Green myths and moral dilemmas

[annwfyn]

I read this in the Times yesterday, and found it interesting enough that I thought I'd share it with you.

I also found it interesting because it triggered many conflicted thoughts in me, as these issues often do. As some may know, I'd like to be more environmentally friendly. I'd also like to be more socially aware, do more to promote animal welfare (within some quite freaky parameters, admittedly) and I'd like to live in a world where some form of global justice exists on both a local and international level.

And a lot of the time it seems as if those desires really don't go hand in hand.

For example, a while ago I came to the conclusion that I really should avoid long haul flights, and focus on taking local holidays, as long haul flights are really bad for the environment. I muttered darkly about the government taxing aviation fuel, and wished that they would. Yet recently I read that a scary percentage of Kenya's economy is dependent on the tourist trade - men and women to come to Kenya via long haul flights. If those flights become dramatically more expensive, then the bottom could fall out of that economy, and I don't like the idea of an African nation which the developed world has already screwed once through colonization suddenly being screwed all over again because we decide that we all need to take up the Green Man's Burden.

Elsewhere, I've had occasionally crisis over my views on battery farming. Basically, I don't object to meat, leather, or fur. I do believe that it is possible to ethically use all of these. I do, however, really think that animals do deserve a certain level of fair treatment in life. I do eat meat. I won't eat factory farmed meat. However, something I was reading a while ago pointed out that banning factory farmed chicken, for example, would essentially be a attack on the economically deprived in this country. It's easy for me to say "I think all chickens should be given a long and happy life on a farm" because I'm essentially a fairly privileged middle class chick from South London. I don't have to try and feed three children on a vanishingly small budget. I don't need to worry about getting food on the table. And I worry that I'm basically saying, when I say that I want factory farmed chicken to be illegal, that I am happy to let the poor and vulnerable in our society suffer from a lack of cheap food.

Tis something that frets me, and something I'm trying to put together in my brain.

Comments

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

But it's even more complicated than that.

If those flights become dramatically more expensive, then the bottom could fall out of that economy

But climate change may do the same thing, in which case you're damned both ways.

More and more, I keep coming to the conclusion that the way our little human world works is just set up wrong somehow.

I think of it as similar to some kinds of computer software, where they started with something small and simple and then had to keep adding things on. Five years later they've got a horrible monstrosity where nothing fits together properly, that's totally unintuitive to use, and that crashes every ten minutes; but they can't afford the time, energy and money it would take to rewrite it from the ground up.

So if you set out to develop an economic system for the world, you probably wouldn't end up with what we have; but nobody did set out to develop an economic system for the world. Instead they started with a basic bartering principle to change things they didn't want for things they did want. Then they got bored of carrying cows around, and invented money. And then they realised that every tribe had invented a different kind of money, so they had to develop exchange rates. And then they came together into towns and countries, and needed a central government to pay for communal things like sewers, so they had to invent taxes.

And the same happened with law and politics until, step by step, we developed the systems we have, all intertwined with each other. And it's probably not the best system; it's probably a rubbish system. But how on earth would we go about rebuilding it from the ground up?

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Necessary disclaimer: I know nothing about economics, politics or law. And I didn't get much sleep last night :)

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I think the trouble with things like Kenya is that climate change might screw their economy. The tourist trade collapsing will screw their economy. And maybe in the long run they would be better off with a bad economy for a bit, rather than long term climate change which messes with everyone, but that's still a maybe, and on a personal level I'm fairly sure that most Kenyans think they would be better off with a job, and food and somewhere to live, paid for by the tourist industry, than without any of those things, being aware that there are still polar bears in Alaska.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

The tourist trade collapsing will screw their economy. And maybe in the long run they would be better off with a bad economy for a bit, rather than long term climate change which messes with everyone, but that's still a maybe, and on a personal level I'm fairly sure that most Kenyans think they would be better off with a job, and food and somewhere to live

I am reminded of the whole fisherman problem.

Ideally, of course, the solution is for them to find something else to be the cornerstone of their economy...

