Climate Food and Agriculture

Pesticides up to no good, says new research

A decrease in pesticide availability led to an associated decrease in suicide rates in Sri Lanka, researchers publishing in the International Journal of Epidemiology have concluded. In 1995 and 1998, restrictions were put into place on importation and sales of highly toxic pesticides in Sri Lanka; in 2005, the country’s suicide rate was half what […]

Mercury contamination in fish declines when emissions go down

Mercury contamination of waterways and marine life doesn’t have to be an ongoing problem — all we have to do is limit industrial mercury emissions. Easy! After a seven-year experiment in a Canada lake, researchers publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that mercury concentrations in fish would decline relatively quickly […]

PETA VP argues vegetarianism is the best way to help the planet

This is a guest essay from Bruce Friedrich, vice president for campaigns at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). It was written in response to Alex Roth's essay "PETA's dogma is all bark and no bite." Friedrich has been an environmental activist for more than 20 years.

In 1987, I read Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé and -- primarily for human rights and environmental reasons -- went vegan. Two decades later, I still believe that -- even leaving aside all the animal welfare issues -- a vegan diet is the only reasonable diet for people in the developed world who care about the environment or global poverty.

Over the past 20 years, the environmental argument against growing crops to be fed to animals -- so that humans can eat the animals -- has grown substantially. Just this past November, the environmental problems associated with eating chickens, pigs, and other animals were the subject of a 408-page United Nations scientific report titled Livestock's Long Shadow.

The U.N. report found that the meat industry contributes to "problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity." The report concludes that the meat industry is "one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."

Umbra on meat eating and global warming

Dear Umbra, I see that PETA’s latest campaign says that meat eating is the No. 1 cause of global warming, not SUVs. This statement may be manipulative and political, but — is it true? J.Helena, Mont. Dearest J., I’ll bite. Shallow digging on one People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals site quickly uncovered their […]

On PETA’s latest campaign

Just ’cause I love poking the hornet’s nest, I thought I’d weigh in on this brouhaha about PETA, vegetarianism, and environmentalism. As I see it, there are three core questions: 1. Should citizens of conscience become vegetarians? To me, the answer to this question is pretty obviously yes. I don’t see how it can be […]

The subjects of PETA and vegetarianism …

… have clearly driven you people insane.

Animal-rights group makes the stupid claim that enviros must be vegetarians

This is a guest essay from Alex Roth, a financial analyst, attorney, and environmentalist in Washington, D.C.

Matt Prescott, a spokesperson for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, asserted last month that "you just cannot be a meat-eating environmentalist." PETA's pronouncement is part of a cooperative campaign among a number of animal-rights groups. Their message is that meat production exacerbates global warming.

Human-powered irrigation can increase harvests for farmers

Recently, I wrote about treadle pumps that let human power replace diesel power for irrigation. As a one-to-one replacement it sounded pretty oppressive. But it turns out that it is not a one-to-one replacement.

Poor farmers who only earn a dollar or so, per person per day, can afford to do a lot more irrigation with treadles than they can renting diesel pumps from rich farmers and buying diesel fuel to run it. So they multiply the size of their harvests by two or three, their incomes by even more. Even in a formal efficiency analysis, you are probably increasing rather than decreasing the output per unit of labor. In human terms, you are increasing the amount of fresh vegetables the family can eat, and paying for things like school fees in areas where education is not necessarily completely tax-paid. So you are making life better for the farmers, and even slightly increasing their autonomy from richer neighbors.

Climate change will cause agricultural output to decline significantly, says study

Attention, people who eat: Climate change could cause global agriculture output to decline by up to 16 percent by 2080, according to a new study from the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Like life itself, the allocation won’t be fair: productivity is likely to generally decline in developing countries […]

How the meat industry thrives, even as costs rise

Note: This is the second installment of a two-column series on global trends in agriculture. The first was on U.S. fruit and vegetable farming. When corn prices spiked last fall, things looked dire for industrial meat processors. These enormous companies thrive by confining (or contracting with farmers to confine) livestock into tightly packed quarters and […]