Deep in Canada’s remote Brevoort Island, in the Nunavut territory, a radar technician was killed last week in a rare polar bear attack. Days earlier, a polar bear was spotted in Rankin Inlet, a remote, but fairly populated, Inuit settlement in the same territory. Experts warn that similar encounters with polar bears will likely become more common as climate change destroys their habitats and makes it more difficult to find food.
John Ussak, a resident of Rankin Inlet, said he was afraid the polar bear was stalking a popular summer fishing spot, and attempted to scare it with warning shots, according to The Guardian. “It took 20 shots before it thought about leaving,” he said. “I’ve never seen that before.” Days later, he reported another polar bear sighting.
“When I heard about what happened to that technician, I was shocked,” Ussak said. “We hardly used to see polar bears here in the past. But now we’ve had at least two in the last few weeks. It feels like there’s more bears up in that area – and they don’t seem afraid of people.”
A polar bear with a GPS tracker forages along the Svalbard coast in Spitsbergen, Norway on Aug. 23, 2022. Sven-Erik Arndt / Arterra / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Given the location and the fact that two bears were involved, Andrew Derocher, a professor of biology at the University of Alberta, told The Guardian that the attack on Brevoort Island was “unusual.”
“The reality is, polar bears are unpredictable at the best of times,” Derocher said. “And with all of the environmental changes we’re seeing, they’re going to become more unpredictable.”
According to a 2017 study published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin, polar bears are more likely to attack humans when they’re “nutritionally stressed” and are in “below-average body condition.”
Nasittuq Corporation, which employed the technician who was killed, said “One of the animals was put down,” according to the The New York Times. The company added, “The safety and well-being of our employees is our highest priority, and we are deeply committed to ensuring a safe working environment.” The attack happened on an outpost of Nasittuq’s North Warning System, which protects North American airspace by detecting cruise missiles and aircraft, reported The New York Times.
According to Parks Canada, unlike other species, polar bears can see humans as a potential food source, making them extremely dangerous. In case of an encounter, it’s recommended to carry deterrents such as an air horn or bear spray, and playing dead is not effective. Instead, it’s recommended to back away slowly and prepare to stand your ground by making loud noises and prepare for a potential fight, aiming for the nose and head.
As climate change worsens, polar bear populations will decline as they need sea ice for habitation and for capturing seals, according to a 2020 research article published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
“Back in the 1980s, polar bears would look like giant, fat sausages lying on the beach in the summer. But now, we’re seeing a population that is much leaner overall. And I suspect as food becomes more of a challenge… they’ll start entering [human] communities. Are those communities ready? Absolutely not. A handful have small polar bear patrol programs, but most have nothing” Derocher said.
More than 10,000 survivors and loved ones of survivors of “climate-driven disasters” have signed an open letter to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) urging an investigation into fossil fuel companies for “climate-related crimes.”
Of the signatories, more than 1,000 were survivors of these disasters and more than 9,000 were loved ones. Public Citizen said they, along with Chesapeake Climate Action Network, delivered the letter to the DOJ.
The letter comes at a time of increased public pressure against the fossil fuel industry and during which climate-related civil lawsuits have increased at an unprecedented pace, and have been mostly successful.
“The burning of fossil fuels has racked up enormous profits for fossil fuel companies while stoking the fire of climate change and driving increasingly lethal extreme weather events that have destroyed lives, property, and livelihoods,” the letter says. “And the damage is far from over. Communities across the country are battling a summer onslaught of deadly heat waves, hurricanes, and wildfires.”
One of the survivors, Allen Myers, said in a statement, “The 2018 Camp Fire burned down my family home in Paradise, took the lives of 84 neighbors, and left hundreds of families displaced for years.” He added that some of his friends are experiencing the same thing, as the Park Fire devastates homes in Butte County.
“Let’s be clear, the fingerprints of the fossil fuel industry are all over it. The industry continues to ignore the catastrophic consequences of burning fossil fuels, which heats our atmosphere and increases the scale and frequency of disasters. The Department of Justice needs to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable now,” Myers said.
