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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: April 2008

Books

 

The Hot Topic: What We Can Do About Global Warming
by Gabrielle Walker & Sir David King

Harcourt (6277 Sea Harbor Drive,Orlando, FL 32887-6777), 2008.256 pages, paperback. $13.00.

Six degrees:Our Future On A Hotter Planet
by Mark Lynas

National Geographic Books National Geographic Society (1145 17th St. NW,Washington, DC 20036), 2008.335 pages, hardcover. $26.00.

 

“Agriculture accounts for about 13% of global greenhouse gas emissions,approximately the same amount as transport,” Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King acknowledge on page 105 of The Hot Topic, in their first and only more than fleeting mention of the contribution of animal husbandry to global warming.

“Almost none of this comes from carbon dioxide,” Walker and King explain. “Though huge amounts of carbon dioxide do pass between the atmosphere and agricultural crops every year, the balance is more or less zero. It’s the sister greenhouse gases––methane and nitrous oxide––that matter most here. Agricultural methane comes from a variety of places,” Walker and King continue, “and almost lways
involves microbes feasting on organic matter in places where there is little or no oxygen. Thus the biggest sources are the guts of cows, sheep, and water buffalo.”

Reducing the numbers of cows, sheep, and water buffalo raised for human consumption would therefore appear to be as helpful in combating global warming as reducing the numbers of cars, or improving vehicular gas mileage. But Walker and King never so much as mention that possibility.

“There are various ways to control agricultural emissions,” Walker and King suggest, “almost all of which involve increasing the efficiency of how we use our land. For instance, better diets for livestock makes them––to put it frankly––belch less. In New Zealand, scientists are studying how to change the microbates that cows use to digest their food to encourage them to make sugars instead of methane…Agricultural lands could even be encouraged to become net sinks of carbon,” propose Walker and King, “by reducing the amount of plowing, which disturbs the soil and encourages microbes to mobilize the carbon that it contains.”

Walker is a contributing editor for New Scientist. King was formerly the chief science advisor to the Tony Blair government in the United Kingdom. In that capacity King in October 2007 supported cattle farmers who then and now seek to kill badgers to prevent outbreaks of bovine tuberculosis––after the government-appointed Independent Scientific Group concluded that although badgers can carry bovine TB, massacring them tends to accelerate the spread of the disease, as infected badgers wander farther to find mates and healthy badgers spread into territory where some infected survivors persist.

As Royal SPCA head of wildlife science Rob Atkinson observed, “The government's study––which took almost 10 years, cost the lives of more than 10,000 badgers and cost taxpayers £34 million––showed killing badgers is actually likely to make matters much worse.”

Despite King’s role then as in effect a spokesperson for the cattle industry, neither King nor Walker seems aware that finding ways to produce more crop yield relative to tillage has been an obsession of agronomists since the Dust Bowl years during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and that some of the most rapid advances in that direction came about 35 years ago with the introduction of no-till corn planting.

Instead of discharrowing a field before planting, a no-till farmer need only clear the field of vegetation that might compete with corn seedlings by dowsing the soil with herbicides, wait a few days for the herbicides to break down enough in sunlight that they will not harm young corn, and then sow seed corn kernels with a device called a seed drill, which essentially injects them into the ground at an appropriate depth.

No-till cultivation minimizes topsoil loss due to erosion, previously the bane of corn-growers, necessitating soil rebuilding with manure after every harvest. A no-till farmer can often just saturate the fields between crops with hog slurry, which soaks in quickly without the need to plow it under. No-till is so efficient compared to traditional corngrowing that it made raising corn to feed cattle, pigs, and chickens more economical than ever before, in turn enabling the explosive growth of confinement husbandry that markedly cut the price of meat relative to other commodities and sent U.S. corn production and meat consumption soaring.

Other nations have followed the U.S. in turning toward to no-till and raising huge fodder corn crops to feed livestock. Just half a century ago most of the corn in the world was produced for direct human consumption. Humans now eat more corn than ever, yet 70% or more of the total global corn crop is grown to feed livestock. Most of those animals represent the net increase in per capita meat-eating over that time.

Plowing less is accordingly unlikely to do very much to slow the pace of global warming. But raising fewer animals for meat could have a marked and dramatic effect, while increasing the volume of grain available for human consumption several times over.

Though their topic is “What we can do about global warming,” Walker and King obtusely ignore the most obvious answer, but at least acknowledge the problem.

Mark Lynas in Six Degrees never even gets warm. Lynas discusses corn growing and cattle grazing in Nebraska on pages 29-30, where “Beef and corn dominate the economy.” Lynas describes the vulnerability of the Nebraska topsoil and water supply to the potential effects of global warming. Yet Lynas never looks at the contribution of raising beef and corn for cattle fodder to the climatic problem that he foresees as a looming threat to the beef and corn industries.

Lynas comes closest to making the connection on page 195. “As the Chinese diet becomes increasingly rich in meat and dairy products, ” Lynas writes, “more grain is needed. By 2030, if Chinese consumers are to become as voracious as Americans, they will use the equivalent of two-thirds of today’s entire global harvest.”

