The environment is a constant in the news, but even more so of late. Climate change, wildfires and, of course, the spread of a global, animal-borne disease has most of us thinking about our planet in unfamiliar ways.

Here, our authors explore the aforementioned subjects and more, as we navigate the natural world that binds us all.

Anonymous writers share their stories on climate change, saving the planet & environmental issues in some unfamiliar ways to help you think outside the box.

Climate Change & Global Environmental Narratives - The Doe

Environment

I write of a subject askew from the usual passions and pastimes of a 37-year-old heteronormative Canadian male. It pertains to my most beloved of feathered friends, the Eurasian Rock Dove, otherwise known by their street name: the pigeon.

Yes, you read that right. Pigeons. I know you may be thinking, “Sky rats?” But, I assure you, there is a good reason why I’ve come to love these birds—the fact that they’re delicious completely aside.

I haven’t had a television in 20 years, much less cable. I haven’t played a video game since Mario 3 came out on the original Nintendo.

As a teen, I began to dislike what reality TV was producing and basically stopped watching television cold turkey. Then, I started a Christian metalcore band, eventually touring across Canada multiple times.

I found out at 34 that I’m on the autistic spectrum: My love of music, touring, people and excitement mixed with things I could never figure out all came together—along with why I wasn’t really all that drawn to the same things my peers were.

Most of my interests are all that “normal.” Hopefully, with this in mind, pigeons as a passionate pastime doesn’t seem quite as off-kilter.

Now, with our world seeing some major hurdles of late (and the environment being front and center for everyone), personal responsibility was getting loud in my mind. I began looking for ways to reduce my carbon footprint, get back outdoors and maybe find ways to catch my own food. What could I do if driving less wasn't an option?

The seed was planted and I went to work looking for ways to enrich my life, my eating experience and reduce my reliance on factory farming.

I was a Boy Scout, ate game meat in our hometown of Prince George and, occasionally, got called to help someone from church butcher a deer or a moose. So, I knew there were other ways to get animal protein than the supermarket. But, alas, hunting was not mom-approved.

Not having a firearms license or a freezer for larger animals—not to mention Canada’s conservation guidelines hunters must abide by—attempting to hunt for my own food seemed like it was right out the window.

Down the YouTube rabbit hole I went, eventually coming across some wilderness survival videos. I quickly discovered an American gentleman who wound up hunting and eating three pigeons he brought down with a slingshot. This is about when my ASD’s “hyper-focused-very-specific-interests-algorithm” fired up.

“You mean pigeons taste like steak and no one cares a lick about them at all?”

I learned quickly there are no rules about hunting or trapping pigeons in my city. They are pests and the government doesn’t really worry about it. When I began keeping the birds, I learned about the Canadian Pigeon Fancier’s Association and joined.

I also discovered how damn tasty these birds are. They’re AAA-grade beef with wings and, like duck, it can be served medium rare without issue. My first few birds were caught wild and I had no intention of keeping them, just harvesting and eating them. It didn’t take long before I realized that despite how delicious these birds were, hunting them was a lot of work for only a couple kills per hunt.

At the time, my roommate and good friend suggested we try and catch them with nets. I was skeptical at first, but we had found a good spot to try it out and the results were spectacular.

I quickly built a coop in the garage and went about catching the first 50 birds in a two-week span. Catching them and keeping them to fatten them up became the new modus operandi.

After about eight weeks, every bird had doubled in size and I knew I had something unique and delicious on my hands. I’ve only had one pal dislike the taste but, that time, I failed hard on the cook.

Out of the first 50 birds, 34 were made into meals for me, my partner and our friends—all while building, expanding and making the coop better and better. The remaining 16 are our core flock and they keep the newbies in line pretty good.

How does this tie back to that personal responsibility? Well, after learning all the things I needed to keep pigeons, I stumbled across something I had completely missed: The second-largest account for greenhouse gases affecting our climate today is, oddly enough, cow burps.

Methane is second only to combustion pollution for carbon in our atmosphere.

This got me thinking about what it takes to get a cow ready for slaughter versus a pigeon. Doing a pound for pound quick calculation, I discovered that one pound of pigeon meat has about 1/1000th of the carbon footprint of a pound of beef. Feed, water, housing and electricity and cost per cow versus a pigeon: Suddenly it felt like I was making a really noble choice.

I’ve had vegans and vegetarians approach me, conflicted, but we always seem to come to an agreement that this is a good way to be personally responsible for the climate. A big bonus is it allows me to advocate for a middle ground where our dietary choices can maintain dignity while also reducing our individual carbon footprint.

It didn’t stop there. I also discovered these little birds also have up to 24 young a year. That’s about the same rate of bunnies, and we all know the saying about reproducing like bunnies.

Not only had I stumbled into an intensely-focused interest that satisfied my need for purpose on multiple levels, but it was also entirely sustainable environmentally, it reduced my personal carbon footprint immensely and opened me up to you, dear reader.

There are some unsavory aspects of keeping pigeons, no doubt about it. First off, hunting isn’t for everyone. Killing your food doesn’t feel cool. You don’t feel like an empowered dude when you end your pigeon’s life to make food. You remember their names and handling and cuddling them. You made sure they were happy and had places to lay eggs, have babies, eat like crazy and be safe. Then you take your sky buddy’s life as swiftly and painlessly as you can.

This sort of thing changes a man. You know the life you’re taking is ending because you’re hungry and want food. You know the plan, you stick to it, but it doesn’t change what you’re taking from the bird, and you can’t change what it does to you.

I can defend my right to dignity in my food for all the reasons above, but I defend it first by caring for my pigeons, tending to their wounds, feeding them extra well, being kind and pleasant and gentle with them, naming them and so forth. In the end, you make sure they aren’t slaughtered by someone they don’t know, because I learned that giving my birds dignity in death is the least I can do.

