An Urgent Call to Save Our Planet 

Internationally renowned spiritual teacher, artist and humanitarian Supreme Master Ching Hai established Supreme Master Television in 2006 to broadcast a message of peace and enlightenment around the world. Today Supreme Master TV draws attention to vital issues that are often not being covered elsewhere—in particular, climate change and its link with our reliance on meat in our diets. If you want to save the planet, the best thing you can do is go vegan, Supreme Master Ching Hai tells us. We spoke to Supreme Master about global warming, swine flu, and other startling concerns facing our world today—and what each of us can do to turn things around.

Q: Supreme Master Television has interviewed many of the top scientists in the field of climate change. These include Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr. James Hansen, world-renowned climatologist and head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Global 500 award-winning physicist and environmentalist Dr. Vandana Shiva. Are these experts unanimous in their conclusions and their recommendations?

SM: All these distinguished scientists agree that global warming has accelerated in recent decades and that major changes must be made immediately. Dr. Hansen has stated that the most important thing an individual can do to stop global warming is to be vegetarian. Dr. Pachauri, who himself has chosen a vegetarian diet, has said that eliminating consumption of animal products is the most effective way to halt greenhouse gas emissions as an individual. And Dr. Shiva, who is also a vegetarian, emphasises organic vegan farming as a solution not just to climate change, but also to public health, world hunger, and even the economy.

Q: Swine flu has recently been named as the first pandemic for 40 years. Why should we be so concerned about swine flu?

SM: According to Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist and Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, the swine flu virus has been evolving for many years through its origin in North American factory farm environments. In these extremely unhygienic settings, the different viruses from the animals easily mix with one another to create new, more lethal flu viruses. In 1918, the flu pandemic cost the lives of a hundred million people. Experts say that the same could happen again with the present swine flu. Swine flu is just one of the many examples of how the meat production industry is threatening humans’ health.

Q: Scientists talk about rising sea levels, but where can we see examples of this happening?

SM: Those low lying countries with major river deltas, upon which millions of people depend to survive—they are seeing eroded coastlines already. Bangladesh, for example, home to some 155 million people, is on one of these major river deltas. According to Dhaka-based Coastal Watch, an average of 11 Bangladeshi lose their homes due to rising water every hour. They have to bear all this as a consequence of global warming.

Q: The Irish Department of Agriculture reports an 80 per cent rise in the number of individuals applying to convert to organic production. How does organic farming benefit the environment and our health?

SM: My heartfelt thanks to your government’s bright leadership and the Irish people who support it, especially the smart, responsible organic farmers. Organic vegan farming is what should be promoted. Organic farming benefits our health because it avoids pesticide and insecticide residues in our food, as well as the antibiotics and other unnatural additives which have been linked to countless diseases.

For the environment, organic vegan farming protects and even enriches the soil, helps to preserve wildlife habitat, and creates much less pollution.

Q: Is the increase in the major chronic diseases of today (cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, obesity) linked to a meat diet?

SM: There are multitudes of studies proving the strong links between meat consumption and all these major illnesses. You can see that cases of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity increased as meat consumption levels rose in the past five or so decades. A study conducted by Harvard University with tens of thousands of men and women found that regular meat consumption increases colon cancer risk by 300 per cent. One study of Japanese women found that those who ate meat instead of a plant-based diet where eight times more likely to develop breast cancer.

Q: How does a meat diet affect world hunger?

SM: According to UN World Food Program, there are more than one billion people worldwide who do not have enough to eat. Meanwhile, a significant portion of the world’s food is diverted for meat production. About 40 per cent of global grain is going to livestock, and 85 per cent of the world’s protein-rich soy is being force-fed to cattle and other animals. If everyone ate a plant-based diet, there would be enough food in the world to satisfy 10 billion people.

Q: How could people reduce their carbon footprint if they changed to a vegetarian or vegan diet?

SM: One six-ounce beefsteak costs 16 times as much gasoline, or fossil fuel energy, as one vegan meal. If all the people in the world became vegetarian or vegan, we would eliminate at least 50 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. It would be significantly more than removing all the world’s transportation, which only accounts for 13.5 per cent of emissions.

Q: In the past few months, we have heard scientists and environ­mental advocates say we need to focus less on reducing CO2 and more on reducing methane, ozone, and black carbon (soot). How would this shift help us cool the planet faster and avoid climate change?

SM: Taking methane as an example, scientists at the IPCC have found that methane actually traps around 72 times more heat than CO2, averaged over a 20-year period. It’s nearly completely gone from the atmosphere within a decade, however, whereas CO2 will stay around warming the planet for thousands of years! So, if we want a quicker cooling of the planet, we have to eliminate those gases that leave the atmosphere quickly.

Q: How does eliminating flesh foods and dairy products help us to reduce these shorter-lived causes of global warming?

SM: The 2006 United Nations “Livestock’s Long Shadow” report makes it clear that livestock is the largest single producer of methane—so eliminating meat and dairy products will help immediately to cool the planet.

Q: How does our demand for meat in Europe contribute to the destruction of the Amazon and increased melting in Antarctica?

SM: Up to 80 percent of the Amazon deforested lands are converted to grazing pastures for cattle. And as you may be aware, Europe is one of the top consumers of beef imported from Brazil. So, the Amazon’s destruction is clearly linked to meat production. The melting in Antarctica can also be related directly to livestock raising, because the heat-trapping potential of methane is so much higher than that of CO2.

Q: We are in the midst of a global and national financial downturn. How can embracing a vegan diet help us to reduce the cost of lowering emissions?

SM: The vegan diet is clearly the most economical. This we already know from logical consideration, because with the plant-based vegan diet, we eat directly what comes from the fields. There’s no need for the food to be transported and fed to the animal, and then to go through an animal before it comes back to the human. A report from the Netherlands called “Climate Benefits of Changing Diet” found that an estimated cost of US$40 trillion to stabilise greenhouse gases by 2050 would be reduced a full 80 per cent by a global adoption of the vegan diet.

Q: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will take place in Copenhagen between December 7 and December 18 this year. What advice would you give to the leaders making these very important decisions for the people of the world?

SM: I have only one humble piece of advice: that it is important to tackle the root cause, which is animal meat production. If we take the vital step to stop the demand for animal consumption, then the rainforest destruction will stop. We will have clean air and clean water. There will be more food for the hungry. We are human; human means “humane”. We should be what we truly are, humane.

Supreme Master TV is a free-to-air station broadcasting constructive news and inspirational programs 24 hours a day. See it on Sky Channel 835 or visit the website at www.suprememastertv.com