• When assessing animal agriculture’s overall contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, estimates range dramatically depending on what is included in the calculation.
• The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations asserts that livestock are a leading cause of climate change, responsible for approximately 7,516 million tons of CO2e emissions per year, or 14.5 percent of annual global emissions.
• The FAO calculation includes the CO2 emitted when forests are cleared for animal feed crops and pastures, but it does not take into account the CO2 that those forests can no longer absorb. (Imagine a life insurance policy that covered the cost of the funeral but not future lost wages.) Among other things not included in its calculation is the CO2 exhaled by farmed animals, even though, in the words of one environmental-assessment specialist, “livestock (like automobiles) are a human invention and convenience, not part of pre-human times, and a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe.”
• When researchers at the Worldwatch Institute accounted for emissions that the FAO overlooked, they estimated that livestock are responsible for 32,564 million tons of CO2e emissions per year, or 51 percent of annual global emissions—more than all cars, planes, buildings, power plants, and industry combined.*
• We do not know for sure if animal agriculture is a leading cause of climate change or the leading cause of climate change.
• We know for sure that we cannot address climate change without addressing animal agriculture.
It Will Be Impossible to Defuse the Ticking Time Bomb Without Reducing Our Consumption of Animal Products
• Scientists estimate that to keep global warming at or below two degrees Celsius—the goal of the Paris accord—we have a CO2e emissions budget of 565 gigatons by 2050.
• According to a recent Johns Hopkins University report on the role of diet in climate control, “If global trends in meat and dairy intake continue, global mean temperature rise will more than likely exceed 2° C, even with dramatic emissions reductions across non-agricultural sectors.”
• Home-front efforts during WWII were not enough, on their own, to win the war, but the war could not have been won without home-front efforts. Changing how we eat will not be enough, on its own, to save the planet, but we cannot save the planet without changing how we eat.
Not All Actions Are Equal
• The most optimistic estimates suggest that, even assuming international cooperation, a global conversion to wind, water, and solar power would take more than twenty years and require a hundred-trillion-dollar investment.
• Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research: “The maths is brutally clear: while the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence [before] 2020.”
• Adjusted for inflation, the global cost of WWII was fourteen trillion dollars.
• The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children.
• Of those four actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases.
• Most people are not in the process of deciding whether to have a baby.
• Eighty-five percent of Americans drive to work. Few drivers can simply decide to stop using their cars.
• For Americans, 29 percent of air travel in 2017 was for business purposes, and 21 percent was for “personal non-leisure purposes.” Businesses must rely more on remote communication, “personal non-leisure” flights must be reduced, and personal leisure flights can and must be cut, but the fact remains that a sizable portion of air travel is unavoidable.
• Everyone will eat a meal relatively soon and can immediately participate in the reversal of climate change.
Not All Foods Are Equal
• Pounds of CO2e associated with a serving of each food:
Beef: 6.61
Cheese: 2.45
Pork: 1.72
Poultry: 1.26
Eggs: 0.89
Milk: 0.72
Rice: 0.16
Legumes: 0.11
Carrots: 0.07
Potatoes: 0.03
• Not eating animal products for breakfast and lunch has a smaller CO2e footprint than the average full-time vegetarian diet.
How to Prevent the Greatest Dying
• To meet the Paris accord’s two-degree goal, an individual’s annual CO2e budget must not exceed 2.1 metric tons by 2050.
• While citizens of different countries have dramatically different CO2e footprints—the average American’s is 19.8 metric tons per year, the average Frenchman’s is 6.6 metric tons per year, and the average Bangladeshi’s is 0.29 metric tons per year—the average global citizen has a CO2e footprint of approximately 4.5 metric tons per year.
• Not eating animal products for breakfast and lunch saves 1.3 metric tons per year.
III. ONLY HOME
Mapping Our Vision
There came a point at which the inhabitants of Mars were no longer able to deny the warming of their planet or the scale of the destruction to come. In a last, desperate attempt to maintain their civilization, they dug vast canals connecting the poles of the planet to the expanse of scorched land that covered the rest of its surface. The annual melt of the polar ice caps would produce water to grow enough crops to sustain at least another generation.
This final struggle against extinction was documented by the astronomer Percival Lowell from his private observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, at the end of the nineteenth century. Lowell was no quack—he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is credited for leading the effort that culminated in the discovery of Pluto—but given that Mars’s “nonnatural features” couldn’t be observed by any other astronomers of his time, his theory, which enthralled the public, was rejected by the scientific community. He continued to observe and make meticulous drawings of the Martian canals, and continued to insist, until his death, in 1916, that they were the last heroic attempts of a dying civilization to save itself.
Lowell didn’t initiate the search for Martian canals. In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported observing canali on Mars, thus launching a search among English-speaking astronomers for nonnatural features on the planet’s surface. Lowell was the only one to confirm Schiaparelli’s observations. Alas, the Italian word canali means “channels” (a naturally occurring feature, of which there are many on Mars), not “canals,” and was mistranslated into English.
When a NASA Mariner spacecraft flew by Mars in 1965, capturing the first photographs of the planet’s surface, the existence of canals was conclusively disproved. If Mars was once inhabited by intelligent life, either that civilization covered its tracks or evidence of its existence had been erased by time—as scientists say will be the case about twenty thousand years after the disappearance of humankind from Earth.
But it took another forty years to explain what Lowell had been observing and documenting all that time.
* * *
I am sitting at my grandmother’s bedside as I type these words. She has been living with my parents for the last few years, after a stint in an assisted-living facility proved to be too stressful for her. At this point, she sleeps most of the day. My mother tells me that my grandmother’s wish is to be woken up whenever someone comes to see her. It goes against so many of my instincts—never wake a sleeping baby, never wake a dying grandmother—but in this case, I act on what I know, not on what I feel. Her smile raises with her eyelids as if they are connected by threads.
She is as mentally present as ever. Despite—or because of—there being so many ultimate things to talk about, it feels as if there isn’t anything to talk about. So most of the
time, we just sit here quietly. Sometimes she stays awake, sometimes she falls back asleep. Sometimes I go downstairs and hang out with my parents while she rests. Sometimes, like now, I stay here. One of the ways that I’ve filled the hours has been to drive around the city to the neighborhoods and sites of my youth: Mr. L’s restaurant is gone; Higgers Drugs is gone; Politics and Prose bookstore moved across the street and spread like an empire; the Sheridan School playground has been overwhelmed by new classrooms; Fort Reno is still there, although Fugazi is no longer a band.
Everything is the wrong size. The “big hill” that my brother and I used to dare each other to bike down without braking is at most a gentle slope. The walk to school, which I remember taking nearly an hour, is only six blocks. But the school itself, which I remember as small, is enormous—many times larger than the school my children now attend. My sense of scale isn’t skewed in a particular direction, but it is badly skewed.
The strangest thing to reencounter was the home where I lived for the first nine years of life. In this case, it was not the physical scale that was skewed, but the emotional scale. I was sure I’d have strong feelings revisiting it for the first time in decades, but it was merely interesting, and I was happy enough to leave after ten minutes.
A few years ago, an artist conducted a series of lengthy interviews with each of my brothers and me, drawing out memories of our shared childhood home. What color is the front door? What do you see upon entering? Is the floor bare or covered? Approximately how many stairs are there? What do the banisters look like? Do the windows have coverings of any kind? How many bulbs are in the light fixture? (All her questions were in the present tense.) She then produced three distinct floor plans of the house, corresponding to our memories. The discrepancies were astounding: different configurations of rooms, different scales, even a different number of floors. How could that be? It was not some building we’d entered only a few times. It was the home in which we were raised. Maybe her experiment proved that memory is even less reliable than we suspect, or that we were too busy being kids to pay attention to our surroundings. But a far more unsettling possibility is that home—which we think of as being essential to the stories we invent and the stories we believe—isn’t nearly as powerful as we assume. Maybe home, in the end, is just a place.
* * *
After the Roman Empire’s fall, exotic plants bloomed across the Colosseum’s bloodstained ground, plants found nowhere else in Europe. They overcame the balustrades, choked the columns, relentlessly grew and grew. For a time, the Colosseum was the world’s greatest botanical garden, if an unintentional one. The seeds had been unknowingly transported in the pelts of the bulls, bears, tigers, and giraffes brought from thousands of miles away for the gladiators to slaughter. The plants occupied the Roman Empire’s absence.
When my grandmother and I used to go on weekend walks through the park, she would take a moment of rest at every bench—it would probably be more accurate to describe those Sunday hours as weekend rests punctuated by moments of walking. Usually we would sit in silence. Sometimes she would give me life advice: “Marry someone a little bit less intelligent than you”; “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich person”; “You paid for the bread in the basket, so you should take it.” More than once she placed her enormous hand on my knee and told me, “You are my revenge.”
This statement has always puzzled me, and I’ve arrived at different interpretations over the years. “Revenge” comes from the Latin word for “vengeance,” vindicare, meaning “to set free” or “to lay claim to.” To set something free again. To reclaim. The ultimate revenge against a genocide that is meant to eradicate you and your people is to create a family. The ultimate revenge against a force that tries to claim and imprison you is to set yourself free again, to reclaim your life. Maybe when she looked at her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, she saw something like a coliseum of thriving, colorful, distinctive life, spectacular precisely for its improbability. If we address the environmental crisis now, the future life we will have enabled—reclaimed, re-freed—to thrive might look the same.
