There are a lot of cows in the Cambodian countryside, just like America. Unlike America, the cows are really, really skinny. Think Kate Moss on Atkins.
The difference is the diet; we feed our cattle a lot more to fatten them up. The cows here are for protein; the cows in the west are for fat, and flavor.
But I'm not sure why our dairy herds should be so much fatter. Cambodian farmers should, I think, be making roughly the same tradeoff between having more cows, or better fed cows, to maximize their milk yield per hectare. But clearly they're not.
Without going into an ethics discussion - the reason why Asian people.. eh.. cattle are thinner is not only because they are not well fed but because they are a different race than the European cattle. They have to withstand heat and parasites better than the US/EU milk machines.
But it is not economical or environmental to have cattle of any kind compared to a vegetarian agriculture. (No, the arguments that cows graze on land that could not be cultivated are among the most retarded I have heard and I do not want to go into it here). People just do not know it better and sometimes think that Coca Cola is better than mineral water, or fresh fruit juice, etc. They copy the good and the bad of the West and this is why we in the West carry such a responsibility!
Asia will suffer more from all this than us in the West. In theory - given a vegetarian diet - Europe and the US could could carry 37% of maximum biocapacity - given only 17% of the population. But the Asia-Pacific can only carry 24% of biocapacity and already houses 56% of the population.
Wasting money and food on livestock is literally insane and suicidal. And the West is to blame for this!
Soon - every Asian will be able download Heroes onto his wireless internet device but will not be able to afford food and water. Shame!
to be continued (due to spam filter again.. I hate it, hate it...)
The rest:
But beyond survival, economics and the environment - it is a horrible idea, health wise, that more and more Asians and Africans are being pushed into milk production - given that most are lactose intolerant (not to mention saturated fats and that milk products are prone to bacterial diseases, etc.)!
We have not even tackled the issue of bird flue and pig flue - both originating from factory farms in China and spreading to the EU and soon the US.
Do Cambodians drink cows milk? No SE Asian I've ever known can stand the idea.
Any discussion relies on lots of assumptions, which is a great way to err. But: assume you've been looking at Holsteins grazing on old-fashioned Northeastern dairy farms. Farms owned by a single family. Milk produced for an urban market sold by the pound. Economically rational owners maximizing output for the market.
The US cows would be getting daily rations of grain providing a large portion of daily nutrients. The Cambodian cows presumably not. Did you see lots of corn fields--I suspect not?
We don't know whether the bovines you saw were milk animals (do we even know whether they were female?). Or whether each had a different owner (maybe you were seeing a modern "tragedy of the commons" before your eyes--in which case the owners are economically rational).
Assuming they were milk animals producing for the NGO population and lactose tolerant Asians, depending on the availability of pasture it might be rational to have more animals who feed themselves on an expanse of pasture than to spend scarce time in better husbandry. (I'm thinking about the hogs that early U.S. settlers allowed to scavenge in the woods as opposed to feeding in the farmyard.
No, the arguments that cows graze on land that could not be cultivated are among the most retarded I have heard and I do not want to go into it here.
I don't know about that, but it seems like agriculture should take more labor than simply letting cows out to graze on pasture.
Hi -
Uhhh, I think the reason that Cambodian cows really look different is that they aren't raised to be food: they are raised to be work animals, providing motive power. They get eaten when they can't work anymore.
They replace tractors when working in the fields.
I don't know anything about the production function for milk, but economics predicts that the farmer should feed the cows until the marginal cost of the feed equals the marginal benefit in terms of new milk. So at the optimal point the derivative of milk with respect to feed will equal the ratio of feed price to milk price. In math terms:
dMilk/dFeed = Pfeed/Pmilk
So (assuming similar cows) the optimal point is the same for both countries only if the price ratio is the same for both, which it probably isn't.
Assuming dMilk/dFeed is declining as feed increases, then a higher ratio of feed price to milk price would imply a lower level of optimal feeding.
Asia will suffer more from all this than us in the West. In theory - given a vegetarian diet - Europe and the US could could carry 37% of maximum biocapacity - given only 17% of the population. But the Asia-Pacific can only carry 24% of biocapacity and already houses 56% of the population. Wasting money and food on livestock is literally insane and suicidal. And the West is to blame for this!
Yeah, Mr Pottisch, I'm saddened when I read every day of those poor souls in Japan starving to death with almost 130 million people with only 14 thousand sq miles of arable land. They were indeed short sighted in the Westernization push over 100 years ago. Indeed, by becoming the most westernized of any Asian nation, they are mired in poverty, disease, poor nutrition, short lifespans, and high infant mortality.
When the milk market was becoming commoditized in the US, people bought milk by volume, and farmers cheated by watering their milk. To prevent this, the industry needed a way to detect how much actual milk there was. It's a historical accident that techniques were discovered to measure fat content before techniques were discovered to measure any other component, so commoditized milk was assayed on fat content. Basically you were paid on the number of grams of butterfat you could deliver, with the rest of the milk assumed to go along for the ride. Cows were therefore bred and fed to pruduce milk with high fat content.
