@Octavious, re climate change.

In general, if we continue to act like we have more than one earth (ie treating the resources as disposable) then we're screwed. I think respect for animals and our bio-sphere requires a big consciousness shift, and without that carbon dioxide reductions will not save us (or at least save our habitat).

Maybe i'm being pessimistic here. (remembering i said my main reasons were ethical, not environmental) And maybe the individual level isn't as important as the global organisational level - which is... like you know how fracking hard it is to organise humans on a global level?? but...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2764323/China-US-India-push-world-carbon-emissions-up.html

Supposedly the Kyoto signatories "exceeded" their very modest target of 4.5% reduction by 2012 from the year 1990, but that's only because Russia and Ukraine's industrial output plummeted in the early 1990s. The rest of the Kyoto signers reduced their Co2 by a collective average of 2.5%, which didn't even meet the target. Furthermore, the worst Co2 emitters weren't part of Kyoto.

@ ora

I have occasionally wondered if the reverse is true. If humanity reaches the stage where we are comfortable and can sustain that comfort indefinitely, is that the moment we stop and wait on our cosy rock until the gods tire of us and do away with humanity like virtually every other species that has existed?

The great developments of humanity are almost always inspired by necessity. Much like evolution and all the beauty and wonder that has come from it has been.

"@steephie "have no desire to be a saint. Whether I actually do that is something I'll decide then." If you do decide to become a saint, please let us know in advance as I'm sure you'll then be everyone's favourite diplomacy opponent."

Hah, I'll only play against good christians and I'll send them to hell if they don't turn the other cheek!

On second thought, I probably wouldn't play Diplomacy because it would be too hard to find 7 good christians who play Dip--- well, to find 7 good christians, basically.

Disclaimer: It's a joke.

Pretty sure it takes humans 50-100 years too long to realize what actually is a necessity. Inertia and dithering is our modus operandi.

While I can understand environmental arguments - which have the biggest effect on me - or the ethics of horrendous conditions, how many vegetarians here would eat meat if it was completely environmentally sustainable as well as done in the most humane ways possible?

I would not. I oppose the commodification of animals on principle.

"I would not. I oppose the commodification of animals on principle."

Just curious. Why?

Because exploiting animals for profit and pleasure is intrinsically gross and anthropogenic. Animals feel pain and have their own lives to lead. They do not exist for humans to do what they please with them.

Anthropocentric

Butchered cows feel about as much pain when they are slaughtered as you would if a speeding bullet passed through your brain. I have never visited a slaughterhouse and don't know how they kill them, but on the farms I have visited, it's a single shot in the back of the head and it only happens when they are at the end of their lives anyway.

I take it that you have a problem with animal captivity in the first place, though, which I understand. I just don't see how a society as massive and obsessed with food as ours could ever survive without manipulative agriculture, or, as you call it, "commidification" of nature.

That so called bullet often doesn't kill instantly, and cows are often alive when they're being skinned and dismembered, not to mention the terror of the transportation process when they are sent to be slaughtered. Cows are also nearly uniformly branded. But yes generally compared to how other farm animals treated, cows are not as tortured on a per capita basis. Poultry farming is by far the worst offender.

"Give yourself an allowance and stick to it, and who gives a damn whether that allowance is taken up by steak dinners, owning pets, having a larger car, or going abroad? Carbon is carbon. You can do your bit and keep the details that help make life worth living."

Do you track your carbon emissions? Moreover, do you track the carbon emissions released when making and transporting the products you use, the clothes you wear, or the places you go? Do you understand that washing and drying your clothes, taking a shower, and opening your garage door all emit carbon or are you blind to anything that doesn't involve directly burning carbon-filled petroleum fuels? Better yet, what is an appropriate individual cap and how is that enforced? Do you judge it based on the pure amount of carbon dioxide emitted or are there more variables, such as whether you live in a more sensitive environment or whether you live in an urban environment? How many tons of carbon do you think a single individual emits, directly and indirectly, without even realizing it and having no way to realize it?

