Too Late for 2: Safran Foer: We Are The Weather

We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. Alex Preston, The Guardian. Oct. 6, 2019.

Warning: Jonathan Safran Foer’s compelling new book is likely to alter your relationship to food for ever…

What would you do to save the world? Not the strapline for a Netflix series, but rather the question that sits behind Jonathan Safran Foer’s second work of nonfiction, We Are the Weather. The answer to the question appears to be “not very much”, given that despite the looming threat of global heating, despite the fact the next generation (and those that follow) will live more precarious lives, with food, water and clean air in ever-shorter supply, despite the fact that the future of our planet appears to be one of flooded cities, scorched forests and sulphurous skies, we continue to behave as if the climate crisis is someone else’s problem. In 2018, despite knowing more about climate change than we have ever known, we produced more greenhouse gases than we have ever produced, at three times the rate of global population growth.

Climate change, therefore, exists as a rhetorical challenge as much as a scientific one. The most pressing question is how to persuade people to act, and to act now, both on an individual basis and, particularly, collectively. Extinction Rebellion provides a blueprint for action, but what about the majority who aren’t about to chain themselves to the headquarters of Shell? One landmark in the rhetorical battle was Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, although it may surprise you to learn that Gore’s film, for all its rigour, didn’t mention the single largest contributor to global heating: livestock.

Now Safran Foer, best known for his astonishing magical-realist debut novel Everything Is Illuminated, but also the author of a bestselling 2009 book about factory farming, Eating Animals, has set about remedying that omission. In We Are the Weather, he demonstrates that, rather than being an insurmountable nexus of insoluble problems, there’s one small change that all of us can make that would have a sustained and far-reaching impact on the climate crisis: eating fewer animal products. “We cannot keep the kind of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go. It is as straightforward and as fraught as that.”

First, a warning: this is a life-changing book and will alter your relationship to food for ever. I can’t imagine anyone reading Safran Foer’s lucid, heartfelt, deeply compassionate prose and then reaching blithely for a cheeseburger. There’s some dispute as to precisely what proportion of global heating is directly related to the rearing of animals for food, but even the lowest estimates put it on a par with the entire global transportation industry. A well-evidenced 2009 report by the Worldwatch Institute claimed that livestock-related emissions accounted for 51% of all greenhouse gases, “more than all cars, planes, buildings, industry and power plants combined”. Whichever the case, Safran Foer’s thesis is clear and compelling: by making “a collective act to eat differently” (he suggests “no animal products before dinner”) we can turn the tide of the climate crisis.

The book is made up of five sections, each divided into a series of sharp, hard-hitting chapters. Part two, How to Prevent the Greatest Dying, is a bombardment of facts that seeks to overwhelm the reader with evidence. “Humans use 59% of all the land capable of growing crops to grow food for livestock”; “60% of all mammals on Earth are animals raised for food”; “There are approximately 30 farmed animals for every human on the planet”; “In 2018, more than 99% of the animals eaten in America were raised on factory farms”; “Animal agriculture is responsible for 91% of Amazon deforestation”; “If cows were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States.”

These facts, though, are part of the problem, rather than the solution. The point is, we know this stuff, we just don’t believe it. And so the rest of the book is dedicated to persuading us that it is our duty to act, just as, Safran Foer suggests, it was the duty of Jewish leaders in the US to act when Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground, came to them in June 1943 with news of the murder and persecution of Jews in Europe. The Jewish leaders, and particularly the supreme court justice Felix Frankfurter, didn’t act. “I am unable to believe what you told me,” Frankfurter told Karski. History now judges Frankfurter as it will judge us.

The final chapter is structured as a letter from Safran Foer to his children. The author’s grandmother, who herself fled Poland just before it was too late to do so, has just died. Most of her family were killed in the Holocaust and Safran Foer powerfully interweaves her story of action with his own history of inaction in the face of global warming. Reversing climate change, he says, “requires an entirely different kind of heroism”. This heroism is “perhaps every bit as difficult” as the sacrifice his grandmother made “because the need for sacrifice is unobvious”. That sacrifice begins, as the book’s subtitle suggests, at breakfast.

