At the end of a long day I’m sitting peacefully watching government-funded SBS telly at peak hour (around 7.30pm) and up pops this ad showing a pie chart, with the top third taken up by cows. We are exhorted to ‘go green, go veg, save the planet’, because methane produced by livestock is causing global warming. It’s the third time I’ve seen this ad, and I know how much tv advertising costs, especially in peak hour. This tv advertising campaign would have cost a fortune, in fact according to a Herald-Sun article, they’re spending $400,000 on it. If the producers believe their pie chart, then why aren’t they also saying ‘walk instead of drive, don’t buy anything made in a factory, and go to bed when the sun sets instead of wasting power running a tv – etc’, to address the other 2/3 of their illustration?
I guess if cows are causing 30% of the global warming that this lot say is taking place, then we’d better kill all the cows straight away?
And I presume all these righteous, holier-than-thou ‘vegetarians’ are using and wearing petrochemical products to ‘save the planet’? And that they refuse all medical and pharmacy products that have any animal products in them, even if they – or their children – have a serious illness or accident requiring treatment with these medicines? Yeah I thought not!
But just who funded these ads? ‘Veg Soc’ is written in large letters – so I presumed, as we were obviously meant to presume, that it must have been the ‘Vegetarian Society’. However a bit of digging around revealed the ads on ‘Ask More Now’. Sounds vague and innocuous, doesn’t it? It’s the Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association Australia website, and there is mention of a ‘Climate emergency advertising campaign’ funded by a group of ‘concerned members’. Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association Australia is described thus: ‘A non-profit humanitarian and spiritual organisation involved with promoting world peace through meditation and a vegetarian lifestyle based on compassion for all beings.’ (Does this mean that they care so much about the native wildlife displaced due to the growing of beans, that they grow all their own food in their own backyards?) Apparently membership runs to hundreds of thousands in more than 300 countries, and Supreme Master Ching Hai makes ‘aesthetic jewellery [for sale] and her fashion creations have toured internationally [everyone has to eat, but trotting out a range of fashionable clothing does seem like a weird way for a cult guru to be making cash]. Excuse me for being sceptical, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it is one – this sounds very much like a stereotypical dodgy cult, fronted by an unusually young-looking female leader (I hope her blonde hair dye is environmentally friendly). They certainly get full marks for shiftiness, given that they don’t even put Ching Hai’s name clearly under the ads that her organisation funds. In fact I’d have thought the whole thing was a spoof if they weren’t spending so much money on television advertising (where’s the Chaser’s War on Everything?). Not yet convinced that it is iffy? Then check out the master website called Gods Direct Contact – the ‘Quan Yin method of meditation with the inner light and sound’. It’s hysterical – check out the book on her ‘heavenly canines’ (I guess she feeds her dogs fried tofu?) and the jaw-dropping list of merchandise available – including the ‘celestial clothes and sleeping mattresses for dogs’. I’m not sure how owning 10 pet dogs fits in with being environmentally friendly, unless she uses their cast off hair to knit jumpers?
At the very least, the members of Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association Australia are clearly not logical. The following is stated on the home page of the website: ‘Going green, going veg’, ‘will also help to improve our national health, saving water, saving our bush land and forest from further clearing, less pollution to water ways, reefs, saving lives’.
If human beings aren’t getting the protein they need to function from meat then they’re getting it from plants – and eating a lot more plants than meat eaters need to eat (eg half a truckload of spinach per day, to ingest the minimum recommended amount of iron to avoid anaemia, that would otherwise be provided by a small round of steak). Farming requires cleared land – you can’t sow crops amongst trees – whereas most cattle in Australia graze in and around trees (except for areas that are naturally treeless, such as the north’s open downs country). So how will not eating meat reduce land clearing? Vegetarianism puts more pressure on Australia’s scant supply of arable (suitable crop growing) land, so it actually increases land clearing.
And total vegetarianism would take the vast majority of Australia’s land mass out of food production. Only parts of the relatively narrow coastal fringe, and far southern Australia, has sufficiently fertile soil and enough water for farming (crop growing). Most of the rest – in particular central/inland/northern Australia – is eminently suited to grazing, particularly extensive beef producing enterprises, but soil, water and/or climatic conditions render it unsuited to farming. So these areas of Australia that currently produce huge amounts of edible protein, in perfect harmony with the natural environment (with flourishing populations of native animals and plants), would no longer be producing any food or export income, if no-one ate meat.
