The letter by Leo Phillips suggested we not only celebrate Earth Day but ‘every day by replacing meat and dairy products in our diet with healthful, eco-friendly foods.’
He made his case by stating that production of meat and dairy products may account for half of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, contributes more pollutants to our water supplies than all other human activities combined, is causing global shortages of drinking water and is the driving force in global deforestation and wildlife habitat destruction.
Mr. Phillips didn’t say, however, why meat and dairy production are such heavy hitters to the environment, so I shared a few paragraphs from Super Freakonomics about our heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers to boost food production to keep up with booming population growth.
To help establish the link between fertilizer and serious degradation to the environment I turned to The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
In it we learn that chemical fertilizer is not a natural, clean product from start to finish. Quite the opposite.
Though I think what I said at the conclusion of Part 3 is true, that ‘the link between food choices, fertilizer and fossil fuel is visible to all, as is the link between fossil fuel dependence and environmental degradation,’ I’d like to share a few more lines from Pollan’s book (pg. 45 - 47) to underline the fact that as long as ‘the economy’ takes precedence over ‘the environment’ there will be no such thing as a free lunch.
When farmers turned to chemical fertilizers, farm production turned a corner.
Mr. Pollan writes, '(A farmer) could buy fertility in a bag, fertility that had originally been produced a billion years ago half way around the world... fixing nitrogen allowed the food chain to turn from the logic of biology and embrace the logic of industry. Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.'
And we sip a lot of it. One major crop that is found in a variety of forms on everyone’s dinner plate is corn. Pollan writes extensively about corn production in the US and by so doing informs us we have much to learn about our current food chain.
'When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn (or other crops), you find that every bushel odf industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it - or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food. Ecologically this is a fabulously expensive way to produce food - but ‘ecologically’ is no longer the operative standard. As long as fossil fuel energy is so cheap and available, it makes good economic sense to produce corn this way. The old way of growing corn - using fertility drawn from the sun - may have been the biological equivalent of a free lunch, but the service was much slower and the portions were much skimpier. In the factory time is money, and yield is everything.'
Unfortunately, factory farms can get pretty sloppy with fertilizer application and thereby pollute our surroundings.
Some fertilizer isn’t taken up by the plants and evaporates into the air ‘where it acidifies the rain and contributes to global warming. (Ammonium nitrate is transformed into nitrous oxide, an important greenhouse gas.) Some seeps down to the water table... the nitrates in the water convert to nitrite, which binds to hemoglobin, compromising the blood’s ability to carry oxygen to the brain.'
Maybe that’s why the brightest idea to come out of North America lately about our food supply has been the KFC Double Down sandwich.
While food production has grown, ecological degradation has taken place.
Pollan writes, ‘The flood of synthetic nitrogen has fertilized not just the farm fields but the forests and the oceans too, to the benefit of some species (corn and algae being two of the biggest beneficiaries), and to the detriment of countless others. The ultimate fate of the nitrates (e.g., applied to vast cornfields in Iowa) is to flow down the Mississippi into the Gulf of mexico, where their deadly fertility poisons the marine ecosystem. The nitrogen tide stimulates the growth of algae, and the algae smother the fish, creating a hypoxic or dead zone as big as the state of New Jersey and still growing. By fertilizing the world, we alter the planet’s composition of species and shrink its biodiversity.'
Environmental degradation spreads as our waistlines grow.
Any bright ideas?
Eat less meat and dairy? Plant a garden?
Certainly.
And tomorrow at 4 p.m., our own City Hall will discussing another one.
Please click here to read Part 5.
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