This appendix consists of additional labels for this entry:
Showing posts with label American Puritanism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American Puritanism. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Sunday, September 27, 2020
Churches of the West: And let the rampaging Anti-Catholicism begin. . .
Churches of the West: And let the rampaging Anti-Catholicism begin. . .:
Anti Catholicism has been termed the last acceptable prejudice in the United States and there's a great deal of merit to that claim. In certain quarters, anymore, there's a subtle to not so subtle anti Christian prejudice in general that people express more or less openly, however, so to at least some degree that statement isn't fully true. And its certainly the case that people will openly express disdain to some religions in some regions. The LDS faith, for example, is often a topic of some disdain on the margins of its territories. Islam is definitely subject to widespread public disdain in the United States.***
The thing that's really different about anti Catholicism, however, is the degree to which its visceral and blisteringly open.**** Additionally, it's rooted in falsehoods of the Reformation even as its advanced by those who reject all strong tenants of Christianity in general, even if it's in their ancestral background. Descendants of Puritans and near Puritans, whose ancestors hated Catholic based on lies that were told by the founders of their faiths in order to justify separation from the only body of Christianity that had existed continually since the First Century, still hate Catholics or disdain them in spite of the fact that they've often completely shed the religions that gave rise to their beliefs.
The United States is really a Protestant country in culture, although that culture has weakened massively in urban areas. The retained belief, however, is that Catholics are a dangerous "other" to be feared, believing in strange dangerous beliefs. That's about to come out in public in spades.
Observant Apostolic Christians continue to believe in a religion that's Christ centric in the way that Christianity was from its onset. A significant aspect of that is a belief that God's laws are immutable and his Church hierarchical in aid of that. All Apostolic Christians, including the Orthodox of every branch and all types of Catholics, if they are observant, hold that. The essence of the Reformation rejected that, although even the first rebels against the Church in the Reformation actually didn't, or didn't at first. Even today, five centuries after the Reformation, some Protestant churches worry about Apostolic succession, still viewing it as necessary to their authority.
Because Catholics, as Apostolic Christians, hold that, it has always been used against them in those European cultural regions where the churches of the Reformation were strong. In English speaking countries, even though the Church of England and the Anglican Communion claim Apostolic succession, it's always been a way to vilify Catholics. In part this was because of the English Established Church's strong animosity towards Catholicism and in part it was because dissenting Protestant English churches took an even more extreme position than the Church of England did. Those latter churches were also heavily invested in concepts of individuality and, moreover, they were very strong in early American history. Some have claimed, although the claim suffers on analysis, that the individualism of those churches helped give rise to American democracy.
While that claim is strained at best, it has become the American Civil Religion that there's no inconsistency in holding your religion close to your heart but not acting upon it in public. American Catholic politicians, always held back by prejudice against their faith at the ballot box (but interestingly not so much at the Supreme Court, where they'd been a presence since the middle of the 19th Century), adopted that view with John F. Kennedy's declaration that:
A similar view was incorporated into the American Civil Religion after a time which at first came to hold that there general Judeo Christian values that we all agreed on, and what a person did beyond that was their own business, with everything else being co-equal. This position is of course absurd on its faith. Religious convictions are an individual's deepest convictions and should inform everything they do.
It's that knowledge that, in some ways, forms the basis for the societal hatred of Catholicism and the spreading disdain for Christianity in general. It isn't that Christians in general or Catholics in particular "want[] the rest of American women to be stuck with [an] extreme lifestyle". Rather its that they acknowledge that there's something greater than the individual and that Christians have to pick up their cross and carry it.
Moreover, the real fear isn't that a single Catholic judge is going to somehow impose her values on American society. Liberals of all stripes, including non observant liberal Catholics, know, or at least should know if they stop to think about it, that not a single conservative judge on the Supreme Court proposed to impose any religious belief on society. What liberals really fear, and won't acknowledge, is that for jurisprudential reasons, not religious ones, those justices will hold that there's a lot of things the United States Constitution doesn't address and therefore its up to the states to address them.
