Cows Destroyed an Entire Marine Ecosystem in California
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Costco sizes makes perfect sense for many people. There’s nothing weird about buying 3lb of chicken at once or a 4 pack of butter. It might even be better by minimizing amount of trips and packaging material.
That is, your income is proportional to your damage almost regardless of what you choose to spend your money on (indirect damage is high for every $ whether spent or invested).
The US is roughly 25% of the world’s GDP with ~5% of the world population, so each person in the US is on average causing ~5x the damage of the average person in the world (often indirectly in other countries).
The single easy thing you could personally do to reduce your long term footprint is to not have kids.
I assume in good faith that your value is pristine nature but it’s a fallacy.
To summarize: yikes.
This sentence alone proves your entire reply unsound. You have assumed something which is obviously irrelevant given not only the context of this conversation but even the tone and content of that comment which you supposedly critique. Then you go on to be condescending.
You can convince people of your honesty and good faith by acting honestly and in good faith, not by trying to reframe your hurried comments ex post facto to retrofit some desired message from what is obviously a bad take.
I don't. It's by now clear they don't think they were doing that either. But your assumption colored your entire reply as a response to an argument that no one was making.
Have fun not existing.
That's why I mentioned Costco because I wanted to specifically attack those encouraging wasteful behavior. Forcing people to buy in bulk is a form of that but that's just one thing they do. The giant sizes of their stores, focus on making it cheap and convenient to buy gas, and providing a status symbol that's about acquiring cheap stuff are others.
If you want to screech about consumerism you're barking up the wrong tree.
If you are looking for things Costco doesn't carry, it is what it is. If your needs or desires line up with Costco's selection though, then there's no better place in terms of both price and efficiency of procurement.
If you find stuff from Costco is going to waste (namely foodstuffs, almost everything else they carry is non-perishable), just throw them all in the freezer. They will last months if not years.
This is where you get deeper into Wall-E territory. A lot of their "good stuff" is junk food. And a lot of people eat more of it when it's lying around their houses. And really it's only "good stuff" because it's brand name. There are better tasting chocolate bars with less packaging than Hershey's Nuggets.
If you get junk food from Costco, that's because you bought junk food.
But isn't the argument was that Costco carries good stuff?
The "junk" in junk food isn't talking about the quality (good/bad) thereof.
If only there was a way to have more than one location to store frozen foods in a home.
>And none of the expiration dates apply to refrigerated food
They don't. "Use or freeze by".
>That's how long you can leave it outside the fridge.
Which you wouldn't do if you're not using it.
If its going bad before using it, thats on you to manage. There are plenty of ways to avoid food going bad, from storing it properly to planning out what your going to use when.
"the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Clinic, on behalf of the Animal Legal Defense Fund and a number of individual plaintiffs, filed suit against the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service, which manages Point Reyes National Park, alleging that cattle ranching is endangering the iconic tule elk.* It’s not the first such lawsuit that has been filed over the past decade against the NPS to stop alleged environmental damage from Point Reyes cows."
I'm from the Midwest, grew up on a farm, and I wish California would get out of the livestock business. I've driven by all sorts of CAFOs, but Point Reyes and Harris Ranch take disgusting to a new level. The Midwest has significant water quality issues stemming from big ag that need to be solved, for sure, but California's ecosystems are varied and amazing, and they're being ruined by types of agriculture that's not well-suited to the land.
But I lived in Arizona and worked with native vegetation for a long time and saw the vast amount of damage cattle did the desert ecosystem. No animal that size lives there natively. Much of the ground was BLM and leased for very nominal fees.
Tearing up a desert ecosystem that takes a long time to regenerate for the tiny amount of money produced by skinny parched cows at a subsidy makes no sense at all.
I vote we keep the cows, but where they belong and not where they don't belong.
I’m not sure there’s much confusion if someone were to say that “coal is contributing to climate change.“
It's shifting the blame away from real culprits.
How?
The point of a cotton field isn't to provide a habitat for your slaves. By the time the slaves are there in the field, the deforestation has already occurred.
To blame the destruction of the marine ecosystem on those cows is misleading.
The marine ecosystem is not the only victim in this situation. Those cows were placed there by humans, for human consumption, and are also victims. We chose to breed and eat them.
So my point is, that by formulating it in this way (Cows destroyed ...) instead of slightly more specific way (like Animal husbandry practices destroyed ...) the real problem is hidden, and that it could be a hinderance in undrestanding of the problem, delaying the necessary changes in our behaviour for more responsible handling of the matter in the future.
Sorry for my english.
> more specific way (like Animal husbandry practices destroyed
This is less specific. It doesn't clarify which species shouldn't have been introduced or should have been managed better.
I think they mean that a farmer had a herd and let it roam free over a vast area. Then he sent some cowboys to take the herd to the city / town with a train and sell them. Just like in Red River movie ;)
> It doesn't clarify which species shouldn't have been introduced
It may be the cows 150 years ago. Now the species mix would be probably different, with similar effects on the marine ecosystems. Does it really matter if the river of urine and excrements is from cow, pigs or chickens? I don't know.
Reasonable people aren’t confused by the use of “cows.” It’s just low-hanging fruit, ripe for fabricated outrage.
