forty-three per cent more methane.
Grass=gas. When a Costa Rican at
Brown’s table at dinner proudly an-
nounced, “One of the priorities of our
government is decarbonizing cattle
ranching,” Brown said, “You can’t decar-
bonize cattle ranching. It’s impossible.
You just need to get rid of those cows!”
At a meeting in the hotel’s lobby,
Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, a Zimba-
bwean scholar and policy advocate who
co-chairs the Global Alliance for Cli-
mate-Smart Agriculture, politely told
Brown that his plan didn’t apply to her
continent. “Ninety per cent of Africans
are not eating meat in quantity,” she
said. “For most smallholders, it’s a goat
or a chicken. We use livestock for dow-
ries, for diversity of diet, and as a store
of wealth. They are literally cash cows.”
Brown had told me repeatedly that
he wasn’t trying to displace poor farm-
ers’ goats, but he replied, “Even those
goats and those chickens are taking a big
toll on biodiversity. They’re eating the
grasses and shrubs and bugs that wild
animals would otherwise be eating.”
“I have yet to see scientific evidence
that goats and chickens have pushed
out other species,” Sibanda said. “Re-
member, you’re looking at arid and semi-
arid areas, so when you say, ‘Meat is bad
for the environment,’ I say, ‘Which en-
vironment? The thing that grows best
here is goats!’”
“The global biomass of goats and
sheep is more than two-thirds that of
all wild animals,” Brown said.
“Disadvantaged people have their
own systems of livelihood—”
“We’re not attacking farmers who
are raising goats! We’re just trying to
remove the economic incentive for cov-
ering the earth with livestock.”
They shook hands and rose without
regret. Afterward, Sibanda told me,
“You’re selling the environmental argu-
ment to us, but it’s the northern coun-
tries—right?—that are responsible for
the majority of the damage. In the south,
the feeling is ‘How can my fifty grams
of meat cause a problem?’”
Brown said, “She cares about many
of the same things we do, obviously, but
we were almost from different universes.”
He added that he wished he had a short
film to show “what the world would be
like in 2035 on its present course, and
what it would be like if we eliminate
animal ag.” In the second scenario, he
said, “the canonical poor farmer with
his goat, or whatever, would get to keep
it. But he would also get the benefits of
averting catastrophic climate change
and of our eliminating the biggest drain
on his freshwater sources and his land—which is his neighbors raising cows.
People need to see ‘How does it im-
prove my life?’” He sighed. “It’s all so
complicated and indirect.”W
hen Pat Brown was twelve, and
he and his six siblings were liv-
ing with their parents in Taiwan, he
figured out that his father, Jim, was in
the C.I.A. He didn’t tell anyone, be-
cause he didn’t want to blow his father’s
cover or impede his mission of keeping
an eye on China. “There’s this real mis-
conception about the C.I.A., that it’s
the dirty-deeds arm of the U.S. govern-
ment,” he told me. “When my dad joined,
he’d been a P.O.W. in World War Two,
in Belgium, where he ended up weigh-
ing ninety-something pounds, and he
came out of it with a well-developed
sense that there are bad people in the
world who need to be watched.”
The family was uprooted with Jim
Brown’s postings: to Paris, Taipei, Wash-
ington, D.C. This itineracy, Brown came
to feel, made him a resourceful citizen
of the world. Brown’s younger brother,
Richard, a neurobiologist who works at
Impossible studying how we perceive
taste and odor, said that the family was
Catholic, but guided less by doctrine
than by curiosity and fairness: “We were
driven by ‘What is intellectually the most
interesting thing to work on, and what
is of the most public service?’” Brown
was a fractious student; a generation
later, he might have been given a diag-
nosis of A.D.H.D. “In Taiwan, I would
get F’s, F’s, F’s for conduct,” he said. “I
was intrinsically not into anyone having
authority over me—I was kind of an ass-
hole. Most of the things of value that I
learned I learned on my own.”
In college, at the University of Chi-
cago, Brown loved pure mathematics,
but felt that it was too removed from
public service. So he majored in chem-
istry. He became a vegetarian the sum-
mer after he graduated, spurred by his
younger sister Jeanne, whose animal-
welfare arguments convinced nearly
everyone in the family to stop eating
meat. That same year, Brown met Sue
Klapholz, and began an M.D.-Ph.D.
program at Chicago; afterward, he did
a residency in pediatrics. The couple
married in 1982 and six years later relo-
cated to Stanford, where Brown became
“I told you not to mix your whites with beets.” an associate professor and an investiga-