If there is one crucial environmental metric, it's the amount of land we use to produce our food.
Farming is the greatest cause of loss of terrestrial habitats and biodiversity. Livestock farming - because it needs so much land - is the major driver.
ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
This is also the environmental issue most obscured by myth-making, wishful thinking and junk science. A lot of people really don't want to know that the meat and dairy they eat is devastating the planet. The industry feeds us reassuring falsehoods.
threadreaderapp.com/thread/1145314…
We know that air is important.
We know that water is important.
But for some reason we overlook the other crucial element: land.
The more of it we take for farming, the less of it there is for the rest of the living world.
All farming represents a radical simplification of ecosystems, in order to extract a product we can eat. Only when production rates fall so low that the system hardly qualifies as farming at all is it compatible with rich habitats.
And even in such cases, humans tend to take the place of the top predators, ensuring that all the fascinating trophic effects they cause are truncated.
To justify livestock farming, we make a mental shift that allows us to see the highly depleted systems on ranches and farms, which are missing their top predators, most of their wild herbivores and many other wild animals and plants, as "natural" or as "mimicking nature".
As this evidence review shows, when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of all groups of wild animals except detritus eaters increases. There are more predators, more wild herbivores, more pollinators.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32369874/
Generally, the more extensive a ranching system is, the more predators are killed to protect the cattle or sheep. The methods, esp in North America, are utterly barbaric, and are applied in most of the places where large predators still live. Sorry, but you need to know.
When ecologicts try to reintroduce large predators to places from which they've been eliminated, general public support is often strong. The opposition comes overwhelmingly from the livestock industry, and it is often decisive.
news.sky.com/story/emmanuel…
Incidentally, at sea the dynamic is very similar. The greatest cause of the destruction of marine ecosystems is industrial fishing. It's causing cascading ecological collapse around the world. And it's the fishing industry that blocks the creation of effective marine reserves.
Why are governments held hostage by these industries? Is it because of their economic power?
No. Livestock and fishing are small economic sectors.
It's because of their cultural power.
And this is something in which we all collaborate.
We give them a free pass because we we have a mythologised view of their practitioners. By comparison to us undeserving drones, they are noble, almost sacred workers.
All people deserve respect. But not adulation. These myths harm the interests of humanity.
So governments pour money, in the form of public subsidies, into two of the most damaging industries on Earth. When farming and fishing lobbyists say "jump!", they ask "off which high building?". The cultural power of these industries insulates them from criticism and regulation.
Apologies for the rethreading. I managed to mishook one of the tweets halfway through.

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

5 Mar
Please remember, as corrupt Covid contracts hit the headlines again, that it the BBC didn't mention the issue for *a full 5 months* after the Good Law Project and others exposed it. Except on a few rare occasions, it has marginalised the story ever since.
This is arguably the biggest corruption scandal of modern times. Yet the BBC has flunked repeated opportunities to give it the attention it deserves.
Sometimes I feel our national broadcaster does more to suppress the news than to reveal it.
Those of us with much smaller resources than the BBC has at its disposal - openDemocracy, the Guardian, Byline Times - were able to give this issue the coverage it deserved. So it's not a question of capacity. It's a question of will.
Read 4 tweets
3 Mar
1. We’ve all had a glimpse of mortality in this pandemic, and a premonition, while housebound by lockdown, of old age. These warnings remind us to use life well. In the words of the immortal Bard (Eminem), you only get one shot. So let’s not allow our lives to be ruled by lies.
2. I don’t mean only the lies we are told, though there are plenty of them, but also the lies we tell ourselves: the false assurances that might get us through the day, but that prevent us from connecting with what is real and worthwhile.
3. Let’s begin by admitting that we are in a bad place. A very bad place. Climate and ecological breakdown are happening at terrifying speed. Our own mortality is shadowed by a much greater one: the closure of the conditions that support life on Earth.
Read 17 tweets
1 Mar
1. Why do we collaborate in our own destruction? One of the answers, I think, is our determined commitment to irrelevance. We face massive, unprecedented challenges, but when you tune in to the most popular radio shows, you hear people talking all day about … nothing.
2. As climate and ecological breakdown happen at stupendous speed and scale, as democracy is hollowed out, as a handful of oligarchs accumulate massive economic and political power, we ensure that our heads are filled with meaningless noise.
3. If alien spaceships started incinerating our cities, and we turned on the radio, we'd be told “so the hot topic today is: what’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to you while eating a kebab?”.
Read 10 tweets
26 Feb
I’ve now withdrawn from the event I was doing at the @sciencemuseum, after discovering that it is still taking sponsorship money from the oil companies BP and Equinor. Such companies use these deals to sustain their social licence to operate – ie to destroy the living planet.
When I accepted the museum’s invitation, I naively imagined those days were over. I mean, what respectable organisation still takes money from this planetary death machine? I love the Science Museum, but it’s hard to express how disappointed I feel.
Please support @Cult_Unstained in their efforts to break this chain of destruction and the greenwash and normalisation of fossil fuel companies that organisations like the Science Museum enable. cultureunstained.org/oil-sponsorshi…
Read 5 tweets
26 Feb
1. In the southern Cambrian Mountains, in central Wales, there’s a Terrestrial Dead Zone of around 300 km². It’s composed of degraded blanket mires, entirely dominated by a coarse grass called Molinia, in which other lifeforms, such as birds and insects, are scarcely to be found.
2. It seems to have been pushed past its tipping point in the 20th Century, into a new stable state. The most likely cause, according to the scientists who have studied it, was a switch from cattle to sheep grazing, and an increase in the stocking rate.
link.springer.com/article/10.100…
3. Flips like this are called hysteresis. Although, in some places, there has been no grazing for 30 or 40 years, the land has not recovered. Once any complex system undergoes hysteresis, the effort required to reverse it is much greater than the effort required to cause it.
Read 14 tweets
18 Feb
I’ve just finished some research about the use of biosolids (human sewage sludge) as farm manure. The results will keep me awake at night.
¾ of biosolids in the UK are spread on farmland. The rules about what it can contain are not fit for purpose. Please read and share this 🧵
Biosolids typically contain a wide range of synthetic chemicals, including antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals, personal care products, microplastics and persistant organic pollutants, among them “forever chemicals”. Yet testing is restricted to a small number of contaminants.
Spreading them across the land means spreading them through the foodchain and the ecosystem. There’s plenty of evidence of uptake of many of these chemicals by crops, earthworms and other soil animals, and of large-scale antibiotic resistance developing among soil bacteria.
Read 11 tweets

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