The letter also asserts that fossil fuel companies have known since the 1950s about the dangers posed by the use of fossil fuels, and, in the decades since, waged a “disinformation campaign” to dispel the science and mislead the public.
Indeed, fossil fuel companies have funded research into the possibility of human-caused climate change as early as 1954, when a group of fossil fuel interests backed the study of early modern climate science, according to The Guardian, and according to the BBC, ExxonMobil’s climate change data in the 1970s was at times even more accurate than NASA’s.
It’s possible that fossil fuel companies knew about these risks even before they started funding these experiments, as the idea of climate change was by no means new in the 1950s. Joseph Fourier was likely the first to propose the greenhouse effect in 1824, although it wasn’t named as such until 1901 by Nils Gustaf Ekholm. In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote was the first to show by experiment that carbon dioxide could act as a warming blanket, and in 1938, Guy Callendar connected atmospheric carbon to Earth’s warming.
As for the disinformation campaign the document alleges, that too is well documented. Since at least the 1970s, fossil fuel companies have kept the skeleton of climate change in their closet while lying to the public.
Glacial flooding damaged more than 100 homes and sent residents seeking shelter on Tuesday in Juneau, Alaska, in what has become a near-annual summertime occurrence.
Last week, Juneau officials issued a warning that Suicide Basin, a side basin of the Mendenhall Glacier nestled just outside Juneau, had reached a level that meant flooding was possible. On Monday, water began rushing from the basin, prompting residents to seek shelter.
“There was a tremendous amount of water that came out at one time,” Aaron Jacobs, senior service hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Juneau, told The Washington Post.
Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy declared the flood a disaster on Tuesday and said Wednesday that no fatalities were reported, but the damage from the flood was “significant.”
As glaciers in Suicide Basin melt, water levels rise, forming a glacial lake that is naturally held back by the Mendenhall Glacier. But the Mendenhall is thinning too. The water continues to rise until it reaches a tipping point from the pressure, bursting through the Mendenhall Glacier and moving into Juneau’s Mendenhall River.
The Mendenhall River crested early Tuesday at 15.99 feet, more than a foot higher than last year’s 14.97-foot flood, according to the National Weather Service.
The National Weather Service has monitored Suicide Basin since 1965, but had not reported a glacial lake outburst until 2011, reported Reuters. Since then, there have been more than 30.
The floods tend to get worse every year. Last year’s flooding saw record amounts of devastation at the time, including a two-story house that was swept away in the flood. This year’s has been even more destructive.
There was “significant inundation in neighborhoods that were not anticipating inundation,” said Juneau City Manager Katie Koester during a city meeting Tuesday, according to the Anchorage Daily News. City officials set up an emergency shelter in Floyd Dryden Middle School that had dozens of residents show up in just a few hours. Deputy City Manager Robert Barr said 43 residents stayed through the night, while many others sought shelter elsewhere.
The National Weather Service said the basin’s water levels had returned to normal on Wednesday.
Eran Hood, a hydrologist with the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, told The Washington Post, “The water level when it cut loose this year was lower than it was last year, but the basin was larger.” He added, “What we saw yesterday can happen again and likely will happen again in the future, and it could be bigger.”
As wildfires become more frequent and intense, they’re creating raging thunderstorms that fuel them even further, making them much more difficult to fight.
These pyrocumulonimbus clouds (pyroCbs) are caused when a wildfire’s intense heat and smoke create strong updrafts, where they condense and form clouds. Those clouds can then develop into fierce thunderstorms that ignite more fires, potentially miles from the fire that created them.
“PyroCbs are such massive, almost volcanic-like eruptions,” Rajan Chakrabarty, an aerosol scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, told Grist. “These pyroCbs create their own fire weather.” In addition to thunder, pyroCbs can create intense winds, hail and even tornadoes.
Last week, that breed of fire weather devastated Jasper, a town in Alberta, Canada, causing at least 25,000 people to be evacuated, reported The New York Times. “They tried to put helicopters on it,” Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, told the Times. “They couldn’t stop it, which is unfortunate because it led to a good chunk of the town burning down.”
