Sir David Attenborough - A life on our planet documentary - Planet saving diet?

meat
#1

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Did Sir David say that we should eat less meat? What was the context? He’s an influencer.

I haven’t yet seen the documentary, A life on our planet.

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#2

This is a very longwinded way to say, “Shut up and eat what we give you, peasant.”

(Alex) #3

Watched this the other day. It was a segment at the end and felt a bit forced. He said that you need about 100 herbivores to support 1 apex predator, and that as there are so many of us we can’t afford to have everyone eating animals as the scale of meat production would be unsustainable. Then he went off on a tangent about hydroponic farming as the ideal way to feed everyone vegetables. I just assumed as the documentary was produced by netflix he was told to get a bit of vegan sentiment in at the end.

#4

I didn’t watch that yet myself.

I understand since long we can’t all afford to eat meat as it requires much more space (grazing animals are great but most meat you get in the supermarket was raised differently)… But the biggest problem is that humankind is too numerous, arrogant, ignorant and very stupid too. And this is one of the most intelligent species of the planet or maybe even the galaxis…

I do what I can but I should prioritize myself. The less plants I eat, the better for me. The more plants I eat, the more good animal products I need to satiate myself (sometimes plant proteins help but I do eat them when I run out of my always very little meat). If I massively overeat due to plants like in my past, nothing will get better. So I continue what I am doing.
I will always use way more resources than many 3rd world people, I can’t even avoid that. Life is like that. I do things that would be horrible if everyone would do that. I still will do them as I can and I often don’t harm anything with it. Too many people doing it would be the problem but most people won’t do it.
But everone eats and it causes various problems due to humans being so many and so ignorant. I do put thoughts into it, I try not waste food (not even eating it unnecessarily), I eat even less meat because I hate buying it with much plastic… But I need proper food for my body.

(Alex) #5

This is pretty much the take home message of the film.

The dietary stuff is just one part of one of his suggestions. He also puts forward the case that we need to protect a large % of coastal waters and all seas and oceans with marine reserves to prevent fishing and let the ocean ecosystems recover, and on land we need government financial incentives for rainforest and forest and other wild biomes to be kept wild and not be flattened to grow crops for a couple of years before the soil is ruined.

In a nutshell his list of things we need to do to avoid extinction are to reach our peak population as soon as possible, switch to fully renewable energy sources, move away from consuming huge amounts of industrially produced meat and palm oil, and enshrine protections in law for our wildnerness and oceans.

I guess focusing on the diet element is guaranteed to get more views though. When I saw him mention it I kinda groaned because it’s only one part and the rewilding and renewables is more crucial and needs public pressure if anything’s gonna change.

Edit: The first half where he reminices about his career and exploring the jungle in the 50s is cool though.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #6

Peter Ballerstedt and Alan Savory have some things to say about this that are a lot more persuasive.

(Bob M) #7

Not to mention there is a lot of arable land that can support many ruminants, but on which you can’t grow crops. If you’ve watched any nature videos where they show thousands of migrating ruminants, the land grows grass, but can’t grow crops. Grass is amazing. That’s WHY we had thousands upon thousands of ruminants everywhere.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #8

Also not to mention… With increasing atmospheric CO2 earth has ‘greened’ in the past 35+ years turning much more land not suitable for agriculture into useful pasture for ruminants. More productive agricultural practices have produced more food on less land, opening up additional land for pasture. We now produce more than enough food to feed everyone and it’s only distribution that fails those who don’t get enough. Every human on the planet is not going to start eating meat exlusively any time soon for a variety of reasons. So I think Attenborough is flogging a dead horse.

My opinion is let ruminants roam in symbiotic harmony with the lands that aren’t suitable for agriculture. Ruminants have been turning indigestible cellulose and lignum into edible meat and fat for millions of years. The symbiosis has been beneficial to both the land, the plants, the ruminants and us.

And finally, the Holocene is not going to last forever. We are still in the Pleistocene, fortunately alive during a glacial minimum. It may last multiple thousand years more, or not. The beginning of the end could start any time. When the Holocene peters out the ability to grow human edible plants will peter out with it.

#9

I think the sensationalism can sometimes make people do good things, like how instagram fitness culture (even tho it isnt healthy at all on its own) makes people workout and eat healthier. Couple obvious points protecting nature and depopulating the world for more modest numbers but im guessing no word of china or india who do the vast majority of destruction to nature? (didnt watch it myself).

Also to put things in perspective Europe and Usa combined have 773 million population. India and China have 2746 million population, so around 3.5x times as much people.

(bulkbiker) #10

He’s been well and truly Thunberged which is a real shame as I’m sure he used to have good intentions and is now just a wittering old fool.

(Ronald Weaver) #11

Attenborough was fine when he just showed us the pictures.
Now ? He’s just an out and out media tart without the balls to come out with an honest opinion.

(GINA ) #12

People often don’t like to think more than one or two steps down the road of their ideas. There are roughly 65 grams of protein in a pound of ground beef. There are less than 15 in a pound of broccoli. So you need 3-4 times as much broccoli to get the same (rough) nutrition. Broccoli, and other vegetables, take a lot of mechanization to grow in any quantity- that’s energy. Vegetables won’t grow everywhere and there are very few places they will grow year round, so they need to be processed, shipped, and stored- even more energy.

