Extinction, Greenwashing, and the Limits of Grazing

0:00Thank you, Gerard. You stayed that we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction. What evidence strongly links animal agriculture to this biodiversity crisis? Yeah, actually, yeah, that's been studied for quite some time. And the latest work, which is a few years out of date, well, there's two things. Well, while I fund WDW, you've put out an index and the footprint on planet earth. And they show that to live to consume as we do in the Western world, like Australia and North America, we need five planets. You could ask any five-year-old, is that sustainable? Absolutely not. But it does, it does matter what we eat. That's the biggest thing. If the work done in North America, for example, on land needed

1:04for diets, showed that the basic American meat heavy diet needs ten times more land than a vegan diet. So that is totally unsustainable. We don't have the land on planet earth to sustain us now. We've gone into overspend. We're actually spending more on the credit card than we can repay. So we're going into debt and it's ecological debt. And if you do that for long enough, you get ecological collapse. It's pretty simple. But the other measure of how far we push nature past any natural point is the biomass of the mammals on planet earth. If you look at that, this is the mammals. This is from mice up to elephants, including us. And humans make up about 30%

2:06of the biomass. This is the weight, live weight, on planet earth. Our animals that we keep for food make up about 60%. So we have this colossus that we've bred. And it's not natural. We breed these things. If we stop breeding, they die out pretty quickly. One percent of the biomass on planet earth is our pets. And 4%, just 4% is the wildlife. Elephants, giraffes, zebras, hippos, kangaroos, you name it, 4%. So we've wiped out nearly three-quarters of the populations of wild animals on planet earth. So we've done a very effective job at stuffing up the wildlife. And just as David Attenborough says, we've overrun planet

3:06earth. And we're way past sustainability by any measure. So we've got a big problem there. And the most effective thing that we can do is change what we eat. Thank you. Hope there's a very articulate brother and sister, Kaylee and Cassie means speaking out about the food system and making some great points about the chemicals. And they're doing a great job. But in their communication, they mention that you can't, you know, something to the effect that it's very good to have grass-fed beef. You've highlighted the concept of greenwashing in animal agriculture. What does this term mean and how is it used to mislead consumers? Sure. Well, just continuing on what Gerard just talked about, land use is such a great thing to bring into the discussion of free-ranging grass-fed, all these things

4:12that are being presented as solutions, right? I mean, so we now know that animal agriculture is impactful on the environment. It's so interesting to see the trajectory. I mean, I've been vegan for 35 years. And we used to never see it in mainstream media, in journal, nothing. Nothing about animal agriculture's impact. If you saw anything about climate change, it never had food involved in the solutions or anything about it. That has changed. You now see that we, at least I do, I've seen, you know, you'll see something like in Time magazine or some, you know, mainstream information, where they acknowledge that, yes, maybe red beef or, you know, red meat beef has impact. You'll see a little bit, right? But, and this is great, great progress. Glad that they're acknowledging it. But interestingly, so what, what

5:13is the, you know, the industry saying, well, the industry is not saying no, eat more vegetables, that's the thing to do. They're saying, no, no, no, no, no. We can do it better, right? We can do grass-fed. We can do free-range. You know, there's so many ways, sustainable, regenerative. Well, the problem with all of these, almost all of these have the same kind of transition or change going on, and that is a smaller number of animals on much larger areas of land, right? So, you are using more land, you're destroying more trees and green spaces, you're filling in wetlands, you're expanding prairie lands, you know, for grazing more animals. We know what is caused all the topsoil erosion and problems in deforestation across the US, across Australia. What is it grazing, right? Grazing, ruminant animals. We know that. So, what are they proposing as the solution? More grazing. This makes no sense, right? It makes no sense. It's very frustrating,

6:19and I'll give an example, in Petaluma, California, it's in Sonoma County, California, where a lot of this, you know, these labels, you'll see these sustainable labels in grass-fed and all of this. So, there is a beef and pork farm in Petaluma, and they, you know, if you go to their website, they've got just acres of land and it's beautiful and green and all of this, right? So, they claim that they give their animals 10 acres per cow and 50 acres per every 10 pigs, okay? We are now up to 60 acres for 11 animals. 11 animals. You know, there's 60,000 people in Petaluma alone. How on earth can they feed everyone with this kind of farming? It just cannot be scaled up. There's no way. You know, free-ranging, grass-fed, all these things can really only be specialty markets for a few elite buyers. There's no way we could feed the 8 billion people on the planet with this

