Clinton Foundation seeks ideas to change the world…

Posted on 11/03/2011 by J. Morris Hicks

Let’s tell them about the greatest world changing opportunity in history.

An email from the Clinton Foundation has been popping up everywhere — seeking ideas from everyone, asking, “What’s your idea for making the world a better place?” So let’s send him a consistent message. I have been thinking for a long time about the single most important thing that Mr. Clinton could do for us: Simply dispel the “protein myth” that most people believe — the myth about actually needing to eat animal protein.

With a powerful organization already in place, who better than Bill Clinton to lead the world's most important global initiative?

Once that myth has been dispelled, all of the great thinkers of the world will be able to start thinking about the enormous benefits that will result from a major shift in the direction of plant-based eating — health, water, trees, biodiversity, climate change, world hunger and so much more.

But, until that protein myth is shattered, the plant-based feeding model is not even on the table for consideration. Here’s how you can help. 

First, watch this video starring Ben Stiller, Kevin Spacey, Sean Penn, Ted Danson and others — including an appearance by Clinton himself at the end. A celebrity spoof, it is very entertaining, but you don’t have to watch the entire six minutes to get the picture.

Enjoy the video, then help me send Mr. Clinton a powerful message.

Now, please scroll down and follow these five simple instructions:

  1. Read the idea below that we submitted this morning.
  2. Copy that idea.
  3. Open the “Submit Your Idea” link below.
  4. Paste that idea in there and send it.
  5. Then send that same idea to all of your friends and ask them to submit the same one.

Here’s our idea that we have been formulating for months; and if this message campaign doesn’t work, we’ll figure out another way to get to Mr. Clinton.

Dear President Clinton,

Thank you for launching this initiative to seek new ideas for changing the world. Here’s my idea; simple, yet extremely powerful. Please announce to the entire world that we don’t NEED to eat ANY animal protein to be healthy. As you well know from following the advice of Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn and Dr. T. Colin Campbell; our wide-spread love affair with meat and dairy is literally killing us and is also contributing mightily to a plethora of environmental horrors. Further, it is totally unsustainable for a host of reasons.

What’s at stake? By telling everyone this basic truth, you will be opening the door for the greatest minds of the world to start planning how we can aggressively, yet smoothly, move in the direction of a health promoting plant-based diet. With this one simple gesture, you’ll open the door for improvements in our own health coupled with a huge reduction in our cost of health care. Equally important, you’ll enable the world’s great thinkers to leverage the uncanny efficiency of plant-based eating to feed 10 times as many people on the same amount of land –while consuming over 90 percent less fossil fuel energy and water.

Home Run. Talking about a home run; you are in a unique position to change the world in the best way possible — promoting health, feeding more people, nurturing the fragile environment, conserving water and fossil fuels and gradually ending the horrendous practice of growing and killing sixty billion animals per year for our dinner tables.

More than one message. It will be necessary for you to make this crucial announcement more than once; it may require hundreds of repetitions before people everywhere really get it. You see, as it now stands, most of the brightest and best-educated people on Earth still believe they truly NEED to eat animal protein; and it will take someone with your credibility, authenticity and leadership skills to convince them otherwise anytime soon.

One Final Point. As a former president, you may be one of the few global celebrities alive that could make such a world-changing announcement without fear of legal action from certain groups citing a violation of our many Food Disparagement Laws in this country. Thank you and God bless you.

Sincerely, J. Morris Hicks, author, Healthy Eating — Healthy World (a new book endorsed by Ornish, Esselstyn, & Campbell; visit our website at hpjmh.com)

Next Step. Copy the above “idea to Mr. Clinton”, go to the link below and paste it in there. Also paste that note into a message to everyone that you know and ask them to do the same. Send them a link to this post and ask them to follow the instructions, just as you have done. You may wish to personalize your message with an introductory paragraph in your own words.

Submit your idea to the Clinton Foundation — Ideas to Change the World.

Donation opportunity. After submitting my idea, I made a small donation and received this message back immediately:

Your transaction has been completed and a receipt for your donation has been emailed to you. Thank you for making a gift of  $10.00 to the Clinton Foundation. Your support is helping to improve lives and uplift communities around the world. You can spread the word about this opportunity to friends, family and colleagues by posting to Facebook or sharing on Twitter.

If Mr. Clinton acts on our simple idea; the world-chaning results will be enormous in terms of  promoting our health and saving our planet.

Authors J. Stanfield Hicks and J. Morris Hicks , working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

If you like what you see here, you may wish to join our periodic mailing list. Also, for help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4-Leaf page. From the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

If you’d like to order our book on Amazon,  visit our BookStore now.

—J. Morris Hicks…blogging daily at HealthyEatingHealthyWorld.com

SHARE and rate this post below…One more thing, occasionally an unauthorized ad may appear beneath a blog post. It is controlled by WordPress (a totally free hosting service). I do not approve or personally benefit whatsoever from any ad that might ever appear on this site. I apologize and urge you to please disregard.

Posted in Activism & Leadership, Bill Clinton, Book Promotion, Celebrities | 7 Comments

“Running roughshod” over our planet at the 7 billion mark.

Posted on 11/02/2011 by J. Morris Hicks

Taking land inventory at the 7 billion mark of human population

Sixty billion animals worldwide for our food. If the entire world ate the way we do, we'd soon need to raise and kill 300 billion animals each year.

Our love affair with the typical Western diet is completely unsustainable for very much longer. This week as we officially passed the seven billion mark according to the U.N., we are reminded of the incredibly wasteful feeding model in the Western world. What do I mean by wasteful?

Let’s start with the amount of arable land required to feed our population. Some simple arithmetic:

  • It takes over three acres per person to produce the Western diet of meat and dairy three meals a day.
  • It takes about 1/6 of an acre to feed someone who eats nothing but plant-based foods.
  • On average, it takes from ten to twenty times more land to feed a given population the Western diet as compared to a plant-based diet.
  • Arable land (where food crops can be grown) totals roughly 8 billion acres.
  • With 7 billion people that works out to just over one acre per person.

So, if you passed 3rd grade arithmetic, you obviously realize that we would need over 20 billion acres of arable land to feed all 7 billion of us the Western diet — about 12 billion more acres than we have. What does this mean? Clearly, everyone cannot eat this wasteful diet-style. And it’s getting worse all the time – not better.

Note: Much of this information is covered in our well-referenced book with 306 footnotes. Also, a few references are shown below, but you may want to do some of your own research. It won’t take you long to realize that we have a very serious problem on planet Earth.

In a mere blink of history, this is typical of what humankind has done to our planet.

A little background on population. Humans have been around for about 200,000 years and the global population stood at about 250 million at year 1 A.D. It took us a little over 1800 years to reach one billion mark. Since then:

  • 1927, we reached two billion. (adding one billion in 123 years)
  • 1959, we reached three billion. (adding one billion in 32 years)
  • 2011, we reached seven billion. (adding one billion every 13 years since 1959)

It gets worse. Our population continues to grow at about 200,000 people per day and is projected to rise to 9 to 13 billion by 2050. At the same time, more people around the world are choosing our wasteful diet-style around the world every year.

When people coming out of poverty have a little money for the first time, they want to start eating like people in the United States and Europe. And we’re placing McDonald’s, Burger Kings and KFC’s all over the world sot that they can do just that.

If we all ate what Nature intended for us to eat, we could feed all 7 billion humans on far less than half of the land we're using today.

We’re not done yet. Our 8 billion acres of arable land is shrinking due to degradation every year — losing an area about the size of South Carolina each year. Some forecast that at the current rate that our total arable land per person could drop from 1.1 acres/person that we have today to only .59 acre/person by 2039. Clearly, we have a problem.

A Sad Summary. When you consider that there has been life on this planet for 4 billion years and that humans arrived just 200,000 years ago, it’s mind-boggling what our race has done to our home since then. And most of that damage has been done in just the last 50 years.

