h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have yet to fully embrace the vegetarian lifstyle but thought some of you might be interested in exploring some other aspects of our fellow organics.

A897843


~jwf~

Hi Dogster .

It is true that Oxfam and Cafod do insist on better working conditions for members of Fair Trade co-operatives. However, the sheer acreage and quality of land required to grow coffee, for instance, is very damaging in the long term to the stability of the local economy and environment. Fair Trade tends to focus on crops that have high value in the West, and are easy to transport.

The arable land required to produce enough coffee to keep me stoked up on caffeine for a year would comfortably support several families. Yet the earnings the Coffee workers receive barely supports two.

The whole economics of the colonial plantation system has held third world countries down for the best part of a century (another great British legacy ).

Overall I am against the meddling of these various 'charities'. By their very existence they have allowed the world's governments to side step their responsibility for the third world.

We bleed these poor countries dry, free them with a fanfare, then shackle them up again with massive debts that can only be serviced by forcing them into a cash-crop economy or by stripping their natural assets.

All these charities do is to salve our consciences when things go pear-shaped. If you added together all the money that charities poured into famine relief and other such schemes last year it wouldn't eaven equal 1% of Europe's or the USA's GDP for the same period!

Sorry for the rant, but it really get's my goat.

Blessings,
Matholwch the Apostate /|\.

Forgive me if I'm wrong Math, but I don't remember the Druids of Old being averse to a little slaughter.

Factory farming of vegetables has led to a reduction in insects and consequently a reduction in birds and small mammals.

Cultivated land requires far more energy than grazing land and cows are very good at converting grass into protein.

Alji the Magus

Factory farming of vegetables? Are you saying vegetables suffer as much as pigs and battery hens when grown in cramped conditions?

And what you say about cultivated land stands all available knowledge on its head: livestock are very energy inefficient. But at least you're not comparing vegetarians to Hitler any more

Perhaps intensive would have been better than factory but I do love standing things on their head.
Not far from where I live, there is a heard of cows grazing on a salt marsh. There's not much that will grow on a salt marsh. I look out of my window and I can see sheep grazing on the steep mountain pasture where the soil is not much more than six inches deep. Not much grows above the tree line except grass so growing veg is out of the question.

When you think about it growing things on a comercial basis requires quite a lot of energy (at least in this country it does) e.g. Poly tunnels, heating, lighting and irrigation systems. Ploughing and harvesting, fertilizer and spraying etc.



Alji the Magus

alji is both right and wrong about the efficiency of intensive agriculture versus livestock.

grassland is much cheaper than intensive farming per acre. the problem comes with 1lb of meat taking much more area to produce than 1lb of cereal or veg.

Hi Alji .

I forgive you .

Were the paleo-pagan Druids not "averse to a little slaughter"? Good question. Let's look at the sources of this little myth shall we?

The Greeks, who traded with Celts and their Druids prior to the Roman conquest, had nothing but great things to say about them. They attribute to them the roles of teachers, judges and sages, and even say they learnt much of their astronomical and mathematical knowledge from them.

The Romans, however, describe these same peoples and Druids as bloodthirsty paganus, who practiced human sacrifice and burnt people alive in wicker men. Strangely these accounts were written after conquests of Celtic lands by apologists for imperial rule and the civilizing influence of Rome.....see my point. It's a bit like our tabloid press demonizing all Iraqis, so it doesn't seem so bad when we bomb their women and children.

The surviving ancient texts that may have had some root in those times from the Celts themselves (the accounts of the Irish and Welsh colleges of Bards, and the Brehon Laws) paint a picture of Druids as ones who tried to prevent war and bring peace. Men and women who were healers and sages.

I have no romantic view of my forebears, they were priests of the earth who lived through savage times and no doubt suffered from all the doubts and confusion we feel now. But be careful of the prejudices of generations of Christian Classics scholars and historians (and the romanticism of the 19th century Celtic revival).

Blessings,
Matholwch the Apostate /|\.

Hi Alji .