The Cambodian milk market may have solved the assaying problem in some other manner, or perhaps they don't commoditize milk at all, so farmers breed their dairy cows and feed them to optimize the ratio of some other figure of merit to feed cost.
-dk
Since this post doesn't have a title, may I suggest "The Thinning Herd"?
Kolohe
I do not want to pretend to be stupid - but I am not sure what you mean by all this.
What you have listed is exactly the reason why I am for the liberation of slaves and markets. Free agents and not slaves are what makes an economy rich and free agents and not slaves is what keeps the ecology rich for all of us.
Japanese have had, historically, a very ecological, macrobiotic diet. It was only in recent times that fish and meat consumption has risen (to replace the staple rice and vegetable diets) and that cheese and other dairy products have reached the plate. The FAO has great stats on per capita consumption and growth since the 1960s!
Yes - only the rich can afford cigarettes and can live nevertheless longer than the poor Africans without cigarettes. But in the case of livestock agriculture - we are smoking the future of our children and not merely reducing our already long life-span by 3 years. (It is more difficult to quit cigarettes than to switch to a soy hot dog)
I apologize for not being a simple absolutist and that I argued that the West carries good and bad things at the same time.
The good things I like are: individual rights for humans, free markets, democracy, information technology, intellectual capital, science, freedom of expression and religion, etc.
The bad things that I do not like: ongoing enslavement of animals and nature, destruction of the ecology that the economy and human survival depends on.
cont.
...
Raising a cow for food is inefficient as it requires water and land and often also lots of energy. In fact it takes 10 times more water and land to produce 1 g of protein or 1 calorie from meat than from vegetables. In other words - if you are a VC and have a choice between a ROI of 10% and 100% given the same investment and risk - I would fire you if you chose the 10% periodically.
I invite you to register with the World Watch Institute (free) and to download their paper: Meat - it's not personal anymore
Hugo Pottisch said,
Arrogance and ignorance is never a good combination and Mr. Pottisch shows an unfortunate amount of both attributes with that statement.
No method of producing food is as sustainable and environmentally friendly as cattle grazing.
Vast amounts of land are unsuitable for farming, yet work perfectly well with grazing. Grasslands in the United States evolved being grazed by vast herds of buffalo. In Africa you see the same thing with cape buffalo and zebra.
If Mr. Pottisch knew anything about history he would recall the dustbowl and the massive wind erosion that occurred in the united states in the 1930s.
If Hugo knew anything about ecology and habitat protection he would understand the root cause of that ecological disaster was destroying land that was best suited for grazing and raising cattle (which Hugo hates and thinks is unsustainable) and converting it to farms that produced crops and vegetables (which Hugo loves and prefers to grazing cattle)
In other words cattle grazing can produce large amounts of food off of land that would be utterly destroyed if it was used to produce crops or vegetables.
Maybe someday Hugo will break out of his protective cocoon of ignorance and inexperience.
Maybe someday he will move beyond regurgitating slogans and acquire some knowledge about food production, habitat preservation, and what government policies can help preserve habitat and what government policies accelerate habitat destruction.
.
Until then I am sure he will continue to burp up astonishingly clueless slogans.
.
Folks like Hugo are very frustrating to people who are concerned about environmental preservation and sustainability of food production.
Mr Pottisch and people like him appear to be concerned about the environment. But in a disapointingly large amount of cases they are just looking for a convenient rhetorical bat to beat up animal agriculture.
Unfortunately, since they don't look for the root cause of the destruction (which is often things like farm subsidies, biofuel mandates, lack of property rights, corruption, etc.) they don't have the knowledge to effectively advocate for measures that would help preserve the environment.
Because of this the destruction they are concerned about continues unabated.
And the end result is situations like this commenter pointed out.
Here in Borneo you can drive for hours through untinterupted palm oil plantations on the way to see the last few hectares of rainforest where the last few thousand orangutans live. Thanks to the bio-fuel
TJIT,
This: "Unfortunately, since they don't look for the root cause of the destruction (which is often things like farm subsidies, biofuel mandates, lack of property rights, corruption, etc.) they don't have the knowledge to effectively advocate for measures that would help preserve the environment." is, no doubt, a sigificant ailment of many 'enviros', though, I'm not sure how it fits to Hugo.. I hear him saying, in so many words: "high-intensity animal agriculture is tremendously wasteful of, relatively scarce, ecologic resources".
He might point to the Amazonian Rain Forest destruction for the propagation of additional beef (?)
No doubt that bio-fuels, as we currently produce them, are an economic sham fueled by direct financial subsidies, trade quotas, and the continued prohibition(in the U.S.) of the one plant, Industrial Hemp, that has a shot of making Bio-Diesel work with existing technology...
