croixian

I am not a militant vegan, or even a vegetarian.  I do eat meat, but have recently decided to eliminate mammals and mammal products from my diet.  No beef, pork, dairy products or even lamb chops.  I still eat fish, chicken and eggs, but only a few times a week.  For health reasons I've also eliminated refined grains and sugar.  This diet is much healthier than my previous eating habits, so I expect to be more fit, energetic and to save money on future health care costs.

It is not the health benefits, or even the money I will save, that has lead me to make this change. My reasons have to do with trees.  

Lester Brown in Plan B 3.0 reports:

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the earth’s forested
area was estimated at 5 billion hectares. Since then it has
shrunk to just under 4 billion hectares... net forest loss worldwide
exceeds 7 million hectares per year.

Considering the value of forests to our planet, this loss is horrifying.  Trees are a wonderfully productive source of food (fruits, nuts, carob, edible leaves); much more productive per acre than livestock or grains.  Trees help maintain freshwater supplies, control flooding, prevent soil erosion and can even help stop global warming by acting as carbon sinks. 

Much of the deforestation that has occurred, and continues to occur, is done for animal-based agriculture, for both grazing land and growing grain as animal feed.  Eliminating animal-based agriculture would stop most deforestation and free up huge amounts of land for tree planting.  

After years of struggle, I finally came to the decision that trees for the planet were more important than steak for my dinner or a hamburger at lunch.

Tim Gamble,

Sustainable Future 

In the Sustainable Future discussion group, we have been talking about what we mean by sustainable.  Here is my definition:

A community must provide clean air, safe drinking water, nutritious food, shelter and clothing adequate for the climate, and safe waste disposal at a minimum.  A community should also provide a certain amount of quality of life issues, such as recreational and educational opportunities, as well as a minimal government/legal system providing some basic organizational structure and protection.  A sustainable community must do these things on an ongoing basis within the natural resource limits of its location, without seriously compromising the health of the human population or the environment in which they live. 

Certainly communities may provide more things then the minimum I outline above, but all things must be provided without degrading the environment beyond nature's capacity to heal.  The idea is to not exceed nature's capacity to replenish a resource.

Most resources are renewable, though the speed at which they can be renewed varies greatly from resource to resource.  Trees, plants, animals, even soil are all renewable.  Fresh water is mostly renewable (with a few exceptions) as long as we don't poison it too greatly.

Energy isn't really a resource, it is the result of using resources.  Some of the resources that are turned into energy are not renewable - oil, natural gas, coal, even uranium for nuclear plants.  But other resources that can be turned into energy are renewable - wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hydro-electric and so forth. Ultimately, we will have to learn to live within the limits of the renewable energy resources.

As someone else in the discussion group pointed out, Native Americans have a tradition of considering the impact of a choice on the seventh generation from now.  In building a sustainable world, we need to consider the impact of all our choices not just on the present generation but for many generations to come.

Announcing:  The creation of the discussion group, Sustainable Future.  

Sustainable Future is a Yahoo email group (listserv) for the discussion of the Plan B books by Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute (EPI). Also on-topic are similar books, articles and other resources for building a sustainable future.

Why create such a discussion group?  There are many potential problems that modern civilization is facing - climate change, overpopulation, peak oil, scarcity of food and clean water, loss of biodiversity, environmental degradation, poverty and scarcity of other natural resources just to name a few. Life as we know it will change drastically in the future. But there is good news. Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, has recently released Plan B 3.0 Mobilizing to Save Civilization, containing his vision for building a sustainable future and the blueprint for doing so.

Lester Brown writes in Chapter 13: