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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.



About the Author

Denis Hayes

Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, Denis Hayes has been at the core of the modern environmental movement since he helped launch it as national coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970. Hayes has been the president of an environmental foundation, an environmental attorney, professor of engineering at Stanford, grassroots organizer, national environmental lobbyist, senior fellow at the Worldwatch Institute, visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center & the Bellagio Center, and director of the federal National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Selected by Time magazine as one of its 100 "Heroes for the Planet," Look magazine as one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th Century, Denis has won the national Jefferson Medal & the Rachel Carson Medal, and has been given the highest awards offered by the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Council of America, American Solar Energy Society, and the Humane Society of the United States. As President of the Bullitt Foundation, Denis developed the Bullitt Center--judged by World Architecture Magazine to be the greenest, healthiest, most resilient office building in the world. Hayes continues to chair the international Earth Day Network.



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