Dr. Richard Oppenlander Interview from
Veganpalooza 2013
August 2013
Dr. Richard Oppenlander, author of Comfortably
Unaware, is a leading expert on the effect of our food choices on our
environment. Noted for his compelling lectures, and a featured guest on
radio and TV, he is the founder of an organic food production company.
DR. OPPENLANDER: Right, and even what you just said there, let’s split
that out a little bit. Right now there’s only 1.1% of our oceans being
protected in areas called marine protected areas, MPAs. A couple things
about that. At the most recent convention on biological diversity in Nagoya,
Japan, in 2010 where researchers come together and try to solve the
situations like this, exactly what you said, they ignored completely
livestock operations on land in terms of its impact on the oceans, but they
only agreed to protect 10% of our oceans by the year 2020. Even if those
areas were protected, you want to go back to what we’ve been emphasizing
thus far, which is they’re protecting areas of oceans that are now also
becoming acidified. Oceans have been decreased their pH levels by more than
30% in the last 50 years, from the operations on land. So even if you have
10% or 20% or 30% or even 50% that were protected, you still are protecting
them in a growing acidified environment.
DR. TUTTLE: The whole ocean, right, is becoming devastated. I see what
you’re saying. So you’re protecting an area but it’s not going to be healthy
protected area.
DR. OPPENLANDER: It’s almost like you really need to view this in terms of
protection in two ways. One is that there’s too little of our oceans. They
said only 1% now and it’s going to grow to only 10% over the next seven
years. But in addition to that, it’s what you’re protecting. The oceans
themselves are great moderators of what we’re doing wrong on the planet, so
they’re taking the excess of heat, and also the excess of greenhouse gas
emissions, and they’re basically absorbing those for us, trying to protect
us. In the process, the ocean waters are overheating and they’re becoming
acidified, both. So no matter what the percentage is that’s being protected,
it’s water that’s being destroyed, which is obviously running havoc with
various species.
DR. TUTTLE: IT’s really the foundation of all life on planet Earth is the
oceans, obviously. So let’s move along. I just want to underline this for
everyone who’s listening. This is a subject that’s so near and dear to my
heart, what we’re doing to the oceans and to aquatic animals. There’s a
connection, I think, that would be good to make also between our food
choices and human hunger and poverty. I was wondering if you could address
that a little. Why haven’t the ways we’ve been addressing hunger and
poverty, like giving care packages and so forth, just giving people grain
that would go to our livestock. Why aren’t things working, and what’s the
approach do you think would work?
DR. OPPENLANDER: Just an incredibly important question with even more
important answers. Let’s first of all, let’s just go over very, very quickly
some basics because most people wouldn’t have a clue to how serious it is or
how possible, whatever they do, would the decisions they make have any
impact on world hunger, as you said, or even poverty. But there are about
900 million people, 879 million people, actually, in the world that suffer
daily from hunger. This year there’s a predicted six million children will
die from starvation. Now, more than two-thirds of all those hunger victims
are found in developing countries, so the countries that are not
industrialized. They’re affected by many other issues: poverty, lack of
education, 60-70% of a lot of these individuals are illiterate, they have
poor human health, many of them are suffering from HIV, they have social
inequities, political instability, of course. But at the heart of all this
is depletion of their natural resources. They’ve lost, in some countries,
two-thirds of their topsoil, and the rest of their topsoil is being lost
faster than it can be replaced. So at the heart of this cycle, this vicious
cycle of hunger and poverty and these other issues that are thrown and the
other complexity of issues, is food choice, both local there in those
regions as well as global.
Now, in a global sense, which is where most listeners would want to hear,
how could they possibly have anything to do with this? Surrounded by other
host of factors, I feel there are four primary ways in which food choice
globally affects hunger and food security in developing countries. All of
them are negatively impacted by the demand to eat animals. This is why. What
we choose to eat in the U.S. and other developed countries drives resource
use, and it drives food pricing, and it drives policy making on a global
basis. Secondly, our food choices impact decision making for these, as you
mentioned in the question, the food relief programs, and also investment
strategies by big businesses, funders of development projects in developing
countries. I’m involved, I’m consulting with a number of non-profit groups
right now to try to get this changed. Thirdly is that local and regional
food choices, they adhere to these established cultural norms, and so they
continue to drive inefficient agricultural practices, misuse of resources,
and it undermines any attempt to improve literacy or human welfare. Then
lastly, of course, collective worldwide demand to eat animals suppresses any
type of education. If everybody in the world essentially, or most people,
98% of people in the world, are eating animals and driving the raising of
livestock and the increase in meat and dairy and fishing industries, that’s
going to suppress, if you think about it, any education to do anything
different in these developing countries to improve their own agricultural
systems.
