> I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem
Eat less meat (huge environmental impact!), bike more, don't consume as much non-local food, etc.
Eat less meat (huge environmental impact!), bike more, don't consume as much non-local food, etc.
I don’t know if it ever happen, but we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game.
Properly Managed Captured Fisheries (Mostly more prosperous nations have well managed fisheries, outstanding fisheries would be in Alaska & New Zealand) allow us to extract protien we all need without destroying ecosystems. Same goes for captured game but that scales significantly worse.
Fish farms are in a unique position because unlike farming animals on land, it can be done without radically changing the part of the ocean the fish are farmed in.
I think recently there have been some problems with fish farms and antibiotic / illness spreading but I really think these can be overcome and that long term aquaculture would be the most environmentally conscious option. (In a similar position to electric cars today).
Fish farms are a little like farming rabbits in packed, huge fenced in areas.
You get a lot of disease, use a lot of medicine and antibiotics - and get a lot of feces. And escaped, diseased rabbits that breed in the wild.
Fish farms on land are likely better - but at any rate, fish farms are far from being without environmental impact.
I guess if you HAVE to eat meat that is a better option, but we don't need it anymore. Its such an inefficient way to get calories and its not as nutritious as plant substitutes.
Better to avoid monocultures by buying organic/biodynamic, shopping at farmers' markets, CSA, growing your own food, etc. Eat less processed and make more from scratch. Better health, better for the environment, and you can still enjoy meat :)
When I visited Manhattan/Brooklyn recently I didn't get the sense that they were lacking in locally-sourced foods either. Main problem I can think of are food deserts, but those are more of an economic problem than scale. When I used to live in one in Baltimore though it was possible to find local food, it just took more effort.
> growing your own food
I should have quoted that directly in my original comment.
> don't consume as much non-local food
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/06/the_biggest_myt...
What the article is asserting and what the science shows is that even if you have Avacados being grown literally next door the environmental impact of buying them locally is often higher than shipping them from abroad.
For example, the SGU podcast they link to [1] (around 55m:50s in) discusses that the net environmental impact (carbon emissions) of shipping beef to the UK from New Zealand is less than consuming UK beef in the UK. So if you're an environmentally conscious UK consumer you should be spending extra to buy NZ beef instead of buying locally produced beef.
This is because the carbon impact of the transportation generally hovers around 10%, which leaves the other 90% for actually producing the product "locally", and some locations on earth are vastly more efficient by every environmental metric in growing certain crops or raising certain livestock.
From the podcast: "An acre of land in Idaho can produce twice the amount of potatoes as an acre of land in Kansas".
Which leaves two reasons to buy locally.
Firstly you may be living in one of the places that's efficient at producing a given product, e.g. you'd buy local beef in New Zealand instead of importing it from the UK.
Secondly there are certain products that don't ship well, e.g. heirloom tomatoes. There you simply don't have the option of buying anything except local varieties.
“environmental impact” and “carbon emissions” are not the same thing; the latter is a very limited subset of the former.
I put "carbon emissions" in parentheses there because the reason for this "buy local" fallacy to begin with is because people intuitively assume that it's the transportation of the good that makes all the difference, when the reality is that that's just 1/10 of the cost.
The environmental impact of the transportation is almost exclusively carbon emissions.
No, most of the environmental impacts of agricultural productions besides carbon emissions are still externalities, usually time-shifted, that aren't priced into the product.
This is what puts me into the defeatist group. As long as people won't even put their reproductive urges in question (and rather discuss how flying is bad), how are we even supposed to achieve anything ? This should be one of the first logical moves, yet it's so frowned upon it's never brought up. Depressing.