Enough complaining about what’s wrong, what’s not happening & people who aren’t doing anything. Every Friday I post a simple way to save the world; whether an action to take on behalf of the environment or an outpouring of love over the planet, there are hundreds of little things we can do to make a difference.
Eat Less Meat
My absolute favourite way to save the world & the absolute easiest way to make a huge difference. I’ve already written about this in more depth so suffice to say that agribusiness contributes between 17 & 33% of global carbon emissions (if you worry about that sort of thing). This is a contentious figure because some tallies of the damage agribusiness does don’t take into account the knock-on effect that the wanton destruction of the Amazon rainforest for farmland to grow animal feed & pasture land to ranch cattle has on carbon levels. Not only does eating meat contribute towards this, indigenous tribes in South America are also getting kicked off land they have lived on for generations & have to watch it razed to the ground by people who claim to own it through the exhange of piece of paper, not through having lived on it & hunted it & had it provide for them their entire lives.
Meat Free Mondays is a good place to ease yourself into the idea, & they don’t use scary words like vegan like I do. This here Guide to Cruelty Free Eating, obviously, focuses on animal cruelty more than I do, but is a pretty exhaustive starter guide to heading in a vegan direction with your dinners.
You don’t have to give up barbecue or bacon for ever, but reducing your meat consumption reduces market demand for it, & profit is the language of government & business. Less money in meat means less devastation in the rainforest, if enough people give it a go. Try holding veggie potlucks, or knocking up some vegan cupcakes for friends.
The funniest thing I heard about being vegetarian recently was the idea that people think the food is ‘tasteless’. Moby points out in an interview with SuperVegan that it’s, uh, plant products which are used to give meat its flavour; garlic, cumin, pepper…
Give it a go!
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