OMNI
VEGETARIAN ACTION NEWSLETTER #28, May 11, 2016.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of
Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
(#4
Feb. 12, 2014; #5 March 12, 2014; #6 April 9, 2014; #7 May 14, 2014; #8, June
11, 2014; #9 July 9, 2014; #10, August 11, 2014; #11 September 10, 2014; #12
October 8, 2014; #13, November 12, 2014; #14, December 10, 2014; #15, January
14, 2015; #16, Feb. 11, 2015; #17, March 11, 2015; #18, April 8, 2015; #19,
June 10, 2015; #20, August 12, 2015; #21, September 9, 2015; #22, Oct. 14,
2015; #23, Nov. ; # 24, Dec. 9, 2015;
#25, Jan. 13, 2016; #26, Feb. 10, 2016; #27, April 13, 2016). 1576 OMNI Newsletter
posts as of Apr 12, 2016. Thank you Marc.
If you need to be
removed from this list or want it to go to another address, just reply to this
email and I'll get you fixed up.
Veggie and Vegan Potluck
Wed, May 11, 6:00 pm @ OMNI
A food-friendly event
with delicious dishes every second Wednesday. .
If you wish, provide your recipe, or at least its name and main
ingredients. Make a special sign or announcement if your dish is vegan or
gluten free.
We want to meet you, at a place and time where
we can talk with others not only about recipes, nutrition, and health, but
about care for other species, for the environment, and the climate. Hope to see you!
As always, folks who
don't identify as vegetarians are welcome at our potlucks.
Car directions to
OMNI: Take College to Harold St (at Flying Burrito), turn east (right if you're
heading north). Go one block to Lee and turn left. Go one block to Bertha and we’re the gray
brick on the corner, 2nd house south of Liquor World.
OMNI CLIMATE CHANGE
LOBBY meets at 7pm also at OMNI. This
group is pushing hard for the “fee-dividend” solution to fossil fuels
emissions.
VEGETARIAN ACTION NEWSLETTER
What’s at stake: “What began as a desire to improve my health
opened the door to realize the tremendous positive impact that veganism has on
the environment and animal lives.
There’s no single life choice that creates such massive benefits for
human health, environmental sustainability, and relieves the suffering of
animals.” Jason Wrobel, author of Eaternity: More Than 150 Deliciously Easy
Vegan Recipes for a Long, Healthy, Satisfied, Joyful Life, in VEGNEWS (April 2016).
This newsletter
especially focuses on the significant connections of vegetarianism/veganism to
education, industrial meat production, nutrition, health, animal rights,
overpopulation, wars, the 6th extinction, and most of all, to which all other
factors either contribute or resist, the catastrophe of climate change. As in all of OMNI’s activities, we seek a
culture of peace, justice, and ecology, to make the changes necessary to end
wars and slow warming.
MAY IS: International
Respect for Chickens Month
VEGETARIAN SUMMERFEST
2016
University of
Pittsburgh, Johnstown, PA, July 6-10.
NAVS North American
Vegetarian Society
I.
NUTRITION, HEALTH
VEGETARIAN RECIPES
Free Arkansas Food & Farm, Food Issue 2016, picked
up at Harp’s, contains 19 pages of attractively illustrated veg recipes (except
for one with some bacon which can be omitted).
www.Arkansasfoodandfarm.com The
magazine is “brought to you by Arkansas
Times and Arkansas Grown” in “partnership with the Arkansas Agriculture
Department.”
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Wiebe believes the use
of glyphosate on wheat may be connected to the rise in celiac disease. “We’ve
seen an explosion of gluten intolerance,” he
said. “What’s really going on?”
Charles Benbrook, Ph.D.,
who published the paper on the mounting use of glyphosate, says the practice of
spraying glyphosate on wheat prior to harvest, known as desiccating, began in
Scotland in the 1980s.
