A couple of years ago I was reading John Robbins' wonderful book "
The Food Revolution" and came across a statistic that blew me away. It was so incredible it moved my husband to finally give up meat. He had already given up beef, pork and turkey but chicken was tough. I'll summarize Mr. Robbins' findings:
Installing low-flow shower heads
John Robbins points out that to conserve water, many of us have replaced the old 3-gallon-per-minute shower heads with 2-gallon-per-minute (or less) low-flow showerheads. If you take a daily 7 minute shower using a low-flow shower head, you'll save almost 2,500 gallons of water per year.
Giving up one pound of beef
To produce one pound of beef takes between 2500 and 5200 gallons of water. So by giving up just ONE POUND of beef a year, you could save double the water you'd save in a year's worth of showers.
If that doesn't convice you to eat fewer hamburgers, maybe these will. (There are thousands of articles with statistics just like these. Just search the web for environment and water.
Here's an example.)
In a world teeming with people suffering from profound hunger and malnutrition, more than 70% of the grain produced in the United States is fed to livestock.
Water needed to produce 1 pound of wheat: 25 gallons; Water needed to produce 1 pound of meat: 2,500 gallons
55 square feet of tropical rainforest are destroyed for the production of every fast-food hamburger made from rainforest beef. (There are more species of birds in one square mile of Amazon rainforest than in all of North America.)
An estimated 70% of the clearing of the Amazon is for cattle pasture.
The amount of water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer would float a (Naval) destroyer. (Newsweek article "The Browning of America")
Production of excrement by total US human population: 12,000 pounds/second; production of excrement by US livestock: 250,000 pounds/second
I love watching people. It fascinates me that people who live in the same area, with fairly similar lifestyles can be so different. Lately, I've started noticing people's environmental habits.This morning, at Panera, I couldn't help noticing the woman beside me getting coffee. She had purchased the same items as me - a bagel with cream cheese and a coffee. But, to be fair to her, she got hers to go. To make a point, I've decided to blog the environmental impact of her decisions vs. mine. In this case, as in golf, the lower score wins.
And the results are in...
I'm not saying I'm a perfect environmentalist. Far from it. If I was, I'd stay home, harvest wheat from my fields, grind it into flour, make sugar from sugar cane my neighbor grows, get water from the well... you get the picture.
My point is, when you go to a restaurant like Panera and get a bagel and coffee to go, consider the environmental impact of every item you throw away. You'll be amazed at your score.
POSTED BY Wendy Richardson co-author of Nerdy Books AT 8:59 AM 1 comments
I tend to make things more complicated than they really are. Composting is a good example. Building that wooden pallet compost bin was a compromise for me. I had planned to build one of those 3-bin systems like you see on the Master Composter web site. According to the "Master Composter", he (or she) uses 3-bins: one for composting, one for storing leaves in the fall, and one for slow-composters like twigs and holly leaves. So I figured if a master composter uses a 3-bin system, that's what I should use.I have the space to build a 3-bin system - I just don't have the time. Most of my friends don't have the space or the time. For those that have the space, my country-bumpkin compost bin made from thrown away wooden pallets might not be appropriate or well accepted by their neighbors.
The other day I thought: what if you just dug a hole and threw in your kitchen scraps. Wouldn't that work? I did a quick search on Google for digging a hole and compost and about 50,000 results came up. Who knew? One of the links went to that wonderful Master Composter site where it says:
They also describe another method, "In-Soil Digestion". You can find details here, but to summarize:
There are plenty of web sites describing this method. Here are a few:
www.mastercomposter.com/more/moremeth.html
www.lewisgardens.com/compost.htm
www.nyccompost.org/how/foodrecycling.html
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/earthknd/compost/compost.html
POSTED BY Wendy Richardson co-author of Nerdy Books AT 10:09 AM 0 comments