First off I want to apologize. I have a pretty bad headache today so I can’t guarantee that my blog entry will make the most sense.
Earth Day is almost here and there are some of us who actually do care.
I wanted to talk about a couple of changes that someone can make to their lifestyle that will greatly reduce their carbon footprint.
When you stop eating meat you reduce your contribution to global warming.
Think of all these wasted resources associated with meat:
1. Ten times the land is needed to grow food for cows than humans would consume. Without out all that land being used to feed animals we could easily have more than enough asparagus to go around. That is a great misappropriation of resources.
2. The by-products of feedlots and slaughterhouses pollute water supplies. I am pretty confident that with less meat farms there would be less e-coli contamination etc.
3. And as Al Gore was so brilliant in pointing out, cow farts yield greenhouse gases. Personally I think gas shouldn’t count but it’s a point regardless.
3. Then there is the transportation of cattle from fields to fields to slaughterhouses to grocery stores to your home. There is a pile of greenhouse gasses just in emissions from trucks.
Even Al Gore (Al Gore pff!) mentions it on his Inconvenient Truth website. Granted he slips it right in there along with using energy efficient light bulbs. But can you blame him? Cattle ops are in his family.
As a bit of an off topic, I really resent someone when they get paid thousands of dollars per engagement for sharing something that is supposed to be of critical importance. It detracts from the message if you ask me. If Saint Gore was truly worried about the earth you’d think he’d be more worried about getting the message out there and less worried about padding his wallet. But whatever…
There are other ways to reduce your carbon footprint. You can try to buy food locally grown (and it would be healthier too. Not just because the food is riper but because the U.S. and Mexico use more chemicals than we do and they use ones that are banned in Canada).
That leads me to point two, buy organic. You’ll be supporting farms that are sustainable and are gentler on the soil as well as food that is not covered with cancer causing chemicals.
And one more thing, eat whole foods. The more processed a food is, the less nutritious it is and the bigger the carbon footprint.
Anyways, this Earth Day, be green and make yourself a tasty, whole foods vegan dish!