Wildfire smoke over Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada on July 24, 2024. ALBERTA WILDFIRE / HANDOUT / Anadolu via Getty Images
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles told Nature that the devastation seen in Jasper is in no way unique. “The sobering reality is that these are not extreme outliers in some ways,” he said. “We’ve seen a lot of fires behave like these ones in recent years, which I don’t think is reassuring at all.”
This year, wildfires in the U.S. have been much more devastating than expected. California’s wildfires are already five times more devastating than anticipated, and its Park Fire has become the sixth largest in the state’s history.
This trend tracks with the recent rise in reports of pyroCbs, and while that points to climate change as a catalyst, with better identification methods, it raises the question of the true extent to which climate change is responsible. “They seem to be happening more frequently,” Payton Beeler, an atmospheric scientist at Richland, Washington’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, told Grist. “Whether that’s a function of warming climate and better identification, I think it’s probably both. But the impacts seem to be very long-lasting and long-ranging.”
David Peterson, a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California, told The New York Times, “The big open question right now is what is the role of pyroCbs in a warming climate system? What are the effects of pushing smoke up extremely high into the stratosphere, especially when smoke that high persists for a year?”
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has selected Peterson to lead a five-year study on the effects of pyroCbs on Earth’s climate, which will begin in October.
The Naval Research Laboratory is working on a detection system for these fires. “We need to develop a warning capability for fires that are more likely to generate pyroCbs because it means something different if you’re fighting it, evacuating people, and predicting where the smoke is going,” Peterson said. “Right now we’re in catch-up mode.”
Far above Earth’s poles, swirling in the frigid stratosphere, are the polar vortexes: massive, freezing whirlwinds that strengthen in the winter and weaken in the summer. Right now, despite being in the dead of winter, Antarctica’s vortex is undergoing an unprecedented weakening, causing a massive heat wave across the continent.
“This heat wave is a near-record (or record) event for the region of Antarctica it’s having the biggest impact on,” Edward Blanchard, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, told The Washington Post in an email.
Antarctica’s vortex has weakened significantly in July, causing temperatures on massive swathes of the continent to soar to more than 50 degrees (10°C) above normal levels while pushing massive amounts of freezing air toward the equator.
These vortex weakenings are usually caused when warm air very quickly rises to the top of the vortex, destabilizing it.
Amy Butler, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Washington Post that atmospheric waves have jostled the vortex this year, leading to high-altitude temperatures to soar in a sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) event.
Every winter, the polar vortex, a ring of stormy weather, forms high above Antarctica in the stratosphere.
This year, the vortex is showing signs of warming & being disturbed
A disturbed vortex may contribute to stormier conditions in NZ & Australia in late July & August. pic.twitter.com/AUxVd60ytk
This year’s Antarctic SSW is already leading to unusually cold temperatures in the southern hemisphere, with Australia, New Zealand and the Southern Cone of South America experiencing unusual cold fronts. SSWs may not be the only factor in the vortexes destabilizing, however. Earth has seen record high temperatures since July, which scientists believe may have been a factor here. Antarctica has been warming as fast as the rest of the planet, according to a 2023 article in the journal Nature, as The Washington Post reported.
SSWs can have immense consequences on their respective hemispheres. In January 2014, an SSW led to a harsh winter in the U.S., causing subzero temperatures in multiple states. 2021’s SSW was particularly brutal, leading to a devastating winter when much of the continental U.S. saw temperatures dip well below zero and during which most of Texas’ electrical grid infamously went dark.
There’s typically a delayed effect between an SSW and colder weather farther from the poles, which can take up to a month. With the Antarctic’s record-high temperatures and SSW continuing, it’s hard to say to what extent this will have on conditions in the southern hemisphere or how far toward the equator areas will be affected in the coming weeks.
The United States’ extremely cold winter in 2021. NOAA
Michael Dukes, director of forecasting at MetDesk, told The Guardian that most scientists have thought that the most significant effects of human-caused climate change would happen at the poles. “This is a great example of that,” he said. “In Antarctica generally that kind of warming in the winter and continuing in to summer months can lead to collapsing of the ice sheets,” he added.
