#136: Glen Merzer - Food is Climate
Glen Merzer- Playwright, Screenwriter, and Author
Rip welcomes playwright, screenwriter, and author, Glen Merzer to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast. Glen has written or co-authored a dozen books alongside plant-based broc stars like Chef AJ, Howard Lyman, and Forks over Knives chef, Del Srouffe.
Glen discusses his latest book, Food is Climate, zeroing in on the real leading cause of climate change: animal agriculture and consumption. He doesn't hold back because, quite frankly, we are now in a moment of urgency. As Merzer writes, "We can simply take off the intellectual handcuffs and stop eating meat. We can thereby rewild more than one-third of the earth. We can achieve drawdown by allowing trees and other vegetation to grow. Continued meat consumption is, quite simply, a recipe for the destruction of life on this planet.”
My friends, it is one thing to stop eating animals for your health. Indeed, it’s the BEST thing you can do. But, in this case, what’s good for your body is also good for Mother Earth.
Let’s save life as we know it for future generations. Glen Merzer tells us why and how.
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Promo Music: Your Love by Atch
License: Creative Commons License - Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)
Full YouTube Transcript
Glen Merzer:
Times have changed. Now, we have an imminent threat to all life on the planet from greenhouse gases. It's very serious and we could, at some point, reach a tipping point. Now, the meat eater is saying, "Rip, enjoy your brown rice and vegetables but I want to enjoy my cheeseburger." We can reply, "Well, you enjoy your cheeseburger for as long as it allows us to breathe." Because that's what's at stake now. The meat industry is destroying the planet.
Rip Esselstyn:
I'm Rip Esselstyn and welcome to the Plantstrong podcast. The mission at Plantstrong is to further the advancement of all things within the plant-based movement. We advocate for the scientifically proven benefits of plant-based living and envision a world that universally understands, promotes, and prescribes plants as a solution to empowering your health, enhancing your performance, restoring the environment, and becoming better guardians to the animals we share this planet with. We welcome you wherever you are on your Plantstrong journey and I hope that you enjoy this show.
Rip Esselstyn:
Hello, my Plantstrong porcinos. I want to welcome you to another episode of the Plantstrong Podcast. I'm Rip Esselstyn. Most of you know me as the firefighter crusading for a plant-strong lifestyle to rescue your own health, which is vitally important. Today, I'm going to be talking about something with even bigger implications, and I'm talking about rescuing this planet, with playwright, screenwriter and author, Glen Merzer. Glen has written or co-authored a dozen books alongside plant-based rock stars like Chef AJ, Howard Lyman, and Forks Over Knives chef, Del Sroufe.
Rip Esselstyn:
He is with me today to discuss his latest book, Food is Climate, which zeros in on the real leading cause of climate change, animal agriculture, and consumption. My porcinos, it is one thing to stop eating animals for your health. Indeed, it's the best thing that you can do. In this case, what's good for your body is also good for Mother Earth. Let's save life as we know it for future generations. Here to tell us why and how is Glen Merzer. Hey, everybody, I want to welcome Glen Merzer to the Plantstrong podcast. Glen, actually, I've known of Glen since 2009, and I know that you're a very prolific writer. You've written, what, how many books have you written on being vegan?
Glen Merzer:
I think I've got 11 books that I either authored or co-authored.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow. Wow. Yeah. You consider yourself a playwright, a screenwriter, and an author, correct?
Glen Merzer:
Yes. Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
All right. I want to dive right in, because the latest book that you wrote, I'm going to hold it up right here, Food is Climate, is ... I read it over the last two days and it is a punch in the face. You don't hold back, not for a second, and I really admire the way you've written this. But it is a serious wake up call to humanity and we got to get moving collectively and we got to move in the direction that you talk about in this book, which we're going to jump into here. Before we do, I want to read something that was written by Philip Wollen. Am I pronouncing that correct?
Glen Merzer:
I think he says Wollen.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay. Philip Wollen, who actually did the foreword for your book. He's the VP of Citibank or former VP of Citibank. He's from Australia and he's quite the environmentalist, philanthropist, and animal rights activist. But he says, "We freak out in the West when a thousand refugees arrived on our shores. Imagine greenhouse gases hitting 500 parts per million or a three degree temperature rise creating 100 million eco refugees. This calamity will reshape the geopolitical landscape forever. We are facing the perfect storm. If any nation had developed weapons that could wreak such havoc on the planet, we would launch a preemptive military strike and bomb it into the Bronze Age, but we can't because it's not a rogue state, it's an industry. Meat.
Rip Esselstyn:
The good news is we don't have to bomb it. We can just stop buying it. George W. Bush was wrong. The axis of evil doesn't run through Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. It runs right through our dining tables. The weapons of mass destruction are our knives, forks, and chopsticks." Then, he goes on to say a lot of really amazing things and really nice things about you. But before we dive in, Glen, you've written this book, Food is Climate. Why should people listen to you?
