"Humanity needs to start shrinking our agricultural footprint."
"The fate of the world's bugs, bunnies and other creatures and critters — and what's left of the forests, wetlands and other habitats they call home — depends more than anything else on what we put in our mouths and how it gets made." |
 | | Michael Highway |
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 | By Eliza Barclay Climate Editor, Opinion |
Earlier this week, I joined the throngs at the Palais des Congrès in frigid Montreal for the world's pre-eminent event for stopping wildlife populations from crashing and ecosystems from being bulldozed. After many Covid-related delays, delegates to the U.N. Biodiversity Conference from 190 countries (excluding the United States, incidentally) are meeting through Monday to work their way through a mammoth draft plan with 22 targets for preventing biodiversity loss by 2030. The idea is for ministers of environment to come to some agreement without, advocates hope, sapping too much ambition from targets such as reducing pesticide use by at least two-thirds and protecting at least 30 percent of land and sea. |
But the hungry elephant in the room, argues the freelance writer Michael Grunwald in a guest essay this week, is the food we eat, and the way we produce it. "The inconvenient truth is that when we eat cows, chickens and other livestock, we might as well be eating macaws, jaguars and other endangered species," he writes. |
While the Montreal draft under discussion includes many brief references to reforming the food system, it doesn't prioritize it. And in Grunwald's view, governments won't make true progress on biodiversity loss until they're more honest about some of the most glaring opportunities to save the precious remaining land we have left: not just shifting diets away from meat, but also cutting food waste, ending the practice of using land to grow fuel and restoring degraded ecosystems, in part to grow more food on less land. As Grunwald suggests, problems like these can be difficult to solve without being impossible to solve. |
| READ MICHAEL'S FULL ESSAY HERE | | |
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