Further anthropological discussion and policy proposals leading up to the UNFCCC meetings.

Blog Post #13

            ONLY ONE WEEK AWAY FROM PARIS!!! WOOOOO!!! Despite the fact that I am not going with…but either way an exciting time for me as well as my fellow classmates heading of to Paris next week for the UNFCCC meetings. Leading up to this class we had to read a document titled, “Collaborative Event Ethnography: Conservation and Development Trade-offs at the Fourth World Conservation” by Congress J. Peter Brosiusa and Lisa M. Campbell. This document discusses the very interesting rise in larger international policy trade-off decisions. An overall anthropological view on building international policy, this document further emphasizes the importance of understanding social context. Even though we never got a chance to discuss this in class I still managed to pull out a key bit, which is important to understanding trade-offs. Here is a good summary of the point behind it when the authors write on page 2,

            “Attention to the processes of decision-making always requires looking not    just at the local, site-specific context in which conservation ‘outcomes’ are           experienced, but outwards to the various actors and processes that bring      those outcomes to life. Thus, ‘social context’ is relevant at what we think of as       traditional field-based sites of a conservation intervention, but also within     and between conservation organizations, where concept development and   planning take place. In practical terms, this means we need to focus our         attention on a set of actors not normally considered in assessments of ‘the            social context’ of conservation: conservation organizations, donors and             others who are instrumental in designing and promoting various        conservation paradigms, policies, and practices.”

It seems that overall consideration of local social context is important to understanding the pros and cons to policy as well as the big picture when discussing these ethnographies.

            Something else important to this week was being able to hear about the other white paper topics people had in my class. There were so many good ideas proposed there is no way for me to summarize such a large class. One that does stick out in my mind was the topic about the role of the Catholic Church in climate awareness. This stuck out to me in particular because I wrote a paper on this topic when I took the Theology and the Environment class last semester. A very good paper topic as he mentioned the hard hits the catholic church takes constantly about how they influenced land degradation habits. I wanted to ask if he examined Lynn White’s article from a few decades back that really ignited this discussion about whether or not the Catholic Church teaches and influenced in the past degrading ways of life. It seems that he came up with similar conclusions to me, yet he had more practical plans for action regarding the church. It seems that people could focus on using current teaching such as: the Benedictine values and Catholic Social Teaching to be incorporated within the spread of environmental awareness.

Furthermore, the church plans to incorporate environmental awareness into the teaching of ordained church leaders. Since these people are the teachers of the church, it makes complete sense to make them aware of the realities and upcoming negative effects of climate change. In short, it seems to me that the Catholic Church has started to become a leader in the fight on climate change. Led by the new views and attitudes of Pope Francis, it seems that the Catholic Church may lead the way for the future in this regard…far different I’d say from the attitudes of how the church is described in years past (changes for the better I think).

Campbell, Lisam, and Jpeter Brosiusa. "Collaborative Event Ethnography: Conservation and Development Trade-offs at the Fourth World Conservation Congress." Conservation and Society Conservat Soc 8.4 (2010): 245. Web.

Tragedy of the Commons - The closest thing to balance and fairness.

Blog Post #12

            This week in class on Thursday was very engaging as we tackled the underlining concept behind Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” discussion. Generally, the idea behind Hardin’s essay states that people acting without the overall interests of the community as a whole is essentially devastating as the cons of certain things would be distributed unevenly. For example, let’s say one actor (A) own a farm up river and actor (B) owns a farm down river. The relationship is good between the two farms until the farmer A decides to increase the amount of cattle grazing on the grass and eventually overgrazes leading to erosion and runoff flowing into the river. Without any sort of regulation, this problem increases overtime until farmer B notices the effects down river and their water source suffers due to farmer A’s decisions. Not only did farmer A overgraze, but also because they only had their own profits in mind, it led to an unbalance and harm onto the local neighbors. Rather than distributing the pros and cons with some sort of regulation, the farmer A’s decision left the entire community in peril.

