Word: rifkin
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VERMIN. THE WORD reminds most people of cockroaches scuttling across kitchen floors and rats skulking in dark basement corners. But to Jeremy Rifkin, the environmental movement's most prominent polemicist, vermin are big, brown-eyed ungulates that graze the rolling countryside, chew their cud and moo. In his controversial new book, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, Rifkin manages to blame the world's burgeoning population of bovines for a staggering spectrum of ecological ills. In the U.S., he charges, runoff from mammoth feedlots is despoiling streams and underground aquifers. In sub- Saharan Africa, cattle...
According to Rifkin, civilization began a long slide downhill when 18th century British gentry acquired a taste for fat-marbled beef and proceeded to spread that proclivity, like a plague, throughout the Western world. Rifkin's real argument, of course, is not with the 1.3 billion bovines that roam the planet but with modern methods of mass-producing beef that include plumping animals with hormones and stuffing them with "enough grain to feed hundreds of millions of people." Although he did not personally visit a ranch or a meat-packing plant, his stomach-churning descriptions of how cattle are treated...
Such inflammatory rhetoric sends shudders through the U.S. beef industry, which is already reeling from a nearly one-third drop in per capita consumption since 1976 -- the result of popular concern about fat in the diet. Now Rifkin hungers for a more decisive blow. This week he is leading a coalition of environmental, food-policy and animal-rights groups in launching a well-financed advertising campaign aimed at slashing worldwide beef consumption by 50% over the coming decade. Members of the coalition range from the Rainforest Action Network, which blames cattle for "killing the Amazon," % to the Fund for Animals...
...father in the interest of fiscal stability are stand-ins for the whole indulged baby-boom generation. The burnt-out father, who obsesses about the past and about a supposed universal abandonment of standards, epitomizes a dying elitist culture. But while the children emerge with convincing particularity, all Ron Rifkin's fiery righteousness and icy brilliance cannot make plausible the contrived second act, which centers on the father's buying and burning an original painting by Hitler...
...Although gadfly activist Jeremy Rifkin failed in a legal attempt to delay the first human-gene-therapy experiment last year, he skillfully used the courts to set back by months, and even years, other scientific trials involving genetically engineered organisms or substances. His success in obstructing genetic experiments came despite the fact that in every case, his warnings of dire consequences proved to be unfounded. Favorable coverage of his views in some newspapers and on TV heightened public misgivings about genetic research...