LA Weekly

I’ve just barely cracked open Tristram Stuart’s 600-some page new book, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times, but I know enough about it to leap wildly to two conclusions: a) It deserves more than a blog entry to appraise it; and, b) it isn’t about Stuart trying to persuade anyone to subsist on seitan and short-grain brown rice. (If it were, he wouldn’t spend so much time on how Hitler’s abstaining from meat conflicted with his monumental cruelty.) So why do some reviewers treat the book as an attack on our right to eat meat?

Not every reviewer, of course: Steven Shapin in The New Yorker simply reviews the book and loves it (“a magnificently detailed and wide-ranging collection of scholarship . . .”); Salon’s Laura Miller, noting that few other subjects provoke such defensiveness, simply reviews the book and dislikes it: “[Vegetarians] have a reputation for being priggish, fanatical, kooky and a nuisance to hostesses, and unfortunately the parade of eccentrics that marches across the pages . . . only confirms that image.”

But Daniel Lazare in The Nation, although he starts out charitable in a review headlined “My Beef with Vegetarianism,” seems to regard The Bloodless Revolution as a declaration of intent: It's as if Lazare thinks Stuart wants him to pry his greasy jaws from that leg of organic mutton he's so proud of and surrender to "the silly defeatism of tofu and sprouts." He takes full advantage of those kooks Miller complained about, and he accuses Stuart of not doing a whole bunch of stuff a book on vegetarianism has no business doing, like considering “the possibility of meat produced according to the strictest environmental standards.”

Most of all, Lazare, appears to believe that avoiding meat denies mankind’s dominion over nature. And “[d]enying humans their supreme power means denying them their supreme responsibility to improve society, to safeguard the environment on which it depends and even—dare we say it—to improve nature as well.”

Really? And here I thought my careful and occasional consumption of fish, following the guidelines of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, combined with my not-too-strict diet of vegetable protein and plants, was actually a way of accepting my “supreme responsibility” to safeguard the environment. What causes Lazare to leap from Stuart’s exhaustive and admittedly “cultural” history to this indictment of vegetarianism as the root of our ecological ills?

I can only conclude this: He was one of those guys who fell for that weird Hummer ad. You know, the one that equated tofu-eating with sissiness, and urged veggie-men to "restore the balance" (of their hormones?) by buying a Hummer.

Vegetarianism makes people nervous. When you tell someone you’re a vegetarian, seven out of 10 omnivores – a conservative estimate – will feel obligated to tell you, a) why he or she is not a vegetarian; b) how he or she used to be a vegetarian but came to understand that he or she simply craved meat; and/or c) why you need to eat meat: You will become anemic, suffer early menopause or, in the case of men, turn effeminate.

Except for those brief lapses when I tried to adapt to the eating habits of unsympathetic friends or family members, I have not consumed the flesh of beast or fowl since I was 14. I have never asked that anyone else give up meat; I frankly don’t believe everybody should. I became a vegetarian mostly to get out of eating my mother’s weekly liver suppers.

But the fact is, good reasons to not eat meat -- or to eat less meat -- abound. For starters, there’s resource issue: As Frances Moore Lappé wrote in her 1972 Diet for a Small Planet, “it takes 16 pounds of grain and soybeans to produce just one pound of beef.” That hasn’t changed in 35 years; if anything, the ratio’s gotten worse.

Then there’s the health issue. People love to tell me how all the vegetarians they know are sick, and I don’t know what to say to them. None of the vegetarians I know are sick, and I’m certainly rarely sick, and even Michael Pollan, in yet another delightfully sane trip into the world of What We Eat in this week’s New York Times Magazine, casually drops the assertion that vegetarians tend to be healthier than meat eaters.

My mother would have chafed at this: As a young woman living through the Second World War in Canada, she donated too much blood, became anemic, and was prescribed a liver diet and recovered. For the rest of her days she associated her good health, and ours, with liver. But at 56, my mother died of colon cancer, a fate I can’t help but blame on a diet high in organ meats and iron supplements and low in fiber.

