Not everybody would have caught the headline, but when you’re as tuned into Climate Change as I am - and many of you are - then Climate chief Lord Stern: give up meat to save the planet is going to grab your attention. Who is Lord Nicholas Stern? He is a world-class economist and leader of the UK’s seminal “Stern Review on the economics of climate change“ that boosted the potential economic devastation of climate change into the forefront of public policy discussion. When Lord Stern starts talking about animal agriculture as a concern, people are going to listen.
He gave a wide-ranging interview recently to “The Times” in which he said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.” “The Times” also reports that “UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds such as soy.”
(If full disclosure from me is of any note, I’ve been a vegetarian for pretty much the entirety of my adult life. I had my last hamburger 38 years ago and have never looked back.)
Not surprisingly, when someone as prominent as Stern makes a pronouncement as unequivocal - and controversial - as this one, there’s going to be a rapid backlash. Thus, Critics round on Lord Stern over vegetarian call is a headline from the very next day from “The Times.” They wrote: “Farmers and meat companies across Britain reacted with a mixture of anger and exasperation yesterday after one of the world’s leading climate change campaigners urged people to become vegetarian to help to fight global warming.”
When another highly visible and respected climate change leader, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, delivered the same message a year ago, there was a not-dissimilar reaction. See this from “The Guardian.”
There is a fair bit to be said on this subject - and I will be saying more here. There are an awful lot of reasons why meat consumption is a big net negative for people and the planet, and climate change is high on the list. There is a growing movement to highlight the connections. Witness, for instance, this useful comment on a recent post.
I’ve been reading a great book on the history of vegetarianism, The Bloodless Revolution by Tristram Stuart, and find, quite to my surprise, that many of the same arguments made today regarding natural resource protection and the medical benefits of vegetarianism were made hundreds of years ago. Pierre Gassendi, for instance, the 17th Century French philosopher and scientist, was a prominent proponent of a vegetarian diet. As the book notes, “…Gassendi produced the mandate for philosophical vegetarianism, by proclaiming that ‘The entire purpose of philosophy ought to consist in leading men back to the paths of nature.’”
This echoes a quote that I love from Alex Steffen, the Executive Editor of Worldchanging, here (in the context of geoengineering as “bad planetary management”): “Our goal should be to cool the planet in ways that reinforce and restore the resilience of its natural systems.” Many would argue that animal agriculture - and certainly the industrial farming that produces most of the world’s meat today - does not reflect how earth’s natural systems were meant to operate.
3 Comments So Far»
Dear Bill,
I like your take on the importance of turning vegetarian globally to reduce the effects of climate change. I work for an energy and environment forum called Comment:Visions www.commentvisions.com) that is currently discussing the question: How must society adapt to rapid climate change to minimise severe upheaval?
Do you think that giving up on meat consumption would be a factor we should seriously consider on a global scale in terms of minimising climate change upheaval?
Kind regards,
Aleksandra Lange
Aleksandra - Thanks for your note and your question. My answer is “Absolutely.” Although I try not to advocate too vociferously for any particular course of action here, substantially reducing meat consumption is certainly due serious consideration. There are just too many reasons not to dive into this way of life - for all its potential benefits.
You have an interesting website going there. Here’s a question for you? Do you think it would be worthwhile to get much more interested and involved in curtailing the enormous financial and environmental burden of industrial agriculture? If we migrate to a much greater reliance on locally and regionally grown foods, for instance, this would greatly reduce the amount of petroleum fuels used in the long-distance land, sea and air transport of food.
Bill - I definitely think it would be worthwhile to give more attention to curtailing the financial and environmental burden of industrial agriculture. It is just not sustainable in the long run and this is why many supermarkets as well as local shops emphasise where their products come from. I have realised there has been a significant change towards this matter over the past few years and I believe we are generally on the right track. However, it will be difficult to persuade many customers, who value their products based on the regions they come from, such as cheese and wine from France or panetonne from Italy. In order to persuade firms to act on the financial and environmental burden of industrial agriculture, I think we must first target society’s attitude and awareness.
Aleksandra
Leave Comments Below»