7:24kind of farming. So, it's really just greenwashing. It may work for a small number of product, but you cannot feed everyone this way. It just can't be done. Thank you. Julian, considering the interconnectedness of climate change, biodiversity loss, and animal agriculture, what is the single most impactful action individuals and developed nations can take to address these issues? Eat wisely. In simple fact, understand where your food comes from and how it is produced. Understand if it's produced by chemicalized, cruel, intensive, you know, money-making methods, or understand how it can be produced sustainably. This is at the core of renewable food. So, the bottom line advice is eat renewable food. Now, if you look at your teeth,

8:25right, those are not the teeth of a vegetarian. They're not the teeth of a sheep. They are the teeth of a mixed feeder, art carnival part vegetarian. That's how we evolved over the last couple of million years. So, persuading everybody on the planet to go vegetarian, especially persuading Americans, Australians, Argentinians, not to eat meat is going to be a bloody big ask, if you ask me. However, we can produce meat without involving livestock. We can do that now, and it requires very little water and almost no land to do it. So, the new meat systems, synthetic meat, it's called. It's getting bad mouths by the cattle industry and so on. But it's coming, and it's going to go into the sausages and pies and nuggets and things like that. And you don't know what's in a sausage. You don't know what's in a nugget. You don't know what's in a meat pie. You will not know the difference. The consumer will not know that they are not eating

9:27cow. Do you mean cell-based meat? I'm sorry Julian, are you talking about like cell-based or what meat are you talking about? You're talking about cellular culture of meat. Okay. I just wanted to clarify. Yeah. The first hamburger grown by these methods cost $300,000 because it was a piece of research. But the price of cellular-based meat is now down to $30 a kilo and it'll be down to $3 a kilo within the decade. So, this kind of meat will be available on world markets, whether or not the cattle industry likes it. In the same way that synthetic fibers now clothe everybody in spite of the fact that the wool and cotton industries didn't like them. So there is a huge change coming in doubt. But look, it's not just cellular meat. It's cellular plants. And we currently eat 300 different plants. Okay. Worldwide, that's the number of different plants we eat, plant foods. There are 30,000 edible plants on planet earth. We are eating 1% of all the available vegetable

10:34richness of this planet. We haven't even begun to explore the earth in terms of the wonderful vegetable foods that are available to be eaten. And once we do, once the chefs, the fewest chefs get onto this, you know, you're going to see an explosion of interest in new vegetable foods. Take it from me. And a lot of them will be produced in cities by hydroponic methods and so forth. So it's going to be a much more exciting food era and less dominated by these big industrial combines than what we've seen so far. Julian, again, I love everything you speak about. I just one little subtlety that, you know, that to bring up. What Gerard seems to be saying and hope also is that even the people that claim that they do the most, not the cell base, but with real cows, the people like Joe Salton who claim they do the most pure, humane, regenerative methods that actually it still is incredibly resource intensive and is not a solution. Is that something that

11:40you're comfortable with or did you come to a different conclusion than that? A conclusion I come to after studying agriculture and food for half a century is that you can't wave a magic wand and cause consumers to change their diets. You can't wave a magic wand and cause them to change their energy consumption. You know, electric vehicles, for example, it takes time for anything to catch on. Let me just respond to hope on the issue of green washing. The fact that there are free range eggs in the supermarket is due to consumer pressure entirely. Farmers would never have gone away from caged chickens. If consumers have not said it's cruel and I'm going to refuse to eat your, your, your cruel chicken meat or your cruel chicken eggs. So at least the farmers have adjusted in response to consumers. We do need consumers to start pushing the food, the food corporations and the food chain in the direction of sustainability. If that doesn't happen,

