Climate Change: Living Differently
Just before its official demise, National Geographic did a visually appealing piece on climate change and the need to change our lifestyles. The online article has lovely pictures, not too much text, and clear messages to do with solutions: the need to phase out fossil fuels and switch to renewable energies.
Nowhere that I could find is there a mention of the immediate changes in our lifestyle that we need to make starting 40 years ago (now is good too). Namely,
- eating a plant-based diet so that we can free up grasslands and pasturelands for restoration back to forest to sequester carbon;
- driving less or not at all, so we can stop using the gas and oil that companies keep destroying our ecosystems to produce, and
- using less energy at home and at work, instead of using the same amount or even more just because the energy is coming from renewable sources, which by the way have embedded energy and other environmental impacts, and takes more time and money to adopt than changing our behavior.
As I’ve said before, climate change and the loss of forests is due to our behaviors – what we eat, how we move around, and the products we buy and consume. In order to stabilize the global climate, we need to start looking at what we do daily, and how we support its destruction.
A plant-based diet is the single most powerful action we all can take against climate change because it will allow us to release grasslands and pasturelands currently used for livestock, to be returned to native forest to sequester carbon.