Justice for all

I know — this post is coming really late in the day (it’s 7:30 pm!). I haven’t had a free moment all day, in between assignments, classes and activities. But seeing as how this blog is all about contributing to a brighter world…I felt it would be a travesty if I didn’t sit down and write something for Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change. So, better late than never. Right?

I used to be a huge environmentalist in high school. Somehow that passion died down a bit as I became more interested in…people. People are easier to relate to than something “abstract” like the environment and biological conservation. Global warming is such a HUGE problem. But because it’s so huge, it’s very abstract. It’s very hard to grasp how switching off the light, using less water, turning down the heat, and taking public transport to work is going to help in the grand scheme of things. I try my best to be environment friendly, but I’ll admit — it isn’t easy to make such habits part of your daily routine when you don’t see much of an end result from your actions. It’s difficult to quantify the exact effects of global warming on people’s lives. So, I think this leads some people to give up on trying. Or to forget about these little things on a regular basis.

Part of the challenge is putting a “human face” on global warming, and that’s the next step we need to take. Thinking of global warming as an abstract problem that will affect us only years from now is misleading. Global warming DOES have a human face, and it’s destroying people’s lives at this moment — not sometime in the far off future.

And it’s developing countries and poor people that are hit the worst. In fact, an estimated 150,000 people die every year due to climate change. And the worst thing is that the poor - who individually contribute less to climate change than we in the developed world do - are hurt the most by it. They are more vulnerable to natural disasters due to poor housing and health conditions. Global warming increases the likelihood of contracting life-threatening diseases - especially as warmer weather allows malaria-bearing mosquitoes to survive in a wider range of areas. By 2030, climate change might result in 90 million more people exposed to malaria in Africa! Meningitis, dengue fever and diarrhea all might increase due to global warming.

And that’s not all. Poor countries are more prone to flooding. And global warming dries out farmland- a severe problem in Africa since 2/3 of the continent is composed of desert or dry climate. There is also more unpredictability in weather patterns overall, with more severe and frequent floods and droughts. Agriculture is one of the main means of livelihood for people in developing countries, and it is severely affected by climate change.

I know this is all very depressing. But the good news is that the environmental movement has exploded in recent times. A few decades ago, no one was talking about it — now, everyone and their mother wants to “go green.” Good for us. But now, it’s up to us to ensure that “going green” isn’t just another short-term fad — we have to keep the movement going until we make significant progress on climate change.

I’ll leave you with an inspirational project that I have written about before, and think is a superb idea. Face the Change, which is aiming to highlight the human face of climate change:

The goal of Face the Change is to mobilize support to tackle climate change by highlighting its social impacts. By putting a human face on global warming, we aim to elevate the current debate on science and energy policy to one that includes key human rights issues of natural disasters and forced migration. The web-based platform will primarily use video and other multimedia to document the current and future impacts and facilitate a global dialogue with the intention of shaping policy. To reach communities without widespread access to the Internet, we will run a pilot project using cell phone Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) to raise awareness, rally and gather feedback from impoverished communities whose homes and livelihoods will be directly threatened by rising seas, drought and other climate change related effects. Cell phones are the windows to the world for many in developing countries, but their potential as a medium that informs under-represented people and allows them to participate in debates is far from realized.

Just like Face the Change, there are tons of other groups and organizations working on climate change issues - from the grassroots level to the international policy level. We just have to do our part to contribute to the movement and ensure it doesn’t fade out — and I think there is hope for future generations.

Do you call yourself an environmentalist? If so - or even if you care about the environment - perhaps one of the best things to do is become a vegetarian.

I’ve been a vegetarian for the majority of my life. Although my family is vegetarian, they felt that I should be allowed to eat meat after we moved to the U.S. - so at a young age, I did eat chicken for a couple of years, but soon after gave it up - mainly due to a love for animals and ethical reasoning on my part. But I’m not here to give you a radical left-wing tree-hugger lecture. Being vegetarian shouldn’t be simply the requisite of the hippie animal-lover and biological conservationist - it should be plausible for all those who love humanity itself. At the end of the day, the environmental implications of becoming vegetarian are so significant that by going veg - you contribute as much to the preservation of future generations, as to animal life itself.

The implications of eating meat are truly astounding. According to a 2006 UN Food & Agriculture Organization report, “The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” Raising animals for food is one of the main causes of global warming, among other problems such as land degradation, air pollution and water pollution. The report states that the livestock sector contributes to 18% of greenhouse gas emissions - more emissions than all the world’s transportation combined, which make up about 13%!

What’s more, feeding animals for meat, dairy & egg production requires growing about ten times as much crops as it would take to simply…grow crops for direct consumption. There are significant costs that go into meat production to the extent that producing one calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times as much fossil fuels as does a calorie of plant protein. At the end of the day, switching to a vegetarian diet has as much, or more impact on reducing global warming than switching to a hybrid car.

Moreover, animal agriculture takes up about 70% of all agricultural land - and growing these farm animals is a huge cause of burning the world’s forests. About 70% of former Amazon rainforest is now used for pastureland. Getting rid of the remaining forests on our planet not only reduces the rich biodiversity in these ecosystems, but also reduces vast areas where trees once used to absorb carbon dioxide. The reduction of forests contributes to carbon dioxide accumulation, as a result accelerating global warming.

And, furthermore — animals (especially animal waste) contribute greatly to other greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, which are even worse than CO2. In fact, nitrous oxide has 296 times the warming power of carbon dioxide! As a result, while animal agriculture results in about 9% of CO2 emissions, it results in 37% of methane and 65% of nitrous oxide emissions!

Another study, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, finds that the costs of factory farming include — “human illnesses caused by drug-resistant bacteria associated with the rampant use of antibiotics on feedlots and the degradation of land, water and air quality caused by animal waste too intensely concentrated to be neutralized by natural processes.”

The environmental movement has made a flaw by ignoring vegetarianism. True - “going green” does involve everyday actions such as turning off the lights, walking and taking public transport when possible, and switching to hybrid cars that reduce vehicle emissions. But why is “going veg” - one of the most important everyday actions - ignored? Likely because campaigning to become vegetarian is fraught with ethical and moral concerns, and intrudes into one’s privacy. It’s not something we can regulate, really. Environmental & climate change advocates don’t necessarily want to get caught up in the mess of animal rights. But at the end of the day, people have to realize how important vegetarianism is going to be in the years to come. Not for animals, but for our own future generations.

When it comes down to it, I’m not talking about your compassion for chickens or trying to appeal to your inner hippie self. Instead I’m asking you to take a good hard look at global warming, and to look at these statistics. This is reality, not morality. Before any great movement, the status quo was accepted. Years ago, we all know that slavery was considered normal and that humans were treated like animals. Well, eating animals is now the status quo - and you might protest against it - but the truth is, the facts are arguing for a change. If history has taught us anything, it’s that the status quo can never be implicitly accepted. There is always something to question. So question it.

You can read more here (picture credit from the same site).