As a request, It's been suggested to me that I should post again, in greater length and detail the subject of the last post. I want to do that, I think it's a good subject and was disappointed in how the last one came out because of it's limited length. The topic is Living deliberately; moral based decision making.
“How much evil throughout history could have been avoided had people
exercised their moral acuity with convectional courage and said to the
powers that be, 'No, I will not. This is wrong, and I don't care if you
fire me, shoot me, pass me over for promotion, or call my mother, I
will not participate in this unsavory activity.' Wouldn't world history
be rewritten if just a few people had actually acted like individual
free agents rather than mindless lemmings?”
-Joel Salatin, "Everything I Want to do is Illegal."
We are living in a very bad age in history. Easy to say not just bad but the worst. We live in the most violent and wasteful of all times. We in the last One Hundred years as a global population have killed more people than the entire of human history, and we have created more permanent waste in the last Fifty years than every would have been thought possible. We have advanced so far in our technology many of us now believe we are free from the chains of nature. That we now have the unquestionable power to live exclusively by our own will and means. Of course this is wrong, technology can never sustain us alone as it itself is depended on the natural world just as much as we are. Thanks to all this we are now in a unique position, a position of choice, one that as mankind we have never been in before. We have two choices; the first is to continue down our path to destruction, and bring ourselves to the most common of pagan finales: our own destruction, or we can chose a more enlightened path and choose to stop our evil ways and learn to live as equals with the natural world.
Lets take a look briefly at the first choice. We're going to look at it through American commercial agriculture. And to narrow it down further we're going to look at three things, Corn, Soy and Wheat. I'm sorry that these figures are going to be old, but they are current enough to be relevant, and bad enough that the change since then is only worse. **
Millions of Acres
Corn; 72.7
Soy; 72.7
Wheat; 53
In the United States there are approximately 382 Million acres of land in use for crop production. So looking at the three previous numbers we can see that they account for nearly 50% of the agricultural land.
Now lets take a look at each of the three individually.
Corn:
"According to the National Corn Growers Association, about eighty percent
of all corn grown in the U.S. is consumed by domestic and overseas livestock,
poultry, and fish production."** I don't even really want to touch on that as I'm assuming most of you are familiar with factory farming and grain-fed livestock / fish, If your not maybe we'll talk about it some other time or you could read one of the great books by Joel Salatin or Michael Pollan. Its much to large of a topic alone for me to get into. In short though Eighty percent of one of Americas largest crops is going to feed things that if we were to change our systems to a natural system would have things to eat already. Cattle should be grazing in pastures eating natural grasses, with chickens and pigs following them. Instead of all three being fed Corn. As well as fish, possibly the most disgusting of all three, because of my personal love of fish. That should seem obvious, fish should not be eating corn, especially carnivorous fish like salmon and tuna. Now Twenty percent is a lot of corn still a lot of food, sadly though the majority of that is still not being barbecued or salsafied. The large percentage of that remaining amount is making it to us indirectly through things such as corn syrup, in soda. Another percentage of that is going to make ethanol trying to make a "green" fuel. So in the end such a small amount of all that is grown is ending up as a good nutritional part of our diet, and for me has created a love hate relationship with corn. It's one of natures most amazing gifts, and we feed it to the cows who don't want it.
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| Soy being Sprayed. |
Soy:
The US produces about Fifty percent of the worlds total soybean crop. The majority of which is going to make oil, which is used for various purposes. This one is less negative than corn, but only slightly. Some of the oil produced from soy is very plain, it's used to make margarine and is one of the leading ingredients, far less canola is used than is often portrayed, as well as other cooking oils, for frying and all that great stuff. That wouldn't be a bad thing if it wasn't being produced in such high amounts just to supply all the fast food places that are deep frying your children's chicken nuggets and fries. Another large chunk of the oil is being used to make ethanol, more soy is used for this purpose than corn is, that isn't a positive thing. E85 a blend of eighty-five percent ethanol to fifteen percent gasoline is what is used for vehicles. You might say great that cuts down a lot on the fossil usage. It might not so much as you think. Vehicles that run on ethanol often end up with a lower gas mileage than running on a straight gasoline, requiring obviously that you use more of it. To be exact 12 gallons of ethanol has the BTU equivalency to 9 gallons of gasoline. Making the ethanol is another thing to take into account to, as machinery is required to separate whatever is being used into it's smaller parts. It needs to be heated to create the syrup, then it needs to ferment. The first to part are energy intensive of course. Heavy machinery and heat need a lot. And of course all the left over from the process goes to feed our wonderful friends over at the factory farms, how tasty. Soy is also one of the crops that uses the highest amounts of pesticides. I'm sure you all agree that that's bad and I don't need to explain. So yet again, we're taking something wonderful, who doesn't love a plate of steamed and salted edemame, and something so vital to a vegan diet, and yup we're just burning it.
