Earthling Liberation notes

Season 7, episode 4. Article is made of spoilers.

PMI Foods is a $3 billion global enterprise that buys and sells more than 1.6 billion pounds (725.7 million kilograms) of beef, pork, chicken, seafood and eggs each year. In the last decade, PMI Foods shipped more than $616 million of Brazilian beef from JBS, almost twice as much as from any other supplier, shipping records show.

High quality video essay.

Spoiler:

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLEibteSj-c&feature=youtu.be

A nice interview with George Monbiot about regenerative grazing bullshit and his disappointingly futile debate with Allan Savory, one of the founders of "regenerative grazing" pseudoscience.

• Introduction (00:00)
• Who is Allan Savory? Exploring the “Is Livestock Grazing Vital for Climate Change Mitigation?” Debate (01:22)
• The Environmental Impact of Beef Consumption: Allan Savory’s Claims and Evidence (05:39)
• The Flaws in Allan Savory’s Supporting Studies (13:26)
• Soil Carbon Saturation and Greenhouse Gas Emissions (18:05)
• The Distinction Between Carbon Storage and Carbon Sequestration (21:04)
• Misunderstandings Surrounding Carbon Credit Schemes (26:17)
• Identifying Genuine Carbon Offset Programmes (33:04)
• Overlooking Carbon Opportunity Costs: Common Misconceptions (34:28)
• Debunking the Myth: Is Carbon Opportunity Cost a Grand Deception? (41:26)
• Is It Too Late for Climate Change Reversal? (52:03)
• Allan Savory’s Assertions in Light of Contrary Evidence (57:54)
• George Monbiot Reflects on the Calibre of His Debate with Allan Savory (1:09:20)
• Livestock Farming and Farmer Revenues: Dispelling Myths (1:12:21)
• George Monbiot Shares His Sentiments on the Degradation of the Natural World (1:20:15)
• Why It Matters: The Imperative to Care (1:22:50)
• Outro (1:24:27)

no

READ IT.

Similarly, sociologist Melanie DuPuis has described how milk was central to the construction of the modern Western nation state. The nutritionally “perfect” white drink was symbolically linked to the white-skinned bodies that were better able to digest it due to a genetic mutation known as lactase persistence. Early 20th century milk advertisements perpetuated this trope, often juxtaposing images of healthy-looking, light-skinned people with sickly-looking, darker-skinned ones. “By declaring milk perfect,” says DuPuis, “white northern Europeans announced their own perfection”.

https://youtu.be/9G8ii4XWhk0

Paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01169-7

Republished here too: https://thebulletin.org/2023/08/kids-and-families-the-latest-targets-of-climate-denialism-propaganda/

The intersectionalism of the conservatives should be studied deeply.

COMIC

“If anything, the number is probably quite a bit higher,” says podcast guest Ben Goldfarb, environmental journalist and author of the new book Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of our Planet.

Fig. 2: Relative environmental footprint from GHG emissions of diet groups in comparison to high meat-eaters (>100 g d−1).

Fig. 3: Relative environmental footprint from GWP100, land use, water use, eutrophication potential and biodiversity impact of diet groups in comparison to high meat-eaters (>100 g d−1).

Global mean surface air temperature responses to future food consumption GHG emissions for mitigation strategies and under a high-population projection.:

We are in the sixth mass extinction event. Unlike the previous five, this one is caused by the overgrowth of a single species, Homo sapiens. Although the episode is often viewed as an unusually fast (in evolutionary time) loss of species, it is much more threatening, because beyond that loss, it is causing rapid mutilation of the tree of life, where entire branches (collections of species, genera, families, and so on) and the functions they perform are being lost. It is changing the trajectory of evolution globally and destroying the conditions that make human life possible. It is an irreversible threat to the persistence of civilization and the livability of future environments for H. sapiens. Instant corrective actions are required.

Mass extinctions during the past 500 million y rapidly removed branches from the phylogenetic tree of life and required millions of years for evolution to generate functional replacements for the extinct (EX) organisms. Here we show, by examining 5,400 vertebrate genera (excluding fishes) comprising 34,600 species, that 73 genera became EX since 1500 AD. Beyond any doubt, the human-driven sixth mass extinction is more severe than previously assessed and is rapidly accelerating. The current generic extinction rates are 35 times higher than expected background rates prevailing in the last million years under the absence of human impacts. The genera lost in the last five centuries would have taken some 18,000 y to vanish in the absence of human beings. Current generic extinction rates will likely greatly accelerate in the next few decades due to drivers accompanying the growth and consumption of the human enterprise such as habitat destruction, illegal trade, and climate disruption. If all now-endangered genera were to vanish by 2,100, extinction rates would be 354 (average) or 511 (for mammals) times higher than background rates, meaning that genera lost in three centuries would have taken 106,000 and 153,000 y to become EX in the absence of humans. Such mutilation of the tree of life and the resulting loss of ecosystem services provided by biodiversity to humanity is a serious threat to the stability of civilization. Immediate political, economic, and social efforts of an unprecedented scale are essential if we are to prevent these extinctions and their societal impacts.

Highlights

• 1,941 game animals from five mammalian orders were surveyed for viruses

• 102 mammalian-infecting viruses were discovered, 21 posing a potential risk to humans

• Civets carried a relatively higher number of potentially “high-risk” viruses

• Human-infecting viruses were also identified in game animals