If you choose to take up hunting and keeping pigeons or you choose a diet free of products made from sentient creatures—whatever your reasons are, I hope we can find those common intersections, especially during a pandemic like COVID-19. Much like pigeons, the better we work together as a community or flock, the better chances we have of surviving, thriving and having beautiful families of our own.

Eating pigeon may seem odd or downright grotesque in this time and age, but the more you learn about pigeons and their history with us as humans, the more and more factory farming and diseases blooming in those environments seem to make choosing alternative meat sources a whole lot easier. Icing the cake with a deeply dented carbon footprint and unexpected respect between dietary camps certainly sealed the deal for me.

My partner and I are building a greenhouse and we intend to use bird droppings as fertilizer to grow even more of our own food on our deck and in the yard. The entire idea to do it at all never would have come up without her asking me, “Well, what are you going to do with all the poop?”

While the idea that this could be egalitarian sure seems tempting, please keep in mind this was all information and knowledge I stumbled across trying to find more affordable food. I didn’t decide on pigeons as a fundamental dietary inclusion because of all the above, I found out along the way. And if there’s any takeaway, for me, it’s that we are all learning as we go—no matter our dietary choices. That realization has led to amazing interactions across the world—ever since this pigeon thing got wings.

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Food

How Eating Pigeons Reduced My Food Carbon Footprint

I’d been a vegetarian my whole life. I realized about five years ago there was a disconnect between what I believed and what I was actually doing—and so I went vegan. That began a domino effect—like a lot of people have—with learning about all of this stuff. I wanted to get involved more and do more for a cause that I really valued.

I contacted PETA and asked if I could work as an investigator. I’ve been doing it since 2017. There are lots of stories. I don’t even know where to begin. We have to investigate all sorts of things like entertainment animals, farming animals and the like.

I’m a young guy from the UK and have a pretty normal background. It’s not the sort of thing I ever anticipated doing when I was younger: It’s been a challenge; it’s been rewarding, as well.

I’ve been in a few slaughterhouses: sheep and chickens. They are awful places.

The role changes depending on the place. Whenever I’m doing investigations, I’m working in the jobs that nobody wants. It tends to be really menial, manual labor work. The job that I had in the chicken processing plant was an awful, awful job. It was the point in the plant where the chickens are coming out of the trucks and they have to be hung up onto the moving line, onto the shackles so they can be carried throughout the whole plant.

I’d start in this very small dark room in a line with ten other workers. The whole shift, we picked chickens upside down by their legs and slotted their legs into the shackles. It was really hot, really musty—there was all of this stuff in the air, you couldn’t really breathe properly, and there is all sorts of shit and piss everywhere. The pick rate is insane: You have to pick a chicken up every two seconds. It’s a really stressful, intense work environment and lots of horrible stuff is going on all around you.

Pretty much all the time at the chicken slaughterhouse—and fairly regularly at the other slaughterhouses—illegal activities are taking place. 

In the slaughterhouse and the hanging room, things were happening all the time that were just absolutely brutal. We stood in line in this dark room—you can only really see the person to your immediate left or right—against a waist-high metal wall and there’s a wall behind you. Often, someone would pick up a chicken and out of—I don’t know frustration or boredom—would just lift the chicken up and then swing it down so that the chicken’s head slammed into the top of this partition wall. Sometimes they’d turn around and slam the chicken into the wall behind them.

All of this is not allowed. Supposedly if they had been seen doing it, they would have been in serious trouble. There’s a camera just one or two meters away from them at all times with infrared but nothing was enforced.

There was one guy who had a real penchant for pulling chickens' heads off. And quite early on when I was working there, he was trying to impress me or something—I don’t really know. I guess he was frustrated or bored. So he grabbed this chicken that was going by on the line by the head and he wrapped his hand around the neck and then just pulled. The chicken was obviously being carried away by the line, and so the body just stretched and stretched and stretched, and then eventually the neck snapped off and the body sprang back. Then he held this chicken’s head up and put it onto one of his fingers, like a little finger puppet. He waggled it around in front of me, making chicken noises. It was really messed up. This was actually reported to the plant while I was there, anonymously, and they didn’t do anything about it. When I left, he was still there.

In the sheep slaughterhouses, it’s generally like a poor boy working, cleaning up the floor. There’s blood and shit and guts everywhere and there’s got to be somebody to mop all that up constantly: picking up severed heads, fixing the troughs and sewers and drainage channels.

When I’m doing these jobs, I’m not thinking about the environment: I’m just thinking about the animals and trying to identify issues relating to them. But, the atmosphere in the chicken farms: They’re just so incredibly unnatural, so incredibly beyond anything that really should ever be done. These chicken sheds house ten thousand, thirteen thousand birds in one room. You can’t go into these places without wearing masks and protective clothing. I did on my first day and I was coughing for weeks. All of the ammonia and all of the dust and all of the shit that’s littering the shed, at the end of the season, will be cleared out and washed away somewhere.

I’ve worked on a pig farm and the lagoons of shit that you get on pig farms were just incredible, acres of land devoted to a pool of feces. I gather that it’s diluted down and sprayed on fields. These operations work at such a scale, they work so fast and they produce so much that the abattoir is just washing blood and shit away all the time—just pools of the stuff—and I can’t imagine that stuff is good for the environment.

People get sick working with animals; those things are inevitable. When I started at that chicken processing plant, I got pink eye within about three days. It was really, really bad. You’re standing in clouds of shit flying around, feathers and dust and all that. You’re bound to get infections. I had a cough at the time so whenever I coughed, my eyes felt like they were going to explode. I can’t imagine how you can work with animals and not anticipate getting sick: When I started that job at the processing plant, all of my colleagues expected me to come down with something. It’s sort of a guaranteed thing. I took a day off because of my eye and they all thought I’d be gone for a week. It’s completely normal.

We know that these things cause disease. If you put thousands and thousands of animals in cramped conditions together, it’s perfect for a virus to develop and spread. And that’s why it doesn’t exist in nature. It’s no surprise and it’s just shocking that nothing is really being done. There’s no change being instigated. As far as I understand it, the pig and poultry farms are the worst violators because of the conditions and the way that a virus can spread quite quickly there. 

