Ed Ayres Quotes

Ed Ayres Quotes

Edward H. Ayres is an American writer, editor, environmentalist and ultramarathon runner. He is the founding editor and publisher of Running Times magazine, and he served as editorial director of the Worldwatch Institute and editor of Worldwatch, a bimonthly global-trends magazine. David M. Shribman states that Ayres has "inspired athletes worldwide and reshaped our ideas about endurance and sustainability".Ayres grew up in the New Jersey towns of Berkeley Heights and Westfield. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1963 and briefly was a teacher at George School. He enjoys making furniture and sculptures out of geodes, petrified wood, and glass bottles.

He placed third in the first New York Marathon in 1970, and won the 1977 JFK 50 Mile.In 1999, Ayres wrote God's Last Offer: Negotiating for a Sustainable Future in which he discusses four trends which he says threaten society: global warming caused by carbon dioxide, mass extinctions, a surge of consumption, and a population explosion. Publishers Weekly stated that "Ayres dismantles the perceptual obstructions that block our awareness of a crisis" but that he "comes up short in offering specific solutions" while Goodreads said that the book "presents a blueprint for a radical shift of policies and priorities to avoid a cataclysm".In 2010, he was co-author of Crossing the Energy Divide: Moving from Fossil-Fuel Dependence to a Clean Energy Future .

Goodreads called his book The Longest Race , an autobiography covering his attempt to run a 50-mile ultramarathon at age 60, an "urgent exploration of the connection between individual endurance and a sustainable society". Kirkus Reviews said that his " broad-ranging interests and accumulated wisdom will appeal to a wide readership, not just runners and environmentalists".Ayres is a paleo-vegetarian who shopped at, and invested in, Whole Foods Market when the stock was still trading for well under $15/share. Ayres is married and has a daughter. Wikipedia

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“To produce 1 lb. of feedlot beef requires 7 lbs. of feed grain, which takes 7,000 lbs. of water to grow. Pass up one hamburger, and you'll save as much water as you save by taking 40 showers with a low-flow nozzle. Yet in the U. S., 70% of all the wheat, corn and other grain produced goes to feeding herds of livestock. Around the world, as more water is diverted to raising pigs and chickens instead of producing crops for direct consumption, millions of wells are going dry. … In the U. S., livestock now produce 130 times as much waste as people do. Just one hog farm in Utah, for example, produces more sewage than the city of Los Angeles. These megafarms are proliferating, and in populous areas their waste is tainting drinking water. In more pristine regions, from Indonesia to the Amazon, tropical rain forest is being burned down to make room for more and more cattle. … We, at least, have the flexibility—the omnivorous stomach and creative brain—to adapt. We can do it by moving down the food chain: eating foods that use less water and land, and that pollute far less, than cows and pigs do. In the long run, we can lose our memory of eating animals, and we will discover the intrinsic satisfactions of a diverse plant-based diet, as millions of people already have.”

Ed Ayres

"Will We Still Eat Meat?", in Time magazine (8 November 1999), pp. 1 http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,992523-1,00.html- 2 http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,992523-2,00.html.

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