Brighter Green Interview

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Every day you and I get bombarded with negative news. And just like our bodies, become what we eat, our minds become the information that we consume. If you want to stay positive, it’s so important that you also listen to stories that inspire you and uplift you. In this podcast we interview leading experts dedicated to solving the world’s most pressing problems. And if you stick around, I promise you will not only be as informed as if you watched the news, you will be uplifted, inspired, and have more positive energy in your life. Welcome to Great.com Talks With.

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Hi and welcome to day great dotcom talks with Mia MacDonald, who’s the executive director and founder of Brighter Green dot org. And if you haven’t heard of them before, Bright Green is a public policy action tank that works to raise awareness and encourage policy action on issues that span over the environment, animals and sustainability. And if you’re new here and you haven’t done so before, you definitely want to press, subscribe or YouTube or in your podcast app, because today we’re talking about lots of important topics. It could be anything from factory farming to international climate advocacy to even talking about how the effects of covid are going to affect the climate long term. Mia, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with greater confidence.

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Thanks, Emile. I’m really pleased to be here.

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I’m happy you’re here. So how would you describe brighter greens to someone that is not familiar with the work that you do?

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Well, you did a nice job relaying our mission there, our mission statement, but I’d say Brighter Green really is seeking to work at the intersection where animal welfare, animal rights and environmental issues intersect with human development, human sustainability. How do we live on this small planet with billions of people and still a growing population, billions and a growing population of domesticated livestock that we’re using for meat and dairy products? And how do we protect the natural world biodiversity forests? And how does that all link with probably the biggest challenge we face the climate crisis. So the idea behind Briatore Green was how can we bring issues together that really should be joined but might not be as clear both to people, to researchers and to policymakers. Where is the intersection and what can we do about it, especially at a policy level? So while we love to engage with the general public, we do some teaching, we do webinars, we do lectures, we publish quite a lot. Our focus is really on policy change and we still believe government policy is really important, as is policy made by large corporations, regulatory agencies, international agencies. So we do a lot of work within the UN system, UN environment program, the UN Climate Change Convention, and quite a bit of research and policy advocacy at country levels as well that we may talk some about that.

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Yeah, it’s fascinating that the more of these interviews we make with different organizations that want to protect animals or prevent climate change, it’s obvious how everything is so linked together and part of a bigger problem and part of a bigger hole as well. And it’s. Yeah, where is the human’s role in this whole puzzle? So you guys are working on policies now. What are you doing to try to change policies like what is the key to create better policies and what are the challenges that you’re facing?

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Yeah, if we knew the key, we might have much better policies everywhere in the world, but our approach so as I as you said very well, we describe it as an action. Right. So you’ve heard the term and many of the viewers and listeners will think tank right where you’re you’re thinking your research and you’re really delving deep into an

issue. And then you share your research with the world or with a certain set of influential people and institutions. What we decided when we started bright or green, was we want to think we want to do research. We want to do that very well. But we want to see how we can take that research sort of out into the world in an action more action oriented way. So when you ask a very good question, how do you change policy? I think we’re all seeing there are many ways and there are also a lot of bottlenecks, but for us we feel the science is very important and we feel the research case is very important to show why something needs to change. So I’ll give you just a very quick example. When we started bright or green, you mentioned factory farming. We really saw a gap in understanding not just the realities of factory farming. And we know that term much better now, but how it was growing outside of the US and Europe, Australia, New Zealand in the global south.

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And some of my colleagues, Janice Cox is a great colleague from World Animal that has done some research on that. But we thought there was really a gap. So we wanted to try to fill that gap and show, OK, in China, rising meat consumption, growing industrialization of the food system, Ethiopia, Brazil, India, those are the four main countries we worked on. But what does this really look like for climate? What does it mean for natural resources? What does it mean for livelihoods for farmers? What does it mean for animals? Of course. So how does China’s policy and action also affect the world? So what I think was different about BreitBurn when we started and it is a little bit of a mouthful, right? It doesn’t lend itself as well to a seven second pitch in an elevator as we really thought it was important to bring different issue areas together that normally remain in silos. You probably heard that term. If you work on climate change, that’s what you work on. You don’t really interact with biodiversity or livelihoods or public health. That has definitely changed even in the 12 years of bright or green has been in existence. So we wanted to make the case on science and then we wanted to develop an agenda of our policy changes that could be made and that was specific to countries and also specific in a global sense.

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But it can include many things from shifting subsidy subsidies still around the world. And we’ll see if this changes with covid. Governments put a lot of money into supporting large scale agriculture, feed production, exports of those products, certainly fossil fuel production. How can we shift those subsidies? Should we be shifting those to something more regenerative, more sustainable, more ethical? So we have a range of policy recommendations and then we seek to engage with policymakers, sometimes one on one, sometimes through public writing, op ed, certainly through the climate change convention. We have a fairly significant program in China. We might talk about where we’ve really tried to take this research and put it into programmatic actions. But I think it’s still a question that can be answered many ways. How do you change policy? You know, we know that there are some institutions that have a lot of influence on policy. They probably shouldn’t as much as they do. So I think that that’s an ongoing challenge and sort of drama for all of us who care about that. And we see even with the youth climate movement. Right. I think they’ve been hugely effective in saying we have to follow the science. But gratitude, goodness that and others were saying last week and the fifth anniversary of the Paris Climate Agreement, we haven’t seen as much action as we haven’t seen the big policy changes that are absolutely essential.

