We Are the Weather

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  There is a Jewish mourning tradition called kriah, which means “ripping.” The close relatives of someone who has died rip a piece of their clothing, to symbolize the grief that they feel. When Bubbe was taken from this room, I felt a ripping—I felt that she was being cut off from me.

  Julian and Jeremy are downstairs. Grandma and Pops. Frank’s down there, too. I’ll join them in a minute, but I wanted a bit more time in here. Bubbe didn’t leave this room for the last months of her life. I have become so used to thinking of it as her final room that I all but forgot that it was my childhood bedroom. It was in here that I read The Catcher in the Rye, learned my haftorah, heard OK Computer for the first time, scrutinized my first pimples, shaved for the first time, read Lolita, studied for the SATs, rehearsed one thousand times how I would ask someone to prom. I have forgotten every word of my haftorah, along with the plot of The Catcher in the Rye, and I haven’t spoken to my prom date in a quarter of a century. But those experiences couldn’t have mattered more to me while I was having them, and I’m still inhaling molecules that I exhaled then. We are connected to ourselves and others across space and time, and so we have obligations to ourselves and others, no matter the distances.

  What was that artist saying with those images he launched into orbit? We were here? We mattered?

  Nobody would question whether Bubbe’s life mattered. She was blessed with many things, but she was cursed by history—cursed by her courage and wisdom and resilience—to be larger than life. When she would share her superheroic life story with my Hebrew school class, or even when she spoke in the intimacy of her living room, she was never just my grandma speaking—she was a representative, an idea as much as a person. We hugged her because we loved her, but also because we felt, even as children, an obligation to all that our arms could not wrap around.

  When Bubbe made sacrifices, the need couldn’t have been more obvious. She walked more than twenty-five hundred miles, endured freezing temperatures, illness, and malnutrition, so that the Nazis wouldn’t kill her. And when Grandma and Julian were born, it was obvious why she would clip coupons, and organize pennies into paper rolls, and patch the ripped patches on their well-worn clothing. She needed to keep her children housed and healthy.

  Facing climate change requires an entirely different kind of heroism, which is far less intimidating than escaping a genocidal army, or not knowing where your children’s next meal will come from, but is perhaps every bit as difficult because the need for sacrifice is unobvious.

  I grew up in this room, and Bubbe died in this room. This room held some of the most important of our family’s dramas. It was our home. But it wasn’t built for us. People lived here before us, and there will be others after us. We have obligations to those people—even to people who don’t yet exist—just as my brothers and I felt an obligation to the things Bubbe did before we were born, and just as she felt an obligation to us before we existed.

  An image just entered my mind, as if I were about to take off in an airplane rather than descend the stairs and rejoin the others. An image as fleeting and enduring as a breath. I’m thinking about when we took a narrow boat down the Erie Canal. You guys were nine and six. Before they gave us the key, we had to attend a twenty-minute orientation. Remember when the instructor asked if we knew how to tie boating knots? And without waiting for our answer, he said, “Well, if you can’t tie knots, tie lots?” I loved that. We loved that. We loved scrutinizing the spiral-bound book of nautical maps (despite the canal offering no navigational options), and we loved how fast our ark felt compared with how slow it was—remember all the joggers who passed us on the banks? We loved radioing ahead to the lock masters, making s’mores on the single burner, watching the Monopoly money get taken by a breeze so strong we never saw it land, peeing off the back of the boat simply because we could, revving the meek engine simply because we could, eating the hot-chocolate powder simply because we could, tying lots of knots in the hot rain. You begged to jump into the water from atop the boat. I had to fight against my reflex to protect you from what was perfectly safe. I remember the two of you in the air: Cy’s smile, his hands clasped in front of him as if to hold the moment like a firefly. And Sasha’s hair, his ribs, his right fist raised in … what? In what? Triumph over fear? An inherited fight-or-flight reflex that predates Homo sapiens? Love of life?

  “To whom do I speak today?” the author of the first suicide note repeats over and over as he enumerates the arguments for giving up. The soul instructs him to “cling to life,” comparing death with “taking a man out of his house.”

  It is not enough to say that we want more life; we must refuse to stop saying it. Suicide notes are written once; life notes must always be written—by having honest conversations, bridging the familiar with the unfamiliar, planting messages for the future, digging up messages from the past, digging up messages from the future, disputing with our souls and refusing to stop. And we must do this together: everyone’s hand wrapped around the same pen, every breath of everyone exhaling the shared prayer. “Thus we shall make a home together,” the soul concludes at the end of the suicide note, perhaps beginning its opposite. Each of us arguing with ourselves, we shall make a home together.

  Appendix: 14.5 percent / 51 percent

  Two of the most frequently cited reports on animal agriculture’s contributions to the environmental crisis—Livestock’s Long Shadow from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in 2006 and “Livestock and Climate Change” from the Worldwatch Institute in 2009—provide two different sets of numbers on what is one of the most important data points in all environmental science: the percentage of greenhouse gas emissions produced by the livestock sector. This number is a species of super-statistic that incorporates and simplifies a vast complexity, and is the most straightforward argument for why changing our relationship with animal products is so crucial.

  Livestock’s Long Shadow was the first report of its kind to gain widespread attention, and when it claimed that animal agriculture caused 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, it attracted applause and criticism. Mostly, however, it triggered alarm: 18 percent was more than the entire transport sector combined. It was therefore surprising when, in 2009, the Worldwatch Institute published its report in response to Livestock’s Long Shadow, claiming that animal agriculture was not responsible for 18 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, but in fact at least 51 percent. “If this argument is right,” state the authors in their introduction, “it implies that replacing livestock with better alternatives would be the best strategy for reversing climate change.” They recommend a 25 percent reduction in the number of livestock worldwide, which, they clarify, “can be made to happen in select locations so that livestock populations in poor rural communities would remain entirely intact.”

  It’s worth pausing on how those two very different numbers were reached, as it is not only of great scientific importance but also reveals how our understanding of our planet can be so out of whack with reality.

  Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang authored the Worldwatch report, which is called “Livestock and Climate Change: What If the Key Actors in Climate Change Are … Cows, Pigs, and Chickens?” (Their ellipsis, not mine.) Those eager to challenge the credibility of the study, including the authors of Livestock’s Long Shadow, claim that it was not peer-reviewed. Others—including Anhang and Goodland themselves—maintain that it was, and that the self-published FAO report was not.

  Jeff Anhang works for the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation. Robert Goodland, who passed away in 2014, was an ecologist, a professor, and a lead environmental adviser to the World Bank Group. He had a Ph.D. in environmental science and served as president of the International Association of Impact Assessment. After he retired from the Worldwatch Institute in 2001, he directed environmental and social impact assessment studies on more than a dozen worldwide projects. In other words, he was not an animal rights guy and not a
hobbyist.

  In a 2012 piece he wrote for The New York Times, Goodland said the following:

  The key difference between the 18 percent and the 51 percent figures is that the latter accounts for how exponential growth in livestock production (now more than 60 billion land animals per year), accompanied by large scale deforestation and forest-burning, have caused a dramatic decline in the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity, along with large and accelerating increases in volatilization of soil carbon.

  In the executive summary of their Worldwatch report, Goodland and Anhang expand this point, arguing that the forgone carbon absorption associated with the livestock industry’s deforestation should be accounted for:

  The FAO counts emissions attributable to changes in land use due to the introduction of livestock, but only the relatively small amount of GHGs [greenhouse gases] from changes each year. Strangely, it does not count the much larger amount of annual GHG reduction from photosynthesis that are forgone by using 26 percent of land worldwide for grazing livestock and 33 percent of arable land for growing feed, rather than allowing it to regenerate forest. By itself, leaving a significant amount of tropical land used for grazing livestock and growing feed to regenerate as forest could potentially mitigate as much as half (or even more) of all anthropogenic GHGs.

  In their 2010 follow-up, which they published to answer questions from the public, Goodland and Anhang defend the choice to include forgone carbon absorption, stating: “We believe that counting a forgone reduction of any magnitude is valid because it has exactly the same effect as an increase in emissions of the same magnitude.”

  Goodland and Anhang identify and correct many other uncounted, overlooked, and misallocated livestock-related greenhouse gas emissions in the FAO report. Among them: overlooked land use, undercounted methane, and undercounted livestock. They also claim that the FAO overapplied data from Minnesota, which is a problem because livestock operations there are more efficient than they are in the developing world, where the sector is expanding the fastest. Goodland and Anhang write that in some sections, Livestock’s Long Shadow “uses lower numbers than appear in FAO statistics and elsewhere.” In addition, the FAO fails to account for deforestation in some countries (like Argentina) and omits farmed fish from its calculation.

  Finally, the FAO does not account for the “substantially higher amount of GHGs attributable” to livestock products versus plant-based alternatives. Livestock products need to be refrigerated, which requires fluorocarbons—compounds that have a global warming potential (GWP) up to several thousand times higher than that of CO2. Cooking animal products is more GHG-intensive than cooking alternative foods is. The FAO overlooks emissions associated with liquid waste disposal and animal by-products—like bones, fur, fat, and feathers—which are either disposed of or distributed.

  Goodland and Anhang also point out that the FAO authors used outdated information. For example, the FAO report used a methane GWP of 23 on a one-hundred-year timeframe, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change supports a GWP of 25. (On a twenty-year time frame, methane’s GWP is 72.) Using the outdated number, the FAO calculates that methane is responsible for 3.7 percent of worldwide GHG emissions. “When methane GWP is adjusted to the 20-year timeframe,” Goodland and Anhang counter, “livestock methane is responsible for 11.6 percent of worldwide GHGs. Recalculation increases GHGs from livestock by 5,047 million tons of CO2e.” Put most simply, when you adjust for methane’s extra heat-trapping power over a shorter time frame, it contributes a higher proportion of emissions.

  Imagine you were outside on a hot summer day and someone handed you a blanket. He tells you that you have to wear this blanket for ten hours. For the first two hours, it will be an electric blanket, three times more powerful than a regular blanket. Then the electricity will turn off. Asking whether to calculate emissions based on a twenty-year time frame or a hundred-year time frame is the difference between asking, “How hot did this blanket make you for the first two hours?” and “How hot did this blanket make you overall?”

  Now imagine that in theory your body could handle the overall heat, but the overall heat was irrelevant, because those first two hours were so hot you experienced heatstroke and had to go to the hospital. Because we have less than twenty years to address climate change, some scientists argue that we should calculate the short-term GWPs of greenhouse gases. Two degrees of global warming is a “tipping point,” after which positive feedback loops might trigger uncontrollable warming, effectively killing us.

  The FAO also “uses citations for various aspects of GHGs attributable to livestock dating back to such years as 1964, 1982, 1993, 1999, and 2000. Emissions today would be much higher.”

  Another major source of carbon dioxide emissions was not counted in Livestock’s Long Shadow: livestock respiration. The FAO authors Henning Steinfeld and Tom Wassenaar claim that livestock respiration should not be counted, arguing: “Emissions from livestock respiration are part of a rapidly cycling biological system, where the plant matter consumed was itself created through the conversion of atmospheric CO2 into organic compounds.” Since the emitted and absorbed quantities are considered to be equivalent, livestock respiration is not considered to be a net source under the Kyoto Protocol. (The Kyoto Protocol set internationally binding emission reduction targets. It was adopted in 1997, and its first commitment period began in 2008.)

  Goodland and Anhang, however, put forth a highly persuasive argument in favor of counting livestock respiration and claim that it is considered a net source under the Kyoto Protocol. They point out that livestock are not essential for human life and that huge swaths of the human population eat few to no animal products. “Today,” Goodland and Anhang state, “tens of billions more livestock are exhaling CO2 than in pre-industrial days, while Earth’s photosynthetic capacity … has declined sharply as forest has been cleared.” They then cite an estimate that CO2 from livestock respiration accounts for 21 percent of anthropogenic GHGs worldwide. In the follow-up piece, Goodland and Anhang add that “carbon flowing into the atmosphere from animal respiration and soil oxidation exceeds that absorbed due to photosynthesis by 1–2 billion tons per year.”

