Sustainability and the Human Diet

I want to take a moment and introduce readers to the thoughts of J. Morris Hicks. As you’ll see in his remarks linked here and pasted below, the fellow has undergone a wonderful evolution in his work with respect to the priorities that he places on various aspects of our lives.

His current efforts as a writer and activist are rooted in the sustainability of the supply chain of the food we eat. The slide above summarizes all of this nicely. It reminds us of how far removed from our consciousness this whole subject is. We go about our day eating as we do, rarely considering the short-term and long-term consequences of our diet.

A further note on this gentleman’s evolution: over time he’s moved from the health of the individual to the health of the civilization, expanding his zone of responsibility from one person to 7 billion. Not too shabby, in my estimation.

From Mr. Hicks:

Greetings!

Since February of 2011, I have published almost 900 articles on my blog-site. Most of the first 100 were about health. The next 600 were about all the many consequences of our food choices.

But the last 200 have been devoted primarily to leadership and activism as it relates to the long-term sustainability of our ecosystem, our civilization and our very species.

Today, I posted a blog about LEADERSHIP and it features Pope Francis. With over 1.3 billion Catholics and another one or two billion (like me) who respect him, he is arguably the most influential leader in the world today. It began like this:

Who is going to tell the world that we don’t NEED to eat animal protein to be healthy? It could very well be Pope Francis–if only he were to become enlightened about the cold hard facts regarding the devastating consequences of our food choices. Click here to continue reading The Pope and the “Protein Myth”

Last week, I posted a blog entitled, the “Most Important Topic in the History of Humanity–Our food choices in the 21st century.” And unlike most of my blogs, it is still getting hundreds of views per day–a full ten days after being published. It began like this:

Life began on our planet about four billion years ago. The human species emerged just 200,000 years ago. If you crammed those four billion years of history into just one year, we’ve been here for just the last 26 minutes of the last hour of that year. And our population has exploded from one billion to seven billion in just the last two seconds.

So what about the health of our planet? How are we doing when it comes to sustainability? Earlier this year, I posted a blog about a new scientific report published in the journal Science by 18 of the world’s leading environmental researchers. In a nutshell, they stated that human activity has already pushed us by four of the nine planetary boundaries that define our planet’s ability to sustain life as we know it.

In that blog I touched on all nine of the boundaries and the most powerful steps that we can take to preserve our precious planet’s ability to support human life. Racing past environmental “tipping points” in 2015

Making complex things simple. In my study of industrial engineering in college, I was taught the importance of making complex things simple. And that’s what I have tried to do here—cramming the simple solution to the most critical problem in the history of the world onto one piece of paper. I call it my One-Page Recipe for Saving our Ecosystem.

Sincerely,

J. Morris (Jim) Hicks