Archive for the ‘Sustainability’ Category
Posted by rosshunter on October 16, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on October 13, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on October 7, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on October 6, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on October 5, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on October 2, 2009
-
Community Markets Association of Williamson County
tags: Sustainability
-
We are in a silent crisis in America because our food supply chain is being poisoned, and will ultimately be destroyed. What’s causing this is the action of corporate practices that exist only to strip every last dollar out of farming until the land is dead. Then the buyers of food will eat whatever they are fed to survive.
This crisis needs to become louder. It needs to turn into the scream it really is. We are being killed by bad food, and the answer for each one of us lies within a few miles of where we live.
-
Down to Earth – Raising Cattle, Kids and Consciousness » Blog Archive » Local Food: Use it or lose it
tags: Sustainability
-
I think the answer is we make our markets where we can. In the end I don’t think all of America drives out to the farmer’s market, I think the food will come to us, one way or another.
I can’t make it to the market tomorrow so I’ve asked someone else to pick up some things for me. Meanwhile I have neighbors here in Georgetown who drive to a market in Austin to buy farm food.
Obviously I need to organize my neighborhood so only one person needs to drive to Florence to buy food for all.
And you farmers need to have subscribers – people similar to investors really – who will guarantee a market for your crop, and who will stay with you in good season and bad, in order to keep you in business and to guarantee that they can put wholesome food on their tables.
It’s a matter of re-arranging the economics of how we grow and buy food more than anything else, in my opinion.
-
A Portland sustainability center could sprout in 2010 | Oregon Environmental News – – OregonLive.com
tags: Sustainability
-
The $90 million Oregon Sustainability Center — for several years a gauzy notion but this year funded by the Oregon Legislature — will be a showcase of the state’s green building innovation that draws visitors, researchers and designer-developers from across the world. It will rely solely on its own solar panels for energy and use no more water than falls on the site, among other major environmental feats.
-
The driving goal: to become a magnet for any business or government looking to meet its sustainability challenges while growing green jobs in Oregon.
-
The sustainability center is intended to meet the Living Building Challenge, a new green building certification program that lays out the most all-encompassing green standards in the industry.
-
Ezra Klein – The Persistence of Obesity
tags: Sustainability
-
interesting post, and discussion. I do think the food chain is poisoned nowadays, and with genetic modification now loose and untracked in the fields there are a lot of untested imponderables going into our mouths no matter how rich we are.
But as to your main point, that the poor suffer extreme stress, and your secondary point, that the rich don’t really understand this because of their own relative insulation from stress – this is clearly true, and verified by all of our experiences if we review them in this light.
As for answers…
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on September 25, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on August 14, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on June 1, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on May 29, 2009
-
Climate Progress » Blog Archive » Big oil made $600 billion under Bush, but invested bupkis in clean energy, Part 2: Details on BP, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, Shell and ExxonMobil
tags: Sustainability
-
K L Reddington wrote: “If we want to lower crude prices, we will have less battles against drilling in North America.”
We don’t want to lower crude prices. We want the price of oil, and coal, and natural gas to go up, to internalize the full cost of the environmental damage that they cause, and force them to compete in the market on a level playing field with clean, renewable sources of energy. We want to burn LESS oil, not drill for more of it. We want offshore wind turbines, not offshore oil drilling rigs.
Besides which, the oil corporations already have vast leases on public lands where they are already permitted to drill, and they aren’t doing it. Why should they? What incentive do the oil corporations have to lower the price of their product by putting more of it on the market?