Following record-low reports of butterflies in the UK, British charity Butterfly Conservation is sounding the alarm.
The charity, which crowdsources data from UK participants through their Big Butterfly Count, put out a blog post explaining that participants are reporting “just over half” the amount of butterflies compared to this time last year. This year’s Big Butterfly Count concludes on August 4.
“The lack of butterflies this year is a warning sign to us all. Nature is sounding the alarm and we must listen,” said Dan Hoare, Butterfly Conservation’s director of conservation said in the post. Butterflies are a key indicator species. When they are in trouble we know the wider environment is in trouble too.”
Butterfly Conservation points to a “wet and windy spring,” along with colder-than-usual summer temperatures to explain the decline, because butterflies mate less often in wet environments, although the current season’s weather is not the only factor. “80% of butterflies in the UK have declined since the 1970s,” the blog post said, “with habitat loss, climate change and pesticide use the main drivers of this decline,” referencing one of their previous reports from 2023.
While the butterflies are mating less often this season due to the wet spring, last year’s drought is also harming them because the plants their caterpillars eat need to be properly watered, reported The Guardian.
A 2020 study published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Animal Ecology points out that because some butterfly species tend to struggle with controlling their body temperatures, they seek out “microhabitats” at the right temperature.
These butterflies, which are classified as specialist species due to their specific habitat requirements, tend to be among the first to be impacted by climate change, making them important indicator species to monitor as an early warning sign for the impacts of climate change.
This makes the current decline in UK butterflies all the more dire, as climate change causes fluctuations in both weather patterns and temperature. Butterflies are also important for pollination and pest control, meaning their absence will likely have consequences for habitats too.
Hoare urged people in the UK to help by monitoring butterfly counts. “People are telling us that they aren’t seeing butterflies, but simply telling us is not enough,” he said. “We need everyone to record what they are or aren’t seeing by doing a Big Butterfly Count as this will give us the evidence we need to take vital action to conserve our butterfly species.”
Scientists have discovered “dark oxygen” being created on the ocean seafloor by “polymetallic nodules” that potentially support life, new research in the journal Nature Geoscience shows.
Andrew Sweetman, the study’s lead author and member of the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), believes the nodules create oxygen because they behave like natural batteries. “If you put a battery into seawater, it starts fizzing,” Sweetman told the BBC. “That’s because the electric current is actually splitting seawater into oxygen and hydrogen [which are the bubbles]. We think that’s happening with these nodules in their natural state.”
Scientists dubbed it “dark oxygen” because, as opposed to photosynthesis, which was previously thought to be responsible for the bulk of oxygen creation in the ocean, the production of dark oxygen doesn’t require sunlight. In fact, the nodules that seem to create it are far deeper than light can penetrate.
The discovery calls into question how big of a part dark oxygen truly plays in our oceans, and has the potential to completely reshape our understanding of the origin of life.
Sweetman first felt something was off in 2013 during fieldwork in the Clarion–Clipperton Zone, a mineral-rich area between Hawaii and Mexico, according to Nature. The team sent down a module to create “an enclosed microcosm of the seafloor,” the authors wrote, where they discovered oxygen.
This by itself wasn’t outside the ordinary: oxygen had been detected this deep in the ocean before, carried down by currents. However, while oxygen levels usually taper off when enclosed, the oxygen levels here had increased.
Sweetman thought it was a sensor malfunction until he had similar results years later. “I suddenly realized that for eight years I’d been ignoring this potentially amazing new process, 4,000 metres down on the ocean floor,” Sweetman told Nature.
Scientists aren’t the only ones interested in these nodules, however. Because they are covered in lithium, copper, nickel and other valuable metals used for goods like batteries and electric vehicles, multiple companies have been researching deep-sea mining to exploit the nodules, including Global Sea Mineral Resources, The Metals Company, Lockheed Martin and others.
Deep-sea mining is a controversial practice, however, because it has been linked with biodiversity loss and destruction of habitats.
Sweetman believes that dark oxygen could be supporting life on the seafloor and opposes deep sea mining near these modules. “If there’s oxygen being produced in large amounts, it’s possibly going to be important for the animals that are living there,” he told Nature.