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Following the software metaphor - there's another problem with rebuilding from the ground up. As many software development analysts have noted, all that kruft and crap is in the program for a reason. If you decide to rebuild from the ground up, you'll find out why it's there when everything breaks.

Look up the effort that Netscape put in to rewriting their codebase from scratch - it took about 5 years. Sure, it gave us a good web browser in the end, but there's a powerful argument that reworking the code from the inside, a bit at a time (known as refactoring) would have worked a lot better and faster.

And hey, look, that last comment brings us seamlessly back to the current political situation again...

[sea-cucumber.livejournal.com]

It isn't just a how much money people earn thing, it's also about where they live I think. People who have next to nothing money who live in the countryside probably keep their own chickens and grow their own food so can afford better food that way. Growing your own food is super cheap. It's less than £1 for a pack of quality vegetable seeds and you get loads! Unless people have allotments or little gardens, it's the poorer people *in towns* that would suffer the most from a lack of factory farmed animals.

I think factory faming is horrible and wrong, but it happens as our country is overpopulated (I would consider any country that cannot support its population on the produce of its own land overpopulated). Unless we start shipping in more food from other countries (in which case we deprive that country's population of food) I'm not sure what can be done about wonky methods of food production without decreasing our population, and any form of that is probably bad :/

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

:(

Yeah, I think it would be a good thing for the UK's population to decrease. But then apparently our economy would collapse because our entire pension system is totally reliant on us having a growing population to support the older people in it, not to mention job traumas and stuff.

Very very depressing.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Except that that can't go on forever. At some point between now and the UK population standing on one another's heads, it's going to all go badly wrong, and I think we ought to be having a think about how to minimise that, rather than going 'it's a hundred years in the future, who cares?'

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

*nods*

But us saying "we've got to fix it now" is sort of a privileged thing to be saying.

*tries to find words for it*

If you and I say "we need to re-haul our pension system, provide a lot more birth control, and try and actively reduce the birth rate in this country", then we're saying this from the position of two people who's parents are mostly sorted for their retirement, I think, and as people who have the time to plan for their retirement, and come from reasonably privileged parts of society, where we may well be able to afford a private pension.

We're not the ones who have to say to Mrs Jenkins, who's 50, has never paid anything into a private pension coz she's never had the cash, doesn't have much of a state pension, and is now looking at not being able to eat properly because the system has changed. We're not the ones who will have to make the sacrifices or be the ones who say "we're making you make the sacrifices"

And that's something I feel really bad about.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, it's not fair, and we are lucky in that we'd probably be able to get through the crash.

But by not doing anything, we're basically saying, 'if I do thing X, it will hurt people, and that is bad, so I won't do it. Which will actually result in a lot more people suffering, but at least it won't be my fault.' Which seems, well, rather self-indulgent to me.

Sometimes there is no fair and right thing to do. Sometimes you just have to do something that's unfair and wrong and live with the consequences. But nobody ever wants the responsibility.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Or to put it another way; feeling bad about doing what has to be done isn't a sufficient reason not to do it.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Well, we could make more tofu.

I should note, I'm not a vegan, or a vegetarian. But the fact remains that one thing we're not considering here is that it's possible to create meat substitutes without the ethical or health risks of battery farming.

Oh, also - it's very cheap to grow food, yes. It's also very, very hard work, particularly if you don't have the skillz. A friend of mine is a keen amateur gardener (mindwanders). I've seen how much hassle and how many failed attempts go into growing cabbages, for example. And animals are even harder to raise.

(There's a corollary here. One thing I'm very interested in is sustainable, idiot-proof farming. Given that massive food factories clearly suck, there's some good research to be done on enabling individuals to grow their own food without needing leet skillz. But it ain't there yet.)

[sea-cucumber.livejournal.com]

I know it is hard work to grow food, I grow some things myself! But if I (being really quite lazy) can do it, then a lot of other people could! This past year in our garden we grew lettuces, rocket, potatoes, two sorts of tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, apples and all sorts of herbs :) You can get blackberries from brambles and mushrooms growing wild too. Lots of almost free food! But you do have to spend hours potting, weeding and poking :) This was my first year doing it, so next year I am going to try much more!