12:40they'll just sit there and make money out of both the farmers and the consumers. So they have to be, so some of this green washing is actually part of a gradual process of change as agriculture adapts to a new world in which it's not very sustainable, you know, and it's terribly climate vulnerable. So yes, we know it's got to change, but it's not going to change overnight. You have to change people's consumption habits and that is a very big ask. I mean, not, not the whole world, the whole world doesn't have exposure to American media, thank heavens. You know, we're not getting the same marketing messages that they're getting in America or in Britain or anywhere else. So you can't change, I mean, Chinese have only just discovered meat. Back in the 1930s, China was a totally vegetarian country and it's discovered meat and hence they have the world's biggest pig population and the world's biggest trick population. So you know, China, you tried talking the Chinese

13:42middle class out of eating meat. They're not going to do it overnight. You might persuade them over a generation, but it's not going to be instant, it's not going to be quick. The crash that humanity is facing is going to come within 30, 40 years. Basically, all of these things are coming together, all of the different, the mega threats that I've, the 10 mega threats of which climate is only one are coming together in the next 40 to 50 years. So unless we start actively changing all of these things, how we use water, what sorts of food we eat, stop using so much chemicals, stop using so much fossil fuels. So we've got to change all of those things and we, that means changing our buying patterns because the only person in the world that corporations listen to is the consumer. They don't give, they don't give a rat's backside about, about governments. Okay, let, let, let, let, let hold, respond to it. Oh, I was just going to say that, Julien, I,

14:46I agree with you. I, and I say it in my talks and in my books that, that this, you know, even though I am, you know, frustrated with and speaking out against all these labels, I think they're a good thing. But I think that we're moving in the right direction. I think that it is a response that the industry is forced to do because of consumer demand. And that is a good thing. So I agree. Um, that these, you know, it's a good, it's, I think it's something we have to go through to get to the other side to get to where we want to be, which, to me, is no, no animal exploitation at all and a completely sustainable food system. Uh, so yeah, I agree with you on that. Um, yeah, and, and I'll just say, um, as far as like, and, and I also agree with you that, you know, it is very important for individuals to make those choices with our dollars when we're at the store, uh, to, you know, express what we want to eat. Um, one thing I will just say, uh, you know, and I, um, being,

15:51I guess I'll, I'll say that I feel like two, we need to change who we are as people, not necessarily just what we do, just our habits. Oh, by this instead of that, you know, I, I, I truly feel that we need to change, um, you know, what, what are our values? What do we, uh, what do we value? What is important to us? Uh, and of course, this is a big, big discussion, but I think that, um, being compassionate, being kind, not exploiting animals in any way and not hurting or killing animals in any way is part of that to me. Uh, I think that that is kind of a core foundational, um, compassion that we need, uh, to be able to make these changes, um, because if we just change our habits from this to that, we can slip back into some other bad habits so easily. We need like fundamental consciousness societal change, I feel. Anyway, big, big picture things though. Let

16:56you move on to Gerard. Um, Gerard, you mentioned that 80% of agricultural land is devoted to livestock and feed. Can you contextualize this figure in terms of the land required for human food production? Yes. Um, land use is, it sounds boring, but it's actually really, really interesting. Um, the where we live, where most people in the world live is in the cities, the built-up areas. And if you add together the, this, the built-up areas, transport, mining, that comes to less than 1% of the world's land by three land. So what happens out there, out behind, out in the bush, as we call it in Australia, is, is almost hidden to, to most people. But we were watching like 10 square kilometers of trees in Queensland, 10 square kilometers of trees cut down a day, actually

18:0011. That's two and a half thousand acres cleared, destroyed, burned per day. Um, 93% of that over decades was for, um, red meat production, basically, some sheep. But, um, the, the land use, what, yeah, what's really interesting, YPC, put out a report a few years ago, looked at land use and, and, and, um, uh, flows of, of, uh, energy, etc. And, and we, and they found that of the crops, of the, of the biomass of crops that are produced on planet earth, half of them, sorry, two thirds of the biomass goes to feeding animals. Um, that, of the rest, uh, half of that, or a little more, goes to feeding humans, and some goes to, uh, fuel and bio, biofuels, uh,