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on May 19, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on April 28, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on April 25, 2009
-
Worldchanging: Bright Green: Open Intellectual Property as Sustainability Accelerator
yes – this is the key point that national developments remain incountry, so it’s okay to share the IP globally = the prime benefits accrue incountry
tags: Sustainability
-
The main point being:
“Since power plants are built in the home country, most of the investments are in the home country,” he said. “You don’t build a power plant, put it in a boat and ship it overseas, similar to with buildings. So developing technologies for much more efficient buildings is something that can be shared in each country. If countries actively helped each other, they would also reap the home benefits of using less energy. So any area like that I think is where we should work very hard in a very collaborative way — by very collaborative I mean share all intellectual property as much as possible. And in my meetings with my counterparts in other countries, when we talk about this they say, yes, we really should do this. But there hasn’t been a coordinated effort. And so it’s like all countries becoming allies against this common foe, which is the energy problem.”
This is an incredibly important and poorly understood idea. I also believe that in an era which may see a decline in material globalization and at least something of a return to localized production, adopting open IP becomes paradoxically more important in creating competitive advantages.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on April 16, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on April 15, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on April 13, 2009
-
The Prophet of Climate Change: James Lovelock : Rolling Stone
tags: Sustainability
-
His latest thought: suspend hundreds of thousands of
600-foot-long vertical pipes in the tropical oceans, put a valve at
the bottom of each pipe and allow deep, nutrient-rich water to be
pumped to the surface by wave action. Nutrients from the deep water
would increase algae bloom, which would suck up carbon dioxide and
help cool the planet.
“It’s a way of leveraging the Earth’s natural energy system
against itself,” Lovelock speculates. “I think Gaia would
approve.”
-
Climate Progress » Blog Archive » Washington Post corrects itself: “Make no mistake, Arctic Sea ice is melting,” may be gone in summer by 2013, “renders climate studies and models seemingly obsolete”
tags: Sustainability
-
Will’s misstatements on Arctic ice were so egregious that Post reporters took the unprecedented step of contradicting Will in a recent news article:
The new evidence … contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.
But the Post has topped that stunner: Today, the Post ran an editorial, “Arctic Ice Is Melting: The 30-year decline is accelerating, new data show,” which begins:
MAKE NO mistake, Arctic Sea ice is melting. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the maximum extent of the winter sea ice cover for 2008-09 was the fifth-lowest on record. Underscoring their point, the agencies added, “The six lowest maximum events since satellite monitoring began in 1979 have all occurred in the past six years (2004-09).”
Global warming is doing a number on Arctic Sea ice.
“Make no mistake”? How about make no mistakes twice? (see “Post lets George Will reassert all his climate falsehoods plus some new ones“)
-
Our financial establishment, if judged by the output of the Council on Foreign Relations, now wants a new cold war with Russia over the 90 billion barrels of oil projected to be under our current polar icecap. They talk about “the new great game in the arctic”, and a gold rush for arctic resources.
Chances are, they are just setting their readers up for the “adapt to it” conceptual frame, very popular in Time magazine. As if adapting to a methane catastrophe was even possible:
http://www.killerinourmidst.com
No we can’t adapt to this thing. And we can’t take a chance that James Lovelock was right, when he realized, as quoted in his interview in Rolling Stone in 2007 ” I realized that the climate system was in failure mode”.
-
One side note (supposition of mine) to these extinction events that ties into crude oil, which supposedly came from huge amount of algae – I could never figure out how you could get such huge amounts of algae with fish and other creatures in the sea which would want to eat it – with a Canfield Ocean (which existed many times for long periods of time) you get a sea full of algae that can handle the hydrogen sulphide – the irony being that our crude oil supplies may have come from (basically) global warming events that spiraled into exctinction events eons ago – and here we are, unknowingly having unlocked pandora’s box to it.
-
We are increasing CO2 at a rate that is unprecedented, and also increasing methane at an unprecedented rate. Couple that with deforestation, and half a trillion tons of carbon stored in the forests that is likely to be released by firestorms, and a trillion and a half estimated tones of carbon in the permafrost some of which is likely to be released by bacterial and fungal decay (and perhaps even peat fires) when it melts. The oceanic methane hydrates contain something on the order of five or so trillion tons of carbon in the form of methane gas, a greenhouse gas currently 25 or so times worse than CO2. The oceans could also start evolving large amounts of dissolved CO2 – think of how CO2 bubbles out of a warm soft drink, compared to a cold one.
