WE NEED TO CHANGE THE CLIMATE DEBATE
What if we have been misled (sometimes innocently, sometimes perhaps not) by politicians and the media on the most important story of our time?
What if the leading cause of climate change is not the burning of fossil fuels?
FOOD IS CLIMATE does not absolve the fossil fuel industry, but it indicts the industry that poses a far greater threat to the future of life on our planet. FOOD IS CLIMATE aims to change the climate debate.
It is not beyond human capacity to heal the planet. The opportunity is in our hands.
Read the book.
Help change the debate.
“Glen Merzer has written powerfully, with courage, compassion, and wit. A gentle smile crept over my face as he surgically eviscerated the self-serving lies of lazy minds. This slender volume is a necessary antiseptic, an antidote, a welcome disinfectant against nonsense.
Glen punctures the balloons of famous names, perched on pulpits, six feet above contradiction: the FAO, Vice Presidents, politicians, billionaires, and of course, the puny, but vocal, conga line from the “rent-an-expert” queue, so richly funded by the Animal Industrial Complex. They are rich targets indeed, rotten fruit from the poisoned tree, as Merzer joyfully walks past, carrying his deadly slingshot.
“Food” has become ludicrously cheap, where even in the high-cost West, we can get a $2 "meal" of rotting “meat” at McDonald’s, yet we pay $6 for a fresh cauliflower. Only financial Luddites fail to see we have descended into the netherworld of Mad Hatter Economics.
Welcome to the Greatest Scam on Earth: taxpayer-funded animal agriculture.”
From the Foreword by Philip Wollen
The Secret that Hides in Front of Our Eyes
The fires you see are pasture maintenance fires, set to facilitate grazing. We acknowledge the use of imagery from NASA's Worldview application, part of NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS).
“On the satellite image, above the ring of fires stretching across central Africa, you will see an almost continuous patch of brown, reaching from the western Sahara all the way to China.
This area was the cradle of civilization, and 5,000 to 12,000 years ago, it may well have been home to more humans than any other area on earth, as it includes the Fertile Crescent, where agriculture was born. (It is an understatement to say that it is not as fertile today as it once was, and now there is a competition between Iraq, Turkey, and Syria for its limited supply of water.) The development of agriculture meant a dependable food supply that did more than protect the population from hunger; it permitted the building of villages and then cities.
The brown patch extends from the Sahara to the Libyan Desert, the Arabian Desert, the Syrian Desert, the Thar Desert, and the Gobi Desert, a distance of over six thousand miles, twice the width of the United States. Most or all of these arid zones were once green and lush.
Is it just a coincidence that this whole vast, almost continuous stretch of land, today so dry and dusty, is where agriculture was born?
Recognizing the genesis of these deserts is the key to understanding the human toll on climate; it’s the secret that hides in front of our eyes.
The ancient civilizations that lived in the region clearly didn’t destroy their environment with gas-guzzling cars, plastics, or coal-fired energy plants. But they did have goats. All of these deserts were likely created in part by agriculture, and particularly by grazing. When goats eat plants that shade the soil, then the exposed soil is vulnerable to drying out in the sun. The soil, no longer held in place by roots, blows in the wind. The valuable top level of soil—the humus that itself holds vast quantities of carbon—becomes degraded and eventually destroyed. And without that fertile top layer, new vegetation fails to take root. With less vegetation, there is less rain. And the desert spreads.”