Also, I was under the impression that one of the reasons we substituted Cattle for Buffalo was that they were more docile and tractable contra to the larger Buffalo, given to Stampedes and much larger roaming territories...(?) Cattle, like most of our 'domesticated' animals, will, more readily, graze themselves out, no?
Hugo -
The fact that even extremely poor societies raise animals for food should suggest to you that they see some value or efficiency in eating meat.
I have a friend out in Colorado whose grandfather owns quite a bit of land which would be of no use if it weren't used for grazing (and grazing seems to produce more nutritious milk.) Granted, that argument doesn't apply for animals that are grain fed. But it would take much more water to irrigate that same area of land, till it which damages the soil, spray it with pesticides, dump large amounts of nitrates on it, and then to harvest and prepare the crops (which consumes labor and thus resources) than to just have cattle graze on it.
It's not easy to get nutrients like EPA or carnitine or DHA on a vegan diet. While I keep to a macrobiotic diet, I greatly prefer fish oils to flax seed oil.
There's a good moral and health argument to be made for less meat consumption. Reducing (but not eliminating) consumption of saturated fats could improve health in the majority of people. But bear in mind, the Japanese were much shorter for centuries before they adopted a more western diet. And certainly if you wanted to make a system to create and distribute antibiotic resistant bacteria you'd have a hard time finding a better method than modern factory farms.
But it's important to separate moral goals from supposed economic efficiency. Vegetarianism is not keeping anyone from starving. Ethiopia was a net exporter of food during its famine. Famines are about more than just how many people can be fed by a given amount of land, as so many essays seem to assume. If meat became undesirably expensive, people would stop buying it and purchase other resource consuming things instead. (Or else, possibly, invest their money)
MEH - I can buy hemp seed in the US. My father used hemp in paper. So what exactly is holding biofuel back?
Are you saying that hemp needs to be produced locally? Why?
Ryan,
see: http://www.naihc.org/
for more background on Industrial Hemp.
And, yes, I'm saying that Hemp should be produced locally, for a number of reasons: 1. transportation costs need not be incurred, 2. our trade deficit is big enough as it is, 3. we could displace some of our input-intensive Cotton crop for further Economic savings...for starters.
Yes, Hugo, you are correct. Cattle is inefficient. Maybe we should all eat the gruel they eat in The Matrix. That stuff look like it was very efficient. Would you be happy then? I didn't realize my life had to correspond in everyway to the maxiumum efficiency.
Throw out all the TVs. Watching TVs and creating TV shows and movies in efficient. Think of the energy savings (gasp, all that C02) we'd get from no more Hollywood and no more TVs being shipped across by the container load.
The simple fact is, in much of the rural southwest, cattle grazing is good for the land. I've seen it, I leave here. Thank you very much.
Every cattle rancher I know, with the exception of the big guys with 2000+ head do it for the fun of it. The enjoy doing it and get paid for it.
I suppose because it is inefficient we should just chuck it out the window.
I think eco-tourism is inefficient too. I don't give a damn if you like it. You have to fly or drive across the country (Gasp, c02!). Then go to an over crowded park and march all over the land. Then of course we have to maintain the land so we have the NPS and BLM who expend an enormous amount of resources pushing dirt around and paving trails. That seems inefficient to me.
Instead of evaluating what other people do and enjoy on the merits of efficiency, why don't you take a page out of your own book and mind your own business?
Sorry for the terrible grammar/spelling issues. I'm feeling miserable today and still recovering from the stomach flu. Fortunately I haven't eaten anything in 2 days so I'm balancing out the inefficiences of my meat diet.
For me the "aha" moment came in India. I remember looking out the taxi window at yet another skinny cow and thinking something like: why are cows so skinny everywhere except the United States? The realization that skinny is actually the normal state for a cow, and that our cows are the outliers, was a curiously powerful idea to me...
Regarding fat cows, milk fat etc.: my immediate reaction was the culprit was agricultural pharma and additives like estrogen. And that fat was a good thing for the context and easily achieved. (However, I think things like estrogen in beef are horrible for humans but the damage is long term and will not be punished by any market.)
Those are most likely not cows -- they are water buffalo. If they are cows, then things have changed since I was in Cambodia five years ago. I saw few cows, but water buffalo everywhere...
[Cambodian farmers should, I think, be making roughly the same tradeoff between having more cows, or better fed cows, to maximize their milk yield per hectare]
Friesians, Holsteins, Jerseys and other high-milk-yield, fat cows will not usually survive well in South-East Asian climates, and even if they do they need high-protein animal feeds which are more expensive in Cambodia than in countries with large grain surpluses.