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

How much food did you grow, out of interest?

Also - given that, as you point out, farming food takes a lot of time (and I'm not even getting into the issues of training here), where is the theoretical single mother of three working two jobs getting that time?

[sea-cucumber.livejournal.com]

Our greenhouse was totally full of tomatoes and peppers! And we had about 50 lettuces! :) Our apple tree is not very big though. But with the vegetables there was more then we could eat really, I gave lots to people at work. And that was with us losing loads due to utterly rubbish weather! If there was some sort of bartering system and a few neighbours did the same thing with different vegetables, you could swap the excess and it would work quite well. Like they did 500 years ago, I suppose :):)

But you are right. Most people might not have the time. I have a full time job and managed to do it, but people with children or multiple jobs probably would not be able to spend hours digging around in the garden! Unless they get their children to do it :) I think the biggest problem is that loads of people don't have gardens though...

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

The people not having gardens is definitely a bigger problem. I've lived in seven different flats/houses other than my parents place in the 11 years since I left home.

This includes two flats in Edinburgh, one flat in Oxford (tho it was in college), one house in Reading, and three houses/flats in London.

Of those, three had gardens. One had a garden it would be possible to grow anything in.

It's easier in the countryside, but of course the majority of people in this country have to live in the city for job type reasons, and there space is at a premium.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Citation, please.

It's an interesting question, and a worrying one. However, one thing that occurs to me is that there's an evidence chain issue here.

How many lower-income families eat chicken? How much? What alternatives are available at that price range? What about vegetarian options? What's the needed price and quantity?

Are they actually buying and eating the raw chicken, which is the only place where cost savings from battery farming really shows? Lower-income families are disproportionately likely not to have cooking skills.

Some quick research shows me, for example, that Bird's Eye Chicken Dippers cost £2.58 per 500g. That's actually not that cheap. Frozen beef mince costs £1.68 per kilo. Asda's best sausages (which are pretty good) are £1.98 per 500g. If your're buying ready meals, it gets even less cost-effective - and again, my reading tends to imply that ready meals are a staple food for most of the UK, and lower education levels would tend to imply lower food education too.

I don't think we need to get into terrorist-with-a-bomb-and-you've-got-the-car-battery ethical dilemma territory yet. We haven't yet gotten anywhere near proving that no battery farming = starving children.

Oh, and on the subject of flights - did you see my lengthy post last year about carbon emissions? The real impact, according to UK government stats, of flights on carbon emissions? Executive summary: somewhere between "fuck" and "all". Cars are a much bigger problem. And domestic flights are disproportionately worse than long-haul to boot. So take the train, walk everywhere you can, buy a bike, and go buy tat from the nice Kenyan people.

(The main thrust of the argument in my post was "we're never going to stop global warming by individual reductionist efforts. The numbers just don't make sense. This is a technological problem, not a self-control one. If you want to help, start reading up on biotech and buy yourself some petri dishes. Or buy alternative energy stock.")

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Sadly, if I don't give a citation, it means that I don't have a reference to hand. The Kenyan figures vary depending on source. I've got figures from 12% (from National Geographic) to 63% (from Mongabay.com). The piece on battery farming was in some newspaper or other, but remains only in my memory, otherwise I'd link to it.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Sorry - the "citation please" bit was actually obscure and rather crap geek humour. Wasn't expecting an actual cite! Just using it to go into my "well, where's the evidence?" bit.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Sorry! I think I've spent too much time in academia. I have an inbuilt sense of guilt about saying anything without a citation. Including 'it's a bit warm today'. ;)

[sea-cucumber.livejournal.com]

Yes! so true! 'Ready meal' or processed type food is a lot more expensive than just buying the component vegetables or whatever the food is made of, but that is what I believe most people in this country eat because it is easier to prepare and fits into busy schedules I guess...