  In short, unlike wild buffalo roaming precolonial America, industrial livestock operations are not a part of a natural carbon cycle—especially considering how many of the planet’s carbon-absorbing forests have been destroyed either to make room for the animals or to make room for growing the corn and soy to feed them—and it is no longer possible for livestock to live in natural harmony with the planet’s photosynthetic processes.

  Which is why, in addition to accounting for cow gas, Goodland and Anhang argue that it is also necessary to account for forgone carbon absorption caused by livestock-motivated deforestation. This is an especially relevant toll because the livestock industry is clearing the kinds of forests that have the greatest photosynthetic capacity:

  Growth in markets for livestock products is greatest in developing countries, where rainforest normally stores at least 200 tons of carbon per hectare. Where forest is replaced by moderately degraded grassland, the tonnage of carbon stored per hectare is reduced to 8. On average, each hectare of grazing land supports no more than one head of cattle, whose carbon content is a fraction of a ton. In comparison, over 200 tons of carbon per hectare may be released within a short time after forest and other vegetation are cut, burned, or chewed.

  Using their new calculations, the Worldwatch authors claim that animal agriculture is in fact responsible for at least 32,564 million tons of annual GHG emissions in CO2e, compared with the 7,516 million tons estimated by the FAO.

  In 2011, a scathing commentary on the Worldwatch study ran in Animal Feed Science and Technology. In their response, titled “Livestock and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: The Importance of Getting the Numbers Right,” the authors (Mario Herrero et al.) repeatedly cite the “widely recognized” and “well documented” Livestock’s Long Shadow and then attack and dismantle the credibility of t
he Worldwatch report, claiming it was not peer-reviewed and implying that it includes “major deviations from international protocols.” The commentary fails to acknowledge that two of its authors were also authors of Livestock’s Long Shadow.

  When contacted by The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2012, Anhang claimed that their study was, in fact, peer-reviewed. “As an employee of the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, Jeff Anhang was required to have peer review on any report he had his name on,” writes the journalist Vance Lehmkuhl, who goes on to say that he “pressed Goodland and Anhang on this question and received details on the researchers and institutions who had reviewed the Worldwatch draft prior to publication, as well as those that have cited it subsequently. On the other hand, Livestock’s Long Shadow may or may not have been peer-reviewed. FAO cites no such process (nor does the Herrero et al. commentary) and I was unable to find any reference to peer review in any coverage of LLS. I emailed Mario Herrero for clarification on this but have received no reply.”

  Anhang pointed out to me that the Worldwatch work was actually peer-reviewed twice—once before appearing as an article published in Animal Feed Science and Technology, and once again in the form of post-publication peer review in a 2010 Worldwatch article.

  Later in 2011, Goodland and Anhang wrote a response to the response to their report (which itself was a response to another report), in which they counterargue the counterarguments to their original counterargument.

  Then, in 2012, Goodland published a piece in The New York Times, “FAO Yields to Meat Industry Pressure on Climate Change.” “Frank Mitloehner,” Goodland writes, “known for his claim that 18 percent is much too high a figure to use in the U.S., was announced last week as the chair of a new partnership between the meat industry and FAO. FAO’s new partners include the International Meat Secretariat and International Dairy Federation. Their stated objective is to ‘assess the environmental performance of the livestock sector’ and ‘to improve that performance.’” Goodland claims that this new partnership isn’t surprising, considering the lead author and coauthor of Livestock’s Long Shadow “later wrote to prescribe more factory farming, not less, and no limit on meat,” whereas the World Bank urges institutions to “‘avoid funding large-scale commercial, grain-fed feedlot systems and industrial milk, pork, and poultry production.’”