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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/eating-animals-greta/"></div>Climate activist Greta Thunberg gave a shaming <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit">speech at the UN General Assembly</a> in September, but she ignored the most important way to fight climate change. “The science is crystal clear,” she said, and the science says that the most effective way to fight climate change is to stop eating meat.
It’s surprising Greta didn’t mention this in her UN Speech, and hasn’t made it a main talking point during her whirlwind year of having the world’s ear. But she’s not alone. Al Gore’s documentaries, David Wallace-Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth,” and even Jonathan Franzen’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending">recent provocative article</a> for The New Yorker all ignored saying that the best way to be a climate activist is to go vegetarian, if not vegan.
Let’s be honest, Franzen says, no matter what we do, the apocalypse of climate change is coming. That’s true. We’re not reaching that two-degree limit. So the best thing to do is to stop pretending and start preparing. And because our politicians are beholden to business as usual, Franzen is right that protesting won’t do anything, other than make us feel like we’re doing something. But as Jonathan Safran Foer argues in his recent book We Are the Weather, we can actually do something that makes a difference: radically reduce your consumption of animal products.
Here’s why: as a <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987">July 2018 study in Science</a> determined, animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change. This is partly because livestock is the leading source of methane and nitrous oxide emissions. The climate change discussion is usually focused on carbon, but methane has 34 times the global warming potential (GWP) as C02 does. In the ability to trap heat, methane is 86 times more powerful than carbon. More significantly, nitrous oxide has 310 times the GWP of C02. Logically, then, methane and nitrous oxide are the most urgent greenhouse gases to cut. And as Foer writes, “because they are primarily created by our food choices, they are easier to cut.”
This brings us to cows. According to the UN Framework on Climate Change, if cows were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the US — that is, cows have greater emissions than the entire EU. Yes, cows burp (not fart) methane, and as far as carbon goes, in terms of what is worst to eat, beef is indisputable winner. Beef has 6.61 pounds of C02 associated with each serving. The next highest, cheese, has only 2.45 pounds. Pork has 1.72 pounds, poultry 1.26, eggs 0.89, and milk has 0.72 pounds—we’ll come back to milk.
These facts are why, as Tad Friend wrote in a recent New Yorker <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/can-a-burger-help-solve-climate-change">article on the Impossible Burger</a>, “Every four pounds of beef you eat contributes as much to global warming as flying from New York to London.” Greta Thunberg got a lot of press for sailing from Europe to the US, but you should get similar praise if you stop eating beef for a month.
Yes, <a href="https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/fake-meat-junk-food">fake meat is still junk food</a>, and yes, Impossible Burgers are unapologetically pro-GMO — they irresponsibly use GMO soy, and the key ingredient that gives Impossible Burgers their meaty taste and look, heme, is genetically engineered. But what’s the priority? It’s not about health, it’s about survival. If we want an inhabitable earth, the priority is to drastically cut animal agriculture. And the way to do that is drastically cut our animal consumption, because consumer habits affect producers, and the market will follow changing diets.
It’s true that eating local, sustainably-grown meat doesn’t cause nearly as much damage as factory farmed meat. But the fact is that <a href="https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates">99% of meat consumed in the US is factory farmed</a>. All fast-food meat is from factory farms, so if most people will still be eating fast-food, it’s better for the fast-food to be plant based. Impossible Burgers require 87% less water and 96% less land than a cow burger, and its production causes 89% less greenhouse emissions. So while I might not eat them myself, it’s incredibly significant that they’re available in fast-food restaurants across the country.
What about fish? Fishing and fish farms have their own issues, but affecting climate change doesn’t seem to be one of them, at least not near the degree that animal agriculture does. If your main concern is the environmental impact of your diet, then pescatarian away.
While we are self-regulating our own diets, the government can also do something to encourage this market shift, and that’s to tax meat and dairy products. The strategy worked well with other social harms like tobacco, and can help in curbing stubborn behavior. Because let’s face it, we don’t want to give up meat and dairy.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s idea is to avoid animal products before dinner. In order to prevent “catastrophic, irreversible environmental damage,” he writes in We Are the Weather, “the average US and UK citizen must consume 90 percent less beef and 60 percent less dairy,” which is about the same as abstaining from breakfast and lunch. His reasoning is that we traditionally have more meaningful meals during dinner, which often involves meat.
But what about egg, cheese, and bacon breakfast sandwiches? What about milk in coffee? There’s no way people are going to give up animal products for breakfast, I thought while reading We Are the Weather. Better to encourage people to give them up at lunch and dinner. No way I’m giving up my cappuccinos, I thought. After all, I’m already vegetarian, and I don’t drive. I’m doing my part. But you know what? I have given up cappuccinos. I simply stopped buying milk. I now have black espresso. Or I use oatmilk — the barista blend. Sure, it’s not as tasty, but it’s totally fine. (And I lost a pound or two.) As for cheese — well, we’ll see about cheese…
Now, I’m not foolish enough to believe that my minor diet change will affect the climate, but I know that millions of similar diet decisions will. As individuals, we aren’t able to stop global greenhouse gas emissions, but we can change our eating habits — right now. So if you want to do something to fight climate change, cutting animal products from your diet is the best thing to do. Go ahead and tell the world, Greta.
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Photo by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/proimos/5568076904/in/photolist-dtevGw-9u2RgW-5c2Yhs-pjhm89-cKE91S-Ua97-TJ7Ng1-h53WvF-Y4sMed-QsxTdx-np9fUa-TZtqx3-23uENxR-WwYoL-m4xfE-bKXojM-oAjWWG-6iWcjZ-dbhCdf-54ZCYv-ekLxK2-6feAmE-6mCXVv-j4wRYE-7LjC45-9LFcZq-a9ngvM-2MPDFp-4L86P5-MkQBm5-qLk4J-dvnZPc-pQWge3-axrBrL-pAuQAz-6nL2CT-QghMyr-pEGVqe-7vPFHF-7P2Ro1-pPE6Dk-6xcDQb-igEJoP-a5hMFy-6nQhS5-7RdV9z-YWA8Kv-f3TJ3R-nFJ5Zz-dC3FJ3/">Alex Proimos</a>.
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What about Eating Animals, Greta?