“Farmers there often had
trouble getting wheat and barley to dry evenly so they can start harvesting. So
they came up with the idea to kill the crop (with glyphosate) one to two weeks
before harvest to accelerate the drying down of the grain,” he said
- See more at:http://healthimpactnews.com/2016/almost-all-american-grains-are-contaminated-with-glyphosate-herbicide/#sthash.L4sIHwza.dpuf
True? Or scaring us?
EAT MEAT SAYETH THE
RULERS
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7:47 AM (8 hours ago)
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This is why you crave
beef: Inside secrets of Big Meat's billion-dollar ad and lobbying campaigns
EAT SPROUTS
[I haven’t tried to
verify all these claims. Comment?]
10 Reasons Eating
Sprouts Should Be a Part of Your Daily Diet
Michelle Schoffro Cook, Care2 | April
6, 2016
Don’t
miss out. Stay Informed. Get EcoWatch’s Top News of the Day.
- Email
Sprouts truly are the best locally-grown food,
yet not enough people eat or grow them. Considering their many health and
environmental benefits, it’s time to consider adding sprouts to your diet.
Sprouts truly are the best locally-grown food,
yet not enough people eat or grow them.
Here are 10 reasons to eat more sprouts:
1. Experts estimate that there can be up
to 100 times more enzymes in sprouts than uncooked fruits and
vegetables. Enzymes are special types of proteins that act as catalysts for
all your body’s functions. Extracting more vitamins, minerals, amino acids and
essential fatty acids from the foods you eat ensures that your body has the
nutritional building blocks of life to ensure every process works more
effectively.
2. The quality of the protein in the
beans, nuts, seeds or grains improves when it is sprouted. Proteins
change during the soaking and sprouting process, improving its nutritional
value. The amino acid lysine, for example, which is needed to prevent cold
sores and to maintain a healthy immune system increases
significantly during the sprouting process.
3. The fiber content of the beans,
nuts, seeds or grains increases substantially. Fiber is critical to weight loss. It not only binds to fats and
toxins in our body to escort them out, it ensures that any fat our body breaks
down is moved quickly out of the body before it can resorb through the walls of
the intestines (which is the main place for nutrient absorption into the
blood).
4. Vitamin content increases
dramatically. This is especially true of vitamins A, B-complex, C and E.
The vitamin content of some seeds, grains, beans or nuts increases by up to 20
times the original value within only a few days of sprouting. Research shows
that during the sprouting process mung beansprouts (or just beansprouts, as
they are often called) increase in vitamin B1 by up to 285 percent, vitamin
B2 by up to 515 percent and niacin by up to 256 percent.
5. Essential fatty acid content
increases during the sprouting process. Most of us are deficient in
these fat-burning essential fats because they are not common in our diet.
Eating more sprouts is an excellent way to get more of these important
nutrients.
6. During sprouting, minerals bind to
protein in the seed, grain, nut or bean, making them more useable in the body.
This is true of alkaline minerals like calcium, magnesium and others that help
us to balance our body chemistry for weight loss and better health.
7. Sprouts are the ultimate
locally-grown food. When you grow them yourself you are helping the
environment and ensuring that you are not getting unwanted pesticides, food
additives and other harmful fat-bolstering chemicals that thwart your weight
loss efforts.
8. The energy contained in
the seed, grain, nut or legume is ignited through soaking and sprouting.
9. Sprouts are alkalizing to your body.
Many illnesses including cancer have been
linked to excess acidity in the body.
10. Sprouts are inexpensive. People
frequently use the cost of healthy foods as an excuse for not eating healthy.
But, with sprouts being so cheap, there really is no excuse for not eating
healthier.
NEW MAGAZINE:
NOURISH
Nourishing News - Real farming, the Amazon, essential fats and
eating less meat
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1:50 PM (1 hour ago)
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What's up Real farming and true food culture is what’s up,
in the first issue o
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Report Exposes Food Industry Cover-up
April 14th, 2016
[Click here to read
the updated carrageenan report]
Toxic, Carcinogenic,
Degraded Carrageenan:
Widespread Contamination Present in the Common Food-Grade Ingredient
Widespread Contamination Present in the Common Food-Grade Ingredient
A just-issued report
by The Cornucopia Institute summarizes research on the common food additive
carrageenan, exposing the industry’s hidden data demonstrating that all
food-grade carrageenan contains a carcinogenic contaminant—low molecular weight
poligeenan.