Nearly all of the recent and old hot button issues in front of the Supreme Court fit into this category. Indeed, as we've stated elsewhere, there really aren't any jurisprudentially conservative justices on the bench or proposed for it. That really shows in their approach to these issues. Abortion is one such issue that is cited all the time, although most typically with the term "a woman's right to choose", by which is meant a person's individual right to choose on a matter of life or death for another person. A jurisprudentially conservative jurist would hold that life was a matter of natural law, and that no person had the right to decide on matters of life or death for a third person except for individual self defense, a natural law paramount. That would truly make abortion illegal, irrespective of the Constitution. That's not what a conservative justice of the type who will be on the bench, or who already is, will hold.
That sort of conservative, of which Barrett is part, would instead hold that its just not in the text, and therefore its up to the states. In terms of supposed deep philosophical statements, that's really weak tea. Its just being politically and textually conservative. That's it. Likewise, on the issue of same sex marriage, the conservative justices simply dissented that it wasn't in the text. They didn't opine on the nature of marriage in an existential or metaphysical or even biological sense.
Given that, the real fear on the part of liberals like Parsa and the thousands like him is that his fellow Americans of all stripes might hold the same conservative views. It isn't that the court is going to make something illegal, it's that the American people will. That's democracy. That doesn't fit into a secular world view, however, of radical self definition and a "progressive" world, which most of the world actually rejects, which is even more radical than the anarchist "No Gods, No Master" ideology, as it takes the view of "I'm my own god and own master and nothing else matters".
The knowledge that something else does matter, and we know it, is inside of all of us however. And that makes most people feel that they have a right to voice an opinion on really important matters rather than have nine elderly men and women of high but limited legal education and liberal values decide those matters for us.^ It isn't really the Catholic hierarchy or dogma that's feared here. The language of the Reformation remains, but it's the spirit of radical individualism in the tone. What Parsa really meant was he wants American men and women to be stuck with no ability to put their beliefs into practice, both in their own lives and at the ballot. If Americans, or even American women, the latter of which is the majority of the population, share his views, this presents no threats to those views at all.
One thing we can be assured of, as this matter progresses, is that Senators who previously were openly hostile to Catholicism at the time that Barrett was nominated to assume her current role on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals will struggle not to come across so openly that way again. Diane Feinstein's blisteringly hostile comment will not be repeated by her, and she's even stated that at least to her, Barrett's religion is off limits. Kamala Harris, who likewise felt free to make anti Catholic comments during Barrett's prior hearing, will have to be careful lest she damage the campaign she's currently in. Durbin's petty comments, perhaps inspired by the fact that his Bishop has denied him Communion rights due to his stated positions, may well come back. But the hostility is going to be there just under the surface. Out in the public and through pundits, it'll be on the surface.
*Parsa is a documentary film maker, but I can't say that he's a well known one, at least to me. I picked up his quote from an article by C. E. Cupp.
**An interesting aspect of Parsa's bigotry is that he associates large families with conservatism and by extension small or no families with progressivism, although I'll be that in the case of families born out of the United States but which have immigrated into the US, his view is the reverse. At any rate, the question of whether or not an employer can be mandated to pay for health care raises moral questions for Catholics, to be sure, but beyond that it raises other philosophical and fiscal considerations that are completely outside of religion. Whether or not society at large, for example, through mandated health care, should be required to subsidize individual acts and when they should is the larger issue. When a society has strongly divergent beliefs regarding this, it raises further questions pertaining to participatory democracy and such choices.
***Islam presents a challenge to liberals in that the religion can demand strict adherence to its tenants and always demand public observation of them by the faithful. Indeed it shares that characteristic with the Apostolic Churches and conservative Judaism, in that some of those tenants cannot be ignored by their members. Muslims may not ignore the daily calls and periods to prayer nor the season of fasting, at a bare minimum, must as members of the Apostolic Churches may not ignore periods of fasting or the obligation to attend Sunday Mass. Mormons, mentioned in this paragraph, likewise have a series of tenants that they can't ignore or shouldn't ignore.
****In fairness, this is also true of Islam.
Antipathy towards Islam to date has been strongly concentrated in conservative circles, but as the Muslim population increases this is almost certain to present very strong challenges to liberals. Already strongly observant Muslim women are relatively frequent callers into Catholic radio on the topic of abortion, where they'll routinely note that Muslims are opposed to abortion and they seem befuddled that people don't realize that.
