Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Prominent Guardian Environment Reporter George Monbiot, who sometimes shows up at prominent climate events, no doubt after a long journey by sail, has decided to eat Vegan supplemented with Roadkill to “reduce his impact” on the global climate.
I’ve converted to veganism to reduce my impact on the living world
The world can cope with 7 or even 10 billion people. But only if we stop eating meat. Livestock farming is the most potent means by which we amplify our presence on the planet. It is the amount of land an animal-based diet needs that makes it so destructive.
An analysis by the farmer and scholar Simon Fairlie suggests that Britain could easily feed itself within its own borders. But while a diet containing a moderate amount of meat, dairy and eggs would require the use of 11m hectares of land (4m of which would be arable), a vegan diet would demand a total of just 3m. Not only do humans need no pasture, but we use grains and pulses more efficiently when we eat them ourselves, rather than feed them to cows and chickens.
This would enable 15m hectares of the land now used for farming in Britain to be set aside for nature. Alternatively, on a vegan planet, Britain could feed 200 million people. Extending this thought experiment to the rest of the world, it’s not hard to see how gently we could tread if we stopped keeping animals. Rainforests, savannahs, wetlands, magnificent wildlife can live alongside us, but not alongside our current diet.
…
Then something happened that broke down the wall of denial. Last September I arranged to spend a day beside the River Culm in Devon, renowned for its wildlife and beauty. However, the stretch I intended to explore had been reduced to a stinking ditch, almost lifeless except for some sewage fungus. I traced the pollution back to a dairy farm. A local man told me the disaster had been developing for months. But his efforts to persuade the Environment Agency (the government regulator) to take action had been fruitless.
…
I still eat roadkill when I can find it, and animals killed as agricultural pests whose bodies might otherwise be dumped. At the moment, while pigeons, deer, rabbits and squirrels are so abundant in this country and are being killed for purposes other than meat production, eating the carcasses seems to be without ecological consequence. Perhaps you could call me a pestitarian.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/09/vegan-corrupt-food-system-meat-dairy
I quite like Monbiot, or at least I find him more entertaining than most greens.
Sometimes he shows a flash of common sense, such as when he defended nuclear power in the wake of Fukushima. Then he goes and blows it by saying something wild, such as telling everyone the corrupt media are keeping the end of the world a secret.
At least Monbiot is going to get enough protein, unlike some Vegans I know. The number of wild deer currently running around the British countryside, and all those impatient drivers trying to beat the rush, Monbiot is not going to starve – unless increasingly punitive British attempts to price driving out of reach of ordinary people finally succeed in clearing the roads of traffic.
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Why does Moonbat think he should get first dibs on road kill ?
What about the birds and other critters that don’t have cars or credit cards ?
What a big meanie .
He must love those bird blenders . Doesn’t even have to run things over .
Didn’t he get this off the “Windmill Kill”?
George “Moonbat” Monbiot. Humanity’s first Myxomatosis victim.
Ya gottsta cook it extra crispy, to be sure.
And do not ferget the taters:
http://www.bromygod.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/gross-food-002-04072014.jpg
I bet the Moonbat is salivating even as I type this. 😀
Singapore special fried rat? Lovely!
Monbiot is a full-on moron, no question. Total moron…100%.. and he is too stupid to realize it.
Who considers this side show clown a “prominent Guardian Environmental Reporter”
Okay, “Guardian” was mentioned. Now I understand the oxymoron.
We were discussing this at Bishophill 3 days ago. I commented:
The Moonbat’s one-off experience of river pollution in Devon and the actions of the Environment Agency is a bit different from mine based on living here. There are two local farmers who are universally hated because of their greedy way of factory farming (one with dairy cattle on concrete and one with chickens in massive sheds). Both methods have nothing to do with animal rearing, but are purely business enterprises that could occur on an industrial estate rather than in the open countryside on farms. They both run anaerobic digesters (both ostensibly to get rid of the animal manure, but in reality to burn crops and get the massive subsidies from the Government-backed renewable energy policies). Both farmers have a history of disregarding best farming practice and both have caused pollution and have been (and continue to be) pursued by the Environment Agency, both having been massively fined recently and in the past. So the Moonbat’s one-off experience of the actions of the Environment Agency are totally different from my ongoing experience of the actions of the Environment Agency in pursuing pollutants.
It is well known that there are considerable benefits to our environment from the rearing of farm animals. The Moonbat is yet again just cherry-picking and showing his prejudices.