Hugo was flat wrong about grazing cattle. They can extract nutrition from land that cannot be farmed, and when cows are fed that way rather than on farm crops, they increase the total nutrition available to humans. However, that way of feeding gives you skinny cows. We've got fat cows because for about a century we valued fat, and were (and still are) rich enough to be able to afford raising cows on corn rather than eating the corn ourselves and turning the cows out to graze on the un-farmable land. You can't support nearly as large a human population the way we do it, but we've got the land...
Go back 150 years, and you'd see "skinny" cows in many places in the USA. The Texas longhorns, turned loose on the range to find their own food, produced dry stringy beef. There were also many working oxen, who may have been grain-fed and heavily muscled, but weren't fat like modern American cows. Developing those required grain-feeding, restrictions on their exercise, and selective breeding for large cows with the capability of putting on lots of fat (in the beef breeds) or producing gallons of high-fat milk (in the milk breeds).
South Asian cows are probably a different breed in the first place (water buffalo), they were bred to work more than for beef or milk, and they probably are pastured on the worst land and fed nothing that is fit for human consumption.
Mr. Pottisch-
Here is what I meant-
Whenever I see something like "The West is to blame for this!" in the context of your ongoing central thesis I read it as: "Man, it is a crime that those Asians (or Africans, or Mezo/South Americans) are being forced to adopt a lifestyle the west is foisting upon them." Thus it is either the West is forcing the Japanese at gunpoint to eat hamburgers, or the Japanese must be ignorant and stupid to freely choose some aspects of western culture, including diet. Additionally, by your hypothesis, this generation born after 1960 must then be unhealthier than at anytime in Japanese history. Which is patently false, even if you control for the step decrease follow by increase in health due to the deprivations of world war 2.
It is the height of western arrogance to tell other people how to live their lives. Hell, its the height of arrogance to the people living in our country (the us in my case) how to live our lives.
"South Asian cows are probably a different breed in the first place (water buffalo), they were bred to work more than for beef or milk, and they probably are pastured on the worst land and fed nothing that is fit for human consumption."-posted by markm
Close. They are zebu. They have more endurance and longer, thinner legs than western cattle. They make better oxen, and are good in the muddier fields produced by monsoons. They do use water buffalo as well, to till the completely inundated fields, but they are much less common.
"Friesians, Holsteins, Jerseys and other high-milk-yield, fat cows will not usually survive well in South-East Asian climates, ..........."
Not only that, but it milk is very hard to handle in hot climates. Aside from the spoilage on fresh milk, there is almost no way to make cheese to help balance out times of high production against times of lower production. Even places like North India, with millenia of tradition involving milk, do not have any tradition of cheese-making. Neither does the American South, even though the English who settled there certainly did.
All the "cattle" I saw in Cambodia, and it hasn't been all that long ago, were water buffalo, and they were for pulling plows, not for meat. And they tasted like it.
You are all missing the obvious reason for the cows - Cambodia is a poor non-industrialized country. The cows are being kept so that their manure can be gathered and used for fertilizer. The cows eat whatever they can graze on, and the peasants gather up the manure for their food plots. Nobody cares what the cows look like, or if they give milk or not, or how big they are. When a cow looks like it's about to die from old age, it will be slaughtered and eaten, but until then it's too valuable as a source of fertilizer. All pre-industrial societies in the europe and everywhere else used their cattle, pigs, etc. the same way.
Sam and Kolohe
I have seriously NO idea what your are saying. Sam argues that Hollywood should shut down because it is ecologically not sustainable. I did not know that. The point is that if you are right – then it will shut down by definition all by itself. Just like Icarus, despite in full flight, will have to crash land.
I never assumed that so many people here want to reduce pollution by quitting movies etc. I always hoped that we would simply switch from oil and coal to solar and geothermal And from livestock to more organic vegetable/fruit agriculture.
Kolohe
The scientists who have told us about the state of the planet and livestock have not forced us to do anything. I would not claim that they are arrogant at all? Where is this arrogance argument coming from? "The blue pill kills you – the red pill saves you. It is your choice" is what they are saying that is all. The scientists have informed us - not forced us. Now we use the democratic process to tackle this challenge.
We rarely force anybody to do anything. The rare exceptions are that we force animals 24 hours per day to suffer. We might force some thousands of civilians to die because there is a 3% chance that the fake intelligence is right and that Saddam might indeed poses WMD which could be used on Israel within decades.. that is when we force people (but this is still marginal compared to what we force animals to do.
Otherwise the West is great - it does not force many individuals but rather protects them in contrast to dictatorships.
When it comes to Coca Cola – we are talking free market and free agents. I believe that most consumers are as stupid as in the US but that we have been at it, blind consumption much longer and therefore we carry more responsibility at present than China. this is not about West vs East at all. This is about planet earth (you know - the one we ALL inhabit)
If WE have the scientists that warn us about livestock being unsustainable, and we are the ones practicing it the most, and if we have the money to adjust – and WE have the children about whose future we care... then I do not see how we need to force ourselves or anybody to do what every animals has tried since the beginning of time: Adjust in order to survive.