In Europe distinct Muslim dietary practices that are shared with Judaism have made Muslims and conservative Jews unlikely allies against laws pertaining to slaughter in some countries. Moreover, while so far Americans are mostly familiar with Muslim women who have taken the opposite view, conservative Muslims have a strict dichotomy of roles and behavior as to men and women. This has also presented itself in Europe where various nations have attempted to ban Muslim female veiling and headdress. The challenge in the United States will be to see if American society can accommodate to itself to conservative Islamic practices which fall outside the American norm.
^One of the refreshing things about a Barrett confirmation would be that she's not a graduate of Harvard or Yale, which have had a lock on the Supreme Court for some time.
And let the rampaging Anti-Catholicism begin. . .
From, Klansman, Guardian of Liberty, by Alma Birdwell White.
It was only a matter of time.Trump’s likely RBG replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, is a Catholic extremist with 7 children who does not believe employers should be required to provide healthcare coverage for birth control. She wants the rest of American women to be stuck with her extreme lifestyle.Documentarian Arlen Parsa.* **
Anti Catholicism has been termed the last acceptable prejudice in the United States and there's a great deal of merit to that claim. In certain quarters, anymore, there's a subtle to not so subtle anti Christian prejudice in general that people express more or less openly, however, so to at least some degree that statement isn't fully true. And its certainly the case that people will openly express disdain to some religions in some regions. The LDS faith, for example, is often a topic of some disdain on the margins of its territories. Islam is definitely subject to widespread public disdain in the United States.***
The thing that's really different about anti Catholicism, however, is the degree to which its visceral and blisteringly open.**** Additionally, it's rooted in falsehoods of the Reformation even as its advanced by those who reject all strong tenants of Christianity in general, even if it's in their ancestral background. Descendants of Puritans and near Puritans, whose ancestors hated Catholic based on lies that were told by the founders of their faiths in order to justify separation from the only body of Christianity that had existed continually since the First Century, still hate Catholics or disdain them in spite of the fact that they've often completely shed the religions that gave rise to their beliefs.
The United States is really a Protestant country in culture, although that culture has weakened massively in urban areas. The retained belief, however, is that Catholics are a dangerous "other" to be feared, believing in strange dangerous beliefs. That's about to come out in public in spades.
Observant Apostolic Christians continue to believe in a religion that's Christ centric in the way that Christianity was from its onset. A significant aspect of that is a belief that God's laws are immutable and his Church hierarchical in aid of that. All Apostolic Christians, including the Orthodox of every branch and all types of Catholics, if they are observant, hold that. The essence of the Reformation rejected that, although even the first rebels against the Church in the Reformation actually didn't, or didn't at first. Even today, five centuries after the Reformation, some Protestant churches worry about Apostolic succession, still viewing it as necessary to their authority.
Because Catholics, as Apostolic Christians, hold that, it has always been used against them in those European cultural regions where the churches of the Reformation were strong. In English speaking countries, even though the Church of England and the Anglican Communion claim Apostolic succession, it's always been a way to vilify Catholics. In part this was because of the English Established Church's strong animosity towards Catholicism and in part it was because dissenting Protestant English churches took an even more extreme position than the Church of England did. Those latter churches were also heavily invested in concepts of individuality and, moreover, they were very strong in early American history. Some have claimed, although the claim suffers on analysis, that the individualism of those churches helped give rise to American democracy.
While that claim is strained at best, it has become the American Civil Religion that there's no inconsistency in holding your religion close to your heart but not acting upon it in public. American Catholic politicians, always held back by prejudice against their faith at the ballot box (but interestingly not so much at the Supreme Court, where they'd been a presence since the middle of the 19th Century), adopted that view with John F. Kennedy's declaration that:
I am not the Catholic candidate for President [but a candidate] who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters — and the church does not speak for me.In retrospect, Kennedy was a pretty bad Catholic in general, but his position was embraced by American Catholics in a way that brought about sweeping changes.Catholic politicians, rapidly followed in Kenney's wake and adopted his formula, rejecting prior Presidential nominee Al Smith's position that:
I do not want any Catholic to vote for me . . . because I am a Catholic. . . . But, on the other hand, I have the right to say that any citizen of this country . . . [who] votes against me because of my religion, he is not a real, pure, genuine American.Smith didn't walk away from his faith the way that Kennedy did, but thousands of Catholic politicians did to be followed by thousands of rank and file Catholics. In essence, Kennedy advanced the position that a person's religion only really mattered as to what he did on Sundays. Smith didn't state that.
