The Sustainability Secret

Rethinking Our Diet to Transform the World

Kip Andersen, Keegan Kuhn

• Publisher: Earth Aware Editions
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781608878215
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política agrícola pública

This companion to the documentary Cowspiracy explores the devastating environmental impacts of animal agriculture—and new paths to sustainability. The 2014 documentary Cowspiracy presented alarming truths about the effects of animal agriculture on the planet. One of the leading causes of deforestation, greenhouse gas production, water use, species extinction, ocean dead-zones, and a host of other ills, animal agriculture is a major threat to the future of all species, and one of the environmental industry's best-kept secrets. The Sustainability Secret expands upon Cowspiracy in every way. In this updated volume, the film's co-creators reveal shocking new facts and interview the leaders of businesses, environmental organizations, and political groups about the disastrous effects of animal agriculture. Extended transcripts, updated statistics, tips on becoming vegan, and comprehensive reading lists provide an in-depth overview of this planetary crisis and demonstrate effective ways to offset the damage.

CHAPTER ONE

A JOURNEY TOWARD TRUTH

Greenpeace has done some terrific work over the years. They famously helped get a moratorium on commercial whaling passed. The continent of Antarctica was declared a world park after five years of campaigning. They helped ban the dumping of industrial and radioactive waste in oceans around the world.¹ They’ve worked with McDonald’s, Unilever, and Coca-Cola on reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. They successfully sued the Bush administration to provide more protection for the polar bear, which has become threatened by the melting of Arctic ice caused by global warming.² I’ll never forget the computer-generated snippet in An Inconvenient Truth of a desperate, exhausted polar bear swimming in an endless Arctic Ocean, no ice floes anywhere to rest on. Greenpeace does good stuff. I’ve supported them for years.

So why was there practically no information on the devastating impacts of animal agriculture on Greenpeace’s website, nor on any of the other major environmental organizations’ websites? It seemed the main focus for many of these groups was natural gas and oil production. Did they not know what was going on?

We decided to speak with these organizations about why they weren’t addressing this issue. We called every single PR person listed on these groups’ websites every day for weeks, spending hours on hold. We sent email after email requesting interviews and received silence in return. Days became weeks, and weeks became months, and for some reason, no one wanted to talk to us about this.

I’d had enough. No more emails, no more phone calls. I realized if I wanted answers, I would have to go to the headquarters of these organizations in person.

First stop was Greenpeace headquarters, Mission Street, San Francisco. Keegan and I headed over there on a windy, sunny afternoon. As we entered the small lobby area, the front desk receptionist, seeing our cameras, jumped up from her seat to quickly lock the door to the adjoining main offices, as if we were going to charge right on through.

“We’re doing a project on sustainability and animal agriculture,” I explained to the woman behind the desk. “And we’re seeing if we could talk to David Barre [Communications Director of Greenpeace].”

Seeming nervous, the young woman asked, “Do you have an appointment with him?”

I explained that we had been trying to contact Greenpeace for months and hadn’t received any response. We were hoping, we told her, that we could set something up.

She asked us to take a seat. After about ten minutes, they sent out a public relations person. She came out from behind the frosted glass doors of the main office and told us to turn off the camera, refusing to be filmed. We told her what we hoped to discuss with Greenpeace, and she promised finally that someone from their rain forest, ocean, and climate change departments would speak with us. I gave her my email address, and we left feeling like we were making progress.

Okay. Fingers crossed. We decided to try the Sierra Club next, another organization I’ve been proud to support for years. Their space was large and airy, with tall windows, situated in the financial district of San Francisco. After an awkward exchange with the receptionist and communications rep, we were finally able to line up an interview with Bruce Hamilton, the Deputy Executive Director of the Sierra Club.

When we sat down with Hamilton, he was affable and welcoming.

“What is the leading cause of climate change?” I asked him, getting right to the issue.

“Well, it’s basically burning too many fossil fuels,” Hamilton said. He had a kind, weathered face with a trim white beard and the look of an outdoorsman—someone who looked like he’d spent a lifetime in wilder places than a San Francisco office building. “Coal, natural gas, oil, tar sands, oil shale. All these new exotic fuels that are kind of hybrids between them. [Those are] basically what is loading up the atmosphere so we have this greenhouse effect where the heat is getting trapped, and the temperatures are soaring at a rate that has never existed in the history of the Earth.

“The world’s climate scientists tell us that the highest safe level of emissions would be around 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” he continued. “We’re already at 400. They also tell us that the safest we could hope to do without having perilous implications as far as drought, famine, human conflict, and major species extinction would be about a 2-degree-Celsius increase in temperature. We’re rapidly approaching that, and with all the built-in carbon dioxide that’s already in the atmosphere, we’re easily going to exceed that. On our watch, we are facing the next major extinction of species on the Earth, [something] we haven’t seen since the time of the dinosaurs disappearing. When whole countries go underwater because of sea level rise, when whole countries find that there’s so much drought that they can’t feed their population, and as a result, they need to desperately migrate to or invade another country—we’re going to have climate wars in the future,” he concluded emphatically.

“And, what about livestock?” I asked. “Animal agriculture?”

Hamilton paused. He looked confused.

“Uh—well, what about it? I mean . . . Do you want to . . .”

His confusion threw me as well.

“We have this research,” I tried to explain. “The UN report says livestock accounts for more greenhouse gases than all transportation put together. A recent 2009 World Watch Report states that livestock causes 51 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.”

Hamilton took a drink from his mug.

“Yeah, well. It is a big issue,” he said, wagging his head side to side, “and we need to address that as well. But, you know, there are just so many different potential sources of methane and carbon emissions.” It sounded like he was saying, “Well, we can’t deal with everything.”