‘We were discussing this at Bishophill 3 days ago.’
???
Bishophill hasn’t had a new thread since June 28. At least with my browser (Firefox).
Untreaded and Discussion are still running
Hilarious!
Maybe his idea could grow legs… Or wings… as it were.
George Monbiots’s Roadkill Kebab stands might pop up across the countryside, though it might not make the Halal quality certificate. The menu could rotate from rodent / lizard to pawed to hoofed, feathered, … Insect appetizers! Imagine the marketing success in offering the daily special, say, of “fresh” wind-farm stork or eagle kill, timed to the migration season! Or 2 for 1 for those recovering vegan couples!
I hear sewer rat tastes like pumpkin pie…and Halloween is coming up fast.
I am still amazed by these Eco-Worriers (no, that is not a mis-spelling) and their understanding where their food come from (no it is not the Supermarket!). It take fossil fuel to power the machinery to plow the fields, petro-chemicals to fertilize them, till them and ultimately harvest. Not to mention the fossil fuel to power the trucks that transport the harvest. What about the fossil fuel used to process the food stuffs. Not to mention the fossil fuel powered manufacturing plants that build the tractor and truck.
Oh, wait! It will be done with electric tractors and trucks powered by wind turbines and another 2m
hectares of solar panels.. No, wait oxen, and carts. Jeez give me a break.
Just recycle your breadcrumbs to Save The Wheat!
@ur momisugly Aussie bear, what about all the all the fossil fuels that the employees use driving to work to sell the food, the fuel they use to heat their houses , run their fridges, computers, wash their laundry, go visit the “folks”, drive to the doctors office , who drives to work, does his laundry ( at work), and the pharmacist who drives to work to fill the prescription the Dr. ordered, that goes home and does the laundr…….
‘that goes home and does the laundr……. “, sorry, “who goes home etc.”
OK with me. LOL
Roadkill? Flee for your life George cos you’ll be more than roadkill when we run over you and you’ll be the ones Down Under-
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/nation_on_the_move/
Think of it like sea level rise projections and add it to the warmening doom list coming to get ya George-
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
Moonbat, you’re nuttier than a portaloo at a peanut festival. If you’re worried about the overuse of land, focus on the pointless harvesting of biofuels.
To his credit Moonbat is not a fan of biofuels.
http://www.monbiot.com/2007/11/06/an-agricultural-crime-against-humanity/
Thanks Eric. Fair play to him for that piece. Perhaps he thought that subject through while collecting his Sunday roast from wind kill.
I bet Willie Nelson isn’t a fan of biodiesel either. Until a couple years ago there was a good sized truck stop with his name on it on I-35 W south of Dallas, TX. It had nothing but biodiesel at the pumps. It now does not have Willies name on it and the pumps have regular ultra low sulfur diesel and has a lot more trucks going through it than it did previously.
From the – let’s sneer at anyone with a different point of view department.
I have not seen any sneering here.
Hysterical laughter, yes.
Concerns for his very sanity, for sure.
Outright contempt, certainly.
But no sneering…sneering implies anger, which would suggest them doing the sneering take him seriously.
Nope…none of that.
But I will happily sneer at you if you are suggesting that “a road kill eating vegan will save the planet” is just another point of view.
i’m sneering.
sure, at first i just arched an eyebrow and glanced askance- but that didn’t seem withering enough.
i’m thinking i need a snidely whiplash moustache for a really potent sneer, though.
cuz deep down i’m convinced he’s not getting his protein from roadkill.
Nicely played Menicholas: set up a straw man so you can sneer a bit more.
Have you ever asked yourself the question – Does any creature value it’s own life less than I value mine?
That was the starting point for me to choose not to eat meat.
Since you don’t eat meat, maybe not, however much of the animal kingdom is not self-aware, so I think for the meat eaters most animals don’t really even know they are alive. ;D
And what is the straw man, pray do tell?
You make a single sentence cryptic remark and then depart.
I responded, somewhat tongue in cheek but not completely unthoughtful.
In fact, many of the comments here show, IMO, much more thoughtfulness and insight that that displayed by Monbiot himself.
His article makes no sense, as it attempts to solve a non-existent problem by dint of a ridiculous proposition…being a vegan but eating road kill.
It does not even have any internal logic.
If you feel strongly or think you can rebut what has been said here, you should do so.
Your simple comment seems more like sneering to me than most any of the other comments.
But you should defend your point of view if you have one.
And I was wrong and admitted it…some here say they were sneering.