Wheat:
Probably the mildest problem of the three, but still not something we're handling well at all. Here we have the largest percentage going directly to use through food, at seventy percent. That's great, I love to bake, I love wheat. Here's the problem, go the grocery store, look at the products that it's getting to you through, and how much of them are there. The majority of it is ending up in products like wonder bread, fruit-loops, and oreos. As a base food none of those three are bad things, Bread is in my opinion one of the best dietary parts of a persons life. A good loaf of bread will supply you with all the fibre you need to fuel your day, kick start your digestive system and serve as a platter for whatever you chose to have it with. Cereal is much the same as bread, I start most of my mornings with oatmeal. Cookies, everyone needs a treat now and then, there's no denying that and you shouldn't deny that. It's the super processed way that we are consuming them. Super bleached to no nutritional value bread, mega sugar doesn't resemble what it is at all cereals and get you sugar high treats. No wonder we have an obesity pandemic when the majority of our daily diet is made of grains that have been robbed of all their value and then given a face lift with refined sugar.
** U.S. environmental protection agency - 2000
So lets sum that up. 50%, that is half, of all the vegetable crop land in the United states is either fed to our fast food industry through cattle feed or fryer oil, burned in our vehicles with bio fuel or making us fat. Isn't that a shame. We are wasting half of our land.
Here's the second choice, life runs in the agricultural world (the whole world for that matter) on a supply and demand system. They supply what we demand, you can't deny that. And so it's not the farmers fault, it's not Kellogg's fault, it's not the governments fault all this is happening. Sorry for this but it's your fault, it's my fault, it's all of us that keep that happening. Great news though, that means the solution is simple, and easy. We simply demand something different. That doesn't meant you write a letter to general mills and ask them to use whole grains in their cheerios. That means you stop eating cheerios and eat whole foods. That means that instead of saying we want a greener more earth friendly fuel, we cut back or better yet stop our dependency on fuel. Park your car, ride a bike instead, take public transit, car pool, walk, they're all better choices than the five cars a family of three uses now. That doesn't mean that we tell McDonald's to offer salads, it means we don't eat at McDonald's, instead we cook food ourselves, eat at home at the same table as our family. Who would have thought, living so simply could have such a positive affect. All of those are really easy things to change. You might say you don't have time to cook at home, well don't make dinner so complicated, there are a million cooks, and cook books out there dedicated to helping you cook good food faster. Some people say they're in too much of a hurry to ride a bike or walk. I feel sorry for them, they have messed up their priorities. If you're in too much of a rush to get to work to work a long day to make more money, then your life is simply costing you too much money to live. Slow down your life, live simpler and smaller. You'll find you start to feel relaxed, are working less but end up saving more money because your spending less money and simply don't need as much. If you want any help with any of those things, or feel lost as to how to start those changes please email me, or facebook me, I can and would love to help.