DR. TUTTLE: Right, plus the fact is that typically it was the less
industrialized nations, it still is, that eat a lot less meat and dairy, but
we have the industrialized nations, like the United States especially and
other countries, they’re basically promoting projects that encourage people
to eat more meat and dairy. We have things like the Heifer Project and we
have World Bank and the IMF that very often are supporting, giving funding
to projects that actually support American corporations and the
pharmaceutical complex, which actually thrives in times where there are
people eating more meat and dairy. So there are all these forces that are
pushing the Western ways of eating on these people.
DR. OPPENLANDER: That’s right. You mentioned a number of multinational
companies, and actually there are a few that control over 55% of all the
seed and grain and over 80% of all final animal products in the world. So
it’s a very monopolized production economic system. We’re running out of
land in developed countries, so they’re going to turn to, they already are
turning to developing countries for their land and to drop resources. Their
now large issue is that I think most people sympathetic to the animal
agricultural industry, in terms of sympathetic, meaning we should be
lessening that, and that are more understanding of the fact of where grain
and food is going and where some of our resources are going, it’s been an
argument that we produce, for instance in 2011, the last year where the
record was kept, that we produced 2.6 billion tons of grain in the world,
but nearly half of that, about 43% of that, was given to animals in the meat
and dairy industries. Which is, the 2.6 billion tons represents an amount
that would feed over two times the amount of people that there are on Earth.
So it’s silly in terms of...
DR. TUTTLE: We’re growing plenty of food, but we’re feeding it to animals.
DR. OPPENLANDER: Yeah, exactly, but my thought, I go a bit beyond that. I
don’t think it’s just that that’s the problem. It’s not as simple as just
giving them the grain. For instance, if we could provide for these people,
in other words, dropping care packages and, as you alluded to in the
question at the onset, dropping care packages in or giving them investment
or dropping in investment from big business to put in large industrial
agricultural systems, that’s not going to really solve world hunger. All
this grain really shouldn’t go to them. What we need to do is to create
sustainability, give them a pattern or blueprint for themselves.
DR. TUTTLE: Right, locally.
DR. OPPENLANDER: Locally, yeah, through and at the nucleus. And if your
listeners could project this out, the nucleus is a plant-based agricultural
system because it’s going to develop a more fertile land, which is what they
need, to rebuild their soil. At the same time in a much more efficient
manner, it’s going to provide health benefits for them, and it’s going to be
much more productive in terms of the amount, in terms of yield. But you want
to be looking at yield not short-term but more long-term, how can they not
only grow enough food for themselves but through many, many generations. So
it’s sort of what I call a multidimensional approach to sustainability while
providing them education, inputs, support in transition to them so they can
take care of themselves. That’s really what’s needed in terms of solving
world hunger.
DR. TUTTLE: Right. The pressure, I know, for example, a huge amount, some
people say about an acre per second, of rainforest is being cut down in the
Amazon, and it’s primarily to grow soybeans and to clear land to feed
animals, and a lot of it’s going to China, a lot of it’s going to North
America, so we’re seeing the devastation of ecosystems as well as the local
communities, all driven by animal agriculture.
DR. OPPENLANDER: And just what you said, China for the first time last year
surpassed us in terms of the amount of pork, the amount of meat that’s being
produced. And you’re exactly right: they’re driving production of meat and
of land devastation in many of these developing countries, especially in
rainforested areas, to produce even crops for their animal industry. So it
is a global picture, and our choices themselves are what is driving all
this.
DR. TUTTLE: One thing you mentioned, too, maybe if you don’t mind, I know
this may be opening up a large subject that would take maybe too long, but
if you could just maybe briefly address it because I think a lot of people
maybe are aware of the recent TED talk by Allan Savory where he’s basically
talking about what you’re saying: in order to have the local people feed
themselves, we should have lots of cattle running on the land. So of course,
all of the meat-eaters are just licking their chops and saying, “Okay, look,
this is just what we wanted to hear.” I know it’s a big subject, you’ve
written a whole article on it that I saw in your blog, but kind of debunk
that for people.
