The Politics of Vegetarianism
Photo by Flickr user Akuppa |
Recently, because of an influx of comprehensive studies on the environmental implications of meat consumption, we have been asked to reconsider our dietary habits. Usually when I broach this subject with my meat-eating counterparts, I am met with scorn and made to feel like a sanctimonious asshole.
But why is questioning someone’s meat consumption a faux pas? The numbers are in and if you eat lots of meat, you’re degrading the environment. Why aren’t you the asshole, in the same ranks as the guy in front of me driving a Hummer? Further, why isn’t the government taking a stand against this industry that is synonymous with filth (both environmentally and ethically)? (partially rhetorical)
Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, mainstreamed environmental awareness and popularized green living. As the movie premiered, oil executives were announcing record profits and Americans were paying more than ever at the pump. Oil companies quickly became the bad guys, but the reasons for this were not so much environmental as they were economic. Car companies couldn’t churn out hybrid designs fast enough and capitalists were thrilled with the prospect of a new industry in green technology. Agribusiness seized this rare moment of “activism” to promote ethanol and biofuel (two solutions that curiously have an adverse effect on the environment yet continue to be promoted), industries they could quickly and easily monopolize.
Meanwhile, gas prices continued to rise as we threatened Iran and Americans being slaves to the pump continued to drive their cars, and citing The Inconvenient Truth as just that, ignored the problem. What does this have to do with meat? My reminiscence of the events of 2006-07 is meant to illustrate both the difficulty in dealing with the quintessential “man” in the oil industry and the disillusionment felt by Americans when trying to fight such a well funded, entrenched interest.
So while Big Oil has hitherto been the poster boy for environmental degradation, academics are finding out that there is another equally offensive, though less formidable opponent in the meat industry. Rather than rehash the points made in the Times’ wonderful piece “Re-Thinking the Meat Guzzler” (appearing in the first hyperlink and again here,) I’ll explain why this fight is vital to the green movement’s future.
Delegates at the opening session of the conference |
Americans alone cannot ratify Kyoto (despite that fact that many polls show support for signing over 70%) or start environmentally friendly car companies. We can, however, make eggplant Parmesan rather than chicken. A study by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.” So let’s say, very conservatively, that a family of four eats 2.2 lbs of beef per week. If they substituted a steak meal (6 oz. per member) for a meal sans meat, they would be sparing us a trip from Chicago to Madison worth of greenhouse gas emissions.
If Americans aren’t willing to make small sacrifices like the one illustrated above, I think that it is the responsibility of government to intervene. Specifically, factory farms should be responsible for reducing emissions (they are currently exempt), and there should be limits placed on production. This wouldn’t be the first time that Americans were called on to make dietary sacrifices for the greater good. I’m not asking for a return to the draconian rationing rules of WWII, but I do think that if we’re serious about fighting global warming, we need to reduce the amount of meat that is produced and consumed.
The first step is to hold factory farms to higher standards of quality by stepping up regulation by the Department of Agriculture and the FDA. If factory farms had to be held to any standard at all, the amount of production would significantly decline (I mean, do you see the shit that they turn into “food”?) To expect the government to do more than that would be naive, so I’ll end my argument for government intervention.
This is a rare moment when we can seriously change policies that our government officials are too corrupt to take on. We can, in effect, sign Kyoto in our kitchens. So, my meat-eating friends, I’m not calling on mass conversion to the good side, I’m simply asking that the next time you’re at the grocery and you find that your cart is full of pork, beef, lamb and whatever other animals you eat, maybe substitute an eggplant here or some seitan there. If not, you can hypocritically ride your bike home from your local grocer packing 155 miles worth of carbon emissions in your bag.
16 Comments »
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The “small sacrifices” you are proposing Americans make in their diet is a misdirection of good intentions. Your article is rife with your bias so this is going to feel like a personal attack…deal with it. Since you have the audacity to suggest that “it is the responsibility of the government to intervene” just because I do not ascribe to your doomsday theories, well then, bombs away:
When I choose to place a pound of ground beef or chicken breasts in my grocery cart, I am also making a choice to not substitute either of those meats for eggplant. You green-freaks have a one-track mind when it comes to saving the environment: shame. You want to inform me? Fine, being educated is how we learn to make responsible decisions. But to shame me into changing my diet for the good of the earth is ludicrous. Your article reminds me of the media hacks who had the nerve to compare Bush and Hitler. Enjoying your Freedom Fries, Senator Choad? Why not go ahead and make the argument that our farts are depleting the ozone layer? I’ve no doubt we could drum up a few factoids to make that sound urgent as well.
An episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!, an outstanding Emmy Award-winning Showtime series, explored the roots of environmental hysteria in their first season. In that episode, Patrick Moore, ecologist, life-long environmentalist (also a founder and former president of Greenpeace) said:
“The environmental movement was basically hijacked by political and social activists who came in and learned, very cleverly, how to use green rhetoric (or green language) to cloak agendas that actually have more to do with anti-corporatism, anti-globalization, anti-business and very little to do with science or ecology.”
Stop taking everything you hear about what it takes to save the world at face value and start questioning its source. You, as a writer, have a responsibility to check your facts and to explore all sides of this issue so that your readership can make a well-rounded and informed decision.
If you honestly believe that changing the content of what comes out of your butt will make a difference, then, by all means Mr. Beck, fertilize the ground with your eggplant. In the meantime, you and your suggestion of an environmental police state would do well to keep your nose out of my shit.
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Gabriel Levinson -
The tone of your comment is very defensive, Gabriel. People from both sides of the aisle now agree that the environment is in trouble, yet your argument refuses to acknowledge the obvious. What about Mr. Beck’s modest proposal strikes you as so wrong? What’s the worse that could happen by simply changing some of our everyday habits? Is your right to eat fatty junk food worth the possible consequences?
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Jonah -
Mr. Levinson,
At first I was unsure whether or not such an idiotic post warranted a response, and then realizing I had nothing to do at work and deconstructing your critique would be practically effortless, I have this to say:
I’ll refute your argument chronologically as it appears on the post.
First, the “audacious suggestion” of “government intervention” that you mention I assume refers to my desire for factory farm emissions to be regulated and stricter regulation regarding the processing of meat, since those are the only two mentions of government intervention in the article (assuming you actually read it). The latter suggestion was offered with a link to the story regarding the largest meat recall in US history stemming from the processing of half-dead animals. I apologize for the assumption that meat eaters would prefer to eat meat that didn’t come from diseased and moribund animals.
As for the former, if you’re actually questioning that then I don’t expect you to take anything from this article anyway.These “doomsday theories” you speak of I assume refers to global warming. I’m pretty sure there’s a consensus that that shit is real, but if you can offer evidence to the contrary then by all means…
You suggest several times in your incomprehensible rant that my sources are questionable: “no doubt we could drum up some factoids”, “You, as a writer, have a responsibility to check your facts and to explore all sides of this issue so that your readership can make a well-rounded and informed decision”, “green rhetoric”. Well I suppose trusting a study from the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, the Japanese Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science, Bush’s conservative EPA, the United Nations, and the non-vegetarian author of the New York Times article was a bit irresponsible. Good of you to put me in my place by citing the “Outstanding, Emmy-Award winning Showtime series”, Penn and Teller’s Bullshit!
The quote from the Founder of Greenpeace suggests that I’ve “cloaked” my “anti-corporate agenda”. I think I made it pretty clear that oil corporations have been raping us for record profits, thus, are bad.
The purpose of these articles is to start fruitful discussion about how to improve the institutions that affect our lives. This can only happen if you’re capable of reading and analyzing the information presented rather than feeling attacked by something that doesn’t suit your preferences. I hope that your meat-eating peers can offer a more coherent argument.
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Matthew Beck (author) -
Wow, someone’s got an axe to grind with vegetarians, sounds like. I do agree that appointing the government as overseer of our diets (or anything for that matter) is definitely not the way to go. But personally, I have no issue with anti-corporatism, anti-globalization, or anti-business positions, and, presuming you’ve quoted Patrick Moore accurately, I think he’s just succumbed to a bit of founder’s syndrome, whining that the interests of the movement he helped found evolved beyond his own narrow perspective.
Nor do I think that it is our duty as writers to “explore all sides of the issue.” First of all, there are always more sides to any issue than will fit within the limit of even a publication like the New Yorker, and attempting to explore them all can only denigrate the significance of each of them. Secondly, to presume to be able to explore all sides of the issue in a “fair and balanced” way assumes that the writer is neutral or can manufacture a neutral perspective. I personally have no interest in being neutral (nor, it seems, do you, Gabriel), and I think neutrality is a perspective in itself—a particularly pernicious one precisely because it pretends not to be.
Lastly, I seem to recall at one point that this “leave a reply” section had a nice reminder: “You may be right, but you’re still an asshole.”