Reduce pollution of the reef and waterways? The most common and the worst water pollution comes from urban runoff, and mining and shipping accidents/bad management. Agricultural-related water pollution is minor, and usually due to chemicals and excessive soil erosion. Cow pats break down quickly (helped along by dung beetles) and fertilise the soil, rather than washing away. Extensive livestock operations use few weedicides, if any (only to kill introduced plants); it is intensively farmed crops that require applications of chemical fertilisers and possibly pesticides or weedicides. Grazing operations along the Queensland coast – i.e. adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef – are relatively few and far between. The higher rainfall, more fertile areas are mostly used for higher return land uses, such as crop growing – eg sugarcane, bananas, melons, pineapples, tomatoes, mangoes, vegetable crops etc. All that good healthy stuff that vegetarians depend on for survival. Grazing operations on this coastal strip virtually never have bare soil because it is relatively fertile and reliably watered (in fact around Tully, for example, the grass grows so rapidly in grazed paddocks that it has to be slashed regularly). Whereas crop growing requires the operation of heavy machinery from planting to harvesting – planting into what is usually bare soil in treeless paddocks, possibly spraying for pests or weeds, then harvesting/picking. Some degree of soil erosion (wind & water) sometimes occurs, despite the very best efforts of farmers, the majority of whom naturally do whatever they can to retain their topsoil – the most fertile and valuable soil they have. No farmer wastes chemicals either – they’d go broke rapidly if they did. It must be mentioned that a degree of soil erosion is also a natural event, as old as the planet – wind and water wear down the bits that stick out and volcanic activity forces up new bits (fundamental geography, year 9 or so). Dust storms occurred in Australia long before European settlement; proven by incontrovertible evidence found in coral core samples on the Great Barrier Reef.
Not eating meat doesn’t mean you are healthy, and eating meat doesn’t mean you are unhealthy. I know meat eaters who have fabulously well balanced diets and I know vegetarians who are smokers living on a diet coke and chips, with chronic anaemia. Going vegetarian doesn’t mean you are instantly healthy. A conscientious vegetarian will be much healthier than the average Australian only because of the consistent thought and effort they put into maintaining a healthy balanced diet. A meat eater who puts the same amount of effort into maintaining a balanced diet is just as healthy. Few Australians eat meat for breakfast lunch & dinner, just as very few ‘vegetarians’ don’t eat some type of seafood – if not jelly beans.
Vegetarianism saves water? What drivel – in our climate most commercial crops, except for dryland cereals, require irrigation. Irrigation uses far more water than supplying livestock with drinking water. Areas with sufficient rainfall to water crops reliably also have abundant natural water supplies (creeks, rivers, lakes etc) so provision of stock water is not an issue. Stock are just recycling the water nature provides.
Their agenda is to have everyone else not eat meat as they do; global warming panic is just their excuse to push their own beliefs onto others.
These ads have been discussed on a couple of other blogs. Andrew Bolt’s Herald-Sun newspaper blog has some very intelligent and witty comments. ‘Ka Ching’ probably tops the list as a sum-up. Then we have Larvatus Prodeo; a blog which states it discusses ‘politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective’. As is so absolutely typical of stereotypical uni/academia, these bloggers bag anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the cult of global warming (caused largely by methane-producing cows, of course!) and carbon panic. It’s a classic ‘lets have a discussion and all agree’ blog. One bloke called Peter bravely battled on, persisting in pointing out the lack of logic in contributors arguments, so the moderator did what all good dictators do – closed the discussion thread.
The ads are depressing because I know there’s a lot of ill-informed people that don’t know anything at all about agriculture (including, obviously, the makers of the ad) who will believe there is some truth in their claims that not eating meat will save water, reduce land clearing, reduce pollution, increase the health of Australians and reduce global warming. When in fact increased vegetarianism would do the opposite.
What is also depressing is that most rural residents and producer organisations have no understanding of just how much damage this drip-drip-drip of misleading negativity does to the view urban Australians have of those who are slaving away producing the food and export income they are so dependent on. Cities only evolved when people started growing more food than they could eat themselves, thus being able to sell the surplus to others – so the others had time freed up to pursue other occupations. Cities can only remain if we have enough growers producing a surplus. Otherwise we’d all be back in a subsistence society (growing our own tucker, with stuff-all time for anything else).
The Australian newspaper regularly prints ignorant little comments hidden amongst otherwise plausible articles, such as one by a Weekend Magazine fashion journalist who a few months ago told us all to buy synthetic handbags, not leather ones, to prevent global warming. It’s not enough to laugh off nutter organisations and idiot journalists spreading incorrect and illogical information, it must be routinely countered with logical arguments and concrete facts. With so much written on the internet, it’s astonishing that there is not more discussion on these particularly obnoxious ads on SBS, and the dubious organisation behind them. They have even made a 16 page submission to the Garnaut Climate Change Review; complete with Endnote references listed with titles such as: ‘Livestock a major threat to the environment’, ‘re-examining the data from a Vegan Perspective’ and ‘How environmentalists are overlooking vegetarinism as the Most Effective Tool against climate change in our lifetimes’.
If urban residents want to help the world’s environment the best things they can do are: 1. ensure they buy Australian food, because of our stringent environmental protection policies (as distinct from third world countries in which the struggle for survival means that looking after the environment takes a back seat while they beaver away to get enough to eat – conservation is a middle class luxury) and 2. ensure farmers are well paid for what they produce, thus enabling them to spend the money they want to spend on looking after and improving the environment [eg by restoring corridors of native vegetation – a huge expense] and 3) live by old tried & true adages such as ‘everything in moderation’ and ‘waste not, want not’.