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"Cowspiracy" - maxamillion.Hi. Just wished to say thanks for the link. I watched the "show" on Netflix yesterday evening and found it quite interesting - probably the best bits being the very uncomfortable looking reactions of the folks in important positions in various organisations who looked quite uneasy (and unprepared) at having to answer such simple and seemingly innocuous questions? I do have one little "complaint" with the general tone of the film and its points of view and that is the one relating to water use. Water use has all its own very politicised and irrational history - and the division and doling out of water rights (?) is hugely contentious. However there is a water cycle - whether that is a "natural cycle" with the water passing through mixed forests, grasslands, savanna and a "wild" large animal populations' collective intestinal tract or whether it is an "artificial cycle" with the water passing through cultivated woodlands (nut trees, orchards and vineyards), cultivated expanses of artificial grasslands, (corn, wheat, barley, oats, rye, millet, rice etc) and through the collective intestinal tracts of domesticated animals - including ourselves. The number of gallons of water needed to produce anything - whether it be an almond, a soy bean a chicken breast or a hamburger is rather irrelevant - except from the point of view of how long it takes to recycle and refresh that water? Surely the water used in any crop irrigation or animal feeding is recycled and returned to both ground aquifers and atmospheric water vapour - just as water used by natural deciduous forests and herds of wild bison and horses and bears and wolves is similarly recycled and returned? There is a certain length of time involved in taking "fresh water" and passing that fresh water through either plant growth or animal growth and returning it into the environment again as "fresh water?" What humanity has done is change the patterns of that water re-cycling by growing crops and herding animals in landscapes and geographic locales that are basically too arid to support such water abundance naturally. Such a massive global scale redirecting of surface waters has indubitably changed weather patterns to some degree and contributed to desertification of some areas while adding moisture to others. The scale of operations - and the lack of adequate filtering / treatment of wastes - has indubitably caused huge "pollution" concerns.However the water cycle is a rapid one - water keeps getting returned back into the environment. However with the scale of fresh water used in fracking operations - that water is quite often left in the ground and gets taken out of surface recycling processes - or becomes heavily contaminated with naturally occurring minerals adding to surface pollution concerns. If it takes a huge amount of water to create one farmed almond - it takes just as much to create one wild hazelnut, almond or brazil nut too? Right?! The important part is that the water so used returns very quickly to the atmosphere or groundwater or aquifer systems. Very little water remains "trapped" or locked up in that nut, that orange, that chicken or that hamburger? The simple inference from the movie is that somehow all that water used to create whatever product is somehow lost forever and is not available for use elsewhere? It seems one can turn nowhere without spin... GS |
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