            Clearly, this is an essay that underlines the obvious reasons we have some sort of coercion with one another. Without it, clearly society would cease to exist and everything would turn to chaos. The question remains then as to what sort of regulations should be implemented. The only solution all encompassing solution is that each situation much be discussed case specific. Local differences call for different strategies. Having said that, what do we do about tackling large issues such as climate change? A lot of the challenges come with implementing such a world widespread concern. Then again, looking back at the ozone layer issue, one can see that we fixed the ozone without much dispute. In class, we discovered that because the ozone is such a clear distinct cause and focus it was easier to focus attention on a single solution. Climate change on the other hand isn’t just a hole in the sky one can see on a chart, but a culmination of numerous factors coming from virtually every inch of the planet. This is why I am hopeful for the up and coming UNFCCC meetings. It seems clear that big issues call for big solutions and I find the only way for people to actually set up something effective is by coerced agreement. Hopefully, all countries will come to agree on something. I just can’t keep sitting here any longer for chaos to unfold!

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Geo-engineering: Worth the Risks?

Blog Post #11

            I’ve gotta say right off the bat how great this week was for class. On Tuesday we had the chance to play a simulation game where we, the players, acted as the EU leaders and make decisions regarding sustainability throughout a two century span of time. I was partnered with my friend Lucas whose blog you should also check out and we actually had a successful run. We started off doing pretty well with keeping our approval rating up and getting support, but often times our fellow world leaders wouldn’t give support even when we subsidized them (so stubborn!). Another interesting part of the game was the unexpected natural disaster that would occur some random year (flood, drought, and others). It was quite a challenge balancing out all of these elements especially with the pressures of providing food and water at the same time as reaching our sustainability goals. This game really makes you think and understand how difficult it is to be in a position of power (not to say it can’t be done effectively).

            On Thursday, we had the pleasure of featuring professor Troy Knight to come to class and talk about Geo engineering and its overall potential.  It was very fascinating to learn about all of these techniques for potential large-scale solutions to taking carbon out of the atmosphere. At the same time though, most of the solutions offered seem like last resort cases to me. Even the most practical solution often called a “biological pump” seemed pretty risky to me. The dumping of chemicals to enhance the biological output of organisms to capture green house gasses surely processes flaws and risks as the ocean and coastal habitats will suffer tremendously to chemical and species imbalance. Hopefully different solutions arise that could reduce the risks of geo-engineering. So far though, they still seem to be there only if we need them.

Another probable solution was one they talked about in an article we read this week titled, “The Climate Fixers”, by Michael Specter. Looking at the effects of the Pinatubo eruption, the SPICE program hopes to try and imitate the cooling effects of a massive eruption by engineering a gigantic twelve-mile-long pipe that pumps sulfur dioxide and other chemicals into the atmosphere. The idea sounds crazy, but not too crazy. The negative effects would only be temporary as we could simply stop the machine and go back to how we were if things go wrong. Also, if sulfur dioxide turns out to negatively effect the ozone too much we can use synthetic chemicals with weaker negative environmental impact. Something I found interesting in the article when they discussed this though was some of the reasoning for objection to these methods. Certain organizations “fear that even to consider engineering the climate would provide politicians with an excuse for avoiding tough decisions on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions” (5). For this reason, I again find geo-engineering (at least in this stage of its development) useful as only a last resort because they do not treat the source. If we are going to have any lasting solution, we need to just not dump this crap into the atmosphere in the first place. Who’s to say that companies won’t just keep encouraging fossil fuels for business if we could just take it out once we put it in? These are important things to consider before embarking down the mysteriously risky road of geo-engineering.

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Specter, Michael. "The Climate Fixers - The New Yorker." The New Yorker. The New Yorker, 14 May 2012. Web. 14 Nov. 2015.

Resource Guide

Forgot that this was going on the blog, but here ya go! Enjoy exploring my sources used thus far in my resource guide for my white topic paper on the animal food industry!

Annotated Bibliography

Andersen, Kip, et al. Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret. Santa Rosa, Calif.: A.U.M. Films, 2014.     DVD.

Cowspiracy really served as a good catalyst for my research as well as narrowing down my topic to focus on the meat industry in the United States particularly. The film really opens up your mind to why industrial livestock raising is the leading contributor to fossil fuels (via release of methane gas), and promotes the benefits of a complete vegan diet and change to the way we view the world entirely. This source will prove useful to my paper for it’s imagery and thought provoking questions that even the leading environmental organizations such as: NRDC, Oceana, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Surfrider, and others either choose to ignore and even contribute to covering up the truth.