Please refer to my much earlier description of how my friends' smallholding is run. We use no fertilizers other than organic compost, our plough is horse drawn, irrigation comes from natural springs and groundwater held in a large pond, and uses gravity to feed it to the vegetable patches. All at 1,500 feet above sea level on supposedly poor soil!?

How can this be so? Well the land was tended for forty years by the old chap who still helps us out, in a totally organic way. The poor soil has been continuously enriched and tended, unlike the hillsides you describe which have been abandoned to grass and sheep erosion. Well tended arable land will easily produce 8-10 times as much good quality food, and in greater variety, than the same land used for grazing.

Salt marsh, prior to being 'destroyed' by cattle grazing would have been used as a constant source of wildfowl (especially important in winter) and thatching reeds and bedding.

Trials at Butser Ancient Hill Farm in Hampshire have shown that properly run organic farming, using only those tools and techniques available to Iron Age Celts can produce harvests of such abundance that it was only after the Second World War and the introduction of Nitrogen fertilisers that they were exceeded - much to the detriment of our environment.

This abundance is what made Britain a prize to the Romans. So productive were these Celt farmers that they could support non-agricultural classes amounting to 20% of the adult population!

Blessings,
Matholwch the Apostate /|\.

Nobody compared vegetarians to Hitler, least of all Alji. In the case of that particular nutter (Hitler, not Alji) he was herbivorous for medical reasons but not becuase of *being* gassed; rather suffering from it in the form of chronic flatulence.
all that was said about intensive veg. farming was that it has led to a reduction in numbers of certain lifeforms; nowhere was there any mention of cruelty.

Math, we have no reed beds on the salt marsh, even in the places where the cows can't graze. As far as wildfowl go, we get a few swans, geese and ducks but they prefere the canals to the river.

While writing this, I have been watching BBC1, Life of Mammals, Meat Eaters.


Alji the Magus

Thanks Mandragora!

On the subject of farming, wild animals in Africa are being pushed out of their natural habitat by farmers taking more and more ground to produce cash crops for export.
Destruction of the rain forrest in South America by farmers is doing the same there.

Math, have a look at http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146410729


Alji the Magus

>Nobody compared vegetarians to Hitler, least of all Alji.<

So Mandragora,

What exactly was 'Hitler was a veggie' supposed to mean then? A wry social comment, a serious political statement? No. It was obviously just a cheap jibe and I treated it as such - same with the 'vegetable factory farming'.

This thread was started by someone who wanted advice on how to live as a vegetarian - it didn't take long for the usual comments to come in. One of the first things you have to learn as a veggie is to defend yourself from the tiresome p**stakes and harassment from some meat-eaters who can't accept that people can be vegetarians. It happens a lot more than the other way round.

Funnily enough, all we want is to be left alone.

The 'Hitler was a veggie' jibe is trotted out with depressing regularity. Hitler, for the benefit of Alji, was also a big fan of astrology...

I've been a veggie for 20 years this Christmas and I've never had the desire to bend or crush the whole of Europe to my will, or draw bad pictures of wolves. Perhaps I was just born in the wrong month?

On topic, I'd join the Vegetarian Society if you're in the UK. That way you get a discount at H&B and help fund their various campaigns to convince others to give up the dead stuff.

Yes I knew Hitler was into astrology!
What I was trying to say was being a vegetarian does not make you a better person.

So if everyone becomes vegetarian what do you think will happen to all the farm animals?


Alji the Magus

I do the veggies a favour. I eat the leftovers of their shoes.

Farm Animals are bred for their meat. What would happen is that, if everyone stopped eating meat, they would probably die and then *not* be replaced by more animals to breed for meat. It's not really that hard to grasp the concept. Your argument assumes that cows, pigs and chickens breed so prodigiously on their own. I hate to break it to you mate, but that's not the way it happens; there's human intervention at work.

*...considers a re-make of Animal Farm in which terrorist carrots lead a vegetable revolution and install cabbages to the civil service of a brave-new-order in which Mister Potato Head rules - then dismisses the idea in consideration of those with no sense of humour....*

peace
~jwf~

Andy who is your reply to?

Alji the Magus

Funny how annoyed some of you are getting at that "Hitler was a veggie" comment. All it shows is that he had his 'good' points too.