What is wrong with you Kolohe – do you not know what real "force" is. Never lived under a dictatorship, never forced to partake in a war, never visited a factory farm?
No – poor thing – the bad bad scientists are not forcing you to listen to them. They are asking you for the sake of your children.
And I have no idea where the life-span discussion of Japan comes from again. I am talking about livestock being unsustainable – not unhealthy. Japanese can afford medicine and cigarettes at the same time because they are free and not being treated like animals. This means that despite them smoking they live longer than some children in Africa who have never smoked.
In the case of livestock however – we are talking about the whole planet and not just regions. If China or Africa screw up and reach an ecological point of no return – then this will affect Europe and the US. If they all die of cancer – we do not care!
Let me guess – you have not yet accepted the fact that climate change is real?
Please watch this short clip and tell me who tell who how to live and how? What adjective would you use to describe this new height?
Re: Grassland
More at the WorldWatch Institute or the UN.
Mr Pottisch- This is your very first comment (emphasis added):
This is what I mean by Western arrogance. How is the bolded statement is any different than the arrogance of "white man's burden"?
No, I've never lived under a dicatorship. But I don't need to, to find it morally reprehensible the way you easily conflate a factory farm with a dicatorship. Are you really equating Con-Agra with the Khemer Rouge?
My point about Japan continues to be is that you seem have a very narrow zero sum view. Japan is clearly beyond its carrying capacity but continues to thrive.
You and others have every right to your evangelism. But similar to the Seventh Day adventists who have been wrong now for about 150 years, those of the Malthusian inclination have been incorrect for about two hundred. So, it takes a higher bar to overcome my skeptism due to longstanding pattern of wolf cries.
(And for the record, no I am not a global warming 'denier'. As an additional aside, you should really use anyone else in your cites besides Ehrlich, who is probably the most spectacularly wrong scientist of the 20th century in terms of his models having any predictive power)
Upon futher thinking about it, Mr Pottisch, for clarity, here is the gulf between us:
1) Your moral arguments against carnivorism are logically unassailable. The problem is that we have different postulates; you posulate that animals (vertebrates? birds and mammals?) have the same rights to life and liberty as humans. I disagree with this postulate.
2) Your consequentialist arguments have some unassailable facts, but I think often lack perspective. (This is why I harp on Japan as a counter-example of your assertions. If "Asia" gets close to or exceeds it carrying capacity, it still probably won't mean dire consequences, as long as other technological, and more importantly robust political and economic systems in place.) Plus, as a mentioned previously, the predictive power of biocapacity models have been completely wrong more times than not. All famines of the 20th century (and so far in our current century) have been caused by politics, not ecology.
Kolohe
I hear you. Let us make certain that the whole world is a free democracy, that there are no wars and that no human child suffers before we...
To be honest - that sounds like "world peace" to me and from my perspective also lacks perspective. I am all up for it and I am glad to see the process under way. We are getting more peaceful, democratic and wealthy overall on earth. At least from a political and economic point of view.
If the ecology were somehow build on top of that political and economic soil, like say social welfare - I'd follow your path. But in this rarest of cases the economy and political stability will relay on shrinking resources of ecology. Oil gone is one thing, species and forest gone another.
We agree to disagree not on economics and politics but on ecological arguments.
I keep referring to this timeless article by E O Wilson, first published in the NY Times 1993:
Read on...
I also wished that predictions in the past had been wrong even more often. But they were right about population growth, acid rain if anybody can remember and also the little hole in the ozone layer, they linked smoking to cancer and ... scientists even manged to prove that the earth is not flat, etc. given enough time those bastards seem to manifest themselves?
When will we start to comprehend what Darwin meant when he wrote his little book? That we are animals constraint by space and time and by mother nature whose breast are not supernatural? They are spiritual and sensual in the sense that they feed us - but they can dry out.
1) I think the 'did you know the world was round and when did you know it?' debate was covered exhaustively when it was discussed how a phobia of gay socratic vegetarian genoese explorer penguins are a root cause of many of our social ills. Let us also agree to disagree on this historical tidbit.
2) Except that population growth estimates have been wrong. Our worldwide growth rate peaked in the sixties, and is now half of where it was and continues to drop. All industrialized countries are either at or below replacement birth rate. No one predicted or even observed this 2nd derivative trend until the nineties (or if they did, no one pushed into the lay public consciousness)
3) Acid rain and ozone depletion seem to have dropped off the radar from when they were front page issues when I was growing up in the eighties. You may be right that the predictions were true in these cases, but they seems not to be the biggest problems. Either we are ignoring ongoing problems or we have ameliorated the acid rain problems where it was possible locally (albeit only in the G-7 world), and have alleviated the ozone problem globally (through CFC bans). However, I don't think vegetarianism or lack thereof has any bearing on either problem or solution to these two .
