Instead of working on visualization a different idea, I wanted to flush this one out more. I realized from some of the comments that I received that the graphic was probably too simplified for anyone who was not familiar with the subject to understand the scope of the issue. So with the idea of brushing up on my flash knowledge, I decided to turn this into an interactive graphic. I like this concept of an infographic that can be explored deeper. This is what I have come up with so far. I am working to add some pictures and other features to make the idea even clearer. Keep posted.
Nitrogen Loss in Food Production
Monday, August 9th, 2010A Step into Sustainable Eating
Friday, November 6th, 2009It was probably a bad idea, in retrospect, to start by telling everyone I would become a vegetarian. I was half-way through an environmental science class my last year at Brown University and I had just discovered how environmentally unsound meat-consumption could really be. Recently, Michael Pollan asserted, “A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a meat eater in a Prius.” While this might not have been factually sound, it’s hard to deny that with the astronomical amounts of food that the human population consumes, what we choose to eat can have a large impact on the environment. I have always strived to be a pretty environmentally conscious human being (coming from Berkeley, its hard not to) so I decided that I needed to think more about my eating habits.