19:06sorry, fiber and biofuels. So, the, the, the roughly 4% of the, of the planet that feeds humans, gives us about 85% of our calories. So, so already planet earth is mostly sustained by just, uh, a small percentage of the land. But we have this, is 40, 40 something percent of the land that is devoted to animal agriculture that provides us the rest. Some of us is seafood, but, but most of it comes up there, they're the land. And, and if you look at totally grass-fed production, that's, that's less than 1% the, the Oxford report, uh, grazed and confused to discover that. So, so really we are being extremely wasteful in the way we use planet earth. Um, and, but no, people don't see that. They see the cities where they live. They see the TV.

20:08They think that protein only comes from meat. They think that calcium only comes from dairy foods. Um, they, they're just woodwinked. And so, what we need to do is change that. But as, as you said, Julian, the, the corporations aren't sort of the baddies in the picture. They're just responding to people, to their demand. But they're also influencing that demand by the incessant ads we get for, uh, KFC, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, um, but I think that, you know, top down bottom up, we, we, the only thing that will change is when we change. And what you said, hope we are changing. I look at my six grandkids and I see there's wisdom there beyond the years. And when they're, if they fully explained the impact of what they're doing, they'll change. Uh, quicker than we ever did. Um, I ever did at that age. So, um, I, I'm positive about the future.

21:10I, I see a bright future for humanity, uh, to tell you the truth. Thank you. Hope when someone comes up to you and says, hope, I completely agree with everything you're saying. And that's why I never eat red meat. Our diet is strictly fish, eggs, milk. But we literally never have beef or chicken. We literally just fish, eggs, and milk. So, we're, we're totally with you. Um, how, how would they do? And what do you, what do you say to them in terms of how they're doing in terms of being, you know, hand being conscious? Um, well, I would probably ask, uh, if they were concerned for the environment, or if they were concerned for animals, because unfortunately, uh, dairy and eggs and fish are incredibly impactful still on the environment and still are, uh, you know, animals are suffering in those industries. Uh, so, you know, um, it, it is interesting. A lot of people,

22:15I have heard before people saying, oh, well, I agree. I, I want to eat more ecological. So I eat chicken, uh, thinking that it's better than beef, right? Uh, so, you know, there's all these comparisons that can go on, right? Well, beef has a little more, uh, climate change impact than chicken and, you know, these little little comparisons that can be made. Well, chicken has more water use than beef in a lot of instances. So there's a lot going on there. There's a lot of different impacts. But the best comparison to make, what you really should be asking is let's compare an animal product to a plant product. That's the comparison that needs to be made. Because anytime you look at life cycle assessments where they analyze the food from, you know, the planting to, to, to, uh, product or an animal products instance from, you know, birth to death, uh, that again and again and again, you find that plant foods have much less impact than animal

23:19foods across the board. You know, some people will, will tell me, oh, well, I eat locally. I eat all local foods, you know, I'm, I'm very local oriented and that can be really good and I don't mean to, uh, say that, you know, supporting your local economy is a bad thing. But, you know, for instance, if you go to the grocery store and you're looking at a banana and you think, oh, well, you know, that's tropical. That had to come so far away. It came across a boat. Uh, maybe I'll eat this local, uh, yogurt, you know, product, right? Organic yogurt. Well, if you do a life cycle assessment on both of those products, again and again and again, you're going to find that whatever the plant food is, it's less in greenhouse gases. It's less in its resource intensity. Uh, when they do these life cycle assessments like, um, for local products, the, uh, how local the food is is about 11% of the equation of the impact of, uh, of a plant, of animal or food, any food animal or plant food, 11% is

24:21kind of how local the food is, but 87%, 83% is how, uh, impactful it is, um, with resources. It's resource-intensive, right? And animal products are incredibly resource-intensive. Uh, so, you know, trying not to get into too much detail, you're going to be better off with the plant food, no matter what you choose, uh, local, organic, you find it again and again with all these labels, uh, that make a consumer feel like, oh, well, this is the better choice, right? Not necessarily. It's very resource-intensive. Thank you. Julian, assume that someone has never read your books, never heard you speak, never, no, doesn't know anything about what you're saying, and you have three minutes to communicate to, to that person that's as much as they'll watch in a video, or that everything that you're concerned about and what the problem is and what the solution is, what would you say if you had a three minutes to sum up every, every bit of what the problem is

