning of facilities to fend off infection and disease. As antibiotic resistance increases worldwide, the movement of diseases becomes increasingly unimpeded. Some of the most dangerous outbreaks result from the growing illegal trade in bush meat, in which diseases harbored by forest primates, such as HIV-which in the past might have remained sequestered in remote jungles-are now brought into an unregulated global marketplace.

A report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture esti- mates that 89 percent of U.S. beef ground into patties contains traces of the deadly E. coli strain.
-Reuters News Service

Animal waste contains disease-causing pathogens, such as Salmonella, E. coli, Cryptosporidium, and fecal coliform, which can be 10 to 100 times more concentrated than in human waste. More than 40 diseases can be transferred to humans through manure.
-Natural Resources Defense Council

According to the World Health Organization, more than 85 human deaths have resulted from at least 95 cases of ebola reported in the Congo’s remote Cuvette-Ouest region. The tip-off to a possible outbreak came when gorillas in the region began dying. Tests of their bodies confirmed the cause of death…. Officials suspect the human outbreak stems from villagers eating infected primates including chimps, monkeys, and gorillas…. When primates are butchered and handled for bushmeat, humans come into contact with contaminated blood. People also get the disease when they eat the infected meat.
-Ebola Outbreak Linked to Bushmeat, www.janegoodall.net

It is believed that a sub-species of chimpanzee in west-central Africa may be the original source of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and that the transmission of the virus, a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), to humans was the result of blood exposures from the handling of chimpanzees killed by hunters.
-Jane Goodall, from a lecture at Harvard Medical School, 2002

Lifestyle disease, especially heart disease, might not have been regarded as an “environmental” problem a generation ago. But it’s now clear that the vast majority of public health problems are environmental, rather than genetic, in nature. Moreover, most preventable diseases result from complex relationships between humans and the environment, rather than from single causes. Heart disease is linked to obesity resulting both from excessive consumption of sugar and fat (especially meat fat) and from lack of exercise facilitated by car-oriented urban design. The environmental problems of suburban sprawl, air pollution, fossil-fuel consumption, and poor land-use policies are also all factors in heart disease.

The irony of the food production system is that millions of wealthy consumers in developed countries are dying from diseases of affluence-heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and cancer-brought on by gorging on fatty grain-fed beef and other meats, while the poor in the Third World are dying of diseases of poverty brought on by being denied access to land to grow food grain for their families.
-Jeremy Rifkin, Los Angeles Times

Who says meat is high in saturated fat? This politically correct nutrition campaign is just another example of the diet dictocrats trying to run our lives.
-Sam Abramson, CEO, Springfield Meats

Meat contributes an extraordinarily significant percentage of the saturated fat in the American diet.
-Marion Nestle, chair of the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, New York University

Not only is mortality from coronary heart disease lower in vegetarians than in nonvegetarians, but vegetarian diets have also been successful in arresting coronary heart disease. Scientific data suggest positive relationships between a vegetarian diet and reduced risk for…obesity, coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and some types of cancer.
-American Dietetic Association

He is a heavy eater of beef. Me thinks it doth harm to his wit.
-William Shakespeare in Twelfth Night

The average age (longevity) of a meat eater is 63. I am on the verge of 85 and still work as hard as ever. I have lived quite long enough and am trying to die; but I simply cannot do it. A single beef-steak would finish me; but I cannot bring myself to swallow it. I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism.
-George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Biodiversity loss and threat of extinction:
Above and beyond the destruction of forests and grasslands for cattle ranching, and the creation of oceanic dead zones by manure-laden runoff, the growing traffic in bush-meat is decimating the remaining populations of gorillas, chimpanzees, and other primates that are being killed for their meat. (A photo we received but declined to print in this issue shows a severed gorilla’s head sitting in a food basket next to a bunch of bananas). As the planet becomes more crowded, poor populations are increasingly venturing into wildlife reserves looking for meat-and not always just for their own subsistence. In these areas, it’s not enough just to say “eat less meat.” Here, the long-term solution will depend on stemming the building of logging roads (which facilitate more rapid invasion by hunters) and stronger protections against poaching and black-marketeering of bushmeat. It will also require more equitable distribution of the world’s limited food output, and of the income with which to buy it.