Davis, Jennifer, et al. "Environmental Impact Of Four Meals With Different Protein Sources: Case Studies In Spain And Sweden." Food Research International 43.7 (2010): 1874-1884. GreenFILE. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.

This is yet another study about the effects of meat diets verses vegetarian diets but this time focuses on two different locations in Europe. It’s important to note that despite these studies taking place in Europe, their findings are still useful as we are dealing with global issues and information very related to that of our own country. If anything were to be assumed it’s that the findings here would most likely look much bigger in America as we consume much more meat than anyone else. In this article particularly one finds that meat diets are less sustainable than vegetarian. The big different in this slightly more specific article is that they found the pea diets consume roughly the same amount of energy in producing it compared to meat diets. Despite this fact, significant evidence points to vegetarian diets still holding the edge in sustainability due to the fact that plant don’t produce waste that releases methane gas into the atmosphere.

Herrero, M., et al. "Livestock And Greenhouse Gas Emissions: The Importance Of Getting The Numbers Right." Animal Feed Science & Technology 166-167.(2011): 779-782. GreenFILE. Web. 12 Nov. 2015.

This is a complementary article referring to the negative effects of grazing animals and climate change. What they focus on especially is the issue of differing data. Like in Oreskes and Conway’s book, The Collapse of Western Civilization, the article I use here breaks down the problem regarding scientific discovery and making use of this data found. Especially in America, we find data with any sort of variability skeptical. This mind-set has set us back in progress of tackling the issue of global climate change. More specifically, in the case of industry meat production it has clouded our judgment causing us to doubt the impact of this issue. I use this article to promote a change in how we look at scientific studies related to livestock and green house gas emissions. In order to successfully make an understandable argument for policy makers, one must make sense of variability in numbers to further understand the extent of this issue.

Johnson, Nathanael. "What Does "organic" Actually Mean?" Grist. Grist, 04 Nov. 2015. Web. 5 Nov. 2015.

This article begins to point out a lot what Michael Pollan tends to argue in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, in regard to questioning organics in general. It covers a lot and sums up nicely specific attributes explaining what organic means. Like Pollan, this text highlights specific pros and cons to the movement that people don’t tend to think about when shopping in a super market. The pros mainly incorporating the banning of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, and the cons being a misleading image in combination with the use of practices no different than industry production. This information will be useful in my argument as the organic movement is an important aspect in discussing sustainable food practices policy makers should know more about especially here in the United States.

"Lives on the Line: The High Human Cost of Chicken." Oxfam America. Oxfam America, n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.

“Oxfam America is a global organization working to right the wrongs of poverty, hunger, and injustice. As one of 17 members of the international Oxfam confederation, we work with people in more than 90 countries to create lasting solutions”. This third party organization put out an article about labor conditions at chicken plants and highlights key issues that the four major producers often try to cover up and keep secret. My paper focuses a lot about the conditions for the animals themselves, but in this article I will utilize information regarding the human condition for the workers, as they are unsafe and often unsupported by their domains. I feel as if people often get caught up with the excuse that these provide people with jobs. That is a very lazy answer as if we focused on safer jobs like sustainable gardening and others we wouldn’t even need this sort of job.

Andersen, Kip, et al. Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret. Santa Rosa, Calif.: A.U.M. Films, 2014. DVD.

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma : A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguiess, 2006. Print.

Michael Pollan’s book contains a plethora of information regarding the diets of human beings, (hence the omnivore title). He traces the history of the big industry farming and questions the ethics of what we choose to put on our plates. Filled with a plethora of content, I hope to focus on the matter of feedlots as well as what Pollan recommends we should end up putting on our plates. Furthermore, I will use this text to take Singer’s ideas a step further into a modern perspective. Pollan himself comments on Singer’s philosophy and agrees with the move to less meat-based diets especially in the United States.

Premalatha, M., et al. "Energy-Efficient Food Production To Reduce Global Warming And Ecodegradation: The Use Of Edible Insects." Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews 15.9 (2011): 4357-4360. GreenFILE. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.