Compare this to something like three quarters of a trillion tons of carbon currently in the in the atmosphere, and a third of a trillion tons of carbon released by the entire industrial revolution. So, to spell it out, runaway heating could dump at least 10 times as much carbon into the atmosphere as it currently has, in a form that is initially 25 times worse as a greenhouse gas than CO2.
No matter how robust a self-regulating system the climate is, and it is robust, it’s hard to see how it could handle this sort of stress.
Lovelock may have had it right, IMO:
http://www.rollingstone.com/ politics/ story/ 16956300/ the_prophet_of_climate_change_james_lovelock
In this interview in Rolling Stone, he predicts 6 billion dead by 2100. Even he might be conservative in this estimate.
-
Leland, I like to tell myself that if the methane in the Arctic started rushing out, the world would warm so rapidly that the resulting chaos and hysteria would ultimately shut down most of our CO2 emissions as everyone scrambled northward with whatever they had. It would be rather barbaric and nasty, and plenty of people would die, but it would keep us from turning into Venus.
-
ertainly we are capable of solving this. But, here in the U.S., we are dealing with a financial elite that has become an elite because of oil and other fossil fuels. They don’t want to change, and they are so rich and powerful we may not be able to force them to change. The Council on Foreign Relations, traditionally dominated by the Rockefeller family (who remain major stockholders in ExxonMobil and who are powerful enough within ExxonMobil to recently force the ex-CEO, Lee Raymond, to resign) has run a series of truly incredible articles by Scott Borgerson, talking in really incredibly daft terms about a new gold rush for “resources” including oil in the arctic and especially under the current icecap. Borgerson has recently carried this message to Congress, and testified before the House Foreign Relations Committee, who thanked him for his testimony and told him he had been very helpful. This campaign has included at least one op-ed in the New York Times by Borgerson, who also talks about “adapting” to global warming.
-
I’m not worried about ordinary, reasonable people. I’m worried about ExxonMobil, and Peabody Coal, and the Koch brothers that fund the Cato Institute.
-
I remember last summer in northern California. We had a million acres burn, in California, last year, when a couple hundred thousand or less is normal.
-
Chris Field recently testified before Congress. He is a Stanford climate scientist, and one of the IPCC group leaders. His testimony before Congress was rather subdued, but the next day on Democracy Now! he laid it on the line:
http://www.democracynow.org/ 2009/ 2/ 26/ member_of_un_environment_panel_warns
-
The reason I say we’re on a trajectory of climate change that we haven’t explored is that we have only looked at scenarios where the growth of CO2 was limited to in the range of two to 2.5 percent per year. We genuinely don’t know what a climate will look like with the more rapid rate of increase that we’re actually seeing….
-
Methane catastrophe
tags: Sustainability
-
The amount of methane
that can be released is indeed massive. Estimates of the amount
of seafloor methane generally range from about 5000 billion metric
tons to around 20,000 billion metric tons (a metric ton is equal
to 1.1 imperial tons, the standard ton used in the United States),
though they usually range around 10,000 billion metric tons. This
amount of methane contains about 7500 billion metric tons of carbon,
vastly more than all the estimated carbon in all fossil fuels:
petroleum, coal, and natural gas. There is a simple way to put
10,000 billion metric tons of methane into perspective: it contains
about ten times the amount of carbon (largely in the form of carbon
dioxide) as does the entire atmosphere. Moreover, though methane
entering the atmosphere is quickly oxidized, it is oxidized to
carbon dioxide, so the problem of its warming ability will remain
with us for thousands of years into the future.
