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It's not I didn't agree with the overall message of the book (I do). It's that I really didn't like the format and I felt the delivery wasn't effective.
It's hard to go wrong with a book from JSF. He's one of my favorites. He takes a unique view of the planetary crisis in this book. Here are some of my favorite clips:
In addition to it not being an easy story to tell, the planetary crisis hasn't proved to be a good story. It not only fails to convert us, it fails to interest us. To captivate and to transform are the most fundamental ambitions of activism and art, which is why climate change, as subject matter, fares so poorly in both realms.
Intellectually accepting the truth isn't virtuous in and of itself. And it won't save us. As a child, I was often told "you know better" when I did something I shouldn't have done. Knowing was the difference between a mistake and an offense.
If we accept the factual reality (that we are destroying the planet), but are unable to believe it, we are no better than those who deny the existence of human caused climate change.
Encoded into our language is the understanding that disasters tend to expose that which was previously hidden. As the planetary crisis unfolds as a series of emergencies, our decisions will reveal who we are.
In 2018, despite knowing more than we've even known about human-caused climate change, humans produced more GHGs than we've even produced, at a rate three times that of population growth. There are tidy explanations - the growing us of coal in China and India, a strong global economy, unusually severe seasons that required spikes in energy for heating and cooling. But the truth is as crude as it is obvious: we don't care.
Researchers recently identified a condition defined by an urge o take selfies and upload them to social media at least 6 times a day. They named it "chronic selfitis."
If you found yourself in the back of an ambulance, would you rather have a driver who loathes his job but performs it expertly or one who is passionate about his job but takes twice as long to get you to the hospital?
From China to Australia to California, fruit and nut farmers will often rent bees trucked in from hundreds of miles away to pollinate their trees. And in areas where human labor is less expensive than bee labor - a thought worth pausing on - the trees are pollinated by hand.
Social scientist Richard Titmuss argues that paying blood donors risks having the opposite of its intended effect, because it undermines the most important motivation: altruism.
Why is there near-unanimous participation in the collective action of Thanksgiving while so few people participate in American democracy? Thanksgiving is inviting. For many, voting is prohibitive.
In 1956, before going on the Ed Sullivan Show to support the March of Dimes, Elvis Presley was photographed receiving his polio vaccination. The photographs were then published in newspapers across the country. That moment has been cited for a parabolic increase in vaccinations.
Social change, much like climate change, is caused by multiple chain reactions that occur simultaneously.
When a radical change is needed, many argue that it is impossible for individual actions to incite it, so it's futile for anyone to try. This is exactly the opposite of the truth: the impotence of individual action is a reason for everyone to try.
If we limit warming to 2 C: Sea levels will rise by 1.6 feet, 143 million people will become climate migrants, armed conflict will increase by 40%, Greenland will tip into irreversible melt, 20 to 40% of the Amazon will be destroyed, human mortality will dramatically increase, malaria will increase, 400 million people will suffer from water scarcity, half of animal species will face extinction, 60% of plant species will face extinction, food yields will decrease, GDP will drop.
Changing the way we eat is simple compared with converting the world's power grid, or overcoming the influence of powerful lobbyists to pass carbon tax legislation, or ratifying a significant international treaty on GHG emissions - but it isn't simple.
The longer we fail to take care of it (climate change), the harder it becomes to take care of.
We cannot go about our lives as if they were only ours.
We cannot keep the kinds of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go.
As with body temperature, a few degrees can be the difference between health and crisis.
Human activity is responsible for 100% of the global warming that has occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, around 1750.
If human history were a day, we were hunter-gatherers until about ten minutes before midnight.
59% of all land capable of growing crops is growing food for livestock.
1/3 of all freshwater that humans use go to livestock (1/13th is used in homes)
70% of antibiotics produced go to livestock.
60% of all mammals on Earth are animals raised for food.
There are approximately 30 farmed animals for every human on the planet.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the average life expectancy in Europe was about 35 years. It is now 80.
It took 200,000 years for the human population to reach 1 billion. But only 200 more years to reach 7 billion.