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Also, a lot of people don't have the knowledge or skills to cook it. This is not a trivial problem.

[sea-cucumber.livejournal.com]

hmm.. perhaps not! I don't really know. I consider myself to a be dreadful cook but I made everything from scratch when I lived by myself (but then that was because of allergies more than anything else)...

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I think this may be a quite serious problem.

Cheap battery produced chicken makes up most of the meat in 'convenience food'. Birds Eye Chicken dominates the frozen foods easy cook section. And it's not the cheapest way of eating, but it is the cheapest way of eating if you're a) very tight on time and b) very low on cooking skills.

Of course there are lots of people out there who can make a banquet out of a tin of beans and a bit of celery, but a lot of folk can't, and cooking is increasingly not a commonly taught skill. In my secondary school Home Economics was compulsory for our first and second year. Then, in third year, we had to pick one arts and craft type subject. I picked textiles, because I thought it sounded interesting and learned to make my own clothes (relatively badly, but I can still theoretically darn, thread up a sewing machine, and follow a dress making pattern). A lot of people picked CDT, which covered metalwork etc.

After third year, there was no real need to do any practical subjects if you didn't want.

So, basically, I was actually taught to cook between the ages of 11 and 12. Everything beyond that was picked up from my mother, who was a fantastic cook, but in a lot of families this probably isn't the case, and I'm honestly not sure where you would learn a taught skill like cooking (because I think a lot of it is a taught skill) if you don't have access to the wherewithall to learn when you're young.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Agree with all of the above. Lack of cooking skills is a really, really serious problem in this and other developed countries.

(Hence one of the reasons I'm starting a cookery show.)

[evilwillow.livejournal.com]

My personal experience is that poorer families are more likely to eat cheap processed foods like sausages, fishfingers, burgers etc rather than raw chicken, which believe it or not would be seen as a treat such as a Sunday roast.

I must admit I eat very little meat and don't often cook it, how can you tell what is battery farmed chicken and what isn't? I don't buy battery farmed eggs but chicken isn't as clearly labelled is it?

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

I think that on the whole, battery farmed chicken can be identified by its blue and white stripes.

[evilwillow.livejournal.com]

:) At the risk of sounding very dense indeed...blue and white stripes? The only thing that springs to mind is Tesco Value.

I think the main thing I wanted to be confirmed is the nature of normal chicken you buy from a supermarket that isn't marked as organic or free range? Is that ethical?

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Tesco Value was what I meant.

And it looks like unless it isn't actually marketed as organic or free range, it's factory farmed.

http://environment.independent.co.uk/article145788.ece

My Google-fu is currently failing me, though, so if you find anything let me know.

[evilwillow.livejournal.com]

I looked in Tesco on the way home from work today and they do a Willow Farm range which is meat from barn raised chickens and the cost is barely above their normal/healthy living chicken range. On the rare occasions I do cook meat I think I'll get that instead.

[taimatsu]

Unless it says 'free range' or similar on it it is likely to be battery-farmed - retailers make a feature of the production methods of their poultry.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of things like Birds Eye chicken breasts or chicken dippers or other preprepared chicken stuff. There's a LOT of cheap chicken dishes in the frozen food section - more types of microwavable chicken breasts that fishfingers - and I kinda thought those were what was being spoken of in the article I read. I know that battery farmed chicken heavily sources that kind of foodstuff.

[nothingtoyou.livejournal.com]

I think that sometimes you just have to take a hard line on these things. There are always going to be objections to change on financial grounds. An end to child slavery? But think of all the people who will lose their businesses because they can't afford to pay workers wages.
People who can't buy cheap meat won't starve to death. Teach them to buy cheap beans and pulses and get their proten that way. If they've got a brain in their heads they'll find an alternative.
And global warming is likely to cause the deaths of millions of people due to floods, famine and disease spread. The Green Man's Burden isn't just for the Western world - it applies equally everywhere. We should tax flights. And we should be helping developing countries at the same time.
Just my twopence worth. Hope Christmas was lovely for you.