AP Environmental Science (APES) is a joke. Everyone knows that. Even the acronym sounds ridiculous. So when I was conscripted (chose) to’ work in an APES classroom to get my teaching license this year (since I’m “not qualified” for biology), I didn’t think much of it besides another hoop to jump through for my license.
Slowly, though, the class has started influencing me in pretty significant ways without my even noticing. More on this in a later post – this current one is about the content itself.
I grew up in a liberal, environmentally-friendly suburb. I’m not just talking about California, or even Los Angeles. I mean Santa Monica. We xeriscape, recommend you turn the lights and AC off, charge for plastic bags and banned styrofoam. There are vegetarian and vegan restaurants offering locally-sourced restaurants on every other block whose names all start blurring together: sweetgreen, tender greens, sprout, greens up, simply salad, veggie grill, flower child – the list goes on. My sister has been on board ever since that fateful scibowl question about reducing one’s carbon footprint (answer: don’t eat beef). So what could the APES classroom do to change me?
Well, starting in January, I’m taking over the class full-time. (Wow.) Having sat in for perhaps half a semester, I’ve certainly become more aware of the environmental problem (in the sense of, it hasn’t been dismissed as the quasi-cached thought of: yes global warming is a problem. Now moving on to something else…). But I’m not nearly as informed as my mentor teacher, and feel rather insecure starting. Of course, I need to prep; at the very least, I should watch the film that the students are going to be assigned: Cowspiracy. I sighed at the silly sensationalist title and queued it up on Netflix, not expecting much.
Instead, I got incredibly frustrated and annoyed at the film.
So…what did it claim?
2% of animal biomass on Earth consists of wild species; the rest, livestock. That surprised me a little bit, though I then realized that cows are big and insects are small. But still. Screen Shot 2017-12-13 at 08.58.58.png xkcd 1138
Methane and nitrous oxide are greenhouse gases many times more potent than CO2. This is true, and I knew it going in. But the film was already starting to irk me. While methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, there is over 200 times more CO2 in the atmosphere than methane; the amount of warming methane contributes is 28% of the warming CO2 contributes.
Cowspiracy is dangerous not because it’s wrong (it’s not that the agriculture industry doesn’t contribute significantly to climate change), but it tries to propaganda its way into having us believe that CO2 emissions don’t matter, that the whole effort to reduce CO2 emissions is a conspiracy, and that environmental agencies are all wrong in their goals.
At first, the film seemed credible; various scientists were interviewed on screen, and I was concerned at my own ignorance. But as I paused the film to do increasingly more research, I realized how scary it was that the film was so easy to believe without questioning. These people’s quotes have been selected and edited into the film, couched in segments chosen to convey what the director wants to say. Making the head of the Sierra Club seem stupid for giving a perfectly reasonable answer to the question is awful! The protagonist-director puts heads of organizations on the spot about issues they don’t know the figures for, forcing them to give an answer instead of letting them do their research, and then poking at the answer because it was wrong. He made uncertainty sound like stupidity, hedging, or hiding when it’s not.
There’s no such thing as sustainable fishing. We can never live off the oceans. These are some choice quotes about the fishing industry from the film. I fully realize they are handpicked and should come with a bit of context. The protagonist-director’s main point, I believe, was that we currently must stop fishing, because there’s no such thing as a sustainable yield when we’re already “in debt”; while we can maintain the current population, it’ll still always be below what we started with. But these other bold remarks (above) were from people he interviewed, and he saw no need to cross-examine those statements as he questioned statements contrary to his point of view. The whole film was extremely one-sided, extremist and at times downright false.
51% of global greenhouse gases are caused by animal agriculture. This statistic is from a 2009 Worldwatch Institute report by Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, not a peer-reviewed scientific paper. Most scientists would say it’s more like 15%. And while yes, I agree this information should be more widely publicized than it currently is, I don’t think this fear-mongering is really fair at all. I understand the flip side of the coin (the environmental agency’s point of view): it’s asking a lot of people to change something more fundamental about them than a lightbulb. It’s higher effort. And yet…part of me agrees with the director. Higher effort is what we need to fix this problem.
We do need frank discussions and to face the truth. It is incredibly sad that these major advocacy websites didn’t list agriculture as a problem just a few years ago (which has now changed, perhaps thanks in part to this documentary!) and that the problem was pretty much ignored. Perhaps when global hunger is still a problem, agriculture can be a touchy subject. Yet I’ve learned that we produce enough food to feed everyone on this planet – it’s just that a ton goes to waste and the majority is diverted to countries who eat too much already.
As I simmered in my annoyance, my S2 started chiming in. I was annoyed at it, because you know what? It agreed with the film.
Ugh.
For a long time, I’ve been annoyed at people like those in the documentary. Like my sister. Being really loud about their cause, shoving it down your face, using rhetoric and things that were just wrong to support their point. And siding with them makes me feel like I’m giving in. Like I was actually convinced by their silly arguments.
But it took me a long time to realize that just because a lot of crazy people believed in extraterrestrials doesn’t actually lower the chance that life is out there. Ad hominem attacks get you nowhere. At the end of the day, diet matters – a sustainable diet matters. We can blame the food organizations who waste something like 40% of their food, but that’s just them catering to the consumer. Who wants to go to a grocery store with ugly vegetables that’s only a quarter full and sometimes runs out of eggs?
Turns out, being “rational” is about acting on what you know. So, what am I waiting for? Align my beliefs and behaviors already! Does beef really bring me that much happiness in life? Absolutely not; I usually opt for chicken anyway. And sure, it feels weird to not have meat with every meal, but how much we eat every day is around what others have once a week. And I already know that being vegetarian (or vegan) isn’t actually that hard – I was shocked by how easy it was (i.e. I wouldn’t have to change my diet at all, once the meat was cut out) to live nutritiously on a vegetarian diet. In fact, the least controversial/most likely to be not-bad nutritionist advice is probably vegan-pescatarianism. In terms of both the environmental and personal side effects, the change would be all positive. So what am I scared of? That my sister will say, “I told you so”? Take responsibility for your actions. If I chose to ignore her all this time, that’s on me.