Today’s Choice, Tomorrow’s Life: Benefits of a meat free diet

Vegetables As a lead forecaster at MetService, I see nature in action.

We look out the window over our Habour and marvel at the beauty of the changing skies. And some of these changes are now ominous for life on earth, with increasing frequency of unusual events and extremes.

Today, I would like to talk briefly about the future that faces us, and then about a choice we can make today, to enhance tomorrow’s life.

Each of us depends on the products and services provided by the earth’s ecosystems, ranging from forest to wetlands, from coral reefs to grasslands. Among the services these ecosystems provide, are water purification, pollination, carbon sequestration, flood control, and soil conservation. A four-year study of the world’s ecosystems by 1,360 scientists, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, reported that 15 of 24 primary ecosystem services are being degraded or pushed beyond their limits. For example, three quarters of oceanic fisheries, a major source of protein in the human diet, are being fished at. or beyond there limits, and many are headed toward collapse.

Climate change is one symptom of this crisis.

As a Meteorologist, I closely follow the arguments, as any scientist should, and there is an unprecedented amount of research being done, which is filling gaps in knowledge. Certain trace gases in the atmosphere, act to trap energy that the Earth radiates to space. The net amount of solar radiation has varied very little. However, the maximum solar energy that falls in any one spot, varies naturally over cycles ranging from 21,000, 26,000 and 41,000 years due to slow changes in the axis of rotation of the earth, variations in the elongation of the ellipse around the sun, and the precession of the earth’s axis of rotation, and are collectively referred to as Milankovitch cycles. They bring about a slow change in global temperature, which has a feedback effect of increasing or decreasing trace greenhouse gases. Changes in greenhouse gas levels, alter the heat stored in the biosphere, triggering a much larger temperature change, and sending us into a warmer world or back to an ice age.

We have been blessed over the last 10,000 years with a usually stable climate with a human friendly mean temperature of 15 deg C. Then, about 150 years ago, humans began to burn the oil that was laid down under the crust 30 to 50 million years ago. This has now lead to an increase of about 30% in levels of green house gases over pre-industrial times.

Greenhouse gases include not only carbon dioxide, but the much more potent trace gases, Methane and nitric oxide, which have also increased due to agriculture activity and increased animal farming, disturbance of wetlands and exploration of fossil fuelsIn spite of the international recession, greenhouse gas emissions continue their relentless climb. We are, in fact, following along the worst-case scenario, with leading climate scientists warning that we are reaching tipping points, which can trigger abrupt climate change.

The biophysical warming signal shows up very clearly in the accelerated melting of the Greenland ice cap and the Arctic, the break up of ice shelves
along Western Antarctica sheet, the migration of plant and animal species and extreme events.
Water supply is also becoming constrained. Lowering water tables, the global retreat of mid latitude glaciers, and increasing severity of drought in major grain producing areas, portends food shortages. And the pumping of underground water exceeds natural recharge in countries containing half the world’s people, leaving many without adequate water.

The stable sea level over the last 10,000 years, not only provided early humans with a high-protein marine food supply, but also made possible grain production in estuary and floodplain ecosystems. At the warmest part of the last Interglacial 150,000 years ago, sea-level was about 6 metres higher than today. Current warming will make the world hotter than the last interglacial within a few decades.

The disastrous outcome of Copenhagen was further proof that climate change is not the central issue in negotiations. For rich countries, the key issues in negotiations were finance, carbon markets, competitiveness of countries and corporations, business opportunities along with discussions about the political makeup of the US Senate. There was surprisingly little focus on effective solutions for reducing carbon emissions…. The choices we can make today!

When I was born in 1949, Homo sapiens were responsible for the burning of 10 million barrels of oil a day. Today, we choose to use 85 million a day, and we now take great risks, searching for oil 5 to 10 miles below sea level, witness the disaster in the Mexican Gulf! The legacy of oil we inherited from 30 to 50 million years ago will all be used within
the space of a bit over one century. And even though we have passed peak oil production, our continued use of fossil fuels over the next decade, will trigger major climate change and a collapse in our food production and eco-system.

