Patrick O. Brown, a Stanford University biochemist, has changed science twice by giving stuff away. In the early 1990s Brown invented the DNA microarray, a tool that measures how cells make use of their DNA; he then showed researchers how to make their own, transforming genetic research. In 2000 he was one of three scientists who launched a free, online scientific journal called the Public Library of Science (PLOS); it has already broken the stranglehold of $200-a-year scientific publications like Science and Nature.

Now he is tackling an even bigger foe. Over the next 18 months Brown, 55, will take a break from his normal scientific work (finding out how a small number of genes are translated into a much larger number of proteins) in order to change the way the world farms and eats. He wants to put an end to animal farming, or at least put a significant dent in our global hunger for cows, pigs and chickens.

Brown, who has been a vegetarian for more than 30 years and a vegan for 5, notes that while livestock accounts for only 9% of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, it accounts for 37% of human-caused methane (most of it emanating from the animals’ digestive systems) and 65% of human-caused nitrous oxide, according to the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Both are far better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, meaning that cows, chickens and their ilk have a larger greenhouse effect than all the cars, trucks and planes in the world.

The green cognoscenti are choosing animal husbandry as their new enemy. Jonathan Safran Foer, the bestselling novelist, has published articles declaring that he is raising his kids vegetarian because of the environmental consequences of meat farming and that if people are going to eat meat, they should consider eating dogs. Lord Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics, told the Independent that the West would have to become more vegetarian in order to combat global warming; without change in present trends, meat and milk output will double by 2050.

Brown brings scientific clout to the debate–he’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute–and a realization that the arguments for change need to be economic, not just ethical. Growing crops to feed animals requires a lot more land, energy and fertilizer than growing them to feed people, he says: 70% of the land that was once Amazon rain forest is dedicated to grazing. Even if scientists figure out how to make milk with stem cells, it’s unlikely they will be able to create milk with the same efficiency as they can corn or wheat.

“There’s absolutely no possibility that 50 years from now this system will be operating as it does now,” says Brown. “One approach is to just wait, and either we’ll deal with it or we’ll be toast. I want to approach this as a solvable problem.” Solution: “Eliminate animal farming on planet Earth.”

Diets are malleable. Thirty years ago nobody drank high fructose corn syrup. Now it’s a dominant part of the American diet. As Western diets move into China, people there are eating more beef. Brown argues that the key to removing meat from diets is to give foodmakers an incentive to make yummy vegetable-based fare. If vendors push the new foods, palates will follow.

Incentive? Brown thinks if he can convince food manufacturers that the costs of selling meat are too high, and rising, they’ll come around. Seemingly tiny changes in economics could make animal farming a lot less affordable. At the moment farmers around the world are arguing they should be immune from taxes and ceilings on greenhouse gases; if they are not exempt, the cost of meat will go up. Raising the price of water would have the same effect. It takes 1,000 liters of water to produce a liter of milk.

Brown plans to spend the first six months of his project hammering out economic models with colleagues, illustrating ways that animal farming is likely to become onerously expensive. Then he’ll take a year off to work with famous chefs and food researchers on tastier vegetarian dishes, and to develop a strategy to tackle the political, economic, legal, behavioral and food-security issues he’s sure to face.

If Brown can work it so that McDonald’s puts less meat in each Big Mac, that could count as a win. Until now little research has gone into making foods friendly to the environment.

“If you’re a big food producer now, this is absolutely inevitable,” he says. “You’d better start thinking ahead. You’d better seriously start investing and trying to find alternatives in order to stay alive.”

Republished from Forbes.com

I gave a talk in South Texas recently on the environmental virtues of a vegetarian diet. As you might imagine, the reception was chilly. In fact, the only applause came during the Q&A period when a member of the audience said that my lecture made him want to go out and eat even more meat. “Plus,” he added, “what I eat is my business — it’s personal.”

I’ve been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I’d never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?

We know more than we’ve ever known about the innards of the global food system. We understand that food can both nourish and kill. We know that its production can both destroy and enhance our environment. We know that farming touches every aspect of our lives — the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil we need.

So it’s hard to avoid concluding that eating cannot be personal. What I eat influences you. What you eat influences me. Our diets are deeply, intimately and necessarily political.

This realization changes everything for those who avoid meat. As a vegetarian I’ve always felt the perverse need to apologize for my dietary choice. It inconveniences people. It smacks of self-righteousness. It makes us pariahs at dinner parties. But the more I learn about the negative impact of meat production, the more I feel that it’s the consumers of meat who should be making apologies.

Here’s why: The livestock industry as a result of its reliance on corn and soy-based feed accounts for over half the synthetic fertilizer used in the United States, contributing more than any other sector to marine dead zones. It consumes 70 percent of the water in the American West — water so heavily subsidized that if irrigation supports were removed, ground beef would cost $35 a pound. Livestock accounts for at least 21 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions globally — more than all forms of transportation combined. Domestic animals — most of them healthy — consume about 70 percent of all the antibiotics produced. Undigested antibiotics leach from manure into freshwater systems and impair the sex organs of fish.