Lastly, I'd say I subscribe to a 'weak theory' of the 'end of history', in that I agree that a technological liberal democratic society is the best form of human organization. The weak characterization comes from that there will of course still be wars and similar conditions due to social (i.e. religious and cultural) and political (i.e. power grab) conflicts.
Kolohe - I have linked to enough sources in order to explain why I do not think that increasing livestock agriculture is sustainable (at home and abroad). In the case of ecology - a major livestock reduction would be sufficient. It is on moral grounds that I have problems inflicting needless pains (being vegetarian). I hear no real argument from you regarding both points?
Regarding the population growth discussion and that some doomsday scenarios have not come true - I would like to quote somebody more accomplished again. He argues that we are not living sustainably here and now - let alone what might happen if more people stroll along or even worse - get richer.
This one is long - but our discussion is a deja vu of an even longer timeframe?
The Bottleneck
By Edward O. Wilson
The 20th century was a time of exponential scientific and technical advance, the freeing of the arts by an exuberant modernism, and the spread of democracy and human rights throughout the world. It was also a dark and savage age of world wars, genocide, and totalitarian ideologies that came dangerously close to global domination. While preoccupied with all this tumult, humanity managed collaterally to decimate the natural environment and draw down the nonrenewable resources of the planet with cheerful abandon. We thereby accelerated the erasure of entire ecosystems and the extinction of thousands of million-year-old species. If Earth's ability to support our growth is finite--and it is--we were mostly too busy to notice.
As a new century begins, we have begun to awaken from this delirium. Now, increasingly postideological in temper, we may be ready to settle down before we wreck the planet. It is time to sort out Earth and calculate what it will take to provide a satisfying and sustainable life for everyone into the indefinite future. The question of the century is: How best can we shift to a culture of permanence, both for ourselves and for the biosphere that sustains us?
The bottom line is different from that generally assumed by our leading economists and public philosophers. They have mostly ignored the numbers that count. Consider that with the global population past six billion and on its way to eight billion or more by midcentury, per capita freshwater and arable land are descending to levels resource experts agree are risky. The ecological footprint--the average amount of productive land and shallow sea appropriated by each person in bits and pieces from around the world for food, water, housing, energy, transportation, commerce, and waste absorption--is about one hectare (2.5 acres) in developing nations but about 9.6 hectares (24 acres) in the U.S. The footprint for the total human population is 2.1 hectares (5.2 acres). For every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet Earths. The five billion people of the developing countries may never wish to attain this level of profligacy. But in trying to achieve at least a decent standard of living, they have joined the industrial world in erasing the last of the natural environments. At the same time, Homo sapiens has become a geophysical force, the first species in the history of the planet to attain that dubious distinction. We have driven atmospheric carbon dioxide to the highest levels in at least 200,000 years, unbalanced the nitrogen cycle, and contributed to a global warming that will ultimately be bad news everywhere.
For every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet Earths.
In short, we have entered the Century of the Environment, in which the immediate future is usefully conceived as a bottleneck. Science and technology, combined with a lack of self-understanding and a Paleolithic obstinacy, brought us to where we are today. Now science and technology, combined with foresight and moral courage, must see us through the bottleneck and out.
"Wait! Hold on there just one minute!"
That is the voice of the cornucopian economist. Let us listen to him carefully. He is focused on production and consumption. These are what the world wants and needs, he says. He is right, of course. Every species lives on production and consumption. The tree finds and consumes nutrients and sunlight; the leopard finds and consumes the deer. And the farmer clears both away to find space and raise corn--for consumption. The economist's thinking is based on precise models of rational choice and near-horizon timelines. His parameters are the gross domestic product, trade balance, and competitive index. He sits on corporate boards, travels to Washington, occasionally appears on television talk shows. The planet, he insists, is perpetually fruitful and still underutilized.
The ecologist has a different worldview. He is focused on unsustainable crop yields, overdrawn aquifers, and threatened ecosystems. His voice is also heard, albeit faintly, in high government and corporate circles. He sits on nonprofit foundation boards, writes for Scientific American, and is sometimes called to Washington. The planet, he insists, is exhausted and in trouble.
The Economist
"EASE UP. In spite of two centuries of doomsaying, humanity is enjoying unprecedented prosperity. There are environmental problems, certainly, but they can be solved. Think of them as the detritus of progress, to be cleared away. The global economic picture is favorable. The gross national products of the industrial countries continue to rise. Despite their recessions, the Asian tigers are catching up with North America and Europe. Around the world, manufacture and the service economy are growing geometrically. Since 1950 per capita income and meat production have risen continuously. Even though the world population has increased at an explosive 1.8 percent each year during the same period, cereal production, the source of more than half the food calories of the poorer nations and the traditional proxy of worldwide crop yield, has more than kept pace, rising from 275 kilograms per head in the early 1950s to 370 kilograms by the 1980s. The forests of the developed countries are now regenerating as fast as they are being cleared, or nearly so. And while fibers are also declining steeply in most of the rest of the world--a serious problem, I grant--no global scarcities are expected in the foreseeable future. Agriforestry has been summoned to the rescue: more than 20 percent of industrial wood fiber now comes from tree plantations.
