Why Do Anti-Environmentalists Fear the Earth Will Be Overrun by Cows?

In ten years of environmentally-motivated vegetarianism, I’ve had a lot of conversations about my choice with a wide range of non-vegetarians, some with valid arguments against it and some whose views are not so impressive (and plenty who just really, really like bacon). A common argument among the less, er, “bright” anti-vegetarians has been “if everyone stopped eating meat, what would happen to all the domesticated cows?”

I expect this sort of argument from the riff raff , but I never thought someone with the title of “Professor” would be quite that inane. But in this month’s edition of Foreign Policy Magazine, Professor Robert Paarlberg argues that organic farming is a bad idea because “To supply enough organic fertilizer, the U.S. cattle population would have to increase roughly fivefold.”

Five times as many cows! They’ll terrorize the populace! I can’t believe I have to say this, but nobody is expecting all farms to go organic at once. The point of the slow food movement is that our food systems need to be gradually restructured in a way that makes basic, intuitive sense, so we’re no longer wasting energy and decreasing food quality by shipping our vegetables thousands of miles for no good reason. So don’t freak out about impending doom via cow attack, just keep buying local.

P.S. I realize Paarlberg’s argument is a bit more complex than that one bit of idiocy, but it’s a long article full of inaccuracies, half-truths and general misunderstanding of the slow food movement, and I haven’t got all day.

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Rachel Bishop

Van Jones lands at Princeton

Anthony (Van) Jones, who resigned as an environmental policy adviser to the Obama administration after coming under fire from conservatives for past statements and political activities, has been named as a visiting fellow at Princeton University for the coming academic year. A statement being released by the university today says that Mr. Jones will be a distinguished visiting fellow at both its Center for African American Studies and its Program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy, and that he will teach a course on race, ecology, and the environment during the spring 2011 semester. Mr. Jones, a 1993 graduate of Yale Law School and co-founder of three advocacy organizations, served as a special adviser to the White House Council on Environmental Quality from March to September of 2009. He left the position after being attacked for publicly using a crude insult in reference to Republicans, signing a petition that questioned whether the Bush administration deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and having past connections to a radical Bay Area group with Marxist origins.

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The Editor

Gillian Caldwell Pushes Obama on Clean Coal

Check out Gillian Caldwell from 1Sky chopping it up with Obama about clean coal. This is an awesome exchange.

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The Editor

Enviromental Protection Agency Getting Its Bars Up!

Just hopped off a video announcement from Lisa P. Jackson, Administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency and definitely a top pick on the short list of D.C. insiders who are really taking their title/mission to heart.

On what is coincidentally (purely surely) the first day of the international COP15 summit, the EPA announces that their thorough (musta been really thorough) analysis of all the available facts leads to one simple conclusion: greenhouse gases “threaten the public health and welfare of the American people.”

There’s more:

“These long-overdue findings cement 2009’s place in history as the year when the United States Government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution and seizing the opportunity of clean-energy reform,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson.

Great talking point from Mrs. Jackson and my instinct thinks she’s legit. When asked on the call about the timing of the EPA’s announcement, when House reps have indicated no movement on environmnetal legislation until early Spring (months from now), Lisa Jackson said the EPA did not want to wait to get the ball rolling and hoped that Congress would “follow the ball.”

Translation: watch out, world. Apparently it’s not a pre-requisite of American political power to actually lose total touch with the land and your people!

Keep it up, Mrs. Jackson.

Posted by:

Sam Patton

Peak Oil…hey, got a light?

This is a few days old i.e. another epoch in internetz time but I bet when society crashes and we burn our laptops for plastic scented warmth, we’ll kill for the chance to one more snarky blog post, to tag one more pic of the person we were before Nature takes our headphones off and smacks us back to the Ice Age.

By which I mean, is anyone really surprised that not only do we have to confront the awesome, shame-on-us specter of global destruction as a simple truth – we are consuming the world, will we do anything about it? – but also as a classic opportunity for government conspiracy, what we don’t know will kill us, of course the Man is savvy to the fact that famine and hedonism are mutually exclusive and you’ll catch more of us flies if you act like the honey is gonna flowwwww forever.

Turns out “[t]he world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit,” with the United States quite specifically called out for encouraging a false representation of 1.) how much oil is undiscovered [how do they know?!] and 2.) how much we’ve got left in our fields.

Consensus is growing that this roller coaster we call Life™ is already over the hump, we’re hurtling down hill to a NEW epoch the people at the Center for Egregiously Named Memetics call Peak Oil. When you hit Peak Oil, your oil production enters a phase called “terminal decline….” yeah, it looks kinda like this:

… Continue Reading

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Sam Patton