We Are The Weather - Saving The Planet Begins At Breakfast

Book by Jonathan Safron Foer (2019)

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Eating Animals and Here I Am. Everything Is Illuminated won the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. Jonathan Safran Foer teaches Creative Writing at New York University. Foer serves as a board member for Farm Forward, a nonprofit organization that implements innovative strategies to promote conscientious food choices, reduce farmed animal suffering, and advance sustainable agriculture.

First and foremost Foer is a creative writer, and a very successful one. He is also passionate about understanding the consequences of our modern eating habits on animal welfare and the planet. In his first non-fiction book Eating Animals, published in 2009, Foer expressed his moral concerns over the industrialized meat industry. In his latest offering “We Are The Weather” Foer turns his attention to the impact of meat consumption on the planet.

Greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) from the Agricultural sector account for 24% of all global emissions. The production of meat is responsible for ~80% of that total, directly through methane emissions from cows and sheep, and indirectly from the vast quantities of crops which are grown to feed livestock where just 10% of those crop calories end up in the meat on your plate (the rest are lost along the way).

Reducing meat consumption can play a hugely supportive role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, restoring forests, and reaching net-zero. It is also a highly divisive and emotive topic - so I was very interested to hear the views of Jonathan Safron Foer.

Now, if you like to get straight to the point in your non-fiction reading then this book is not for you. Foer begins by using a multitude of seemingly disparate narratives, used to prepare the reader’s moral compass for some serious navigation. The intertwining stories eventually turn into a conversation on the subjects of climate change and veganism unfolding in the authors head. The direction of the book doesn’t reveal itself until about a third of the way though.

It may be a winding path, but I very much enjoyed the journey, and the book certainly gets you thinking about our relationship with the planet and with the animal world. Here are some short extracts that particularly stood out for me:

• Reflecting on a Warmer Earth of the Past: “Fifty million years ago, the Arctic was filled with tropical rainforests. Crocodiles, turtles, and alligators lived in the polar forests of what is now Canada and Greenland. Two-hundred-pound penguins waddled in Australia, and palm trees grew in Alaska . . . Earth was five to eight degrees Celsius warmer than it is today.”

• The Outsized Impact that Humans Are Having on the Planet: “It took two hundred thousand years for the human population to reach one billion, but only two hundred more years to reach seven billion”, “There are twenty-three billion chicken living on Earth at any given time. Their combined mass is greater than that of all other birds on our planet.” “There are approximately thirty farmed animals for every human on the planet.”

• The Human Relationship with Nature and A Reflection on Progress and Productivity: “nut farmers will often rent bees trucked in from hundreds of miles away to pollinate their trees. And in areas where human labor is less expensive than bee labor - a thought worth pausing on - the trees are pollinated by hand. Workers swarm the fields. Using long sticks with chicken feathers and cigarette filters on one end, they painstakingly transfer pollen from bottles around their necks into the stigma of every flower. A photographer who documented this process said “On the one hand it’s a story about the human toll on the environment, while on the other it shows our ability to be more efficient in spite of it all.””

*Cover Image by Alex Merto

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