Glen Merzer:
Well, Rip, you and I have written books making the case on health.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yup.
Glen Merzer:
It's so important for everybody's individual life, what could be more important than their health? I'm always amazed by people who love their families and eat cheeseburgers. Because if you love your family, even if you don't care about yourself, you would want to eat plant-strong, right? You would want to care about your longevity and your health, if not for yourself, at least for those you love, so it's so important to take care of your health. But now, we're talking about the health of the planet. The argument used to always be between meat eaters and vegans or vegetarians about the cruelty to animals.
Glen Merzer:
Effectively, the meat eaters would say, "Well, I know, but pig is delicious." Or, "I like to eat the way I eat. I'm not stopping you from having brown rice and vegetables. Don't stop me from enjoying my cheeseburger." That used to be the argument, but times have changed. Now, we have an imminent threat to all life on the planet from greenhouse gases. It's very serious and we could, at some point, reach a tipping point. Now, the meat eater is saying, "Rip, enjoy your brown rice and vegetables, but I want to enjoy my cheeseburger." We can reply, "Well, you enjoy your cheeseburger for as long as it allows us to breathe."
Glen Merzer:
That's what's at stake now. The meat industry is destroying the planet. It is the number one cause of greenhouse gases. Now, in the book I adopt Sailesh Rao's peer reviewed study that estimates 87% of greenhouse gases are from animal agriculture. I just saw a study today that got published, someone else says 68%, but whether it's 68% or 87%, it's the leading cause of climate change.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. I want to come back to that in a sec, because I think that's very important, but you start out the first sentence of your book, basically saying that climate change is dire. I just did a little research on ... We recently had the COP26 Climate Conference in Glasgow and coming out of it, the United Nations Climate Change executive secretary basically writes how we've got to move forward, we have to hold countries to some really higher standards if we want to really make a difference. She's pushing for a "generation green" is what she's calling it, in quotes, "generation green". Of course, the goal is carbon neutrality by 2050 and preventing the heating of the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius. Did you keep up with what was going on with COP26? Did they even touch animal agriculture?
Glen Merzer:
Barely at all. Barely at all.
Rip Esselstyn:
Barely scratched it.
Glen Merzer:
I have friends who were climate activists who were in Glasgow. They even gave out my book. They handed a copy to Al Gore as he got onto an elevator and he looked down, he saw his name in the subtitle and I'm told that he looked interested, but they scarcely talk about animal agriculture. The leading spokesmen on climate, like Al Gore and Paul Hawken, and Bill Gates, and others, they only talk about fossil fuels and fossil fuels are part of the problem. I drive an electric car, which would seem to be a good thing, but the truth is that when I plug it in to charge it, that electricity is being generated by coal.
Glen Merzer:
My car is running on coal, really. That's out of my control. I can't change the energy grid by myself. But what's in my control is what I eat, that's what's within all of our control.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, you hint in, I believe it was chapter three, you started out by basically letting us know the story that we've been told. According to the story that we've been told, what is the crisis climb?
Glen Merzer:
The story we've been told is that the crisis is too many molecules of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere radiating heat back to the planet and raising surface temperatures, and that the solution to that is to reduce fossil fuel burning. Switching from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy and carpooling, and having smart thermostats and things like that, anything to reduce fossil fuel burning. The truth is, we've been trying to do that for 30 years and we burn more fossil fuels now than we did 30 years ago. What they always do is they kick the can down the road and they say, "Okay, we've got the problem solved now. By 2050, we're not going to be burning any fossil fuels."
Glen Merzer:
Well, if you could really do that, then do it tomorrow. It's insanity really to keep proposing the same thing over and over again. To say, "In the future, we're going to reduce fossil fuel burning." Right now, we're at 4% solar and 9% wind in terms of energy generation in the United States. We're a long way from carbon neutral. When Al Gore flies on his private jet to Glasgow, then he buys some carbon offsets. It's what the Catholic Church used to call indulgences, to atone for the fossil fuels he's burning. We're not going to solve the problem that way.
Glen Merzer:
If you think about it logically, it can never work as long as we're eating meat, because even if next week, magically, we had solar airplanes and everybody was driving electric cars and all the electricity was from solar and wind. Even if next week we were fossil fuel, we were done with fossil fuels, which would be a good thing, but even then the planet would keep warming up because we have 1.3 billion cows on the earth belching methane, which is 120 times as potent as carbon dioxide. We have nitrous oxide from the fertilizer used to grow feed for the cattle. We have nitrous oxide and methane from the cattle and the pig waste.
Glen Merzer:
We have oceans being deadened by industrial fishing operations that are trawling the ocean floor and kicking up methane and carbon dioxide from the ocean floor. Something nobody couldn't even measure. We have pasture maintenance fires. I have an image of it, a NASA image on the cover of my book. These red areas are pasture maintenance fires that are set in grazing lands all around the earth, which are set in order that anything the cows don't eat, they burn. It makes it easier for the cows to just have grass. We have all these sources of greenhouse gases that won't go away just from electric cars.
