Battlefield

Marianne Thieme, head of Holland's Party for the Animals and member of the Dutch legislature, is not as famous as Al Gore, but she tells the 'inconvenient truth' that Gore left out of his Nobel award-winning documentary about global warming. Livestock production to satisfy the demand for meat is the single largest cause of greenhouse gases.

The Boston Vegetarian Society recently hosted the Boston première of Meat the Truth at Grasshopper, an Asian vegan restaurant where the group regularly meets. Although Meat the Truth hasn't gotten the media attention that Gore's An Inconvenient Truth has achieved, the new documentary narrated by Thieme takes up what Gore didn't tell the public.



Marianne Thieme



The reasons you haven't seen Meat the Truth at your local theater are varied and include industry resistance and something more personal--your next meal. While it is easy to rant against the petrochemical industry and wasteful energy and resource usage, Meat the Truth forces viewers to confront their own daily eating habits making it an uncomfortable truth.

Thieme articulately and methodically cites the statistics that many don't know and are left out of most energy-conservation awareness efforts. Eighteen percent of greenhouse gases are attributable to meat consumption.

Livestock production is responsible for more greenhouse gases than all of the cars, trucks, buses, trains, and airplanes combined. Using figures validated by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations and World Watch as well as the Institute for Environmental Studies, Thieme makes her case that Gore was silent about the largest cause of greenhouse gases.

Thieme offers no theory about Gore's omission and instead works to fill in the information gap in a film modeled after An Inconvenient Truth making it an important sequel.

One of the documentary's sequences features interviews with a number of people including academics about the largest cause of greenhouse gases. Person after person cites factories, automobiles, and the standard list of polluters--all with a pronounced air of authority. It is only until a pair of giggling teenage girls talk about 'cow farts' does the misinformation end and the realities begin to sink in.

Of course, not all the climate changing consequences of meat consumption are from cattle methane. Livestock production also is responsible for massive deforestation, groundwater contamination, and an inefficient allocation of resources.

Thieme, herself a vegetarian, encourages people to quit meat just one day a week for the environment. The result of such a cutback would be a noticeable reduction of greenhouse emissions says Thieme.

Meat, the uncomfortable truth that Al Gore didn't talk about.


For more info: www.meatthetruth.nl/index.html


http://www.examiner.com/x-1969-Boston-Progressive-Examiner~y2009m5d4-Inconvenient-truth-about-An-Inconvenient-Truth--Al-Gore-left-out-largest-cause-of-global-warming