Sources for Thinking About Climate Change and Diet re Foer's We Are the Weather

 

My spur to deeper inquiry & perhaps some knowledge

This brief bibliography and videography is an addendum to my review of this book. The review was critical (and included praise as well). I stated several contentions that I didn't cite. This brief piece provides some sources of my thinking and my general outlook toward the challenge of climate change, diet, and our political economy. Needless to say, this could be a much, much longer document. But I think it covers sources for particular contentions that I made and informs any reader about my general attitude on these issues. 

1. 1     Climate Change Generally

1. Two thinkers who've most influenced how I think about climate change

1. 1. William Patrick Ophuls. His books (linked to my reviews)

1. Ecology & the Politics of Scarcity Revisited by William Ophuls & A. Stephen Boyan, Jr.

2. Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment & the Challenge of the Next Millennium by William Ophuls

3. Back to the Future: A Review of Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology by Patrick (William) Ophuls

4. Decline & Fall in the 21st Century: A Review of Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail by William Ophuls

5. Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences by William (Patrick) Ophuls

2. Thomas Homer-Dixon, The following three books by Homer-Dixon create a trilogy of books dealing with climate change and related issues. 

1. The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? by Thomas Homer-Dixon

2. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization by Thomas Homer-Dixon (to my chagrin, I realize that I haven’t written a review of this fine work. Something to fix). 

3. Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril by Thomas Homer-Dixon

2. My best resource about the current situation & prospects regarding climate change: Uninhabitable Earth; Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (2019)

2. On Diet in General

1. Gary Taubes: Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)) and Why We Get Fat & What We Can Do About It (2011) & all his books published since then. 

2. Nina Teicholz, Big Fat Lie (2014) and this 2021 Youtube video, “The Science & Politics of Red Meat 2021” 

3. On Agriculture, Plant & Livestock

1. Sacred Cow, documentary film available on Amazon & iTunes. (There is a companion book as well, but I haven’t read it yet.) 

2. Kiss the Ground documentary film available on Netflix. 

3. Eating Less Meat Won’t Save the Planet. Here’s Why and   Are Cows really Bad for the Planet? Why did we start blaming them?  From the “What I’ve Learned” video essayist Joseph Everett. (Although somewhat redundant, it’s worth your time to watch both. As usual with Everett, thoroughly researched and well-presented.) 

4. Sustainable/Regenerative Agriculture

1. Changing Paradigms: Regenerative Agriculture: a Solution to our Global Crisis? | Full Documentary. About Australian farmer Charlie Massy about his experience in traditional and regenerative farming. 

2. How regenerative farming can help heal the planet and human health. Charles Massy TEDx talk. 

3. Running out of Time | Documentary on Holistic Management. Zimbabwe farmer Allan Savory on holistic management of his farm. 

4. Cows, Carbon & Climate. Virginia farmer Joel Salatin’s TEDx talk. 

5. Mainstream Press Articles: Recent & Relevant

1. Meat Is Murder. But You Know That Already by Mark Bittman in the NYT is a well-considered review of We Are the Weather that anticipated many of my concerns about Foer’s shortcomings. I still nevertheless disagree with Bittman on some points. He still peddles the “meat is bad for you” line, but he understands the need for pricing accurately (all costs of production of any foods), the problems of industrial plant agriculture, Big Food, & junk food. N.B. I almost didn’t read this review because I found the title insipid, and I feared that the article would prove likewise. I’m happy that this didn’t prove so.  

2. The Washington Post ran three op-ed pieces in one day (15 May), well after I posted my review, but still relevant. They are: 

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/beef-isnt-bhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ditching-meat-isnt-the-answer-for-climate-change-better-farming-is/2021/05/14/86001c36-b426-11eb-ab43-bebddc5a0f65_story.htmleing-banned-but-its-always-a-staple-of-the-culture-war-diet/2021/05/14/6c58919e-b423-11eb-ab43-bebddc5a0f65_story.html

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-meat-industry-is-doing-exactly-what-big-oil-does-to-fight-climate-action/2021/05/14/831e14be-b3fe-11eb-ab43-bebddc5a0f65_story.html

3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ditching-meat-isnt-the-answer-for-climate-change-better-farming-is/2021/05/14/86001c36-b426-11eb-ab43-bebddc5a0f65_story.html

6. A rebuttal site with a downloadable pdf attachment from “What I’ve Learned” guy Joseph Everett in response to criticisms of his two video essays listed above. This guy does his homework. 

7. As you can imagine, this list could go on forever, and should. We’re still learning and will all have to constantly calibrate our positions as new (dependable) information becomes available. Thanks to Jonathan Safran Foer for starting my internal conversation and the spur to look into the issues his book raised. 

            

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 16 May 2021

 

On Tyranny

Timothy Snyder

What is truth?” Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

If we think of death in Wedge terms, our assured demise is the ultimate stressor, and thus our motivation to make choices that mean something. Death is the stake that all of us are born with. No matter our triumphs or failures, death will always be waiting. With the end inevitable, it’s only our choices that matter. In other words, life is the wedge between birth and death.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Suffice it to say, breath is the most basic wedge—one that that we’re all born with.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

Freedom, which is theoretically only a methodological tool [in liberalism], becomes a positive value; and as such it is equated with other things made into positive values—e.g., the exclusion of “exclusionary” religions promotes a secularist othodoxy; the exclusion of exclusionary philosophies promotes a pragmatic orthodoxy; the exclusion of exclusionary political systems promotes a democratic orthodoxy. No amount of verbal play will keep these “procedural” bans from taking on a positive coloration of orthodoxy in a supposedly value-free system.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Thus I would expect (or hope) that a future religion would transcend tribalism and take a more cosmic stance, expounding a universalist teaching that offers abundant spiritual succor and moral support without having recourse to the Grand Inquisitor’s miracle, mystery, and authority. An inkling of such a teaching is perhaps to be found in the Upanishads or the Tao Te Ching.

History Man

Fred Inglis

Philosophy in this book [Speculum Mentis] is crowned queen of the sciences; art, absolutely necessary to us as the first vehicle of explanation of ourselves to ourselves, cannot get beyond its own contradictions, standing as it is athwart our intuition of the world and our expression of our feelings about it (which is which, for heaven’s sake?), defying us to tell the difference between imagined circumstances and our substantive thought.

Pure, White, and Deadly

John Yudkin

Sucrose, the chemical name for the subject of this book, is one of three common disaccharides. It is made up of one unit of glucose joined to one unit of fructose. When digested, a mixture of equal amounts of glucose and fructose, called "invert sugar," is produced. There is reason to believe that it is the fructose part of sucrose that is responsible for many of the undesirable effects of sucrose in the body.

N.B. This book was first published in 1972 & re-issued in 2013 with a foreword by Dr. Robert H. Lustig; update with Gary Taubes's The Case Against Sugar (2016).