bodhi tree swaying

A nice little trailer pointing out some of the carbon-related benefits of reducing or eliminating meat from our diet. This is one of the posts that’s part of my book launch party.

I put this image together to show the relative volumes of the Earth, the Earth’s total water reserves (salt, fresh, vapor), and the accessible fresh water reserves. If you look at about five o’clock on the water sphere, you’ll see a smaller. That’s all the fresh water available for human use on our planet. It doesn’t look like much!

This is an adaptation of the image shown here, showing the relative volumes of the Earth’s total water reserves and atmosphere. The image of the Earth is from NASA.

I calculated the sphere representing the fresh water reserves based on the claim at globalchange.umich.edu that

“…of the world’s fresh water … ~0.007% … is accessible for direct human uses. This is the water found in lakes, rivers, reservoirs and those underground sources that are shallow enough to be tapped at an affordable cost.

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I’ve been rather remiss at keeping this blog up to date recently. Here are a bunch of articles I’ve had open in my browser for a long time now:

1. Here’s an article by Jeanette Stingley — one of the worst pieces on Buddhism and vegetarianism it’s been my misfortune to read. (Have I mentioned I was thinking I should rename my blog “The Angry Buddhist”? Actually that’s a bit of a joke. I feel sad, rather than angry, when I read self-justifying rationalizations such as this passing itself off as spiritual teaching).

I believe if you are Buddhist and you are contemplating becoming vegetarian or not, follow what your thoughts tell you. Neither is right and neither is wrong. It is an individual choice.

Paying people to kill animals so that you can eat them, or not paying people to kill animals. It’s all the same, …

The Tricycle Blog carried this quotation from the Audobon Magazine:

Simply put, raising beef, pigs, sheep, chicken, and eggs is very, very energy intensive. More than half of all the grains grown in America actually go to feed animals, not people, says the World Resources Institute. That means a huge fraction of the petroleum-based herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers applied to grains, plus staggering percentages of all agricultural land and water use, are put in the service of livestock. Stop eating animals and you use dramatically less fossil fuels, as much as 250 gallons less oil per year for vegans, says Cornell University’s David Pimentel, and 160 gallons less for egg-and-cheese-eating vegetarians.

But fossil fuel combustion is just part of the climate–diet equation. Ruminants—cows and sheep—generate a powerful greenhouse gas through their normal digestive processes (think burping and emissions at the other end). What comes out is methane (23 times more

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Eating meat causes global warming:

The trillions of farm animals around the world generate 18 percent of the emissions that are raising global temperatures, according to United Nations estimates, more even than from cars, buses and airplanes.

I missed this NYT editorial from a few days ago.

Per capita meat consumption more than doubled over the past half-century as the global economy expanded. It is expected to double again by 2050. Which raises the question, what does all that meat eat before it becomes meat?

Increasingly the answer is very small fish harvested from the ocean and ground into meal and pressed into oil. According to a new report by scientists from the University of British Columbia and financed by the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, 37 percent by weight of all the fish taken from the ocean is forage fish: small fish like sardines and menhaden. Nearly half of that is fed to farmed fish; most of the rest is fed to pigs and poultry.

The problem is that forage fish are the feedstock of marine mammals and birds and larger

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