Well, Lierr’s book certainly did convince me that factory farming is massively destructive and where I’m convinced then by all means.

Climate, not so much and it is something I’ve followed rather closely for a long time. Here’s a skeptic’s website that is very measured and fair. He’s a former exec, Princeton & Harvard educated and knows his science.

http://www.climate-skeptic.com/

That said, I certainly agree that we oughtn’t be wasteful, unnecessarily destructive and should move in the direction of sustainability in all things.

I appreciate your comment. It’s well written, well reasoned and reasonable.

Though I gather from your writings, Mr. Nikoley, that you think climate change is just another fundamentalist faith. Having been raised in a fairly extreme sect of fundamentalist Christianity, I understand the repugnance, it needs no excuse. I also imagine you get a lot of weird pushback from radical vegans, and I’ve gotten my share of that as well while writing about sustainable agriculture issues from a liberal perspective. But I’d like to suggest that climate change is an issue unlike either fundamentalist Christianity or radical vegan theology.

While ecological systems are complex, there are things about them we can understand. One is that the blunt force trauma of increasing CO2 concentrations as much as we have, by digging up previously sequestered CO2 and burning a damn lot of it, has certain large-scale effects. One is the acidification of the oceans, which is contributing to the destruction of reef coral skeletons all over the world. One is the alteration in the amount of heat trapped from sunlight, an effect that’s been known for nearly 200 years.

Humans have displaced or disturbed almost every ecosystem on the planet. Our impact is truly massive. Agriculture is certainly part of that, and a very large part, if not the original frame for what we’re doing in other aspects of civilization – burning complex things to make simpler things that hold less carbon in solid form.

We’re destroying ecosystems, as Keith says, by simplifying them to the point where instead of sequestering carbon, they’re bleeding it out all over the place. There are ways we could manage land and ecosystems so that they fed us and well, so that they proliferated life and maintained a higher equilibrium ratio of solid:gaseous carbon. And I don’t believe that we either can or should do it without including animals in those ecosystems, but I’m frustrated in that while the industrial agricultural system wants them excluded for safety reasons that have largely to do with the poisonous diet of corn fed to cows*, environmentalists often want them excluded for reasons that hearken to the exact myths Keith shatters. No one pays attention to biology on either side.

Just, it’s for that reason that we can affect the climate. The atmosphere is a byproduct of the sum of all living beings breathing and eating and dying, with a roughly even split of photosynthesis between land and sea. We’ve not only dug up and burned the buried products of past photosynthesis, but heavily altered natural patterns of photosynthesis and decreased the numbers of mouths photosynthetically fixed carbon goes through before being offgassed again.

Anyway, I’d urge you if you haven’t to read 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann, and also Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, by William Cronon. Both books discuss the ways pre-industrial societies in some parts of the Americas had learned ways to manage the land and feed themselves without destroying the ability of their habitat to keep them healthy in the long term. Some of those ways indicated paths towards carbon neutrality, or even carbon negative sequestration.

I think it’s a shame that humans finally figured out how to make our lives easy and it’s destroying us and our habitat. You see that in food, where the easy Twinkie and soda aren’t obviously destructive before you take their full accounting. But I believe that if we focused on the services that we wanted (healthy food, good jobs, abundant energy, insulation from inclement weather, good transportation) instead of the ways those services are delivered in our current economy, that we’re smart enough to come up with other ways to achieve our goals.

In sum, I don’t want to give up meat, coffee or computers, and I believe that the suggestion we have to is either a false choice or a strawman. I don’t believe in an environmentalism that’s about the imposition of suffering, but about taking our best ideas from whatever era of human history and using them to live sustainably, humanely, healthfully, and above all, comfortably. I’m not a hairshirter, but I am well convinced that we’re in trouble climate-wise. The people I met at the Copenhagen climate conference were well convinced of it, and people dependent on the land in Africa and Asia are living it (and they’ll tell you all about it if you get a chance to ask.)

So I’d ask you, please, to reconsider this issue.

* As you may know, cow guts are supposed to have a nearly neutral pH on their natural, grass diets. Human guts have a highly acidic pH, so under normal conditions, the E. coli from cow guts should be virtually unable to survive in our stomach acids. When cows are fed corn, their stomachs turn acidic and their E. coli are more likely to survive our guts and make us sick. When cows stand in nasty paddocks full of each other’s waste, they all get each other’s germs. This is an insanely dangerous way to raise cows.

This may be a little late in the game, but B12 actually comes from bacteria in the soil. Animals can’t produce it on their own. So, as grazing animals tend to get soil with their produce, they synthesize the B12 into their systems. Since humans are a lot more inclined to wash our veggies before eating (not to mention the various forms of pesticides and herbicides we put on food crops that kill off the bacteria), we don’t get it directly.

So, basically, when people eat meat they are “supplementing” their B12 much as people who take it in vitamin form do (and to break it down even further, so are the animals that eat the bacteria).

And yes, I’ve been a(n extremely healthy) vegetarian for 19 years.

-Erica

Just point out vitamin B12 to them. It can only be gotten naturally from animals. If you don’t get any B12, you experience psychosis, brain damage, and eventually death. We can synthesize B12 artificially, but it’s a bit different and isn’t as good as the real B12. If our body were meant to be vegan, being vegan wouldn’t be deadly to us.

Insert whatever other pro-meat-eater arguments you may have. Especially that one about the paleo diet allowing your teeth to actually heal themselves of cavities. That’s pretty awesome right there.

It’s a fact that meat is good for us. So the big moral question now is this: Who’s more important, us or the animals? To a human, a human being should come before an animal. This assumes animals you’ve never met and humans you’ve never met. You could put your pet dog above a bum on the street I suppose. You love the dog, you don’t the bum.

The vegans basically want us to sacrifice ourselves to the animals. Whether they know it or not, that’s what they’re asking us to do. It comes down to a choice: us or them. Do we have a right to live or don’t we?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m an animal lover. But we gotta eat ‘em to live. That’s all there is to it.

It’s more detailed than that. What the book claims (I’m highly summarizing) is that clearing land for annual monocrops is highly destructive (she calls it “biotic cleansing”). It kills the soil, depletes the soil, salinizes the soil and many other things. Conversely, ruminants that graze on perennial grasses builds and fortifies topsoil, not only through manure, but by means of their flesh & blood when they die.

In short, she shows what every conservationist ought to already know: if degradation of natural ecosystems is of concern, then the worst thing you can do is clear and farm the land. Grazing animals naturally — even for ultimate culling of meat — is far more friendly to these biosystems, and it’s highly sustainable, as she shows.

Here’s a subsequent review you might find of interest, if you didn’t see it already.

http://freetheanimal.com/2009/10/the-vegetarian-myth-revisited.html

And I don’t really see how the whole circle-of-life part applies either. The way the world is doesn’t imply anything about how the world should be. In other words, the fact that everything eats everything else hardly means that we should.

One more thing: Does anyone really consider all forms of life to be morally equal? I consider humans to be more important than anything else because we can “prove” that it matters to us, but I don’t see why animals should be completely discounted, especially when not eating them is beneficial to us as well.

Dogs love bones: they chew on them, bury them, etc. However, no dog has ever or will ever develop a science of “bone-ology” to further investigate bones, the concept of bone-ness, or otherwise reflect on just why they love bones so much. Nor has or will any dog ever open a bone store to buy and sell bones with other dogs or any other animals.

Imagine two world populated by net consumers, no producers. In one world, everyone has a right to these things, in the other, they don't.

What's the difference, without producers to take from to fulfill these “rights?”