Rip Esselstyn:
You used the term, and I think you borrow it from Sailesh Rao, the killing machine versus the burning machine.
Glen Merzer:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
The burning machine basically is, you're referring to what, the fossil fuels, right?
Glen Merzer:
The fossil fuels, yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
The fossil fuels and how that's just really not going to butter the biscuit, so to speak, whereas-
Glen Merzer:
That's not vegan.
Rip Esselstyn:
No, it's not. As opposed to the killing machine that is, if we really want to zero in on the heart of this issue, we got to go after the killing machine, and that's where the crux of everything is lying.
Glen Merzer:
Right. Rip, that's because if we stop the killing machine ... I just gave you a fantasy where, if a week from now we had no fossil fuel burning. Let's do the other fantasy. A week from now, everybody eats like you and I eat. Everybody is plant-strong. Everybody has no animal foods in their diet, which is something we can do. We can actually do that. Well, what happens then? Well, then, we don't need the grazing land. Why would we need grazing land? The grazing land is 37% of the non-ice land surface of the earth. That will go back to, much of it to forest, to vegetation, and that draws down carbon dioxide.
Glen Merzer:
Sailesh Rao's published peer reviewed study showed that if 41% of the grazing land, which is the amount that was forest in the year 1800, that he could prove was forest in 1800, if that returns to forest, we're pulling down enough carbon dioxide to get us back to pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. Incredible.
Glen Merzer:
Yeah. If in the good fantasy everybody eats like you and I eat, then we have ... we can restore forests, we can save the oceans because is no one will be eating fish anymore. We won't need those ocean trawlers and we could have healthy phytoplankton population. The phytoplankton draw down carbon dioxide, emit oxygen, and the yeast also emit a chemical called dimethyl sulfide that rises in the atmosphere, bonds with water droplets and forms clouds. We can restore the planet by leaving the oceans alone and by leaving enough of the earth alone, that it could heal itself.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, as you talk about in your book, it's a very, very simple solution. This does not have to be difficult. Everybody's like, "Oh, my God, it's going to be so impossible, so difficult, so arduous." The reality is, we got to do it. We got to do it. The only thing that's at stake here is, our civilization, it truly is. I want to go back to Sailesh Rao, and you said that his paper that he wrote called, The Climate Healers position paper that came out in November of 2019, where he says that global greenhouse gas emissions from animal agriculture are responsible for 87% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Rip Esselstyn:
Let's go back a little bit earlier, because you talk about in your book, how in 2006, the food and agriculture organization of the United Nations wrote a paper called, Livestock's Long Shadow, where they said it was 18%.
Glen Merzer:
Right.
Rip Esselstyn:
Then, a couple years later, we had the World Watch Report, part of the World Bank with Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, and they actually, in their report, said it was 51%. My question to you is, how do we get from 2006, 18%? Then, it was corrected to 14.5% and then 2009, 51%, and then, Sailesh Rao, 87%?
Glen Merzer:
Right. Well, let's start with the FAO. The FAO works in tandem with agricultural interests around the world. It's analogous to the US Department of Agriculture creating our food pyramids. They're working with farmers, so they want to make sure there's dairy in the food pyramid. The FAO is working with farming interests around the world, so when they came out with their paper, 18%, it was a shock to many people that they were estimating it so high, 18% is a big contribution to global warming. They angered a lot of their constituents.
Glen Merzer:
That's why a few years later, after consultation with the, something called the Meat Secretariat and other food interests internationally, they said, "Oh, I guess we overestimated it." They reduced it to 14.5%, which is still a big chunk of global warming, but they reduced it under political pressure. But when they said 18%, they were not including all kinds of ways in which animal agriculture creates greenhouse gases. When Goodland and Anhang came up with their paper in 2009, they included animal respiration. Animals breathe in oxygen, breathe out carbon dioxide.
Glen Merzer:
The UN FAO objected and they said, "Well, that's just part of the natural carbon cycle. Trees release oxygen, take in carbon dioxide, release oxygen. Animals take in oxygen release, carbon dioxide. It's just part of the natural carbon cycle." Well, we used to have 6 trillion trees on the planet. We now have 3 trillion. We didn't use to have 25 billion farmed animals, so if you take the FAO logic, if we get to the point that we have a trillion farmed animals and one tree left, are they going to say, "Well, it's just part of a natural carbon cycle."
Glen Merzer:
At some point the numbers mattered, don't they, how many trees there are and how many farmed animals there are. We have more and more farmed animals and particularly ruminants that belch methane, so you have to look at it. Another thing that the FAO did was that they undercounted methane because methane degrades in the atmosphere over time. When it's initially emitted, it's 120 times as potent, the greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide. But a hundred years later, there's very little methane left because it's degraded into carbon dioxide, so they average it out over a hundred years.