Elephant, whale, seal, etc. cows are quite commonly found in the wild. Cattle cows, not so much.
Are you sure that 100% o people who seen this title will know that the article is talking in fact about humans, about our preferences eating cows and dairy, about our mega farms conveniently hidden of our sight, and not some wild creatures bringing havoc to the coastal areas?
I'm not so sure.
Yeah, humans are ultimately responsible, but not really for the reasons you listed.
The cows are gone, but it's not like we've left the vegetation alone for centuries to let it reach it's previous levels, and it's not like the marine life can spontaneously reappear after being wiped out. It's hard to restore a destroyed ecosystem.
Which were there for 100 years (1770's as stated by author) without causing a problem until the mid 1800's? Which is when LA was incorporated?
I dunno man, that looks like a lot of yarn when something like more easily explains it.
> He believes that factors such as urban runoff and sewage discharge, which are ongoing, help to explain the higher overall rate of sedimentation.
Yeah overgrazing is bad we get it. But whats more disuptive to an area? LA, one of the largest, most rapid, urban developments ever or cows?
It seems the authors still have to learn the correlation vs causation thing. Concluding it must be cows because you cannot think of another alternative is a really bad way of doing science.
I am going to take a complete negative view when someone mentions overgrazing as the cause of vegetation decline. In South Africa, there is a person who predicted for the British that by removing 30,000 elephants we can restore the land and vegetation. He later went down to regret that and realize it became a lot worse than it was before. The elephants were helping.
Elephants won't stay in one place long enough to overgraze, they tend to migrate and eat something here and there, spread seads from one place to another and make place for new growth in forests by making new paths through the forests, etc. They are helping the ecosystems.
We can't say the same of herds of cows, who will happily stay in one place until they eat every little green blade of grass, pull out every last root and trample in the rest, so nothing more than mud remains.
In this days it can't be overgrazing that's the problem. Now the animal ag hides the animals, as there are not even enough pastures for all the cows we have. How many farm animals have you seen in the last month, considering that in US alone 19000 land animals is killed every minute (IIRC)? Almost all farm animals are hidden in windowless buildings, out of sight, out of mind. So not freely grazing animals - more likely the problem is runoff from farms (via rivers) now, I presume.
If you're not seeing them it's because you're not going where they are. Land in places like the bay area is WAY too expensive to use for grazing. C'mon over to Pennsylvania, I can show you thousands of cows within an hour or two of Pittsburgh.
(I run an agtech startup that specializes in helping cattle ranchers optimize their grazing operations to reduce the need for buying supplementaln grain and sequester more carbon via improved pasture management.)
Overgrazing can absolutely be a problem, as can run-off from feedlots. It's really important to hit the right stocking rate (the number of head of animals per acre) in order to operate regeneratively instead of destructively. (Disclaimer: that's part of what we help ranchers do, so I'm a little biased here! :)
"About 4% of U.S. beef retail and food service sales is comprised by grass-fed beef with a value of roughly $4 billion. .. There were about 92 million head of cattle in the United States at the end of 2015, with roughly 30 million head slaughtered that year. For perspective, the grass-fed industry currently slaughters about 230,000 head, or less than 1% of the total conventional slaughter."
> https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is...
"About 75% to 80% of grass-fed beef sold in the U.S. is grown abroad, from Australia, New Zealand and parts of South America ..."
At least we know where the Amazon beef goes to.
The first 600-800lbs of growth are almost always on pasture, eating a mix of forage (the grasses) and possibly supplemental feed in winter depending on location.
As I said above, most animals are finished (grown from 600-800 to final weight of about 1400lbs) on a feedlot eating grains and soy and whatnot. Those are not counted as grass-fed beef.
Feedlots are still outdoors. It's silly expensive to build a building around them. Feedlots are big.
I'm not from USA, we don't really have feedlots here. I must have been thinking about dairy cows, pigs and chickens.
Crammed in buildings like this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230219172107/https://i.redd.it...
https://images.ctfassets.net/ww1ie0z745y7/6Uw3q2e3Ee5LLG53Ds...
Dairy cows in the US are a mix of confined and pastured; it's kind of an ongoing experiment. Dairy calves are more likely to be raised in some form of shelter/confinement than beef calves. (Here, a "beef calf" is one being raised specifically with the intent to raise it for slaughter; many dairy cows will end up becoming beef eventually but the path to getting there is different.)
Beef cattle outnumber dairy cattle about 3:1 in the US.
This.
As far as California is concerned, you can't drive down the I-5 or CA-99 without seeing cattle and other livestock (and smelling them, with the windows up!).
The talk of "windowless buildings, out of sight, out of mind" is straight up woke propaganda with no basis in reality.
Never heard that story before, but what a market person. He made money killing elephants, and now is making money telling stories about that (was bad) and teaching others "a new framework for decision making" [0]. Wow.
0 - https://www.bookdepository.com/Holistic-Management-Allan-Sav...
They say the cause was the destruction of the fauna, something that hasn't really returned. The cows were tge ones that destroyed the fauna.
can't help but mention a different SoCal ecosystem problem however.. a few tens of thousands of fifty gallon barrels of DDT. keyword search "dilution is the solution to pollution" .. (not kidding, wish I were)
https://www.elgalabwater.com/blog/solution-pollution-not-alw...