Keith Akers

“Half-Earth”? Our wanton destruction of nature is a one-time, irreversible experiment on our shared ecosystem—a threat to humans as well as to the natural world.

Our wanton destruction of nature is a one-time, irreversible experiment. Drastic #degrowth of livestock agriculture would fix many of the problems. In "Sufficiency and Wellbeing Magazine": www.sufficiencywellbeing.com/p/half-earth

Land sharing or land sparing? It was always going to be both!
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar... and www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2025/09/the-...

(But there's no avoiding the fact that meat and dairy are by far the most inefficient forms of food production in terms of land use)

The biology of limits to growth. Humans have completely overrun the Earth.

My first post in Sufficiency and Wellbeing: degrowth has a biological dimension.
www.sufficiencywellbeing.com/p/the-biolog...

ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Do They Do Now?

This exposes the problems with a corrupt, decaying society. Slaughterhouses are brutalizing both to terrified animals and traumatized, underpaid workers. Now workers are being deported and the whole industry is in trouble.
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/u...

Top panel: Increased awareness of AR after the GN protest is associated with increased thoughts about animal welfare/rights issues (A), decreased agreement that society has a broken relationship with animals and needs to change how we treat animals used for entertainment (B); was not associated with how morally acceptable people considered using animals for entertainment (C). Bottom panel: Higher awareness of the GN protest is associated with increased thoughts about animal welfare/rights issues (D), decreased agreement that society has a broken relationship with animals and needs to change how we treat animals used for entertainment (E); increased agreement that it is morally acceptable people considered using animals for entertainment (F).

Association between awareness of the GN protest and changes in people’s attitudes towards animals immediately after (grey) and six months after the GN (purple) relative to before the protest. The plot shows the posterior probability densities of the Bayesian regression models. The white dashed line reflects the estimated means. All variables were coded such that negative values indicate less favourable attitudes towards animals.

Short and long-term effects of disruptive animal rights protest
#AnimalRights #AnimalActivists #AnimalWelfare #DirectAction #AnimalSaveMovement #Vegan #AnimalRescue #FoodSystems #IntensiveAnimalAgriculture #FactoryFarming #ClimateChange #Sentience #Plantbased #Science

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Veganism implies degrowth:
". . . if the whole world went vegan, we could then rewild, you know, three quarters of our agricultural lands. Which would draw down enormous amounts of carbon. It would restore biodiversity. It'd be super helpful."

"Embracing Limits" compassionatespirit.com/wpblog/

We need to talk. Is making wasteful and cruel animal farming practices marginally less wasteful and cruel the best application of degrowth ideals?

Excellent suggestion. It looks like the whole world may be nonviolently moving towards something like China's one-child policy. We could at 1-2 billion in a century. Use our capital for degrowth instead of overpopulation.

‘Half the tree of life’: ecologists’ horror as nature reserves are emptied of insects A new point in history has been reached, entomologists say, as climate-led species’ collapse moves up the food chain even in supposedly protected regions free of pesticides

www.theguardian.com/environment/... Ecological collapse. Surely degrowth also means veganism, and veganism is already degrowth in terms of human biological domination.

“Net Zero Beef?” Why Sustainability Claims Need More Than Headlines | Feature | Foodfacts.org Fact checking ‘net zero beef’ claims. Is this greenwashing or something that holds validity behind corporate-sponsored sustainability narratives.

These net zero beef claims are corporate-funded messaging - hidden behind industry funded academics - with a simple goal to protect beef supply chains... not to deliver real environmental solutions.

My comments: www.foodfacts.org/articles/net...

"Food systems are the top/key drivers of all Planetary Boundaries, with animal ag playing the biggest part." #degrowth #vegan #plantbased

Yes! They have completely lost their minds. Here's a novel idea: stop the spread of bird flu by not raising, killing, and eating billions and billions of birds. Bonus: health benefits! Just a thought! #degrowth #vegan

Colorado River basin has lost nearly the equivalent of an underground Lake Mead Reservoir lost 27.8m acre-feet of groundwater in 20 years, study finds, vanishing ‘twice as fast as surface water’

Colorado River basin is now steadily LOSING water. And here is most of it going? Livestock agriculture. #vegan #degrowth #plantbased
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

The Reductionist Delusion: How We Got Climate Change Wrong | Art Berman The failure of the climate movement isn’t just political or scientific—it’s philosophical. At its core is a reductionist mindset: isolate one culprit, pursue one goal, rally around one fix. Fossil fue...