25:24and what your solution is? Steve, I want to start by paying a huge compliment to you, because you are part of the most important evolution that humans have ever been through. That is sharing knowledge, wisdom, understanding, and ideas globally, online, at the speed of light, basically this is the most important thing that humans have ever done. We've stopped being tribal citizens and we've become earth citizens, and we're not going to fix any of our problems unless we solve them together. We're not going to fix any problems as Americans or Russians or Chinese or Indians or Australians. We're only going to fix them as one people on one earth, and you are doing your bit, especially in the health space, to achieve that so good on you. I hope I want to praise you for saying yes, we've got to change, and let me offer a way that we can change. Let us put women in charge of the world. Let us put women in charge of government. Why? Because

26:31governments that have men in charge invariably end up fighting wars. Women don't start wars. Men do, right? Men like to fix things quickly with chemicals and machines, and they end up killing somebody down the track, and they don't care. Women think about what's going to happen to the grandkids. They take a much longer range view of things. I'm not saying that women are perfect, like you. They do squabble over things, and just like men, but they take a more conservative long range survival oriented view. And if we had women in charge of government, religion, business, you know, and almost all of our social structures, we would have a much more peaceful and sustainable world, because they would be thinking about the future. The men are just concerned with making as much money as we can and riding headlong into whatever crisis we that comes along next. Okay, so please put women in charge. How to sum up the crisis that is facing the human emergency. There are 10 mega threats. They all have solutions. The solutions are documented in

27:36my book. How to fix a broken planet and five other books before that. They're not hard to implement. The advice on what you can do in your own life is in that book. I can't encapsulate it in three minutes, but there's about 300 things you can do in your own life to save the lives of your grandchildren. Thank you. Are Gerard same question? If someone had never met you, doesn't know you'll work, and you have three minutes to tell them everything that's important, that you want to communicate the most urgent information and the science behind it and the solutions. How would you go ahead? What would you say? Yeah, thanks, Stephen. I underline Julian's comments. This is great work that you were doing. The interesting thing is that the solutions are out there, as Julian said. What my work does to add to that is to re-value trees. It re-values the carbon value and the biodiversity value. No, not so much the biodiversity, but the climate value of trees. The only way

28:45to get trees restored in a big way at large scale is through changing landures. The only way to change landures is to change what we eat. Our food occupies 40 times what our cities do. That's a big lever to pull. By pulling that lever, we can change the long-term, that is we can make carbon dioxide a short-term emission. We can also change the thing that will affect the heating on the planet in the next decades, which is methane production, which is a major thing. We can also change biodiversity. If we give a large chunk, almost 40 percent of the planet, the grazing land, back to nature, that will go a long way towards fixing wildlife populations and the biodiversity

29:48crosses. Thank you. Can I just say something real quick, Stephen? I think it's really interesting that we have... Julian has some really wonderful technological solutions. Gerard has the nature-based solution of rewilding and re-growing. We have the solutions here. If people could just make the changes, it's beautiful to see. It's very interesting the dichotomy of the two trajectories of solutions, but we have them here. It's amazing. Great. Thank you. I hope also for you, what would you like to say? What was the question again? Someone who doesn't know your work and you had three minutes to explain what the problem is and what your research shows and what the solution is, what would you say to them? Well, for myself, I think, going vegan, live vegan. I think that's really the

30:49easiest thing that someone can do immediately without any... They don't have to have extra money. They don't have to have money to buy solar panels. They don't have to go digging to find anything new, really. It's all right there in your supermarket. It's the easiest solution that has the largest impact is living vegan. Assume that someone reads your books, reads your research, reads your arts, latest papers. Again, we come back to the same problem that whoever is selling something doesn't want it sales to slow down. How do we make progress if we all agree that terrible things are happening? The way to change it is that we've got to stop eating eggs. Well, the people who sell eggs don't want that solution. If the solution is we should stop using pesticides. Well, the guy who sells pesticides doesn't like that solution and the people who own stock in that company and the people who do the marketing and everyone around that industry