A similar view was incorporated into the American Civil Religion after a time which at first came to hold that there general Judeo Christian values that we all agreed on, and what a person did beyond that was their own business, with everything else being co-equal. This position is of course absurd on its faith. Religious convictions are an individual's deepest convictions and should inform everything they do.
It's that knowledge that, in some ways, forms the basis for the societal hatred of Catholicism and the spreading disdain for Christianity in general. It isn't that Christians in general or Catholics in particular "want[] the rest of American women to be stuck with [an] extreme lifestyle". Rather its that they acknowledge that there's something greater than the individual and that Christians have to pick up their cross and carry it.
Moreover, the real fear isn't that a single Catholic judge is going to somehow impose her values on American society. Liberals of all stripes, including non observant liberal Catholics, know, or at least should know if they stop to think about it, that not a single conservative judge on the Supreme Court proposed to impose any religious belief on society. What liberals really fear, and won't acknowledge, is that for jurisprudential reasons, not religious ones, those justices will hold that there's a lot of things the United States Constitution doesn't address and therefore its up to the states to address them.
Nearly all of the recent and old hot button issues in front of the Supreme Court fit into this category. Indeed, as we've stated elsewhere, there really aren't any jurisprudentially conservative justices on the bench or proposed for it. That really shows in their approach to these issues. Abortion is one such issue that is cited all the time, although most typically with the term "a woman's right to choose", by which is meant a person's individual right to choose on a matter of life or death for another person. A jurisprudentially conservative jurist would hold that life was a matter of natural law, and that no person had the right to decide on matters of life or death for a third person except for individual self defense, a natural law paramount. That would truly make abortion illegal, irrespective of the Constitution. That's not what a conservative justice of the type who will be on the bench, or who already is, will hold.
That sort of conservative, of which Barrett is part, would instead hold that its just not in the text, and therefore its up to the states. In terms of supposed deep philosophical statements, that's really weak tea. Its just being politically and textually conservative. That's it. Likewise, on the issue of same sex marriage, the conservative justices simply dissented that it wasn't in the text. They didn't opine on the nature of marriage in an existential or metaphysical or even biological sense.
Given that, the real fear on the part of liberals like Parsa and the thousands like him is that his fellow Americans of all stripes might hold the same conservative views. It isn't that the court is going to make something illegal, it's that the American people will. That's democracy. That doesn't fit into a secular world view, however, of radical self definition and a "progressive" world, which most of the world actually rejects, which is even more radical than the anarchist "No Gods, No Master" ideology, as it takes the view of "I'm my own god and own master and nothing else matters".
The knowledge that something else does matter, and we know it, is inside of all of us however. And that makes most people feel that they have a right to voice an opinion on really important matters rather than have nine elderly men and women of high but limited legal education and liberal values decide those matters for us.^ It isn't really the Catholic hierarchy or dogma that's feared here. The language of the Reformation remains, but it's the spirit of radical individualism in the tone. What Parsa really meant was he wants American men and women to be stuck with no ability to put their beliefs into practice, both in their own lives and at the ballot. If Americans, or even American women, the latter of which is the majority of the population, share his views, this presents no threats to those views at all.
*Parsa is a documentary film maker, but I can't say that he's a well known one, at least to me. I picked up his quote from an article by C. E. Cupp.
**An interesting aspect of Parsa's bigotry is that he associates large families with conservatism and by extension small or no families with progressivism, although I'll be that in the case of families born out of the United States but which have immigrated into the US, his view is the reverse. At any rate, the question of whether or not an employer can be mandated to pay for health care raises moral questions for Catholics, to be sure, but beyond that it raises other philosophical and fiscal considerations that are completely outside of religion. Whether or not society at large, for example, through mandated health care, should be required to subsidize individual acts and when they should is the larger issue. When a society has strongly divergent beliefs regarding this, it raises further questions pertaining to participatory democracy and such choices.
