Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth

I haven't had much time to write today, but I wanted to post something really quick. This article in The Guardian was insightful, I thought:

Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet.

The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.

The new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Other recent research shows 86% of all land mammals are now livestock or humans. The scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.

I've written about this topic before. But I think it's important to reiterate. The truth is that we're desperately losing the battle against climate change. Even if we miraculously went down to zero emissions as a planet, the temperature is still going to rise. But it isn't hopeless yet as people like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein have written. And the one thing that all of us can do to help prevent disastrous climate change is to stop eating meat and dairy as much as possible. 

That seems like an impossible, unreasonable thing to ask most people. But almost ever big social change has felt impossible. Does that mean we shouldn't try?  

Does The Moral Arc of The Universe Actually Bend Toward Justice?

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

"The biggest story of the last fifteen years, both nationally and globally, is the growing likelihood that a cyclical model of history will be a better predictor than a model of ongoing progress." -Tyler Cowen

Just a quick little blog post before I start work...

That MLK quote above is much quoted. The words are often used to lend optimism to a troubling time, such as the current situation in the United States. I used to believe it wholeheartedly myself. After all look at the gains made by the civil rights movement that King help start? Look at LGBTQ rights? History is only going one way, and that is toward justice, I thought perhaps naively. 

I'm starting to think that is wrong. I just finished Tyler Cowen's "The Complacent Class," which the above quote is from, and he makes a very convincing argument that history is cyclical and any progress made often gets erased by the whims of time. 

Take the rise of fascism of in places like Hungary, Greece, and Italy. Or even the United States. Or how the gains in school segregation have been completely erased. Or how inequality is at its largest gap since the Gilded Age. These aren't old problems. They are just recycled from an earlier era and given new names like "neoliberalism" or "neofascism." 

It is quite possible after the end of Vietnam, the Civil Rights era and the fall of the Soviet Union, we were in an odd time of relative peace throughout the world. Yes, there was plenty of injustice still, but wars and violence have decreased drastically for the bulk of humanity in that time. But perhaps that time is over. Climate change is coming. Fascism is on the rise. Inequality is everywhere. Those factors are bubbling right at the surface. It is only a matter of time before it explodes.