In 1966, distorting contact lenses were invented to make it harder for chickens to see their increasingly unnatural surroundings, thereby easing the stress that caused violent pecking and cannibalism. The lenses were burdensome for farmers, so they switched to debeakers.
The current level of meat and dairy consumption is equivalent of every person alive on the planet in 1700 eating 950 pounds of meat and drinking 1,200 gallons of milk every day.
Humans eat 65 billion chickens per year.
Animal ag. is responsible for 37% of anthropogenic methane emissions and 65% of anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions.
If CO2 were the thickness of an average blanket, imagine methane as a blanket thicken than LeBron James is tall.
Allowing tropical land currently used for livestock to revert to forest could mitigate more than half of all anthropogenic GHGs.
Animal agriculture is responsible for 91% of Amazonian deforestation.
If cows were a country, they would rank third in GHG emissions, after China and the U.S.
Changing how we eat will not be enough, on its own, to save the planet, but we cannot save the planet without changing how we eat.
The FAO calculation includes the CO2 emitted when forests are cleared for animal feed crops and pastures, but it does not take into account the CO2 that those forests can no longer absorb. (imagine a life insurance policy that covered the cost of the funeral but not future lost wages). Among other things not included in is calculation is the CO2 exhaled by farmed animals.
When researchers at the WWI accounted for emissions that the FAO overlooked, they estimated that livestock are responsible for 51% of annual global emissions.
We do not know for sure if animal agriculture is a leading cause of climate change or the leading cause of climate change.
The 4 highest impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change: Eat a plant based diet, avoid air travel, live car free, have fewer children. Of these 4, only plant based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important GHGs.
Is there anything more narcissistic than believing the choices you make affect everyone? Only one thing: believing the choices you make affect no one.
The opposite of someone who eats a lot of animal products is someone who is attentive to how often he eats animal products. The best way to excuse oneself from a challenging idea is to pretend there are only two options.
3 million children under the age of 5 die of malnutrition every year. 1.5 million children died in the Holocaust.
It is not elitist to suggest that a cheaper, healthier, more environmentally sustainable diet is better. But what does strike me as elitist? When someone uses the existence of people without access to healthy food as an excuse not to change, rather than as a motivation to help those people.
Doing what needs to be done will involve invention (like plant-based meats), and legislation (like adjusting farm subsidies and holding animal ag responsible), and bottom-up advocacy (like college students demanding cafeterias have better options), and top-down advocacy (like celebrities spreading the message on IG).
However complex the world is, people still recycle, protest, vote, pick up litter, support ethical brands, donate blood, intervene when someone appears in danger, challenge racist remarks, and get out of the way of ambulances. These actions are not merely good for the individual health of the actor, but essential for the heath of society: actions are witnessed and replicated.
While structures matter - food deserts, subsidies, and unhealthy cafeterias undeniable influence diet - the most contagious standards are the ones that we model.
There are powerful systems - capitalism, factory farming, the fossil fuel industrial complex - that are difficult to disassemble. No one motorist can cause a traffic jam. But no traffic jam can exist without individual motorists. We are stuck in traffic because we are traffic. The ways we live our lives, the actions we take and don't take, can feed the systemic problems, and they can also change them: #Metoo, civil rights act, voting rights act, etc.
Although it may be a neo-liberal myth that individual decisions have ultimate power, it is a defeatist myth that individual decisions have no power at all.
but putting aside the fact that collective revolutions are made up of individuals, led by individuals, and reinforced by thousands of individual revolutions, we would have no chance of achieving our goal of limiting environmental destruction if individuals don't make the very individual decision to eat differently. Of course it's true that one person deciding to eat a plant-based diet will not change the world, but of course it's true that the sum of millions of such decisions will.
The planet isn't what we want to save. We want to save life on the planet - plant life, animals live, and human life. Accepting the necessary violence of our existence is the first step to minimizing it: we must consume resources in order to survive. This would remain true in any political utopia. But plenty of species, including humans, have managed to live in harmony with nature, and they do not do so by committing suicide. They do so by taking less than the planet is able to produce and nurturing ecosystems. They do so by living as though we have only one Earth, not four. By treating the planet like our only home.
