Climate Change is one of the most pressing global issues we have been discussing today. From the international negotiations scheduled in Paris this week to a number of proposed energy saving alternatives; people now fully recognize the worldwide threat and potential damage of the phenomenon.
Indeed, all of mankind are doing every possible way to educate, inform and convince the public to help reduce the causes and sources of Global Warming in every way that they could. Even the littlest changes can be multiplied in to waves of transformations, including the sources your of dinner tonight.
Michael Pollan, a teacher, researcher and speaker on Health, Nutrition, Food Technology and the Environment is releasing a documentary, "Time To Choose", which will tackle the importance of acknowledging one of the tiniest, but probably biggest impacting cause of Climate change.
He suggests that if we want to encourage change, we need to trace one of the basic source of the threat that actually makes the highest impacts to the problem. According to them, a "far too little attention has been paid" to the changes to the technology we use in agriculture and advanced farming practices.
According to Pollan's letter "to the future"; "The climate impact of fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture and processed food is still far from common coin in climate discussions that focus mainly on coal plants, oil refineries, and motor vehicles."
The food system is the second top source of greenhouse gas emissions, energy comes in at first. "Approximately one-third of the carbon [now] in the atmosphere had formerly been sequestered in soils in the form of organic matter, but since we began plowing and deforesting, we'[ve] been releasing huge quantities of this carbon into the atmosphere... the food system as a whole--that includes agriculture, food processing, and food transportation--contribute[s] somewhere between 20-30 percent of the greenhouse gases produced by civilization--more than any other sector except energy," Pollan expressed.
Ironically, the raw products and food made from these coal powered motors and infrastructures could actually risk our health. "These emissions are strongly associated with foods and diets that we now know are very unhealthy. Industrial food, and especially industrial meat, contains pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics suspected to contribute to many diseases," Pollan said. These foods and diets are attributed to higher levels of obesity, diabetes and even cancer.
Pollan believes that every single one of us, regardless of socioeconomic profile, age, race or nationality can do one simple thing as the initial step in saving our planet: making a choice-one that is beneficial both to our environment and ourselves.
His documentary will be available for live streaming through the Huffington Post starting November 30, as the UN holds the global climate talks in Paris.
Pollan calls for little by little change; "Either we can continue to feed ourselves using millions of gallons of fossil fuels to make synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to support the unsustainable monocultures that undergird the present food system, or we can turn towards modern organic and regenerative agriculture. The good news is that, thanks to the innovations pioneered by our most creative farmers, we already know how to do the right thing."