* * *
It wasn’t until 2003 that the question of what Lowell had been seeing and documenting for all those years was finally answered. A retired optometrist, Sherman Schultz, noted that the modifications Lowell had made to his telescope turned it into something quite similar to the tool used to detect cataracts. The tiny aperture, which Lowell felt offered a clearer image of the planets he was observing, cast shadows of his own blood vessels and floaters in the vitreous body of his eye onto his retina, making them visible. By accident, Lowell took a tool that was invented to reveal the things that are farthest from a beholder’s eyes and altered it to reveal the things that are closest to them. He was born shortly after the Industrial Revolution—the period during which Western humanity most dramatically imposed its own vision on Earth, altering it forever. The maps Lowell drew of a dying civilization’s planet were maps of the structures and imperfections of his own eyes.
The house where I grew up has not shrunk, and neither have my grandmother’s hands. Just like Lowell, I misattribute phenomena I observe to external changes rather than internal ones. Even those of us who accept the fact of anthropogenic climate change deny our personal contribution to it. We believe that the environmental crisis is caused by large outside forces and therefore can be solved only by large outside forces. But recognizing that we are responsible for the problem is the beginning of taking responsibility for the solution.
The planet will get revenge on us, or we will be the planet’s revenge.
Home Is Almost Always Imperceptible
I am in Brooklyn, sitting on the floor of my son’s bedroom as I type these words. He spends virtually no waking time in here, and so, other than when putting away laundry, neither do I. Which is why I can still detect the subtle ways it smells different from the rest of the house: the almost imperceptible mold of the Landmark Books series he inherited from his uncle, the soap and shampoo that are unique to his bathroom, the stuffed-animal scents of bears, pigs, and tigers received for birthdays, won at carnivals, or exchanged for teeth.
Have you ever become suddenly aware of your home’s smell? Perhaps upon returning from a long trip? Or because a visitor mentions it? Under normal circumstances, we are literally unable to smell where we live—to smell anything that we are used to. According to the cognitive psychologist Pamela Dalton, after only about two inhales, “the receptors in your nose sort of switch off.” Having decided that an odor isn’t threatening, we stop paying attention to it. Get an air freshener and see if after a week you find yourself questioning whether it’s working. This rapid adaptation to smell is likely an evolutionary one: rather than expend our attention on something that we know is safe, we can direct our resources to detecting new, potentially dangerous stimuli in our environment. Many evolutionary biologists believe this arose from the need to detect when meat was no longer safe to eat.
It seems untrue that this phenomenon applies to sight and sound as well—that we stop hearing something after a few seconds of listening, or stop seeing after a few seconds of looking—but this is exactly what happens. While not as dramatic as with smell, sensory adaptation applies to all the senses. People who live beside construction sites tend not to hear the racket. When you rest your hand on a dog, you at first feel the warmth and fur, but after only a few moments you become unaware of touching anything at all. The sky is in my field of vision for most of the day, but other than when I deliberately focus my attention on something—a daytime moon, a rainbow—I am capable of forgetting that the sky is there at all. What is always there stops being there.
For most people, home is the most familiar, least threatening place. Because of that, it is also the place we are least capable of accurately perceiving.
Glimpses of Home
You have to achieve at least twenty thousand miles of distance from Earth in order to see it as a globe. “The Blue Mar
ble” was not the first photograph of Earth, but it was the first of the fully illuminated whole. The photo that came to be one of the most reprinted and recognizable images not just of Earth but on Earth was taken on a somewhat illicit impulse. “Photo sessions were scheduled events in a rigorous flight plan that detailed every step essential to success,” wrote the filmmaker Al Reinert. “The film itself was strictly rationed like everything else on those perilous flights; there were 23 magazines onboard for the 70mm Hasselblad cameras, twelve color and eleven black-and-white, all intended for serious documentation purposes. They weren’t supposed to be looking out the window, either.”
Apollo 17 was the last manned mission to the moon, and when the crew reached their destination, they collected the largest number of lunar samples to date. But the images of Earth have proved to be its most enduring contribution to humankind. As the Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders—the man who took “Earthrise,” a photograph that preceded “The Blue Marble”—put it, “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”
Many have attributed the rise of the environmental movement to those first photographs of Earth. Some credit the planet’s apparent fragility in the images—alone, unsupported, and suspended in black—for inspiring a collective desire to protect it.
Astronauts have been profoundly moved, and changed, by the sight of Earth from space. It wasn’t when he landed on the moon that Alan Shepard cried, but when he looked back at his home planet. The experience is so powerful and consistent among space travelers that it has been given a name, the “overview effect.”
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