Last night, I watched with great interest George Monbiot's documentary on CH4 titled
"ApocalypseCow".
What a provocative title, but hey...investigative Journos like these titles! I like them too :)
The film was full of mistakes and simplifications, though.
It had a naive approach.
It suggested that forests are better than farms. On what basis?
It also suggested that the biggest problem in rivers is animals' manure...that causes algae to grow. This is scientific non-sense. The biggest pollutants of water beds and water resources are anthropogenic activities producing heavy metals and pesticides.
Chemical pollutants are much worse than organic pollutants because chemical compounds bio-accumulate in Nature and in animals.
But hey, George focused to manure!
Also, cultivating animal cells to produce food is simply sci-fi at the moment. In the 1990's I was doing in my PhD in Food Science in Leeds and everybody was upbeat about GM plants. Today...some 25 years later, nobody wants to eat GM foods!
So, let's take our time to think about food coming from cells... at the moment, it is tasteless, bloody expensive and just sci-fi. In my view...
The film ended with George killing a dear! What a scene! An environmentalist holding a gun not in self defense but to kill a beautiful animal!
Killing dears is tragic. There are so many other ways to control its population... No need for such stupid violence...
One question for George and the supporters of the film :
all the farmers, fishermen, fish-farmers etc...if they lose their jobs thanks to cells-food, what will they do? Is this a valid societal question or do we just care for the "Environment"?
In my view, Humans are Environment as well!
Ioannis Zabetakis
Head
Biological Sciences, UL