It takes a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of conventional beef. If all the grain fed to animals went to people, you could feed China and India. That’s just a start.

Meat that’s raised according to “alternative” standards (about 1 percent of meat in the United States) might be a better choice but not nearly as much so as its privileged consumers would have us believe. “Free-range chickens” theoretically have access to the outdoors. But many “free-range” chickens never see the light of day because they cannot make it through the crowded shed to the aperture leading to a patch of cement.

“Grass-fed” beef produces four times the methane — a greenhouse gas 21 times as powerful as carbon dioxide — of grain-fed cows, and many grass-fed cows are raised on heavily fertilized and irrigated grass. Pastured pigs are still typically mutilated, fed commercial feed and prevented from rooting — their most basic instinct besides sex.

Issues of animal welfare are equally implicated in all forms of meat production. Domestic animals suffer immensely, feel pain and may even be cognizant of the fate that awaits them. In an egg factory, male chicks (economically worthless) are summarily run through a grinder. Pigs are castrated without anesthesia, crated, tail-docked and nose-ringed. Milk cows are repeatedly impregnated through artificial insemination, confined to milking stalls and milked to yield 15 times the amount of milk they would produce under normal conditions. When calves are removed from their mothers at birth, the mothers mourn their loss with heart-rending moans.

Then comes the slaughterhouse, an operation that’s left with millions of pounds of carcasses — deadstock — that are incinerated or dumped in landfills. (Rendering plants have taken a nose dive since mad cow disease.)

Now, if someone told you that a particular corporation was trashing the air, water and soil; causing more global warming than the transportation industry; consuming massive amounts of fossil fuel; unleashing the cruelest sort of suffering on innocent and sentient beings; failing to recycle its waste; and clogging our arteries in the process, how would you react? Would you say, “Hey, that’s personal?” Probably not. It’s more likely that you’d frame the matter as a dire political issue in need of a dire political response.

Vegetarianism is not only the most powerful political response we can make to industrialized food. It’s a necessary prerequisite to reforming it. To quit eating meat is to dismantle the global food apparatus at its foundation.

Agribusiness has been vilified of late by muckraking journalists, activist filmmakers and sustainable-food advocates. We know that something has to be done to save our food from corporate interests. But I wonder — are we ready to do what must be done? Sure, we’ve been inundated with ideas: eat local, vote with your fork, buy organic, support fair trade, etc. But these proposals all lack something that every successful environmental movement has always placed at its core: genuine sacrifice.

Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing, the current proposals will be nothing more than gestures that turn the fork into an empty symbol rather than a real tool for environmental change.

James E. McWilliams, an associate professor of history at Texas State University at San Marcos and a recent fellow in the agrarian studies program at Yale University, is most recently the author of “Just Food.”

Republished from The Washington Post

The Oceans are like the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg. As long as it was alive it laid a golden egg each day but then the greedy farmer decided to kill it to get all the gold inside and found nothing and the Goose laid no more golden eggs because it was dead.

For centuries, the oceans have fed humankind. But in the last century, human greed has raped and pillaged oceanic eco-systems remorsefully with an ecological ignorance that is staggeringly insane.

I don’t eat fish because I am an ecologist and I have seen the diminishment of fish in the seas all of my life. I was raised in a fishing village and I was raised on a diet of cod, sardines, mackerel, smelts, clams, lobsters, flounders and trout. I have seen with my own eyes the steady diminishment of fish, lobsters and crustaceans. And what I ate as a child I choose not to eat today for the simple reason that there are to many of us on land eating so few of them that live in the seas.

The fisherman has now become one of the most ecologically destructive occupations on the planet. It’s time to put aside the outdated image of the hardy, independent, salt of the sea, hard working fisherman working courageously to feed society and support his family.

No longer does the average fishermen go to sea in dories with lines and small nets. Today’s industrial fishermen operate multi-million dollar vessels equipped with complex and expensive technological gear designed to hunt down and catch every fish they can find.

One manufacturer of electronic fish locators (Rayethon) even boasts that with their product, “the fish can run but they can’t hide.”

And for the fish, there is no safe place as poachers hunt them down mercilessly even in marine reserves and sanctuaries.

We humans have waged an intensive and ruthless exploitation of practically every species of fish in the sea and they are disappearing, and if we don’t put an end to industrialized fishing vessels and heavy gear very soon, we will kill the oceans and in so doing, we will kill ourselves.

Scientists this week revealed that widespread malnutrition is affecting the fish, bird and animal populations of our oceans. Not only are we depleting their populations, we are starving the survivors.

We are feeding fish to cats, pigs and chickens and we are sucking tens of thousands of small fish from the sea to feed fish raised in cages. House cats are eating more fish than seals, pigs are eating more fish than sharks, and factory farmed chickens are eating more fish than puffins and albatross.

With other factors like increased acidification, global warming, chemical pollution and ozone depletion causing plankton populations to decline, we are waging a global assault on all life in our oceans.

