Sentient: The Podcast

In this episode of the Sentient Media Podcast, we meet Nicholas Carter to tackle the myths around animal agriculture.

Watch the interview on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/jl8xG6TVhyc

Nicholas is an ecologist and co-founder of PlantBasedData.org, a library of peer-reviewed articles and summaries on the environmental, health, economic, and zoonotic disease evidence to shift to plant-based diets. He’s recently prepared a scientific report for World Animal Protection, including a contribution to carbon modeling with Navius Research, on the impacts and opportunities with agriculture in Canada.

Nicholas is also on the advisory board of the Eco Cooks Club, an educational program to empower youth to take climate action by connecting how our food choices impact the planet. He’s also helped launch and leads climate communications for a data center that’s part of the Canadian Centre for Climate Services. He was recently a Center for Biological Diversity panelist alongside Dr. Tara Garnett from Oxford University, and a speaker at the launch of the documentary Meat the Future along with the Jane Goodall Institute, the Good Food Institute, and BluNalu. His research during his master’s degree in environmental practice focused on the global greenhouse gas emissions that are attributed to animal agriculture. He's since written and been interviewed for The New Republic, Plant Based News, Plant Proof, Sentient Media, Forbes, The Globe and Mail, Macleans, and Planet Friendly News. Transitioning to plant-based farming systems has also been a focus where he’s written about regenerative plant farming practices with A-Well-Fed World.

Links:

• Coverage of the Nexus report by Jessica Scott-Reid: https://sentientmedia.org/canadians-meat-dairy-climate-goals/
• Dairy campaign advert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_NII-LL9kw
• Article by Jenny Splitter on Frank Mitloehner, money and miscommunication: https://sentientmedia.org/frank-mitloehner/
• Coverage of Frank Mitloehner in Unearthed and New York Times: https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2022/10/31/frank-mitloehner-uc-davis-climate-funding/ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/climate/frank-mitloehner-uc-davis.html
• George Monbiot’s book, Regenisis: https://twitter.com/georgemonbiot/status/1522851257794318336
• Achieving climate targets in Canada with a shift to plant-based: https://www.worldanimalprotection.ca/news/canadas-2030-climate-targets-are-achievable-if-canadians-move-more-plant-based-diet
• We will not achieve the Paris 1.5 degrees C climate goal without addressing animal agriculture:
  • https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed
  • https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0594-0
  • "If global trends in meat and dairy intake continue, global mean temperature rise will more than likely exceed 2° C, even with dramatic emissions reductions across non‐agricultural sectors." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286920313_The_Importance_of_Reducing_Animal_Product_Consumption_and_Wasted_Food_in_Mitigating_Catastrophic_Climate_Change
  • https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32474248/
• Largest meta-analysis on our food system to date looking at over 38,000 farms in 119 countries representing 90% of all foods: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216
  • 83% of all agricultural land is used for animal agriculture.
  • Shifting entirely away from animal agriculture would free up more than 3 billion hectares of land, equivalent to the continent of Africa.
  • As covered here as well: https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production
• Cycling crops through animals at about a 10% conversion rate: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015/meta
• Even the best type of grazing that can draw down some carbon relative to more intensive uses of land, doesn't offset the methane emissions or other tradeoff environmental concerns: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/reports/fcrn_gnc_report.pdf
• More myths around Grazing: https://grazingfacts.com/
• Nationwide shift to grass-fed beef requires larger cattle population, emits more methane, and would use far more land than is available: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/37260135
• Kiss the Ground analysis and podcast: https://plantbasednews.org/opinion/kiss-the-earth-last-ditch-effort-keep-meat-relevant/
• Rewilding documentary and research from Dr. William Ripple https://www.rewildingamountain.com/
• Stock-Free or Veganic Farming: https://sentientmedia.org/farming-for-the-planet/ and https://awellfedworld.org/issues/climate-issues/farming-for-climate/
• Biodiversity:
  
  
  • "The livestock sector is currently the single major driver of habitat loss and degradation, which is in its turn a leading cause of species decline and extinction worldwide."
    • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2530064420300614#bib0085 Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation
  • The “past and present processes by which human carnivory threatens the world's biodiversity makes it arguably the most detrimental aspect of our ecology, from a conservation point-of-view."
    • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969715303697 Science of the Total Environment
  • Grazing & Biodiversity - Possibly some more birds and insects vs. an intensive feedcrop, but far less than rewilding: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ele.13527 & https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1011013108
• Highly paid beef industry academics: https://sentientmedia.org/frank-mitloehner/ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/climate/frank-mitloehner-uc-davis.html
• This study showed doubling the proportion of veg meals offered increases veg sales by between 41%-79%: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1907207116
• Nudge and increase accessibility to plant-based foods: https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/43/2/392/5637580?login=false#.Xeom9b_uTbw.twitter

Find @NicholasDCarter on social:

https://twitter.com/NicholasDCarter

https://www.instagram.com/nicholasdcarter/

Website:

https://www.plantbaseddata.org/