Funny you speak disparagingly of preconceived bias, when you display a healthy dose of that towards this site and everyone on it.
Laughable, really.
You should perhaps watch the video posted of how meat eater (read that normal people) would behave if they acted like vegans.
I would bet you hate it.
That’s a very convenient assumption micro.
Menicholas I agree, claiming to be vegan is going to proclude you from eating any kind of kill.
Even wild animals know not to eat what they didn’t kill.
Yeah no. Most species which are omnivorous and not obligate carnivores will sample and eat just about anything. They may not stay on the feed, or simply just sample it and move on. Humans can eat a much wider variety of “foods” then we do. Mostly, our digestive system will reject the undigestible. However, free chomping on whatever crosses your path carries huge risks. Rotting carcasses generate neurotoxins. A whole range of really nasty parasites are just waiting for a new host. While avian roadkill is frequently happenstance, many mammals caught on the road are sick. Dangerously sick with communicable disease with very serious consequences. Having spent many professional years in the study of diseases of wildlife, thanks, but no thanks, on the roadkill for dinner.
Moonbat chews on roadkill because he is confident that our evolved medical science can fix whatever ills it gives him. Britain’s evolved animal/environmental health and welfare has given a degree of protection to wildlife as well. Moonbat is able to be smug because the accrued knowledge and practice of those who have “despoiled” the environment before him have allowed him to be so. He’s nothing more than a hypocrite.
Yes I was sneering when he didn’t seem to know that plants are living things. He might benefit from going back to elementary school and learning that plants are living things.
I stand corrected.
But apparently Mr. McLeod did not care to stick around and explain why we should not laugh, or psychoanalyze, or voice scorn…or even sneer at Monbiot’s “point of view”.
If one cannot defend what one says, perhaps the point was not a very strong one, eh?
Ah yes, just woken up here in Australia, sneering is so much easier than thoughtful examination.
Doesn’t matter who or what topic, if it contradicts the preconceived bias it gets the full sneer treatment here at Lets sneer at that.
i’ll put on my sneering snood.
ready!
He is going to eat vegan roadkill? Tumbleweeds? A new form of veganism?
Meat means murder…………..
Yes…delicious, flame broiled murder!
Mmmmmmmmm……………..murder….
Mouthwatering homicide…
Yes!
So do eggs. I like mine over easy please.
Now I don’t mean to go off at a tangent here with this but once Georgie succeeds in banning the use of the internal combustion engine won’t all the road kill then all dry up?
He’s a Turkey voting for Christmas.
Or will he have a back-up plan?
Murder is an entirely anthropomorphic concept. For a very large part of the animal kingdom, meat means dinner. Now, for a subset of that, meat doesn’t even have to be dead. We are all food for something, dead or alive.
He is actually correct on many levels although a lot of this is due to the Elephant in the room. IE Population increase of about 100million per year. Carbon Credits just don’t cut it there.
What elephant…where?
Food production is increasing much faster than population, with no hint of any abatement in the trend.
And CO2 is increasing, ensuring ever more marginal land comes into food production, and those acres that are in production grow ever increasing quantities of food and do so faster than ever.
Besides, if there is ever not enough food, people will have to get all the way down to the stage of eating a healthy amount of food instead of an amount which makes lots of us rotund lumps of jiggly-jelly, before a point is reached of starvation.
Besides Nankerphelge (hey, good handle!), we can always just move the line over some more to the left:
The bunny rabbit needs to be on the other side of the line.
I’ve had horse…not bad, if cooked right.
I’d draw the line around ‘cat’.
Is it too early to say Korea and left of the line?
Dog is popular in some Asian countries. — Eugene WR Gallun
Or in fact Belgium (Horse)?
There is an animal missing from the billboard.
What happened to the “tolerance brigade” here? Many people eat rabbits, and several places it is acceptable to eat both dog and cat. Who are these people to say that eating these animals is wrong? That would make them bigoted and attempting to prove moral superiority.
(Rabbit definately belongs on the other side of the line.)
Apart from the horse and the rabbit that poster only has two other animals on it on the pet side – cats and dogs.
I know, not a very good poster for the given meme.
Where is the sheep, or the goat?
In South America and Africa, I understand a lot of monkey is consumed.
I personally would keep rabbits on the food side, not because I would eat one, but my pets do if they can catch one, and that makes them food. And those little footsies make a groovy rear view mirror ornament.
But ducks are on the pet side…they are cute when babies and too greasy for my taste.