Sweetman and the other researchers also wonder whether this same process could be happening on other planets or moons, potentially supporting life.
“If the process is happening on our planet, could it be helping to generate oxygenated habitats on other ocean worlds such as Enceladus and Europa and providing the opportunity for life to exist?” Sweetman said to The Guardian.
California officials discovered human remains in a burned Mendocino County home on July 8, reporting the state’s first death of an unusually devastating 2024 wildfire season.
The woman is believed to be 66-year-old Dagmar Stankova, who was last seen using a garden hose to try to extinguish flames outside of her home, as The New York Times reported.
California’s approximately 3,500 wildfires have already burned nearly 220,000 acres this year, said Joe Tyler, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire,) at a news conference last week.
While the total number of wildfires is slightly below the state’s five-year average, they have already burned more than five times the average area, which follows a larger trend of worsening natural disasters amid rising temperatures.
“The hots, we say it all the time, are getting a lot hotter,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom at a news conference last week. “We’re experiencing unprecedented record heat — these heat domes over the entire western United States — over and over and over and over and over again: record-breaking temperatures. Record-breaking heat.”
As of Thursday, the fire, dubbed the Mina Fire, was 97% contained, according to Cal Fire.
California experienced a wet winter in 2023, pulling it out of a drought, but led to a significant amount of grass growth that since dried out, which, along with high winds and record-breaking temperatures, contributed to the fire spread.
The June heat wave came during the 12th consecutive month that Earth’s global average temperature was more than 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average, the hottest 12-month stretch on record.
“We are not just in a fire season, we are in a fire year,” Tyler said at the conference, urging caution in dry, hot and windy conditions.
Tyler advised California residents and families to prepare for wildfires. “Please create a wildfire action plan that addresses escape routes, meeting points, animal arrangements and a communication plan with your family,” he said. “Listen to the guidance of law enforcement and our firefighters for evacuation warnings and orders, prepare your home to defend from an advancing wildfire.”
Humans have an enormous impact on planet Earth, but from both an animal welfare and an environmental perspective, perhaps nothing is more important than our diets.
In 2022, more than 82 billion livestock animals were slaughtered for meat, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States, with the majority of those animals being factory farmed. In addition to enormous animal welfare implications, the practice of farming animals is estimated to account for somewhere between 11% and 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
All things considered, what is the most ethical diet? According to utilitarian moral philosopher Peter Singer, it’s one that includes zero — or at least very few — animal products.
Singer is among the most influential living philosophers and is widely credited for putting animal ethics on the map with his controversial 1975 book, Animal Liberation. Because most nonhuman animals have the capacity to suffer, Singer argues, we should not exploit their suffering for our own good, particularly with the horrific conditions of practices like factory farming.
More recently, he published an extensively revised version, Animal Liberation Now, which brings to light the brutal living conditions for tens of billions of animals today.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Singer and discussing speciesism, the conditions of factory farming and how to have an ethical diet.
You’re widely regarded as the father of the animal rights, or as you may prefer, the animal liberation movement. Can you make your case for the pursuit of animal liberation?
The case for the animal liberation movement is that to disregard or discard the interests of beings because they’re not members of our species is indefensible. I use the term “speciesism” to describe that, and that is intended to make the parallel between other -isms such as racism and sexism that most people — certainly I hope the audience that I’m addressing — reject and say that although the analogy is obviously not complete, in all of these cases there’s been a dominant group which has developed an ideology to enable it to justify using a group that it dominates. In one case, nonwhites, in another case, women, and then in this case, nonhumans. To justify using that group for its own purposes in ways that are clearly very harmful to the group, but somewhat beneficial to the dominant group.