At the same time, developing countries like China are following western life styles and moving to the western based high impact meat diet.

We need to despair and then turn our despair into action.

Lets review some of the impacts of animal farming on greenhouse emissions.

Half New Zealand’s emissions come from agriculture, and most of this is methane emitted by livestock. No techniques to sustainably reduce methane (CH4) emissions directly by ruminant livestock have yet been established.

Agricultural N2O nitrous oxide accounts for about one sixth of NZ’s CO2-equivalent emissions. It is a by-product of microbial degradation of animal excrement (mainly urine) and of nitrogen fertilisers in pasture soils. Recent innovations use “nitrification inhibitors” added to the fertiliser that slow down the N2O production.

An ICF study shows that three quarters of the potential that is economic to implement in the next few years is agricultural. However, the simple and most effective answer of moving away from animal farming is not yet taken seriously. Recent high prices for Dairy products have lead to a rush to Dairy Farming by New Zealand farmers, putting severe strain on water resources, especially in Canterbury. It is ironic, that the areas converting to Dairy are also the areas where grains grow best, and it is more grains that the world really needs.

One billion people remain poor and hungry, and remaining global reserve stocks of grains are likely to disappear within a few years, due to continued population increases in developing countries, increasing drought in grain producing areas such as Australia and USA, and disappearing water aquifers.

Growing animals for food is also a very inefficient way of producing vegetable protein, using 7 to 10 times the water and energy to food crops. However, according to a report in World Watch Magazine by Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, the life cycle and supply chain of domesticated animals raised for food have also been vastly underestimated as a source of GHGs, and in fact account for at least half of all human-caused GHGs.

If this argument is right, it implies that replacing live-stock products with better alternatives would be the best strategy for reversing climate change. This approach, in fact, would have far more rapid effects on GHG emissions and their atmospheric concentration, and thus on the rate the climate is warming. The authors point out that livestock, like the automobile, are a human invention and convenience, not part of pre-human times, and a molecule of co2 exhaled by livestock is not more natural than one from a tail-pipe. Today, estimates of cattle raised for human consumption every year, range from 20 to 50 billion head. This is a sharp increase from a century ago.

Growth in markets for livestock products is greatest in developing countries, where rainforest normally stores at least 200 tons of carbon per hectare. Where forest is replaced by moderately degraded grassland, the tonnage of carbon stored per hectare is reduced to 8. On average, each hectare of grazing land supports no more than one head of cattle, whose carbon content is a fraction of a ton. In comparison, over 200 tons of carbon per hectare may be released within a short time after forest and other vegetation are cut, burned, or chewed. From the soil beneath, another 200 tons per hectare may be released, with yet more GHGs from livestock respiration and excretions.

An earlier FAO report did not take into account annual GHG reductions from photosynthesis that are foregone by using 26 percent of land worldwide for grazing livestock and 33 percent of arable land for growing feed, rather than allowing it to regenerate forest. Leaving a significant amount of tropical land used for grazing livestock and growing feed to regenerate as forest, could potentially mitigate as much as half of all anthropogenic GHGs.

The capacity of greenhouse gases to trap heat in the atmosphere is described in terms of their global warming potential (GWP), which compares their warming potency to that of CO2 (with a GWP set at 1). The new widely accepted figure for the GWP of methane is 25 using a 100-year timeframe— but it is 72 using a 20-year timeframe, which is more appropriate because of both the large effect that methane reductions can have within 20 years and the serious climate disruption expected within 20 years if no significant reduction of GHGs is achieved. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change supports using a 20-year timeframe for methane.

Worldwatch report on a range of other aspects that all contribute to substantially higher amount of GHG attributable to livestock products vs alternatives. For example, farmed fish, liquid waste, disposal and creation of specialized packaging and medical treatment. FAO estimates that global population will increase by another 35% by 2050, but in that same period, a doubling of livestock numbers.

