The MEATrix

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

- KENNETH E. BOULDING

If the UN-FAO Report on "Livestock’s Long Shadow –Environmental Issues and Options" does not mean anything to you, you might find this award winning movies interesting: The Meatrix I, II, and II1/2 (Indonesian subtitled). Whether we (represented by Leo) take the blue pill and remain in a fantasyland or will he face the bitter pill reality? ... it's all in our hands. Some may say that the movie is a crap or not a serious one, still there are truth in it. Just read several articles and find the facts and statistics relating factory farm issues. There are disturbing facts and several dangers on factory farming and food safety: artificial hormones, antibiotic resistant germs, massive pollution/environmental problems, cruelty treatment, antibiotics overuse, mad cow disease and community destroyed. We should save the environment and our health by considering not consuming cow-meat again.

Fast Food Nation, published in 2001 and a New York Times bestseller, was an incendiary nonfiction exploration of the factory farming and fast food industry. Fast Food Nation is a Recorded Picture Company production directed by Richard Linklater and written by Eric Schlosser and Linklater. With several issues shown in the book and in the 'documentary movie', I’ll be quite surprised if they're not vegetarians in real life. The same surprise, if I found that Morgan Spurlock is continuing his rituals having meals in McDonald resaurants after being supersized at the 30th day period. He is an American independent filmmaker who wrote, produced, directed and starred "Super Size Me", an Academy Award-nominated 2004 documentary film.

Other things to chew on (other than the french fries you're lovin' it!):

[The statistics are showing those in the US, but they should be approximately applicable to any place in the globe. Btw we all have only one earth]

• More energy is consumed by the beef industry than any other single industry in the US,
• If we were to reduce by 50% our meat consumption, we could totally eliminate our reliance on nuclear power throughout the US,
• The same resources that are used to produce one pound of beef can produce sixteen pounds of grain,
• Rainforests account for an astounding 80% of the eart's vegetation, and are critical to our ecosystem. The US imports 10% of its beef from Central and South America. In order to meet this need, rainforests are being eliminated at a pace of one acre every five seconds.

The decision about what to put on your dinner plate tonight is one that has profound processional effects. It sets in motion a whole series of events and activities that are shaping the quality of life on earth. Behind the chuck steak hides the forests that have been cut down, our children's food and water supply, our children's top soil, their future environment. And we have to look at the steak and say, 'That costs too much.' Real power lies in the decisions you make in the supermarket and in restaurants and in your kitchen.
(Robbins, John, "Diet for a new America"; Robbins Research Report, "The Fate of Our Planet" - cited from Anthony Robbin's "Awaken the Giant Within")

Inconvenient Truth

The contents of this post were taken from The McDougall Newsletter

According to the 2006 UN report, global production of meat and milk will more than double by 2050. We cannot let this happen. Our planet is already being devastated. Long-overdue changes based on the truth could halve livestock usage by 2015.

According to a report, Livestock’s Long Shadow –Environmental Issues and Options, released in November of 2006 from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock* emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to every one of the most serious environmental problems. (The release of this report was not covered by any of the major news outlets, only a few mentions are found on the Internet.)

*livestock refers to beef cattle, dairy cattle, chickens, pigs, and a few other animals domesticated for food uses.

The Following Are Some of the Findings from the UN Report:

Atmospheric Damage
Animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalents. By comparison, all transportation emits 13.5% of the CO2. In addition to CO2, environmentally toxic gases produced by livestock include nitrous oxide, methane, and ammonia generated from the animals’ intestines—belching, flatus, and manure. The report says “The impact is so severe that it needs to be addressed with urgency.”

Livestock:
- Produces 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2.
- Accounts for 37 percent of all human-induced methane (which is 23 times as warming as CO2).
- Generates 64 percent of the ammonia, which contributes to acid rain and acidification of ecosystems.

Land Damage
- The total area occupied by grazing livestock is equivalent to 26 percent of the ice-free terrestrial surface of the planet. In addition, the total area dedicated to producing feed crops for these animals amounts to 33 percent of the total arable land.
- Clearing forests to create new pastures is a major source of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 percent of former rainforests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing. The forests are the major “sinks” for removing the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere—they are the “lungs of the Earth.”

Water Damage
The livestock business is among the most serious users of the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources; in addition, contributing to water pollution, excessive growth of organisms, depletion of oxygen, and the degeneration of coral reefs, among other things.

- The major water-polluting agents are animal wastes, antibiotics, hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers, and the pesticides used to spray feed crops.
- In the United States livestock is responsible for 55 percent of the erosion and sediment, 37 percent of the pesticide use, 50 percent of the antibiotic use, and a third of the load of nitrogen and phosphorus put into freshwater sources.
- Widespread overgrazing disturbs water cycles, reducing replenishment of above and below ground water resources. Significant amounts of water are withdrawn for the production of feed.