While a relative newcomer to the planet, in just the past few hundred years (a mere blink in the eye of history) we have taken possession of all of the land and have lived as if all of the other creatures have been placed here for our pleasure.

One recent example of how we’re running roughshod over our precious planet was reported earlier this year in Fast Company prompting me to blog on 7-19-11, Burning trees in the Amazon — to feed pigs in China (See source article below). To support a completely unnecessary diet-style, we’re destroying the environment, wasting fossil fuel energy shipping soybeans across the ocean so that the Chinese don’t have to depend on other countries to meet their steadily growing demand for pork.

All of this madness began to come into focus for me back in 2003 when I had my “blinding flash of the obvious.” Suddenly, after reading and studying this topic for about six months, it became crystal clear for me as I realized, “Oh my God, we’re eating the wrong food.”

The solution is so beautiful, so simple and so wonderful for our planet and all of her millions of species of creatures.

The Bottom Line. Clearly, what we’re doing cannot continue for much longer — and unless we humans correct this problem soon, we’ll leave Mother Nature no other choice but to do it herself. And that wouldn’t be a very pretty picture.

While our collective problem is maddeningly complex and frustrating, the primary solution to all of the above is incredibly simple. We simply must begin to aggressively return to the natural diet-style — the one that Nature intended for us to eat all along. As we make that move back to plant-based eating, not only do we solve our problem with the shortage of arable land, but we also make a huge dent in our problems with water shortage and pollution, our energy crisis, and the global warming issue.

Finally, the single biggest human problem in most developed countries would be almost totally eliminated — our absurdly high cost of “disease care,” now standing at 17% of the GDP in the USA. Everything is connected.

Haven’t had your blinding flash of the obvious yet? Take a few hours and watch the following two documentaries; they may very well change your life. And if enough of us watch them, they may change the world.

“Earthlings” — A documentary that we all NEED to see

HOME – a 2009 film — a powerful eye-opener

J. Morris Hicks, author and activist. Working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

Frequently I am reminded of what Mark Twain said over 100 years ago. I think he got it right about our reckless and selfish species — way back then. People didn’t like hearing it then and they probably won’t like hearing it now:

“Twain had arrived at the not unreasonable but never popular conclusion that mankind “was not made for any useful purpose, for the reason that he hasn’t served any; that he was most likely not even made intentionally; and that his working his way up out of the oyster bed to his present position was probably a matter of surprise and regret to the creator.”

If you like what you see here, you may wish to join our periodic mailing list. Also, for help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4-Leaf page. From the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

If you’d like to order our book on Amazon,  visit our BookStore now.

—J. Morris Hicks…blogging daily at HealthyEatingHealthyWorld.com

Population and Arable Land Information from One Simple Idea.com

Wikipedia on Arable Land

The Bacon Uprising: How China’s Top-Secret Strategic Pork Reserve Is Burning Down The Amazon | Fast Company

Time Magazine. “Head Count” by Andrea Ford (10-31-11)

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Posted in Activism & Leadership, Big Picture, Sustainability | 4 Comments

Topping 7 billion on Halloween — Very scary indeed.

Posted on 11/01/2011 by J. Morris Hicks

But there are many things happening that are much scarier than goblins.

From snowbound New England on Halloween

Yesterday was Halloween. And, according to the United Nations, it was the day that the human race officially reached the seven billion mark. Time Magazine reported in their 9-31-11 issue that we have now added four billion people in just the past fifty-two years.

That rapid growth and its implications on potential water and food shortages is scary enough, but pales in comparison to what else is happening. As reported in the powerful 2009 movie HOME; in that same time period, the human race has inflicted more damage on the fragile harmony of the planet than ALL previous generations of humans combined for the past 200,000 years.

