The Green New Meal: What You Eat Impacts Us All

By Michael Betzold

Urgent issues abound today. But nothing is so overwhelming as the rapidly worsening climate emergency. The survival of civilization itself is in peril. The lives of our own children and grandchildren, and of future generations worldwide, are at stake.
We must act. The good news is there's something we all can do: match our consumption patterns with our ethical values and our moral obligations. A "Green New Deal" is essential, but it's not enough. Michael Betzold summarizes the overwhelming research evidence that must inform the effective, rational, simple, everyday action needed to meet the existential challenge we face. It starts with your next meal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667826707

Book preview

A Priceless Inheritance

Through most of history, only the wealthiest or the most talented could bequeath to their offspring material or artistic treasures. Because human civilization is now at an unprecedented crossroads, anyone—rich or poor, accomplished or unsuccessful—today can leave to their children and grand-children something of great value: a fighting chance to survive. But if you don’t act very soon, you’ll leave them nothing but apocalypse.

Our gift to those who will follow us in this world requires only that we be willing to jettison a habit that harms all inhabitants of our planet. If enough of us embrace this unique opportunity and do so quickly, we can leave behind a transformed world of more kindness. Doesn’t that seem like an easy choice? Believe me: it is. So why isn’t it happening? Why is the step we must take often left out of the discussion altogether?

Daily Alarm Bells

On June 7, 2021, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography reported that the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere had once again hit a new all-time high—as it has every year since the institution began measuring that green-house gas at the peak of Mauna Loa in Hawaii in 1956.

This record CO2 level got little attention. Many media outlets didn’t even report it, and those that did buried the story deep down in the daily lineup of political bickering, hate crimes, and celebrity gossip. It elicited, at most, a collective shrug. Same old story, nothing new.

Another bit of alarming yet unsurprising news on that same day was the extreme spring drought in the Western U.S. states. National Public Radio’s Eric Westervelt reported: The record-setting heat wave’s remarkable power, size and unusually early appearance is giving meteorologists and climate experts yet more cause for concern about the routinization of extreme weather in an era of climate change. The Wall Street Journal headlined its story about the potentially deadly consequences: Western States at Risk of Blackouts as Hydroelectric Power Dries Up.

In Michigan, we weren’t directly affected by this, but my partner’s daughter lives in Phoenix, so it got our attention. But for most Americans, it was just another shrill climate alarm sounding. We’ve grown quite used to that noise, since hardly a day goes by without such alarms. For a lot of people, they barely register any more.

Isn’t it remarkable that we’ve grown accustomed to living with the most daunting, overwhelming, frightening prospect in human history? That such signs of the impending collapse of our civilization don’t even command the attention of most people? Extreme and even deadly weather events clearly caused by human-made climate disruption are now routine.

As these latest alarms went off, my partner’s great-granddaughter was starting her thirteenth month of life. With every climate wake-up call, we are again jolted into clearer awareness that much of her life could be a struggle for survival in an unimaginably hellish world. That thought is intolerable, and not just because we know how serious and often understated the threat to her future is. It’s flabbergasting, because we’re certain that news reports will continue to pass over a key aspect of the climate story. Why don’t they say that despite the enormity of the threat, we each hold the power to do something to prevent catastrophe? If more of us would act more responsibly, we could still avert the disaster. But for some reason, that isn’t part of the news.

About the new carbon dioxide peak, Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory, was quoted as saying: The solution is right before our eyes. … Solar energy and wind are already cheaper than fossil fuels and they work at the scales that are required. …If we take real action soon, we might still be able to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Tans is right that we need to act soon, but what he describes as real action that might