Moby on California Drought: ‘The Way We’re Living Is Stupid’

Moby has long been known nearly as much for his activist stances — sometimes expressed in the liner notes of his hit albums — as those albums themselves. He’s an outspoken vegan and animal rights activist, and has even edited a book of essays about the meat industry. Now, as a record-setting drought expands in his state, the California resident has taken an interest in another part of the food system: the way the state’s increasingly scarce water supply is allocated to state agribusinesses.

You’re partnering with Courage Campaign and Food & Water Watch to push a petition pressing Jerry Brown for a more stringent water budget, particularly through tougher limits on agriculture. Why respond to the drought in that way?
I grew up on the East Coast — in New York and Connecticut — where water was kind of an unlimited resource. Now that I live out in California, I realize water on the West Coast is a really limited, finite resource. It’s stating the obvious, but that means it needs to be allocated responsibly. So I was, in kind of a cursory way, looking at where California water is allocated and I read an article saying that 20 percent of California’s water goes to residences, and 80 percent goes to agriculture.

On the surface of things, that doesn’t seem like it’s too egregious. But then you realize that agriculture in California is important, but it only contributes 2 percent of California’s gross domestic product. And then you dig even deeper and you realize that most of that water goes to just a few types of agriculture that use water incredibly irresponsibly and that contribute less than 1 percent of California’s GDP: alfalfa, beef, almonds, cotton and then some others as well. A pound of beef can take up to 10,000 gallons of water to create, whereas a pound of broccoli takes 90 gallons of water to create. It just didn’t make any sense to me that California would subsidize and facilitate irresponsible water use.

You’ve been outspoken and involved in food issues for a long time, but in the past you’ve been more focused on meat production. How has the drought influenced the way you think about other components of the food system?
I want to answer this without sounding like a crazy apocalyptic lefty, but basically as a species our approach to resources is to use them as if they’ll always be there.

So let’s say over the last 200 years we’ve been on a spending spree with regards to air, water, food, timber, petroleum, etc. We just have gone crazy using all these resources, thinking in the back of our minds that maybe the next generation will be the one to figure things out and deal with the consequences of this resource-spending spree. But now we’re coming up against the consequences — and no one wants to admit that there are consequences.