The real trouble has come in the last 10 years or so, as the big multinational companies, particularly European companies, are opening up the [central African] forest with their roads. Hunters from the towns can use the logging trucks to go along the roads…. They shoot everything from elephants down to gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, monkeys, birds-everything. They smoke it, they load it on the trucks and take it into the cities, where it’s not to feed starving people-it’s where people will pay more for bushmeat than for domesticated meat…. The pygmy hunters who’ve lived in harmony with the forest world for hundreds of years are now being given guns and ammunition and paid to shoot for the logging camps. And that’s absolutely not sustainable.”
-Jane Goodall in Benefits Beyond Boundaries, a film by Television Trust for the Environment shown on BBC in 2003

The animals have gone, the forest is silent, and when the logging camps finally move, what is left for the indigenous people? Nothing.
-Jane Goodall in Benefits Beyond Boundaries

Albert Einstein, who was better known for his physics and math than for his interest in the living world, once said:
“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.” We don’t think he was just talking about nutrition. Notice that in this article we haven’t said much at all about the role of meat in nutrition, even though there’s a lot more to talk about than heart disease. Nor have we gone into the ethics of vegetarianism, or of animal rights. The purpose of those omissions is not to brush off those concerns, but to point out that on ecological and economic grounds alone, meat-eating is now a looming problem for humankind. You don’t have to have any conscience at all to know that the age of heavy meat-eating will soon be over as surely as will the age of oil-and that

You really have to hand it to the Brits - they make no bones, or rather…tofu?…about the most effective way to stop climate change - stop eating meat and dairy. In a December 12 58-page report - Setting the Table: Advice to Government on Priority Elements of Sustainable Diets - the Sustainable Development Commission made the following recommendation:

Changes likely to have the most significant and immediate impact on making our diets more sustainable, in which health, environmental, economic and social impacts are more likely to complement each other:

• Reducing consumption of meat and dairy products
• Reducing consumption of food and drink of low nutritional value (i.e. fatty and sugary foods)
• Reducing food waste.

Additionally, to reduce energy consumption, the report also recommends that we should shop on foot or via the internet, and do stop using bottled water. Besides, eating more fruits and vegetables, cutting out the meat and dairy, is also good for overall health.

An article in the Guardian nicely paraphrased the report’s recommendations. To read more, check out it out online.

It’s official - be veg to save the planet.

Perhaps it’s the first of its kind in the world, at least for the time being, Max Burger in Stockholm, Sweden is encouraging less meat consumption to lower their diners’ carbon footprint. The restaurant even goes a step further - it publishes CO2 emissions on its menu.

From the methane produced by the cows, to the machinery used on the farm, through to the emissions produced by the abattoir and the lorries which move the meat around - the weight of CO2 represents the carbon footprint of that meal.

It’s a great concept to help diners see the environmental impact of what they eat. It’s a small step in the right direction. It would be even better if Max Burger could develop its own line of tasty meat-free eco-friendly burgers and snacks.

It’s also pretty cool that European countries like Sweden are developing climate labels on food products to help consumers make a more informed choice. Though, in the end analysis of actions that are most effectively in reducing global warming - just cut back or stop eating meat entirely. Just by going veg or becoming vegan, the huge savings in energy, water, finance, health, ecology - you name it - are tremendous. We don’t have to read a label to give us a clear conscience and the satisfaction of knowing that we’re doing our part in protecting lives and preserving the planet.

Try it. Be veg today…even if it’s one, two, or a few days a week.

Fear has spread throughout Gaza, Palestine as the first 12 swine flu deaths occurred, including the loss of a well-known surgeon, 35-year old Dr. Mahmud al-Haddad.

“The health situation is in a state of emergency in medical centres and hospitals in Gaza, and our doctors are working around the clock despite the strict siege and the lack of medical necessities,” the [Gaza medical] official said.

To help the region cope with the outbreak, Israeli officials have made arrangements to transfer at least five seriously ill Palestinian swine flu victims to regional hospitals for treatment. In the hope of staving off the infection, Gazans bought protective masks and hand-sanitizers.

“We ran out yesterday because everyone was asking for them,” said Manar al-Bilbasi, a pharmacist in Gaza who had just turned away three university students. “There aren’t any left in the whole country.”

Meanwhile, after North Korea reported dozens of swine flu fatalities and closed schools a month early to slow the viral spread, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak requested that medical aid be sent unconditionally to the country.

”It would be good if emergency aid is provided as there are concerns that swine flu could spread rapidly,” Lee told the Cabinet meeting, according to the statement.