In addition to it not being an easy story to tell, the planetary crisis hasn't proved to be a good story. It not only fails to convert us, it fails to interest us. To captivate and to transform are the most fundamental ambitions of activism and art, which is why climate change, as subject matter, fares so poorly in both realms.
Intellectually accepting the truth isn't virtuous in and of itself. And it won't save us. As a child, I was often told "you know better" when I did something I shouldn't have done. Knowing was the difference between a mistake and an offense.
If we accept the factual reality (that we are destroying the planet), but are unable to believe it, we are no better than those who deny the existence of human caused climate change.
Encoded into our language is the understanding that disasters tend to expose that which was previously hidden. As the planetary crisis unfolds as a series of emergencies, our decisions will reveal who we are.
In 2018, despite knowing more than we've even known about human-caused climate change, humans produced more GHGs than we've even produced, at a rate three times that of population growth. There are tidy explanations - the growing us of coal in China and India, a strong global economy, unusually severe seasons that required spikes in energy for heating and cooling. But the truth is as crude as it is obvious: we don't care.
Researchers recently identified a condition defined by an urge o take selfies and upload them to social media at least 6 times a day. They named it "chronic selfitis."
If you found yourself in the back of an ambulance, would you rather have a driver who loathes his job but performs it expertly or one who is passionate about his job but takes twice as long to get you to the hospital?
From China to Australia to California, fruit and nut farmers will often rent bees trucked in from hundreds of miles away to pollinate their trees. And in areas where human labor is less expensive than bee labor - a thought worth pausing on - the trees are pollinated by hand.
Social scientist Richard Titmuss argues that paying blood donors risks having the opposite of its intended effect, because it undermines the most important motivation: altruism.
Why is there near-unanimous participation in the collective action of Thanksgiving while so few people participate in American democracy? Thanksgiving is inviting. For many, voting is prohibitive.
In 1956, before going on the Ed Sullivan Show to support the March of Dimes, Elvis Presley was photographed receiving his polio vaccination. The photographs were then published in newspapers across the country. That moment has been cited for a parabolic increase in vaccinations.
Social change, much like climate change, is caused by multiple chain reactions that occur simultaneously.
When a radical change is needed, many argue that it is impossible for individual actions to incite it, so it's futile for anyone to try. This is exactly the opposite of the truth: the impotence of individual action is a reason for everyone to try.
If we limit warming to 2 C: Sea levels will rise by 1.6 feet, 143 million people will become climate migrants, armed conflict will increase by 40%, Greenland will tip into irreversible melt, 20 to 40% of the Amazon will be destroyed, human mortality will dramatically increase, malaria will increase, 400 million people will suffer from water scarcity, half of animal species will face extinction, 60% of plant species will face extinction, food yields will decrease, GDP will drop.
Changing the way we eat is simple compared with converting the world's power grid, or overcoming the influence of powerful lobbyists to pass carbon tax legislation, or ratifying a significant international treaty on GHG emissions - but it isn't simple.
The longer we fail to take care of it (climate change), the harder it becomes to take care of.
We cannot go about our lives as if they were only ours.
We cannot keep the kinds of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go.
As with body temperature, a few degrees can be the difference between health and crisis.
Human activity is responsible for 100% of the global warming that has occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, around 1750.
If human history were a day, we were hunter-gatherers until about ten minutes before midnight.
59% of all land capable of growing crops is growing food for livestock.
1/3 of all freshwater that humans use go to livestock (1/13th is used in homes)
70% of antibiotics produced go to livestock.
60% of all mammals on Earth are animals raised for food.
There are approximately 30 farmed animals for every human on the planet.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the average life expectancy in Europe was about 35 years. It is now 80.
It took 200,000 years for the human population to reach 1 billion. But only 200 more years to reach 7 billion.
In 1966, distorting contact lenses were invented to make it harder for chickens to see their increasingly unnatural surroundings, thereby easing the stress that caused violent pecking and cannibalism. The lenses were burdensome for farmers, so they switched to debeakers.
The current level of meat and dairy consumption is equivalent of every person alive on the planet in 1700 eating 950 pounds of meat and drinking 1,200 gallons of milk every day.
