The Biggest News Story Ever
Climate change became the biggest news story of 2018 according to GoogleTrends, with endless reports of unprecedented temperatures, hurricane devastation, and young people marching in the streets for climate justice. ScienceNews chose climate change as its top story of the year.
Hitting Them from Nowhere, Youth Take the Lead
This year Greta Thunberg propels climate change into a young people’s movement to save us all. That’s no surprise when you consider that Americans, particularly millennials, are concerned about global warming. Yet most of them say they feel helpless to do much about it. It’s all too powerful a punch. But I think they found their platform in Greta.
That same helplessness, by the way, is what many of them, and their parents, feel about their own health and weight—a big hit out of nowhere.
Clearly they don’t realize that each of them can affect the trajectory of climate change and their health simultaneously, with one swipe back, fork-in-hand.
The roadblock to their personal solution is staring back at them from their breakfast, lunch, and dinner plates: the Standard American Diet.
Yes, that SAD contributes greatly to greenhouse gases (GHG), using more soil, resources and water for meat and sugar than any other diet. On the other hand, a largely organic plant-based diet can control the consequences of global warming to our planet. Added bonuses include better health and better soil.
A clean diet made of whole plant-based foods is the most efficient way towards ideal weight, more energy, a stronger immune system, and a longer life, all because clean organic soil makes productive, regenerative cropland to grow more food with less energy.
Livestock production that feeds the SAD slams the environment with an estimated fifth of all global GHG emissions, and takes the prize as the main source of nutrient pollution in our waterways—pollution from all the fertilizer and herbicides necessary to prop up dying soil. Greenhouse gasses continue to accumulate from all that fertilizer only to create an invisible blanket trapping heat from the sun, revving up temperatures, and hastening the melting of vast sheets of ice in the polar regions that then flow right into the oceans.
Taking Matters into Our Own Hands
The cycle perpetuates into increasing sea level rise, and in time, flooding and submergence of populated coastal areas. We are seeing this faster than the scientists have previously predicted. Isn’t it time to take matters into our own hands? We can, with intimate thing we do most—EAT, (…no, not SEX). With every mouthful we vote to either maintain our business-as-usual global warming, soil destruction, and ill health, or not. We can stop the cycle right now without waiting for our policy-makers to do it.
Eat Clean and Vote
We can make our personal voice count, powerfully, by our own simple actions. Those actions must include consuming a plant-based diet made up primarily of GMO and herbicide-free vegetables, fruits, whole grains and legumes. We also need to vote—vote in effective leaders bold enough to take on the global imperative of climate, and vote out those who don’t have the vision to create a global road map towards clean energy and clean food.
It’s as simple as that. Eat clean and vote. You can’t do it alone, but the paradigm shift starts with your personal actions. Don’t squander them now; we’ve just run out of time.
Think Big, Vote Big, and Eat Well
Written by Kathy Pollard, MS