Although the world’s swine flu cases, both fatal and mild, are far more in number than officially recorded, government agencies have reported at least 12,054 lost lives since April 2009.

Flag of Israel

The total death toll in Israel has now reached 67, and in Turkey, confirmed swine flu deaths rose by 55 in just 3 days to a sum of 296.

Meanwhile, the Netherlands has reported the third fatality due to a mutated form of the swine flu virus, while 42 people so far have died of the original virus. Concern still runs high about the ongoing risk of swine flu combining with other viral diseases at large, such as bird flu.

Ireland

In Ireland , nearly 500 people have experienced severe adverse reactions to the swine flu vaccine, which involves the brutally inhumane treatment of monkeys and chickens in its production. It is a worrisome phenomenon that has an impact all over Europe.

The general pattern of adverse reactions in Ireland is reflected across Europe where some 10 million people have been vaccinated against swine flu, according to the European Medicines Agency.

The swine flu virus has origins in the livestock industry where animals were kept in abysmal and inhumane conditions. Their debilitating health led to the development of the mutant swine flu virus.

In addition to being the number one contributor to the total greenhouse gas emissions, the livestock industry is also a hothouse for the development of diseases such as swine flu. We have one more important reason - human health - to going veg and reducing our meat consumption.

The UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reveals that the levels of most greenhouse gases continue to increase in the atmosphere.

In 2008, global concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, which are the main long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, have reached the highest levels recorded since pre-industrial times.

The WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud is worried that if nothing is done as soon as possible, the levels will continue to increase exponentially.

According to Mr. Jarraud, atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by 38% since 1750 and methane has increased significantly in 2007 and 2008.

In related news, a report released by the Stockholm Environment Institute states that lifestyle changes such as increasing rail travel while decreasing transit by car and plane as well as reducing meat consumption by 60 percent could bring down the European cost of global warming mitigation to about US$3 per person per day.

Harvard University Professor and two-time Pulitzer Prize winning biologist and ecologist Edward Wilson, often referred to as “Darwin’s natural heir,” warns that biodiversity on Earth is suffering from drastic loss.

We don’t hear as much public concern, protestation and plans by political leaders to save the living environment. It doesn’t get anything like the attention the physical environment has.

With just under two million species currently catalogued, an estimated 30 million exist. And although 183 species have been formally declared extinct since the beginning of the last century, Dr. Wilson states that this number is a vast underestimate, with annual extinctions more likely in the neighborhood of 20-30,000 species. In an interview with UK Guardian newspaper, Dr. Wilson said the threat to utter biodiversity destruction is so critical that he is urging for the creation of an international group of experts to oversee biodiversity, similar to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Mass extinction of species is no longer an issue for debate - it’s reality.

European Parliament Vice President calls for less meat to ease global warming. In an editorial published in the UK’s Yorkshire Post, European Parliament Vice President Edward McMillan-Scott explained why he has chosen not to eat meat. Citing the 2006 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistic that 18% of all greenhouse gases come from livestock, Vice President McMillan-Scott stated that meat takes 16 times more energy and resources than its vegetable equivalent.

Livestock production produces more greenhouse gases - 18 per cent - than the whole transport sector - 13 per cent. Some gases from meat production are far more dangerous than those produced by transport. Nitrous oxide has about 300 times the Global Warming Potential of CO2. Most of this comes from manure.

Meat also uses vastly higher amounts of water, even as 62% of the world’s population faces scarcity and drought. In addition, farmed animal raising occupies a full 70% of agricultural land and is a major cause of destructive deforestation.

Meat takes upwards of 16 times more energy and resources than its vegetable equivalent. This includes massively more water, at a time when 62 per cent of the world’s population face water “stress” or drought.

Other environmental and health detriments include meat consumption’s effect on the more than one billion who are now suffering from hunger. He also pointed out that 60% of “bugs” that affect human health comes from the animals or poultry raised for human consumption. Vice President McMillan-Scott went on to call on governments, organizations and individuals to opt for a healthier and environmentally-friendly alternative diet.

Sustainable meat, dairy and fish production is hardly mentioned in the climate change debate. A change of diet is literally our biggest chance to stop global warming, as well as improving our health and saving money.

The issue of sustainable food policy is seen by many - but not enough - as key to winning the “hot war” against global warming, with world population likely to rise to more than nine billion by 2050, and meat and milk consumption set to double.