Good message from a direction I wasn't expecting: "We need a new relationship with energy that includes respect for Nature and our place in it, humility and restraint." Perhaps #degrowth?
www.artberman.com/blog/the-red...

This Is Abundance American author Ezra Klein has written a book about his vision for the future. The Climate Laundry conducted a rudimentary analysis to determine if he knows what he's talking about. Spoiler alert: he ...

“After all if our atmosphere wasn’t finite we’d not be capable of elevating atmospheric CO2 concentrations to record levels.

& here’s the rub: humanity has expressly done these things in its quest for abundance, or what economists call growth.” #degrowth
the-climate-laundry.ghost.io/this-is-abun...

New reports tell us cattle and sheep farming can be sustainable – don’t believe them, it’s all bull | George Monbiot Feeding the world sustainably is an incredibly complex challenge, yet some people are trying to sell us a bucolic fairytale, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Degrowth urgently needed in the livestock sector. #vegan #degrowth www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Does Finance Need a Hippocratic Oath? Don't over think it.

degrowthistheanswer.substack.com/p/does-finan...

Why limits to wealth are more urgent than ever A system failure that is difficult to discuss

“The ecological crisis we are in cannot be decoupled from distributional aspects.

Therefore, we must engage in discussions regarding what we consider an acceptable level of wealth for individuals & its subsequent contribution to the climate crisis.” #degrowth
open.substack.com/pub/hanssteg...

12 economic growth myths and how to counter them By Dave Darby. Reproduced with permission from lowimpact.org published there 29 October, 2024. It’s essential that we stabilise the global economy. More people understand this every year, but corpo…

“We can continue to evolve, to develop intellectually, emotionally, artistically & spiritually—but we can’t keep growing materially, which is what inevitably happens if the economy grows.” #PostGrowth #Degrowth

12 economic growth myths & how to counter them
degrowthuk.org/2024/12/12/1...

Wishing for Collapse: The Unintended Path of Depletionism Be careful with what you ask for. Because you might not be happy with what you get

If you keep telling people that renewables are useless, people will search for something else, and, no, it will not be degrowth or Socialism.

senecaeffect.substack.com/p/wishing-fo...

Pope Francis and Laudato Si’: an ecological turning point for the Catholic Church Pope Francis has died at the age of 88, the Vatican has announced. 10 years ago, his encyclical, Laudato Si’, was published. This environmental text sought to move the Catholic Church and its concern ...

The legacy of Pope Francis in one article: theconversation.com/pope-francis...

What if growth is the problem?
Heikkurinen urges us to confront ecological limits and embrace a finite world—before it’s too late.
Within our collection: Pasi Heikkurinen's DEGROWTH: An experience of being finite.
Download the free PDF: mayflybooks.org/degrowth-an-...
#openaccess #edusky

This is a good article on the "degrowth" dilemma --- the word "degrowth" sounds negative. But the word "degrowth" does capture the most critical fact: the physical economy must and will shrink (because physics). You can call it something else, but that's what it is.

Imagination and Possibility: Part 2 We can - and should - imagine a better world, and it helps if we know what is possible.

“Step one in implementing #degrowth is releasing the wellbeing of people from the requirement of the economy to grow. This is best done by providing universal basic services, high up on the list of which is social housing.”

- @erinremblance.bsky.social
open.substack.com/pub/erinremb...

I heard Jennifer Jacquet (co-author of these studies) at the DU Animal Law forum recently. She's very well informed. One point she made is that the meat industry often declares a meat industry advocate to be a "climate expert", further confusing the public (and sometimes, us).

A Challenge to the Christian Churches The Churches’ Betrayal of the Animals. Carl Anders Skriver, Ph. D. English translation by Christine McClarnon. Lulu Press, 2025. PDF is available for free; write to cbabookinquiry@gmail.com. To ord…

compassionatespirit.com/wpblog/2025/...

Solving climate change requires changing our food systems Abstract. Humanity is facing an important existential threat—irreversible climate change caused by human activity. Until recently, most of the proposals to

It's been a while since I've seen exaggerated claims about animal agriculture's impacts in a report...especially peer-reviewed. This is filled with a number of them, using mis-cited and low-quality sources, and even some outright fabrications. 🧵 academic.oup.com/oocc/article...

Cattle pasture is the largest driver of Brazilian Amazon deforestation by a dramatic majority. All urban infrastructure, power transmission, mining, and more combined contributes 2%.