AGRICULTURE The most damaging farm products? Organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb......George Monbiot Tue 16 Aug 2022 Analysis: You may be amazed by that answer, but the area of land used for grazing is vast compared with the meat and milk produced. Perhaps the most important of all environmental issues is land use. Every hectare of land we use for extractive industries is a hectare that can’t support wild forests, savannahs, wetlands, natural grasslands and other crucial ecosystems. And farming swallows far more land than any other human activity. What are the world’s most damaging farm products? You might be amazed by the answer: organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb. I realise this is a shocking claim. Of all the statements in my new book, Regenesis, it has triggered the greatest rage. But I’m not trying to wind people up. I’m trying to represent the facts. Let me explain. Arable crops, some of which are fed to farm animals, occupy 12% of the planet’s land surface. But far more land (about 26%) is used for grazing: in other words, for pasture-fed meat and milk. Yet, across this vast area, farm animals that are entirely pasture-fed produce just 1% of the world’s protein. Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases. The only category in which numbers fall when grazing by cattle or sheep ceases are those that eat dung. Where there are cattle, there are fewer wild mammals, birds, reptiles and insects on the land, and fewer fish in the rivers.
The most ambitious goal of the animal movement has always been to eradicate factory farming and inspire people to eat more plants and fewer animals. This only makes sense, as the scale of the violence endemic to industrial farming radically dwarfs all other forms of animal suffering. Beyond the problem of the inevitable suffering involved in the slaughter of animals we consume, factory farming necessitates new forms of animal abuse such as intensive confinement, drugs that keep sick animals just alive enough to be profitable, and genetic modifications that induce diseases. (While genetic modification is often interpreted to mean direct edits to a genome, the USDA’s definition also includes selective breeding, the technique the factory farm industry has used to deform animals beyond recognition.) These harms to animals, as we will see, are tightly linked to harms to humans. But the way forward for the animal movement may be less about swelling the ranks of vegetarians and vegans — which has long been its primary ambition — and more about identifying an overlapping consensus between social movements that center animals and those that center concerns like climate change and public health . These movements share an interest in shifting toward a more plant-based food system as never before. We should also share resources and tactics. Today, government at every level, from local to federal, activel
Let’s consider a rather extraordinary development that resulted from animal and environmental groups working together that occurred in just the last year. A groundbreaking experiment suggests reducing US meat eating is attainable.Starting last September, hundreds of American college and university dining halls serving about a million students began to systematically modify how they served food in ways designed to substantially increase the consumption of plants. The schools, which have in common the use of Sodexo as a food service provider but little else, were guided in part by a recent peer-reviewed study finding that the use of “plant-based defaults” could significantly shift diners’ choices toward plant-based foods. (One of us, Aaron, is on the board of and helped launch an organization that partnered with Sodexo on this experiment, but he was not personally involved in the project.) In the three-month study, a hot meal station in three college dining halls, two in the American Northeast and one in the South, alternated between serving a plant-based and meat-based meal by default. When a plant-based entrée was the default, diners could ask for a meat meal. Depending on how conservatively the results are calculated, on average between 21.4 and 57.2 percent fewer meat-based meals were chosen when plant-based foods were the default. And, crucially, surveys found that diners remained as satisfied as ever (something that the presence of plant-based meats seemed to have helped in this study). A range of other public and private institutions — including governments, hospitals, and businesses — around the world are experimenting with similar tactics.Diners do not need to be ethical superheroes, or even be ethically motivated, to eat in ways more in line with their values.The basic insight being employed here is that institutional food service providers already make decisions every day that shape what their customers choose by deciding, for example, what dish to list first on the menu, what entree to make the special, and what products to most heavily promote. We diners are already being nudged by food service providers toward more profitable foods (often animal products) every time we buy food. The strategies being employed at the 400 colleges and universities in one way or another involve a decision on the part of dining services to let concerns about health and sustainability — especially climate change — influence these existing decisions about food order, placement, and so forth. This can be thought of as behavior architecture. Just as good physical architecture is aesthetically pleasing and makes it easy to do what we have come to that place to do, good behavior architecture in dining halls, supermarkets, and restaurants helps consumers make prosocial choices — like plant-based foods with lower climate impacts — the easiest choices. Diners do not need to be ethical superheroes, or even be ethically motivated, to eat in ways more in line with their values.