All of this industrial animal farming is, as far as I’m concerned, the main culprit for the spread of disease. And not to mention, the use of antibiotics on the farms. I saw everyone coming down with viruses all the time. I think this sort of pandemic we’re experiencing now with coronavirus is going to happen again.

Being on the front lines of it, it’s impossible not to see the only way of avoiding all of these issues that pop up with factory farming is to just stop buying the things they are producing. I want everyone to go vegan, and to stop eating animals and buying animal products. So much pain will be prevented.

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I'm a PETA Investigator: Stop Eating Meat or Expect More Viral Outbreaks

The first thing I noticed outside the metro station, other than the bone-chilling cold, was the ridiculous giant bunny begging me not to eat him or his friends. He was so cute, and yet so pitiful and so preposterous all at the same time. How could anyone eat anything that cute, even if it was delicious and nutritious? And why in the world were all these smelly hippies shrieking at us about “revolution”? And what in the heck did any of this freak-show outside have to do with the supposed solving of alleged man-made “climate change” going on inside, anyway?

It felt like an insane acid trip. But it was very real. And you are paying for it all.

My colleagues and I were on our way into the 25th United Nations Conference on the Parties, better known as the U.N. COP25 in Madrid. Just like the last 24 times they gathered, its members were developing a plan that would supposedly save the world from this horrible toxic pollution known as carbon dioxide—a “pollution” that is literally exhaled in large quantities by every single person on the planet, every single day, and is necessary to all plant life on earth.

It was quite an “ambitious” agenda, to use the language of the U.N.'s confab. While it sounded so noble to the uninitiated, I couldn't stop thinking about Pinky and the Brain, the infamous genetically engineered cartoon lab mice who, each episode, “try to take over the world.”

Of course, the hippies and the vegan lady in the bunny suit were at our entryway. That entrance is for the humble proletariat—all the tax-funded rent-a-mobs, the cheerleading squad (they prefer to be called journalists), and the legions of lower-level bureaucrats and servants who make the summits happen.

The VVIPs you see on the news—also known as “Very, Very Important Persons”— have their special own entrance reserved just for them, no riffraff allowed. That way, when they get off their gas-guzzling private jets and step out of their fancy limos and helicopters, they don’t have to go past the cute bunnies or the hippies shrieking at the plebs.

This was only my most recent adventure at one of these U.N. climate summits, which I've been attending since 2009 in exotic locations all over the world as a U.N.-credentialed reporter.

If the average American could see what I have seen, or experience what I have experienced, the “climate crisis” would have been solved years ago. Indeed, the scam artists behind the whole thing would have been run out of town and probably tarred and feathered. To call the U.N. summits a clown show is a terrible insult to clowns everywhere.

The U.N. climate extravaganzas are always weird and uncomfortable, especially for an American. But the one in Madrid—it moved there from Santiago at the last second after the communist revolution in Chile got too hot too quick—was especially outrageous.

If an alien had shown up from outer space to find out what world leaders were doing at this COP25 conference, they would have likely concluded that they were having a billion-dollar, two-minutes-of-hate session to rage against U.S. President Donald Trump and the horrible, fat, evil, racist, fascist, polluting basket of deplorables who elected him. 

It seemed like every speaker spent most of their time whining about how evil Trump and America were. The sideshows put on by tax-funded “non-government organizations” were doing the same thing. And the propagandists posing as journalists were, too.

Even the Americans, like current climate czar John Kerry, a man who flew in a private jet to Iceland to receive a climate leadership award and defended the PR fail by claiming that private jets were “the only choice for someone like me,” could only speak of how horrible Trump and America were.

Much of the rest of the event was babbling about how there were just too many plebs for the planet to sustain. One burned-out hippie, the producer of what he claimed was the top documentary in human history, got to speak at least a few times on key stages about how there needed to be fewer people and especially fewer Swedes.

Being married to a Swede, naturally, this anti-Swedish racism piqued my curiosity. “Don't have children—and I'm looking at you white men,” said the old white guy. Billionaire CNN founder Ted Turner told me something similar in Rio De Janeiro in Brazil at the U.N. Sustainable Development conference in 2012. He has five kids. But then, he's not a pleb.

Speaking of hypocrisy, at the Madrid summit, my team and I ran into former New York City overlord Mike Bloomberg as well. Naturally, the man was surrounded by at least three heavily armed bodyguards. And obviously, he came in one of his private jets, too—quite a sacrifice to leave behind his CO2-spewing helicopters, yachts, mansions and more to save the planet for us plebs by forcing us to use windmills and bicycles—if we're lucky! Bloomberg even agreed to take his picture with me, until his handlers growled, demanded to know who I was. They whisked him away.

Another semi-VVIP I ran into at a U.N. climate summit (this one in 2009) was Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed. He had been blabbering about how his nation was going to sink under the waves unless the world did what the U.N. was demanding right now. Apparently, “science” had spoken, and it was not for us to question, only submit.

Interestingly, one of the key sea-level scientists for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Swedish geophysicist named Nils-Axel Mörner, had been measuring sea-levels in Nasheed's part of the world for five decades. His findings suggested that sea levels were not only not rising, but they may also even be declining. 

Obviously, I asked Nasheed about this. Boy, was he angry. With the blood vessels almost popping out of his eyes, he claimed Mörner—again, a scientist who worked on the U.N. IPCC, supposedly the top authority on The Science™—was not “worthy” of a response. Then he proceeded to claim to me, falsely, that the pope had killed Galileo.

U.S. diplomatic cables exposed by Wikileaks later proved that the U.S. government was offering big money to the regime in the Maldives to build a deeper harbor—something that made no sense if the nation was truly about to be swallowed up by the sea—if they would play along with the climate hysteria and support the U.N. deal. Nasheed was later convicted under anti-terrorism charges in his home country, though the top court finally overturned the conviction in 2018.