Glen Merzer:
Well, we may not have a hundred years at this rate. The really accurate way to measure methane is by its global warming potential immediately, 120. Goodland and Anhang averaged it out over, I think, 20 years and they took the number, I think, 72. I would use the number 120, but in any case, the FAO used the number 20. They didn't make methane as powerful as it really is. But the main thing that the FAO didn't take into account is called carbon opportunity cost. What if we didn't have all this grazing land and we let the forest come back?
Glen Merzer:
The FAO didn't look at that because they assumed we have to have the grazing land. Goodland and Anhang looked at that, calculated that, but not to as great an extent as Sailesh Rao did. Sailesh Rao said, "What if 41% of it comes back to forest?" That's why Sailesh's number was more dramatic than Goodland and Anhang.
Rip Esselstyn:
Let's take a minute to share another wonderful email from a recent plant-strong convert. "Rip, just a quick note to thank you for your incredible influence in my and my family's life. We are loving the Plantstrong products from Whole Foods and the online products such as the Pizza Kits and the Big Bowl cereals. Thanks to you and your mom, I now put grapefruit on my cereal every day. Who knew that would be so delicious? Your books are fantastic and full of shareable information when others question my plant-based diet. Love you and your wonderful dad, mom and sister, Jane. Thanks for everything, Cheryl."
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, Cheryl, big love and kisses right back to you. Yes, grapefruit on your Big Bowl is absolutely delicious. For anybody out there that has never even fathom putting grapefruit on your cereal, give it a whirl. I think that you're absolutely going to dig it. I love that Cheryl, even though she's super new to the Plantstrong lifestyle, just since 2020, I love that you're diving right into it and getting super creative. That's also what's great about all of our Plantstrong products, whether it's the pizza crust, the chilies, the stews, the granolas, the Rip's Big Bowl, the new Multi-grain Flakes cereal.
Rip Esselstyn:
You have a healthy and nutritious base and then you get to dress it up to your heart's content. You simply can have all of these foods delivered right to your doorstep by going to plantstrongfoods.com. It could not be any easier. Kale. Yeah. While you're dreaming of your next Plantstrong meal, let's get back to Glen who continues to explain why our food choices matter so much. Will you dive a little bit deeper into ... so, methane, what produces, what causes methane?
Glen Merzer:
It's from the bacteria and the digestion of food.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay. I've also heard that there's methane, for example, in the permafrost.
Glen Merzer:
Yes.
Rip Esselstyn:
As we start to heat up and if that permafrost basically starts to melt, we're in real trouble and there's going to be a lot of methane released there.
Glen Merzer:
Right. There are what we call climate tipping points where ... or positive feedback loops. As an example, as the Arctic ice melts, well, the ice reflects heat, so it's white and reflects heat. As the ice melts, turns into the ocean, which is darker, which absorbs heat. If it absorbs heat, it gets hotter and more ice melts, turning into more water, turning into more heat, turning into more melting. That's a positive feedback loop. The same with methane, as it gets hotter, more methane is released from the permafrost. The permafrost thaws in places like Siberia.
Glen Merzer:
Well, as the methane gets released, it gets hotter in the atmosphere and then more methane is released, and there's enough methane that could be released that could destroy civilization. We can't let it get so hot that all the methane from the permafrost gets released.
Rip Esselstyn:
How is that methane in the permafrost? Do you know how it got there to begin with?
Glen Merzer:
I'm going to say that it's from organic ... just like there's coal in the earth from the decay of organic material. I'm going to suggest that I think it's just organic materials that have been frozen in the earth, but maybe, I'm sure a scientist can give a better answer.
Rip Esselstyn:
Do you know how close we are? What's it going to take for that to get touched? Do we know?
Glen Merzer:
I don't think anybody knows. There's already some methane being released, so I don't think anybody knows. It's what engineers call nonlinear systems. They're very hard to predict. Maybe we won't hit that methane tipping point in a hundred years or maybe we'll hit it in five years. I don't think anybody really knows. That's why a lot of what this is about is arrogance. Let's not be arrogant. We don't know how close we are to tipping points. Therefore, if we want civilization to continue, let's be as wise and cautious as we can be and let's not create any unnecessary heat in the atmosphere. We could do that by getting ourselves healthy by eating plant-strong. Why would we want to mess with nature this way and risk the tipping points?
Rip Esselstyn:
You showed us all the fires going on here. We also have the record heat and the record dryness going on, we have all kinds of forest fires going on as well, that are not intentionally set. Can you explain to the listener why the burning of forests is a climate catastrophe?
