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'I was wrong' says former vegan diet advocate
Climate change journalist George Monbiot says he was wrong when he claimed 'the only ethical response is to stop eating meat.'
Thu, Sep 09 2010 at 3:39 PM
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“To admit you were wrong is to declare you are wiser now than before,” goes the popular saying. And one climate change journalist did just that earlier this week — by renouncing his previous argument for veganism.
“I was wrong about veganism,” is the bold title of George Monbiot’s latest column for The Guardian, which retracts his 2002 statement that veganism is “the only ethical response to what is arguably the world’s most urgent social justice issue.”
What changed Monbiot's mind? He read "Meat: A Benign Extravagance", a new book by Simon Fairlie (currently only available in the U.K.; free excerpt available at Permaculture Magazine) — to discover that many of the pro-vegan arguments and statistics he’d believed were misleading.
For example, “the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1,” Monbiot writes. And livestock are responsible for just about 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — not 18 percent as often claimed. Meat production also isn’t as water-intensive as many vegans claim either. “Like many greens I have thoughtlessly repeated the claim that it requires 100,000 liters of water to produce every kilogram of beef,” Monbiot writes. “Fairlie shows that this figure is wrong by around three orders of magnitude.”
But don’t go buy a Big Mac meal at your nearest McDonald’s just yet! George’s belief that the current ways we feed livestock and produce meat are unsustainable and unhealthy still stands; Fairlie agrees on this fact, too. “But these idiocies, Fairlie shows, are not arguments against all meat eating, but arguments against the current farming model,” writes Monbiot in his column:
The meat-producing system Fairlie advocates differs sharply from the one now practiced in the rich world: low energy, low waste, just, diverse, small-scale. But if we were to adopt it, we could eat meat, milk and eggs (albeit much less) with a clean conscience. By keeping out of the debate over how livestock should be kept, those of us who have advocated veganism have allowed the champions of cruel, destructive, famine-inducing meat farming to prevail. It’s time we got stuck in.
Monbiot’s column was illuminating for me, both intellectually and on a more personal level. So often, we can get so entrenched in our current view of the world that we’re unable to clearly see — sometimes even unwilling to examine — a different perspective. Monbiot’s willingness to reexamine his current beliefs by reading a book that, in Monbiot’s words, “starts by attacking me and often returns to this sport” — and his courage in publicly stating he was wrong — encourages me to try to be vigilantly open-minded when examining my own green beliefs.
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Monbiot is wrong on everything he gets excited about, whether it be meat, climate, Pachauri, or whatever. He is a driven man, driven mad by the flimsy foundation of environmental extremism.
since he's opposed to the current farm model, i presume he's still vegan.
also i love how the guy says things like "vegans often argue..."
it's not vegans - it's the world health organization, the united nations, and other huge, global organizations - do a quick search on "livestock's long shadow"
don't argue with me (the lowly vegan) argue with the united nations team of scientists from around the world
Right...BUT "Livestock's long Shadow" is often misrepresented by Vegans as evidence towards eliminating meat production when in fact it present 7 steps to improving it by making meat production more sustainable. If only vegans actually read what they preached (and not make the mistake of giving the study to a graduate degree holder with plenty of experience reading research), maybe they wouldn't make all of these erroneous claims.
I think you have to clearly see what sort of vegan meal you are having. As I see when there is a market companies will start releasing products that suits for vegans but that dose not mean that it is a healthy vegan diet. It is totally artificial and it might be worst than other fast food.
Vegans can decide what they want to eat. Farmed animals can't decide what to eat, how to live, or protect themselves against being killed. I don't think it matters much if vegans eat junk food if that's what they want. But it matters a great deal that nonhuman animals are killed by the billions each year and none of them deserve it.
It's called the cycle of life. :(((((((( it happens.
Your entire post is based upon your extremely biased conclusions towards animals. There is NOTHING factual about what you are saying...it's merely your opinion.
as a sustainable form of agriculture, both animals and plants are required to form the complete circle of life. The backbones of the vegan diet, soy and grain, are devastating the worlds ecology through intensive agriculture. And its probably also devastating your health as both of these foods are neolithic and humans just did not evolve effective metabolic processes to handle them.
Bruce, let the animals of permaculture be volunteers, not slaves. This is the way nature managed for hundreds of millions of years. Soy and grain are not the backbones of the vegan diet. Vegans -- and all humans -- need a variety of food, so there is no "back bone". And grain has relatively little nutrition compared to fruits and green veggies. Please learn more about veganism before coming to hasty conclusions about it.
So Monbiot reads one book, "Meat", written by one man, and he is now convinced that everything he has thought before was wrong? Aren't journalists supposed to think critically and use more than one source of research. I think it's absurd that this man can so confidently declare he was "wrong" after reading ONE book. He would not make a good scientist nor does he make a good journalist.
Whether anyone agrees with this man or not, you should be proud of his bravery in admitting he believes he was wrong. Too many people would not do that, on any subject, let alone one as touchy as this one.
Unless and until humans start volunteering their own flesh, we can safely presume that other animals don't volunteer theirs.
Beth has it right -- we can choose compassion or choose to create a world with more suffering. Conversion ratios or water usage are irrelevant to whether we, as ethical individuals, should pay someone to kill a fellow sentient being for a mere mouthful of flesh.
Viewing Animals as being more important than human beings (because let's face it, that's what veganism is about, not equality) is not "compassion", it's sociopathy.
There is a slippery slope when it comes to a restrictive but healthy diet. There has been a rise in the occurrence of orthorexia nervosa, defined as an extreme devotion to healthy eating— a true health food junkie. It has more sufferers than anorexia and bulimia put together, it affects as many men as women.
Take the Quiz: Healthy Diet or Eating Disorder?
http://gigabiting.com/?p=4977/
Many of us do not eat meat for ethical reasons, not just because we believe it's better for the environment. This argument does not address ethics and suffering. It's not that persuasive to me, since we all know that humans do not need meat to thrive. Interesting viewpoint, though, but not so revelatory for me.
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