But Lynas does not discuss Chinese potential demand for meat and dairy products in terms of greenhouse gas yield. The major conseqence Lynas sees is that, “One study conducted by the United Kingdom and Chinese governments suggests that by the latter third of the 21st century, if global temperatures are more than three degrees highest than now, China’s agricultural production will crash.

Yields of staple crops like rice, wheat, and corn will decline by nearly 40%, perhaps more if water supplies for irrigation run out.” If rice, wheat, and corn were only raised for human consumption, not to inefficiently feed to livestock for slaughter, global output of these grains could decline by 40% next year, while nearly doubling the presently tight supply of grain available to feed people.

“Given that world foodstocks are already at historical lows because of population growth and droughts,” Lynas writes, criticizing the notion that biofuels are an effective response to global warming, “devoting more of our best farmland to growing fuel for cars seems close to insane. It may also be immoral,” Lynas continues. “Because car-owning people are by definition among the world’s rich elite, using food crops to replace gas would create scarcity and drive up food prices on the commodity markets, leaving the poorest to starve. The reality is simple: you can use land to feed cars or to feed people, but not both.”

Overlooked is that the same argument applies to growing fodder crops for factory-farmed pigs and poultry.“A related question arises with the European Union’s target of 5% biofuels in its vehicle fleet by 2010,” Lynas adds.“Much of this fuel will come from biodiesel, and a major feedstock for this is palm oil grown on plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. These plantations have been responsible for disastrous clear-cutting of the fast-declining natural tropical forests, destroying the habitat of rare species like the orangutan and causing major additional carbon releases through the burning of wood and underlying peat.”

This is all correct––and this same argument applies to clearing tropical forests in Central and South America and parts of Africa to expand grazing lands used to produce beef.

A hint as to why Lynas is so determinedly oblivious to the role of meat production in creating global warming comes when he mentions that “Anti-wind farm campaigners truly concerned about dangers to bird populations would probably be served to grab a shotgun and conduct a cull of the local neighborhood cats.”

Among other details, the birds most menaced by wind power generation include hawks and owls, who are in no way menaced by cats. What Lynas advocates as the best solution to global warming is for humanity to retreat to essentially the lifestyle of a time when hotgun-owning people were the world’s rich elite––an argument that King, for one, rejected in a recent interview with Oliver Berkeman of The Guardian.

“There is a suspicion, and I have that suspicion myself, that a large number of people who label themselves 'green' are actually keen to take us back to the 18th or even the 17th century,” King said. “I think that is utter hopelessness. What I'm looking for is technological solutions to a technologically driven problem, so the last thing we must do is eschew technology."

Concludes Lynas, “Just as people were better off and healthier in Britain under food rationing during the Second World War, so most of us would see a dramatic improvement in our quality of life if ‘carbon rationing’ were introduced by the government.”

Presumably Lynas does not incorporate the terror of the Blitz or the disease threats occasioned by bombed water and sewer lines in his assessment of “better off and healthier.”

The major food commodities that were rationed in Britain during World War II were meat, milk, and eggs, a point Lynas fails to mention. Some people were “better off and healthier” through avoiding the effects of consuming animal products, and that could be repeated, but is more likely to occur, along with slowing global warming, if what really needs to be done is actually discussed.

The technological solutions that King seeks may or may not be found. Yet finding a relatively quick, clean fix to much of the global warming problem is as simple as abandoning the meat habit. ––Merritt Clifton

Winged Wonders: A Celebration of Birds in Human History
by Peter Watkins & Jonathan Stockland

Bluebridge (240 West 35th St., Suite 500, New York,NY 10001), 2007. 207 pages, hardcover, $22.00.

Dogs Miscellany
by J.A. Wines

Bantam Dell (1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019), 2007. 185 pages, paperback. $10.00.

 

 

Random compilations such as Winged Wonders and Dogs Miscellany were fashionably called “non-books” several decades ago, including by some of the most notorious compilers of the era, in recognition that they have no plot, no theme, and little structure beyond a cover and a price.

The term “non-book” came and went, however, and miscellanies are still with us, as they have been for as long as books have been published. Almanacs, magazines, and encyclopedias evolved out of miscellanies, which delighted readers for more than 500 years, offering much information about favorite topics when information was hard to come by.

But the miscellany publishing business is now challenged. These days anyone can run a web search and produce an instant miscellany, with attractive color illustrations and links to further particulars. Miscellany compilers are still in business, as Winged Wonders and Dogs Miscellany d e m o nstrate, yet may soon become as obscure in purpose to younger generations as carbon paper and phonograph needles.

Actually, Winged Wonders and Dogs Miscellany are obscure in purpose to me, too. The former offers some little known vignettes about the occurrences of 16 bird species in myth and literature, but the birds’ roles are often either abstractly symbolic or seemingly incidental.

The latter is just a mish-mash of usually unattributed and sometimes erroneous material, the sources of which, when recognized, tend to be far more deserving of a reader’s attention. ––Merritt Clifton
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