Glen Merzer:
Yes. Again, it's something that could be a tipping point because when forest burn all that carbon dioxide and black carbon goes into the atmosphere and that makes it hotter. When it gets hotter, it gets drier and then more forest can burn. That's another positive feedback loop. We've seen in the last decade in California that it's happening more and more, that California has been on fire. The trees themselves, if we have healthy forest, they're the solution. We need the trees to pull down the carbon dioxide. Trees are our best hope and so far ... when you have a forest fire, you're losing the trees, you're losing the capacity to pull down, to sequester carbon dioxide, and at the same time you're contributing carbon dioxide and other pollutants to the atmosphere.
Rip Esselstyn:
Are trees our best hope or is it the phytoplankton in the oceans?
Glen Merzer:
It's above my pay grade. We need both.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay, need both. But in the book, you talk about how the ocean is actually responsible for sequestering about 40% of atmospheric carbon dioxide. We got to do everything we can to preserve the oceans because when the oceans die, we die.
Glen Merzer:
Right. Rip, I can't even believe that people who eat fish would want to keep doing what we're doing because there won't be any fish left. I think people just believe in this myth, oh, the oceans are so big, there must be so many fish. Well, not at the rate at which we're catching them. They have these mile-long fishing nets. Even if you wanted to eat the occasional fish, you should call for a moratorium on industrial fishing. Then, maybe some years from now, you'll be able to eat the occasional fish, but we are extracting all life from the oceans.
Glen Merzer:
Again, when it comes to this question of how much of meat eating and flesh eating is responsible for greenhouse gases, remember they're trawling the bottom of the ocean. Nobody is there able to measure how much methane and carbon dioxide they're kicking up from the bottom of the ocean. That's a disaster. We have to understand that the real solution to the climate emergency is planet Earth. It's just like, if you get injured, you get wounded, the doctor maybe dresses the wound. Then, what does the doctor say? He says, "Leave it alone. It'll heal."
Glen Merzer:
The doctor never says, "I want you to go home and scratch it. Leave it alone. It'll heal." We are a self-healing mechanism and the Earth is a self-healing mechanism, so the only way this crisis gets solved is if we leave enough of the earth alone, that it could heal. What is the human activity that is most responsible for not leaving the earth alone? That is the activity of eating animals. So much of the earth, like I said, 37% percent of the non-ice land surface of the earth is grazing land. Another 6% of the non-ice land surface of the earth is used to raise food for animals, so that's 43% of the land.
Glen Merzer:
Then, you got all the oceans that we're destroying with the fishing. If we stop the fishing, we can still have our container ships and our pleasure craft, just stop the fishing. Then, we're leaving the oceans alone. That's 70% of the earth. We stop eating meat. That's more than another 10% of the earth. We're over 80% of the earth we could leave alone by stopping eating meat. Then, I think we could still fly in airplanes occasionally and drive our cars, on the other 20% of the earth.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, it goes back to the burning, the burning versus the killing, and we got to attack the killing immediately. I think that the thing is just, how do we get a culture, a society that what, probably 92% of us are currently, consider themselves probably omnivores eating meat. How do we get 92%, let's just say, of this country, to see the light and make it happen? You've got people like Joaquin Phoenix and Billy Eilish, some pretty big celebrities that are starting to scream it from the mountaintops, but I don't know what it's going to take. I truly don't.
Glen Merzer:
Yeah. This is the struggle that we're in and you and I are part of a movement of many people who are trying to make this case. I just have to hope that there's a tipping point, too, in terms of public consciousness. There was with gay rights, 30 years ago, it was unimaginable that there could be gay marriage. Even when Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he wasn't supporting gay marriage. If he had been, he probably wouldn't have been elected, frankly. Yet, it hit a kind of ... in public consciousness, it hit a tipping point, then most people realized, why are we discriminating this way?
Glen Merzer:
Then, suddenly we had gay marriage. Now, if you ask the American people, they're overwhelmingly in favor of gay marriage. We have to follow that model. It has to be from the people up. The people have to change the way they eat and then eventually, the animal agriculture will fold.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, I think you and I are also very, very hopeful. You and I have both witnessed with our own eyes what's happened with this plant-based/vegan movement over the last 30, 40 years. It almost is going at light speed, but we need to get it to warp speed. But I'm amazed how far it's come since my father first started his research at the Cleveland Clinic back in 1984. I want to come back, we were talking about the oceans and you have a sentence in your book where you say that whale feces indirectly helps create clouds and regulate the climate. Can you expand on that?
Glen Merzer:
Yeah. I mentioned before about how phytoplankton seed clouds by releasing dimethyl sulfide that bonds with water vapor. Well, what gives us a healthy phytoplankton population? The answer is, among other things, whale feces. That's a rich source of iron and other nutrients for the phytoplankton. You see, this is part of the web of life. Nobody with a harpoon ever thinks about this stuff, but this is the web of life that we need to leave alone because that's the human arrogance of not knowing, not understanding this complex web of life and then, messing with it.