You do a shitty job of acknowledging the existence and perpetuation of anthropogenic climate change while showing remarkable apathy and lack of responsibility toward it. Rather than take the blame - and the burden - upon yourself to deal with the most important global issue of our lives, you would rather shove a little bit on everyone. That's great, all things being equal. If your emissions were completely independent of everyone around you, then you would be an environmental hero, someone who understands the power of limiting oneself and the capability we have of destroying everything we rely on when we don't. You're an example of what we all should strive for.

Too bad neither you or I are even close to independent and too bad we only have a limited ability to control our emissions. You can put your clothes on a drying line instead of using a drier that on its own can emit over a ton of carbon per year. You can ride your bike or whatever the hell you want to do to cut your own emissions. That doesn't erase your interactions with massive industrial giants every day that release huge amounts of carbon, methane, and other destructive chemicals both to the climate and to the local and global ecological chain. Suggesting that we're already making progress and tackling climate change by "living within our own means" is absolving them of responsibility.

When you literally put a rifle to the back of the head of a cow, you're not gonna miss. Slaughterhouses may do things differently, but the family-owned farms I have been around care for the livestock they've spent 10 or 20 years growing and want to make it painless and relieve their suffering as badly as anyone else.

Yes, poultry farming is far worse. There's something to be said for free range poultry farming, but honestly, other than raising organic local stock and buying local, I'm not sure what can be done to prohibit a company like Tyson or Perdue from mistreating their farmers and workers as well as their livestock. They're just too big.

Free range is a meaningless gimmick with no regulatory teeth, sadly. And locally sourced poultry still likely gets its hatchings from the handful of corporations that vertically control the poultry industry.

@Bo_sox

Did someone mention.....

*Agriculture?*

Some of you may have wondered what I was doing while I was away for so long. The answer is: learning about alternative modes of food production. I'm now in grad school for agronomy.

The bottom line is that yes, a human being, or any animal, must make certain demands on the environment around them for survival. All creatures do this, all creatures "consume" in this biological sense. Plants take up water and nutrients from the ground and store them in their bodies. Animals eat corpses of other animals or living plants and incorporate those molecules into their own bodies and derive energy from them. This is just the fact.

However, the real key to the ethical dimension of this is the question of necessity. So much of what modern humans do, in terms of our demands on our environment, on our fellow humans, on animals we raise, on wildlife, on ecosystems - is gratuitous, pursued for the sake of greed, domination, out of a bored emptiness or a gnawing fear.

Let's take modern agriculture. I know that anyone reading this is immediately going to jump down my throat and say "well I happen to LIKE _____(insert agricultural product that I'm about to imply is gratuitous)". Yeah well, whatever. We all like shit we don't need. We were raised that way. To some extent it's in our blood. That doesn't make it ethically defensible, and anyone with an ounce of intellectual and moral courage would admit that at least to themselves.

So, moving on. Think of all the crops that we didn't need to grow, didn't really need. Tobacco. Lots of cotton and other fibers that were made into frivolous clothes and other wasteful things that nobody even necessarily wanted that badly. So that's the non-food world, we could go on and on with just that. But even in food - how much chocolate does the world really need? How many avocados? How much coffee and tea? How many spices? How many ornamental shrubs and bouquets of flowers?

It can certainly be argued that even the most austerely wholesome life would leave some small room for minor luxuries like a cup of tea. I agree with this assessment. But it turns out that those little comforts can be almost always easily derived in a much much more ecologically responsible way, if the person in question will simply tolerate a bit of moderation and a slight change to the fairly cosmetic aspects of the experience.

Example: in the southeastern United States yaupon holly grows wild all over the damn place. It's native, but in a lot of disturbed ecosystems, especially those that have been cleared in the last century (Read: a huge amount of the South), and those that have been prevented from burning regularly as they had usually done in recent natural history, the yaupon begins to take over the understory and drive down plant diversity. Basically it becomes a bit of a pest.

Here's where the humans come in. We caused that problem. We can solve it, and replace a lot of tea plantations in Sri Lanka too. Yaupon holly can be made into a really pleasant tea with a respectable caffeine content, it was drunk by the natives of the area ceremonially.