DR. OPPENLANDER: Yeah, actually, you’re exactly right. It’s a very large
topic mainly because the reason that he had spoken, the reason that he was
selected, and the reason that he received the standing ovation is because
just what you said, is that carnivores, or people who are omnivores
throughout the world, are basically just trying to grasp anything they can
in terms of justification for furthering their dietary choices. In the midst
of all the facts and reality that it’s unhealthy for them, it’s unhealthy
for our planet, it’s certainly unhealthy for animals. Now, you’re exactly
right, and I guess the first thing I’d like to do is because it’s such a
large topic, and I’m happy you mentioned it because I spent a bit of time
trying to not just debunk the myth about his talk but more or less elucidate
for the audience in that blog that I wrote all the complexities of about
desertification in terms of how it starts first with erosion from
deforestation and then it runs its course. I felt it was a fairly
enlightening type of article from a lot of different standpoints, so it’d be
great if anybody that would want to look further to look up that blog on my
Comfortably Unaware website or on a blog website.
Very quickly or briefly to help answer that is that there are a couple
different levels to help answer that. Let’s just talk about the two most
important ones. One is that livestock themselves can actually are better for
land in terms of if you’ve lost topsoil or it’s been desertified, loss of
all topsoil in particular, that’s better than just planting plants or having
plant-based agriculture. Which it’s not, and there’s been just so many,
hundreds and hundreds of articles about that. So it’s just, and we could go
into much more detail about that.
But another most important aspect of that talk which was completely false is
that first of all he started in the middle of the process talking about
desertification, and that’s actually the end of the process. Most of the
land that’s been desertified, sure, there are some ancient grasslands that
have been desertified, but most of them are just what you were alluding to
in the beginning of this, which is most of the land have been forests. And
in fact, those areas that he highlighted by a NASA photograph were in the
Amazon, as you mentioned, they were in Africa, and some in Southeast Asia.
All those areas were initially forest, and they were deforested. They were
all cut down in order to support animal agriculture. Almost 90% of the
deforestation in the Amazon has been placed in cattle or crops to feed
cattle. So if you start at the beginning of the process and just change the
eating habits so we’re not eating meat, the land would be used in a much
more efficient fashion. We wouldn’t have to be deforesting these areas. It
wouldn’t be turning them over to cattle. They wouldn’t be becoming erosive.
We wouldn’t be losing topsoil, and therefore they wouldn’t be desertified.
So he’s sort of creating, he’s starting the subject at the end instead of at
the beginning.
DR. TUTTLE: That’s so important for people to understand that. The deserts
that he’s talking about healing are the ones that were destroyed by animal
agriculture to begin with. It’s not healing them anyway because plant-based
agriculture. Thank you, and I really want to recommend everyone, if you have
a chance, go to comfortablyunaware.wordpress.com, and you can look up that
article that Dr. Oppenlander wrote. Another thing that I think would be
great to kind of shift gears here, talk a little bit about just basically
Michael Pollan, maybe before that, this whole idea that we see around us,
this very strong movement toward and people promoting permaculture and, as
part of that, grass-fed or pastured animal agriculture and calling this
fully sustainable. What are your thoughts on this kind of animal-based
permaculture sustainable agriculture?
DR. OPPENLANDER: Well, you mentioned someone’s name there at the beginning,
and I don’t know if you had any other specific question related to Michael
Pollan.
DR. TUTTLE: We can go into that. Michael Pollan, it’s not just him. It’s
quite a few other experts that have been promoting eating animal foods or
saying eat less meat but keep eating some meat. So that was in a way maybe a
little different question I was going to ask about the sort of taking baby
steps question. But maybe before that, the whole grass-fed pastured animal
agriculture might be interesting.
DR. OPPENLANDER: Right, and that’s why I mentioned that because he’s one of
the proponents of this movement. In fact, he sort of ultra publicized it
when he was on Oprah two years ago and made a statement that grass-fed beef
is fully sustainable. Oprah even asked him again to repeat that and the
audience, which he did. Then he’s, of course, with all of the literature
he’s written and the books, he’s made it very clear that it is a sustainable
way to produce food. The issue is, and we’ll come back to this if you want
to talk more about the platform that some of these authors have, but he
really begins from that, in a sense, that what we’re hearing is a type of
agriculture, or permaculture, first of all, from the words permanent and
agriculture, so it does have a lot to do with sustainability. So the issue
really is that the people who are proponents of this pretty much eat meat
themselves, and they have permaculture systems, grass-fed systems, that they
either have their own cows or cattle, as Michael Pollan does, or they just
ascribe to it.
