- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I think I have an answer to your question, but you're not going to like it. The answer is "it depends." You should look up an op-ed that ran in the NY Times around the August timeframe regarding New Zealand lamb. The author of the op-ed appears to have been put up to it by NZ "big ag," which has a very lucrative export business involving England. Still, this author made a number of valid points about the relative carbon footprint of NZ lambs versus local English lambs. In NZ, the lambs are able to graze off of naturally-growing clover, and various practices in NZ apparently give NZ lamb an overall lower carbon footprint than locally-produced English lamb, even taking into account the fossil fuel needed to ship the lamb from NZ to England. This sparked a number of letters to the editor, one of which was from me. In my letter, I suggested that if it's actually more efficient to import lamb from NZ than to produce it ourselves, then perhaps we should be eating less of it. Yes, that's right, vegans, I advocated that we should eat less meat. But I'm sure that's not good enough for you to conclude that you and I might actually be on the same side of this issue. No, not when I still eat marshmallows and feed milk to my 3-year-old.
To the vegans (I'm sorry, I should have specified earlier that I meant "to the insufferably self-righteous vegans," not necessarily all vegans): All I'm suggesting is that, to the extent you think being vegan puts you on the environmental/climate change high horse, I would say you're splitting hairs. If you're in a developed country, sitting in front of your computer sending letters to Salon.com, and living off of produce shipped several thousand miles to your local grocery store (you don't by any chance use plastic bags to transport that produce home, do you?), I would submit that the extent to which you are part of "the problem" is comparable to that of some of our most avid meat-eaters.
If going vegan is your own particular way of showing concern for climate change, then bully for you. But stop acting like everyone else who is parlaying their concern into other forms of environmental consciousness, like backyard gardening, use of public transportation, CFL bulbs, solar panels, etc. is overlooking what you consider to be "the" solution. We're all trying here.
By the way, to the "anonymous" who corrected me earlier on the subject of dairy cows: thank you. Believe it or not, I don't claim to be an expert here, I'm just someone who is trying my best to educate myself on this topic and get my questions answered. I'd still like to learn more about this, and am curiuos whether, if we as a human race applied ourselves, we could breed dairy cattle that would be both more efficient *and* adaptable to third-world living conditions. I mean, gees, if we can figure out how to breed a pug dog so its nose is shoved halfway into its brain just because we think it's "cute" that way, can't we work on cows?
