If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth by Helen Caldicott. 

3/5 rating. 

Book #100 of 2019!! August 21, 2019. 

With my deep love for all things environmental and conservational, I figured I had to make book 100 a book about this. This book had some great portions and a wide array of wonderful quotes. Though, it gets pretty dry and meaty in the middle part of the book, I appreciated Helen’s ideas of how to combat some of the major issues affecting the earth. As always, the number one thing is that YOU need to decide that a change needs to be made. GO SAVE THE EARTH! Here’s to the rest of the books I read this year and beyond.

Quotes:

“A small amount of UV light has always penetrated the normal ozone layer, producing a certain number of skin cancers, but the incidence of skin cancer and malignant melanoma is now increasing rapidly. Some part of this increase is almost certainly due to ozone depletion. Melanoma, a dark mole that becomes malignant and is usually lethal, doubled in frequency worldwide in the two decades between 1970 and 1990.”

“To put global warming into perspective, however, carbon dioxide accounts for only half of the greenhouse effect. Other gases, the so-called trace gases, which are present in minute concentrations, are much more efficient at trapping heat.”

“Methane is also a very efficient heat trapper (twenty times more effective than carbon dioxide) and is released at the rate of about 25 gallons (100 liters) per day from the intestine of a single grain-fed cow.”

“In fact, in the United States, cattle-produced methane and manure has a global-warming effect equivalent to that of thirty-three million automobiles.”

“Agriculture, as it has been constructed over the past century – the production of fertilizers and pesticides, and the planting and harvesting of food – is also based almost entirely on oil. In fact, about 10 calories of fossil fuel is used to produce each single calorie of food. The global transportation system and the trading of food are totally dependent on oil. Amazingly, the average distance traversed by food in the United States is over 1,500 miles (about 2,400 kilometers). Obviously, the shortage of oil will translate into ever-higher food prices and inevitable shortages.”

“In fact, there is enough area on the roofs of all parking lots in the United States to power the country’s entire fleet of cars by solar energy and then to add this electricity to the grid to power homes at night.”

“The grain [in ethanol] that is used to fill a single SUV tank just one time could feed one person for a whole year.”

“It has been calculated that if an area the size of Australia or the United States were planted with trees, the air could be cleared of carbon dioxide released from fossil fuels.”

“Brazil owes a huge debt to US banks. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which represent the interests of these banks, have advised the Brazilian government to chop down the Amazon forest to pay back the debt.”

“Ranching occupies 72 percent of the cleared forest areas, and most of the beef is used to supply fast-food burger chains in the United States, Central America, and Europe. Between 2000 and 2005, 60-70 percent of Brazil’s forest area was cleared for cattle ranching, making cattle ranching the leading cause of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.” 

“Christopher Uhl, of Pennsylvania State University, estimates that a quarter-pound hamburger derived from steers raised in Central America represents the loss of 55 square feet (5 square meters) of immeasurably valuable tropical rain forest containing one giant tree, about fifty smaller trees, twenty to thirty different tree species, about a hundred species of insects, and many other bird, mammalian, and reptilian species, as well as a huge diversity of fungi, lichens, mosses, and bacteria – in short, millions of living organisms and thousands of species are sacrificed for one quarter-pound hamburger.”

“Over 1.5 million barrels of oil each year is required to produce these billions of plastic [water] bottles – enough oil to fuel a hundred thousand cars. More than 85 percent of the plastic bottles are not recycled, and it takes more than a thousand years for the plastic to biodegrade, if it ever does.”

“Because of our own addictive consumption, people in the developed world cause a hundred to a thousand times as much pollution per capita as do people in the developing world. (The US population, a mere 4 percent of the world total, creates half of the world’s toxic waste. The average US citizen affects the world ecology twenty to a hundred times more negatively than does the average person in a developing country.) Of the 350 million-500 million metric tons of hazardous waste manufactured on the planet each year, the United States produces 245 million-260 million metric tons – almost one ton per person, or about 4.5 pounds of waste per person per day.”

“About one billion trees’ worth of paper is thrown out every year in the United States alone.”

“Amazingly, less than 0.1 percent of all pesticides ever reach the target insects. The other 99.9 percent are dispersed in groundwater, lakes, weirs, soil, and the air. Groundwater has been contaminated with more than fifty varieties of pesticides and water conducted in 1998, the US Geological Survey found that 95 percent of streams and 50 percent of wells close to agricultural and urban areas were contaminated with pesticides.”

“Over thousands of years, the human race had utilized about seven thousand different plant species for food, but the present generation tends to rely on only about twenty species to provide 80 percent of the world’s food.”

“Many people probably do not realize that 90 percent of the most valuable US crops, worth a total of $4 billion, are fertilized by insects, and the catch-22 is obvious. As described already, pesticides and herbicides used to protect the crops from predatory insects and weeds kill the very organisms upon which the crops depend, including, of course, the bees.”

“Fifty-two percent of the human population is composed of women. According to the United Nations, women do 66 percent of the world’s work, including much of the work of producing food, and for this labor they receive 5 percent of the global income and own only 1 percent of the property.”

“It is time for men in religion, in politics, in corporations, and in global agriculture to stand aside and attest to the intelligence and wisdom of women.”

“The Feinstein World Hunger Program at Brown University estimates that if the world population is fed primarily with grains and vegetables, there is, at present, enough food to ensure the USDA recommended daily per capita intake of 2,200 calories for the global population.”

“In 2006, when US foreign aid expenditure totaled over $22 billion, Americans spent $9.5 billion on movies and theaters, $86.6 billion on tobacco (in 2003), and $155 billion on alcohol, plus $35 billion on weight loss items that don’t usually work.”

“In 2005, the United States ranked first in military spending, arms exports, military technology, naval fleets, global military bases, and number of nuclear bombs; while at the same time it was eighth in adult literacy rate, ranked fifty-first in per capita spending on secondary-level public education, and had the highest newborn mortality rate in the developed world. These data, though not strictly financial, indicate present priorities in American society.”

“Or as Dwight D  Eisenhower put it, ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.’”

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