The silly rhetoric is typical, though. At that same U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen, I got to hear Saint Al Gore, who had just arrived on a CO2-belching private jet, lecture us about how “the entire polar ice cap…could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” He cited models that claimed there was a 75 percent chance of this occurring.

It sounded scary and made for terrifying click-bait headlines. But of course, five years came and went. Then seven. Then ten. And yet, the polar ice cap never became ice-free—not even close. Meanwhile, according to NASA, there is massive ice growth in the Antarctic that is causing a net decrease in global sea levels. But don't tell Nasheed.

It would be easy to fill a book with all the crazy stories I’ve heard from these clown shows. In Cancun, the clowns opened the COP with a prayer to the Mayan goddess of creativity without mentioning her association with cannibalism and human sacrifice. Yes, seriously.

After that, pranksters from an American grassroots organization managed to dupe almost every U.N. delegate that was asked into signing a petition to ban a dangerous substance known as Dihydrogen Monoxide. The chemical kills thousands each year and is a major component of acid rain, they were informed. They literally supported a petition to ban water. But you can trust them—they're the experts following The Science™.

The adventures of Lord Christopher Monckton, who I've gotten to know pretty well, have been priceless, too. In 2012, the British aristocrat impersonated a delegate from Burma and spoke to the whole U.N. plenary session about how the so-called science behind the man-made warming hypothesis needed to be investigated. The year before, he jumped out of a plane in Durban to prove the sky was not falling.

At an earlier U.N. summit, filmmaker Phelim McAleer dressed up in a polar bear suit and went hunting for the disgraced “scientist” at the center of “ClimateGate,” the scandal involving hacked emails that broke out shortly before the summit. The tax-funded legions at the summit seeking more climate loot were not amused.

And who could forget the Gore Effect—a mysterious phenomenon I have personally witnessed numerous times in my career—involving snowfall at U.N. climate summits starting as soon as Gore's private jet lands in town.

Full disclosure, in case you have not realized by now: I think the U.N.-backed hypothesis that man's emissions of CO2 are driving global warming—I mean, “climate change,” or is it “climate crisis” now?— is just as silly as the crazy man-made “global cooling” hypotheses peddled in the 1970s. Ironically, it was often the very same fanatics and propaganda organs disguised as news outlets now trumpeting the alleged man-made warming. And no matter how hard they try to deny reality on Wikipedia, the evidence is there for all to see.

Going to these U.N. climate summits for over a decade makes it clear that even our would-be overlords peddling the man-made warming hypothesis do not believe it. If they did, why would they show up in fleets of private jets? And why would they try to drastically cut American CO2 emissions while shifting all of the economic activity to China, where the regime is building coal-fired power plants faster than we can count them, and where CO2 levels per unit of output will be drastically higher than in the United States?

Something doesn't smell right. I wish you could smell it yourself.

Don't get me wrong—I love the environment, and you should, too. But nations squandering billions on this non-issue so U.N. fat cats can travel the world and party at our expense is grotesque, especially while real pollution, needing real solutions, goes unaddressed in China and other nations conducting the crazy climate clown circus.

Climate Change

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Mother Earth

Inside the U.N.'s Climate Show Circus

Growing food with urine is safe and effective and should be a common practice. As a biology artist with a background in agriculture, I’m interested in the ways humans can shift their relationship to the earth from parasitic to symbiotic, and using pee to grow plants is one simple way. 

Synthetic fertilizer reduces biodiversity—it’s a leading cause of pollution and could easily be replaced with a daily byproduct of human life: urine. What if we could help dismantle the patriarchy and close the consumption loop? And what if pee helped? What if pee helped preserve and increase biodiversity? What if pee saved our relationship with the earth? What if pee saved lives? It sounds dramatic, I know. But hear me out.

This article will touch on the extraction methods of synthetic fertilizer, briefly compare the makeup of urine to synthetic fertilizer, roast the toxic relationship the majority of humans have to Earth, provide a nuts and bolts how-to that anyone can do, and answer frequently asked questions around peeing on plants.

I’m a sensitive person and know I’m not alone when I say that I feel the earth sort of groaning under the pressure of human life. I have nostalgia pangs over the biodiversity lost in all the places I’ve known for so long, and these pangs are usually followed by an urge to run away to a new place for a fresh start. With that fresh start comes a new baseline and an uncomplicated “just the facts, ma’am” getting-to-know-you of the place. A common human experience has been one where we long to escape the damage we’ve caused, fall into brand new love of a new-to-me environment and explore it—then we colonize the shit out of it. 

“Let’s see what’s under that mountain over there, and under that forest.” No stone goes unturned. We become the invasive species (here’s looking at you, Mars). It seems that, whether we go or stay, the vast majority of humans need to come to terms with our role on this rock and the wake that we leave, lest The Great Nothing That Consumes Everything stays on our heels. Up next, the Sixth Extinction, while we just chase our species’ tail and squabble over that last spacesuit.

This might be a stretch, but what if we look at all that through the lens of patriarchy? We already do, it seems. Mother Earth and mankind are old tropes. Certain groups of humans have been trying to glorify and force their dominion over the earth for how long? She won’t submit, bless her, and she’s ready to swear off man altogether, threatening to burn the house down. I can’t say I blame her and she has never been known to make an idle threat.

What if we could stay together, though? I imagine a sort of couple’s therapy, the earth and her most dominating and draining lovers. We’d promise to change and if she just wouldn’t be so withholding and get so worked up and always superstorm and polar icecap melt on us then…no, we’re past that point. 

It’s past time to listen to what she has been saying all along and be in this relationship, to give as much as we take. At this point, it feels like we can never make up for all the shit we’ve put our old lady through and we just can’t help it, but down the block, there’s this redhead, Mars, and she sure seems like a hot little number. She doesn’t have much, but she’s sweet. Nothing a little colonization won’t fix, if you know what I mean. 

But Earth is still so good for us and she just needs us to love her for it to work. Really love her. And she wants to try golden showers. Don’t be nervous.

