Scientists and environmental organizations around the world urge a shift toward plant-based foods as one of the most impactful actions we can take to reduce climate destruction and improve our health.

That’s why we created the Climate-Friendly Food Guide to provide more details, recipes, tips, and resources.

There's a PDF version there too.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16280962

Conspiracy theorists are trying to influence European election campaigns with disinformation and lies. Much of the fabrication comes from Moscow, but plenty is homegrown.

If media campaigns in more than a dozen European countries were to be believed, the European Union (EU) intends to force citizens to eat insects instead of meat. 

The claim has touched nerves, especially in Italy, where variations of it have been revived and splashed across billboards during European elections to pit Brussels against mama's special sauce.

But consumers of this claim are being fed pure nonsense, an example of countless fabrications launched or adopted by candidates seeking political gain at the cost of the truth.

The fake insect-food narrative, which first surfaced last year in a number of EU countries, has proven so popular with malign actors both within and outside the bloc that they've brought it back for the European election cycle to try to discredit pro-EU candidates.

…

But no one should be surprised that malignant actors want to impact Europe's election cycle, with 720 seats up for grabs for the next five-year term in the European Parliament and many national elections taking place simultaneously as part of a record year for elections worldwide.

The EDMO reports a record-high amount of disinformation ahead of the vote about universally controversial issues like migration, agricultural policy and climate change, including even the resurrection of fake stories from years past, such as COVID-19 conspiracies.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15823220

Four parties hammer out agreement filled with bad news for scientists

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The nationalist, populist Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, won 23% of the vote in the November 2023 House elections, putting Wilders—once a fringe figure who proposed a “head rag tax” on women wearing headscarves—close to the center of power. Since then, Wilders has been in contentious and often chaotic negotiations to form a government with three other parties, including the center-right party led by outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, which saw its electoral share shrink to 15%. The governing plan endorsed by the four parties, which marks a crucial step in forming a new government, includes a series of harsh anti-immigration measures. Centrist and left-wing parties fiercely criticized the plan during this week’s debate.

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Another sharp turn comes in environmental policy. The Netherlands, a major agricultural exporter, has more farm animals per square kilometer than any other country in Europe, and their waste emits high levels of nitrogen compounds that violate EU rules and harm the country’s ecosystems. Past government plans to tackle the issue have triggered massive protests by farmers and the rise of a new party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement, that won 4.7% of the vote and is part of the new coalition.

The CDC is locked in a power struggle with key states and agriculture players as it tries to better track the virus and prevent another potential pandemic.

Many farmers don’t want federal health officials on their property. State agriculture officials worry the federal response is sidelining animal health experts at the Agriculture Department, and also that some potential federal interventions threaten to hinder state and local health officials rushing to respond to the outbreaks.

A big reason for the resistance: Farms don’t want to be identified publicly as potential hotspots for the virus, nor do they want to draw scrutiny to their workers, a significant proportion of whom are undocumented immigrants and fearful of government officials.

https://www.humanehoax.org/ for context

https://fishfeel.org/

Donna Haraway

Issue #75

September 2016

Pesticides are critical to agricultural intensification but can negatively impact human health. We show that as soy cultivation spread across Brazil, agricultural pesticide exposure was associated with increased childhood cancer mortality among the broader population indirectly exposed to these chemicals. We find that populations were exposed to pesticides through the water supply, but negative health effects were mitigated by access to high-quality cancer treatment centers. Our results support policies to strengthen pesticide regulation, especially in contexts intensifying their food production systems, and increased public health attention to pesticide exposure in the broader community.

Over the last several decades, Brazil has become both the world’s leading soy producer and the world’s leading consumer of hazardous pesticides. Despite identified links between pesticide exposure and carcinogenesis, there has been little population-level research on the effects of pesticide intensification on broader human health in Brazil. We estimate the relationship between expanded soy production—and related community exposure to pesticides—on childhood cancer incidence using 15 y of data on disease mortality. We find a statistically significant increase in pediatric leukemia following expanded local soy production, but timely access to treatment mitigates this relationship. We show that pesticide exposure likely occurs via water supply penetration. Our findings represent only the tip of the iceberg for substantial health externalities of high-input crop production and land use change. Our results are of particular interest in developing contexts with demand for intensified food production systems and underscore the need for stronger regulation of pesticides and increased public health attention to exposure in the broader community.

Next. Diamond likewise argues that the Eurasian landmass offered a uniquely amenable population of potentially-domesticable proto-livestock. His principal contrast here is to the Americas, where Amerindians puzzlingly domesticated nothing but the llama, the alpaca, the Muscovy duck, and the (yum!) (awwww) (yum!) (awwww) guinea pig (the foregoing being the Andeanist version of the tastes great/less filling debate). Now, again, this argument runs into the a posteriori problem. He asserts that it is possible to infer that undomesticated animals are and always have been undomesticable animals. But this is unpersuasive. It supposes that we moderns (or specifically Jared Diamond) could (for example) look at a jungle fowl and infer, finger lickin’! even in the absence of domesticated chickens. He surveys the world outside Eurasia and declares it deficient in proto-goats, proto-chickens, proto-pigs, proto-cows, proto-sheep… Make of this what you will, in essence it is hand-waving.

Furthermore, in the lowland South American context at least, there is considerable evidence that human-animal relationships are in important respects conceptualized and experienced as relations between social equals, such that a pastoral, dominating, domesticating relationship is rendered “no good to think” (apologies to Stanley Tambiah). Philippe Descola is writing about this, and the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro lends itself to the same interpretation. This sounds a bit New Age & woo-woo as I’ve thumbnailed it here, but (I promise) it is compelling and thought-provoking when properly expounded. Given the many parallels between Melanesia and Amazonia, I wonder if a similar analysis would be applicable there (and, perhaps, elsewhere too). The point, though, is that given the presence of potentially useful animals, it is not a foregone conclusion that humans will set about domesticating them. It is simply not valid to read back from a present absence of domesticated animals a past dearth of proto-domestic animals.

Citated paper:

Domesticated Landscapes: The Subsistence Ecology of Plant and Animal Domestication

read it

In 2006, the animal agriculture industry was confronted with the first global estimate of the livestock sector’s contribution to anthropogenic climate change. Consistent with other industries, including tobacco and fossil fuels, the animal agriculture industry’s response to evidence that its product caused harm was to push back. The industry employed the help of universities. Industry-funded university-based researchers and centers have helped downplay livestock’s contributions to climate change, increase public trust that the industry is proactively reducing emissions on its own accord, and shape climate policymaking in the industry’s favor. Despite more than 15 years of research attributing significant climate change impacts to animal agriculture, US policies to mitigate the climate impacts of livestock emissions remain insufficient and dominated by industry-supported financial incentives that are voluntary and taxpayer-subsidized.