When I get right down to the bone of my own eating philosophy, though, I avoid meat mostly for emotional reasons, the same emotional reasons with which Stuart introduces The Bloodless Revolution, quoting early 18th-century philosopher Bernard Mandeville: “I question whether ever anybody so much as killed a Chicken without Reluctancy the first time, yet all of them feed heartily and without remorse on Beef, Mutton and Fowls when they are bought in the Market.”

I eat some fish because I can and have killed fish, not remorselessly, but at least not with the great grief and tears that would follow my bringing down, say, a deer. It seems dishonest to me to eat something I’d be unwilling to kill.

But if you can stomach the hunting and shooting of deer, and you eat those deer and make moccasins from their hides, I salute you; I really do. I would ask, though, that you not fight the reintroduction of natural predators just so you can have more game to pursue. And eat your venison with a good helping of wild rice and sweet potatoes. Whether you’re exercising your dominion over nature or just eating food you like, you still need the fiber.

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Okay, it was lame, that speech. A little blip about “global climate change” (woo-hoo!), a few nods to ethanol. Nothng epic like last year’s “addicted to oil.” But the news that Bush likes biofuels (not news at all, but I’m being nice), combined with Schwarzenegger’s renewed interest in alternative fuels for California cars, has got everyone talking about ethanol again. Is it the fuel of the future? Will it slow the pace of climate change by reducing pollution from automobiles? Will it cause the price of tortillas to go through the roof in Mexico? And why does Chevron like it so much?

Answer: Maybe, maybe, probably not (ethanol and tortillas use different kinds of corn) and because they can still make money on it.

I’ll make it easy for you.

Corn-based ethanol: Evil

Grain-based ethanol: Bad

Cellulosic ethanol (made from the same stuff of cat litter -- waste husks, sawdust, paper pulp, etc.): Good

Cellulosic ethanol + biodiesel from rapeseed and waste oil + plus forcing automakers to produce cars that get better mileage + bike lanes + living closer to work . . . aw, forget it. It’s too good to ever be true.

Way back in 2001, Cornell agricultural scientists David Pimentel did the math on corn-based ethanol, and came up with this:

An acre of U.S. corn yields about 7,110 pounds of corn for processing into 328 gallons of ethanol. But planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre.

In other words, corn would have to be even more heavily subsidized than it already is to produce cost-efficient energy crops, and it would take so much petroleum to grow it the net carbon load on the atmosphere would hardly decrease at all.

Ethanol from other crops, like soy, isn’t much better: You just can’t get that much ethanol out of feed stock. For every unit of energy invested in producing it, soy ethanol yields only about 1.6 units, while soy biodiesel, gets roughly 3.4 units out of every unit invested.

If you make biodiesel from rapeseed, 8 big units of energy emerge from just a single unit invested. Why aren’t we doing it? I mean, besides the nitrogen issue (biofuels emit more nitrogen which turns to ground-level ozone in the sunlight), which can be easily eliminated with better emissions-control technology?

The problem with all this, I think, is that we’re looking for the One Big Thing that can solve all our energy problems, while allowing us all to live exactly the same lives we live now – drive the same big cars, commute the same miles to work, make as many small trips to the grocery store in our Range Rovers and Blazers. But only if we attack our energy consumption on a number of fronts, will we kick our addiction, and at the same time address a whole slew of other problems, including obesity, pollution, traffic congestion and the intense isolation and fracturing of communities that has cause us to welcome surveillance cameras on every corner.

On another alternative energy note, my esteemed colleague David Zahniser brought my attention to a story in the L.A. Daily News this week about Bob “I don’t wanna zetz the guy” Hertzberg taking his solar panel startup to Wales. Yes, Wales, where hurricane-force winds last week left thousands without power for days , and you can bet they’re thinking about how to reduce their carbon output. I don’t want to zetz the guy, but when you have to bring your solar power business from California to Wales to make a buck, something is terribly wrong in the state of California. Something, suggest the story, to do with a lack of government subsidies and public support, A Million Solar Roofs notwithstanding.