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So that’s a real challenge for those who care. And I’m sure most of your viewers and listeners do care about the future of the planet. How do we get the better policies that we really need?

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All right, so if I may summarize kind of what you said, so I make sure I understood and I will oversimplify now, so often an organization works only with climate change or factory farming, but you see all of these problems so interlinked that you want to get a holistic approach. And you also see a problem. Normally, maybe someone is only looking at maybe a country, so they only look at how it affects, you know, Ethiopia or Brazil, but you want to show how you can change policies and take actions that has broken broken down those barriers between both coastal areas and nations.

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You did a great job of summarizing that.

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Yes, I mean, certainly there is a need for national policy, right? Sweden is different from Ethiopia. There’s a need for local policy. I live in New York City. We have some climate policy. We have policies on recycling, policies on public health. All of that is very important. But I think there’s certainly a role for national policy, but also global policy making right through something like the Paris Agreement. One of the ways we started with bright green, too, was in the UN climate negotiations there. There was almost no one talking about agriculture and food systems, even though there was an important report put out by the United Nations called Livestock’s Long Shadow that showed, you know, producing meat, dairy feed. It has significant climate impacts. Yes, thirsty forestation. But they also looked at what are just the carbon emissions of methane emissions and nitrous oxide emissions. You know, there are many greenhouse gases. What can we attribute to the global livestock industry? And we first started working in the UN after see, you know, when you would talk about those things, delegates, journalists would really

look at you like what you want me to be a vegetarian, a vegan. And we might say, sure, but that’s not really the point. The point is that science, the research show we have to take this issue seriously. It’s not just a personal decision. Eat less meat, don’t eat meat, be a vegan.

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It’s more that this needs to be incorporated into climate policy. And one thing I could say, and I think we’re being played a small part in this and others have also done important work. I think that disconnect between climate and food and agriculture systems is breaking down. I think, one, I think science has really grown, too. I would also say the awareness is growing, but there’s also a sort of generational shift. So like as you describe writer Green’s work and you did a nice job summarizing it again, I feel like people of my generation breaking out of those silos saying, you know, deforestation, if, of course it affects wild animals. But there’s a driver of domesticated food production in that. Also, when I see the younger generation. So people 30 and younger. They have fewer boundaries, many of them between equity issues, climate issues, animal related issues, concerns for forests and biodiversity. And so I think that’s really, really hopeful. It’s complicated for sure. Right. It’s not easy to have policy coherence, a very policy wonky term across all these areas. But, yes, our view is that it’s really important to understand how food and agriculture, animal agriculture affects these sectors and how it should be addressed by them. If I could, if I could put it that way. But I almost think you put it better.

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I mean, I think you’re right to think maybe especially the younger generation has more awareness of some kind of holistic environmental thinking. And if there’s any silver lining coming out of climate change is that it’s kind of forcing us both to look at the whole, but also to start collaborating over nations. And I guess the same thing is happening with covid that a silver lining is that, oops, we’re all having the same problem right now and we kind of have to collaborate. So what effect can you see something like covid have long term on our ability to work together, but also how we interact with the natural world?

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Yeah, I think that’s a really important question and something we’ll probably be thinking about and talking about for a number of years. So on the one hand, we could say international cooperation on covid really has not been so good. Right. And I’m sitting in New York, in the United States, and unfortunately, we’re still in the Trump era for a couple more weeks. And it seems like the US did very, very little to cooperate through the World Health Organization and with other countries. And I think there is a sense that agrees with a vaccine or are we really going to have global cooperation to make this fair? So the people who need it urgently can get it, whether they’re in Kenya or they’re in Sweden or in the United States. And I think there’s a real challenge around that. It is really going to happen. So I wouldn’t say global cooperation entirely broke down. I think there’s a lot of still interest in that from governments, from international institutions, from citizens. But I think it showed us the system is kind of creaky, actually. And perhaps we could have all dealt with Kobe better if we’d had better cooperation. So that’s one point to your other question. Our part of the question, how might covid affect how we interact with the non human world? That is something that I and my colleagues are thinking about, writing about. We collaborate with more than one hundred organizations to issue an animal’s manifesto just a couple of weeks back to prevent the next covid. And in that we’re arguing the roots of covid, even if the exact animal transmission route is somewhat unclear.