Humans eat 65 billion chickens per year.
Animal ag. is responsible for 37% of anthropogenic methane emissions and 65% of anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions.
If CO2 were the thickness of an average blanket, imagine methane as a blanket thicken than LeBron James is tall.
Allowing tropical land currently used for livestock to revert to forest could mitigate more than half of all anthropogenic GHGs.
Animal agriculture is responsible for 91% of Amazonian deforestation.
If cows were a country, they would rank third in GHG emissions, after China and the U.S.
Changing how we eat will not be enough, on its own, to save the planet, but we cannot save the planet without changing how we eat.
The FAO calculation includes the CO2 emitted when forests are cleared for animal feed crops and pastures, but it does not take into account the CO2 that those forests can no longer absorb. (imagine a life insurance policy that covered the cost of the funeral but not future lost wages). Among other things not included in is calculation is the CO2 exhaled by farmed animals.
When researchers at the WWI accounted for emissions that the FAO overlooked, they estimated that livestock are responsible for 51% of annual global emissions.
We do not know for sure if animal agriculture is a leading cause of climate change or the leading cause of climate change.
The 4 highest impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change: Eat a plant based diet, avoid air travel, live car free, have fewer children. Of these 4, only plant based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important GHGs.
Is there anything more narcissistic than believing the choices you make affect everyone? Only one thing: believing the choices you make affect no one.
The opposite of someone who eats a lot of animal products is someone who is attentive to how often he eats animal products. The best way to excuse oneself from a challenging idea is to pretend there are only two options.
3 million children under the age of 5 die of malnutrition every year. 1.5 million children died in the Holocaust.
It is not elitist to suggest that a cheaper, healthier, more environmentally sustainable diet is better. But what does strike me as elitist? When someone uses the existence of people without access to healthy food as an excuse not to change, rather than as a motivation to help those people.
Doing what needs to be done will involve invention (like plant-based meats), and legislation (like adjusting farm subsidies and holding animal ag responsible), and bottom-up advocacy (like college students demanding cafeterias have better options), and top-down advocacy (like celebrities spreading the message on IG).
However complex the world is, people still recycle, protest, vote, pick up litter, support ethical brands, donate blood, intervene when someone appears in danger, challenge racist remarks, and get out of the way of ambulances. These actions are not merely good for the individual health of the actor, but essential for the heath of society: actions are witnessed and replicated.
While structures matter - food deserts, subsidies, and unhealthy cafeterias undeniable influence diet - the most contagious standards are the ones that we model.
There are powerful systems - capitalism, factory farming, the fossil fuel industrial complex - that are difficult to disassemble. No one motorist can cause a traffic jam. But no traffic jam can exist without individual motorists. We are stuck in traffic because we are traffic. The ways we live our lives, the actions we take and don't take, can feed the systemic problems, and they can also change them: #Metoo, civil rights act, voting rights act, etc.
Although it may be a neo-liberal myth that individual decisions have ultimate power, it is a defeatist myth that individual decisions have no power at all.
but putting aside the fact that collective revolutions are made up of individuals, led by individuals, and reinforced by thousands of individual revolutions, we would have no chance of achieving our goal of limiting environmental destruction if individuals don't make the very individual decision to eat differently. Of course it's true that one person deciding to eat a plant-based diet will not change the world, but of course it's true that the sum of millions of such decisions will.
The planet isn't what we want to save. We want to save life on the planet - plant life, animals live, and human life. Accepting the necessary violence of our existence is the first step to minimizing it: we must consume resources in order to survive. This would remain true in any political utopia. But plenty of species, including humans, have managed to live in harmony with nature, and they do not do so by committing suicide. They do so by taking less than the planet is able to produce and nurturing ecosystems. They do so by living as though we have only one Earth, not four. By treating the planet like our only home.