Glen Merzer:
It's like with DDT, they thought they could solve the problems of pests and so forth with DDT, and then birds were dying. Don't mess with nature. There's a web of life that's incredibly complex and intricate and evolved over millions and hundreds of millions of years. You mess with it because you want to have whale blubber or something. Then, next thing you know, the climate is heating up.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. You also have a story of an individual who had an experience with a whale. His name's Michael Packard. Can you tell us that story?
Glen Merzer:
Yes, this is from the news from last June, I think it was. He was and still is probably, I don't know, a lobsterman in Cape Cod.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Glen Merzer:
A lobsterman, and I want everybody who eat lobster to think about this, what the lobstermen do is they set traps at the bottom of the ocean where the lobsters crawl and those traps are connected to buoys at the ocean surface by ropes. Those ropes sometimes trap and kill whales. In that New England area, there are whales called the Right Whales and almost all of them, at one point or another, have been trapped by these ropes. The right whale population is threatened. Michael Packard was one of the lobstermen and he was at work in the ocean one day and he got swallowed whole by a humpback whale.
Rip Esselstyn:
Incredible.
Glen Merzer:
He's in the whale's mouth thinking he's never going to see his children again, feeling the whale squeezing him. Then, the whale in a moment of compassion, spits him out, a friend witnessed it and said he came out flippers first.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right.
Glen Merzer:
My question that I pose in the book, which I say that in a certain sense, all of humanity hinges on this is, has he learned his lesson? Is he still trapping? I don't know the answer. I don't know what the man is doing. Is he still in the business of trapping lobsters or has he learned a lesson? Because I think that humpback whale was letting him out to teach us all a lesson.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Let's certainly hope so. Another thing you talk about in the book that I'd love for you to speak to is, you mentioned that the most significant fight on planet Earth right now pits the yellow dragon against the great green wall.
Glen Merzer:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
That sounds like a Marvel movie. What do you mean by that?
Glen Merzer:
Well, this is in China where they're trying to keep the Gobi Desert from expanding. There have been times when the winds from the Gobi Desert have blanketed, the dust has blanketed Beijing, and I think even the other countries in Asia. The Gobi Desert is a threat, and the way you fight a desert is with trees. It's difficult because you could imagine trying to plant trees in the middle of the Sahara. They're not going to take very easily. You have to work from the outside in, from the borders in, and yet you really ... you need agronomists who know what they're doing and plant the right kinds of trees and take the right kind of care of them.
Glen Merzer:
But they're trying and, unfortunately, I think they've used too much monoculture in the past so a lot of their trees have died, but they're trying. They've had some success at restraining the desert from expanding and expanding. It's an ongoing battle. A similar battle is being fought in Africa with the Sahara Desert and the Sahel Desert, where they're using trees and they're having, I think, more success in the Sahel Desert to keep the desert from expanding and beat it back.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. You mentioned, too, that the genesis of deserts actually is one of the secrets that hides in front of our eyes. What do you mean by that?
Glen Merzer:
Well, if you look at this image of the Sahara Desert, oops, there it is. We've seen that all our lives and we just assume, well, that was always desert. Well, it wasn't. We know that, they know from ... they go deep in the earth and they take cores and they examine the evidence. We know that this was a lush forested area. Now, it was forested and it had savanna for millions and millions of years. In fact, there's even evidence that there were dinosaurs hundreds of millions of years ago in this area. They have cave paintings and the cave paintings in the Sahara show giraffes and hippopotama. We know that this was at least savanna and in some areas forest, for millions of years.
Glen Merzer:
Now, just mathematically, what are the odds that an area was forested and had savannas for millions of years and in the last 5,000, 6,000 years became desert when humans discovered agriculture 10,000 years ago and started chopping down trees and engaging in animal husbandry? In those cave paintings, they even show humans engaging in animal husbandry. What are the odds that that had nothing to do with humans? There have been recent scientific papers that have made the case that the Sahara was at least, in part, manmade. Now, there are other factors that traditional scientific explanation has something to do with wobbles in the Earth's axis that causes more sunlight to hit the area directly and makes it hotter.
Glen Merzer:
I'm sure that was a factor, but I could guarantee you that another factor was human intervention. More and more scientists are coming to that conclusion now, too. It's interesting that those who still survive in the Sahara, a couple million people who manage to live in these harsh conditions, what do they do? They're engaged in animal husbandry. They're still doing the activity that created the environment they're living in. The same thing in the Thar Desert in India, the leading occupation is animal husbandry.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. That is really, really interesting to connect those dots. Let me ask you this, in the subtitle of your book, you make a response to Al Gore, Bill Gates and Paul Hawken. Should we talk about Al Gore first?
Glen Merzer:
Sure.
Rip Esselstyn:
Anything you want to talk about Al and what Al's getting right and what he's missing through the trees?