"Social progress is running parallel to economic growth. Literacy rates are climbing, and with them the liberation and empowerment of women. Democracy, the gold standard of governance, is spreading country by country. The communication revolution powered by the computer and the Internet has accelerated the globalization of trade and the evolution of a more irenic international culture.
"For two centuries the specter of Malthus troubled the dreams of futurists. By rising exponentially, the doomsayers claimed, population must outstrip the limited resources of the world and bring about famine, chaos, and war. On occasion this scenario did unfold locally. But that has been more the result of political mismanagement than Malthusian mathematics. Human ingenuity has always found a way to accommodate rising populations and allow most to prosper.
"Genius and effort have transformed the environment to the benefit of human life. We have turned a wild and inhospitable world into a garden. Human dominance is Earth's destiny. The harmful perturbations we have caused can be moderated and reversed as we go along."
The Environmentalist
"YES, IT'S TRUE that the human condition has improved dramatically in many ways. But you've painted only half the picture, and with all due respect the logic it uses is just plain dangerous. As your worldview implies, humanity has learned how to create an economy-driven paradise. Yes again--but only on an infinitely large and malleable planet. It should be obvious to you that Earth is finite and its environment increasingly brittle. No one should look to gross national products and corporate annual reports for a competent projection of the world's long-term economic future. To the information there, if we are to understand the real world, must be added the research reports of natural-resource specialists and ecological economists. They are the experts who seek an accurate balance sheet, one that includes a full accounting of the costs to the planet incurred by economic growth.
"This new breed of analysts argues that we can no longer afford to ignore the dependency of the economy and social progress on the environmental resource base. It is the content of economic growth, with natural resources factored in, that counts in the long term, not just the yield in products and currency. A country that levels its forests, drains its aquifers, and washes its topsoil downriver without measuring the cost is a country traveling blind.
"Suppose that the conventionally measured global economic output, now at about $31 trillion, were to expand at a healthy 3 percent annually. By 2050 it would in theory reach $138 trillion. With only a small leveling adjustment of this income, the entire world population would be prosperous by current standards. Utopia at last, it would seem! What is the flaw in the argument? It is the environment crumbling beneath us. If natural resources, particularly freshwater and arable land, continue to diminish at their present per capita rate, the economic boom will lose steam, in the course of which--and this worries me even if it doesn't worry you--the effort to enlarge productive land will wipe out a large part of the world's fauna and flora.
The pattern of human population growth in the 20th century was more bacterial than primate.
"The appropriation of productive land--the ecological footprint--is already too large for the planet to sustain, and it's growing larger. A recent study building on this concept estimated that the human population exceeded Earth's sustainable capacity around the year 1978. By 2000 it had overshot by 1.4 times that capacity. If 12 percent of land were now to be set aside in order to protect the natural environment, as recommended in the 1987 Brundtland Report, Earth's sustainable capacity will have been exceeded still earlier, around 1972. In short, Earth has lost its ability to regenerate--unless global consumption is reduced or global production is increased, or both."
By dramatizing these two polar views of the economic future, I don't wish to imply the existence of two cultures with distinct ethos. All who care about both the economy and environment, and that includes the vast majority, are members of the same culture. The gaze of our two debaters is fixed on different points in the space-time scale in which we all dwell. They differ in the factors they take into account in forecasting the state of the world, how far they look into the future, and how much they care about nonhuman life. Most economists today, and all but the most politically conservative of their public interpreters, recognize very well that the world has limits and that the human population cannot afford to grow much larger. They know that humanity is destroying biodiversity. They just don't like to spend a lot of time thinking about it. The environmentalist view is fortunately spreading. Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the "environmentalist" view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view. In a realistically reported and managed economy, balanced accounting will be routine. The conventional gross national product (GNP) will be replaced by the more comprehensive genuine progress indicator (GPI), which includes estimates of environmental costs of economic activity. Already a growing number of economists, scientists, political leaders, and others have endorsed precisely this change. (Note by Hugo: far too few are behind this seriously)
What, then, are essential facts about population and environment? From existing databases we can answer that question and visualize more clearly the bottleneck through which humanity and the rest of life are now passing.
By the end of the century some relief was in sight. In most parts of the world--North and South America, Europe, Australia, and most of Asia--people had begun gingerly to tap the brake pedal.
So what? Read on: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=000E5878-3E45-1CC6-B4A8809EC588EEDF&print=true
MEH you said
My point is that by using rainforest destruction as a rhetorical argument against animal agriculture folks like Hugo never bother to understand what drives habitat destruction and what policies would reduce it.
