Eating Earth: Environmental Ethics and Dietary Choice
Dr. lisa kemmerer
ISBN: 978-0199391844
Publisher: Oxford, 2015
Overview
Uniquely, Eating Earth focuses on three subjects that ought to be—but are not—found between the covers of any other single book: animal agriculture, the fishing industry, and hunting. In this compact, easy read Dr. Kemmerer’s concise, complete, and fact-filled chapters provides 44 summary slides and 34 graphs and diagrams to explore the effects of what we choose to eat on deforestation, freshwater loss, dead zones, species extinction, and climate change. With a healthy dose of wry humor, Dr. Kemmerer sets out to answer one clear question: Can an environmentalist who is both sincere and informed legitimately choose to be omnivorous—or even vegetarian?
Book Quotes
“Some of the world’s biggest killers (including heart disease, a number of common cancers, obesity, diabetes, and infections from pathogens such as E. coli) are more likely for those who consume flesh, diary, or eggs. Anymal agriculture is implicated in a number of additional serious and deadly medical concerns, including respiratory diseases, antibiotic resistance, and zoomorphic diseases—which are funded and furthered by those who buy anymal products, but which affect all human beings.”
- AMORE, Health Chapter
“In choosing our diet, we choose not only whether or not a pig, cow, sheep, or chicken will live a miserable life and face slaughter in their adolescence, but whether or not mothers will be allowed to raise their young, whether or not the sacred bond between young and their mothers will be respected and honored. . . . Only vegans refuse to participate in the suffering and death that defines anymal agriculture.”
- AMORE, Feminism Chapter
“Farmers burn fossil fuels to prepare the land, to plant, fertilize, harvest, and then to transport and store millions of tons of feedcrops. Anymal agriculture burns fossil fuels to transport herds and flocks to slaughter and then to move anymal products to shops and for cold storage. Anymal agriculture is also the largest source of human-induced methane, created and emitted into the environment by the decomposition of manure and the digestion process of billions of cattle, sheep, and goats birthed and raised as “food,” and human-induced nitrous oxide, which is created and emitted by the decomposition of manure and synthetic fertilizers made from the trillions of tons of manure produced on anymal farms”
- AMORE, Environment Chapter
“Perhaps more importantly (and rather obviously), 2000-year-old descriptions of ritual sacrifices that were performed before Jesus became the final sacrifice—abrogating the need for any further sacrifice—have nothing to do with eating a cheeseburger in the 21st century.”
- AMORE, Religion Chapter