Glen Merzer:
Well, yeah, what he's getting right is fossil fuels. Of course, we need to reduce the burning of fossil fuels and renewables are all to the good, but what he's getting wrong is he's not discussing the leading cause of climate change, which is animal agriculture. It seems to be a subject he's uncomfortable with. I'm told he claims to be a vegan. He doesn't like to talk about it. I don't know if these ... I don't think Al Gore's running for office again, but maybe these are just the vestigial instincts of a politician because he couldn't imagine getting elected, running for office on a vegan platform.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay. I get it with Al and I think we all saw An Inconvenient Truth and back in the day that was, it really struck a chord with people.
Glen Merzer:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Obviously. What about Bill Gates? I know he just wrote a big old book on climate change. Why is Bill Gates not basically zeroing in on animal agriculture? What does he have to lose?
Glen Merzer:
I couldn't tell you. When you're that rich, I don't know, what ... where personal interest can even come into the picture? The only thing I could say is it's a, there's a way in which people's focus is narrowed by their own culture. Bill Gates is part of our culture. He discusses in the book, in about a paragraph or two, the possibility of reducing greenhouse gases by the world going vegan. He says, yeah, some people might propose that but really that's not possible because of our cultural celebrations. That's what he says, cultural celebrations.
Glen Merzer:
In other words, at the July 4th picnic, you have a hotdog and a hamburger. At Thanksgiving, you have a Turkey and whatever traditional flesh foods people eat at different holidays. He just can't imagine that changing. Well, I say, why not? Why can't you have a plant burger at your July 4th picnic? Why can't you have rice and vegetables at Thanksgiving and not to mention cranberry sauce and sweet potato and other things that are traditional Thanksgiving food. What is so hard about this?
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Nothing. His actual quote, I have it right here is, "Eating meat is a crucial part of festivals and celebrations."
Glen Merzer:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Come on, man.
Glen Merzer:
For that, he's willing to let the planet go because of the festivals and celebrations.
Rip Esselstyn:
It seems like Al and a lot of other people, environmentalists, they're zeroing in on the burning as opposed to the killing.
Glen Merzer:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
This is not going to happen that way. What about Paul Hawken and his drawdown theories? Well, first of all, will you let people know who Paul Hawken is?
Glen Merzer:
Yeah. Paul Hawken is an economist, an entrepreneur, an author. He's probably just a great guy. I actually met him three times. He wouldn't remember this, but I met him once when he was speaking at an organization called Tree People in Los Angeles, and I happened to run into him twice in Whole Foods in Los Angeles. Each time I chatted with him for a couple minutes. He was very gracious and he seems like a very likable guy. He's a brilliant guy. He's a good writer. He's made a lot of positive contributions, but he has a personal characteristic that is, in most cases, I would say a good thing, which is that he is not a judgemental human being.
Glen Merzer:
He doesn't like to judge people as being good or bad or anything as being right or wrong. He's very accepting. In many ways, this is a positive attribute. I try not to go around judging people all day long for any choices they make, whatever. But the planet is at stake here, and so he was asked at a ... and this is something I found on the Internet at something called the Aspen Ideas Festival, I think. He was asked a very simple softball question after he spoke about his book, Drawdown. He was asked, couldn't we make a big contribution by going on a plant-based diet?
Glen Merzer:
His answer was something like, "Well, it would be nice, but our book, we don't say this is right or this is wrong, or this is good or this is bad. We don't make any judgements in our book. No judgements, what all. It's whatever you want to do." That's his attitude. That's a nice attitude when it's applied to sexuality.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right.
Glen Merzer:
But when the earth is facing tipping points, we have to say something is good and something is bad, and something is right, and something is wrong. When we're destroying the earth for hamburger, that's wrong.
Rip Esselstyn:
Is he vegan? Plant-based?
Glen Merzer:
I don't know. I don't know.
Rip Esselstyn:
Don't know. Right. Well, he had a list. What is it? Is it the top 75 things you can do?
Glen Merzer:
Or 80 maybe?
Rip Esselstyn:
Or 80? Where was going plant-based, do you know?
Glen Merzer:
It was something like number five, but it was something like, what did he call it? More plants in the diet or something like that. He never says stop eating meat. End animal agriculture.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right. Right. Yeah. In reading your book, you see some of the solutions that people are going for, especially these industries, for example, you mentioned how Cargill is now basically, they're selling methane-absorbing masks to the European dairy farmers for their cows, right?
Glen Merzer:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
It's like, really?
Glen Merzer:
We have this problem in which animal agriculture is destroying the planet. The simple solution is to stop eating meat. Yet, we have industries and leaders coming up with one crazy way after another to try to allow us to keep eating meat until we all die. This one is to put masks on cows. They have another theory. They'll feed more seaweed to cows so they belch less methane. Then, there's something called regenerative agriculture where they try to rotate the cattle on grass from paddock to paddock in a way that they think is going to restore the land. None of these things work.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right, and speaking of that, you also mentioned how much to what people think. Grass-fed, actually, versus the feedlot cattle actually is worse for the environment.