Two issues raised here seem especially important. The first is to better understand how recent and unique the new overlapping consensus between animal and ecological concerns is and what is making it work. The second is to consider the potentially even more consequential, but less-developed, coalitional possibilities of animal and ecological advocates teaming up with the public health sector to advocate a shift towards plant-based diets and away from factory farming. In an era of ubiquitous factory farming, the public health sector has its own reasons to prefer a more plant-based food system — for example, the way that factory farms promote antibiotic resistance, an escalating global crisis associated with nearly 5 million annual deaths and increase the risk of zoonotic diseases like bird flu reaching pandemic proportions. Balanced plant-based diets are also widely regarded to have health advantages (especially lowering risk for heart disease), but since these benefits are well known, here we want to emphasize the distinct advantages of a more plant-based food system, beyond the general healthfulness of plant foods. That a more plant-based diet is better for animals isn’t enough to move policy. This same diet shift is already being used to reduce climate impacts; it could also preserve the value of antibiotics and reduce the number of new diseases we face, as well as shore up political will to transform our diets......read on https://www.vox.com/future-
In terms of economic contributions, immigrants represent a diverse pool of talent and skills for our workforce, which in turn stimulates economic growth. In fact, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, immigration will help bolster the U.S. economy by about $7 trillion over the next decade and generate approximately $1 trillion in federal tax dollars. Fiscal benefits are not limited to high-skilled immigrants on labor visas either; according to a new Department of Health and Human Services study, refugees and asylum seekers alone made a net positive contribution of nearly $124 billion dollars to local, state, and federal tax coffers from 2005 to 2019. Addressing labor shortages, which have resulted in 8.5 million vacancies, would also bolster the tax base that funds Medicare and Social Security. In fact, immigrants are 80 percent more likely to start businesses, thereby creating jobs, spurring innovation and strengthening our broader economy. Additionally, immigrants directly contribute to both programs through payroll taxes, including undocumented immigrants who contribute billions of dollars to a benefits system they will likely never be eligible to access themselves. With an aging population and native-born birth rates at an all-time low, immigration also offers much-needed demographic rejuvenation, which is essential for both Medicare and Social Security to survive. By welcoming more immigrants, we revitalize the workforce and support a larger pool of contributors to these programs.....read on https://thehill.com/
Summer wildfire inferno on the horizon, and federal officials are sounding the alarm on drought conditions and higher-than-normal temperatures indicating another record-breaking wildfire season. Nearly the entire country is under moderate drought conditions and has been since spring 2023, according to a government official who briefed the press on Wednesday. The drought has meant less precipitation through winter. Higher temperatures also led to a faster spring thaw, setting the stage for early wildfire conditions. Officials told reporters there are approximately 70 wildfires now burning in Canada. Many survived the winter and are known as zombie fires, which lie dormant under the frost and re-emerge after the thaw. Most of those fires are burning in northern B.C., northern Alberta and southern N.W.T.Federal officials are sounding the alarm on drought conditions and higher-than-normal temperatures indicating another record-breaking wildfire season. Nearly the entire country is under moderate drought conditionsand has been since spring 2023, according to a government official who briefed the press on Wednesday. The drought has meant less precipitation through winter. Higher temperatures also led to a faster spring thaw, setting the stage for early wildfire conditions. Over the next two months, there is increased wildfire risk for northern Ontario, western Quebec, the Prairies, Northwest Territories and British Columbia, according to the official. However, it is still too early to definitively forecast conditions.Officials told reporters there are approximately 70 wildfires now burning in Canada. Many survived the winter and are known as zombie fires, which lie dormant under the frost and re-emerge after the thaw. Most of those fires are burning in northern B.C., northern Alberta and southern N.W.T. https://www.
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