A methane catastrophe,
therefore, is an abrupt surge of greenhouse gas that could rival
or exceed the carbon dioxide warming of the planet. It could potentially
overwhelm the natural heat regulatory system of the Earth, which
operates in a much more gradual way, and on a much more protracted
time scale. The quantity of methane that could be released is
so massive there would be no remedial action that people would
be able to take to mitigate it except in the most superficial
way. Once a methane catastrophe were to begin, there would be
major consequences for the planet and its inhabitants, human and
other, and we would be able to do little except wait it out. Methane,
in a very real sense, is the joker in the deck of global warming.
-
We are certainly on the
verge of releasing a huge amount of permafrost and seafloor methane
within a very short time; we may also be on the brink of methane
catastrophe. By our own actions — by our continuing and increasing
use of carbon fuels — we are slowly but inexorably creating the
conditions during which a such a methane release, catastrophic
or more gradual, could occur. We probably have time to prevent
a catastrophe, but there is a certain non-negligible possibility
that we have already crossed — or will shortly cross — an invisible
threshold that will render a methane catastrophe inevitable and
unstoppable.
-
Poor prognosis for our planet | smh.com.au
tags: Sustainability
-
The great insight offered by James Lovelock in Gaia is that we are the model. Planet Earth, being a web of complex self-regulating systems, operates very much like a human body. Terminal illness gives us the template for most forms of ecological collapse. One set of changes initiates another, and so on in a downward cascade of negative feedback until the whole system falls apart.
-
wherever you look in the natural world the message of exponential change is reinforced, yet humans have a weird predisposition to see change as linear.
-
But there is no tipping point – a curve is always tipping, and each new finding redraws the curve. If this year’s figure comes in under 4 million square kilometres the patient could be dead inside five years, and ships will be crossing the North Pole in September 2014.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on April 1, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on March 31, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on March 20, 2009
-
Climate Progress » Blog Archive » Welcome Rolling Stone readers to “America’s fiercest climate-change activist-blogger”
tags: Sustainability
-
For any first-time visitors here because of the Rolling Stone special section “RS100: The people who are reinventing America,” this post is intended as an introduction to Climate Progress.
[My apologies to regular CP readers for yet another introductory piece — and of course, for the tasetless RS cover — but I’ve kinda started hangin’ with a bad crowd now. And who doesn’t like ice cream?]
-
Climate Progress » Blog Archive » The Campaign for an Energy Efficient America pushes an Energy Efficiency Resource Standard
tags: Sustainability
-
For the most part, the debate has ignored the cheapest, cleanest energy source: using electricity more efficiently. Reducing energy demand and consumption would mean that we could do more while using less. According to McKinsey & Company, improving energy efficiency could offset
85 percent of projected electricity demand in 2030. Energy saved via efficiency improvements costs
significantly less than
conventional base-load electricity.
-
Even though efficiency reduces energy use, saves money, and reduce pollution, a win- win-win, most government and businesses are just awakening to the opportunities of efficiency investments. Uniting under the newly announced
Campaign for an Energy Efficient America, more than 60 corporations and nonprofits strongly advocate a national Energy Efficiency Resource Standard (EERS) to mandate efficiency improvements across the country.
-
Climate Progress » Blog Archive » Obama at SCE Electric Vehicle Technical Center: “The nation that leads on energy will be the nation that leads the world in the 21st century”
tags: Sustainability
-
Because these cars of tomorrow require the batteries of tomorrow, I am announcing that the Department of Energy is launching a $2 billion competitive grant program under the Recovery Act that will spark the manufacturing of the batteries and parts that run these cars, build or upgrade the factories that will produce them, and in the process, create thousands of jobs right here in America.
Show us that your idea or your company is best-suited to meet America’s challenges, and we will give you a chance to prove it. And just because I’m here today doesn’t exempt all of you from that challenge — every company that wants a shot at these tax dollars has to prove their worth.
We are also making a $400 million down-payment on the infrastructure necessary to get these cars on the road; and because these cars won’t leave the showroom unless consumers buy them, the Recovery Act includes a new tax credit of $7,500 to encourage Americans to plug one in at home.