Carrageenan, harvested
from specific species of red seaweed, is a highly effective
thickener/stabilizer found in processed foods including infant formula,
plant-based beverages, deli meats, and some dairy products, including cream.
The controversy over carrageenan has existed between food industry
representatives and public health researchers for years, but it is now flaring
up again over its use in organic food.
Cornucopia’s
report, Carrageenan: New Studies Reinforce
Link to Inflammation, Cancer, and Diabetes, will be formally
released in Washington, on April 25, at the upcoming meeting of the USDA’s
National Organic Standards Board. The board will be debating whether to remove
carrageenan from its list of approved materials for use in organic food. MORE
Forwarded by David D
II.
ANIMAL
SENTIENCE, COMPASSION, ANIMAL PROTECTION AND RIGHTS
Consequences of Consciousness: Sy Montgomery on
Human Treatment of Other Animals. Tuesday, 19 April 201 By Leslie Thatcher,
Truthout | Interview. Montgomery is
author of The Soul of an Octopus and The
Good Good Pig.
"The 2012 Cambridge Declaration on
Consciousness said all mammals and birds and octopuses specifically have the
neural substrates necessary to generate consciousness -- ultimately, the world
is far more alive, intelligent, thinking and feeling than we have wanted to
admit for a long time."
Consideration of other creatures' agency becomes
ever more urgent as we learn more about cognition across species. Now that we
absolutely know that lobsters can feel themselves being cooked to death, it
seems self-evident to me that we should never put a lobster in a pot of boiling
water, but many other people still feel their own pleasure in eating the
lobster is more important than the lobster's suffering -- a view grounded in
the long history of denial of other animals' sentience. In other instances,
what we do with what we know about animal consciousness seems more complex. The
forms our own empathy should take can be deeply at odds with current cultural
norms.
Additional reading:
Claire Williams. “6 Bids on Ballot for Shareholders at Tyson
Foods: Transparency among issues; Execs Urge ‘No’ Across Board.” AD-G (Feb.
1, 2016). For example, Green Century Funds that advocates for
environmental policies asked Tyson “to disclose the risks of using gestation
crates.” The Tyson board of directors
urged shareholders to vote against the proposal, citing its “Office of Animal
Well-Being and Farm-Check program.”
Also, the word “cruelty” never occurred in Ms. Williams’ report.
Stephen Brown. “Arkansas Should Do Better by Animals,
Decrease Cruelty.” AD-G (LTE, March 17, 2016). Denounces the unregulated, uninspected,
often cruel “puppy mills.” Ethical
sensitivity toward domesticated animals may influence attitudes toward farm and
particularly toward industrial “farming” leading to mass torture and killing.
HENRY SALT
www.ivu.org/history/salt/
Henry S. Salt is probably not
well-known today but he wrote nearly 40 books most of which cogently argued and
urged for some much needed humane reforms ...
www.all-creatures.org/articles/an-tpr-darla-salt.html
Henry Stephens Salt was a prolific
English writer, biographer, and literary critic, the author of nearly 40 books.
He was also an avid campaigner for social reform.
The Silence without Animals
CURSE OF THE CARNIVORES
By Gerry Sloan (April
2016)
As the summer
waned, a bullfrog
harrumphed each
night on the rim
of the pond, a vaguely
reassuring
sound. Then, foolishly,
I took a gig
and flashlight down
to dispatch him,
undressed for his
dance in the pan.
We dined frugally on the
fried legs,
just one for each
of us, then sat
in the gathering
darkness
listening only to the
crickets.
III.