But the issue really is this, is that 45% of the entire landmass on Earth is
used by and for livestock right now. And that figure actually was
substantiated or documented by the International Livestock Research
Institute. So if anything, I feel like it’s understated. With that in mind,
less than 2% of all the animals raised in the U.S. and about 9% worldwide
are grazing. All the rest are involved in factory farming. So as we shift,
and this is how much land’s being used still, even though only 9% are
grazing, so as we shift to what they feel is sustainable, grass-fed systems,
is we’re advocating more and more land occupation because it takes more land
to raise cattle, anywhere from 2-35 acres depending on where you are in the
world, to support one cow. So the productivity is just a fraction of what it
is. Instead of 150-400 pounds of what people call food, which is meat from a
carcass from one cow being produced per acre, we can produce somewhere
between 5000-50,000 pounds per acre of plant-based foods. So it’s an issue
of efficiency and productivity. Also, one-third of the world’s topsoil has
been lost because of the cattle that are using 45% of the landmass. In fact,
eating less meat and producing more grass-fed cattle will mean that we’ll be
using more land, and we’re going to be contributing more to climate change
because it requires more grass-fed cattle produce somewhere between 50-60%
more methane than cattle if they were not on grass-fed than from factory
farms. And we’ll still be using more water than what we should, between
25,000 gallons all the way up to two million gallons per one cow.
DR. TUTTLE: In their lifetime?
DR. OPPENLANDER: In their lifetime before they’re slaughtered. The reason it
moves up from one to two million is because in most areas of the world where
they feel like they have a highly efficient system, they actually use water
to irrigate alfalfa and their pastures, and in many areas, for instance,
there’s 900,000 acres being irrigated in just California of alfalfa. Every
one of those acres is irrigated, and they’re irrigated at a rate of about
one to two million gallons per season of water per acre. So it becomes an
enormous strain on water, on climate change, on land use, and all for the
end product that isn’t sustainable for us to eat either. So using the word
sustainable for grass-fed or placing grass-fed animals into a permaculture
environment is nonsensical.
At some point in time, we could discuss more about where permaculture began.
It was actually in Austria, and the person who started that, I’m not going
to go into too much detail here, he did use animals, but they only used
animals to help cultivate or help actually till the soil. They didn’t really
use them for necessarily to slaughter in large amounts. But that model has
been, and it worked well for that person, Sepp Holzer in Austria, worked
well for him 50, 60 years ago in that area, but on a worldwide basis, it
wouldn’t work at all because of all the inefficiencies that we’ve just
talked about. So permaculture as a whole, it if was applied to small-scale
single-owner farm operations that only produced plant-based foods, it is
probably a wonderful model vs. industrializing everything, but not if they
include animals, which are incredibly inefficient.
DR. TUTTLE: It seems like the word permaculture’s been somewhat co-opted by
the animal agriculturists just to include. So tell me a little bit more now
about the so-called food experts, like not only Michael Pollan but Jamie
Oliver, Mark Bittman, and others that have a really large-scale platform,
lots of people are listening to them, reading what they’re writing and so
forth. What do you think about their approach? What do you think is wrong
with their approach of focusing on how bad processed foods are, how bad high
fructose corn syrup is, eat meat but just eat less meat, and so forth?
DR. OPPENLANDER: Just once a week.
DR. TUTTLE: Right, once a week. Or once a week go vegetarian, maybe, these
sort of little baby steps. I think our listeners, it’s very interesting to
look at this more deeply.
DR. OPPENLANDER: That is really, you’re tying in a lot of topics actually,
directly and indirectly, because this is what we’re all hearing and this is
what’s influencing. This is the core of influence, for at least the United
States and most of the world. So here’s the way I view this. The people that
you mention, including we could even talk about people like Al Gore that did
a wonderful thing, winning a Nobel Peace Prize, opening the door up to
global warming, as he called it, so these people that you mentioned, these
New York Times bestselling authors and lecturers and now are celebrities
essentially, they’ve opened the door. We don’t want to detract from one or
two things they have done. They’ve opened the door for many, many people to
at least be concerned about their food instead of just eating it and not
having a clue to where it came from. That’s a good thing.
The bad thing is that they know very well that their platform would be
diminished if they discussed anything that would be somewhat controversial
or going against the grain in terms of what our cultural influences are, or
even politically now, what our political and economic influences are from
all the billions of dollars that are being spent by the meat and dairy and
fishing industry. So they have a different agenda. They’re essentially
taking the path of least resistance. What Pollan, for instance, and Bittman
and Jamie Oliver are talking about in terms of eating less processed foods
and dropping off high fructose corn syrup and things like that, or eating
what your grandmother ate, things like that, are really nothing new, as you
know. These are things that we’ve heard back in the Pritikin day in 1970s.
