Cowed: The Hidden Impact of 93 Million Cows on America’s Health, Economy, Politics, Culture, and Environment

Cowed: The Hidden Impact of 93 Million Cows on America’s Health, Economy, Politics, Culture, and Environment

Author: Denis Hayes

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2015-03-09

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0393246639

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From leading ecology advocates, a revealing look at our dependence on cows and a passionate appeal for sustainable living. In Cowed, globally recognized environmentalists Denis and Gail Boyer Hayes offer a revealing analysis of how our beneficial, centuries-old relationship with bovines has evolved into one that now endangers us. Long ago, cows provided food and labor to settlers taming the wild frontier and helped the loggers, ranchers, and farmers who shaped the country’s landscape. Our society is built on the backs of bovines who indelibly stamped our culture, politics, and economics. But our national herd has doubled in size over the past hundred years to 93 million, with devastating consequences for the country’s soil and water. Our love affair with dairy and hamburgers doesn’t help either: eating one pound of beef produces a greater carbon footprint than burning a gallon of gasoline. Denis and Gail Hayes begin their story by tracing the co-evolution of cows and humans, starting with majestic horned aurochs, before taking us through the birth of today’s feedlot farms and the threat of mad cow disease. The authors show how cattle farming today has depleted America’s largest aquifer, created festering lagoons of animal waste, and drastically increased methane production. In their quest to find fresh solutions to our bovine problem, the authors take us to farms across the country from Vermont to Washington. They visit worm ranchers who compost cow waste, learn that feeding cows oregano yields surprising benefits, talk to sustainable farmers who care for their cows while contributing to their communities, and point toward a future in which we eat less, but better, beef. In a deeply researched, engagingly personal narrative, Denis and Gail Hayes provide a glimpse into what we can do now to provide a better future for cows, humans, and the world we inhabit. They show how our relationship with cows is part of the story of America itself.


The Beginning and the End of the World

The Beginning and the End of the World

Author: Robert Crawford

Publisher: Birlinn

Published: 2011-06-14

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0857900587

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In a work of spectacular imagination and remarkable synthesis, poet Robert Crawford celebrates St Andrews, the first town in the world to have its people, buildings and natural environment thoroughly documented through photography. The Beginning and the End of the World tells the stories of several pioneering Scottish photographers, linking their work to one of the nineteenth century's most scandalous and hotly debated publications. Here is the extraordinary intellectual life of an eccentric society rich in apocalyptically-minded Victorian inventors and authors whose work has had an international impact. The protagonists include a very quarrelsome professor, a cello-playing ex-military golfer, a notorious scientist, a married couple coping with mental breakdown and a physician obsessed with sewage. In paying full attention to these people's inter-relationship, implicitly and explicitly this book suggests that their lasting legacies may have a bearing on our own arguments about environmental sustainability and the possibility of largescale extinction.


Slavery and Class in the American South

Slavery and Class in the American South

Author: William L. Andrews

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0190908386

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Slavery and Class in the American South reveals how work, family, and connections that made for socioeconomic differences among the enslaved of the South are critical components of the American slave narrative.