Well the glow from our Locally Grown 2 benefit concert is wearing off and reality hits again. Some ominous articles lately concering global warming and our food systems. This article maintains that in this century ag will collapse in some of the most populous and poverty stricken in the world--countries like India, Bangladesh in Asia, and Sudan in Africa--that can least afford decreased agricultural productivity. The article says that while ag in temperate countries like the US may not suffer as much, the massive numbers of refugees from these countries certainly will certainly have a huge impact.
Another topic under the umbrella of ag and climate change relates to our diets and what we chose to eat. As I've mentioned in an earlier post, eating meat contributes to climate change because the more cattle on the planet, the more methane from belching and farting cows, and the less land available for forests and food crops that are carbon sinks. Here's a short article from www.planetark.org environmental news website:
Less Meat, Less Heat -- Fewer Steaks May Save Planet
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UK: September 14, 2007
LONDON - Eating too much red meat is not only bad for your health -- it is also bad for the planet, according to scientists.
Worldwide, agricultural activity accounts for about a fifth of total greenhouse-gas emissions and livestock production has a particularly big impact because of the large amount of methane emitted from belching cattle.
Tony McMichael of the Australian National University in Canberra and John Powles of Britain's University of Cambridge, writing in the Lancet journal, said worldwide average meat consumption could be realistically reduced by 10 percent.
This would help in the battle against global warming and also reduce health risks associated with excessive consumption of red meat, they said.
Global average meat consumption is currently 100 grams per person a day but there is a tenfold variation between high-consuming and low-consuming populations.
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
A ray of hope to end on...regionalizing our ag and food systems is perhaps one of the best things we can do to ensure our food systems sustain us into the future AND begin to minimize the contribution of our food system to the green house gases that cause climate change. A wonderful example (and joyous celebration) can be found at in the Capay Valley in California and the "Hoes Down" event.
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2 comments:
Let's start by getting rid methane-belching moose!
After them the elk, etc.
I hate the choices. My husband (who you met, I think, back before we got married) and I have both cut way back on meat, and that's almost entirely chicken (which, raised "ethically," has a smaller greenhouse footprint than cow-dairy does) and fish rated green on the Monterey Bay Aquarium's sustainable fishing card. I eat limited soy for health reasons, but when I do eat it, I think about monoculture, and about snow geese feeding on soy fields in Louisiana and becoming so health that their populations overwhelm the tundra in the summer in ways that carry over to the next summer, permanently damaging tundra health.
So our primary focuses are on
1) local and sustainable
2) organic
3) much less meat (not no meat, not yet)
4) ethically/sustainable meat (e.g. though we rarely eat pork, we only eat it when we know it's local and small-scale, as the national pork industry's just horrible)
We don't do any of it perfectly, but we try for each of those as an ideal.
One of the biggest helps is our fully organic garden, currently planted for the weekend with a variety of brassicas, spinach, and snap peas.
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