Getting a Grip

flappe September 21st, 2007

(Frances) A gorgeous New England day and I’m on the train to New York City to speak this afternoon at the Interchurch Center to a gathering of religious leaders. The topic is personal choices and solutions to climate chaos.

Reading the latest on the energy impact of grain-fed meat-centered diets, I feel like I’m 26 again—my jaw dropping in amazement at what I’m learning, just as I was when writing Diet for a Small Planet.

My prep for this talk includes David and Marcia Pimentel’s (Cornell) latest in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. They calculate that it takes around 40 calories of energy to produce one food calorie of beef. (Lamb is even worse at 57 to 1 calories.) They also note that meat-eating Americans down twice the protein recommended by nutritionists. What they don’t point out is that our bodies simply excrete what we can’t use, so all that extra is wasted.

And then, there’s the contribution to global heating from rainforest felling to plant soybeans for livestock. Other articles in my lap tell me that about 40 percent of Central America’s rainforests are gone, largely to such conversion.

Imagine the gain for ourselves and our planet when we combine plant-centered diets with organic and local. My daughter Anna calculated that to get one crop (tomatoes), to one state (New Jersey) for one year is the energy-use equivalent of driving a Mac truck to the moon and back 13 times!

But the heart of my message today will be that in Getting a Grip. It’s not about righteous scolding: “Be better people. Be more responsible people.” No. The urgent and empowering message to ourselves and others can be: “We can all free ourselves from the deadly ideas — the mental map — that keep us creating this world gone mad.

So maybe the answer isn’t becoming “better” people but becoming more audacious people. That’s what I wanna be.

Frankie

• Frances