HOME: Our life choices

      My mission tonight was to watch "Avatar" since I missed it in theaters. I stayed home today to relax and reflect, and watching Avatar seemed like a good way to spend the rest of my night. Thinking that I had found it, I clicked on a youtube link. As I began to watch the film, I was amazed at the intro and how it really spoke to the earth's landscape and environmental issues. I thought it was an excellent way to highlight and segue into the movie's focus on earth's resources and imperialism. As I watched earth's lush landscapes and listened to the story of it's birth, I wondered when I would see the CG characters that made the movie so famous. 30 minutes into the film, I looked at the title and realized I had not been watching the movie I intended. At 9pm I was not mad that I spent time watching "Home", actually I was content on watching the rest of it because it was so captivating.


         "Home" focused on how humanity's activities have effected the earth. It's a sot of mash-up of the films "Baraka" and "Earth" . The words reflected in the awesome narration were both informative and a reminder for me of how I thought of the earth as a child. Without knowing the intricacies of science, ecology, sustainability, and industry, with caution in my heart I somehow understood the basic idea of energy, and how heat, movement, and resources could contribute to the dwindling of the natural wonder of earth. My basic idea was that if buses, trains, planes, and the activity of the hustle and bustle of people in the world, especially in the cities could produce heat, it would make the earth hotter and things would move at an unnatural speed. In addition, that alone could not be the cause of some of Earth's atmospheric imbalances, but also man's deliberate efforts to manipulate and destroy resources. The 9 year old me understood this, and the adult me can have my childhood speculation confirmed. (I would probably call it an educated guess as well since at 8 or 9 years old the recycling campaign was introduced to my generation... and I really took it to heart).

Here are a few things "Home" brought to mind. What if:

1. We never bought frivolous things that require excessive packaging, we can't use right away, are not biodegradable, or are not earth-derived? (Canal Street in NYC would be a great place to start.)
2. We bought food harvested locally and seasonally, to harm the land less, and have a little more autonomy on the foods that are available to us? 
3. We provide jobs and communities that would financially and culturally support the people who made a living from what could be our "former" way of gaining food? This would alleviate the anxiety people who work in the current food industry may have about continuing to make a living and re-create their immediate environment with social and cultural abundance as the goal.

What "Home" did for me was sustain my ammunition for remaining a vegetarian.  In my continued efforts to  research vegetarianism for sustainability, here is a crash course of terms and key points for your understanding. I have gathered this info from a few different sources:

Nutritional Ecology (The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition) :
The term nutrition ecology was coined in 1986 by a group of nutritionists at the University of Giessen, Germany (6). Nutrition ecology is a holistic concept that considers all links in the nutrition system, with the aim of sustainability. Thus, nutrition ecology describes a new field of nutrition sciences that deals with the local and global consequences of food production, processing, trade, and consumption. 

• More that 1/3 of all fossil fuels produced in the United States go towards animal agriculture.
  
• According to a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (1), the production of one calorie of animal protein requires more than ten times the fossil fuel input as a calorie of plant protein. This means that ten times the amount of carbon dioxide is emitted as well. 
• A report in the New Scientist estimated that driving a hybrid car rather than an average vehicle would conserve a little over one ton of carbon dioxide per year. A vegan diet, however, consumes one and a half tons less than the average American diet (2). Adopting a vegan diet actually does more to reduce emissions than driving a hybrid car!
• A Smithsonian study estimates that the necessity for more grazing land means that every minute of every day, a land area equivalent to seven football fields is destroyed in the Amazon basin(1).
• On average, land requirements for meat-protein production are 10 times greater than for plant-protein production. About 40% of the world’s grain harvest is fed to animals. Half of this grain would be more than enough to feed all hungry people of our planet. Animal manure, which is produced in huge amounts by industrial agriculture, causes high levels of potentially carcinogenic nitrates in drinking water and vegetables. Animal production requires considerable energy and water resources and leads to deforestation, overgrazing, and overfishing.

I hope this information inspires you to have a better relationship with the earth, and I hope in watching "Home" you can understand your power to positively change the damage that has been done to it. We can all do our part to sustain the circle of life on Earth. Now I feel like watching the "Lion King" : )

InJoy,

Nicole