Natasha Chart

Recent Activity

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  Natasha signed the petition | 9 days ago

  Give Safeway employee Ryan Young his job back with back pay
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  Natasha signed the petition | 12 days ago

  Stop Verizon’s Corporate Greed
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  Natasha signed the petition | 12 days ago

  Chris Anderson, curator of TED: Release video of Nick Hanauer's TED talk on inequality
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  Natasha signed the petition | 3 months ago

  Tell Business Leaders: Help Repeal Alabama's Anti-Immigrant Law
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  Natasha commented on the article | over 2 years ago

  In Response to "The Omnivore's Delusion" Part 2

  If you have healthy soil to start, you're working with organic matter added previously by animals, perhaps birds and small rodents, and by microfauna in the soil, even if it happened over a very long period of time imperceptible to the current occupants.

  
  

  Unless worms and beetles, etc., are really misclassified plants or fungi, you're just wrong about how that all works.

  
  

  If you only care about animals that remind you of yourself, you're as anthropocentric as I am. Take some biology classes.

  
  

  And gods, gooseberries and kale. Nice side dishes. That reminds me of how, whenever I'm forced to eat vegetarian meals, I'm always grimly unsatisfied no matter how much I chew through, not even counting the inevitable blood sugar crash. If I never eat another nasty, undercooked lentil dish (and really, lentils? one of the fastest cooking beans?) proferred by earnest vegan potluckers, it'd be too soon.

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  Natasha commented on the article | over 2 years ago

  In Response to "The Omnivore's Delusion" Part 2

  Anthropocentric? Guilty.

  
  

  I'm not insulted by the suggestion that I care more about my own species than other species, because it's true. There isn't a single animal anywhere whose life I'd put equal to the life of a human. Any human. Not one. You can feel differently if you want to.

  
  

  And the point of integrating animal and plant agriculture is that plants need the nutrients animals provide. Without the synthetic agriculture that's poisoning the world, some or all of dung, bones, urine and blood are necessary for plants to thrive. If you exclude animals from the ecological systems where our plant foods are cultivated, you must use the planet's dwindling supply of fossil fuel and mineral resources to get a harvest out of them, you must poison animals and fungi and plants with horrendous chemicals that cycle around the food chain for generations. That's your choice.

  
  

  But exploring the other main alternative for plant fertilization, fossil fertilizers, that's also an animal product. That's all oil is. Compressed, dead animals, that offgassed more or less 'natural' gas. 

  
  

  Plants need to eat animal products, themselves, or they can't sustainably feed us. You can try it at home. Try to raise plants that haven't been fertilized, see how it goes. This is what I mean when I've said there are no vegan ecosystems, because it's the ecosystems themselves that need animals, whether we're growing food in them or not.

  
  

  It may be a nobly-motivated sentiment not to want anything to die so you can live, but that's not how it works.

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  Natasha commented on the article | over 2 years ago

  In Response to "The Omnivore's Delusion" Part 2

  There's a lot of the planet's surface which is extremely unsuitable for row crop cultivation, land that needs to be kept under steady cover of vegetation and not dug up every year.

  
  

  Unless you want to rely heavily on petrochemical dependent crops that strip the land of it's nutrients and provide insufficient cover even without tillage, and that often requires unsustainable fossil water use, that land is mostly unsuitable for producing food for humans. Poultry and ruminants can turn grass and scrub and bugs we can't eat into high quality, nutrient-dense food that we can eat. Their waste, when not contaminated with pharmaceuticals and heavy metals, builds vibrant soil communities that sequester carbon and preserve nutrients.

  
  

  And while it's certainly possible to have a vegetarian diet in areas where the land is better suited for milk-producing animals than grain, there are no pre-industrial vegan societies. Without manufactured foods and synthetic agriculture, most people and particularly children, need milk and eggs at least to grow up as strong and healthy as their genetic template allows. While we may be nearly drowning in fat, it was a prized, if more occasional, part of a diet that didn't rely on an industrial food chain, high calorie sugar hits, and revolting levels of soy consumption.

  
  

  A sustainable agriculture requires a vision of agricultural production communities as functional, self-repairing ecosystems. There are no such ecosystems without animals.

  
  

  There need to be things grown for animals to eat out on land that resembles their natural habitat, ways to recycle their waste immediately into productive soil, predators to cull their excess numbers and keep them in balance. That would work for a long time, it could continue. That agriculture could sustain itself without fossil fuel-derived pesticides and fertilizers, without exhausting mineral phosphate reserves, without poisoning the rivers and seas.

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  Natasha commented on the article | almost 3 years ago

  Boycott Whole Foods

  I'm sure it would suit corporations best if they could wholly divorce that last little shred of conscience from our purchasing decisions, but alas, niggling scraps of concern for the common good remain.

  
  

  Anyway, if corporations believed so strongly in freedom of speech, people would never get hired, not hired or fired, over what they post on private web sites or facebook pages, but that isn't how it works. Corporations don't operate in a vacuum of value, nor do they believe that they do, however much they like to be insulated from the self-serving greed of their executives when they're dumb enough to let their inner Tory shine through.

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  Natasha commented on the article | almost 3 years ago

  Agriculture's Nitrogen Fix

  The number of things human beings have tried that seemed like a good idea at the time, but later proved to have unforeseen negative consequences, is vast. It doesn't seem like something that was intended maliciously.

  
  

  Nonetheless, it's run into problems and we know a lot more now about organic nutrient management techniques, as well as having a worldwide wealth of experimentation to work from. We can and should change direction.

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  Natasha commented on the article | almost 3 years ago

  And .... We're Back

  Thank you, ma'am!