So I think we ought to be able to see that the difference in species is not relevant to how bad it is when a being is suffering, if the being is capable of suffering. What matters is how much the being is suffering, what kind of suffering that is — can we compare it with the suffering that we humans may experience? To some extent, I believe we can. And when we make that comparison, it’s not difficult to see that there are many areas in which we inflict immense suffering on nonhuman animals for either no benefits or minor benefits to humans. So I think it follows from the idea of equal consideration of similar interests — which is a principle that I think should hold irrespective of species — it follows from that that many of the things we do to animals are unjustifiable, and that’s the case for animal liberation, or if people want to so put it in terms of recognizing the rights of animals, or, I would say, the case for equal consideration for similar interests across species.
Should we all become vegan or vegetarian?
I would say not in absolutely all circumstances, but if we’re thinking about the situation of somebody who has the option of nourishing themselves well, having an adequate diet, being healthy without consuming animal products, and if those animal products come from commercial enterprises where there’s a profit motive for not being concerned about the wellbeing of the animal beyond productivity of the enterprise, then I think it does follow that we ought not to be consuming those products.
So as I say, there are various other circumstances — that would be circumstances of people who can’t nourish themselves adequately without eating animal products — they have a much larger sacrifice to make than others. And there may be cases where you’re not getting your animal products from large commercial enterprises where the animals have good lives and are humanely killed that would need separate consideration, but the claim I make is one that obviously applies to billions of people in the world today, so that’s enough, I think, to try to get that changed.
You first published Animal Liberation in 1975. And then in May of 2023, you published an updated version, Animal Liberation Now. Surely, much has changed in terms of factory farming practices, the state of animal welfare, among many other factors. In your view, what are some of the most significant changes since 1975, and what made you decide that it was time to publish a revision of Animal Liberation?
Obviously there has been a lot of changes and that’s why it’s really virtually a new book, rather than just a new edition because I’d say probably about half of the text is new. And not so much on the philosophical argument that I just gave you. I think that that has stood up very well to criticism and discussion. But the two longest chapters of Animal Liberation are largely factual where I’m describing research done on animals, and the other describing factory farm conditions. Those chapters had to be completely rewritten. And then there were other discussions about climate change, for example — which was not on my radar or not on many people’s radars in 1975 — had to be brought in because that’s very relevant to the ethics of eating animal products. And I wanted to talk a bit about the progress that the animal movement has made and the progress that it has not made. So those are important changes to the book, and I wanted to talk about that — the new discussion about ethical questions relating to animals, which again was very much a neglected issue, hardly an issue that anybody touched upon in 1975, but now has quite a major literature. So a lot of different things. And also, I should add, there’s more research on animal sentience. So I think we can have more confidence in saying that fish, for example, are sentient, which is something that some people questioned after the first edition was published. And the sentience of octopuses, and even some crustaceans, like lobsters, I think is now much more firmly established than it was. So there’s been a lot of science that has supported the view that I was taking about animal sentience and actually has extended it.
Peter Singer with a previous version of Animal Liberation, on Sept. 22, 2022. Derek Goodwin Photography
In terms of the most significant changes, well, I think some things have gotten better and some things have gotten worse. I talked about the improvements in regulation of factory farming in a few places, most notably the European Union. Also some states of the U.S., but only a minority, particularly California, which passed stricter legislation. So those are good things, but there have also been negative developments. In the case of the chicken industry — chickens are, by far, the most numerous of the land-based vertebrate animals we raise for food — that’s gotten worse because chickens have been bred to grow even faster. And this causes all sorts of problems for them and causes skeletal abnormalities. And they put on weight so fast now that their legs are immaterial for bearing their weight. Chickens are slaughtered when they’re very, very young birds — about six weeks old when they’re slaughtered. And so they’re really babies and their leg bones just aren’t strong enough to support the weight that they’ve put on because they’ve been bred to eat so much and grow so fast. So there’s actually a new cause of pain to bear. They have difficulty bearing their weight, difficulty standing up and walking around because of how fast they’ve been bred to grow. So there are new developments, like that, that make factory farming even worse in some respects than it was.
You describe yourself as a flexible vegan. So you must believe that there’s at least some wiggle room when it comes to having an ethical diet.
