Maathai’s Meatrix

New Year, fast review. As 2010 gets going, I thought it was worth looking back — well, just a couple of weeks — to the Copenhagen climate talks and what Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai said about meat at the side event Brighter Green and Maathai’s Green Belt Movement co-sponsored there. Here’s her answer to a question from Lasse Bruun of Compassion in World Farming about why, despite all the evidence about the negative consequences, climate and more broadly ecological, people want to eat so much meat (and policy-makers don’t seem to want to address the issue):

Globally when we have more money in our pockets, we want to eat more meat, even three times a day, which is why we have a crisis. Mia [that’s me — Wangari, I and two other colleagues were panelists] is a vegetarian, I’m a semi vegetarian…it must be psychological, this desire for meat. People say, ‘I can afford it. You hear that all the time.’ [Perhaps] we need to go back to where we were and not eat so much meat.

New Year, new Meatrix. Thanks, Wangari.