Animals we can eat are already adapted to live everywhere humans do. As was pointed out up thread, they can live on land that can’t be used for crops or much of anything else. They can be slaughtered year round, whenever food is needed. Sure, it takes some energy to raise, say, caribou to feed people in the northernmost parts of the word, but not near as much as trying to grow triple the amount of broccoli in a more temperate climate then process and ship it thousands of miles.

(Doug) #13

It’s not going to be “easy” - we’ve got at least twice as many people as the planet can decently support already, and the population is still growing fast.

#14

:cry:

I think he is a wise senior. But we can see where, even though he is a life long learner, he still has things to learn. Human nutrition and food production are yet to be his forte. I wonder if he is a vegetarian? See, I’m still looking to him as a life exemplar. A West-side guru.

Yes, getting a story out to the ignorant masses is an important first step. The fact that the story has perceived flaws allows discussion and debate, helping us think, and through some own research to learn.

It does all circle back to n=1, and what actions we can take.

Another guru (I reckon, never have just one):

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #15

People don’t really think deeply about things. Any things. Example:

Cows require x number of pasture acres for their individual nutrition. Let’s say x=20. So if each cow requires 20 acres to grow to maturity then the number of cows times 20 is the number of acres required to support the number of cows. If people eat y number of cows then y number of cows times x number of acres per cow (20) equals the total acreage required to support the cows. This total leads non-deep-thinking people to conclude that we don’t have enough acreage to support the cows for this to happen. What they don’t realize, however, is that the acreage the cows require is not acreage that might be used for other agricultural production. In fact, the acreage the cows can use for their nutrition is not useful for production of human edible plants. So the cows add rather than deduct from the total of ‘food productive land’. Further, as the Holocene cools towards the next glacial max, the land useful to cows to produce human edible food will increase in direct proportion to the decrease in lands useful to produce human edible plants.

#16

I just don’t care. He’s probably right, but that won’t change what I eat. Very low carb is good for me and meat is part of it.

Taking a flight to go somewhere on vacation is also bad for the planet, but I’ll also still do it. He does that a lot, by the way. His showing the planet is part of what made me want to go to those amazing places and see them for myself.

(David Cooke) #17

So we can look forward to the day when the entire planet is owned by Monsanto and artificial fertilisers, pesticides and weedkiller will be used to make otherwise ‘unproductive’ grazing land profitable.

(Doug) #18

“Rewilding” - that’s a tall order. The net effect of so many people on earth is exceedingly fast change in the other direction. How this can be rationally considered ‘stoppable’ to any substantial degree is beyond me.

While we already have “a lot” of people on earth, a comparatively recent change - in the last few decades - is countries like China, India, Brasil, Russia and quite a few others developing or drastically increasing their middle class. These countries are almost half the world’s population, and it’s the ‘global middle class’ that has the lion’s share of demand for land and resources.

China, for example, essentially had no middle class at all as recently as 1990. By 2015 it had 16% of the global middle class. By ~2030 there will be another 350 million Chinese in it.

India is fairly similar - in 1990 it had 1% of the the global middle class. In 2015, it was 8%, with another 380 million by 2030.

When you look at the ‘hard numbers’ of it all, it’s profound. The U.S., with ~4% of world population, consumes about 25% of world resources and 40% of energy production. On the basis of resource production, the earth could only support 1,320,000,000 people at the U.S. rate of consumption, or 17% (~1/6) of total present world population. On the basis of energy, only 11% could be supported at U.S. rates of consumption.

The total world population itself will increase by ~30% over the next 3 decades, barring extraordinary change. Interesting times…

(Doug) #19

Indeed, Michael, but here too the ‘hard numbers’ of it are daunting. We begin with a lot of land - 150,000,000 sq km, 57,500,000 sq mi. or 15,000,000,000 hectares or 36,800,000,000 acres. But then it all goes downhill from there… :neutral_face:

It’s come up before - there was a thread in the past that included authors and videomakers who advocate reintroducing grazing animals to land, adding organic matter at the beginning, and “letting the land return to nature” while providing pasture land. It sounds like a good idea, and it certainly is - to the extent that it works. But the amount of “net gain” to be had from this as far as meat production is depressingly small.

For substantially fertile, long-growing-season land, like in the southeastern U.S., it takes about 2 acres or 0.8 hectares per cow. In general, livestock need about 4% of their weight, per day, in forage.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #20

I just threw out some numbers for discussion. I have no idea so thanks for some realistic values. My educational background was geology and I maintain active interest in issues related. One of those issues is something that few seem to realize which is the earth is still in Pleistocene. We just luckily happen to be alive during one of many and short glacial minima that punctuate the maxima every 100-125 k years. I wonder what we’re (our descendants) are going to eat when the Holocene ends. I suspect we will probably see a regrowth of the Mammoth Steppe - without the mammoths, but maybe with bison, musk oxen and cattle.