Meat That Can Save The Climate
Before they departed for good, the Bush administration finally released four critical climate change reports. I haven't had a chance to go through them in detail, but as with all the other recent climate news we've gotten, they could be summed up this way: we're in deep, deep doo.
Our food turns out to be a very important part of the puzzle of figuring out how to live on the Earth in a way that will allow us to continue living on Earth in relative comfort. As climate change is expected to increase droughts and flooding, making crop cultivation difficult in many of the world's breadbasket areas, and as many agricultural practices increase the amount of greenhouse gases, what we're doing is starving ourselves later to feed ourselves now.
How much later? Oh, a few decades, end of the century at latest, and grain production in the northern hemisphere is expected to drop precipitously. It hasn't helped that the vast grasslands of the American plains were plowed up for grain, and the carbon-based soil organic matter steadily used without replenishment to feed more and more humans, while economically destroying or displacing locally appropriate farming in other parts of the world. The Carbon Farmers of America put this loss of soil captured carbon in perspective this way:
... If the American people were to restore the soil fertility of the Great Plains that we have destroyed in the last 150 years, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide would be reduced to near pre-industrial levels.
Seen globally, the same results would be achieved if we humans were to increase the organic matter levels of the world agricultural and grazing lands by 1.6%. ...
They explain on their site that a one percent increase in soil organic matter can mean a 12 percent increase in biological productivity. And that's why the Great Plains were so productive in the first place, because millenia worth of stored organic matter was available to supplement farming practices that exposed the soil to erosion and ended the ability of communities of soil organisms to renew the lost organic matter.
The best and easiest solution for this loss of organic matter, bar none, is managed grazing.
As noted at the link just above, "In 2005, the USDA released a report showing that properly managed pastures store 2 to 3 times more carbon in their soils than fields that were left unmanaged, used for hay, or left un-harvested. Another study released by the University of Iowa in 2002 showed that grazed pastures were the ideal land use for storing carbon."
The steady grass cover protects the soil, the animals fertilize the soil, and you don't end up using fossil fuel intensive grain to feed to cows at a rate of eight to nine pounds of grain per pound of meat (which I think everyone interested in food sustainability can agree is a bad system.) Further, a local agricultural ecosystem that includes animals can comprise a renewable ecosystem, one that can provide a fuller range of foodstuffs for people living nearby. That means less need for food that's been shipped long distances or required intensive processing.
Is imported tofu a sustainable food? Are methane-producing, flooded rice fields sustainable? And if we don't flood the rice fields, will the methods used instead to control weeds be sustainable? If you can give me a clear yes or no on those questions, go ahead and give it a shot.
There are some simple rules people can follow to lower their carbon profile, or if you really want to step to the head of the class, their greenhouse gas profile. Some of that includes changes in our diets and it's entirely reasonable for there to be simple actions people can take to help, or for those who can do more to stabilize the climate to do so. Yet biology and the climate are complex, and so appropriate comprehensive responses to their interactions are going to be complex.
If the phrase hasn't been tortured into meaninglessness by greenwashing energy company executives, there are no silver bullet solutions to climate change, we're going to need silver buckshot.
And I'm looking forward to the range-fed burgers we're making for dinner tonight. Just doing my part to help the planet and reward a more sustainable economy.
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