We Are The Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99)
On an intellectual level, we all know that climate change will ultimately make our planet uninhabitable. So, why aren’t we really doing anything about it?
That is the fundamental question asked in We Are the Weather, the second non-fiction work by Jonathan Safran Foer (the first was the vegetarian clarion-call, Eating Animals), the American novelist known for such works as Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. And the new book’s sub-title, Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, hints at Safran Foer’s preferred strategy in response.
For him, emissions related to livestock are the greatest contributors to the climate and wildlife crises. He proposes a collective agreement to eschew all animal products for breakfast and lunch, which he claims would see each of us save 1.3 metric tonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) each year.
The average human being currently has a CO2e footprint of 4.5 metric tonnes. The Paris Accord’s long-term target of limiting the increase in global temperature to two degrees Celsius needs individual footprints to stay under 2.1 metric tonnes of CO2e.
So his plea for a “collective act to eat differently” wouldn’t solve everything overnight. But it would be a big step in the right direction — and going vegan before dinner isn’t that hard.
Pages 75 to 101 of We Are The Weather are designed to blitz the reader with ominous facts. Some are hard to fathom — our current level of meat and dairy intake is apparently equivalent to every person alive in the year 1700 eating 950 pounds of meat and drinking 1,200 gallons of milk every day — and the overall picture becomes much bleaker. Not only are we destroying the planet, but we’re doing it in full knowledge of what will happen.
But it is the last segment of the book that packs the most punch, as Safran Foer draws on his recently deceased Bubbe’s sacrifice to flee from Poland to escape the horrors of the Holocaust. Much of the rest of the family perished.
She walked more than 2,500 miles in freezing temperatures and braved illness and malnutrition to escape the Nazis and ensure her descendants could lead lives which were “housed and healthy” in the United States.
“Facing climate change,” Safran Foer writes, “requires an entirely different kind of heroism, which is far less intimidating than escaping a genocidal army, or not knowing where your children’s next meal will come from, but is perhaps every bit as difficult because the need for sacrifice is unobvious.”
Ben Weich is a JC reporter
