Eating Meat Is Bull
Kathy Sinclair (Confessions of a Meat-Eating Vegetarian) was hoodwinked by people with an agenda to push the meat habit. They shamelessly exploit our deepest held fears and mythological thinking about our health. They bullied Kathy into eating meat when she didn’t even want to.
It’s sad. Any vegetarian knows there are perfectly adequate supplies of iron, vitamin B12, calcium, essential fatty acids, and everything else a healthy body needs, in a diet completely free of animal products. There are many vegetable sources of iron. “We” (but not Kathy, evidently) get our vitamin B12 from a variety of sources including vegetarian yeast, mushrooms, and—duh—daily multivitamin supplement tablets. An annual blood test confirms my B12 is good. Surely you knew that 100 per cent of B12 in meat is in fact from bacteria contaminating the meat?
My EFA intake comes from flax seed, walnuts, soy, various types of beans, topped up with a supplement from vegan-farmed algae. Am I a nut bar? No, I’m a healthy, happy, intelligent vegetarian who won’t take “you must kill and eat animals” as an answer for anything.
—John Burgess, via e-mail
And We Thought We Were Being Clever
Is there such a thing as a meat-eating vegetarian? I don’t believe so because I know of no plant which grows meat. However, everything a body requires for good health is readily available and does not require the death of any creature. Unless we practice compassion, can we expect any?
—Freda Betker, Burnaby
The Science of Climate Change
In the February issue, the Editors’ Picks recommends the book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery. The summary for the book maintains that global warming is a natural phenomenon and that humans play no role in it.
S. Fred Singer is a well-known climate change denier. Mr. Singer is a physicist not a climate scientist (many of whom are physicists) and has attacked scientists who are. He built his career in rocket science during the Cold War and became Ronald Reagan’s chief scientist at Transportation. Mr. Singer works with the Washington, DC think tank, the George C. Marshall Institute.
This institute was founded in 1984 by astrophysicist Robert Jastrow and joined by solid-state physicist Frederick Seitz and physicist William Nierenberg. The reason the institute was founded was to support Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or “Star Wars,” Missile Defense program) to counter attacks by physicists because it was technically dubious. By 1986, a petition was signed by 6,500 physicists in order to boycott SDI funding. Physicists know pork when they see it.
The George C. Marshall Institute does no scientific research, does not publish in peer-reviewed journals, and does not debate scientists, but does write op-eds in magazines and newspapers. S. Fred Singer went on to challenge the science linking sulfur and nitrogen emissions to acid rain, CFCs to ozone depletion, and tobacco smoke to lung cancer.
Singer, Jastrow, Seitz, and Nierenberg are all scientists of the Cold War, are against government regulation and international treaties, and believe that free-markets and technology are all we need to solve our problems. These men disguise political debates as scientific ones by using scientific uncertainty as a political tactic. Intellectual dishonesty has no place in science.
No scientists deny that the Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled by natural forces over the billions of years of the Earth’s evolution. However, it has been known for 40 years that greenhouse gases emitted by human activities contribute to global warming. An excellent source of information is Real Climate, a blog written and maintained by climate scientists.
For information regarding S. Fred Singer, check out the YouTube presentation, “The American Denial of Global Warming” presented by Naomi Orestes, UC San Diego,
and George Monbiot’s book Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning, Chapter 2, “The Denial Industry.” This book also describes how we can reduce our carbon emissions by 90 per cent in five keys areas (energy production, land transport, buildings, retail, and cement) relatively quickly, cheaply, with minimal disruption, and without becoming a poor Third World country.
And yes, this will require government regulation, international treaties, and a great deal of political courage.
—Manon Gartside, Vancouver
Not Man Enough?
I have a little beef with you and your magazine. But first I want to compliment you on putting out a nice, clean, good-looking publication. It is an improvement from two to three years ago. I like the layout, the articles, the contents page is easy to use and intelligently laid out. But one thing I noticed is that of nine articles in the February issue, there are none written by men. How about a little balance?
—Wayne Ross, via snail mail
Editor’s Note: Dear Wayne, we promise you we have nothing against men. We love men! Note that Bruce Skipper provided the art direction for the February cover story as well as laying out all the pages while bringing in new and innovative design concepts. Bruce also wrote the Sadhana CD review for our March Editors’ Picks, and Adrian Mack (if he were a girl he’d be “Adrianne”) penned our March cover story.