It is completely and 100% subjective…we all want to live, but we all in fact die at some point.
Is it better for a certain group of animals to never be born if they are getting cooked for food in the end?
In the wild natural environment, virtually every beast winds up as dinner eventually, and not a clean painless death, but consumed while not quite dead in many cases.
So who is to say having a billion chickens or cows which would never have been born is a bad thing because they will be killed and eaten someday?
Is it better to have loved, or lived, and lost, than to never have loved, or lived, at all?
A question for the ages…I am no closer to a definitive answer than the bard was I suspect, nor is anyone else.
All depends if you want to live and breed, cause if you are not eating something alive, at least for now, you’re dead.
Me, I don’t want to be dead, and I like meat.
Well, if you want to eat a vegan diet the gorilla diet (which is mostly vegan) offers guidance
A gorilla does have to supplement its diet to get missing nutrients.
http://www.veganhealth.org/b12/animal
Gorillas, possibly the closest to vegan of all the species closely related to humans, eat insects and sometimes feces
suspect the folks in Venezuela would move the line all the way left, and even further if there was more protein left of that.
Couldn’t help but notice that all the animals shown are all of the domesticated variety. Some of us eat quite a few other animals that aren’t domesticated and which are not represented on the billboard. A heck of a lot more animals not shown belong on the food side of that line. At least the silly people that paid for it don’t have to worry about Squirrels, deer, geese, etc rising up in protest that “wild lives matter”.
That’s two besides’.
Let me know if that’ll hold ya for a while
🙂
It all comes down to if your hungry enough yet!
there was something on the wireless this morning; out of ~240 dead chicken chicks left out in a field in 24 there were ~3 left. Monbiot can go to Waitrose for his provisions so why deprive birds, small mammals and insects of a decent meal ?
For road kill he should come to this part of the world. He’d wax fat on the road kill of those nearly extinct kangaroos
He could move to Texas and feast every night on Armadillo. — Eugene WR Gallun .
Armadillo = Possum on the half shell.
RAH — Haha! Good one! — Eugene WR Gallun
AKA hoover hogs–some a bit older than me would remember
Of course, they need to be fully cooked, to kill off the Bubonic Plague bacteria. I recommend battered and deep fried…
Actually the Armadillo is a carrier of Hanson’s Disease (Leprosy). Because they were found to be susceptible they were used for cultivating the disease. Last I read they hadn’t figured out if Armadillos acquired it because they were used as animal models for research or if they already were carriers before experimentation. But they have found carriers in the wild. The last Leprosarium in the Continental US was at Carville, LA where they did the research on Armadillos but it was closed years ago. The CDC says that transmission of the disease from Armadillo to humans is rare but possible.
They’re a delicacy in parts of Brasil – “tatu”
Well, if every Human on the planet were to follow his example….we would all have to do a lot more driving to keep up the supply of road kill !! (Do electric cars actually go fast enough to produce road kill, and would the car survive the first impact ??) lol
Maybe he should think about eating cadavers preferably those comprised of green constituents.
Need to watch the Monbiots of the world, one small step and its pesky humans in the diet -crosshairs!!
*
PP, embrync and ftl ccktails, “Young blood antiaging trial raises questions”
Wow. The censors are itchy today. They will only permit a Twitter response. I wonder what sets them off.
Why roadkill, when there is a smorgasbord of flora and fauna displaced, destroyed by large-scale windmill and photovoltaic farms? Well, airkill and groundkill. It must be hard to be so green.
Is there some kind of reason for the rich phony-lefties at the Guardian to keep supporting this mentally ill person? Treading water until they can find some new direction?
Bonne appétit, cher Georges.
Pointman
Ok George, go for it;
https://edibug.wordpress.com/list-of-edible-insects/
Leave the beef to me.
Moral maze time: You’re a meat-eater (just love those T-Bones) and you invite some friends round for dinner. One couple are vegetarians so you cater for their needs accordingly (‘cos they made a point of warning you ahead of time!) with no second thoughts. You then get a return invite to the vegetarians’ home. Do you think it possible they will offer you a T-Bone – with no second thoughts? Would it be unreasonable to expect one?
Bring your own steaks, Harry ;o)
They would not want it touching their plates, utensils, frying pans…and vegetarians have little use for a grill, so that is out…I guess aluminum foil on a cookie sheet in the broiler…but those spatters on the oven interior…deary me!
Grilled asparagus is good. Also corn on the cob and potatoes.
The best thiing he can do to save the planet is to eat himself.