The use of properly diluted fresh urine as a nutrient source for plants is a safe and effective practice that protects human life and promotes a healthy environment. It’s a practice that has been commonplace for public works for petrochemical in other countries but is pretty much taboo for Western culture. Sure, we have reclaimed water for irrigation on golf courses, a similar concept, but we can simplify, broaden and personalize the application. 

Urine is not a very effective vector for disease (as opposed to solid human waste), which makes it safe and simple to use as fertilizer. It has pretty much the same salt, mineral and general other constituents as the ubiquitous moist, crystalline, blue house plant food concentrate, but your body just makes it. For free. All day. 

The same house plant food company strip-mines and mountain-top-removal-mines for nearly the same salt and mineral content that we piss away multiple times a day. Those mountains are more than sometimes home to endangered species and indigenous populations of humans that are then “displaced” in order to access the materials under them. Urine is great news for all the mountains since it is so plentiful and free. Did I mention it’s free? 

Here are some other crazy stats, if you’re into that: The average American urinates into about 12 gallons of potable water each day, or 4,380 gallons a year, turning 1.25 year's worth of drinking water for one human into blackwater. Blackwater is a major contaminant to drinking water sources, lakes, rivers and bays, posing a health risk to humans and suffocating greater ecosystems. Meanwhile, a year’s worth of urine from one human can grow enough wheat to make 365 loaves of bread. We pee a loaf a day. 

Replace your mined petrochemical fertilizer with homegrown golden showers (for your plants). 

For house plants, mix one-part fresh urine with nine parts water and apply, repeating every third time you water. For herbs and veggies, mix one-part fresh urine with five parts water for a stiffer drink and water as usual. Vegetables are heavy feeders, so repeat every other time you water your garden.

The great news about lawns? You don’t have to dilute if you don’t want to. You can put your urine in a watering can and sprinkle it sparingly over your turf. 

For general use, you will need to supplement with iron (compost, worm castings, blood meal, menses) every so often, but you will have to do that with the store-bought stuff, too, in most cases.

Remember, the sun will swallow the earth someday, so hold her and love her and affect change for the better sooner than later. 

A: Absolutely. Dilute the ratio to three-quarters or half-strength (one part urine to 13 to 18 parts water), feed and make sure to allow nutrient solution to flow through the pot as opposed to pooling in roots/media, the same as you would for any orchids. I put my indoor orchids into the unplugged bathtub and feed to avoid overflows and sogginess.

Q: If I water my veggies with urine, like you say, am I eating urine come harvest time?

A: If you rinse, as you would for any produce, you’re following best practices. You are eating minerals that the plants have extracted from the urine,  just as they would from soil, manure or petroleum-based nutrient sources. You really are what you eat.

A: A two-part answer: It won’t have a detectable odor any more than that store-bought, blue house plant food. Having said that, dilution is key with both. Some people look at the directions and think, “If a little is good, a lot is better.” This adage perfectly sums up the fine line going from nutrient source to pollution. The more accurate phrase would be, “If a little is nutrient, a lot is pollution.” Secondly, don’t save it up for later. Aside from starting to smell, the precious nitrogen your plants need will escape into the atmosphere if it sits for more than half a day. That would be that ammonia smell of old urine. Besides, you will make more pee, I promise.

A: First thing in the morning is ideal, as it’s the most mineral-rich. But any point is fine. Some find it easiest to pee into a watering can or plant pitcher with a wide mouth. With—how do I say it—certain “tackle,” the world is your oyster. And by oyster, I mean piss pot.

Q: What if I’m on medication or supplements?

A: The main precaution would be to avoid using urine from a course of antibiotics. Wait two weeks before feeding plants again. Antibiotics are basically a nuke bomb on the rich microbiotic life that is the biome of soil, turning fertility into wasteland.

Q: How come dog pee kills lawns if urine is so good for plants?

A: The “dilution is the solution to pollution” rule applies here. I could burn my name into your lawn like Fido with a strong solution of blue crystal miracle-stuff. 

Q: First you said that urine is safe and then went on to say that it’s a health risk in drinking water. Which is it?

A: I love this question. Both, really. Urine, like any fertilizer, is high in nitrogen and is perfectly fine to consume after having been turned into sugars and carbon by the metabolism of a plant. “Uncut” nitrogen consumed by mammals starves hemoglobin in the blood (and as a result, the brain) of oxygen. Following that pattern, excess nitrogen in bodies of water causes algal blooms, which starve the aquatic ecosystem of oxygen and causes mass die-offs of micro and macro-organisms.

A: I’m not exactly sure, but I am uncomfortable with the plummeting levels of biodiversity and the stability of the ecosystem as a result of slipping into the Anthropocene. For further reading, enjoy this rabbit hole of amazing data about using pee for good.

Best of 2021

It’s Time to Start Growing Food With Urine

Drugs & Alcohol

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Extra, extra, read all about it! The news-media industry has shifted dramatically over the last decade—heck, within the last two years. Between print journalism, podcasting, social media and infotainment, The Doe turns over every rock in this evolving ecosystem.

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The ol' nine to five has changed quite a bit in the past couple of years, from working remotely to, well, not working at all. This month we take a look at how cash still does rule in our capitalist society and what the future of business and money might just look like.

The Doe's editorial team takes a look back at the year and shares its favorite narratives.

As a journalist, a major part of my work, in some way or another, focuses on how religious identity interacts with lived experiences—both individually but also with the greater society at large. I didn’t always look at religious practice and faith along these lines. In fact, when I was younger, I was of the opinion that observances of faith should stay private and separate from the rest of our political and social affiliations. But a few years ago, when I attended a faith and climate action workshop, I had a lightbulb moment. Suddenly, I questioned the very essence of what I’d known religion to be my whole life.  