Species Loss
Livestock’s very presence in vast tracts of land and its demand for feed crops also contribute to loss of other plants and animals; livestock is identified as a culprit in 15 out of 24 important ecosystems that are assessed as in decline. The loss of species is estimated to be running 50 to 500 times higher than background rates found in the fossil record.

Al Gore Does Not Discuss the Role of Food Animals
Not once during the 96 minute presentation, An Inconvenient Truth, did Al Gore mention animal foods as a cause of global warming or suggest any form of management of livestock as a solution. This oversight would be similar to not mentioning cigarette smoking in a discussion of lung cancer. With all due respect to Al Gore, I must speculate as to why he ignored this essential connection. Ignorance could not have been the reason. Catastrophic damage to our environment from livestock, especially cattle, has been recognized for decades. Nor do I believe his exclusion of this topic was for political correctness. His documentary is filled with unrestrained challenges to almost every segment of business and society. Al Gore is a brave and honest man, but he has human frailties, too.

Al Gore identified one reason for his leaving out the livestock connection in his documentary when he said, “You know more than a hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote this: ‘It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.’” Al Gore has been involved in the business of raising Black Angus cattle for most of his life. Today quite a few Angus breeders from around the country are among his closest friends.

To explain the second source of his blindness to livestock’s role in global warming, I offer one of my personal quotes, “People love to hear good news about their bad habits.” With no intention to offend, I must point out that Al Gore’s physical appearance reflects overindulgence in the Western diet—filled with meat, chicken, seafood, milk, and cheese. To speak plainly, he cannot see over his own dinner plate.

Does Global Warming Matter Enough?
For forty years I have believed people would rise up and take action once they realized that the vast majority of human sickness and suffering in developed countries is due to eating animal foods. The masses have remained quiet. For the past decade I have witnessed the growing epidemic of childhood obesity—a misery caused largely by the fast food giants. All this time I have waited for informed citizens to rise up in protest, or at the very least, to boycott the perpetrators of this child abuse. The sellers of easily procured beef burgers and milk shakes thrive uncontested by a single one of us.

Until now, inaction meant other people and their children became fat, sick and died prematurely—somehow, we have been able to live with those immoralities. The inconvenient truth is that most human beings find the destruction of fellow human beings, even little ones, acceptable. You can assume these same people will sit idly by and let the entire earth be destroyed. But we cannot let this happen, because this is our world, too. This time, failure to act means we and our children will be lost, along with those who do not seem to understand or care.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. warned that “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Nothing matters more than solving global warming. Those of us—meaning you and I (experts or not)—who have the ability to take action, have the responsibility to take action.

Action Items

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
- Leo Tolstoy

We frequently heard "action speaks louder than words" words though words are not always less important than word-less...

Looking at the mind map in the previous post, alot of things can actually be done to make the global warming cooler. So, see what have been doing. Let's start with the easiest and easier things: using energy saver light bulbs, optimizing natural lightings, buying LCD screen to replace the tube monitor, planting trees, constructing absorption well in the yard, working out 3x a week in the gym, etc.

It looks easy to practice all of the those acts, doesn't it? Any 'regular' persons can do it and even there are several other things every of us able to do. Seem as easy as any action listed above, I consider the followings as the major ones (but we may have different opinion or priority):

1. Converted car into water fueled. It is not literally a water powered car that I built. I only planted a device that produces hydrogen from water by electrolisys. This is not a new thin by the way. Many people may have developed this since years ago. Daniel Dingel did it in Filipina and many others in the US and perhaps all over the world. But not many have the courage to bring it in public. The inventor, Stanley Meyer, was reported as poisoned at a restaurant in 1998. Conspiracy theories persist that oil companies and the government were involved in the death (wow!).

Mine is not as sophisticated as those people have developed. It is a very simple, yet very cheap, device could be made by any junior high school (not the lazy ones for sure). And you could find the secret or the diagram by googling it with key words: water fuel, hydrogen, etc. I would not make a claim that the device I bult works successfully as I haven't made empirical obervation and measurement of the performance improvement. To minimize any possible risk, this prototype is installed in a 1975's Volkwagen as an experiment car. I am not confident enough to implant it in my SUV's ignition engine at this moment. However, for the sake of going green, contributing in pollution reduction, developing clean-renewable energy, it will be part of the SUV's fueling system very soon... once it's noticed that there is nothing wrong with the VW and it is positive result with having it installed, at least on the reduced emission and fuel saving (yes, gasoline is needed still, but hopefully at a lower amount)...

2. Stop eating meat !!! This is the hardest part. I was raised in a carnivorous family, omnivorous community. Being a vegetarian (not yet a vegan) in a non-vegan world is not easy. In the past, I ridiculed those who not eating what the Nature had provided. I told one who practiced it as an oxymoron.

