One Single Little Declaration Would Change It All

DANGER! We are beyond DANGEROUS climate change!

That one little declaration on the part of any nation with influence at the international level would change the game — and the future — at the Cancun climate talks coming up later this year. (And yes, I'm oversimplifying to make a point.)

That's because "avoiding dangerous interference with the climate system" is the objective of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to which most nations in the world are signatories (and therefore legally bound). Since we have no only not avoided dangerous interference, we have surpassed dangerous interference, there should be huge legal and political ramifications.

But the developed (Annex 1) nations get away with this because they haven't yet "defined" dangerous interference. And if there's no definition, well, how can we be held responsible? Annex 2 (developing) nations, I'm afraid, are just as guilty here — they could have (and should have, considering they're already experiencing the dangers of interference with the climate system) defined and called dangerous. I think they're afraid of larger nations cutting off aid and development funding. (Don't get me going on that one! The UNFCCC says that developed nations should be helping smaller nations develop clean energy technologies, etc. but not much of that has been happening either. We are SO short-sighted and stingy!)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says they can't define "dangerous" — it's a value judgement that only society can make. Only a handful of climate scientists has dared wander into this fray. James Hansen, John Holdren, Hans Schellnhuber, Bill Hare, and perhaps a few others have stated that we're flirting with climate catastrophe (my words, not theirs!).

Society (at least in influential countries) ain't about to declare "dangerous interference" anytime soon, partly because the denial industry has people so confused all they want to do is watch TV, and partly because their favourite TV show is coming on in just a few minutes. Certainly anyone intimately connected to rape-and-pillage capitalism isn't going to sound the alarm.

So, maybe that leaves the one profession that mops up after "dangerous" every day: the healthcare profession: doctors, nurses, public health officials, and other associated groups. But it can't be about "change the lightbulbs in your clinic" — we're way beyond that personal actions stuff now. If no one else will do it, all the doctors of the world should stand up with their allied colleagues and declare, in a loud, influential voice: "HOLY CRAP! IF THIS ISN'T DANGEROUS INTERFERENCE WITH THE CLIMATE SYSTEM, I DON'T WANT TO BE AROUND WHEN THE $#@! REALLY HITS THE FAN!" 

Oh, sorry, did I say that out loud? Let's try it again:

Doctors and other healthcare professionals should stand up with their beleaguered colleagues from Russia and Pakistan and Niger and say firmly: "We know danger, and this is it." 

Visit Climate Change Emergency Medical Response for more information.

Veganism Is No Fad, But a Vital — and Compassionate — Solution

It's fascinating to be a vegetarian-almost-vegan in a country like Bolivia, which is a real pollo y carne (chicken and meat) culture. Peter and I (and the wonderful owner of the hotel we're staying in) have been talking about this a lot. We suspect they're not doing feedlots and factory farming like we do back home, but we've also talked about the fact that an animal like a cow is insurance for poor families in poor countries (with no government subsidies) against drought and crop failure.

Anyway, we're not here to judge this culture, but I do have the right to judge my own — and our meat-eating habit is an inhumane and unnecessary one.

Here's why this came up.... An opinion column in a back-home "news"paper published a column insisting that vegans are illogical lemmings just following a fad. I tore it out and brought it along, and thought I'd share my response (in a letter to the editor) with you here. You won't need to read the original column (or even be veg) in order to understand the ridiculous things the columnist wrote.

*******

Dear Editor,

I'm hoping that Mr. S will be as open to changing his conviction about meat as he wants us "veggies" to be. Let me tell you why.

The reason vegans are no longer silent about their diet is that it is now the only diet that provides any hope of safeguarding the future from the ravages of climate change. The livestock industry is so overwhelmingly implicated in global warming and the emission of the top three greenhouse gases that an immediate global switch to eating lower on the food chain is the only strategy that could buy us some time to implement a zero-carbon economy.

If we average the UN FAO's statistics (18 percent) with those from the Worldwatch Institute (51 percent), the global industrial livestock industry has contributed to 35 percent of global warming. As one example, industrialized meat (especially beef) production is responsible for 40 percent of anthropogenic methane emissions, and methane is over 70 times stronger than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. But factory-farmed meat also emits unconscionable amounts of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide (which is almost 300 times stronger than CO2 in the atmosphere), and is responsible for 80 percent of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest (the lungs of the Earth).

So right now, vegans aren't asking you to become vegetarian, they're asking you to refrain from eating meat for the sake of all the children in the world. (And to those who wonder about eating locally raised meat, I'll leave it to you to decide.)

Mr. S passes on a few misconceptions about the veg diet that I would like to dispel. First, humans did not evolve to be carnivores. Our digestive tract is 12-14 times our shoulder-to-hip trunk length, like that of other fruit eating animals. (Carnivores have very short digestive tracts.) Apes (our closest kin) are primarily fruit eaters, and only very rarely eat meat. We evolved to be omnivores, and there are very few cultures where the diet is almost all meat (Inuit comes to mind). Even the paleolithic diet consisted of nuts, vegetables, fruits, berries and eggs in addition to "caveman" meat, fowl and fish.

Next, vegetarians and vegans don't eat just vegetables. Beans, nuts, seeds, grains and legumes can be stored all winter long, and provide all the protein we need. If these were grown on our island, for example, in the big fields where a few cattle and sheep now graze, I wonder how many people we could feed during our winters -- without all that transportation technology Mr. S speaks of (which also trucks animals long distances to slaughter and then to grocery stores).

Did you know that we sacrifice tens of billions of animals around the world every year for what Mahatma Gandhi called "the meat superstition"? And we do this while nearly 30,000 human children die each day from hunger! (Nearly 40 percent of world grain is fed to livestock instead of humans.)

Mr. S seems to make fun of people who become vegan out of compassion for other animals, and all the children of all species. However, we vegetarians/vegans don't make fun of "carnivores" ... we are sad for you! Sure, compassion for all life is a chosen worldview, but it's one that allows us to see (and respect) our connection to all other living beings. I wonder if Mr. S has ever researched what happens to his meat before it reaches his plate. Today's livestock industry is unspeakably cruel. John Robbins says, "The cruelties of modern factory farming are so severe that you don't have to be a vegetarian or an animal rights activist to find the conditions to be intolerable, and a violation of the human-animal bond." (See Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals.)

And finally, Mr. S is incorrect when he says that the vegan diet does not provide a healthier lifestyle. In fact, all studies show that it does. A vegetarian (especially vegan) diet is far easier on the body (we didn't evolve to be meat eaters, but meat "tolerators"), and meat-eating contributes to a host of health problems such as heart disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes -- the top killers in North America.

I do hope Mr. S will enjoy a delicious nut burger with us sometime. [His last line was "Enjoy a juicy, delicious hamburger now and then, as God has intended our lives to be." I didn't realize that God's last name was McDonald!] According to Genesis 1:29 (if we're going to bring God into the discussion), human beings were told "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food." In Genesis 3:11, God told Adam and Eve to "eat the plants of the field" (vegetables). Is it not Mr. S, then, who is the "illogical lemming" following the meat fad?

*******

By the way, we're getting lots of lovely veg meals here. The fresh veggies are absolutely delicious and fresh flavour makes a light tomato salad quite fulfilling. The hotel owner is even trying out new vegetarian recipes on us! La comida esta muy buena.

188 Days Left - The Art of Shameless Self-Promotion

There's no secret about success. Did you ever know a successful man who didn't tell you about it?
— Kin Hubbard (1868 - 1930)

A friend of ours wrote today to tell us some good news (you read about his Global Green Fund idea in yesterday's blog ... the guy's a genius with a good heart) and sent it to practically everyone on his email list. Shameless self-promotion, I call it.

That got me thinking that my action today could be shameless promotion of the work of others — good people fighting the good fight, giving up a lot (time, money, energy and sometimes relationships) to do what they feel they have to do for what they love ... the Earth, the children, life itself.

So here, in no particular order, are the websites of some really great climate heroes, people I count as like-hearted friends.

1. See. Act. Inspire. Glenn MacIntosh is ecoSanity.org. The name says it all. Glenn tells people, "The world's atmosphere is on course to reach a state of unsurvivable extremes within the lifetimes of today's children." He gets the urgency (not to mention the insanity) of global climate disruption. Visit ecoSanity.org especially for fascinating video clips of some fascinating climate warriors.

2.Beatle George Harrison once said, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." Fortunately, we do know where we need to get to, and it's 350 parts per million of CO2 in our atmosphere - or even less - to avert global climate catastrophe. Michael McGee started CO2 Now after taking his young son to hear Al Gore speak about the climate emergency. CO2 Now is "what the world needs to watch.... Global warming is mainly the result of CO2 levels rising in the Earth's atmosphere. Both atmospheric CO2 and climate change are accelerating. Climate scientists say we have years, not decades, to stabilize CO2 and other greenhouse gases. To help the world succeed, CO2Now.org makes it easy to see the most current CO2 level and what it means. So, use this site and keep an eye on CO2. Invite others to do the same. Then we can do more to send CO2 in the right direction

3. My husband, Peter Carter, MD, is a retired family physician. Throughout his adult life, he has been involved in the peace and environmental movements. As a doctor, he knows only too well that climate change is going to be (and in many parts of the world, already is) the biggest public health threat ever. (And that's just on our way to the biggest threat to our very survival ever.) His website for health care professionals is called Climate Change Emergency Medical Response. Check it out for the latest scientific climate research, and for suggested actions that doctors and other health care personnel can take. Hey, why not send it to your doctor?

Yo! Where are the women in this campaign? Oh right, here I am!!! (Just a little shameless self-promotion. ;-)