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/exodus-really-happened-according-new-theory-israel-knohl/"></div>For anyone familiar with the story of the Exodus, it’s rather disappointing to learn of the near consensus among scholars that there is no evidence of an Israelite presence in ancient Egypt. This means there was no 400 years of slavery, no Passover, and no exodus to the Promised Land. There wasn’t even a Moses. In other words, the foundational narrative of Judaism is bunk. That’s why it’s big news that biblical scholar Israel Knohl thinks he can prove otherwise.
Knohl, who is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, made his career with his book The Sanctuary of Silence (1992) and its theory of the “Holiness School,” the group who wrote the Holiness Code found in chapters 17-26 of the Book of Leviticus. In his new book How the Bible Was Born, recently published in Hebrew by the Israeli publishing house Kinneret, he proposes a theory anchoring the exodus story in historical fact. That is, Knohl has found evidence supporting the idea that Moses actually existed, and that the exodus was real — though not as we know it.
Knohl’s theory is based on Egyptian documents from the period, “historical hints” in the Bible, and the writings of Mantheo, the 3rd century BCE Egyptian priest whose work we know from being quoted by the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus. I was fortunate to get a peek at an early translation (a section of which will be published in the Fall 2018 issue of Harvard Divinity Bulletin), and here’s what he’s put together:
The first thing to know is that there was a devastating famine around the year 1200 BCE, give or take 25 years. This famine lasted for about 50 years, and affected the entire Mediterranean region, causing a mass migration of people all over the ancient near and middle East. Most of these groups headed to Egypt, where food could still be grown. War was raging everywhere, with groups like the Philistines migrating from Greece to Canaan, devastating populations on the way.
Knohl believes this crisis is the historical setting of the Joseph story in Genesis 41–47, when there’s a “world-wide famine” and Joseph’s brothers come down to Egypt and are settled “in the best of the land in the region of Ramses.” In the late 13th century, Ramses II was the pharaoh of Egypt. According to Egyptian sources from the same period, a tribe from the Edom region (in the Transjordan north of Arabia) called Jacob-El took their flocks down to Egypt during the famine, and, as starving migrants, served as cheap labor for the building public projects for the Egyptians. Knohl sees this tribe as the biblical sons of Jacob.
About 30 years after the death of Ramses II, his dynasty — the 19th dynasty — came to end. The last ruler of his dynasty was a Queen named Tausret, who died around 1188 BCE with no descendants. An Egyptian document from this time called the Great Harris Papyrus, tells of a “Haru” — a Canaanite, Syrian or Transjordanian from the north — who came and took over Egyptian rule after her death. The document says this Haru brought with him a large group of followers, who objected to the Egyptian gods and their rituals, and that he and his followers ruled the country for a time, exploiting it economically.
There’s also a monument set up by Pharaoh Setnakhte in the city of Yev or Elephantine, in southern Egypt. It tells of how Setnakhte, the founder of the 20th dynasty, battled the Haru who had taken over Egypt, stripped him of power, and ascended the throne in his place. The Setnakhte monument also says that the Haru gave silver and gold to mercenaries he invited from other countries to help him rule over Egypt.
A similar story is told by Mantheo, who writes about a group of so-called lepers in Egypt whose leader was named Osarseph. Mantheo says Osarseph gave the group a new religion that disrespected the Egyptian gods and sacred animals, which the lepers slaughtered, roasted, and ate. This blasphemy was too much for the Pharaoh, who decided to cleanse the kingdom of these lepers. The lepers were attacked, and Osarseph went to Jerusalem to enlist the help of mercenaries. He came back down with tens of thousands of soldiers, looted the Egyptian temples, profaned the idols, and slaughtered and ate the sacred animals.
So there’s a basic agreement in all three sources: A foreign group tried to rule Egypt with the help of mercenaries. They insulted the Egyptian gods and sacrificed the sacred animals. Finally, they and their allied mercenaries were expelled from Egypt. Putting the story these sources tell together with a few key phrases from the Bible, Knohl determines the Exodus was not oppressed slaves fleeing for their life, but essentially a military evacuation of foreign soldiers, after their failed attempt to rule the country.
What are these key phrases? Exodus 12:37-38 reads: “the people of Israel journeyed from Ramses to Succot, around six hundred thousand men on foot, besides children, and a mixed multitude went up also with them.” The word ragli, “on foot,” is only found eleven times in the Bible, and the other ten refer to an explicitly military context to mean infantry soldiers, as opposed to cavalry or charioteers. And what is “a mixed multitude”? The Hebrew word erev means mixed, and when it is used elsewhere, specifically in the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, it refers to a military unit of foreign mercenaries. So Knohl thinks this passage means the Israelites went up from Egypt and many foreign mercenaries went with them. This matches Exodus 13:18, which says the Israelites left Egypt not only with wealth, but ready for battle, armed.
Bringing everything together, Knohl boldly pinpoints the exodus to a specific year: 1186 BCE, the second year of Setnakhte’s reign. And he says the “Haru” Canaanite-Syrian leader who despised Egyptian religion and brought mercenaries down from Jerusalem is…? You guessed it: Osaresph, who, Mantheo writes, was also called Moses.
So, to nutshell, Knohl proposes that the Israelites (the Jacob-El tribe) came from Edom to Egypt during the great famine, which began at the end of Ramses II’s reign, around 1225 BCE. After Tausret’s death in 1188, they were led by Moses and his group of foreign mercenary armies, and tried to take over Egypt. Moses and his men lost, were expelled from Egypt, and retreated to Canaan. They left at the beginning of Setnakhte’s reign, in 1186 BCE. That’s a span of about 40 years, from Joseph to Moses.
If accepted, Knohl’s proposal will have many profound implications, and I’ll let the scholars sort all that out. For most of us, however, the take away is that if you attend a Passover meal this year and someone mentions 400 years of slavery, you’ll be able to say, “Well, actually…” and give the table a lot to talk about.
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How the Exodus Really Happened, According to a New Theory by Israel Knohl