But they’re very eloquent writers. So they’re picking up a very, very large
audience, and it’s what people want to hear. They want to hear, “I want to
still eat my meat, so I want to hear reasons. I want to be validated for
this.” Well, the thing that what’s drastically wrong with their approach is
that it’s taking the focus off of all the proper way to approach eating
meat, which is not eating it at all because it’s the most important or
critical factor in global depletion in terms of depleting all of our
resources. It’s barely under the energy sector in terms of its effect on
climate change and our anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions,
human-induced. It’s equal to, if not more important, and you have a number
of other speakers that will talk about this much better than I can, I’m
still involved with a number of patients of mine, it’s equal to or more
involved in terms of all our Western diseases.
So for them to take the approach that we can still eat this product that’s
devastating our planet and our resources and our own health, not to mention
the animals that are affected. When we talk about animals, that’s one other
thing I want to throw in here real quickly, is that I don’t think we should
ever separate out. I think that so oftentimes our movement toward a more
peaceful lifestyle and eating habits and healthier eating habits are geared
towards the animals that are involved that we slaughter, that we eat, and
even more so, it’s even more focused into factory farms. Well, we’re
forgetting all the trillions of animals and insects that are slaughtered or
lose their habitat each year that are wild, that we aren’t eating directly,
and I think that’s very important not to separate that out. So that’s just
one other aspect of what they’re doing. They’re placing all the focus on
high fructose corn syrup and things like that, which really are important,
but it’s just a fragment, a very small fragment, of the picture.
So their solutions of taking baby steps or going meatless on Mondays, their
agenda is a completely different than really what the world is on. The world
has a different timeline. We have only a very short period of time to reduce
greenhouse gases to affect positively our climate change issue, and of
course each hour that goes by, we lose another, we slaughter another eight
million animals. So I think that if you look at the agenda they’re on, it’s
very easy for them to say, and it’s very easy for people to accept, that
let’s just go meatless on Mondays or take baby steps. But as I’ve said a
number of times, if you’re striving to this, this going meatless on Mondays,
what you’re doing is you’re contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and
pollution and destruction of, devastation of our planet’s resources and your
own health on six days of the week. So you’re creating a false justification
for what you’re doing. So we need to do better than that because the world,
the planet, the animals, everything living on our planet, we’re on a
different timeline than what these authors are on that have their own agenda
to make sure they keep selling book.
DR. TUTTLE: What you’re talking about is a sense of urgency, and also a
sense of how this approach really disempowers people from actually working.
DR. OPPENLANDER: It does. One quick thing I have to say about his newest
book, Michael Pollan’s newest book, which is Cooked, and it’s everywhere. He
has audiences of over 20, 30 million people at a time listening to him
during a one week period of time. With that book, it’s eloquently written.
He compels everyone to relish the act of cooking. So that’s great. But I
think the audience and the world needs to hear, though, and certainly for
me, it’s not at all an issue, and I know you know this, Will, but it’s not
an issue at all of how a particular food item is cooked or even if it is
cooked. What’s most important is where that food came from, what story it
tells, what resources it took to produce it, and if an animal’s life had to
be sacrificed in order to get to our plate, that’s infinitely more
concerning as an individual or a component of a world community, global
community, than how an item happens to be cooked.
DR. TUTTLE: Can you talk a little bit now, we’re kind of moving toward the
end of our time here, but can you talk a little bit about some of the food
movements that are very strong, the slow food movement, the local food
movement, the organic, the real food, the sustainable food, the humanely
raised food, all these things, are these really a great thing that’s
happening? What do you think about all that?
DR. OPPENLANDER: No, not at all. It’s kind of the same thing. What it is is
there are movements that are heavily garnered, they garner heavy support
from the media and from these well-known individuals, so that’s a nice segue
into this question to answer it better. But the problem is that they’re all
based on an improper definition of the word “healthy.” I think the one type
of food, the two types of food I can pull out of those movements, the two
types of movements that I think best represent this, are local and real
food, both because they’re growing, most people can identify themselves with
those, and they’re the most I guess blatant in terms of how they’re not
healthy.
