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.