-
Climate Progress » Blog Archive » Climate competitiveness 2: When the global Ponzi scheme collapses (circa 2030), the only jobs left will be green
tags: Sustainability
-
Like all Ponzi schemes, the system must collapse. When it does, the only jobs left standing will be those that are “green” — which can be defined as those jobs that do not plunder nonrenewable energy resources and natural capital and/or do not to destroy a livable climate.
-
I expect most opinion makers and the majority of the public to get desperate about reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the 2020s. But desperation is not collapse. I have tended to think that the inflection point is around 2030.
-
the UK government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, laid out something very close to the collapse scenario in his speech yesterday to the government’s Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster. He warned that by 2030, “A ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions,” as the UK’s Guardian put it.
You can see a five-minute BBC interview with Beddington here. The speech is now online, so I will excerpt it at length
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on March 18, 2009
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on March 15, 2009
-
An expensive approach to climate change | Cap and binge | The Economist
ap and Trade that Works
So far, cap and trade systems have not succeeded in reducing emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion enough to justify the economic hardship they’ve inflicted. The fundamental reasons for this failure are that the economic incentives and disincentives of this system have not hit the correct targets, and that the programs are prone to fraud and difficult to enforce. The following proposal corrects those problems.
1. Limit the scope of the cap and trade program to electric power generation. All fossil fuel use outside the program should be subject to a carbon tax (which could be implemented separately, perhaps with the tax rate following a price established by this program).
There are several reasons to confine the program to electric power generation only. First, limiting the number of pollution sources in the program makes it possible to enforce compliance, and second, electric power generation is fundamentally an energy conversion and delivery industry and not an energy consumer, and as such its incentives should be applied differently.
The most and least important reason to limit the scope of the program to electric power generation is that it makes the program politically possible right now. The electric power industry is already regulated, and many voters imagine cap and trade will solve the climate problem without costing them any money. Elected officials should be able to support this program without jeopardizing their re-elections.
2. Define a cap in terms of metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted per megawatt hour generated and sold.
Specifying emissions per megawatt-hour targets the generation mix rather than the total amount of power supplied to the grid, and will guide power company choices for new generation facilities and upgrades to existing facilities.
3. Distribute allowances that reflect the cap to all generators, including non-polluting generators, based on the amount of electricity they sell. Require allowances to be used to purchase fossil fuels fo
tags: Sustainability
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on March 12, 2009
-
Toxic Assets
tags: Sustainability
-
The banks, the Fed and Treasury are playing a hiding game, if they do actually have a good idea of what the assets are worth – they don’t want the share prices to collapse (more than they have).
The astronomical amounts involved in credit default swaps are often mentioned, as in the WaPo piece referred to by JHM. But who are these amounts owed to, people on Mars? If someone is obliged to pay, someone else has to receive. To a considerable extent there is a colossal bookkeeping problem, which won’t be cleared up as long as people have reasons to hide the true situation.
-
I have no quarrel with Dean’s comments here, but think we need to focus on a larger picture. Regarding the figures put forward in the Post op-ed cited by JHM, I would guess that the 5 to 30 cents on the dollar valuation is one that merely takes into account the orgy of asset inflation over the past couple decades, but NOT the fact that economic arrangements such as suburbia and the present food system are not viable without enormous energy inputs that are completely unsustainable. Surely the needed transformation of our economy and society in the face of the death trap we have set for ourselves is the number one priority, along with a new set of financial arrangements that must be completely subordinated to this goal – NOT shoring up the existing banks. I agree that along the way the banks will have to be placed in receivership, but the concern expressed in several of the comments over proper asset pricing and open books, is also, to my mind, something of a diversion from what is most important.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Posted by rosshunter on March 10, 2009
-
Building a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty — Green For All
tags: Sustainability
-
What’s the best way to give Americans of all socioeconomic backgrounds a tangible stake in fighting for issues like global warming?