Demand for oil will soon be impossible to meet, because of a terminal decline in production (the “peak oil” phenomenon). Petroleum’s price will spike so high as to bring about the collapse of many parts of today’s economy. Livestock products from factory farms may take an extra hit because every gram of biofuel from crops that can possibly be produced to replace conventional fuel likely will be produced—and thereby diverted from livestock—in efforts to stave off disaster.

The NZ Government is allowing further intensification of dairy farming, even allowing high country land to be turned into dairy farms. Landcare ecologist Bill Lee said moves to intensive farming practices over the past decade had “dramatically” wiped out native plants and animals. “The Canterbury Plains have probably suffered the highest level of biodiversity loss of any ecological region in New Zealand.” Fish species had suffered from pollution and loss of habitat from water extraction.

Now is the time to change.

Leaders in our food industry need to begin to replace livestock products with better alternatives now.

Food companies can produce and market alternatives to livestock products that taste similar, but are easier to cook, less expensive, and healthier.

Protein-rich legumes and grains are readily available alternatives, and these typically take one tenth of the energy to produce, and a lot less water.

The most important advantage of a plant based diet for each of us individually, is the huge health benefits, bearing in mind the high incidence of obesity and overweight conditions and chronic degenerative diseases linked to livestock products. Increased amount of plant, and fruit based daily consumption has lower possibilities of getting all types of cancer: breast, cervical, pancreatic, colon, bladder, stomach, mouth, larynx, esophagus, and lung.

The answers are life reaffirming.

Philosophers over the centuries have all celebrated the benefits of a meat free diet. I would like to share with you one story of a well-known New Zealander.

The man of the trees

Richard St. Barbe Baker, an influential English forest protection worker, moved to New Zealand in the late 1950s. Long before environmentalism was fashionable, Baker campaigned for forest conservation and vegetarianism, urging communities to save “Earth’s Green Mantle”. He pioneered practices now known as social forestry, encouraging local people to restore and safeguard their own forests.

In the 1920s he worked by the British Colonial Office in Kenya, where he encouraged the local Kikiyu people to set up a tree protection society known as Watu wa Miti. Members pledged to protect the native forest, plant native trees every year, and take care of trees everywhere. They devised a special secret handshake and a password, “Twahamwe,” meaning “All as one”. Watu wa Miti flourished, eventually growing into “Men of the Trees”, an international forest protection society with branches in many countries. It is now known as the International Tree Foundation.

In the late 1950s Baker moved to New Zealand to live with his second wife on a sheep station in the Southern Alps. Here he prepared organic compost for their vegetable garden, joined the New Zealand Vegetarian Society, wrote books, meditated, and gave lectures on tree planting. He lobbied the New Zealand authorities that forestry was more profitable than sheep farming. At the age of 74 he rode 1200 miles from the northernmost kauri tree in the country to the southernmost, near Invercargill.

In his autobiography, My trees, my life, he imagined a vegetarian future:

In some countries, such as the U.S.A., up to three-quarters of the land has been degraded to the use of growing crops to feed animals, which they kill to feed themselves. Surely a round-about way of getting food, when it is possible to get food for ourselves direct from the earth through fresh vegetables, fruit, and nut-bearing trees … I picture village communities of the future living in valleys protected by sheltering trees on the high ground. They will have fruit and nut orchard and live free from disease and enjoy leisure, liberty and justice for all, living with a sense of their one-ness with the earth, and with all living things.

Baker remained vegetarian until his death in 1982 at the age of 92.

And the way we live and eat matters not only for sustainability, but also for our safety, comfort and health

The quickest way to slash our greenhouse gas emissions on an individual and planetary scale, and the most effective means of preventing more environmental devastation on a major scale, is to reduce or eliminate meat and dairy consumption.

If you want to be safe, live close to where you work, travel by train, use a bicycle on car free routes … and become a vegetarian.

These are solutions that bring good friends and connectedness.

We do have ways to live more lightly on the earth that give joy and better health. Our end game can be a delightful, cradle-to-cradle, pollution free environment. Now is the time to wake up to community gardens, energy efficient buildings, the power of solar and a non-meat diet.
Paul Bruce