For the most part, the concept of entomophagy, the human diet of eating insects, seems like a stretch for most people in the United States to wrap their heads around. I use this articles finding to bridge the gap between the unsustainable industrial meat system we have now and this more sustainable idea/alternative of eating insects as our main source of protein. In order to stress the urgency behind this proposal, I take note of the current rise in demand for meat. Partially due to the increase in population, the bottom line remains that given the increasing demand, meat industry leaders will continue to try and meat those demands. This in turn forms a cycle because it not only feeds the people buying into the problem but meeting the demands described also increases the use of fossil fuels. Moreover, the negative effects of the meat industry continue to grow and only fuel the fire of the green house gas issue.

Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Print.

In the mid 80’s Tom Regan wrote The Case for Animal Rights, and Peter Singer edited the book. This book provides moral arguments for the case of animal writes. This further supports my argument in my paper because as well as treating animals with moral consideration, the benefits of avoiding these practices outweigh the setbacks many people are afraid of. Regan makes good points regarding the use of animals as test subjects as well as hunting them for sport, but I want to focus on his middle portion of his movement: the total dissolution of commercial animal agriculture. As a result, I want to talk about the concepts of contractarianism, human rational, egalitarian perspectives, as well as what Regan himself concludes in his argument. 

Scarborough, Peter, et al. "Dietary Greenhouse Gas Emissions Of Meat-Eaters, Fish-  Eaters, Vegetarians And Vegans In The UK." Climatic Change 125.2 (2014): 179-192. GreenFILE. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.

The content of this published work discusses a study done on the green house emissions that come out of different diets including: meat eaters (high, medium, and low), fish eaters, vegetarians, and vegans. As I expected the results clearly showed that the closer to vegan a diet is, the less carbon footprint one leaves behind. In fact, the article found that the dietary greenhouse gas emissions for meat eaters doubled those of vegans. This article supports my argument very much as it touches on the issue of global climate change. Ethical issues aside, the data found in this article alone should point to the fact that meat-eating habits are by far some of the most concerning factors in regard to global climate change.

Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation : The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.

I’m not sure for certain yet if I want to include this book into my white paper, but either way it served as an eye opening experience to how I view the fast food nation we live in. The book is filled with real-life examples of not only the conditions for the animals, but also the conditions for the workers as well. If included into my paper I will utilize the story described of a dedicated slaughterhouse worker who did everything he could for the company, yet received little support when injured multiple time on the job. The story certainly puts into perspective the real lives of the people working in these conditions as well as highlighting the big companies responsible for the issue.

Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement. 40th ed. New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2015. Print.

This book was crucial in beginning a philosophical questioning of our meat eating habits. Originally written forty years ago, this book has sparked a revolution in regard to the ethical consideration for the treatment of animals. Specifically, the book discusses the meat eating diet and concludes how it is unethical because those who oppose human suffering must then oppose animal suffering. Despite the fact that the book came out almost half a century ago, it's still crucial to discuss in the ethical history portion of my paper. I will highlight the arguments that initiated other writers and tie that into my overall argument to changing the American diet. In this case, it will come from a philosophical point of view rather than a conservation point of view.

Todd, Richard W., et al. "Methane Emissions From A Beef Cattle Feedyard During Winter And Summer On The Southern High Plains Of Texas." Journal Of Environmental Quality 43.4 (2014): 1125-1130. GreenFILE. Web. 12 Nov. 2015.

Methane is a seriously powerful green house gas that must be avoided as much as possible. The problem is that our unjust diet contributes to the issue significantly from the amount of excrement produced from the animals. This specific study, done in Texas, highlights the ties between feeding and emissions and also confirms the tier two estimates of CH₄ emissions provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The data discussed here will prove very useful in my argument for changing the way Americans eat. For policy makers, the science presented in this study acts as clear evidence of the negative impacts. More importantly, it will show them a close to home example of the pollution this practice causes hopefully encouraging them to incorporate it in their policy decisions.

Yen, Alan L. "Entomophagy And Insect Conservation: Some Thoughts For Digestion."               Journal Of Insect Conservation 13.6 (2009): 667-670. GreenFILE. Web. 12 Nov. 2015.

Here I utilize another article addressing the beneficial use of entomophagy, (the diet of eating insects). This article goes in depth of how beneficial insects could be as a protein substitute for meat in general. By studying this topic of entomophagy, these findings suggest various sustainable conservation management practices that could help reshape how we get and share our food. I use this article to explore the options from entomophagy, which provide policy makers valid reasons to support this step away from grazing meat industry like: smaller carbon footprint, health benefits and efficiency, availability, and more.