This is Safran Foer’s follow-up book to one that changed my life: Eating Animals. Like his first book, this one also delves into the connection between climate change and diet, specifically how society’s reliance upon cheap, factory-farmed meat and other animal products is detrimental to our future. This book had a much more urgent tone, and Safran Foer plays with a variety of narrative techniques to get his points across. As a vegetarian, I’m already bought into these ideas, but this still challenged me and confronted the ways in which I continue to be complicit in climate change. I was convicted by Safran Foer’s argument that if all of us were to commit to eating plant-based for 2 out of 3 daily meals, we could totally shift the market demand and lower emissions. For Lent, I’ve decided to do just that and I’m finding it way easier than I expected. I’ll leave you with this thought-provoking quote: “Although it may be a neoliberal myth that individual decisions have ultimate power, it is a defeatist myth that individual decisions have no power at all.” Read this.
If I could get everyone on earth to read one book, it would be this one. It is beautiful. It is convincing. It is important.
It reaffirmed my life beyond climate change and inspired me to cut meat and dairy out of 2 of my 3 meals a day.
I’m not sure why other reviews seem to think it does not have sufficient facts. It does. Read closely. There is also lots of beautiful prose, as the author weaves in stories from his own life and family.
Wonderful. If you care at all about my opinion, read this book.
It reaffirmed my life beyond climate change and inspired me to cut meat and dairy out of 2 of my 3 meals a day.
I’m not sure why other reviews seem to think it does not have sufficient facts. It does. Read closely. There is also lots of beautiful prose, as the author weaves in stories from his own life and family.
Wonderful. If you care at all about my opinion, read this book.
I don’t contest that this book is well written or researched, but my God is it hard to get through. It’s probably because I disagree with (what I took to be) Foer’s takeaway that hope is useless. Hope is one of my biggest coping mechanisms in the fight against climate change, and I agree that we need it to be accompanied by action. But this book was very depressing and made me need to reach out to my therapist. Again, I don’t believe that what he’s saying is wrong or incorrect, but it is so difficult to stomach. Maybe that’s the point.
Viele gute Informationen, durch die dauernden eingestreuten Anekdoten, persönliche Geschichten und Details wirkt es oft unnötig gestreckt. Als Person, die wegen/mit "Eating Animals" von ihm zum Vegetarier wurde, haben mich seine Rückfallgeschichten ("Ah manchmal brauche ich auch nach 20 Jahren noch nen richtig geilen Burger, wenn der Tag stressig war") ein bisschen… angewidert? Gestört? Na ja, den Klimateil hätte man in 50-100 Seiten erzählen können.
Love the message but wasn’t a fan of the execution!
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
We Are the Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer was a thoughtful and personal take on climate change. I appreciated how he went beyond the usual “turn off the lights” advice and focused on real, individual actions that can make a difference. His reflections on parenting and family made the topic feel more personal and urgent. It definitely made me think about how easy it is to check out of climate conversations when they feel distant. I really enjoyed listening to this one and would recommend it as a solid starting point for learning about climate change.
3.5. Interesting attempt at a reformulation of the climate crisis in more emotionally relatable terms--the notion being that everyday acts are harder to rally around compared to acts of heroism. Weird thread of morbidity, but I guess it was effective enough. I'd say I'm about 2/3 vegetarian already...time to bring down the quantity of animal products I eat...
Dieses Buch zu bewerten ist recht schwierig, denn gegen die Zahlen und die vegane Ernährung lässt sich nichts negatives sagen, Sie sind Fakt. Was ich jedoch kritisieren kann, ist Foers Herangehensweise. Mein Lieblingsteil des Buches ist der Erste : Unglaublich. Die vegane Ernährung als Lösung für unsere Probleme wird sehr lange nicht erwähnt, sondern es geht um die Wahrnehmung des Kilmawandels und weshalb wie gehandelt wird. Es war sehr erleuchtend seine Gedanken zu diesem Thema zu lesen und hat auch meine Wahrnehmung beeinflusst.
Aus dem "Gespräch mit der Seele"-Kapitel bin ich leider nicht so richtig schlau geworden und es war anstrengender zu lesen als der Rest des Buches. Dennoch ist dieses Buch für jeden empfehlenswert.
Aus dem "Gespräch mit der Seele"-Kapitel bin ich leider nicht so richtig schlau geworden und es war anstrengender zu lesen als der Rest des Buches. Dennoch ist dieses Buch für jeden empfehlenswert.