Ok so now lets take this solution to the waste that we just came up with and make it even better. So now we've effectively cut out fast food from our lives, we've cut down to an average of one car for every five families of three, we've all started cycling everywhere, and we now all sit around our tables together for at least one whole home cooked meal everyday. lets pretend we all did all of that. The first thing we're likely to notice is that the city suddenly got a lot quieter, and hey maybe you noticed your head stopped aching. Man that's great. You'd probably notice after about a week that your fighting less as a family or with your co-workers, as lets face it most of your fights before you changed your life were because you were in a hurry to do something and lacked the patience to deal with it. You've probably noticed that your sleeping better at night. That's all thanks to your new diet. Not to mention that you've miraculously lost a couple inches off your waste, though you may not have dropped weight. Congratulations you just traded some fat for muscle, wow what a healthful improvement. Those are all very personal things you'd notice, and they are all fantastic and endlessly positive. Now lets look at the change that had globally. All of a sudden fast food joints are shutting down, and being replaced by locally owned good food restaurants, like the one that just opened here last week; Root Down. Now because they're gone suddenly we don't have a need for all the factory farming, or for the majority of the farming we just talked about. Wow, we just freed up millions and millions of acres. So lets do a little bit more number crunching with that in mind.
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| I`ve been told I look like these guys, Love it. |
If before we were farming Fifty Percent of the land to produce food which only about Ten Percent of which made it to our tables in some edible form. Lets take a look at what we could potentially now produce on that land. This is going to be very rough. I realize that certain things cannot be grown everywhere, land conditions really affect what we grow where, so this will be a vague estimate but still very powerful. So lets say we just freed up two hundred million acres of tillable agriculture land. Lets look at what could be grown. If you use the practices which are pretty widely seen of the hutterite's. You would be able to feed one person off of two thousand square feet. Their food bill would be One hundred percent eliminated. There is 43560 square feet per acre. So that works out to be approximately twenty-one people per acre, multiply by two hundred million and you get four billion two hundred million. Which looks like this 4,200,000,000. That's half the worlds population. Much more than the United States population. Now lets fantasize a bit to improve the numbers. I have been practicing a method known as mini, or intensive farming. What I see as the ultimate small scale food production. The belief here is that you need only seven hundred square feet to feed one person ninety percent of their food bill. To feed them one hundred percent you have to up it to about one thousand square feet, this allows for grains and meat. so that doubles our number. And we now feed the entire population of the world with just the land currently being farmed in the United States alone. WOW, we have suddenly improved the quality of life on this planet in every conceivable way. Now imagine everyone was to grow a portion of their own food globally. This would mean that a family of three would need more space than the average now has. We`ll put each family on one half acre. That if they want is enough to have a small house, feed themselves nearly entirely, and have a bit of space to play. By doing this we would solve virtually everyone of the worlds problems at the moment, climate change, disease, world hunger, everything you can think of would be solved if people lived in a way where they did things by their own hands, and helped each other.
Now of course that`s an Ideal, and even if it`s exactly what we all wanted we would not be able to reach that for generations. So the question is how do we make positive change, how do we work to solve the worlds problems, and how do we as individuals make a difference. The answer is simple. We need, heavy on the need there. Need to start exercising our moral free will. We need to live with deliberate consideration of the environment and humankind with all of our decisions. Now your going to say that sounds like a lot of work, I don`t want to think about all that every time I buy a chocolate bar. Well I say why not *question mark(sorry my shift button broke I can`t do a question mark) Is your chocolate fix so important that you won`t consider others first *Insert question mark. Ultimately, Yes, this means that your life will slow down, you will not have time to do as much as your doing now, but you know what your retention rate of what you do do will increase and you will get more enjoyment out of one single act than you would previously out of ten. Yes please take the time to think about the impact you are having with every aspect of your life, I ask you as a parent, as a neighbour and as friend to do this. Living your life with Deliberate Moral decision making is the most important thing you could do in your life. It`s easy to do, often it means listening to your gut, listen to what your body tells you, what your mind tells you. If you feel bad about what your doing or gross it`s likely something that is harmful to you or others and maybe you should take a second to think it through. One last time I will say if any of this seems unclear or you want help, or whatever please feel free to ask me. Joel Salatin said above that history would have been re-written had people acted with their moral conscience, I agree and I don`t believe that it is too late. You are not a mindless robot, you have the power to make the decisions. As a great man once said be the change you want to see in the world. Live a more responsible life, live a life of example. One in which you are proud to live on display.
Thanks for reading.
