Need Help With A New Year's Resolution

From our friend Ali Krishna in Gainesville...

I admit it. I'm obsessed. I'm a fanatic. I can't stop thinking about it. So I'm going to do something about it.

This year, I will beg, I will plead, implore, request, abjure, advocate, beseech, besiege, bribe, canvass, conjure, entreat, impetrate, importune, invoke, nag, obsecrate, obtest, petition, pray, press, requisition, solicit, supplicate, urge, woo, and ask all of you to PLEASE STOP EATING MEAT! (in between studying for my GRE's).

This year, the UN Conference on Climate Change was held in Copenhagen from December 7th-18th. Delegates from 192 countries negotiated global and shared solutions against global warming. Yet, show me in the itinerary where the livestock industry sat center stage, guilty as charge?

How long will our university's textbooks continue to ignore the impact of livestock production on climate change, human and environmental injustice?

Here in the US, articles in popular eco-magazines like Sierra publish articles articulating the importance of improving biofuels, limiting CO2, ending mountain top removal, controling mercury levels, boosting MPGs, and regulating coal ash. It seems to me like something is missing. Something very obvious, yet too inconvenient, even for Al Gore.

It's about the meat industry, stupid. But as Paul Goodman puts it, "No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties.''

Maybe I've gone ecocentric in my old age but I'm actually striving to be GAURA-centric. Over 1 billion people are currently suffering from starvation or malnutrition. If this world isn't about suffering, I wouldn't be here. I'm not claiming to be a saint but as Reno Sweeny puts it in the musical Anything Goes, "But now that I have seen the light, I eat grains by day and fruits by night."

Here are three recent articles, again demonstrating the symbiotic relationship of eating meat and climate change:

"Global Warming: the impact of meat production & consumption on climate change"

"India Tells West to Stop Eating Beef"

"People should give up eating meat to halt climate change"