The PETM and Today's Climate

I was recently reading a story in National Geographic about the PETM.  If you have never heard of this it is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.  If you think that carbon levels in the atmosphere are high now, how about levels about 5 times what they are today?  In the Paleocene, the average annual temperature of the earth was 68° F compared with 45° F today--then it went up to 77 by the Eocene.  There is no uncertainty about what caused these hot global temps, or the increase in the global temperature...it was a massive release of carbon and methane into the atmosphere about 56 million years ago.  There is however speculation as to what was responsible for the "sudden" release of greenhouse gases. 

We are somewhere just above 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere right now, while just before this massive release of greenhouse gases there was already 1000 ppm in the atmosphere, thus the high average global temperature to start with. This is not all to say that the world has been through higher carbon levels so we have little to worry about with our piddly 400 ppm.  It is to say that carbon in the atmosphere has a direct effect on global temperatures.  There is a difference between the PETM and global warming today though.  The increase towards a spike of over 1500 ppm happened over thousands of years, while humans will likely quintuple carbon levels over the span of a mere century and a half through their burning of fossil fuel and the resulting cascade of natural carbon release that will be triggered as the Arctic melts.

Remarkably, there wasn't a massive extinction associated with the PETM, though there were massive changes and evolutions that happened during the era.  But nature was given time to evolve over thousands of years  Species were able to gradually move thousands of miles north or south to find more temperate climes. It's uncertain whether nature will be able to adapt in a mere couple hundred years this time around.  Natural systems will also have to contend with the fact that humans are using up nearly every last inch of the planet in their quest to meet the needs and luxuries of an ever-growing population.

Unless something is done soon about the amount of carbon we are releasing, we are headed for disaster. This is why I've come to Dancing Rabbit--to live this way and set an example of how humans can live with a much smaller footprint on the earth.  If everyone in the US (the country single handedly responsible for most of the carbon being released) really took seriously this issue of reducing their impact and made deep changes in their lifestyle, it might be possible to turn things around in time. Other countries are doing it on a governmental level, but here in the US our governments are largely impotent because they are dictated by the laws of capitalism.  Although I do use many products that were produced by fossil fuel, the amount of fossil fuel I use directly in my life is very minimal, and I can safely say that when I see documentaries about the coal industry destroying mountains in Appalachia and causing climate change, I have little complicity in those crimes.

When you set your mind to creating systems that are not dependent on things that do harm, you find or develop alternatives. We humans think we are so smart and unique, but we act like any other animal in being unable to control our basic animal instincts--consumption and reproduction.  When you give an animal abundant food, it will consume the food and increase its population in response.  Some humans have the capacity to adapt and survive through their unique ability to problem solve.  Others are driven only by their greed.  Right now it seems the greedy ones are winning out in directing the fate of humanity and the planet. If we are to survive as a species and preserve the diversity of life on earth, we need the problem solvers to take the upper hand.

Meat: A Benign Extravagance

As a follow up to the previous essay I wrote on livestock I have some new statistics of note to mention that come from the book Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie, which I have finally been able to get a copy of.   I feel like the title of the book is misleading because it doesn't seem to be endorsing meat or a meat diet at all.  I think maybe the title was chosen to provoke.  In the end Fairlie seems to say that we will have to dramatically reduce the animal products in our diet to make it more sustainable, but it does advocate keeping livestock as a part of a sustainable food system.

Of major note in the book are the estimates of land use required for production of different food products. There is a lot of information Simon Fairlie gives to support that a straight comparison of meat to vegetables or grain is not as simple as propaganda would lead us to believe. Taking into account that livestock can be grazed directly on pasture (that may not be suitable for grain or vegetable crops) instead of being fed grain or hay, the impact of meat production on human land use for food production in an ideal production system could be far less than the 10:1 ratio often given by vegetarians and vegans as the reason not to eat meat. Grain-fed beef is the least efficient meat in terms of land use, fitting the 10:1 ratio commonly stated as the ratio of land required for amount of food value offered for all meat. Taking into account the ability of pigs to live entirely off food waste and by-products (and the fact that they do in many parts of the world), the potential ratio for pork production is comparable or even lower than that for most vegetable and grain crops. Food waste cannot, in the same way, be fed directly to grain or vegetable crops to produce more food. Statistics are given in the book that estimate that were it legal in the UK to feed food waste to hogs, the waste would be able to supply pork amounting to one sixth of the country's entire meat consumption. Another interesting point is that meat is a more nutritious form of food, so the straight ratio of weight or volume of food cannot be compared directly, a fact most anti-meat advocates ignore. In other words, one must eat more grain and legumes to supply as much nutrients as offered by a comparable amount of meat (of course this varies depending on the meat and type of grain or legume).

