Moby on California Drought: ‘The Way We’re Living Is Stupid’
Animal products are just egregiously unsustainable, from a resource perspective. It takes up to 500 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. And it goes without saying that 500 pounds of grain is food that could be fed directly to people. It just doesn’t make sense to funnel food resources through animals. It’s a really irresponsible and inefficient way of using food resources.
One of the interesting things we’re learning from this drought is how complicated our current system is and all of the unforeseen, difficult-to-trace impacts. There was this whole backlash against almonds, and then a backlash against the backlash, and people who are drought-shaming Californians without recognizing the California water that’s inside the food in their refrigerator.
The way water is allocated in California is so complicated and so byzantine. A lot of legislators don’t want to deal with it simply because it’s complicated. There’s a benefit from taking someone like me who can look at things in a more reductionist, simplistic way without being inhibited by the complexity of the situation. Because at it’s core, it’s really simple. And it’s not an academic discussion; we’re talking about a finite resource that’s going away. And as is oftentimes the case, when people are confronted with a change that may compromise the status quo that they’re comfortable with, most people are really resistant to that change.
But change is going to happen whether people are comfortable with it or not. And California, in a very realistic way, could run out of water — unless you take the 50 percent of California’s water that’s been used for alfalfa, beef, almonds, etc. and reallocate it.
I saw this very first-hand with record companies. In the late Nineties and early 2000s, record companies didn’t want to acknowledge the change that was coming. So they all buried their heads in the sand and pretended that iTunes and Napster and downloading were not real, or they were fads and everyone was going to go back to buying CDs. They ignored that change, and the change still happened. And I feel like Governor Brown and the legislature are taking a similar tactic to water that the record companies took to Napster. They want to pretend that things are going to go back to a much easier, simpler status quo. But they’re not.
This pattern has been going on for thousands of years. I’m sure all the manual elevator operators in the early Twentieth Century thought automatic elevators were a fad they didn’t have to pay attention to. When people who worked in the silent film industry were confronted with talking pictures, they didn’t want to acknowledge that the change was coming. But the change happened — and the same thing is happening with much more deleterious, serious consequences regarding water of California.
The legislators all want to stay in office. And a question I want to ask them is, “Who’s going to vote for you if on your watch, California runs out of water?” Nothing’s going to kill a politician’s career faster than being the one who could have done something to preserve California’s water and didn’t. It’s a huge problem, but it’s also an opportunity to redress some of these issues: Rebuild the crumbling infrastructure and replace outdated, atavistic legislation about how water is allocated.