Growing up in Pakistan, in a conservative Muslim family, my religious identity was as easy to me as breathing. I was always a Muslim, and as part of a demographic that was a majority in the society where I grew up, I never thought too much about what my identity really meant. Sure, I knew the basics—I prayed my namaz five times a day; I made sure I fasted during Ramadan; and I knew that charity was a good deed. I even started wearing hijab when I was 12 because I knew my mom and grandmother did it and it was a good thing to do. I’ve always been very proud of my religion and, growing up, I thought I was the kind of person who was making a genuine effort to understand it.

But it wasn’t until I moved to the U.K. that I suddenly realized that my faith isn’t as easily categorized as I thought it was growing up. I had always stood out wearing my hijab at a young age, but I soon realized just how political my choice of clothing could be. Suddenly, I wasn’t only reminded of my religious identity when I heard the azan and rolled out my prayer mat or when, for one month of Ramadan, all of us at home would prioritize religious prayers until the month was over. No, wearing a hijab in a non-Islamic country meant I always held my religious identity with me, no matter where I went. The shift in my own perception of my identity, which suddenly began to loom larger than the pockets I had neatly contained them in, made me realize that I had so much more to learn. 

It was here that I began to explore avenues that would help me understand the role of my own faith identity in the public sphere, like the Faith Center at the London School Of Economics. When I became a part of its interfaith discussions program, the Faith Center became the push I needed to see religion outside of the mosque and home for the first time.

The Faith and Climate Action program combined workshops and seminars to help participants understand how faith-based communities could inspire and lead climate action movements. It also showcased how faith-based dialogue was being used as a way to help communities who struggled to understand the language of science in climate change or felt excluded from secular movements connected to the climate movement. It even challenged issues of accessibility in the climate movement, where language barriers and education access have often meant that these movements are mainly led by a few elite leaders, and brought it down to the masses in a far more relatable approach.

I could say I felt inspired and motivated by this approach—and I did. But most of all, I felt like a hypocrite. Despite always being so connected to faith and living in a society that seemed so focused on religion, I felt that we were taught about it far too selfishly to ever understand how this key part of our lives could help make a difference. Of course, one of the things we are taught as Muslims is the importance of charity, and for those who can afford it, giving a certain amount to charity is compulsory.

But what I learned during my time at the Faith Center is that for so long, I was interacting with religion on such a shallow level. Looking at the work that many faith-based organizations had achieved in mobilizing communities concerning climate action made me realize just how closely faith is—or, at least, should be—linked to social justice. Many faith communities often find themselves excluded from more secular social justice movements because of the way the two are pitted against each other. 

On the other hand, faith communities often find themselves bound together through their united religious beliefs, and so using that common factor can go a long way in mobilizing other causes. I also feel more and more that anyone on a journey to understand their faith or seek knowledge truly should not do so without understanding the responsibility of them embodying that knowledge. I felt that change within myself as well. I no longer felt able to keep my religion as a mere part of me that could be taken out or boxed back in when needed. As a feminist and a proponent of social change, I slowly began to understand how my identity as a Muslim interacted with all the other work I was learning to do. 

We simply cannot underestimate the power of faith, which dominates the lives and understanding of so much of the global population, in teaching people how to make the world a better place. I’ve realized that had I continued with the way I had boxed in my religious identity growing up, I would be doing a disservice both to my religious practice as well as to the causes I claim to stand for. 

Religion

I Attended a Faith and Climate Action Workshop That Changed My Worldview

I was about to put my hand into the waters of Anchar Lake, situated in the congested area of Soura in the capital city of Srinagar in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir. “Hey,” my friend warned me, “Don’t touch the water. It will bite you back.” The water of the lake looked dark gray and had a layer of green weed all over it. It had an unpleasant odor.

I grew up in Srinagar and, over the years, I have witnessed the bloody conflict in the region and watched the beautiful freshwater lakes shrink. 

Who knows? I may see them vanish as well. 

Indian-administered Kashmir is a Himalayan region in the north of India. Both India and Pakistan claim Kashmir as their part, and the region has gone through decades of conflict since the partition of India, with three major and two minor wars fought between the two nuclear countries so far. The region is surrounded by Pakistan and China and is a Muslim-majority region where people have been demanding freedom over the years.

I used to go to this lake once a month, sometimes twice. I love to visit the lake during winter to see the migratory birds that also visit it. Recently, I planned to travel to Anchar Lake for the first time in three years. When we first got there, all I saw was a green pasture and, for a few minutes, I wondered where the lake was. When we finally got to it, the shore was full of dirt and trash. I saw a woman come out of a house and throw a dustbin filled with dirt and plastic directly into the lake. I wasn’t shocked. I have witnessed these kinds of scenes before.

My friend and I were going to take a small wooden boat across the lake. As I stepped into the boat, it was wet and had a pungent smell. The lake looked more like a cesspool. The person rowing told me that he had been clearing the grass on the lake before picking us up. As he started to row, the smell of garbage mixed with drainage started to fill the air and grew stronger as we rowed further. It began to make me nauseous. I had to cover my mouth with a scarf, even though I was already wearing a mask.

As the oar passed through the water, the scum on the water pushed back and, as I tried to see the water, it was blackish. For a moment, my thoughts paused and I hoped not to drown there. I thought the smell and color of the water might be enough to kill me.

The boatman, an elderly man in his 70s, told us stories from when the lake used to be crystal clear and a destination for tourists. “We used to drink water from this lake, and it was beautiful,” he said. “Now it smells like garbage.”

“I wish I had the opportunity to see the times when the lakes in the city were beautiful,” I replied. He continued the tales from his childhood growing up near the lake and how it was his favorite spot for swimming.

The scenes and the condition of the lake made me feel sad. 

It was a hot spot for fishing, and the lake used to be busy with wooden boats. Over the years, I have watched it turn ugly, thanks to a mixture of conflict, government negligence, pollution and illegal encroachments.

As I traveled on the lake, I met six elderly men who had stopped their small boats at different locations to cast their nets in the water for fish. I remember my parents telling me that the lake was once famous for its fish. There are just a few old men now who catch the fish here. The rest of the people have shifted to other jobs. “This lake has died,” one of the old men told me, “and fish here don't breathe anymore.”