Easy: Make it their livelihood. Every day, about 135 million people go to work in the U.S. Imagine what would happen if millions of those jobs — plus new ones created for people who are currently unemployed — were in fields like renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and green building.
Our two crucial concerns about survival — the environment and making a living — would be combined. A person’s commitment to their job would also be their commitment to the planet.
-
Overshoot: Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
classic text Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change – William Catton
tags: Sustainability
-
Circumstance: The Age of Exuberance is over, population has already overshot
carrying capacity, and prodigal Homo sapiens has drawn down the world’s savings
deposits.
Consequence: All forms of human organization and behavior that are based on the
assumption of limitlessness must change to forms that accord with finite limits.
-
Unrecognized Preview
The Industrial Revolution made us precariously dependent on nature’s dwindling
legacy of non-renewable resources, even though we did not at first recognize
this fact. Many major events of modern history were unforeseen results of
actions taken with inadequate awareness of ecological mechanisms. Peoples and
governments never intended some of the outcomes their actions would incur.
-
GrowthBusters.com » Find Out More
tags: Sustainability
-
We are hooked on a system that depends on growth
It no longer provides the prosperity or happiness we seek
It is unsustainable
-
Change Everything Now | Orion Magazine
tags: Sustainability
-
At the current rates, the world economy will be twice as big as it is today in seventeen years. That carries the potential for enormous additional destruction. The environmental movement has a lot of wonderful things about it, and it’s accomplished a lot. But it’s not up to this challenge of dealing with this amount of environmental loss and destruction.
The fundamental thing that’s happened is that our efforts to clean up the environment are being overwhelmed by the sheer increase in the size of the economy. And there’s no reason to think that won’t continue. So we have to ask, what is it about our society that puts such an extraordinary premium on growth? Is it justified? Why is that growth so destructive? And what do we do about it?
Capitalism is a growth machine. What it really cares about is earning a profit and reinvesting a large share of that and growing continually. Profits can be enhanced if the companies are not paying for the cost of their environmental destruction—so they fight [paying it] tooth and nail. The companies themselves are now quite huge, quite powerful, quite global, and no longer just the main economic actors in our society. They are the main political actors also.
-
The Gospel of Consumption | Orion Magazine
tags: Economics, Sustainability
-
Today “work and more work” is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Sustainability | Leave a Comment »
when i drink milk, if it is not organic, i think that the hormones and antibiotics are getting into my system cumulatively, and i cant imagine that would be a good thing.
i dont like to take any medications unless absolutely necessary, so i dont want to take them gratuitously in the milk i use.
i dont know if that is foolish thinking or common sense, but that is how i feel.
i know there is nothing scientific in this, but when i bite into a crunchy and unpolished apple that is organic, it really tastes better to me.
i am not imagining that.
when i bite into a red, delicious apple that looks like it has been polished with armor-all, it just seems to lack taste. i feel sorry for it.
it looks like they cant breathe in their own skins.
the lustre on it looks unnatural and makes me uncomfortable.
i confess that i have no real data, so i am not qualified to have a serious discussion.
my way of thinking with most things is, “if it aint broken, dont fix it.”
i just think we tamper with too much stuff.
i also dont like to eat other animals.
perhaps i feel that that their brothers and sisters will be angry.
that is not very scientific, and perhaps just magical thinking, but who knows for sure?
i have a whole family of rabbits living under part of my house.
somehow, in some inexplicable way, i think they know i am a vegetarian, and so they are comfortable co-habitating with me.
i have no scientific proof of this.
i also apologize to all wasted food and talk to the plants in my garden regularly, as well as with the squirrel family in my tree.
so i guess i am not the best person to have a discussion with.
i have no scientific evidence, but i have so many hummingbirds, squirrels and rabbits and butterflies that live right here in my garden, that i think nature approves.
i wont send any of this to the “new england journal of medicine.”