CLIMATE
CHANGE
POPULATION GROWTH
HOME > PROGRAMS > POPULATION AND SUSTAINABILITY > CLIMATE > HUMAN POPULATION
GROWTH AND CLIMATE CHANGE
|
“HUMAN
POPULATION GROWTH AND CLIMATE CHANGE”
The largest single threat to the ecology and biodiversity of the
planet in the decades to come will be global climate disruption due to the
buildup of human-generated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. People around
the world are beginning to address the problem by reducing their carbon
footprint through less consumption and better technology. But unsustainable
human population growth can overwhelm those efforts, leading us to conclude
that we not only need smaller footprints, but fewer feet.
Portland, Oregon, for example, decreased its combined per-capita
residential energy and car driving carbon footprint by 5 percent between 2000
and 2005. During this same period, however, its population grew by
8 percent.
A 2009 study of the relationship between
population growth and global warming determined that the “carbon legacy” of
just one child can produce 20 times more greenhouse gas than a person will save
by driving a high-mileage car, recycling, using energy-efficient appliances and
light bulbs, etc. Each child born in the United States will add about 9,441
metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent. The
study concludes, “Clearly, the potential savings from reduced reproduction are
huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle.”
One of the study’s authors, Paul Murtaugh, warned that: “In
discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of
an individual over his or her lifetime. Those are important issues and it's
essential that they should be considered. But an added challenge facing us is
continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources. .
. . Future growth amplifies the consequences of people's reproductive choices
today, the same way that compound interest amplifies a bank balance."
The size of the carbon legacy is closely tied to consumption
patterns. Under current conditions, a child born in the United States will be
responsible for almost seven times the carbon emissions of a child born in
China and 168 times the impact of a child born in Bangladesh.
The globalization of the world economy, moreover, can mask the
true carbon footprint of individual nations. China, for example, recently
surpassed the United States to become the world’s leading greenhouse gas
emitter. But a large portion of those gases is emitted in the production of
consumer goods for the United States and Europe. Thus a large share of
“China’s” greenhouse gas footprint is actually the displaced footprint of
high-consumption western nations.
The United States has the largest population in the developed
world, and is the only developed nation experiencing significant population
growth: Its population may double before the end of the century. Its 300
million inhabitants produce greenhouse gases at a per-capita rate that is more
than double that of Europe, five times the global average, and more than 10
times the average of developing nations. The U.S. greenhouse gas contribution
is driven by a disastrous combination of high population, significant growth,
and massive (and rising) consumption levels, and thus far, lack of political
will to end our fossil-fuel addiction.
More than half of the U.S. population now lives in car-dependent
suburbs. Cumulatively, we drive 3 trillion miles each year.
The average miles traveled per capita is increasing rapidly, and the
transportation sector now accounts for one-third of all U.S. carbon emissions.
Another one-fifth of U.S. carbon emissions comes from the
residential sector. Average home sizes have increased dramatically in recent
decades, as has the accompanying footprint of each home. Suburban sprawl
contributes significantly to deforestation, reducing the capacity of the planet
to absorb the increased CO2 we emit. Due to a dramatic decrease in
household size, from 3.1 persons per home in 1970 to 2.6 in 2000, homebuilding
is outpacing the population growth that is driving it. More Americans are
driving farther to reach bigger homes with higher heating and cooling demands
and fewer people per household than ever before. All of these trends exacerbate
the carbon footprint inherent in the
basic energy needs of a burgeoning U.S. population.
Globally, recent research indicates that assumptions regarding
declining fertility rates used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
to develop future emissions scenarios may be overly optimistic. While fertility
rates have generally declined over the past few decades, progress has slowed in
recent years, especially in developing nations, largely due to cutbacks in
family planning assistance and political interference from the United States.
And even if fertility rates are reduced to below replacement levels, population
levels will continue to climb steeply for some time as people live longer and
billions of young people mature and proceed through their reproductive years.
Per-capita greenhouse gas emissions may drop, but the population bulge will
continue to contribute to a dangerous increase in greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere.
