Notes From an Environmentalist; Of Solar Panels and Holsteins, or why Dustin Hoffman Didn't go into plastics."
Solar Panels and Holsteins
(Or why Dustin Hoffman didn’t go into plastics.)
On February 5th I found myself traveling to Burlington, Vermont.
It was part of an experiment. I had grown up as an environmentalist in the Sixties and had bought into the whole “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” philosophy.
Well not the drugs part, just the environmental part. Anyway, after college I moved to the country and started a hippie-style marine biology commune where we studied ecology, grew and gathered our own food and drove as little as possible.
But now it is 2024 and I want to see if we really can build our way out of the environmental crisis, by flying less, driving more and buying lots more smart technology.
I’m not convinced but am willing to give it a try. So, instead of flying to Florida we were driving my friend’s Tesla through the bucolic farmland of Vermont, but wait, they were no Holsteins, no Jerseys, only solar panels and wind turbines.
It was a shock, but if a farmer can make more money selling wind than selling milk who am I to argue? Actually his decision does two really important things for the environment.
It produces green cheap energy, plus it cuts down on raising beef and dairy cattle, which are the two most environmentally unfriendly, and unhealthy agricultural products you can produce, because raising cows and steer produces more carbon emissions due to deforestation than any other crop. Plus it creates water pollution in fields, streams and the ocean.
Don’t get me wrong I love cows, but cows weigh ten times more than all the wild mammals on earth. As cute as they are, our planet would be much better off with fewer cows.
In fact switching from eating beef to eating chicken would improve the environment much more than switching from eating chicken to eating veggies … but that’s not a bad idea either.
The lack of Holsteins got me thinking about our other inconsistencies and contradictions about the environment.
There has always been something fishy about environmental groups sponsoring billboards that say stop wind turbines to protect whales. It turns out those groups and their billboards are funded by shady fronts and fossil fuel advocates like Charles Koch.
I also admit I love to compost but get confused by all those different colored bins and am not very good at recycling plastics.
It also turns out Dustin Hoffman got it right in “The Graduate.” As early as the Seventies the plastic industry knew that it was damn near impossible to recycle plastics. So now only 5% of plastics are recycled. The rest end up in landfills, the soil, the ocean and us.
So what’s the answer? Like beef, don’t produce plastic in the first place.
Other than that we had a beautiful trip without so much as a flake of snow. After all it was the hottest February ever recorded. But that’s a topic for a whole other conversation.