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/erling-kagge-seeking-silence-within/"></div>Ajahn Sumedho, the esteemed American-born teacher of the Thai Forest tradition of Theravada Buddhism, has spoken and written extensively about the sound of silence. He’s not talking about the sound of silence that Simon and Garfunkel sang about, nor is he referring to a silence of protest in the face of political injustice. And no, it’s not the silence referred to in Shusako Endo’s novel-turned-Scorsese-movie Silence either — that is, the silence of God in the face of prayer, a theme popular since the days of Solomon’s Temple. Sumedho is talking about something else. For him, that sound of silence is the ideal object of meditation. Once the mind is calm and quiet, it becomes clear that there is actually no such thing as silence. If you can hear the buzz of your own brain and the swish of your blood, you’re meditating well. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/erling-kagge-seeking-silence-within/#more-6108" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Erling Kagge, Seeking Silence Within

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/dharma-princess-bride-coolest-fairy-tale-time-can-teach-us-buddhism-relationships/"></div>In 2015, the statistical website FiveThirtyEight conducted a survey of the 25 most rewatchable movies of all time. The Princess Bride was number six — tied with The Godfather. It&#8217;s one of my very favorite films, and since it came out in 1987 I&#8217;ve watched it many, many times. But perhaps not as many as Ethan Nichtern.  A teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, Nichtern loves the movie so much he not only regularly quotes it in his Dharma talks, he wrote a book about the connections between the film and Buddhism, aptly titled The Dharma of “The Princess Bride.” <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/dharma-princess-bride-coolest-fairy-tale-time-can-teach-us-buddhism-relationships/#more-5113" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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The Dharma of “The Princess Bride”: What the Coolest Fairy Tale of our Time Can Teach Us About Buddhism and Relationships

The Dharma of “The Princess Bride”: What the Coolest Fairy Tale of our Time Can Teach Us About Buddhism and Relationships

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Randy Rosenthal is the co-founding editor of the literary journals The Coffin Factory and Tweed’s Magazine of Literature &amp; Art. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, The New York Journal of Books, Paris Review Daily, Bookforum, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Daily Beast, and The Brooklyn Rail. He is a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School, where he studied religion and literature, and currently teaches writing classes at Harvard.

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Randy Rosenthal is the co-founding editor of the literary journals The Coffin Factory and Tweed’s Magazine of Literature &amp; Art. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, The New York Journal of Books, Paris Review Daily, Bookforum, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Daily Beast, and The Brooklyn Rail. He is a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School, where he studied religion and literature, and currently teaches writing classes at Harvard.