All is not well with our Mother Earth this Earth Day. We must
focus on solutions to the crisis of our warming planet if our species is to escape this century safely. Of course, we must address fundamental changes to our economic and political systems. This takes time of which we are in short supply if we are to heed the warnings of the scientific community. There is much we can do to push those changes forward but there are also individual changes that need to be made. Our agricultural system
must be reformed and we can be a part of that change by the dietary choices we make three times each day. This gives us an immediate and simple action which in concert with many can go a long way in preparing us for a new safe future.
The industrial food system, especially livestock production, is a major cause of climate change and has contributed to the massive public health problem of the creation of "super bugs" that are resistant to conventional antibiotics. And because at least one-third of the world's grain is fed to livestock rather than to humans it makes less food available to humans and contributes to food insecurity.
As the crisis of climate change becomes more urgent, leaders are emerging to educate about the most simple and economical solution to the crisis—that of reducing meat consumption.
Prominent among these is leading world scientist Patrick O. Brown M.D. PhD, of Stanford University—a biochemist who is most frequently associated with the invention of microarrays and their use in studying gene expression, and he should be familiar to the readers of PLoS as a driving force behind open-access journals. But these are only two examples of his many successes, which span the worlds of topoisomerase, HIV integration, protein microarrays and post-transcriptional regulation.
Dr. Brown recently took an 18-month sabbatical to work promoting reducing meat consumption as the most practical and cost-efficient way to solve the climate crisis and hunger. Here he is giving one of his brilliant no-B.S. talks at Leaders Preserving Our Future: Pace and Priorities on Climate Change, sponsored by The World Preservation Foundation in London.
Animal farming is by far the most environmentally destructive identified practice on the planet. Do you believe that? More greenhouse production than all transportation combined. It is also the major single source of water pollution on the planet. It is incredibly destructive. The major reason reefs are dying off and dead zones exist in the ocean—from nutrient run-off. Overwhelmingly it is the largest driving force of deforestation. And the leading cause of biodiversity loss.
And if you think I'm bullshitting, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN, whose job is to promote agricultural development, published a study, not knowing what they were getting into, looking at the environmental impact of animal farming, and it is a beautiful study! And the bottom line is that it is the most destructive and fastest growing environmental problem.
It's actually way past time to focus on solutions to climate change. But procrastination has gotten us nowhere fast and there is no better time than the present.
This is an update of a diary I wrote in 2013