John Seed and the Council of All Beings Part III
(Page 4 of 10)
May/June 1989
By Pat Stone
Every cent Seed earned from last summer's Council of All Beings went to support the Ecuador project. His only personal income came from selling items like books and tapes.
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MOTHER: I understand how your Australian group could help save forests in your own country, but what can an action group in the U.S. do about rain forests on the other side of the world?
Seed: We can't directly influence governments like Brazil, Malaysia or Indonesia. But we can stop the World Bank and other organizations from funding themand we can stop consuming the products of their destructive practices. The United States is the second-largest importer of rainforest timbers in the world. Only Japan buys more, and a lot of the wood Japan imports gets used in products that are then sold to the U.S. So we need to teach people and governments not to use tropical timbers like mahogany, meranti, teak, lauan and Pacific maple.
There're other things we can do. Last year, RAN groups identified Burger King as the biggest importer of Central American beef. As you know, much rain forest in that region is destroyed to raise cattle for American hamburgers. So these groups proclaimed a "Whopper Stopper" month last May and held demonstrations in about 50 cities. In a typical demonstration, a papier-mache cow would eat rain-forest leaves and then excrete Whoppers onto the pavement.
These actions received a lot of publicity so much that Burger King sales dropped 11 % during May. Finally, Pillsbury, Burger King's parent company, agreed to stop importing beef from the target countries. Two weeks later, a Costa Rican newspaper announced that the country's beef exports had dropped by 80% because of Burger King's, pullout.
Now, I'm not trying to say that was a solution; no doubt, Costa Rica got rid of its beef somewhere else. Plus, Burger King is now using domestic beef, and that brings up a whole other story which I hope MOTHER EARTH NEWS covers sometime-namely, that the livestock industry in this country is as huge a cause of environmental destruction as cattle are in Costa Rica. I'm only pointing out that these small, decentralized actions are definitely the sort of direction that rain-forest protection has to take.
MORE THAN ONCE SINCE OUR MONTANA meeting, Seed wrote to me, citing John Robbins' book, Diet for a New America, and urging me to cover America's livestock industry. So OK, John, briefly, here goes:
According to Robbins, over 80% of the corn, oats and soybeans raised in the U.S. are eaten by livestock. Directly and indirectly, they consume half of all water used in the U.S. and cause 85% of our topsoil loss. Two hundred sixty million acres of our forest have been clear-cut to create cropland for livestock. Ninety per cent of harmful organic wastewater pollution in America is attributable to livestock. Most of this damage could be reversed if Americans ate less meat. Indeed, one acre of trees is spared each year by each individual who switches to a purely vegetarian diet.
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