***Islam presents a challenge to liberals in that the religion can demand strict adherence to its tenants and always demand public observation of them by the faithful. Indeed it shares that characteristic with the Apostolic Churches and conservative Judaism, in that some of those tenants cannot be ignored by their members. Muslims may not ignore the daily calls and periods to prayer nor the season of fasting, at a bare minimum, must as members of the Apostolic Churches may not ignore periods of fasting or the obligation to attend Sunday Mass. Mormons, mentioned in this paragraph, likewise have a series of tenants that they can't ignore or shouldn't ignore.
****In fairness, this is also true of Islam.
Antipathy towards Islam to date has been strongly concentrated in conservative circles, but as the Muslim population increases this is almost certain to present very strong challenges to liberals. Already strongly observant Muslim women are relatively frequent callers into Catholic radio on the topic of abortion, where they'll routinely note that Muslims are opposed to abortion and they seem befuddled that people don't realize that.
In Europe distinct Muslim dietary practices that are shared with Judaism have made Muslims and conservative Jews unlikely allies against laws pertaining to slaughter in some countries. Moreover, while so far Americans are mostly familiar with Muslim women who have taken the opposite view, conservative Muslims have a strict dichotomy of roles and behavior as to men and women. This has also presented itself in Europe where various nations have attempted to ban Muslim female veiling and headdress. The challenge in the United States will be to see if American society can accommodate to itself to conservative Islamic practices which fall outside the American norm.
^One of the refreshing things about a Barrett confirmation would be that she's not a graduate of Harvard or Yale, which have had a lock on the Supreme Court for some time.
Wednesday, September 16, 2020
September 16, 1620. The day the "Pilgrims" . . .
set sail for the New World.
It was at sea for ten weeks, putting in near Cape Cod on November 11, 1620.
Monday, January 13, 2020
I think I'll have a steak, rare.
Bar har har!
Let's be blunt. If you really want to pour the greenhouse gases into the environment, go vegan.
Eh?
Yes. A fair amount would be there anyway.
That's because we're not done discussing gassy cows.
This brings us around to farming.
No, that's not even close to how that happens.
A big part of Buzzards point here has to do with greenhouse gases, which I'm only addressing here because of the claim that switching to vegan burgers or something is going to address that in any meaningful way. This isn't a post on the climate, it's a post on diet, or more specifically meat.
Anyhow, the "5 Changes" the blogger discusses in detail are these: 1) Reduce your food waste; 2) Reduce your reliance on single use plastics; 3) Park the car and walk (or take public transportation; 4) Turn off your faucets and lights; and 5) Stop buying so much stuff.
The same blogger is pretty blunt with an additional administration of a dope slap with this one:
A note, this is one of those threads (well actually now two combined threads) I started along time ago (in October, to be exact), and I'm just getting back around to it.
Anyhow. . . it's back on my radar, and for some amusing and not so amusing reasons.
Almost every single aspect of dietary advice that's existed in the course of my lifetime has turned out to be flat out wrong, so why would this be surprising?
A lot of health advice has to be taken with a grain, or even a bucket, of salt. And I've tended to do that with the constant "don't eat meat" which is the deceptive morphed view of "don't eat red meat".
I've also tended to take the real advice, which I've ignored, to be don't eat fatty red meat, which is different advice actually, and as stockmen have responded to the demand, fat red meat is harder to get than it used to be anyhow. A steak, even a prime cut, can be fat or lean. If you order one now, unless you are specially ordering a steak in some place that's really old timey, is not going to be anywhere near as fatty as one you might have ordered in the 1970s.
Now, I'm not a dietitian, and nobody should take eating advice from me, but frankly, if your spouse would let you get by, and some will, on deer, elk, moose, antelope (particularly that) I think you could skip this entire topic.
But assuming not, you are now left with this:
Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice.
Hee hee hee.
Well, of course everyone who has a
vested interest in the existing state of things is countering it. "What?
That can't be true! I've been saying the opposite."
Well, consider this, from the NYT:
Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice.