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Mr. Beck and friends,
While I won’t take back what I wrote, I admit that the weaknesses in my response arose out of my own bias, the kind of bias that I called out Mr. Beck on. We tread a thin line when it comes to hot-topics, and its far too easy to let our passion of a topic get in the way of the facts being discussed (which I obviously fell victim to).
I have read your other articles on this site Mr. B, and this is the first time that I felt what you presented was a rush-job. Your political pieces certainly have your voice behind them, but there seems to me a more careful presentation to support that voice; it is the careful presentation that I found lacking in this one. I’m looking at this from an editorial standpoint, I have a feeling that we’re going to agree to disagree here.
Fhar, you got me. Its ignorant to call for a representation of all sides of the issue. Where’s the fun in that? Then we lose the art of the argument and thus lose out on engaging dialogue (such as this, ha).
Jonah, I do believe that global warming or climate change (or whatever the most up-to-date PC term is) is an issue…what I question is not its validity, I question its urgency.
I’ll try to bow out with a modicum of grace here. For the sake of perspective, I leave you with this:
//Gabriel Levinson -
I’m writing because I promised someone I would, but I’ll start off by saying that I care far less about any of this than you do. I’ll agree with Gabriel that the piece seems like a rush job, a quaint undergraduate polemic on vegetarianism. But everyone, author and commentors alike, is missing the point. If one truly cared about the environment, one would move to a remote, wooded area and grow her own food. Yes, I agree, meat production is awfully bad for the environment. So is vegetable consumption — your acres of soy that would feed the world the times over would also require (judging by current practice) millions of tons of pesticides to be sprayed over them, which would in turn wash into our rivers, etc. etc. etc. Do you, Matthew and commentors, not buy fruits and vegetables and tofu that come in aluminum and plastic? Do you know how much energy goes into making that plastic? Do you eat vegetables that aren’t grown locally? Do you know how much gasoline goes into transporting those vegetables? Do you sit at your computers all day, e-mailing and posting, without thinking about the energy that goes into supporting the world’s servers? Do you use lamps instead of candles?
I’m aware that I am coming across as being on the side of the “I can’t make a REAL difference, so I might as well not try AT ALL” camp, but on the contrary, I try to make as many conscious decisions about what I consume, food and otherwise, every day. But I’m not going to chastise one group (meat-eaters, for example) for fear of being a hypocrite (by eating vegetables that aren’t grown locally and that have been packaged in plastic, and then using precious energy to write a less-than-stellar article about it on the Web).
Anyway, all is futile. Until America decides to do a 180 on its way of living and working, we can all do very little. It’s going to take a massive revolution in our thinking and a new approach to comfort and economics. We’ll need more than a few snarky comments to even begin to get people really thinking.
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Kate -
Thanks, Kate, for bringing this debate back to the issues. Apparently the point here is that environmentalism is a wasted idea, a ‘futile’ effort as you phrase it in your last paragraph. If “one truly cared about the environment, one would move to a remote, wooded area and grow her (one’s?) own food.” How Rousseauvian of you.
Honestly, I think you’ve missed the point completely. As you mention, it would be hypocritical if a vegetarian continued to eat vegetables that had been sprayed in pesticides and shipped in from Guatemala. But that’s why people shop at Farmers’ Markets and eat organic fruits and vegetables.
The point, as I see it, is that if you’re going to say you care about the environment (in the way that a lot of people did after watching ‘An Inconvenient Truth’) it doesn’t make sense to stop caring at the point where that caring influences your diet. If one thing has become obvious from this string of comments it is how personal meat consumption is for a lot of people, especially Americans. Kate, if you say you, “try to make as many conscious decisions about what I consume, food and otherwise, every day,” why does the conscientiousness of those decisions stop with meat consumption?
Your phrasing of this issue as being about “chastising meat eaters” is ridiculous. (Although, I think that people who claim to care about the environment, but who continue to destroy it by eating meat that is produced in factories that don’t follow any kind of environmental restrictions, deserve some form of chastisement). This issue is about real changes that people can make in their lifestyles to decrease their ecological footprint. One of those changes happens to involve being a vegetarian. Writing this issue off because environmentalism as a whole is a futile effort seems pretty lazy to me.
(By the way, I should note that I’m still in college, so if this reads like an “undergraduate polemic,” I hope you’ll forgive me).//
Neesha -
http://www.slate.com/id/2138176/
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/moneymag/0706/gallery.whole_foods.moneymag/index.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/dining/28whole.html
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Kristin Chaney -
For the most part, I’ve made it my mission to be a neutrino with vegetarians who preach about it — as in, non-interacting.
