Anything You Can Do I Can Do Greener
“I am even dustier! Dustier than thou!” - Sideshow Mel
Ah, Salon.com and Slate.com, the Time and Newsweek of our time. This week each of them had an article about meat eating and the environment. Both articles boil down, more or less, to the fact that eating meat is bad for the environment but not as bad as serious vegans would have you believe (links: Salon - Earth to PETA, Slate - Vegans vs Vegetarians). The gist of both is that producing beef and pork creates more greenhouse gasses than not doing so, but we don’t all have to go vegan to feel good about ourselves, etcetera etcetera. There is nothing really wrong with either piece, but they share a common assumption that strikes me as silly and self absorbed. What’s more, you can see it in a lot of other popular discourse about acting green, caring about the environment, and doing something about global warming.
That assumption is that through personal choices you (Yes, you!) can have an impact on the environment. I have bad news; this is patently false. Your small acts of environmental heroism and self sacrifice are almost completely meaningless. Sorry. People want to feel like they’re doing something, or at least feel that they can do something, but it ain’t necessarily so.
I once saw a license plate on a Prius that read 4UEARTH. The conceit and self delusion behind that is staggering. Obviously a Prius emits a lot less carbon dioxide than a Hummer, but they are both still using an internal combustion engine. If, starting with the 2009 model year, all cars used some type of hybrid engine we’d see enormous savings in oil consumption and emissions, but driving one voluntarily is not a mark of environmental sainthood. You’re still burning fossil fuels to pick up the kids, go to the movies and buy groceries; it’s just a matter of degree and in the grand scheme of things it’s utterly meaningless.
Now let’s take a look at food in general and meat specifically. Our food system wasn’t constructed with efficiency in mind, of water, energy or anything else. Not surprisingly it isn’t very efficient. Since transportation and packaging account for so much of the inefficiency the immediate and logical reactions are things like the Eat Local Challenge. The problem with solutions like that is that they aren’t convenient and they aren’t practical. There isn’t much food production in and around metropolitan Phoenix, for example. Even if you live someplace where buying mostly local food is an option, you still have to go out of your way to do it.
As for beef and pork and chicken and eggs, my sneaking suspicion is that there are probably ways to raise cows, pigs and chickens that are more or less sustainable. We aren’t doing them right now because there’s no incentive to raise feed animals in that manner. Going vegan is all well and good, but it doesn’t address the underlying issue, which is that in terms of environmental sustainability the way we produce meat is irrational and dumb.
That’s the real problem with hybrid cars, eating locally, going vegan, or whatever other environmentally conscious behavior people proselytize these days. Some Americans, but by no means even close to a majority, have the time, the money, and the inclination to try and lower their personal environmental impact. It’s basically a hobby that makes you feel better about yourself. Dick Cheney was right, it is personal virtue; and as long as it costs more, in time and money, to be green than it does not to be green it will remain that way.