The evidence is too weak to justify telling individuals to eat less beef and pork, according to new research. The findings “erode public trust,” critics said.
Of course, by this point the public's trust in dietary advice is pretty eroded anyway, which may explain why so many Americans are practitioners of the Diet Of The Week, no matter what it may be, combined with a lot of non scientific baloney about eating this or that substance not approved by the FDA for anything.
And as I've long stated, a lot of American's dietary habits de jour are based not on science, but on our national cultural history and the sad state of our society.
Puritans, they didn't have any food hang ups, but were pretty much opposed to almost everything fun. Modern Americans have largely dumped their theology as they prefer to believe that God personally approves of anything they do, but they've oddly kept the strong instinct to suffer.
The best dietary advice a person could give would be to grow your own food, and hunt for your own meat, to the extent you can. That dovetails with the best health advice a person can give, which is get regular exercise. We basically ignore all of that as we want to rationalize the modern urban lifestyle we largely detest, find an explanation for the reasons we're unhappy that don't involve making any really tough or disciplined decisions, and also, oddly enough, punish ourselves in some ritual manner that makes us miserable but also makes us feel morally superior. It's a combination of the effects of our Fourth Law of Behavior, modern conditions, and our cultures ongoing Puritanism.
This would explain the change over the years from diet to a sort of secular Jainism. Contrary to widespread belief, Hindus can and do eat meat, but the related Jain's do not and claim not to eat anything that lives (which they do, as almost everything in a real human diet was alive at one time and you can't live on the few things, like salt, which are not). The Jain diet is a religiously imposed one and a very odd one at that, the underlying roots of which we'll not go into, but as odd as it is, the American vegan diet that's come up in recent years is stranger yet. It's deeply, deeply unnatural, not good for its practitioners, and bad for the environment in spades, but it allows its adulterants to suffer with a sense of misplaced moral superiority while not having to observe any of the strict moral codes such disciplines require. By way of a more familiar example, some Christian monastic orders or individual monks also ate strict vegetarian diets or nearly vegetarian diets, as a form of fasting, but they also pray without ceasing and completely abstain from sex, something most emaciated vegans none the less would recoil from following even though its a lot more likely to bestow real virtue upon them. But then, that requires real concentration and sacrifice, not just ordering the vegan special at dinner and then lording it over your friends.
More recently yet, now armed with a scene of benighted superiority, the followers of such diets in the west have been on a full blown Cromwellian campaign to compel it on everyone else, the most recent example of which was the really absurd example of the Golden Globes serving a vegan dinner in the name of the environment. Well, dear vegans, your diet is arguably the most destructive one on the planet ever imagined.
Let's be blunt. If you really want to pour the greenhouse gases into the environment, go vegan.
Let's start with some basic facts, something Americans in particular do not like interjected into their public discourse. Beef cattle are responsible for only 2% of US greenhouse gas emissions. That means 98% are from something else, and farming (i.e., plant farming) contributes its share to that. And of that 2%, a fair amount of it would be there anyway.
Eh?
Yes. A fair amount would be there anyway.
Cattle get picked on as the cattle industry has been the whipping boy of ill informed environmentalist going back at least until the 1970s. Themes have varied, but generally a lot of urbancentrntric or relocated urbanites took up picking on the cattle industry in the west under the strange assumption that it was responsible for the decline of everything that they loved, and if it wasn't there, things would be 100% Granola Perfect. The basic gist of the argument was, if you boiled it down, cattlemen came in and shoved out the Indians (which is not the way that happened) and put their dirty dirty cows on the range which displaced the super clean and nifty buffalo. If the cattle were removed, all the good old days would return.
Navajo horsemen, 1904. They weren't vegans.
The big fallacy to that, of course, is that the Indians tribes who fought so hard to retain their lands (quite a few of whom now raise cattle) would require these same lily white Granolas to also remove themselves from the range in order to achieve that natural status. That's not part of the proposal.
Navajo sheep.
Indeed, it doesn't even begin to grasp that the wide open spaces in the West are here today as they're livestock ranges. The degree to which people are deluded on a topic such as this is perhaps best symbolized by an article once written by a University of Wyoming professor decrying seeing cattle out of her house windows in Laramie, when in fact the reason such a person can see that is that they must in one of the newer houses on the edge of Laramie. Building houses destroys wild lands like nothing else.
