John Dunne Lecture/Flourish Foundation
September 15, 2015
http://foodchoicetaskforce.org
Hollywood Movie director/writer/producer James Cameron in Fortune Magazine Q&A discussing his passion for sustainable food and animal agriculture on a growing planet.
‘…and one of the things that gave me the most hope was when I realized what an enormous contributor the animal agriculture was to greenhouse gases. It’s 14.5%. It’s greater than the entire transportation sector combined, not by much, but all the tailpipe and smokestack emissions from ships and jet engines and everything on the planet combined is about 13.5%. So this is an area where we could make a big immediate change just by empowering people to make a change in their lifestyle and their behavior. It doesn’t require an enormous technical rollout. It doesn’t require new innovation and new engine designs, electrification of the transportation system, or a massive rollout of renewable energy.’
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‘I agree with the principle that cities and regional governments could ultimately be more effective than even national governments. These are the principles that my friend Arnold Schwarzenegger espoused and went all over the world and got governors working together. The idea of mayors working together is critical. If you can reduce emissions through specific urban initiatives, also reducing particulate pollution from coal plants and from tailpipe emissions and all that, then that’s all a step in the right direction.’
http://fortune.com/2015/09/14/james-cameron-sustainable-food/
Variety Magazine’s article on Cameron’s push to change the American diet:
‘…but when 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions are coming from animal agriculture, that is a big thermostat that you can turn down. The average person can start to make a big difference right away.”
Cameron founded the Avatar Alliance Foundation, named for his highest-grossing movie of all time, to pursue climate change issues, and the organization has distributed grants for such things as ocean science research. More recently, he founded the Food Choice Task Force, jointly funded with cellular mogul Craig McCaw and others, with a recent initiative called My Plate, My Planet.
Among other things, the initiative has gathered dozens of groups and scientists to push federal officials to adopt dietary guidelines higher in plant-based foods, running open letters in March in The New York Times, the Washington Post and Politico. The Dietary Guidelines Committee, which makes recommendations to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services, recommended such an approach, with implications for the school lunch program and, when it comes to education, the food pyramid.’
What does your bookshelf say about you?
The patina of books and the magic thrill of a new idea
Seth Godin
‘Show me your bookcase, the ideas that you’ve collected one by one over the years, the changes you’ve made in the way you see the world. Not your browser history, but the books you were willing to buy and hold and read and store and share.
Every bookshelf tells a story. You can’t build one in a day or even a week… it’s a lifetime of collected changes. On the shelf over there I see an Isaac Asimov collection I bought when I was 12, right next to a yet-to-be-published galley by a friend of mine. Each of them changed my life.
It’s thrilling to juxtapose this look backwards with the feeling I get when a great new book arrives. It hasn’t been read yet (at least not by me) and it it offers unlimited promise, new possibilities and perhaps the chance to share it with someone else after I’m done.’