Go Veg! This writer finally takes the plunge.

The Serious: Switching from a meat-based diet to a vegetarian diet does more for the environment than switching from a gas-guzzling SUV to a hybrid car.
(University of Chicago geophysicists, from Veg For Life)

The Silly: The Meatrix: "It is all around you, Leo Hamderson. Take the red pill and I'll show you the truth."

Think about this the next time you're about to order a steak. Livestock farming is super inefficient, using up 8lbs of grains to produce each pound of meat that appears on the shelf -- but meat doesn't have any nutritional advantages, so there isn't any good reason we persist in doing it, other than meat's comfortable position in the status quo (and on take-out and fast-food menus nationwide). Not only that, over 70% of American grain and corn is fed to farm animals, instead of people! That same amount could feed 800 million hungry people.

Switching to a vegetarian diet has broad health benefits: statistics on a variety of issues, from heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer to osteoporosis, meat-related proliferation of resistant "super-bug" microbes, and food-borne pathogens support cutting out meat entirely. More on nutrition here. The tragedy of livestock animals' short, pain-filled lives and the damage they innocently wreak on our soils and our waters is an epidemic. Personally, I have ignored it for convenience sake for too long, and it's time to make a conscious choice to stop. Recognizing the consequences of one's actions is a necessary step to being a conscientious citizen and to work toward changing for the better.

"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."
- Dean Ornish, M.D.

There are even more potential benefits of vegetarianism related to the state of the environment. Factory farming, the majority source of milk and cheese in the U.S., produces such concentrated wastes as to pollute the land beyond the ability to rebound naturally. Animal meat provides a very concentrated source of accumulated human-created toxins, which get stored in their fatty tissue. Eating the plants they feed on instead makes people less likely to suffer from ailments that have arisen as a result of our landfill-happy culture and the subsequent leaching of endocrine disruptors, heavy metals and cancer-causing agents that permeate the water that Daisy the dairy cow or that your Christmas ham end up drinking.

And let's not forget the fish. Overfishing has resulted in a complete imbalance of the oceanic food chains, and with the nitrogenous and phosphoric farm waste flows contributing to the problem, dead zones dominate once-vibrant waterways. Oxygen-depleting organisms have made waters even more uninhabitable for complex, higher organisms that work to keep smaller ones in check. Algal blooms (also known as a "red tide") are more common now than ever, and the drought will surely have an amplifying effect for the eastern United States (see notes from new hampshire for more on that). Farmed fish aren't any better; they consume 3 pounds wild fish, from already-barren oceans, to every pound produced.

My conclusion is that my meat consumptions stops, now. I will try to eliminate dairy products as well, but my primary priority is to start treating the flesh of animals like the sentient beings they are, and let them be. I'll leave you with a quote:

"Kindness and compassion toward all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well ourselves."
-Cesar Chavez

My First Week: A Non-Profit Primer

Here are a few amusing things learned my first week on the job at CHEJ:

• Celebrity is an important thing in the world of non-profits. It behooves an organization to be founded by or peopled by celebrities - everyone wants to be near to them in case some star power rubs off. But also important are celebrity donors, who flock to fancy donor events in big cities to show their support for the cause. Who would have thought my first staff meeting would include a discussion of who's networked with the likes of Brooke Shields, Ralph Nader, and even Hillary?

• Everyone does everything. I'm not just an intern, you know; I'm going to play toxicologist and organizer, too. This will probably be mostly good; first, I won't get bored from being boxed in too tightly, and second, I'll have a more well-rounded set of skills when I leave.

• Staff all seem to know someone who served in or who is currently serving in the peace corps. That means lots of good stories and advice for me! Best so far is my co-worker who built her own greenhouse and quit her PC job-function as an environmental educator to better serve the needs of the community. As she put it, "It's not like they would actually fire you."

• Environmental organizations take running a green office seriously. This means printing and copying with soy-based ink on recycled/reused paper, 100% donated and reused office furniture, a moratorium on paper, plastic, and styrofoam kitchen supplies, and a strictly enforced recycling policy. Needless to say, I'm pleased.

• Public transportation is marvelous. I can knit, I can read all manner of publications, I can mouth the words to old Juanes and Tears for Fears songs, and I can people-watch. It's a relaxing way to wake up or wind down, and not having to worry about terrible snow traffic is amazing. But, you say, this is not limited to non-profit orgs-- and this is true! But it's a first for me, so I say it counts.
  

Channeling that North American Alchemy

In A Safe and Sustainable World: The Promise of Ecological Design, Nancy Jack Todd whips up an amazing how-to/history on practical solutions to ecological and social imbalances, focusing on key biological details to the same degree that Affluenza focuses on the theory. The forces behind New Alchemy's gaian Ark-home cum greenhouse and industrial strength wind-powered pond-scrubber are convincingly identified as none less than healing powers of nature. How did they get there? The New Alchemy Institute members started by asking the question, "Was it possible to support Earth's population over time while protecting the natural world? And if so, how?" and conclude with an outlook of great hope that bodes extremely well for the you and I, assuming that such great ideas could amass the necessary will to broad scale action.

The greatest accomplishments of the holistic approach detailed in the book are often achieved in the context of a naysayers (who ranged from amused to desperate) through the tireless and continued efforts of an ever-growing community of scientists, artists, students, and children. The community approach was probably as integral to New Alchemy's success as was the vision of their leader (and the author's husband), John Todd. Also present as supporters of the Alchemy Farm in its beginnings were such idealogues as E.F. Schumacher and Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who were both important for their work in the domain of philosophy of environment; at the Farm, these and all others who participated left their mark as a part of a beautiful synergy, much like the integrative work itself. Other books, like the Sierra Club's "Compost This Book!" impressed me with its practical and earth-friendly projects that solved challenging problems of equal ecological importance. However, New Alchemy leaves behind not just a nice mechanistic solution but an entire breathing biome, all its cycles restored and in harmony with living needs, including those of modern people.

Frightening fact: The World Health Organization estimates that 70 percent of cancers are caused by environmental factors. Cancer rates continue to rise despite Billions of dollars spent on research and treatment. Through ignorant or otherwise unintentional exposure to byproducts inherent in a corporate-controlled and economics-driven world, people are finally becoming a victim to what society has wrought. But Ocean Arks International, the contracting offshoot of New Alchemy's residual faith in natural efficiency, is working directly with these destructive entities and reclaiming unsightly waste pits as lush, abundant sanctuaries. They took stock of a sewage canal in crowded Fuzhou province and made it into a pond/walkway uniting bordering apartment communities, and they dared to transform the runoff from a Tyson, Inc. chicken farm into an energy-producing greenhouse replete with solar energy-storing fish tanks. No single person could have dreamed up the elegance of nature's own nutrient recycling program that drives these awesome solutions, but the Todd's have been imaginative enough to harness it for urgently necessary purposes. Their story comes to a close having learned and accomplished so much, and the timing is just right for renewed efforts by the next generation - yours and mine.

More Info:
John Todd's CNN Biography
John Todd and the New Alchemists on Design Outlaws

I'm happy to say my list of influential and important folks grows longer, along with great resources for further inquiry and exploration!