There are Lacto-vegetarian, Ovo-vegetarian, the combination of those types and vegan. I consider my self as Seafo-vegetarian. I am eating sea food still, but I quit eating meat, especially of animals "possessing self awareness of life-conscience". First, I dropped beef from my diets since last year and later on chicken is also absent from my dish and plate. It's really a big challenge. One who said that he could resist of not choosing "rendang" and "ayam bakar" in Padangese restaurants or tenderloin steak in Outback's, most likely he/she was lying. Replacing steak with tempe and fried chicken with tofu, would it work for me? That's a big question mark?

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It was very difficult in the beginning or even to got it started, but after we accustomed we can just do it so joyously. It's a matter of the ability to control the will-power in a one square-inch spot in the head. The reason behind this decision is a combination of several factors, that I may want to explain in the upcoming post(s). I did not say that this was a victory of the brain over the belly, not at all. It's just a matter of choice. Btw, I have made a life changing decision in the past, far greater than this. I have changed the way I live... now I want to change the way I eat - no matter what. I would not be able to change others, families, communities, the world, ... if I could not change my self. "No matter what" is strong words to bear in mind for moving forward with rational things we strongly believe, especially if we did not follow the crowds.

I am not accussing any one, but I just recall PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) argue that being a 'meat-eating environmentalist' is an oxymoron. I am not sure, to me it just like 'deafening silence', 'a mournful optimist', 'cruel kindness', 'brutally honest', 'marijuana medicine', 'smoking doctor' or 'buncit indah' words.

I noted that Fuel and Food are notorious topics most widely discussed in the mainstream media these days (besides the 'never-ending' competition between Obama and Omama v. Ograndpa...) Then, taking those two subjects for discussion is necessarily appropriate as an effort to improve our planet earth and its inhibitants' life, if followed with adequate actions. Let's check the week's breaking news:

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On "Earth Day" Tuesday, the price of a barrel of crude hit a record $119.90, a fivefold increase since the beginning of 2002!
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Today, rice prices hit record. This week's 5 percent jump in Thailand rice takes prices to $1,000 a ton, nearly triple their level at the start of the year, intensifying fears of social unrest in Asia. This week, even the United States felt the reverberations, as major retailers started to notice signs of panic buying. Sam's Club, a unit of retail giant Wal-Mart, said on Wednesday it was capping sales of rice at four bulk bags per customer per visit!

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Serious issues we are all facing...

Global Warning

Something has gone wrong so that there was a global warning on global warming… (You may simply google it or go to wikipedia to understand what global warming is). And it may look foolish today, but there also are global cooling worries. The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations as written by Lowell Ponte in his 1976 book “The Cooling.” Apparently, the later case was not what we have been facing in the tropical area, but perhaps by those of us living in the other part of the earth.

It is too soon to 'decide' whether we would eventually face an ice or fire at the end, but the impact is now so obvious that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude. Only minorities of people that regard the climate change merely a fiction nowadays. There are ominous signs we see in the television and newspaper’s headlines that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes are causing a drastic decline in food production with serious implications for just about every nation on Earth.

If there's something wrong, those who have the ability to take action have the responsibility to take action. Benjamin Franklin Gates – National Treasure

What actions we must take then?

Earth Day

Today, 38 years ago, Gaylord Nelson (the Democratic senator from Wisconsin) and millions of people in the US from coast to coast involved in nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment. An event to express their concerns about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes, and air. That’s a remarkable history of Earth Day.

". . . on April 22, 1970, Earth Day was held, one of the most remarkable happenings in the history of democracy. . . " -American Heritage Magazine, October 1993

Today, April 22, 2008, we are facing an environmental crisis, far worse than the US demonstrators realized in the 1970. Earth is already showing many signs of worldwide climate change:
- Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880
- The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia.
- Average temperatures in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average between 2000 and 2004.
- Arctic ice is rapidly disappearing, and the region may have its first completely ice-free summer by 2040 or earlier.
- Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana's Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910.
- Some experts also attribute an upsurge in the amount of extreme weather events, such as wildfires, heat waves, and strong tropical storms, in part to climate change.

Just like a body with lung cancer, it will not recover simply by quitting smoking. It is almost impossible to turn the earth just like it was two hundred years ago, when it was young and strong, when we still had time to establish sustainable development. Damage has been done, it is now much too late to pretend we are living in the 'same' earth. Something got to be done… a radical change just to make this earth remains a friendly place to live. Even turning all the cars and trucks off will not make our earth a better place; we need to do more than just stop smoking. And we need to do it together… started by every one who accidentally read this, whoever we are. Get out of the comfort zone because 'business as usual' is no longer an option. The planet is ours to save. Don't leave it to the government, earth needs our actions today... yes! ours, today...