Very scary indeed, but the scariest part is that we’re not doing nearly enough to reverse this deadly trend. It actually continues to worsen with every passing year. For a number of reasons:

  1. Population. It continues to grow at an unsustainable pace of about 200,000 people every single day — an amount equal to the city of Grand Rapids, MI. This is just slightly better than the 210,000 per day that we’ve averaged for the past 52 years.
  2. Arable Land. The amount of land available to grow food is shrinking every year due primarily to degradation attributed to the production of our rich Western food. How much is it shrinking each year? By a piece of land about the size of South Carolina.
  3. More people choosing the Western diet. Each year, millions of people in the developing nations begin to move toward our highly inefficient diet-style that requires about twenty times as much land — on a per calorie basis — than a plant-based diet.
  4. Water Shortages and Pollution. Like land inefficiency, the Western diet is a water hog, also taking twenty times as much water per calorie as the the highly efficient plant-based foods.
  5. Cost of Health Care. With the USA leading the way with the highest cost of health-care in the history of the world — now at 17% of our GDP, this “scary situation” alone is enough to bankrupt the entire world if we don’t shift to promoting health instead of managing disease. Without some “new thinking” here, we’ll hit 31% of the GDP by 2035 in the USA.

The Barack Obama Halloween mask -- a big favorite this year.

In the midst of all of this frightening information, it seems that not a single one of our world leaders has a grasp of this “big picture” and what must be done about it. It’s like we’re an international community where no one is in charge.

Each country is just proceeding along as if the only thing that mattered was their own local economy and the ideal population; along with the necessary fertility rate to optimize that economy. This all leads to the poorest nations being squeezed; coming up on the short end in terms of water and food. Even now, we’re burning forests in the Amazon to grow soybeans to ship to China to feed their pigs. Very scary.

As the above five facts continue to exacerbate the current problems of food and water shortages, eventually our collective complacency will lead to famine, conflict and chaos unlike the world has ever seen. Without a doubt, we simply must come to grips with the absolute necessity of taking aggressive action to reverse the deadly trend identified in the five points above.

Right now, a very small minority knows what must be done. 

Without a doubt, the single most important thing that we can do as humans to address these terrifying issues — is to organize a serious international effort to move as quickly as possible in the direction of a whole foods, plant-based diet. It won’t solve the world population issue but it will give us some time. Now here’s the main problem:

Many great thinkers around the world are aware of the impending problems, but only a handful of them recognize a that complete shift to plant-based eating is even a viable option worth considering.

That’s because they still believe that we NEED to eat animal protein to be healthy.

My home-made Steve Jobs mask that I wore last night; helping inspire me to become "crazy enough to believe that we change the world."

With a well-planned and well-funded plan and the right people on the team, we can dispel this man-made “protein myth” and thereby open the minds of the world’s brightest to addressing the most serious problems facing our world since it has been “managed” by the human race.

As a writer, blogger and activist; this is where I plan to place my primary emphasis — perhaps for the rest of my life. And I am going to do my best to enlist the leadership and financial support from the most influential world leaders whose attention we can attract.

A related post from last week, inspired by a “seven billion people” article in the New York Times. As Jobs would say, “Let’s get crazy enough to change the world.”

This just in. If you saw my “Dr. Oz Prehistoric Diet Blog,” you may be interested in seeing the actual video from the show. Just click here for about 20 minutes of video. If you missed the blog, here it is again for your convenience:

Oz hits a HOME RUN with Julieanna Hever…

If you like what you see here, you may wish to join our periodic mailing list. Also, for help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4-Leaf page. From the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

J. Morris Hicks, author and activist. Working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

If you’d like to order our book on Amazon,  visit our BookStore now.

—J. Morris Hicks…blogging daily at HealthyEatingHealthyWorld.com

SHARE and rate this post below…One more thing, occasionally an unauthorized ad may appear beneath a blog post. It is controlled by WordPress (a totally free hosting service). I do not approve or personally benefit whatsoever from any ad that might ever appear on this site. I apologize and urge you to please disregard.

Posted in Activism & Leadership, Big Picture | 1 Comment