I wanted to tack on here that even our agriculture has a huge environmental impact — nothing worse for biodiversity than how we’ve replaced animal habitats with fields of a single crop! And then pesticides etc.
I don’t know if it ever happen, but we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game.
Properly Managed Captured Fisheries (Mostly more prosperous nations have well managed fisheries, outstanding fisheries would be in Alaska & New Zealand) allow us to extract protien we all need without destroying ecosystems. Same goes for captured game but that scales significantly worse.
Fish farms are in a unique position because unlike farming animals on land, it can be done without radically changing the part of the ocean the fish are farmed in.
I think recently there have been some problems with fish farms and antibiotic / illness spreading but I really think these can be overcome and that long term aquaculture would be the most environmentally conscious option. (In a similar position to electric cars today).
> Fish farms are in a unique position because unlike farming animals on land, it can be done without radically changing the part of the ocean the fish are farmed in.
Fish farms are a little like farming rabbits in packed, huge fenced in areas.
You get a lot of disease, use a lot of medicine and antibiotics - and get a lot of feces. And escaped, diseased rabbits that breed in the wild.
Fish farms on land are likely better - but at any rate, fish farms are far from being without environmental impact.
> we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game
I guess if you HAVE to eat meat that is a better option, but we don't need it anymore. Its such an inefficient way to get calories and its not as nutritious as plant substitutes.
Are you serious? Most of the plant substitutes for meat are based off nutrient-devoid grains, soy, and corn. It's also not at all an inefficient way to get calories; fat packs the most calories per gram, and fat (especially saturated fat) is not easily available in plants unless you're making a concerted effort to eat avocados, olives, and coconuts. I'd rather eat a fatty steak and be satiated for hours, than have the same calories from quinoa (or some other 'healthy' grain) and be ravenous 2 hours later when my insulin levels drop.
You make a compelling point. If I wanted to support one of those companies by purchasing their products, what would I look for? Any chance salmon is among the fish that are well farmed?
Factory-farmed meat is bad for humans and bad for the environment, true, but any industrial-scale monoculture crop has huge negative impacts, and that includes vegetables too.
Better to avoid monocultures by buying organic/biodynamic, shopping at farmers' markets, CSA, growing your own food, etc. Eat less processed and make more from scratch. Better health, better for the environment, and you can still enjoy meat :)
I've long had a scifi vision of the future in which autonomous drones intelligently, with sustainability as a goal, hunt wild fish as a good way around the factory meat problem. Only slightly related, just wanted to share some techno-optimism.
How so? In San Francisco there are several local produce markets within walking distance of where I live. Whole Foods and Trader Joe's are pretty common major grocery chains here, and there are two weekly farmer's markets I can think of that are accessible by bike/transit.
When I visited Manhattan/Brooklyn recently I didn't get the sense that they were lacking in locally-sourced foods either. Main problem I can think of are food deserts, but those are more of an economic problem than scale. When I used to live in one in Baltimore though it was possible to find local food, it just took more effort.
That article is missing point. The point of eating local food is that you eat what's in season and what's available in your area. Obviously if you live in Canada you won't be able to find 'local' Avocados, but the idea is you would forfeit eating Avocados in favor of eating whatever is locally produced, instead of shipping those Avocados from Mexico.
What the article is asserting and what the science shows is that even if you have Avacados being grown literally next door the environmental impact of buying them locally is often higher than shipping them from abroad.
For example, the SGU podcast they link to [1] (around 55m:50s in) discusses that the net environmental impact (carbon emissions) of shipping beef to the UK from New Zealand is less than consuming UK beef in the UK. So if you're an environmentally conscious UK consumer you should be spending extra to buy NZ beef instead of buying locally produced beef.
This is because the carbon impact of the transportation generally hovers around 10%, which leaves the other 90% for actually producing the product "locally", and some locations on earth are vastly more efficient by every environmental metric in growing certain crops or raising certain livestock.
From the podcast: "An acre of land in Idaho can produce twice the amount of potatoes as an acre of land in Kansas".
Which leaves two reasons to buy locally.
Firstly you may be living in one of the places that's efficient at producing a given product, e.g. you'd buy local beef in New Zealand instead of importing it from the UK.
Secondly there are certain products that don't ship well, e.g. heirloom tomatoes. There you simply don't have the option of buying anything except local varieties.
Yes, but generally those will average out, and other than carbon emissions the environmental impact tends to get pretty well priced into the end product because it tends to be more land or resources that are required.
I put "carbon emissions" in parentheses there because the reason for this "buy local" fallacy to begin with is because people intuitively assume that it's the transportation of the good that makes all the difference, when the reality is that that's just 1/10 of the cost.
The environmental impact of the transportation is almost exclusively carbon emissions.
> other than carbon emissions the environmental impact tends to get pretty well priced into the end product because it tends to be more land or resources that are required.
No, most of the environmental impacts of agricultural productions besides carbon emissions are still externalities, usually time-shifted, that aren't priced into the product.
Why does everyone seem to forget the essential "have less kids" one ?
This is what puts me into the defeatist group. As long as people won't even put their reproductive urges in question (and rather discuss how flying is bad), how are we even supposed to achieve anything ? This should be one of the first logical moves, yet it's so frowned upon it's never brought up. Depressing.
"Eat less meat" is not a good solution since industrialized monocrop agriculture has tons of problems on its own like topsoil erosion and air/water pollution. The problem doesn't lie in any one single food, but in commercial food production in general, be it livestock or agricultural. If you want to help against that, the best option would be to support sustainably raised meat and vegetables from local farms by going to farmers markets or eating out at farm-to-table restaurants. If possible, plant your own vegetables, raise your own chickens or hunt. Avoid buying from the big food producers, like Kraft, Tyson, PepsiCo or ConAgra
I don’t know if it ever happen, but we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game.
Properly Managed Captured Fisheries (Mostly more prosperous nations have well managed fisheries, outstanding fisheries would be in Alaska & New Zealand) allow us to extract protien we all need without destroying ecosystems. Same goes for captured game but that scales significantly worse.
Fish farms are in a unique position because unlike farming animals on land, it can be done without radically changing the part of the ocean the fish are farmed in.
I think recently there have been some problems with fish farms and antibiotic / illness spreading but I really think these can be overcome and that long term aquaculture would be the most environmentally conscious option. (In a similar position to electric cars today).