If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the path to an ecologically conscientious faith is vexed with misleading dead ends.
News & Observer religion reporter Yonat Shimron’s profile of one local church’s stab at environmental ethics during Lent illustrates how easily parishioners drift off momentarily on a tangent, often motivated by misinformation or transient fads. The result being that many simply retrace their path, then forever abandon the journey forward.
I’m not saying there’s nothing meritorious in the good folk of United Church of Chapel Hill denouncing their carnivore habits for the duration of the Lenten season. Only that doing so for the sake of reducing carbon emissions is about as convoluted a line of reasoning as one could concoct. Furthermore, it smacks of hopping aboard a popular bandwagon which, these days, is inordinately obsessed with global warming at the expense of addressing a root problem of overconsumption, an issue where Westerners shamefully lead the world’s parade to destruction.
You see, the environmental pitfall in eating meat really has little to do with CO2, methane, or gaseous emissions of any sort. The sticking point with meat is that the agricultural industry generally pours ten times more energy into producing 1 kcal of animal meat as it does 1 kcal’s worth of a grain product like wheat, rice, or corn. So for what it takes to feed and care for the one Angus, you could feed ten adults for much longer than the bovine’s lifetime.
If you step back and look at the physics and physiology of what’s going on, you see you’re devoting considerably more resources just keeping a cow alive long enough to satisfy your preference for the taste of cow flesh. And the operating principle is no less true for other living creatures like fish and chickens or scallops. You expend extra energy maintaining the life of the animal just long enough to eventually kill it.
Naturally, I haven’t even touched on all the other ancillary ecological issues that swarm around livestock farming — things like land use, antibiotic overuse, animal wastes, and perhaps most damning of all, the horrendous conditions to which industrial farming systems subject the poor creatures they churn out of their meat mills.
In turn, this raises the ethical questions that come with saddling an already economically disadvantage and socially oppressed people — namely, the unfortunate slaughterhouse workers — with the gruesome task of personally butchering thousands of animals week after bloody week. If we don’t have a Christian obligation to consider both the physical and psychological damage that imposes on our neighbors, then what’s Christianity good for?
So a token Lenten effort to abstain from eating animals is only about as good as the 40 days it covers. Void of a sounder rationale for the enterprise, if one simply returns to his previous habits, the few pounds of carbon emissions spared won’t mean much juxtaposed against the lifelong commitment to rape and pillage the planet while condemning its creatures, be they humble or human, to an endless cycle of savagery.
I hate to come across like a killjoy, but if conserving inanimate carbon, the sixth element of the periodic table, is the strongest incentive the congregation at United Church of Chapel Hill can find to compassionately steward Yahweh’s planet, then perhaps their time might be better spent getting to know a few live chickens the other 325 days of the year.
