Fire and Knowledge

Even with … cautious parameters, selected in a biased manner to draw a maximally optimistic conclusion, the number of species doomed each year is 27,000. Each day it is 74, and each hour 3.

If past species have lived on the order of a million years in the absence of human interference, a common figure for some groups documented in the fossil record, it follows that the normal “background” extinction rate is about one species per one million species a year. Human activity has increased extinction between 1,000 and 10,000 times over this level in the rain forest by reduction in area alone. Clearly we are in the midst of one of the great extinction spasms of geological history.

–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 280

Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing or forgetting.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 84

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 18

Joel Salatin, a farmer in Virginia (one of the best in America, as far as I know), wrote an interesting diatribe about how everything he wants to do is illegal. He can’t slaughter his own animals, collaborate marketing with neighbors, charge for farm tours, or build the house he wanted without government interference. If you don’t know much about how government makes life hard for small, environmentally-conscious farmers, you should definitely read this.

I learned about Joel in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and was really taken with his permacultural methods of farming. Someday my wife and I hope to visit his farm and attend one of his seminars.

This article made it on the homepage of del.icio.us, which is very encouraging. In fact, I have been very encouraged over the past year about how environmentally / agriculturally-aware our culture is becoming. It is still a very small segment to be sure, but it is starting to catch on. Thank God.

My hope is that someday feedlots, industrial agriculture, pollution, and destructive mining and foresting practices will be as reprehensible to us as racism.

How can I resist posting a picture of my cat? Isn’t that what blogs are for, anyway? I post boring quotes every day but rarely use this blog in line with blogging’s greatest strength: cat pictures.

Here’s Hobbes:

We found him and a couple other siblings in our garage a while back. We kept this one and took the others to the animal shelter. He’s still deciding if he wants to keep us, I think.

Rheobatrachus silus [is] an Australian frog that swallows its fertilized eggs, broods tadpoles in its stomach, and gives birth to young frogs through its mouth.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “Here Goes Nothing” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 294

Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers.

–Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), 417

In the current regulatory environment, the rules make small-scale traditional food production and distribution almost impossible. Selling home-baked bread, or any food prepared in a home kitchen, is prohibited by most, if not all, health codes in the United States. Livestock for sale (with the exception of poultry, in most places) may not be slaughtered by the farmers who raise them; instead they must be trucked to anonymous factory-like commercial slaughterhouses. Milk and other dairy products may not be sold without pasteurization, which diminishes nutritional quality, digestibility, and flavor. Cider, too, is nearly always required to be pasteurized or irradiated. In other words, real food, increasingly illegal, is being replaced by processed food products. Laws dictating food standards are driven by the model of mass production, where sterility and uniformity are everything, rendering much of the trade in local food technically illegal. Eating well has become an act of civil disobedience.

–Sandor Ellix Katz, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements [source].