Reduce Your Waste.

By G. B. Talovich

http://talovich.blogspot.com

A talk which is being given in an ethics class.

In this ethics class, we have discussed a lot of beautiful ideas as abstract theory. Now I want you to put your money where your mouth is.

We have all agreed that suffering is bad. We have also agreed that, as the poet says, “No man is an island.” All beings rely on each other. We are all connected. Take a deep breath. Two weeks ago, that air was thousands of miles away. The air you breathe contains oxygen that came not very long ago from the Amazon basin as well as from the Siberian steppes.

We are all well fed and comfortable; we are a minority. Only one person out of a hundred alive today is a college graduate. 70% of all human beings are illiterate. Fifty per cent of today’s world population is malnourished, and 80% do not have decent homes. One billion people in today’s world live on less than on US dollar a day. The four hundred richest people in the world have a combined worth greater than the bottom 45 per cent of the whole world’s population: that means that 400 people have more money than about 2.3 billion other people. Bill Gates alone has more money than 40 per cent of the poorest Americans; in other words, he has more money than about 100 million other Americans combined.

Now I am not suggesting we force those four hundred people to cough up their money. It’s their money, not ours, and we have already argued at great length about how much say we have in deciding how others use their money. What I am asking of you now is that you examine your own commitment.

Do you condone suffering? I ask you to examine your own lifestyle, and see what you can do in your everyday actions to reduce the suffering of other human beings.

My first premise is that the world’s resources are finite. I know I shouldn’t say it out loud, but we have to admit that human greed is infinite. Don’t worry about others. Curb your own greed. In LA, the average well-regulated, well-planned middle class nuclear family with two parents and two kids consumes about twice as much as an entire village in Bangladesh. The problem is that the resources of the world are, as I just reminded you, finite. It is impossible for the whole world to live as wastefully as Californians do. In other words, if we all insist on maintaining our spendthrift lifestyles, we create a world in which inequality is inevitable. It is up to each of us to reduce our consumption. The whole world could live on the standard of a Mediterranean village. With modern amenities such as the Internet run by solar power or wind power, that wouldn’t be too bad, would it?

You all know that thousands of people starve to death every day. At a conservative estimate, let’s say about 25,000 people are starving to death today, and about one out of every three people on this blue earth is going to bed hungry tonight. Don’t for a moment believe the myth that there isn’t enough food to go around. We have more than enough food for everybody, but most of it goes to feed livestock. The United Nations repeatedly calls for rich people － that’s you and me － to voluntarily reduce meat consumption. Meat eating causes heart disease and cancer. More Americans will die of cancer this year than died in World War II, the Korean War, and the Viet Nam war together! But this is not why we are being asked to eat less meat.

Raising meat animals requires food and land. Great amounts of valuable food stocks are fed to cattle, pigs, and poultry. This is extremely wasteful. 16 pounds of grain fed to cattle produces only one pound of edible meat. In other words, one mouthful of meat equals sixteen mouthfuls of meal; which can feed more people? Eating that mouthful of meat means that 15 poor people get nothing.

Some cattle are put out to graze for a while. To provide grazing land, big business buys the cheapest land possible. This means that poor peasants are displaced; you can figure out the problems of social justice for yourselves. Invaluable forests － especially Central America rain forests － are destroyed. Don’t forget that many of our migratory birds are losing their winter homes. These birds keep down the insect pests in this country, so as rain forests in Central America are destroyed, we have to use more and more pesticide within our own borders. Each dollar’s worth of pesticides used produces environmental harm that requires seven dollars to clean up. How much sense does that make? For every person who switches to a pure vegetarian diet, an acre of trees is spared every year.

In California, where most of meat is brought in from other states, the government spends $24 billion dollars subsidizing the meat industry; that’s a thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child in this state. Couldn’t we find better uses for that money?

Some of you may remember 1991. That was the fifth year of the drought. At the same time the government of California was asking us not to brush our teeth so we could conserve water, the state government was also subsidizing turkey farmers. It takes 26,000 gallons of water to produce one turkey. To produce one day’s food for a meat-eater, it takes over 4,000 gallons of water. A pure vegetarian requires only 300 gallons for a day’s food. It takes less water to produce a year’s food for a pure vegetarian than to produce a month’s food for a meat-eater.

Speaking of water, I’d like to remind you that around the world, animal wastes account for ten times as much water pollution as the total amount caused by the human population. In the United States, livestock produce twenty times as much excrement as the entire human population of the country.

I know some of you are vegetarians for health reasons. As to the rest of you, please think of this. Even if you don’t care about your own health, aren’t you concerned about the earth’s health? We all know how important biodiversity is for the earth’s well-being, and how vital the oceans are to this planet. Say for example you eat seafood, like shrimp. For every pound of shrimp that reaches your plate, twenty pounds of other sea animals are caught, killed incidentally, and dumped back into the ocean. The entire ocean food chain is being destroyed by fishing, but over one half of the word’s fish catch is fed to livestock.

Something that frightens me to think about is what future generations will say about us. We inherited a rich, clean world, wasted the resources, and polluted the environment.

I am calling on you to consider where you stand on the ethical issues we have discussed this term: where you stand, not what you say, not what you pay lip service to. If you have a conscience, reduce your waste.