Actionable item toward a sustainable future
No less than Mark Carney, current and former governor of the Banks of England and of Canada respectively, “warn[ed] of potential 'catastrophic' climate impact on financial markets” just last month. This a scant two months after George Monbiot warned us at Imagine 2027 in Cambridge UK not of “climate change” but of “climate catastrophe”.
If this is not a wake-up call from two great heads of today — one at the business end and another at the media end of the spectrum — then I’m not sure what is?! Of course this didn’t come out of the blue, and there is ample debate for and against the evidence where we are heading, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately.
Disclosure: Born in Vienna of parents fleeing Budapest post-Oct. ’56 uprising. Grew up on the expat circuit in France — my first home and still my parents’ — Algiers and Australia. Emigrated to Canada 40 years ago, then spent a decade in the US until a decade go. Returned to England, where we had spent a year over Y2K. Naturalised French & Canadian, and circled the globe twice by age ten, but remained stateless until age 13. Exposed to Southeast Asia, North Africa and the Middle-east early and later in life. Wife also English and daughter also American, therefore “citizen of the world with privileges”.
While climate is something we may or may not be able to handle given today’s geo-politics, there are some things we can and should do ourselves.
I trained as a structural geologist, and observed when doing field work that small structures at the level of a hand specimen such as small folds or laminations, reflect much larger ones at the level of a mountain range such as anticlines and faults. Likewise in chaos theory, there’s the “butterfly effect”, where a minute action like the fluttering of a butterfly, can end up having a much larger effect like a tsunami across the ocean. And therefore in our own lives, our individual day-to-day decisions can and will have momentous environmental effects at large — take the example of drinking water out of plastic bottles, which in Rio clogged up the sewage system and led to the flooding destruction of some favellas — in America we drank filtered water out of carafes and in England we recycle plastic bottles, although water refill in its infancy in England would do away with plastics altogether.
Monbiot posted today this piece from the Guardian, so let me expand on it:
- There is ample evidence that deforestation of Amazonian forests or turning the American Midwest into corn and soy mono-culture — where&when land isn’t dedicated to grazing, urban sprawl and fracking — serve a single purpose: to produce beef and pork for our insatiable western diets.
- It’s also well known that East Asian populations are moving away from centuries-old grain-based diets, recently toward meat-based diets — this started with WWII American soldiers bringing hamburgers with them to the Pacific theatre of conflict, followed Japan emulating the US economy in the sixties to best it in the eighties, spreading to the Japanese fandom for western classical music and literature — but now that phenomenon has spread to the far more significant population centres of China in particular.
- the West’s colonial past makes it incapable of not spreading its policies and mores to Asia and the Middle-East — with currently disastrous consequences in the latter —and there’s a concerted effort to stymie the emergence of alternative social, economic or political powers like BRIC.
- therefore while there is in the West an interest in the Eastern soft arts — especially as alternate medicine, philosophies and religions — this has not translated in the West adopting any of that wisdom… forgetting that’s where most of our civilisation comes from in the first place!
- it follows that we have it all backwards — instead of adopting Eastern habits that have adapted to high population density and limited resources, we’re exporting Western wastefulness to the East… just as the Earth is groaning under our over-exploitation!
The Guardian puts it starkly but clearly: “ More than 80% of farmland is used for livestock but it produces just 18% of food calories and 37% of protein”. And they follow on with “A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions.”
So there you have it, and it was Earth Day in 1971 —… that’s almost 50 years ago! — that re-branded the military saying “we have met the enemy and they are ours”. While we debate the reality and impacts of climate change, let us remember what we can do as individuals. Cutting down on meat — even purportedly ‘greener’ grass-fed beef and freshwater-farmed fish — may not only have a positive environmental impact as cited above. It may also start reversing the negative impact of the West exporting its wasteful ways to the East.
As a student and in my first marriage I went through a “granola” phase, shopping in health-food co-ops and my ex planting a vegetable garden etc. Having moved around a lot since then has made it hard to stay green, as each time we had to relearn local ways&means. But today we keep meat&milk consumption to a minimum, and our daughter has gone flat out vegan.
I mentioned here the Jesus Lane Meeting House I belong to among Cambridgeshire Quakers . We are committed to a sustainable lifestyle according to the Canterbury Commitment, which “… challenges us […] to seek a sustainable, equitable and peaceful life on Earth.” I edit their Calendar Newsletter and lead the Outreach Committee, both of which help communicate such social action.
As the speaker in yesterday’s Imagine2027 talk Fair Sharing across Generations in 2027 said (paraphrasing) “there is no ‘other’ over there we can look to solve current issues, we have to commit the resources ourselves”: while the topic was fiscal issues, is that not apt to this one on the environment?
Also Imagine 2027 looks not only to uncover topics, but also calls us all to action: their last session will be a “Forum on Action”, so that we don’t just go home feeling good about have heard it all again.
As @Imagine2027 retweeted this, “we have it all backwards”. This very small matter of improving our diet is one such actionable item toward a sustainable future.
