Name: Comfortably Unaware
Rating: 3.9 (30 reviews)
Author: Richard A. Oppenlander

What’s in it for me? Learn about some surprising triggers for our environmental crisis.

Everyone’s talking about it. Global warming. Natural resources are exploited; our planet is suffering. We are over-harvesting timber from our forests, pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and polluting rivers and oceans.

These blinks provide you with great insights into the current state of the earth. But it’s not the familiar story about the evils of burning fossil fuels. There’s more to global environmental depletion than that. We need to take a close look at the very foods we eat.

It’s a matter of our food culture, and how the raising of animals has multiple negative effects on our planet. Read on and you may never eat steak again.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

which greenhouse gases are the most harmful;
why the clearing of forests impacts our hope of curing cancer; and
why our use of the oceans is unsustainable.

What you eat has a direct impact on global warming and environmental depletion.

Did Al Gore’s book on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, inspire you to use less water and electricity and start taking public transportation? If so, that’s great, but unfortunately, you’ve only tackled part of the problem.

If we really want to stop global warming we have to start caring more about what we eat, especially when it comes to meat, fish and dairy.

Global warming is triggered by an increase in the earth’s temperature as a result of humans releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These gases are mostly made up of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

Between 1750 and 2006, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose 35 percent. And in just the last 15 years, methane has increased by 145 percent. This is more troubling since methane is far more powerful than carbon dioxide, having 23 times the impact on global warming.

So what is causing this rise in methane? It is primarily related to the increase in livestock.

Approximately 40 percent of methane generated by human activity comes from raising livestock. And to make matters worse, livestock also accounts for 65 percent of the nitrous oxide we generate – a gas that has 310 times more of an impact on global warming than carbon dioxide!

But global warming is only one piece of a larger problem known as global depletion: the point at which the earth’s renewable and non-renewable resources start to disappear.

But even renewable resources, such as trees, can take hundreds of years to mature in great enough numbers for us to use them again. And unfortunately, at the rate we are using our natural resources, we’re not giving nature the time it needs to restore itself.

In the blinks that follow, we’ll see how the food industry is pushing us to global depletion.

Food shortages could be reversed if the grains given to animals were used to feed humans.

If we stopped devoting so much land to raising animals for food, we could feed everyone on the planet.

For example, the United States sets aside 70 percent of the grain it grows to feed livestock. Meanwhile, according to the World Hunger Organization, 6 million children died of starvation in 2009.

Our oceans are being emptied by excessive fishing activities.

Unfortunately, reducing our meat intake isn’t the only step that needs to be taken. If we want to become environmentally conscious, we also need to look at the damage our seafood consumption is doing to the oceans.

Overfishing is rampant around the world and far from sustainable. This is largely because fishing practices are not well regulated.

Key ideas in Comfortably Unaware