The secret to a better humanity
A perspective
1. Eat less meat (or no meat). Giving up meat reduces your food-related carbon emissions by around 30%, possibly as much as 50%. As less land area is needed to feed people on veggies, less animal production frees up huge areas of land that could be used for enhancing biodiversity and/or climate change mitigation.
It seems that anxiety about climate change is a growing problem.
And this is entirely understandable. So let’s get the bad news out of the way first, THEN reasons to feel a little better.
The Earth is indeed facing a calamitous change. Continued climate changing emissions mean that the planet is very steadily heating up, resulting in areas of desertification, melting glaciers and shrinking polar ice. The melting ice will cause sea levels to rise around the world resulting in low-lying areas being flooded, displacing millions of people and destroying some coastal ecosystems.
Ecosystems will change, globally, in response to climate change. In the past, this has meant that ecosystems had to literally move to a suitable new territory. Ecosystems are currently in bad shape already from habitat destruction and subsequent loss of volume and coverage. They’re not in a great shape to move. Extinctions will be high.
Why do many of us find it hard to believe in scientific facts and instead fall for weird conspiracy theories? Why do we lack trust in politicians or the media? It’s become really hard to trust anybody anymore, partly due to the deluge of contradictory info on social media.
Science and reason have helped to get humanity where it is, so why turn our backs on that now?
Ok, so we’re all fed up with wearing masks. And some people don’t want the Covid vaccine.
One of my concerns around Covid conspiracy theories is that they are either rightwing in nature or are a gateway into rightwing thought and other rightwing, even fascist, conspiracy theories and campaigns.
Continue reading “Are Covid conspiracies rightwing? Asking for a friend”
Are you one of those people who aren’t all that bothered about climate change?
You might look out of the window and think…. It looks nice enough, the weather. And when you last went on holiday, sure it was really hot and some local temperature records were broken, but that happens now and again anyway, right? You might think to yourself that, hey, the climate has always changed, so it’s all part of natural long terms trends.
If that’s you, then you’re the person I’ve written this article for.
Is it natural for humans to eat meat?
Humans are far from the natural animal that they once were. We are way beyond ‘natural’ and getting more ‘unnatural’ all the time. It’s very obvious that humans are very different from all other animals. We know that we live on a spherical planet as part of a solar system. We know where that solar system is within a spiral galaxy. We know the evolutionary history of our planet and how we are genetically related to all other life on Earth; we are more related to some things than others, but at the end of the day we are all ‘Family Earth.’ Our technological sophistication allows us to do incredible things; things that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago.
So if what we are like today was unimaginable 50 years ago, how unimaginable will we be in another 50 years?
The writing is on the wall – drinking milk that comes from animals is coming to an end.
A recent article by Plant Based News suggests that 1 in 3 Brits now drink plant-based milks. While in America, almost half of all American households are purchasing plant-based milk.
The uptake of plant-based milk seems to be growing exponentially.
Continue reading “Drinking milk from animals is coming to an end”
It looks like, so far, activism has largely failed on climate change. There have been wins, here and there, but the relentless push of economic growth has overtaken these. For example – wins on halting rainforest destruction – we might stop it for a while, but the push for relentless economic growth eventually overcomes these gains. With climate change, one of the wins is the growth of renewable energy. This has made a difference, but still, the push for growth means ever higher carbon emissions.
What could we have done differently?
Continue reading “Where environmental activism got it wrong”
It seems to be a common question. When there’s a big story in the media about a massive problem linked to animal agriculture and some commentator offers the solution of removing animals from our diets, people often ask – “But what would happen to all those animals; all those cows or pigs? Would they all have to become pets or moved to a reserve, and how impractical would that be?”
If you spend a few minutes thinking about this question, you soon find that it isn’t an issue at all.
Here’s why…
Continue reading “If everyone stopped eating meat, what would happen to all those animals?”
Here’s another one of my projects – t-shirt art. Or art on a t-shirt. Same old goal – human transformation. What else is there to do?
Some of these are my original art from many years ago.
Others are memes for social change.
You can find them – here.
See below for some of the memes…