A Bright Clean Mind. Camille DeAngelis

with moss. I think of that story sometimes when mundane conditions seem to be conspiring against me: day jobs that gobble up precious writing time but don’t provide enough to live on, bank fees for not maintaining a minimum balance, an eight-year-old laptop that hopefully won’t die before my deadline. Even when you manage to fill the sieve, your drinking water tastes faintly of mud.

      Alec Thibodeau, Competition is Overrated, screen print, 2018.

      In Life Without Envy, I wrote at length about the “scarcity mindset” that traps artists in a never-ending struggle for professional recognition, since there will never be enough accolades to satisfy everyone who strives for them. Lately, I have been reframing this outlook in terms of “real-world problems”: not to say that a middle-class writer’s want of money in the bank is insignificant compared to a scarcity of food or potable water (though it must certainly look so to one who is hungry and thirsty), but to empower the artist to respond to problems beyond her immediate sphere.

      Now the artist replies, “I can make a small donation to an international relief organization, but apart from that token gesture, I can’t really do anything to help.” But that’s not true. She can look at how corporations misuse our resources and how her own diet is supporting that system. For starters, it takes roughly 2,500 gallons of water to grow the feed crops to produce one pound of cow flesh for human consumption, and as one Newsweek reporter articulated this ludicrously inefficient use of resources all the way back in 1981, “The amount of water used in the production of one pound of beef would be enough to float a destroyer.” While beef is the worst, all meat production is wasteful: one pound of chicken uses 815 gallons of water, and one pound of pork uses 1,630. Compare these numbers to 25 gallons of water per pound for wheat or 244 gallons a pound (or less) for tofu. Dairy is extremely water-intensive too, with 683 gallons of water needed to produce a single gallon of milk and 896 gallons to make one pound of cheese. Eating vegan does make a difference, since it takes roughly 4,000 gallons of water to produce one day’s food for a meat eater versus 1,200 gallons for a vegetarian and only 300 gallons for a vegan. The US livestock industry uses two billion gallons of freshwater per day, an appalling statistic given that at time of writing, the residents of Flint, Michigan, still have to use bottled water for all their basic needs. Not only is factory farm runoff the leading cause of water pollution (culminating in the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico), the filth sickens low-income Americans (who tend to be people of color) because no one wants to live that close to a hog or cattle farm.

      Those gallons-per-pound figures seem abstract so long as water still runs freely from your faucets, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore ongoing crises in the Middle East, North Africa, Cape Town, California, and elsewhere, and water-wealthy regions won’t be very far behind. In a report on the environmental effects of industrial agriculture, researchers at the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University explain, “In many parts of the world, irrigation is depleting underground aquifers faster than they can be recharged. In other cases, agriculture depends upon ‘fossil aquifers’ that mostly contain water from the last ice age. These ancient aquifers receive little or no recharge, so any agriculture that depends upon them is inherently unsustainable.” The Ogallala Aquifer—one of the largest in the world, stretching across eight states in the American Midwest—is being depleted at a rate ten thousand times faster than it can replenish itself. Compared to crops raised directly for human consumption, animal agriculture squanders so much water that the World Resources Institute is predicting water shortages for at least 3.5 billion people—half the current world population—by the year 2025. Analysts at the Food Empowerment Project note that “as scarcity increases, water’s value as an economic commodity rises—and multinational conglomerates are only too eager to profit from this deteriorating situation by buying up water rights on every continent.” So, it’s likely we’ll see ongoing armed conflict over control of water sources, and as Dr. Breeze Harper points out in Sistah Vegan, these shortages and any resulting violence will disproportionately affect people of color.