Charles C. Mann: evaluation

Transcript context

…This is western Massachusetts? Western Massachusetts. Sorry, I live in western Massachusetts, and we have a boutique farm next to us that us yuppies support because we like Jeremy, and it’s all a sort of friendly but slightly ridiculous enterprise. The beef and pork he has is absolutely delicious, so we pay a ludicrous amount for it. Any normal person would think we were idiots. But his stuff, his animals, they eat scraps. They eat leftovers, and they graze on weeds. As far as I can tell, the environmental cost to what they do is zero or negative in the sense that they also have manure, and the manure is then plowed back into the fields. So obviously what he’s doing is having extremely small impact on the environment. Possibly the methane. Now you get to these giant feed lots, and this is where they’re talking about how terrible it all is. But that grain is used for so many things, and the cattle themselves are used for so many things. Even if you didn’t eat meat, there’d still be need for leather, there’d still be need for keratin and collagen and all the other things that come from cattle. When you take these things and just say, “Oh, 10 pounds of grain produces a pound of meat,” it also produces all this other stuff, as does the grain. So I think that the environmental impact is overstated. I’m sorry, that was a very long-winded answer. Great. Due in part to the influence of Rachel Carson, the use of DDT has been highly restricted. Some people have charged this cost a fairly high number of human lives, and other people are more skeptical. What’s your view?…

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