Oh, and one more thing: the California Air Resources Board has announced appointees to two committees making decisions about the state’s new climate initiative, AB 32, signed into law this fall. People I’ve heard of and admire, such as Martha Arguello of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Jason Mark, the U.S. Transportation Program Officer at the Energy Foundation, have been appointed on both committees. And something about that thrills me.

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“The policy challenge is to act in a serious and sensible way, given the limits of our knowledge. While scientific uncertainties remain, we can begin now to address the factors that contribute to climate change.”

--President George W. Bush, June 11, 2001

Speculation abounds in newspapers around the globe as to just how for George W. Bush, in tomorrow’s State of the Union address, will go in acknowledging that the climate is changing, and what he will propose to try to stop it. Or if he’ll acknowledge it at all. Or if he’ll try to stop it. What’s bugging me is that so many people are talking like he hasn’t acknowledged it before.

In fact, that’s about all he’s done.

“I've asked my advisors to consider approaches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including those that tap the power of markets, help realize the promise of technology and ensure the widest possible global participation….Our actions should be measured as we learn more from science and build on it.”

--President George Bush, May 18, 2005

I don't need to remind anyone that this is the same White House that warned NASA in 2004 that “all climate-related press releases” will be reviewed; the same White House that established a committee on climate change and then, as we learned when Rick Piltz resigned from the Climate Change Science Program in 2005, allowed a former oil industry lobbyist named Phil Cooney to rewrite scientific results; the same White House, in fact, that cut NASA’s funding for climate change research by nearly a quarter since 2004.

If he can't lay out a plan for mandatory caps on emissions in the future, as California has done under Schwarzenegger, the least Bush could do might be to introduce some sort of cap-and-trade scheme to encourage private businesses and utilities to reduce emissions of CO2. Cap’n trade means that if one entity spews more than a certain legally prescribed limit of greenhouse gases, it can buy credits from a company that puts out less than the legal limit. It’s a little like saying I can take long, hot showers because my neighbor rides his bike to work, or because I compost I get to drive a Hummer (or I can drive a Hummer because I run a bike shop – okay, it’s only an H3, and it's the best bike shop in Hollywood, but still), or, my favorite, from my friend Debbie:

“I’m a vegan lesbian who doesn’t own a car. I can club baby seals if I want to.”

(The problem, of course, is that my neighbor is going to ride his bike to work whether or not I squander water.)

But Tony Snow assures us today that while "there has been some talk about, sort of, binding economy-wide carbon caps in the speech, but they are not part of the President's proposal."

And Bill Kovacs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, says the CattleNetwork, thinks that “he's going to hit climate change from a technological point of view," like with those hydrogen cars we're all lining up to drive.

As Bush plays his, uh, liar as the world burns (as illustrated on the cover of this week’s New Yorker), the CEOs of a gaggle of non-usual-suspect corporations (like Alcoa and Dupont) have come out with their own collective plan to slow climate change. It’s cap-and-trade based, but does call for Congress to establish a program in which “the offset must be environmentally additional” – in other words, you can only buy credits from someone who has actually reduced his carbon emissions to get credits.

And while it’s short on specifics, it does demand that the White House introduce a mandatory (albeit flexible) program to stem the flow of carbon into the atmosphere in the very near future. Best of all, it makes the point my recent blog commenter corinth along with Amory Lovins (recently profiled in the New Yorker), have made before:

"In our view, the climate change challenge will create more opportunities than risks for the U.S. economy. Indeed, addressing climate change will require innovations that increase energy efficiency, creating new markets."

And at least, at long last, only a few straggling nutcases dispute that climate change is real and caused by man. They know who they are, and their names will not darken this blog again.

"[T]he forests are disappearing one by one, the rivers are polluted, wildlife is becoming extinct, the climate is changing for the worse, every day the planet gets poorer and uglier. It's a disaster!"

