Page 70 - Spring2015

Tim's DVD Reviews

Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret land, and cows produce enough manure to bury
AUM Films, First Spark Media several large cities and a few small countries.
He lists those cities and countries. He does not
Our story opens with Bruce Hamilton of include Washington, DC, presumably because
the Sierra Club expounding on rising carbon it is already covered. He admits that the amount
dioxide levels, rising sea levels, drought, famine, of water associated with cattle raising is prob-
extinction, cats fornicating with dogs, etc. Well, ably grossly overstated and assumes that water
he might not have mentioned that last one, but disappears from the planet forever once used.
in a nutshell, according to Hamilton, we’re all He looks at grass-based farming but concludes
shortly going to die horrible deaths. And then it is even less sustainable than the conventional
the movie gets really depressing. model.
Kip Andersen interviews a variety of en- While he was looking at the over-grazing
vironmental and health experts. Mr. Andersen issue, he came across the name of Allan Savory,
came across an alarming piece of news from the and for a brief moment I thought he might come
UN that cows are responsible for emitting more to an intelligent conclusion about grazing. Silly
greenhouse gases than the entire transportation me. Allan Savory made mistakes in his earlier
sector combined. When he talked to various envi- years, some very unfortunate, but learned from
ronmental groups about this looming bovine eco- those mistakes and went on to do some great
logical apocalypse he was disappointed at their work. Andersen fixated on the mistakes and
responses. Greenpeace didn’t even want to talk decided he would not listen to anything said by
to him. California government representatives someone who would make mistakes. If that is his
talked to him but had no comment on how too standard, I’m not sure how he’s finding anyone to
many cows are going to do us all in. The Sierra listen to. He went on to interview a sock puppet
Club spoke with him at length but didn’t see any for the GMO industry but had the wisdom not
reason to panic about this cow-tastrophy. One to listen to the puppet.
person somewhat bluntly disagreed with him, There are more episodes of throwing dubi-
which he found bizarre. It’s not clear whether it ous numbers around. For example, Andersen
was bizarre that someone would disagree with claims we can get fifteen times more protein
him or that the very idea that he might be wrong from plants than animals. There is no thought
was bizarre. given to what happens when that partial plant
Andersen eventually finds Will Anderson protein turns out not to be enough. Also no
who is a former director of Greenpeace and will thought about all the nutrients you can’t get from
talk to him. Will Anderson starts out by saying plants. At one point he bemoans the killing of
The West that environmental organizations are not telling all those cows. At another point he recommends
was not an the truth about what the world needs from us as using all crops for humans and not feeding it to
a species. Up to that point I agreed with him but cows. I’m not sure what he thinks is going to
untouched he quickly lost me after that. happen when you stop feeding cows.
wilderness Kip Andersen has amassed a blizzard of From a nutritional point of view this film is
sparsely factoids from his interviews, UN reports, Inter- a disaster, but it goes well beyond that. It seems
net blurbs and Chicken Little. Highlights include many people, in particular some environmental-
populated these familiar items: Cows produce methane. It ists and those who bloviate about sustainability,

by a bunch of takes twenty-five hundred gallons of water to are operating under false assumptions based
vegans. produce one pound of beef. Rain forests are being on what the early white settlers (Europeanus
torn down to graze cattle. Cattle overgraze the ignoramus) found when they got here and their
68 Wise Traditions SPRING 2015 Wise Traditions

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