Habitat Destruction | TheNewLanguage

Chef

1) A person who, by shaping people’s tastes and establishing a demand for certain foods, protects ecosystems and supports ecologically friendly farming practices.

2) A person who facilitates eating behaviors that are adapted what the planet can produce (and do so without habit destruction).

3) A person who is knowledgeable about our existing food production systems and how those systems strain or harm our ecosystems and who seeks out food producers whose practices are complementary or beneficial to ecosystems.

4) A person capable of directing the tastes of human beings towards food sources that aid the planet’s ecosystems or complement them instead of harming them; an environmentalist.

5) A person who makes, for farmers, the growing of ecosystem-friendly crops and ecologically-friendly farming practices economically feasible—and gives farmers confidence that there is a market for what they grow and produce.

A chef can and will, for instance, develop a taste, among his or her customers, for ecosystem friendly forms of protein over steak, for example (as a steak is resource intensive to produce and the purchase of steak often contributes to deforestation, the use of feedlots and GMO corn monocultures). This behavior of chefs stands in contrast to cooks for whom the desires of customers and eating conventions (the use of imported beef or flour made from GMO wheat) take priority over the interests of ecosystems. Chefs possess the inclination and ability to interest human beings in things other than overharvested fish or energy expensive vegetables such as corn. For instance, a chef might make a dish using proteins with low energy to protein ratios (more efficient energy to protein conversion) or with perennial wheat varieties which are beneficial to the soil and often require no pesticides (as opposed to resource-intensive annual varieties, the majority of which are GMO crops that require heavy doses of pesticides and herbicides).

In addition to influencing agricultural practices and eating behaviors, chefs can increase people’s knowledge about composting and food waste.

What Are Your Choices?

What can you do? Here are some choices that are available to you.

1) Share this definition with others and be aware about our ability to advance our principles through our food choices.

2) Ask cooking schools to require courses in organic farming, soil health and cooking that requires only local, seasonal and sustainable ingredients—as well as ingredients with low calorie conversion rates.

3) Require that cooking schools be certified in sustainable environmental practices and require too that the schools accept no financial support from industrial agriculture companies.

4) Support local measures and legislation that requires restaurants to place a sign in the window that declares its chefs use primarily local, seasonal, sustainable ingredients and grades the restaurant according to its environmental practices.

5) Cook and select food using local, seasonal and organically grown ingredients.

Below is a pdf of the sign which can be downloaded and used by restaurants who follow these practices.

EcosystemFriendlyRestaurantDeclaration

Lawn

1) A monoculture with intensive water, fertilizer and often pesticide requirements.

2) A human tradition with high costs to ecosystems.

3) An energy expensive form of landscaping.

4) It is human aesthetics being chosen over the necessities (for survival) of other living things.

A yard is an opportunity develop a habitat for insects and wildlife. A yard is an opportunity to plant edibles, native plants (which require less watering and therefore put less stress on the local water supply), plants that are food sources to birds and insects. A yard can be a part of a larger effort to increase the amount of acreage (there are approximately 25 million acres of lawn currently in the U.S.) for species other than human beings. In short, a yard can be part of a reversal of a long-term trend toward habitat destruction.

Choices

What Are Your Choices?

What can you do? Here are some choices that are available to you. Continue reading “Lawn” »

Deforestation

1) A rapid decline in the planet’s oxygen production capacity and the destruction of both ecosystems and the species that inhabit them; the removal of a major component of the planet’s living systems.

2) A type of habitat destruction that results in a decrease in the species diversity.

3) A common practice of the industrial agriculture system and one fostered by a) the limited liability protections given to corporations and b) the logic of financial statements, which is indifferent to losses born by others.

See the speed at which deforestation can occur with current technology.

Deforestation leads to oxygen loss — TheNewLanguage.Org

Garbage Can

1) A gateway to the trillions of tons of waste that human beings bury and burn every year.

2) An object that gives people permission to think that waste is acceptable; it is permission to destroy in the guise of convenience.

3) One component in a system that causes habitat destruction and pollution.

Human beings are the only species that produces waste and products that cannot be absorbed into ecosystems and used productively within them. What other species produce can be can be, usually in a short time frame, cycled back into the ecosystem and used productively within it.

This familiar object influences the perceptions of human beings by rendering a behavior that is destructive to ecosystems and the biosphere into what seems to be an ordinary and acceptable act with no negative consequences. In short, it makes normal a behavior that is unknown among all other living things.

Dropping an item into a garbage can is one of human being’s many “out of sight, out of mind” practices.

Alternative behaviors available are recycling, less consumption, composting and the use of re-usable packaging.

Environment

A terms that organizes all living things into two categories: first there is “us” and then there is “all other living things.” The term claims, implicitly, that human beings and the world’s habits are divisible and independent from each other, an illusion fostered for hundreds of years.

Also implicit in the term is the notion that all other living things are subordinate to human will, interests and concerns. Out of it comes the belief that “human beings have primacy over the earth” and that the planet is “under our rule.”

This ideology is widely-accepted and is complicit in the ecological degradation of the earth as this ideology is used as a rationale and justification for most habitat destruction.

Terms which more accurately reflect our dependence on the planet’s living networks are ecosystem, habitat and biosphere.