Time is short, but it not too late to stop runaway global
warming. Economy-wide reduction of greenhouse gas
emissions to a level that brings atmospheric CO2 back from 386
parts per million to 350 or less, scaling back first-world consumption patterns, and long-term population
reduction to ecologically sustainable levels will solve the global warming crisis
and move us to toward a healthier, more stable, post-fossil fuel, post-growth
addicted society. [I could not find the
date of this article. –Dick]
Methane Emissions Are
Spiking, But It Might Be More Cow Than Car
Since 2006, atmospheric
levels of methane — a greenhouse gas 86 times more potent than
carbon dioxide over a 20-year period — have steadily been on the rise. For years, scientists weren’t sure what was behind the rising
levels of methane, but they had a few ideas: namely an increase in fossil
fuel-related emissions.
Now, a new study is pointing to a different culprit:
agriculture-related methane emissions, especially from livestock and rice
production.
Published last week in the journal Science,
researchers from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric
Research (NIWA) found that the majority of methane released into the atmosphere
since 2006 was produced by bacteria, pointing to sources like agriculture —
rather than sources like fossil fuel production or the burning of organic
material — as the culprit behind the increase in methane levels.
A unique signature for
methane
The researchers were able to discern agricultural methane from
other sources of methane by looking at the gas’ isotopic signatures — or the
ratio of various carbon isotopes — using data from atmospheric monitoring
stations around the world. By looking at the distinct isotopic signatures, the
researchers could differentiate between methane produced from fracking, for
instance, and methane produced from agriculture, because they each have
different signatures.
The data also suggested that the increase in methane came from
regions including India, China and Southeast Asia, suggesting that the rise was
due to agriculture, not the growth of fracking in North America.
“That was a real surprise, because [around 2006] the U.S. started
fracking and we also know that the economy in Asia picked up again, and coal
mining increased,” NIWA atmospheric scientist Hinrich Schaefer told Phys.org.
“However, that is not reflected in the atmosphere.”
Livestock production in Asia has been expanding rapidly since
the middle of the 20th century, and is expected only to increase as economies
in the region become more developed.
Livestock production accounts for about 35 percent of total
anthropogenic methane emissions
Around the world, livestock production has been increasingly under
scrutiny in recent years, as animal agriculture’s carbon footprint has grown
clearer. Ruminants, like cows, produce methane as they digest their food,
through a process known as enteric fermentation. But livestock manure also
produces methane as it decomposes in closed-air containers known as lagoons,
which factory farming operations often use to store the massive amounts of
manure produced by their farms. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture
Organization estimates that livestock production accounts for some 2.2 billion
tons of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases annually, or about 35 percent of total anthropogenic methane
emissions.
But it’s not just livestock production that researchers say is
behind the rise in methane. Rice production is also a methane-intensive
activity, because root systems in rice plants secrete carbohydrates during
photosynthesis. When rice paddies are flooded, the oxygen-devoid environment
creates the perfect place for bacteria to feed off of those carbohydrates,
creating methane as a byproduct. That’s a problem, because rice is one of the
most important staple crops on Earth — more than 3.5 billion people depend on
rice for at least 20 percent of their daily caloric intake. In an effort to
curb rice’s methane production, scientists have actually been working to create
a lower-methane strain of rice (and have had some success).
But what about fossil
fuels?
Still, not everyone is convinced by NIWA’s analysis. Speaking
with InsideClimate News,
Robert Howarth, a Cornell University professor who studies methane emissions,
said that the isotopic ratios in methane are too broad to confidently attribute
to a single source.
“When you have eight or nine or 10 different sources of methane,
each with a range of ratios, there is no way to calculate where it is coming
from,” he said. “If you had a little bit of melting of permafrost and a big
increase in natural gas production, you could get a pattern that these people
are interpreting as cows in India.”
Many other studies point
to an increase in fossil fuel production, especially oil and gas production in
the United States, as another key factor behind the recent increase in methane
production. A recent study conducted by climate scientists of Karlsruhe
Institute of Technology (KIT) found that as much as 40 percent of the recent
increase in methane could be due to fossil fuel production.