31:53fights back viciously. So, how do we ever solve anything when we might see a problem, but the person who's solving, you know, to solve a day we might lose money and that guy, you know, the guy who sells the chainsaws to cut down the trees wants to keep cutting down trees because he sells chainsaws. So, how do you get around the core problem that someone loses money even if the change is good for the world? If I could offer a thought there and it's not a comfortable thought, there is going to be a collapse. We've currently got four times more people on the planet than it can sustain in the long term. The sustainable population at current levels of consumption is about two billion and women are getting the population down because they're reducing their fertility levels, but probably not fast enough. So, there is going to be a crash. There's probably going to be before there comes a crash of resources, there's going to be an economic crash. So, people who make money are going to find that their money is more or less

32:57worthless. So, the economic crash will proceed. Now, I can't predict when that's going to happen. It could be within 10 years, it could be within 50 years, but the resources are going to give out the climate pressure is going to become too great. The toxins are spreading so widely, nuclear wars will probably break out because we've got the weapons to do it and some fool will use them sooner or later. So, those things are likely to precipitate a disastrous crash in the human population. Science says that if we continue business as usual, then nine out of 10 humans are going to die. However, what we have here, by doing the changes that Gerard and Hope are talking about and other changes, we can actually mitigate that crash, we can reduce the death toll, we can reduce the loss of humanity by living a much more sustainable life and managing our population down to a sustainable level. To get sustainable, by the way,

33:57all we have to do is offer every woman on earth family planning. That's all we have to do. Women will do the rest. They're already doing it. So, you know, we will get the population down one way or the other. We have a choice between a natural driven crash and a managed crash. That's all that's the only choices we've got because the earth just can't carry this many people for so much longer using the resources at the rate we're using them. So, it's going to happen. No, I'm sorry to say that that's not a delightfully optimistic, but I'm not in the business of fooling people or being a Hollywood promoter and telling them what they want to hear. I'm in the business of telling them what the science is telling me. And that's what the science is saying. Julian, how do we stay in touch with you if you want to stay involved with your work, your books, what's the best way to do a website? How could people stay in touch with you and learn more? Yeah, through my website, I can't even remember the web address at this stage, but also the Council for the Human Future, where we are working hard on spreading awareness of

35:03the issues and of the solutions. The Council for the Human Future has got some useful advice in there. Join us because we are about joining hands with everybody who wants a habitable for our grandchildren. And hope how would we stay in touch with you and get your books and learn more? My books are available anywhere that you buy books. My non-profit is Compassion of Living. Oh, that's my podcast. Hope for the animals podcast. I have some really wonderful episodes on regenerative animal farming and environmental impact. There's a drop-down menu with categorized episodes. Yeah, we go to episodes and you can go to environmental, the environment one. And yeah, and that's got some great podcasts that are specific to what we're talking about today. Yeah, and also have a project called the HumaneHokes. HumaneHokes.org if you

36:06want to check it out. Great, thank you very much. In Gerard, how would we stay in touch with you when you're working your projects? Yes, well, at the moment, it's through the World Preservation Foundation. You can look for their website. Also, we had a large contribution to the documentary eating our way to extinction. And that's available for free on YouTube. And there are websites and the EDIWATER group to extinction and eating for the future. And you can look at those websites and there are contacts there. So, yeah, if they want to know more, eating a way to extinction is a good way to get to us. And what about how old is this most recent paper you did? How new is it and how do people see it? Yes, okay. The two papers that we produced recently were both published in one of the top

37:14journals called Environmental Research Letters and one in October and one last month. And we are in the busy promoting those right now. But what I'll do is I'll put the links to each of those in the in the chat if anyone's interested in that right now. Okay, great. Thank you. And I'll also put, I'll also put my email. Okay, great. Well, thank you all for sharing this. It's not enough time to discuss everything, but thank you so much for being willing to share this. And we look forward to continuing to work with you and hear your information. If we could unmute everyone, so everyone could thank them as well.