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I think more people look at my photos on Flickr than read my shit on here so I've taken to including little environmental messages and hyperlinks on my photos and today I just created this cheesy "motivational" poster using www.flagrantdisregard.com. I'm hoping I can inspire people to find out more about environmental issues through my photostream.
Mike writes eloquently, with wit and humour and I just wanted to give him a plug on here since he truly deserves a wider audience. I love following his regular updates.
Here's one my favourite bits from Master Mike's blog:
I find the boatswain and the rest of the crew down in the hold, they’re doing rope work. “Old man wants the sails up” I call down to them. Crew come up the ladder and, with hardly a word, they go about preparing the ship to sail. The booms are swung out and secured with the preventer rope such that the jib is furthest out, followed by the main sail, then the others - each successively more inboard than the one in front. Phil, the boatswain, stands on the forecastle with me. He has a yellow remote control unit with four buttons in his hands with which to operate two electric winches. I look down on the deck and there is a crew member standing by each mast with a similar remote control. In perfect synchronicity each crew electrically unfurls the sails whilst, at the same time, hauling on the outhaul - we are now motor sailing.
 Me eating local farmed mussels - © Satu |
There's something I have been wanting to put into writing for quite sometime and that is why most vegans are usually stupid. I don't mean they have a brain the size of a pea or anything no - it's more that they don't use their brain (however big it may be) to consider their ecological footprint. The vegans I have met are fairly self righteous about their lifestyle and often feel certain that the way they live their life leaves the smallest ecological footprint on the earth. Usually I find they have failed to consider several major factors. Just because you eat vegetables and no animal products doesn't mean your diet is totally eco-friendly. While it's true that for every pound of meat you could grow many times more vegetables therefore using up less resources - eating a carrot for example may have required an unknown number of unenvironmentally friendly things (including animal cruelty) to happen before it got to your mouth.
The things I try to consider are:
1) Were any chemicals used which may have had detrimental impacts on the surrounding environment? - most artificial fertilizers and pesticides are damaging to wildlife and humans so I buy organic produce whenever possible. However, although a product may be "organic" that does NOT mean that dead animals were not used to grow it (fish and bone fertilizer - hmm?) and that the fertilizers used were from sustainable sources.
2) Is the product fair trade? - it's often difficult to find fair trade products but I when I see them I always buy them instead of similar items which are not fair trade.
3) Are there any genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in it? - I avoid GMOs because the potential and proven environmental disadvantages outweigh the mostly unproved advantages.
4) How far has this product travelled? - I try to buy local produce as much as possible and avoid imported foods from a long way away. The environmental impacts (most notably C02 emissions) of food transportation are a major factor when considering your ecological footprint.
I also try to apply similar ethics to buying clothes and other products although it's not so easy finding things like organic cotton in local shops - especially in small places like Bermuda. Vegans however, boast about the fact that they don't wear wool or leather but what about their plastic shoes and their cotton shirts? There is more to being an ethical consumer than simply drawing a line between plants and animals. I do take my hat off to any vegan who buys local organic produce and wears natural organic clothes. However, most of the vegans I have met do not consider the things I have listed to be as important as the issues involved in livestock farming.
I am totally against livestock farming on land (especially factory farming but when it comes to the sea - as long it's sustainable and doesn't involve needless cruelty - I'm buying it! Of course my oceanic diet is fairly restricted because these days we're overfishing and depleting the oceans of life *rolls eyes* so there isn't much you can eat from the sea without a guilty conscience. However, local line caught fish together farmed mussels and tilapia are usually the best options. I'll talk more about them another time - but trust me on this - mussels - unless they are dredged - are like ZERO ecological footprint seafood ;-) and in my opinion are way better to eat than most vegetable sources of protein.
I know that vegans think I am cruel for eating fish that have no doubt suffered pain but when you destroy native flora and fauna in order to grow vegetables - is that not cruel and shouldn't it be avoided as much as possible? Sure we waste a lot of land growing animals and I am against that but it's even better to eat mussels and locally caught fish than it is to eat tofu... unless you consider killing fish and mussels a terrible sin - in which case - you would really need to find out where all your vegetables are coming from because you'll find that lots of animals died or suffered along the way - and I just don't know how you could justify eating anything unless you were a fruitarian that grew all your own organic fruit and if you were - I'd want to meet you and shake your hand to make sure you were real!)
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