In a press release, the KIT scientists said that their findings
were actually congruent with the NIWA study, stressing that “increasing
emissions from the oil and natural gas sector, combined with emissions from
wetlands and maybe animal husbandry increasingly appear to have caused the
renewed increase in methane
concentration in the last decade.”
An unregulated industry
The Obama administration has taken some unprecedented steps in the
recent months to regulate methane from oil and gas production. Most recently,
the EPA announced that
it would begin regulating methane from existing oil and gas facilities, with
the ultimate goal of cutting methane from the oil and gas sector by 40 to 45
percent below 2012 levels by 2025.
But methane from the
agricultural sector is still largely unregulated, despite the fact that
greenhouse gas-related emissions from livestock manure management systems grew 54 percent between
1990 and 2013.
Quite the opposite of imposing regulations on livestock producers
in the United States, Congress has actually explicitly forbidden the EPA from
collecting greenhouse gas emission data from livestock producers, making it the
only major source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States that enjoys such an exemption.
“The EPA’s methane strategy is completely ignoring agriculture,”
Tarah Heinzen, an attorney with Food & Water Watch, told ThinkProgress.
“We’re not dealing with it as a regulatory issue as we are with other sources
of methane.”
Decarbonizing what we eat is just as important as decarbonizing
what we drive or what we use to heat our homes
California, which is one of the most livestock-heavy states in the
country, has made moves to begin regulating short-lived climate pollutants,
like methane. According to Brent Newell, legal director for the Center on Race,
Poverty & the Environment, methane from livestock accounts for about 5
percent of California’s total greenhouse gas emissions. The state’s Global
Warming Solutions Act, passed in 2006, mandates that the state reduce its
greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent — and yet agriculture is the only sector
not subject to regulation.
In 2014, the California Senate mandated that the state’s Air
Resources Board (ARB) come up with a plan to regulate methane from livestock
operations. But thus far, the ARB has decided to achieve reductions only
through voluntary measures, which Newell argues allows the livestock industry
to effectively continue with a business-as-usual approach to methane
production.
“It’s acting like it’s doing something, it’s pretending like it’s
doing something, but voluntary controls for a massive greenhouse gas emitter is
a crazy regulatory response and it exemplifies the political power that the
dairy industry has over the Air Resources Board,” Newell said.
The plan is expected to be finalized later this month, when it
will be seen whether environmental groups’ calls for mandatory regulations for
the California livestock industry have been heard by the ARB, or whether such
calls have fallen on deaf ears.
“It is really shameful that this industry continues to enjoy an
exemption, while others are forced to comply,” Newell said. “Decarbonizing what
we eat is just as important as decarbonizing what we drive or what we use to
heat our homes.”
REDUCING WASTE AND CONSUMPTION
Jaime Adame. “Food Talk
Focuses on Cutting Waste: Fayetteville Campus Hosts Conference. Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette (April 17, 2016).
“’…in the U.S., nearly a third of all the food that’s produced is
wasted.’”
The US School of Law has established a Food Recovery Project.
Vegetarian Action Newsletter #27, April 13, 2016
NUTRITION, HEALTH
Local Restaurant News
Local Food
VegNews
Magazine
Junk Food and Calories
ANIMAL PROTECTION,
COMPASSION, RIGHTS, LIBERATION
A Trend Away from
Cruelty? SeaWorld Changes
VegNews
An Undercover Investigator of a
Factory “Farm”
Several Advertisements of Cruelty-free
Products
Why One Cook Changed to Vegan
New book by David Pellow, Total Liberation: Oppression, Animal Liberation, and the
Radical Earth
Movement
CLIMATE CHANGE
Carnivores
Cowspiracy Against Eating Meat Endorsed by Unitarian Universalist
Association
POPULATION
Human-driven factors forcing regional and
global environmental change:
Negative Population Growth/NPG
CONNECTING THE DOTS,
THE COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH
Dick, Vegetarianism/Veganism, Perceiving
Patterns and Systems for the Earth’s Habitability
Nourish, a Comprehensive Perspective
END VEGETARIAN ACTION NEWSLETTER #28, MAY 11, 2016
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