“The fish which we catch now don’t taste as good as they did before,” another man said.

I could see that in the years since my last visit, many more small houses had been built along the shore of the lake. The lake is slowly being occupied illegally. People have been filling parts of the lake with grass and mud and claiming the spots. I saw many small kitchen gardens floating on the lake, masses of grass that the residents build and grow vegetables on. “This is a way of occupying land on water,” the person rowing the boat said.

Drainage from one of Kashmir’s biggest hospitals goes into Anchar Lake, which is a place for many fish species and lotus stems. The lotus stems are called nadru in Kashmiri, and they’re cooked into a number of Kashmiri dishes. I love eating lotus stems, cooked or raw, and most of them come from this lake. After witnessing the conditions there, I don’t know if I can eat them anymore.

Looking at the figures, I found out that Anchar Lake has shrunk from 19 square kilometers to nearly seven square kilometers over the years. I see the same tale as the famous Dal Lake. When I look at Dal Lake, which is a famous tourist destination, it looks a little bit cleaner on the outer sides. But as I travel to the interiors of Dal, the condition of the lake is worse. The inside scenes are not only a pain to the eyes but to the heart as well, with wooden houseboats draining their toilets directly into the lake while happy tourists pose for pictures. 

Both of these lakes are dying slowly. Others in the valleys of Kashmir have already vanished, but no one seems to care. People have lost their livelihoods. I wonder what we are leaving for the coming generations to see. Visiting these two formerly beautiful lakes now, all I can see are the illegal encroachments and the lakes turning into dustbins.

Gone Fish: The Beautiful Lakes of Kashmir Are Vanishing

It was approximately 9:30 p.m. on September 1, 2021. I had just finished having dinner with my partner, Alex, and we sat in our bedroom playing chess online. It was raining quite heavily and had been doing so for about two or three hours. I had been going out to the front of our New York City building every 45 minutes or so to get some fresh air, fascinated by how hard it was raining.

Eventually, my basement neighbor knocked on my door. I thought this was strange, as I rarely received a knock. He warned me that a bit of water was beginning to come in underneath the building's front door and into the hallway. He was very calm, and the water by the door didn’t seem like much at this point, almost as if someone had spilled a bucket of water. I realized my neighbor’s concern; he's in a basement and some of his property could be damaged, so I offered to help him move some of his belongings to higher ground. As I left my bedroom and headed into my apartment hallway, two or three centimeters of water had trickled inside.

"OK, we'll put some towels down at the front door and that should help out,” Alex and I thought. Soon, a significant amount of water had accumulated in the building’s hallway and began rushing into my unit. The water was now at my ankles—much worse than I thought. But at this point, I didn’t think the water would go any higher. I called my mom just to check up on her and let her know the situation. 

By then, our third-floor neighbor had invited us to store some belongings in her apartment and to possibly spend the night. We gratefully accepted. Alex had grabbed a few things, and I brought my laptop. On our way upstairs, one of the neighbors suggested we go back down to move our stuff to higher ground. Alex insisted this was something we should do. Again, I didn't think the water would get any higher than my ankles, so I thought it was unnecessary, but I agreed, mostly because I didn't want Alex to be down there alone. We spent a couple of minutes on the third floor before returning to the first floor, where the water had risen to my knees.

At this point, I began to understand this was a potentially life-threatening situation—I began to understand the stakes. The water was rising so quickly that I knew any previous estimation I made was going to be useless. We swiftly ran into the apartment with the idea of grabbing our documents (passports, wallets, IDs, etc.) and any other valuable belongings we wished to save. Alex managed to secure them while I grabbed an empty backpack. Suddenly, the water began pouring through the windows, forming a cascade. "My car is outside and probably submerged in water,” I thought. It was all quite difficult to process—especially with a waterfall in my living room.

Nothing made any sense except knowing that the only thing worth saving in the apartment was our lives. I ran into the bedroom where Alex was packing a bag with clothes. I grabbed her by the wrist and forcefully pulled her toward me and headed out to the front door, which was now closed shut. I attempted to turn and pull the doorknob to no effect. The pressure applied on the door was too great. I was locked in, and the water was just below my waist. 

This being a first-floor apartment, all the windows had metal rails to deter any would-be thief. There was no way in or out besides the steel-reinforced front door, which was now shut and too heavy for any human to open. I had only one thought: "I have to get through this door, but I have to destroy it to get through.” Alex tried calling 911 but calls weren’t answered. I began to have that sensation of water creeping up higher and higher on my body, not unlike slowly walking into a shallow pool or wading into the ocean.

To bust down the door, I would need my toolbox underneath the kitchen sink. The problem was that the cabinet underneath was hidden under murky water, and visibility was practically zero. But as any desperate man in such a desperate situation would do, I reached down into the cabinet, and by the grace of God, or whatever manifestation of a higher power or supreme being that you may believe in, the toolbox—that small, orange, $10 toolbox from IKEA—was the first item that grazed my hand. I pulled out the hammer and knew I needed to get through the locking mechanism on the door. That meant open season on the door handle.

After a few good smashes, I wrecked the knob, but the door still wouldn’t open. My next thought was to strike the doorframe right by the lock and attempt to bend the doorframe, releasing the tension on the lock and causing it to swing open. I made some progress but still couldn’t get all the way through. At this point, the water was at my belly button.

My neighbor then rushed downstairs with a hammer of their own and began striking the frame from the opposite side of the door. One, two, three good, coordinated strikes and the door swung open with massive force. Needless to say, Alex and I ran all the way up to the third-floor apartment to spend the night, safe from the flooded floors below.

My hands were completely beat up. In striking the door, every hammer miss meant that my hand made contact with the door, taking chunks out of my flesh. Importantly, I survived, and I’m grateful for that. I wasn’t able to save anything of significance from my apartment, but I’m alive, which is more than enough to be thankful for. In hindsight, adrenaline saved me and my lack of exit strategy. Many others were not as fortunate.