That’s because, you know, my ethics are utilitarian or consequentialist. I’m always looking at the consequences of what I do, and my ethics is not about rigid rules. So for me, being vegan is not like somebody — a religious person — who will only eat halal or kosher meat and will think it doesn’t matter how much non-kosher or non-halal meat you eat. It’s just wrong to do it and the wrong would be as great if you ate more of it or less of it. But for me, I want to not be complicit in supporting these industries that treat animals so badly. And the degree of complicity obviously varies by how much I’m spending — to what extent my dollars are supporting those industries. So if for most of my everyday shopping, I avoid animal products, but sometimes when I’m traveling there’s nothing much to eat that doesn’t have some, you know, something like a dairy product, let’s say in it. It’s not a significant contribution that I’m making, and if it’s going to be really difficult for me to get anything to eat that doesn’t contain an animal product — or if I’m in social circumstances where it would disturb the group if I said no, I can’t eat anything here — I’ll eat something that’s vegetarian but not vegan. So that’s the sense in which I’m flexible.
So for people who recognize the cruelty of factory farms and the climate implications of factory farms, and even the climate implications of organic animal farms, but don’t feel ready to commit fully to veganism or vegetarianism, how can those people eat more ethically?
Well, they can still avoid factory farmed products which I think is really important, because that’s where the vast majority of the suffering we inflict on nonhuman animals is. So I would say, depending on how much you feel you want to eat in terms of animal products, I think if you’re talking about the most affluent countries, including the United States, the animal product that perhaps is most easy to get in a form that is not ideal, but is still acceptable, would be eggs from pasture-raised hens. So if you can find a farm that is producing eggs, and the hens really are out on pasture — it’s not just that they’re cage-free, which still might mean that they’re locked up in a big shed — but they’re actually able to go outside and exercise, chase insects, dust bathe, all of those things that are natural for the hens, then you could at least say, well, if the hens are having a reasonably good life here (and sure they’re going to get killed prematurely, and sure the male chicks of that breed are going to get killed immediately on hatching because they’re of no commercial value), it’s a better product definitely than products from animals who are inside all of their lives, very crowded. So I would start with that.
After that, it does get harder. Many people will say, well, what about dairy products from organically raised cows — cows who are outside on pasture again. And that’s certainly better from an animal welfare point of view — as for that matter is beef from grass-fed cows — but it’s worse for the climate, because cows are ruminants and they emit a lot of methane. And the fact that they’re on grass doesn’t really help in terms of reducing their methane output. It’s still there. And in fact, some studies suggest that with grass-fed beef, it’s actually higher, because if you don’t feed them on grain as most beef is fed, for at least the last six months of their lives, they put on weight more slowly, and so for each pound of beef produced there’s more digesting and more methane produced. So you know, that’s a dilemma. But again, if people say, well, I just want to do this occasionally as I need it, or I’m not prepared to go without it, maybe eating small quantities of grass-raised or pasture-raised dairy or beef products might be the next thing to do.
I understand that you’ve recently stepped back from your teaching role at Princeton. So if you don’t mind sharing, what’s next for you?
Yeah, you’re right, I taught my last semester at Princeton now but I’m I’ve got plenty of opportunities to write, to speak, to give interviews like this one. And I’ve got offers of taking visiting positions in other parts of the world which I plan to do, the first of those probably going to Singapore for about a month during 2024. There are other possible places that I will be going to and speaking out in Europe and possibly in Asia. So yeah, I’m planning to keep pretty busy.
That’s all the questions that I had prepared for you. But I’d also like to ask if there’s anything else you’d like to share? Maybe something that we haven’t touched on that you’d like to add?
Oh, I think we’ve covered quite a lot. Obviously, I have a broader interest in bioethics beyond what we’ve spoken about. And so there are a variety of things I’m interested in and I’m continuing to work with the organization The Life You Can Save, which tries to encourage people to give to the most effective charities helping people in extreme poverty. So I think that’s also an important thing to do. And if people want to know more about my work there, they can have a look at my website, petersinger.info, or also go to thelifeyoucansave.org where they can download a free digital copy or audio copy of my book The Life You Can Save and learn more about my work for people in extreme poverty.
Every winter, the polar vortex, a ring of stormy weather, forms high above Antarctica in the stratosphere.