The leaders are speaking out. The facts are stark and scientifically proven. We still have a chance. We are not helpless. We, too, can  make a difference in protecting our own lives and the lives of our loved ones. Start by stop eating methane-producing and disease-laden food. Be veg to save our planet.

It’s so awesome that the European Parliament had a hearing a little while ago on Climate Change and Food Policy: Less Meat Less Heat. This hearing was initiated by the EU Vice President Edward McMillan-Scott of England. He invited two very influential and powerful individuals to speak on the issue of reducing meat consumption to stop climate change - Sir Paul McCartney and IPCC Chief Dr. Rajendra Pachauri.

Their key message was, in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in particular methane and nitrous oxide, then we need to reduce our meat consumption. It’s the easiest and most do-able solution.

After the hearing,  a press conference was held so that members of the media could get a chance to ask questions directly to Sir Paul McCartney, Dr. Pachauri, and Vice President McMillan-Scott. In response to a question posed by a TV reporter about climate change, Sir Paul McCartney replied:

If something isn’t done, there’s going to be a real global crisis.

 As the press conference concluded, Vice President McMillan-Scott announced that the food provided would be 50% plant-based. Not bad at all. It would be even better if it was 100%.

Thank you, VP McMillan-Scott for initiating this hearing a few days before COP15. Let’s hope all the world leaders would also support and endorse the single most easy and simple solution that doesn’t cost much time or money to implement - be veg laws and policies.

Whoa! Stop the band! Former US Vice President Al Gore is encouraging people to go veg to save the planet! That’s one of the best news I’ve heard in a long time!

I’m not a vegetarian, but I have cut back sharply on the meat that I eat.

In an interview with ABC Television in New York, USA, climate change campaigner Al Gore pointed out some of the problems eating meat has on the planet:

It’s absolutely correct that the growing meat intensity of diets around the world is one of the issues connected to this global crisis - not only because of the CO2 involved, but also because of the water consumed in the process.

You could add in the health consequences as well.

As the threat of a runaway global warming situation looms large, many experts and leaders worldwide are speaking out. Global warming is real and the solution is clear - be veg. By cutting out meat in our diet, we can contribute tremendously to stopping many of the global crises that our planet is facing - water shortage, hunger, economic collapses, climate refugees, and pandemics.

The solution is so simple, and it doesn’t cost us a dime. Each one of us can be a part of that solution - today. It would be great if our governments acknowledge this fact and effect policy changes during the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen this December to protect not billions of only human lives but also our only home.

With the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen just days away, the Dalai Lama is urging individuals and leaders to take global warming seriously .

Taking care of the environment … (is now) part of my life. Taking care of the environment should be part of our daily life.

In fact, the Dalai Lama is calling on governments to put global interest before national interest because climate change affects every single country.

The global issue should be number one. In some cases in order to protect global issues, some sacrifice of national interest (is needed).

In his own personal life, the Dalai Lama is taking steps to be more environmentally conscious:

In my own case I never use bathtub, only shower. Whenever I leave my room I always put off my light.

Though he doesn’t mention it, the Dalai Lama is also a vegetarian. That in itself has a greater impact in reducing greenhouse gas emission since the livestock industry has been pinpointed as being the greatest contributor to the deteriorating state of our planet.

 What are some of the ways to stop global warming and save millions of lives? A group of scientists in the British journal, The Lancet, plan to share their recommendations for lifestyle changes at the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen (COP15), starting on December 7 2009:

Eat less meat, have smaller herds of animals, switch to more efficient stoves that pollute less, and develop more sustainable public transport systems…

According to an article published by IRIN news - GLOBAL: Good for health and reducing global warming - reducing meat consumption really helps lower greenhouse gas emissions and improve human health at the same time.

The food and agriculture sector contributes 10 percent to 12 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide said Sharon Friel, of the Australian National University, and Alan Dangour, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in a study calling for a 30-percent reduction in livestock production. This would lower emissions, while less intake of animal saturated fat would improve health.

 However, their conclusion of greenhouse gas emission contribution by the livestock industry seems very conservation in comparison to a recent study released by the Worldwatch Institute. In this study, at least 51% of total greenhouse emissions come from factory farms. We can take a closer look at this study in a later blog.

 The message is clear: we need to reduce or completely stop our meat consumption worldwide in order to save millions and possibly billions of lives.

