III. An Environmental Catechism

We also vacation and visit and sightsee, but most of what our cars do is take us away from the people we love, so that we can do the things that we have to do in order to buy more gas to put into our cars.

A full 30 percent of the fresh water used by humans on planet Earth is spent in the production, maintenance, and slaughter of meat animals. The twenty-five billion cows, pigs, and chickens that live in captivity while waiting to be slaughtered are given medicine in vast amounts. As of 1990, two-thirds of the antibiotics used in the United States ar

the United States uses half of the OECD’s total energy and one-third of the OECD’s total electricity and is responsible for just under half of the OECD’s total carbon dioxide emissions. The United States also eats one-third of the OECD’s total meat as well as one-quarter of the OECD’s total sugar.

The people of the OECD, while representing only one-sixth of the global population, use one-third of the world’s energy and half of the world’s electricity and are responsible for one-third of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Not only that, but the OECD consumes one-third of the world’s meat as well as one-third of the world’s sugar.

It makes sense that the most effective and long-lasting mechanism for curbing global population growth revolves around an elimination of gender inequality.

Henry George was also right in that most of the want and suffering that we see in our world today originates not from Earth’s inability to provide but from our inability to share, as we’ll see so many times in later pages. It is because so many of us consume far beyond our needs that a great many more of us are left with almost nothing.

If there is something in the world nobler than a good dog, I have not yet encountered it.

The number of endangered species within freshwater habitats is greater, proportionally, than in the land and ocean combined.