Because they ignored the root cause of rainforest destruction folks like Hugo have no policies and no chance of stopping rainforest destruction caused by biofuel production or other future drivers of rainforest destruction.
Hugo,
Your continue to display your ignorance with your comment on grassland. Since all you managed to type out before regurgitating some slogans was Re: Grassland at least it was brief.
Your post (once again) misses the fact that most of the grassland left was preserved by ranchers grazing cattle.
Ranchers who preserve grasslands by continuing to graze cattle on them are not eligible for the many government policies that subsidize the environmentally destructive conversion of grassland to crop or vegetable production.
So you keep complaining about ranchers and they keep up the environmentally beneficial practice of grazing at considerable financial cost to themselves.
The ironic fact is the rancher has done far more to preserve fragile ecosystems then the average vegetarian such as yourself ever will.
TJIT,
earlier: "Unfortunately, since they don't look for the root cause of the destruction (which is often things like farm subsidies, biofuel mandates, lack of property rights, corruption, etc.) they don't have the knowledge to effectively advocate for measures that would help preserve the environment."
Yes, no doubt. It's, actually, a nice sum of why many 'enviros' are termed 'Watermelons': Green on the outside...
TJIT
Thank you for countering the ecological unsustainability argument of livestock by the UN and the WorldWatch Institute with economics.
Of course - as long as we cut subsidies and introduce free markets worldwide species will stop going extinct. It is all about the economy stupid! I now understand why we differ - you think that the ecology is build on the economy and not the other way around as E O Wilson has argued.
As long as markets are free - Asia and Africa can eat as much livestock as we do. It is just about policies.. and the enviros (E O Wilson, UN, WorldWatch) have no clue what good policies might be...
Thank you for the links that counter the UN, IPCC and WorldWatch and explain how cattle emissions and soil erosion and species extinction actually preserve the environment.
Thank you for mixing bioful into the economic arguments????? In this one case we can look at ecology and not mere economics and politics? Why on earth?
What is the difference to my links and arguments that livestock agriculture produces more climate emissions than all cars and planes combined - and that it wasts more land (soil erosion and species loss) and water than anything else we do? Most of the land, not just rain forests, has been wasted for livestock and not biofuel (which I have been fighting also at The Atlantic but relatively less compared to livestock as at this point it is rounding error in comparison).
The big paradigm change as E O Wilson argues is that for the first time in history (6.7 billion people getting richer) we have to ask "is it sustainable" before we ask "is it profitable"
Thank you again for implying I do not know the implications of the farm bill in the US and the CAP in Europe. Never heard of it, never commented about it here. Something I have to look into..?
No, you and me both agree that farm subsidies are economically inefficient. Do we agree that livestock subsidies (ca 70%) are on top of all economic arguments also ecologically inefficient? How do you propose to "save our earth" with good ecological policies without agreeing what destroys it ecologically speaking?
It seems to me that it took some agreement over the IPCC report first - before we could discuss the Pigot Club? Discussing policies without the ecological footprint discussion is purely theoretical and has nothing to do with the real-world view that E O Wilson is proposing. This kind of approach has led to biofuel subsidies in the first place!
And after your explanations and links...
Thank you for comparing a consumer with the produces (farmer vs me the vegetarian). That of course makes the ecological footprint discussion extremely fruitful or better meatingful?
There might be some producers who also have a lower ecological footprint than I do (organic vegetable farmers?) but I doubt that livestock farmers and consumers can make such claim. And I am not sure how to compare you personally with IBM although I see some similarities with John F Akers?
It's, actually, a nice sum of why many 'enviros' term exemptionalists as dead meat. Rotten on the outside, fat on the inside...
Hugo,
You continue to generate great volumes of verbiage while not understanding the root cause of habitat destruction. If you do not understand what drives habitat destruction you are utterly powerless to stop it. You said (bold emphasis mine)
Let me break it into easy to understand pieces for you
.
1. Government has mandated biofuel usage and production. That is the politics.
2. The politics made it profitable to destroy rain forest and other habitat to produce biofuels. That is the economics
In other words "mere" economics and politics is what caused the habitat destruction. If you continue to ignore politics and economics you will never, ever, understand or stop habitat destruction.
TJIT,
Take it easy on poor Hugo; I think he's very entertaining (in fact, if he didn't show up and post for free, Megan would probably hire him to do so.)
I have no idea how this thread emerged from a question about skinny cows. I don't think the world is better off, either. The most convincing answer to Meghan's question had nothing to do with economics per se, or the upcoming dissolution of the ecosystem as we know it-but rather, the simple claim that the cows weren't meant for eating.
Kirk,
When it comes to habitat preservation the more the merrier. I am just trying to provide Hugo with some knowledge that will let him be a more effective advocate for ecosystem preservation.
I'm sure he will continue to post interesting comments.