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You know, I think there’s pretty good evidence it did start in China. It likely is a result of a bat interacting with another animal that might have been being farmed or being eaten or interacting with human societies in a way that stressed that animal, that put them in a small cage, that that led to this coronavirus emerging. We also know biodiversity destruction, deforestation, habitat being clear. Many of us were are still pained to see the fires in the Amazon in Brazil. There have also been fires in central Africa. You know that human incursion into habitats also brings us into more contact with animals in ways that we probably shouldn’t have. That contact could lead to more spread of viruses, pandemics, zoonoses. And then just one more point on that. We’ve talked a little bit about large scale animal agriculture, factory farming. There is very, very good research that shows those big facilities, many, many animals, sometimes thousands crowded together. It’s dirty. It’s full of animal waste. The animals are stressed because they can’t express their natural behaviours. Those have been sites of development of avian flu, swine flu. So the research on zoonoses linked to could become a pandemic. From the way we are producing food, the way we’re treating animals domesticated and wild, all of that is getting much stronger. But I think the question now is, will governments grapple with that? Will industry grapple with that? How will we change? And I think we’ve seen some positive things, a lot of people in the lockdown’s presumably in Sweden and elsewhere for me to. Have you seen animals, squirrels, birds outside of their window have been intrigued and fascinated by that, I think found respite in nature where there weren’t so many people around, it also was good for social distancing.

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So I think, you know, what we need to have change is it’s a theoretical kind of conceptual and ethical frame. How do we live on this planet with ourselves, but also with the non-human world in a way that doesn’t destroy the climate, doesn’t decimate biodiversity, because, of course, those have huge effects on human communities. And we see with pandemic roots in a wild species, how many people have lost loved ones? How many people might have long covid? How many people have lost jobs, livelihoods because of this? We need to prevent this happening in

future. And as the final point I’ll make on this, and it sounds a little bit like a, you know, almost like a sweet thing to say, but I think there is growing scientific evidence. You know, if we treat the planet well and non-human animals and ecosystems, it’s going to be better for human societies, too. And certainly that’s the case in terms of climate change. Right. We still only have this one planet. So that’s what I would say. So I’m cautiously hopeful that covid will change. But if we look at some of the building back better policies, they haven’t been as green as as I and my colleagues have been seeking to advocate for to really say, let’s invest in clean energy, let’s invest in public transport, let’s invest in reforestation, let’s invest in more sustainable food systems that feed people better. Don’t destroy the natural world, don’t lead to zoonosis. Don’t exploit billions and billions of animals.

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Yeah, I hope we use the wake up call from climate change and call it to create more positive policies. Now we’re coming up towards the end of this interview. And for the one listening to this, what kind of. Action, would you like to see them take to take the world towards more positive policies?

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Yeah, I would say the first thing is, do you inform yourself as much as you can? You can come to the brighter green website, but do look into some of the good research, the good science. And there’s a lot more in the mainstream media now about food systems and climate change, animal agriculture and climate change, animal agriculture and biodiversity. As I mentioned, those are the Animals manifesto. It’s a very, very detailed document. So you can look at our website. You can also use Google Animals manifesto. You should find it. So I think informing oneself is important. I think in terms of action, I would say two pronged. I think it is important to push policymakers, to push businesses, to push international institutions. Are international banks to say.

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And individuals can do this, they can do it on their own, they can do it through organizations to really say these are the kind of policies, these are the kind of steps I want you to take. And I think there are a number of organizations right or green, but many others who are doing very good work in the space. So people can affiliate with organizations. They don’t have to give money necessarily, but they can sign on to letters, they can talk to people in their community, they can write their own letters or work on social media to seek to hold some of these policy institutions more accountable. And I do think that our own lives, we can make changes. I mean, policy is hugely important, but individual action is also important. And so I think people can look at their consumption. They can seek to make it more sustainable.

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They can, I would say for sure, look at the kind of food they eat. Can they reduce reliance on animal products? Can they look for a more diverse diet that they can eat? Can they support farmers who really have good practices? Obviously, things like public transport. I mean, bright green doesn’t work as much on that. But I think anything that can help reduce emissions. So individuals are absolutely important. But policies are essential, right? I don’t think solely individual action is going to get us where we need to go. But it’s still important that I do know gratitude because a nice quote where she says, you know, we need big action, right. We need the big actors, but we also need individual action because, one, it shows we’re serious about these issues. We’re not just saying leave it to the policymakers, leave it to the banks, leave it to the corporations. And also, it makes us feel more involved in this real struggle, I would say, to protect our planet, to protect ourselves and to ensure greater equity and all of those relationships, including between ourselves and each other. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot people can do and learn, listen, engage and talk to people you know and people you don’t know.

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Yeah, well said. I feel inspired to take action. Mia McDonald, thank you so much for speaking to. Great to come today.

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Thank you so much. And I should just say, since you’re in Sweden, I drink only oatmeal in my coffee. So it’s not nice. But from what I know about the business model, it seems like they are really quite serious about sustainability. I think so, too. It’s a pandemic shortage. There was no milk shortage in the pandemic. I know. Nice anyway, but I haven’t. So. Yeah, OK. Well thank you so much.

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Thank you so much for speaking to Great and for you listening. If you enjoyed this press, subscribe on YouTube or in your podcast, because if you do more people can hear conversations about how we can create policies for a better planet in the future. Thank you so much for listening and we’ll see you in the next episode.

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