High altitude prairie. Ranching keeps it as such.
Next to it, ironically, is farming.
I love farming, but a farmed field is not a natural field. We'll get back to that in a moment.
As noted, only 2% of U.S. greenhouse gases derive from cattle, and much of that is due to the way they're fed out on corn. If you don't don that, and simply eat grass fed beef, the figure drops.
It'd never drop to 0% as ungulates fart. . . including wild ungulates.
Buffalo, in this case ones that are being raised as livestock.
One of the cherished tales of the Granola set is to recount how before the millions of cows, there were millions of buffalo. Millions. And those millions of buffalo. . . well. . . they farted too.
It could be pointed out that there are no doubt more cattle today than there were buffalo, but there were a lot of buffalo and they were gassy. That's the way ungulates are, to a small extent. So, even in the Granola dream, those millions of domestic ungulates, were they gone, would be replaced, in a pure state of nature, by millions of wild ungulates.
Indeed, it might be noted, cattle themselves were a wild species originally, although not in North America. They certainly were all over Europe, Asia and Africa, however. Indeed, they still are in Africa.
Environmentalist Ernest Hemingway with a gas contributor in Africa.
This brings us around to farming.
One of the things that's become really obvious about modern Americans is that very few of them have any concept whatsoever of how food gets on their tables. Not even remotely. It just appears there.
Vegans and other vegetarians seem to have the concept that agriculture exists in the Neolithic, or even the Paleolithic era. That is, a farmer goes out of his stone hut and roots in the ground with a sharp stick (note, such sticks were often sharpened and then hardened with fire, so we'll presume our super environmental neolithic farmer doesn't use flame. . . just more sticks). Having done that, he plants his seeds by hand and waters them with a clay jug throughout the growing season. Once that's completed, he carriers his food to market by hand, where it's sold in Free Trade Farmers' Markets.
No, that's not even close to how that happens.
Even this would be an advanced state of agriculture compared to the one that vegans and vegetarians seem to imagine exists.
Modern farming is petroleum dependent in a major way in reality. Much more so than livestock production. Every farm of any substantial size uses really heavy rolling equipment that consume buckets of diesel fuel and expel CO2 exhaust, among other things. In addition to that, even watering systems simply to water crops depend quite often on gasoline or diesel engines, or electricity supplied by a power plant that may well be fossil fuel using. From planting to harvest there isn't a day that doesn't go buy that uses a lot of fuel.
And that crop doesn't get to wherever its going, either to be processed or to market, with out more fuel. It's trucked to one place, and then shipped to another, and in the U.S. that's by truck. When Jimmy Hoffa declared back in the 60s and 70s:
If you have it, a truck brought ithe was right.
And this assumes that you are restricting yourself to crops grown in North America. If you are enjoying feasting on third world plantains or nuts or whatever, that came by a diesel powered ship and was grown in a place where the concern for fuel consumption was likely low and the environment even lower.
Indeed, the beauty of animal consumption is that animals feed themselves on what they eat, and you usually can't eat it. Cattle live on grass, and you can't eat grass. Even cattle fed out on corn are eating something that humans are extremely inefficient at digesting (and frankly cattle aren't great at digesting, but which are better than we are). They water themselves and while cattlemen do use fuel to be sure, in much of hte US cattle are left to themselves to a surprising degree much of the year and another ungulate, horses, remain used for transportation much more than a person might imagine.
And to add to that, agriculture is a great killer.
Vegans and vegetarians like to imagine that by having that bowl of rice they've avoided hurting animals, but they're simply fooling themselves. For one thing, every farm field has displaced natural habitat. But for another, agriculture itself results in the death of a lot of animals simply by accident and occasionally by design.
All of which leads to this. Veganism and vegetarianism aren't supported by your evolutionary biology. That doesn't mean your current diet does either. Ideally, you'd plant a garden and hunt for meat, or buy local lean meat if you can't hunt for it all. That's what you'd do if you really were concerned about your diet. If you aren't, chances are you are concerned about something else. With some, that's a frightened knowledge that they'll die combined with a primitive belief that day can be pushed back endlessly through ritual. For many others, it's a lack of knowledge combined with, or even simply dominated by, a retained Puritanism that's become secular in nature and which demands that you must suffer, for which you may regard yourself as superior to others.