--Astrov, in Uncle Vanya, by Anton Chekhov, 1896

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Last Thursday, I sat down with a small group of friends to watch the L.A. installment of the PBS show, Edens Lost and Found. I wanted to love it, really I did; or at least like it. It featured people I admire (TreePeople’s Andy Lipkis for one, former Assemblywoman Cindy Montañez, for another), but in truth, I was bored. Bored with Jimmy Smits’ puzzlingly monotone commentary; with the happy tears of the young urban gardeners in the Boyle Heights’ club “Girls Today, Women Tomorrow” (GTWT); with the whole notion that Los Angeles is a hotbed of environmental activism (I have been to such hotbeds, and this isn’t one of them). I even suggested a title change: Opportunities Found and Squandered, because I couldn’t imagine that anyone would pay attention to this kind of one-dimensional civic back-slapping unless they had to.

At first, two of these three friends – urban environmentalists themselves who compost, recycle and conserve as a matter of course – disagreed. They resented my idea that the GTWT would have been better had the women had, oh, a fight, or if there’d been some struggle to keep their club and gardens going. But when the third friend, another writer with little more than a theoretical interest in living the Green Life, admitted that left to himself he would have turned off the television, the enviro couple had to relent – although they still didn’t think you had to pump up conflicts just to make a story alluring. Instead, they argued that the average person just isn’t all that interested in environmentalism. “Our neighbor is a wonderful person, but she doesn’t recycle,” the woman of the pair told me. “We asked her about it, and she just said ‘Oh, we don’t do that.’ And that was it.” To talk to her about it, we agreed, would have been preachy and pointless.

Not to mention hypocritical, in a way: For everything I think I do to lessen my impact on the planet, there are a hundred ways in which I fall short (at the tail end of my recent move from a house in the Hollywood Hills to a tiny mid-city apartment, for example, I found myself muttering “fuck recycling” as I tossed out huge bags of trash).

And that’s often how Edens Lost and Found felt to me, with its long segments on that righteous revolutionary, Ed Begley, and his “modest” house (it looked huge to me), and public-relations pitch from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who, let it be known, gets himself driven around town in a Big Black GMC Yukon.

So then, how do we talk about this stuff? It’s an age-old problem: How do we get people to recycle, to drive less, to stop dumping their motor oil down storm drains? How do we get them to pick up their plastic bags in the city, their cigarette butts on the trail, their dog poop on the sidewalk? And how do we convince them to do these things without causing their eyes to glaze over?

In other words, what kind of stories do we have to tell to get people interested in the environment?

And how do we tell those stories well enough to make them sexy? Does toxic black smoke really have to fell people in London before we stop burning coal? Do men and women both have to stop reproducing, à la Children of Men, before we ban hormone-disrupting chemicals from our plastics? Does Florida have to go underwater before we stop driving Hummers? (Then again, there's always that "amphibious Hummer" option.)

It’s with that question on my mind that I’m re-launching this blog after a long and reflective holiday hiatus. In the time that I’ve been galumphing around looking for the hook on which to hang my online reflections, a lot has happened to make this question more urgent than ever. Nature, as Al Gore once told me, is her own best marketing rep (actually, he said "she has a voice in this debate," but I like my version better), and the signs of a changing climate, as well as the increasing toxicity of our environment, have become impossible to ignore, even for that oily old sod, James “greatest hoax” Inhofe of Oklahoma. Crocuses have begun springing up in New York City in the winter; snow has fallen in Malibu (that’s why they call it “climate change,” and not, necessarily, “global warming.”) Greenland is melting, the oceans are dying, polar bears are starving and cancer rates are soaring.

Today, Schwarzenegger signed a bill into the law requiring steep cuts in the carbon content of fuels beginning in December 2008 (a boon to the ethanol market, at least), and Rep. Nancy Pelosi proposed creating a house committee on global warming. And still, if someone sends me one more story about climate change, no matter how eloquent and transporting (like this one from Mark Wedin of the Amsterdam Weekly), I fear I will rend my garments and run naked and screaming into the street – because the news is so bleak and frustrating, and because it feels to me that it’s the one thing I can’t do a goddamn thing about on my own.

Which is another reason to keep asking this question: Some of these problems we can only solve as a unit. But how do we persuade that unit to act?

I’ll be blogging from now on every Monday and Thursday evenings, with emergency dispatches now and then, but not often. Next post: Setting the stage for next Tuesday’s State of the Union, Bush’s annual giving of lip-service to that thorny thing called “energy independence.” And, of course, why you should care.

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