Take a Bite: Brighter Green on China

An interview with Mia MacDonald by Brighter Green colleague, Anna Lappe, about China and the rapid rise in and dairy production is now up on Take a Bite Out of Climate Change. That’s Anna’s savory, savvy site that charts the intersection of food and global warming. She asked some great, and tough, questions. Read the full interview here, and Brighter Green’s China paper (in English or Chinese), below.

Here’s Anna’s intro to the piece:

Old MacDonald may have had a farm, but Mia MacDonald points out that the traditional farming way of life is giving way across the planet to the environmentally devastating factory farms we’ve pioneered in the West.

As an advisor to the “Take a Bite out of Climate Change” project, Mia has been an enormously helpful resource for understanding the global trends of industrialized agriculture. Through Brighter Green, her action think tank that helps advocacy groups take informed action through research and analysis, Mia is currently at work on a series of case studies, starting with China.

I met Mia nearly seven years ago, when we first crossed paths in our shared work with Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Wangari Maathai (that was before she became a Nobel Prize winner). Mia was with Wangari when they received the legendary phone call. They were on their way to meet with some of Wangari’s constituents outside of Nairobi; neither was expecting the call.

In true Wangari fashion, despite the news—and pleas from international journalists to return immediately for photo ops in Nairobi—they continued on to a previously scheduled meeting in a rural village in Wangari’s Parliamentary district. Mia had a hand in helping Wangari pen her memoir, Unbowed, and has worked with her on her latest book, The Challenge for Africa, which will be published by Pantheon in April 2009.

I caught up with Mia recently and she let me pummel her with a few questions about Brighter Green’s new report, Skillful Means: The Challenges of China’s Encounter with Factory Farming, which delves into China, meat, and the connection with our climate.