Vesanto Melina

So one of the questions today, in fact, the main one that SPEC posed was, what can you do today and in the upcoming days to reduce this climate crisis, to help? And on the SPEC website, they listed about Beeswax wraps, less plastic, recycling, composting, and changing your travel mode, but not a mention of dietary choice. And I see this so repeatedly. There's a film, Conspiracy, that you can get from the library, or it's on Netflix, where the interviewer goes out to different environmental organizations, to Sierra Club, all sorts of different ones, and says, why don't you have dietary choice on your website? Like, it's way more important than transportation choice. Why is it not there? And the most honest organization said, well, we might lose some memberships. I think people really want somebody in Brazil to do something about it, not burn down the rainforest, but not to take action ourselves when it involves these deep lifestyle changes. And yet this is really, really important. For example, if you choose to get your protein from beans instead of beef, one pound of beef protein compared to one pound of beans protein, and they have all the amino acids in the plant foods. That's where animals get their amino acids. But we can use, for the beans, 18 times less land, 12 times less fertilizer. All this fodder is grown, and then it's funneled through animals. There's 10 times less water, 10 times less pesticides, and nine times less fuel. Huge difference when we make that dietary choice. And yet, it's not commonly reflected in a lot of the environmental organizations or in people who want to be environmentalists. When we find animal agriculture contributes to 18% of the greenhouse gas emissions, whereas transportation exhaust is only 13%. So there's big differences here. One dairy cow produces 25 to 50 times the manure of 1 human. And what sewage system is there for the cow? All the cows. None. So it goes into waterways. And last November, we had in the news all about romaine lettuce causes E. coli problems. There was withdrawals of romaine lettuce. And yet, later on, and this didn't hit the headlines, Health Canada said, well, actually it was manure that led to the E. coli. It seeped into the waterways. These manure lagoons lead to the growth of a lot of toxic organisms. Now, Canada, we put 6 to 8 billion dollars a year into food subsidies, and most of that is going to animal agriculture. And some of this makes absolutely no sense. We know that, for example, red meat increases our risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and hypertension, and yet we're subsidizing promotion and the fodder and even the advertising and the production. Now this does not make sense anymore. So the two actions I would like to propose that you do is first of all to contact legislators, members of parliament and so on to stop the subsidies for foods that are making us sick. and shift them to things like plant foods. Or like 1 McDonald's burger, apparently that costs $5, would cost $13 if it weren't for subsidies. Like there's huge impact here. And that'll really make a big difference. And it is already. I mean, feedlots are closing, lots of things are happening, very positive. And find foods that you really, really like. and share them with your friends and really have a good time with it. Because even traditionally, people used a lot of fiddleheads, cranberries, greens, just all sorts of nuts and things that were grown on the land. So thank you all for coming. Thank you for the parks. I always feel with the parks in Vancouver, I feel how much love there has gone into this city and appreciate that. Yeah, thanks to everyone here.