Reducing Overconsumption on Earth Day and Every Day

(crossposted at Marysia's RHRealityCheck Diary)

I am glad to see this article on RHReality Check, pointing out the many points of connection between environmental and reproductive justice:

A Cleaner, Greener Planet

And of course one article can't cover all the grounds of this enormous subject, so I'd like to raise some more relevant issues.

When it comes to reproductive and environmental responsibility, many people is the wealthier countries think of the responsibility to limit their own reproduction for the sake of the planet.

Now I'm not going to argue for one minute that the Earth has an endless carrying capacity, or that people shouldn't voluntarily choose to limit their conceptions. But I do stand in solidarity with women from the Two Thirds World who finally were able to change the terms of the debate at the 1994 UN population conference in Cairo.

Two Thirds World activists have shown that it is not just the total number of people that threatens the environment, but the patterns of grotesque overconsumption in the wealthier countries. They have argued that the most important thing is to alleviate child and maternal mortality and ensure educational and work opportunities for women as well as access to voluntary contraception--and population size will take care of itself.

One key way for people in the wealthier countries to reduce their overconsumption is to forego (or at least minimize) their use of animal products. Many are beginning to ask questions about the use of such products in the manufacture of contraceptive and safer sex items, and to demand--and even get--contraceptives and safer sex items that are free of animal products, or at least products from animal carcasses. The Glyde Corporation, with its line of vegan-friendly items, is a leader in this regard. Please see the left side of this blog and also the Nonviolent Choice Directory Mall for (nonprescription) vegetarian and vegan birth control and safer sex items.

But the largest, single most decisive step people can take is to become vegan or vegetarian, for their own health, the health of other human beings, and of course for the sake of our fellow sentient beings who get killed for meat.

In the US especially, enormous quantities of energy and land are hijacked and blasted with endocrine-disrupting pesticides to feed meat animals crammed into factory farms. Which in turn create environmentally devastating pollution, as shown on the recent PBS "Frontline" special by reporter Hedrick Smith, "Poisoned Waters."

Growing at least part of one's own food organically and very locally is another option, even if one has very little available land But the average front lawn in the US can be through rather easy-to-learn, low-tech methods farmed to grow enough produce for a family of four for one year. And urban apartment dwellers often can join or start community gardens--that's how my own family has dealt with the problems of no yard.



To learn about these options, please visit:

Go Veg (includes Veg Starter Kit)

Grow Biointensive

as well as our Directory sections on Eco-Friendly Living and Nutritious, Nonviolent, Eco-Friendly, and Low-Cost Eating

The net result can only be better for everyone's lives and health, including our reproductive health.

Another Way to Grow One's Own Food Security

The global crisis in food costs is hitting the poorest of the poor the hardest. Fortunately, there are many eco-friendly, high-yield gardening and farming methods now that can help people, including pregnant and nursing mothers, take their own nutrition and their own food security into their own hands. These methods can be adapted to a wide variety of climates.

The Nonviolent Choice Directory covers some of these methods in our section on Help With Crisis Pregnancy and Beyond: Food & Nutrition: Nutritious, Nonviolent, Eco-Friendly, and Low-Cost Eating.

In the tiny Southern African nation of Lesotho, "keyhole gardens" are catching on. Residents of the arid highlands cannot afford imported food, yet local conditions make farming very difficult.

Keyhole gardens are a blessing because they yield large amounts of nutrient-rich vegetables. And because they are in raised beds, people who are pregnant, sick, or elderly can easily tend to them. This is very important in Lesotho; it has been hard hit by HIV/AIDS, and many grandparents are raising their grandchildren.

To learn more about keyhole gardening, please check out:

--This BBC World Service Report (mostly text).

--This video from Send a Cow:

http://www.graspr.com/videos/Making-a-Keyhole-Garden

FAO Calls for Local Food Production to Stave Off Famine

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization demands immediate action to protect the Earth's poor from steep escalations in food prices.. FAO is zeroing in on the need to boost local food production in 37 countries.

Food security is part of the right to life, and it is essential to women's good reproductive health and the healthy prenatal and postnatal development of children. Yet so many of Earth's poor are subject to famine, despite the fact that (at least now, this could change) it is a matter of distribution, not availability.

Historically, too, this has been true of many famines. As a boy, Amartya Sen witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed three million people. As part of his career as a Nobel Prize-winning economist, he researched the causes of this and other past Indian famines. He concluded that the problem was not so much lack of food, but overly high food prices and other preventable, addressable causes--meaning that millions of deaths were wholly unnecessary.

This gets personal for me, too. Some of my ancestors escaped An Gorta Mor, the Great Irish Hunger of the nineteenth century, which drove into exile or killed millions of human beings. Irishers will refer to 1847, the most deadly year of An Gorta Mor, as "Black '47" (that's what it's named for, the New York City band of Larry Kirwan and lawsuit-against-the-BBC-winnin' rapper Chris Byrne, aka Seanchai.)

The potato blight was but one cause of many. In fact, it was simply the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. The English colonizers forced the Irish to devote most of the land to export food, leaving very little land to grow their own food security. Even though political decolonization of the Two-Thirds World was at its height forty and fifty years ago, this economic scenario prevails today in so many impoverished, famine-threatened nations. Small wonder that so many Irishers, like the people of Concern Worldwide, are involved in hunger relief.

In other words, just as there was during these historical catastrophes--there's currently enough food and food production capacity to go around--the richer countries just don't have political or economic will, or enough of it, to ensure that poorer countries are not robbed of what is rightfully theirs. FAO is right to focus on local food production and security.

In part because I have a long memory...the Nonviolent Choice Directory offers numerous resources on Food & Nutrition (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/foodnutrition.html if the link doesn't work) not only for people who wish to get involved in this issue, but for pregnant, breastfeeding, and other humans in need of emergency food assistance; for anyone interested in learning about and promoting the nutritional needs of mothers and children; for anyone interested in the eco-friendlier, often less expensive option of vegetarian diet; and for anyone interested in feasible, practical ways to grow their own food security.