“If the number one leading cause of climate change is animal agriculture and meat consumption,” I said, “then doesn’t that need to be the number one focus? If not, then number two?”

Hamilton closed his eyes briefly.

“Well,” he said brightly, “that’s your assessment. Our assessment is different.” He shrugged and laughed.

That was bizarre. It was too bizarre. Why would a highly educated person such as Hamilton, not to mention a leader of the Sierra Club, avoid addressing one of, if not the, largest sources of global warming?

The next day Greenpeace got back to me by email: “It was great to meet with you yesterday. I have spoken with various people here at Greenpeace about your request, but I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to help this time. Thanks again and we wish you the best of luck.”

I just couldn’t understand why the world’s largest environmental organizations were not addressing this issue when their entire mission is to protect the environment.

I was, however, able to connect with a handful of environmental authors and advocates who were willing to address the issue, including why the big environmental organizations might be keeping quiet. I took my trusty old van, Super Blue, out of carbon dioxide retirement and hit the road in search of answers to my questions.

At a local speaking event in California, I met and talked to New York Times best-selling writer Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, who makes his home in the east bay of San Francisco.

“Environmental groups say use less coal, ride your bike,” I said. “What about eat less meat?”

Pollan nodded. He’s got an intelligent, long face and a bald head and was dressed in a khaki jacket with round wire glasses.

“I think they focus-grouped it and it’s a political loser,” he said. “Because they’re membership organizations, you know. A lot of them. They’re looking to maximize the number of people making contributions, and if they get identified as being anti-meat or challenging people on their everyday habits, something that’s so dear to people, that it will hurt their fund-raising. I don’t know, but that is what I would suspect.”

We also met up with Dr. Will Tuttle, author of The World Peace Diet, in a Bay Area venue as he traveled the country on his extensive lecturing tour. He agreed with Pollan.

“They do not want to address the primary driving cause of environmental devastation, which is animal agriculture, because they’re businesses, and they want to make sure that they have a reliable source of funding,” Tuttle said to me.

“It’s like when we talk about a dysfunctional family,” he went on, “and the father is an alcoholic. That’s the one thing no one talks about. Everybody just goes around that, and yet it’s the one thing that’s causing the devastation in the relationships in the family, and it keeps getting worse because no one wants to talk about it.”

Several weeks later, in a park outside of Washington, D.C., we spoke with Demosthenes Maratos, Communications Director of the Sustainability Institute at Molloy College. Maratos, a tall man with a shaved head, black-rimmed glasses, and several small hoops in his ears, was presenting at a conference there.

“If you listen to a majority of the major environmental organizations,” Maratos explained in his raspy voice, “they’re not telling you to do much besides live your life the way you’ve been living it, but change a lightbulb from time to time, drive less, use less plastic, recycle more. It’s better for their fund-raising and better for their profile to create a victim-and-perpetrator sort of plot line. How could these organizations not know? I mean, the issue is right in front of them. It’s unmistakable at this point, and these organizations are falling all over themselves to show the general public that climate change is human caused, and in doing so, [the public] completely fail[s] to see what’s right in front of them. That animal agriculture, raising and killing animals for food, is really what’s killing the planet.”

What Maratos said made a lot of sense. The general public feels that they’re doing all they can to help the environment by making small changes in their lives, like driving less, turning off lights, taking shorter showers—the same way I felt when I was biking everywhere. The greenhouse gas we hear the most about from the environmental organizations is carbon dioxide. In the public mind, carbon dioxide emissions are the biggest cause of global warming. And to be sure, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, carbon dioxide makes up 77 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.³

But as I learned recently, methane is 86 times more destructive than carbon dioxide.⁴ That’s because its global warming power—the ability of methane to trap heat in the atmosphere—is 86 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. Globally, cattle produce 150 billion gallons of methane every day.⁵

Again, why wasn’t the public being informed about methane emissions? In his office at the University of California, Berkeley, surrounded by books and papers, Kirk R. Smith, Professor of Global Environmental Health, said to me, “I was invited to a meeting with Al Gore some years ago now. [I] made these methane arguments, and he was really [taken aback]. [His argument is that] ‘It’s hard enough to get people to think about carbon dioxide. Don’t confuse them.’”

But there’s a very good reason to focus on methane instead of carbon dioxide. Not only is methane more destructive than carbon dioxide, its levels have a much more immediate impact on the environment. “If you reduce the amount of methane emissions,” Smith said, “the level in the atmosphere goes down fairly quickly,⁶ within decades, as opposed to carbon dioxide. If you reduce the [carbon dioxide] emissions to the atmosphere, you don’t really see a signal in the atmosphere for about one hundred years or so.”

And if the public is going to be “confused” by information about methane, as Al Gore said to Professor Smith, then what are they going to think about nitrous oxide? Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that has a global warming potential 296 times greater than that of carbon dioxide.⁷ It stays in the atmosphere for 150 years.⁸ And 65 percent of human-produced nitrous oxide comes from the animal agriculture industry, most of it generated by manure.⁹

“Livestock is one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” senior UN FAO official Henning Steinfeld said in a 2006 UN report. “Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.” Steinfeld is the senior author of the FAO report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which states that, “The environmental costs per unit of livestock production must be cut by one half, just to avoid the level of damage worsening beyond its present level.”¹⁰

And here’s a gem from Time in December 2013: “There may be no other single human activity that has a bigger impact on the planet than the raising of livestock.”¹¹

I still wanted to hear directly from the big environmental organizations. What about National Resources Defense Council (NRDC)? Unli...