But I wanted to say that:
1. I’d love to see a synthesis of the points made here with the ones made in the Locavore’s Dilemma. I think the “buy from Farmers Markets” approach has to answer to the issues involved with being a Locavore.2. Kate has a real point about the dangers of overproduction of Soy. Not to mention there is an issue with overconsumption — soy contains estrogens which can be harmful to one’s health. I don’t claim to believe that this is always the case because every person is built differently. But I do know that when I frequently substitute soy for meat and take all of my vitamins/supplements, my immune system goes to crap. This is an experiment I have carefully run repeatedly over the last 9 years. If my immune system is crap, I can’t be an activist, and I’m not really saving anything at that stage.
That said, my girlfriend is a marketing manager for one of North America’s largest Soy companies, so I can’t complain if people buy her products.
3. I think what is missing from the discussion about saving the environment and who is and who isn’t is the fact that the problem is overconsumption. Not of just of beef, but also of soy. Not just of carbon fuels, but also of biofuels. Etc. Overconsumption + inefficiency of consumption (which is really just another form of overconsumption) = shitasticness for planet Earth.
The real challenge before us is to figure out how, given our ever growing population and limited resources, we can become more even-handed consumers and innovative users of the resources available to us. But that doesn’t mean we all move to one side and vigorously all use the same product. It means that we are careful to use a diversity of products in an even manner.
It’s also worth noting that the carbon emissions problem is really linked to the transportation of food. That will continue to be a problem until we figure out how to develop clean energy. I know that physicists who do research in this area outside of industry are persistently underfunded. That’s too bad.
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Chanda, I think you agree with Matt, you are just stating the opposing side of the compromise you both seem to endorse.
“So, my meat-eating friends, I’m not calling on mass conversion to the good side, I’m simply asking that the next time you’re at the grocery and you find that your cart is full of pork, beef, lamb and whatever other animals you eat, maybe substitute an eggplant here or some seitan there. ”
1) I don’t think any rational person would suggest that at this stage we should shop only at farmers markets (locally), but I would say that everyone should supplement their shopping at least partially with those goods. Right now this country is far from fearing the repercussions of locavorism, so lets address the problems we do face (as Mat laid out).
There is a longer response on the board for the Locavore’s Dilemma blog.
As for the overconsumption, that is at issue too. Mat’s article mostly discusses the downsides of meat consumption, asking us as consumers to be aware of this and consider it when we shop. The issue of overconsumption makes it all the more crucial that we begin discussing these issues, particularly the ones from which we currently suffer (the locavore’s dilemma is not pressing). Of course their are other concerns as well, but next time you decide to buy an orange in the middle of the winter it is worth considering the carbon emitted to bring it to you.Rather be a “neutrino” towards vegetarians who talk about it openly (“preach”), try engaging them. You never know, you just might find yourself conceding a point. You should never be afraid of discussing and idea, it only suggests that you doubt your own position.
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ncm -
Oh come on, let’s not get into “you won’t debate because you’re afraid to” accusations. That kind of goading is unproductive.
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I would never suggest anyone fears debate, but I find it curious when people avoid engaging an issue. Please explain then why you avoid discussing this issue with “vegetarians who preach.”
frankly, I agreed with you on many points, and I find that you agree with Matt on many points. It is unfair to respond only to the most militant elements of a movement. Rather, recognize that we do need to moderate our meat consumption because of the negative affects on the industry. (I won’t even go into issues of animal treatment)//ncm -
Well, when I am considering whether to engage in any kind of discussion that can be construed as debate (regardless of subject), I think about:
a. how much time I have
b. how much I care about the person (and thus their opinion)
c. whether they are saying something I have not heard before
d. whether something productive will come out of the conversationSo …
Time is always a problem.On the other hand, if I care about the person, they can spew bullshit, and I will argue with them until Kingdom comes because what they think matters. I guess that point is obvious.
As for whether someone is offering something I have not heard before: I think, having read about it, having vegetarian and vegan friends/acquaintances, I am fairly informed about the arguments.
This sort of leads to the last point which is that I’m not going to stop eating meat because my health matters just that much to me (which is also why I try to eat free range, organic or Kosher whenever possible). The vegetarians and vegans who respect this choice are awesome. The ones who suggest that I’m some kind of asshole comparable to a dick with a Hummer are somehow less cool in my book. So the question is what productive component is associated with us getting into a discussion about it? Neither is going to convince the other side. And perhaps neither should be trying.
