I = P x T x E – Part 1

Impacts are Equal to Population multiplied by Tools multiplied by Energy available to drive those Tools

Editors Note: The Wildlife News has a history of tackling difficult and sometimes uncomfortable or disturbing topics. This may be one for you…

For those of us who care about our public lands and wildlife, we need to pull back a bit and look at the broader picture of where we are at. This dialog (along with the more important internal dialog) may not be really comfortable but it is one that needs to happen. I am pretty sure some of what I will be bringing up in this I = P x T x E Series will have people electronically screaming at me, let’s see….I hope not.

Over the past 30-40 years it has become forbidden to talk about the human population and it being THE driver for virtually every problem the planet faces. In the last decade or so there even has been a concerted effort by certain billionaires with bloated egos and certain men who play with couches, who think that the laws of physics can be ignored, that the real problem facing the world is too FEW humans.

Setting aside the physics problems for a moment, do we really want to live in a world where there is no room left for anything by us and our things?

Most readers of The Wildlife News live in the western US where there are some patches of semi-functional ecosystems still left, so you can be excused for not thinking things are quite so dire, but I am reminded of a fairly recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled The global biomass of wild mammals

Here is the bottom line….

So human bodies and their livestock (mammals only, not including birds, fish , etc) weigh in at 1,020 million tons, while all other mammals on the planet come in at 60 million tons.

So >94% of the mammalian biomass is humans and livestock with <6% are all other mammals.

In another recent article ….

A diverse range of mammals once roamed the planet. This changed quickly and dramatically with the arrival of humans. Since then, wild land mammal biomass has declined by an estimated 85%.

While the PNAS paper only looked at mammalian biomass, this article looked at bird biomass.

71% of total bird biomass exists solely as human food.

Looking at this from a time perspective, the article provides this chart. The orange and blue sections are the bars are humans and livestock, while the aqua on the left is everything else.

Now the proverbial shit is about to hit the fan because this is a very personal issue. And I will bet that 99% of those heaping opprobrium on me for mentioning this taboo still are part of the demand for the livestock, poultry and farmed fish.

Sorry but we have to deal with the proverbial elephant in the room.

Why I am bringing this up is I was forwarded this morning a deep dive into the animal agriculture’s grip on the conservation world.

The article is not a short read, but its an important read. I hope you take the time to read it.

You can’t separate the issues of wildlife, biodiversity, healthy ecosystems and wildlands from the human footprint and our daily actions.

“The taking over of these [conservation] organizations for greenwashing has reached such a level that I think we need to be honest about it,” said Silvia Secchi, a natural resource economist and professor of geographical and sustainability sciences at the University of Iowa. “Because it’s pretty obvious that the industry is using them, and whether willing or not, they’re letting themselves be used.”

Most importantly, these partnerships obscure what environmental scientists increasingly say rich countries must do to meet global climate targets: rapidly shrink livestock populations and shift to a more plant-based food system.

It’s what’s called the “carbon opportunity cost” of meat. In rich countries, which eat a lot of meat, that cost is massive. According to a 2020 study led by Matthew Hayek, a New York University environmental studies professor, a shift to plant-based eating in rich countries would free up enough land to sequester an amount of carbon dioxide approximately equal to the past nine years of their fossil fuel emissions.

“If you can’t get the Sierra Club to [support a methane tax], how the fuck are you going to get anyone else in society to do that?” [Todd} Shuman told me in exasperation. “If your environmental organizations — that people expect to kind of lead on this — are too scared to do that, what hope is there for our species on this planet?

I was recently collecting data on the Indian Creek allotment between Moab and Monticello , Utah which is permitted to one of the organizations repeatedly mentioned in the article. The “ranch” is one of this organization’s supposed crown jewels proving that livestock production as a wondrous conservation tool.

I clipped 17 sites, most of which were the BLM’s “key sites” for vegetative condition monitoring. The average Similarity Index calculation, how close current vegetative conditions are to what they should be for that soil and precipitation zone, for all grasses was a stunning 9%. The is the low end of the POOR category.

75-100% of potential is HCPC (Historic Climax Plant Community) 50-75% is GOOD, 25-49% is FAIR and 0-24% is POOR.

There’s also the uncomfortable fact of personal habits. Being an environmentalist doesn’t require being a vegan, but several people I talked to speculated that environmentalists may not care to change America’s relationship to meat because they’re unwilling to change themselves.

“People have told me about their [organization’s] leaders not willing to eat the vegan meal and going out and getting a steak or whatever,” one longtime activist told me, requesting anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the issue in the environmental movement. “I hear stories and I just think, ‘That’s like a person working on renewable energy and driving a Hummer.’ … If we can’t change ourselves in the environmental community, then how would we expect to change the general population?”

The idea that environmentalists shouldn’t try to influence how people eat “is a win for industry … It’s their script,” said Jacquet, the University of Miami professor. Environmentalists who repeat this, she added, have “become sock puppets for industry, and they don’t even mean to be.”

Well, my personal journey on this issue had nothing to do with concern for the environment. Back in 1981 I did a fast for a few days. After ending it, eating meat was no longer pleasant. Being indoctrinated in the American BS that that meat is a required part of the human diet, I forced myself for about 4 months after the fast but then I just said, no more. That was almost 45 years ago and I have not shriveled up and died yet.

The dairy thing was bit harder. It was not until about 6 years ago I could no longer deal with the cognitive dissonance of working around the shit, piss and filth of cattle and the disgust of dealing with the corruption engendered by the livestock industry yet still enjoying butter, sour cream and cheese, so I decided I had to change to match my values.

Now on the rare occasions some dairy product winds up on the plate, I no longer find the experience pleasurable, all I taste is cow.