“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better,” said Lord Stern of Brentford in an interview with The Times just last month. Lord Stern is a former chief economist of the World Bank and now I. G. Patel Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. He is also author of the influential 2006 Stern Review that addresses the issue of climate chante.

More recently, during an interview with Indian newspaper Financial Express, British climate economist Lord Nicholas Stern voiced his encouragement for the meat-free lifestyle as a viable climate solution, stating, “A vegetarian diet is climate friendly. It’s less carbon intensive. Though eating food is a matter of personal choice, it is desirable to help people make informed decisions.” While in India, Lord Stern was delivering a lecture on “Building an Equitable Agreement on Climate Change.” Lord Stern is joining several other notable leaders in voicing support for the climate benefits of a vegetarian diet. These include United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri; United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change chief Yvo de Boer, and British former Beatles member, Sir Paul McCartney.

The news coming out of Washington , USA, doesn’t look good: The ocean is sick. The shrimps are leaving town because there isn’t enough O₂ to pass around. Oysters are not having babies in four years for the same reason. What’s worse, life-saving medicines derived from fungus on seaweed and bacteria in the deep sea may be in jeopardy.

The state of the ocean is getting the researchers, scientists, and even Jacques Cousteau’s granddaughter worried. It’s not a pretty picture they’re painting for the future of the US coastal states. What’s going on? Apparently, global warming is the culprit. It’s causing changes in oceans around the world.

Ocean acidification or diseases that thrive in acidified, oxygen-depleted seawater could be responsible for oysters not reproducing in Washington state, said Brad Warren , who oversees the ocean health and acidification program of the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership in Seattle .

Federal studies also found acidity levels in the North Pacific and off Alaska are unusually high compared to other ocean regions. The high acidity is already taking a toll of such tiny species as pteropods, which are an important food for salmon and other fish.

It’s definitely not a pretty picture. The way we’re going right now, things won’t change and damage to the oceans will continue.

As greenhouse gas emissions increase, billions of tons of carbon dioxide from smokestacks and vehicle tailpipes are absorbed by the oceans. The result is carbonic acid, which dilutes the “rich soup” of calcium carbonate in the seawater that many species, especially on the low end of the food chain, thrive in…”

Runoffs from farms are also causing dead zones in the oceans. These are areas where marine life cannot survive. Imagine a room of toxic gas. That is what dead zones are like in the oceans. That is also one of the reasons why you find whales and other sea mammals heading for shores and ended up dying there. They were trying to get away from the toxic sea.

The evidences are plenty. It saddens me that there are some of us who still think all this a hoax or that we’re alarmists. Even in the most unlikely event that it is so, I still think precautionary measures are needed. We pay through our noses for all sorts of insurance - cars, house, health, and who knows what else - why not do the same for our planet? If our planet goes, everyone goes. So why not take the steps to prevent it before it is too late?

The solutions are there. We can recycle, drive less, carpool, use and develop more sustainable energy, and cut down on our meat consumption or just be veg. And pray. It’s not a pretty picture right now, but we still have a little time to change that. If you have never gambled before, or an addicted gambler, this is the time to do it, the reason to do it, after all, the life as we know it is at stake here.

Awesome news today! US President Obama has set the limit on greenhouse-gas pollution from cars. Based on a standard that was proposed by the state of California, automakers have to manufacture cars that run on average 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016. According to the news, the President has pushed the new legislation four years sooner than previously planned. That’s great. For the US to reverse its policy on car pollution from the Bush Administration, it is a step in the right direction:

Obama’s action is the “biggest single step to curb global warming,” Dan Becker, director of the environmental group Safe Climate Campaign, said in an interview.

It’s not the biggest step, but it’s a step, nevertheless. There is still more to be done. I hope the US continues to push forward to make positive changes in its policy to deal with climate change. According to the UN’s report “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the transportation sector is the #2 contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The #1 culprit is the meat industry. The methane gas emits by cattle is far more efficient in trapping heat than carbon dioxide produced from cars, 72 times more potent over an average of 20 years. That’s huge!

There is still much to be done at the government level; but for each one of us, we help by reducing our meat consumption as much as we can. Go veg, try a vegan meal. There are more restaurants nowadays that offer a vegetarian or vegan menu. One great resource to check online for a healthy and environmentally sound diet anywhere in the world is www.happycow.net.

It’s awesome that there are more and more good news every day about governments taking action to curb climate change: the Philippines, the European Union, the city of Ghent in Belgium. We can do our part. Yes we can!