Finally, I really like it when heated discussions are leading in the direction of productive action. For me, this one just isn’t going to. At least not how it has been framed here. I would love it if people started talking in more general terms. For the most part, what I hear is, “I am a vegetarian. I believe that people should eat more sustainably, and it is obvious to me that doing so requires doing as I do.” I would love to hear people spark a more global and inclusive discussion which is, “We all come to the table with different needs and interests. But one thing we can agree on is that sustainable food production is crucial. How should that be achieved?”
There’s a certain one-sidedness to how the conversation happens most of the time. Frankly, I’m just not a fan of preachers who presume to tell me how to live for whatever reason, particularly when they don’t seem to include who I am in their assessment. This includes people who don’t want me to marry my girlfriend later this month as well as people who call me names because I do what I need to do to stay healthy. Generally speaking the two groups could fall into distinct categories (people who definitely don’t have a point and people who probably do), but they sound the same when they simply preach and attack.
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I should add that one of my favourite non-interacting conversations* recently involved hearing that meat eaters are psychopaths.
*It’s worth noting that this generally means I listen but don’t engage.
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‘Enjoy life while you can’
Climate science maverick James Lovelock believes catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So what would he do?
Decca Aitkenhead
Saturday March 1 2008
The GuardianIn 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and “all sorts of fanciful technological stuff”. When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. “It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business,” he said.
“And of course,” Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, “that’s almost exactly what’s happened.”
Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain’s most respected - if maverick - independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.
For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its calculations aren’t a million miles away from his.
As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we’re trying to do about it is wrong.
On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.
“It’s just too late for it,” he says. “Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”
He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. “Carbon offsetting? I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you’re offsetting the carbon? You’re probably making matters worse. You’re far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests.”
Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? “No we don’t. Because we can’t.” And recycling, he adds, is “almost certainly a waste of time and energy”, while having a “green lifestyle” amounts to little more than “ostentatious grand gestures”. He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. “Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam … or if it wasn’t one in the beginning, it becomes one.”
Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail’s plastic bag campaign seems, “on the face of it, a good thing”. But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, “but I’ve learnt there’s no point in causing a quarrel over everything”. He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.
“You’re never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours,” he says. “Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time.”
This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. “I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they’re doing. They want business as usual. They say, ‘Oh yes, there’s going to be a problem up ahead,’ but they don’t want to change anything.”
Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.
Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. “Maybe they’ll synthesise food. I don’t know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco’s, in the form of Quorn. It’s not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it.” But he fears we won’t invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects “about 80%” of the world’s population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. “But this is the real thing.”
Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto’s preventative action and Lovelock’s apocalypse - who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested Lovelock’s readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: “People who say that about me haven’t reached my age,” he says laughing.
But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: “Personality.”
There’s more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren’t his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?
“Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can’t help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don’t like it because it upsets their ideas.”
But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he’s found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. “Oh no! In fact, I’m writing another book now, I’m about a third of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead.”
Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock’s predictions of doom, and his good humour. “Well I’m cheerful!” he says, smiling. “I’m an optimist. It’s going to happen.”
Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when “we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn’t know what to do about it”. But once the second world war was under way, “everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday … so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that’s what people want.”
At moments I wonder about Lovelock’s credentials as a prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it’s not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth - or Gaia - it is in the purest scientific terms all.
“There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism.”
What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange
//Gabriel Levinson
This reminded me of an article I read in the Economist a while back that pointed out some very valid faults of organic food stores like Whole Foods, and the organic food movement in general, but I couldn’t find it. Instead, I found the following:
http://www.slate.com/id/2138176/
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/moneymag/0706/gallery.whole_foods.moneymag/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/dining/28whole.html
How are we supposed to maintain the socially-minded moral high ground when you can’t drive and/or eat meat while still calling yourself a liberal?
I think you’re right in pointing out the moral hypocrisy in all of this. Why is smoking attacked with such communal self-righteousness, but obesity, bad eating habits, and other self-destructive patterns not subject to the same social taboos?
But doesn’t it all come down to a drastic change in life-style that Americans just aren’t ready for? The org-movement has grown incredibly hip and trendy, but are the end results of the “enlightened” consumer practices that much different from those we scorn?
21 February 2008 at 2:21 pm