That's just one specific example. And at any rate, could a lot of us stand to do with less tea and coffee and dessert anyway? Yes. I've recently stopped drinking coffee and alcohol. I don't miss either one. They're just addictions, and although I knew their pleasures intimately, turns out I don't need them. My quality of life is the same or better. Who would have thought. And when I really just want a mug of something, an herbal tea does the same job, and I can still frequent the coffeeshops just the same as I always did.

So it is with all the frivolities. If it is different, then they are not frivolities, are they?

And that's the answer to the question of how we can ethically live on this planet, without a catastrophically destructive anthropocentric mindset that Putin rightly critiques. Even if you are an anthropocentric through and through, you should agree with this prescription, because we are shooting ourselves in the foot. Turns out its all connected.

I can go on, but I've probably said enough already.

@Putin ... very possible.

"Free range" to me means not raised in tight cages where they sleep in their own shit. I don't expect chickens to need an entire pasture to themselves, but hell, a coop instead of a cage would at least be worth something, wouldn't it? It's at least room to breathe, which they don't have on big poultry farms.

@Thucy ... I'm one credit away from an environmental science degree and I don't know how you got from point A to whatever point you ended all that at. Of course there are a lot of unnecessary crops. People have preferences. People want certain things. You seem to want to fight economic supply and demand. If that's what you're going for, I have two words for you:

Good luck.

Do you have any questions about my reasoning? I was just going off the cuff and I'm happy to elaborate. It's not a subject I have a shortage of preparation on.

Your reasoning is easy to deduce. There's a lot of crops and other things in our material world that we don't need. Some of these things do irreparable harm. I don't have any problems with that conclusion; in fact, I largely agree with it. I just don't get how you plan to eradicate personal preferences. Chocolate and coffee aren't going anywhere. Maybe they'll get more expensive once they can't be made with slave labor or once they stop cutting rain forests in order to make it, but they're not disappearing.

See my reply in the other thread. These personal preferences you speak of are for the most part a cultural artifact. We have to approach it that way and change it through social organization. There is absolutely hope in that respect. If you have ever been a member of a countercultural group you will know what I mean. There are other ways to live.

What if, on a small scale, eating meat is *good* for the environment? For instance, I enjoy hunting. Where I happen to live, we have an overabundance of deer. I happen to enjoy deer meat. In order to sustain healthy populations of deer, and the plants they eat, the DNR attempts to encourage more hunting by giving out more deer tags. When I shoot a deer, one that was as "free-range" as possible, and it dies relatively fast, and then I eat it, I am enjoying my food while also helping the environment by aiding the management of deer populations.

KingCyrus, the most overpopulated species is humans. Why aren't we controlling their population by shooting them down to size?

KC, the easy answer to your question is that we (humans) created the population problem with deer by eradicating their predators since they also predate livestock. Obviously, population management is a good thing, but the population would manage itself if we hadn't interfered initially.

Venison is really good, though. I can't wait to get more soon.

@""Free range" to me means not raised in tight cages where they sleep in their own shit. I don't expect chickens to need an entire pasture to themselves, but hell, a coop instead of a cage would at least be worth something, wouldn't it? "

I heard recently that chickens are agrophobic, and that free range chicken farmers were confused because the chickens would always stay inside the coop. But they stay inside because they are scared of the open sky, and their natural habitat would be under the cover of trees. I don't know how accurate this is, but it could open up the possibility of growing hack some forests and chickens in the same farm...

I think of 'free range' as a marketing gimick. I don't know how free they are, but i'm not willing to invest the effort in visiting my local farms to find out... So i play it safe by not eating them.

@KC, you said "What if, on a small scale, eating meat is *good* for the environment? For instance, I enjoy hunting. Where I happen to live, we have an overabundance of deer. I happen to enjoy deer meat"

As i said, my main objection is suffering, i believe wild deer which are hunted suffer far less than farmed animals (particularily industrial/factory farming) - so from an ethical point of view, i have far less problem with this meat consumption.

