Beef and Mother Gaia

🐃🐂🐄Cattle farming: How it affects the Amazon forests, referred to as "lungs of the earth", producing up to 20% of oxygen demand, and the global climate with the emission of greenhouse gases 🌎🌍🌏

Could the recent forest fires in the Amazon be just an accident? Expert analysts say no. This was just such an act of malice which went too visible and loud to go unnoticed
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/08/22/americas/amazon-fires-humans-intl-hnk-trnd/index.html

The vast majority of these fires are human-lit," said Christian Poirier, the program director of NPO Amazon Watch. He added that even during dry seasons, the Amazon -- a humid rainforest -- doesn't catch on fire easily, unlike the dry bushland in California or Australia.

And 99% percent of the fires result from human actions "either on purpose or by accident," Alberto Setzer, a senior scientist at INPE, said. The burning can range from a small-scale agricultural practice, to new deforestation for a mechanized and modern agribusiness project. 

The Amazon forest produces about 20% of the world's oxygen, and is often called "the planet's lungs." According to the World Wildlife Fund, if it is irrevocably damaged, it could start emitting carbon instead -- the major driver of climate change.

This begs the question:Why do the Brazilian farmers set the Amazon on fire? Simple answer: To create herding ground for industrially raised cattle. Brazil is the largest exporter in beef, contributing  to 20 percent of the global demand. 

"Cattle ranching in the Amazon region is a low yield activity, where densities often average just one cattle per hectare. Most land in cattle operations in the Brazilian Amazon are medium and large size ranches, with averages of several hundreds of hectares."

An increase in the consumption of beef worldwide has thus a direct impact on the intensity of deforestation in the Amazon, that too on a very inefficient level of its application, the largest herding grounds reaching as many as thousands of hectares.

A possible rebuttal is advocating factory farming, which confines animals into small spaces. But even then, to  produce the required food, one needs a lot of land for raising the crops. Even this won't fare better in the succeeding cost benefit analysis as we'll see. 

Eating beef not only affects global climate with the effect of deforestation, but also with creating a higher carbon footprint on the atmosphere by the factory bred animals. More animals raised above the normal ecological levels means more co2 emissions.

https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/21/giving-up-beef-reduce-carbon-footprint-more-than-cars 

So the effects are cumulative: with mode demand for beef, more possible deforestation and more greenhouse emissions, the food demand though eventually replaceable by a vegetarian diet.
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/17/world-cropland-feed-3-billion-more-people-study?__twitter_impression=true

So how exactly does this "green house emissions from industrially raised cattle(esp beef) compare with conventional sources of green house emission such as cars, industries, etc.?

Comparison with other sources of greenhouse gases https

An interesting comparison with other sources of nutrition
(All pic credits @sciam )

On top of all this, regular red meat requires far more amount of resources than what is necessary for other forms of meat or vegetarian alternatives

Finally a research study on the emission of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and CH4 by livestock.

Revised methane emissions factors and spatially distributed annual carbon fluxes for global livestock Julie  Wolf1, Ghassem  R.  Asrar2  and  Tristram  O.  West

Non Dual Nature of Consciousness

A few thoughts on the subject- object aspect of everyday perception

Subjective-objective division is actually
a case of duality. Before delving deep, try considering cases of duality of scientific interest and how they've been tackled over time.

1. Space time duality in special relativity
Lorentz transformations tell us space and time are not absolute, but rather transmutable. That is, there's nothing called absolute space or absolute time, but a fluidic existence of a fundamental reality called space time.

Two things which were thought to be immutable, turned out to be a single flexible reality, the duality being only an illusion.
SPACE AND TIME ARE NO LONGER INDEPENDENT.

2. Wave particle duality.
Waves and particles are conceptually different entities.
But not the case actually. Particles and waves, deep down, exhibit both behaviours. The material existence is neither particulate, nor vibratory in its fundamental level.

One way to model this non dual behaviour is the Schroedinger equation, which shows the interdependence of particle and wave nature at the atomic level. Deep down, the reality is neither fully of particles or of waves, but something entirely different.

3. Something more subtle, Mass energy equivalence

E=mc2
That mass and energy are not different, but a collective unity.


What do all these tell us?
That the duality we perceive is only relative and illusory. On the basis of things is more of a superposed non-dual nature, the qualities being interdependent on each other.

And then there's this observer-observed or subject-object reality, which presumably thwarts all our efforts to dissect its nature. Why don't we just extrapolate from previous inferences and conjecture that this duality is in fact a perceived illusion of a fundamental unity?!
In short the theory would be that there's no rigid dividing line between an observer and the observed. The two concepts would be interdependent and overlapping like we have in waves and particles. The illusion of separation only appears on a gross level.
Consciousness and observer is synonymous. So this must imply that even the "object" an "observer" observes has some element of "consciousness" in it, though it's not very evident like the absence of wave nature for bigger particles.
We can say the observer is like a particle and the observed is like a wave, entirely different on the gross level but the separation is merely the result of an increase in "dimensions".
Just like particles "possess" wave nature, every observer has observed nature and vice versa.


In a different jargon, "Consciousness" must have the nature of material objects and material objects too should have "conscious" nature according to the hypothesis. Just as the universe is pervaded by matter, it's pervaded by consciousness too!



When it comes to "space time", that which brings about the non duality is motion. With "wave particle" it's dimensions.
So what is that which would help us visualize this presumed non duality of "subject object" or "mind matter"?!

Short Intro

I started this blog with the intention of asserting that Hindu scriptures essentially point to one and only one thing : The Nature Of Ultimate Reality. 

Shiva in Rig Veda

Here I'm going to quote two verses from the Rig Veda where Lord Shiva is mentioned.