Well, I'm sure I'm not coining any new words today, but there sure is a good case to be made for working on the climate protection issue on a personal level—by becoming vegetarian or Vegan. If you've already changed out your light bulbs with compact fluorescent's and maybe even purchased a solar PV system, there is ample evidence that cutting back on your meat consumption (even just one or two days a week) could also make a contribution to further cutting your family's ecological footprint and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Even if you can't identify with more "militant" Vegans who are opposed to eating meat for animal cruelty reasons, there are a number of important environmental reasons to do so. If you love eating meat as much as I once did, you will probably stop reading here because, frankly, you don't want to know anything that might make you feel guilty about enjoying it. You purchase meat in nice, shrink-wrapped packages that just kind of "show up" at the store, you take it home, you cook and you eat it. But if we're really concerned about the environment, about social justice, and about supporting sustainable food production practices, we also need to consider the following:
Animal agriculture is highly wasteful of precious resources (especially water), is highly polluting and damaging to our entire ecosystem, (air, land, fresh water and the sea), is a highly inefficient use of land for producing food, is a principal cause of deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest and elsewhere around the world, and is a major contributor to biodiversity loss. Go here for a short review of the many environmental problems associated with raising livestock. If you really want to understand the enormity of the issues, go here.
The following is good "food" for thought:
"Many of the impacts associated with eating animal products stem from the very basic process of digestion. Each time an animal consumes energy in the form of calories, it assimilates about 10 percent of the total energy available from its food. Roughly 90 percent of the energy is lost as heat and undigested material. This 90 percent loss occurs at each trophic level, so when humans eat animal products, they receive only one percent of the total energy available from the same amount of vegetation originally eaten by the animal (10% of 10% = 1%). Stated another way, if humans eat only vegetable matter, the total plant mass consumed at all trophic levels is 90 percent less than if they eat only animal products. Because omnivores require the consumption of so many more total calories than animals with pure vegetarian diets, they also require more resources to produce their food..." (and many of these resources are currently non-renewable). "It is this relationship between food and non-renewable resources that causes many environmental problems associated with eating animal products."
From "Environmental Implications of Modern Animal Agriculture: Save the Planet with your Fork" by Lacey Gaechter, University of Colorado
And the following adds some good points too:
"The 4.8 pounds of grain fed to cattle to produce one pound of beef for human beings represents a colossal waste of resources in a world still teeming with people who suffer from profound hunger and malnutrition.
According to the British group Vegfam, a 10-acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, 10 people growing corn and only two producing cattle. Britain—with 56 million people—could support a population of 250 million on an all-vegetable diet. Because 90 percent of U.S. and European meat eaters’ grain consumption is indirect (first being fed to animals), westerners each consume 2,000 pounds of grain a year. Most grain in underdeveloped countries is consumed directly.
While it is true that many animals graze on land that would be unsuitable for cultivation, the demand for meat has taken millions of productive acres away from farm inventories. The cost of that is incalculable. As Diet For a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappé writes, imagine sitting down to an eight-ounce steak. “Then imagine the room filled with 45 to 50 people with empty bowls in front of them. For the ‘feed cost’ of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a full cup of cooked cereal grains.”
Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer estimates that reducing meat production by just 10 percent in the U.S. would free enough grain to feed 60 million people. Authors Paul and Anne Ehrlich note that a pound of wheat can be grown with 60 pounds of water, whereas a pound of meat requires 2,500 to 6,000 pounds."
From The Case Against Meat by Jim Motavalli
With water predicted to become the new "oil" and even more wars being fought over water rights than access to oil in the century ahead, the massive amounts of water needed for animal agriculture just isn't sustainable.
Perhaps the way to go in the short term is simply to aim for a 10% to 20% reduction in meat consumption in this country. Most people, I think, could go meatless one or two days a week and barely notice it, but it could make a big difference for the environment and towards alleviating world hunger.
And check out Leonardo DiCaprio's new movie on the looming climate crisis:
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