The fish cannot compete with our excessive demands. We have already removed 90% of the large commercial fish from the sea. Chinese demands for shark fins is destroying practically every species of shark in the ocean.

Whereas the fishing industry once targeted and destroyed the large fish, they are now focusing on the smaller fish, the fish that have always fed the larger fish. Of the top ten fisheries in the world today, seven of them now target the small fish. If to small to feed people, they are simply ground up into fish meal to feed domestic animals and farm raised salmon and tuna.

Aquaculture has also now emerged as the most wasteful utilization of fish and is the economic engine driving the intensive exploitation of the small fishes.

And now Japanese and Norwegian fisheries are extracting tens of thousands of tons of plankton from the sea to convert into a protein rich animal feed.

This week a report on the State of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture released by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concludes that 80% of all marine fish stocks are currently fully exploited, overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion; including stocks of the 7 largest prey fisheries. Very few marine fish populations remain with the potential to sustain production increases, and more have now reached their limit than ever before

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not taking an animal rights position on this issue when we say that people must stop eating fish and eating meat that fish are fed to. Our position is based solely on the ecological reality that commercial fishing is destroying our oceans.

We all know this. We are all aware of this diminishment. We feel it in our gut. The ecological reality is not only staring us in the face, it is kicking us in the teeth. The problem is that we are in absolute denial and we refuse to acknowledge that by stripping life from the seas, we will be undermining the foundation for our survival on land.

This denial is so entrenched that even Greenpeace serves fish to their crew onboard their ships while undertaking campaigns to oppose over-fishing.

The Kaiyapo people of Brazil call those who destroy the forests – the termite people because they gobble up the trees. In the oceans we have human parasites sucking the life out of the ocean and giving nothing back. We humans have become the parasitic bloodsuckers of the ocean and when we kill our hosts, as we will surely do, the way we are presently going, then we ourselves will die.

For a long time, I wondered why I even have bothered to speak out about these concerns to a society that refuses to acknowledge this reality and simply dismisses any talk of over-exploitation as radical extremism. For decades, I have endured this extremism of apathy and ecological ignorance.

This last week in Paris at the Sustainability Conference I spoke of these things to a room full of journalists and when I called for a closure of all commercial fishing in the Mediterranean, I was pleasantly surprised that not a single journalist disagreed nor questioned me for making such a radical demand. In fact my announcement was greeted with applause.

The public is becoming aware of the gravity of the ecological predicament that threatens life in the sea. And this is very encouraging.

I can’t think of anything more important than the preservation of diversity in our oceans. Perhaps we can adapt to global warming and perhaps we can survive a mass extinction even of species on land. But I know one thing to be an ecological certainty and that is if we kill the oceans – we kill ourselves.

In diversity is the preservation of life.

We must stop eating the oceans. Eating fish is for all intents and purposes – an ecological crime. There are no oceanic sustainable fisheries – not a one.

That little fish consumer sustainability card that some people carry around to pretend to be ecologically correct consumers is simply a fraud, an attempt to make ourselves feel good as we continue to eat the seas.

Now I know that some people are not going to like what I am saying, but then again, I have never written or spoken for the purpose of winning popularity contests. I don’t try to be all things to all people. I aim to be ecologically correct in my thinking and from any perspective that I have viewed it, coupled with my observations of the steady and now escalating diminishment of life in the sea since I was a boy sitting on the end of the dock in Passamaquoddy Bay to now, where I voyage through all the oceans of the world trying to defend life in the sea, I see the writing on the wall in big bold letters and the signs look ominous indeed, dangerously so.

Some may think that a call to ban all commercial fishing is radical. I view it as a very conservative and essential policy that we must implement to save the oceans and ourselves.

Am I concerned about the fishermen and their families? I am not without sympathy for their situation but I am far more concerned for the future survival of humanity and the oceans. We simply need to put an end to an industry and an occupation that is literally undermining the life support systems of this planet. This requires sacrifices but sacrificing a job is preferable by far than sacrificing the future for all of us.

We need to consider the needs of the fishes and we need to give them the space and the time to recover from the terrible slaughter we have inflicted upon all the species that live in the sea.

I am tired of hearing the excuses of fishermen that the seals or the dolphins have diminished the fish numbers. They want to take us for fools to buy into this unscientific scapegoat argument. The fish are gone because they the fishermen took them, and took them and took them without mercy. And now like Wall Street bankers they come begging for subsidies and getting them because politicians for the most part suffer from homopechephobia or a political fear of fishermen, who if they don’t get what they want tend to riot and threaten.

They need to be treated as the Ocean destroying thugs that they are. The fishing industry needs to go extinct before they cause a pattern of irreversible extinctions and loss of diversity in our oceans.

If an ecological collapse occurs because of the removal of a pivotal species or species, we won’t be worrying about jobs. We’ll be worrying that our fellow man will be hunting and eating us. If that occurs the words that Jesus Christ once said will become perversely very true indeed when he said to the fishermen, “I will make you to become fishers of men.” (Mark 1-17) 
To learn more visit http://www.seashepherd.org/.