So let’s take real food, just very quickly. Real food, the real food
movement, is based on Jamie Oliver’s movement and now it’s another group has
taken it up, and it’s actually the quickest growing food movement amongst
college campuses. I see it everywhere I talk on all campuses everywhere
across the country. It’s based on being, the food has to be local, fair,
sustainable, and humane. Those four situations have to exist at the same
time. So you say to yourself, “Good, that’s great. They’re looking out for
four very important issues.” But the problem is that inherent to their
definition, okay, because something’s local doesn’t at all mean that it’s
humane. We have local, you can find chicken that’s slaughtered in any which
way, any fashion whatsoever, just two minutes, two steps from anybody’s
house. In terms of sustainable, we’ve already talked about how various
grass-fed movements and permaculture movements and anything that has
anything to do with our oceans or fish or certified sustainable, how they’re
really not sustainable. The label is placed because it’s trying to find a
way to support continued efforts to eat meat, but it’s really not
sustainable in any fashion. In terms of humane, you have many other people
talking about that, but just because there’s a humane certifying agency now
stating that an animal was raised in a humane fashion doesn’t at all mean
that when it’s killed it’s humanely killed. You can take any of the animals
we have at our animal rescue and I guarantee that not one of them would
follow you into a slaughterhouse, if they knew what was going on in there,
to be put through that. So really, the essence, the root of the definition
of real food is flawed, and therefore the movement is flawed.
And similarly with local. Local is a word that most people ascribe now to,
which is buying food within 100-mile radius of sorts, and basically, again,
you can have any food that is produced from an animal or an animal product
itself which is not going to be sustainable, and it’s not going to be
healthy for you, it’s not to be healthy for the animal that was killed, even
though it’s local. So it’s much more important to look at, again, how a food
item was produced, and it’d be much healthier for the world and for yourself
and for the animal if you bought food from 1500 miles away if it was
plant-based, entirely derived from plants, rather than eating an animal that
was produced by your next-door neighbor. Now, in the other direction, it’s
certainly good to support local businesses, but not if they have anything to
do with animal agriculture.
DR. TUTTLE: So basically, it comes down to that from every angle, not only
compassion, but from environmental sustainability, and it really even from
energy use and pollution and so forth, that plant-based agriculture is much
more efficient, much less environmentally damaging than any animal
agriculture, whether it’s local, real, slow, humane, whatever, it’s always
going to have inherent within it the devastating effects to the environment
and to animals.
DR. OPPENLANDER: That’s right, and one other thing you could add in that
summary, and it’s on a timeline. Anytime that anyone would be supporting the
meat and dairy and fishing industry, you are contributing to and lengthening
out a timeline that’s not in our best interest.
DR. TUTTLE: Right. This has really been amazingly interesting. What I’ve
felt as you’re basically unpacking the hidden side, really, of animal
agriculture is that I wish we had more time.
DR. OPPENLANDER: No question. Will, I think there’s one thing I’d like to
say just very quickly, now that I was just listening to you talk there for a
minute. You have a number of people, a number of speakers that are just so
beautiful in terms of what they have to say and their message talking about
ethics. You yourself, you’re so well-known for your ability to transfer
information in a very kind way to make people understand about the ethics of
eating food. Well, I think that’s one more definition that needs refinement
is ethics, the consideration of what we choose to eat. I think that instead
of just animal rights and animal welfare, certainly we need to start
thinking about the ethics of, for instance, is it ethical for any of us to
eat food that causes the extinction of other species and irreversible
climate change, loss of ecosystems, resource depletion, etc.? That’s the way
the word ethics should now be applied.
DR. TUTTLE: Right, exactly. Causing the devastation of the planet for future
generations and other species. Wow, thanks so much. I’m going to, I want to
just really encourage everyone to look more deeply into the work of Dr.
Richard Oppenlander. Can you say what you prefer is your website?
DR. OPPENLANDER: You mentioned earlier a couple websites, but the one that I
think you could get the most information from that links to everyone else is
just comfortablyunaware.com. I’ll even probably wrap the second book into
that one, and that would be great.
DR. TUTTLE: Great. Comfortablyunaware.com. thank you very much, Dr.
Oppenlander, it’s been really extremely thought-provoking to have you with
us, and I hope people can continue, everyone who’s listening, to do more
research and find out, make an effort to find out if what he’s saying is
really true, and if it is, how we should live, how we should respond to
these truths because I think that’s the most important thing that we can do.
Thanks so much for joining us.
DR. OPPENLANDER: Thank you very much for all your efforts here and in
general. I appreciate the opportunity to be part of this, and a heartfelt
thank you to everyone listening. Let’s all go out and inspire others now.
Thank you so much, Will, I appreciate it.
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