However from an environmental point of view, i think you have to look at the massive positive impact which the reintroduction of wolves can have. I think it was yellowstone which saw this recently, and 'natural' methods of keeping populations in check seem best. (Those with environment-related degrees may correct me on this)

@Bo "KC, the easy answer to your question is that we (humans) created the population problem with deer by eradicating their predators since they also predate livestock" - but humans are predators, so with human over-population it seems natural to hunt wild deer.

War and human-on-human violence is also 'natural' - look at chimps going out in hunting packs and murdering other chimps from neighbouring groups - the naturalness or otherwise of a action/solution doesn't automatically make it good/moral/'the kind of world i want to live in'.

Again, i can reduce things to a moral principle; i don't want to be killed by humans (for meat or as population control) therefore i should not kill or advocate for the killing of other humans (by empathy). Pretty similar reasoning to my reasons for being a veggie.

I understand the fact that we created this problem by eliminating the primary predators, wolves, of the deer. But wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone is completely different to reintroduction to a populous state. I don't think it would work where I live, though I know there are still wolf packs - which I believe are recovering - in the northern parts of my state.

"What if, on a small scale, eating meat is *good* for the environment? For instance, I enjoy hunting. Where I happen to live, we have an overabundance of deer. I happen to enjoy deer meat. In order to sustain healthy populations of deer, and the plants they eat, the DNR attempts to encourage more hunting by giving out more deer tags. When I shoot a deer, one that was as "free-range" as possible, and it dies relatively fast, and then I eat it, I am enjoying my food while also helping the environment by aiding the management of deer populations."

Depending on the ecological context, it totally is good for the environment, and should be encouraged. What should also be encouraged is proper respect for the life of the animal. Here in the Southeast US feral pigs are a huge problem, and they need to be culled as quickly as possible. But we must recognize that just because their population is out of control that this does not make them scum or vermin or something. Their ancestors were brought here by the Spanish, they are simply living their lives the way they know how. It is a shame that they need to be killed, but they do need to be.

But don't let the existence of a case like that convince you that now hamburgers twice a week are fine, or that frivolous consumption of any kind is justifiable. Because if you do, you become more dangerous to the environment than a feral pig ever could be.

@octavious. We are nowhere near tackling climate emissions. Even if the Paris commitments were met, that is not even half of the reductions needed. In principle, you are right that there is no need to prefer one emission source over another, but in our current day reality we have so little room to maneuver that ALL reductions must be maximized. This, dealing with climate change require reductions in animal agriculture right alongside everything else. Even then we are unlikely to forestall major disasters. That is just the math

@"This, dealing with climate change require reductions in animal agriculture right alongside everything else. Even then we are unlikely to forestall major disasters. That is just the math"

Even reductions like lower calorie intake in obese populations? Even reductions like reduced human population?

Which would be an economic disaster of not incredibly gradual - not that i'm implicitally against this, but you can look at Russia or other former Societ nations and see the effect of population decline, and Russia still had some oil-based economic growth... Societies colapse and, well that would massvely drop emmissions at least - the best example we have of a 'globalised' collapse is the bronze age, east mediterranean collapse of about 8 different cultures (don't know if they should be called states, or nations... ) with only Egypt recovering from that collapse... And we don't know what caused that, but once trade was disrupted you can imagine that social institutions which depended on that trade also collapsed and the knock on effect collapsed multiple neighbours... Other examples are easier to see how empires or kingdoms collapsed due to environmental disaster - on a local scale where farming (mostly) pushed the local environment beyond the point it could sustain, and then a food growth collapse destroyed the cities/capital. With Easter Island being the craziest example (who decided it was a good idea to cut down the last tree? When your society depends on wood for boat making and boats for fishing, and fishing for survival? Oh, maybe they didn't know that trees don't just occur naturally, that they rely on other trees to reproduce... Or maybe there was a shortage and you knew someone was going to cut the tree down, so you went ad did it first for short-term profits... Who knows?)