Glen Merzer:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Can you explain that?
Glen Merzer:
Yes. First, let's keep it in context. About 1% of the meat that Americans eat is grass-fed. This is a very small percentage and I, maybe a fraction of that is what they call regenerative. I would concede that probably the cows are happier being grass-fed than the cows in the concentrated animal feeding operations. But when they're eating grass, they belch more methane and they live longer or they're allowed to live longer, because it takes them longer to gain the sufficient weight at which they want, the meat industry wants to slaughter them. When they're living longer and belching more methane every day of those longer lives, they are contributing more methane to the atmosphere.
Glen Merzer:
Also, they are degrading the soil as they graze and the soil holds twice as much carbon as the trees. Remember, it's the grazing land that we need to save the earth. We need to reforest. Grazing is the activity that is preventing us from healing the planet. In all those ways, grass-fed is worse for the climate crisis than the CAFO meat.
Rip Esselstyn:
I think you have a suggestion and maybe it's similar to Bill Gates, that we should try and plant a trillion trees. Is that right?
Glen Merzer:
Yeah. I don't know that Bill Gates calls for that, but I do.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay.
Glen Merzer:
I'm hardly the first. There are any number of organizations and I note many of them in the book that are working on reforesting and rewilding.
Rip Esselstyn:
Rewilding. I like that term, rewilding. Yeah.
Glen Merzer:
There's an organization called Rewilding Europe that's doing great work. If Bill Gates really wanted to make a contribution, why doesn't he buy up all the cattle ranches in America and rewild them?
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, I think he's the largest private landowner in the United States.
Glen Merzer:
Well, rewild that land, Bill, that would help. The rewilding is the, really our best hope. Let's get as much land as we can and rewild it. I talk in the book about how Chernobyl got rewilded after the nuclear accident. There were no more human beings there and it turned to forest again.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. You have a whole chapter it's called, basically something like leave it alone. Actually, let me see exactly what it's called here. But, exactly your point, Chernobyl, you say there's nothing that does not improve. Then, you make the same point with the oil spill. I think it was in the Gulf of Mexico somewhere?
Glen Merzer:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Even with the oil spill, you explain.
Glen Merzer:
Yeah. When we had that terrible oil spill, how long ago was it about?
Rip Esselstyn:
2010.
Glen Merzer:
2010, The Gulf of Mexico. Actually, what happened was, it proved to be good for fish populations. Now, why would that be? Did they like their food oily? Why would the fish be more abundant after there's more petroleum in the ocean? Of course, it wasn't because of the petroleum. It was because the humans stopped fishing. It gave the fish a chance. It was like a fishing moratorium for a while. As horrible as that oil spill was, it was actually good for restoring fish population.
Rip Esselstyn:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I want to read, this is the last two paragraphs of this book, and this chapter is called Heart to Heart. I'm going to read this. "Or, we can simply take off the intellectual handcuffs and stop eating meat. We can thereby rewild more than one-third of the earth. We can achieve drawdown by allowing trees and other vegetation to grow. Continued meat consumption is, quite simply, a recipe for the destruction of life on this planet. We can either on one hand, improve our health and hunger and begin to cool the planet by moving to a diet of plants while reforesting as much land as possible and protecting the seas.
Rip Esselstyn:
Or, on the other hand, we can begin to say goodbye and tell our children to say goodbye to life as we know it. It's hard to imagine this to be a hard choice. Ask yourself where you stand. It shouldn't be that difficult." I hear you loud and clear and I think you've done just an absolute brilliant job, Glen, with Food is Climate. I do believe that you are helping to create a new enlightenment that cannot happen fast enough. I want to thank you for this.
Glen Merzer:
Thank you, Rip.
Rip Esselstyn:
I recommend that everybody pick it up. It's a slender book. It's about 56 pages that talk about the food is climate, and then you have about 64 recipes that follow up.
Glen Merzer:
Well, don't sell me short, Rip. It's 59 pages, 59 pages.
Rip Esselstyn:
Thank you. Thank you. My bad, my bad. Put it by the nightstand and eat it up. Well, Glen, I appreciate your time today. Thank you for your contribution.
Glen Merzer:
Thank you for yours, Rip.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Let's continue to do everything we can to make this more of a plant-strong world. Thank you, Glen, for your research, courage, and compassion. As you have written, it is not beyond human capacity to heal the planet. The opportunity is in our hands. Or, let me add, on our plates. You can find all of the links and resources from this episode on the Episode page at plantstrongpodcast.com. We'll see you next week, but in the meantime, keep it plant-strong. The Plantstrong Podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, Ami Mackey, Patrick Gavin, and Wade Clark.
Rip Esselstyn:
This season is dedicated to all of those courageous truth-seekers who weren't afraid to look through the lens with clear vision and hold firm to a higher truth. Most notably, my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. and Ann Crile Esselstyn. Thanks for listening.
