MovieChat Forums > Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2015) Discussion > Things i don't like about this one and m...

Things i don't like about this one and more like it


There are few things that i can't get my head around when watching these kind of documentaries.

1) Facts
Facts are presented biased. You got global facts mixed with US facts. They pretty much picked the bigger number, no matter what zone that statistic focused on. Am scientific approach would present you the numbers based on a specific year, on a specific zone. More than that, you would present the values progress form one year to another. That would be much more logical.
In practice, i can tell you that most numbers presented in the movie are estimates. They are, most often, considered as the worst case scenarios in those studies. They basically took the number of animals globally and assumed that all cows grow up in the same conditions.
At EU level, we just started to implement an fair count of emissions from industries. Until now, everything was estimate. An indoor farm will have much less impact that an outdoor one. They assumed that everything was outdoor, in those estimates.
Facts are thrown to sound good. You can't focus on them too much if you are really interested in the subject, as they are all over the place.

2) Approach
I usually dislike the approach of most "save the earth" documentaries. Guess what. Earth does not need us to save it from anything. We can only save our species. But Earth couldn't care less if we survive or not. It would do just fine without us or without atmosphere.
Our evolution it's never seen as an thing, but seen as an negative impact. It is not, it's simply evolution. A big pack of lions can have an "negative" impact over the gazelle population in an area, but it's all part of evolution. The same way, humans have an impact over the environment. It's all evolution.

Human nature it's never took into consideration. We're doing a big part of the things that we do for psychological reasons. We feel pleasure eating a stake, we enjoy driving cars, we like wearing good clothes. We're not survivalists at this point. Going back in time, it's not acceptable. We can't expect to live as tribes did, as we reached a specific point in our evolution.

And let's say that we solve food problem. An environmental approach will be taken onto the next industry. Then you will have the transportation system. We will have statistics that will shown that 80% of emissions are related to transports, so we will shut that down too. Next clothing, and so on. We will shut down everything and go back living in tribes. That's not rational.

3) Solutions
You are not presented with viable solutions. Improving the agricultural sector is. Moving the farms indoor, using better food for animals, better water treatment, this are real things, that are seeing improvement every year, but they are completely ignored.
Going all vegan tomorrow it's not an viable solution, as there is not enough supply for it. An governmental approach of forcing people into eating vegan food would start up wars. People in agriculture would not have jobs anymore, countries would have to invest a lot in changing their industry sectors. Not all countries will be able to do so.
Nevertheless, the impact on the environment will probably be pretty awful. We developed as a society by eliminating other exemplars of species, we took over their territories, and species extincted due to us.
The greenhouse effect it's not this evil monkey that's trying to kill us all, it's an NECESSARY effect for our survival. We need those gases in the atmosphere. We do not need all the emissions, but we need a part of them. By eliminating a big source of those emissions, you will have climate modifications. Temperature might drop, crops won't be able to adapt to this climate change, so we will still have problems.

And long-term solutions, like colonization of other planets, or atmosphere alterations that we might made in the future are not taken into consideration either. Because, if we would extinct because growing animals, that's not gonna happen in 10 or 50 years. It will have over few hundred years. In that time, we will discover new technologies.

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Excellent points. To me, it all seemed like a mix of scare tactics and vegan propaganda.

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