If my firsthand experience with a flash flood is worth anything, remember the following: In a flash flood, the paramount thing to do is get to higher ground. Your personal items and belongings can be replaced or recovered over time. Your life cannot.

Collection

Hurricane Ida: The Night I Barely Survived a Flash Flood

I can’t get away from it. To this day, I look at my hands sometimes and see blood, even though it’s not there. I hear the cries of tortured farmed animals ringing in my ears. 

I’ve done four undercover investigations at factory farms—two at dairy facilities, one at a chicken facility and one at a fish facility. As an animal lover, I wanted to be a hero for farmed animals and expose the abuse and exploitation they endure daily. Little did I know, my brief time in the industrial animal agriculture sector would cause lasting damage to my mental health. When I have flashbacks now, I try to breathe and hang on to reality, but sometimes it’s all I can do to keep myself from falling apart. As undercover investigators, we put ourselves on the front lines of the animal advocacy movement, but there is a hidden price we pay in the pursuit of truth and justice for animals everywhere.

To prepare for my journey as an investigator, I watched hours and hours of undercover footage of animals being brutally abused at factory farms, knowing I was going to capture additional footage to help expose to the world where meat, dairy and eggs really come from. I was also going to help people realize that there are healthier and compassionate alternatives to eating animals and animal products.

My harsh, difficult upbringing led me to believe I was hardened enough to be able to do this harsh, difficult job. I was fully prepared to leave family, friends and the only life I had ever known. At the time, nothing else mattered. As someone who grew up suffering, I wanted to help the animals needlessly suffering inside factory farms. Whatever needed to be done, I would do it without worrying about my own mental and physical health. But nothing could have prepared me for what I saw as an investigator.

I had no idea how unforgiving the industrial animal agriculture system could be until my first investigation at a “broiler” chicken factory farm. There, I witnessed how twisted animal farming really is. These chickens only live for roughly 47 days until they’re slaughtered for their meat. During every single one of those days, they live crammed into dark, windowless sheds by the thousands, with nothing in those sheds except food, water and corpses of other birds littered throughout the building. I picked up the dead bodies of chickens who had been left in the sheds for days until they turned into a purplish sludge that melted right through my fingers. I watched workers pull the heads off of chicks who were too small or sick and impale them on metal nails driven through the ends of plastic pipes.

On the last day of that investigation, I sobbed in my car as I left the site one last time, knowing that I was leaving behind so many chickens in such torturous conditions. My next investigations into the dairy industry were even worse. I witnessed affectionate, intelligent cows being beaten with wooden canes and metal pipes and dragged with chains by tractors. I watched workers mutilate young calves as they pressed hot iron tools into their skulls to burn away their skull tissue, part of the standard practice of disbudding. On one particular day, I saw a manager standing in front of an injured cow who was laid out on the ground behind a barn in the pouring rain. He had a rifle in his hand and held the barrel end of it to her forehead. 

If I close my eyes, I can still see how frail and frightened she looked. When the manager pulled the trigger, her head fell to the ground. But then I was shocked into silence as she struggled to get back up again. The manager brushed it off with a casual comment and I continued to watch her pitifully crawling until another shot finally put her out of her misery. 

I’ll never forget the sound of the calves grinding their teeth to brace themselves against the pain of the disbudding process, or the cries of the cows vocalizing in pain as their tails were twisted and their bodies beaten by workers forcing them into the milking areas. With each investigation, I ignored the brutal imagery and the noise in my mind. I shoved my emotions down and continued to do the work. It wasn’t until I conducted an investigation into the fish-farming industry that I realized that all the workers I encountered who committed all these shocking acts of cruelty might have been doing the same.

Since fish are unable to vocalize their discomfort the way land animals do, I thought I would encounter workers who were indifferent to their suffering and not bothered at all by their pain, even more so than any of the other workers I encountered at the other facilities I investigated. But at a salmon hatchery, I was surprised by how often the workers expressed remorse over how the fish there were treated. And yet, their actions were contradictory to their words. 

I documented workers stomping on fish, slamming them against walls and tossing them over their shoulders to perform “trick shots.” One day as I watched a barrel full of live fish slowly suffocate to death, a supervisor approached me and told me how much it used to bother him, how the standard practice there was to let the fish suffocate and die. He then finished his statement by shrugging and saying that he got desensitized to it all. And that’s when it all clicked into place.

The factory farming industry is inherently designed to influence employees to abandon all the best, compassionate parts of themselves in order to accomplish the tasks at hand. Low-level farmworkers are compelled to stifle their humanity in order to accept that they cause pain to animals during standard practice procedures, even when they hear their screams on a daily basis, enabling them to escalate their aggression into abuse. I experienced only a short amount of time in the industry and could already feel how the environment was designed to chip away at my spirit and leave me numb.

I escaped the grip of factory farming and I still came away from it with lasting damage to my mental health. I feel like a fractured version of myself, still working to put the pieces back together. Part of my path to healing involves continuing my animal advocacy work even after retiring from undercover investigations. In my current position, I work to spread awareness about the cruelty of industrial animal agriculture and the exploitation that extends to animals and workers in the system. Going undercover allowed me to truly understand how detached workers often become from their own moral compass in order to fuel the profits of a devastating industry that cultivates pain, fear and death. Everyone—humans and animals alike—are caught in the crossfire.

The Hidden Toll of Factory Farming

After nearly a year of revelling in flat Earth articles, podcasts, and memes, I finally have my chance to talk to some “flatties” in the wild. The room is bunker-like; small, slightly tatty and buried beneath a London Premier Inn. There’s about fifteen people total, ready to roll.

It is about to be a very frustrating experience.

A growing number of people think the earth is flat. My curiosity was pricked by an article in The Economist. Since then, I’ve debated (or, more accurately, “debated”) many flat Earth believers. Here, I offer up some words of advice on how to steer a flat earth debate.

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