Heritage Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs foraging in an apple orchard

 

Another enlightening statistic is the amount of land required for production of vegetable oils, which is about the same as that required for beef in terms of m2 per kilo produced. The amount of land required for butter production is half what is required for vegetable oil and lard is possibly even lower, since pork takes a third of the land to produce that beef does.

In analysis and comparison of different food systems the vegan organic permaculture system is the most efficient in terms of land use and sustainability, using nearly half the land of the livestock permaculture system. They both end up using an equal amount of arable land, but the livestock system uses additional marginal land that would not be suitable for crops.  And whereas the vegan system uses a tractor and biofuel, the livestock system uses draft animals for farm power.  These systems are more efficient than either organic vegan or an organic system with livestock (which is the least efficient), which are not integrated systems set up to recycle all waste and maximize sustainability. Though less efficient than other systems, the organic livestock system is still more sustainable than the chemical vegan or livestock systems. Conventional agriculture is able to feed about twice as many people on a comparable amount of land, but given that it isn't sustainable in the long term, it should not be considered a viable option. Fairlie refers to the Global Opponents of Organic Farming (GOOFs), who advocate the conventional route over the organic, claiming organic agriculture won't be able to feed the ever-growing human population because it uses too much land.

Keeping livestock for a more sustainable food system

Have you ever traveled through the farm fields of the Midwest and wondered why there is nothing but corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see? I'm sure it's not a question many Americans ask themselves because, by and large, we've lost our ability and our need to make connections between our food and the earth it comes from. All those fields of corn and soybeans are part of the huge portion of the United States that's devoted to producing the meat and dairy products that dominate our diet.

But not all Americans eat so much meat and dairy. Many vegans and vegetarians are opposed to the eating of animal products for environmental and/or animal rights reasons. From the perspective of the animal rights activist, animal production is inhumane, while to the environmentalist it is an inefficient use of land. Eating lower on the food chain is thought to have much less impact on the planet because, given the amount of plant matter required to feed animals, it would be more efficient to eat the plants ourselves.

It's easy to see how anyone could come up with many arguments as to why in the 21^st century the industrial production of meat and other animal products could be considered cruel and unsustainable. It's estimated that livestock worldwide account for 20 percent of the total terrestrial animal biomass, a number that clearly illustrates our impact on life on the planet. Vast acreage is devoted to growing grain to feed livestock that are raised in inhumane conditions in factory farms and feedlots, all to provide a meat-based diet for those in affluent countries. As well, a UN report found that livestock are currently responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. Those consuming meat and animal products have little awareness of the lack of sustainability of and cruelty inherent to their food system.

Unfortunately, in arguments against animal agriculture often no distinction is made between the production of animals in factory farms and the more humane, small-scale keeping of livestock that has been the human norm for thousands of years. It is true that a vegetarian diet can require less land for a given population size, however, in terms of sustainability, there is evidence to support that making use of livestock in our food production system will be more sustainable over the long term. Livestock were raised sustainably for thousands of years before modern times, so it's obvious that livestock are not the problem; the number of them and the practices we use to raise them today are the problem. In the coming decades we will all have to find alternatives to fossil fuel if we are to survive. By doing away with livestock production we would be tossing out one of humanity's simplest and most valuable alternatives to fossil fuel and a vital means of lessening our impact on the planet.

Do We Want More Humans or Less?

The number of humans on earth just passed the 7 billion mark. To mark the occasion, there was a Planet Money podcast about countries whose populations are declining.   Some of the countries experiencing declines in population are affluent, places like Japan and Germany, where every new baby is, in terms of resource consumption, equivalent to dozens of babies in poor countries. But the podcast was not about how great it is to see this decline in population. Oddly, in rich countries the lack of population growth is seen as a problem, and governments are actually giving many incentives to people to have more babies. It's a strange paradox that though the world cannot survive overrun with humans as it is, some countries feel they cannot survive without a continually growing population. The notion that rich countries need a continuously growing population is linked to the belief that we need a continuously growing economy. The problem with both of these concepts is that the earth can sustain neither.

I've often thought there was an integral connection between population growth and economic growth. Though I don't have a background in economics, my knowledge about environmental issues and my interest in the way they relate to other disciplines such as economics, have helped me understand this connection better. In this Planet Money podcast, they explain this connection that is obvious to many economists. Each new baby is not just another mouth to feed, it is another consumer, another worker. In an unsustainable capitalist economy like ours in the US, each new kid is an excuse to tap more resources from the planet. The extraction of more resources is required to grow the economy at such a rapid rate. So when populations slow, as is explained in this podcast, economies stagnate. There aren't as many people buying stuff, there aren't as many people to work the jobs that contribute to the wealth of the economy. As well, there are fewer taxpayers and less revenue to sustain government programs.