Things Are Bleak! Kate Aronoff, The Nation. Oct. 29, 2019.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s quest for planetary salvation.

Foer does not propose that an accumulation of individual lifestyle choices will in and of itself solve the problem, which requires (by his admission) large-scale government action. He doesn’t pretend he has One Quick Trick to Save the Planet. But he contends that change cannot come without an accumulation of individual lifestyle choices: Be the emission reductions you want to see in the world. “Humankind takes leaps,” he writes, “when individuals take steps,” noting also that “of course it’s true that one person deciding to eat a plant-based diet will not change the world, but of course it’s true that the sum of millions of such decisions will.” Like so many well-intentioned liberals, Foer individuates a collective problem. Planetary salvation is possible only if we each, on our own, begin to become better people—and better eaters.

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What’s so unsettling and even tragic about Foer’s book is that his moralizing is illustrative of a broader self-flagellating despair among many liberals who are troubled by the ominous climate forecasts but who have absorbed right-wing nostrums that it’s a problem of our shared making.

When it comes to Foer’s specific remedies for climate change, it is worth noting that there are compelling ethical and scientific cases to be made for constraining meat, dairy, and egg consumption—many of which Foer presents in Eating Animals.

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For many reasons, we should all eat fewer animal products. Yet Foer never makes it entirely clear how giving up yogurt and BLTs will lead to any significant change in the atmospheric temperature in the short time frame that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given us to mitigate climate catastrophe. The high-consumption lifestyles of those lucky enough to have them are conditioned by much larger forces, from the agribusiness companies that lobby to maintain a broken food system to the fossil fuel executives who have funded disinformation campaigns to spread doubt about the reality of climate change. Driving to work in a gas-guzzling vehicle isn’t a choice so much as a necessity for people living in places where austerity has deprived them of functional public transit and for whom 30-plus years of wage stagnation has put Priuses and Teslas out of reach. A less meat-intensive diet may well be easier and cheaper than we make it out to be, but without systemic changes to erode the power of industrial agricultural—to better value the work of farmers and make healthy food accessible to all—it won’t be worth much to the planet.

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And therein lies the problem. For Foer, climate change is first and foremost an issue of personal morality, not corporate power.

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“We” are not all the deniers that Foer makes us out to be. As even Bittman, who has long promoted the benefits of a mainly vegan diet, has noted, decades of writing and advocacy urging people to make more climate-friendly consumer choices hasn’t led to a meaningful decrease in emissions. That’s not likely to change based on a Jonathan Safran Foer book. Our best hope in the face of enormous odds is collective action of a different sort than he prescribes, pioneered by those listed above. As with the New Deal and even the mobilization for World War II, any adequate solution to the climate crisis will emerge from a head-on confrontation with those blocking progress and the kind of ambitious public policy that will allow countries and people to transform their consumption in the ways Foer advocates. In fighting the New Deal order, early neoliberals understood that changing public consciousness wasn’t a matter of having enough conversations about Hayek around the dinner table. It was about taking power.

If the world does manage to steer away from catastrophe, the credit will be owed to a critical mass of social movements, unions, and the elected officials accountable to them, working to take power back. No angst-filled breakfast or lunch can do the same.

see also:

Is Eating Meat Worse Than Burning Oil? Charles Kennedy, oilprice.com. Oct. 22, 2019.

Bad news for meat worshipers. Eating healthy isn't just good for your body--it’s good for the environment, too, according to a series of new studies, suggesting that only vegetarians can save the planet.

The fight against climate change is already polarizing enough without adding the meat-plant divide.

But new studies insist that what we eat has quite a lot to do with climate change. It’s not just about food security or species extinction, either.

Today’s food supply chain creates around 13.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents and 26 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

A further 2.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (5 percent) are caused by nonfood agriculture and other drivers of deforestation.

A study from 2017 found that if citizens in 28 high-income nations like the United States, Germany, and Japan actually followed the dietary recommendations of their respective governments, greenhouse gases related to the production of the food they eat would fall by 13 percent to 25 percent. But giving up meat is hard to do. ....