eating less meat seems like the biggest thing individuals can do here. Animal waste/fertilizer runoff/agricultural waste seems like the biggest contributor.
I'd caveat this by saying eating less industrially raised and processed meat would help. The same goes for industrial produce though, they cause a ton of damage that few people ever see or think about.
If we want realistic solutions, they'll all be incremental like using less plastic or Turing lights off when you aren't home. If we want recommendations that would actually help, we would need to completely reorganize societies and our daily lives.
We don't need cars, air travel, grocery stores, or even air conditioning to survive. Those are all modern inventions on the order of decades old. People aren't going to do that willingly though, including me. I live a very different, and more simple, life than the average American but the idea of throwing out so many things that we have today only because we've enslaved natural fuel sources is scary as hell.
Whatever the solutions are, let's not push burden on the individual. Resources are like highway lanes: even if you don't drive your car, someone will use it just.
Regenerative agriculture. No till, no spray, cover crops. Managed grazing of ruminants and poultry on the same land that crops are grown on to build top soil and serve as pest control.
Regenerative ag is a ton of work, and at least in my anecdotal experience I didn't see any meaningful gains from it.
We rotated our cows once or twice a day, carefully tracking how much space they got each day based on the animals' weight and quality of forage. The animals got by okay, but honestly they seemed to act more like prisoners than cows. It shows even when you watch some of the biggest names in regenerative move their animals - the animals dive past the line into the space. Those animals are hungry and stressed by being so densely kept that they feel they need to eat before it's all gone.
Today we keep our cows in what anyone else would consider a much too low stocking density. We move them occasionally between 3 different pastures, on the order of weeks or months between each move. The animals seem less stressed, they're definitely happier, and they've created familial bonds and hierarchy that wasn't obvious when we kept them in closer quarters with frequent moves.
_heimdall|1 year ago
If we want realistic solutions, they'll all be incremental like using less plastic or Turing lights off when you aren't home. If we want recommendations that would actually help, we would need to completely reorganize societies and our daily lives.
We don't need cars, air travel, grocery stores, or even air conditioning to survive. Those are all modern inventions on the order of decades old. People aren't going to do that willingly though, including me. I live a very different, and more simple, life than the average American but the idea of throwing out so many things that we have today only because we've enslaved natural fuel sources is scary as hell.
mihaic|1 year ago
goda90|1 year ago
_heimdall|1 year ago
We rotated our cows once or twice a day, carefully tracking how much space they got each day based on the animals' weight and quality of forage. The animals got by okay, but honestly they seemed to act more like prisoners than cows. It shows even when you watch some of the biggest names in regenerative move their animals - the animals dive past the line into the space. Those animals are hungry and stressed by being so densely kept that they feel they need to eat before it's all gone.
Today we keep our cows in what anyone else would consider a much too low stocking density. We move them occasionally between 3 different pastures, on the order of weeks or months between each move. The animals seem less stressed, they're definitely happier, and they've created familial bonds and hierarchy that wasn't obvious when we kept them in closer quarters with frequent moves.
adrianN|1 year ago