Really health or healthy environment? Not so much.
Indeed this topic has been well explored by some other blogs, which were once going to be the topic of a separate blog entry here but now have been combined with this one. One really interesting one is this one below, by the self styled "Buzzard", a young woman rancher in Kansas:
Anyhow, the "5 Changes" the blogger discusses in detail are these: 1) Reduce your food waste; 2) Reduce your reliance on single use plastics; 3) Park the car and walk (or take public transportation; 4) Turn off your faucets and lights; and 5) Stop buying so much stuff.
The same blogger is pretty blunt with an additional administration of a dope slap with this one:
A Burger Won't Negate an Airplane.
I won't comment on all of those, and I think you ought to read the blog entry if you are interested. But I'd note that the really interesting one of those is "Stop buying so much stuff".
Buying stuff is the modern American thing. Even people who claim not to buy stuff, buy a lot of stuff. The entire modern American economy is based on buying stuff. Americans buy stuff just for something to do. I know more than one person who is cognizant of this that they'll choose working over an idle day as if they have an idle day, they'll buy stuff. Indeed buying stuff is now so vital to the American economy that after the U.S. was hit by terrorist on September 11, 2001, politicians urged the American public to spend, so as to keep the economy rolling. Americans themselves are routinely referred to by their leaders by the insulting term "consumers".
An economy based on stuff purchasing is sort of odd in a way. I'm not arguing against buying stuff and indeed shopkeepers and manufacturers are depending upon the sale of things for their living, and always have. But the level of stuff consumption is something I haven't ever addressed on the blog and probably ought to just as an interesting societal matter.
The reason I haven't addressed it is that I don't have a good command on the consumer culture. I've read widely that it started to come about in t he early 20th Century, but simply reviewing old ads and newspapers I suspect it came about at least as early as the post Civil War period. Already by the turn of the prior century there were a lot of advertisements aimed at consumer spending during the Christmas period, for example, and Christmas Season advertising of a century ago is very familiar to what we see today. Economists worry like crazy if people stop buying stuff, even while encouraging people to save, as if everyone quits buying stuff, the result is an economic depression.
Anyhow, the consumer culture in the U.S. is so deep that people really can't grasp the extent the extent to which they participate in it. Even people who are the greenest of the greens usually are pretty deeply into it, they just don't realize it. Indeed, they often express their greenism by things they bought to show you how green they are.
Anyhow, the consumer culture in the U.S. is so deep that people really can't grasp the extent the extent to which they participate in it. Even people who are the greenest of the greens usually are pretty deeply into it, they just don't realize it. Indeed, they often express their greenism by things they bought to show you how green they are.
The point there is that even while we can disagree with Buzzard on items on her list, your diet probably isn't contributing that much to greenhouse gases unless, ironically, you are a vegan or vegetarian, as the amount of fuel needed to produce what you are eating in the modern farm economy is enormous.
So, what to do if you really want to be a dietary steward of the environment? Well we could add to her list with 6) plant a garden and 7) go hunting and fishing. Or you could just make that your list and maybe add being careful about what you buy and how much of it you buy. Stop participating in a throw away society in other words, if you are. Buy local if you can, including local foods.
I'd add a bit, before going on, that if Buzzard's blog hits a little too hard, you can find a lot of the same type of content on the twitter feed of one Sarah Mcnaughton in a very well presented and scientific way. Mcnaughton, a young woman agriculturalist in North Dakota also has a blog, Sarah's NoDak Living, which is worth checking out.
Indeed, both of these blogs are connected into our blog feed under the agricultural heading on this site.
Anyhow, go hunting or fishing, preferably both, and plant a garden. If you can't do those, you might, or might not, be able to get a fair amount of your meat and vegetables locally. But don't go vegan, your DNA will hate you and it doesn't achieve anything other than to make you weak, crabby and make everyone view you like Oliver Cromwell dropping into a Christmas Party.
Oliver Cromwell. Don't be Oliver Cromwell.
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