Welcome to Brighter Green
Brighter Green is a new public policy "action tank" that aims to raise awareness and encourage dialogue on and attention to issues that span the environment, animals, and sustainable development both globally and locally. Brighter Green's work has a particular focus on equity and rights.
On its own and in partnership with other organizations and individuals, Brighter Green generates and incubates research and project initiatives that are both visionary and practical. It produces publications, Websites, documentary films, and programs to illuminate public debate among policy-makers, activists, communities, influential leaders, and the media, with the goal of social transformation at local and international levels. Brighter Green works in the United States and internationally, with a focus on the countries of the global South.
Recently on Our Blog
August 19, 2008 2:11pm
Breeding Sow in a Medium-Sized Farm, Eastern China (Picture: Peter Li/HSI/CIWF)
New York–based policy action tank Brighter Green’s new report,
Skillful Means: The Challenges of China’s Encounter with Factory Farming (PDF) explores the emerging superpower’s “livestock revolution,” which is having serious impacts on public health, food security, and equity in China—and the world. The Beijing Summer Olympics are showcasing a resurgent nation, which only two generations after a devastating national famine is eating increasingly high on the food chain. In the past ten years, consumption of China’s most popular meat, pork, has doubled. In 2007, China raised well over half a billion pigs for meat.
Given that every fifth person in the world is Chinese, even small increases in individual meat or dairy consumption will have broad, collective environmental as well as climate impacts. Increasingly, what the Chinese eat, and how China produces its food, affects not only China, but the world, too.
August 12, 2008 10:24pm
Kangaroo: How rare do you want it?
File this under "Suggestive Connection": In
a report on the BBC, an Australian researcher is recommending a vast increase in the farming and eating of kangaroos in order to combat global warming. Because of their different digestive systems, kangaroos do not produce as much methane as cows and sheep (currently the main source of meat for Australians), and thus humans switching to a different sort of muscle to chew on would reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.
In an
unrelated—but perhaps not that unrelated—story, a team of scientists have discovered that many prehistoric species extinctions, including that of the three-meter tall giant kangaroo and marsupial lion, were caused not by natural causes, such as catastrophic weather events or habitat change, but by the newly evolved human beings. Apparently, we hunted them to death -- presumably, as many animals continue to be today, for our consumption.
